This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Name a disgraced former Congress member, not originally from Florida, whose time in office was marred by shady financial dealings and who ran in yesterday’s GOP primary for Florida’s 19th District. 

…This is, amazingly, a trick question. Because TWO candidates who fit that bill ran in FL-19, and neither of them won. (They were Madison Cawthorn and Chris Collins.)

Florida is — how do I put this? — one hell of a drug. And its primary results were no less surprising or chaotic. On the Democratic side, a socialist candidate for Senate came out of (literal) left field to topple an opponent who out-fundraised her 16 to 1. Meanwhile, progressive challengers lost decisively in two other races.

On the Republican side, President Donald Trump’s picks won most of their contests, including the race to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis. But two endorsed candidates also lost in surprising upsets. Republicans ousted Rep. Cory Mills, for instance, who has been accused of assaulting one woman he dated and threatening another. And Trump’s pick in FL-19, Catalina Lauf, fell not to Cawthorn or Collins, but to the founder of a conservative talk-radio station. Florida!!! 

Go a little deeper

This all makes for a pretty muddled cup of tea leaves. So rather than generalize about Florida’s results, let’s zoom in on one primary race you might not have followed.

That race — the Republican primary in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District — pitted an open Islamophobe (Rep. Randy Fine, who won) against an avowed antisemite (the manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian). 

Both men are shocking in their bigotry, even for a party that has inured itself to shock. Bilzerian, a self-described sex addict and former professional poker player, has fantasized about “exterminating Israel” and “revisiting” the ideologies that precipitated the Holocaust. Fine, meanwhile, has repeatedly compared Muslims to dogs and said that Israel should let Gazans starve. 

How did men with such repugnant views emerge as this race’s top finishers? The first reason is dark, but fairly obvious: a significant share of Republicans hold Islamophobic or antisemitic opinions.

The second reason is maybe more interesting: Republicans increasingly treat any perceived limit on speech as an intolerable form of censorship. That new norm has made it less likely that party leaders will condemn hateful views, since the appearance of policing speech is often considered just as bad as bigotry or extremism. As a pair of conservative writers warned in the New York Times last week, this reflex has created “a subculture of racism, sexism and antisemitism” in the GOP. 

Some on the left hold hateful views too, of course. But Democrats don’t have those same norms against policing speech. 

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➨ Stop trying to “sell” yourself to new people. That’s advice from my colleague Allie Volpe’s evidence-backed guide to optimizing your online dating profile, but I’d argue it applies to most social interactions. Other all-purpose gems from Allie: be selective with how much you share about yourself and convey your willingness to get to know other people. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the length of the average middle-grade book ballooned from 175 pages in 2006 to 290 pages a decade later? It’s one of the unexpected reasons that kids aren’t reading as much as they used to. 
• Today’s trivia: Jackie Robinson and Jackie Joyner-Kersee attended the same college. What college was that? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you which Dutch astronomer theorized “a cloud that constantly creates comets.” (Say that three times fast!) That would be Jan Oort, namesake of the Oort Cloud — an immensely distant band of billions of icy objects that are thought to surround our solar system. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Karoline Leavitt, the 28-year-old firebrand who became the nation’s youngest-ever press secretary in 2024, is stepping down to “spend more time with her beautiful young children.”

President Donald Trump announced the news on Wednesday night in a Truth Social post, adding that Leavitt would remain an adviser and “an influential voice within the Republican Party.”

It feels fitting that Leavitt — whose public persona required her to perform both her job and her role as a wife and mom — is stepping down to parent. In MAGA’s conception of womanhood, there can be no higher calling. Not even serving the president. 

For more than two years, however, Leavitt made a show of trying to do both. She returned to work on Trump’s reelection campaign only days after the birth of her first child and regularly shared photos of herself working while holding her son. 

Leavitt also welcomed a daughter over the spring, amid what Fox News dubbed a White House “baby boom.” Officials and conservative media quickly turned the new mothers into advertisements for the pro-natalist movement: Proof that women could, and should, have both careers and children. 

Leavitt is still being held up that way, even — perhaps especially — as she departs. “She’s been a role model to millions and millions of young women,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News on Wednesday. “A mother, a family woman, a press secretary, a patriot.”

MAGA’s rules for women

The MAGA movement tends to glorify traditional female roles — wife, mother, homemaker — while simultaneously (and confusingly) elevating ambitious, career-driven women like Leavitt. 

At first glance, her prominence — and that of other women in Trump’s administration — would seem to rebut the charge that the movement is misogynist. In fact, that’s a line of defense that Trump himself has advanced. 

But look a little closer, and you’ll see the structural contradiction at the heart of MAGA femininity: Female power is only legitimate when it’s exercised on behalf of Trump, and by women who conform to traditional expectations around gender, marriage, motherhood, and physical appearance.

To Trump, a female White House correspondent was a “piggy,” for instance. But a female press secretary who defended the slur was “knocking them dead.” 

A female employee at a Trump golf course was asked to sign an NDA after reporting harassment. But the female attorney who allegedly pressured her to sign it was, according to Trump, “a rocket ship.”

A female politician rose to prominence championing the president’s deportation agenda. But to get there, she had to find her “Mar-a-Lago face” — and she was ousted after showing signs of personal ambition. (In fairness, she was also very bad at her job.) 

It’s a very tricky little tightrope to walk. And lately, that strain has begun to show. While Trump began his second term with an unusually high number of female Cabinet members for a Republican president, women now hold only four of 23 Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions. 

Trump’s support is also down among young women. In Congress, a bloc of prominent conservative female lawmakers recently broke from their party to censure Republicans accused of misconduct. Now, the MAGA movement is losing one of its fiercest female proxies in Leavitt. 

Even at the height of her powers, however, Leavitt never really got her due. The luxurious office traditionally reserved for the White House press secretary instead went to another White House staffer. A dude.

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➨ Meet the latest and greatest exercise cult. It’s called HYROX — yes, in all caps — and it’s an eight-round agility and strength competition. Participants spend thousands of dollars on training, registration, and travel for these events, which tend to “subsume your entire existence.” That’s a very hard no for me, personally…but a lot of very fit and competitive people are apparently into it. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the US attempted to assassinate longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by poisoning his ice cream? And that’s somehow not even the weirdest or most far-fetched Castro assassination scheme. 
• Today’s trivia: Who was the first woman to perform hip hop at the White House? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the German philosopher who wrote Critique of Practical Reason. That would be Immanuel Kant, whose work also arguably inspired one of the core conflicts in the Avengers films.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Wisconsin won’t be the very first state to get a socialist governor, after all. In Tuesday’s gubernatorial primary, Democrats there narrowly selected David Crowley, a moderate county executive, over the democratic socialist and reformed Thanksgiving-hater Francesca Hong. 

