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Good news for even the most discerning fans of Middle-earth: The second season of Amazon Studio’s The Rings of Power, which premiered August 29, includes a whole lot more characters and landscapes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, many of which never made it into Peter Jackson’s film adaptations. Whether it’s anywhere near as captivating, however, is […]

Welcome to Kids Today! I’m Anna North, a senior correspondent at Vox covering policy and culture, and today, I’m launching a Vox newsletter that will have me in readers’ inboxes weekly with stories about Generation Alpha (people born between 2010 and 2024) and American childhood.  It’s a newsletter about kids — for everyone. If you’d […]

Ah, yes, late August in the Midwest: a time for popsicles by the lake, a trip to the county fair, and, of course, extreme humidity made more miserable by … corn sweat. Corn sweat. It’s a thing! And people are talking about it.  The term refers to the moisture released by fields of corn during hot […]

The Georgia State Elections Board recently enacted two new rules that seem designed to allow local election officials to sabotage the state’s vote-counting process. Republican nominee Donald Trump praised the three board members who supported these new rules, all of whom previously questioned the result of the 2020 election that Trump lost, as “pit bulls […]

College tuition is a hefty sum for many students and their families in America: Average yearly tuition at a private university totals $42,162; $23,630 for public out-of-state tuition; and $10,662 for public in-state tuition. It’s no surprise, then, that over 85 percent of undergraduates are awarded some form of financial aid — including federal aid, […]

Earlier this year, projections from UN Tourism put international travel on track to recover to pre-pandemic levels — putting a swell of tourism on a collision course with the increasing danger of climate disasters, from wildfires ripping through Greece to megaquake warnings in southern Japan. While peak tourism season is mostly behind us, off-season travel […]

Several meters underwater off the coast of Bonaire, a small island in the south Caribbean, Danielle de Kool floated in place in front of a large head of boulder brain coral. The pattern across its surface looked like the maze you might find on the back of a cereal box.  From a plastic syringe, de […]

Since Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, a careful truce has settled in place between centrist, liberal, and progressive Democrats. No loud or public spats among elected Democrats or Democratic voters over Harris’s candidacy or campaign have made headlines, save for some premature skepticism by online progressives over Harris’s […]

More than a decade ago, scientists achieved a historic breakthrough: They found a first-ever cure for hepatitis C, one of two related liver diseases that, combined, take more than a million lives every year.  In 2016, just three years after the antiviral drug Sovaldi received FDA approval, the World Health Organization (WHO) set the audacious […]

A federal court in Texas has put one of the biggest legalization programs in over a decade on hold temporarily, leaving more than half a million people in limbo.  The program, announced by the Biden administration in June, allows undocumented spouses of Americans to apply for a green card without having to leave the country. […]

This week Mark Zuckerberg sent Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) a letter outlining how the Biden administration pressured his company to “censor” free speech on Facebook — specifically misinformation about Covid-19. The letter also made reference to Hunter Biden’s laptop and Zuckerberg’s lack of plans to spend money on the election. This sounds bad. But none […]

SpaceX plans to send four people into Earth orbit as soon as Wednesday in a daring mission that will test new technology, expose astronauts to high levels of radiation, and potentially change how future spacewalks are conducted. The privately funded mission, called Polaris Dawn, will be led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who participated in and […]

Three weeks ago, Ukraine’s military launched a stunning operation to take the war in Ukraine back onto the territory of the country that launched it. Three weeks later, the Ukrainians still occupy hundreds of miles of territory in Russia’s western Kursk region.   The incursion had a number of goals: to force Russia to divert its […]

Immigration has loomed large over the presidential election. After going on the offensive against former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies in 2020, the Democratic Party has seen public opinion shift in recent years, with more people taking a dim view of immigration and favoring more restrictive border policies. Trump has pounced on this shift, promising […]

Before the era of Donald Trump, the right’s very online radicals yelled at the Republican Party from the cheap seats. Now, they’ve become players within the conservative power structure, as the walls that once kept them at bay have crumbled. The Republican nominee for vice president has explicitly cited a neo-monarchist blogger as an influence […]

Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of messaging app Telegram, was detained in Paris on Saturday as part of an ongoing French investigation into financial and cyber crimes. On Monday, French officials said he remains under arrest, though he has not been charged with any crime.  French President Emmanuel Macron denied the arrest was politically […]

Oklahoma v. Department of Health and Human Services is the sort of case that keeps health policy wonks up late at night. On the surface, it involves a relatively low-stakes fight over abortion. The Biden administration requires recipients of federal Title X grants — a federal program that funds family-planning services — to present patients […]

It’s bachelorette season in America. A couple of months ago, I was at one such party in Florida: nine women, one house, a zillion group activities to get dressed for. And something strange started to happen. Almost every time I complimented someone’s outfit — a cute jumpsuit or matching set — inevitably the response was: […]

As the frontier of artificial intelligence advances at a breakneck pace, the US government is struggling to keep up. Working on AI policy in Washington, DC, I can tell you that before we can decide how to govern frontier AI systems, we first need to see them clearly. Right now, we’re navigating in a fog. […]

Climate change remains a major platform issue for Democrats, but you’d hardly know it listening to the hours of speeches at the Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago.  Vice President Kamala Harris, accepting her party’s nomination for president, gave a brief nod to the fundamental freedom to “live free from the pollution that fuels […]

Last fall, a reader asked me what they could really do, as one person, to aid people living on the streets. “I often feel helpless to enact change,” they wrote. I’d been covering homelessness in America and knew that even the sprawling support organizations that have been working on outreach for decades had failed to […]

Few things have bedeviled education policy researchers in the US more than public school teacher strikes, driven by educators on the vanguard of resurging labor activism. While union membership nationwide continues to decline, nearly one in five union members in the US is a public school teacher — and their high-profile, disruptive strikes generate significant media […]

For the first time, the federal government has negotiated directly with pharmaceutical companies over the prices for a handful of drugs. The new prices, which were announced mid-August, take effect in January 2026, and they will help the Medicare program cap what individual patients spend out of pocket on their prescriptions in a year at […]

This post contains mild spoilers regarding the outcome of the couples of Love Is Blind: UK In 1776, desiring independence and freedom, Americans overthrew British rule. Roughly 250 years later, we have finally enacted a singular revenge for English domination: subjecting them to the distinctly American cultural and romantic exercise known as Love Is Blind.    […]