What do a Bollywood actor, a member of Congress, and Israeli directors have in common? 

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. The punchline, though, is that governments of India, the United States, and Israel, respectively, think they should be stripped of their national status.

Bollywood star Imran Khan, nephew of Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, was told he has until October 28 (and since extended to November 2) to leave India, where he resides on an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card. India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, but OCI status gives individuals of Indian descent and their family members the right to permanently live, work, and study in India; its revocation uproots its holders from their homes and their lives. Khan had protested in a demonstration demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, India’s chief election commission. He is challenging the order in court.

Earlier this month, US Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by federal authorities who are reportedly preparing a case to strip her of citizenship, alleging that her father said she was 17 when she was really 18 when he filed her naturalization paperwork. President Donald Trump subsequently said that, because a federal court filing allegedly referred to her as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar,” she should have to resign from Congress.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has intimated that Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors of the film NAZA, in which Abraham interviews Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on Tel Aviv rooftops about how they assessed and decided to kill civilians in Gaza, could be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, saying he would pursue legislation to go after critics of the military who crossed a line. “We will revoke citizenship for anyone who defames IDF soldiers around the world — he will be deeply hurt in his pocket,” said Netanyahu, who cited the filmmakers as a potential example and called their work “intolerable.”

The move to strip citizens of their passports and their rights is not a new one, nor is it limited to these three countries. Perhaps most famously, Jews were stripped of citizenship by the Nazis in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. To take a more recent example, over the summer, Russia passed legislation that effectively strips Russians abroad facing domestic prosecution on political grounds of their citizenship (the law takes away their property, freezes their bank accounts, and refuses them consular services).

Still, that three high-profile cases are coming from three countries that claim to be democracies raises the question: Why do reactionary leaders in democracies reach for denaturalization (or quasi-denaturalization, in the case of loss of OCI) as a weapon against political and cultural elites? What do they hope to gain? And, relatedly: What might they lose instead?

It’s not just about the high-profile targets

Reactionary leaders do not typically threaten to make an example of high-profile political opponents or cultural elites as a first step. In each of these cases, there are demographic groups — whole swathes of the population — whose governments have been trying to disenfranchise, denaturalize, or deport them (or some combination of the three) long before the recent spate of high-profile headlines. 

In India, there’s currently a politicized election integrity push that experts warn could illegitimately prevent tens of millions of voters from marginalized groups, especially Muslims, from participating in elections. What should have been a routine clean up of voter rolls ended up with 130 million — nearly 10 percent of the population — struck off the lists. The sweeping approach has raised widespread concern from critics that many voters will be incorrectly removed — and deep suspicions that this disenfranchisement is targeted and intentional.  

Mukulika Banerjee, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, noted this happened after the position of chief election commissioner was made partisan and given immunity for life. And while normally in India (unlike in the United States) the onus is on the state, not individuals, to register voters, in this case, the state said that if people were to be put back on the voter rolls, they “had to produce a whole bunch of documents…which by implication affected the socially disadvantaged,” per Banerjee. 

That meant women, people from lower castes, rural voters — and, since “the Muslim population amongst the most seriously socially disadvantaged, the likelihood of Muslims falling in this category is very high,” Banerjee, author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India, said. In places like West Bengal, where Muslims make up nearly 30 percent of the population, there were some assembly constituencies where, in elections earlier this year, the number of names deleted from the rolls was greater than the margin of victory, and while anti-incumbent sentiment was high and the BJP may well have won anyway, some, per Banerjee, are asking, “was this an attempt to choose the electorate, so to speak.”

In the United States, the Trump administration has made denaturalization a priority, hoping to find people they can make an example of as part of their broader immigration crackdown. They have already filed to strip dozens of Americans of their citizenship by claiming they lied on their naturalization paperwork (“Justice Department Moves to Strip Citizenship from 40 Criminals in Largest Single-Period Filing Under the Trump Administration,” a press release from earlier this month crowed). The White House also tried, unsuccessfully, to revoke America’s constitutional right to birthright citizenship, which could have left future generations far more vulnerable to removal or persecution.

And in Israel, Palestinians have long been made to feel the weight of citizenship — and the heft of its absence. This is not only true in, say, the West Bank, where Jews live as citizens but Palestinians live under occupation and military law, but in East Jerusalem, where most Palestinians are permanent residents, not citizens, meaning they cannot vote in general elections for the Israeli legislature.