This contest was widely seen as a test of the progressive movement’s strength beyond deep-blue cities…and a bit of a mess. Two candidates dropped out amid scandal just weeks before the election. Crowley himself suspended his campaign and endorsed another candidate, only to reenter the race with less than a month left. That teed up a chaotic, last-minute showdown between establishment Democrats and the party’s upstart left-wing contingent.

That contingent was expected to win in Wisconsin, where Hong campaigned on practical issues like universal childcare, free school meals, and opposition to new data centers. But she also struggled to explain controversial positions that she staked out at the height of the pandemic — positions that both pro-Crowley groups and Republicans pilloried in well-funded attack ads. 

The furor certainly riled up Wisconsin Democrats: They turned out in huge numbers on Tuesday. And while Hong performed well in Madison and other liberal strongholds, voters in both Milwaukee and most rural counties went for Crowley. 

Go a little deeper

The Wisconsin primary was weird and messy, so I wouldn’t generalize its results too much. But there’s little doubt that Hong suffered from her association with “Woke 1” — a strain of early-2020s social justice activism that many on the left now want to disavow.

You’d probably recognize Woke 1, even if you haven’t heard the term. More than a movement or a policy agenda, it was a strident, binary way of talking about race, class, and social justice that peaked after the racial reckoning of 2020…and that ultimately alienated many centrist and working-class voters, including some in minority communities. 

“Defunding the police” = classic Woke 1. So are calls to abolish police or prisons — or, as Hong proposed in one infamous 2020 tweet, to cancel Thanksgiving.

Many Democratic voters agreed with the impulses behind these slogans — police and prisons need reform; colonialism bad — but felt alienated by the rhetoric around them. And even in Woke 1’s heyday, issues like immigration and racial justice mattered less to most Americans than things like healthcare and inflation. 

As left-wing candidates attempt to build new and broader coalitions, many seem to have gotten that message. Politicians like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed have both walked back comments about defunding the police, for instance. 

Instead, they’ve centered issues like affordability and healthcare and begun openly discussing how their positions changed. “There was a huge opening of the Overton window” during the pandemic, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday. “Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

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➨ Spend more intentionally. Frugality was all the rage in the wake of the Great Recession, when a generation of popular, thrift-focused bloggers taught Americans to do more with less. Pop culture has since turned on frugality, as a value — in part because people feel so pessimistic about their long-term economic prospects — but it’s still worth mining the old-school frugalsphere for relevant lessons. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that since 1980, the number of fires in the US has fallen by more than half? Thank more effective smoke alarms, automatic sprinklers, and fire-resistant furniture and finishes. 
• Today’s trivia: Which German philosopher wrote Critique of Practical Reason? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the country whose capital is Vientiane. That would be Laos, which — together with China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam — has one of the world’s only one-party communist governments. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

It’s not exactly the stuff of Netflix spy thrillers, but…it’s also not every day that the president makes a covert getaway in a catering truck. 

White House officials revealed on Monday that, before a flight from Turkey to the United Kingdom last month, President Donald Trump used the truck to secretly move between planes, then switched aircraft again after landing in Britain. 

The ruse deceived both Trump’s press corps and many of his staff, who weren’t warned of the last-minute plan in advance. But the deception was undertaken, officials said, in response to an assassination threat from Iran. 

Such plots are one tool weaker powers can wield in asymmetric warfare, or conflict between unevenly matched opponents. Iran can’t strike the US homeland with conventional military force the way the US can strike Iran.

As the catering truck caper attests, however, that doesn’t put Americans entirely beyond Tehran’s grasp. Instead, Iran is finding other, less conventional ways to inflict damage on US turf — from assassination plots to cyberattacks. 

We might need a bigger catering truck to escape all of that. 

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply.” 

— Joshua Corman, founder of I Am the Cavalry, a digital security nonprofit

Iran doesn’t appear able to launch the kind of major cyberattacks that would seriously disrupt Americans’ daily lives en masse. But over the past five months, attacks linked to Iran and pro-Iranian groups have targeted US medical device makers, social networks, public transit agencies, and — most recently, and perhaps most alarmingly — small-town utilities.

Unknown hackers compromised the water and wastewater systems of municipalities in at least 12 states last month, prompting water shut-offs, flooding and boil-water notices in a handful of locations. Cybersecurity experts think Iran is most likely behind the breaches. And American water systems — which are overwhelmingly run by small, local agencies — are especially vulnerable to this type of attack. They have little in the way of IT support, and relatively few state or federal laws require them to take cybersecurity precautions. 

It isn’t just utilities at risk, either. Over the past 10 years, Iranian hackers have also breached US targets ranging from satellite companies to political campaigns. And if the war continues to stretch on, some analysts believe the country’s hacks could grow more aggressive. 

The Trump administration hasn’t shown any great desire to address this risk, alas. Just a few months ago, it proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — the people responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyber threats. 

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➨ Ignorance can truly be bliss. Many of us feel the very modern compulsion to suck up all the information we can: about the news, about our bodies, about random subjects we encounter on the internet. But that deluge of daily data can overwhelm both your mental bandwidth and your mental health. Try letting go of some of these low-stakes tidbits so you can focus on subjects that most deserve your attention. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that pigs are smart enough to use tools without human prompting? 
• Today’s trivia: Vientiane is the capital of which Southeast Asian country? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for Dorothy’s last name in The Wizard of Oz. That would be Gale. Author L. Frank Baum is believed to have borrowed the name from either the victim of an 1879 tornado or his late infant niece, who died in 1898 at just over five months old.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

President Donald Trump may have to settle for the hand-me-down Nobel Prize medal that he scored several months ago. Despite their best efforts, his envoys don’t seem to be having much luck advancing a peace deal in Gaza. 

Over the weekend — just days after Trump announced a “HISTORIC” agreement to gradually disarm Hamas and stand down Israeli troops — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the framework. 

The plan, brokered by Trump’s Board of Peace, would have seen both sides ramp down in tandem. But that’s apparently a nonstarter for Netanyahu, who said Hamas must disarm before Israeli troops withdraw. Israel still controls about 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, according to NPR — and has continued launching attacks in the territory, even after an October ceasefire.

What happens if the US cuts off aid to Israel?

It’s the latest setback in what has been a long and ugly conflict — a conflict that has turned many Americans against their longtime ally, Israel. Against that backdrop, some Democratic lawmakers and pro-Palestinian activists are advancing a once-fringe policy in the hopes of forcing Israel to end the war in Gaza and change its course in the occupied West Bank: cutting off military aid to Israel. 

It’s an intuitive approach to behavior modification, familiar to any parent who has denied a child a desired toy or treat: withhold something they want until they behave. But Israel, in this admittedly imperfect metaphor, is not a toddler. It’s a full-grown adult with a $600 billion economy and a mind of its own…and it can absolutely buy its own drones and missile-defense systems.

