They have fun names like Feel Free, Smurphs, and Hazy Tabz. They come in colorful packages and in gummy form. They’re widely available at gas stations, corner stores, and smoke shops across the country.

They’re also highly addictive, largely unregulated, and in the news after they were found near the bodies of two dead University of Mississippi students.

The drugs are called Kratom and 7-OH. The first, kratom, is derived from the leaves of a coffee-like plant in Southeast Asia. When taken in small doses, kratom causes a low-key buzz. In higher doses, the high is described as euphoric. It operates like an opioid — a chemical in kratom called mitragynine binds to opioid receptors in the brain, which leads to that euphoric high. It also can lead to addiction and overdose. 

Social media is full of videos of people trying to kick the drug, with harrowing stories of dependence and withdrawal. 

7-OH is a highly concentrated compound derived from kratom, which dials up both the high and the danger. The drug has caught the attention of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who warned in a press conference last year that 7-OH was “marketed for children.” 

“They’re gummy bears, they’re bright colors, they’re candy-flavored,” Kennedy said. “This is really a sinister, sinister industry.” In August, federal agencies announced they were taking steps to effectively ban 7-OH nationwide. 

To break down the increasing prevalence of both kratom and 7-OH, what the drugs do, and what to do about them, Today, Explained spoke with Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist who covers drugs and drug policy and who wrote about kratom earlier this year. 

As Busby explains, kratom and 7-OH are “definitely in the zeitgeist. It’s in the news and for good reason. To have these 7-OH gummies just in gas stations is a really potentially problematic thing. Without the drug education alongside it, this drug has just popped up out of nowhere.”

Busby also talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the business interests behind the drugs, why they’re a complicated topic for the Make America Healthy Again movement, and how industry lobbyists have teamed up with several Trump administration officials to try to sway the results of regulatory decisions. 

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.

Is there an important distinction between kratom and 7-OH? Is 7-OH found in kratom?

7-OH is found in relatively small quantities within kratom, but this businessman, Vince Saunders, who is the self-styled American shaman out of Kansas City, basically figured out how to extract the 7-OH and blow it up into entire pills.

I’ve never tried 7-OH and I’m not interested, just for the record, since I’ve been talking about how I don’t mind kratom, but these 7-OH tablets are uber, uber strong. I think the large number of people that are taking it are using it instead of opioids. And maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. 

Is 7-OH something you can also easily find at your neighborhood gas station?

Yeah. It’s much the same as the kratom formulations, so you’re talking gummies, little shots, capsules, and the brand names for the 7-OH companies are perhaps even more kind of out there — 7-OHeaven is one. 

It’s certainly not heaven when you’re going into withdrawals.

And do we know that people are? Are people becoming addicted to 7-OH?

People are becoming addicted to kratom and 7-OH. I think the whole thing, the concern originally sprung up with the Feel Free tonics that are like a mix of kava and kratom. And people just got habituated into drinking several of them per day and realized that it’s very unpleasant if they don’t continue to do that on a daily basis.

We have a federal government that loves to police drugs of all sorts. What are they doing about 7-OH? 

It’s this MAHA dilemma, right? Because their ethos is very “natural medicines and freedom.” The idea that this Feel Free tonic, whose owner JW Ross recently gave, or a company related to him recently gave, like $500,000 to the MAHA PAC, and he’s been photographed next to RFK Jr. — he’s perhaps predictably come out on the side of the kratom industry, which is lobbying for a ban of 7-OH. 

RFK Jr. called it sinister and said that it targets children, which it appears to do in some cases with the gummies. There’s kratom gummies too and clearly gummies are an easier way, especially for older people, to ingest the medicine or substance, so we shouldn’t just blame the gummies here. 

But clearly, when you’ve just got packets of these gummies that are called like 7-OHeaven just on the shelf or indeed behind the counter at the gas station, there’s going to be concern about that. 

There are other MAGA figures like Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who’s got a million-dollar investment in the parent company of Feel Free. There’s definitely this nexus of figures in the government that have got some interest, potentially, or relationships with the kratom industry. And indeed the department when I was writing my Wired story reminded us and readers that everything he’s done is ethical and I’m sure it has been.

We usually think of liberal drug policies as a lefty thing. Markwayne Mullin’s about as right as they come. Are kratom and 7-OH making friends across the political spectrum because there’s a big business opportunity here?

You look at Trump’s executive order on psychedelics and then rescheduling cannabis, and it seems that the right has really seized the mantle and is looking at it from a more libertarian perspective of, “Hey, what happens in a man’s head is his own business.” 

They’re also being probably more business friendly than people on the left would be, so it’s a really interesting moment, especially with RFK Jr. as health secretary.

Trump has spoken at length about the opioid crisis in the United States and how it’s tearing our communities apart and whatnot. Here we have readily accessible opioids at our gas stations. 

Yes, they’re not killing nearly as many people as prescription drugs are. However, they’re a lot easier to get than prescription drugs. Help me understand this administration’s position in relation to what could be a real terror for some people.

They are in the process of banning 7-OH. Last month, the Department of Justice set out an emergency scheduling, so that’s open for comments at the moment. When they ban something, it doesn’t just happen overnight. 

I think by the beginning of next year, it’s quite possible that these 7-OH products won’t be in gas stations and indeed some states have already taken action.

And just to get ahead of any confusion here, 7-OH may be banned from gas stations and probably other convenience stores, but not kratom?

Exactly.

Why one and not the other? Obviously 7-OH is stronger, but you could take a lot of kratom and it might feel like taking a little 7-OH, no?

Absolutely. You just need to take a lot and it’s in powder form. So you need to consume a prodigious quantity of it or drink a bunch of these seltzers. 

I think that they’re not going to ban kratom because there’s an obvious recognition of the good it does for people that are recovering from opiate addictions and that they do have a kind of natural off-ramp, [which] is very unlikely to kill you even though you might take a huge amount. Whereas, if you’re taking like 26 different medications, including a bunch of opioids for your chronic pain, you might die. 

Who do you think wins the argument at the end of the day? We have some strong lobbying forces involved here. You’ve got a lot of people who have come to enjoy or depend on these substances that are, as we’ve established many times now, readily available all over the country. 

Do you think we see fewer or more kratom products in our gas stations and convenience stores in the years to come?

The kratom advocates are a lot more eloquent and suited and booted than the 7-OH folks. What I see is that 7-OH will be forced underground and that kratom will continue its long and illustrious ascent in American culture. 

We do really have a gas station culture in this country, and I wonder if these substances being so available in them is a particularly American thing. You live in the UK. Are gas station drugs a US thing?

It’s an American thing for sure. But you guys take a lot of drugs!

With 28 days until the midterms, polling suggests that Democrats have an excellent chance of taking back the House in November. Flipping the Senate, once considered a long shot, is starting to look realistic. Come November, the party may have majorities in both chambers that will give it far more leverage than in the first half of this Donald Trump presidency. 

If voters entrust them with power, though, how will Democrats use it? Their legislative options will be limited, with Trump still in the White House, but party leadership has gestured at a platform focusing on affordability, healthcare, and investigations into the Trump administration. 

Still, many of the particulars are missing — which Puck News congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor says is by design. As Sotomayor explains, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the likely next speaker of the House, will want to present a unified front ahead of the election, which means no infighting over the messy details of policy. The real work can start after they take the House.

To break it all down, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Sotomayor about how Democrats are feeling ahead of the midterms, the prospect of a Speaker Jeffries, and the Democratic to-do list.

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.

What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?

The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. If anything, it’s mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, “Don’t oversell how amazing of a night we’re going to have.” Genuinely, in the number of conversations that I’ve been having with strategists, lawmakers, those seeking office themselves, the question isn’t, “Will Democrats flip the House majority?” anymore. It’s “Democrats will flip the House majority. How big is that majority going to be?”

They want to play in deep Trump districts, and they’ve been doing that in Trump +5, Trump +10 districts that he won in ’24. Now they’re like, “What about Trump +21 districts?” And some people are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, let’s not get too overly excited” because everybody kind of has some PTSD from the ’22 midterms — that’s when Republicans ended up taking up the House. 

[In 2022], Republicans were in the same place around this time where they were like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to flip 30-plus seats.” And then they only gained a five-seat majority. And we saw how difficult that [majority] was for Republicans, and frankly, it continues to be.

You would think that the Democrats would be trying to sell themselves based on, “Here’s what we’re going to do if we flip the House and the Senate.” But I don’t hear a ton of that. What are this party’s priorities if they take back the House?

You’re totally spot-on. It’s more or less vague. I’m sure Democrats would argue, no, we’re being really specific. And sure, we do know that if they take the majority, there’s three planks, and this is what Jeffries outlined even a year ago, and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, to some extent, has also adopted these planks. They want to tackle affordability, healthcare, and corruption.

Affordability means a number of different things. And the way that Jeffries is looking at it is you have your first 100 hours, your 100 days, and then your first year. And we don’t really know what is going to come up in those 100 days and in the first year, but within those 100 hours, he’s starting to give us some hints. 

There are some issues where they could easily, probably very quickly, pass. Those Medicaid tax credits that are going to expire just in the next couple of months because of the one Big Beautiful Bill, [for example].

You also have the corruption part of this where a number of committee Democrats have been taking notes. It’s like, oh, the Trump admin did that? Okay, going to write that down so I can remember to circle back when we have the majority. 

I’ve been told to expect subpoenas to start being sent out to administration officials, to Cabinet officials, to potential corporations that have cozied up too close to the Trump administration, pretty much after the House majority is declared.

Is it all but certain that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker if the Democrats win?

From inside of the Capitol, all that I’ve heard is that he is going to be speaker.

That being said, a number of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez, a number of those members are already talking to a number of the progressives who are coming in, who are kind of being a little coy with whether they’re going to vote for Jeffries. 

Their message has been, look, Democrats need to stay united. We have differences of opinions on a number of fronts, but we need to be united, we need to govern, and we can’t get to any of that until we elect a speaker.

I remember Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want to spend the years of Trump’s first term investigating and impeaching, but the nature of Trump forced her to ultimately do that. Do you think Jeffries has learned anything from how his predecessor approached the president? 

To your question about impeachment, it is fascinating to see where House Democrats are right now versus where they were back then. I do not hear “let’s impeach Trump” that much from the 200 and something Democrats that are currently in office. And the reason why is because, one, there is the thinking that, okay, the Constitution says he can only be a two-term president, and probably the Supreme Court’s going to rule that he can’t run again [if he tries]. So let’s not get into that. 

But because Democrats are already thinking, planning, strategizing all of their investigations, I think we should expect possible impeachments against Cabinet officials. [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is a name I keep hearing a lot, because there’s a number of Republicans who are incredibly upset with him. 

Democrats are thinking a little bit more strategically in terms of if we are going to impeach, or if we’re really going to try to subpoena or hold people in contempt of Congress, will we have Republicans backing us up in those certain cases? 

These three planks — affordability, healthcare, and holding the crooks accountable — those could have been the planks in month one or month two of the second Trump term. 

I wonder how much motivation there is in the caucus to take on some of the issues that have come up in the last year or so. ICE comes to mind, Iran, spending billions of dollars on vanity projects around DC, making billions of dollars off of his own name and brand while in office. How much are Democrats pushing for the issues that maybe have struck a chord more recently?

Behind the scenes, actually, they’ve been pushing those things a lot. But my understanding is that Jeffries doesn’t necessarily want to broadcast anything that could show any divisions among Democrats right now. He really just wants to project that Democrats are united on these three issues. 

Everybody else is like, okay, but there’s so many more things that we have to prove, and we should get done and we should show contrast with Republicans moving forward. And my understanding is his idea of it is we will get to those issues after the election. They’re not even worth debating pre-election because first we have to win.

No one is trying to sugarcoat how hard it is going to be to tackle a number of these issues where Democrats aren’t united. And there’s conversations about how the size of the majority affects that, right? Because if you have a bigger majority, that means Democrats flip seats in districts that Trump won by a whole lot. So you’re going to get a lot more centrist Democrats in the caucus. If it’s a smaller majority, that’s really going to help a number of those Democratic socialist candidates coming in have a much stronger voice. 

All of those dynamics are going to be on full display and it all, again, is determinative on what happens in November.

A while back, I was at physical therapy, and the topic of tennis came up. Someone said something about yellow tennis balls, and I was like… “What? They’re green.” And then someone else chimed in, “No, they’re yellow!” And then someone across the room hollered, “No, they’re obviously green.”

There was basically a physical therapy uproar. And when I started asking other people how they saw them — yellow or green — they told me they couldn’t even believe there was a debate. So I called up Bevil Conway. He’s a neuroscientist who heads up a lab at the National Eye Institute. He’s working on a book called Color Coded, which is due out next year. And he’s also a working artist — which is actually how he got into studying color in the first place. 

Conway told me there’s a pretty good reason for why so many people disagree about tennis balls. He said it’s simple: “There’s no such thing as a color.”

In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I talked with Conway about what color even is, the viral dress fight (black and blue or white and gold?), and why we get so upset when people don’t see color the same way we do. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Listen to the episode anywhere you get your podcasts or you can watch on Netflix.

So you are an artist. You are also a neuroscientist. You study color. You’re also working on a book about color. Are there still color mysteries? Are there things science doesn’t know about color? 

There are lots of mysteries about color. For a long time, people thought that color was a little bit like a filter, that everything that’s really important is in black and white, and then there’s a color filter you put on top of it. 

But a bunch of years ago, my lab were blown away to discover that there’s as much brain involved in processing color as there is in face recognition.

The same amount of processing power?

Yeah, there’s tons and tons of tissue [and] pretty fancy bits of brain that are doing pretty high-level things — parts of brain we think of as being involved in social cognition and in high-level reasoning and visual memory. Color must be more than just this little add-on. It’s doing something much deeper. So we’re trying to understand what those bits of brain are doing.

So what is color? How does it work? How do our brains and eyes perceive it? 

The classic definition would be: Color is the visual feature that you get from wavelength properties of the light entering your eye. People typically see the long wavelength end as red light, and then going through short wavelengths, you know, following ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

If color were just wavelength, then an object under blue light would look blue, and the same object under yellow light would look yellow. And that wouldn’t be very helpful — because what you want is a signal that tells you about objects, immune to the lighting condition. You want them to always have that color. 

A perfect example is a peach. If you look at a peach outside and you look at it inside, it’s always gonna look like a peach color. But if you looked at the pattern of wavelengths that are coming off of the peach, they’re very different under different lighting conditions. They should be different colors if color were just wavelength, but they’re not. Those two different compositions of wavelengths look the same color. 

What I think is so cool about color is it’s so fundamental for how we need to experience the world — but the mechanics of how it does it teaches us a lot about the brain.

What we’re talking about is color constancy. That is, an object’s color is constant despite the viewing conditions. 

So if the peach is fundamentally a different color inside and outside, and our brains are telling us that it is still, you know, peach colored, how are our brains deceiving us?   

So it’s not fundamentally a different color. It’s the same color. That’s the cool thing. The problem is that you are carrying around, Noam, in your head an idea that color is wavelength, and that is the mistake.

Color is not wavelength! And we’ve known this for a long time. But the problem is that we want something that is an empirical, measurable number that’s outside of an observer, that’s a thing out there in the world, that would be the same number regardless of who looks at it. And color, at its core, is not that. 

Color is dependent on your own visual system interacting with the world. And that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. It just means that its reality is dependent on psychological neural brain processes. And that’s what makes color fascinating. 

Color is, you’re saying, something that is essentially created in the brain. 

Absolutely, yes. Color is a generative product of the brain that gives us reliable, useful, true, meaningful, objective information, but it itself is not [those things].  It’s some generative product of  your brain in order to come up with this information that’s useful and meaningful about the world.