“That is a tool that Israel has used in a different way that could easily be transplanted to citizens,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst on Israel at Crisis Group. And if you can strip residency from Palestinians in Jerusalem, maybe you can strip citizenship, too. “If this government is reelected, I could see that becoming a less and less crazy idea” as what was once unthinkable becomes “normalized.” Palestinian citizens in Israel have expressed the same concern.

The chilling effect of deportation threats 

How — and why — does an aspiring authoritarian move from threatening the rights and status of demographic groups to going after elites?

Sometimes, the elites are — in addition to being outspoken and high profile — from the demographic group under threat.

Several years before Khan’s OCI status came under threat, the Modi government took journalist Aatish Taseer’s OCI card from him. This happened in 2019 — months after Taseer authored a Time story with “India’s Divider in Chief” plastered across the cover, after which the prime minister himself said, “Time Magazine is foreign. The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.” Taseer’s father was indeed a Pakistani political figure, but this was hardly some secret of which Taseer had made offhand mention; Taseer had written about his father and the role his absence and rediscovery in his life, including in his first book, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands.

And so with Imran Khan, Taseer said in a phone interview, there is an element of, “Just get the Muslim out” (Khan’s mother is Muslim). In Taseer’s own case, he said, he became “the Paki.”

The same is true at least in one high-profile case in the United States: Omar is Muslim and from Somalia, two groups that frequently attract the ire of the Trump administration. Recently, Trump urged Minnesotans to “fight back” against Somali immigrants before the state is “taken over.” Omar is also a prominent and progressive member of Congress. 

“It’s got these two levels,” Taseer said. “One is an ethnonationalist agenda. The other is a blunt instrument of coercion.” If you speak out too freely, Taseer added, “you won’t be able to return home.”

The blunt instrument, though, is more narrowly applied than, say, stripping people from voter rolls en masse. It is designed to cause fear among elites: journalists and actors and academics.

And it is meant, Banerjee said, to raise the price of protest.

The government’s first instinct, she said, is to call protesters terrorists and anti-nationals, rather than citizens exercising their rights: “They don’t seem to understand that to peacefully protest is there in…the constitution.”

And by taking a Bollywood star’s OCI status, the government can “make an example and say, look, we can take the biggest and the richest and the most prominent.” It is a message to the rich and the famous and the powerful: Do not think you are bigger than government coercion. You are not.

Whether it works is almost beside the point. Trump is facing an uphill legal battle in proving that an error committed by Omar’s father, if indeed any error exists, means she should lose her citizenship. Omar has said she sees the administration’s goal as exhausting and intimidating her to the point she leaves politics — something she says will not happen. 

And, it’s unlikely, Zonszein said, that Abraham and Szor will actually be stripped of citizenship given Israel’s own judicial protections. But, “It’s an empty threat, but one that works, because it chills dissent, it stifles it, it makes people scared.”

It also suggests that, regardless of whether you’re a member of the targeted group, or have some special status that could set you apart, power can come for you, too. That can scare people out of speaking out for the marginalized. It can also alert them into the need for doing so.

“When it happens in a democracy, one has to always keep one’s radar attuned to who is suddenly becoming prey, whether it’s LGBT in Russia or now in Turkey or in this case in India, Muslims, Taseer said. ”It’s sort of — what they’re going to those people, they’re going to eventually do to the population at large. It’s not one of those things where they’re like, ah, let us do this little thing, and then you guys can all live happily ever after. It’s generally always accompanied by a deeper authoritarian turn.”

For example, in addition to threatening Abraham and Szor, Israel has revoked the entry permits of American Jews who volunteered to work with and protect Palestinian farmers during harvests and froze aliyah — the name for the process by which Jews abroad immigrate — of two Jews over their pro-Palestinian West Bank activism, which, as Israeli outlet Haaretz reported, could be a violation of Israeli law guaranteeing the right of all Jews around the world the right to move to Israel and become citizens. 

“I mean, anybody with their head on straight would say, if you treat one person this way, it’s not that hard to treat another person this way,” Zonszein said. “That’s pretty basic, obvious stuff.” 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Another day, another hugely consequential foreign election. (If you’re wondering why all the world seems to be voting now, there’s no conspiracy — it’s largely coincidence!) 

