Last week, House Democrats voted on an amendment that would have cut $3.3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel from a State Department funding bill. The amendment was brought to the floor by Rep. Thomas Massie, an outgoing Republican from Kentucky. It failed 314-104, but 103 Democrats — nearly half of the House Democratic caucus — supported it, signaling a significant shift in the party’s longstanding support for aid to Israel.

In 2024, a similar vote came up in the House to cut military aid to Israel. Then, just 37 House Democrats voted for the measure. Now, two years later, 103 House Democrats voted to cut funding. That shift in support was accelerated after the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, which has killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians. The debate is also playing out in Democratic primaries across the country. In New York and Colorado, Democratic socialist candidates who have sharply criticized Israel and opposed continued US military aid recently won House primaries.

Historically, Jewish Americans have overwhelmingly identified with and voted for the Democratic Party, while Democratic lawmakers have generally supported Israel and US military assistance to the country. In 2016, the Obama administration signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Israel, committing the US to seek $38 billion in military assistance for fiscal years 2019 through 2028. Congress must vote to approve this funding, so the shift in Democratic support of Israel could have real consequences.

There is still a very strong support for Israel among many House Democrats, but the shifting views are notable. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposed the Massie amendment, arguing that it was overly broad and could jeopardize humanitarian assistance. But in a letter addressed to his House colleagues he also called for a “major reset” in US policy toward what he described as Israel’s “far-right Netanyahu government.”

Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents Illinois’s 10th Congressional District, and remains a strong supporter of Israel.

Below is an excerpt of the 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. 

Can you walk us through last week’s vote? You voted against the measure to cut aid to Israel, and a lot of your colleagues obviously did not. How did that play out for you?

Growing up in the ’60s, ’70s, and for the last 65 years, I fundamentally believe that the US-Israel relationship is important. I also believe that the aspiration for peace in the Middle East, not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but broadly throughout the region, is something that is in the United States’s interest and the interest of the people in the region. So this is not a new issue to me, and it’s something I thought long and hard about. 

Tom Massie doesn’t believe any of that. His intentions with this amendment were anything but pure. It was hastily crafted and poorly written. And one of the biggest issues with it is not only does it [not] address this 10-year memorandum of understanding, something negotiated by President Obama eight years ago, but there are also two years left on the MOU. 

It was a messaging bill and nothing more, and it was a negative message. I voted no because I think if we’re going to move toward peace, we need to do so in a constructive way. A lot of my colleagues were saying we need to send a message to the Netanyahu government.

“I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark.”

I’ve been extremely critical of this government, their failure to address the settler violence in the West Bank, the failure to plan for a day-after in Gaza following what was a horrific war. If we’re going to move towards peace, if we’re going to find a path where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side and the region can have the peace they deserve. Because we’re not just talking about Israelis and Palestinians; there’s progress being made between Lebanon and Israel in giving Lebanon, the people of Lebanon, the liberty and freedom they all deserve. 

Can I ask you if you still take money from AIPAC? And if so, how much?

I appreciate the support I get from people who care about the issues that I advocate for. So people who are pro-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship are likely to support me because I’m pro-US-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship. I’m also pro-addressing gun safety and reducing gun violence in this country. So I get the support of those groups. The support I get doesn’t determine my positions. I think my positions determine who supports me. 

Has your position on Israel shifted at all since October 7th, or at any point in your political career? And if so, can you tell us how?

So my position hasn’t changed because I’ve always been committed to promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and finding a path where both can live together, which I believe ultimately is two states: a Jewish democratic state of Israel, and a Palestinian state living side by side. My frustration with the current Israeli government has grown and continues to grow. Every conversation I have with them, whether it’s the US ambassador to Israel, whom I’ve had the privilege of working with many times, or my meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I’ve had an engagement with the prime minister going back now for almost 30 years. But in the last several years, every single conversation I have with them talks about the need to address settler violence, the need to get humanitarian aid.

One of the things that I am proud of and will say loudly and proudly is that immediately after October 7th, as the war began, my team and I worked hard to push for humanitarian aid into Gaza to do everything we could to make sure that the civilians who were always caught in the middle of any war wouldn’t suffer more than they did. And the suffering was horrific. And I did challenge Israel when they made what I’ll call ill-conceived, ill-advised, in some cases illegal decisions to deprive humanitarian relief from entering Gaza. We pushed hard, and we worked with the Egyptians to get the Rafah crossing open. We pushed the Israelis to open the Karam Shalom crossing. And to not just get aid to those crossings, but get aid into and across the territories within Gaza.

Why are you so optimistic about the situation? 

I am always going to be optimistic. I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark. And let’s separate the issue for folks living in the region and the folks living here. And for the Israelis and Palestinians, these are two peoples who are totally traumatized — traumatized not just over the last couple of years, but for decades. So I recognize the trauma that Israelis have and are experiencing, and I recognize the trauma that the Palestinians have and are experiencing. And that’s part of what I feel is my obligation: to hold onto that optimism and speak to a better future and work to try to find ways to bring the parties on both sides of the issue together to make the hard choices and take the risk to get to a path to peace.

So the reason I’m holding onto optimism — and it’s not 24/7; I have my moments when I am down and where I feel like the hill we’re climbing is just too steep — is you take a deep breath and you dig deep, and you say, I can’t give up on hoping and working towards peace because otherwise peace is never going to happen. And I want to find people who are like-minded.

And that is not just on the Israeli side of the equation. We have to find people on the Palestinian side, and for those on the Palestinian side, we have to find Israelis. And I meet, and I spend time with them on a regular basis. They come to my office. When I’m in the region, I talk to them. We have to strengthen and empower those voices who believe that peace will only come when the Israelis see the Palestinians as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and the Palestinians see the Israeli as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and recognize that until they get there, there’s no future for either side. We’ve got to have a path where both are pointing in the same direction.

Fermented food is the hottest new trend in the halls of the White House. Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are reportedly walking about with jars of sauerkraut in the hopes that it will give them glowing skin and tiny waists. 

Wall Street Journal’s Liz Essley Whyte told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance are all on this eat-a-lot-of-steak-and-sauerkraut diet.”

So, should we all be eating jars of sauerkraut? Or are ferments just the new Florsheims?

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 your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there a name for this diet?

Kennedy calls it the carnivore diet. I think people mean different things when they say that, but for him, it includes a lot of yogurt, a lot of kimchi or sauerkraut, a lot of steak, a lot of eggs. Kennedy now travels with sauerkraut. His wife has said that he has asked her to carry it in her purse for him, and she has said, “I actually cannot,” which is an amazing phrase. It seems they all think their skin is glowing, and people online have commented that JD Vance is looking good.

Are we sure it’s not Wegovy?

We don’t have any public knowledge of that, but we do know that he is eating eggs, sauerkraut, pickles, blackberries, and raspberries for lunch pretty often — and beef and lamb with sauerkraut for dinner. Then, when he’s on Air Force Two, he snacks on beef jerky and maybe eats a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.

Now that you’re mentioning the full spectrum of JD Vance’s diet, it’s kind of reminding me of their new food pyramid. Is this part of that?

Earlier this year, Kennedy and the other health officials like to say they flipped the food pyramid. They recommended a lot more fruits and vegetables, red meat — which was controversial — and whole grains, and whole milk, that kind of thing. They also, and for the first time in the nation’s dietary guidelines, recommended fermented foods, which was something that was actually agreed upon by a lot of people, and they thought that was a good part of this, even if they had qualms about the red meat recommendations, because those can introduce more cardiac risk and risk of bad cholesterol.

How widespread is this in the White House? Does it go up all the way to the top, to the president?

Given what we have seen of his recent public dieting, I don’t think so. At the Knicks game, he was eating pizza and french fries, and, you know, he still has his Diet Coke button on his desk where he just pushes it and a Diet Coke comes. Kennedy said, once said on a podcast about him, “I don’t know how he’s alive.” 

Does the science back this up, or is this some kind of quackery that ferments can make your skin healthier and help you lose weight?

I don’t think there are a lot of good studies that show exactly that sauerkraut can help you lose weight, but there have been a number of studies that have shown health benefits. Researchers have generally agreed that sauerkraut and other fermented foods can help with digestion and inflammation. There was a 2025 study from UC Davis that suggested fermented cabbage could protect your gut and protect against illness. Basically, they found that the intestinal cells do better with sauerkraut. They help maintain the integrity of those intestinal cells. And, in general, that has a lot of other good health effects. Mainstream scientists, dieticians, are pro-fermented veggies. This is not something that is hotly debated.

Most people in the scientific community are realizing there’s a lot of good fresh science out there about how important your gut really is in your overall health. The part of the diet that is a little more controversial is the focus on red meat. Obviously, that comes with some cardiac risk and some cholesterol risk. That is why when the new dietary guidelines came out and recommended more of that for Americans, that part, in particular, made some dietitians a little upset.

Do you think fermented foods could help people with this parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea?

I personally have not seen any studies on whether fermented foods help with explosive diarrhea, but let me know if you find one.

AI was supposed to make our lives better. Instead, it’s made many of us scared and angry. Communities are protesting against the building of new data centers — the warehouses of IT equipment powering the AI buildout — across the country, and increasingly they’re winning. And polling shows most Americans think AI is moving too fast.

So how did public opinion on AI curdle so quickly? Jasmine Sun, who reports on the industry from San Francisco, argues that the backlash treats AI less as a technology and more as a political project. “The debate was not about like, is ChatGPT useful to me?” Sun told me during a taping of Vox’s The Gray Area. “The debate was actually something more like, there are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires…coming into my city, coming into my life and changing it without having any sort of democratic input?”

Filling in for Sean Illing, I talked to Sun about the rise of “AI populism,” the parallels with the Industrial Revolution, and how the backlash could crash into the 2028 presidential election. 

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

You’ve been writing about a phenomenon you call AI populism. How would you define that? What is AI populism?

I define AI populism as a worldview where AI is not seen as an ordinary technology, but specifically as an elite political project to be resisted. I came to the term while thinking about the AI backlash and the reasons people are increasingly anti-AI — whether that’s LLM slop, whether that’s Waymos in their city, whether that’s a new data center project. One thing that occurred to me was that a lot of times the debate wasn’t about whether ChatGPT is useful to me, or whether Waymos are safer than a human driver. The debate was actually something more like: There are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires who are coming into my city, coming into my life, and changing it without any democratic input.

When I talk to people who are opposing AI in various ways, they seem more concerned with this concentration-of-power, anti-elite dimension — which is where I take the word “populism” — rather than classic AI safety concerns, which are more about the technical characteristics that might introduce risk.

You wrote a piece that touched on some of this but went to a darker place — “AI populism’s warning shots” — and you wrote about actual shots. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was targeted by a Molotov cocktail and a shooting within the span of a couple of days. There was an Indiana councilman who voted for a data center and woke up to gunshots at his home and a note reading “no data centers.” Why do you think of those incidents of violence as warning shots of something to come?

It was pretty scary. I’m no Sam Altman fanboy, but it’s terrifying that assassination attempts are showing up in response to people’s worries about AI. One factor is that we’ve been seeing a rising wave of political violence and support for political violence in the US, especially among young people, over the past few years — the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, the Charlie Kirk shooting. Increasingly, a lot of disaffected, maybe nihilistic young people are turning toward political violence as a way to express political beliefs they don’t feel they have other channels for. Or maybe that person is just unwell. But I do expect to see more of it, because my theory of political discontent is that if people feel they have institutional channels to bargain for their rights — if they feel the democratic process is working, or they’re part of a union and believe their union leader will go bargain about how automation shows up in the workplace — they’ll most likely go through those channels.

When it feels like the official channels aren’t working, opposition becomes much more diffuse and volatile. That’s part of why, in creative communities, you’ll see people witch-hunting each other over AI use. I think we’ll see more political violence against people seen as AI leaders, or as supporting AI leaders.

That’s really scary.