Here’s a statistic that really drove that point home for me: In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on its military, plus US aid. To sustain that level of military investment without US support, Israel would need to allocate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. Not exactly a massive change. 

There are other valid arguments for the US to end Israeli aid, of course. (Among the most common: to avoid complicity in war crimes and possible genocide in the Gaza Strip.) But if US lawmakers hope to force Israel’s hand, on the two-state solution or anything else, then cutting military aid probably won’t provide enough leverage. 

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➨ About that organic chicken…many consumers shell out twice as much for organic poultry because they believe it was raised humanely. But while an organic certification does, on paper, require more space, fresh air and outdoor access for chickens, farms that supply Costco and other major retailers have been accused of serious animal welfare violations. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that migratory birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate? But scientists still don’t know which body part the birds use to do that sensing.
• Today’s trivia: What is Dorothy’s last name in The Wizard of Oz? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: On Thursday, we asked you for the fourth-largest Great Lake. That would be Lake Erie, which ranks as the 11th largest lake globally. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this week — a major public health breakthrough for an administration that’s been troublingly down on vaccines. 

The flu is a gigantic and costly illness, causing 1 billion infections and 300,000 deaths each year. But this new shot, built on advances from the Covid-19 pandemic, is expected to outperform the standard flu vaccine that we’ve used, largely unchanged, for the past 80 years.

The new shot fixes a problem that has long bedeviled the traditional vaccine: the gap between how quickly the flu virus mutates and how slowly vaccines are produced. The flu is changing constantly. But under current methods, manufacturing a flu vaccine — which, to my enormous fascination, most commonly involves secret chicken farms — takes six to eight months. 

That long lag often means the virus circulating during flu season isn’t the one the vaccine was designed to target. But the new mRNA vaccine works differently: Instead of using a weakened or dead virus to trigger an immune response, mRNA vaccines contain genetic instructions that train the immune system to fight influenza. 

mRNA vaccines also take less time to manufacture, so they can be produced closer to flu season. In a clinical trial, older adults who received Moderna’s mRNA vaccine were 27 percent less likely to get the flu than those who received the standard vaccine.

Heads up: Vox’s offices are closed tomorrow, so Today, Explained is taking a day off. We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday.

A world without flu?

Public health experts are justifiably hyped about mRNA technology. In addition to this new flu shot, researchers are developing mRNA vaccines against diseases including malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV.

But when it comes to influenza, mRNA isn’t the endgame. The real white whale is a “universal flu vaccine” — a shot that’s at least 75 percent effective against influenza A, the most dangerous type of flu virus, and lasts at least a year.

The challenge, again, is that the virus keeps mutating. Flu vaccines, whether mRNA or conventional, teach the immune system to recognize a viral protein called hemagglutinin and then fight off the virus. 

But hemagglutinin is a part of the flu virus that mutates often. To make a more durable vaccine, researchers are trying to either target parts of the virus that rarely change or teach the immune system to simultaneously recognize many different strains.

Several vaccines that use these approaches are already in clinical trials. And if they succeed, the flu shot could hypothetically become more like the measles vaccine — providing years of protection in one go, instead of requiring annual updates.

In other words, we’re used to thinking of the flu as a routine winter hazard, but that might not always be the case. If you can persuade people to get their shots, at least.

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➨ Go ahead, take your time. Three etiquette experts tell Vox that, in most casual situations, you can run 10 to 15 minutes late without appearing inconsiderate. But that guideline is very culturally and contextually dependent, which is bad news for chronically late people like myself. I prefer to think it’s a result not of rudeness, but of polychronicism.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the Fast & Furious franchise, now on its 10th movie, is (loosely) based on a 1998 magazine article? The author of that piece is still a working journalist, so it would not appear he got his money’s worth from Hollywood. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the fourth largest Great Lake? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers. That would be Double Dare, which just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first episode. The show is credited with influencing a generation of children’s media. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed won Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan — though the vote was so close that most outlets didn’t call the race until this morning.

It’s not exactly the resounding triumph progressives expected. In the lead-up to Election Day, El-Sayed’s campaign boasted of a “massive” polling lead over centrist Rep. Haley Stevens that they said definitively proved the mainstream appeal of his style of politics.

In reality, the takeaways from one of the midterms’ bitterest and most consequential races are probably more mixed. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public health official who has championed policies like Medicare-for-all and an end to military aid for Israel, appeared to struggle in some of Michigan’s lower-income and less-educated districts. 

That said, his win is still a big deal, especially given the forces arrayed against him. Democratic heavyweights and big-money donors both threw their considerable weight behind Stevens. 

The left’s big swing-state test

The Democratic primary in Michigan centered on a lot of interesting issues: money in politics, a whole bunch of -isms, and the role of “the establishment,” to name just a few. But the upcoming general election will test one question above all: Can a left-wing populist win over swing-state voters the way right-wing populists have been doing for years now? 

We have some left-wing populists in office already, of course — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-NY), who both campaigned for El-Sayed this cycle. Progressives represent a number of cities and urban congressional districts. And over the past few months, the left wing of the Democratic Party has notched some notable primary wins.

But all of these candidates have run to represent solidly Democratic communities, where winning the primary effectively meant winning the seat. An out-and-proud, Sanders-style, left-wing populist arguably has yet to prove that this platform can win a statewide general election in a state that isn’t deep-blue already. 

That makes Michigan a high-stakes test. The state went for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. Winning Michigan as a Democrat means cobbling together a coalition from a broad and varied range of constituencies, including Black Detroiters, swing suburbanites, college-town progressives, blue-collar union workers, and both Jewish and Muslim Americans. 

“Michigan is like a microcosm of America,” one Detroit reporter told my colleague Astead Herndon. If a left-wing populist can win there, in other words, the Democratic Party will really have to pay attention. 

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➨ Have that second cup of coffee; there’s a strong case to be made for its health benefits. In contrast to other, highly publicized food studies of this arena — many of which are sponsored by industry groups — a number of large, rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have found that coffee reduces your risk of developing dementia, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that for most people, physical fitness peaks around age 33? I wish I didn’t know that, but now that I do: Misery loves company! 
• Today’s trivia: What was the name of the Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you how many states have legalized marijuana. That would be 41, if you count medical use, and 24 if you do not.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The Spokane, Washington wildfires have destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced 65,000 people from their homes — and with high winds forecast for later this week, the crisis probably isn’t over. 

As of Tuesday afternoon, three separate blazes were still burning uncontained to the north and west of the city center, according to a data clearinghouse managed by the US Forest Service. And heavy smoke from the blazes continued to spill across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. 

Meanwhile, investigators appear to have made progress in determining the cause of the largest fire: On Tuesday, local sheriff’s deputies arrested a 37-year-old Arizona man on charges of first-degree arson. The vast majority of US wildfires are started by humans…but typically through carelessness or by accident.