Today we’re jetting off to Israel, where voters turned out in record numbers for what some analysts have called the most important legislative election in the country’s history. It’s an election that will determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stays in power — and could shape the future of Israeli democracy.

These are, after all, the first national elections since the October 7, 2023, attacks, and they’re a referendum on everything that’s happened since: the devastating war in Gaza, the widening conflict across the Middle East, and Netanyahu’s attacks on independent watchdogs, foreign media, and his political opposition.

Both Netanyahu and the opposition have depicted the election in existential terms. Quite literally, in some cases. Campaign banners for Netanyahu’s Likud party warned Israelis that they could cast a vote for a right-wing party…or for Palestine. Opposition leaders, meanwhile, are framing the election as a fight to preserve Israeli democracy.

Go a little deeper

Some of you, I realize, may question whether Israel qualifies as a democracy at all, given its treatment of Palestinians. Listen: I appreciate the complexity here! That complexity is central to the stakes of this election. 

Israeli democracy — whatever its asterisks — faces both an immediate threat and a more foundational problem. The immediate threat is, of course, Netanyahu and his more authoritarian impulses. A record seventh term would give him more time to weaken checks on his power.

The foundational problem, meanwhile, concerns who gets a say in how Israel is governed. The state rules over Palestinians who cannot vote in its national elections, while its own Arab citizens — who make up one-fifth of the population — face well-documented discrimination in areas including housing, land use, and family reunification. That marginalization also shows up in politics. Both Netanyahu and several opposition leaders have vowed not to work with Israel’s Arab parties to form a governing coalition. 

But that’s where this election could get interesting. Under Israel’s parliamentary system, Israelis essentially vote for a party, and parliamentary seats are allocated proportionally. Aligned parties then band together to try to form a coalition that can command the majority of parliamentary seats. 

A Netanyahu coalition would likely include, for instance, a number of right-wing, nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, while an opposition coalition would likely include Jewish parties from the left, center, and center-right. 

Either bloc could win enough seats today to govern without additional partners. (Polls closed at 4 pm ET, and we’ll have a fuller picture as the evening goes on.) But if the opposition falls short, it might need support from one or more of the Arab parties that some of its leading figures have lately sworn off. 

Should no one form a governing coalition, Israelis may have to vote again. But more importantly, for our purposes, the debate over partnering with Arab parties goes back to that “deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy,” as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp once put it. 

As Zack argues, most Israeli Jews want to live in a democracy — but paradoxically, they want to live in a democracy that privileges some citizens over others. Netanyahu has tried to resolve that paradox by weakening Israel’s democratic institutions. 

Today’s election and its aftermath could show whether there’s appetite in Israel for a very different, pro-democratic approach. Democracy is 2-0 this week! We’ll soon see if it puts a third win on the board. 

One link for later

➨ Treat your bot banker with care. Research shows that AI tools like ChatGPT dispense pretty good financial advice, on the whole. But you should still approach these tools with caution. Sharing specific financial information with a chatbot raises privacy concerns, and chatbots are not licensed or regulated the way human advisors or accountants are. Think of them as financially savvy friends: helpful…but fallible!  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that a desire to please other people is one of the most common reasons people tell lies? It’s more common than lying for both personal gain or pleasure.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the first predominantly white community in the US to vote in favor of school integration. That would be Teaneck, New Jersey, which in 1964 began bussing all of its sixth-grade students to a new central school building.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Vox isn’t typically in the business of covering elections in far-flung locales like the central Balkans. (No offense whatsoever to anyone from the central Balkans!) But on Sunday, an insurgent student-backed movement in Serbia successfully toppled the country’s ruling right-wing political machine, creating an unexpected opening for democratic reform. 

Then, in another upset halfway around the globe, Brazilian voters reelected incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over his far-right challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro. “Democracy always, dictatorship never again,” Lula said in his victory speech.

That’s two big repudiations of the nationalist right in 24 hours. Not quite enough to declare a trend, maybe, but sufficient to remind us that there’s still hope for the world’s embattled democratic institutions. 

More than that, these results offer evidence of something that sounds naive and Pollyannish in our current moment, but can (apparently!) still prove true: Organizing can be a powerful force for electoral change — both abroad and maybe here at home.

