Bookmarks (533)

At around 5:15 pm on Tuesday, a man in a black hoodie stopped Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts. She tried to walk by, but he grabbed her. She screamed, and it seemed like help was arriving. But the masked newcomers were actually there to help her assailant. They […]

The buzzword of the past couple of weeks is Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book about why we stopped being able to build things in America and how that’s destroying our country. (Klein is a co-founder of Vox and now a columnist for the New York Times; Thompson writes for the Atlantic.) Abundance’s […]

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it […]

Earlier this month, Thomas Edsall published a column in the New York Times titled, “Even if the Democrats can move to the center, it may not help.” In it, the eminent political analyst argued that “there is evidence that the process of moderation has the potential to result in unintended adverse consequences.” Edsall was referring […]

Washington has been convulsed over the past week by the question of how a prominent journalist was invited into a private Signal chat between senior Trump administration officials over an impending military action and why that conversation was happening on Signal at all. But the actual topic that these officials were discussing — a strike […]

President Donald Trump came into office with plans to enact his agenda at breakneck speed, and to some extent, it’s working. Less than 100 days into his second term, Trump has already issued 99 executive orders — a “shock and awe” approach meant to overwhelm his opposition and signal decisive action to his supporters. However, the […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. In almost all ways, the Liberty Hotel in Boston is like any other swanky hotel. It hosts galas, weddings, and New Year’s Eve parties. It has weekly events like “Fashionably LATE […]

If, on January 19, 2025, a day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, you had asked foreign aid experts, “does the US Agency for International Development (USAID) need reform?” most would have readily said “yes.” Not enough programs are evaluated for effectiveness; too much is run through a small number of private contractors; the foreign aid mission […]

A Vox reader asks: How do I know which vitamins and supplements are right/safe for me? I feel inundated by the vitamin craze these days. When I’m scrolling Reddit, I frequently see promotions for the Hims brand that sells pills for erectile dysfunction and hair loss; I guess the algorithm has figured out I’m middle-aged. […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Today I’m focused on the Trump administration’s attempt to deport a foreign student without trial, seemingly as a punishment for her political views. What’s […]

Can you truly be friends with a chatbot?  If you find yourself asking that question, it’s probably too late. In a Reddit thread a year ago, one user wrote that AI friends are “wonderful and significantly better than real friends […] your AI friend would never break or betray you.” But there’s also the 14-year-old […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. If you want to observe a particularly American problem, go open your phone’s Venmo app. Click on “me” and then click on “transfer.” If you have a balance in your account, […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. This past fall, I set out to get rejected as often as I could.  A healthy fear of rejection lives inside most people, and has some of us in a chokehold. […]

The biggest story in America is, and should remain, the Trump administration’s accidental inclusion of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal group chat about planning airstrikes in Yemen. This is not only colossally incompetent, but a scandal of the first proportion: Top officials, including the vice president and secretary of defense, discussing the most […]

The Social Security Administration — which distributes benefits to tens of millions of retired workers, people with disabilities, and their families — is in crisis. Since billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set its sights on finding fraud in Social Security, the agency has been trying to shed 12 percent of its workforce, […]

“The only thing worse than being homeless in America is not being considered homeless in America,” says Brian Goldstone, a journalist and ethnographer. America’s homelessness crisis extends far beyond what we see on the streets, and Goldstone wants us to pay attention to those who are hidden from public view.  In his new book, There […]

Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is one of the most straightforward cases the Supreme Court will hear this year. It involves a federal law that requires every state’s Medicaid program to ensure that “any individual eligible for medical assistance” may obtain that care “from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. America’s fragile child care system relies heavily on immigrant workers. Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown could cripple it. Since 2011, federal guidance has advised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents against conducting […]

The second Trump administration has shown remarkable aggression in abruptly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at elite universities — in an effort to force them to make major policy changes in line with the president’s politics. Trump officials revoked $400 million in research funding to Columbia University (illegally, per experts). They’ve […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Today Joshua Keating and I are focusing on top Trump administration officials accidentally messaging a journalist with their plans for bombing Yemen. It’s a bizarre story — and one […]

The Supreme Court sent a rather unfortunate message during Monday’s argument in a racial gerrymandering dispute called Louisiana v. Callais: Do not trust us. To understand where that message is coming from, it’s helpful to be familiar with a case the Court decided just two years ago that is nearly identical to Callais. In Allen […]

If you’ve read the news lately, you’ve probably heard that Americans may be in the middle of a sex recession. But at least one demographic of people are having the best sex of their lives: Gen X women. At least that’s the argument writer Mireille Silcoff makes in her most recent piece in the New […]

If you know the name of a case the Supreme Court will hear on March 31, Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, you can probably guess who will prevail.  The Court’s Republican majority almost always rules in favor of Christian litigants who seek an exemption from a federal or state law, which […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. In the middle of the Caribbean Sea, over 1,000 rhesus macaques live on an island that measures less than a tenth of a mile across. Descendants of a monkey colony imported […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. When was the last time you felt utterly, stupefyingly, mind-numbingly bored? It might’ve been when you languished in the waiting room at a doctor’s office for 10 minutes too long. Or […]

You’ve surely heard “First They Came,” German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the road to Nazi Germany. It’s one of those texts quoted so often that it can feel cliché. “First they came for the communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a communist” the poem begins, listing […]

An earlier version of this story appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. A Vox reader asks, “Why do children often have imaginary friends?” Sometime in the doldrums of Covid lockdown, when day care was closed and social life felt like a distant memory, I caught my then-toddler […]

All across the world, people are having fewer children. The birth rate is declining quickly in countries ranging from the United States to Finland to Mexico and Turkey. Fertility data used to be a fairly esoteric concern. Not anymore. Vice President JD Vance talks about it regularly, Elon Musk calls it civilization’s greatest threat. There’s […]

If you’re anything like me — a policy dork who spends too much time on X — you’ve been unable to escape discussion of a new book called Abundance.  Written by the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and the New York Times’s Ezra Klein (also a co-founder of Vox), Abundance is one of those policy books with […]

There are many lawsuits challenging allegedly illegal actions by the Trump administration — 132 of them as of March 21, according to the legal news site Just Security. That’s a lot to keep track of. Two issues raised by some of these suits stand out, however, as Trump’s most blatant violations of the Constitution, and […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Today I’m focusing on powerful private institutions caving to Donald Trump’s demands — and a law firm demonstrating another way forward. What’s the latest? Donald Trump took back an executive […]

Late in Hulu’s new series Good American Family comes a moment of irony that’s become all too familiar in true crime docudramas. The fictionalized Natalia Grace Barnett — at this point in the story a teen, being played by the 27-year-old Imogen Faith Reid — glowingly reads supportive comments from random internet strangers. “I feel […]

Put the Nobel Peace Prize on hold for just a bit.  President Donald Trump came into office promising a swift end to two wars in Gaza and Ukraine. He has taken a radically different approach to both conflicts than Joe Biden, and in some cases produced results.  What he has not done is end either […]

Elon Musk has opinions on how a lot of the world’s countries should be run.  He has weighed in on elections in Germany on behalf of a far-right party, sparred with the government of his native South Africa, and called for the removal of the president of Ukraine, not to mention the two-month siege he […]

If you have any say, you might want to avoid scheduling your next surgery on a Friday. The most comprehensive analysis of what happens to patients who have surgery on Fridays versus Mondays, published this month in JAMA by more than a dozen US and Canadian researchers, is unequivocal: The people who underwent all kinds […]

In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media did not exactly cover itself in glory. To quote myself from an early February 2020 piece, when the virus had already been spreading for more than a month in China and the US already had confirmed cases:  In the last week or so, new […]

Disney’s new live-action Snow White, dogged by controversy after controversy, must have been cursed at birth by a wicked fairy (oops, wait, wrong fairy tale). It has to be disconcerting for the studio. The original animated film was such a massive success when it was first released in 1937 that it more or less invented […]

The conservative philosopher GK Chesterton is known for a parable about two lawmakers who encounter a fence. One, brash and overeager, announces that he can’t see the point of the fence so it should be removed. The other, who Chesterton labels the “more intelligent type of reformer,” scolds his companion, warning him that they should […]

It’s now well established that for decades, major oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming, and yet did everything in their power to obstruct climate policy. They intensively lobbied policymakers, ran advertising campaigns, and funded think tanks to cast doubt on climate science. According to two new papers recently published in […]

Last summer, I quit Spotify, and wrote about it with the rather unsubtle headline “Why I quit Spotify.” My reasons remain sound: The software had become clunky, the ads relentless, and the Sabrina Carpenter songs too inescapable. I wanted to find a better music streaming service. It gives me no pleasure to report that a […]

When a Democrat contemplates their nation’s biggest problems today, minimum lot sizes in suburban housing codes probably don’t rank very high on the list.  After all, the US president is a reality star turned insurrectionist, who’s ordering investigations of his political enemies, subverting court orders, gutting entire federal agencies, and fomenting a global trade war. […]

For half a century, conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy have flourished. President Donald Trump himself has dabbled in these theories, once claiming that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the former president’s murder.  Now, Trump has officially declassified the remaining JFK files. And so far, the documents appear to […]

I have, like I suspect many readers, been in quite a bad mood for the last two months. My go-to joke explaining why — which I feel like should land with readers of this newsletter — has become: “I didn’t realize quite how much my overall optimism about the state of the world depended on […]

Humanity’s battle against tuberculosis has been one of slow and imperfect progress. The disease no longer kills one in seven people in the US, as it did in the 19th century. But look elsewhere and its burden is still terrible: TB killed more than 1.2 million people in 2023, likely making it once again the […]

The Trump administration has shuttered a number of federal agencies, and ordered another tranche closed last Friday. Among them was Voice of America — a news outlet founded to help the Allies fight the Nazis that still publishes and broadcasts today. Or did, until Saturday, when its employees found themselves unable to go to work.  […]

Over and over again, the Trump administration has claimed to be fighting antisemitism while wielding power against its domestic enemies. Yet, at the same time, there’s been a troubling surge in antisemitism among MAGA influencers and even some Trump administration staff. Concern for the safety of the Jewish community has been the stated motivation for […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Today we’re focusing on a new development in Ukraine that gives us more insight into Donald Trump’s approach to Russian President Vladimir Putin. What’s the latest? Putin […]

It’s been 12 years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her last novel, Americanah, to overwhelming acclaim. In the time since, she’s delivered a viral TED talk on feminism, been sampled by Beyoncé, been denounced by students for anti-trans speech, and denounced those students in turn for cancel culture. Now, at last, Adichie has finally released […]

Louisiana v. Callais, a case about whether Louisiana’s congressional maps are an illegal racial gerrymander, should be one of the easiest cases the justices have heard in many years. That’s because less than two years ago, the Supreme Court decided another gerrymandering case, known as Allen v. Milligan (2023), which by Louisiana’s lawyers’ own admission […]

The question of what happens if the Trump administration openly defies a federal court order has hung over the United States since President Donald Trump’s second term began. If that happens, it will trigger a constitutional crisis. Now, that long-awaited crisis may be upon us. On Saturday, Trump issued a proclamation claiming the authority to […]