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Pete Buttigieg is having a hard time getting noticed. One month after launching his presidential campaign, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, remains little more than a hard-to-pronounce afterthought in a field that is getting deeper by the week. According to the most recent polling from Morning Consult, 62 percent of Democrats say they‘ve never heard of Buttigieg, while nearly half of those who do know his name say they haven‘t heard

When Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) arrives to her boss Katharine‘s (Sigourney Weaver) place to housesit in the movie Working Girl, nothing announces the gulf between the two women as clearly as the art Katharine has hanging in her fancy Manhattan apartment: She has four Warhol-style portraits of herself on the wall, her face silk-screened and painted over with bright colors, as in the famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Katharine, the audi

These 28 days of Black History Month are dedicated to the sometimes painful and absolutely essential history of Americans of African descent. The month also brings the usual grumblings demanding a white equivalent. And those of us who study culture and history are tasked to explain the many reasons why that is a horrible idea (again).

Tech CEOs have plenty of reasons to worry about public attention these days, but usually not during their big product events. Tim Cook tends to be giddy when he opens the Apple Event each September. Facebook still makes a big deal about F8, where Mark Zuckerberg once gave everyone in the audience an Oculus VR headset to wear as he walked past them unseen. These events are moments for celebration, not hyper-scrutiny: Tech writers who focus on gear

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives will vote on a resolution to terminate President Trump‘s national emergency declaration to build a Southern border wall. The resolution will pass. It may even pass the Senate. It would then be met, however, with the president‘s first veto, and it‘s doubtful there will be enough votes to overrule him.That wouldn‘t be such a fruitless end for Democrats, though: The emergency resolutio

A New York Times report published Friday featured several allegations that Sen. Amy Klobuchar had mistreated her staff, including an eyebrow-raising anecdote that started the piece: Klobuchar, a 2020 presidential candidate, once used a comb from her bag to eat a salad after her aide forgot a fork-and afterward handed the used comb to the staff member and told him to clean it. Blurred lines of professionalism and more serious allegations of a demo

Last week, the nonprofit research group OpenAI revealed that it had developed a new text-generation model that can write coherent, versatile prose given a certain subject matter prompt. However, the organization said, it would not be releasing the full algorithm due to ‘safety and security concerns.‘

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has done a fine job of turning this year‘s Oscars ceremony into a farce on its own, but Screen Junkies is still keeping up the annual tradition of releasing an Honest Trailer that mocks all of the Best Picture nominees. With help from Josh Robert Thompson as the voice of Fred Rogers-the subject of an egregiously snubbed documentary feature-the video tackles Academy‘s many flip-flops as w

The big night: With the Oscars coming up on Sunday, Kevin Sandler explains how Netflix‘s history-making Best Picture nominee Roma broke the mold of film distribution. And, in an annual tradition, Bryan Lowder names his pick for Best Original Score: ‘a cushion of music I want to collapse into over and over again.‘

A joint study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Atlantic released Tuesday presents a rather bleak portrait of American ambivalence towards pluralism-not just living alongside difference but actively engaging with it . The findings follow on the heels of two years of increasingly panicked discussion about the danger of the filter bubbles that we are all supposedly trapped in, engendered and bolstered by the polarization that

A warrant is out for the arrest of musician R. Kelly, who has been charged on 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Cook County State‘s Attorney‘s Kim Foxx announced at a press conference Friday that a grand jury indicted Kelly for incidents involving four victims-three of them underage at the time-that took place over the course of more than a decade. Foxx noted that each count carries a possible sentence of 3-7 years.

The United States has a collective action problem. Not just the most obvious one, of high-ranking members of the Donald Trump administration persistently failing to act while in office and then publishing I-told-you-so memoirs or sniggering onstage at public fora about the president‘s unfitness. No, the problem is also at the most micro level, and at sweeping constitutional levels as well. The prevailing ethos seems to be that so long as th

An inmate has filed a class action suit against the Florida Department of Corrections for confiscating his digital media files. William Demler says that since 2012, he has spent more than 550 on digital music, downloaded to a prison-sponsored music player he acquired for 99.95. But when the FDOC switched music vendors last year, Demler was told he‘d have to purchase all his music again if he wanted to continue having access to it.

The Trump administration‘s attempt to deny citizenship to the children of binational same-sex couples suffered a setback on Thursday when a federal court ruled these children are American citizens. U.S. District Judge John F. Walter of California rejected the State Department‘s startling assertion that a married gay couple‘s son was born ‘out of wedlock‘ and thus is ineligible for citizenship. But his decision applie

On Thursday, Judge Dana Sabraw held what could be the most consequential hearing in months in the family separation case Ms. L v. Ice, which has resulted in the identification and reunification of more than 2,000 separated children with their parents. The new developments could lead to the identification of thousands of more separated children, or a bitter court fight over whether the Trump administration has the responsibility to account for the

On Thursday, after months of protesting by thousands of its workers, Google agreed to stop requiring workers to submit to forced arbitration of employment disputes. The company had previously taken this step only with regard to sexual harassment cases, and now workers facing discrimination, wage theft, or other violations will also have the option of bringing their claims in court, including through class actions. Other companies should emulate t

Desus andMero‘snew late night series premiered Thursday night on Showtime, and the hosts decided to call out one of the most divisive films this Oscar season: Green Book.

Next week is set to see the biggest fight over the federal judiciary since Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in October. As the New York Times reported on Wednesday, the Senate is due to consider a Republican plan to cut the amount of debate time on district court judges from a maximum of 30 hours to just two hours. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is reportedly considering nuking the filibuster to push through this change,

The executive producers of Empire have announced that Jussie Smollett‘s charcter, Jamal Lyon, will not appear in the final two episodes of the current season. The announcement comes shortly after Chicago police charged Smollett with disorderly conduct and filing a false police report alleging that he was attacked in a racist, homophobic hate crime. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said in a press conferencethat Smollett paid two men to a

What?!?!

Much of the discussion surrounding the Trump campaign‘s contacts with Russia in the months leading up to the 2016 election has mystified the American public. As the country prepares for special counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation to reach its final stage and for congressional investigations to ramp up, it‘s important to develop a more accurate and effective vocabulary for assessing the information that these bodies produce.

When Academy voters sit down to cast their ballots, they keep certain guidelines in mind. In the Best Original Score category, the main consideration goes as follows: ‘Works shall be judged on their effectiveness, craftsmanship, creative substance and relevance to the dramatic whole, and only as presented within the motion picture.‘ In other words, the game is about how the music works in the film. Which: fair enough! But music lovers

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