Go a little deeper

To be fair, the two elections differed considerably, and I don’t want to suggest it’s all sunshine and democratic renewal ahead for Brazil and Serbia. Bolsonaro is refusing to concede, for instance. And in Serbia, the victorious Student List still has to stand up a government, a prime minister, and a full policy platform — something the nascent movement has never done before. 

But academics and elections-watchers in both countries have credited the results in large part to mass protests and grassroots organizing that helped mobilize unexpected numbers of voters.

Serbian students began their movement in 2024, following the partial collapse of a railway station that killed 16 people. The government’s failure to fully explain the cause of the collapse — or hold anyone responsible — fueled months of marches, protest bike rides, and other demonstrations. That movement eventually grew into the Student List: an opposition electoral slate that fielded 250 candidates in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. 

The story in Brazil is quite different. Lula, the country’s leftist president, was actually poised to lose. Brazil uses a two-round popular vote to elect its president, and if no candidate secures more than half the vote in the first round, then the top two candidates proceed to a runoff election. Lula placed second in that first vote, after Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the heir to his father’s far-right political movement. 

To many Brazilians, that second-place finish served as a kind of wake-up call. “No runoff campaign in Brazil has ever brought so many people to the streets and onto social media,” Guilherme Casarões, an associate professor of Brazilian studies at Florida International University, wrote in an analysis of the surprise results. One WhatsApp channel dedicated to turning voters out for Lula grew to nearly 11 million followers, up from just 50,000 after his first-round loss. 

Looking at these projects abroad, I’m struck that American pro-democracy movements like No Kings haven’t achieved that kind of influence. Arguably, that’s in part a consequence of their failure to turn protest energy into actual political organizing — things like registering voters, knocking on doors, and fielding candidates. 

But there are some signs that may be shifting. No Kings has lately pivoted its focus, for instance, from mostly organizing protests to urging Americans — of both parties — to vote in the midterms. And Indivisible, one of the groups behind the movement, claims that early voting surged during the latest protests in the zip codes where they occurred.

It’s not exactly a central Balkan moment, but maybe it’s a hint of things to come. Elections can surprise you, after all. Just ask a Serb or a Brazilian. 

One link for later

➨ Leave your big life decisions to chance. (Sort of.) A team of researchers invited people to make a big life decision by flipping a coin and then tracked their happiness with the outcome. They found that, of the people who obeyed the results of the toss, the ones who changed something big were overwhelmingly happier. That doesn’t literally mean we should all resort to coin tosses, but it should tell us something important: We often tend to be too cautious about making major changes. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that in the 1870s and ’80s, spectators flocked to Madison Square Garden for long-distance walking competitions? Athletes walked up to 600 miles in six days, just going round and round the stadium. 
• Today’s trivia: Which New Jersey city was the first predominantly white community in the US to vote in favor of school integration? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the radioactive noble gas with the chemical symbol Rn. That would be radon, once a trendy (deadly) ingredient in quack medicines. 

On the first day of its war against Iran, the United States killed 123 children when it targeted and struck an elementary school. 

The strikes, ultimately approved by humans, were facilitated by the US’s Maven Smart System, an AI-enabled software platform developed by Palantir Technologies that allows the military to aggregate, organize, and process battlefield data. Operators fed Maven intelligence classifying the elementary school as an Iranian military facility, and the system, in turn, marked it as one of the priority targets for day one of the war. Though the site was formerly part of a naval military base, it had been converted into an elementary school in 2017 and had remained one since. The intel handed to Maven did not reflect this.  

This mistake resulted in what some reporters have called “one of the single worst massacres committed by the US government since the Vietnam War.”

Such scenarios may become more common as militaries continue to deploy a once-theoretical technology — AI-assisted or autonomous weapons, capable of making both targeting and launch decisions on their own — on real battlefields around the globe. And they raise a troubling, unresolved question: When human beings and machines collaborate in violating international law, who is to blame? 

In this case, the government and private sector are pointing the finger at each other. Some US Central Command personnel, according to Pentagon officials who spoke to Bloomberg, expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets. Meanwhile, a Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies,” while also denying that the evidence indicated that its software was at fault in the strike. 

This debate underscores the fact that AI and autonomous weapons are raising a new host of unresolved issues within the law, even as they’re actively assuming positions on the battlefield. In institutions where the line between human and machine decision-making continues to blur, how do we assign responsibility for war crimes? And, are the laws in place suited for the job?

In institutions where the line between human and machine decision-making continues to blur, how do we assign responsibility for war crimes?

To unpack some of these issues, I spoke with international law expert Allen Weiner, a senior lecturer at Stanford Law School, where he teaches courses on the law of armed conflict. Before teaching at Stanford, Weiner practiced international law in the US Department of State for more than a decade. We discussed the difficulties in attributing criminal responsibility, achieving justice for those harmed by lethal autonomous weapons, and much more. The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How do autonomous weapons challenge traditional understandings of responsibility when it comes to the law of armed conflict?

For most of the 20 years I’ve been teaching at Stanford, there’s been a real fascination and fixation on the problem of autonomous weapons. But the truth is that up until pretty recently, nobody really had any [of them]. It was more of an idea than a problem. It’s only in recent years that we have begun to see the deployment of tools that seem to have the capability [to make decisions themselves], so this does raise the question about compliance with illegal orders and where in the chain responsibility lies.

There are different theories about this. Some people say that if we’re engaged in an illegal attack, that has to be because of the programming or the code, so the manufacturers are somehow responsible for committing war crimes. 

Other people would say no, that’s not the case, especially if the military has said the tool is not allowed to make very substantial autonomous judgments, or can’t say no. Then it’s basically the commander, at the point they decide to deploy this weapon, who might be responsible for the illegal acts, even without knowing in advance what they’re going to be.

So to finish where I began, this does present a big challenge to our traditional understanding of responsibility for targeting decisions and of what it would mean if there were an obligation [for autonomous weapons] to say no. 

The real issue is not the obligation to say no, but this: If you train a tool and it wages war in a manner that’s unlawful, where does responsibility for that lie?

If a commander gives a clearly illegal order, such as, “blow up this school,” it seems clear that responsibility falls on the commander. But I could imagine a scenario where a commander is using an AI-assisted or autonomous weapon, isn’t giving it any illegal orders, is trusting that it will operate within the law, and the weapon breaks the law “on its own.” Where does responsibility fall in those cases?

I can imagine two different scenarios. One is that you say, “We’re going to carry out an attack against our enemy, and we want to hit them really, really hard.” Your tool has been trained to say, “We’re not allowed to hit civilian objects,” so it might say, “I’m not going to hit a school.” But if the military has said, “Don’t refuse any targets,” then it might override the way it’s been trained. 

We’re seeing this already, with the stories coming out about breaches where AI tools, Claude and ChatGPT in particular, interpret their instructions in a way that causes them to do something the person who gave the instruction would not have wanted. When Anthropic gave Claude a challenge to figure out if it could do something, the tool figured out, well, maybe we should break into Hugging Face as a way of solving this problem, and the people who gave the AI tool the challenge never intended that.

So if you said, “We want to launch a really punishing campaign,” what happens if the tool on its own says, “Nothing’s going to hurt them more than seeing their kids killed, so let’s attack the school?” That’s one risk, and it’s a real challenge.

So [as for who’s responsible], it’s not the commander who said “hit them hard,” because when he said that, he didn’t mean “attack schools.” It’s not really the companies, because the companies didn’t want them to hit schools either. 

But the tools are out there, reading everything on the internet, and it came across something that said the way you win a war is by attacking the things your adversary holds most dear, and they hold nothing more dear than their children. So it makes this kind of judgment on its own. And it’s not as if you can go back and say who ordered it to hit a school, which is the thing that is clearly illegal. So I do think there’s a risk of diffusion of responsibility here.

You could say the commander knew the tool might work this way, or the person who decided to contract with Palantir or with Claude, whoever it is, to build this tool. But if we’re really thinking about criminal responsibility, the level of responsibility you would need to convict someone requires a culpable mental state. You would need the person to intend, or at least know, that they were authorizing an attack against the school. And I can easily see a commander saying, “I had no idea.”

The decision to authorize this tool, or to give an instruction like “hit them very hard,” could be a basis for some other kind of accountability — administrative discipline within the military, a reprimand, your rank is lowered. But if we’re talking about criminal responsibility, which is what we often think about when we talk about war crimes, I think this diffusion of responsibility is going to make it very hard to identify any single individual who has the required mental state to give rise to accountability.

The second scenario is where the tool just makes a mistake based on the information available to it. We saw that with the attack on the girls’ school in Iran, where it was pretty clear the tool was looking at old data. Now, who’s responsible for that? 

Is it the people who said “give me targets based on this data set,” when they should have made sure the data and the maps were current? All of this strikes me as negligence or recklessness, and it does seem challenging to imagine a situation in which we would say yes, somebody here has committed a war crime. 

“There can well be war crimes, but identifying who the war criminal is might be a big challenge.”

A war crime has been committed, but is there a war criminal? That’s the situation we’re seeing. There can well be war crimes, but identifying who the war criminal is might be a big challenge.

There’s a professor of law, Rebecca Crootof, who proposes the idea of “war torts.” Instead of thinking about war crimes involving autonomous weapons solely through a criminal responsibility lens, maybe tort law — which allows victims to sue wrongdoers for negligent, reckless, or intentional harm — could address the diffusion of responsibility you mentioned. What do you think about that idea?

I think the idea is interesting. We have to separate out the obligations that countries have under international humanitarian law. In a situation like the one I just described, where there’s a war crime but no war criminal, that doesn’t mean the country is not responsible. There may not be an individual who’s criminally accountable, but if a country targets civilians in a circumstance that’s unreasonable, that’s a violation of international humanitarian law, and that could be a basis for claims between the two countries. 

Tribunals were established between Ethiopia and Eritrea, for instance, after the Eritrean War of Independence, that dealt with claims between the two countries for money damages, and some of them involved allegations of violations of the law of armed conflict. Iraq paid reparations after the first Gulf War for harms it had caused to people in Kuwait, under something called the UN Compensation Commission. So the idea that the state is responsible is well established, and one of the ways states would discharge that responsibility would be by paying money damages. That’s the domestic-law equivalent of torts.

Whether there would be a mechanism for [civilians] doing this in domestic law is an interesting idea. We would probably need legislatures, either state legislatures or the federal government, to create a private cause of action allowing people who have been injured to bring claims against, say, the manufacturers of these tools. But this gets procedurally very complicated, because there’s a whole body of law on federal sovereign immunity. 

Could you sue the Defense Department? Probably not. Could you sue an individual soldier? Probably not. Could you sue Anthropic or Palantir? Maybe. But it would probably require Congress to enact a new cause of action, because in general it’s very hard to bring private lawsuits in US courts for violations of international law.

The basic idea of what we would think of as tort or civil responsibility is really the whole essence of international law. On the substance, states do owe responsibility to one another, and they can engage in violations of international humanitarian law that would invoke their responsibility. But then the whole separate question is whether you have a forum within which to adjudicate that and get compensation.

Does that look different in cases where violations of international law were committed by a human soldier versus a machine?

Well, we don’t know, because there have been no cases in the latter category. All of the international humanitarian law violations that have been the subject of international law claims were ordered by humans. 

Now, if an American machine launches an attack against a girls’ school in Iran, and there were a court with jurisdiction, the US would be responsible. In some ways it wouldn’t matter whether it was an individual or a machine, because we don’t have to go down to the level of the individual actor, company, AI tool, or commander. The responsibility is the responsibility of the country. In some ways, that makes it easier.

If we pursued compensation through state-to-state claims, you’d be able to do that without getting into the details of who within the state that committed the war crime was responsible. The state whose school was attacked would say, “I don’t care. You committed a war crime, you’re liable to me, you’re responsible for the damages, and you can figure it out internally.”

But if we were doing something like a war crimes prosecution, where we’re trying to hold an individual criminally responsible, that would make quite a difference. We would have to deal with all of these difficult questions about responsibility and mental state that you and I are struggling with right now.

So, in most cases, the state would have to take responsibility regardless.

Right, and there are lots of [International Court of Justice] cases involving different aspects of the use of force. The principle that you can bring state-to-state claims for violation of these rules is quite well established. 

But with international law, states have to consent to the jurisdiction of a court. They can do that in advance by saying “I’ve signed up to the jurisdiction of a court and I accept any claims that might be brought against me in this court,” or they do it on a case-by-case basis. And it may not surprise you to know that some of the most powerful countries in the world, the ones most likely to use force outside their borders, have tended to be reluctant to accept the jurisdiction of international courts and tribunals.

Russia, the United States, Israel, and China have not accepted the so-called optional clause jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. So there’s the substance, about the responsibility of states, and then there are the procedural aspects of whether these cases could be brought in court.

