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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.

One link for later

➨ 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.

Ever find yourself hunched over your laptop, eyes glazed, slack jawed, and stunned by the quantity of information modern life is throwing at you? You might take a break to stare at your phone. Or you could try switching from one browser tab to the next while checking your email and inching closer to the day’s deadline. 

Some people call this TikTok brain. Others call it brain rot. Either way, it feels like a distinctly 21st-century affliction, caused by scrolling through too many short-form videos and social media feeds that trains your brain to seek out little hits of dopamine and ruins your ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. People with the condition may not be able to read books or even watch feature-length films. They can’t do anything except watch little videos, leaving them prone, catatonic, faces blank and bright in the glow of their smartphone screens. 

I don’t even use TikTok, but I feel this way all the time. Give me one hour to complete a task that requires even a medium amount of mental fortitude, and I’ll find 55 minutes’ worth of other things to do. It’s not that I’m avoiding the task. But once I get started, my mind wanders relentlessly, no matter how hard I try to keep it on track.

You can blame technology for doing this to you — and I do — but the real issue is with how we treat our brains. Generally speaking, the human brain works like an analog computer, processing one thing at a time, and when you switch tasks (which is what we’re actually doing when we say we are multitasking), it comes at a cost: It drains your cognitive resources, which makes it even harder to pay attention in the future. The more you do this, the more ingrained the behavior becomes.

“It’s a myth to think that we should push ourselves to focus as long as possible and we’ll be more productive,” said Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity and the Substack The Future of Attention. 

The human attention span is not one thing. There are different types of attention, including sustained attention (your ability to stay engaged with a task over a period of time) and selective attention (your capacity to take in certain information while tuning out irrelevant details). Alternating attention (the mental flexibility required to switch tasks rapidly) and dividing attention (process multiple things at once) are especially demanding on your cognitive resources. And all of this is managed by the brain’s command center, your prefrontal cortex, which handles executive function. When you’re experiencing cognitive fatigue, there’s a physical reason why: There’s actually less blood flowing to this portion of the brain.

“We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”

Amisha Jha, University of Miami neuroscience professor

The good news is that the damage is not permanent. The human brain’s capacity to focus is just as intact as it was in the 19th century when everyone spent their evenings reading novels and knitting fisherman sweaters. Lots of things have changed since then, of course. As smartphones have driven us to consume endless amounts of information, psychologists have been working on strategies to put the pieces of our attention spans back together. I called a few of these attention experts hoping that they might tell me the secret to regaining my ability to focus. They all agreed that two things are necessary to solve the problem: Be intentional with your attention and let your brain rest.

“What we need most is the capacity to know where attention is, moment by moment, and greater agency over our attention so we can direct it intentionally,” Amishi Jha, a neuroscience professor at the University of Miami and author of Peak Mind, told me. “We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.” 

Put another way, in order to reclaim your attention span, you first need to be mindful. That means spending less brain power dissociating on social media feeds and more on whatever you’re actually interested in. You also need to give your brain a chance to rest and recover. Staring at your phone will not help you recharge and reclaim your attention span. Staring at a tree, however, will. 

Let your brain rest

One way to think about your own attention span is to consider what is voluntary and what is not. When something like a bright light or a loud noise grabs your attention, it engages your involuntary attention, which is effectively limitless. When you’re deciding to pay attention to something, however, you’re using your voluntary, or directed attention. This is a limited resource. As you’re making an effort to focus on something, like a book, your supply of directed attention runs down, but it can be replenished in specific ways.

This simpler way to understand how our attention works dates back to the 19th-century psychologists, like Williams James, but it’s making a comeback thanks to attention restoration theory (ART). This school of thought, first developed in the 1980s by University of Michigan psychology professors Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, suggests that spending time in nature restores your directed attention. The theory claims that the natural world does this by captivating our indirect, or involuntary, attention and allowing our cognitive resources to recover.

Imagine you’ve gone for a hike and happen upon a waterfall that’s so fascinating you can’t look away from it. Marc Berman, one of Stephen Kaplan’s former students and now a professor at the University of Chicago, refers to such a spectacle as a “soft fascination,” something that can grab your attention without consuming it, thus giving your mind space to wander. You might get the same effect from staring at a campfire or looking up at tree branches swaying in the breeze. Hard fascinations, by contrast, capture so much of your attention that you can’t look away and you can’t quickly recover. Times Square is a canonical example, but being on social media counts, too.

“Doomscrolling, streaming, surfing the internet — they’re activities that maybe seem restful, but we actually think that they’re fatiguing and depleting,” said Berman, who is also the author of the book Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being. 

In one study Berman conducted, he and his team (which included Kaplan) gave research subjects difficult attention and memory tasks, sent them on a walk in nature or an urban environment, and then repeated the tests. The participants who went on nature walks improved their performance in these tests by about 20 percent, Berman said, and the improvements held regardless of whether participants said they liked the walk or not.

“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention.”

Nilli Lavie, University College London psychology professor

Berman said they aren’t entirely sure why nature seems to have this effect on us, but he theorizes that it relates to fractals, or repeating, self-similar patterns whose individual parts resemble their larger whole — tree branches or fern leaves, for instance. Fractals are common in nature, and Berman thinks their orderly arrangement helps our brains to process the information. “It’s easy to get the gist and you don’t need to encode all the details,” he said. “Whereas in the built environment, it’s not very fractal and you might have to encode everything, which might be more taxing.”

Of course, it’s not always possible to zip over a forest in the middle of the work day. If you can’t take a walk in the park, Berman said that even looking at a picture of nature scenes can help. (Try not to do that on Instagram, though, because you might end up just doomscrolling.) 

Be intentional with your attention

Reclaiming your attention is one thing, but holding onto it in the first place is its own distinct challenge. When you find yourself feeling distractable, it might be that you need a break. If that’s the case, you can’t will your way into concentrating.

“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention,” said Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London. “It’s not enough to just want to pay attention.”

Instead, you have to put yourself in an environment that makes paying attention not only possible but achievable. That means making a concerted effort to avoid multitasking, which will drain your cognitive resources. Try the alternative: monotasking. 

Monotasking likely requires clearing away clutter, whether that’s literal clutter on your desk, or digital clutter on your screen in the form of extra apps or browser tabs. Turning off all notifications is essential. You should also hide your phone — put it in a drawer or in another room. (A widely cited study published in 2017 found that even having a phone in sight can reduce your cognitive capacity and affect your ability to concentrate.) When you need to take a break, don’t go find your phone: Take a walk outside, or stare at a tree, or look out the window and listen to a song you like.

Monotasking also means being intentional about how you do that one thing, avoiding distractions along the way. At work, this might mean carving up projects into digestible chunks. You might even try the Pomodoro technique: Set a timer for 25 minutes, focus hard on the task until it goes off, take a five-minute break, and repeat. At home, it could mean making to-do lists and prioritizing tasks so that the toughest ones get done first, while you still have some gas in the tank.

If you aren’t ready to turn off all notifications at this point, at the very least turn off all the ones that aren’t coming from humans. You do not need to be alerted of an Amazon flash sale while you’re trying to plan your family’s meals for the week.

Give yourself some constraints

There’s no such thing as being 100 percent locked in to any given task. When there are no external distractions, your brain actually turns inward and finds something else to pay attention to, which can lead to daydreaming and mind wandering. Daydreaming — creating a structured narrative of imaginary scenarios — is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. It can be productive in helping you plan and think creatively. But if you’re just mentally wandering from random topic to topic, you’re getting into the danger zone. 

Some people find that adding constraints can improve their attention. One approach you’ll see in self-help books is the use of a so-called commitment device that restricts future behavior in service of a larger goal. If you’ve read (or seen) The Odyssey, you might remember the scene in which Odysseus orders his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast and ignore his orders so that he won’t steer the boat into the rocks when he hears the Sirens’ call. Odysseus was using a commitment device to avoid killing his whole crew. You might use a commitment device, like a dedicated writing space or the Pomodoro technique, to avoid distractions, both external and internal. 

So how do you focus just the right amount? Removing those external distractions is a great start. Much like paying attention, ignoring these distractions consumes your cognitive resources, impacting your performance, and causing you to make mistakes. It also takes more effort to stay on task as time goes on. From there, do your best to avoid overtaxing your brain to the point that the internal distractions take over and your mind is wandering. That’s how you know it’s time to take a break.

“For several minutes, give yourself no new input,” Jha said. “Do not reach for the phone while waiting in line. Take a short walk without listening to anything. Look out a window. Let the mind wander without trying to solve a problem.”

Take a walk in the park. Sit quietly and look at a bird. Paying attention has never sounded so relaxing.

The 2026 midterm cycle is projected to be the most expensive election cycle in US history, with candidates across the board raising money at a record pace. And voters are taking notice: Big-donor groups tied to issues like Israel policy, AI, and crypto have become major flashpoints in primary races in both parties.

Campaign spending alone doesn’t determine elections. The recent Democratic Senate primary in Michigan was the most expensive Democratic congressional primary in terms of outside spending — but ended with Abdul El-Sayed overcoming a major financial disadvantage to win the nomination. In California, billionaire Tom Steyer spent over $200 million of his own money on his bid for governor, but lost. 

But the ever-rising tide of cash helped fuel voter concerns about corruption and the campaign finance landscape is only getting more confusing: In June, the Supreme Court struck down limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their own candidates, further blurring the line between what candidates raise directly and what parties can spend on their behalf.

How can voters follow the money? How much difference does outside spending actually make in the outcomes of these races? And how much can candidates rely on grassroots donors to push back? 

Danielle M. Thomsen, a professor of political science at the University of California Irvine and author of the 2025 book, The Money Signal: How Fundraising Matters in American Politics, has spent years studying these questions. The conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Let’s start with a race like the recent Michigan Senate Democratic primary. Abdul El-Sayed was massively outspent by outside interest groups like AIPAC and still won. Does that change how you think about money’s role in politics, or is it generally consistent with what we know?

The bulk of my research is looking at US House primaries, and I think you could probably draw similar conclusions for Senate primaries, except that in most cases, Senate primaries have way more information. So in the case of Michigan, I think people knew largely what the choices were. And after you get to that stage, largely through money and advertising and voter outreach, and campaigning, after that point, money might matter less because voters become more familiar with choices. But this is a really steep hurdle in most congressional primaries.

I think that people forget how low information these contests usually are. Many primary voters really don’t know much about candidates. I think in the Michigan Senate example, that was less true. Money isn’t irrelevant, but when you have other pieces of information, that can override money. And furthermore, in that case, both of the candidates were spending millions of dollars in the primary. I mean, this is just so unique in a lot of ways.

Is there a minimum level of money congressional candidates need to be viable? Do we know?

The average for non-incumbent successful candidates in open seat primaries is about three to $400,000 in the first quarter. And if you look at incumbents who lost or struggled, well, their challengers for the most part, are not, you know, broke jokes. They’re raising $200,000 to $300,000 in their first quarter, which resembles what quote unquote “open seat candidates” are raising too in many districts. Maybe not your super wealthy districts like in New York or in California, but in many districts, $300,000 in your first quarter is a really good showing. So I would say money is money, and early money in particular is a prerequisite.

And that’s not going to mean that if you raise a lot of money, you definitely will win. That’s never been the case and that’s still not the case. But it does matter for you, it matters for who is seen to be seriously in the mix, who is perceived to be relevant. And in this cycle, just like in most cycles, virtually all contenders who are either successful or are seen as successful show support through early fundraising.

Your view is that fundraising works largely as a signal of viability and strength — to the public, party leaders, media, everyone. Is that the consensus view in political science, or are there competing frameworks?

In many ways the argument of my book is not very groundbreaking if you talk to practitioners, but it hasn’t been empirically documented in the ways that I did. Some other people in political science call attention to endorsements. The other theory is that money matters not as a signal of viability but for material goods — so to buy advertisements, office infrastructure, hiring staff, and consultants.

“Among those who run, rich candidates are also more likely to win.”

Within a candidate’s total haul, does it matter where the money comes from, like a broad base of small donors, a candidate self-funding, or a super PAC backed by a few wealthy people?

I’ve recently begun to look at this. With a graduate student of mine, Ryan Mundy, we collected data and wrote a paper on why wealthy candidates are likely to win. Because it’s not just the case that rich candidates are more likely to run, which most people know and prior research has shown, but among those who run, rich candidates are also more likely to win.

And what we show is that rich candidates are more likely to raise early money. In particular, they’re more likely to raise large-dollar donations, which then have a greater return in subsequent quarters.

What do we know about candidates who fully self-fund?

So I’ve learned that fully self-funded candidates, meaning those who don’t supplement with financial support from others, typically lose. Self-funding on its own is not as valuable as getting money from others, and in particular large-dollar donations from others.

However, many, many candidates supplement with their own money. Something like 40 percent of non-incumbent general election winners self-fund at least $10,000. I think people don’t really understand the prevalence of self-funding as a supplement, and how that keeps some people disadvantaged, particularly those who can’t self-fund at all.

For some self-funders, I think some of them just don’t want to raise money. It can be pretty unpleasant! And while self-funding with no supplemental money from others is overwhelmingly a bad strategy, there are a couple handful of people who have done this and won out of our sample that looked at 2014 to 2024. There were 407 non-incumbent general election winners in that period. And 17 of them did bankroll at least 90 percent of their first-quarter dollars and won. So not very many, but there are a handful of exceptions who do it and win, and they are all rich. So funding is complicated.

And on the “friends and family” side of early money, who’s actually writing those first checks?

Almost all early money comes from individual contributors. Most of that is itemized, so contributors over $200. Most of our elections are driven by the upper class. On average non-incumbent general election winners are getting like 50 percent of their early money from max-out donors, meaning people who pay the maximum of $6,600. Who can afford to pay that? Not normal Americans. It’s basically politically engaged, politically connected upper-middle class people who know people who run for office.

And the other thing is most of them are not repeat donors! Most of them don’t even give to more than one candidate. Because they’re probably just giving to the one rich person they know who is running for office that year. That’s why in political circles the first quarter is called the “friends and family quarter” — that’s when political consultants tell candidates to open up their Rolodex and call everybody they know from when they started kindergarten to who their coworkers are now.