[Your brain is] actually creating that thing that is a color. Colors don’t exist out there in the world independent of a viewer to see them. 

Is this related to “the dress” — you know, like 10 years ago when that photo of a dress went viral, and a bunch of people on the internet thought it was blue and black, and a bunch of other people thought it was white and gold, and everyone got super upset? Is this the same type of thing, of seeing something in different lighting or different contexts and perceiving a different color? 

It is. So the dress was fascinating because people with normal color vision looking at exactly the same thing were asserting very different perceptions. 

And, you know, from a deep kind of philosophical point of view, it’s important because they weren’t saying, “Yeah, it kinda looks different to me, but I understand how you could see it as different.” They were like, “No, it is white and gold.” And other people were saying, “It is different colors.” That was, for me professionally and personally, a really big deal because it underscored this fact that color is this generative, constructive thing that your brain is doing, making all kinds of assumptions, filling in the gaps about lighting, about what you think you’re seeing.

In the case of the dress, it’s such a crappy little photograph, very blurry. It doesn’t give you a lot of context. And your visual system, your own brain, has to make a guess about what the lighting is. And if your brain guesses that the lighting is nice, warm, direct sunlight, then it implicitly subtracts out a little bit of the yellow from the image, and you see it as blue and black. Whereas other people looking at exactly the same pixels on the same monitor who assume that the lighting is cool, indirect, shaded light from blue sky, their brains color-correct the image, subtract out some of the blue, and they see it as white and gold. And so you have these two groups of people whose brains have just made different assumptions. 

Why do you think that left people feeling so unnerved? When this happened, people could not possibly believe someone else could look at that dress and see a different color. 

It was amazing! And, you know, it’s still, to date, I think, the most viral image in the history of the internet. Right when it came out, my initial reaction too was like, “Huh, that’s weird. I wonder what’s going on there.” And a lot of my colleagues thought, “Well, maybe it’s got to do with proportions of rods and cones, or people are looking at different displays, or maybe people are just silently color blind.” 

But I think the idea that your own brain could play such a fundamental role in determining what the pattern of wavelengths means, even for vision scientists, wasn’t sitting front of mind. 

I think the reason that it played so deeply, if I could wax poetic, it’s that our contemporary society depends on a shared experience, right? Our laws depend on a common idea of what’s right and wrong.

Yeah, like whether my red is your red; we still need to be able to point at something and agree that it’s red. 

Yes, and here was an example where it was like: “That isn’t white and gold, that’s blue and black, clearly. Do we live in a shared reality?”

And if you can’t trust your eyes, what can you trust? I think people genuinely felt like, “Is this the beginning of the end?” Like, “Is our whole society collapsing?” I mean, look at Twitter, there were all sorts of expletives flying around. 

Have you ever gotten into an argument about a color? I once got into an argument about tennis balls and what color they were. 

Yeah, what color are they? I’m curious. 

I couldn’t believe anyone thought they were yellow! I always thought they were green.

They’re totally yellow. I mean, we can get into one now. You’re wrong. It’s so funny — I really thought that they were definitionally yellow.

So what is going on with tennis balls? 

Tennis balls are funny. I mean, if you ask people to pick their best example of green and blue and red and orange and yellow and so on, there’s a lot of variability. Green and blue is the most variable. Some people’s best example of green is another person’s best example of blue. 

Meaning, you could ask me  to pick a color that would be perfectly green, and then someone else would be like, “No, that’s blue.”

Yeah, exactly. And this isn’t language-based. This is true across all cultures. 

We just perceive blues and greens kinda badly or vaguely? 

Yeah, and one of the ideas that we have about that is that blues and greens aren’t really the colors that are tied to objects.

So if I ask you what colors are objects, it’s a weird question! It’s like, objects can be any colors. But it turns out, if you actually go and measure, you know, the colors of things that you choose to label in the world, most of them are, like, yellow, brown, red, pink, some purples, not many.

Yeah, I guess green and blue is the background. Like green’s the forest, and blue is the sky. 

Yeah, exactly. And, and even in nature, there are very few natural blue objects, and that’s partly what made blue as a pigment so desirable. So what’s weird about yellow is that yellow, if you just ask people in the rainbow to pick where yellow is, people are incredibly consistent.

So people really know yellow. 

They really know yellow. And I think what’s going on with the tennis ball is that it is a little bit fluorescent. It’s actually emitting a little bit more light than it’s taking in because it’s reprocessing it, short-wavelength light in the visible spectrum.

So they’ve picked this bright yellow, which is right at the peak of our visual system sensitivity. So the color of the tennis ball is the optimal wavelength that we can detect with our eyes, and it’s right in that range where it’s technically probably closer to green than it is to yellow. But because it’s so bright, and yellow is considered a bright color, the brightest color, people could be persuaded to see it in a yellow direction.

What I hear you saying is that I’m right — and it’s green. 

Yeah, yeah. Although, I still like it as yellow.

Think about what you’re wearing right now. Did you pick it out? Or was it chosen for you by an algorithm you haven’t even considered? 

You may think it’s the former, but with the state of the fashion industry, it’s likely the latter. There was a time when taste was decided by designers at luxury fashion houses, à la Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, or Anna Wintour-type magazine editors (think of the famous cerulean sweater monologue from The Devil Wears Prada). Now, in the era of fast fashion, our clothing options are often dictated by computers. 

Amy Odell writes the Back Row newsletter and hosts a podcast with the same name. She told Vox that what’s known as fast fashion has been kicked into hyperdrive by companies like Shein. 

“I’ve also heard it called instant fashion,” she says. “The way it works is that they use algorithms to track trends and what people are interested in, and then they make a few hundred of a very large number of different items and they test demand.” She says this model has allowed companies like Shein to introduce around 4,700 new apparel styles per day. (For comparison, fast-fashion brand Zara produces around 20,000 a year.)

Some are trying to claw back their personal style by hitting the thrift store instead. Traditionally, it’s where people go to find less expensive clothes. But fashion journalist Hannah Marriott says it can be so much more than that. 

“For the last probably a hundred years, [the thrift store] has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures,” Marriott told Vox. “Whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma.” 

So how did thrifting go from stigmatized to chic? And are thrift stores still thrifty now that they’re more mainstream, especially in an era of ultra-cheap Shein clothing? We find out that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Marriott, 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.

There’s sometimes this stigma that’s attached to buying secondhand clothes. How has its perception changed over time?

Secondhand clothing used to be something that there was a real sense that if you couldn’t buy new, you would buy secondhand. At the same time, it has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures. 

People within countercultures — whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s — secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma. It’s also been a really important resource for people on lower incomes for a long time. 

I think it was a gradual shift by various things that happened in the pandemic, including this absolute influx of apps [like the RealReal and Depop] that got very, very popular during that time, particularly among younger Gen Z consumers. 

Thrifting became a social currency on social media platforms, especially on TikTok. It’s a vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching. The stigma has really gone away, and it’s almost reversed.

What does that ecosystem look like?

There are different layers to it. There are consignment places like the RealReal where they take quite a big cut, but they will promote your items for you. I think those sites tend to work best if you’ve actually got designer clothes that have quite a big margin, particularly handbags. 

“I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster.”

Then there are other sites that are a bit more laid-back: eBay maybe skews a bit older, Depop skews a bit younger and trendier. There’s Vinted, which I know from the UK, but is making inroads into the US now. There’s ThreadUp as well. Poshmark. 

It’s an absolutely vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching.

One of the biggest secondhand shops here in the US is still Goodwill. Can you walk me through how Goodwill has adapted and changed to the secondhand boom?

Neighborhood thrift stores of that kind are the sort of stores that people on lower incomes do rely on more. It’s less trend-led than something like Depop. And it is somewhere that people have often been going for decades to get clothes that they can afford. 

Goodwill undeniably has put its prices up. Inflation is such an issue for everyone, so I’m sure that there would be an element of prices going up anyway, but a lot of shoppers feel strongly that they’ve gone up a lot — that you can’t find bargains anymore, that the bargains get sent online to either their website or are bought by resellers who sell them for an inflated price online. 

It’s hard to get to the bottom of exactly how true all of that is, especially because Goodwill is run as 150 autonomous [nonprofits], and each of them set their own prices. But what I would say is you are seeing things like the Goodwill branch in Connecticut charging $75 bucks to go on a thrift tour coach to get early access to a Goodwill store, and then you get to go to another store. You used to be able to buy 10 things in Goodwill for $75.

It’s so interesting that thrifting used to be this edgy original thing, but it’s really gone mainstream. Has it sold out? 

I remember when I was much younger, people would say, “Ooh, you got that secondhand.” I just don’t think anyone would ever say that now because that’s kind of how we shop. 

But I still think it is great if you find something original that you love that no one else has, and I still think you’re more likely to find it secondhand or in certain other under-the-radar brands that aren’t fast fashion. 

I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster. I think we’re all feeling a bit tired of that business model, so we’re trying to find other ways to shop and express ourselves.

In October 2024, students at Cornell University received a campus crime alert about a reported sexual assault. At the time, it was just a campus story. Nearly two years later, on September 16, the victim, known only as “Jane Doe,” filed a civil lawsuit that brought national attention to her story. People across the country are asking what happened and why criminal charges never followed. 

Doe alleges that seven men drugged and sexually assaulted her at the Chi Phi fraternity house two years ago. Her lawsuit also accuses the university, fraternity and sorority organizations, and a local bar of failing to protect her. 

The lawyers for several of the men have denied the allegations and any wrongdoing. Cornell says its disciplinary actions led to suspensions and expulsions for some of the young men, and that the Chi Phi fraternity remains barred from campus. 

Doe went to campus police in November 2024, and the district attorney’s office reviewed her account and declined to bring charges. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has said that what she described to Cornell police didn’t meet the state’s requirements for criminal charges. 

Van Houten reopened the investigation late last month while continuing to defend his original decision to not pursue charges, but it’s now out of his hands: On Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul named the state attorney general, Letitia James, as special prosecutor to investigate the allegations, saying she had “lost faith” in Van Houten. 

To break down why Van Houten didn’t pursue the case at the time and what should have happened instead, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Lauren Hersh, a former Brooklyn prosecutor who led the office’s sex trafficking unit and CEO of World Without Exploitation, about how authorities handled Jane Doe’s allegations, the limits of New York’s consent laws, and what needs to change. 

Hersh also explains where she believes the case should go next and what a special prosecutor can do to investigate (the interview took place prior to James’s appointment). 

Below is an excerpt of Hersh’s conversation with Noel 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.

I want to start with what we know in 2024. A young woman who we know as “Jane Doe” goes to the Cornell campus police and says she had gone to a frat house while under the influence of alcohol. 

At the frat house, she was given more alcohol and ketamine. Several men had sex with her while she was intoxicated. This is what she tells Cornell campus police. What, in your view, is supposed to happen next? 

There are a number of things that could happen. What I would say about these cases is there is no perfect scenario of what is supposed to happen, because what is critically important is we listen to the desire of the survivor. 

We want to take this at her pace. We want to be guided by her wishes. We want her to decide if she is ready to go forward, if she wants to speak to campus police, the Title IX office, if she wants to speak to the local law enforcement. There are a lot of variables here, but for me, what is critically important is that we’re listening to the survivor and what she ultimately wants to happen. 

In the present day, the district attorney who was involved has said that his office reviewed Jane Doe’s statement at the time and found at the time that what she described didn’t meet the legal definition of a crime. 

I think people want to understand, Lauren, how is that possible? 

To be really candid with you, Noel, this is an area that seems super unclear to me because the role of the district attorney in that moment is to investigate. 

When you first get a case file, you first get a victim statement, and especially with facts as horrific as these facts are, or our understanding of this six-page document that the DA read — I would never say that this is a clear-cut case where there’ll be a conviction at the end. We never know that. 

What I can say with 100 percent certainty is if you get a document like that, as a prosecutor, that is a significant investigative lead. And so, as a prosecutor, what I believe to be good practice is starting to pull the layers back, trying to understand what transpired here. Interviewing the victim. That feels critical. That never happened. We now know that there are all these text messages that were shared between these boys, and the prosecutor’s now saying, “I didn’t know about the text messages.” 

It’s my understanding that there were a lot of boys on that particular text thread. And so a good investigator would have gone to that fraternity house and tried to interview some of those boys, tried to understand what were the contemporaneous statements made at that time. Were there any text messages? Was there any social media activity? And I believe that had they done that in a timely fashion, they likely would have come up with these text messages at that time and not two years later.

What you’re saying is interesting because the DA has come out publicly and defended himself by saying, essentially, the details of this lawsuit, which was filed in September of this year, are different from the details in the young woman’s 2024 statement to the police. 

He has used that in his defense, right? “Here’s what I knew at the time versus what this young woman is saying today.” I think I hear you saying that maybe that’s not an excuse?

You’re asking about the inconsistent statements, and I find it troubling that the DA is leading with this notion that the victim has inconsistent statements because that feels to me like here we are making excuses and blaming the victim. 

To my knowledge, the DA has not yet interviewed this victim. Perhaps he’s talking about the civil complaint, which I would think is written in a way where she has worked with her lawyer to put this together. And the initial statement, the initial six-page document that the DA read, my understanding is that it is basically a summary of a conversation. 

Inconsistencies come in all shapes and sizes, so it’s hard to know exactly what we’re talking about here, but it is very common for there to be some inconsistencies. That is not a dealbreaker, despite the fact that this prosecutor wants the public to believe that it is. 

What do you make of the prosecutor speaking publicly in the way that he is at this moment?

I find it rather confusing. I’m not really understanding why he is doing a media tour rather than sitting in his office doing the work, interviewing this particular victim, interviewing witnesses, seeing what evidence actually exists.

It seems to me that the DA has gotten to a conclusion before he’s done the work in actually investigating the case, and it is deeply troubling. And I think the governor should consider appointing a special prosecutor because I am not certain, based on this media tour, that this DA is able to give this particular survivor a full and fair investigation of the facts. 

Drugs and alcohol are central to this case, right? The young woman admits she had been drinking and she was using ketamine. Under New York law, how does that affect whether or not someone is believed to be capable of consenting to sex? 

New York law is actually really problematic here. It’s a place where I believe we are desperate for a legislative fix. I think that there have been a lot of advocates who’ve been championing a correction to this voluntary intoxication loophole for a lot of years, and we’ve not been able to get it. 

New York law makes it very, very hard to prosecute a person when the victim is voluntarily intoxicated, but not unconscious, and this new law would allow the prosecutors the ability to bring cases when the victim is so severely intoxicated but not physically helpless and where a reasonable person should have known the victim’s condition. 

In this particular case, based on what we’re hearing, she was in a condition where a reasonable person should have known her condition. And so in this particular instance, the DA is right. This is a very, very hard case to prove in this moment, but I’m a big believer. We don’t not prosecute cases because they’re hard cases. But at the same time, we know that a change to the law is critically important. 

You clearly want more investigation here. What questions do you want asked? Who do you want to be [interviewed]? 

Before I say who and how and what that investigation looks like, I think it’s really important to say that when two years have passed and the DA did not investigate these cases immediately, we have a big problem on our hands.

The fact that the DA did not investigate this from the moment he found out about this, it’s really problematic because as we know, evidence disappears, memories fade. When you’re dealing on a college campus with a specific culture, there may be a narrative that takes hold. And so it’s important to talk about the time lapse and how that harms the case. 

That said, I still believe that the investigation is critically important. I don’t believe that this DA is the right person to do the investigation. I think a special prosecutor should be appointed. And then I think that the prosecutor and law enforcement should be interviewing everybody who was in that fraternity on that night. Anybody who saw this victim before, saw this victim after. Were there any statements in the immediate aftermath of her leaving that fraternity? Was there an outcry witness? We know that some text messages have come to light. Are there other text messages? I suspect that there are. 

I’d want to interview as many of those boys as possible to understand what was going on because some of those text messages that have come to light — one says, “Free pussy” — don’t sound like a mindset that is engaging in consensual sex. 

I think it is critically important that we understand all of the correspondence of that night. I think we want to see what is out there that helps us get closer to understanding what transpired that night. 

I’ve seen two lines of thinking about this. One is that this is a horrific incident that never should have happened, but it is in some ways singular. But I’ve seen another line of thinking that says, “No, this is a systemic failure. This kind of thing goes on on college campuses, and the steps that follow the outcomes are often the same.”

I wonder if you think this is a systemic failure, and if you think it is, what would need to be done to fix this problem? 

That’s a big question. I do think it’s a systemic failure. I also think it’s a cultural failure. And the reason that I would say this is because I don’t think this is isolated to this specific college campus. I think that sexual assault is happening across the country on college campuses everywhere.

In terms of additional systemic failures, I’ve been working with the Epstein survivors for the last year and a half, so I’ve seen so many systemic failures, so many prosecutorial failures, so much failure with law enforcement. I think that this is yet another example of prosecutorial failure. 

I think the law enforcement failed this young person — the fact that there’s no investigation that happened immediately in the aftermath of this incident, no investigation. We just continue to fail survivors all over the place, and we have to start doing better.

“In what world,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked on Friday, “would the police learn from a victim that she’d been literally gang raped while she was intoxicated by five men in a fraternity house and not elevate those allegations to the district attorney?” 

Hochul was speaking about the case of a former Cornell student who said she was raped by several members of the university’s Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. At the time, the district attorney filed no criminal charges.

The case has rocked the nation and forced a renewed reckoning over how sexual assault is dealt with in higher education. While the district attorney has defended his handling of the case, many politicians and legal experts are now examining whether certain details of the alleged victim’s account were neglected, and prosecutors have reopened the case.

Amy Wang is a staff reporter at the Washington Post who’s been covering the story over the past week. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about what allegedly happened on the night in question, what happened afterward, and what we still don’t know. 

Since the two spoke, New York state Attorney General Letitia James has also been assigned to oversee the case and said it is now “an active criminal investigation.” As new information comes to light, further legal action could be taken. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation between King and Wang, 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.

In October of 2024, a young woman went to a fraternity house near Cornell University’s campus. Who is this young woman, and why did she go to the frat house that night?

The young woman is only identified in documents as Jane Doe, so we don’t know her name. She was, at the time, 20 years old. She was a sophomore at Cornell. And around 11 pm on the night of October 19, 2024, this Jane Doe goes to a bar on campus, and then, after that, goes to the Chi Phi fraternity house to hang out with a friend. 

She said that she was already pretty intoxicated at that point, and she’d had maybe 10 drinks in about three hours. Her friend at the fraternity house hands her a beer. After that is where she alleges that another member of the fraternity pressured her into taking drugs, specifically ketamine and marijuana, and drinking more alcohol. She alleges that two members of the fraternity assaulted her, and that one of them later sent a Snapchat message out to active Chi Phi members. The message is pretty graphic, but essentially invites them to join in, and several did.

In about three weeks, this young woman was going to go to the Cornell campus police and report what happened that night. But in the interim, what was going on? What was happening?

We now know, based on reporting by the New York Times and CBS News, this young woman was a member of a campus sorority, so she went to a member of her sorority and was trying to make sense of what happened. She was still processing it in real time. She wasn’t using, according to their reporting, the word “rape” or “assault.” And she was also seeing rumors circulating around campus about what had taken place at the fraternity house and was growing concerned about how they portrayed her. 

She, in the interim, also received a text message from one of the seven men at the fraternity essentially apologizing for how things went down the other night. She is not yet accusing them of assault, but is chatting, even seeks to reassure him in that first message. 

On October 22, she then makes an appointment at the campus health clinic because she had what she thought was a UTI and wanted to be tested because she told the doctor that she had gone through a traumatic experience. 

According to the New York Times reporting, you could see her thinking about what happened kind of evolve over those few weeks. She at some point says that this is starting to ruin her life, and she’s sleeping and crying and she’s feeling ashamed. She’s just really grappling with what had taken place, trying to make sense of it. By November 3 is when, according to these investigative documents that were obtained by the Times, she kind of comes to this conclusion that what happened at the party at Chi Phi was assault. 

She texts one of the seven fraternity members and says, “This was not consensual. I was given more ketamine than I can remember,” and that she was uncomfortable. A few days later, November 7th, 2024, according to these documents, she goes to the ER and asks for a rape kit. And the following day is when she goes to Cornell University Police.

When she goes to the police, how does she characterize what happened to the police? What does she tell them?

What she tells the police is that she believes she was assaulted, and she tells the police that it had started out as something that was consensual. And then at the end she says, “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped.” She tells police she was extremely uncomfortable and that she kept taking ketamine in part because she thought she might black out and pass out. She had thought of at least two of the men as her friends. After the events of that night, she is then confronted with rumors that were spreading across campus, sort of depicting her as loose and blaming her essentially.

What happens after Jane Doe talks to the police? What do they do?

When she talks to Cornell University Police, they summarize what she said in a six-page statement that she then signs. And that is the statement that is submitted to the Tompkins County district attorney. 

And the district attorney would be the person who would bring charges or decide not to bring charges. What does he decide? 

Yes, so the district attorney decides not to bring charges in 2024 based on, he has said, the sworn statement that she signs to police. 

The DA says no charges for the seven men. Were they disciplined in any way?

We don’t know exactly how each of the men were disciplined. Cornell has said that they faced a range of disciplinary measures, including expulsions and suspensions. One of the details that had gone particularly viral about this is that the disciplinary measures included for some of the students to write essays. Cornell has not denied that, but it has specifically denied that the students only had to write essays as a disciplinary measure. The university has cited privacy laws and said it really can’t release any more specifics about how individual students were punished or not punished. 

What did Jane Doe do after first talking to the police and then learning the DA wasn’t going to press charges?

After she goes to police, we know she remains on campus and she has to continue seeing some of these men. And she also participates in the school’s Title IX investigation, which takes place over several months and concludes at some point in 2025.

I want to ask you about the DA. He is out in public defending his decision to not press charges in 2024. How is he defending himself?

The DA is a big part of the story. This is the Tompkins County District Attorney. His name is Matthew Van Houten. And he has said that in 2024, based on the written statement from Jane Doe, they did not have what they needed to press criminal charges. 

It’s important to note that we, as in the public, we’ve not actually seen a copy of Jane Doe’s sworn statement. The DA issued a press release in which he summarizes that statement. And in that summary, he describes her characterization of this as voluntary and conscious and consensual. That is at odds with some of the investigative documents that we’ve seen reported since then, including that transcript of Jane Doe’s interview with Cornell Police in which she very confidently says that she believes she was raped and even says that she was physically hit during that night.

The DA said that he did not see, before the lawsuit, the screenshot of the Snapchat message where the frat members are talking pretty crudely about the situation, and he also says he didn’t see the transcript of the interview between Jane Doe and police.

We now know the names of the seven men who were there that night. Have they said anything?

The seven men themselves have not publicly said anything, and the lawyers for three of those seven men have publicly denied the allegations. One of them says that his client went into the room, but immediately left and didn’t participate in the assault.

This is a story that is developing very quickly, and it seems like new information is coming out just about every day. What do we know about what happens next?

So there’s at least two things going on here. There is the reopened criminal investigation. 

Separately, there’s the civil lawsuit that Jane Doe filed last month, and that is not dependent in any way on how the criminal investigation goes, but that will also proceed against the university, the seven fraternity members, and the fraternity itself.

With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, polling increasingly suggests that the GOP is in for a bad time. As the Iran war drives up inflation and fuel prices, Republicans are on the back foot not just in swing states like Michigan, but in redder parts of the map: Iowa, Texas, and maybe even Kansas, among others. (Not to mention Georgia and North Carolina.) 

It’s shaping up to be a Democratic wave, in other words, and a major repudiation of President Donald Trump. According to Sarah Longwell, the publisher of political news site the Bulwark, there’s a clear reason why this is the cycle that things seem to be falling apart for Trump, who has dodged scandals and bad poll numbers before. “The average person is often voting on instinctual things,” she explains, “and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially.” And for many voters right now, things are not okay materially.

Longwell would know: She regularly speaks with voters for her podcast, The Focus Group, and she’s the author of the new book How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. 

Longwell talked with Vox’s Astead Herndon for a special live recording of the America, Actually podcast at the Texas Tribune Festival earlier this month about why voters are both more and less complicated than punditry sometimes suggests, what the future holds for the Republican Party post-Trump, and the lesson Democrats need to learn to capitalize on their wins.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Longwell, edited for length and clarity. 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.

One of the themes in the book is to talk to voters like real adults. What does that mean? 

There was a long period of time in our history where the artifice of politics was part of the performance of politics.

You could give a good speech. You’d do a debate. Those are not the rules of politics in this communications environment anymore. Every single one of you, if you’re a Bulwark person, you interact with me. I am in your ear, and we’re having a conversation.

We have a parasocial relationship. I walked in here and met a bunch of people, and they were like, “I feel like I know you.” And people want to feel like that about their political leaders now. And so they want to know what makes you tick. Are you a real person? And so the artifice of a debate on CNN is starting to feel really stupid, no offense to CNN.

People demand more now. And a lot of it is just that artifice is falling away for voters. Donald Trump understood that as a person who had been in people’s living rooms as a performer. Democratic politicians still have not figured it out. 

One of the things that comes through in both the book and I think the work that we both do is how voters don’t always fit into those neat ideological boxes.

I always tell the story about when I was at the Iowa caucuses, and I remember in 2019 in the Democratic primary, someone telling me they were stuck between Bernie [Sanders] and [former New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg, and asking, “How did you get there?”

And what was the answer? 

I think the short answer was they liked a strong guy where they knew what he believed in. And they did not care which side of that coin that was, as long as it felt consistent and something they could put their hands around.

If ideology is not the controlling paradigm for voters, how should we think about the different ways people are sorting themselves right now? 

My answer is genuinely not to sort them as much. This is the reason people say things like, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and then everybody gets bored with that answer, and they want to talk about 10 other things because they’re like, “Well, that’s so straightforward.”

But I try in the book to say it really is about improving people’s material well-being and ensuring their safety. So you go back to: What are the most human things that people want? They want to be able to afford gas. They want a job. They want a job [where] they think that they can go up the ladder. 

They want their kids to get a good education. Then they want to be safe. They want to know that they’re safe in their community. They want to know they’re safe in the places that they go. And Donald Trump and Republicans really do understand: People vote with weird animal instincts. 

Now, I bet a lot of the people in this room are college-educated suburban voters, but the average voter in a general election is a 55-year-old white guy without a college degree.

The average person is often voting on instinctual things, and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially — your cost of health care, and then for you to be safe. And so if you think about those base-level desires and then think about what Democrats spend most of their time talking about, you’re like, “Is that the thing that captures all these people?”

When I watch Democrats as somebody who’s an immigrant into the Democratic ecosystem, there’s a lot of, like, “And you get a policy, and you get a policy, and you get a policy.” And I don’t really understand that because everybody needs cheaper gas.

Everybody needs groceries that they can afford. And so talking about the things that unite us or that everybody needs, to me, is the secret sauce for how Democrats should think about policy. 

Three years ago, Democrats thought that being against January 6th was a thing that united everybody. There was a belief that pro-democracy arguments were going to unite people across ideology. Why did that fail in 2024? 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as Trump gets terrible poll after terrible poll, and this is my point.

The coup, all of the horrible things he said about women, all of the lawsuits — I mean, he told everybody an election was stolen. Why is he underwater right now? Because of gas prices, because of a war in Iran, because the negative personal consequences of his policies are hitting people.

I know that it frustrates people. I’m so aware of the frustration where people are like, “Why are people so selfish? Why don’t they think about the bigger picture of democracy?” And one of the things I try not to do is magic words — consultant stuff, because a lot of consultants do that. They’re like, “Say freedom,” and “Say affordability.”

There’s nothing to back it up. But the one magic word I do think that Democrats should start using is “America,” and swap it in for “democracy.” And the reason is, voters practice democracy in America by its individual things.

They practice free speech. They like rule of law. They like checks and balances. So they like the elements of democracy, but they don’t think about them up here as democracy. And also the word democracy now is very polarized, right? Republicans think that Democrats are a threat to democracy because they stole the 2020 election. And Democrats think Republicans are a threat to democracy because they lied about the election being stolen and then tried to overturn the entire government.

I think one side of that equation is more right than the other. But I think that’s why it didn’t work. 

I want to look ahead. Our show focuses on building a roadmap for American politics without Trump, and part of that question has been about Republicans.

They have made themselves into a new kind of America First-esque party. But what does that mean without Trump at the center of it? When you’re in your focus groups, is it clear what values or principles Republicans believe in besides what Donald Trump says to them?

Absolutely not. They don’t have anything. This is why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because we have 2026, we have 2028, and we have 2032. 

By 2032, there’s going to be a new census, and things are going to get worse for Democrats. Hear me on this. People are not grokking this yet. The map — people are leaving California for Texas, people are leaving New York for Florida, and it’s just going to get harder for Democrats to win if this same trajectory that we’re currently on holds.

But there is a generational opportunity right now, and it’s why I desperately wanted to bring this book and get it out there. The Republican Party at this moment is as hollowed out as … Donald Trump is going to leave it in shambles. There is no Trump heir who can do what Trump does, who has the longstanding parasocial relationship with voters where they give him this blank check that other people don’t get.

But my concern is that 2026 will go really well and that Democrats will say, “See? It’s fine. Everybody likes us.” They don’t.

This was the big mistake in 2022. The midterms were extrapolated [to signal] Biden’s re-election, and those were not the same thing.

They are not the same thing. And again, the average voter is a 55-year-old white man without a college degree. And you can just hold that in your head and picture that guy and say, “Do we have candidates who can appeal to that guy?” 

I was being annoying when I was flying here, tweeting things, and there’s a new poll out for [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro. He is beating his Republican opponent by 21 points in the poll right now. This is the largest swing state in the country, and Democrats hate Josh Shapiro.

Hate feels a little strong. I think the left doesn’t like Josh Shapiro. I don’t think that’s the whole party.

That’s a good point.

I’ll just say, as a slight Josh Shapiro stan, perhaps I feel more than most people’s antipathy to the idea of Josh Shapiro running. I get a lot of people just being like, “Absolutely not. He’s a corporate centrist. We would never consider him. And also he’s Jewish slash Zionist.”

And a lot of this is Twitter discourse, but it feels like he doesn’t get the same buzz or interest, which seems insane to me when you’ve got somebody that popular in such a big, important state that Trump was able to win twice. 

The electoral argument for the Josh Shapiros of the world is clear.

Twenty-one points in Pennsylvania at any rate is impressive, but let’s use him as an example, because I do think it speaks to where some Democrats have gone in the last couple years. The polling will tell you that the majority of Democrats want to see their party reshift its relationship with Israel and want to see things like an arms embargo.

Polling would tell you that the majority of Democrats believe that they shouldn’t be taking corporate money, or that things like AIPAC money are bad. How does a Josh Shapiro — let’s use him as an avatar. … Is that compatible with where the Democratic base is right now, even if it’s clearly compatible with Pennsylvania?

The way that you just said it doesn’t sound compatible. But I don’t think that it’s incompatible. 

This is a book about what the voters think, and the voters want a new relationship with Israel, hands down. Without question. They want America to reevaluate our relationship with Israel. And the next Democratic presidential candidate is going to have to do that.

