TIME Magazine Asia

As Congress considers legislation that could lead to a TikTok ban, the popular platform has found an unlikely ally: Donald Trump. The former President has recently railed against a bill that would remove TikTok from U.S. app stores unless its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, sells its stake. To many, the move came out of left field. As President, Trump signed an Executive Order to ban TikTok unless an American company acquired it, alleging the Chinese government was using the video-sharing service to surveil millions of Americans. Challenged in federal court, the order never went into effect. But now Trump sees some utility in helping to keep TikTok around, especially after President Joe Biden said he would sign the new congressional bill into law. “Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok…

On March 16, 1983, the Country Music Association (CMA) celebrated its 25th anniversary, and I was invited. Buddy Killen, the song publisher who pitched “Heartbreak Hotel” to Elvis Presley, thought “the Black girl from Harvard” might just be the second coming of that hit’s songwriter, Mae Boren Axton. He put me on the guest list and paid for the tickets. It was a complicated night. The event was held at the DAR Constitution Hall, built by the Daughters of the American Revolution, an infamous venue whose management had refused to allow Black opera star Marian Anderson to perform on its stage in 1939. I took special pleasure in seeing guitarist and singer Charley Pride stride onto that stage—in a building named to honor the U.S. Constitution, but run to exclude Black…

When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Donald Trump last April, the case drew some derision. Prosecuting a former President over hush-money payments to a porn star seemed trivial, critics said, and relied on a legal technicality to bump the charges up to felonies. Given that three other cases were targeting Trump for trying to overthrow the 2020 election and refusing to return national-security secrets, Bragg’s case, the first criminal indictment of a former President in U.S. history, seemed like weak sauce. But after nine months and 91 felony charges in four courts, the New York case has become less of an afterthought. In fact, it might end up being the main show. Bragg, more than special prosecutor Jack Smith or Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, may be the…