Category: News

By all indications, we’re currently experiencing a flattening of the curve in terms of new coronavirus cases per day. Even hard-hit states like New York and New Jersey are experiencing a decline in new cases as strict social distancing measures continue to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. We should all feel cautiously optimistic about that fact, but don’t forget that we’re experiencing this slight flattening because of the strict statewide social distancing measures. So don’t expect life to go “back to normal” anytime soon, we’re not out of the woods yet, and it’s likely that reopening the country will be a rolling effort that looks different depending on where you live.

At the present, millions of Americans nationwide are still under some form of shelter order which is keeping nonessential businesses closed, with most states ordering residents to stay at home except to get exercise or seek essential services. Despite President Trump’s assertion that he has “total authority” on this matter, we’re likely to be living under these social distancing measures to some degree or another until our respective governors give the “okay” for states to reopen.

We’ve collected each state’s current order as of April 16th, 2020. Some states have an end date on the books and others are working in unison to reopen segments of the country jointly — so take these dates with a grain of salt. They’re likely to change as each state assesses their respective COVID-19 situations.

Alabama

Until at least April 30th, all Alabama residents have been ordered to stay home unless they’re engaging in essential actives.

Alaska

Nonessential businesses in the state of Alaska are closed for the foreseeable future and residents statewide are being told to remain in their places of residence. Governor Mike Dunleavy had planned on opening the state as early as April 8th, but Alaska currently remains in lockdown.

Arizona

Arizona’s current stay-at-home order will be in effect until April 30th, at which time the state will reassess its response.

California

California’s stay-at-home order currently has no set end date. Earlier this week Governor Gavin Newsom revealed that moves to reopen the state would be coordinated along with Oregon and Washington and is dependent on six factors. The factors include widespread quick testing and tracing efforts, social distancing infrastructure for schools and restaurants, and increased hospital supplies and staff capable of meeting sudden surge capacity.

Colorado

Colorado’s current stay-at-home order has been extended until April 26th.

Connecticut

All non-essential businesses in the state of Connecticut will be closed until May 20th. Individuals are being ordered to “Stay Safe, Stay Home” by Governor Ned Lamont. Efforts to reopen will be coordinated with New York.

Delaware

Delaware’s stay-at-home order has been extended until May 15th or until the threat to public health has been eliminated.

Florida

Florida’s “Safer At Home” order began on April 1st and will see non-essential businesses throughout the state closed until April 30th at the earliest.

Georgia

Georgians are under a shelter-in-place order until April 30th. K-12 public schools in the state will remain closed throughout the rest of the school year.

Hawaii

Hawaii’s stay-at-home order will last until April 30th. Anyone entering Hawaii has been ordered to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Idaho

Idaho residents are being ordered to stay home except to seek essential services until April 30th.

Illinois

Illinois is under a stay-at-home order until April 30th and all non-essential businesses are closed until further notice.

Indiana

Indiana residents are under a stay-at-home order that is scheduled to end on April 20th, though the order will likely be extended.

Iowa

Non-essential businesses in the state of Iowa are to be closed until April 30th. Residents aren’t currently under a stay-at-home order.

Kansas

Kansas is under a statewide stay-at-home order until April 19th. Governor Laura Kelly is currently considering an extension of the order.

Kentucky

Kentucky’s current stay-at-home order is scheduled to end on May 1st.

Louisiana

Louisiana residents are under a stay-at-home order until April 30th at the earliest.

Maine

Maine residents are under a “Stay Healthy at Home” order issued by Governor Janet Mills until April 30th at the earliest.

Maryland

Maryland residents statewide are currently under an indefinite stay-at-home order.

Massachusetts

Non-essential businesses across the state are closed until May 4th. Massachusettes residents are being advised to stay home.

Michigan

Michigan residents are being ordered to stay home except to seek essential services until April 30th. The state’s reopening will be dependent on the following four factors: a sustained reduction in cases, expanding testing and tracing capabilities, new guidelines for continued social distancing, and a healthcare capacity to meet a surge in demand.

Minnesota

Minnesota residents are being ordered to stay home until May 3rd at the earliest.

Mississippi

Mississippi has been under a stay-at-home order since April 5th that is set to expire on April 20th.

Missouri

Missourians have been ordered to stay home until April 24th.

Montana

Montana’s stay-at-home order has been extended until April 24th.

Nebraska

Nebraska residents aren’t currently under a stay-at-home order. Hair salons, tattoo parlors, and strip clubs have been ordered closed until May 31st, but social distancing guidelines have been issued for work, school, and shopping frequency.