Is there a point, empirically, where more spending stops helping or even backfires? I’m thinking of a case like Tom Steyer in California.

So the assumption has always been that money has diminishing returns. That goes back to Gary Jacobson’s work from forever ago. But nobody in political science puts a number on it. What they do is they say things like, Oh, the relationship is positive until at some point it goes down.

When outside groups pour money into a race, like AIPAC now, or the charter school lobby and the NRA in earlier cycles, can that spending become politically useful to the candidate it’s targeting, from backlash or otherwise?

“Most candidates are raising the bulk of their money from itemized donors. And most money is still from large donors.”

Yeah, so I don’t think there’s actually good research on this. I don’t think there’s enough information. But I think in general most people don’t know where money comes from. So the backlash is minimal. I’ve asked candidates who raised a lot of money from self-funding, “Did your self-funding ever come up?” And they’d say, “No, it never came up. I thought it would either help me, to show that I wasn’t beholden to special interests, or it would hurt me because I didn’t have the support that having fundraising money from others would demonstrate. But it didn’t come up.” Another candidate who raised a lot of money out of state told me that while it was raised a few times by people on Twitter, no one in person ever asked him about it.

Many people don’t know their own members of Congress. So you can imagine why there wouldn’t be a backlash, because people don’t know enough for there to be one — except in these cases where it does become an issue, like the recent Michigan Senate Democratic primary. It’s certainly part of the narrative for candidates like Elizabeth Warren, her stance against big money is a big part of her persona, same with Bernie Sanders and AOC. But those are real celebrity candidates.

In the 2010s, small-dollar fundraising was talked about as a democratizing counterweight to big money, but I remember reading that research found it could also make politics more polarized. Where did that political science literature land, and has the rise of small donors changed anything as Super PACs and mega-donors have grown more powerful?

So I would say the research is exactly how you describe it. There are so many studies that have shown that small-dollar donors tend to be more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans. So they are coming from the ideological edges of the spectrum. And there’s a lot of evidence of that. So that’s the finding, that’s the literature.

If you look at how candidates raise money by and large today, it’s not coming from small donations or unitemized donations. Most candidates are raising the bulk of their money from itemized donors. And most money is still from large donors.

So your read is that, despite all the attention on small-dollar fundraising, the underlying picture hasn’t shifted much either direction?

There’s a tendency to look at the cases that don’t conform to the rule rather than the rule. Like Eric Cantor [who lost in 2014] and AOC [who won in 2018]. In some cases, the losers raised way more than the partisanship of the district in those cases would predict, and then you have candidates who raised no money and unpredictably won. So there’s always this tendency to prop up the exceptions to the rule. In political science, though, we like to look at the rule.

Tom Tiffany, the new Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, is not just a passive supporter of President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election. He is an active promoter of them.

In December 2020, when he was a member of Congress, he signed on to a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory. On January 6, 2021, he voted against certifying the results in Pennsylvania and Texas just hours after rioters threatened to kill his colleagues. He has stated he would have overturned Wisconsin’s results too, and just this year endorsed an FBI investigation into the state’s elections. And though the national climate in 2026 favors Democrats, Wisconsin is a closely divided state: Tiffany could beat the odds and win the general.

There is, in short, a very real chance that someone who doesn’t believe American elections are legitimate may soon be supervising them in one of the 2028 presidential cycle’s most important swing states.

It’s not just Wisconsin. In each of the other most critical 2028 states — Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada — Republicans have chosen an election denier as their nominee for governor, secretary of state, or both. If any of these candidates win, they will have at least some degree of authority over the administration of elections in a state that could determine the outcome of the next presidential election. 

So could the outcome of the 2026 midterms ultimately lead to a stolen election in 2028, as some are already warning? Election experts say it’s very unlikely.

State election laws contain numerous overlapping checks on interference from top officials. The judiciary has a pretty strong track record in stopping election malfeasance. A reform to the Electoral Count Act, passed quietly during the Biden presidency, significantly improved federal protections against election interference. And in 2028, the man uniquely responsible for previous pushes to invalidate the 2020 election won’t be on the ballot.

“[There are many] reasons why one should not be concerned,” said Rebecca Green, the co-director of the Election Law Program at the College of William and Mary. “Even in circumstances where there is a single partisan in control of a state’s election process, there are numerous checks on that power.”

That said, the risk isn’t zero. There is a remote chance, if the election is extremely close, that a well-placed election denier could swing the outcome. And even if they don’t outright steal an election, someone like Tiffany could still use their office to damage the electoral system in some pretty important ways.

“We have to be walking between complacency and alarmism,” said Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at UCLA. “Both of those are bad.”

Why the 2028 election is more secure than you think

Election law varies from state to state. Most of the time, the state’s secretary of state (SOS) is in charge of elections, but sometimes it’s the state board of elections. Sometimes the SOS is directly elected, and sometimes they’re appointed by the governor. 

But in broad strokes, there are three ways for governors or an allied SOS to attack an election. They can try to suppress opposition voters before the voting starts, by (for example) purging them from the rolls or putting insufficient polling stations in their neighborhoods. They can try to interfere during the vote count, by trying to disqualify outparty ballots or even falsifying the vote count. Or they can try to interfere afterward, by refusing to certify election results.

“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism. That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”

Rick Hasen, UCLA election expert

Each of those is exceptionally, perhaps even prohibitively, difficult to pull off — even for a committed election denier.

Voter suppression is hard because the tactics are legally limited. Current federal law bans voter roll purges within 90 days of the election, which allowed Democrats to simply re-register voters disqualified in previous Republican purges (though the Supreme Court may overturn this provision in an upcoming case). Impediments like polling station placement are, per Hasen, hard to target; they are most likely to affect low-income and low-propensity voters, who have trended Republican in recent elections.

Interfering with the counting of votes is made difficult by what Green terms “adversarial election administration”: basically, the fact that partisans from both parties are involved in multiple different stages of the counting process. Every state has strict rules governing the counting process, and observers from both parties can see if they’re being breached in the other party’s favor. If there is an irregularity, courts are empowered to step in and correct it.

And it is simply illegal for governors or secretaries of state to refuse to certify legitimate elections. State laws in all relevant battleground states allow courts to issue a writ of mandamus requiring officials to certify duly counted results, which they have done repeatedly since 2020 when Republican-controlled county election boards withheld certification.

“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism,” Hasen said. “That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”

The 2022 reform to the Electoral Count Act added several additional safeguards for presidential elections specifically, including a requirement that Congress defer to court determinations on electoral legitimacy if a governor attempts to defy them. 

And all of that assumes that a Republican who denied the result of the 2020 election would necessarily attempt to steal future elections. That may not be the case. 

“Just because you have partisan control of an election, and just because that person has cast doubt on previous elections, doesn’t mean that person is not going to be committed to running a fair election,” Green said.

Such a sentiment may sound naive, but it also may reflect the reality of post-Trump politics. The president was the driving force behind the attempt to overturn the 2020 election; his insistence that he did not lose, and his iron grip on the hearts and minds of the GOP base, pushed the party onto grounds that its other leaders clearly feared to tread. 

While Republicans certainly attempted to stack the electoral deck in their favor prior to Trump, these brazen attempts to overturn or steal legitimate elections are a product of his time in office. Whether he has permanently changed the Republican Party into an entity that will regularly reject elections they lose is very much an open question.

Why electing election deniers could still matter

All of this should give us some comfort about the upcoming state-level races: It is simply very hard for a governor or SOS to steal a presidential election even if they want to. While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.

But even the most impregnable-seeming fortresses can be breached. And there are reasons to worry that, in an extreme case, an election denier in key positions could well damage the integrity of the 2028 presidential election.

In a 2022 paper, the law professor Lisa Marshall Manheim argued that conventional legal analysis has proven inadequate for addressing the threat of election subversion. While legal experts are correct to say that the law makes stealing an election hard, the most dangerous threat to US elections — Trump’s 2020 campaign — was essentially extra-legal in character.

While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.

While “superficially” operating through the legal system, Trump was actually asking officials from Congress on down to engage in obviously unlawful behavior. When Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to overturn the state’s results, or for Mike Pence to find the “courage” to nullify the results on January 6, he wasn’t asking these two men to act according to their legal duties. He was asking them to step beyond law, to embrace a reading of their office’s powers so obviously absurd that it amounts to declaring the text of the law to be no limit at all.

This is the nightmare scenario: one in which officials in key positions simply decide that they no longer have to follow a good-faith reading of the law. If enough officials in the right places decide to cast off legal shackles, no carefully crafted statute can stop them. We will, as Hasen put it, exit the domain of law into “something else”: the politics of raw power.

Anyone who endorsed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election — let alone actively attempted to act on them — has already shown a degree of contempt for election law. That means that one can’t rule out a similar display of contempt in the future, only this time with the power to turn that into impactful defiance of law.

It’s vastly too early to say the conditions under which such a radical breach might occur, in 2028 or in the future. A lot depends on the makeup of the Republican Party; whether leaders after Trump embrace or downplay his hostility to the electoral system itself. But we now know that the risk is there. And the more election deniers we have in key positions, the greater the odds are that the risk becomes real — even if the baseline probability remains low in absolute terms.

This connects to another, more insidious risk: that electing election deniers could exacerbate the ongoing crisis of electoral confidence since 2020.

Even if Tiffany or someone like him doesn’t try to outright prevent or nullify Democratic victories in their state, they could still declare that they lack confidence in the result’s integrity. That they tried to run a fair election, but that Democrats or the courts prevented them from doing so — and thus, despite their lack of legal powers to stop it, that they believe the election to have been compromised or even stolen.

This may not lead to a series of January 6s across the country. But even if it didn’t, it would deepen the lack of trust Republican voters have in the electoral system. If Republicans post-Trump continue to believe that Democrats are engaged in widespread cheating, that could contribute to an environment where the kind of extra-legal shenanigans Manheim warned of could look more tempting.

So while it is quite unlikely that the 2026 elections will lead to a crisis in 2028, it could play a role in dashing the possibility that American democracy moves on from the dangerous Trump-era fighting over elections. And as long as that fighting persists, another 2020-style crisis will remain a live possibility.

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.”

One link for later

➨ 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. 

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee — better known by its short name, AIPAC — bills itself as a bipartisan advocate “for policies that strengthen the US-Israel partnership.” In 2026, it’s become something else: a major — and seemingly, losing — issue in Democratic politics. 

Progressive Democratic candidates in primaries across the country are explicitly calling out their opponents’ relationship with AIPAC, often using the connection as a rallying point to persuade voters about the problem of “dark money” in politics. Most recently, in Michigan, AIPAC spent about $30 million boosting Rep. Haley Stevens in her bid for the state’s Democratic Senate nomination. Her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, drew attention to it again and again. She lost. 

As one of the biggest spenders in US elections, the group has gone well beyond its origins lobbying members of Congress to support its agenda. According to David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, AIPAC is spending millions of dollars against candidates who speak out against Israel’s actions in Palestine — sometimes using advertisements that have nothing to do with Israel, and may appear unrelated to AIPAC.

Dayen spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the backlash surrounding AIPAC’s spending, the group’s complicated web of shell PACs,  and what it all means for the Democratic Party’s quickly evolving stance on Israel.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

What is AIPAC?

AIPAC started out as a lobbying organization. It was inaugurated in the 1950s. It has historically been seen as one of the more powerful lobbying organizations in Washington. And its goal is to strengthen and maintain the relationship between the US and Israel.

They have annual conventions where pretty much everybody across the political spectrum attends and gives speeches. But something changed about five years ago. AIPAC was not content to just lobby members of Congress. They wanted to influence who actually got to Washington. And they began to engage in the use of super PACs to run advertising and other forms of political engagement in campaigns, and particularly in primary campaigns that determine who actually gets to a general election.  

Why did they want to influence who got to Washington? Maybe that sounds like an obvious question, but it wasn’t happening before, so why did it start happening?

One thing that happened is in 2018, we saw the rise of what is known as “The Squad,” and that included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — people who had very strident views, particularly about the US-Israel relationship. Those progressive Democrats were very successful in winning safe seat races. And I’m not in their head, but it could be that AIPAC wanted to try to provide a counterweight, and stop that from happening, and use their resources — very prodigious resources — to spend money in these campaigns and to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Once upon a time, an endorsement from AIPAC was a powerful thing. It could be a huge benefit to a candidate. What exactly did it get you when AIPAC said, “This is our guy, this is our gal?”

I mean, in practical terms, it probably got you $5,000 because that’s the limit on a corporate PAC. But because AIPAC was powerful and also a bipartisan organization, getting your name on the list of AIPAC endorsees was something that you could tout in your election. It was something that showed that you had a commitment to what has historically been an important bond between the US and Israel. 

It certainly wasn’t as controversial in the years before 2023 as it is today. After October 7, we saw what a lot of people have termed a genocide against the Palestinian people. The changing attitudes around the US-Israel relationship more broadly, where large numbers of Americans now view that relationship negatively, have changed what the meaning of an AIPAC endorsement really is.

I know that you’ve dug into the numbers. What do we know about how much money AIPAC is specifically spending this midterm cycle?

It’s a hard question to answer. If you go by the Federal Election Commission disclosures, AIPAC has raised about a hundred million dollars this election cycle, and has spent in independent expenditures — that’s TV ads and mailers and these kinds of things — about $28 million. 

But that is an undercount for a couple different reasons. When I say those numbers, I am going by the specific super PAC that AIPAC has created. It’s called United Democracy Project. United Democracy Project has sent money to other PACs — about $9 million worth.

Is this a lot of money?

I think the real innovation here is the transfer of money from, in this case, pro-Israel PACs, to these pop-up PACs, these shell PACs that are created specifically for a particular election and then funded through AIPAC and, in some cases, other other pro-Israel PACs. 

They are sort of laundering this money through to other PACs, so those other PACs run the ads and it doesn’t look like it’s coming from AIPAC. A perfect example was the first real major primary state of the cycle, which was Illinois.

There were four open seats in the Chicago area that are pretty strongly blue. A Democrat is going to win the general election. And so these primaries were highly contested. AIPAC set up two PACs, one called Elect Chicago Women and the other called Affordable Chicago Now. And millions of dollars went from AIPAC’s super PAC, which is called United Democracy Project, into these two pop-up PACs. 