And I have a theory about this. I do think that the 2028 nominee is very likely to be a Jewish person who is highly critical of Israel, because I think that it helps to heal the deep divide right now on this issue within the Democratic Party.

Now, do I think it’s more likely that that is the very handsome Jon Ossoff? I kind of do. But I just … a big part of this book is, “Don’t you want to win? Don’t you guys want to win?” Like, do you want to win more than you want to be right about everything?

Everyone knows how much gasoline prices matter. The recent spike in gas prices triggered by the war with Iran has fueled deep pessimism about the economy and weighed heavily on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings.

But diesel fuel — the lifeblood of shipping, agriculture, and heavy industry — usually flies under the radar. Its price has surged too, and while truckers and farmers are feeling the initial blow, the rest of the country won’t be far behind.

“Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”

On the podcast, Bomey discusses what’s driving the price spike, how quickly it’s going to become a problem for everyday consumers, and whether electric semi trucks could offer a way out.

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

What is happening with diesel?

There was one major geopolitical event this year that disrupted the entire energy economy, which is the US and Israel attacking Iran. Iran is at the center of the oil economy in some ways, but primarily you have to look at the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the jockeying over it that has happened in the months since.

Once they closed the strait, it disrupted the entire global energy economy because it handles a substantial portion of the shipping bringing supplies out of the Middle East. That affected diesel prices, gasoline prices, jet fuel prices, and effectively everything based on crude oil.

Who are the people right now that are profoundly freaked out about the cost of diesel?

First off, truckers are freaked out because their cost of doing business is going much higher. Farmers are also freaked out because they’re already facing real pressures from trade wars and things that are out of control, like climate issues, that have caused their costs to go higher. 

The price of diesel affecting farmers eventually affects the price they charge, which ultimately gets to the consumer because it ends up costing more to pay for things like an ear of corn.

How stark do you think this might be? In a month or two, do you think I could go down to Walmart and see that something I buy all the time is now a dollar more expensive? 

I think the impact is imminent. This flows through very quickly. We’re not talking about months; we’re talking about weeks, if not days, before people will start to notice increases, especially in the grocery aisle. That’s the first place people will notice it because fresh food has to be shipped on a weekly basis. Diesel prices are going to have a big effect on food inflation. This is coming off of several years of food price increases that we experienced in the wake of the pandemic.

We’re also barreling toward the holiday shopping season, which is going to be affected by this as well. If a toy, for example, is made with a resin affected by the cost of crude oil, which also affects the cost of diesel, and then it’s shipped over the road to Walmart in a truck that uses diesel, all of these things add up and will probably lead to higher prices.

We’ve also got an issue with heating oil, which is a fuel used primarily by households in the Northeast to heat their homes. Heating oil, diesel, and all of these oil-based products are caught up in this vortex right now. Ultimately, it is not something the ordinary person can do much about.

Do the industries that rely on diesel have any other options?

There are definitely alternatives to diesel, but in many cases, they cannot be switched to quickly. If you think about the trucking industry, they are invested heavily in big rigs that take products from place A to place B. If you are invested in a truck, yes, you could theoretically switch, but you would be scrapping this huge investment you’ve made. Diesel trucks are not really going anywhere immediately. A lot of times, they’re simply still the best way to get somewhere.

You can switch to rail; railroads are definitely a competitor to trucking, but really only best for certain types of products. There are other types of trucks you can buy. Compressed natural gas or liquid natural gas is an alternative fuel for some trucks, and biodiesel can actually be good. Hydrogen is more of a futuristic thing down the road.

In the short term, there is the possibility of using electric trucks. That is starting to become more realistic. In fact, in recent days, Tesla began major production of the Tesla Semi, an electric semitruck we’ve been waiting for for years. I remember covering this in 2018 when Tesla debuted the semi, and we all thought it was going to be coming out soon.

It has taken nearly a decade for this to finally become a reality in large proportions, but the Tesla Semi is an electric truck that could be an alternative for some. There are other companies making electric trucks too, so that could be viable. But the problem with electric trucks is that the battery is so heavy, making it tough to compete with diesel on shipping heavy items.

It was often joked that when the Tesla Semi first debuted, the very first thing it shipped was a bunch of bags of Cheetos because they were so light and the truck couldn’t handle extra weight. They had a deal with PepsiCo, and it wasn’t ready at the time to ship anything heavy. 

It’s a lot better now, but the issue is still how heavy electric truck batteries are, which will make them somewhat limited in capacity. However, we are seeing some demand for the Tesla Semi that indicates it might become more competitive because of the price of diesel.

So when prices are high, generally somebody somewhere is benefiting. Who is it, in this case?

The people benefiting from diesel prices being so high are the refineries, which a lot of people don’t think about much because they’re the middle person in this entire process. They take the crude oil and turn it into usable diesel for a pickup truck, a semi truck, or farming equipment. 

The refinery business is experiencing high demand right now, and there’s limited capacity to do this because of issues in Russia, Iran, and other places throughout the world. There’s really nowhere else to do this, and therefore they can charge higher prices. That means higher profits for the refineries.

All of this is shaping up to potentially mean a really ugly winter. One thing I think about a lot is that American consumers will accept a lot of pain. We had Covid — the inflation, and shortages of literally everything. Then we had the war in Ukraine, and prices went up again. 

People still keep spending money, even as we predict this one’s going to get bad. People go to the store and spend money, and maybe they gripe, but it’s not like we’re out in the streets. Do you think this coming diesel shock — imminent, in your words — is going to be different?

I’m not an economist, but there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the economy where consumer sentiment is at rock bottom, but consumer spending is actually really strong. There’s a gap emerging between what people say they feel and what they’re actually doing — in this case, they’re still spending. 

Maybe it’s YOLO spending. They’re thinking they don’t have much going for them, so they’re just going to keep spending. I’ve experienced that a little bit, so I don’t blame anybody.

At the end of the day, the numbers matter a little bit more than what people say they feel. But I do think people are going to hit a breaking point because they simply cannot continue this level of spending if the underlying fundamentals of the economy start to collapse.

The national conversation about AI in the US is full of fear: fear about AI’s potential to end humanity, fear of data centers moving in, fear that government officials will do absolutely nothing even as the industry pleads for regulation, you name it.

But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific.

In China, driven by public enthusiasm and a state-backed push for AI dominance, the country is in the midst of a large-scale AI integration into all facets of its society, driven by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s support for the technology.

“He’s super AI-pilled,“ said Kyle Chan, an expert on China’s technology development and industrial policy at the Brookings Institution. “When you look at his speeches, when you look at Chinese policy documents, everything is about rolling AI out to as many domains as possible: manufacturing, services, education, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and of course the military. Everything is about trying to integrate AI.”

Beneath this push for a high-speed AI adoption across Chinese society lies a regulatory framework designed to safeguard political stability and keep boundaries on the kind of information AI models are able to share.

Chan joined Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to speak with co-host Sean Rameswaram about the different AI anxieties in the US and China, and whether joint regulations on AI safety are possible while the two countries are engaged in an AI arms race.

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.

One thing that really struck me about the way the Chinese government is approaching AI is that China has this explicit goal, right?

China has some concrete plans to boost AI adoption through the country, including its recent AI-plus initiative. And their goal is to try to boost the penetration of AI in so-called terminal devices, everything from computers to smartphones, to 90 percent or more by 2030. 

It’s going really fast and it is, in part, a state mobilization effort. There are state-owned companies, there are government agencies that are trying to integrate AI, but also there’s just an enthusiasm from the general population.

If you look at surveys like the latest Gallup poll, people in China are much more enthusiastic and positive about how AI might help them and help the country. It’s quite a striking contrast with what you see in the US in terms of attitudes towards AI.

Because people here are worried about AI as an existential threat. People here are worried about AI taking their jobs, people here are worried about AI data centers in their backyards. Is that not the vibe in China?

Not so much. There is some concern about AI and jobs. But in general, China’s not worried about AI wiping out humanity. You really don’t hear that from the Chinese policymakers. There’s no talk about a P(doom), the probability that AI will wipe out humanity. So this is just a different approach to AI risk in general.

And why not the existential risk? 

You know, one factor, I think, is sci-fi and the culture. 

Huh. We’ve watched too many movies?

It seems like every major sci-fi book or film involves machines trying to kill us all, and I think that that idea has become very prevalent. 

When you imagine a future with AI, that is one of the primary futures that people imagine, versus in China, I think a lot of the attitude towards technology in general, not just AI, is about using this edge to keep up and to become more competitive. 

For a lot of people in China, technology was something that they saw transform their lives in real time. And Chinese leaders think it’s the key to China’s future modernization and transformation to a global superpower.

Let’s talk about what concerns there are.

One of the biggest concerns that Chinese political leaders have when it comes to AI is political and social instability. They don’t want AI-generated content to act the way that social media or the internet broadly could, which is to disseminate information, maybe deepfakes, maybe viral news that could threaten the [Chinese Communist Party’s] hold on power.

For AI-generated content, it was about making sure that the models didn’t say the wrong things about sensitive topics. A lot of this is about social and political risk rather than about existential technological risk per se. 

From pretty early on, China has been developing a model registration system where basically AI services have to be vetted in advance and go through a battery of tests where they’re asked sensitive political questions and they’re supposed to either not answer them or say the “right thing” before they are officially registered. And once they’re registered, then they can be released to the public. So it’s a pretty tight regulatory framework for controlling things like political content.

We know that there’s a high unemployment rate in China, especially among young people, which is also a great concern of the government. Are people worried that this bullish approach to AI could affect employment numbers?

Yes and no. On the one hand, China is actually facing this demographic problem with a shrinking labor force. Fewer people want to go into, say, factory jobs, but China still wants to make everything the world wants to buy. 

They see AI as a partial solution to that, a way to automate things like manufacturing. On the other hand, though, there are growing concerns in China about job loss. And you see also some recent court cases in China where they basically are telling employers, you cannot use AI as a reason to fire workers. 

But I think overall, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find this balance between the diffusion of the technology and trying to prevent any kind of large-scale protest movement that might arise from sudden mass unemployment of, say, factory workers or food delivery drivers.

And President Xi was of course here in Washington last week. From the limited photos we have of the state dinner or of President Trump and President Xi on the tarmac, everything looks so chummy, even though we are so clearly in a cold war with China over AI. The president’s always talking about how he wants to win. 

Was there tension in his visit to Washington last week? Did you notice any?

The weird thing is that just between these two men, there seems to be this kind of romance where Trump really fawns over Xi Jinping. 

I think he has tremendous respect, even admiration, for Xi Jinping’s grip on power and control over the government apparatus in general. 

What is happening under the surface, though, is continuing tensions and a deep competitive structural relationship. That involves especially competition in AI. AI has emerged as a new fault line of competition between the US and China, one that could come to define the relationship going forward. 

I think that on the one hand, they’re talking about cooperation on things like AI safety and AI risk. On the other hand, there’s a whole bunch of issues where the US wants to lead. China wants to also get ahead. And when it comes to things like distillation or cyber capabilities, it’s as zero-sum as it’s ever been.

Who’s winning?

It depends on what you’re looking at and how you define winning. If you’re talking about the best models, for sure the US. And virtually everyone in China would agree, right? In fact, Anthropic’s Claude is very popular in China, even though technically Anthropic bans its use in China.

But aren’t their open-source models kind of popular here?

Yes, exactly. Chinese open-source models are getting more popular in the US, especially at a time when some of the capabilities are so incredible that most normal people don’t really need them, and they also don’t want to pay for the most advanced and most expensive models. Ultimately it’s this weird sort of cooperation and competition at the same time.

American models are popular in China. Chinese models are popular in America. We’re at each other’s throats, but quietly, politely.

Does the cold war make it all but certain that safety isn’t going to really be a chief priority for either country until something terrible happens?

The fierce level of competition and the very, very deep distrust between the two countries makes any kind of cooperation on AI safety very, very difficult. Even just talking to each other, having the US and China establish an official AI dialogue, which apparently they’ve agreed to, is seen as a huge first step, even though they’re just talking. 

There’s a long, long road to go before we can even think about something like an arms control treaty or a broader international agreement about AI and AI safety. But I think that’s what some people, especially in Silicon Valley, are trying to jump to.

If you haven’t heard of “live shopping,” you might soon. Livestream shopping is already a staple of e-commerce in China, where consumers log onto apps like Douyin and Taobao to buy products from a livestreamer — think QVC. Now, a new app is trying to bring it to the United States.

The Whatnot app features rolling live auctions that can last from three seconds to a minute. Users can bid on everything from trading cards to clothes to steaks. With about 550,000 hours of streaming per week, the site moves an extraordinary amount of product. 

Using Whatnot is fast-paced, and essentially frictionless. Users swipe at the bottom of their screens to place the highest bit for an object. If they win, the object is sent to their house, no confirmation screen needed. 

The system isn’t without its drawbacks. Hanna Krueger, a retail reporter for the Wall Street Journal, investigated how Whatnot has become an addiction for some users. She tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that she spoke to a user who spent over $1 million on the app — and lost everything in the process. 

Below is an excerpt of Krueger’s conversation on the podcast, 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.

Tell us about this app, Whatnot.

Whatnot is a live shopping app. Imagine the home shopping network had a baby with TikTok and eBay, and it was on your phone and it was running 24 hours a day. 

You open up the app [and] there’s countless numbers of categories. You can get coins. You can get cards. You can get horse tack, plants, goo, lobsters. I mean, the categories are expanding all of the time. And there are sellers live-auctioning off these goods in real time. 

There’s a countdown clock, and it’s counting down and the auctioneer or the seller is hyping up the chat, as they call it. And that chat is commenting like, “Wow, look at this. What a deal.” In the meantime, there’s some music. Sometimes it’s nice mellow music, other times it’s metal or EDM, depending on the personality of the seller. 

The end result is that the last person to swipe at the bottom of the screen, which is how you bid, gets the item. And once you have swiped and you’re the final person to do that, there’s no real confirmation screen. We’re just onto the next product and you only really find out what you got when it shows up at your door.

It started as a marketplace for Funko Pop figurines, which are these niche, squareheaded figurines in the collectible world, but it quickly expanded. I would say the biggest categories are sports cards and trading cards like Pokémon. And then the other one is women’s fashion and beauty products. 

I spoke to multiple people who found themselves just spiraling into holes of addiction and what they liken to gambling because of that “break format.” 

Tell us about the break format.

Break format typically applies to trading cards. That could be sports cards, Pokémon. It can also happen with rare coins, but the idea is that there is a sealed pack of cards and that sealed pack is pretty expensive to buy outright — say it’s $10,000. Before the show starts, they’ll say, “Okay guys, there are 10 slots that apply to this pack. So I need 10 people to buy in at a price of $1,000.” This is a steal, right? You’re getting a piece of the pie of a $10,000 pie for only $1,000.

The reason that they’re willing to do that is that within that pack, there might be cards that are worth $2,000, $3,000, $10,000. So you recoup quite quickly if you only paid a thousand for that. The other side, the flip side that often does happen is that the cards are worth nothing close to what you bought in for.

People will get a card that’s worth $50, $100, and at the end of it, all you have to show is these small-value cards. And those who have described kind of a cycle of problematic behavior say that when you lose, when you don’t make up the value that you paid, you just buy right into the next one until you get out of the hole. 

It’s this feeling of the high, the thrill, the adrenaline rush, the “Oh my God, look what I just did” when you get a card that’s way over what you thought. And there’s the despondency, this despair, the shame, and that feeling of, “Okay, I need to make my money back on that flip side.”

This is where this app really begins to look like gambling, to look like addiction, to look like a drug. As does the story of Sean Harding, with which you open your piece for the journal. Tell us about Sean.

Sean Harding is a 45-year-old finance manager from Denver. Sean found himself on this app and he wasn’t spending too much in the very beginning, maybe $100 a day. And then within 40 days he was spending over $1,000, $5,000 a day. Just swiping whenever he could get a free moment — when he was doing laundry, sitting on the toilet. 

It was only when his wife confronted him about this odd behavior, about some missing pages on his credit report, that he really looked at what he had spent and that number was crazy. It was $1.3 million in four months. He had borrowed money from a friend, he had taken out personal loans. And finally, when all that was depleted, he had used his employer’s credit card.

You spoke to the founder of Whatnot. What does he say when you tell him a story like Sean’s?

[Whatnot CEO and cofounder Grant] LaFontaine said that addiction does not register as a problem to them in their internal data, which they look at often. When we presented a story like Sean’s, they repeated that addiction does not register as a problem. When you breach the topic of gambling or people accusing this app of having gambling features, that’s where Whatnot definitely buttons up. They’re under pretty intense scrutiny surrounding that allegation.

They categorially reject that and they say they can’t comment on pending litigation. But they do say that they created an app that had the best user experience possible and that they’re new and they’re learning and they’re scaling and they’re assessing the marketplace in real time.

Are they implementing any guardrails to maybe prevent someone like Sean from ruining his life and his family’s life?

While they say that addiction doesn’t register as a significant problem, they also have introduced optional spending limits and watch time caps. They said that’s not because of addiction concerns, but because some users said that they spent more than intended. That was the distinction that they made. 

They said there’s other safeguards coming, such as “velocity of spend” alerts for sudden spending spikes. Some have PIN locking for categories, so you have to type in a PIN to go to a certain category. Some of these are self-policed. A watch time cap, you could presumably change that yourself, even though you’re the one that implemented it. 

They’re also saying that they’re going to develop some type of birthday reconfirmation option so they could catch underage users, which is coincidentally how I came to know about Whatnot. One of my colleagues’ daughters had spent over $5,000 in one night on Pokemon cards. And he only realized that when he looked at his credit card and was like, “What is this?” And he went to sell those cards at a card shop after the fact to try to recoup, and he could only get back like $300.

Is this just a Whatnot thing, or are there other ways kids and adults can be gambling their lives away on these live auction-type of platforms?

Live shopping has been one of the most predominant ways that Chinese shoppers shop for a long time, and the wave has crested over there a long time before it has here. It really started to take off and gain traction in America in the kind of post-pandemic world.

While Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, TikTok has their own thing called TikTok Shop that has a similar kind of setup. eBay is trying out stuff like this. And then for the card-collecting hobby specifically, Fanatics Live is a major source to get your cards and experience breaks and all that.

Do all of these different platforms, be it on TikTok or eBay, have the sort of gamified countdown clock to make it more intense, more exciting, and perhaps more addictive?

Whatnot’s found a way to create a really engaging and easy-to-interact-with atmosphere. They’ve also successfully merged the parasocial media aspect. There are relationships between the seller and the buyer, so if you keep going back to the same seller, they’ll remember your name, the people in the chat will remember. There are some folks who were like, ‘I found friends in here.’ 

Sean said that the night that he used his company credit card, he was reached out to by a seller and they were like, “Hey man, you got to join this. This break’s awesome. I have a great slot for you. I’ll give it to you at a discount.” And he’s like, “I don’t have any money.” And that’s when he realized that he had a little money. It just happened to belong to his employer.

That kind of shows that there’s this social atmosphere. Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, but other companies are seeing how successful this is, and I think it’s only time before they kind of merge all these aspects together in an attempt to take their market share from them.

Recently, while taking the metro to work, I encountered something that shocked me. The train was pulling up, just as the man in front of me tapped to pay to go through the gate, and a woman pushed past me to cut me in line. I still made the train (after I briefly considered acting in a way that would have made us both late for work), but as I passed each stop I got angrier and angrier. Why did she think her commute was more important than someone else’s? We learn to wait our turn when we’re children — why was that lesson lost all these years later? 

I’m not the only one irritated by this kind of thing. Almost half of Americans say that they’ve noticed people are ruder in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Whether it’s poor behavior at the airport or blasting music from your phone with no headphones in public, it’s like people don’t know how to act anymore. 

Kirsty Sedgman is a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of the book On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better. She argues that while people might not mind them as much anymore, manners are important. 

“They encourage us to think about others and to behave in ways that are not antisocial and potentially even dangerous,” she told Vox. “How can we have these conversations so that we figure out what we all want social life and public space to be like in a way that benefits everybody and doesn’t accidentally exclude [anyone]?

While some etiquette rules are pretty self explanatory (let’s not cut in line!), others are more difficult to navigate. “I always try to make a point and I’m not perfect, believe me,” Sedgman said. “I’m not saying that I know how to behave in every single circumstance and I’m always right. I’m no Emily Post.”

Post was the socialite who literally wrote the book on the subject: Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home was first published in the 1920s. More than a century later, her family is still in the business of teaching us how to mind our manners.

Lizzie Post is Emily Post’s great-great granddaughter and co-president of the Emily Post Institute. That’s a title and pedigree that could come with a lot of pressure. But Post says it’s all about your audience. “A lot of times, as long as I don’t get the sense that they would prefer a very formalized version of me, I try to reassure people: laugh, joke, swear, it’s okay,” Post said.

Audience isn’t the only thing that’s changed — the times have too. How has etiquette shifted over the years? And how do we navigate newer things — like our phones? We find out that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Post, 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.

For a long time etiquette has just been something that’s agreed upon. You have to have certain manners to socialize in certain circles and within certain classes. But I think that’s changed. Why do you think that’s happened?

My great-great-grandmother wrote from 1922 to 1960. While she talked about the standards of the day, she also allowed those standards to change. Think about 1922 to 1960 — there were huge swings in how people behaved. Chaperones were gone from the book by her second edition. Life was changing and evolving and she changed and evolved with it. 

Etiquette is a French word — it sounds fancy. I think that it can very easily have these connotations of being something that is about a secret society, or it’s only about formality, or it’s only for people who are very wealthy. It can also start to feel a lot like judgment. 

One of the reasons etiquette can feel so out of sorts, particularly right now, is because times are changing and they’re just changing really quickly. 

I think phone etiquette is really, really emblematic of that. One thing that is so common is people playing music or having their phone on speaker, no headphones. Do we just not know how to act when it comes to our phones? 

There are definitely rules of courtesy and blaring anything out of your phone, whether it’s a phone call, it’s a FaceTime call, it’s your TikTok feed, or that movie that you’re watching, is all inappropriate when other people are a captive audience and haven’t asked to be. 

It’s this mindful moment where people forget where they are. They’re so used to being in their own world with their phone six inches from their face that they forget that anyone can even hear what it is that they’re doing on their phone at that particular moment. 

It’s really hard to correct this behavior because generally, we don’t correct other people’s behaviors.

I admit, especially in public spaces, I am Team Mind My Business. But at what point do you step in?

It’s a really tough judgment call, and it’s going to be different for every situation. 

I think that when I am in a space that I’m only going to occupy for a short time, I am telling myself, “Mind my own business, don’t worry about it.” When it’s that train ride that we’re starting, or that four-hour flight that you’re on, I think we start to have to say something and to ask, “Hey, could you put some headphones on while you’re enjoying that or watching that or on your call?” 

I say, “Could you,” because they might not have headphones with them, but even if they don’t, it’s a reminder. It’s like that check of awareness that, “Oh, this thing I’m doing is impacting people around me.”

Here’s the rub: You can’t control other people’s behavior. You cannot control if this person is going to get defensive. If you’re going to ask the question, be prepared for rudeness in return. And I hate saying that, but it is the reality. We can’t control other people’s behavior.

So there’s clearly a wrong way to use speakerphone and FaceTime. What’s the right way to use them? 

We do a lot of talking on our speakerphones, even in our own homes. You might be moving from one room to another, passing through the living room where people are watching TV or you’re in the kitchen and all of a sudden a roommate has come into the room while you’re on a call that’s on speakerphone. You really want to let the person on the other end of the phone know that there’s other people present now. 

My cousin is so good about this. He always tells his daughter when she gets into the car, “Hey, Aunt Lizzie is on the phone. Say hi to her.” Then I know to watch my language. She knows to say hi to her auntie. And that’s just so much nicer than all of a sudden having a voice pop up and realizing, “Oh my gosh, I was just telling a really personal story and I didn’t realize there was a bigger audience for it.” 

What about having your phone on the table you’re at dinner? People feel very passionately about that one.

I am so bad about this one. I often have mine face down on the table. The funny thing is, I’m not looking for someone to call with an interruption, but it’s not good etiquette. 

It is really best to have that phone put away, to make sure that it’s on silent and it’s not going to interrupt your time together. To have it there, especially face up where any message that comes in is now going to catch the attention of everyone at the table, that’s an unnecessary distraction. 

Is there an obligation when you need to text someone back? Does it have to be within a certain time? You go about your day and the next thing you know, you look at your phone and you have 80 unread texts and it’s like, “Oh no, what do I do? My friends will all be mad at me.”

I wish there was, but it depends on the text itself. 

The ones I don’t think you should wait on is when friends or potential romantic partners offer a time to get together. Don’t let that sit. If there’s a reason why you’re letting it sit, talk to someone about that. Say, “Oh, I’ve got to check with my partner about that. I know we had talked about doing something else Saturday at that time.” 

Give them some kind of an understanding, because it’s a really beautiful thing to be invited to go spend time with someone. I think we want to treasure that a little more than we do in today’s age.

William Lawrence is a Democrat running to represent Michigan’s Lansing-area Seventh Congressional District with a campaign that largely focuses on data centers and affordability. It’s not an unusual story in 2026 — but not long ago, Lawrence was cutting his teeth in progressive politics as a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, primarily focused on organizing around the climate crisis.

His arc, from progressive activist to politician, is emblematic of a bigger trend, as a wave of millennial progressives in midterm races across the country try to lean into issues that have broader, more immediate appeal with voters.

But that arc also raises big questions about the left’s changing priorities. In a recent interview for Vox’s podcast and video series America, Actually, host Astead Herndon spoke with Lawrence about his past activism and how he has pivoted. “It can sometimes feel like…folks hop from issue to issue, whether it’s climate, even anti-AI right now, without those things being solved,” Herndon told Lawrence. 

According to Lawrence, “that’s the reality of the time. It seems like everything is unraveling, and it is because the whole social, economic, political compact is being renegotiated, not just in this country, but on a global stage.” Still, Lawrence said, that earlier organizing shapes how he sees different challenges today.

The two also discussed whether opposition to data centers and AI has wide, regular-voter appeal in places like Michigan and how Lawrence went from hopeless and disengaged to regaining a sense of agency through organizing.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. 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.

You started in Sunrise and were at the forefront of a young progressive movement that was aligned at that time — in 2018, 2019, and I think still — with progressive members of Congress like Rashida Tlaib or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I remember reporting about Sunrise at the time. The goal was to elect a Bernie Sanders, but the other goal was to have the party largely embrace things like a Green New Deal. How would you grade the efforts of the climate movement of that time, looking back?

I think we did some things very well.

We put climate jobs and justice at the top of the agenda for the incoming Biden administration. I think the Bernie-Biden task force is an often overlooked but very important chapter of that whole story, where Bernie and Biden both understood they had to bring their people to the table.

And that’s how Build Back Better got negotiated. We fought hard for Build Back Better, and ultimately came up two votes shy in the United States Senate.

Do you see that as a success or a failure of the climate movement?

I think Build Back Better was a success in coming to the table and negotiating, from the Green New Deal to Build Back Better, and then what we ended up with was the Inflation Reduction Act after it passed the final filter, which was Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. At the time, now, how I felt about it was, this is historic. This is the largest investment in green jobs and infrastructure in United States history. I know how hard it was to get here. I’m tremendously proud of the work that I did and so many others did.

Just in my district alone, we’ve delivered $26 billion in investment for manufacturing and sustainability because of the Inflation Reduction Act. But at the time, we knew that this is maybe 5 percent or 10 percent of what we need in scope. And now we’re experiencing the consequences of that.

Obviously, we still have a very volatile economy. We still lack energy security because we now have closed the Strait of Hormuz. We’re still too dependent on a global oil market, and we could use many more investments in solar and other kinds of renewable energy than we have now.

And ultimately, it wasn’t enough for the Biden-Harris administration to be able to win reelection, because people didn’t feel it enough in their pocketbooks.

Why do you think Democrats are talking less about climate?

I think it’s the intensity of the crises that we face. It feels like we’re falling through midair, after the end of all of the constitutional protections, the rule of law, and the economic security that people had previously enjoyed. 

There are a lot of very acute and urgent crises, and I think that that has bumped climate, which is a super massive but also somewhat slow-moving crisis, a little bit lower on the priority list just in terms of what comes up for people on the Hill.

You went back to Michigan to focus on housing and advocacy. Did that make you think a little differently about the national work you were doing?

I think it’s fair to say that when I was younger, I got very focused on this climate issue, and I was very focused on it because it is this existential crisis we all face.

But it was after the pandemic that I wanted to bring my work closer to home. I wanted to do the work of putting down roots in the place that had raised me and make my life there. And in seeking to organize there, it was clear that we needed an in to organize that was more immediate.

“I believe in the agency of regular people taking charge of our own lives and working together to build a better future.”

More immediate than the Green New Deal.

Than the Green New Deal or than the looming climate crisis. People know that that’s an issue, but they’re like, “I’ve gotta pay rent at the end of the month.” And as an organizer, I believe that you have to listen to people, you have to hear what’s going on for them, and then work on issues that have the potential to bring people together.

Housing is one of those issues. Whether you’re in the city of Lansing, whether you’re in small towns, urban, rural, suburban, young or old, everybody can agree that the rent is too damn high and it’s too hard to buy a home anymore.

Were you surprised Trump won the state in 2024? 

No.

Why not? 

Because I saw it all unfold. We hoped to deliver more through the Biden-Harris administration than we ultimately did through Build Back Better. We didn’t deliver as much to relieve the economic anxiety that people were feeling. And then I do believe that the war and the genocide in Gaza and our blank check to allow that to happen with our money and our tax dollars destroyed the Democratic coalition that had been assembled from 2017 through 2020 for the purpose of beating Trump.

I just saw that unfolding over the course of the whole year, just like a slow-motion train wreck.

I want to ask locally, what do you think is most important in this race: housing, data centers, or pushing back against Donald Trump?

If I had to choose, I’d say data centers because that’s where people in the district are finding some common ground across the spectrum — in fighting back against the concentrated power in Silicon Valley, which has been fully enabled by [incumbent Rep.] Tom Barrett and Donald Trump.

So you’re saying that’s the issue that allows you to create cross-ideological coalitions?

Yeah.

Our last question is, just thinking through the scope of your career and the kind of progressive work: It can sometimes feel like folks hop from issue to issue, whether it’s climate, even anti-AI right now, without those things being solved, right?

Like, we still have a climate crisis. The rent is still too high. All of these things are still happening. How am I to trust that AI is the crisis of our time when I’ve heard so many crises of our time?

Some have called it a polycrisis — overlapping crises.

That’s the reality of the time. It seems like everything is unraveling, and it is because the whole social, economic, political compact is being renegotiated, not just in this country, but on a global stage. I don’t think it serves us to lie about that. I mean, here’s the reality, folks.

Everything is up in the air. Does it feel like you’re falling through midair? It’s because we are. All the old protections, all the old agreements have been chopped up. So we have got to come together. This is what I believe in more than anything, if there is a through line…I believe in the agency of regular people taking charge of our own lives and working together to build a better future. 

That’s what I learned as an organizer, and that’s what gave me hope actually, at a time when I was doomer-ing in my younger years. And I told you, I wanted to just drop out of society and all that. It was seeing that regular people have come together before, and they’ve won a better future for their kids and grandkids, that gave me a path to follow in.

