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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. This past fall, I set out to get rejected as often as I could.  A healthy fear of rejection lives inside most people, and has some of us in a chokehold. […]

The biggest story in America is, and should remain, the Trump administration’s accidental inclusion of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal group chat about planning airstrikes in Yemen. This is not only colossally incompetent, but a scandal of the first proportion: Top officials, including the vice president and secretary of defense, discussing the most […]

The Social Security Administration — which distributes benefits to tens of millions of retired workers, people with disabilities, and their families — is in crisis. Since billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set its sights on finding fraud in Social Security, the agency has been trying to shed 12 percent of its workforce, […]

“The only thing worse than being homeless in America is not being considered homeless in America,” says Brian Goldstone, a journalist and ethnographer. America’s homelessness crisis extends far beyond what we see on the streets, and Goldstone wants us to pay attention to those who are hidden from public view.  In his new book, There […]

Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is one of the most straightforward cases the Supreme Court will hear this year. It involves a federal law that requires every state’s Medicaid program to ensure that “any individual eligible for medical assistance” may obtain that care “from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform […]

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. America’s fragile child care system relies heavily on immigrant workers. Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown could cripple it. Since 2011, federal guidance has advised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents against conducting […]

The second Trump administration has shown remarkable aggression in abruptly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at elite universities — in an effort to force them to make major policy changes in line with the president’s politics. Trump officials revoked $400 million in research funding to Columbia University (illegally, per experts). They’ve […]

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: Today Joshua Keating and I are focusing on top Trump administration officials accidentally messaging a journalist with their plans for bombing Yemen. It’s a bizarre story — and one […]

The Supreme Court sent a rather unfortunate message during Monday’s argument in a racial gerrymandering dispute called Louisiana v. Callais: Do not trust us. To understand where that message is coming from, it’s helpful to be familiar with a case the Court decided just two years ago that is nearly identical to Callais. In Allen […]

If you’ve read the news lately, you’ve probably heard that Americans may be in the middle of a sex recession. But at least one demographic of people are having the best sex of their lives: Gen X women. At least that’s the argument writer Mireille Silcoff makes in her most recent piece in the New […]

If you know the name of a case the Supreme Court will hear on March 31, Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, you can probably guess who will prevail.  The Court’s Republican majority almost always rules in favor of Christian litigants who seek an exemption from a federal or state law, which […]

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. In the middle of the Caribbean Sea, over 1,000 rhesus macaques live on an island that measures less than a tenth of a mile across. Descendants of a monkey colony imported […]

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. When was the last time you felt utterly, stupefyingly, mind-numbingly bored? It might’ve been when you languished in the waiting room at a doctor’s office for 10 minutes too long. Or […]

You’ve surely heard “First They Came,” German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the road to Nazi Germany. It’s one of those texts quoted so often that it can feel cliché. “First they came for the communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a communist” the poem begins, listing […]

An earlier version of this story appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. A Vox reader asks, “Why do children often have imaginary friends?” Sometime in the doldrums of Covid lockdown, when day care was closed and social life felt like a distant memory, I caught my then-toddler […]

All across the world, people are having fewer children. The birth rate is declining quickly in countries ranging from the United States to Finland to Mexico and Turkey. Fertility data used to be a fairly esoteric concern. Not anymore. Vice President JD Vance talks about it regularly, Elon Musk calls it civilization’s greatest threat. There’s […]

If you’re anything like me — a policy dork who spends too much time on X — you’ve been unable to escape discussion of a new book called Abundance.  Written by the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and the New York Times’s Ezra Klein (also a co-founder of Vox), Abundance is one of those policy books with […]

There are many lawsuits challenging allegedly illegal actions by the Trump administration — 132 of them as of March 21, according to the legal news site Just Security. That’s a lot to keep track of. Two issues raised by some of these suits stand out, however, as Trump’s most blatant violations of the Constitution, and […]

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: Today I’m focusing on powerful private institutions caving to Donald Trump’s demands — and a law firm demonstrating another way forward. What’s the latest? Donald Trump took back an executive […]

Late in Hulu’s new series Good American Family comes a moment of irony that’s become all too familiar in true crime docudramas. The fictionalized Natalia Grace Barnett — at this point in the story a teen, being played by the 27-year-old Imogen Faith Reid — glowingly reads supportive comments from random internet strangers. “I feel […]

Put the Nobel Peace Prize on hold for just a bit.  President Donald Trump came into office promising a swift end to two wars in Gaza and Ukraine. He has taken a radically different approach to both conflicts than Joe Biden, and in some cases produced results.  What he has not done is end either […]

Elon Musk has opinions on how a lot of the world’s countries should be run.  He has weighed in on elections in Germany on behalf of a far-right party, sparred with the government of his native South Africa, and called for the removal of the president of Ukraine, not to mention the two-month siege he […]

If you have any say, you might want to avoid scheduling your next surgery on a Friday. The most comprehensive analysis of what happens to patients who have surgery on Fridays versus Mondays, published this month in JAMA by more than a dozen US and Canadian researchers, is unequivocal: The people who underwent all kinds […]

In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media did not exactly cover itself in glory. To quote myself from an early February 2020 piece, when the virus had already been spreading for more than a month in China and the US already had confirmed cases:  In the last week or so, new […]