Go a little deeper

I was struck by an observation that one longtime Spokane resident made to NPR this week: “Obviously, we’ve had wildfire seasons,” she said. But she “never, ever imagined” having to evacuate, because she lived so deep inside of the city. 

Living in a city is no protection from climate change, though. And the destruction caused by wildfires in cities and suburbs is very much on the rise. Consider the devastation caused by recent fires in Colorado (2021), Hawaii (2023), and Los Angeles (2025). 

Why are wildfires causing more damage in cities and suburbs? It’s not because they’re new. One recent study found urban wildfires have remained a fairly stable share of all US fires over the past generation. 

What has changed is the scale of their damage, thanks to factors like climate-driven increases in extreme fire weather and human incursion into forests and grasslands. As a country, we are increasingly building homes and other structures in the “wildland-urban interface” — a liminal zone where neighborhoods and nature overlap. 

While housing isn’t dense in these areas, the buildings that exist can serve as tinder that helps fires spread. And putting more people, roads, and power lines into these zones creates more opportunities for ignitions.

All this means that city-dwellers and suburbanites will likely face more wildfire risk in years to come. And for those of you in the Midwest or on the East Coast, like me, don’t assume that wildfires are someone else’s problem. “Every single state” with wildland-urban interfaces also holds the potential for fire disaster, one pyrogeographer told Vox in 2023. That includes communities like Spokane, sure — but also Florida, Minnesota, and Mississippi.

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➨ Go ahead, save that tiny glass jar! It’s apparently a bona fide pop culture craze. But don’t bother doing it for the environmental benefits: One policy professor (disappointingly!) tells Vox that consumer decisions like choosing glass over plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there’s a special branch of medical science devoted to the physiology of space travel? It’s appropriately called “space medicine.” (Alas, practitioners aren’t called Space Doctors.) 
• Today’s trivia: How many US states have legalized marijuana? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Pennsylvania-based singer/songwriter who’s sometimes called the godmother of punk. That would be Joan Jett, who shares the contested honorific with (New Jersey-born) Patti Smith and (German-born) Nina Hagen. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

We always like a bit of good democracy news — such news being in overall short supply — and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared to deliver some last night. 

Blanche is currently jockeying for the permanent AG gig, which would put him in charge of the Justice Department. But his confirmation process stalled over bipartisan objections to President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” a $1.8 billion reparation program for people who claimed the government had wronged them. 

On Sunday, in acknowledgement of those objections, Blanche confirmed in writing that the Justice Department had rescinded the fund and had no plans to revive it. It’s a rare reminder that the Senate’s confirmation power can still constrain the White House, even if many Republican lawmakers would rather not rock the boat. And the presidential boat was very much rocked by the dustup over Blanche’s confirmation. 

In a post on Saturday, Trump insisted that he’d get some version of the fund even over senators’ objections. And on Monday, he told reporters that he didn’t sign off on the rescission. Notably, the two Republicans who forced that surrender — North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Texas’s John Cornyn — will both depart the Senate in early 2027.

All the president’s slush funds

The anti-weaponization fund is just the latest of Trump’s attempts to siphon federal money into an account that he or his allies control. In fact, the quest to secure such a slush fund is a defining feature of his presidency — and several of his previous, less egregious attempts have been more successful. Those include: 

1. Venezuelan oil accounts: Since the US toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil have gotten routed into special US Treasury accounts, which are labeled as Venezuela’s sovereign property — but only released at the direction of the secretary of state.   
2. The Board of Peace: Trump’s controversial coalition for rebuilding Gaza was conceived as a pay-to-play operation: Member countries get seats for a mere three years unless they pony up $1 billion to the Trump-controlled organization. While more than 20 countries have signed on, Reuters reported in April that only two had actually made contributions.  
3. US sovereign wealth fund: Trump first floated this idea of a government-owned wealth fund, which would allow him to direct federal investment in private companies, during his first term. While it never got off the ground as such, the administration has since acquired equity stakes in at least a dozen firms.

“The long-term risk is not just that Trump might be doing something illegal,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, wrote for Vox earlier this year. “The long-term risk is that his presidency is normalizing treating the receipt and disbursement of money as instruments of personal power.”

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➨ Happiness is overrated. In a new book, the author Ian Bogost argues we should instead pursue sensory gratification: the simple and immediate pleasure found in physical experiences, whether changing gears in a stick-shift car or holding a warm mug in your hands. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that dolphins have been known to beat and kill other animals for fun? I spent much of my weekend watching a baby animal documentary with my sick child, and am actually devastated to learn that many adorable animals “are also murderous monsters.” 
• Today’s trivia: What Pennsylvania-born singer/songwriter is sometimes called “the godmother of punk”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last Friday we asked you for the Vietnamese word for festival. That would be “tết,” as in the 1968 Tet Offensive — a brutal military campaign that began during Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The American economy lost some steam this spring as the war in Iran pushed up energy prices. But don’t let that slower growth, or the downer vibes, fool you: The economy is actually…doing all right.

The latest report out Thursday from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which covers the months of April, May, and June, finds that consumers and businesses have been feeling surprisingly spendy, despite the drag of inflation.

Inflation does remain well above the Federal Reserve’s annual target of 2 percent. And a surge in imports — largely semiconductors and other gear related to the AI boom — pulled the economy down on paper. Overall, the US gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 1.5 percent, slower than economists expected. 

But imports and exports can swing dramatically from quarter to quarter, and cleaner measures of underlying demand (like the dreadfully named “real final sales to private domestic purchasers,” which filters out some of the noise of quarter-to-quarter swings) showed stronger growth. “It’s an economy that’s doing okay,” summed one economist to the Washington Post.

The US economy is surviving Trump

This raises an obvious question that President Donald Trump somehow has not posted about yet: If the economy is chugging along, does he deserve the credit?

After all, in addition to these GDP numbers, unemployment is pretty low. And wages rose faster than inflation last year, helping offset higher prices. 

But many economists argue that the economy has held up despite Trump’s policies, not because of them. Without Trump’s meddling, today’s “okay” economy might have been fantastic.

Let’s take a closer look at inflation to see how this shakes out. Trump has famously imposed massive and ever-changing tariffs on virtually all of America’s trading partners — including, most recently, a 50 percent levy on many goods from Canada. If I run a liquor store and want to stock Canada’s iconic Crown Royal, each $25 bottle now costs me $37. I either eat that cost, drop the product…or pass some of the increase on to customers. 

Repeated across the economy, these little pass-throughs add up. The Dallas Federal Reserve calculated that, as of March, America’s core inflation rate would have been just 2.3 percent — instead of 3.2 percent — without Trump’s tariffs. Put another way, Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that tariffs cost the average US household $1,100 a year. 