And those two PACs then funded ads for four candidates in those four open seat races. Now, if you were watching that on television, you would say, “Hey, elect Chicago women. That sounds like a good idea. I’m gonna watch this ad” or “Affordable Chicago now. I like affordability.” The truth is that this money was coming from AIPAC into these ads and supporting candidates that were generally supportive of the US-Israel relationship. 

Now, those four races — AIPAC won two of them and they lost two of them. And it was really interesting, I think, where they were successful, and where they weren’t. In one race up in the Evanston area, it became a big issue that AIPAC actually was behind these ads from Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now. 

The [AIPAC] candidate, a state senator named Laura Fine, actually was harmed, I think, in the election by this fact that this got out, and that this became a major issue in the campaign. And she ended up finishing third in that primary, despite having millions of dollars supporting her. There were other races where this wasn’t sort of as explicit a factor in the election itself, and those candidates were able to win. 

This all sounds quite shady and yet I wonder — how unusual is it for an interest group in politics to be doing something like this?

I think it’s pretty unusual. It’s not something I’ve seen a whole lot of. We saw it to a smaller degree in some other election cycles — two years ago, four years ago — but it has become a concerted strategy this time. 

And so there are these pop-up PACS that are specific to a campaign, but also some established PACs that have been around for a while are receiving money from AIPAC and affiliated groups and using that in campaigns. 

Emily’s List is a very well-known political organization that supports pro-choice women. They took [hundreds of thousands of dollars] from an organization called Democratic Majority for Israel that is not affiliated with AIPAC per se, but aligns on similar candidates. 

There are other examples of this, more obscure examples. Like there’s a PAC called Crush MAGA PAC. And it’s affiliated with a different, I’m gonna sound crazy when I say this, but Crush MAGA PAC is affiliated with a different pack called Save Democracy, and Save Democracy has received $100,000 from United Democracy Project, which is AIPAC Super PAC. So sometimes the layers here are two or three or even four PACs deep. 

And it can be really hard to untangle all this and figure out where the money has come from, because AIPAC certainly isn’t saying, “We’re funding that campaign.” They’re releasing disclosures as required by the Federal Election Commission, but they’re not saying where the money is earmarked for, if it’s for a specific race, if it’s for a specific candidate.

AIPAC at times has responded to criticism of it by appearing to conflate it with criticism of Israel or criticism of Jews. Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders comes out with a statement. He denounces Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for what he says is the “extermination of Gaza.” He calls for an end to military aid to Israel. He says people are starving to death.

AIPAC attacks Sanders’s statement, calling it a hate-filled rant and blood libel, and pointing out that in his statement, he didn’t mention Hamas’s attack on Israel. So AIPAC is now public in a way that historically it has not been. And it is tying criticism of Israel to antisemitic sentiment. Does this help or hurt AIPAC’s cause, do you think?

It depends on the messenger, but the issue is that there’s a very straight line between how this money is being used, transferred, spent, concealed, and a broader critique that I think a lot of Democrats have about money in politics. And so when AIPAC decides, “Okay, we’re going respond to criticism that is rooted in what AIPAC believes, and the conditions in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, et cetera,” to saying, you know, “Any criticism of what we’re doing is antisemitic — I think people who see this as a broader problem about money in politics see that as an extremely cynical take.”

I don’t think that really connects to one of the big reasons why people are really objecting to this, which is that they don’t want to see their politicians essentially bought.

But it’s additionally fraught because there are antisemitic tropes where, you know, a cabal of Jews is secretly controlling the government and finance, right? It feels triply complicated.

Look, I’m Jewish, and in having to cover this, I have to try to follow money from Jewish groups from one place to another, and that can certainly be uncomfortable. And it does add some weight to this issue. 

But I feel like we are talking here not about somebody’s religion, but about a policy. And it’s a twofold policy. One is the policy of the US government funding, to the tune of billions of dollars, the destruction of an entire region, and also the policy of allowing super PACs to dictate who ends up making decisions in Washington.

Over the weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced on Instagram that she had joined the thousands of American women who freeze their eggs every year, a number that has been steadily growing for the past decade.

“This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her Instagram story sharing her decision. 

As politicians in the public eye often do, Ocasio-Cortez turned her personal choice into a statement:

Usually I keep my private life quite private, but I have made the decision to start freezing my eggs, and I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time. I was saving for it for a very long time, and there just isn’t a ton out there, I feel, and sometimes it can feel very daunting. As women in general, we are not taught about our own bodies. We are not prepared for our own lives. … We need to show more depictions of women having full lives.

At the same time, she acknowledged being “in a very privileged position” to be able to take advantage of egg freezing. The process still typically costs $10,000 or more — and most insurance still doesn’t cover it. Not even AOC’s federal health plan. Egg freezing is a luxury afforded only to the people who can pay for it and take on the significant burden of the treatment and all of the uncertainty that comes with it.

Ocasio-Cortez’s announcement underscores the awkward place that egg freezing still occupies in the landscape of fertility access — at a moment when Republicans in power are lamenting falling birth rates and searching for ways to encourage more people to start families. In theory, egg freezing gives women the flexibility to take more control of their decisions about having kids and preserve that possibility for themselves in the future. But in reality, the promises of this important procedure have often been unfulfilled. 

Beyond the intimidating price tag, as AOC alluded to, many young women don’t know some of the basics about age-related fertility decline and how to maximize their chances that egg freezing will lead to an actual pregnancy. There are some “significant gaps in fertility knowledge amongst Gen Z women in particular,” said Danielle Melfi, CEO of Resolve, a fertility treatment advocacy group. 

“That points to why someone like AOC who has such broad awareness and broad reach across her channels,” Melfi told me, “specifically younger people who aren’t tuned into any politician but would be tuned into her. Her sharing her story and journey matters.”

Egg freezing is not a panacea, and it never will be. But it can give individuals options and a sense of empowerment. And right now, as AOC acknowledged in her video, those are privileges reserved for the people who are in the know and have the means to take advantage of it. For everyone else, significant barriers still remain.

Freezing time doesn’t come cheap — or easily

On average, the cost of egg freezing averages between $10,000 and $20,000. And, for most people, including AOC, who makes $174,000 a year on her congressional salary alone, health insurance coverage is not an option. According to a 2024 KFF employer survey, just 12 percent of large employers who offer health insurance provide egg or sperm freezing.

That’s not for lack of trying.

As of now, 21 states have mandates requiring health insurers to provide some level of coverage for “fertility preservation” when it is deemed medically necessary — for a younger cancer patient who is about to undergo chemotherapy, for example, a more and more common scenario these days. But coverage for what is viewed as elective freezing, as AOC is doing, is still generally not included in those requirements.

But even the state-level mandates come with a huge carveout. Under America’s Frankenstein healthcare system, there is a very important type of health insurance plan that is exempt from such state laws: self-funded employer plans, meaning those that fully cover their workers’ medical expenses without relying on an outside insurance company. They are governed only by a federal law known as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and that law provides no guarantees for egg freezing or other reproductive care. 

About half of Americans get their insurance through their work, and of those employer plans, more than 60 percent are self-funded. That is a lot of people who have no guarantees for this kind of service, even when a serious medical reason is motivating them to freeze their eggs. The select few who can get egg freezing covered are typically higher-income, too, adding to the disparity between the US healthcare system’s haves and have-nots.

Support for IVF among the American public has been rising, with 70 percent saying in 2024 that access to IVF was a good thing. And fertility coverage is having a political moment, too: the HOPE With Fertility Services Act, which would require insurers to cover some basic fertility treatment when it is deemed medically necessary, was introduced this year with a bipartisan slate of more than 20 sponsors, though it remains stuck at the committee level for now. The Trump administration has fixated on dropping fertility rates, but, beyond a limited IVF executive order, they have not seriously pursued plans to expand access to egg freezing. A national mandate to cover egg freezing, even only when medically necessary, could end up being opposed by both health insurers (which have fought all kinds of benefit requirements in the past) and the religious right (which has specifically challenged mandates for reproductive healthcare, like the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate).

It will likely take a variety of policy changes to give people more financial support for this important but expensive service. So what now? Unfortunately, I think we are stuck with patchy coverage and can expect only incremental improvements for the foreseeable future. On the plus side, Melfi said, more employers may increasingly offer these benefits as a competitive advantage.

But access isn’t the only problem.

Egg freezing works best when people actually know how to take advantage of it

Even if a person is able to access egg freezing, it doesn’t always pay off. 

A study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in February found that fewer than 6 percent of people who froze their eggs electively had come back to thaw them within five to seven years. Of those people, 79 percent had a usable embryo after warming and 29 percent had a pregnancy that resulted in a live birth.

Of course, just because some people haven’t warmed their eggs within seven years doesn’t mean they won’t come back in nine: The point of this service is you could freeze your eggs at 30 even if you’re not ready for kids until you are 40. Those numbers will likely grow with time. And some of those people might end up successfully getting pregnant on their own the old-fashioned way, which means they won’t need their frozen eggs at all. 

“Typically, people who are coming in to freeze their eggs haven’t actually tried to conceive yet. When they are ready to start conceiving, a lot of people may not have any issues conceiving,” said Dr. Mabel Lee, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at HRC Fertility in Pasadena, California who led the published study. 

What is true is that getting pregnant is difficult no matter how you go about it — even conceiving through intercourse only results in a 20 to 25 percent success rate on a given try, Lee said — and success with frozen eggs depends on how young the person was when their eggs were preserved: The younger they are, the higher the chances of success. That makes it all the more important that people — particularly younger people — know about the realities of egg freezing and how to make the most of it, whether they are spending thousands of dollars of their own money or whether they are using insurance to pay for it. Awareness among young people of the basic relationship between age and fertility remains discouragingly low. Lee said she has patients come in all the time who say they wish they had known more about egg freezing sooner.

The likelihood of a live birth may go up if the eggs were younger, but is that enough to convince someone in their mid-20s to pay out of pocket to freeze their eggs? In the midst of an affordability crisis, is that even an option? It might not be; in the meantime, Lee said women could get a blood test to measure their ovarian reserves, which estimates a person’s egg count, and use that to make an informed decision about egg freezing in consultation with their doctor.

Once you have decided to freeze your eggs, using a high-quality clinic is a must: That’s the other major variable in success, Lee told me. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology maintains a national database covering clinics across the country and tracking birth success rates and other metrics. It’s like a report card of sorts, so you can hopefully choose the best provider for you.

There are still no guarantees. Fertility is too fickle. But by improving access and raising awareness, there are clear steps we can take to try to maximize egg freezing’s potential.

Mollie, a 10-month-old pet hamster in the Netherlands, probably runs a lot more than you. 

We know this because, a few weeks ago, a Dutch physicist named Thijs — who owns Mollie — rigged up the rescued hamster’s running wheel to Strava, a popular app that runners use to log their miles. Thijs found that Mollie typically runs around six miles every night.

“He’s beating me,” Thijs told the CBC. “Almost 70 kilometres a week, which I think many people doing marathon training would be happy to hit.”

The internet loves a quirky animal story, and this one has gotten plenty of attention on Reddit and X. Mollie even got a recent profile in Runner’s World, and he now has over 9,000 followers on Strava. Mollie’s Strava updates are headlined with cute puns like “No Rest for the Whiskered,” and “The Fast and the Furriest.”

I get why so many people are cheering on Mollie and his commitment to going the distance: Hamsters are adorable, and the idea of one logging miles on Strava is extra charming. But the light-hearted virality of the story masks a fundamental problem with owning small pets like hamsters. Mollie evolved to run in an open and diverse ecosystem, but he lives in a small cage and doesn’t have much to do besides circle endlessly in a simple wheel.

Big problems with small pets

Most pet hamsters are Syrian hamsters, native to that country’s Aleppinian plateau — steppe terrain in the northern part of the country. In the wild, they regularly traverse the landscape to forage for food, consuming a wide sampling of seeds, fruits, insects, and green vegetation. They store their haul in their cheeks while journeying back to their two-foot deep burrows. 

But, as pets, they’re largely fed a monotonous diet of grain pellets and are confined to tiny cages where they can’t engage in their natural behaviors, like building proper burrows, traveling for food, and exploring their turf. Confining a dog or cat in a kennel for all or most of their lives would no doubt be a severe form of cruelty, yet we’ve normalized doing so for small animals whom we’re less likely to view as capable of suffering, even though there’s no scientific basis for that assumption.

And while you might think it could be nice for an animal to not have to work for their food, research has found that many species don’t like to freeload (cats might be one exception). On top of all of that, according to some research, these smaller pets are less likely to receive veterinary care to address their ailments and injuries than cats and dogs. 

Their tedious and confined existence can contribute to “stereotypic” behavior: repetitive motions, like gnawing on cage bars, that are indicators of stress. Some animal welfare researchers have proposed that wheel use could also be a sign of stress — or that it could indicate an urge to run or escape. One other study suggested it might help reduce other stereotypic behaviors. 

“I think that the welfare of these animals is worse than anybody else’s,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and author of several books on the ethics of pet keeping, told Vox for a previous story. She was talking about small pets in general — not just hamsters, but also species like snakes, fish, and birds, most of whom are still much more wild than our domesticated cats and dogs (who also might not be as happy as we think). 

Thijs, for his part, is sympathetic to these concerns, which he told me over email were fair. “I hope the attention that Mollie got will not result in people impulsively buying hamsters (and then forgetting about them after it turns out their hamsters just sleep 80% of the time),” he said.

He adopted Mollie from someone who could no longer take care of him and who kept him in an even smaller enclosure. “[Mollie] showed some behaviour that really concerned us back then (climbing, biting the fence, etc),” Thijs said over email. So, within the first week, he upgraded Mollie to a larger cage and a larger wheel and got him some toys, which seemed to improve his mood.

“I think some behavioural aspects (more running, digging tunnels in the bedding, ‘foraging’ if we hide food in the bedding) make his behaviour closer to natural, but it’s, of course, never like in the wild,” he said. Thijs also wonders whether his data-gathering might provide insight into how certain actions — like when he cleans Mollie’s bedding or when he stays up late watching Netflix — affects Mollie’s running behavior. 

“People often talk about pets being ‘happy,’ but, especially with small animals, that’s difficult to assess objectively,” he told me. “I’m curious whether long-term activity data might give us useful clues about changes in his behaviour or wellbeing!”

Inside a “hamster mill”

While Thijs adopted Mollie, there’s also the question about where many of these pets come from. A 2024 undercover investigation by the nonprofit Last Chance for Animals into a massive US “hamster mill” documented thousands of rodents being bred and raised in overcrowded, small, barren cages. Some of the animals were dehydrated, diseased, and suffered from wounds. Individual animals weren’t provided with veterinary care, and breeding hamsters whose production dropped — along with litter runts — were gassed to death.  

Investigations into other rodent mills have found similar problems. Such investigations, combined with veterinarians’ concerns with keeping small animals as pets, has driven some cities — including Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC — to prohibit pet stores from selling rodents and other small pets.  

I don’t mean to single out Thijs for his interesting experiment, especially considering he adopted Mollie and immediately improved his life. But animal ethicists like Pierce argue that however much effort one puts into giving these small pets a better life, it likely doesn’t ever add up to a good life, considering the constraints of cage confinement and other common care issues. 

To Pierce and some of her colleagues, the sizable gap between what small pets need and what they often get reveals a largely hidden but serious crisis of animal neglect and suffering. And that’s rarely mentioned, if at all, in viral social media posts or news articles about these critters. 

If we take a moment to pause and see Mollie’s life for what it is — and examine the industry that breeds these small animals for profit — all those miles he’s logging on Strava seem more like daily posts saying that he’s striving for a far different life with no way to get there. 

“This entire ‘track his runs on Strava’ thing started off more as a geeky side-project, I never expected it to get anywhere near this much attention,” Thijs told me. “But it’d be nice if you can use it as a way to educate people (including me!) about the ethical considerations!”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”

No, that isn’t the latest Heated Rivalry fanfiction — it’s the opening line of a 2,000-year-old erotic poem. Yes, in the middle of the Hebrew Bible, a text that has so often been weaponized to shame sexual desire, there is a collection of straight-up filth: 

“I arose to open to my beloved,

    and my hands dripped with myrrh,

my fingers with liquid myrrh,

    on the handles of the bolt.” 

Girl. Tell me more…

As a gay kid growing up in the 1990s, sex was far from holy. Indeed, it was deemed dirty, diseased, and damned by the church. The shadow of AIDS lingered long and information readily accessible to me was limited to guidance on birth control. Nothing about pleasure; certainly nothing practical about the mechanics of gay sex. It meant that my first time, aged 18 at a youth conference with a Brazilian boy whose name I hardly knew, was both messy and painful.

For years, it didn’t cross my mind to look at what religion had to say about having good sex. Why trust these traditions that have been so callous and cruel to queer people like me? Well, it turns out that those sages of yore were just as horny as we are. And the practice of worship, the experience of divine intimacy, and the sweetness of surrender are as applicable in sex as they are in spiritual life.

To get more insight into this, I called author and Rabbi Jay Michaelson, whose book, God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice, first got me thinking about sex as a spiritual practice. In it, he argues that spirit and body are not separate at all, and that our bodies are the very place where holiness expresses itself in the world. 

For Michaelson, there are three key gifts that religion offers us as a way of connecting with our sexual selves. First is the cultivation of presence. Michaelson isn’t just a rabbi; he’s also a meditation teacher, and so Buddhist practice is core to his spiritual life. “I don’t understand how people have sex without meditation!” he jokes. “To miss out on the intimacy with the other person or just with one’s own experience, with one’s own body, is, to me, a shame. … It can be really simple.” He adds that if you can have mindful eating, you can have mindful sex.

How can we practice presence? Take inspiration from religious rituals! Think about the ways in which worship services use incense, music, even mood lighting through stained-glass windows. The incantation of holy words, the eating of special food, the anointing with holy oil…these are all tools to help people be present in the here and now. So, the same is true for sex: Light some candles, use massage oil, tell your partner (or yourself) what you want and how, and put on a playlist to be truly present.

But just like meditating, sometimes being fully present to our sexuality can bring up unexpected negative emotions. Maybe we worry about how we look, or the sounds we’re making, or how we taste. We judge ourselves or get embarrassed about what we want. That’s where the second gift religion can offer us comes into play.

It’s “about really embodying the knowledge that pleasure is a blessing,” Michaelson says. Whether that blessing comes from God or is just the experience of being alive is immaterial to Michaelson; what matters is believing it. “That is something that is easy to read, but, like any other spiritual insight, to actually take it in and really believe it…that takes a lifetime of practice,” he says. 

In a story from the Talmud, a rabbi by the name of Kahana follows his teacher home and hides under the bed in order to learn how he should make love. He waits and listens — and when he’s discovered and scolded for his voyeurism, he tries to defend himself by saying, “It is Torah, and I must learn!” Luckily for us, we have better strategies for learning pleasure these days. 

Court Vox is an intimacy coach based in Los Angeles who helps gay, bi, trans, and queer men learn the language of their embodied pleasure. Through hands-on workshops that center sensation, touch, breath, and movement, Vox teaches men to understand their own nervous system and what feels good. You could try this by simply spending some time moving different objects over your body: a feather, a stone, a fork, a hand. Slow down enough to notice what really feels good, and where. You will likely be surprised by what does and doesn’t give you pleasure as you explore.

Fundamental to Vox’s work is moving people out of a state of hypervigilance so they can actually let go enough to enjoy themselves. “You cannot surrender when you are still managing,” he says. And for many, surrender can be so very sweet. Vox explains that for him, true letting go feels like being inside “some sort of Jell-O or honey, almost like a womb.” But for that to happen, you have to feel safe. If you don’t feel safe, you’re not going to find real pleasure — which means that consent is a prerequisite for everything that Vox does, and it should be for the rest of us too. 

So, if good sex is about presence and pleasure, the final element Michaelson says that we can pull from religious tradition is integration. “It’s not where I want to be spiritually to have great sex and then 15 minutes later…I go on as if it never happened,” he says. Sex shouldn’t be a random experience that’s separate from who we are in every other part of life. Sex connects us to the world; to each other; to the very force of life. 

Religious traditions have often integrated sex into daily living through myths and storytelling. By integrating stories of sex into their own creation myths, sex was deemed natural and necessary. Usually, these myths focus on fecundity — new life literally coming from some sexual activity. For example, the Mesopotamian goddess of the salt sea Tiamat mates with the freshwater god Abzû to birth a pantheon of newer gods. Or the Sumerian god Enki masturbates and ejaculates semen to create the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

So, how might we find stories and rituals that give sex a meaningful place in our everyday lives? Yes, we might entwine our sex lives with the cycles of the moon, or host board game nights with a host of lovers! But some old traditions can find new life when we look at them anew, too.

Father Jarel Robinson-Brown is an Anglican priest. On Sunday mornings he officiates the Mass, or Eucharist, which is a ritual retelling of a story of love, sacrifice, death, and resurrection. This ritual has integrated core theological ideas into worshippers’ everyday lives for 2,000 years.

But for Robinson-Brown, this church service isn’t the only place where God’s presence is felt. Speaking in a personal capacity in an episode of the podcast All Out With Jon Dean earlier this year, he explained that dark rooms and cruising grounds can be similarly sacred. “The space of a dark room [is a] kind of metaphor for what I think a particular experience of God can be and with other people can be in terms of intimacy and safety. … People are not judged on their appearance, or their differences, but come to each other as they are.” In these sexual encounters where individuals are nameless to one another, there is an experience of union that transcends identity, biography, and status. They are simply bodies together. And for Robinson-Brown, being embodied is what Christianity is all about. “Not only does God belong in the bedroom, or wherever the erotic space might be,” he tells me, “God is already in us.”

What Robinson-Brown is modeling here is the integrating of our sex lives into a larger pantheon of meaning. Cruising and sex in a dark room is an affirmation of each person’s sacredness and the necessity of human connection. 

That’s our task: to find ways of narrating (through stories and rituals) the presence and pleasure we experience in sex. To celebrate it; to delight in it; to see its holiness. That’s why there’s an erotic love poem at the heart of the Bible. Its closing words offer us this invitation: 

“Come away, my beloved,

    and be like a gazelle

or like a young stag

    on the spice-laden mountains.“

Whatever you believe, and however you have sex, I hope you find presence, pleasure, and stories that can integrate it all into your life. Good sex is spiritual. And good religion is full of sex. Let us be glad for it!

It turns out there is a limit to how far left Democrats are willing to go with a crucial swing state on the line. 

Francesca Hong ran up against that wall on Tuesday, falling short in her race against Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Wisconsin. 

He’ll go up against Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican backed by President Donald Trump and closely associated with his MAGA movement, setting up a major contrast in a state where elections are often decided by paper-thin margins.

Had Hong won, she would have had a chance to become the first democratic socialist governor in any state in US history. And Hong was the story of the election for most of the last month: She led recent polls by a double-digit margin, and Crowley’s campaign was considered a last-second rescue mission by party leaders — he had previously dropped out of the race, and only rejoined it last month with Gov. Tony Evers’s encouragement after other candidates faltered. 

Despite his earlier stumbles, however, Crowley managed to consolidate Democratic support amid widespread concerns about Hong’s viability in a general election.

Hong’s rise and fall showcased multiple trends in the party — the growing appeal of progressive populism, the struggles of center-left party leaders to contain it, and an ongoing debate about electability that ultimately proved too much for her to overcome.

The issue that helped propel Hong’s campaign

Hong, 37, is a chef by trade and first ran for state assembly in 2020 while struggling to keep her ramen restaurant afloat during the pandemic. She tapped into the same well of progressive activism that’s powered other insurgent campaigns this year, positioning herself as a candidate who would aim higher in office than her opponents. 

“Incrementalism is irresponsible,” she told Vox’s Andrew Prokop last month. “Pushing for the middle or the moderate has not yielded us the wins that we need.”

But state political experts credited one issue in particular for helping her stand out the most: data centers. 

Hong was an early and vocal opponent just as public opposition was beginning to surge. Running on a pledge to “Control-Alt-Delete” the AI buildout, she pledged to cut off tax incentives and implement a moratorium on new projects.

The rest of the field imploded

Though Hong’s populist-left politics dominated the headlines, the story of her rise was also about a cascading series of failures among the rest of the Democratic field. 

Just as Democratic leaders hoped to consolidate behind a more conventional candidate to head off Hong, things started going off the rails in the final weeks of the contest, leaving them little time to course-correct. 

In July, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez dropped out of the race just as her campaign was gaining some traction, citing campaign finance irregularities that made it impossible to continue.

That left former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who lost a close Senate race in 2022, as Hong’s only significant rival. But Evers, concerned about Barnes’s viability, encouraged Crowley to reenter the race after he had already dropped out, and then endorsed his revived campaign.

Barnes and Crowley split the vote in polls while Hong surged — but then Barnes dropped out just as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel revealed it was investigating allegations of sexual misconduct.

Republicans, meanwhile, were happy to take advantage of the mess to try to build momentum for Hong, who they saw as a weaker opponent. A group associated with the Republican Governors Association spent over $3 million on “attack” ads to help elevate her profile with Democratic primary voters.  

With just weeks to rally support, Crowley looked to assemble a coalition of moderates along with Black voters, a demographic that left-wing candidates have often struggled to win over in primaries.  

“When people try to call me the establishment, I look at that as a slur, particularly as an African American candidate,” Crowley said ahead of the primary. “I have never run for office to protect the establishment. I’ve always been here to protect people.”

Hong’s campaign split the left

Even as Hong rocketed to frontrunner status, cracks began to show. Unlike Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, whose campaign became a massive rallying point for progressive leaders around the country, the lesser-known Hong was greeted with somewhat less enthusiasm on the left. 

Most notably, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a frequent booster of left-wing insurgent campaigns, did not endorse her, saying he was not focused on the race. 

Some of that may have had to do with electability concerns, a sensitive issue for the Sanders-led movement as it looks to prove it can win in swing states this cycle, something that has eluded them since 2016.

As Hong rose in the polls, she gave a series of interviews to national media outlets where she faced questions about old rhetoric, like a call to “cancel Thanksgiving,” and some past controversial positions, like abolishing prisons and defunding the police. While she eventually made clear she would not pursue either idea in office, her sometimes disjointed answers worried allies on the left, who publicly urged her to refocus her campaign on more friendly topics. 

The divide over Hong ended up sparking a broader national discussion among progressives about how — and whether — to move past the more strident language and policies around social justice issues that hit their peak during the pandemic.

“I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said on ABC News on Sunday. “Woke 1 was crazy.”

The debate clearly resonated with voters in Wisconsin, who were looking to their nominee to be a bulwark against a Republican nominee who had sided with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Democrats have proven willing to break with tradition and embrace new arguments about what makes a candidate electable in 2026, but Hong wasn’t able to convince them she was worth the bet. 

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: August is famously a slow time in Washington, DC. It’s hot and humid, Congress is out of session, and everyone who’s still here generally wishes they were somewhere else.

Even by that standard, though, President Donald Trump is having an exceptionally listless month. There’s a war in Iran, which is trapped in its nth cycle of almost-a-deal-any-day-now (a deal may really be coming, but signs today are less hopeful). There’s Trump’s push for the SAVE America Act, which has long looked mathematically unfeasible, and which senators abandoned this past weekend. There’s all of that construction.