It does feel like a powerless time, I have to tell you. And a lot of this AI revolution, to your point about control or about agency. We’ve talked to so many people who just think that these things are happening to them, rather than feeling that they are participating in the changes afoot.

But you’re telling a kinda hopeful story. 

I’m a hopeful guy. I was angry too, even when I got into this race. I was angry especially about the wars. But then in campaigning, I’ve met so many people across the district, old friends, new friends, and they give me a lot of hope because you just see the way that people are already performing miracles on a daily basis.

Maddie Kowalski is a student at the University of Florida. Last November, someone found nonconsensual intimate images and videos of her, stitched them together, and uploaded them to X, where they were viewed millions of times.

“Can you imagine?” asked Ej Dickson, a senior culture writer at Wired who reported on Kowalski’s story earlier this month. “You’re 19 years old and a video that you don’t even remember shooting, let alone consenting to, goes viral nationally along with your name and your sorority, and your parents, your grandparents, everybody in your life sees it. It’s a humiliation and a privacy violation that is kind of incomprehensible.”

The video was followed by a campaign of intimidation and harassment. Kowalski and her parents received threatening phone calls and texts. People on the internet posted old photos of her, her father’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap. Kowalski sought help from the police, from the university, and from X. But the video was being shared faster than the posts could be removed, and her name became a trending topic on X.

What made the video go viral, Dickson explains, is something called the “burnerverse”: a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X. The community mainly exists to discuss college sports, but sometimes it disseminates videos and rumors aimed at shaming young women and ruining their lives. The burnerverse has harassed Kowalski and her family for nearly a year, sometimes encouraging her to kill herself.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Dickson about the online network that targeted Kowalski, and why it’s been so difficult to do anything to stop it. 

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.

Your story describes how Maddie has, without even realizing it, entered into something called the burnerverse. This is something I think a lot of us, prior to your piece, had not heard of. What is the burnerverse?

I hadn’t heard of it either. The burnerverse is an online community of anonymous accounts, and ostensibly these are college sports fan accounts. They talk about the coaches, the players, new recruits, they share memes after their team loses, but there’s a corner of the community that has emerged that is pretty violently racist and misogynistic and antisemitic. And one of the things that they’ve started doing in recent years is doxxing young college-age women like Maddie.

Why is it called the burnerverse?

Because it consists of burner accounts, anonymous accounts.

Okay. So the reason that whoever is spreading these videos of Maddie and others feels comfortable doing that is because they’re anonymous. Nobody knows who’s behind them?

Yes, exactly. And I also want to be clear: This is a small segment of the college sports burner community. 

There are a lot of these accounts that are pretty innocuous and would never dream of doing something like this to a young woman. I would say probably the vast majority of these accounts are not like that, but it is a sizable enough segment that they’re able to make these types of narratives go viral.

What do we know about who is part of the burnerverse? Who is likely to be a part of this?

That was one of the most shocking things that I learned from my reporting, actually. I had assumed that these were largely frat kids. I assumed that they were largely SEC frat kids because a lot of these young girls who have been doxed were students at SEC schools. But when I actually started looking into these accounts and who was behind them and who was sharing these images and making these jokes about Maddie, I learned it was way more wide-ranging than that. 

There are a lot of college students who are involved in the burnerverse, but it’s also men who are 10, 20, 30 years out of college. Sometimes they have wives. Sometimes they have children. Sometimes they have grandchildren. They’re from all over the country. It’s not limited to one race or economic demographic. It’s really very wide-ranging, which is kind of what makes it so terrifying.

And it is not just Maddie Kowalski. What did you learn about other young women who are targeted by this?

No, it’s not. So perhaps the most well-known case is this girl named Mary Kate Cornett, who was a student at Ole Miss in February 2025 when this salacious campus rumor about her sex life started going viral. And the rumor was false and it was clearly defamatory, but it went so viral that it kind of escaped containment from Ole Miss and went viral among SEC schools and then went viral nationally, to the point where her name was trending nationally on X. 

This very famous ESPN personality, Pat McAfee, talked about her without using her name, but talked about her and the details of this rumor on his podcast. And a lot of these athletes and college sports personalities tweeted about it as well. What started as an unverifiable and false rumor about a college girl’s sex life was just blown up and amplified to the degree that it was a national news story within a couple of hours. 

The speed with which this happens — [Cornett]she was telling me that basically a few hours after she learned that she was going viral, her parents’ house was swatted. The speed with which this community works toward making these women’s lives a living hell is really, really rapid.

Did you come away with an understanding of how an online community that is meant to be talking about college sports descends into this?

Part of it is just a consequence of how internet subcultures work. Even fairly innocuous, large internet subcultures and communities, there’s always going to be a small part of any online subculture that splinters off and forms its own community that is going to skew a little bit more extremist. 

That’s not surprising in itself, but I do think that there is something about the discourse surrounding college sports, particularly the media ecosystem that’s represented by Barstool, that does create a space for this type of rampant misogyny to foment. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the accounts that I have seen posting really horrible defamatory content about Maddie are smaller Barstool accounts that are associated with individual colleges. I do think that has definitely played a role.

Why did Maddie become the target of these people in the burnerverse?

Because she’s young and she’s attractive. Basically, the criteria is these women are young, attractive, they’re usually white for some reason, and they are perceived to have departed from a sexual norm in some way. 

They’re either subject to some sort of rumor about their sex life or their sexual behavior or maybe a text message leaks about them or a photo. Then these guys take it and they blow it up and it goes viral nationally. 

They’re very purposeful about it too. I can’t tell you how many tweets I’ve seen that are just tweets of a girl’s name and they’re like, “Make her famous, make her go viral.”

In an ideal world, this kind of thing would be stopped before it even happened. So, knowing that there is not much that victims can do, what are the methods of preventing this?

That’s a very complicated question. I know that there are platforms developing various AI tools in order to prevent nonconsensual intimate images from spreading. But I imagine that would be pretty difficult to regulate, especially with the rise of deepfakes and with the rise of-AI manipulated nonconsensual images, so I don’t have a lot of faith in that. 

Honestly, I think that the biggest path toward prevention is — can I say this? Parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit.

You can say that. You can absolutely say that.

I think that the biggest course of prevention is parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit, honestly. To just set a clear line and say, “It’s not okay to view women as commodities. It’s not okay to talk about women like this. It’s not okay to view social media engagement as the ultimate goal without thinking about the lives that you’re impacting by spreading this content.” I think that parents need to have conversations with their kids about that. 

I think that there needs to be education within fraternities and sororities and universities because it’s not like what happened to Maddie Kowalski is an isolated incident. I was able to identify almost a dozen other young women who have been targeted by the burnerverse in this way. 

I think that there needs to be more discussion of this in general because it’s not just the burnerverse. It’s this larger ecosystem that is socially ordained at this point of men saying horrible things and doing horrible things to women with impunity. That’s the real problem.

If there’s one thing that Americans can unite behind, it’s anxieties over artificial intelligence.

According to a recent NBC News/Decision Desk poll, 70 percent of adults say they are personally more worried than excited about the technology; it’s basically underwater in every area of society with one notable exception: its use in scientific research and medicine.

According to Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician at Weill Cornell Medicine and writer at the New Yorker, that optimism is well-founded.

Khullar uses AI tools in his own practice as a physician and writes about their advancements in the medical field. He says that “right now, at least, there’s a generally optimistic view of how AI will change healthcare going forward.”

AI in medicine is nothing new. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to researchers who developed an AI model that enabled breakthroughs in predicting protein’s complex structures. As it becomes more ubiquitous, it’s also emerging as a resource for doctors to get second opinions and as a tool to take notes on patient-doctor interactions.

On top of that, Khullar says, it might help unlock new medicines to treat diseases. 

Khullar joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to discuss the ways that AI is transforming drug discovery and research, as well as what it still can’t do. They also discuss how to think about AI’s potential in healthcare at the same time as top AI researchers are increasingly warning about the technology’s risk.

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.

You’ve been thinking about lifesaving AI innovation. Has AI already started saving lives?

I think it has. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen healthcare take up a new technology. Part of that might be that the healthcare system is so messed up that there’s an appetite for some type of change. It’s unaffordable, it’s inaccessible, it’s inconvenient, the quality is uneven. 

There’s at least a hope that AI is going to help with all of these things, and I think it’s already starting to make its way into the healthcare system. Now it’s our responsibility to figure out how to make the most of it without also promulgating some of the downsides.

For those who are unaware, tell us how it’s working its way into the system.

It’s helpful to categorize it into a few buckets, at least for healthcare. 

The most rapid uptake, and I think the place that it’s already starting to make a difference, is on the administrative side. Many people who have gone to a doctor recently might have noticed that there’s an AI scribe that’s taking notes now. And people seem to really like it, at least so far. Doctors are able to look their patients in the eye in the way that they weren’t able to when they were poring over their computers and just typing what the patient was telling them. 

The second big area is patient navigation. When is your next scan? When’s your next appointment? Do I need to take this medication on an empty stomach or not? There’s a huge opportunity for people, let’s say, who are diagnosed with a serious illness like cancer or heart failure to navigate the system more seamlessly. 

The third big area that I’m really excited about is drug discovery. AI is making a huge dent in the early parts of drug discovery. 

The last thing that I’m excited about and that I use every day when I’m in the hospital is [AI] as a second opinion. Now instead of having to get a consult or turn to a textbook, AI can be a very, very helpful clinical decision support. It’s not to say that I never consult someone, of course, but that first pass — I’m not sure what’s going on. What are some recent trials that might influence my decision here? Is there something I’m missing? Is there a test that I should be ordering that I’m not ordering? — all those types of things, they start to help with.

The biggest chunk of this positive view of AI and medicine is drug discovery. Tell me more about how that’s going so far and how it might be going in a year, or five, or 10.

I don’t want to leave this conversation and say that we’ve solved the cure for cancer because of AI, but I do want people to know that at least for the early stages of drug discovery — figuring out the very basic steps of is this an interesting molecule? Does it have potential biological applications? — AI is already very helpful for that. 

They’re trying to take, basically, what is an infinite number of drug-like molecules that are theoretically possible to be drugs and they’re trying to match that to some disease that’s going on inside a human. And human biology is incredibly complex as well. There’s tens of thousands of genes, hundreds of thousands of proteins, trillions of cells, and you have to match a potential molecule to a potential target within a human. 

In the past, a researcher might take years to study a disease or a biological pathway and figure out, okay, this protein seems to be involved. And actually, it might not be involved, it might be involved, it might be disrupted, but not be the causative agent. There’s a lot of uncertainty there, so now AI can take enormous amounts of data, and it can rank various potential targets that seem to be the most likely to be causing a particular disease and give you that short short list of potential targets that may have taken months or years in the past.

So now you know what to attack, but you have to figure out what to attack it with. So you need a molecule, you need to generate a molecule that’s going to fit into that target or disrupt that target in some way. 

Now again, AI can scour vast chemical spaces and give you a list of the things that seem to be most likely to be able to disrupt that target. And then it can actually help you generate that molecule in some cases. 

So now we have the target. Now we have something that we’re going to attack the target with. And then you have to do something called lead optimization, and that’s the third thing. Lead optimization means you have this lead and you have to optimize it.

“I would make the counterargument that healthcare is ripe for disruption and you don’t even need the frontier frontier models to make it a lot better with AI.”

Now we have to figure out, of all the molecules that seem to be good at potentially affecting this target, which ones are able to be absorbed in the body, which ones are going to get to the right tissue. AI models can predict the most likely molecule to give you that Goldilocks set of properties that’s needed for a safe and effective drug.

As we all know from anyone who’s asked AI to write an email for them or Googled a question, these tools have a certain degree of certitude, even though these tools can just be flat out wrong about stuff. Are you guys worried about that in the field?

Absolutely. And so this is why I think the narrative around AI just replacing scientists or doctors or other workers is incorrect. Because you still need a lot of judgment. 

You need to be able to adjudicate the output of these models to figure out what is most promising and what is potentially dangerous. That is going to require wet labs and scientists and reasoning based on prior experience and understanding the context. There’s all sorts of issues around, can you manufacture some of the drugs that are being proposed by these models? So just because it’s set, it dreams something up doesn’t mean you can actually make that thing in the real world.

Some of the drugs that it proposes might actually be toxic in certain ways that it didn’t predict. And of course, then you have to take this thing into clinical trials. You have to recruit l people who are willing to put this medication in their bodies. You have to find out who might benefit, you have to put it through the regulatory process. 

That’s why I said that the first part of drug discovery, where you’re trying to figure out how do we get the right drug candidates, what seems most exciting to test further, that’s going to be really accelerated. That whole second half where we actually have to figure out if it works in human biology, that is still going to be in some respects an analog process.

It doesn’t sound like you’re terribly scared that we are like ceding control of our hospitals, of our research facilities, to AI. This is very much in the sort of assistant bucket?

For now it is. And I think one of the challenges is to maintain our agency as these models become more and more sophisticated. As you lean more on these machines, if you’re a doctor, inevitably some of the skills, the critical thinking, the reasoning that we put into coming up with the diagnosis that we honed over the course of years, that can start to atrophy. 

These are the types of things that we still need to sort through as we’re implementing more and more AI into the healthcare system.

For the people who just say, shut it all down, this is too dangerous, the risk is far too great, we don’t actually need this, this isn’t doing anything for society, would you make a counterargument?

I would make the counterargument that healthcare is ripe for disruption and you don’t even need the frontier frontier models to make it a lot better with AI.

Even if we wanted to “slow the pace of the frontier,” fine. But there are models from a year or two years ago that could be very helpful in the healthcare setting. When we’re talking about slowing the pace of the frontier and the most sophisticated and potentially dangerous models, fine. 

But if we’re talking about shutting down AI and not using it in biotechnology or not using it in scientific research or not using it in clinical care delivery, that’s where I would push back pretty hard.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has moved aggressively to leave his mark. Many of his most visible legacy projects are not pieces of legislation, though. They’re part of a campaign to reshape Washington, DC, itself. 

Last year, Trump knocked down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his massive new ballroom. He tried renovating the Reflecting Pool, which did not turn out well. He regilded four large statues near the National Mall, paved the White House Rose Garden, and drenched the Oval Office in gold and golden appliqués.

Other Trump plans are still in the works: He’s proposed building a 250-foot triumphal arch in a traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River. He now says the arch would double as a “military complex,” housing drones, snipers, and ammunition.

And, of course, there’s the ongoing fight over the Kennedy Center, which Trump has threatened could be “ripped down” if he doesn’t get his name on the building in some capacity (he already tried once, and was ordered by a court to remove it).

It’s all a lot to keep track of. Luckily, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently spent time with Trump touring the ballroom construction site. Terris explains what ties all the disparate projects together and what they reveal about the Trump’s effort to reshape the nation’s capital — and his own legacy.

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. 

What is up with Trump’s obsession with physical landmarks? 

Before I even talked to him, I did a lot of reporting about why he seems to be so obsessed with all this stuff. And it’s really like a legacy for him. He’s trying to build something that will last beyond his time here, both his time here in the White House and probably his time here on Earth. He wants to actually have physical monuments to himself. 

Somebody who’s close to him told me that the president doesn’t care that much about legislation. He doesn’t care that much about the kind of nuts and bolts of being a president. He cares a lot about buildings and prizes. If he has buildings and prizes, then he feels like his legacy will go on forever. That’s why he wants the Nobel Prize. That’s why he’s building an arch for himself in Washington. It’s really about a legacy that will withstand the test of time in his mind.

Which is to say, he doesn’t really realize that the right legislation could get him more prizes.

Most presidents try to be very successful presidents and have other people build monuments for you. He’s trying to honor himself, basically. It’s something I asked him about actually when I sat down with him in the Oval Office. There was a viral moment a few months ago from Senator Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia who may run for president. And he said at a rally that the president is building monuments to himself because he knows that nobody will do it when he’s gone.

I asked the president this because I thought maybe he’d take a shot at Jon Ossoff or deny it, but I was very surprised. He just said, “Yeah, that’s true. Nobody will do it when I’m gone. When I’m gone, nobody will do it.” 

It feels kind of self-aware, surprisingly, of Donald Trump to not take a shot at Jon Ossoff, but to just agree with him and say, “Yeah, that’s exactly my motivation.”

Part of me though — okay, here’s a guy who recognizes that when he’s gone, history may not necessarily look fondly upon him. But also there was a part of me that thought that that’s not actually what he was saying. 

What he was maybe saying is, “I’m the only person in the world capable of building something as beautiful and important as these monuments. I alone can fix it. I alone can build it.” Nobody else has the ability to do this the way that he has. So on the one hand, possibly self-aware that he won’t be recognized the way he wants to be. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a kind of egomaniac talking about how he’s incredible at things and nobody else can do it. I think it’s all kind of tied up in that he’s not the most introspective person I’ve ever talked to, let’s put it that way. 

But even the least introspective person in the world, when he gets to be 80 years old, might start thinking about what’s left of him after he’s gone.

Tell me about the tour President Trump gave you. 

I thought I was going to get 20 minutes with him in the Oval Office. I ended up getting 45 minutes in the Oval Office and then almost a 45-minute tour of the White House grounds. 

He showed me the Rose Garden, where they put statues and they turned it into a kind of paved-over terrace that looks like Mar-a-Lago. He showed me the Presidential Walk of Fame, where they have all the pictures of the presidents and then the autopen for Joe Biden, and a room called the Palm Room where he put down a new marble floor that he was very proud of. 

The helipad was still being constructed. He walked me over there and introduced me to the construction workers as they were building this helipad. And then he took me to the ballroom itself and showed me this behemoth building. 

“Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever.”

There’s steel rising 70 feet in the air. It’s the size of one-and-a-half football fields. He was bragging about how there’s more steel there than in the Washington Commander stadium that’s being built. It’s this enormous thing that you can’t really see anywhere in Washington unless you go up the Washington Monument and look at it from afar. And I was just in the middle of this thing and I couldn’t really believe how huge it was. 

He wanted to show me this is where the entrance is going to be, [where] the chandeliers will be. He told me he could picture it all already because this is, quote, “What I do.” 

He’ll gaze out the window in the morning first thing in the morning from the residence to see the work. He’ll look out the window at night to see the work. He is monitoring this very closely.

One thing that the ballroom especially shares with the Kennedy Center is that it feels like this administration is doing its darnedest to outmaneuver the courts, to get around any legal questions concerning the work. Did that come up at all while he was giving you this tour?

When I was getting the tour, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that they could keep going. There was a kind of pause on their ruling where they were allowed to keep doing construction while the Supreme Court figured out how they were going to rule on it. And so clearly they were racing against the Supreme Court to get as much done as possible. They really wanted to become like a fait accompli. They wanted it to look like the whole thing was done. It was beyond going back. 

I was asking the president, “Are you worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule that you can’t keep doing construction unless you get permission from Congress?” Congress does have the right to decide what happens to federal buildings, so it would make sense that they would be able to make a decision on this. And he said he wasn’t worried about it at all. He said, “the Supreme Court’s going to make the right decision. The people want this.”

He’s like, “If I needed to get Congress’s approval, I could do it, but it’s not going to happen.” And he ended up being right. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval. The Supreme Court’s letting him do it.

But Congress may get shaken up in about a month and a half. Is that on his radar?

Yes, and certainly Democrats are aware. I talked to a bunch of Democrats for this story mostly about what happens next. Are they going to start investigating the ballroom? Are they going to start looking at subpoenaing donors and looking at the contracts and figuring out if there’s a pay-to-play scheme, if there was illegal construction happening? And Democrats are champing at the bit for that. 

They’re calling it a target-rich environment. They’re ready to get subpoena power. And they’re also talking about in 2028, what do we do if we get the White House ourselves? Will we tear this down? 

[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] says she wants to turn it into a soup kitchen. There are all sorts of ideas for it. I asked the president about that too. I said, “Are you worried that Democrats will get the White House in 2028 and they come and they tear down this ballroom right after you built it?” And he basically said, “I’d like to see them try.” 

He said, “We’re building this ballroom with nuclear concrete.” That’s what he called it, nuclear concrete, concrete that can withstand a nuclear blast. He’s like, “If it can withstand a nuclear blast, I’d like to see Democrats try to take it down.” 

He told me somebody could go to the ballroom with a jackhammer and spend two days straight jackhammering one column and it wouldn’t even leave a mark. And so he’s basically daring them to try to tear it down because he’s building something that he feels like can withstand a nuclear blast so it can withstand Democrats.

At the end of the day, all of this is just about his legacy. That’s what you learned by hanging out with him and talking to him about it. Do you think by spreading his efforts across DC, he’s ensuring that at least something stands and that his legacy is ultimately secured? 

He definitely thinks that these buildings can withstand more than anything else. Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever. 

I do think there’s a world in which Democrats tear down some of the stuff. The arch is a good example. I mean, the ballroom is hard to tear down, right? First of all, it’s super expensive. It’s huge. It also has to be replaced with something. You can’t just tear it down and then leave a hole in the ground. You have to then build another ballroom, which would be kind of a crazy thing to do and take all this time and then become another story about how Democrats are spending all their time building a ballroom. 

Is it possible? Sure. It just seems a little bit harder to imagine, but the arch, you could see that thing getting dynamited on some Fourth of July and then just leaving it as a traffic circle. So I could see a world in which maybe some of these things get destroyed in a kind of, I don’t know, epic fashion. Why not?

It feels like he might be onto something, which is that it would be very controversial to just tear something down for the sake of it out of spite.

Absolutely.

There’s also two years left in his term. Do you get the sense that this is slowing down or ramping up?

It’s hard to say. I have a hard time believing it’s going to end, especially if he becomes a lame-duck president and there’s even fewer things he can do legislatively.

Why not just keep building things and putting your name on things because there’s nothing else to do with your time? 

He said that in the first term, the reason he didn’t do a lot of this stuff is because he was too under siege, that it was a difficult time to build a ballroom because of the Russian investigations or the impeachment trials and stuff like that.

Maybe he gets tied up in all that same kind of stuff if Democrats take charge, but I also feel like he’ll have an easier time just trying to ignore subpoenas. It’s going to be a really messy time. And so maybe he’ll just hole himself off into a room somewhere designing more buildings, because what else is he going to do?

For decades, research into Alzheimer’s disease has made painfully little progress. More than 7 million Americans are living with the disease, which is the most common cause of dementia. It’s incurable, and treatments have been hampered by groupthink, as well as by systemic fraud from some of the field’s most famous researchers.

But there are finally signs that the field is turning a corner, including two new drugs, rolled out in the last few years, that can treat Alzheimer’s directly.

“If somebody walks into a clinic right now and is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease,” Vox senior correspondent Dylan Scott tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram, the drugs “will hopefully have some effect in slowing down their cognitive decline.” 

As Scott says, “The drug development pipeline is also starting to look much more robust” — even “revolutionary,” to quote one doctor he spoke with.

The two talk about why researchers are more optimistic than they have been in years, whether GLP-1 drugs might help prevent Alzheimer’s, and an experimental surgery pioneered by doctors in China that has produced striking — but if unproven — reports of improvement in people with the disease.

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.

You mentioned two treatments. Tell us what they are, Dylan?

We have two drugs right now that have been approved by the FDA: lecanemab and donanemab. And these are drugs that target the amyloid plaque in the brain that scientists have long thought might be associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

The amyloid hypothesis [the belief that Alzheimer’s is caused by the buildup of deleterious amyloid proteins in the brain] has been very controversial for a while, in part because there were these years and years where we weren’t seeing any progress despite this being the dominant hypothesis about the disease. But we do have these two drugs that in clinical trials have been shown to both clear out the amyloid plaque in somebody’s brain and they do seem to lead to slower cognitive decline for those patients.

And the hope is that this is the ground floor. These are the worst drugs, hopefully, that we’re ever going to have and continued scientific discovery and progress with developing drugs will lead to even better treatments in the future.

“The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

Tell us more about the scientific discovery. You mentioned that there’s promising research beyond amyloid plaques?

It’s not like the amyloid hypothesis has been invalidated, but I think our understanding of the disease has become more complex. 

We’re realizing that there’s probably also a role for a different kind of protein called tau. There may also be a role with chronic inflammation, your vascular health, your body’s ability to just pump blood through your body may also be playing a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. And so now we’re starting to see treatments that target these other things. 

The way I’ve been thinking about it is if we used to be putting all of our bets on amyloid, we’re still putting some bets on amyloid, but we’re also putting bets on these other things. And so now there are treatments in the works targeting, for example, these tau proteins.

They’re still in the early stages of clinical trials — really at the stage where they’re just checking the safety of these drugs and making sure that somebody can take them without getting really sick, or God forbid, dying or something like that. But even when they’re doing those safety checks, they do start to collect qualitative data about, well, are we starting to see any effects? 

Some of the preliminary results from some of these tau targeting treatments that are in the works have looked pretty promising. And so that’s encouraging, obviously. It’s possible that we’re moving towards a future where not unlike cancer treatment, there’s not just one drug for Alzheimer’s disease, but maybe you take a combination of different things that work on different mechanisms for the disease and the collective cumulative effect is that it stops the progression or even reverses it. 

The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Five, 10 years from now sounds nice, but is there anything else that’s in the cocktail now that people are discovering could be promising for Alzheimer’s?

There are also, yes, drugs that millions of people are taking right now for other reasons that might also be able to help with Alzheimer’s disease. And GLP-1s in particular are the big ones.

No way!

Yeah, I know. These drugs — it seems like every day you see some new headline about this miraculous thing that they can do.

Weight loss, smoking, my poker addiction, and…?

And it might prevent dementia down the road. 

If you step back and think about it, the theory does make some sense. Like I said before, scientists increasingly think there’s an association between your vascular health and your cognitive health, especially as you age. And what do these GLP-1 drugs do? They help people lose weight. 

Losing weight helps to lower your blood pressure, lowers your risk of vascular problems, whether it’s heart disease or pulmonary disease or stroke or something like that. So if more and more people take these, they take them earlier in life, they lose weight, they keep it off, they don’t develop these heart or vascular problems, it does make some sense that that may also reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. 

It’s still sort of theoretical, but the Alzheimer’s Association is putting $100 million behind some research projects to investigate this possible link. We may learn five, 10 years from now, as millions of people are now on these GLP-1 drugs — maybe we start to see Alzheimer’s less often. And that would be another reason to be optimistic that the future for this disease is looking brighter.

How about reversing it? Is that still a pie in the sky?

It’s out of reach for now. Certainly some of the scientists that I’ve talked to have said, “In theory, it should be possible. Your brain is really resilient. It’s really good at rebuilding itself if you give it the chance.” It seems like it should be possible to stop the progression of the disease eventually, and maybe ultimately reverse it. 

Now, there has been some really intriguing, but also mysterious developments around reversing Alzheimer’s, not from scientists based out of the United States, but from scientists in China. People may or may not have seen that there have been videos of these patients who underwent an experimental surgery and the before and after of these videos is incredible.

In the before, you’ve got somebody who clearly has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize their loved ones, has trouble with their train of thought. In the after videos, it’s like they’re a completely different person. They recognize their loved ones, they’re talking articulately. And so that has, as you can imagine, generated a lot of excitement, also a fair bit of skepticism.

Are these videos real? Do we know?

We don’t know for sure if they’re real or not. What’s intriguing about this surgery is that the theory of it, at least to me as a lay person, makes some sense. 

The gist of this surgery is the surgeons create a drain in the patient’s brain and the drain is supposed to help the brain get rid of these amyloid and tau proteins that we think are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. On a hypothetical level, it makes some sense. And scientists in the United States and Europe and elsewhere have been intrigued enough about these videos and the findings that have been reported in academic journals to set up their own studies to try to replicate these findings. 

Now, it’s a crazy story because this scientist in China who pioneered this idea has actually been arrested by the Chinese government. And as I understand it, he’s currently in detention.

For what?!

The reporting I saw was these seem to be kind of flimsy charges of insurance fraud. The Chinese government has also tried to ban the surgery, at least outside of clinical trial settings. So that’s obviously complicated the story a little bit.

But nevertheless, you do have scientists in the US and outside of China who are like, “Well, we at least want to try this for ourselves and see if it works.”

It does feel like it’s something that could get people’s hopes up who have been waiting for this for decades.

Exactly. I mean, I think this is like the holy grail. Can we find a way, whether through surgery or through pharmaceuticals, to actually reverse these symptoms and restore the person to who they were before Alzheimer’s took over?

Because that’s the thing that I think everybody recognizes but is worth emphasizing, is, as one doctor put it to me, and I’ve never forgotten it, Alzheimer’s is a disease unlike any other because it robs you of your identity. 

To be able to restore people’s identity through whatever means, that is the goal that all of these scientists are chasing.

We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic: More than half of Americans say they feel isolated, and we’re getting together less and less. In 2023, only about 4 percent of adults said they went to a party on a weekend or holiday. 

According to Imogen Willetts, a party historian and author of the book Up All Night: A History of Going Out, this moment is an outlier. 

“For most of human history, the experiences that we associate with nightlife — drinking, dancing, music, hedonism — those experiences were simply part of religion because religion was so all-encompassing,” she told Vox.

If parties are so ingrained in humankind, then, what are we missing when we don’t get out the door on a Friday night anymore? And what lessons can we learn from the turnups of yore? We get into all of that and more — including how to throw a great party and how to be a good guest — on the latest episode Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Willetts, 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.

Can you talk about the role religion played in early nightlife? Because I think we often think of religion and partying as two separate things, but that was not the case for all of history, was it?

[Religion] contained people’s hedonistic instinct. There was nothing really outside of it. And so there’s even evidence, which I love thinking about this, that the churchgoing experience in medieval England was actually quite rowdy and quite raucous. 

On feast days there would be drinking, there would be dancing. And there’s one theory that wooden pews were introduced in Wells Cathedral in England to subdue the dancing because it was so raucous. And so in some sense, it takes us a while to get to nightlife because we sort of didn’t need it for a very long time. Religion contained hedonism quite comfortably within it.

Seventeenth-century Japan, I would say, is the beginning of modern nightlife because we have these commercial party scenes, nightlife environments, which have nothing to do with religion, 

“Whether it’s at a sports match or a concert stadium, and even within religion — that is collective effervescence.”

Crucially, they’re also separate from court. Another part of party scenes is court spectacle — think Louis XIV and Versailles and all of that stuff that was contained within these monarchical structures. So the first real nightlife destination is Yoshiwara, which was built on the outskirts of Edo, which is now Tokyo.

The idea of church being a place to party is so interesting. I do get the same feeling I get at church when I’m on the dance floor and I hear Kaytranada. I can imagine how these religious experiences allowed people to access that feeling of release through music and through dance.

An expression that I came across when researching the book that I think really wonderfully kind of captures the essence of nightlife and partying is this term coined by the sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912, which is “collective effervescence.” That’s the feeling that we experience during peak communal experiences. 

Whether it’s at a sports match or a concert stadium, and even within religion — that is collective effervescence. That is the same sensation, that surge of euphoria that people feel on dance floors. I think parties and nightlife are such an important way to access this very important human feeling, particularly in societies that are increasingly atheist or increasingly secular. 

We need nightlife to have these communal euphoric experiences and feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

You’ve written about how, yes, parties are fun, but they’re also at the epicenter of some pretty important cultural and societal shifts.

I think nightlife is very uniquely poised to allow for experimentation and innovation and transgression. Also, in a very practical way, if you’re part of the abstract expressionist scene of mid-century New York or something, you need somewhere to meet and talk to people and figure out how you’re going to sell your work that’s like nothing people have ever seen before. 

These social spaces play a really, really important role in culture. The abstract expressionist artists were hanging out in the Cedar Tavern, and then you have things like the Viennese Secession Movement and Cabaret Fledermaus was part of that meeting space.

Similarly, you get things like dance and music that’s very much created for dance floors, for clubbing, for nightlife: the can-can and then disco and then techno. Nightlife has been so crucial to the propulsion of culture.

A lot of this is happening in the club, but what about parties happening in private homes?

One of the great examples of people opening up their homes in a sense of turning the home into a club was turn-of-the-century New Orleans. On Saturday nights, people would host fish fries: Basically, when you would open up your home to the public, you would charge entry at the door. Once inside, people were treated to this amazing spread of food, drink, and there would be bands that would perform. It was often a way for households who were struggling with rent payments to earn some extra cash.

It happened again in Harlem in the 1920s. Langston Hughes writes about the Saturday night rent parties, where people’s apartments would be opened up in the exact same way. He said they were more interesting than anything that was going on in the cabarets and the clubs. He was going to those as often as he could and collecting the invitations for them. 

People would write their address on business cards, leave them in different shops and pubs and hairdressers or whatever, and then you would pick them up and then go to the party. Langston Hughes collected them, and they now are randomly in a Yale archive of all places.

As you think of parties over the centuries, are there elements that all the best parties have in common? 

At their very core essence, you need good music, you need good lighting, and I think also you need to create this atmosphere where the sense that anything can happen. What you want is for the people that are at your party to feel like they can behave differently or do something a little bit wild. 

I think that there’s something very satisfying in experiencing a domestic world upturned. I think seeing the kitchen become a gloomy cocktail bar, the living room becoming a dance floor — there’s something very satisfying in experiencing that.

It goes back to what the heart of nightlife culture or party culture is all about. We want to shed our daily lives. You want that sense of slight disorder that makes people feel alive.

In 2024, Donald Trump’s victory was powered in large part by massive gains with Latino voters. He won 48 percent of those voters that year, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. But now, that support is plummeting; Trump’s approval rating among Latinos who voted for him recently fell from 93 percent to 66 percent, where it was at the beginning of his second term.

Why? It has a lot to do, as with everything these days, with the economy. 

It was the same in 2024. During that election, voters were experiencing rising costs and stagnant wages — the same trend that has continued until today. In 2024, though, Joe Biden and his administration — which also meant Vice President Kamala Harris — took the blame from all voters, and particularly Latinos. Today, the blame is falling on Trump. 

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Stephanie Valencia, who co-founded Equis Research, a political research firm that specializes in Latino voters, to unpack some of these recent shifts and explain them. 

“I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup,” she said on the podcast. “And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more.” 

That’s why, when the economy is bad, this group is primed to be a “swinging giant” in US politics, Valencia explains — and right now, it appears to be swinging hard against Trump. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. 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.

Equis has called Latinos one of the last great wild cards in American politics. Is that because of some of the double-digit swings that we’ve seen among this voting group over the past few elections?

Yes, it absolutely has to do with that. Latinos often get given the title the “sleeping giant,” which I just want to get rid of from everybody’s vocabulary. 

We should be called the “swinging giant” based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical, and that swinging middle really is deciding every single election.

Your playbook gets into messengers and particularly how we reach folks where they are. It makes a Spanish-Spanglish distinction talking about the different types of media that Latino voters consume. 

I wanted to ask, in that vein, what’s the single biggest mistake campaigns make in terms of not reaching folks where they are?

Oh man, how long do we have so I can tell you how many mistakes? They’re really simple unforced errors. I’m going to give a very concrete and simple example that I think illustrates that. 

Look, I’m Latina. I grew up speaking mostly English, but I listen to Spanish-language radio. I watch a lot of YouTube, and on YouTube I’m watching people like Karol G and Carin León. A lot of people — a lot of Latino swing voters — have the same media consumption habits that I do.

The first problem or challenge that a lot of candidates make is they just simply translate their English ad into Spanish. And that is, to me, one of the biggest mistakes because there are a lot of things that people want to be communicating in Spanish that don’t translate word for word. There are sayings in Spanish that don’t translate directly from English or more direct ways you can communicate.

I’m sure it immediately reads Google Translate rather than an original message for said community.

Exactly. So that’s mistake No. 1. Mistake No. 2 is when they’re deploying that ad digitally, as a proxy for talking to people, they’re going to use Spanish-language browser settings. So they say, “We don’t want people who speak English to see the Spanish-language ad.”

So the way they find that set of voters is just by going to people who have Spanish-language browser settings. 

Like I said, I don’t have a Spanish-language browser setting. Everything I consume online is set in English on Chrome, but I still watch a lot of content in Spanish on YouTube.

So you’re missing a voter like me who’s going to see a Spanish language ad from a James Talarico or a Manny Rutinel and be turned on by it because I’m going to say, “Hey, that candidate’s speaking to our community. That candidate has enough respect to develop a Spanish-language ad.” 

We did some testing a couple of years ago that showed that over 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish think that party or candidate cares more about Latinos. It matters that much.

Let’s stay in 2024 for a second longer. Your research found that Project 2025 and Trump’s mass deportation plans were not top of mind for most people, and that they were thinking about the economy. I wanted to ask about that because I remember the RNC signs at the convention saying, “Mass deportations now.” One number says that 62 percent of Latinos now think that Trump wants to deport undocumented immigrants broadly. 

Why did it take till post-election to realize those threats of mass deportation were real considering they were so front and center during his campaign?

I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand the kind of news that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, is consuming.

What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on people or Trump surrogates who said he was going to focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals.

And so that’s what people bought. Fast-forward to 2026; the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. 

They were told he was going to focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was going to focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

And then add that to the litany of broken promises.

I’m hearing a distinction between a focus on the border, which Republicans did try to prioritize rather than the interior deportations that may have been more attributed to Stephen Miller than Donald Trump. But we have certainly seen that be a focus of the administration once they came back into office.

You mentioned the shift that has happened since 2024, and that’s really important, of course. Trump’s approval rating with Latinos is now worse than with non-Latinos, a stunning reversal in 18 months. 

You mentioned the factors that have contributed there, but is this really just the economy?

It’s the economy, it’s the war, and it’s immigration. It’s those three things. 

One thing that is really interesting to note about Trump’s approval, other than that it’s at basement levels — and he’s very much pulled down the GOP with him broadly and with Latino voters — is that in Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval on his total job.

And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.

Listen, you tell people you’re going to fix egg prices and gas is going to go down, and then you do the opposite, and we’re hearing that story universally across different electorate groups. 

You’re saying that’s still the main story when it comes to Latinos also?

Yes, it’s still the main story. I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup. What that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. 

We have less savings. We have lower rates of home ownership. So the safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have. 

That really has exacerbated the kind of impact that people are feeling right now as they’re trying to make ends meet.

You mentioned the exponential growth in the terms of people who now regret or are disappointed with their vote for Donald Trump. Does that mean a preference for Democrats? How should we think about the binary choice between D and R versus what is a clear story about a backlash to Donald Trump’s actions?

I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling about Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and promises broken that that is automatically going to translate for them as a party and as a brand.

Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. Twenty years of comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group. 

And part of what the build-up to 2024 was, was not only 20 years of a promise undelivered; it was the chaos at the border, it was feeling like Democrats were focused on everything but Latinos and their families, or everyday Americans and their families, and that they had lost that thread.

At the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, the documentary NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it’s all anyone’s talking about, even though few have actually seen it. 

Made by two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the movie takes place on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence agents and soldiers discuss things that they did in Gaza and how they did them.

As Bilge Ebiri writes in his Vulture review of NAZA, “One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll.”Another interviewee agrees that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Since its reception in Venice, the film has faced harsh criticism from the Israeli government — with at least one politician issuing a call to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. 

Shany Littman is a journalist for Haaretz in Israel and has been reporting on the film’s reception. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the conversation around the movie in 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.

Have you seen the documentary NAZA?

I haven’t. I asked the PR person of the movie to send me a link and it’s not possible. I mean, considering the huge storm that came out, they’re probably rethinking how to handle the distribution of the film.

What I hear you saying is it’s safe to assume most people in Israel have not actually been able to see the movie. Is that right?

Yes, that’s correct.

But they are aware of what is in it. Let’s talk about the conversation around this movie in Israel. What’s the reaction been like?

You can find many different types of criticism from all sides of a political range. It’s not only right-wing people or people who are supporting the war. The claims are first that maybe the film itself is not verified. They have witnesses that are anonymous that they didn’t verify well enough. But I think most people — they just feel that this is an opportunity for all the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and [antisemitic] people in the world to attack Israel. Israelis from all sides are afraid of the way the world is seeing us at the moment. 

Is anybody in Israel saying, “Hey, we’re glad that they did it. We’re glad that they made this movie”?

Yes. There are people who are supporting Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, supporting their right to criticize, to investigate. As a liberal country, we should be able to investigate ourselves, to criticize ourselves. They are doing their work as journalists. 

There has also been a reaction from the Israeli government at a more official level. What has the Israeli government said about this film?

“There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening.”

The first person to react was the minister of culture. He said that the nationality of Yuval and the filmmakers should be revoked. That they should not be Israeli citizens anymore. There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening. I’m completely horrified by this. 

I already saw some clips on social media by people who were filming themselves where…you could see a house [in the background] and someone was saying, “You can all come here. This is the house of Rachel Szor’s parents. They live here and you can come and do whatever you want. I invite you all to come here and take revenge.” And there were several clips with the same message. 

I’m guessing they’re not coming back to Israel at the moment. I think it has become really dangerous for them to be here, and it’s a new level. I published an article about this. I didn’t do the movie. I just published an article supporting them in Haaretz and my mother is afraid that someone will attack me. The echoes of this event, they’re going very far now.

Are you frightened for the filmmakers if they choose to return? Do you fear for their safety?

Yes, absolutely. Especially because the elections are coming in a month. Many Israelis see this day as like the red line or the moment where we will be able to know if we can still live in Israel as a democracy, as a liberal democracy, or that the country has changed in a way that many [civil] rights and liberties that we think we have are gone. And that this country is not a democracy anymore. And so I think this is also why the blood is boiling.

This is a very, very tense and fragile moment. And for them I assume it is even more crucial and I hope they will not do anything that will put them in danger.

Is AI going to kill us all? 

In Silicon Valley, it’s not such a novel question. But after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon quit his job last week and posted on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a lot more people are asking. 

“This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Coxon is far from alone in his assessment — some current Anthropic employees agree — but his post struck a particular chord. The AI industry quickly weighed in, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI research. Other AI leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have done the same.

To break down whether we really need to worry about a robot apocalypse, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Wired senior writer Maxwell Zeff. According to Zeff, “there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility.” But not everyone agrees, and they certainly don’t agree on what to do about it. 

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Zeff, 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.

Are we all going to die at the hands of AI?

There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility. 

The thing that people have to understand is that Silicon Valley has been calling for added attention on AI safety for years. So when this Anthropic researcher said last week that he was worried that AI could kill humanity in the next few years, that was shocking to many people. My parents, my family called me, and they were worried, understandably. They asked me the same question: “Are we going to die?” 

And I had to tell them, these people have been worried about AI killing all of us for years, and now it seems to be breaking through.

What was it about this statement from Jacob Coxon that broke through?

I interviewed Jacob, and the thing he said to me is that he thinks this is just the right time. Anthropic is about to go public in what could be the biggest IPO ever. The Trump administration is focused on AI in a way that no other presidency has ever been before. And of course, yes, the Hugging Face incident everyone just heard about, you talked about it on your show a few weeks ago. 

People are starting to become aware that these AI systems are getting really good, and the companies that are building them don’t seem to understand how to control them. His tweet got more than 150 million views on X. It was heard around the world. And it also was a big wake-up call to lawmakers and leaders in Silicon Valley and saying, “This is a moment for action.”

Are there people who are pushing back?

One of the most interesting pushbacks that this got was from David Sacks, who is an adviser to the Trump administration on AI. He has called out a lot of this as “doomerism” and said that these calls for AI to slow down are the AI industry warning about the technology that they’re building and advocating for regulatory capture. 

There’s a lot of skeptics in Silicon Valley who think that this is just another person in the AI safety community that is blowing the whistle. The view of a lot of venture capitalists and investors and startup founders in Silicon Valley is that we don’t need some big regulation to protect us from AI risks. We just need to uplift more players in the space.

The skeptics don’t win the day. In fact, it’s the doomers and the fatalists who do, right? Because Jacob’s call only leads to more calls right up to the top of Anthropic.

What this all leads to is [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei [posting] a blog saying that we need to “pace the frontier.” This is a call for the entire AI industry, not just Anthropic, not just OpenAI, but also Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, all the big tech companies in America, to get together and slow down their AI development. 

This doesn’t mean they’re going to stop building AI altogether. They’re still going to put their products out into the world. They’re still going to try to improve them, but they just want to make it a little slower than it would be if it was completely uncontained.

Amodei really asks for three specific things: 

• The first thing is, AI companies should have these independent evaluators inside of them. This is a common thing in other industries like the banking industry or the airline industry. People come in to make sure that these companies are doing safe things. 

• The second thing is this collaborative effort from American AI companies [on safety], and that actually will need to involve the US government to allow this to happen. The US government, he says, may need to issue some sort of waiver, some sort of law that says they can go ahead and coordinate on safety. 

• The third thing is this international slowdown, this international agreement between China and the US and Europe to say, “Hey, we recognize that this is akin to a nuclear arms race and it’s too dangerous for all of us to be competing with each other.”

All these guys are responsible for the rapid acceleration of AI models in our lives, collaborations with the Defense Department, God knows what else. And they’re all coming out over the weekend at the exact same time after this whistleblower and saying, “Yeah, dude, slow this thing down. This thing’s crazy.” Should we be skeptical?

It is very fair to be skeptical of this claim. One thing that these AI companies have realized in the last year is that AI is extremely unpopular. Recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans think AI is developing too fast. They’re worried about it. They think it’s going to take their jobs. They are not big fans. Maybe you’ve heard — data centers are not very popular. 

By calling to pace the frontier and saying, “We’re going to slow our own development down,” they notched this up as a public perception win. This is them getting out in front of this and saying, “Hey, we want to be safe. We want to be responsible.”

They’ve seen what’s happened with Meta and what’s happened with social media companies in the last two decades, and they are really cognizant of trying to get out in front of that.

Is there any truth to this major first collective freakout we seem to be having right now?

There’s a fairly large camp of people inside of AI companies who genuinely worry about the safety of these AI models. 

To go back to the Hugging Face incident, this was a case where OpenAI was training thousands of AI systems internally, and the systems escaped the sandbox that OpenAI thought was isolated from the internet and hacked into another company’s production infrastructure. The agents were colluding together on something. They were trying to deceive the humans that were testing them. And this was all happening without OpenAI knowing what was going on. 

It’s hard to understand how much of a wake-up call this is to Silicon Valley, that they don’t have their AI models under control. People worry that while in this case there was not a ton of economic damage [or] damage to real humans’ everyday lives, it’s not unreasonable to think that more capable AI systems could hack into financial infrastructure, modern-day utilities, and more critical services that are based online. 

Dario Amodei says as much in his post, that he thinks that in six to 12 months, an AI system could take down the whole internet. It’s not just that they’re trying to protect their bottom line here. But it’s possible that these calls for safety are beneficial to the companies in more ways than one.