So maybe the economy is doing okay…but it could also be better. Personally I’d like an extra $1,100. And a Canadian whisky, for that matter. 

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➨ Don’t rent the new iPhone. Apple rolled out a new “upgrade” program a few days ago, partnering with Klarna to offer customers the ability to rent smartphones for $35 a month. The scheme may make sense for diehards who always want the latest phone and switch devices frequently. But for most other people, it’s not worth it. “How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here?” one law professor said. “If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that stroke patients can sometimes relearn speech by singing their sentences first? The treatment is called melodic intonation therapy, and it grew out of research into how the brain processes music and language.
• Today’s trivia: What kind of fruit is an ugli? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of Hercules’s stepmother. That would be Hera, who in Greek mythology — and contrary to her Disney movie portrayal — absolutely hated Hercules and repeatedly tried to kill him.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Surely Anthony Fauci has earned the right to party with Robert De Niro in peace. But instead, America’s embattled former Covid-19 czar was hauled before the Senate today to defend five-year-old diary entries. 

Senate Republicans subpoenaed Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as part of a broader effort to dispute the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fauci is the longtime face of American infectious disease research and has appeared in front of Congress more than 250 times. But this morning — in a tense, highly partisan spectacle — he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify. 

Fauci accused Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who’s leading this circus, of nursing an “unhinged” and “obvious obsession” with him. Paul recently released Fauci’s unredacted diary, which includes lots of deeply cringe tidbits about the immunologist’s celebrity hobnobbing…but nothing that materially alters our understanding of the pandemic or Fauci’s handling of it. 

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”

Why we’re still arguing about Covid-19

Fauci occupies an uneasy spot in American politics. To some people, he’s a hero who helped steer the country through a terrifying pandemic. To others, he’s a villain who imposed damaging policies, concealed inconvenient facts, and never answered for his various missteps.

The evidence doesn’t back that darker story. But Fauci’s vilification points to one possibility that is worth taking seriously: As a country, we never adequately reckoned with the mistakes and uncertainties of Covid-19.

Consider the narrative trajectory of the lab-leak theory, which is central to Paul’s vendetta against Fauci. Early in the pandemic, Paul and other proponents argued that the novel coronavirus might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory. Some people went even further, claiming that Fauci had funded the lab’s research and then covered it up. Both theories were treated as ridiculous.

To be clear, the second theory is ridiculous. (There’s absolutely no evidence that Fauci was somehow, improbably involved in the making of Covid-19.) But the consensus around the lab-leak theory has changed. While most researchers still believe the virus spread naturally from animals to humans, a laboratory accident has never been definitively ruled out — and many now allow for the possibility in a way that they didn’t four or five years ago. 

The same is true of other pandemic controversies, too. Reasonable people can now debate whether lengthy school closures did more harm than good. Guidance on masks and other measures changed repeatedly, sometimes without a ton of explanation. 

None of that means officials acted in bad faith. But we’ve arguably never had the kind of serious, bipartisan examination of the pandemic’s missteps that a once-in-a-century public health crisis deserved. And in the absence of that (naive? impossible?) shared reckoning…we’re getting Fauci’s leaked journals. 

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➨ Check for ticks. Ticks are responsible for a whopping 90 percent of vector-borne disease in the US, but local and county health departments do very little to stop them. To protect yourself, use permethrin spray when you go outside and examine your body for the little buggers when you get home. Throw your clothes in the dryer after a hike, too — ticks hate heat! Who knew. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that in Wisconsin, placing certain bets on the prediction market Kalshi can cost you your right to vote? The law dates back to 1849, and it’s one of several state laws that bar voters from gambling on elections. 
• Today’s trivia: In Greek mythology, who is Hercules’s stepmother? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you the name of the Dutch cheese typically coated in red wax. That would be the Edam. In the 15th century, Edam reportedly helped make its namesake city one of Europe’s most important cheese markets. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
An underappreciated surreality of climate change is the incredible sense of déjà vu: Every heat wave seems to be the new worst; every hurricane season seems to break records. 

The wildfires sweeping France and Spain this week are the latest entries in that grim catalog. They are the largest blazes either country has faced in modern history — and they could worsen as temperatures spike above 100 degrees later this week.

Already, France has evacuated more than 250,000 people from their homes in the southwest, outside Bordeaux. Spain, meanwhile, ordered some 100,000 residents to relocate as fires swept rural and wooded areas to the west of Madrid. 

Both countries have experience with wildfires. What’s new, however, is the scale of the fires: Wildfire season is lasting longer across Europe, and the blazes are burning larger areas. Climate scientists say that a series of record heat waves this summer — there’s that apocalypse déjà vu again! — helped make this year’s wildfire season particularly brutal in Spain and France.

Dry hot European summer

Every continent on Earth is getting warmer. But Europe is riding the express bus. The region has seen its average temperatures rise twice as quickly as the global average over the past 30 years, according to the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme. 

This dubious honor begs a question, however: Why does “global warming” vary between regions if it is, ya know…global? 

The answer relates to local geography and weather patterns. In broad strokes, the same climate story is playing out everywhere: When humans burn fossil fuels, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Those gases make it harder for heat to escape into space.

But some places warm faster than others. Land heats up more quickly than oceans, for instance — so coastal waters can provide a bit of insulation. 

Local weather patterns matter, too. One reason Europe has been hit especially hard is that air currents have increasingly allowed hot air to stall over the continent, fueling intense heat waves like the ones we’ve seen this summer. 

Ironically, another major reason for Europe’s rapid warming springs from an environmental victory: In the 1980s, European countries cracked down on sulfur pollution from coal plants and factories. That pollution had been reflecting sunlight back into space and slightly cooling the continent. But as the pollution disappeared, more sunlight reached the ground — and revealed the warming that pollution had previously masked. 

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➨ It is possible to wear Meta’s “pervert glasses” in a non-creepy way. Namely, and respectfully: by oneself. The polarizing $300 smartglasses come equipped with dual cameras, multiple microphones, and a whole lot of well-deserved cultural baggage. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that, in the US, the age-adjusted death rate from cardiovascular disease has fallen by three-quarters since 1950? It’s one of several pretty incredible signs that modern medicine is trouncing heart disease.
• Today’s trivia: What is the name of the Dutch cheese typically coated in red wax? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the singer of the 1988 song “Orinoco Flow.” That would be Enya, the reclusive New Age artist who became one of Ireland’s wealthiest and most successful musicians without ever going on tour. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

America formally eradicated measles in the year 2000. But like many other remnants of the 1990s — flip phones, CDs, baggy pants — measles is now regrettably and undeniably back. 

More than 2,300 Americans have come down with measles so far this year — the highest number since 1992. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that there’ve been more cases in the country in the last two years than in the 24 years prior. 

Many of the cases trace back to large outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, some of which have ended. But the underlying problem is both much broader and much trickier to address: As more parents pass on routine childhood vaccinations for their kids, these once-eradicated viruses have more chances to spread.

For measles, which is incredibly — almost frightfully — contagious, 95 percent of people in any given community must be immune to stop its transmission. But today, only 28 percent of US counties vaccinate enough of their kindergarteners to meet that threshold. 

Another record-setting year for measles

Lower vaccination rates are, in large part, a result of political polarization, misinformation, and declining trust in health authorities and institutions. But there’s another, more ironic reason for measles’ resurgence: We did such a good job getting rid of it.

As late as the 1950s, virtually every American child contracted measles before age 16. Roughly 48,000 patients were hospitalized each year with measles, which is among the most contagious infections known to humanity. 

But the development of a highly effective vaccine in the 1960s, and a series of aggressive public immunization campaigns in the decades after that, all but eradicated a once-common childhood illness. The federal government poured millions of dollars into vaccination programs, especially for low-income kids. Everyone from Michael Jackson to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles championed measles immunization. 

All that campaigning worked. By the end of the 1990s, more than 90 percent of Americans had received the measles vaccine, and a similar percentage agreed that it was important to vaccinate children. As a result, most people born in the last 40 years have no firsthand experience of how dangerous measles is.

“We’ve done too good of a job,” one doctor joked to Vox last December. In other words, ironically, America’s success at vaccinating against measles … has made Americans complacent about measles vaccination. 

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➨ Go with your gut. The hashtag #GutTok has over 6 billion views on TikTok, and viral trends that promise to “hack your gut” through miracle products and cleanses are all the rage. But you don’t need an influencer-endorsed supplement for digestive wellness. Instead, actual experts recommend basic lifestyle steps like eating a high-fiber diet and reducing stress. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there are more endangered species in California than in any other US state? But more surprising is the runner-up: After California, Alabama has the most endangered species. 
• Today’s trivia: Which Irish musician sings the song “Orinoco Flow”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: On Friday we asked you for the four-letter university located in Athens. That would be Ohio. But there are more than two dozen Athenses in the US, and a rival Athens is also home to the University of Georgia. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

During his campaign to become mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani famously vowed that he’d arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next time he visited the Big Apple. 

This week, Netanyahu essentially called his bluff. He’s expected to address the United Nations in September. And after a whole lot of hemming, and hawing, and hedging, Mamdani admitted in a video Tuesday night that he does not actually have the legal authority to arrest a foreign dignitary on US soil. 

The retreat is not surprising to legal experts, who had long questioned how Mamdani would pull this particular promise off. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court — a tribunal recognized by 125 countries, not including Israel, China, Russia, or the US — did issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of starvation, murder, persecution, and intentionally directing attacks against civilians.

But the US does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. And even if it did, the job of executing its warrants would presumably not fall to New York City cops. So, why did Mamdani suggest he’d arrest Netanyahu when he actually knew he could not?

The end of the pro-Israel consensus

Mamdani’s allies argue that the principle here mattered, that the mayor needed to issue some kind of denunciation, even if he couldn’t act. But there’s another, more cynical read here, too: For Democrats, critiquing Israel is good politics. 

This is a seismic, generational shift, with far-ranging implications for both Democrats and US foreign policy. The party’s left flank has criticized Israel for years, but older and more moderate Dems only soured on Israel recently. 

“A few months after October 7, younger and progressive Democrats overwhelmingly took the opinion that Israel was committing a genocide,” said Hamid Bendaas, of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group. “But there were still elements of the Democratic Party — people watching MSNBC or NPR — that weren’t convinced.”

For many of these voters, the turning point only came after President Donald Trump took office again. Severe famine swept across Gaza last summer — the consequence of ongoing conflict and Israeli restrictions on food and aid shipments. Netanyahu also allied himself closely with Trump, particularly around the war in Iran. Support for Israel has consequently grown more GOP-coded, rather like Kid Rock or Bass Pro hats.

Now, even Democrats far to the right of Mamdani are looking to retool the US-Israeli relationship. Listen to Tuesday’s Today, Explained podcast episode for even more about the shift (!).

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➨ Beat the endless scroll at its own game. Social media is compelling — and compulsive — because it hijacks your sense of curiosity. But my colleague Constance Grady has come up with a delightful (and delightfully simple) antidote: To reclaim your time, just find the thing that fascinates you even more than your feed. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the term “luddite” comes from a movement of skilled, 19th-century textile workers who smashed and burned automated looms?
• Today’s trivia: The city of Enid, Oklahoma, is named after a character from which Victorian literary work? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday I messed up! I told you that there were 23 countries in Latin America, when there are in fact 23 countries in North America. (I think we can all agree that the latter makes for more surprising trivia.) I also asked you for the name of the Eminem song that gave us the slang term for an obsessive admirer. That would be “Stan.” It also samples Dido. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

A yet-unreleased, cutting-edge AI model escaped its test environment last week, connecting to the internet and murdering its creators in a bid for self-determination and autonomy. 

I’m kidding, of course: That’s the plot to Westworld. (And Ex Machina, and The Matrix, and too many other sci-fi stories to list.) But on Tuesday, OpenAI did reveal that two of its models broke containment and hacked Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, during a recent test. 

The test was designed to evaluate how good the models had gotten at finding, and exploiting, cybersecurity flaws. To do that, researchers placed the models in a tightly controlled, tightly isolated environment, called a “sandbox,” and essentially challenged them to solve a cybersecurity puzzle. 

Instead of solving it directly, however, the models identified an unknown flaw in software connected to their test environment — then used that flaw to tunnel through OpenAI’s research network until they located a computer with internet access. From there, the models (correctly!) reasoned that Hugging Face might hold the answer to their challenge. 

It’s an “unprecedented” incident, OpenAI said — and a cautionary tale. Over the past year, a growing chorus of AI researchers, cybersecurity experts, and tech executives have warned that society is unprepared for this new generation of frontier AI models. 

In the real world, of course, these models do come with guardrails. (OpenAI turned them off for the test.) But the episode still suggests that the gap between reality and science fiction is narrowing — perhaps a bit faster than you’d expect.

The (impossible?) quest for a moral AI

The Hugging Face hack is a textbook example of what AI researchers call the alignment problem: the enormous, mind-melty challenge of getting AI systems to do what you want, the way that you wanted them to do it. 

Given a task and left to their own devices, AI models will pursue that task using the most efficient means available to them. But sometimes, the most efficient means are harmful, deceitful, antisocial, or otherwise…bad. 

The Hugging Face episode is one example. Bias is another: When an Amazon hiring algorithm discriminated against female candidates, for instance, it was doing what Amazon wanted (finding candidates who resembled past hires) in a way that Amazon did not want (by penalizing resumes that included words associated with women). 