Yeah, I’m quite worried about it. But again, my sense is that it comes from a feeling of — what else is there to be done, when you have this level of concentration of wealth and power, and there’s no democratic input right now into how AI is regulated or built?

It’s like a jump straight from complaining at your community meeting about the data center to an act of violence.

I was talking to some friends about this. During the 20th century in the US, there was a wave of factory mechanization and automation, but unions were really strong — often when a company said, “We’re going to bring in these machines,” they’d sit down with the factory union leader and say, “Okay, you can bring in the machines, but we’re going to couple that with a wage increase,” or a 35-hour workweek, or earlier retirement. There was a channel to make a deal about how automation would show up in your workplace. That meant people were more likely to accept it as something lifting all boats. I don’t think that’s happening now — most of the industries affected by AI aren’t organized in labor unions, and the democratic channels are questionable at best.

It’s like when people have agency to be part of the transition, the process goes a lot smoother. Is there a historical analogy for a technological change that didn’t allow for input from the people involved? I’m thinking of the Luddites.

The Luddites are a good example. When the automated looms were introduced, there was a lot of violence against the looms. The book I’d really recommend here is Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap. He’s an Oxford economist who studied a ton of historical examples — in Europe, in China, all over the world — including the Luddites and 20th-century automation. His central question was: In what contexts do workers successfully stop automation, and in what contexts do they allow it to be introduced? How does the political environment, or the balance of power between people and their leaders, change the outcome? He found that when automation was introduced alongside social welfare policies — a higher minimum wage, some form of redistribution — people were much more willing to accept it, which is fairly rational.

I want to talk about Silicon Valley’s understanding of this backlash more generally. You’re painting a pretty dark picture, and you’re right in the belly of the beast in San Francisco — I’m sure you talk to people involved with AI every day. Is there a moment when it clicked for them that this backlash is real and something they have to take seriously? Or has that happened yet?

I’ve definitely noticed a huge difference, over the past six months, in how seriously people in Silicon Valley take the AI backlash.

Like what?

People just talk about it more. I’d bring up AI populism to people last year, and they’d normally say, “It doesn’t matter — technology always introduces some discontent, people get annoyed but they get used to it, like the internet.” That was the standard reaction last year. Not anymore. I think part of the reason OpenAI and Anthropic have felt pressure to introduce economic policy proposals around job automation is that they’re seeing how worried people are. The data center moratoriums and the broader data center backlash have been surprising and meaningful in getting AI leaders to recognize they have both a messaging problem and an actual problem with the product and the technology they’re introducing.

A lot of the increasing opposition to AI in Washington has caused people to see this too. At first, Trump — as you mentioned — was very pro-AI. He and David Sacks were accelerationists; they wanted AI to go faster and to block attempts at regulation.

He was the AI czar.

“The moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.”

He was the AI czar — he’s no longer the AI czar. But it turned out a lot of other constituencies, both on the left and the right, were pretty opposed. For example, Trump and David Sacks tried to introduce a big federal bill that would preempt all state-level AI regulation — no state could regulate AI for 10 years. They tried to sneak it into a big omnibus bill so no one would notice. But members of Congress realized it was happening, and — whether for kid-safety reasons or frontier-safety reasons — people said, Wait a second, the idea of preventing any state from regulating AI for ten years is crazy. A lot of people organized in Washington to successfully stop that preemption. I think that showed the scale and bipartisanship of a coalition that was very keen to make sure it stayed possible to regulate AI was underestimated. As a result of all this — the moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.

China is our big competitor in the AI race, and it certainly has all the conditions for a populist pushback to AI — youth unemployment is really high, and AI technology is in some ways more advanced at taking over real-world jobs. I was watching a video about fully automated factories and a robot pharmacist. You’re one of the rare American tech reporters who gets to spend time in China, and you wrote a piece that surprised me — you found there wasn’t really a populist backlash to AI there. Why not?

I was really interested in this question, and I was finishing my New York Times piece while in China for a few weeks, talking to both AI people and non-AI people. The main reason there’s not a big populist backlash in China is that there isn’t a lot of social unrest or populist backlash against anything — the entire MO of the Chinese government, the No. 1 priority, is domestic social stability. Any whisper of protest gets shut down; that’s why they have such strong speech controls. So one factor is that China doesn’t have much of a culture of resistance in general, whether in workplaces or politically. I’m not saying no one dissents — but it has a cultural effect too, because people don’t see it as useful or as an option. When I ask family members of mine in China about AI, sometimes they’re annoyed about specific things, but fundamentally, the idea of opposing AI is seen as almost unimaginable.

The other thing about China is that if you’re middle-aged there, you’ve lived through so many political, economic, and technological revolutions in your lifetime. When I was a little kid visiting Shanghai in the mid-2000s, there were no high-speed trains — now China has some of the best high-speed rail systems in the world. Technology has always gone hand in hand with dramatic economic advancement, with being lifted out of poverty. The modernization process has been aggressive and disruptive, but it’s not something the party has offered opportunities to resist, and it’s something most Chinese people still see as an inevitability that was mostly good for most people — because incomes did increase by dramatic amounts alongside the technological change. So I think people have a similar attitude toward AI: It’s much less about “Can I stop the AI wave?” and more “How can I take advantage of the AI wave to get ahead economically?”

We were just talking about this deep pessimism about what technology can bring us here in the US. I think a lot of people look around and think: We don’t have a cure for cancer yet, but we’ve sure seen our lives get worse in a lot of ways because of technology, social media, whatever. That pessimism probably fuels the backlash to AI, the skepticism about whether it can ever deliver on its promises. And that experience just isn’t the same in China, or probably much of the rest of the world, where technological progress has been faster and more concrete in people’s lives.

My 90-year-old grandfather said he’d love an elder-care robot to help him do tasks around the house so he doesn’t have to rely on his kids — he wants more freedom and mobility. It’s seen more as a tool to help individual goals. Even with the robot factories or pharmacies — one thing that struck me visiting a robot pharmacy was that the PR people happily said, “Yep, we’re doing these robots because human workers take too many smoke breaks and bathroom breaks and take too long.”

You’d never say that in the US, but they’re probably thinking the same thing — they just don’t say it. The other thing they mentioned is that this lets the pharmacy operate 24/7, because a lot of people need medications in the middle of the night and want to order via the DoorDash equivalent. There was actually a labor shortage before — Chinese workers weren’t willing to work night shifts — so these pharmacies are offering real consumer surplus. A significant percentage of orders come in overnight, when no other pharmacy is open. And with the factories, part of the issue is that Chinese workers, especially young people, don’t want to do factory work anymore.

“I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation.”

That anecdote gets at the promise and peril of AI, and the role of the backlash movement — which I’m still wrestling with how I feel about. On the one hand, I want to live in a world where cancer gets cured, where we live in an era of abundance, where things are cheap and easy to make because factories can run all the time with machine workers who don’t require anything — I want the future we were promised, of flying cars and everything working well.

But I also don’t want to lose my job, or see humanity wiped out by an angry machine god. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen yet, it’s hard to work out my own feelings about the pushback here in the States — what’s appropriate, and what’s holding us back from real advances in our lives.

Totally, I agree. I like Waymos — I think they’re safer, and I’d prefer a safer robot car driv[ing] me around instead of me driving. I’m not a good driver; no one should let me drive. So I wrestle with some of the same things.

To close out the conversation — let’s come back to the United States. AI populism is brewing as a political force. We’ve seen it show up in a couple of races so far, but it’s early. We’ve got the midterms, then the presidential election. How do you think it’s going to affect American politics this November, and in 2028?

My sense is that this November, it’s going to be more about state and local races where AI really shows up. I’m going to spend some time in Michigan and Wisconsin this summer touring some of the data center sites facing the most opposition — those states also have contested governor and Senate races where AI and data centers have become a core issue, so I’m interested to learn more there. I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation — especially if we start to see some of the employment impacts people are expecting. As soon as we see something like a 2 percent rise in unemployment, if that happens, I think people will be very upset, and we should expect a ton of focus on the issue.

The other thing I’ll note is political opportunism — you’re already seeing a bit of this, where politicians are likely to raise the salience of AI above where people might ordinarily care about it, because it’s become a convenient boogeyman. It polls so poorly, people are so anti-AI and anti-data-center, AI billionaires are so unsympathetic, that no matter what your policy program is, AI is a great reason to push it. I think a lot of politicians who are being clever about this are going to move AI to the center of the conversation, raising its salience to manufacture urgency for proposals they’re already excited about. That’s definitely something I’m watching for 2028.

Have you noticed there are a lot of professional basketball players named Jalen? Well, it’s not just the NBA: There are a plethora of Jalens in the NFL, and even the NHL has one. How did this name get so popular? Did all their parents watch basketball in the 1990s and fall for Jalen Rose?

There are many ways names come about, and according to Cleveland Kent Evans, there is something unique about naming traditions in the United States. Evans is the former president of the American Names American Name Society, and he writes a column for the Omaha World Herald nabout what names are popular, and why.

“In American culture, individualism is so strong. What I hear most often from parents is we want to find a name which is different, but not too different,” he told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.  “A lot of people are picking names which are unusual to them because they don’t know anybody their own age or their parents’ age with the name.” 

So what makes some names go mainstream, and what outside factors play a role in what parents choose? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

So we have this very American individualized outlook when it comes to names. I would love to get into how other social factors shape how we name people. How does race shape our names?

The African American community has had a very different experience with naming since the 1960s. If you go back before the 1960s, unfortunately prejudiced racist people, one of the things they used to see about Black people was that they have funny names.

Statistically, before 1960, that wasn’t really true. It was like Black people had names that were like 1 or 2 percent more unusual than white people. It was very small. What happened in the ’60s as part of [the] Black Power [Movement], they turned what had been a negative into a positive. Many Black people said, “We are the people who give our children unique names to show how much we love them, to show how valued they are.” And that’s when you got the tradition of creating new names. Instead of the individual names necessarily being what went through fashions, it was the syllables they were made out of. In the ’60s and ’70s for girls, the most common prefix was law. And so you had Lakeisha, Latasha, Latoya. Then in the ’90s, the most popular prefix was Sha. And so you had Shanisha, Shaquita.

“Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name.”

How does class show up in the way we pick names?

People who are highly educated want new names for their kids, but for them, they have to find something that has a history in the culture. They’re the ones that go back and revive the old names, while blue-collar people are more interested in stuff which is new — things which are newly invented or things which have not been girls or children’s names until recently. 

How do names become popular?

Things do not go from zero to top 10 overnight. But what happens is you often have what I call the Hollywood feedback loop. Screenwriters in Hollywood tend to be college educated. They often are going to give their characters names which are too young for them because they name their characters like they would name a kid. The screenwriters name characters and that presents the name to the whole population. Then all of a sudden it shoots up. An example of something changing social class that way was Tristan. Tristan sort of first came up among more educated people. There was a character in the original All Creatures Great and Small. Then you have the movie Legends of the Fall, which comes out with Brad Pitt playing the character Tristan. All of a sudden the name shoots up. It was not just the educated people who were naming their son Tristan anymore very suddenly at that point. 

Are there any other examples?

One of the hugest increases just because of television was a few years ago. About 2008 there was a program on one of the cable TV networks called 16 and Pregnant. One of the first babies born on that show was a boy named Bentley. The name Bentley for baby boys was one of the fastest growing boys’ names ever. It went from almost nothing to within about three years being the 75th most common name for boys in the US.

Do people ever see naming their children as a way to break from their past or from their culture? 

If you look at the immigrant groups that came from Europe in the 19th and the early 20th century, it was very common for the immigrants to want to give their kids quote “American” names. They would tend to pick things which they heard in the neighborhood. Then as the ethnic groups become assimilated, one of the ironies of that is that the grandchildren or great grandchildren of the immigrants go back and they say, “Well we want to revive our ethnic names.”

The first group that did that was the Irish. A lot of Irish people came over and they quit naming their kids things like Bridget. Then a lot of them wanted to bring back Irish names like Kevin. And then because they were doing it, those names started spreading to the whole whole country. So today Kevin is not an especially Irish American name. There are many, many Americans who have no Irish ancestry who are named Kevin. 