And then, there are a number of “zombie” priorities — previously dead Trump agenda items that are coming back to haunt the news cycle. Here’s what’s still on the president’s to-do list: 

• The Reflecting Pool: Late last month, the Justice Department dropped its felony case against a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the pool, which was actually the victim of shoddy contractor work and poor decision-making. Trump was not pleased at the time, and, on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House is pressing the DOJ to bring a new case. 
• Birthright citizenship: In June, the US Supreme Court struck down Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship via executive order as unconstitutional. Then, earlier this month, he issued a new, far narrower executive order trying to restrict birthright citizenship at the margins. As my colleague Ian Millhiser explains here, that order is likely unconstitutional, too, but Trump is trying anyway. 
• Fed independence: Another June SCOTUS ruling curbed Trump’s immediate attempts to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump has accused of mortgage fraud. But Trump is still trying, notifying Cook last week that he was “considering” removing her, according to ABC News.
• The slush fund: Attorney General Todd Blanche committed to ending Trump’s sought-after $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” in order to get confirmed to the role. Now that he has been confirmed, though, it’s anyone’s guess whether the fund will stay dead.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

My dad sent some very cute photos of a troupe of baby raccoons to the family group chat this morning, so I read this Atlantic article about raccoon domestication with great interest. As it turns out, they really might be on the path toward domestication. But, right now, they make terrible pets. Still, it’s a fun read, and you can find it here with a gift link. 

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

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. 

One link for later

➨ 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.

Everyone is wrong about Hank Green. 

In case you missed the controversy: The veteran YouTube star, writer, and science comms entrepreneur was recently “canceled” after he acknowledged using AI for research.

“I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid,” he wrote in a statement on Reddit. “It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn’t know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic.” Although Green wrote that the words in his videos are his own, his reliance on AI as a research aid still gave the finished work an ineffable “AI feel.” And his relationship with AI, he wrote, had become “not healthy for me or good for the world.”

Some of Green’s followers, known by the cheerfully dorky moniker “Nerdfighters,” turned on him for daring to use AI in any capacity. Just as quickly, that backlash produced its own backlash, aghast not at Green’s use of AI but at his prostration before an anti-AI mob — “self-canceling,” as some put it, over a legitimate use of the technology. 

I think both of these camps are misguided and have flattened a complex issue into a set of binary extremes. And it surprised me that, despite robust societal debate on AI’s impacts on our ability to think, write, and produce original ideas, the debacle hasn’t prompted more thoughtful conversation about the limits of AI in creative work. 

I felt this because I recognized myself in Green’s statement: the feeling that even using AI for research can start to take over your creative process, that it can become hard to know where your own brain ends and where AI begins, and that the technology can simply push you to work too fast. I don’t use AI to generate writing and would not do so — but its use need not rise to that level to raise profound questions about how much of our work to automate, and what happens to our ability to think for ourselves when we do. 

In a follow-up video published late last week, Green laid out a new AI policy for his work. He wrote: 

1. No portion of any script will be written, edited, or outlined by an LLM.

2. The thesis of a video will always originate with a human. 

3. No image or music in a video will be generated by AI. If something is accidentally included, best efforts will be made to remove it. 

4. LLM outputs are not trusted as a source.

These are all good ideas for any creator trying to avoid AI creep in their craft. But still, they raise a bigger, harder-to-answer question: The very structure of generative AI makes it hard to use without offloading human thought and judgment, which can lead to a widely discussed phenomenon known as “cognitive surrender.” And it pushes us toward uses — like synthesizing research, brainstorming, generating ideas and angles — that short-circuit the original thinking and discovery that we ought to be doing ourselves. What, then, can we even responsibly use AI for? How can we set guardrails that allow us to avail ourselves of its usefulness, without melting our brains in the process? 

The most tempting uses of AI are precisely those best avoided

Remember late 2022, when ChatGPT first came out and everyone mocked its crappy research skills and propensity to hallucinate in every other sentence? I am so wistful for those days. 

Many people who abstain from AI may not know it, but in the time since, and especially in recent months, large language models have gotten way smarter (especially the paid premium versions). It’s become unnervingly good at summarizing niche, complex research areas and debates, and producing ideas, often without being asked, for further research or writing on the same subject. 

Whenever I have a research question these days (which is pretty much any time I’m working on a story), I’m more likely to fire up an LLM than a traditional search engine. If I ask, “Why are old-growth trees still being logged in North America?” it produces a synthesis of research, news, opinion, and whatever else its training absorbed on the subject: “We’re using an essentially nonrenewable ecological asset to smooth a temporary transition to a renewable timber resource,” it says. Probe it further, and it’ll suggest arguments for you: “Instead of conservationists having to prove that every old forest deserves protection, logging companies should have to demonstrate that cutting a centuries-old stand serves a need that cannot reasonably be met with second-growth or engineered wood.” 

LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful.

These aren’t particularly smart or creative ideas — they’re perfectly replacement-level, which makes them plausible substitutes for the thoughts of most people. The AI can supply pat answers to every conceivable question and follow-up you might have while working on a project, relieving you of the need to mentally engage with the shape of a problem. Contrast that with Googling in the pre-AI overview days, which, while certainly not without its problems, at least used to send you to a list of sources that you then had to read and make sense of on your own. 

Most of us who’ve engaged with LLMs know what this feels like. They make it easy for users to skate on the surface of a subject and feign understanding or insight, and in the process they can become involved in interpretive decisions that should be our own. In my experience, even more narrowly designed generative AI models don’t escape these problems. Google’s Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), for example, allows you to upload all of your sources for a project — books, reports, papers, audio and video recordings — and ask it questions based on what they contain, rather than searching the entire internet. It’s less prone to generating outright slop than general-purpose AIs. I use it for most stories I write — it’s an incredibly useful, time-saving tool. But it also enables me to engage with sources in a perfunctory, contextless manner: The AI can surface precisely the bit I need rather than forcing me to form the deeper connections that come from reading a text as a whole.

The best creative work (including not just art and writing, but also technological and medical breakthroughs) probably comes from having a wide range of background associations, and being able to combine them in unexpected ways. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré put this beautifully in his essay “Mathematical Creation,” where he wrote that it’s the tedious, sustained conscious effort that ultimately leads to flashes of insight. 

I think this is what Green meant when he wrote that AI can prevent him from finding his “own ways into and around a topic.” LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful. This argument has already been made about AI-generated writing: Letting an LLM write for you defeats the point, because writing is thinking. But it can also be true, as Green’s example has shown, of using AI for the research that feeds the creative process. 

If you use AI, consider creating a personal AI policy

Perhaps all these concerns are overblown — humans are hardly less prone to lazy and logically unsound thinking than AI. That’s absolutely true, but the point of doing our own thinking isn’t that we’re inherently good at it. To the contrary, it’s that we can only get better at reasoning by practicing it. 

I don’t want to suggest that using AI for research is illegitimate. It’s too useful a tool to take off the table entirely, and we can’t put that genie back in the bottle. It can be extremely helpful with identifying the best sources that you wouldn’t find otherwise, but those very abilities can make it double-edged, foreclosing a slower, more open-ended exploration process. But AI’s greatest strength — its endless variety and flexibility — can be used to steer it away from the most tempting uses, especially those that ultimately harm us.

There are very obvious things that any LLM user should do to that end, like never assuming that a claim from an AI is accurate and always reading original sources. Beyond that, the necessary guardrails depend on your own use patterns, but above all, I think it’s helpful to avoid training ourselves to expect immediate answers to difficult questions.

One of my colleagues refrains from using it to brainstorm ideas entirely, instead using it to provide sources for narrow factual questions and to aid in the fact-checking process (emphasis on “aid”) after a story is written. To generalize from this, I think it’s a good idea to resist having AI do much synthetic work on a subject before you have drafted your project yourself. The less you do that, the less you will, to paraphrase Green’s recent video, see every problem as an “LLM-shaped problem,” and the less you’ll feel like you’re in the singularity where your brain is merging with AI.

One way that I like to use AI is as an enhanced thesaurus, to find the precise word or short phrase to express what I want to say in a sentence. When done right, I don’t find this harmful any more than using a traditional thesaurus; I find that it can enrich my working lexicon. But it must be used carefully and surgically, by setting a clear limit on the length of a phrase used from AI — like two or three words max — and avoiding sharing much of your writing with the tool at all, lest it start recommending extensive rewrites. 

When interrogating the contents of specific sources or a body of work, or stress testing your own arguments, AI would be better for our intellectual development if it took a Socratic approach — pushing you to discover an answer rather than simply giving you one. It might say, for example, “there might be some relevant caveats to your idea on pp. 42-43 of the source.” LLMs can be directed to behave this way in their custom instructions. It also helps to simply touch grass — find the sources you need, and rather than interviewing the AI about what they say, just close the chatbot and read them from start to finish. 

Configuring AI in a way that’s healthier for our brains would also make it less addictive — when you find yourself getting sucked into a long back-and-forth with an AI, that’s often a sign that something has gone amiss. Green evidently struggled to set that boundary, referencing the unhealthy “level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs.” AI labs have very strong commercial incentives to want us to be addicted to their products, and unless they build different constraints into models themselves, it’s hard to expect the average person, who has far less autonomy over the terms of her work than Green does, to change these conditions on her own. 

Although researchers at some AI labs are thinking about the societal risks of cognitive atrophy, it’s another matter to expect these companies, which compete on ease of use, to introduce friction into their models. We shouldn’t count on that happening soon — but we’re far from powerless against AI’s impacts. We can set our own personal AI use policies, and we can enforce social norms against AI-induced brain rot. Like, at bare minimum: Don’t send me your AI-generated writing. It’s rude! 

When the Russia-Ukraine conflict erupted into full-scale war in 2022, things looked grim for Ukraine. Its capital, Kyiv, was under threat almost immediately, and there were questions about how long the smaller country could hold out, even with US support. More than four years later, however, the dynamic is changing. US military support has waned, but not only has Ukraine held its own in years of grinding, attritional fighting, it increasingly has Russia on the defensive.

According to Marcus Walker, who covers Ukraine as South Europe Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, “it’s certainly possible for the smaller country to survive and have a chance of winning only because it is more nimble and and better at improvising and for large periods of the war has had the edge in terms of innovation.” 

Walker, who, last month, reported on how the war is beginning to shift against Russian President Vladimir Putin, talked with Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain how Ukraine has held on this long — and how it’s successfully improvising on the battlefield to press its advantage.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, including how Ukraine has recently gained a new ally on the American right who has Trump’s ear. You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

You recently wrote that Ukraine has Russia on its back foot. How?

To understand what happened this year, we have to go back to the very beginnings of the war, which were in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the Eastern Donbas region in a smaller-scale war. And, at the time, Ukraine was a militarily weak country. Its army was pretty backward and had outdated equipment; although, it fought as hard as it could. The society was politically divided, especially over its relationship with Russia and with the West and with Europe. And Russia seems to have drawn the lesson that Ukraine would be a pushover when it launched its full scale invasion in 2022. And, at the time, now four and a half years ago, even most Western governments and intelligence services thought that Russia would win the war easily.

Instead, the very fact of Russian pressure on Ukraine had somehow welded Ukrainians together and created a stronger, more united society and state that shared — whatever the internal differences — at least the determination to have a country called Ukraine. And, in the meantime, they did a lot of reforms to their country and to their military. 

And so, when Russia launched a full scale invasion — thinking, “this will be easy,” — instead they found themselves in a full-scale war that they’ve been unable to win. On balance, Russia is really struggling to get any military result despite the investment of massive resources and the loss of incredible numbers of soldiers in trying to win this war. It just isn’t able to turn its advantage in numbers into victory. 

Right now, it’s hard to see Ukraine collapsing. However, Ukraine’s a long way from winning outright. And the outcome of this war is ultimately still open.

Ukraine must be doing something right on the battlefield. What is it doing right?

It has found ways to counteract Russia’s advantage in numbers, in manpower, and in equipment. And, above all, the asymmetric war that Ukraine has been fighting has come to rely heavily on drones, on its know-how, and on its skill at improvisation to develop a new form of drone warfare that other countries around the world have been trying to learn from, including the US military, including Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, and including other NATO countries in Europe — and, of course, the Russians, too. 

There is a constant arms race here in terms of drone technology and tactics. And both sides are now using incredible numbers of these often very tiny weapons — often 12 or 15 inches big with four little propellers — that can kill at ranges of 20 to 30 miles.

What is Ukraine using the drones to do, exactly?

They’re the most important tactical weapon at the front for killing Russian infantry. They are also using larger bomber drones with propellers or with wings to try and destroy Russian logistics, to blow up trucks transporting ammunition or other supplies on the supply roads far behind the front. They’re using long-range drones that can fly for a thousand miles or more to destroy Russian oil refineries deep inside Russia in an attempt to cut off the oil revenues that are vital for the Russian state and for Putin’s ability to finance the war. 

On the front line, drones are also doing all sorts of work that humans used to do, such as transporting ammunition, and food, and water to infantry soldiers on the front line. So, if you go to frontline areas now, or anywhere near them, you can see ground drones: little remote-control vehicles with big chunky wheels trundling along on their own with no human in sight. 

They also, for example, evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers. They will lie down on these ground drones and be ferried out, because that is better than having six men carry you out on a stretcher where, if you’re hit again, then you might have seven casualties.

How did Ukraine end up using drones in so many areas — and so successfully? Is this just weaponry evolving the way it tends to?

Obviously, in all wars, innovation happens very fast under the pressure of necessity. But there is something very particular about Ukraine. It is a country of people who like to improvise. It’s also a country with a large software sector, a large IT sector. And it’s a place where large parts of the military have a culture of, as we journalists sometimes put it, trying to MacGyver solutions. You take what you have, and you improvise. 

It so happened that the drone revolution started with consumer drones, the same kind of quadcopters that people were using to take pictures on holiday. And they worked out ways to attach a claw to them that can then drop a grenade or strap some explosives to it and crash the whole drone into a Russian vehicle. That was how it began at the start of this war in 2022. But, now, these things have become really a deadly fleet of flying killer robots that saturate the frontline area. 

Of course, the Russians are doing the same. So, on both sides of the front line, it has become extremely difficult and dangerous to move under a sky full of these killer robots.

I was reading this weekend that Ukraine has been using drones to target warehouses for this company called Wildberries. It’s kind of like Amazon for Russia. What’s the strategy there?

There are a couple of aspects to that. One is that Wildberries has also been selling a large amount of military gear, such as body armor or drone components. It’s more like an Amazon from which the soldiers can order a lot of gear to continue the war, so it is a way of disrupting military logistics. 

But, also, it strikes a blow to Russian civilian perceptions of the war, because, for years, Putin tried to tell the Russian population that this war is something happening far away, and it wouldn’t touch them directly. Now, it turns out that their equivalent of Amazon deliveries are not going to be arriving, because the warehouse burned down. 

At the same time, it’s a way of damaging the Russian economy, because Wildberries also owes a lot of money to banks. And so, if the company is in trouble, then it also causes trouble for the Russian banking system. And it hurts the tax revenues of the Russian government that pay for the war.

Is Russia showing evolution on the battlefield, as well?

Yes, they have. They have also come up with their own innovations. For example, in the last couple of years, since about 2024, they’ve been using large numbers of drones on fiber optic cables. That means the pilot that’s flying them is attached via a long thin plastic cable or fiber optic cable to a drone that carries a spool and is unspooling this cable as it flies. Now, what does that do? It means that electronic interference with the radio signal is no longer possible, because there is a physical connection between the pilot and the drone. So, that was an innovation that bypassed electronic warfare or the interception of the radio signal of the video feed that pilots need to fly their drones. 

They’ve had other innovations too. The Russians last year, for example, came up with a whole new class of medium-range drones — cheap, fixed-wing drones. The Ukrainians have now responded and made their own versions, which are better, but it really is a constant race of innovation and adaptation. And every time I come back and talk to military units here, everything’s changed. The tactics that worked last year no longer work. And the drones that work now didn’t exist three months ago.

Is there some possibility that Ukraine can win this war by not losing it?

Yes. Winning in war means achieving political war aims. And Ukraine’s aim is to survive as an independent nation state. It can do that. It can achieve that even if it loses currently about 20 percent of its territory that’s under Russian occupation. 

I think it’s hard to see how Russia can achieve its own central war aim, which was to reimpose political control over Ukraine to turn it into a kind of protectorate — really to take back control of the place that was once Russia’s largest colony. It’s very hard to see how the Russians can achieve that. The Russians seem to be counting on the West, on the US and the Europeans getting tired of supporting Ukraine, of sending financing and loans and weaponry. Putin seems to believe that, without this international support from the West, Kyiv won’t be able to carry this on forever.

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Lessons from “Woke 1” 

Earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) flashed her political dexterity on ABC’s This Week when she was asked about the policies of Peak Woke — call it Woke 1, that stretch around the 2020 pandemic when the American liberal machine seemed to be at its political and cultural height. “I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” the Bronx congresswoman said. “Woke 1 was crazy.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her support for defunding the police in 2020: “During lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”https://t.co/dR4cGgbAq4 pic.twitter.com/e8z7EFyQvU

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 9, 2026

She was quoting a tweet from Chi Ossé, a New York City Council member from Brooklyn, but the point underneath it was the real tell. The Democrats’ emerging left — fresh off primary victories in New York, Colorado, and now Michigan — has developed a playbook for handling any unpopular stance, or tweet, from the early 2020s, whether it’s pandemic masking, defunding the police, or the broader vocabulary of that summer.

The new plan: Brush it off. Then refocus on the present, and on the policies that will actually make people’s lives better.

So far, the strategy is working. Zohran Mamdani walked back his support for defunding the police during his 2025 mayoral campaign and is now the mayor of New York. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed congressional candidate in New York’s 13th District, had a stack of deleted posts that CNN’s KFile resurfaced this June — including one that read “all deportations are wrong.” When I asked her about them, she didn’t disavow a word. She won her primary, albeit in a deep-blue district, anyway. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong had a bad case of the woke mind virus in 2020 — the “cancel Thanksgiving” kind — and she’s still in the hunt in this week’s Democratic primary, where her candidacy has been far more focused on issues like data centers and education funding. 

Electorally, at least, Ossé has been proven right. The pandemic was wild, and primary voters seem to be extending progressives a grace period of sorts — a chance to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years. And while Republicans are still hopeful they can relitigate some of these fights in a general election, they’ve struggled to make them stick in high-profile races since 2024.

But these are also the issues — race, gender, sexuality, affirmative action, religion, cancel culture — where the simplest story gets repeated out of ease. The national media’s distance from everyday people, and especially from working-class people of color, is felt most in how it covers culture. Catch-all terms like “wokeness” flatten real differences across the electorate and quietly impose a conservative frame on genuine arguments about equity and inclusion.

That was one of my biggest takeaways from that 2020 summer: our collective discomfort with all of these issues in the first place. I watched that year up close, traveling with Democratic and Republican candidates through the pandemic and the racial-justice protests, and there was never a clean “Two Americas” moment — at least not the left-versus-right one everyone expected. The real gap was between Masked America — coastal, professional, absolutely consumed by identity politics — and everyone else. Among ordinary voters of all parties, and especially minority voters, there was significantly more skepticism from the start toward the highly-specific “woke 1” litmus tests now being renounced by their leading proponents. At George Floyd’s memorial in Houston and in the city where he died, there was no consensus on defunding the police, only a shared agreement about racial injustice and a deep distrust of institutions. In south Chicago, people were already skeptical that the sudden flood of corporate money into racial justice would outlast the moment — even while the checks were still being written.

So no, I don’t love the tidy language of Woke 1 (then) versus Woke 2 (now). But here are a few lessons from that summer — and from our recent reporting on America, Actually — that I think apply now, especially to the progressives stepping back from things they used to say.

1. Woke isn’t dead

The broad ideals — diversity, equity, a basic sense of fairness — still matter to Democratic voters. Criminal justice reform still has real purchase with the base. Minority and women candidates have kept winning since 2024, and even ideas like reparations still resonate with big chunks of the Democratic electorate. What’s changed isn’t who these candidates are — it’s what they choose to lead with.

What has fallen out of favor is a way of talking. Let’s say it’s the nonprofit register, or the Ford Foundation cadence — the language that lived in mission statements and land acknowledgments, or that made sweeping generalizations about a specific group — white women, cis men, you name it. David Axelrod, describing Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong, gave it this label: a “font of zany liberal, faculty lounge exotica.” Yes, that’s the part that’s gotten less popular. The vocabulary changed more than the values.

2. The left rewrote its message after 2024

The clearest change is the affordability pivot. When Abdul El-Sayed ran for Michigan governor in 2018, the animating cause was climate and a Green New Deal. Today the center of gravity has moved to economic populism, affordability, and a rethinking of the US relationship with Israel. Climate didn’t vanish, but it’s no longer the headline. And “representation” was, at its core, a white-collar frame — it spoke loudest to people already inside the room. 

Affordability speaks to everyone. When I sat down with El-Sayed on the show, this is how he described what Michigan voters were actually asking:

“Who poses the biggest pushback to a system of politics that has been bought off in ways that leave me unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home, unable to look at my kid’s school and believe that that’s a good place for them, unable to get healthcare when I need it — and then sending my money abroad, telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”

That’s not the language of 2020. It’s economic, universal, and it doesn’t ask anyone to first pass a vocabulary test.

It helps to remember that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was never really “woke.” He talked about class more than culture, the many against the money. And it repeatedly got him into trouble, leading him to adopt more of the left’s rhetoric and positions on identity and race after 2016. In 2028, the sweet spot is probably the middle, and that’s what the next generation of progressives — AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed — can do better than their Burlington forefather. They’re fluent in blending the class critique and the social one without missing a beat. 

“This is about the many versus the money,” El-Sayed told me. “If you support a politics of the UAW, of working people everywhere, of teachers, of nurses, of working families, of Bernie Sanders and AOC, of people who want to break the chokehold of corporations and special interests on our politics — this is that race.”

3. Democratic voters have changed

Progressives never had enough power to implement their most controversial ideas en masse (the Minneapolis City Council was backtracking off “defunding the police” by the summer of 2021). Instead, “woke,” as a cultural phenomenon, took its deepest hold in liberal and academic circles. So the corporate whiplash that followed — the rush to embrace new HR trainings, new DEI policies, and new vocabulary in 2020 and the quiet discarding of it a couple of years later — was felt most acutely by college-educated progressives themselves, and not by the more working-class voters cable news often invokes as most alienated by this period.

I think this speaks to Ossé’s tweet, and why the grace period is real. And I think we can’t underrate how many voters have been on a similar journey since 2020 — being genuinely shocked by the video of George Floyd’s murder, agreeing in large part with the ideals of progressive activists, and maybe coming to disagree on the specifics in hindsight. In some ways, it reminds me of the way MAGA voters heard out now-Vice President JD Vance’s journey from Trump critic to Trump loyalist. The audience is willing to believe the candidate’s evolution because they’ve been on a similar one. 

I think part of the reason “Woke 1” had a short shelf life was that it was based on a rigid framework of race and identity that has already been proven outdated. The binary that has guided most political discourse about race in the Democratic Party — with Black people on one side and white people on the other — is more outdated every election cycle. The emergence of Latino, Asian, and Arab swing voters has created coalitions for candidates beyond the Democrats’ traditional base.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion already mean something different than in 2020, and that’s what the next Democratic presidential primary will sort out.

4. The establishment’s credibility collapse is the bigger story

But, of course, the reaction to Donald Trump’s first presidency is different than the reaction to the second one. There have been material changes to the country, and voters aren’t weighing progressives against some pristine center. They’re weighing them against an establishment they believe has lied to them and fumbled the things that mattered, from inflation and immigration in Joe Biden’s presidency to his decision to run for reelection. 

That was the theme of my recent interview with Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC). Asked what the party should learn from 2024, he pointed the finger at Black voters — arguing Vice President Kamala Harris would have won if turnout had been higher. And while I appreciated the congressman’s candor, that sentiment — pervasive among moderate Democrats right now — is exactly why the establishment is in the predicament it’s in. Yes, there are real policy fights, over corporate PAC money and Medicare-for-all. But voters are also rejecting an insular way of doing politics, one built in the pre-Trump era, that refuses to account for its own failures.

The Democratic Party leadership is on the defensive, and handwringing about “woke” — and its so-called excesses — is fighting the last war. It’s what helped Trump get elected in 2024. I don’t think it’s going to win elections in 2026 or 2028. 

Also, I think most people have moved on. The scope of Trump’s actions in his second term are so severe, and the backlash to anything “DEI” adjacent is so total, that the mild annoyance of Peak Woke seems tame in comparison. 

What I’m hearing

With the Wisconsin primary today, I talked with Sachin Chheda, a progressive strategist in Wisconsin who works on Democratic elections for issues and candidates. He oversaw winning campaigns for Wisconsin’s all-important elections in the state Supreme Court. He is the principal at Earthrise Strategies. 

Is the expectation at this point that Francesca Hong is going to win?

I think that’s the most likely scenario, but politics in Wisconsin is like the weather, and you can see big swings in a very short period of time. 

The contours of this race have sort of been confounding, starting with Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, and then the collapse of Mandela Barnes. Should we see this race as Hong winning? Or the Dem establishment failing to organize itself?

I think it’s two things. 

First of all, the other candidates, who run the gamut from farther left to close to centrist, all underestimated Fran. 

She really hit on where the electorate is — especially on Gaza and data centers. Gaza isn’t a central issue of this campaign, but it’s a signal, and just like Joe Biden, most of the other candidates missed it, while her supporters centered it. 

And she just has her finger on the pulse of the electorate on data centers, while most of the other candidates were more focused on navigating the building trades politics. Again, not the central issue for most voters — but being the lone candidate against data centers sent a signal and allowed her to differentiate herself. 

The other thing is the “alternative-to-Fran” candidates didn’t coalesce — the opposite of what happened with Biden in South Carolina. There’s some real differences among the candidates, there’s some real ill-feeling and animosity and history among them, and there’s real resentment of Gov. [Tony] Evers’s late power move. 

Is there any risk Wisconsin Democrats have an issue uniting ahead of November? 

Competitive primaries are always tough on the candidates, on activists, on volunteers…and fun for pundits! 

But I have no doubt that whomever wins, Wednesday in Wisconsin will be just like Michigan last week — where a close race still ended in a quick endorsement and a very public show of unity among the candidates. 

All of the Democrats support lowering the cost of healthcare and childcare, funding public schools, taxing the rich, building more housing, putting guardrails on data centers, protecting civil rights, blocking ICE from kidnapping Wisconsinites, and stopping the corruption of the Trump administration and the MAGA agenda. They of course differ on many of the details, and that’s why we have the primary election. There will always be some folks at the margins who don’t get on the train, but 99% of Democrats will support the nominee and oppose far-right extremist MAGA goofball Tom Tiffany. 

Last week, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order that purports to strip citizenship from some Americans. 

This isn’t our first time here: Last year, Trump issued an executive order that attempted to strip citizenship from many Americans born in this country. Months later, in response to a lawsuit brought over Trump’s order, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that everyone born in the United States who is subject to US law is a citizen. The Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara (2026) was hardly a surprise, as the Court first ruled that everyone born in the US and subject to its laws are citizens in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898).

Still, the Barbara decision did invalidate an executive order from Trump. And that made him very angry. The new order appears to be a response to that 2025 Supreme Court decision, though it is much narrower than his original one.

In this sense, Trump appears to be experimenting with where the line is for the justices when it comes to birthright citizenship. When Trump’s first order came before the Court in Barbara, there was more than a century of precedent establishing that the order was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, four justices voted to overrule at least some of that precedent. 

Now, with the new order, Trump is testing whether a smaller bite at the apple is enough to win over one of the justices who voted with the majority in Barbara — two of whom are Republicans. If he manages to hold onto the four dissenters in Barbara and pick up just one more justice’s vote, his new order will stand. It’s a plausible outcome, and one that could potentially foreshadow future efforts to chip away at birthright citizenship.

What does the order actually do?

Trump’s first citizenship order, the one struck down in Barbara, attempted to strip citizenship from many Americans whose mothers were either undocumented or legally-but-temporarily present in the United States when they were born. Had this order been in effect at their birth, it would have stripped citizenship from many prominent Americans, including former Vice President Kamala Harris.

The new order, entitled “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” is much narrower; indeed, it’s unclear some of the categories of people it hopes to denaturalize actually exist. The new order, for example, purports to strip citizenship from children of two non-citizen parents when either parent belongs to a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

So, in the unlikely event that, say, a member of Al-Qaeda impregnated a non-US citizen woman who later gave birth on US soil, Trump’s order would mandate that the child’s US citizenship would be taken away. 