In a truly apocalyptic scenario, you could even imagine — and many sci-fi writers have imagined — AI systems killing people in the narrow, relentless, and morally indifferent pursuit of their goals. Consider an AI that’s asked to order coffee, for example, and then takes steps to ensure that no one on earth can ever stop it. 

In the interests of avoiding this dystopia, AI companies have poured billions of dollars into the project of encoding their creations with human values. But even that apparently worthwhile ambition raises thorny questions, because human values vary — and often, conflict.

Should the AI order the cheapest coffee, or the cup produced under the best labor conditions? A lot of forests are cleared to plant coffee each year; maybe the AI should nudge me toward tap water, instead. Is your inferior human brain starting to melt yet…? 

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➨ Write a little note today. By hand. With a pen. Handwriting is a disappearing art in American schools, homes, and workplaces. (The average kindergarten teacher spends only 10 minutes a week teaching handwriting, and that’s the primary grade when kids learn penmanship.) People tend to think more deeply when they’re writing than when they’re typing, one education researcher told Vox. Plus, a handwritten note has a certain charm that an email or text does not. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the average F1 race car driver can lift 90 pounds — wait for it — with their neck? Driving doesn’t immediately sound all that athletic, but the extreme physics of F1 racing demand extraordinary fitness.
• Today’s trivia: Which Eminem song gave us the slang term for an obsessive admirer? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the number of countries in North America. The answer is 23. It includes Central America and the Caribbean, in addition to the big three.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

President Donald Trump seemed visibly irked when asked about his plans for Iran on Tuesday. “You don’t know anything,” he snapped at a reporter who said Iran showed no signs of deescalating. 

You have to forgive the man his vexation — he is in something of a bind. The war in Iran, never popular to begin with, has only become more of a lemon since a tenuous ceasefire collapsed earlier this month. In the two weeks since, Iran has bombarded targets across the Middle East with missiles and drone strikes. The onslaught badly damaged US bases and, just last week, killed three American soldiers’ lives.

Now Iran and its allies, metaphorically drunk on their recent successes (…alcohol is technically illegal in Iran!), appear to be revving for a new round of attacks. Iran launched strikes on Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain this week, reportedly targeting both US bases and civilian infrastructure. And on Monday, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia also threatened to shut down a second key waterway that could further strain global oil markets. 

The world is running out of soldiers

The latest US casualties are a grim reminder that — for all the talk of drones and precision missiles — wars are still fought by actual, human people. 

But major military powers are running short on soldiers: The US, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have all recently struggled to recruit troops. And the forces driving that shortage aren’t easily reversed. 

For starters, falling birth rates and aging populations have left many countries with fewer military-age adults. Being the right age is also only half of the equation. In the US, factors including weight, drug use and physical or mental health conditions would disqualify an estimated three-quarters of young Americans from military service.

Then there’s the military’s image problem: Polls show that young people around the world are becoming less willing to fight for their respective countries. And young Americans, in particular, have more negative views of both the military and the war in Iran than do their parents or grandparents.

There is another way to fill the ranks, of course…but it isn’t popular. The US ended its draft in 1973, and most Western militaries have similarly transitioned to all-volunteer forces. If the US did ever need to restart its draft, both the politics and the logistics could prove formidable. 

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➨ Treat yourself to a froyo. The go-to dessert of my misspent 20s is apparently very much back in vogue. But this time, it’s less about the zany flavors and maximalist toppings and more about wellness buzzwords like…protein and probiotics. Hmmmm. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that carrots don’t actually improve your vision? The myth originated as part of a World War II propaganda campaign to conceal Britain’s development of radar technology.
• Today’s trivia: How many countries are in North America? Don’t look it up — just guess! (Our daily trivia generally comes from Vox’s daily crossword, but today’s tidbit comes from my colleague Sean Rameswaram.) 
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday I asked you to name the Mesoamerican civilization that spoke Nahuatl. That would be the Aztecs — though 1.5 million people in central Mexico still speak the language now.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The first thing you need to know about the UK’s new prime minister is that he’s previously moonlighted as a DJ. 

Okay: probably not the first thing you needed to know. And sure: That DJ gig was for charity. 

But it still tells you a little something about Andy Burnham, who today became the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years. He’s widely seen as a pragmatic, affable, down-to-earth kind of guy — more Zohran Mamdani than Keir Starmer. 

As the long-time former mayor of Manchester, the UK’s second-largest city, Burnham won adoration for his focus on improving public transit and affordable housing. His vocal advocacy for England’s post-industrial cities even earned him the nickname “The King of the North.”

Burnham’s first speech as prime minister, delivered (without notes!) on Monday morning, doubled down on some of those populist themes — including the need to bring down Britain’s cost of living and address homelessness.

Political observers don’t expect Burnham’s policies to actually differ all that much from those of Starmer, his predecessor. (They’re both members of Britain’s center-left Labour Party.) And the fundamental relationship between the UK and US is also expected to stay much the same. 

Asked how he’d relate to President Donald Trump, Burnham said: “I like to think I’ve got some personality myself.” You can be the judge of that! There’s video of his 2022 DJ set.

Will Britain’s new PM reverse Brexit?

Here’s one place where Burnham does break from his predecessor: He wants Britain to rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. (Though he’s also promised not to relitigate Brexit.)

Call it a breturn or a brejoinder — it’s a tantalizing prospect for the majority of Britons, who now either have soured on their country’s 2016 vote to depart from the EU or never supported Brexit to begin with.

But undoing Britain’s break with Europe would be a monumental undertaking. First, the government would likely need a clear political mandate from British voters, either through a second referendum or a general election where a breturn figured heavily. 

Then the UK would have to negotiate its way back into the bloc…and convince all 27 member states to give it another go. Some could approve accession with parliamentary votes. But others, including France, could require national referendums of their own. 

“Countries have very different views of Britain,” one European observer told Vox last month. “There are those that still think that the EU is better off without Britain.”

One link for later

➨ Slow down time — or at least your subjective experience of it. Neuroscience research shows that both novelty and strong emotions seem to stretch time out a bit. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that despite all the evidence to the contrary — license plates, hip-hop lyrics, etc. — a minority of American peaches are actually grown in the great state of Georgia? 
• Today’s trivia: Nahuatl is still spoken by millions of people today. But it was also the primary language of which former Mesoamerican civilization? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Friday’s trivia: On Friday, my colleague Dylan Scott asked you for a Russian name that means “holy.” That would be Oleg, as in Oleg Cassini — the Russian count turned designer who dressed Jackie Kennedy. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Canadian wildfire smoke is pouring over the US border today, blanketing much of the Northeast and Upper Midwest in fine particulate. 

When I went outside to water plants in Buffalo this morning, the air tasted like campfire and glowed with a faint amber haze. My colleague Zack Beauchamp, who lives in Ontario, said “the sky looked genuinely apocalyptic” in Toronto yesterday.