What advice do you have for people out there who are like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to name this kid. What am I going to do?” How should people be approaching it? How should they be thinking about it?

Well, I think first of all, they shouldn’t worry about it too much. I got a communication from a woman who had an uncle who she really loved and really admired, whose name was Floyd. She said, “Can I really name my son Floyd? Won’t he be teased too much?” I told her, “Look, you really love this uncle. What you do is you name your son Floyd, but then from the very beginning, you tell him why you named him that and why his great Uncle Floyd was a marvelous person and why you loved him so much and make him proud of it to protect him from the teasing.”

Just like there is no such thing as the perfect parent or the perfect child, there’s no such thing as the perfect name. There are lots of different names that would work equally well for your child and you shouldn’t think that you have ruined their life by giving them the wrong name. 

The Democratic Party is at war with itself, and nowhere is the fight clearer than the Michigan Senate primary. On one side: Rep. Haley Stevens, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the establishment, who says the left is too untested and too extreme to win a general election. On the other: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the former public health official who wants to blow up the whole premise of the question.

More than $40 million in outside money has already poured into this race — a big chunk of it from pro-Israel groups lining up against El-Sayed — because it’s less a Senate primary than a proxy war for where the party goes next. And at the center of it sits that dreaded word: electability. 

That term has become a catch-all used by Democrats to encapsulate whatever approach they think has higher odds of winning the general election. 

This week on America, Actually, I sat down with El-Sayed about what his theory of electability actually means. 

Here are three takeaways from our conversation:

1. His electability pitch is an “America First” argument  

El-Sayed takes the two things his critics treat as liabilities — his opposition to US support for Israel and his populism — and fuses them into a single kitchen-table argument: money going abroad is money not going to you. Anti-war politics and affordability policy become one and the same.

“My priority is money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all. That’s what I’m campaigning on,” he said. That reminded me of a similar argument I heard from Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist candidate who won an insurgent congressional primary in New York City. 

“Kids need glasses, kids need schools, kids need functional infrastructure,” El-Sayed continued, fleshing out his case. “And I’m gonna find the money that we’re sending to do heinous things to other people and keep it here.” 

He says that pitch appeals to a broader swath of the electorate than the traditional left: Voters, he says, feel that the government is making them “unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home… and then [it is] sending my money abroad telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”

2. He rejects the left-right dichotomy

El-Sayed also repeatedly rejected the left-right spectrum entirely. His read on Michigan isn’t that voters keep lurching between extremes — it’s that they are searching for a fresh type of politics, which neither traditional party was offering. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, Donald Trump in that cycle’s general election, Joe Biden in 2020, Trump again in 2024. It’s not whiplash, he argues. It’s hunger. And that hunger reorganizes the whole map.

“If Michiganders wanted moderate[s], why would they have elected Donald Trump twice?” he asked. 

“The better way to think about our politics is top-down: people who are locked out versus people doing the locking out. And if you’re on the side of the people doing the locking out, you’re going to have a really hard time in our politics right now.”

With this framework, El-Sayed thinks he can create a greater contrast with Republican nominee Mike Rogers than his Democratic counterpart can. 

“Both Mike Rogers, the Republican, and Haley Stevens, my opponent in this primary, have been on the side of the people doing the locking out,” he said. “They take their money and do their bidding.”

3. The moderates are in hiding 

The Stevens campaign rejected multiple requests for comment — which is becoming a bit of a trend on the Democratic establishment side of the party’s civil war. If you want to bash the left, they’ll talk. But if you’re interested in their vision, they are much less willing to be forthright. In some cases, it seems like the moderate lane of Democrats is downright scared of its own shadow. 

But that’s also a political strategy. Stevens and her allies at groups like Third Way are making a bet: that if they can turn the race into a verdict on El-Sayed himself — the Hasan Piker streams, the old campaign clips, the loose-cannon caricature — voters will get nervous and retreat to the safe choice. 

El-Sayed said the approach was an insult to voters: “It’s interesting taking political advice from a shop that exists specifically to launder old ideas and make them seem new again — and then, like, fail miserably at that.” 

New episodes of America, Actually are in your feed every Saturday. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or in the Today, Explained feed.

On  a recent episode of Today, Explained, I explored Donald Trump’s ongoing succession wars, and whether the president that’s upended the Republican Party is taking an active role in deciding who might replace him. 

The short version: The race to inherit MAGA, already underway, runs through Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump has every incentive to keep everyone guessing about how it ends. 

As a guest host of Today, Explained, I talked to my former colleague, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for years, and recently released a new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with Times reporter Jonathan Swan. 

Here are three things that stuck out: 

1. It’s Vance’s to lose — but it’s not a given

“Vance is the presumptive frontrunner right now, and it’s hard for me to see who else that could be,” Haberman said. Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., and the Turning Point network have all signaled they’re lining up behind the vice president as Trump’s heir. Rubio has gone as far as telling Vanity Fair that if Vance runs, “he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.” 

But being the frontrunner isn’t the same as having been anointed. Regime Change lays out real fault lines between Trump and his vice president; over the Iran strikes and the Epstein files, Vance repeatedly landed on the opposite side of the president. On the decision to go to war, Haberman reported, Vance “was the only one who really argued forcefully with the president,” and “it cost him with Trump.” 

That offense could be remembered when the next Republican primary arrives. 

2. Trump plans to stick around

The biggest obstacle to a clean handoff may be that Trump doesn’t want one. “Trump doesn’t want to cede the stage to anybody,” Haberman said. “The second that he anoints somebody or backs somebody or whatever, the clock starts ticking on his own relevance.”

And there’s nothing in his history, she added, to suggest he’ll ride quietly into retirement: “There is nothing in his history that suggests that he’s just going to go off and do paintings like George W. Bush.” Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 2028 should expect Trump to still be standing next to them — and still expecting credit.

3. Trump still dangles Rubio over Vance

Even with the field seemingly settled, Trump keeps reminding Vance that it isn’t. The most vivid scene in Regime Change comes from an October dinner in the White House Blue Room, with Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. executives at the table alongside the Vances and Rubio. Trump turned to Murdoch and asked what he thought of JD. “JD has the potential to be great,” Murdoch offered — a pointed answer from a man who had tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance in the first place. “Thanks a lot, Rupert,” Vance said.

Then Trump asked, “Well, what about Marco?” Murdoch’s reply, according to Haberman: “Marco is brilliant.” After that, Haberman says, the table got “uncomfortable.”

There’s no evidence Rubio is actually running — “quite the opposite,” Haberman said. But Trump has always pitted rivals against each other, and by Haberman’s account, he simply has better personal chemistry with Rubio than with Vance — a striking turn given the “Little Marco” cruelty of 2016.

So will Vance get the endorsement he needs? “I think anybody who is counting on Donald Trump’s anything often ends up pretty disappointed,” she said. 

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Scientists have started calling it the “Godzilla El Niño.”

The nickname comes from actual climate researchers, which should tell you something; they are not generally in the habit of comparing climatic systems to mega-monsters. What’s building in the eastern Pacific right now is a surge of ocean warming that is likely to make 2027 the hottest year in recorded history, possibly by a lot. The median projection puts next year at about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average. The high end gets close to 1.9, which, until recently, was a number climate models saved for the late 2030s.

David Wallace-Wells has spent a decade thinking about what numbers like that mean for the people who have to live under them, first in his 2017 essay “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the 2019 book that grew out of it, now as a writer and reporter at the New York Times. In a recent piece for the New York Times, Wallace-Wells made the case that 2027 could work as something stranger than a disaster forecast: a preview of everyday life in about 2035. It could be a full year lived at a temperature we weren’t supposed to reach for another decade: fire seasons, atmospheric rivers, disrupted monsoons, strained food systems, and all. 

What’s less certain is if any of this will change our politics. Americans tell pollsters they’re more worried about climate change than ever — more than after Katrina, more than at any point in the Bush, Obama, or Biden years — even as elite discourse on the subject has been waning. Meanwhile, the green transition keeps compounding. More than 90 percent of the new energy capacity built in America last year was green — and under an administration doing its best to stop it.

Sean Illing talked through all of it with Wallace-Wells for this week’s episode of The Gray Area. When Sean asked whether 2027 will be a real test of how much climate disruption we can manage, Wallace-Wells doesn’t blink: “I think it’s going to be a test on that score, which we will fail.” 

So yes, it gets dark. But, it also ends with the most convincing case for hope on climate I’ve heard in a while — and I write a newsletter that goes looking for good news every week. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Just about everybody has heard the term El Niño, but most of us — myself included, until very recently — don’t really know what it is. So let’s just start there. What is an El Niño?

It’s a climatic event that happens irregularly but pretty often — usually about every three or four years, sometimes as infrequently as every seven — in which you get a burst of warmer-than-normal temperatures in the coastal Pacific, off the coast of South America. And that has a lot of amazingly global consequences, in ways that are not intuitive to most normies.

So, in this case, you tend to see a lot more rain across the western US. You tend to see a lot less rain across Brazil and the Amazon. You see disruption to the monsoon season in South Asia; a similar disruption to rain across the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa; and, typically, a suppression of hurricane activity in the Caribbean. Which is all to say: It’s a global disruption to the basic normal patterns that we come to depend on, but the disruption isn’t all in one direction.

At the global level, it makes things hotter — and the one that we’re seeing forming this year may be a record-setting one. I think the best way to think about it is just like we shook up the whole planet’s climate system, and we see a lot more disorder than we see in non-El Niño years.

What is particularly scary about this El Niño? Why do scientists seem to be alarmed?

There are a few different components to it. The first is that we are going to experience it at a much higher baseline of global average temperature than has ever been experienced before. Given that we are warming the planet quite rapidly, just about every year is warmer than just about every year that came before. We’ve normalized it so much that we don’t raise our eyebrows when we set new records for global average temperature. But novel events like an El Niño are happening on top of that baseline.

The things that terrified us into action not that long ago are now our inevitable future.

But another reason why scientists are concerned is because it is a super El Niño. Some of them are even calling it a Godzilla El Niño, which is to say the boost that we’re going to see because of this event may be bigger than any similar event ever observed in modern history.

That’s particularly alarming, because the El Niños of the late 1870s produced perhaps the most human suffering that the modern world has ever experienced: famines that killed tens of millions of people all around the world, from Africa to South Asia to China. I don’t want to suggest that this El Niño is capable of producing that kind of suffering. Obviously, 2026 is a different world than 1878, but it gives you a framework for how the consequences of an El Niño may filter through our political world if, over the next year, we see significant crop failures in multiple parts of the world, which is maybe even more possible because there’s a fertilizer shortage as a result of the war in Iran.

We probably will be able to respond to that such that 10 or 50 million people don’t die, but there will be considerable political disarray that results: bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world. I’m not saying that’s inevitable, but it reminds us that a huge amount of what we take for granted as stable features of modern life is nevertheless subject on some level to disturbance by the climate system. And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop.

You write that next year, 2027,could be a preview of what everyday life will be like in a decade or so. Talk about that.

So, here we are in 2026, and the global average temperature is about 1.5°C above the preindustrial average. It doesn’t sound like very much, and on any given day that kind of effect is basically imperceptible to the average person. But it is a global average, and it hides a lot of extremes.

Our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.

It is also right about what we agreed we would try to limit warming to in the Paris agreement in 2015. We said we would definitely keep warming below 2 degrees, and we would do everything we could to keep warming close to 1.5 — a number that came from emerging science and emerging political sense among the world’s most vulnerable countries that 2 degrees wasn’t enough. That 1.5 degrees was itself going to be quite difficult to manage, but anything north of that was going to be quite catastrophic.

When we signed that agreement just 10 years ago, we were not yet north of 1 degree of warming. We are now, in the long-term average, somewhere about 1.3 or 1.4, [with] a single year at 1.5. And we are heading quite rapidly not just past the more ambitious goal we set for ourselves but toward the less ambitious one: 2 degrees. It now seems, practically speaking, inevitable. We’re heading toward a future that we defined as unacceptable.

