In 1965, then-French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came up with the “mot juste” for describing the way that the supremacy of the dollar provided the foundation for the financial supremacy of the US. The fact the dollar was so dominant in international transactions gave the US, d’Estaing said, an “exorbitant privilege.” Because every country needed dollars to settle trade and backstop their own currencies, foreign countries had to buy up US debt, which in turn meant that the US paid less to borrow money and was able to run up trade and budget deficits without suffering the usual pain. The exorbitant privilege of the dollar was that the US would be able to live beyond its means. It’s always been an open question as to how long that privilege would last, but President Donald Trump’s harsh tariff policies, paired with a budget bill that right now would add trillions to the budget deficit, might just be enough to finally dislodge the dollar. Annual federal deficits are already running at 6 percent of GDP, while interest rates on 10-year US Treasuries have more than doubled to around 4.5 percent over the past few years, increasing the cost of interest payments on the debt. As of the last quarter of 2024, 58 percent of global reserves were in dollars, down from 71 percent in the first quarter of 1999. The dollar may remain king, if only because there seems to be no real alternative, but thanks to the US’ own actions, the exorbitance of its privilege is already eroding — and with it, America’s ability to compensate for its fiscal fecklessness.But the dollar isn’t the only privilege the US enjoys. Since the postwar era, America’s best universities have led the world. Harvard, Princeton, MIT, CalTech — these elite universities are the foundation of the American scientific supremacy that has in turn fueled decades of economic growth. But also, by virtue of their unparalleled ability to attract the best minds from around the world, these schools have given the US the educational privilege of being the magnet of global academic excellence. In the same way that the dollar’s dominance has allowed the US to live beyond its means, the dominance of elite universities has compensated for the fact that the US has, at best, a mediocre K-12 educational system. And now that privilege is under attack by the Trump administration. Cutting off federal funding for universities like Columbia and Princeton and eviscerating agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation were bad enough, but the administration’s recent move to bar international students from Harvard would be a death blow, especially if it spread to other top schools. And it seems entirely possible that it might. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the US would “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students and enhance future scrutiny on all applicants from China. (That includes applicants from Hong Kong — a once-free city that has come firmly under the boot of the Chinese government — who are precisely the kind of students a past America would have sought to defend.)The ability to attract the best of the best, especially in the sciences, is what makes Harvard Harvard, which in turn has helped make the United States the United States. Just as losing the privilege of the dollar would force the US to finally pay for years of fiscal mismanagement, losing the privilege of these top universities would force the country to pay for decades of educational failure. American science runs on foreign talentAs Vox contributor Kevin Carey wrote this week, foreign students are a major source of financial support for US colleges and universities, many of which would struggle to survive should those students disappear. But the financial picture actually understates just how much US science depends on foreign talent and, in turn, depends on top universities like Harvard to bring in top students and professors.An astounding 70 percent of grad students in the US in electrical engineering and 63 percent in computer science — probably the two disciplines most important to winning the future — are foreign-born. Nineteen percent of the overall STEM workforce in the US is foreign-born; focus just on the PhD-level workforce, and that number rises to 43 percent. Since 1901, just about half of all physics, chemistry, and medicine Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans, and about a third of those winners were foreign-born, a figure that has risen in recent decades. It’s really not too much to suggest that if all foreign scientists and science students were deported tomorrow, US science would grind to a halt.Could American-born students step into that gap? Absolutely not. That’s because as elite as America’s top universities are, the country’s K-12 education system has been anything but. Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is given to a representative sample of 15-year-old students in over 80 countries. It’s the best existing test for determining how a country’s students compare in mathematics, reading, and science to their international peers. In the most recent PISA tests, taken in 2022, US students scored below the average for OECD or developed countries in math; on reading and science, they were just slightly above average. And while a lot of attention has been rightly paid to learning loss since the pandemic — one report from fall 2024 estimated that the average US student is less than halfway to a full academic recovery — American students have lagged behind their international peers since long before then. Other wealthy nations, from East Asian countries to some small European ones, regularly outpace American peers in math by the equivalent of one full academic year.To be clear, this picture isn’t totally catastrophic. It’s fine — American students perform around the middle compared to their international peers. But just fine won’t make you the world’s undisputed scientific leader. And fine is a long way from what the US once was. America was a pioneer in universal education, and it did the same in college education through the postwar GI Bill, which opened up college education to the masses. By 1950, 34 percent of US adults aged 25 or older had completed high school or more, compared to 14 percent in the UK and 11 percent in France. When NASA engineers were putting people on the moon in the 1960s, the US had perhaps the world’s most educated workforce to draw from.Since then, much of the rest of the world has long since caught up with the US on educational attainment, and a number of countries have surpassed it. But thanks in large part to the privilege that is elite universities like Harvard or the University of California, and their ability to recruit the best, no country has caught up to the US in sheer scientific brainpower. Take away our foreign talent, however, and US science would look more like its K-12 performance — merely fine.Life after HarvardIt seems increasingly apparent that the Trump administration wants to make an example of Harvard, proving its own dominance by breaking a 388-year-old institution with strong ties to American power and influence. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the administration planned to cancel all remaining federal contracts with Harvard, while Trump himself mused on redirecting Harvard’s $3 billion in grants to trade schools. Grants and contracts are vital, but they can be restored, just as faith in the US dollar might be restored by a saner trade policy and a tighter budget. But if the Trump administration chooses to make the US fundamentally hostile to foreign students and scientific talent, there may be no coming back. Politico reported this week that the administration is weighing requiring all foreign students applying to study in the US to undergo social media vetting. With universities around the world now competing to make themselves alternatives to the US, what star student from Japan or South Korea or Finland would choose to put their future in the hands of the Trump administration, when they could go anywhere else they wanted?The US once achieved scientific leadership because it educated its own citizens better and longer than any other country. Those days are long past, but the US managed to keep its pole position, and all that came with it, because it supported and funded what were far and away the best universities in the world. That was our privilege, as much as the dollar was. And now we seem prepared to destroy both.Should that come to pass, we’ll see just how little is left.A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!Update, May 29, 9:50 AM ET: This story was originally published on May 28 and has been updated to include news of the Trump administration’s move to look to revoke visas of many students from China.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

The Trump administration’s recent decision to bar international students from attending Harvard University was less a policy decision than an act of war. The White House had hoped its opening salvo against the nation’s oldest university would yield the kind of immediate capitulation offered by Columbia University. When Harvard chose to fight back instead, Trump decided to hit the university where it hurts most. The administration’s actions are illegal and were immediately stayed by a federal judge. But that won’t prevent real harm to students and higher learning. While Harvard has a famously selective undergraduate college, most of the university’s students are in graduate or professional school, and more than a third of those older students arrive from other countries. Overall, more than a quarter of Harvard’s 25,000 students come from outside the United States, a percentage that has steadily grown over time. The proportion of Harvard’s international students has increased 38 percent since 2006. Even if the courts continue to block this move, it will be difficult for anyone to study there knowing they might be deported or imprisoned by a hostile regime — even if they’re the future queen of Belgium. And an exodus of international students will end up harming universities far beyond Harvard, as well as American research and innovation itself. The question looming over higher education is whether the international student ban is merely the next escalation of the Trump administration’s apocalyptic campaign against a handful of elite institutions (as seen by the administration’s announcement Tuesday that it would cancel its remaining federal contracts with Harvard) — or the beginning of a broader attempt to apply “America First” protectionist principles to one the nation’s most valuable and successful export goods: higher learning. The rapid growth of international college students in the 21st century represents exactly the kind of global cooperation the isolationists in the White House would love to destroy. International students helped buoy American universities after the Great RecessionIn recent decades, international enrollment has shaped, and in some places transformed, higher learning across the country. According to the State Department, the number of annual F-1 student visas issued to international students nearly tripled from 216,000 in 2003 to 644,000 in 2015. And while many nations sent more students to America during that time, the story of international college enrollment over the last two decades has been dominated by a single country: the People’s Republic of China. In 1997, roughly 12,000 F-1 visas were issued to Chinese students; this was only a third of the number issued to the two biggest student senders that year, South Korea and Japan. Chinese enrollment started to accelerate in the early aughts and then exploded: 114,000 by 2010; 190,000 in 2012; and a peak of 274,000 in 2015. The change was driven by profound social and economic shifts within China. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution essentially shut down university enrollment for a decade. When it ended in 1976, there was a huge backlog of college students who graduated in the 1980s into the economic liberalization of Deng Xiaoping. Many of them prospered and had children — often only one — who came of age in the early 2000s. Attending an American university was a status marker and an opportunity to become a global citizen. At the same time, many colleges were newly hungry for international enrollment. The Great Recession savaged college finances. State governments slashed funding for public universities while families had less money to pay tuition at private colleges. Public universities offer lower prices to state residents and private schools typically discount their sticker-price tuition by more than 50 percent through grants and scholarships. But those rules only apply to Americans. Recruiting so-called full-pay international students became a key strategy for shoring up the bottom line. Colleges weren’t always judicious in managing the influx of students from overseas. Purdue University enrolled so many Chinese students so quickly that in 2013 one of them noted that a main benefit of traveling 7,000 miles to West Lafayette, Indiana, was improving his language skills — by talking to students from other regions of China. That same year, an administrator at a second-tier private college in Philadelphia told me that the college tried to keep enrollment from any one country below a certain threshold “or else we’d have to build them a student center or something.” While federal law prohibits colleges from paying recruiters based on the number of students they sign up, this, too, only applies within American borders. International students sometimes pay middlemen large sums to help them navigate the huge and varied global college landscape. While many are legitimate, some are prone to falsehoods and fraud. At the same time, colleges also used the new influx of students to expand course offerings, build strong connections overseas, and diversify their academic communities. One of the great educational benefits of going to college is learning among people from different experiences and backgrounds. There has likely never been a better place to do that than an American college campus in the 21st century. The most talented international students helped drive American economic productivity and research supremacy to new heights. F-1 visas declined sharply in 2016, in part because of an administrative change that allowed Chinese students to receive five-year visas instead of reapplying every year. But the market itself was also shifting. The Chinese government invested enormous sums to build the capacity of its own national research universities, giving students better options to stay home. Geopolitical tensions were growing, and American voters chose to elect a rabidly xenophobic president in Donald Trump. Covid radically depressed international enrollment in 2020, but even after the recovery, Chinese F-1 visas in 2023 were only a third of the 2015 peak. Colleges managed by recruiting students from other countries to take their place. India crossed 100,000 student visa for the first time in 2022. At the turn of the century, fewer than 1,000 Vietnamese students studied in America. Today, Vietnam is our fourth-largest source of international students, more than Japan, Mexico, Germany, or Brazil. Enrollment from Ghana has quintupled in the last 10 years.A catastrophe for American science and innovationIf the Trump administration expands its scorched-earth student visa strategy beyond Harvard, it won’t just be the liberal enclaves and snooty college towns that suffer. Communities across the country will feel the hurt, urban and rural, in red states and blue. Some colleges might tip into bankruptcy. Others will make fewer hires and produce fewer graduates for local employers. Even before the visa ban, the government of Norway set aside money to lure away American scholars whose research has been devastated by deep Trump administration cuts to scientific research. Other countries are sure to follow. And if international students stop coming to the US, it will be a catastrophe for American leadership in science and technology. World-class research universities are magnets for global talent. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a worldwide center of medical breakthroughs because Harvard and its neighbor MIT attract some of the smartest people in the world, who often stay in the United States to found new companies and conduct research. The same dynamic drives technology innovation around Stanford and UC Berkeley in Silicon Valley, and in university towns nationwide. If you or a loved one benefited from a new cancer treatment, there’s a good chance the person who saved your life came to America on the kind of student visa the Trump administration is trying to destroy. Like printing the global reserve currency or having a good relationship with Canada, getting the pick of international students is one of those incredibly valuable things that Americans won’t fully appreciate until someone is stupid enough to throw it away. In 2021, JD Vance told a group of movement conservatives that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The administration has more than made good on his word, in part because the electorate is rapidly reorganizing around education attainment, with college graduates clustering in the Democratic party and nongraduates moving to the Republican side. Trump and his minions see elite colleges and universities as enemy fortresses in the culture wars, training grounds for the opposition that must be razed and broken.Modern colleges look like the future that MAGA forces most fear. Visitors to campus today see students from scores of global communities, speaking multiple languages and practicing different cultural traditions. Places where people from other countries are welcome, and no single race, nationality, or religion reigns supreme. People like JD Vance are so terrified by this vision that they would rather destroy America’s world-leading higher education system and terrorize hundreds of thousands of people who are in this country legally and only want to learn. See More:

The first observance of what came to be known as Memorial Day was on May 30, 1868, when a Civil War general called on Americans to commemorate the sacrifices of Union soldiers. It was initially called Decoration Day, for the practice of decorating graves with wreaths and flags. And there were so many graves — more than 300,000 men had died on the Union side, and nearly as many for the Confederacy. In total, more died on both sides of the Civil War than in every other US conflict through the Korean War, combined. It wasn’t long, though, before remembrance began to be overshadowed by celebration. Within a year, the New York Times opined the holiday would no longer be “sacred” if parades and speeches became more central than the act of memorializing the dead. Which is precisely what happened, especially after Congress in 1971 fixed Memorial Day as the last Monday in May, making it the perfect launchpad for summer, with an increasingly perfunctory nod to the holiday’s original purpose.The gap between those for whom Memorial Day is a moment of remembrance versus three days of hot dogs and hamburgers will likely only grow in the future, as veterans of previous wars pass away and the divide between America’s all-volunteer military and its civilians deepens. Fewer than 1 percent of the US adult population serves in the military, and those still signing up increasingly come from a small handful of regions and families with a history of military service. (You can include my own family in that ever rarer number: My brother is a retired Army captain who served in Iraq.)With ever-inflating military spending — now nearing $1 trillion, according to one estimate — the footprint of the US military is hardly shrinking, but the number of those who will potentially be called on to give what Abraham Lincoln called the “last full measure of devotion” is.Yet there’s a greater gap embedded in Memorial Day: It’s between those who died as warfighters (to use one of the Pentagon’s terms), and the far greater number around the world who have died not as war’s participants, but as its victims. When civilians die in warThe past is not just a foreign country to us, but a bloody one. From the interpersonal to the international, conflict was a constant throughout much of human history. Between 1500 and 1800, there was hardly a year when great powers weren’t enmeshed in some kind of war. Though war became somewhat less common as we entered the 1900s, it did not become less deadly. Far from it — while the death toll of war in the past was more chiefly concentrated among combatants, the 20th century saw the awful blossoming of total war, where little to no distinction was made between those fighting the war and the civilians on the sidelines, and new weapons enabled mass, indiscriminate killing.Go back to the Civil War, which sits at the junction between battle as it had long been practiced and the greater horror it would become. Over 600,000 soldiers were killed in the conflict, against at least 50,000 civilians, ranging from those killed directly to the many who died in the wake of war, from starvation and disease. That number was terrible, yet in the wars to come, it would only grow.In the First World War, a roughly equal number of combatants and civilians were killed globally — approximately 10 million on each side. In the Second World War, more combatants were killed than in any other conflict in human history, a toll nearing 15 million. Yet for every soldier, sailor, or airman who was killed, nearly one and a half civilians would die, totaling, by one count, almost 40 million. The last of the dead would come in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when as many as 210,000 people — nearly all of them Japanese civilians — died in the first and so far only atomic bombings. Not only were these new weapons capable of murdering at a vastly larger scale than ever before, but they existed chiefly to threaten the lives of noncombatants. Thankfully, given the weapons militaries now had at their disposal, World War II was the high mark for war deaths. In the decades that followed, deaths in battle for both combatants and civilians sharply declined, minus the occasional spike in conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Even with the recent resurgence of conflict, people around the world today are much less likely to die in war than their ancestors, which is one of the most undeniable — if tenuous — markers of our species’ under-appreciated progress.Yet even in this era of comparative peace, civilians still bear the brunt of war when it comes, including when it is fought by the United States. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, more civilians were likely directly killed in post-9/11 conflicts than fighters on either side — and when the number of indirect deaths from starvation and destruction are included, that gulf only widens. In Ukraine, at least 12,910 civilians have been killed in the war as of March 31, including nearly 700 children, while nearly 31,000 civilians have been injured. In a single large-scale Russian missile attack on April 24, at least nine civilians were killed and 90 were injured, including 12 children.In Gaza, accurately counting the civilian death toll has been all but impossible, but the most recent UN estimates put the number of dead children, women, and elderly people at north of 27,000, with thousands of dead bodies still unidentified. Even those civilians who have escaped death face the real risk of starvation, with Israel only now allowing trickled of aid in after a blockade that has lasted more than two months. And of course, Israel itself lost nearly 700 civilians in the October 7 attacks, while many noncombatants are still held hostage by Hamas and other militant groups.And the ongoing war in Sudan — which has received only a fraction of the global attention of Ukraine and Gaza — has led to horrifying levels of civilian death. Last year Tom Perriello, then the US envoy for Sudan, estimated that at least 150,000 people had died of war-related causes, while 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes.A new kind of Memorial DayThe US has its Memorial Day to honor fallen soldiers, while other countries have their Remembrance Day, their Victory Day. Yet there are only a handful of monuments to honor the countlessly greater number of civilians killed in war.It’s not hard to imagine why. As the shift in perception around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has shown — from unpatriotic atrocity to a celebrated work of national mourning — we can honor the sacrifice of service members who died in a war, even if we don’t believe in the war. But the death of those who died without a rifle in hand, who died in childhood and infancy, who died because they could not fight and could not be protected, shows war for what it ultimately is: a waste. And we can’t begin to know how to mark the unmarked.America has been a historical exception in many ways, but perhaps no more so than that its civilian citizens have largely escaped the scourge of war. (Though the same, of course, can hardly be said for its Indigenous populations, so long treated as enemy combatants in their own land.) Americans have fought and Americans have died, but at an ever-increasing remove, a distance that grows with each Memorial Day. The general decline of war is one of our great accomplishments as humans, something to be unequivocally celebrated. Perhaps we would feel that more if we gave the deaths of civilians the same honor as that of soldiers — a new kind of Memorial Day that can begin here. A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!Update, May 26, 2025, 8 am ET: This story was first published on May 31, 2023, has been updated to include new data on civilian deaths in Gaza, Israel, Sudan, and Ukraine.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Close your eyes and think of the word “summer.” What comes to mind?Is it long days at the beach, a drink in one hand and a book in the other, letting the sun fall on your face and the waves tickle your toes? Two weeks of vacation in some remote destination, piling up memories to keep yourself warm through the rest of the year? The endless freedom you remember in those July and August weeks of childhood, set loose from the confines of the classroom? Hot dogs and ice cream and roller coasters and ballgames? John Travolta’s falsetto at the end of “Summer Love”?Well, I have bad news for you, my friend. You are yet another victim of the summer industrial complex, that travel industry-concocted collection of lies designed to convince you that June, July, and August are the three best months of the year. The beach? That sun will literally kill you. Vacation? Just don’t look up how much plane tickets cost, and don’t even think of leaving the country with the way the dollar is dropping. Freedom? Unless you are an actual child, a schoolteacher, or an NBA player, you’re going to spend most of your time in summer working as hard as you do the rest of the year. Hot dogs are honestly the worst way to eat meat. Your ice cream is already ice soup. Roller coasters kill an average of four people per year (you can look it up). If you want to drink beer, you don’t need to sit through a baseball game while doing it. Grease is fine, but its success led to John Travolta one day being allowed to make Battlefield Earth, a film so bad that as of this writing, it has a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Summer is the triumph of hope over experience. Every Memorial Day weekend, we begin our summers full of expectation, sure that this will be the season we create the summer to remember. And every Labor Day weekend, we emerge, sweaty and mosquito-bitten, wondering what precisely happened over the past three months. Then next year we do it all over again, fruitlessly chasing that evanescent summer high — even though deep down inside, you know it’s probably going to be a disappointment, and secretly you’re counting the days until September. If you were able to control those hopes, you might be able to control that disappointment.But don’t you dare air those feelings out loud. When I suggested this essay to my fellow Vox editors, they reacted as though I were about to commit a war crime on paper. Doesn’t everyone love summer? Isn’t summer the best? How dare you look askance at the gift that is the three months when our hemisphere happens to be titled toward the rays of our life-giving sun? What kind of monster are you?As it turns out, I am precisely that kind of monster. So what follows is why this is our most overrated season — and unlike summer itself, which really is getting longer year by year, I’m going to be brief. It’s hotYou will not be surprised to learn that I don’t like the heat. Maybe it’s genes — my ancestors come from Ireland, a small, charming, rainy island where for most of the year, the sun is little more than a rumor. I realize this makes me unusual. The US county that has added the most people in recent years is Maricopa, Arizona, home to Phoenix. Phoenix has a lot of things going for it: relatively inexpensive housing, a fairly robust labor market, and a vibrant population of wild parrots, which is absolutely something I knew before researching this article.Phoenix also has sun — lots and lots of sun. Just look at what they named their NBA team. And with that sun comes unfathomable summer heat. Across the full 2024 calendar year, the city logged a record-breaking 70 days of temperatures over 110 degrees, obliterating the previous record of 55 days set in 2020. It also set a record for the most days straight with temperatures in the triple digits, with an unfathomable 113 days in a row.Yet every year, apparently tens of thousands of Americans take a look at those numbers and think, “Yes, please, I would like to see if they have any available lots left on the surface of the sun.” Look, I get it. The tremendous growth of the Sun Belt in recent decades is one big piece of evidence that, if given the choice, most Americans would rather boil than freeze. Or even be slightly cold. And sure, historically cold temperatures have had a bad habit of killing large numbers of human beings. No one in Game of Thrones was warning that “summer is coming.”But while it’s still true that extreme cold kills significantly more people globally than extreme heat by a large magnitude, heat is catching up. And there’s one thing you can count on with climate change: It will continue to get hotter. Summer — that season you love so much — is where we’re going to feel it. You may have heard the line: “This could be the coolest summer of the rest of your life”? It’s true! Just to take one example: A study found that by 2053, 107 million people in the US — 13 times as many as today — will be living in an extreme heat belt where they could experience heat indexes above 125 degrees. So sure, Americans like the heat just like they like summer, though I can’t help wondering if that has to do with the documented connection between extreme heat and cognitive impairment. (Summer! It makes you dumber!) But I doubt you will like it when your body is no longer able to cool itself through sweating and you begin suffering multiple organ failures. It’s boringLet’s flip through the major events of autumn. You have your Halloween — everyone loves candy. Thanksgiving — by far the best American holiday, even if we have all collectively decided to eat a bird we wouldn’t otherwise touch the rest of the year. Christmas and Hanukkah — presents and several days off.Spring has Easter, a festival of renewal and chocolate. Winter has…okay, to be clear, this is an argument against summer, not a defense of winter. Summer has Memorial Day (cookouts, beaches); Fourth of July (cookouts, beaches, and ooh, a chance to blow off my finger with fireworks); and then two utterly endless months before Labor Day, where we also have cookouts and beaches. And in between, there are just…days.This is the secret problem with summer. After school has let out and Independence Day has passed, we enter a tepid sea of indistinguishable days, with little to no events to break them up. July 12? July 27? August 13? I challenge you to tell the difference. Time becomes a desert that stretches out to every horizon, without even the false hope of a mirage to break it up. The Catholic Church, which I grew up in, calls the entirety of summer “Ordinary Time” in its liturgical calendar, which always seemed fitting to me. Nothing special, nothing to wait for — just all the Ordinary Time you can take.And while the calendar is no help, there’s also what I call the collective action problem of summer. Everything slows down and even shuts down, either because people go off on vacation or because they haven’t but almost everyone else has so what’s the point of doing anything. All the big cultural events — the books, the (actually good) movies, most of the good TV — won’t arrive until the fall. (Except The Bear. The Bear is great.) The sports landscape is as barren as your office, and this summer we don’t even have the Olympics.I’m sure someone will tell me I’m missing the point of summer, when the very formlessness of the days reminds us to slow down and appreciate these moments out of time. Sure, great, whatever. Personally, I can either be hot or I can be bored — not both.It has AugustTechnically this should be a subcategory of the previous section, but even Auxo, the Greek goddess of summer, would get impatient with August. Why does it have 31 days? Who voted for that? August is the worst parts of summer concentrated and then wrung out over the course of more than four sweaty, sticky weeks. I am positive that I have experienced August days where time begins to move backward.Slate had it right back in 2008: Let’s get rid of August. We’ve gone to the moon, we’ve mastered the genome, we’ve somehow made Glen Powell a movie star. If we can do all that, we can remove one measly month from the calendar. Or we could, except that August is the month when all motivation goes to die.It has vacations…in AugustI’ve got a great idea. Let’s have most of the country all go on vacation during the same few weeks. And then let’s ensure that those few weeks are set during one of the hottest, muggiest months of the year. What could go wrong (other than ridiculous travel costs, heat stroke amid the capitals of Europe, and the better-than-average chance of getting hit by a tropical storm)?It has FOMOIt’s probably not true that everyone is having more fun than you this summer, all evidence on social media notwithstanding. But it will feel that way.It’s become a verbLet me give you one last piece of advice. If you encounter someone who uses the term “summering” in a sentence, get far, far away. You are dangerously close to getting into a conversation about the best way to clean linen pants.I realize I’m not going to change a lot of minds here. There’s something deep in our biological clocks that can’t seem to help but welcome the days when the sun stays up past 8 pm and the air temperature reaches equilibrium with our bodies. Add that to the enforced summer love that comes from all the industries that capitalize on this seasonal affliction. We summer haters are few and rarely invited to parties, but at least we see the truth. The truth is that you might actually enjoy your summer more if you lower your expectations. It’s not the summer of your life — it’s just three months in the middle of the year. And please, put on some sunscreen. That big thing in the sky really is trying to kill you. Update, May 26, 9 am ET: This story was originally published on July 8, 2024, and has been updated with new data on heat waves in Phoenix.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Every generation has a small group of young fiction writers who make it: They top bestseller lists, win prizes, and become household names. And for decades — well, nearly every decade — they have all been straight white men. Philip Roth. Norman Mailer. John Updike. Jonathan Franzen. Jonathan Safran Foer. You get the picture. But in the last decade or so, that’s changed: The up-and-coming writers capturing buzz and dominating critics’ lists have largely been women. Think Sally Rooney or Emma Cline or Ottessa Moshfegh. And when men do break through, they usually aren’t young, straight, or white. It’s worth pointing out that, while women now publish more books than men, men are still publishing more books now than they ever have before.But the (relative) decline of the men in letters has led to searching discussions, first murmured, but now increasingly debated in places like the New York Times and the Guardian: Why does the decline of the young, white, male writer matter? And what do we lose — if anything — with this shift?“We’ve seen a lot of great work being done to account for perspectives that were left out of literature for a long time,” Ross Barkan, a journalist and novelist, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “But I also think it’s important to know, for better and for worse, what the men of the 2020s are up to.”Barkan and King talked about how he feels young men have been shut out of literary fiction, what he thinks is lost, and his experience trying to get fiction published. His third novel, Glass Century, was released earlier this month.Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Make sure to listen to hear the whole thing wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We are talking to you today because you wrote an essay not long ago called “From Misogyny to No Man’s Land: The Vanishing Male in Contemporary Literature.” What’s your argument in that essay, Ross?My argument in that essay is that among young literary writers today, there is a lack of men. This doesn’t mean there are no male novelists of prominence under the age of 40 — that’s the cutoff I use for young — but there are fewer of them than there were historically. And most of the prominent literary fiction writers today are women. I’m talking about a very specific type of fiction that is vying for awards or trying to vie for awards, trying to attain a certain level of prestige.You’re 35, and you’re a white man? Correct. I wonder about the kind of driving force for this essay and whether you are the vanishing male writer of which you wrote.I think so, yeah, I think there’s less of me for sure. I mean, there’d be an era where there were a lot of novelists like myself, Jewish or not Jewish, but certainly white men.I am inclined to find your argument very compelling. I was a teenager in the ’90s, a young adult in the 2000s. That’s when you read a lot of fiction, right? And I do remember David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer…Yeah.…Jonathan Franzen. Jonathan Lethem! And so what you’re saying actually really does track to me. The question I wonder about is the why. And let me ask you first to answer the why from your personal perspective. You’re a novelist. You’re 35 years old. You’re a straight white guy — do you feel like those identities are holding you back in some way?Not in the real world. In the real world, I have enormous privilege. But in the 2010s, the literary world was less interested in straight men. I think you have a general lack of the heterosexual male perspective in newer fiction. There’s a long history of writers portraying toxic masculinity and rough male characters — and it feels like you see less of that today. I also think at the same time, young male writers, white and non-white, were taking less of an interest in fiction. It’s a chicken-and-egg challenge: Is it the publishing industry deciding this is no longer something we’re going to push or take a real interest in, or is it market forces as well?So some of it is internal — maybe there are fewer men who want to be great novelists, but maybe publishers are saying, “Hey, we’re just less interested in the perspectives of straight white men.” When you approached publishers with your novel Glass Century, did you hear that?I think you hear it behind the scenes. You’re never told to your face. I’m not complaining — I don’t consider myself a victim. I’ve had a successful career. I’m very happy with it. But what do you hear behind the scenes?To echo Joyce Carol Oates in a sort of notorious but not wrong tweet from several years ago — and I’m paraphrasing — agents and editors, at least in the 2010s and early 2020s, were just less interested in straight male fiction. I want to broaden it a little bit because you see even among Black, Hispanic, and Asian straight men — there are some, but [they’re] less common. And, certainly, the white male is now even less common, so I think publishers in general in that era were trying to diversify, which was fine. You had social justice politics, you had what they call “woke,” and in a way woke worked because it broadened things out and brought in new voices, but it is also zero sum. Some come up; some go out. And so for me, it’s observing that trend. What do you think we lose when we lose the perspective of those young white men?It’s a large part of the country. I think you have a lot going on with young men today. White and non-white alike, straight men — they are falling behind academically. They’re increasingly alienated. They’re increasingly angry. They are increasingly online. And fiction, in my view, is not grappling with all of that.I agree with you, but I did actually see that in one book in the last year, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. There were characters who were highly online. The most acclaimed story was about an incel. That book was incredibly powerful. And it got praise, right? What do you think about that?He’s a fantastic writer. I’ll start there. He’s a great prose stylist. There’s a short story I love about a young Asian man who is having these very lurid sexual fantasies about dominating other men. Fantastically written — he’s sort of the Roth of our era in terms of his ability to make a sentence really sizzle. But this is the caveat that people seem to be afraid to point out: It’s not a straight male fantasy. Could Tony have written a straight male fantasy of wanting to subdue a woman the way that character wants to subdue men? Tony himself is straight. It was an interesting choice there to inhabit a gay character. Nothing wrong with that. Writers should write about whatever sexuality. I don’t believe in limiting anyone in that way. But I thought it was a choice, right? Because straight male lust is very disconcerting. It’s not easy to write about. What do men think about? The modern novel is not addressing that enough. The nasty, nasty men. The men who are not — maybe they’re good at heart, but they have a lot of bad thoughts. And they take bad actions. You don’t see that much in fiction today, I would argue.Let me ask you about an argument that I think many people might have in response to what you’ve said, including many women. If you look at the stats going back to the year 1800, women made up about 5 percent of published authors. It’s 10 percent through about the 1900s, and then in 2015, women surpassed men — more women are publishing books than men. Although both genders are still publishing a lot of books, it should be said.Are you at all sympathetic to the argument that you guys had your turn for centuries, the attention, the prizes, the accolades, so we’re just leveling the playing field out?Yeah, I’m sympathetic, for sure. I think that it’s reasonable to believe that — that’s an honest argument. The problem is you’ll hear from people who say this isn’t happening, and I find that very tiring. I think the honest thing to say is that it’s time to rebalance the scales or turn the tables. But there are winners and losers, right? Women were losing; now men are losing. I will say, there’s no solace offered to the 26-year-old male who must pay for the sins of the past, right? The young male writer can’t sit at home and think, Well, golly, it was good Norman Mailer and John Updike had such a great run. So yes, I think one can rebalance, one can seek balance, one can ensure that groups of people who are discriminated against have their time as they should. My point merely is that you can’t then pretend there aren’t those who aren’t getting what they want.See More:

Botox injections used to be a secret for (largely) women in their 40s and 50s. But growing numbers of (largely) women in their 20s and 30s are turning to “baby Botox,” or smaller doses that are intended to prevent aging rather than combat it.Baby Botox is just one intervention that doctors say younger people now frequently seek, and some view the trend with concern. Dr. Michelle Hure, a physician specializing in dermatology and dermatopathology, says younger patients aren’t considering the cost of procedures that require lifetime maintenance, and are expressing dissatisfaction with their looks to a degree that borders on the absurd.Hure traces the demand for “baby Botox” and other procedures to the start of the pandemic.“Everyone was basically chronically online,” she told Vox. “They were on Zoom, they were looking at themselves, and there was the rise of of TikTok and the filters and people were really seeing these perceived flaws that either aren’t there or are so minimal and just normal anatomy. And they have really made it front and center where it affects them. It affects their daily life and I really feel that it has become more of a pathological thing.”Hure spoke to Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the rise of “baby Botox” and her concerns with the cosmetic dermatology industry. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You told us about a patient that you saw yesterday, and you said you probably wouldn’t keep her on because her mentality really worried you. Would you tell me about that young woman?I had this patient who was mid-20s, and really a beautiful girl. I [didn’t] see a lot of signs of aging on her face, but she was coming in for Botox. There wasn’t a lot for me to treat. And at the end of the session she was asking me, “So what do you think about my nasolabial folds?”Basically, it’s the fold that goes from the corner of your nose down to the corner of your mouth. It’s the barrier between the upper lip and your cheek, and when you smile it kind of folds. Of course, the more you age, the more of the line will be left behind when you’re not smiling. And she was pointing to her cheek as if there was something there, but there was nothing there. And so I had to tell her, “Well, I don’t see that, you’re perfect.” It’s a phantom nasolabial fold. It didn’t exist.That sort of mentality where someone is perceiving a flaw that is absolutely not there — providers need to say no. Unfortunately, they’re incentivized not to. Especially if you have a cosmetic office, if you’re a med spa, if you have a cosmetic derm or plastic surgery office, of course you’re incentivized to do what the patient wants. Well, I’m not going to do that. That’s not what I do.That means you may get paid for seeing her in that visit, but you’re not getting paid for putting filler in her face. I think what I hear you saying is other doctors would have done that.Absolutely. One hundred percent. I know this for a fact because many times those patients will come to my office to get that filler dissolved because they don’t like it. In the larger practices or practices that are private equity-owned, which is a huge problem in medicine, you are absolutely meant to sell as many products, as many procedures as possible. Oftentimes I was told to sell as much filler as possible, because every syringe is several hundred dollars. And then if they’re there, talk them into a laser. Talk them into this, talk them into that. Then you become a salesman. For my skin check patients, I’m looking for skin cancer. I’m counseling them on how to take care of their skin. I was told, “Don’t talk to them about using sunscreen, because we want them to get skin cancer and come back.”I was pulled out of the room by my boss and reprimanded for explaining why it’s so important to use sunscreen. And so this is why I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to start my own office and be on my own. I can’t do that. That goes against everything that I believe in, in my oath. Because there is potential harm on many different levels for cosmetic procedures.What are the risks to giving someone a cosmetic procedure that they don’t really need?This is a medical procedure. There is always risk for any type of intervention, right? What gets me is, like, Nordstrom is talking about having injections in their stores. This is ridiculous! This is a medical procedure. You can get infection, you can get vascular occlusion that can lead to death of the tissue overlying where you inject. It can lead to blindness. This is a big deal. It’s fairly safe if you know what you’re doing. But not everyone knows what they’re doing and knows how to handle the complications that can come about. Honestly, I feel like the psychological aspect of it is a big problem. At some point you become dependent, almost, on these procedures to either feel happy or feel good about yourself. And at what point is it not going to be enough? One of my colleagues actually coined this term. It’s called perception drift. At some point, you will do these little, little, incremental tweaks until you look like a different person. And you might look very abnormal. So even if someone comes to me for something that is legitimate, it’s still: Once you start, it’s going to be hard for you to stop. If you’re barely able to scrimp together enough to pay for that one thing, and you have it done, great. What about all the rest of your life that you’re going to want to do something? Are you going to be able to manage it?I wonder how all of this makes you think about your profession. Most people get into medicine, it has always been my assumption, to be helpful. And you’ve laid out a world in which procedures are being done that are not only not helpful, they could be dangerous. And you don’t seem to like it very much.This is why it is a smaller and smaller percentage of what I do in my office. I love cosmetics to an extent, right? I love to make people love how they look. But when you start using cosmetics as a tool to make them feel better about themselves in a major way, it’s a slippery slope. It should be more of a targeted thing, not making you look like an entirely different person because society has told you you can’t age. It’s really disturbing to me.See More:

Late last month, some 14,000 baby chicks in Pennsylvania were shipped from a hatchery — commercial operations that breed chickens, incubate their eggs, and sell day-old chicks — to small farms across the country. But they didn’t get far. They were reportedly abandoned in a US Postal Service truck in Delaware for three-and-a-half days without water, food, or temperature control.By the time officials arrived at the postal facility, 4,000 baby birds were already dead. The thousands of survivors — mostly chickens, but also some turkeys and quails — were taken to Delaware’s First State Animal Center and SPCA, which worked tirelessly to find homes to take in the animals as pets.The incident has received extensive national news coverage, and it highlights an often hidden aspect of America’s network of small poultry farms and backyard chicken operations: the shipping of millions of live baby animals in the mail to be raised for eggs or meat.Most chicks survive their journey through the mail, but many don’t. In 2020, 4,800 chicks shipped to farmers in Maine perished due to postal service delays, while in 2022, almost 4,000 chicks destined for the Bahamas died on the tarmac at Miami International Airport from heat exposure. There are plenty of other stories of chicks dying in the mail, and backyard chicken enthusiasts say it’s not uncommon for a few birds out of every 50 or so that they order from hatcheries to die in the mail or shortly after arriving. Mass-casualty mail-order events are rare, but when they happen, they tend to receive news attention. It’s a weird-sounding story with aggrieved customers and sometimes, a hopeful outcome, like the thousands of rescued birds in Delaware. But many more farmed animals die in transportation than most of us realize. That’s because these animals — whether raised by backyard poultry enthusiasts or major meat-producing conglomerates — are commodities, and their deaths merely a margin of error baked into the economics of the annual hatching, raising, and slaughtering of billions of chickens for food. What happens between the factory farm and the slaughterhouseAnimals raised for food are often transported numerous times throughout their lives, and they’re typically treated like cargo rather than living, feeling animals. Sometimes, it’s boxes of day-old chicks shipped through the USPS from a small hatchery to a small farm. But more often, it’s truckloads of fattened-up chickens or pigs moved from a factory farm to a massive slaughterhouse.More than 9 billion chickens raised for meat annually in the US are kept on factory farms — long, windowless buildings that look more like industrial warehouses than farms. The birds have been bred to grow enormous, which causes a number of health problems, and in these overcrowded facilities, disease spreads quickly. The conditions are so awful that up to 6 percent die before they can even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That’s over half a billion animals each year.Once the survivors reach about 6.5 pounds, they’re quickly and tightly packed into crates. Those crates are then stacked one atop another onto a truck bound for the slaughterhouse. They’re still babies, at just 47 days old, but 6.5 pounds is their average “market weight.”Chickens packed into crates bound for the slaughterhouse. Jo-Anne McArthur/We AnimalsMost chicken farms are located close to a slaughterhouse, so the trip isn’t too long — often 60 miles or less, according to the National Chicken Council. But “even if it is a short journey, the weather and the stocking density has a huge effect on mortality,” Adrienne Craig, an attorney at the Animal Welfare Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for more humane conditions in animal transport, told me. “They could be transported for 45 minutes and if it’s 110 degrees,” a lot of chickens could die. They can also become stressed and physically aggressive toward one another when packed so tightly. The US poultry industry doesn’t publish statistics on how many animals die in transport — what they call “DOAs” (dead on arrival). In the early 2000s, according to the data analytics firm Agri Stats, Inc., the DOA rate was around 0.36 percent. Assuming this hasn’t changed much (a reasonable assumption, as it’s not so different from DOA rates in many European countries), around 33.8 million chickens in the US died in transport in 2024, or 92,602 every day. (The National Chicken Council didn’t immediately respond to a request for industry DOA figures.)To put that into context, around 33 million cattle are slaughtered for beef each year in the US. In a 2023 report, the Animal Welfare Institute published a report that details a number of mass-death events in chicken transport. Here are just a few:In 2018, 34,050 chickens died in transport to a Pilgrim’s Pride slaughterhouse from severe cold and wind. (Pilgrim’s Pride happened to be the top donor to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.)In 2020, more than 9,000 birds raised for Butterfield Foods died after being held overnight in unheated transport trailers when the temperature fell to minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit.In 2022, a transport truck carrying birds for Lincoln Premium Poultry — Costco’s in-house chicken production company — caught fire and 1,000 birds were burned alive, while an additional 1,500 were injured and euthanized.The DOA rate is even higher for pigs, with about a million every year either dead on arrival at the slaughterhouse, unable to move or keep up with other pigs after unloading, or in such a terrible state that they must be euthanized on arrival. Blood is seen on a truck bringing pigs to the Farmer John slaughterhouse in Vernon, California. David McNew/Getty ImagesAnimal rights activists give water to pigs arriving by truck to the Farmer John slaughterhouse in Vernon, California. David McNew/Getty ImagesSimilar to poultry birds, pigs and cattle are subject to extreme temperatures, but they’re often transported much further distances. And a typical beef or dairy cow is shipped multiple times to different farms, and often across state lines — not just the trip from the farm to the slaughterhouse. These long distances mean the animals are living in one another’s urine and feces while on the truck, and, according to Craig, they can experience bruising when jostled around as truckers navigate curves and bumpy roads.Animals have no federal protections in transportation trips under 28 hours, and the federal Twenty-Eight Hour Law, intended to reduce their suffering on those longer journeys, is poorly — and rarely — enforced. The law also excludes poultry birds — the vast majority of animals raised for meat. The average consumer, if they think about farm animal suffering at all, may only think about it in the context of factory farms or slaughterhouses. But the factory farm production chain is incredibly complex, and at each step, animals have little to no protections. That leads to tens of millions of animals dying painful deaths each year in transport alone, and virtually no companies are ever held accountable. These deaths are just as tragic as the thousands who died in the recent USPS incident, and they are just as preventable. The meat industry could choose to pack fewer animals into each truck, require heating and cooling during transport, and give animals ample time for rest, water, and food on long journeys. But such modest measures would cut into their margins, and if there’s one thing that should be understood about almost every major US meat company, it’s this: They will always cut corners on animal welfare to increase profit unless they’re legally required to change. You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

The astounding drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s and extended through the mid-2010s is one of the most important — and most underappreciated — good news stories of recent memory. That made its reversal during the pandemic so worrying.In the first full year of the pandemic, the FBI tallied 22,134 murders nationwide, up from 16,669 in 2019 — an increase of roughly 34 percent, the sharpest one-year rise in modern crime record-keeping. In 2021, Philadelphia alone recorded a record 562 homicides, while Baltimore experienced a near-record 337 murders. Between 2019 and 2020, the average number of weekly emergency department visits for gunshots increased by 37 percent, and largely stayed high through the following year. By the 2024 election, for the first time in awhile, violent crime was a major political issue in the US. A Pew survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans believed crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress, up from 47 percent in 2021. And yet even as the presidential campaign was unfolding, the violent crime spike of the pandemic had already subsided — and crime rates have kept dropping. The FBI’s 2023 crime report found that murder was down nearly 12 percent year over year, and in 2024 it kept falling to roughly 16,700 murders, on par with pre-pandemic levels. The early numbers for 2025 are so promising that Jeff Asher, one of the best independent analysts on crime, recently asked in a piece whether this year could have the lowest murder rate in US history.All of which raises two questions: What’s driving a decrease in crime every bit as sharp as the pandemic-era increase? And why do so many of us find it so hard to believe?The crime wave crashesWe shouldn’t jump to conclusions about this year’s crime rates based on the early data, especially since we’re just now beginning the summer, when violent crime almost always rises. Crime data in the US is also patchy and slow — I can tell you how many soybeans the US raised in March, but I can’t tell you how many people have been murdered in the US this year. But what we can tell looks very good. The Real-Time Crime Index, an academic project that collects crime data from more than 380 police agencies covering nearly 100 million people, estimates there were 1,488 murders in the US this year through March, compared to an estimated 1,899 over the same months last year. That’s a decrease of nearly 22 percent. Violent crime overall is down by about 11 percent. Motor vehicle theft, which became an epidemic during the pandemic, is down by over 26 percent. Peer down to the local level, and the picture just keeps getting better. In Baltimore, which The Wire made synonymous with violent, drug-related crime, homicides fell to 199 last year, its best showing in over a decade. As of early May, the city had 45 murders, down another third from the same period last year. City emergency rooms that were once full of gunshot victims have gone quiet.How much lower could it go nationally? The record low homicide rate, at least since national records started being kept in 1960, is 4.45 per 100,000 in 2014. So far this year, according to Asher, murder is down in 25 of the 30 cities that reported the most murders in 2023. Asher argues that if the numbers hold, “a 10 percent or more decline in murder nationally in 2025 would roughly tie 2014 for the lowest murder rate ever recorded.”What’s behind the drop?In short: The pandemic led to a huge increase in violent crime, and as the pandemic waned, so did the wave.The closure of schools during the pandemic, especially in already higher-crime cities in the Northeast, meant far more young men — who are statistically more likely to be either perpetrators of violent crime or victims of it — on the streets. The closure of social services left fewer resources for them to draw on; and the sheer stress of a once-in-a-lifetime health catastrophe set everyone on edge. The murder of George Floyd in spring 2020 led to a collapse in community trust in policing, which in turn seemed to lead to less aggressive policing altogether. As the pandemic eased, though, those buffers came back, providing a natural brake on violent crime.But the government, from the national level down to cities, also took direct actions to stem the flood of violence. The White House under President Joe Biden poured hundreds of millions of dollars into community violence interruption programs, which aim to break the cycle of retribution that can lead to homicide. Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy has brought together community groups and law enforcement to deter the people considered most likely to get involved in gun violence. And the erosion in police forces nationwide that occurred during the pandemic has largely stopped. The situation is far from perfect. Even though Floyd’s murder triggered a nationwide reckoning around police violence, recent data shows that police killings kept increasing, in part because fear of crime often stopped momentum around reforms. Here in New York, even as overall crime on the subways has fallen to historical lows, felony assaults on the trains have kept rising, fueling fears of lawlessness. Why can’t we believe it?As Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer, the next few months will tell whether the pandemic was truly just a blip in the long-term reduction in violent crime. But what we can say is most people don’t seem to notice the positive trends. An October 2024 poll by Gallup found that 64 percent of Americans believed there was more crime nationwide than the year before, even though by that time in 2024, the post-pandemic crime drop was well under way. But such results aren’t surprising. One of the most reliable results in polling is that if you ask Americans whether crime is rising, they’ll say yes. Astonishingly, in 23 of 27 national surveys done by Gallup since 1993, Americans reported that they thought crime nationwide was rising — even though most of those surveys were done during the long crime decline. Crime is one of the best examples we have of bad news bias. By definition, a murder is an outlier event that grabs our attention, inevitably leading the nightly local news. Sometimes, as during the pandemic, that bias can match reality. But if we fail to adjust to what is actually happening around us — not just what we think is happening — it won’t just make us think our cities are more dangerous than they really are. It’ll sap energy for the reforms that can really make a difference. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration opened a new front in its war against Harvard this week, attempting to block all international students from attending the university — and swiftly getting slapped down by a federal judge.What did the Trump administration do? On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, alleging that the university is “perpetuating an unsafe campus environment” and “employs racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies.” The move put Harvard’s nearly 7,000 international students at risk of losing their visas.What’s the latest? Harvard swiftly sued the administration, and a federal judge this morning issued a temporary restraining order, which means the university will be allowed to continue admitting foreign students, who make up more than a quarter of its student body. What else has the administration done to attack Harvard? Trump has attempted to seize control of Harvard’s curriculum and admissions policy, and slashed nearly $4 billion in federal grants; the New York Times has tracked at least eight separate investigations by six federal agencies targeting the school, and Trump has floated revoking the university’s tax-exempt status.Why is the Trump administration going after Harvard? The Trump administration has accused Harvard and other elite universities of perpetuating antisemitism on campus, but its attacks have quickly grown in scope. As my colleague Andrew Prokop has reported, Trump’s particular focus on universities is part of a broader ideological campaign to break what the right perceives as liberal institutions. But Harvard has pushed back — in addition to Friday’s lawsuit, it sued the administration last month over funding cuts.What’s next? Harvard’s international students are protected for now, and its lawsuits against the Trump administration will work their way through the court system. But Trump’s latest salvo is a reminder that the administration’s efforts to go after its perceived enemies show little sign of abating.And with that, it’s time to log off…University of Maryland graduates attended their “Kermencement” ceremony on Thursday — like a normal graduation, but with Kermit the Frog as the commencement speaker (his creator, Jim Henson, was a UMD graduate). Kermit urged students to stay connected to their friends and loved ones, and to their dreams, “no matter how big” — good advice for us all. Thanks for reading, have a great long weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday! You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

During a severe heat wave in 2023, scientists scuba diving off the coast of Papua New Guinea captured clownfish to measure their bodies. Between February and August, they calculated the length of 134 of these iconic, orange and white fish once a month, taking a total of six measurements for each fish.Those measurements revealed something peculiar: Most of the fish shrank.This week, the researchers reported their findings in Science Advances, concluding that the fish got shorter — on the scale of a few millimeters, or a small, single-digit percent of their length — in response to the heat wave.Morgan Bennett-Smith“We were so surprised to see shrinking in these fish that, to be sure, we measured each fish individual repeatedly over a period of five months,” said Melissa Versteeg, a doctoral researcher at Newcastle University, who led the study in collaboration with Mahonia Na Dari, an environmental organization, and Walindi Resort. “In the end, we discovered [that downsizing] was very common in this population.”Versteeg and her colleagues don’t know how, exactly, the fish are shrinking — one untested idea is that the fish might be reabsorbing some of their bone material or tissue. But getting smaller isn’t a problem. In fact, the study found, it may be an adaptation to help clownfish survive hotter ocean temperatures.Morgan Bennett-SmithWhen it’s good to be smallLast year, the planet was about 2.65 degrees warmer than it was in the late 1800s. This level of warming impacts wild animals in a number of strange, mostly bad, ways, from fueling koala-killing wildfires to causing corals to bleach and then starve.But rising temperatures also appear to be making many species smaller. One especially striking study, published in 2019, found that birds shrank by an average of about 2.6 percent between 1978 and 2016. More recent analyses have linked rising temperatures to a reduction in body size of small mammals in North America and marine fish. Most of these existing studies report that animals, on average, are simply not growing as large.The new study on clownfish, however, suggests individual fish are shrinking over mere weeks in response to a heat wave, which, in the case of the Papua New Guinea event, pushed temperatures in the bay about 7 degrees (4 degrees Celsius) above average.Why do they do this?Being tiny has its advantages in a hot climate: Warm-blooded animals, like mammals, shed heat more easily when they’re small and this helps them cool down. The benefits for cold-blooded creatures, such as clownfish, aren’t as clear, though researchers think they may have an easier time meeting their bodies’ energy requirements when they’re small.Morgan Bennett-SmithRegardless of the reason, being small seems to help clownfish when it’s hot. The fish that shrank, the study found, had a much higher chance of surviving.“It was a surprise to see how rapidly clownfish can adapt to a changing environment,” Versteeg said. “We witnessed how flexibly they regulated their size, as individuals and as breeding pairs, in response to heat stress as a successful technique to help them survive.”The study adds a layer of complexity to what is otherwise a depressing tale about the world’s oceans. Heat waves linked to climate change, like the one that occurred during this study, are utterly devastating coral reefs — and in severe cases, are nearly wiping out entire reef sections. These colorful ecosystems are home to countless marine animals, including those we eat, like snappers, and clownfish.Amid that loss, animals are proving highly resilient. They’re trying hard to hold on. Yet if warming continues, even the best adaptations may not be enough.See More:

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For nearly 60 years, California has enjoyed the ability to set its own standards governing air pollution from automobiles, as long as they’re more stringent than the federal government’s. This rule, written into the Clean Air Act, was meant to recognize the state’s long-standing leadership in regulating air emissions.The US Senate undermined that authority on Thursday when it voted 51-44 to revoke a waiver the Environmental Protection Agency approved allowing the Golden State to implement and enforce a de facto ban on the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. The Senate also rescinded waivers allowing California to set stricter emissions standards for new diesel trucks and mandating the adoption of zero-emission trucks.Environmental groups quickly decried the votes, saying that California’s standards are essential to protecting public health and achieving nationwide emissions reduction targets. The rules are seen as a sort of national benchmark since automakers don’t create separate product lines: one for California and another for everyone else. A provision in the Clean Air Act also allows other states to adopt the Golden State’s standards; 16 states and the District of Columbia have adopted many of the rules established by the California Air Resources Board.“These standards are vital in protecting people from the vehicle pollution which causes asthma attacks and other serious health problems,” Dan Lashof, a senior fellow at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement.On a wonkier level, however, legal and policy experts objected to the way senators rescinded California’s waiver: They used the 1996 Congressional Review Act, or CRA, a law enacted to allow Congress to overturn some federal actions with a simple majority rather than the usual 60 votes. Two government watchdogs said the act did not apply to the state’s waiver.“Republicans twisted the Senate’s own rules,” Joanna Slaney, vice president for political and government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. UCLA law professor Ann Carlson warned in a blog post ahead of the vote that Congress “may be opening up a Pandora’s box it can’t close” and that “there will be no limit on using the CRA to overturn all kinds of actions that the act doesn’t cover.”At the heart of the controversy is whether the air pollution waiver that the EPA granted to California last year qualifies as a “rule” under the CRA. Both the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan oversight agency, and the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan appointee tasked with interpreting congressional rules and procedures, issued advisory opinions earlier this year saying that it doesn’t. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) appeared to agree with this interpretation: A one-pager on a bill he proposed to repeal California’s waiver said that the exemptions “cannot be reviewed under the Congressional Review Act because the waiver granted by EPA is not a rule as that term is defined in the CRA.” Party leaders don’t usually contravene the parliamentarian’s guidance. If they do, they run the risk of their opponents doing the same when they are in power. “Republicans should tread carefully today,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, told NPR on Thursday. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) said in a statement that “radical Republicans” had “gone nuclear on the Senate rule book.”“It won’t be long before Democrats are back in the driver’s seat again,” Padilla added. “When that happens, all bets will be off. Every agency action that Democrats don’t like — whether it’s a rule or not — will be fair game, from mining permits and fossil fuel projects to foreign affairs and tax policies.” Dan Farber, a professor at UC Berkeley Law, told Grist that the Senate’s capricious interpretation of the CRA means it could be used to rescind waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services allowing states to modify Medicaid requirements or broadcasting licenses issued by the Federal Communications Commission. The act could also be used to revoke pollution permits that the EPA grants to states.He clarified, however, that the Senate only nullified specific waivers in California affecting the sale of gasoline-powered cars. It did not repeal provisions in the Clean Air Act that allow the EPA to issue new waivers, as long as they’re not “substantially the same” as the rescinded ones. “I think that California still has the power to put forward, and EPA has the power to approve, different emissions regulations in the future,” Farber said. “Changing the deadlines by a few years could be enough.” California’s current standards require 35 percent of new cars sold within the state to be zero-emissions by 2026, ratcheting up to 100 percent of new sales by 2035. President Donald Trump revoked California’s waiver allowing such regulations in 2019 during his first term, but that move was challenged in court and the waiver was restored by Joe Biden’s administration.Although automakers have previously backed California’s air pollution standards, industry groups cheered the vote on Thursday. John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group, said in a statement that the Senate deserved “enormous credit.” “The fact is these EV sales mandates were never achievable,” he said. “Automakers warned federal and state policymakers that reaching these EV sales targets would take a miracle, especially in the coming years when the mandates get exponentially tougher.”California Attorney General Rob Bonta objected to the Senate vote and vowed to challenge it in court. “Reducing emissions is essential to the prosperity, health, and well-being of California and its families,” he said in a statement. Gov. Gavin Newsom said undoing his state’s air pollution rules risked “ced[ing] American car-industry dominance to China.” See More:

On Thursday evening, the Supreme Court handed down a brief order, which temporarily permits President Donald Trump to fire two federal officials who, by law, are shielded from being summarily terminated. That, in itself, is not particularly significant because, on April 9, Chief Justice John Roberts acted on his own authority to temporarily permit Trump to fire the same two officials. So the practical effect of Thursday’s order in Trump v. Wilcox is simply to maintain the status quo.That said, the Thursday order does contain some important new information from the Court’s Republican majority. While the Republican justices have signaled for quite some time that they are eager to give the president broad authority to fire officials that Congress intended to insulate from presidential control, the order includes a paragraph signaling that they will not allow Trump to fire members of the Federal Reserve.From a legal perspective, the paragraph is difficult to parse. And, as Justice Elena Kagan writes in a dissenting opinion, is not supported by the legal authority it cites. But it is likely to reassure investors that, while the Supreme Court does appear eager to expand Trump’s authority over previously independent parts of the federal government, it won’t permit him to disrupt the Fed’s ability to make technocratic decisions about interest rates. The immediate stakes in Wilcox involve a former member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which enforces labor laws and adjudicates union-related disputes, along with a former member of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which hears disputes claiming that a civil servant’s employment protections were violated. Trump fired both shortly after taking office, despite the fact that federal law only permits them to be fired for some sort of neglect or malfeasance.The NLRB and the MSPB, moreover, are just two of an array of “independent” agencies led by multi-member boards, whose members all enjoy similar employment protections – agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Reserve.For at least 15 years, when the Court handed down Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Board (2010), a majority of the justices have signaled that they are eager to strip Congress of its authority to create such independent agencies, and give the president full authority to fire these agencies’ leaders at will. Many economists and investors, meanwhile, have warned that it would be particularly dangerous to strip the Federal Reserve — which is supposed to set interest rates based on delicate economic calculations and not based on what will benefit the sitting president — of its independence, as doing so could throw the US economy into chaos.Thursday’s order is a clear signal that the Court has heard these concerns and does not intend to eliminate the Fed’s independence. It is unlikely to satisfy many constitutional scholars, as its explanation for why Federal Reserve leaders should be treated differently than the leaders of any other independent agency is so baffling that it appears contrived. Regardless of the underlying reasoning, however, the order does strongly suggest that this Court will not give Trump full control over the Fed.The “unitary executive,” briefly explainedTrump v. Wilcox is the culmination of a longstanding grudge many Republican legal elites hold against Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court case establishing that Congress may create independent agencies whose members may only be fired for cause. Though the leaders of these agencies are typically nominated by the president for a term of several years, and confirmed by the Senate, Humphrey’s Executor explained that laws protecting them from being fired while in office are supposed to ensure that they “act with entire impartiality,” and “exercise the trained judgment of a body of experts.”All six of the Court’s Republicans, however, have made it clear they believe in a theory known as the “unitary executive,” which is incompatible with Humphrey’s Executor.The Constitution provides that “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” In a 1988 dissenting opinion, which many legal conservatives now treat as if it were a holy text, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that “this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.” And thus, if a federal official is charged with executing federal laws in some way, they must be fully subject to presidential control.If you take this unitary executive theory seriously, then there should be no doubt that Federal Reserve governors may be fired at will by the president. The Fed’s authority over interest rates, after all, derives from federal statutes instructing it to pursue the dual goals of “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” So the Fed is charged with executing federal laws.But the consequences of stripping the Fed of its independence could be catastrophic. In 1971, President Richard Nixon pressured Fed chair Arthur Burns to lower interest rates in advance of Nixon’s reelection race — the idea was to juice the economy right while voters were weighing Nixon’s record — and Burns complied. In the short term, this worked out great for Nixon. The economy boomed in 1972, and Nixon won reelection by a historic landslide. But Burns’s action is often blamed for years of “stagflation,” slow economic growth combined with high inflation, in the 1970s.The Fed, in other words, has the power to effectively inject cocaine into the US economy – giving it a temporary boost that can be timed to benefit incumbent presidents, at the cost of much greater economic turmoil down the road. It’s not hard to see how presidents could abuse their power if they can fire members of the Federal Reserve who refuse to give the economy such a temporary and costly high.One might think that these risks would be enough to caution the justices against overruling Humphrey’s Executor. But the Republican justices appear quite committed to the unitary executive theory, and they have been that way for quite some time. (If you want to know more about why they feel this way, I can refer you to three separate explainers I’ve written on this subject.)And so those justices spend the bulk of Thursday’s Wilcox order laying out the process they are likely to use to formally overrule Humphrey’s Executor. The order announces that the Trump administration is “likely” to prevail in its bid to fire NLRB and MSPB officials, and it temporarily blocks lower court decisions that reinstated the two officials at issue in this case. But the Court puts off the question of whether to formally repudiate Humphrey’s Executor until after the ordinary appeals process plays out and the justices receive full briefing and oral argument on whether to do so — which could happen as soon as the Court’s next term.The Wilcox order’s language protecting the Fed is gobbledygookEmbedded within all this language laying out the process to challenge Humphrey’s Executor is the paragraph indicating that the Fed is safe. While the two fired officials “contend that arguments in this case necessarily implicate the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee,” the order states, “we disagree.”The justices who joined the order then offer a single sentence explaining why: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”It’s certainly possible to parse the components of this sentence. The description of the Fed as a “quasi-private entity,” for example, may refer to the fact that much of the Fed’s authority is wielded through regional entities, which are themselves controlled by board members who are mostly selected by commercial banks. But it is hardly unusual for members of the private sector to be given a formal role within government — just ask Elon Musk. Indeed, the Supreme Court heard at least two cases this spring involving the role experts from the private sector may play in setting government policy.The “First and Second Banks of the United States” are 18th- and early 19th-century predecessors to the Fed. The Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power to create national banks in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), but the nation abandoned national banking under President Andrew Jackson, setting off a period of economic turmoil, including an economic depression shortly after Jackson left office.But it’s unclear what any of this has to do with the president’s powers as outlined in the Constitution. If the theory of the unitary executive is correct, then no entity — regardless of whether it is “quasi-private” or is part of a “distinct historical tradition” involving banks — may execute federal laws, unless that entity is controlled by people who are themselves under presidential control. As a legal matter, the Court’s explanation of why the Fed is special is nothing more than word salad.The only legal authority that the Wilcox order cites to support its claim that the Fed is special is a footnote in its pro-unitary executive decision in Seila Law v. CFPB (2020). But nothing in that footnote provides any support for this claim.As Kagan points out in her dissent in Wilcox, the only relevant language in that footnote is a throwaway line responding to her partial dissent in Seila Law. Kagan had argued that “federal regulators” historically have enjoyed some insulation from the president. The footnote dismisses this argument, stating that even “assuming financial institutions like the Second Bank and the Federal Reserve can claim a special historical status,” the agency at issue in Seila Law does not qualify.The Court, in other words, waved away Kagan’s argument that institutions like the Fed should be shielded from presidential control in Seila Law. Now, however, the justices in the majority appear to be signaling they believe there is some merit to Kagan’s argument.If the Court does formally overrule Humphrey’s Executor in the coming months, the justices in the majority will likely elaborate on why a different rule should apply to the Fed. The best reading of the Wilcox order’s one paragraph about the Fed is that a majority of the justices have already decided that they want to protect it, and they would now like some smart lawyers to file briefs coming up with an argument for that position — one that uses terms like “quasi-private” and that refers to the early history of national banking.Of course, this is not how the law is supposed to work — judges are not supposed to start with the outcome that they want and then invite members of the bar to explain how to get there. But this also will hardly be the first time that the Roberts Court started with its intended outcome and reasoned backward to get there. It’s just being more transparent this time around.See More:

Is President Donald Trump leading a vanguard of right-wing populist world leaders, working together to lay waste to the liberal international order while consolidating power at home? Possibly — but based on his recent foreign policy actions, he doesn’t appear to think so. Establishment-bashing politicians around the world, from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to the UK’s Boris Johnson, have drawn comparisons to Trump over the years. Some, notably Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Argentina’s Javier Milei, have cultivated ties to the Trump-era American right, becoming fixtures at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and making the rounds on US talk shows and podcasts. In Romania’s recent presidential election, the leading right-wing candidate somewhat confusingly described himself as being on the “MAGA ticket.”Trump himself has occasionally weighed in on other countries’ political debates to endorse right-wing politicians like France’s embattled far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Some of Trump’s senior officials have spoken openly of wanting to build ties with the global right. In his combative speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance described what he sees as the unfair marginalization of right-wing parties in countries like Romania and Germany as a greater threat to Europe’s security than China or Russia. Trump ally Elon Musk has been even more active in boosting far-right parties in elections around the world. But just because Trump and his officials like to see politicians and parties in their own mold win, that doesn’t mean countries led by those politicians and parties can count on any special treatment from the Trump administration. This has been especially clear in recent weeks.Just ask Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent years cultivating close ties with the US Republican Party, and with Trump in particular, and has followed a somewhat similar path in bringing previously marginalized far-right partners into the mainstream. All that has been of little use as Trump has left his Israeli supporters aghast by carrying out direct negotiations with the likes of Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran and being feted by Gulf monarchs on a Middle East tour that pointedly did not include Israel. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, has likewise been compared to Trump in his populist appeal, majoritarian rhetoric, and dismantling of democratic norms. Trump has cultivated a massive coterie of fans among Hindu nationalist Modi supporters as well as a close working relationship with Modi himself. But after Trump announced a ceasefire agreement in the recent flare-up of violence between India and Pakistan, Trump enraged many of his Indian supporters with remarks that appeared to take credit for pressuring India to halt its military campaign and drew equivalence between the Indian and Pakistani positions. Adding insult to injury, Trump publicly criticized Apple for plans to move the assembly of American iPhones from China to India, a move that in other administrations might have been praised as a victory for “friendshoring” — moving the production of critical goods from adversaries to allies — but doesn’t advance Trump’s goal of returning industrial manufacturing to the US. Even Orbán, star of CPAC and favorite guest of Tucker Carlson, has appeared frustrated with Trump as of late. His government has described its close economic relationship with China as a “red line,” vowing not to decouple its economy from Beijing’s, no matter what pressure Trump applies. Orbán’s simultaneous position as the most pro-Trump and most pro-China leader in Europe is looking increasingly awkward. Overall, there’s simply little evidence that political affinity guides Trump’s approach to foreign policy, a fact made abundantly clear by the “Liberation Day” tariffs the president announced in April. Taking just Latin America, for example, Argentina — led by the floppy-haired iconoclast and Musk favorite Javier Milei — and El Salvador — led by Nayib Bukele, a crypto-loving authoritarian willing to turn his country’s prisons into an American gulag — might have expected exemptions from the tariffs. But they were hit with the same tariff rates as leftist-led governments like Colombia and Brazil. Ultimately, it’s not the leaders who see eye to eye with Trump on migration, the rule of law, or wokeness who seem to have his fear. It’s the big-money monarchs of the Middle East, who can deliver the big deals and quick wins he craves. And based on the probably-at-least-partly Trump-inspired drubbing inflicted on right-wing parties in Canada and Australia in recent elections, it’s not clear that being known as the “Trump of” your country really gets you all that much. Whatever his ultimate legacy for the United States and the world, he doesn’t seem likely to be remembered as the man who made global far-right populism great again, and he doesn’t really seem all that concerned about that. See More:

Let’s imagine for a second that the impressive pace of AI progress over the past few years continues for a few more. In that time period, we’ve gone from AIs that could produce a few reasonable sentences to AIs that can produce full think tank reports of reasonable quality; from AIs that couldn’t write code to AIs that can write mediocre code on a small code base; from AIs that could produce surreal, absurdist images to AIs that can produce convincing fake short video and audio clips on any topic. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.Companies are pouring billions of dollars and tons of talent into making these models better at what they do. So where might that take us?Imagine that later this year, some company decides to double down on one of the most economically valuable uses of AI: improving AI research. The company designs a bigger, better model, which is carefully tailored for the super-expensive yet super-valuable task of training other AI models. With this AI trainer’s help, the company pulls ahead of its competitors, releasing AIs in 2026 that work reasonably well on a wide range of tasks and that essentially function as an “employee” you can “hire.” Over the next year, the stock market soars as a near-infinite number of AI employees become suitable for a wider and wider range of jobs (including mine and, quite possibly, yours).Welcome to the (near) futureThis is the opening of AI 2027, a thoughtful and detailed near-term forecast from a group of researchers that think AI’s massive changes to our world are coming fast — and for which we’re woefully unprepared. The authors notably include Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who became famous for risking millions of dollars of his equity in the company when he refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement.“AI is coming fast” is something people have been saying for ages but often in a way that’s hard to dispute and hard to falsify. AI 2027 is an effort to go in the exact opposite direction. Like all the best forecasts, it’s built to be falsifiable — every prediction is specific and detailed enough that it will be easy to decide if it came true after the fact. (Assuming, of course, we’re all still around.) The authors describe how advances in AI will be perceived, how they’ll affect the stock market, how they’ll upset geopolitics — and they justify those predictions in hundreds of pages of appendices. AI 2027 might end up being completely wrong, but if so, it’ll be really easy to see where it went wrong.Forecasting doomsdayIt also might be right. While I’m skeptical of the group’s exact timeline, which envisions most of the pivotal moments leading us to AI catastrophe or policy intervention as happening during this presidential administration, the series of events they lay out is quite convincing to me. Any AI company would double down on an AI that improves its AI development. (And some of them may already be doing this internally.) If that happens, we’ll see improvements even faster than the improvements from 2023 to now, and within a few years, there will be massive economic disruption as an “AI employee” becomes a viable alternative to a human hire for most jobs that can be done remotely. But in this scenario, the company uses most of its new “AI employees” internally, to keep churning out new breakthroughs in AI. As a result, technological progress gets faster and faster, but our ability to apply any oversight gets weaker and weaker. We see glimpses of bizarre and troubling behavior from advanced AI systems and try to make adjustments to “fix” them. But these end up being surface-level adjustments, which just conceal the degree to which these increasingly powerful AI systems have begun pursuing their own aims — aims which we can’t fathom. This, too, has already started happening to some degree. It’s common to see complaints about AIs doing “annoying” things like faking passing code tests they don’t pass.Not only does this forecast seem plausible to me, but it also appears to be the default course for what will happen. Sure, you can debate the details of how fast it might unfold, and you can even commit to the stance that AI progress is sure to dead-end in the next year. But if AI progress does not dead-end, then it seems very hard to imagine how it won’t eventually lead us down the broad path AI 2027 envisions, sooner or later. And the forecast makes a convincing case it will happen sooner than almost anyone expects. Make no mistake: The path the authors of AI 2027 envision ends with plausible catastrophe. By 2027, enormous amounts of compute power would be dedicated to AI systems doing AI research, all of it with dwindling human oversight — not because AI companies don’t want to oversee it but because they no longer can, so advanced and so fast have their creations become. The US government would double down on winning the arms race with China, even as the decisions made by the AIs become increasingly impenetrable to humans. The authors expect signs that the new, powerful AI systems being developed are pursuing their own dangerous aims — and they worry that those signs will be ignored by people in power because of geopolitical fears about the competition catching up, as an AI existential race that leaves no margin for safety heats up.All of this, of course, sounds chillingly plausible. The question is this: Can people in power do better than the authors forecast they will? Definitely. I’d argue it wouldn’t even be that hard. But will they do better? After all, we’ve certainly failed at much easier tasks.Vice President JD Vance has reportedly read AI 2027, and he has expressed his hope that the new pope — who has already named AI as a main challenge for humanity — will exercise international leadership to try to avoid the worst outcomes it hypothesizes. We’ll see.We live in interesting (and deeply alarming) times. I think it’s highly worth giving AI 2027 a read to make the vague cloud of worry that permeates AI discourse specific and falsifiable, to understand what some senior people in the AI world and the government are paying attention to, and to decide what you’ll want to do if you see this starting to come true.A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump is one step closer to getting his “big, beautiful bill” after it passed the House in a close vote early this morning.What would the bill do? As my colleague Andrew Prokop has explained, the bill has four major pillars: Renewing Trump’s 2017 tax cutsImplementing new tax cuts, such as Trump’s “no tax on tips” proposalSpending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the militaryIncreasing the debt ceiling, a recurring, necessary step that will likely have to get done by JulyIt would also lift the cap on the state and local tax deduction, or SALT — a political hot button important to frontline Republicans. And it would make deep cuts to Medicaid, clean energy programs, student loans, and food assistance.What happened last night? House Republicans had been staring down a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline to advance their bill. Early Thursday morning, they passed the bill 215 votes to 214.What happens now? The bill will head to the Senate, where the only certainty is another contentious process. Republican senators have a long list of sometimes-contradictory changes to iron out before their next deadline on July 4, and a relatively slim margin of error with their 53-member majority.Will this actually make it to Trump’s desk? No one knows. The bill is the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda and passed the House despite a fractious Republican conference, but a number of Republican senators have already expressed concerns about elements of the bill. And it will need to pass the House again after the Senate makes its changes, potentially a tall ask given the number of Republican hardliners in the lower chamber.And with that, it’s time to log off…The penny is officially on its way out, as of this morning. But as we bid farewell, it’s a perfect opportunity to read Caity Weaver’s incredible history of the one-cent coin, past efforts to do away with it, and the mounting absurdity of its existence. One fun fact from her story: Did you know the US has produced at least enough pennies — some 240 billion — to give two to every human who has ever lived? You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

On Wednesday evening, the American Jewish Committee held a reception at DC’s Capital Jewish Museum. The gathering, aimed at Jewish foreign policy professionals between the ages of 22 and 45, featured speakers from humanitarian groups. One such groups, IsraAID, said in a statement that the event “focused on bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza through Israeli-Palestinian and regional collaboration.”At around 9 pm, a gunman killed two attendees leaving the event. Their names were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim: They were young people working at the Israeli Embassy and a couple planning to get married.Their murders were undoubtedly political. In video of the perpetrator’s arrest, he yells “free Palestine” — a slogan that eyewitnesses also heard him repeat after the killing. A manifesto, published on Twitter/X under the shooter’s name, lays out a clear motivation: punishing those he saw as complicit in Israel’s mass killing of the Palestinians.Reflecting on this sequence of events, it’s hard not to spiral into ever-greater depths of anger and despair. This is partly for personal reasons: I grew up Jewish in Washington, DC, and am the kind of young professional this event would be marketed to. But more fundamentally, it’s for political ones: these murders underscore how dangerous the current political moment is, and may materially make it worse.Wednesday was not the first time that a pro-Palestine activist in America attempted political murder. Last month, a man attempted to burn down the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania in retaliation for, in the suspect’s words, “what [Governor Josh Shapiro] wants to do to the Palestinian people.”These events were not only predictable but predicted. Since October 7, 2023, prominent elements of the pro-Palestinian movement have glorified political violence. Though repeatedly warned that this was harmful, including by fellow critics of Israel’s war, this kind of talk became normalized — including in the sort of online left-wing social media spaces where the DC suspect apparently spent time. The vast majority of the pro-Palestine movement is peaceful, but the most radical subfaction created a climate where real-world violence might become more thinkable.“Fears of anti-Israel political violence on the left are real, and last night that threat became deadly,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the leader of the pro-peace J Street activist group, said in an emailed statement. “We urge all those in the pro-Palestine movement to take stock of this moment and recognize the danger of extreme rhetoric as it hits the ears of unhinged individuals.”Moreover, the killing in DC actually endangers the chances for peace in Gaza — changing the domestic politics on Israel-Palestine in a way that decreases the chances of the US government reining in Israel even as it begins a nightmarishly violent offensive.“Every single act & word that can associate the Palestinian cause with terrorism, hatred & antisemitism is an act or word that hurts Palestinians in Washington, DC. [This] act of terrorism did all three,” writes Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at NYU Abu Dhabi.There is no good here, no silver lining. Two young people were murdered in cold blood by an ideologue who convinced himself that murder, not democratic activism, is the right way to advocate for the downtrodden. He is not the first to do so — and the track record of those like him is bloody.How pro-Palestine extremists made violence more likelySince the October 7 attacks, a number of leading American pro-Palestine voices have publicly and loudly embraced violence.Students for Justice in Palestine, the national convening group for campus protests, described Hamas’s killings on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Within Our Lifetime, a New York-based activist group that embraces violence as a Palestinian tactic, uses similar language. University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). Prominent left-wing media figures compared October 7 to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and valorized anti-Israel terrorist groups. Perhaps the most relevant case for current purposes is Khymani James, a Columbia student who served as a spokesperson for the campus protest group CUAD. James fantasized about going out and murdering “Zionists” — a loose label that could include, say, attendees at a Jewish networking group in DC. While CUAD initially condemned James, the group later reversed its stance and issued a statement calling for more violence.“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group said. “In the face of violence from the oppressor equipped with the most lethal military force on the planet, where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.”I want to be clear: these extremists do not speak for the vast majority of pro-Palestinian activists and demonstrators. There have only been a handful of incidents of violence at pro-Palestine rallies in the United States since October 7; these examples of extreme rhetoric are not a justification for painting an entire movement with a broad brush. And yet, the fact that there are influential organizations and individuals talking like this matters. It creates a social and political climate where violence targeting American Jews becomes more likely, even if we cannot (and should not) draw a straight line between any one instance of extreme rhetoric and the violence on Wednesday.In trying to understand the role of violent ideology in inciting terrorism, scholars Donald Holbrook and John Horgan suggest thinking of ideas as fundamentally “social” things. Most people who come across radical ideologies online, even explicitly pro-violence ones, do not become terrorists. But when there are communities either online or in person that are seen as validating violence, individuals become more likely to escalate to real-world killing.This is part of why we saw a deadly wave of white nationalist violence in 2019. Even though each killer acted independently, the existence of online spaces valorizing their acts of violence creates incentives for more people to turn violent.“The sharing of ideas that convey an understanding of collective grievance, aspiration and a sense of community is relevant to terrorism in a variety of often interweaving ways. Perhaps the most obvious concerns ways in which ideological output legitimizes certain targets or methods employed through terrorist violence,” they write.The DC shooter says something similar in his alleged manifesto. He writes that violence would have been justified as far back as 11 years ago, during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. However, he writes, there were not enough Americans who would have agreed with his actions to make it politically effective. In 2014, he wrote, people would think it simply insane; today, he thinks “there are many Americans” who will see the killings as “highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”His expectations were not wrong. Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, one of the most prominent pro-Palestine journalists in America, published a post condemning the DC shooting — only to face a wall of replies justifying the violence. (“The only good zionist is a dead Zionist” is but one of many examples.)The likely political consequences for Palestinians are disastrousMore broadly, there is good reason to believe that the evil in Washington is likely to abet Israel’s ongoing evil in Gaza.Israel has launched a new offensive in Gaza with a horrifying endgame: essentially, the full and complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Yet the offensive is in its early days, and there is still time to prevent the worst-case outcome from coming true.A lot will depend on the political climate in the United States. As Israel’s chief weapons provider and patron, Washington has immense leverage to push Jerusalem to back down. The question is whether Trump cares enough to pick a fight with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prior to the attack in DC, the two men were seemingly growing apart. Barak Ravid, Axios’s well-sourced Israel-Palestine correspondent, reports that Trump is increasingly “frustrated” with the ongoing Gaza war but still has not applied significant pressure on Netanyahu to back down.Now, however, the spotlight has been turned away from Gaza and back on the domestic American pro-Palestine movement — with much of the MAGA base seeing the Washington shooting as proof that the pro-Palestine left is indeed an internal enemy that deserves to be crushed. Andy McCarthy, a right-wing legal analyst at National Review, predicted a renewed crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech:I believe the consequences of these terrorist murders will include a stepping up of civil rights investigations of antisemitic violence and intimidation by the Justice Department, as well as a reaffirmation of the administration’s commitment to deport from the United States aliens — even legal aliens — who have participated in pro-Hamas agitation on American campuses and elsewhere.The political winds have shifted in a direction that makes the Trump administration less likely, not more likely, to confront Netanyahu.“Less than one full day ago the global news cycle, including Israeli newspapers, were focused on Israel terrorising foreign diplomats. Now a self-proclaimed ally’s act of terrorism shoots diplomats dead, shifts our focus & snatches that moral high ground away,” writes Marks, the NYU professor.It’s hard to say exactly how much the attack damages prospects for stopping Israel’s nightmare plan for Gaza. But we can be certain that it does not help.Much like the October 7 attacks themselves, the attack in DC is thus a double crime. It is an indefensible murder of innocents that also harmed the very people it claimed to be defending.See More: Politics