The heavy smoke comes from both the hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada and a meteorological phenomenon known as a “heat dome,” which traps hot, smoky air close to the earth. 

Those conditions are expected to linger through Saturday, exposing more than 115 million people to dangerously polluted air. Stay indoors, if possible. (AC and air purifiers can help maintain your indoor air quality.) And if you must go outside, wear an N95 mask and avoid strenuous activity. 

The pollution success story everyone forgets

Smoky, polluted summer weeks like this one still feel like outliers on the East Coast. But they were actually pretty common before the passage of the Clean Air Act 63 years ago. 

Pollution from cars, factories, and power plants had exploded in the boom years following World War II. Major US cities were routinely blanketed in falling ash, yellow smog, and a toxic “smaze” — that’s “smoke” + “haze” — that, during flare-ups, killed dozens of people. 

The Clean Air Act spurred early research into monitoring and control, however, and laid the groundwork for an ambitious federal regulatory system that set limits on polluters. Over the next 50 years, those efforts significantly slashed US air pollution and, according to some estimates, prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. The effort was so successful, in fact, that many Americans no longer remember a time when cities like New York regularly looked like this. 

But the news here isn’t all good. After decades of progress, some air pollutants — like the fine particulate matter released by wildfires — have experienced year-to-year increases. And the politics of addressing climate change, which makes wildfires larger and more intense, are far thornier than the politics of cleaning up car tailpipes or smokestacks. 

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➨ Today is a great day to buy a produce brush. (Online, obviously. Don’t go outside for one!) Cyclosporiasis, the explosive-diarrhea parasite, continues to wreak havoc on America’s bowels. And the best way to reduce your risk is by washing raw fruits, vegetables, and herbs under running water.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that “pins and needles” numbness you sometimes feel in your limbs isn’t caused by a lack of blood flow? It’s probably related to nerve compression, and for most of us, it’s pretty normal. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s an animal that can be as narrow as a few millimeters or as wide as 13 feet? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you to name a famous Indo-Caribbean wrap-style sandwich. That would be the roti, versions of which also exist in many Asian and African cooking traditions. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

If I had a nickel for every time President Donald Trump backtracked or changed course on Iran, I’d have…well, at least enough money for a gallon of $3.89 gas.

Trump has threatened attacks and postponed them. He’s praised Iran’s leaders in one breath and panned them as “scum” in the next. The latest about-face played out Tuesday morning, when Trump canceled a controversial, short-lived plan to charge fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway at the heart of this whole mess.

It’s incredibly easy to get lost in all the back-and-forth. (Even as I write this, the United States is still sanctioning Iranian oil sales, preventing ships from docking at Iranian ports, and bombarding the country with missile strikes.) But if you zoom out far enough, a clear narrative does emerge: Whatever the war might’ve been about in the beginning, it’s now very clearly a strait-up tug-of-war for control of the Strait of Hormuz. 

The strait is the world’s most important energy chokepoint: A fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally passes through it. And now that Iran has shown it can shut down that traffic, whoever controls the strait will gain both a major potential revenue source and a powerful economic weapon.

These waterways run the world 

The Strait of Hormuz is what’s known as a maritime chokepoint: a narrow waterway that handles an outsized share of global trade. Your daily life is almost definitely filled with and fueled by goods that pass through these channels. But you may never have occasion to consciously think about them until something — like a war or a stuck container ship — gets in the way. Here are a few of the other heavyweights (click to see a larger version here): 

One link for later

➨ Health trackers offer a ton of data. And much of it is only good for raising your stress! Instead of obsessing over metrics like your daily resting heart rate or HRV, focus on the long-term trends. And don’t forget to pay attention to how you actually feel, as opposed to deferring to what your wearable says.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that singing with a group of other people raises your oxytocin levels? This experiment was conducted in a choir rehearsal, but I’m personally and self-servingly gonna assume it applies to karaoke, as well.
• Today’s trivia: Caribbean and Indian cooking traditions combined to yield what delicious wrap-style sandwich? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the bizarre human nickname that San Franciscans give their heavy summer fog. That would be Karl, a reference to the 2003 film Big Fish. The gag started on social media.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Two fatalities, a surge in arrests, large protests in the streets — the past two weeks of US immigration news have given me flashbacks to January. 

But this time, something’s different. Or at least appears to be different. This time, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fatally shot two men during traffic stops…the agency ordered most traffic stops to temporarily cease. 

The directive is a far cry from the denials and smears ICE lobbed last winter, after agents killed two American protesters in Minneapolis. At the time, administration officials went so far as to baselessly claim the victims were “domestic terrorists.”

The circumstances of these new shootings are different, though early reports from eyewitnesses have raised similar alarms. Yesterday, agents shot and killed a Colombian man — identified as 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero — after he exited a home they’d been surveilling. Guerrero was reportedly not the target of the surveillance.

Days earlier in Texas, ICE agents fatally shot another man, 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, as he drove three fellow construction workers to a Houston job site. DHS claimed Araujo tried to ram the officers’ vehicle. But the other men in Araujo’s van said the agents never even identified themselves as law enforcement.

How Trump remade ICE

The fatal shootings in Maine and Texas underscore an important reality: President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign might’ve faded from the headlines, but it never actually went away.

In March 2026, the most recent month with complete data, ICE arrested nearly 30,000 people, according to Syracuse University research. And just this month, ICE arrested 10,000 people in a single five-day sprint — more detentions than the agency booked per month for long stretches of the Biden administration. 

The quiet persistence of the crackdown reflects Trump’s priorities: His desire to deport tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants hasn’t actually changed, even if the PR calculus has. 

But it also speaks to a profound administrative shift: ICE is a fundamentally different agency than it was under prior administrations.  

Consider ICE’s budget, for instance, which shot up eightfold between 2024 and 2025. ICE now receives more money than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives…combined. 

For the first time in at least 20 years, ICE is also charged with entering communities to make proactive arrests, as opposed to merely picking up undocumented people detained on other charges by local or state police. That’s how we ended up with agents surveilling homes and making traffic stops in the first place. 

One link for later

➨ If you’ve never read The Odyssey, there’s no time like the present. Christopher Nolan’s movie of the same name comes out this week and seems destined to be a gigantic hit. Also, Vox’s Constance Grady says, it’s “funny, gripping, and sexy.” That’s not exactly my recollection from 11th-grade English, but I’m willing to give another translation a read!  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the name of the popular cosmetic drug “Botox” comes from the Latin word for sausage? The bacteria that the drug is made from, Clostridium botulinum, was discovered in Germany in the early 1800s after it caused an outbreak of food poisoning in people who ate spoiled sausages. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the bizarre human nickname that San Franciscans give their heavy summer fog? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you the name of the third US vice president. That would be Aaron Burr, sir — who is, of course, far more (in)famous for shooting Alexander Hamilton.