Amazon‘s free music-streaming service has launched in the U.S. — but the tech giant is making anything but a big deal out of it. The ad-supported free service quietly became available this week exclusively through Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant programmed into Echo devices, indicating that Amazon is more interested in …

Attorney General William Barr on Thursday submitted to Congress and released to the public redacted versions of the Mueller report. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings, the result of a nearly two-year investigation that resulted in over 30 indictments, were posted to the Justice Department’s website shortly after 11:00 a.m. The …

In the space of just a few weeks, Lil Nas X‘s “Old Town Road” has already enjoyed multiple lives, transforming from a goofy TikTok craze to a left-field hit to a rallying cry for those who want to eliminate the barriers between genres. Now the single has reached a new …

Ashley McBryde and Dillon Carmichael have both been compared to Chris Stapleton for their old-school approach to country music. Last week, the rising singer-songwriters teamed up during a radio-station listener event in San Jose, California, to show off those throwback sensibilities by performing “Tennessee Whiskey,” the song that helped introduce …

Sometimes, in politics, truth is stranger than fiction. As a cub reporter at Mother Jones in the late Nineties, I wrote an article about novels by American politicians called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job,” reviewing a noir thriller by former Republican Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts. Called Mackerel by Moonlight, …

Before a crowd of 4,000 people, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) launched his presidential campaign with a kick-off event in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey on Saturday afternoon. Booker, who was mayor of Newark before running for the Senate in 2013, evoked Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from …

Earlier this month, Lilly Hiatt tweeted something she overheard while selling merch on her spring tour: “Lilly Hiatt, is she related to John Hiatt?” “No, he’s H-Y-A-T-T.” She chose not to correct them, but should the misinformed parties pick up Lilly’s new Record Store Day release on Saturday, they’d have …

Five years after Amazon’s award-winning series Transparent became one of the most visible dramatizations of trans life, the series will kill off its central character, Maura Pfefferman, in its feature-length musical series finale. The decision comes after the show fired actor Jeffrey Tambor, who played Maura, following allegations of sexual …

Toronto singer-songwriter Jessie Reyez and Atlanta rapper 6lack have released a new video for their song “Imported,” the latest single from Reyez’s upcoming debut album, scheduled for release later this year on Island Records. The intimate clip shows the two of them wandering through an empty house, with lyrics dealing …

In the first presidential election season since Democrats elected a black man as president twice and nominated a woman for the first time, a white man with a terrible record of campaigning for the job and a litany of gaffes sits at or near the top of the 2020 primary …