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With President Donald Trump’s second administration just weeks away, congressional Republicans are gearing up to execute on a wide-ranging legislative agenda touching on everything from taxes to immigration to fossil fuels. In a Monday interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump noted that his preference for doing so was “one big, beautiful bill,” but said […]

Bitter cold has lashed its icy fingers across the United States, bringing a frigid start to the new year. Dubbed Winter Storm Blair, the tempest has triggered winter weather alerts for more than 60 million people this week in a swath from Illinois to New Jersey.  The ongoing storm has already dropped up to a […]

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said today that he’d step down as head of the country’s Liberal Party, after weeks of speculation that his time in leadership was coming to an end. In Canada, the head of the party with the highest number of seats in Parliament leads the country. Though Trudeau will no longer […]

In what is likely to be one of her final actions as the federal government’s top Supreme Court litigator, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked the justices last week to significantly diminish the power of lower court judges to block federal laws and policies. Should the Court take her up on this invitation, the biggest immediate […]

With an annual toll of 40,000 American lives, the deadliness of secondhand smoke is now common knowledge. But it was only a few decades ago that puffing on a cigarette was defended as an act that affected only the smoker. In the 1980s, researchers for the first time demonstrated that smoking can kill people who […]

One in three Americans has resolved to make 2025 the year they get therapy. If you’re one of them, brace yourself: Figuring out how to get your insurance benefits to cover therapy can take some legwork.  The drudgery of figuring out whether and how your insurance plan covers therapy — or choosing between plans in […]

When former Buffalo Bill Jordan Poyer heard New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers extol the benefits of ayahuasca on The Pat McAfee Show in 2023, he was suspicious — but intrigued. Poyer had been struggling with his marriage and his recovery from alcoholism, and after hearing Rodgers discuss “plant medicine” — as the psychoactive brew […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. I am a recovering optimizer.  Over the past several years, I’ve spent ages agonizing over every decision I made because I felt like I had to do the best […]

It always seems like everyone wins and no one really loses at the Golden Globes.  The event has historically been known as more of a boozy party than a serious awards show, a casual hangout with Hollywood’s most charming celebrities rather than a cutthroat winner-take-all situation — even if it’s had its fair share of […]

In an ideal world, everyone who qualifies for an aid program ought to receive its benefits. But the reality is that this is often not the case. Before the pandemic, for example, nearly one-fifth of Americans who qualified for food stamps didn’t receive them. In fact, millions of Americans who are eligible for existing social […]

On New Year’s Eve, America’s most prominent nativist declared that the nation needs more immigrants.  “We need competent people, we need smart people coming into our country,” President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, “we need a lot of people coming in.” It may sound as though Trump was just visited by the […]

It’s been a contentious 24 hours in South Korean politics, after impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol narrowly avoided arrest for insurrection on Friday, a month after his martial law declaration.  It’s the latest development in a month-long political meltdown that has not only thrown Korean politics into turmoil, but surfaced the country’s deep political polarization, […]

House Republicans — after some initial drama — successfully reelected Rep. Mike Johnson as speaker on Friday. Johnson’s victory in the first round of voting came as something of a surprise, after three Republicans initially voted against him, depriving him of the 218-person majority he needed to win the speakership. After conferring with Johnson, however, […]

We’re all inured to sensationalist headlines about some disaster or another on the horizon. So I don’t blame anyone who was exhausted when they saw last month that dozens of scientists were warning in the journal Science that mirror bacteria could bring about a catastrophic ecosystem collapse and even mass extinction.  After all, we already […]

The question has been hurtling through think pieces, op-eds, and ominous headlines over the past few years: Have American men stopped reading? Specifically, have they stopped reading fiction? And is that why the world is so bad now? The most recent entry in this genre came in December, when David J. Morris, an assistant professor […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Haga clic aquí para leer esta historia en español. VALLE DEL CAUCA, Colombia — From the side of an old highway that cuts through the Andean foothills, Dora Alicia […]

Sometime last spring, I decided to glow up. This is an extremely embarrassing thing to admit, or at least it should be. But this is America. If you’re not “glowing up,” which is to say, committing all of your time and money to the endless quest of self-improvement, you’re “letting yourself go.” And in America, […]

Your doctor orders blood work or requests you get a biopsy, or maybe your kid broke a bone and you need to rush to the emergency department. A few months later, a bill arrives in the mail with an astounding figure. Despite the federal No Surprises Act made into law in 2022 — which prevents […]

The deadly attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve that left 15 people dead feels like a disturbing reminder of a past era, one when the transnational terrorist organization known as the Islamic State, or ISIS, dominated the nation’s attention and resources.  The attacker, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a 42-year-old Army veteran from Texas, rammed […]

Selecting a health insurance plan in the US is a little like going through a maze, or solving an impossibly difficult crossword puzzle. It can be a morass of hard-to-figure-out terms — HMO, PPO, deductible, premium, coinsurance — and plans. Under another Donald Trump presidency, understanding Affordable Care Act insurance plans may get even more […]

Sometimes, it seems as if navigating health insurance benefits requires its own language (and maybe an actuarial degree to boot). The questions are endless: Is it better to have a high premium and a low deductible, or the other way around? How are you supposed to guess how much money to put in a flexible […]

A Vox reader asks: Why is some soap labeled antibiotic? Is there a soap that is friendly to germs, viruses, etc.? I thought the whole idea was to get rid of germs and viruses. There really are too many varieties of soap out there. Too many brands, too many fragrances and colors, too many claims […]

If you’ve studied First Amendment law, it’s impossible not to experience déjà vu while reading the briefs in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a Supreme Court case the justices will hear on January 15 about online pornography.  That’s because the Texas law at the heart of Free Speech Coalition is in all relevant respects identical […]

For the sixth year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect convened in December to make predictions about major events in the year to come. Will Congress pass a tariff bill that makes President-elect Donald Trump happy? Will the H5N1 bird flu become an honest-to-god pandemic? Will the war in Ukraine stop? Will a […]