And when I say that, I don’t just mean that the scientists at the IPCC defined it as unacceptable. When they published their research into the difference between those two levels that report was the event that gave us the huge global climate awakening of late 2018, 2019, into 2020. It’s the reason we know who Greta Thunberg is. It’s the reason we heard of Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise. It’s the reason we started talking about a Green New Deal. All the lip service that presidents, and prime ministers, and CEOs paid to climate change in the years that followed came out of a report that was basically saying, “We need to limit warming below 2 degrees.”

And we now know that we will be heading north of 2 degrees. The things that terrified us into action not that long ago are now our inevitable future.

Is it your belief that 2027 will be a real no-bullshit test of how much climate disruption we can effectively manage at this stage?

I think it’s going to be a test on that score, which we will fail. And the question is what impact that makes socially and politically. We are already seeing every year, in countless ways, how poorly prepared we are for the climate present, but most of the time it isn’t producing the kind of political and social response that I would like to see. And I worry that the basic pattern is going to continue, even into a much warmer future, where, rather than changing course and designing a much more responsive and resilient future, we will just find ourselves defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal as the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change.

A decade ago, a lot of people — myself included, I guess — really did believe that extreme weather would eventually force climate action. Can we just say by now that that theory has failed?

People are complicated, populations are complicated, and politics is complicated. I think of this story going back to Katrina, which was an eye-opening event more than 20 years ago now. It seemed, for a time, to mark a high point in American climate concern. It helped discredit the presidency of George W. Bush, gave us an upsurge of climate urgency and the election of Barack Obama — who said this would be the moment we looked back on as the moment the seas slowed their rise and the planet began to heal.

“We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to, because climate change will be that disruptive.”

We’re going to be muddling through, and the future that we live in as a result will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it.

We’ve seen a bunch of climate disasters just in the United States since then. Again and again, there’s a period of intense national focus and, then, a kind of withdrawing from the story of climate change. But that narrative — that we keep getting knocked back on our heels by climate disasters and then forget about them entirely — is also too simplistic. Looking at the headlines, you might think that everybody moved on from climate. The truth is that when you look into the survey data, we’re basically at the highest point for climate anxiety that we’ve ever been. Americans are more concerned about climate change than they were in the aftermath of Katrina. They’re more worried than they were at any point in the George W. Bush presidency, the Barack Obama presidency, and the Joe Biden presidency.

So, we have an interesting political story here. We’re telling ourselves that the country has moved on from climate. But, in fact, at the level of individual people — how they feel about their lives, the lives of their communities, and the future of their country — they are just about, if not more, worried about climate impacts than they’ve ever been before. And our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.

But the question is not whether they’re worried. The question is whether they’re worried enough to actually sacrifice anything in order to make headway.

You often hear from people who think we needn’t worry as much about climate change that most Americans are not willing to pay, say, $10 a month to take action on climate. In some ways, I feel like that’s a way of weaponizing American entitlement against one particular set of policy crusades. But the other thing I would say is that it’s not the case that we need to shoulder burdens in any meaningful sense to take action.

Solar power is dramatically cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative that’s ever been produced — at least by the levelized cost of electricity, which has been the industry standard for a generation. That measure is misleading, because it only accounts for the marginal cost of electricity and not the overall cost of a system; you get more solar when the sun’s shining and more wind when the wind’s blowing, so you have to build out around that to have a reliable supply. But because batteries have now made the same dramatic improvement in their cost that solar did a decade ago, you can use very cheap batteries to even out the distribution of solar and wind power. And that means the overall cost, according to recent research, of renewable power is now lower than any alternative system. We know those price declines are going to continue for renewables, and we know that they will not decline for fossil fuels.

I’m not an economic determinist — politics plays a huge role here, as does culture — but look at the United States right now. We have a president in the White House who is remarkably opposed to renewable energy. He has done an awful lot to try to kneecap the development and rollout of renewables in America. And, yet, last year, when he returned to office, more than 90 percent of all the new energy infrastructure built in America was green. For every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure we were building, we built nine times as much green energy. This year, the share is going to be even bigger. It’s expected to be 93 percent, which is about what it is around the world entirely.

And with the Iran war, we see many countries around the world looking at the logic of their dependence on fossil fuels and thinking, “Why would I depend on international actors to continuously supply a power source at prices that they determine when I can do a one-time importation of green energy infrastructure and then collect the dividends in the form of sun and wind, which never stop and are domestically controlled?” If you’re talking about this as a race, it seems obvious that the green stuff is winning. The problem is that it’s not winning nearly fast enough to avoid some of these quite scary climate outcomes.

David, I feel smarter at the end of this conversation, because I know more, but I do not feel more optimistic about tomorrow. Do you have any good news that we can dip out of here with?

The world is full of good news. I can be the famous optimist David Wallace-Wells. Just on climate stuff: The green transition is proceeding at a breakneck pace, much faster than even its biggest boosters said was possible 10 or 15 years ago. The battery revolution changing the economic calculus for renewables is really profound. It means that we can probably, in large parts of the world, do 100 percent renewable power, which many people said was going to be completely impossible. And even before we get there, we are already dealing with free electricity in the middle of the day in sun-rich parts of the world. In Australia, they’ve literally passed a law promising citizens that, for several hours every day, they will be guaranteed free electricity.

And that’s just power. With the EV rollout that we’re seeing all around the world, you never have to go to a gas station ever again, because you just charge up at your house. Whenever we electrify anything, it gets dramatically more efficient. And we’re cleaning up air pollution, which is a much larger threat to human flourishing on any conceivable timescale than climate change is. Today, somewhere between 5 and 10 million people are dying every year from air pollution, but we’re past the peak of that. We’re drawing it down. There’s a lot of progress that is really wonderful and worth celebrating.

So, I don’t want to give the sense that, for all of my political despair, and for all of what I would call my climate realism, we are all doomed in some meaningful way. We’re living in an incredibly messy world. We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to, because climate change will be that disruptive. But that challenge is a political one, it’s a social one, it’s a technological one. And while we are not pursuing each of those paths optimally, in my view, we also shouldn’t assume that we will fail each of those tests like we’re getting a zero.

We’re going to be muddling through, and the future that we live in as a result will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it, which is, of course, human nature and human history. One hopes along the way we will wake up a little bit more — not just on climate, but on politics and governance. My hope, when I’m feeling optimistic, is that these stories are playing out on long enough timelines that we have at least the opportunity to take control of our climate system, our economic system, and our political system in ways that have eluded us in the past.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

In 2024 the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, won back the prime minister’s office after more than a decade out of power.

He told a jubilant crowd: “Change begins right here!”

Starmer was right that British voters wanted change; unfortunately for him, they pretty quickly wanted him out too. Starmer is stepping down on Monday — making him Britain’s sixth prime minister in less than a decade. 

“We’re just not used to this,” Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman magazine, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world…and now we have become Italy only with bad weather and worse food.”

McTague talked to Rameswaram about why Starmer flamed out so fast, the far-right candidate angling to take the top job, and why the incoming prime minister, nicknamed “the King of the North,” might be Labour’s best shot at turning things around.

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.

Why is Britain on its way to a seventh prime minister in a decade?

We are living through very, very weird times here in Britain. We’re just not used to this. We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world — we could smugly look out on countries like Italy or Australia as they churned through their prime ministers, and we just held steady with Margaret Thatcher for 10 years or Tony Blair for 10 years. Now we have become Italy, only with bad weather and worse food.

I think, big picture, we’re actually not that different to the rest of the Western world in this regard, in that all of the same reasons that cause disquiet in the United States or in France or in Germany are the same kind of reasons that are causing political disquiet here. Immigration, poor economic growth, living standards not improving as quickly as we’re used to, inflation post-pandemic — all of that comes together and it creates similar forces that you see in the US. So we have electoral coalitions, the rise of people who can communicate super well on social media in the new age who grab hold of attention.

It’s just that what is happening here is happening in our parliamentary context rather than a presidential context, where you elect a president and they are there for a full term whether they’re unpopular or not. Here, if you lose the confidence of the public or the confidence of members of parliament, then suddenly you can be out on your ear within weeks or months.

Let’s talk about the last time there was a major shift. It was in 2024 when voters had become wary of the Conservative Party in the UK, and that’s when they elected the Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer into office?

They elected them with a landslide — an astonishing majority in the House of Commons, enough to basically do whatever they wanted. But I think once he’d got into power, he didn’t really know how he wanted to change the country. He stood on a manifesto of “change,” in quotes — it was a kind of hopey-changey thing, without much substance to it.

In one sense, he was quite a small-c conservative man. He wanted to just get this thing working again, and he thought you could do that through sensible, incremental, rational, technocratic change. And I think that analysis has proven fundamentally flawed.

What follows Keir Starmer? Does the Labour Party retain control of parliament?

Yes. So the Labour Party fundamentally has kicked out its own prime minister. It’s based on the fact that he was deeply, deeply unpopular in the country, and they thought if they hung around with this guy any longer that they were all screwed, basically, and that they would all lose their jobs. That’s the reason why he’s been removed from power. He lost the support of his members of parliament and his cabinet, who eventually turned on him and looked to the man who’s going to replace him — a guy called Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Greater Manchester.

Tell us a bit about him. I mean, they call him the King of the North?

Yeah, like the Game of Thrones stuff — he’s going to sort of come down with his, I don’t even know what they’re called, White Walkers, is it, or something?

The North of England is, I guess, the equivalent of the Rust Belt Midwest kind of vibe. It’s seen as a place that is a bit more down to earth, a bit more post-industrial. It’s got more economic problems — it’s a place which used to be rock-solid Labour but has moved to the right. And so I think there is an opportunity here for Andy Burnham to win the next election and stick around for a bit longer.

You talk about leaders in the UK thus far having lacked a mandate or perhaps a broad vision for the country. I wonder if the person who has those things right now is Nigel Farage. Could you tell our audience a bit about him?

Nigel Farage was the man that was introduced to America by Donald Trump as “Mr. Brexit.” He is the figure on the populist right of British politics who has stood outside of the Conservative Party — the traditional party of the right here — and challenged it for not being conservative enough, for not being patriotic enough, for not being tough enough on borders and immigration.

All of the things that happened to the Republican Party from the Tea Party or from Donald Trump — it’s just that he did that from outside of the Conservative Party. And he is a kind of charismatic figure, a very good public speaker, very hard to pin down, speaks kind of fluently and off the cuff.

He was finally elected to the House of Commons at the last election for his insurgent populist party called Reform UK. And from that position, he has taken the party into the lead in the polls. But something else is going on now, where because he is a prospective future prime minister, he is facing a level of scrutiny that he hasn’t faced before.

So all sorts of stuff is going on in British politics, which sounds completely wild.

People are looking at this situation — this run of prime ministers, this ascendancy of Nigel Farage — and they say the UK has become ungovernable. What would you argue the situation is, Tom?

Look, I would argue that it’s parliamentary democracy at its messy kind of fundamentals. Britain is a country, like many countries in Western Europe, which is struggling to work out how it’s going to make its way in the world in the 21st century, in a world where so many of the assumptions which we have come to take for granted no longer appear to be holding.

A United States that is a trusted ally — that is changing. Free market economics, global free trade appears to be ending. And you add into that social media, the AI revolution, all of this. It feels like the turmoil in British politics is just a reflection of a kind of turmoil in the world and in the global economy. You can see the same sorts of questions going on in Canada and in Australia and France and Germany. And I don’t think anyone really has the answers yet, and Britain certainly doesn’t.

In less than a week, two people have died during encounters with ICE — one in Texas and another in Maine. The incidents have put immigration enforcement back in the headlines and raised new questions about how ICE is carrying out President Donald Trump’s promise of an aggressive immigration crackdown, and what he has called the largest mass deportation effort in American history.

The renewed scrutiny ICE is facing comes during a moment of transition inside the Department of Homeland Security. Under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, immigration enforcement was loud: High-profile raids. Border Patrol agents deployed alongside ICE. Made-for-TV operations that produced dramatic videos, went viral online, and frequently led cable and local news broadcasts. After months of criticism, Noem was replaced by Markwayne Mullin, who has continued pursuing many of the same immigration goals with a noticeably quieter public profile.

The killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston has become one of the first major tests of DHS’s quieter and more professional approach. Following the second fatal shooting in Maine, ICE announced Tuesday it was putting a halt to its practice of traffic stops. But the Houston killing remains a revealing flashpoint, 

Houston Public Media reporter Bianca Seward has been covering the shooting from the beginning. She told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that her reporting has continued to evolve over the past week as witnesses have come forward, competing accounts of the shooting have emerged, and local officials have clamored for the opportunity to conduct their own investigation. 

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.

So let’s just go back to where this whole thing started, which I believe is almost a week ago, Tuesday morning, July 7. What happened on Tuesday to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo?

Yeah. Well, we’ve learned a lot over the last week as to what exactly happened Tuesday morning and there’s still a lot of outstanding questions, but I can take you back to Tuesday afternoon when the first time we heard about the shooting. We had a very small statement from ICE just kind of detailing their very short account of what happened. And according to an ICE spokesperson, they were attempting to do a targeted enforcement operation, arrest Salgado Araujo, and they say during that traffic stop, during that moment, during that encounter, they claim that Salgado Araujo was weaponizing his vehicle, attempting to evade arrest, attempting to ram an ICE officer with his car when the officer fired his gun. He was shot in the abdomen and then taken to Ben Taub Hospital, a hospital here in Houston, where he later died of his wounds. But it wasn’t until the early afternoon when we, the public and reporters, began to hear about what had happened. And at that moment we had very little to go off of.

Did people initially take that account as the, you know, unimpeachable truth or was there immediately suspicions that there may have been another side of the story?

It was almost immediate that immigrant rights organizations like LULAC and the family were disputing the account. Mostly we just didn’t have a lot to go off of. We had the very short statement from ICE and we had almost no details from the family. The family themselves were looking for more answers. It took them a while to figure out what had happened to their father, when he had passed. So a lot of outstanding questions Tuesday night and the calls for accountability, transparency began immediately.

So how long does it take until we get a differing account of what happened on Tuesday morning?

The next morning we started to hear from the family. Two of Salgado Araujo’s sons, Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr., spoke to the public and started to offer just details about who their father was and that they believed their father would have complied, that he was trying to just go to work and they didn’t believe that their father would be acting aggressively, ramming his car or attempting to evade arrest. They said it didn’t sound like [their] father, but it would take a few more days before we got any more credible accounts about people who were in the car with Salgado Araujo.

And when did that happen and what did they say?

On Thursday, we started to see reports online that the detainees, the men who were in Salgado Araujo’s car, who were also detained by ICE, started to kind of come out through their lawyers, speak out about their experience. On Friday, the lawyer for two of the men who were detained, Hugo Balderas, said that the accounts given to him by his clients completely conflicted with what ICE’s versions of the events were. Essentially they were saying that at no time was there an ICE agent in front of the car, that [the ICE agent approached] the side of the car, that the shots [were] fired from the side of the car, basically discredited the idea that Salgado Araujo was ramming his car with an officer or was ever trying to run an officer over. They alleged that the account happened completely from the side and that the officer fired immediately upon exiting his vehicle.

How does the city respond to this differing account?

Yeah, there’s been a lot of calls for Houston Police Department to do an independent investigation, for anybody on the Houston official level to launch an investigation. And it’s kind of unfolded over the week in a bit of a confusing manner, I think, for the public. [Harris County] District Attorney Sean Teare did say that he was launching his own investigation, that he was collecting evidence, that he was asking for surveillance video. We ourselves have seen people from the district attorney’s office going to different gas stations in the area and other businesses to ask for surveillance footage. But the problem that Teare is outlining is that they haven’t been invited by the federal authorities to collaborate or work alongside them. So Teare is clear that he may not be privy to all of the evidence that federal authorities do collect during their own investigation. Right now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading the inquiry, but their investigation is clearly into the potential assault on law enforcement. It doesn’t say that it’s into the shooting as a whole to find exactly what happened.

And how is ICE responding to this account that disputes theirs?

We’ve asked repeatedly about allegations that their account is not fully accurate or that it’s missing details or that it implies that Salgado Araujo was behaving in a way that he might not have been. And we’ve gotten no answers. We haven’t got any kind of comment about the allegations that the account is not credible or if they wanna add any more to their initial statement.

So how are we gonna find out the truth?

It’s gonna be a difficult process and part of the thing that complicates that is that ICE and DHS has said that the officers on the scene were not wearing any body cameras and they had no dash cam video of the incident. So they’re saying that the ICE agents on the ground have no video to share with the public. We are starting to see clips on social media from those surveillance videos, from the footage at gas stations or from witnesses who were filming as well, circulate online that show different parts of the shooting and different parts of the encounter, but we’re still not getting the most full, clear picture yet.

Could you tell us about this individual, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo? Who was he?

From what we’ve learned from his sons, he got to Houston in the early ’90s and has been here since working in construction, helping build homes in the Houston area. They said, you know, he would go to work all day, come home and be with his family. You know, he’s the father of three sons, all of whom have gone on to college and are now working in teaching professions or as engineers. They describe him as a shy man. A man who loved his family, a man who cared for his sons, a man who loved the Chivas soccer team from Mexico. 

And was he undocumented? Did he have warrants out for his arrest or anything of that sort?

As far as we can tell, we’ve done our searches within Harris County and in other databases that we found no criminal record so far. And the sons also say that there was no criminal record for him, that he hadn’t had any issues with the law. He was undocumented. But they, the sons, shared with us last week that he was working to obtain a work permit, so could have been on the path. His sons were all born here in the United States, so are themselves citizens. And I think the family was starting to look at ways to legitimize their status here.

And was ICE after him on Tuesday morning or was this like a case of mistaken identity or what?

Well, no. Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of their investigation. They did say that they were targeting another man and Salgado Araujo was picking up men on his way to work. So [a] DHS spokesperson has said that they were targeting another man that they believe got into the van with Salgado Araujo. It’s not clear if they were correct, if the man that they were targeting was the man that got in the van. They have confirmed that Salgado Araujo was not the intended target, that his brother who was in the car was not the intended target. But they haven’t come out and said that, yes, it was one of the other men who had final removal orders or had an administrative warrant out for his arrest. They just say that they were targeting an individual and they believe he got in the car with Salgado Araujo, which is what prompted their chase.

Houston obviously is not Minneapolis, but there are some similarities between what happened here and I mean, most obviously I think, what happened to Renee Good in Minneapolis, if you think about someone behind a car and ICE’s account, which says that, you know, an agent was at risk from someone behind the wheel of a vehicle. How is Houston responding?

There [have] been protests and vigils this week. And they’re kind of latching onto that confusion too. The similarities of the narratives, not only with Renee Good being accused of ramming her vehicle into an ICE officer agent and later the video showing that that was not necessarily the case. But it’s also happened here in Texas in South Padre Island. A year ago, another man was accused of ramming an ICE officer and the video didn’t really conclude that to be the case. So this is a narrative that Houstonians have heard before and immigrant rights office case organizations immediately find suspicious. They don’t have trust in the organization. They don’t have trust in the narrative. And they want more transparency. They want accountability. They want to know what happened.

Do you see any signs that the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo might lead to changes in how ICE is operating in Houston?

It’ll be hard to tell. This is an organization that’s been really emboldened by the Trump administration. So it’ll be hard to see if there will be motivation to change practices. One thing that we did learn is that Rep. Sylvia Garcia [D-TX] said she spoke with acting ICE Director David Venturella, specifically about the lack of body cameras on these agents. He promised her that all agents in the field would have body cameras by the end of the month, but a DHS spokesperson later clarified it would be within 60 days. So that may be a change that we see coming on the horizon. When we asked DHS about why the agents weren’t wearing body cameras, they blamed the quote, “Democratic government shutdown.” They said it takes time and money to outfit these agents. And, because of the government shutdowns, they were held up in distributing the cameras.

Pope Leo XIV is dealing with his first schism. 

A small, conservative sect of Catholics were excommunicated from the church earlier this month after it ordained a group of bishops without the pope’s approval. The drastic move from the first American Pope is the latest way he’s cementing his tenure at the helm of the church, just months after his call to “disarm AI.”

But David Gibson thinks the Pope’s strategy of dealing with this radical group of followers tells us something bigger about how we deal with our stateside politics. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Gibson about the Catholic drama, what this schism represents, and why it might be a losing battle to go up against the pope. 

Below is an excerpt of the 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.

Pope Leo XIV did something dramatic. Tell us what happened. 

Well, basically the pope excommunicated a bunch of traditionalist, super right-wing, Latin mass, types. Actually he would say they excommunicated themselves. It’s this group called The Society of Saint Pius the X (SSPX). They ordained four bishops. 

The Catholic church is an apostolic church. It’s all about chain of custody. You can’t break the chain. You need bishops to ordain priests. You need to keep bishops going. The pope is the one who ordains bishops. He says you can ordain a bishop. You can’t go ordain a bishop on your own. That’s like starting your own church. That’s a total red line.

They said, “No, we need this,” July 1st in Écône, Switzerland. They gathered SSPX and they ordained these four bishops. That was a schism.

It’s really a tiny, tiny group. They’re located in the West. It’s all about restoring christendom, restoring the glories of old European, white Catholicism. Basically, this group wants a special carve out, a special bubble where the Pope says, “It’s okay and I’ll give you your own bishops.” The Pope is saying, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t go off and have your own special little church.” So essentially they’re saying, “Okay, we are more Catholic than the pope.”

You mentioned that this group, the Society of St. Peter the X that has now at least partly been excommunicated by Pope Leo wanted to keep the church to some degree European. This is in the wake of what people thought could have been the first Asian Pope, the first African Pope. Is this group a little kind of white racist?

They’re certainly culturally chauvinistic to put it mildly. I’ve traveled around the world with popes. I’ve seen popes celebrate mass in a dusty refugee camp in Africa. I’ve seen mass celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica with the incense and the whole deal. It’s beautiful. It’s the mass wherever you are. It’s diversity. These folks don’t like that. 

It’s very much this kind of cultural, ethnic, and some would say racial chauvinism that our culture, our people, is the same dynamic in the church. It makes no sense from a Catholic perspective. You’re baptized Catholic, you’re raised Catholic, you are Catholic. Anybody is Catholic, whether you’re in Indonesia or Indiana. But these folks don’t see it that way. That’s what they’re about.

They have influence and they have money. So that’s really why it’s a big story. They also have an amen corner.

An amen corner?

So to speak. The Vatican for decades has bent over backwards to try to accommodate these folks. Because it’s kind of a “no enemies to the right” dynamic within the Catholic Church. Here are these folks who’ve been given everything and they still went and split. They would never have given to people on the left wing, on the progressive wing, but they’re giving them to people on the right wing, on the far right wing and that they still thumb their nose at the Pope is what makes this so important.

So this small but powerful sect of the Catholic church thumbs its nose at Pope Leo. Why pick a fight with the pope?

Well, there are two reasons. One is to go down the liturgical rabbit hole of all this arcana about the mass and the Latin mass and can you change it and can you not?

They want to revisit the Vatican II council where the Church modernized like 60 years ago?

Yes, exactly. In the 1960s, they did things like lifting the anathemas of Protestantism, engaging in endorsing religious freedom, accepting a division between church and state, and lifting the teachings of contempt against Jews. 

It also gets to what is really going on. It’s not about the Latin mass. They love to argue about that stuff. The bigger dynamics that I wanted to get to in a New York Times op-ed I wrote about this are that these really channel the same dynamics we’re seeing in the secular world, where it’s this sort of civilizational fight to retain the privilege and position mainly of white European folks who see America, “the glories of empire,” of the past, being “taken away what is rightfully ours.” That kind of resentment is what they are using as a wedge issue. That’s really their platform of grievance against what they perceive as a loss of status.

