Dan Kopf

Nearly 6.4 million people came to the United States on a B visa in 2017. This common visa type—B-1, for business travel; B-2, for tourism; or the combo B-1/B-2, for a bit of both—is issued for short-term travel to the US. If you plan to attend business meetings or conferences, spend a week on vacation in Hawaii or Florida, or visit family in the US, this is the visa you’re likely to need.

Taylor Swift released her new album Lover today. It might have been more apt to name it Shorter.

Today, Taylor Swift will release her highly anticipated seventh studio album, Lover. There’s little doubt that the pop star’s record—featuring such hyped hits as “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down”—will be a success. Especially if you consider CDs.

On Ariana Grande’s first three albums, she was restrained by the rules of grammar. The titles of her songs, including hits like “Break Free” and “Into You,” were capitalized in the conventional style: first letter of the first word, plus all nouns and active verbs. But no longer. On her 2018 album Sweetener and 2019’s thank u, next, only two of Grande’s 27 songs include a capital letter (“R.E.M.” and “NASA”). She even decided that hits like “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” and “no tears left to cry” were fine in only lowercase.

Just like spoken languages, programming languages evolve. Popular languages like C++, Java, and Python have all changed dramatically over time. As the needs of programmers change, languages adopt new features or modify existing ones. These alterations are usually made by committees that manage the language or users who create libraries (plugins that make it simpler to complete tasks) that are shared and become integral parts of the language.

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” is one of the biggest hits in American music history. It has been number one song on the Billboard Hot 100, the influential US music chart used to rank the country’s most popular songs, for a record 19 weeks. The song is a sensation on US social media and popular with people of all ages.

Every month, the US government collects the prices of products and services sold across cities in the United States. The rise and fall of these prices is how the government calculates inflation, the statistic that economists use to understand how much more or less a dollar buys now versus the past. It is also a good way to gauge the impact of the Trump administration’s protectionist trade policy.

You may have noticed that CBD—the non-intoxicating cannabis-derived chemical compound—can now be found in drugstores, cafés, pet stores, bars, spas, and all over the internet. Farmers have also noticed, and are planting hemp to supply the rapidly expanding industry.

Stranger Things 3: Music From the Netflix Original Series, a soundtrack from Legacy Recordings, is the top-selling vinyl album in the US this week, per Billboard.

The future of work in the US is uncertain. Artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and the move away from full-time employment are all factors that make it increasingly unpredictable.

After a slow and steady rise, Mexico is now the US’s number-one trading partner.

Americans spend a lot less time shopping than they used to.

China and the US are returning the negotiating table today in an effort end their trade war. The talks will take place in Shanghai, and will be led by Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

On May 23, 2019, Felecia Evans, the principal of Lander Elementary School in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, released a video of her students singing along to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” at their fifth grade talent show. After seeing the video, Lil Nas X asked on Twitter,  “when they want a free show.” When he eventually performed at the school, the kids were rapturous:

Billboard magazine reports that Live Nation, the concert promoter and ticket sales company, has allowed artists to directly sell concert tickets on resale websites like Stuhbub.

In 2012, Gabriela de Queiroz had just moved from Rio De Janeiro to San Francisco to start graduate school in statistics. Looking for things to do, Queiroz discovered Meetup, a website for finding groups of people with similar interests.

Moving in together is perhaps the most dramatic step in a relationship. Even more than marriage, it is the moment when lives become shared. For each couple, the right timing is different, and if for some, like Gwyneth Paltrow, that time may never come.

Anna, a fictional Spotify subscriber, is a big jazz fan. She recently fell in love with a jazz trio called The Expressionists (also fictional). The Expressionist’s new album accounted for 100% of her time listening to music last month on Spotify. Anna might reasonably assume that of the money that went to artists from her $10 monthly subscription, nearly all of it went to The Expressionists. She would be wrong.

The programming language R is one of the most important tools in data science, used by millions of people across the world. Along with spreadsheet programs, like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, and other programming languages, such as Python, SQL and Julia, R is what many analysts use to gain insights from the huge amount of data that’s collected these days.

There is a new music chart in town. On July 2, Rolling Stone launched “Rolling Stone Chart,” a ranking of the most popular songs, artists, and albums in the US. The music magazine’s new chart is a challenge to the hegemony of Billboard magazine’s ranking system, the industry standard since the 1930s.

When it comes to movies and music, the US dominates global cultural exports. Not so much for cuisine. Italy, China and Japan are the world’s leaders in “exporting” their cuisines, claims a recently released study (paywall).

Attending music festivals is expensive. A three-day pass for this year’s Coachella music festival in California cost $429. Tickets for the Glastonbury Festival in the UK went for £253 ($321). Next month’s Lollapalooza Festival in Chicago will run for $340, with VIP tickets costing $2,200. Add in the cost of food, drinks, and transport, and for a lot of music fans a few days at a festival comprise a large share of their monthly income.

What’s the best way to get people to to the theater? Sequels! Nearly a third of the top 100 grossing movies in the US in 2017 were sequels or prequels, compared with less than 10% in 2005—according to film data researcher Stephen Follows.

The US-China trade war and the 2019 Women’s World Cup each have the world captivated at the moment. And they are surprisingly related.