Nevada

Nevada’s stay-at-home order is set to expire on April 30th.

New Hampshire

New Hampshire residents are under a stay-at-home order until May 4th.

New Jersey

New Jersey is under a statewide stay-at-home order indefinitely. New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Pennsylvania will coordinate reopening efforts jointly.

New Mexico

Residents are being advised to stay home until April 30th at the earliest. All non-essential businesses statewide are closed.

New York

New York’s social distancing orders will remain in effect until May 15th at the earliest. Reopening efforts will be jointly coordinated with New Jersey, Connecticut, and other eastern states.

North Carolina

North Carolina is under a statewide stay-at-home order until April 29th.

North Dakota

Non-essential businesses like schools, restaurants, gyms, and theaters are closed until further notice. Residents are not under a stay-at-home or shelter-in-place order.

Ohio

Ohio is under a stay-at-home order, set to expire on May 1st.

Oklahoma

Vulnerable residents of Oklahoma — those over 65 or with underlying health issues — are being advised to stay at home until April 30th.

Oregon

Oregon will coordinate efforts with Washington and California on when to reopen the state. Until then, residents are under a stay-at-home order.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania residents are being ordered to stay home except to seek essential services until April 30th at the earliest.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island’s stay-at-home order has been extended until May 8th.

South Carolina

South Carolina residents are being ordered to limit their movements outside of their homes to only seek essential services until further notice.

Tennessee

Tennessee’s stay-at-home order has been extended until April 30th.

Texas

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered all Texans to limit social gatherings to those in the same household and to stay home unless seeking essential services until April 30th.

Utah

Utah residents are being advised to stay home until May 1st but are not being ordered to do so.

Vermont

Vermont residents are being directed to stay home until May 15th.

Virginia

Virginia’s stay-at-home order will be in effect until June 10th. All essential businesses will remain closed until then.

Washington

Washington residents are being ordered to stay home and will coordinate efforts to reopen with California and Oregon. Nonessential businesses will remain closed until mid-May at the earliest.

West Virginia

Residents are being directed to stay indoors until further notice. All nonessential businesses throughout the state are closed.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin residents are being ordered to stay home until April 24th. All essential businesses will remain closed until April 24th.

Wyoming

Bars, restaurants, and personal-service businesses are closed and residents are being directed to congregate in groups smaller than 10 people. Individuals entering the state for non-work-related reasons must quarantine for 14 days. Wyoming is not under a stay-at-home order.

There are few things that trip up Jeopardy! contestants more regularly than sports categories. It’s a blind spot for many in the world of academia, and for those of us that know nothing of literature but a lot about sports, those categories always provide a bit of schadenfreude.

However, sometimes when contestants guess wildly at a sports question, it can produce a fairly cringeworthy moment, as happened on Wednesday night’s episode during the College Tournament. The $1,000 answer in the category of “Unique College Courses” was:

“One of the topics covered in a Major League Baseball course at Arizona State is this player, who broke the color barrier in 1947.”

The correct response is, “Who is Jackie Robinson,” but one contestant buzzed in and, I assume, shouted out the first old baseball player they could think of in Babe Ruth.

It’s an unfortunate prompt to fire off a guess at, as Ruth, of course, was extremely white and dominated baseball while it was still segregated. Nathaniel, the contestant from Yale, quickly buzzed in and offered up the correct response. The good news for Xiaoke is that she would rebound from this miss and go on to win this episode and earn a place in the tournament finals.

One way that ESPN tried to fill the live sports gap was via an NBA 2K tournament involving a handful of NBA players, which was eventually won by Devin Booker of the Phoenix Suns. Now, the Worldwide Leader in Sports is turning to football for its latest video game tournament.

ESPN announced the Madden NFL 20 Celebrity Tournament on Thursday afternoon. It’s set to pit a loaded field of competitors — including NFL players, ESPN personalities, and rappers — against one another, with a bracket being revealed on April 19 at noon on ESPN2 and the tournament beginning the following day on ESPN’s Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube accounts, along with the ESPN App.

Here’s the list of participants, all of whom will go head-to-head in single-elimination games:

• Ravens receiver Marquise Brown
• Former UFC two-division champion Daniel Cormier
• Bills receiver Stefon Diggs
• Falcons running back Devonta Freeman
• Broncos running back Melvin Gordon
• Cardinals wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins
• Saints defensive end Cam Jordan
• Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce
• Rapper Lil Yachty
• Broncos quarterback Drew Lock
• ESPN personality Pat McAfee
• ESPN personality Katie Nolan
• ESPN personality Omar Raja
• Rapper Snoop Dogg
• Former UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman
• Rapper YG

It’s quite the field of names, although we’ll have to wait and see what their Madden game is like. The winner of the tournament will be crowned following a game aired on ESPN2 on April 26 at noon EST, with Feeding America receiving a donation in the winner’s name.