Medicaid may be about to change in a big way: Republicans in Congress are getting closer to passing a bill that, along with cutting taxes and imposing new immigration restrictions, would require people to work — or else risk losing government health benefits. It’s a change the party has long desired.Right now, if you qualify for Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income people, based on your earnings, assets, and life circumstances, you can receive health coverage through the program — no other questions asked. Nearly 80 million people are currently insured by Medicaid, making it the single largest insurance program in the US. Under the current law, there is no obligation to work or fulfill any other community service requirement in order to receive your Medicaid benefits.But now, the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed the House by one vote early Thursday morning, would establish nationwide work requirements for the program for the first time, starting at the end of 2026. If the bill becomes law, people who became eligible for the program under the Affordable Care Act — generally, adults without children living in or near poverty — would be required to report at least 80 hours of work every month or another community activity such as volunteering, or they could lose their benefits. Seniors, people with disabilities, caregivers for dependent people, and pregnant people are supposed to be exempted under the bill as currently written, but there’s some gray area here. Some of the decisions about how to implement the requirements will be left to the states: They could, for example, require Medicaid enrollees to report their activities every month or every six months. (Prior research has found that additional reporting requirements tend to lead to more people losing benefits.) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 10.3 million people would lose their Medicaid coverage by 2034 under the GOP bill, about half of them due to the work requirement provision. Other losses would result from a number of smaller provisions, according to the estimate. These include things like more frequent and stringent eligibility checks that will also require people to jump through more hoops to keep their benefits. Outside projections are even higher: The left-leaning Center for Budget Policy and Priorities estimated that as many as 14.4 million people could lose benefits in the next decade.In a recent New York Times op-ed, a number of Trump officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Medicare and Medicaid administrator Mehmet Oz, outlined the Republican rationale for the requirements: They argue that too many able-bodied people are choosing not to work so they can stay on Medicaid, and more stringent requirements will force those people into the workforce and into better-paying jobs that provide their own health insurance.“This is about opportunity,” they wrote. “We believe that work is transformative for the individual who moves from welfare to employment.”But based on the best available estimates and past experience, Medicaid work requirements likely won’t achieve what Republicans want. The Senate will now consider the legislation and more changes could still be made, but if these requirements do ultimately become law and take effect, millions of Americans could lose their insurance over the next decade — and not necessarily because they aren’t working. Why work requirements will cause a lot of harm without doing much goodMedicaid was founded in 1965 as an entitlement program: If you qualify by your income and you sign up, you get the benefits. No extra red tape. More than half of the program’s enrollment is estimated to be people over 65 (10 percent), people with disabilities (13 percent), and children (34 percent). Many of the adults covered by Medicaid are either pregnant mothers, who can receive up to a year of postpartum coverage, or parents of young children. For most of the program’s history, adults who were not disabled and did not have kids were not eligible in most states. But in 2010, the ACA changed that, extending eligibility to anyone whose income was 133 percent of the federal poverty level ($20,800 for an individual; $35,000 for a family of three) or lower. The expansion added roughly 20 million people to the rolls.Republicans have long argued for work requirements for people who receive benefits across a variety of programs — Medicaid, food stamps, cash assistance — and even successfully instituted them for food stamps in 1996 as part of President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform legislation. After Medicaid was expanded by the ACA and then Republicans failed to repeal the law in 2017, work requirements became one of their top priorities for the program. Medicaid expansion had proven too popular to totally undo, but instituting work requirements would reduce coverage for a group many in the GOP do not want covered by Medicaid at all.But our country has already tested this — and it didn’t go so well: During President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration allowed states to apply to experiment with work requirements and approved the first-ever Medicaid work requirements in a handful of states on a preliminary basis. One state, Arkansas, actually implemented the policy before it was blocked by the courts.In just a matter of months, 18,000 Arkansans lost their health insurance — most of them losing coverage because they were found ineligible after not reporting their information correctly to the state. After the policy was implemented, respondents were required to report their work activities by paper forms, phone calls, or an online portal each month; that included those who were exempt. But Arkansas was criticized for the arduous reporting process and for failing to clearly explain the change: An analysis from Harvard researchers found that 70 percent of the people who were supposed to satisfy the work requirement were confused about the policy’s specifics and did not know whether it was actually in effect. During one month, according to state data, less than 15 percent of the people who were supposed to report their work activities to the state actually did.About 25 percent of the people who were supposed to comply with the new work requirement lost coverage from June 2018 to March 2019 — even though experts estimated 95 percent of the affected population should have been exempted or were meeting the obligations.As I have written before, the Medicaid population can be hard to reach: People with lower incomes are more likely to change addresses, more likely to have irregular work schedules, and less likely to have regular internet access. For all of these reasons, these people can struggle to send paperwork by mail or complete an online form. And if they fail to do so when a Medicaid work requirement is in effect, they will lose their health coverage.Based on the Arkansas experience, the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities estimated that two out of every three people who could lose coverage under the Republican bill would be people who are working or who should qualify for an exemption — but who fail to submit their paperwork properly or experience another administrative snafu.The GOP argues these incentives will lead to more people getting jobs or earning higher wages, but Arkansas’s experience doesn’t inspire much confidence there either. Employment rates stayed flat. The Harvard researchers concluded that the Arkansans who were subjected to the Medicaid work requirement did not see an increase in their employment or their earnings. The policy failed to push people into the workforce — it just pushed them out of the safety net. Multiple studies have found that Medicaid is literally a life-saving program. When people lose Medicaid benefits, they are more likely to face medical debt and push off medical care because of the cost. In Arkansas, according to the Harvard analysts, 56 percent of people who lost their coverage because of the work requirement said they delayed a medical service and 64 percent of them said they delayed taking a medication because of its cost.That’s the new world that the Republican bill would create, one in which failing to turn in the right paperwork could mean you can no longer afford your blood pressure or diabetes drugs.See More:

On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed the No Tax on Tips Act, pushing one of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises one step closer to becoming law. The pledge to eliminate federal taxes on service and hospitality workers’ tips rallied voters in the 2024 election, so much so that even former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed the idea in her campaign against Trump. Now, both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill seem to want to make it a reality. It’s easy to see why “no tax on tips” has broad bipartisan support: It looks like a populist policy that gives lower-wage workers much-needed relief, and opposing it might make you seem out of touch with the working class. But as I wrote last year, “no tax on tips” would actually be more of a tax break for businesses that would cost the federal government an estimated $10 billion to $15 billion a year in tax revenue. In short, the policy incentivizes businesses to lower workers’ wages and make them rely more on tips. But that’s exactly the opposite of what workers — and tipped workers in particular — need. Tipped workers are underpaid. Some of them would certainly see their take-home pay increase if the federal government stops taxing them on tips, assuming that their wages stay the same. But tips can be volatile, and often vary by season, and a “no tax on tips” policy would make offseasons worse for tipped workers, who will likely be stuck with lower base pay. The reality is that the problem for tipped workers isn’t that their taxes are too high — it’s that their wages are far too low. Plus, not having their taxes tipped means workers might end up accruing less credit toward their Social Security. In fact, many underpaid workers won’t even see a difference from the policy. Some tipped workers — by some estimates more than a third of them — earn so little that they are already exempt from income taxes, which means that a “no tax on tips” law would do nothing to boost their take-home pay. More than that, “no tax on tips” doesn’t help out most low-wage workers: More than 95 percent of low- and moderate-wage workers don’t receive tips on a regular basis. So while Congress busies itself with flashy tax cuts that won’t go too far in helping low-wage workers, it might be better to focus on the root cause of tipped workers’ problem: the subminimum wage.What is the subminimum wage and why is it so low? The last federal minimum wage increase was in 2009, and it’s been the same since: $7.25 per hour. Many states have minimum wages that are higher than the federal level — but most also have a subminimum wage for tipped workers. That’s a carveout that allows employers to pay their workers less so long as they make up the difference in tips, and that wage is just $2.13 per hour. If a subminimum wage worker doesn’t make enough tips to reach the full minimum wage, the employer is required to pay the difference. These tiered minimum wages date back to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), passed in 1938. The legislation created a subminimum wage with the intention of encouraging employers to hire people “whose earning capacity is impaired by age or physical or mental deficiency or injury.” The idea was to ensure that job opportunities and work training programs would still be available for people with disabilities. But in 1966, Congress amended the FLSA to include a subminimum wage for workers who regularly receive tips, hoping this would lower payroll costs for service-sector businesses. This change fundamentally changed the culture around tipping: While customers used to give workers tips as a show of gratitude, tips became a necessity for workers in order to make ends meet. Since then, workers in the service and hospitality sectors in most places have been subject to a subminimum wage that has not increased since 1991. While tipped wages are often sold to workers as a benefit — in theory, there’s no limit to how much they can make if customers are generous — the reality is that their overall take-home pay, even including tips, is often not enough. For example, the median wage for waiters in 2024 was $33,760, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the bottom 10 percent of waiters earned about $18,000. For context, the standard deduction — that is, the portion of your income that is untaxed — is $29,200 for a married couple and $14,600 for an individual. “No tax on tips” might give waiters a small tax break, but it’s hardly enough to work as a meaningful solution to low wages.The movement to abolish the subminimum wageMany workers have grown frustrated with the tiered minimum wage system, leading to the creation of organizations like One Fair Wage, which advocates for getting rid of the subminimum wage — a measure that would likely help alleviate poverty. (At least eight states have eliminated the subminimum wage for tipped workers.) And because a handful of states have already abolished the subminimum wage in favor of one equal minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped workers alike, we can see how the former holds workers back.According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, tipped workers have a higher poverty rate in states with a subminimum wage compared to states that have abolished it. In states with the subminimum wage, 14.8 percent of tipped workers live in poverty. By contrast, those same workers have a poverty rate of 11 percent in states that have gotten rid of the subminimum wage. The biggest problem with the “no tax on tips” idea is that it will likely only suppress wages, which will ultimately hurt workers in the long run. There are better ways Congress can help low-wage workers than eliminating taxes on tips, including by expanding the standard deduction — giving a meaningful tax cut to all low-wage workers, not just those who receive tips — or by finally getting rid of the subminimum wage. And they might consider increasing the minimum wage while they’re at it. After all, a raise is long overdue. This story is written for the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.See More:

Don’t call Kylie Kelce a WAG. The acronym for the “wives and girlfriends” of professional athletes rankles the podcaster, who first rose to fame as the wife of retired Philadelphia Eagles player Jason Kelce. As Kelce explains, the phrase suggests that “your spouse’s profession swallows you up as well.”But many in the media are heralding this moment as a “new era” for WAGs, and Kelce is just one of several famous women who are at the fore of this renaissance: Everyone from TikToker Alix Earle, who is dating Miami Dolphins player Braxton Berrios, to Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles — unquestionably the more famous athlete — who is married to the Chicago Bears’ Jonathan Owens. Then there’s Taylor Swift, one of the most successful musicians on the planet, who, thanks to her relationship with Kylie’s brother-in-law Travis Kelce, has become the ultimate symbol of the new WAG.Meanwhile, a host of lesser-known women are experiencing their first taste of fame through their relationships with tennis players, Formula 1 race-car drivers, and even pole-vaulters. A sizable number have leveraged their romantic lives to receive brand deals, podcasting opportunities, and magazine profiles.By and large, our understanding of WAGs is rapidly evolving to acknowledge their own social and economic power. They’ve transformed from tabloid punching bags to an appealing status symbol. Still, the continued use of the term does raise some complicated questions: Why are we so interested in defining these women, some of whom are independently successful, by their relationships to men? And what does it mean that they might be raking in more attention and financial opportunities than some female athletes? The rise of the new WAG The public’s fascination with WAGs isn’t new. The acronym originated across the pond in the early 2000s to describe the wives and girlfriends of English footballers. British tabloids and football fans alike lambasted women — celebrities in their own right — like former Girls Aloud member Cheryl Cole and former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham for their partying, extravagant spending, and flashy, maximalist looks. When the England national football team lost the 2006 FIFA World Cup, their partners were blamed in the press for the defeat. In the United States, being a WAG could be an equally dangerous public position. From Jessica Simpson to the Kardashians, they’ve been painted as distractions, attention-seekers, and bearers of bad luck. Over the past two decades, though, a WAG has become less of an involuntary title and more of an identity that some women are willing to cultivate, given that it can come with its own rewards.David and Victoria Beckham at the MOBO Awards on October 6, 1999. Dave Hogan/Getty ImagesThis modern version of WAG-dom can be credited to early 2010s reality shows like WAGS, Basketball Wives, and La La’s Full Court Life. These platforms allowed these women — some anonymous before they entered into relationships with athletes — to craft their own public narratives and become notable personalities on their own. For years now, Ayesha Curry, wife of Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry, has modeled what it means to be a “WAG influencer,” embracing her public relationship with her spouse while building a separate career as a successful cookbook author and host. Since then, WAG-influencers have become a welcome staple of certain sports cultures. Formula 1 has exploded in recent years, with a small part of that popularity owed to the sport’s stylish other halves. Since 2017, female viewership has grown from 8 percent to 40 percent. This has been largely credited to the popular Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which put a spotlight on the personal lives of drivers and, naturally, their partners. Lily Herman, who writes the F1 newsletter Engine Failure, says that the current popularity of WAG-influencers in Formula 1 can be credited to the former partners of a few young popular drivers from 2019 to 2022, like Carlos Sainz’s girlfriend Isa Hernáez and Charles Leclerc’s girlfriend Charlotte Sine, who were both featured on Drive to Survive. In 2022, Sine was the first WAG in the sport to explicitly use her access to the F1 circuit as a part of an ad campaign for the skincare brand Sunday Riley.“They were around during an era where the sport saw a lot of growth in its younger fan base, especially among teen girls and younger women, and there was a new wave of interest in these young drivers’ personal lives,” says Herman. These women have inspired fan pages, Tumblr accounts, and subreddits dedicated to their relationships, fashion, and rumored drama. Lately, the organization has fully embraced WAGs as recognizable supporting characters in the F1 universe, featuring them on social media and including them on chyrons during racing broadcasts. Tennis has tried to replicate the WAG-to-influencer pipeline too, although the sport and its fans are still warming up to the presence of outside partners. Morgan Riddle, who’s dating highest-ranked American male player Taylor Fritz, has been making get-ready-with-me videos for tournaments and vlogging about her life on the tennis tour since 2022. Ayan Broomfield, a former college tennis player who’s dating Frances Tiafoe, and influencer Paige Lorenze, who’s dating Tommy Paul, have mimicked the same career path, broadcasting their lives as WAGs on social media. Herman says that WAGs play a role in “adding dimension” to their male partners, contributing to the marketability of both. “Fritz is pretty bland as a public figure without his girlfriend,” says Herman. “She’s done way more in her work as an influencer and content creator to make him seem multidimensional than he has through solo interviews and profiles.”It certainly benefits younger, newer WAGs who are already powerful women. Biles and Swift have joined their ranks and seem to take pride in the role. Beckham, now a successful fashion designer, has also played a role in igniting a nostalgia for WAGs, thanks to the popular 2023 Netflix docuseries Beckham. The business of being a WAG is still very traditional In our current political climate, the WAG boom raises interesting questions. Research shows that some Gen Z-ers are identifying as more conservative than their parents. “Trad wife” content abounds online. Where do WAGs fit in? WAG influencers share some obvious similarities to tradwife influencers, women who’ve created lucrative identities and even businesses by perpetuating conservative ideas of marriage and motherhood. In a Substack essay, sports writer Frankie De La Cretaz argues that WAGs are essentially the tradwives of men’s sports: “No matter how many businesses a WAG starts or how many charities she runs, she still embodies a heteronormative idea of family and a woman’s place in society.” It’s hard to get around the fact that most WAGs are initially famous for their association with a male partner, although they may ultimately transcend that attachment (see Kylie Kelce’s complaint about being called a WAG and consider that her podcast, Not Gonna Lie, briefly dethroned The Joe Rogan Experience when it debuted in 2024).WAGs are gaining visibility while the most talented female athletes are still fighting for wage parity and struggling to land brand deals.But even attempts to define WAGs outside of their relationships come off a bit shallow. Stories about how these women are impacting sports largely focus on their brand deals and follower counts. When we celebrate the influence of WAGs, we’re mostly talking about their ability to turn other women into consumers and spectators, not athletes. Meanwhile, WAGs are gaining visibility while the most talented female athletes are still fighting for wage parity and struggling to land brand deals. Back in March, Australian tennis pro Daria Saville made a TikTok about the lack of sponsorships she and other female pros receive compared to tennis WAGs. “Female tennis players are not getting those brand deals,” she said. “It’s actually tennis WAGs that fit into the ‘aesthetic’ rather than, us, sweaty tennis players.” De la Cretaz tells Vox that the WAG boom echoes the mainstream platforming of tradwives. “It’s an extension of “girlboss” feminism, the idea that promoting women regardless of what that looks like is somehow good for women,” De la Cretaz says. “It’s also this idea that whatever you’re choosing is valid, even though those choices don’t exist in a vacuum.” The most visible WAGs are still predominantly in straight relationships, and a large part of being one still involves affirming a male athlete’s heterosexuality. As journalist Kira Cochrane wrote in a 2010 piece for the Guardian about football WAGs, “consciously or not, the women know their role is to boost their partner’s masculinity.” She added that their often highly feminized presentation “underlines [their] status as possessions, part of the package for footballers.” WAGs, with their new clout and influence, haven’t exactly gotten a total makeover. Rather, their hustle has grown more appealing. After all, they represent all the things women are encouraged to be in a time when mainstream culture is trending more conservative. They’re tradwives. They’re girlbosses. They’re stylish and beautiful. Most of all, they’re sitting on the sidelines. See More:

This week, for the respective editions of their newsletters, Kids Today and User Friendly, senior correspondents Anna North and Adam Clark Estes have a chat about something that’s occupying both of them as journalists and as parents of young kids: How AI will shape the lives of the next generation?Anna North: Hi Adam! Excited to chat about AI and kids! In addition to reporting on kids for work, I also have a 7-year-old (who is home sick today and watching Amphibia right now, so might interrupt), and a 2-year-old (who is not currently home sick, yay!).Adam Clark Estes: Hey Anna! My kid is not yet 2, but as they say, the days are long, but the years are short. I feel like I’ll be meeting her AI friends in no time. Anna: Ha! So speaking of which, should we kick this off by talking a little bit about our hopes and fears for our kids growing up in the age of AI? I do feel like there’s a lot to be hopeful about: I’m excited that my kids will grow up in a time when we can use AI to develop new drugs and decode elephant language (although maybe some of those AI tools are more properly called machine learning?). My biggest fear is that my kids won’t see the point of learning certain skills, like writing and math, because AI can do those tasks for them. I certainly worry about AI taking jobs, too, but that’s a ways away for my kids.RelatedShould schools lock up kids’ phones?Adam: I’m actually not that worried about my kid having AI friends. She probably will! I just hope that she doesn’t spend too much time with them or too much time with AI-powered technology in general. I hope we enter this new AI era together and learn how these tools can make our lives better, richer, and more interesting. It reminds me of how the internet came of age around the same time I did, but my parents seemed too afraid to figure it out at the time. I hope I can be brave. Anna: My dad was actually an internet early adopter, and so we did enter that era together, which was sweet. We used to go to Doctor Who chatrooms — I remember once listing “our” age as “43 and 12.” That was nice for me because 1) I learned to use a computer and 2) I learned to be curious and not fearful around new technologies. Except I am a little fearful around AI! Maybe I have to channel that spirit of curiosity a little more when I’m with my kids.A friend of mine was telling me her district is rolling out AI tools potentially in kindergarten, so it starts young.Adam: And I keep seeing ads for AI-equipped stuffed animals. AI is still such a buzzword, but I do think we’re starting to see how it really will take over technology as we know it. I always say that it’s just the next iteration of the software that’s already in everything. So, of course, it’s going to be in classrooms — not just for cheating purposes, either.Anna: Cheating using AI is less of an issue for little kids because they’re not doing much of their work on computers yet. The AI tools I’ve seen proposed for K-6 are like this AI-powered reading coach, which seems less vulnerable to cheating than, say, ChatGPT. I’ve definitely heard people say that AI could potentially offer more personalized tutoring one day, which could be positive since individual instruction is really beneficial, but public school classes are often too large to offer much of it. That idea doesn’t freak me out too much, although, of course, there are questions around how reliable and accurate AI tools are.My older kid is in first grade, and at his school, there’s a lot of talk about the role of AI in math. The argument I’ve heard is very similar to what we were taught about calculators, honestly: that these tools will be able to do a lot of simple operations for us, so kids should be able to think intuitively about numbers.I don’t really think we’ll return to oral exams, but we will have to reconsider what education looks like in a world that runs on AI.Adam: I’m also curious about how AI simply changes how schools work. Like, if AI makes it too easy to cheat when essay-writing, what will teachers assign instead? And what will they grade? I don’t really think we’ll return to oral exams, but we will have to reconsider what education looks like in a world that runs on AI.Anna: I do think there’s a shift to more in-class tests and assignments, which can cause its own stress. I also wonder if there’s just going to be a shift toward developing a different set of skills, if writing just becomes less important. We already see kids and young people consuming less text — I wouldn’t be shocked if there was more emphasis in the coming years on oral presentation or audio and visual production skills. That bums me out as a writer, but maybe it’s what Plato would’ve wanted? I do try to remember that people have always been skeptical of new technology (even written language), and some of the anxieties we’re experiencing now are thousands of years old.I wouldn’t be shocked if there was more emphasis in the coming years on oral presentation or audio and visual production skills.Adam: And some look like instant replays of anxieties from just a decade or two ago. Every time a new technology or medium comes along, there’s a collective freakout that it’s destroying the youth. This is just as true for social media as it was for TV, video games, comic books, and even radio. I think this will be true of AI in social settings, too. It’s already possible to have an AI friend through apps like Replika or Kindroid. I wasn’t kidding about the AI stuffed animals, either. There’s one called Grok that’s designed — by Grimes of all people — for ages 3 and up. Kids can ask it questions, and the AI will tell them things, like a futuristic Teddy Ruxpin, except Teddy Ruxpin had a cassette tape in his belly that parents could listen to and know what the stuffed bear would say. I have no idea what AI will be telling our kids!I’ve seen people call this the end of the imaginary friend. I actually think it’s just the beginning of something new. What that is, I can’t imagine. At least not yet. Anna: It’s funny to me because Teddy Ruxpin was famously creepy! The social/play aspect of AI is super-interesting. I’m not worried about AI killing imaginary friends — kids will make friends with a can of tomato paste, and I don’t think you can destroy their social creativity that easily.My biggest concern around AI friends right now is safety — there are already lawsuits alleging that chatbots nudged kids toward violence or self-harm. Do you know what guardrails there are in place? Adam: My general feeling about guardrails is that, no matter how many there are, technology finds a way to leap over them. YouTube, for instance, has long struggled with how to make sure parents can steer their children to safe, age-appropriate content, but kids inevitably find themselves sucked down a rabbit hole of uncanny algorithmically generated videos. Throwing an infinite supply of AI-generated content into the mix won’t help, so I think parents will have to be vigilant about triple-checking what their kids are watching or playing with.There was a Pew study earlier this year that said about a quarter of all teens had tried ChatGPT for schoolwork. That number had doubled in a year.So if you assume that guardrails aren’t there or won’t work and that kids are going to try some kind of AI tool eventually, where does that leave parents? To be honest, I think we should all do what your dad did with you: Hang out in the proverbial chatrooms together. Talk to the chatbots together. Play with the AI toys together. Learn about this new technology along with your kids and help them learn when to put them away.I think we should all do what your dad did with you: Hang out in the proverbial chatrooms together. Talk to the chatbots together. Play with the AI toys together.Anna: I’m sure my dad will appreciate this endorsement of his parenting! You’re not alone, though. Andrew Przybylski, an Oxford professor I think we’ve talked about who studies phones and kids, talks about introducing his children to smartphones the way you would teach a kid to ride a bike: It’s a tool. It has hazards but also uses. It can be fun, and it’s a basic part of life. Maybe the same is true of AI?This conversation is sort of making me think I need to use AI more with my kids, which is not where I expected to end up. Adam: It’s important to point out that we’re mostly talking about generative AI here, and chatbots. There are also image and video generators. These all have obvious applications for kids in schools, for cheating and learning. But we haven’t even gotten into what the next generation of AI will impact our kids’ lives — things like AI agents that can use computers themselves or the much feared artificial general intelligence that can theoretically do anything. That future is a lot harder for me to comprehend right now.Anna: Yeah, I think there’s a lot about the next 10 or 15 years, both in AI and just in our kids’ lives generally, that’s hard to wrap one’s head around. My husband and I always joke about our children going to college on the moon, but I think it’s just a way of expressing the uncertainty that’s always there when you try to project too far out.See More: