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Donald Trump announced he intends to nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to serve as his attorney general.  Gaetz is a longtime Trump loyalist who will likely be tasked with remaking the Department of Justice. The department has traditionally adhered to strong norms against interference by the president; Trump and his allies have been explicit in […]

Support independent journalism that matters — become a Vox Member today. In the warm blue waters of the Solomon Islands, an island chain in the South Pacific, lies one of the world’s largest sea creatures.  Roughly the size of two basketball courts, it’s neither a whale nor a giant squid. It is a single piece of […]

Some 110 years ago, a picturesque new road known as Roosevelt Boulevard began ferrying vehicles across the nascent but burgeoning neighborhoods of North and Northeast Philadelphia. At first, traffic was light, but it rapidly thickened as car ownership rose and the surrounding area developed. By the 1950s, when the boulevard expanded to meet the new […]

This week, a number of social media users were, once again, disappointed by the selection of a certain man to a coveted position. Actor John Krasinski — yes, Jim from The Office — was given the title of People’s “Sexiest Man Alive.”  It’s a choice that’s less egregious than genuinely perplexing. It’s not that Krasinski […]

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that two of his most vocal supporters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the “Department of Government Efficiency.”  “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said. “It will […]

It’s a truism that everything’s bigger in America — just look at the cars and houses. But perhaps nowhere is the virtue of bigger is better more bizarrely apparent than how toilet paper is sold. Wander into the bathroom products aisle at the supermarket and you’ve entered a topsy-turvy world where numbers shape-shift. A pack […]

Welcome to the golden age of STI prevention. Sure, condoms are still an effective strategy for lowering the risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) — but now, they’re just one of a smorgasbord of strategies for decreasing your chances of catching an infection spread by sex.  That includes vaccines to lower your risk of certain […]

Over the weekend, a very small wildfire broke out in a hilly and densely vegetated area of Prospect Park, a swath of green space in Brooklyn. The 2-acre blaze drew about 100 firefighters as residents were warned to stay out of the park. Meanwhile, on the New York-New Jersey border, another blaze, the Jennings Creek […]

Support independent journalism that matters — become a Vox Member today. Since the war in Gaza began, the threat of a protest vote — in which voters would choose to abstain from the presidential election or vote for third-party candidates who had no shot of winning — hung over Democrats’ heads because of President Joe Biden’s […]

President-elect Donald Trump has begun naming members of his White House team, offering an early signal to the direction he’ll take on issues, including foreign policy and immigration.  Thus far, Trump has announced a handful of policy staffers, nominating House GOP Conference chair Elise Stefanik as United Nations ambassador, and former Rep. Lee Zeldin as Environmental […]

President-elect Donald Trump is pushing for the next Senate majority leader to allow recess appointments, which would allow him to install some officials without Senate confirmation. Typically, the Senate must approve presidential nominations for high-level posts, including cabinet positions, ambassadorships, and inspector general jobs, in a process outlined in the US Constitution. This procedure is […]

[Editor’s note: On November 11, 2024, Richard Allen was convicted of the 2017 deaths of Liberty German and Abigail William.] In my inbox sit three eerie, unsolicited photographs of a crime scene.  The photos, not graphic but disturbing all the same, were allegedly taken at the scene of the Delphi murders — the double homicide […]

Last week, 43 monkeys, all of them young female rhesus macaques, escaped from the Alpha Genesis research laboratory in Yemassee, South Carolina, when an employee failed to properly secure the door to their enclosure.  It wasn’t the first time something like this happened at Alpha Genesis, a company that breeds and uses thousands of monkeys […]

A Vox reader writes: “Trump can’t run for a third term, right? (Yes, we know what the Constitution says … but he really, truly can’t run for a third term, right??)” President-elect Donald Trump has won his second — and final — term in office.  While Trump has joked about pursuing a third term and […]

There is no sugarcoating it: Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday is a major setback for many antipoverty policies. With a Republican majority in the Senate (and likely in the House as well), there’s little doubt that spending cuts will be up for debate, and tried-and-failed ideas like imposing work requirements on welfare recipients will be […]

After winning the 2024 election in part due to high inflation early in President Joe Biden’s term, President-elect Donald Trump wants to enact policies that would lead to the very same kind of inflation that doomed Democrats. Though Trump inherits a strong economy and low inflation, he’s proposed a 10 to 20 percent tariff on […]

For all its serious subject matter, there’s something deeply comforting about a movie like Conclave. Edward Berger’s new mystery thriller, about a cardinal (Ralph Fiennes) assigned with overseeing the election of a new pope, is surprisingly juicy and a lot more fun than many of the standard, austere Catholic dramas Hollywood has churned out in […]

Democrats have faced a bitterly disappointing defeat, and the debate is on about why that happened. Amid the opportunistic finger-pointing and evidence-free assertions that Vice President Kamala Harris could have won if only she had done this or that, there is a genuine search for explanations about what happened. The answer Democrats find most persuasive […]

In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, online misinformation claiming the election was rigged in his favor has proliferated — including theories about missing votes and voting machine dysfunction.  As was the case with election denialism following the 2020 election, these conspiracy theories about election fraud are false. According to the Cybersecurity and […]

Some people collect coins or stamps. For a time, I collected debit cards. Not stolen ones! Each one of them had my name on them, right below the logo of the latest banking app I’d decided to try out: Venmo, Cash App, Chime, Varo, Current, Acorns.  For the better part of a decade, I did […]

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to launch a mass deportation program starting on day one of his second term. That could have devastating consequences for the millions of people residing in “mixed status” households: those in which both undocumented immigrants and people with permanent legal status reside. Trump has said he would rely on an […]

Germany appears headed toward an unexpected election — and complete political upheaval — after its deeply unpopular ruling coalition collapsed this week. Until Wednesday, Germany, which operates under a parliamentary system in which multiple parties compete for power, was governed by a fragile coalition of three parties with very different aims. That arrangement changed after […]

As leaders scramble to assign blame for Donald Trump’s decisive win on Tuesday, this round of post-election finger-pointing differs markedly from recent cycles. Unlike past elections with narrow margins, Trump’s likely popular vote victory and his uniform swing across states and counties defy simple explanations like a racist electorate or discontent over President Joe Biden’s […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The people of Washington state elected to save the most ambitious price on carbon in the country. A large majority of voters, 62 percent, rejected a ballot initiative to repeal the state’s Climate Commitment Act, the cap-and-trade law that has already raised […]