Is it a losing battle?

If you’re looking at the global church, these folks are already outliers. They’ve already lost. When Pope Leo was elected, they lost in a global sense. In the smaller kind of Western sense, the jury is still out because they are much larger. This kind of conservative oppositional mentality is much wider in the United States. And will that triumph? Will they try to make peace with Leo, the first American pope? Will they recognize that he could be around for 20 years and we better take a step back? Or will they just persist here in the United States as kind of right-wing Catholicism? 

JD Vance, who wouldn’t know a Latin mass from anything, he’s the guy who tells the pope to stay in his lane on theology. It’s that kind of mentality that we’re really talking about, which is why the stakes really are high. The issue is whether this conservative Catholicism remains ascendant and essentially isolates the American church even further in the global church. That would be a tragedy.

This weekend marks the season finale of Love Island USA. The show is more popular than ever: Its eighth season generated 2.3 billion viewing minutes in its first two weeks and ranked as the No. 1 streaming series in the United States, according to preliminary Nielsen data.

The premise of Love Island is straightforward(-ish): The show brings together 12 attractive 20-somethings — six men and six women — in a villa in Fiji. They compete in risqué challenges, form romantic couples, and try to win over viewers at home, all for a chance to split a $100,000 prize. Along the way, new contestants, also known as “bombshells” in the show’s parlance, come in to try to break up existing couples. Viewers at home get to vote on which couples make it to the end. 

But some longtime viewers say that the show has changed. What was once a slow burn built around flirtation and romantic tension has become increasingly vulgar, filled with hypersexualized challenges. 

To help us sort through the drama and explain how the show has evolved over its eight-season run, Today Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill spoke with Brooke LaMantia, a staff writer at The Cut. LaMantia recently asked: Is this the least sexy season of Love Island ever?

Below is an excerpt of the 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. 

For those who have never taken a trip to the villa, what is Love Island? 

Love Island is a reality TV show that started in the UK around 2015. It came to the US in 2019. And it’s basically a dating show where a bunch of hot young people go to a villa. They’re cut off from the world. It’s as live as you can get, so they’re there right now. These people that we’re watching are in Fiji as we’re speaking and they try to find love.

What makes this show work as real and “I’m here to find love,” versus some of the other dating reality shows we have out there?

In the past, it actually has been quite genuine because it’s a lot of people coming into one space, and all you’re thinking about is like, do I like my connection? Do I like this person? And so you can talk to everyone. The Bachelor, for example, it’s one boy and 30 girls. That’s crazy. That’s never going to work. 

Love Island is equal to boys and girls. You’re thinking about who you’re attracted to and then who you have good conversations with and who you want to share a bed with. There are all these different layers that make it more real when it comes to dating, as real as you can get. And I think that has led to success. There are people who are married and have babies and that’s pretty good to me. 

What changed this season?

Everyone’s still in bikinis. Everyone’s still hot. That hasn’t changed. But I think the way that they’ve engaged with sex and with kissing and with anything physical has really, really changed from old seasons. And it’s not as fun to watch. 

It’s often actually kind of gross to watch and it’s like, I don’t need to see everyone kiss every single day because they’re being forced to in a challenge. There’s no genuine and natural romantic and sexual tension left in the villa. And that is where I think it’s lost the plot and it’s not as sexy as it has been.

For those who don’t know, “challenges” are what they call, essentially, games that they have the Islanders play. Usually they are set up like a competition with boys against girls or the couples against each other. Can you say a bit more about how the challenges were different this season? 

The show has always been very couple-forward. You couple up with a partner, you guys share a bed. And so it’s always very, like, what’s going to happen in bed? Are we going to cuddle? And there’s a very clear thing that the couples will put the covers up over their heads and that means they’re kissing and doing stuff. 

But more and more, and especially this season, they have all involved extremely heavy making out right away. Imagine you enter a villa, you’re half naked, you don’t know these people. And then you’re like, I’m just going to stick my tongue down everyone’s throat and see what happens. It’s strange. It’s not a normal way to say hello. 

It used to be every challenge would be like, okay, maybe kiss an Islander that you’re interested in. And it would be like a cheeky little, let me do a slight little peck of this different Islander that’s not my couple that maybe I’m intrigued by. And it was sexy and low-key and kind of flirty, but not like ass-grabbing, tongues everywhere, porno vibes. And yeah, it commodifies everyone’s bodies in a weird way that makes it uncomfortable to watch and not as fun.

I think it’s so interesting because on one hand, the show is a little more sexed up than it has been in past seasons, but Gen Z, which is the generation that’s primarily on the show, is having less sex than ever. I wonder how you square those two things.

I think that’s always a sentiment that’s interesting to me, because I’m technically Gen Z. We get this rep that we are not having sex, but I think it’s because then we get on shows and we do stuff like this and it’s like you grab an ass like you’ve never even seen an ass before. And it’s like, have you seen an ass before? We need to think about these things. It’s not a shame. 

I will say, I think it’s hard criticizing this show because there’s a world where it was really like, women weren’t allowed to be sluts, men weren’t allowed to be sluts. And I think it’s really great that people are embracing sexiness and sluttiness and it feels like you can kind of do what you want. I think that’s amazing and I think people should live their truth in that way. But it’s like performance art in a way. 

I think of myself at 22, yikes. 

Also, it’s like, if I was in the show and producers were like, okay, now make out with everyone — I’m going to do that. But it’s like, I’m 21 years old. Give me some more time to think about how I want to show up in this world. Because everyone’s watching. They’re going to have a lot of influence, and it does impact young people and how they see dating. 

You’re watching your peers. And so it’s almost like you’re seeing how my friends would respond. And I would hope that people would watch this show and be like, “Okay, Love Island is a reality show and maybe this is not how I should act,” but you never know. And I think having the show lack official and verbal consent, especially when it comes to all the sexual things happening, is a little bit jarring and a little scary for our future.

We need to realize that that is not how the world actually works. And I think because we’re so invested and because we feel so parasocial, this feels like an extension of our world. But there needs to be very clear boundaries between what is TV, what is entertainment, and what is real life and real dating.

Two years after her whirlwind ascension to Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris is thinking about…running for president again. Not doing it — yet — but laying the groundwork in case she does.

She’s done the book tour through the early states. She’s taken the meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and dialed up pro-Palestinian organizers to feel out the room. And she’s leading many 2028 polls — ahead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, ahead of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ahead of the field. But she remains noncommittal to the prospect about running in 2028 and is yet to weigh in on the Democratic party’s most pressing ideological fights.

It’s an odd situation: The candidate is unclear if she wants to run — and the party seems unclear if they want her to.

So last week, I talked with Democratic Party officials, donors, and South Carolina voters for our last episode of America, Actually to figure out whether Harris has a lane for another presidential bid — and whether it’s one she actually wants.

Here’s what I learned:

The Harris camp treats 2024 as an anomaly

The case from her inner circle is that the 2024 presidential election against President Donald Trump simply doesn’t count. To start, President Joe Biden dropped out in July — under pressure from virtually the entire Democratic Party — and left her just 107 days to mount a campaign.

And, then, there were the multiple assassination attempts against Trump, including one that resulted in an indelible image of the bloodied candidate pumping his fist in a knot of Secret Service agents. As one Harris surrogate put it to me: “I think Jesus Christ would’ve lost in 2024 after the assassination attempt.”

It’s a real argument, but it’s also exactly the argument a team makes once it has decided the loss wasn’t about the candidate. I’m not sure the rest of the party agree. (Also, she did run for the nomination in 2020 and dropped out in late 2019, before the first primary contest.)

The donor class may be ready to turn the page

I called John Morgan, a Florida mega-donor who’s raised tens of millions for Democrats going back to the Clinton years. He doesn’t want Harris to run, but, even more, he said that he thinks the money won’t materialize and that she and Newsom would be cannibalizing the same California checkbooks. He also raised her ties to the Biden administration. According to Morgan, the entire Biden era needs what he called — and I’m quoting the man — a “Bye Bye Biden” sendoff.

Morgan also added plenty of donors feel this way, and almost none will say it out loud, because “people think to say no to her, they could be labeled racist, and they don’t want that, ’cause they’re Democrats,” he said. 

Oof.

Nobody has actually replaced her — and that’s the real story

Here’s one where the Harris team has a point. No one has yet supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base: Black voters and women. To this moment, that bond holds. I felt it at a Juneteenth picnic in North Charleston, where “Yes, she should run” won our little yes-bucket, no-bucket poll. A few other responses we got: “Third time’s a charm.” “We need women.” “It was stolen from her the first time.”

But the fuller conversations were more nuanced than any topline number. There’s a generational split — younger voters are raising her prosecutor record and her posture on Gaza, with one telling me she “was locking us up until she needed our vote.” There’s a gender split — men at the picnic were ready to run back “a competent white man” before another woman, and women insisted that the door just needs one more good push.

Beneath nearly all of it, one word kept surfacing, from the yeses and the nos alike: fresh. People want a fresh face. Some want a fresher Harris. Some just want somebody new.

The Black vote — particularly in the South — has been the great consolidating force in modern Democratic primaries: the firewall that lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, that rescued Joe Biden in South Carolina in 2020, that ultimately made Obama.

Democrats run orderly primaries when that group decides early and moves together. A Black electorate that’s split by age, split by gender, and openly shopping for a new face isn’t just a headache for Harris; it’s a break from decades of how this party has chosen a nominee. That’s not really a story about Kamala Harris. It’s a story about a party that doesn’t know what it wants — and a 2028 presidential cycle that’s going to be a good deal messier than the polling makes it look.

As always, there’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

There’s a new kind of influencer making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram: the loneliness influencer. Most of these influencers are young women, and “loneliness” might be a slight misnomer. They claim they aren’t lonely, simply alone — no friends, no family, no kids. And they prefer it that way.

“I really wanted to convey a normal life of somebody that doesn’t have this big, great, fun social life,” one influencer, Lana Isa, told Vox. “Like, what does a life look like as someone that doesn’t really have this great big social life, is not really interested in dating and generally prefers nights in? If you were to watch a Friday night in my life, you’d essentially just watch a girl enjoying her peace.”

Isa, and influencers like her, are just one representation of a larger trend, though. The Atlantic’s Faith Hill, who recently wrote a story titled “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that, even though you mostly hear about young men facing a loneliness epidemic, women are having a hard time, too.

“If you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and, in some cases, more than young men,” Hill said.

Hill spoke with Noel about what’s going on with young women, how their crisis looks different from men’s, and why they’re covered differently.

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 your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In the first half of the show, we talked to a young woman who has made a name for herself as a loneliness influencer. What do you think is going on here?

My first impulse when I heard about this genre of video that people are watching is that there’s a lot of people spending a ton of time alone.

We’ve heard a lot of people talk about the loneliness epidemic, so I thought people were getting social connection through these videos from a safe distance, rather than spending time in person with people. Maybe there’s some of that going on. But, I also realized, as I was looking through these videos and reading all the comments, that a lot of the people commenting seemed to have a lot going on in their lives socially, so much so that they were busy, and exhausted, and burned out.

For some people, the appeal was actually in the fantasy of it, in the way that some people would look at influencers posting about these fabulous, exotic vacations they can’t afford to take. People have a very complicated relationship to solitude. People are working long hours. A lot of people [are] taking care of family members without much help. Many people are sort of torn between these needs for social connection and solitude.

Does that mean that this is, perhaps, not as sad as it appears on its face?

I don’t think it’s all sad. My heart goes out to people who are needing more solitude, as well as more social connection. Most people probably don’t have the perfect balance, and I can relate to that myself. I feel like I either have too many plans or not enough.

It’s not necessarily all happy, but it doesn’t mean that there are just so many people out there who are only getting social connection through these videos. I think there’s something a little more complicated going on.

We’ve all heard about the male loneliness crisis. You wrote a very interesting piece that basically said, actually, women are in crisis, as well.

I’ve just been hearing so much about men, and especially young men, being in crisis. I think there’s a lot of reasons we should take that seriously, and I do. But I felt like in those conversations, young women were kind of being flattened into a comparison point where, instead of people talking about how on some measures young men are struggling more than they used to, it got twisted into “young men are struggling more than women.”

There’s this image of the thriving girlboss, the one who is going to college, graduating college, entering the workforce on these conventional measures of success, doing so well. But if you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and in some cases, more than young men. And so, I don’t think it needs to be a suffering competition, but I did think part of the story was not coming through.

In what ways are women struggling?

Women have, for a long time, reported depression and anxiety at higher rates than men. That is getting worse. It seems like mental health on a lot of different measures — different kinds of stress and distress and suicidality — young women are reporting that at higher and higher rates. It turns out that women actually attempt suicide at higher rates than men do, on average. And the reason that more men die of suicide is that they’re more likely to use lethal means such as firearms.

A lot of times this conversation really revolves around college attendance rates, and women are attending and graduating college at higher rates than men. But a woman with a bachelor’s degree still makes less than a man with a bachelor’s degree on average, even within the same field of study.

When I talk to people for this story, researchers and therapists, I heard that a lot of young women are in for a rude awakening when they graduate from school. They’ve been in this bubble where they did feel like they could grow and thrive and they were taken seriously. And then, you go out into the real world, where sexism is still very real, and a lot of women are working in workplaces where they realize they’re not taken as seriously, or the people around them who are in positions of power are all men. That’s a difficult realization.

Why, if women and men are both in crisis, did men pull focus?

Women, as an overall population, tend to be a fairly high-functioning one in this narrative. I talked to someone who had trained as a medical sociologist, and she told me a saying that they used to use in this field was, ‘Men die quicker, but women are sicker.’

Women are more likely to endure a lot of chronic illnesses and to sort of soldier on with their pain unnoticed. And we might not be taking that as seriously, because the idea that women are struggling isn’t necessarily a new one or a super surprising one to a lot of people. I think men having a hard time is more of a news story, and we have become, perhaps, kind of inert to women’s distress in this way.

I wonder, as you found yourself covering this, where do you find the hope here?

I am heartened that we’re talking about [young adults] a lot. There’s been a lot of concern lately about Gen Z, and a lot of what we’re talking about when we talk about young men struggling also applies to young women, so we’re onto some of the right things.

I wrote another piece about young adulthood a while back that was really about the idea that young adulthood actually is a really hard developmental phase. And when I published that article, I think for a lot of readers, it seemed to be somewhat of a surprise that young adults are struggling, too. Even just since I’ve written that, people have talked more about young adults struggling. So I do think people are starting to take that seriously and understand that this is an age group that might need help.

The Democratic Socialists of America have notched some impressive primary wins over the past couple of weeks. In New York, two DSA members beat Democratic establishment candidates — including the sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — in House primaries. In Colorado, Melat Kiros beat out a 30-year incumbent in another House primary. All of that is on top of the ascendancy of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who’s looking like a Democratic kingmaker after his endorsed candidates triumphed last month. 

It’s been a long journey for the DSA, which began its current rise a decade ago with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, the party has slowly amassed popularity with the left wing of the Democratic Party, building a brand as “fighters” with a populist economic message. 

Megan Romer is a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down what the DSA stands for and how it got here — plus, some of the controversies surrounding its candidates. 

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 your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The DSA has had big primary wins in New York; in Colorado; in the mayoral race in Washington, DC. Why do you think DSA candidates are doing so well in elections right now?

I think there’s the kind of rage that people have about seeing any remnants of our social safety net be dismantled. I think they see their wages stagnating while inflation continues to go up and cost of living continues to go up, and I think that has people really on edge. 

I also think that they’re looking for answers, and for solutions, and for things that are actually going to change their lives for the better. When we talk about expanding child care for all, or Medicare for all — child care debt, and medical debt, those are very real issues to real people. So I think they’re excited to see someone not just saying, “Well, the other [option is] worse,” but really saying, “Look, we’re going to rethink some of these things and come up with solutions together.”

Your economic message seems to have caught fire for Americans who really do feel like life is too expensive, but the DSA’s positions on some domestic issues like borders, like policing, open you up to claims that the DSA is just too extreme for regular Americans. I know that you’re aware of this charge. How do you respond to that?

A lot of the charges come from documents or, sometimes, panels where they’re clipping people talking about this long-term view, because we’re not just trying to fix little problems. We’re trying to really get to the root of these societal problems and think about what life could look like and what society could look like if we change them. 

Things like abolishing the carceral state as we know it — people say, “So you’re just going to fire all the police?” Well, no, the goal is free child care, free health care, free college, these sort of things that will actually make there be less crime. We know crime is inextricably linked to poverty. We’re not saying, “Yes, let murderers run free in the streets.” We’re saying, “If we have eliminated, in this long-term vision, a lot of these crimes of poverty, crimes of desperation, what can the system look like?” And it will have to be different. 

Even in a much better world, people will still murder other people. This is an unfortunate fact. And voters hear “abolish the carceral state,” whether it’s next week or 50 years from now, and they sense that you are not where they are.

Working class voters in the last election moved toward President Donald Trump, in part because, as we understand it from polling, many people felt like the Democrats had gotten too pie-in-the-sky. Right? They were too extreme on cultural issues. And so, I wonder whether the DSA considers that while the economic platform is very appealing, abolishing the carceral state simply isn’t. 

We think it’s important to connect those two things. The reason you do something matters too. [If] they say, “Well, you want to abolish the police,” it’s like, well, we are not doing that right now, but we have invested in “Care not Cops” programs, because the long-term goal is to stop prosecuting people for crimes of poverty. It’s not to make you less safe; it’s to make you more safe. Because, right now, the system as it works does not make us more safe.

There are real concerns about some candidates who are affiliated with the DSA. Darializa Avila Chevalier just won a big election in New York City. She said in posts on X at one point that she wiped her dirty hands on an American flag, because she didn’t have napkins. She suggested that white people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships. There’s a lot more. She has apologized and, independently, she deleted her X account. She told my colleague Astead Herndon that she finds it better to not spend too much time online. 

But, I wonder: If you are working with anti-establishment candidates, there is a level of vetting that it just isn’t going to be the same as with establishment candidates. Do you think you’re going to have difficulty finding candidates who are strong on your economic message, but don’t have to issue these embarrassing apologies?

That is an interesting spot we’re in. We’re not forming our candidates in a lab, right? We’re not raising perfect Model UN children and sending them to—

Oh, come on. Perfect model UN children? White people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships? 

No, I agree. No, that is way out there. What I’m saying is: We are dealing with imperfect, messy people, for sure. And I don’t know why she tweeted that. I am imagining she had a bad breakup and was just tweeting too close to the sun or some terrible thing. 

That’s a bad tweet. She apologized for it. Trump did bad tweets this morning, right? That is going to be the reality of running candidates who did not come into adult life thinking they were ever going to be a candidate.

I want to ask you about an issue that’s become very sensitive over the past few years. The DSA’s focus on Israel strikes some people as obsessive, possibly even tipping into antisemitic. 

Let me give you a couple of examples that I see cited frequently. On October 7, after Hamas attacked Israel, the DSA released a statement expressing solidarity with Palestine. It did condemn the killing of all civilians, but it added, “This was not unprovoked.” Mayor Mamdani recently set some Jewish leaders on edge when he referred to AIPAC as “monsters.” He said he was quoting the philosopher Antonio Gramsci. A DSA candidate in Colorado who had a big win last night, Melat Kiros, was recently asked by a reporter whether a firebombing attack on a peaceful Jewish gathering in Boulder was an act of antisemitism. And she said, “I don’t know what’s in the perpetrator’s heart.” 

Now, there’s an argument that these types of things taken together illustrate that there is antisemitism within the DSA. There’s also a more nuanced argument that says the DSA isn’t antisemitic, but you’re fostering a culture that allows your members to talk in ways that are. What do you say to American Jews who think the way that DSA-affiliated politicians talk about Israel goes beyond taking issue with foreign policy and into something darker?

That is something that we think a lot about, but what we see is that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. People are mad and should be mad. It’s a genocide. We don’t equivocate on that definition or on that understanding of the events. We see an apartheid state. We see people being in an open-air concentration camp, essentially, in the Gaza Strip. 

People are mad. And sometimes, yeah, people are mad and they’re going to not nuance their words as much as they should. I do think it’s very important, obviously, that we stand against antisemitism in all its forms, but I do not see the state of Israel as something that we should be defending on any grounds. It’s a genocidal apartheid state, and I am not apologizing for that.

In 2024, the DSA rescinded an endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a fierce critic of Israel — after she attended a panel with Jewish leaders on antisemitism. A lot of people looked at that and said, you have a fierce critic of Israel who votes as a fierce critic of Israel, who attended a panel on antisemitism, and the DSA rescinded their endorsement of her. You can see the math here. You can sort of see where the brain goes from here. Why did the DSA rescind its endorsement of AOC?

That was actually a complicated process. We didn’t actually rescind our endorsement of AOC in that way. What we did was we made an endorsement that came with some strings attached, which was the first time we’d ever done that. 

We said, we want you to pledge to not fund Israeli military anything — not defense, not offense, no weapons for Israel. We want you to not sign on to any of that. I think she voted present on the Iron Dome. We want her in the same voting line as Rashida Tlaib, who is one of the most fearless defenders of Palestine and the Palestinian people in Congress. So AOC had voted present on some, and she had equivocated on some. And so we said, okay, you can’t do that anymore. AOC has since pledged to vote no on all funding of any kind for the Israeli military.

So ultimately, she came around to your point of view? The pressure worked?

Yeah, yeah.

The DSA, we are told, and you can confirm it, wants to run a presidential primary candidate in 2028. Tell me what that means about your ambitions.

The Bernie Sanders campaign changed the face of the American left a bit. He was the first person who went out there on stage and said, “I am a democratic socialist.” And it felt like it gave a lot of people permission to say it out loud. It broke the dam a little bit on using that big scary S-word. So if we run a presidential candidate, we can at least make sure that there was a voice in the primary holding people to account. 

When Bernie was in the primary, standing strong for Medicare For All, got a bunch of the other candidates to sign a Medicare For All pledge — those things are good. And so, we would love to win the presidency. We would also, at the very least, love to move the needle by having an actual democratic socialist voice in the debates — fighting for working families, fighting for labor unions, fighting for healthcare for everybody, and fighting against the military-industrial complex.

Today's links

• In praise of vultures: They screw you because they can.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Linus v MSFT; Argentina v MSFT; Danny Hillis on theme parks v games; Smartfilter v Distributed Boing Boing; Rental laptops filled with spyware; Torture didn't help capture bin Laden; Massively parallel Apple //e; Stephen Harper v election law; John Deere v Iowa cartoonist; Qualia.
• Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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In praise of vultures (permalink)

One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists really hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck/#price-giver

The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Whether or not you believe that this computer exists and functions as predicted, one indisputable fact about it is that it requires the freedom to choose in order to work. The point of market-as-computer is that it aggregates decisions, so it can only work if everyone is as free as possible to decide.

But that's not the world capitalists want. For capitalists, the point is to restrict other people's choices in order to maximize your own freedom. That's how we get economic doctrines like "revealed preferences": the idea that if a person says they want one thing, but does another thing, then you can tell what they really prefer by looking at the latter and disregarding the former. This is the kind of doctrine you can only fully embrace after sustaining the kind of highly specific neurological injury that is induced by taking an economics degree, an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. Under the doctrine of revealed preferences, someone who sells their kidney to make the rent has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Capitalism is supposed to run on risk: the risk of being overtaken by a competitor drives businesses to deliver better services more efficiently, thus producing a bounty for all. But capitalists really hate risk, hence the drive to monopoly: Mark Zuckerberg admitted, in writing, that he only bought Instagram so that he wouldn't have to compete with it ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Feudalism is like capitalism, in that you have a ruling class that creams off the surplus generated by labor; but under feudalism, society is organized to protect rents (money you get from owning stuff) over profits (money you get from doing stuff). The beauty of rents is that they are insulated from risk: if you own a coffee shop, you're in constant danger of being put out of business by a better coffee shop. But if you own the building and your coffee shop tenant goes under, well, you've still got the building, and hey, now it's on the same hot block as the amazing new cafe that's driving its competitors out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don't rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don't start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don't invest in the company, buy options on the company's shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Monopoly is to capitalism as gerrymandering is to democracy, a way to strip out any meaningful choice. Think of the two giant packaged goods companies that fill your grocery aisles: Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Practically everything on your grocer's shelves is made by a division of one of these two massive conglomerates. If you try to "vote with your wallet" by buying a low-packaging version of a product, it's going to be sold to you by the same company that sells the high-packaging version. If you switch to an artisanal brand of cookies made by a local family business, Unilever or P&G will buy that company and issue a press release declaring that they made the acquisition because they know "their customers value choice":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-big-to-care

Gerrymandering strips your vote of any impact on political outcomes. Monopoly strips your purchases of any ability to influence economic outcomes. Wrap both of them in "revealed preferences" and you get a system that endlessly narrates its ability to deliver choice, and then blames your misery on your having chosen badly.

This is the method of the entire conservative project. As Dan Savage says: the thing that unites conservative assaults on voting, birth control, abortion and no-fault divorce is the stripping away of choice. Conservatives are trying to create a world populated by husbands you can't divorce, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, and politicians you can't vote out of office. Add to that Trump's assault on the National Labor Relations Board, his reversal of the FTC's ban on noncompetes, and his protection of "TRAP" agreements that force employees to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs, and you get "jobs you can't quit":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Conservative strongmen like Trump and Musk exalt the value of self-determination – for themselves, at everyone else's expense. Trump's ability to stiff the contractors that built his hotels and Musk's ability to rain flaming rocket debris down on the people who live near his company town require that everyone else be stripped of protections. They get to determine their own course in life by taking away your ability to determine your own. Their right to swing their fists ends two inches past your nose:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria

Cheaters and bullies hate the rule of law, hence Trump's endless repetition of Nixon's mantra: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." But not everyone can be president, and the world is full of would-be Trumps in positions of power who would like to be able to commit crimes without fear of legal repercussions. For these people, we have something called "binding arbitration."

"Binding arbitration" is a widely used contractual term that forces you to surrender your right to sue a company that wrongs you. Instead of suing, binding arbitration forces you to take your case to an "arbitrator"; that is, a lawyer who is paid by the company that cheated you or maimed you or killed your loved one. The arbitrator decides whether their client is guilty, and, if so, how much that client owes you. The entire process is confidential and it is non-precedential, meaning that if a company rips off millions of people in the same way, each of them has to arbitrate their claims separately, and people who are successful can't share their tactical notes with the people who are next in line to plead for justice.

That makes binding arbitration another key weapon in the conservative movement's war on choice: not just jobs you can't quit and politicians you can't vote out of office, but also companies you can't sue. Binding arbitration is a creation of the Federalist Society and their champion Antonin Scalia, who authored a series of Supreme Court dissents and (ultimately) decisions that opened the door for binding arbitration everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration

Given the Fedsoc's role in shoving binding arbitration down every worker and shopper's throat, it's decidedly odd that they invited Ashley Keller to be their keynote debater in 2021, where he argued that "concentrated corporate power is a greater threat than government power":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY5MrHGjVT8

Keller is a powerhouse lawyer, and an avowed conservative, who has pioneered many tactics for overcoming binding arbitration clauses. He helped create "mass arbitration," bringing thousands of arbitration cases on behalf of Uber drivers who'd had their wages stolen by the company. Since Uber has to pay the arbitrators in each of those cases, they faced a much larger bill than they would face in any possible class action suit:

https://www.reuters.com/article/otc-uber-frankel-idUKKCN1P42OH/

Mass arbitration cases spread to all kinds of large firms that used petty grifts to steal from thousands or even millions of people, like Intuit, who deceive – and rip off – millions of Americans every year with their fake Turbotax "free file" system:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks

Mass arbitration worked so well that Amazon actually revised its terms of service to remove binding arbitration from their terms of service, because they realized that they'd be better off facing class action suits:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

Of course, the point of binding arbitration was never to create a streamlined system of justice – it was to bring about a world of no justice, where you have no right to sue. It's part of the decades-old "tort reform" movement that the business lobby has used to take away your right to sue altogether. Any time you hear about a seemingly crazy lawsuit (like the urban legends about the McDonald's "hot coffee" case), you're being propagandized for a world without legal consequences for companies that defraud you, steal from you, injure you, or kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

That's why companies (like Bluesky) are now trying terms of service that also ban you from mass arbitration, while retaining the right to consolidate claims into a mass arbitration case if that's advantageous to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

But Keller keeps finding creative ways around binding arbitration. He's currently bringing thousands of arbitration claims against Google, on behalf of advertisers whom Google stole from (Google is a thrice-convicted monopolist, and they lost a case last year over their monopolization of ad-tech, where they were found to have defrauded advertisers).

He also just argued before the Supreme Court in a case against Monsanto over the company's attempt to escape liability for causing cancer in farmworkers with their Roundup pesticide:

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5793804/supreme-court-monsanto-roundup-arguments

Keller appears in the latest episode of the Organized Money podcast, for a fascinating interview about his work and outlook, and how he reconciles his work fighting corporate power with his identity as a movement conservative:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-conservative-who-torments-big

Keller's first big, important point is that (basically), capitalists hate capitalism (see above). He cites Milton Friedman, who "always said that the tort system is the best way to ensure that companies behave and follow the rules." For Keller (and Friedman) the alternative to private litigation against bad businesses is "government regulation and the alphabet soup of Washington, DC agencies [that] try and police these companies."

But, of course, the businesses that want binding arbitration and tort reform (so they can't be sued) also want to "dismantle the administrative state" (so they can't be regulated). They're the impunity movement, the "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal" movement, the "heads I win, tails you lose" movement. They're the caveat emptor movement, the "that makes me smart" movement:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

They don't want efficient markets, with the ever-present threat of a better competitor putting them out of business. They want feudalism. They want to go meta. They want to have the kind of self-determination you can only achieve by taking away everyone else's self-determination.

I was very struck by Keller's claim to be engaged in an exercise that Milton Friedman identified as the best one for making markets work. One of Keller's most forceful points is that class action suits are especially important for reining in petty, recurrent grifts, the junk fees that are the hallmark of enshittification.

He quotes his old boss, the archconservative judge Richard Posner, who said "Only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $20." But if you multiply a $20 junk fee by ten million purchases, a company can use that fact to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That's real folding money, which is why every company has figured out a way to whack you for a $20 junk fee.

There are two ways to end this racket: one is litigation, the other is regulation, and the capitalism-hating-capitalists who run the world want to kill both. That's why the business lobby smears lawyers like Keller as being "vultures." But as Matt Stoller says, "vultures look aggressive and whatnot, but when you actually get rid of vultures out of an ecosystem, all sorts of things go haywire."

I love this point. Vultures live off the disgusting, rotting crap that would otherwise pile up around us, breeding disease and emitting an unbearable stench. If plaintiff-side, no-win/no-fee lawyers are vultures, then junk fees, wage theft, and the million petty frauds they fight are the disgusting, rotting crap that vultures feed off of – and the harder we make it for our noble vulture lawyers, the more disgusting, rotting crap we have to live with, hence the unbearable stench that is all around us.

Listening to Keller was a fascinating exercise. I thoroughly disagree with him about many things – the way he characterized Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act couldn't have been more wrong – but it's quite bracing to hear a capitalist who doesn't hate capitalism defend it against the vast majority of capitalists, who hate capitalism more than any socialist ever did.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Why Reddit blocked my daily visit to its mobile website https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/why-reddit-blocked-my-daily-visit-to-its-mobile-website/

• "The Score Is Four/and Next Time More" https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/the-score-is-fourand-next-time-more

• Bodyform | Never Just a Period https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFYcj2sJ3A

• Getting Digital Fairness Right: EFF's Recommendations for the EU's Digital Fairness Act https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/dos-and-donts-eus-digital-fairness-act-effs-recommendation-regulating-digital

• DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-demanded-google-surrender-data-on-canadians-activity-location-over-anti-ice-posts/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Torvalds responds to Microsoft's Craig Mundie https://web.archive.org/web/20011019132822/http://web.siliconvalley.com/content/sv/2001/05/03/opinion/dgillmor/weblog/torvalds.htm

#25yrsago Bankrupt Argentina considers banning proprietary code and switching to free software https://web.archive.org/web/20010614131152/https://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,43529,00.html

#20yrsago Danny Hillis on how games are(n’t) like a theme park https://web.archive.org/web/20060513182649/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/disney.html

#20yrsago Mission Impossible opening marked by anti-Scientology flyover https://web.archive.org/web/20060514000636/http://hailxenu.net/

#20yrsago SmartFilter targets Distributed Boing Boing – how to defeat it https://memex.craphound.com/2006/05/04/smartfilter-targets-distributed-boing-boing-how-to-defeat-it/

#15yrsago John Ashcroft assumes charge of “ethics and professionalism” for Blackwater https://web.archive.org/web/20110507103749/https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/blackwaters-new-ethics-chief-john-ashcroft/

#15yrsago Rumsfeld and other US officials say torture didn’t help catch bin Laden https://web.archive.org/web/20110505012303/https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/surveillance-not-waterboarding-led-to-bin-laden/

#15yrsago Rental laptops equipped with spyware that can covertly activate the webcam and take screenshots https://web.archive.org/web/20110506130156/http://www.ajc.com/business/pa-suit-furniture-rental-933410.html

#15yrsago Parallel machine made out of 17 stitched-together Apple //e’s https://web.archive.org/web/20110504194313/http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/AppleCrateII.html

#15yrsago Sarah Palin and James Lankford: giving $4 billion of taxpayer money to oil companies doesn’t matter https://web.archive.org/web/20110505220640/https://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/03/palin-lankford-oil-subsidies/

#15yrsago Stephen Harper violated election laws https://web.archive.org/web/20110701000000*/http://www.examiner.com/canada-headlines-in-canada/stephen-harper-breaks-election-rules-campaigns-on-radio-on-election-day

#15yrsago History and future of bin Ladenist extremism https://www.juancole.com/2011/05/obama-and-the-end-of-al-qaeda.html

#10yrsago Belushi widow & Aykroyd produce Blues Brothers animated series https://deadline.com/2016/05/the-blues-brothers-animated-comedy-series-dan-aykroyd-1201748389/

#10yrsago Chinese censorship: arbitrary rule changes are a form of powerful intermittent reinforcement https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/04/why-growing-unpredictability-chinas-censorship-is-feature-not-bug/

#10yrsago US government and SCOTUS change cybercrime rules to let cops hack victims’ computers https://www.wired.com/2016/05/now-government-wants-hack-cybercrime-victims/

#10yrsago After advertiser complaints, Farm News fires editorial cartoonist who criticized John Deere & Monsanto https://web.archive.org/web/20160505042150/https://www.kcci.com/news/longtime-iowa-farm-cartoonist-fired-after-creating-this-cartoon/39337816

#10yrsago Outstanding rant about establishment pearl-clutching over Trump https://web.archive.org/web/20160505033357/https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/george-will-is-a-haughty-dipshit-1774449290

#10yrsago The Planet Remade: frank, clear-eyed book on geoengineering, climate disaster, & humanity’s future https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/04/the-planet-remade-frank-clear-eyed-book-on-geoengineering-climate-disaster-humanitys-future/

#5yrsago Qualia https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/04/law-and-con/#law-n-econ

#5yrsago Whales decry the casino economy https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/04/law-and-con/#all-bets-are-off

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Guelph: Musagetes Lecture, May 8
  https://riverrun.ca/whats-on/guelph-lecture-on-being-2026/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/

• Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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