Another provision purports to strip citizenship from the children of foreign nationals who work in their nation’s embassies or in similar diplomatic capacities but who do not enjoy diplomatic immunity from US law. Again, it’s unlikely that all that many children fall into this category, given the relatively small number of these jobs.

The largest group of people that Trump targets in his new order is children whose parents “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States” for their birth, such as by buying a plane ticket to enter the United States while pregnant. But this category is also fairly small. 

In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 9,576 people were born in the United States to residents of foreign countries — out of about 3.6 million annual births — though it is unclear how many of these babies would be affected by Trump’s new executive order, because we don’t know if their mothers entered the United States “to ensure” that their child we be on US soil when born.

So, what does the Constitution actually say about birthright citizenship?

The question of whether people born in the United States are citizens was, until fairly recently, one of the most uncontroversial questions in US law. When Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, handed down the first court decision blocking Trump’s original attack on birthright citizenship, he commented that he’d “been on the bench for over four decades [and]…can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”

The relevant provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” So, everyone born in the US, regardless of their parent’s immigration status, past behavior, or membership in a particular organization are citizens — unless they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

As the Court recently reaffirmed in Barbara, moreover, a child is within US jurisdiction if they are “subject to American law.” So, if undocumented immigrants and their children were not subject to US jurisdiction, that would mean that it was illegal to arrest and deport them. And, if members of foreign terrorist organizations were not subject to US law, that would mean that it is illegal for the US government to prosecute them for committing terrorist acts.

That said, Wong Kim Ark did recognize a few narrow categories of individuals who are present in the US but not subject to its laws — two of which are still relevant today. Children of invading foreign armies do not receive birthright citizenship, nor do children of foreign ambassadors and other diplomats who are immune from US law.

As the Court clarified in Barbara, both of these exemptions are derived from an old English rule that provided that the King could not convey citizenship to “those born in lands that he did not control.” Thus, when a foreign military occupied English soil and stripped the King of his ability to rule over those lands, children born to members of that military were not citizens.

The exemption for ambassadors and some other foreign diplomats, meanwhile, flows from what Barbara described as a “fiction of extraterritoriality.” While senior diplomats are present in the United States, they are nonetheless deemed to “remain on foreign soil” and thus are not subject to US law.

But not all employees of foreign governments qualify for this diplomatic immunity. Consider, for example, the tragic facts of Moncada v. Rubio (2025), a recent federal appeals court decision holding that a man who lived as a US citizen for nearly seven decades was not, in fact, a citizen. 

Roberto Moncada is the son of a Nicaraguan diplomat who worked in the United Nations when Moncada was born in 1950. The US government previously concluded that Moncada’s father served as a “consul” when his son was born, and, thus, Moncada was a US citizen, because consuls and their families do not enjoy diplomatic immunity. But, in 2018, the US government discovered that Moncada’s father was actually an “attaché,” a more senior diplomat who does enjoy immunity. And then, the father’s diplomatic immunity cut the son off from US citizenship.

Under these principles, several provisions of Trump’s new executive order are unconstitutional, at least in part. The provisions stripping citizenship from the children of employees of foreign governments are lawful to the extent that they apply to children of people with diplomatic immunity but unconstitutional to the extent they apply to lower-ranking individuals with no immunity. 

The provision dealing with members of foreign terrorist organizations is also unconstitutional, since people who engage in terrorism on US soil are very much subject to US law — as are babies born on US soil to parents connected to terrorism. Although, in the unlikely event that a foreign terrorist group actually seized control of some portions of US soil, then the exemption for children of invading armies would likely apply. 

The provision dealing with so-called “birth tourists” is also unconstitutional, because a pregnant woman who enters the United States to ensure that their child is a US citizen is subject to US law, as is her child.

Indeed, Trump appears to concede this later point in a separate executive order handed down at the same time as his “Continuing to Protect” order. The second order, entitled “Ending Birth Tourism,” instructs two federal cabinet departments to update their rules to discourage alleged birth tourists from entering the country, including by taking “appropriate action to prevent the entry into the United States of, or the granting of any visa or other travel authorization” to such individuals. But, again, if the United States has the power to deny visas or otherwise bar these individuals from entering the country, that means that they are subject to US jurisdiction.

Why Trump keeps trying to restrict birthright citizenship

So, the Constitution’s text, the Court’s venerable decision in Wong Kim Ark, and its brand new decision in Barbara are all clear about who qualifies for birthright citizenship. All of these authorities establish that much of Trump’s new executive order is unconstitutional, because it purports to strip citizenship from people who are subject to US jurisdiction.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the order will be struck down. While Barbara did little more than reaffirm the same rule the Court announced nearly 130 years ago in Wong Kim Ark, four justices dissented in Barbara — although, these justices also released four separate opinions with four separate definitions of who does and does not qualify for birthright citizenship. So, on this Supreme Court, the mere fact that a legal question has been settled for more than a century does not prevent many of the justices from voting to unsettle it.

Indeed, this Court does not even reliably follow its own recent precedents. The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), which repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act and limited Congress’s power to prevent race discrimination in elections, was wholly at odds with the Court’s three-year-old decision in Allen v. Milligan (2023). The Court’s decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), which repealed a federal law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own doctors, cannot be squared with its decision two years earlier in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023). 

So, while two of the Court’s Republicans joined all three of its Democrats in Barbara, it is possible that at least one of those Republicans will vote with the dissenters on a narrower question, like whether Trump can strip citizenship from the children of so-called birth tourists. And even if all of the justices in the Barbara majority hold the line, if one of them leaves the Court while Trump is still in office, he will almost certainly replace them with someone who opposes birthright citizenship.

So, while Trump’s executive orders often defy the Constitution’s explicit text, Trump also understands something important about US law: It doesn’t actually matter what the Constitution says if you have five votes on the Supreme Court who are willing to do what you want them to do.

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: President Donald Trump is trying to revise the childhood vaccine schedule. 

What’s happening? On Monday, Trump signed an executive order recommending fewer childhood vaccines, directing new vaccine research, and attempting to advance “parental choice” on vaccines. The new guidance substantially cuts the number of shots recommended for all children, from vaccines for 18 diseases to just 11. 

Vaccines for rotavirus, meningococcal disease, the flu, and Covid-19 are all among those the order no longer recommends for all children.

What does that mean for vaccine access in the US? For now, not too much. The order only issues recommendations, and as the Washington Post points out, many states have already elected to stop relying on federal vaccine recommendations. It’s certain to increase confusion over vaccine safety, though, and could throw up new administrative barriers for parents. 

Why does Trump care? Trump has long amplified baseless conspiracy theories linking childhood vaccines to autism; on Monday, he claimed that childhood vaccine doses are “the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.” (They are not.) 

Parts of the order directly reflect Trump’s personal hobbyhorses around vaccines, such as a recommendation to break up the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine into three separate shots; as the Post points out, those kinds of individual shots aren’t even commercially available right now.

What’s the big picture? Monday’s EO doesn’t make any earthshattering changes, but it’s concerning to see vaccine policy — or at least policy recommendations — made from the Oval Office. And the order will have another impact: Trump’s attempts to dictate vaccine policy to states, combined with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s year and a half plus of meddling, will only serve to further demolish America’s splintered public health consensus.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Have you heard about the fitness competition Hyrox, possibly against your will? Have you not heard about Hyrox? Are you perhaps thinking of the Oreo-adjacent cookie Hydrox instead? Whichever category you fall into, I recommend my colleague Alex Abad-Santos’s latest piece explaining what exactly is going on over there. You can read it with a gift link here.

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

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. 

One link for later

➨ 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. 

Exercise can be a humbling experience. 

A simple push-up can debase the most dignified humans, transforming them into helpless little halibuts, unable to unmoor their bellies from the floor. Squats and lunges can leave their victims crouching like tiny goblins or trembling against gravity’s will. Have you ever willingly watched yourself run at full speed? Only if you have self-esteem of steel.

But for certain people, the most physically demanding experience of their lives is not something they want to avoid, but an alluring temptation: a challenge too impossible to ignore, an irresistible dare that must be completed day after day. And they quench this desire — as well as the thirst for friendship and community; some vanity muscles; and mini vacations to the likes of Oslo, Brisbane, and Bangkok — in the sweaty, grunty, made-for-TikTok $200 million world known as Hyrox. 

What is Hyrox and why is everyone doing it without me?

HYROX is stylized in all caps. Capitalization makes it seem as if it’s a word that only exists to be yelled, an apt choice for an experience that seems to take inspiration from military training and/or the PE class you hated growing up.  

Since launching in Germany in 2017, Hyrox has become a worldwide phenomenon. As CNBC reported in June, it initially started with just 650 people and now is projected to capture roughly 1.5 million participants across 121 events in 34 countries around the world. Revenue, which comes from a combination of contest entry fees, sponsorships, merch, licensing for Hyrox-affiliated gyms, and other avenues, is expected to reach $270 million in 2026. This year, 42,000 tickets were sold to the New York City race in the event’s first 24 hours. In 2025, there were roughly 12,700 athletes registered for the event.     

Technically speaking, Hyrox is a timed competition that spans eight rounds; the person or team — athletes can compete as individuals, as doubles with a partner, or as part of a relay — with the fastest overall time wins.

Each round consists of a 1-kilometer run followed by a more “functional” strength-based move, often done using a machine. These exercises include: 1,000 meters on a SkiErg; a weighted 50-meter sled push; a weighted 50-meter sled pull; 80-meter burpee broad jumps; a 1,000-meter row; a 200-meter Farmers Carry (lugging around two heavy weights at your side while walking); 100 meters of lunges with a sandbag on your back; and 100 wall balls (squat thrusts that involve launching a medicine ball into the air as you stand). It’s run-exercise-run-exercise-run-exercise until all eight kilometers and all eight movements are completed.

But Hyrox is also, Hyroxers say, a lifestyle. Because the best way to succeed at Hyrox — and for many participants, winning or at least finishing with a decent time is the goal — is to train for it. That likely means going to Hyrox-affiliated gyms that prepare you for the different exercises, and training alongside other people who also plan to run the race. And that’s where it can get all-consuming.    

Abby Roskind, a 35-year-old project manager living in Washington, DC, who has finished two races, told me that Hyrox sort of subsumes your entire existence. Training for Hyrox, she said, involved 5:30 am workouts, an excruciating amount of time learning how to properly broad jump, daily soreness, and lots of complaining. 

“Because you are always with other people doing these things, it becomes a little bit of a hostile takeover of your life where you meet up with your ‘fitness’ friends, and then they become your actual friends, and all you end up doing when you’re not training for Hyrox is talking about Hyrox,” she said. 

Roskind and other Hyroxers told me that people who are very serious about wanting to do well in competition may go on a diet, cut alcohol before the race, or squeeze in extra workouts, which naturally leads to less dinners out, less meeting up for drinks, and, ultimately, less socializing. It makes sense that people going through this experience will want to talk about Hyrox since so much of their life centers on it, and that the best audience for a discussion on Hyrox strategy would be other people doing Hyrox. 

“It definitely didn’t come across as culty where it’s like, ‘Oh, welcome to my Scientology of Exercise and you’re going to do this,’” said LJ, a 34-year-old with one Hyrox under his belt. (LJ told me he was afraid of being “canceled” by fellow Hyroxers and maybe his friends for talking to Vox, so we agreed to let him use his first initials to maintain some anonymity.) LJ said that one of his friends had run races in Europe and talked him and a small group of others in their circle into competing this past year. They generally approach it as a fun, casual thing to do together.  

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just a spectator, speculating😌 #hyrox #chicago #fyp #foryoupage #spectator

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“But then when I got to the actual venue day of the race, I felt like Hillary Clinton walking through that apartment like, What the hell is going on here?” he said. “Because there are a lot of people where this is a big chunk of their life. I saw people walking around — I guess they [Hyrox] give out badges — showing all the badges that they had from all the different cities that they competed in.” 

The idea of someone, ostensibly with a day job, going from city to city to compete in Hyrox and then showing off commemorative brooches is what signaled to LJ that the workout he enjoyed could be experienced in a different, more serious way. In that moment, LJ saw Hyrox the way outsiders might. Still, for him, the positives of Hyrox — being in better shape; experiencing runner’s highs, friendships, and the rush of competition — outweighed the possible cult-by-association.

A lot of people want to feel like an elite athlete, and now we can pay for the experience

If you make a Hyroxer feel comfortable enough, you will find that they all love to talk about the parts of the race they hate the most. It’s the feeling of thick death rushing through their lungs as they stare down the number of meters left in the burpee broad jump section. It’s the judges who are there to make sure participants are getting low enough during the wall balls. It’s seemingly everything about the race. 

There’s a bottomless chasm between how much people love Hyrox and how much they love to talk about how much it actually sucks to do. The bridge that connects the two is getting to feel like an elite athlete.  

“Once you become an adult, how many times are you going to get a sticker?” James McMillian, a trainer and the president at Tone House, a strength and conditioning facility in New York City, asked me. “How many times are you going to get a reward? How many times are you going to get a medal? People just want to be part of something. They want to feel close to greatness.”

McMillian, who has completed six Hyrox races, said that the vast majority of us will never ever know what it’s like to be a GOAT like A’ja Wilson or Lionel Messi, but Hyrox lets racers microdose it: the discipline sticking to a training schedule (as opposed to just working out day after day), the adrenaline of competing on game day, and the high of thousands of people cheering for you. 

“They turned working out into an athletic sport,” McMillian said. “Making everyday people feel like an athlete and giving them that opportunity to compete like one — that’s a smart business.”

Because it turns out that people are more than willing to pay for that athlete feeling. 

While participants aren’t required to work out at Hyrox-affiliated gyms to run the race, Hyrox-specific classes can cost more than regular group fitness packages. One Hyroxer told me that their 10-class package was around $600. There’s also a microindustry developing around getting better times. You might, for example, purchase Hyrox-branded fitness trackers and training apps, Hyrox shoes, and Hyrox equipment for your home gym (like a Hyrox Official Competition Power Rope, $275; Official Competition Sandbag, $87; or HYROX Perform Turf, starting at $1,799).     

