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President Donald Trump has put millions of lives at risk by shutting down most of America’s humanitarian and development work abroad. After freezing almost all spending on foreign aid, the administration this week finished its purge at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), announcing that 83 percent of its programs are being axed. But […]

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold statement. Rather than to help college kids get dates, he claimed, Facebook was invented as a platform for “free expression.” Six short years later, Zuckerberg’s company is trying to muzzle yet another whistleblower — one who happens to have written a book full of […]

The US and Canada are meant to be the best of friends, but they’re in the midst of a pretty ugly fight.  It began with President Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, when he began referring to his outgoing Canadian counterpart as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”  Things escalated from […]

The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it’s starting the process of undoing 31 environmental regulations, including a ruling that’s foundational to US climate policy. But undoing any regulation is a cumbersome process, and with the climate rule in particular, the EPA may end up painting itself into a corner.  The big target here […]

From the start, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been extremely fragile. Since the agreement took effect in January, Israel has only escalated its raids in the West Bank, displacing more than 40,000 Palestinians — the highest level of displacement there since the occupation began in 1967. And after the first phase of the […]

People have known for centuries that drinking too much alcohol is bad for you. The short-term physical effects on cognition and motor function speak for themselves. The longer-term physical consequences of abusing alcohol — liver damage, jaundice, and cancer — have long been impossible to ignore. So why, in that case, has there been a widespread […]

Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of basic tasks, especially in the “personal assistant” realm, that the most highly trained AIs in the world remain hopeless at.  You can’t ask ChatGPT or Claude “order me a […]

Few individual animals have ever been more important to their species than 2323M — a red wolf, dubbed Airplane Ears by advocates for his prominent extremities, who spent his brief but fruitful life on North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Red wolves, smaller, rust-tinged cousins to gray wolves, are among the world’s rarest mammals, […]

In the past week, Donald Trump announced that he would buy a Tesla and advertised the company’s vehicles at an event that turned the White House lawn into a showroom benefitting his ally, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He also said that vandalizing Tesla cars — as some demonstrators have done to protest Musk — will […]

Candidate Donald Trump promised an economic renaissance. President Donald Trump is delivering economic turmoil.  The US stock market, once the only measure of economic performance that the president cared about, has seen a significant selloff amid fears of an impending recession — and the US is underperforming relative to its global peers. Other indicators look brighter, […]

It is a political truism that it’s bad to be the president in charge when the economy turns sour. It may be especially bad for President Donald Trump — because, through endless controversies during his decade in politics, voters’ belief in his economic savvy has been his most consistent polling bright spot, Now that bright […]

My entire job takes place on my laptop. I write stories like this in Google Docs on my laptop. I coordinate with my editor in Slack on my laptop. I reach out to sources with Gmail and then interview them over Zoom, on my laptop. This isn’t true of all journalists — some go to […]

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. The news on that front has been chaotic — a draft executive order to close […]

Donald Trump has a gift for inheriting valuable things. And the economy of January 2025 was no exception.  When the president took office, stock values were hitting record highs, unemployment was hovering near historic lows, and consumer confidence was stable. Wall Street expected that business conditions would only improve. Among investors, conventional wisdom held that […]

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 the Trump administration’s move to cut the Department of Education’s staff by half. Before we dive in, a request: If you’re enjoying The […]

Conservative activists have been dreaming of dismantling the Department of Education for decades.  They’re halfway there. On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced mass firings of its workforce, which would cut the department staff down to about half of what it was when Joe Biden left office — from about 4,000 to about 2,000. President […]

Is Donald Trump tanking the economy? The stock market has taken a beating, giving up six months of gains in the past three weeks. Several economic indicators — consumer confidence, GDP estimates — have gotten gloomier.  All signs point to the main culprit being Trump and his trade war obsession. The markets have spoken loud […]

There’s a thought experiment that has taken on almost mythic status among a certain group of technologists: If you build an artificial intelligence and give it a seemingly innocuous goal, like making as many paper clips as possible, it might eventually turn everything — including humanity — into raw material for more paper clips.  Absurd […]

Civil rights advocates are accusing the Trump administration of trampling the First Amendment following the arrest of an immigrant who was involved with pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly showed up at Mahmoud Khalil’s university-owned apartment in Manhattan on Saturday and arrested him without telling him or his pregnant US […]

If I ever need a reminder that I’m not a natural extrovert, I need only to look at the journal I kept during the early days of my improv classes. “I am having incredible dread about improv tomorrow,” I wrote one day. “I would literally pay any amount to get out of this class,” I […]

Exactly five years ago today, after more than 118,000 cases and more than 4,200 deaths across 114 countries had been recorded, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic.  With the virus spreading rapidly around the world, the need for a vaccine was desperate — but the prior record for the fastest development […]

The beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidential term has most certainly been full of sound and fury. What has it signified? As in the first Trump administration, it’s been challenging to distinguish between the controversies of the day that will soon be forgotten, and the concrete changes that truly matter and will last.  On many […]

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 the Trump administration’s arrest of a pro-Palestinian activist, a chilling development for defenders of free speech and the First Amendment. What’s the latest? Immigration […]

The past few years have violated many of my assumptions about human progress. Twenty-year-olds are going MAGA. More and more Americans say that women should return to their “traditional” roles in society. For some reason, we have decided to gamble with bringing back once-eradicated deadly diseases.  And now, add to the list: Cow’s milk is […]