It seems not everyone is feeling Playboi Carti’s comeback single, “@ Meh,” which the Atlanta rapper dropped without warning earlier today. Lil Uzi Vert, with whom Playboi has been both a collaborator and who is now something of a rival, trolled his onetime friend on Twitter, reacting to the new song with a post of the cover art from Whole Lotta Red and the caption: “Just meh.”

While Lil Uzi denied that he and Carti were “beefing” earlier this year, there has been evidence of either a legit tiff or a playful rivalry in past months as the duo have made both overt and oblique references to each other several times on their respective social channels. The split seems to have taken place over their canceled 16*29 Tour which was originally planned to promote a joint tape of the same name.

After months of radio silence in the wake of the cancelation, Uzi tweeted in November 2019 in response to a fan query that he and Carti were no longer on good terms, attributing the split to the fact that he “just took a different route.” He also jabbed at Carti on Twitter last month, “When he drop, I’m gon drop again” while teasing new music. It appeared that he held true to his word, as shortly after he poked fun at Carti’s single, Carti teased “Monday” in a tweet, to which Uzi replied: “So u dropping Monday? Bet it,” before tweeting “Monday” himself.

Something is up between the two, and it seems we’ll find out what it is soon enough.

While people across the globe remain at home in quarantine, many musicians are using their newfound free time to work on new projects. Christine And The Queens has been particularly prolific. When a stay-at-home order was originally put in place, Christine was one of the first musicians to begin nightly livestream concerts from her living room. The singer debuted a soaring cover of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” from her home. Now, Christine is offering up a bonus track from her recent EP.

Christine And The Queens shared “I Disappear In Your Arms” Thursday as a bonus song off her 5-track release La Vita Nuova. “I Disappear In Your Arms” is a haunting, disco-infused anthem. Over a thumping snare and low, metallic bass, Christine’s powerful vocals cut through. “Don’t you dare ask of the world to stop / Just as you leave / Don’t you dare let the substances drop / When I could grieve,” Christine sings.

The bonus track arrives following her La Vita Nuova short film that accompanied her EP. The film was a cinematic exploration of the themes touched upon in her album. Then entirety of the film was made up of impeccable choreography and even features a cameo from Caroline Polachek.

Listen to “I Disappear In Your Arms” above.

La Vita Nuova is out now via Because. Get it here.

The majority of Americans are now working from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This has led to adjustments for everyone — whether it’s learning etiquette of video meetings, figuring out how to pace the day out when working from home, or, just generally, how to be productive when not at the office, a lot of folks are learning on the fly.

This group includes athletes, who are tasked with trying to stay in shape without access to training facilities and finding ways to keep their skills sharp despite the constraints of space and equipment. Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly is among those with a rather expansive home and a backyard big enough to have decent throwing sessions, but that yard isn’t the biggest and the tight quarters bring disaster into play.

On Thursday morning, disaster struck when Kelly threw a wayward pitch towards the net that, for some reason, was positioned right next to a bedroom window. When that pitch got away from him and fluttered out to the right, it missed the net completely and crashed through that window. Luckily for us, everything got caught on camera.

Why he insisted on throwing in the direction of the house, I don’t know. Probably because he assumed, as a professional pitcher, he would never miss that giant net, which most of us would’ve thought as well. It’s a horrid pitch and couldn’t have gone much worse, although I guess someone could’ve been in that bedroom when a baseball smashed through the window.

There’s never a good time to break a window, but doing so when everyone is locked down and it’s probably tough to get someone to come out and fix it is especially bad. Maybe turn that net the other way and throw away from the house with large windows, Joe.

Travel is about to change drastically, especially for the airline industry. Most international fleets are grounded and we don’t really know when they’ll get back in the air (outside of repatriation flights, which are still flying). This week we got a peek into one way our experience of flying might be altered forever. Emirates gave blood tests to all passengers flying from Dubai to Tunis to test them for COVID-19 antibodies before boarding.

According to CNN, the blood tests are rapid tests that give results in ten minutes. The actual testing was carried out by real health officials from the Dubai Health Authority and not by airline staff. Emirates Chief Operating Officer, Adel Al Redha, said in a statement reported by CNN that they “are working on plans to scale up testing capabilities in the future and extend it to other flights.” Though companies will all develop their own policies, this feels like one iteration of what the future of flying might look like.