The actual competition varies in price depending on the race and location, but can cost upward of $200. Racers can also opt in for a $35 photo package, which means a professional will take shots of themselves looking muscular and sweaty during the race.

You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete in Hyrox — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Then there’s Hyrox’s travel aspect. Hyrox is a benchmark and a goal, and race day is the culmination of all the training and sacrifice. It’s also where you get an official time. More competitive racers are training not just for their home city’s Hyrox, but to go to other races on the Hyrox calendar. 

The races are often in desirable destinations like Rome, Berlin, and Miami Beach, which can make Hyrox seem like vacation or, I guess, make a vacation seem more like Hyrox. If you’re traveling for Hyrox, that may mean paying for a plane or train ticket, or gasoline, and lodging. One Hyroxer I spoke to said that he spent roughly $1,500 on airfare and a hotel in addition to the official entry fees and photo options. Another said they spent roughly $500 in travel, saving money by splitting a hotel with a fellow racer. 

“Look, it’s the fitness space’s Eras Tour,” Bobby McMullen, a trainer and founder of the fitness app Adonis, told me. McMullen has completed four Hyrox races. “If you don’t get to do as well as you think, you’re like, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Vegas, I’ll go to Vegas,’” McMullen said. “Or if maybe you do really well and you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to go do that again.’”

“If you travel for Hyrox, just like if you travel for Taylor or if you travel for Disney, that’s fine,” McMullen added. “But the thing I learned about Disney adults is they’re rich. It’s so expensive. Same with Hyrox.” 

Hyrox is easy, sort of 

Here is a secret to the success of Hyrox that you may not believe: Despite its HARDCORE exterior and all of its supposed brutality, Hyrox is fairly accessible for a certain type of person, particularly millennials who have made fitness a part of their life for a couple of decades now, and who’ve dabbled in intense workout trends that included Tae Bo, CrossFit, Orange Theory, and Peloton. Think about it: Hyrox couldn’t do $270 million in business if it was too difficult for people with injuries, or if participants couldn’t finish, let alone do it over and over again.

Adherents claim there’s less injury risk compared to CrossFit because Hyrox exercises are relatively lower impact and don’t involve lifting heavy weights in complicated ways. Hyrox requires less training than preparing for something like a marathon, coaches and trainers told me. Unlike a triathlon, you don’t need to find access to water or risk drowning. The same cannot be said of an IRONMAN (another race, stylized in capitalizations that just feel very aggressive).

“For the New York marathon, I would have to start training right now,” McMillian, the coach and president at Tone House said. “I could start training a month and a half before and be able to finish.” 

To be clear, McMillian makes his living being fit. Though we did not put this to the test, I’m pretty sure he could squat two of me. McMillian competes in the pro division, the competition’s advanced tier. His definition of what’s physically doable is relative because McMillian looks like he could physically do anything. 

Still, he assured me that Hyrox’s barrier to entry is lower than it might seem. While prospective Hyrox racers also have the option of taking uniquely tailored classes at Hyrox-affiliated gyms (over 15,000 across the world) and group fitness studios, McMillian said you can do most of the race’s strength-based exercises or variations of them on your own, at any basic modern gym, making it somewhat more accessible. 

“What we noticed with our clients was that these are movements they’re already doing,” McMillian said. “All we have to do is make you better at those movements and teach you how to breathe during the movements, teach you the actual metrics on the rowers to be more efficient, teach you how to be a better runner instead of teaching you a whole new style of training. We’re already teaching you what you know how to do.”

Essentially, people already working out — and there are plenty of them — are well equipped to try Hyrox. Part of Hyrox’s appeal is that it’s a bigger, bolder version of the popular, grueling luxury fitness classes that already exist, or a more competitive version of what everyone’s already doing at Equinox. “It’s a little like, how good can you gym?” says Roskind, the DC-based project manager who’s competed in two Hyrox races. 

She wryly pointed out that being good at Hyrox is a little different than winning a tournament in a skill-based sport (e.g., tennis, soccer, basketball) or getting a qualifying time into a speed-based race like swimming or running. You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Being so good at the gym and spending money to compete against other people who are good at the gym is perhaps why some racers I spoke to seemed to temper their love of Hyrox with a scrim of self-deprecation. It’s as if they’re slightly embarrassed that this race may be a millennial-targeted fake Olympics, and it’s scored a direct hit with them. In mixed company, they might not want to say why they’re really going to Athens, Mexico City, or Dublin.

This may be the most relatable thing about Hyrox and the people who love it: Even when you’re really good at exercise, it can still find a way to be, at least, a little humbling.    

Los Angeles offers one of the most vivid examples of our nation’s broken housing system: a quintessentially American expanse of traffic-clogged roads and single-family homes, coupled with the highest home-price-to-household-income ratio of any major city in the country.

To moderate prices, LA urgently needs to build more homes by allowing more density in its neighborhoods — but much of the city’s leadership has vigorously opposed it. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the fight over SB 79, a landmark California law that overrides local zoning to permit taller, denser housing near major transit stops. LA’s city council and its incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, have opposed it and sought ways to avoid complying with it. 

Now, as Bass seeks reelection, mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — one of the city’s, and perhaps the country’s, strongest advocates for building more housing — wants to oust her.

Raman has gained unusual traction in a city long resistant to growth and has become a nationally prominent YIMBY. How to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, Raman told Vox in a recent interview, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.” She believes she can do better.  

Earlier this summer, Raman advanced in LA’s mayoral primary, setting up a November runoff against Bass. The race has resonated far beyond Los Angeles, because Raman is making one of the defining problems in American life — the punishing non-affordability of our most productive cities — the centerpiece of her campaign. Its outcome could shape the future of housing in America’s most populous state and help determine whether LA can become the engine of California’s pro-housing turn, or its most potent obstacle. If she succeeds, she might cut a path forward for better housing policy in high-cost blue cities elsewhere.

Just as core to Raman’s appeal is a commitment that’s often seen as at odds with housing abundance. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a forceful champion of tenant protections, including rent control. (Her relationship with the DSA is complicated, however.) She helped shape a stricter rent stabilization formula that was adopted in LA late last year, though it was strongly opposed by rental property owners. 

Many housing policy experts, as I recently wrote, believe rent control can worsen the housing affordability crisis it aims to solve, because it tends to reduce the supply of rental housing. But in high-cost cities and states, interest in it has been surging nonetheless. A rising cohort of progressive politicians, including Raman and Zohran Mamdani in New York City, believes cities must protect current renters from price shocks and displacement while adding housing supply. In doing so, they hope to mount the kind of political support that has long eluded YIMBYs.   

I spoke with Raman about how she thinks about these competing interests, and how she intends to combine them to make a meaningful dent where her predecessors have failed. I was struck by how cautiously she discussed one of the city’s most politically explosive housing policy questions — densifying single-family neighborhoods. Though she has previously pushed for legislation allowing midsize apartment buildings in some wealthier single-family neighborhoods, she emphasized gentler, more gradual change in our conversation. It reflected the core paradox facing housing reformers in LA and nationwide: the need for sweeping change, and the political pressure to make it feel gradual.

Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below.

You’ve gotten an enormous amount of traction on housing issues in LA. If you win the election, then what? 

When I’m asking for-profit developers and affordable housing developers alike, “What is your biggest barrier to building in LA?” they say that the city of LA is their biggest barrier to building in LA. Whether it is extraordinarily long permit approval timelines, whether it is the failure of the Department of Water and Power [DWP] to be a good partner and to provide real predictability in the building process, both in timelines and in costs. The city of Los Angeles stands in the way of new housing. 

As mayor, I want to do everything in my power to change that. I want to set deadlines by which departments have to respond to applications. I want to bring DWP to the table early and to ensure that they’re a predictable partner for new development. I want to make sure that departments that need to talk to each other are talking to each other quickly and early on in the process, as opposed to providing conflicting answers and taking months and even years to respond. These are all within the power of the mayor to influence and things that this mayor has ignored.

Sometimes rent control and renters’ rights on one hand and new housing production on the other are treated as rival agendas, yet you have made them both central to your politics. What connects them for you?

I don’t think that you can have lower rental costs in a city like Los Angeles without having more housing being built. This is a city that has resisted the construction of new housing for decades, explicitly restricted new apartments from being built in many, many parts of the city for a very long time. We have among the fewest homes per adult of any major city in America and the highest rent-burdened population of any city in America, and to me those two facts are very deeply connected. We can’t really lower rents unless we have more housing here, and lower rents are a big part of how you protect renters.

LA has a rent control system, and you were a champion of a change that tightened that system last year. Do you worry at all that tighter rent control could do damage to housing supply through some of the well-documented mechanisms, like causing landlords to convert apartments to condos? Is that in tension with the goal of increasing housing supply?

Housing built after 1978 cannot be subject to rent stabilization [in LA]. So, making sure that renters in older buildings are protected and trying to incentivize new housing from being constructed to me are not in conflict with one another.

You talked about landlords potentially exiting the market. We’ve also heard concerns from apartment associations and from neighborhoods that there’s been increasing corporatization of housing, that smaller landlords are selling to larger corporate landlords, that being a mom-and-pop landlord is becoming increasingly unfeasible. What we’d love to see is more data on that. And, if that is actually happening, if we are driving landlords out of the market through these changes, if smaller landlords are selling to large corporate landlords, I want to know, and we should be looking at the impacts of this policy accordingly.

I’m very open to learning more. But, so far, what I see is that we have an extremely unaffordable city where all the data has shown us that rents have risen higher than incomes for a very long time. The regulations that we put in place are really trying to ensure that struggling renters are still able to stay in LA.

Is there one specific, concrete housing policy mistake made by Mayor Bass that you would point to? How would you have handled it differently?

There has been an overall lack of urgency in addressing housing supply in [Bass’s] administration, exemplified by the fact that we have not had a deputy mayor of housing for years.

The city has actually opposed and written letters to state officials pushing back against new mandates to build more housing. Instead of telling Sacramento, “How do you want to build that housing?” and trying to shape state laws to suit us — the largest housing market in the entire state — those laws should be written with our input, not written with our opposition. 

I think the most stark example [of Bass’s failures on housing] is this: We’ve had 100 percent affordable housing projects like Venice Dell that are fully funded, that the city has sued and opposed and stalled for years.

“I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing.”

To what degree do you think that LA voters see the housing affordability crisis as a problem caused by a lack of supply — a housing shortage? 

I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing. It’s not universally necessarily agreed upon, but I think if you were to ask people, “Is there a housing shortage? Is there a shortage of housing you can afford?” everybody would say yes.

Why should renters trust private developers?

I think that renters should trust the city to regulate private development such that we actually are building what we need here in LA and such that new building is actually enhancing what people love about their neighborhoods. I don’t think it’s the job of renters to trust developers. They need to trust that their city is going to make sure that we’re working hard to build neighborhoods that are beautiful, and welcoming, and beneficial, and can help families thrive. 

That’s part of why I talk about production and protection always in the same breath. If you see that new construction is going to displace you, I think you’re less inclined to support it or to accept it. But if you feel secure in your current housing, and you know that you’ll be able to stay there, then new housing is less of a threat and can actually be a boon for a neighborhood.

That relates to an argument I’ve heard a lot: that tenants who feel protected from displacement by rent control and eviction protections will be less afraid of new development and more willing to support it. Have you seen evidence of that happening in LA?

There is a very broad coalition of people who are fighting for more housing now, a much broader coalition than I’ve seen in many other places. And it includes renters’ rights organizations that have historically been some of the strongest advocates for tenant protections. They’re actually in council chambers testifying around the need for more density across the entire city, particularly around transit hubs. 

Do you see rent control as a temporary bandaid on a broken housing market, or is it something that should have a permanent place in housing policy?

I think protections against rent gouging are really important, and I think regulation in the housing market is really important. As a city, we have to be very careful about how we regulate these markets so that we are eliciting the best results and outcomes for our residents. I’m going to follow the research, and I’ll always engage with these issues closely. 

The Democratic Socialists of America, of which you are a part, has talked about wanting to “de-commodify” housing and take it out of the private market. The DSA’s Housing Justice Commission says, “the housing market is not necessary.” Do you think that’s a good idea? 

My approach to these issues is driven by how I can help Angelenos who are dealing with spiraling costs that’s driving working families out of the city. The city saw, I believe, a 16 percent drop in people under 18 over the past few years, because families cannot afford to live here anymore. That is a travesty for the city of Los Angeles. 

My question as I approach this is about what I can do to ensure that we can keep people here. We can build new housing through publicly funded housing. I want to be able to make sure that people who will never be served by the private real estate market have support from the city to rely on that can help them stay, whether that’s in the form of housing vouchers, whether that’s in the form of social housing, whether that’s in the form of permanent supportive housing or new public housing.

I’m supportive of measures that are bringing public dollars to the table to build. However, the money that we have available to us will never be able to satisfy the extraordinary demand that there is for new housing in Los Angeles. So now, we have to rely on the private real estate market to make housing available and affordable to a much larger number of Angelenos. 

Rent control primarily protects tenants who already occupy apartments that are covered by rent control. But building more housing is partly about people who don’t yet have a foothold in LA and who would move there if they could afford it. Is it possible to build a housing politics that gives those future residents real weight, even though they don’t vote in city elections?

I think that’s the question of this election in many ways. That’s been the question of my politics. But it’s not just about the future; it is also about our present. It’s also about parents whose children can’t live near them anymore, because it’s too unaffordable here. It’s about rising homelessness, which is inextricably connected to the cost of housing. All the impacts of not having housing are already felt by Angelenos. 

So much of LA is single-family homes, and there’s been research finding that the city’s housing shortage can’t be filled without densifying single-family neighborhoods. Is that politically possible?

Some of the largest numbers of new units being built are actually ADUs, which are densifying single-family neighborhoods. And duplexes and triplexes and other kinds of interventions are in many places already legal to build. That’s been happening and, largely, been non-controversial in neighborhoods. 

Around certain transit hubs, I think potentially greater density will be allowed in single-family neighborhoods through SB 79. So I think some single-family neighborhoods will have to change. But what I’m seeing in LA is a gradual process of adding more density that I think, in many ways, can be even beneficial for homeowners, because they’re able to make additional income or accommodate more people on their lots.