CNN makes it clear that the tests are not checking for active COVID-19 infection but the antibodies the body creates when fighting off the virus that you then carry with you. The report also notes that Etihad Airways is about to roll out a new “self-service kiosk” that’ll examine passenger’s heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature and deem them fit to fly, or not. It’s probably very likely that if big-name carriers like Emirates and Etihad are getting ready for wider roll-outs of this nature, then other airlines are looking into doing the same when they get back in the air. When that actually happens is still anyone’s guess.

(Via CNN)

Over his lengthy career, Snoop Dogg has cemented himself as an acclaimed rapper, a philanthropist, and an unlikely gastronomist. The rapper hosted a series of weekly dinners with TV cooking show host Martha Stewart in 2016, proving his affection for cooking. Now, the rapper is taking his love of food one step further and creating his own wine brand: Snoop Dogg announced a partnership with Australian winemakers 19 Crimes.

The rapper’s Snoop Cali Red will be available everywhere this summer. According to press materials, the Snoop Cali Red is the first 19 Crimes wine to be bottled in California. Launching nationwide in July, Snoop’s wine is a blend of Syrah, Zinfandel, and Merlot. “I’ve been a fan of this wine and I’m excited to unveil my ‘Snoop Cali Red’ this summer and share the experience with all my fans,” Snoop said in a statement. “It’s one of the most successful brands in the market, so I’m more than eager to bring this collaboration to the world!”

Treasury Wine Estates marketing vice president John Wardley echoed the rapper’s excitement. “Snoop Dogg, an entertainment and California icon, is the perfect partner for 19 Crimes Snoop Cali Red,” Wardley said. “Snoop embodies the spirit of 19 Crimes — rule breaking, culture creating and overcoming adversity. We are truly excited to partner with Snoop and welcome him to the 19 Crimes family.”

Check out the Snoop Cali Red bottle above.

Turn on all the lights before you watch the latest episode of UPROXX Sessions, because Dana Dentata’s dark performance of her song “Texted” is about as unsettling as it gets. The latest episode of our live performance show turns the Bathroom into a murder scene as Dana flashes her gold grill at the camera, brandishes a bloody shovel, and lords it over a body laid out on the floor. The femme fatale’s new song details the unfortunate circumstances with ominous wit and an eerie soundtrack.

Dana Dentata is a Toronto-raised, LA-based goth-rap rulebreaker who got her initial start as a member of Dentata, a metal band from which she borrows her stage name and general artistic persona. Receiving early-career co-signs from both Marilyn Manson and Kanye West, her music is best described as the closest thing to a platonic ideal a combination of the two superstars’ music could get. Despite the spooky vibes, she wants her music to empower people — especially women — even as she embraces the bloody imagery of her metal and horrorcore hip-hop forebears. Her style may seem to be a far cry from her Sessions predecessors 1TakeJay and idontknowJeffery, but like each of them, she infuses her set with her own distinctive personality.

Watch Dana Dentata’s performance above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s new performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

In a new couch gag for this Sunday’s episode, The Simpsons appears to be giving a nod to audiences who are finding ways to pass the time while bunkered at home.

The longer than usual opening segment features Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie going wild in a virtual reality world that starts with Homer diving in, Fortnite-style, to steal a plane from Ned Flanders, which he then uses to buzz the Springfield nuclear plant, presumably to stick it to his boss Mr. Burns. From there, we catch Bart snowboarding out of a helicopter and writing on the side of a mountain in a nod to his now 30-year-old chalkboard gag in the opening credits.

Meanwhile, Marge catches some waves (Who knew she likes to surf?), Lisa explores the ocean floor where she meets up with some whales, and Maggie tears up the town on a revved up tricycle. It seems like the whole family is making the most of their VR experience while responsibly self-isolating like the responsible Springfield citizens that they are. However, things soon go south for Homer as the tail of his plane explodes causing his plane to crash, and that’s apparently enough VR for him as he rips off his headset and returns to his one true love: TV.

The couch gag marks a decidedly less controversial moment for The Simpsons during the global pandemic. An old joke from a ’90s episode recently became the subject of a racially-insensitive viral meme that prompted a former Simpsons writer to denounce it in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

In lighter, less health crisis-based news, Disney+ has confirmed that it will keep its promise to fans by making classic episodes of The Simpsons available in their original aspect ratio by the end of May.