And Trump recently said everyone on the International Criminal Court should “resign immediately.”

Yeah, exactly. 

And what about the role of these military tech companies, like Palantir?

“At what point does Palantir become a good target under international law? Or at what point does Anthropic become a good target under international law, if its AI tools are being used to promote the war effort?”

Another issue [I’ve been thinking on] because of the questions we’re talking about is when the companies themselves become combatants.

We know that a private company that manufactures airplanes, an airplane factory, is a good target under international law. At what point does Palantir become a good target under international law? Or at what point does Anthropic become a good target under international law, if its AI tools are being used to promote the war effort? I think that question is about when the connection of these private companies to the war effort, in a way we’ve never really seen before, meets the standards under international law.

A civilian loses their immunity when they directly participate in hostilities, or if they assume what is known as a “continuous combatant function.” Are there arguments to be made that some of these private companies are participating in hostilities by virtue of supplying the tools the military is using to wage war? I think that’s a really interesting question.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Israel felt inescapable in the midterm primaries, especially for Democrats, where centrists and progressives clashed — memorably! — over military aid, Gaza, and (of course) AIPAC.

But with the Election Day almost upon us, the subject seems less prominent. When I Googled “Israel US elections” this morning, all the top results concerned next week’s Israeli parliamentary elections.

In less than two weeks, however, Americans will also head to the polls. They’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. 

As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Previously, we dug into how both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, and the politics of high costs. This week, we’re tackling Americans’ growing disillusionment with Israel — and how that will (or won’t) show up at the midterm ballot box.

Go a little deeper

You know the first part of this story already, because we’ve discussed it quite a lot: Americans’ views of Israel have nosedived over the past 18 months. 

That shift helped shape the Democratic primaries and will likely figure prominently in the coming presidential contest. But how much Israel matters in a general midterm election, to people outside the political left…well, November will really test that.

Voters rarely rank Israel policy among their top priorities. In a poll that the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted earlier this month, about 80 percent of registered voters said Congress should highly prioritize the cost of living during its next term, and roughly 70 percent said the same about ending the Iran war. By comparison, less than a third of voters said they prioritized cutting off aid to Israel. 

There’s another way that Israel factors into US elections, of course — and that’s in fundraising. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has become one of the biggest spenders in US elections and a repeat flash point in this year’s Democratic primaries. 

But in the general election, even AIPAC has been overshadowed by the GOP’s big-business donors, many of them in tech, who have given Republicans a historic spending advantage in this year’s contests. On Wednesday, the lobbying group actually announced it would no longer endorse political candidates or make direct campaign contributions.

In either case, whatever happens in the midterms won’t likely transform US policy toward Israel. President Donald Trump is still in charge of foreign policy, after all, and even if Democrats take back the House, they’ll have little ability to reverse his agenda. 

But a Democratic majority would gain “new congressional tools to act on Israel-Palestine issues,” Hady Amr, the former US Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, wrote in a new analysis for Chatham House. Those tools aren’t flashy (think: hearings, funding restrictions, and reporting requirements), but they could certainly set the stage for a broader policy shift under a Democratic president.

Races to watch:

• Florida’s Senate race, where Democrat Angie Nixon has criticized her party’s ties to the pro-Israel lobby;
• Michigan’s Senate race, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign grew out of pro-Palestinian activism; 
• Michigan’s (deeply purple) Seventh District, where progressive William Lawrence has vocally criticized US support for Israel. 

More from Vox: 

• The left is winning the argument on aid to Israel. The next step will be harder.
• The first true swing-state test for the Bernie left
• What American Jews want from the midterms

One link for later

➨ Gather ye roast spuds while ye may. Vegan restaurants appear to be experiencing a downturn of sorts: According to one online directory, the number of establishments fell from 1,717 last October to 1,509 now. But the news isn’t entirely or unambiguously bad. One added pressure on plant-based restauranters, for instance, is growing competition from mainstream restaurants that have started offering vegan dishes. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that North America’s largest wind farm has more than 900 turbines, each as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and encompasses an area roughly the size of Chicago? It just came online in June. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the plural of Prius, as in Toyota’s hybrid hatchback car? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked after the definition of the word “cartomancy.” That’s the practice of fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. Witchy!

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 cozying up to Russia again. 

What’s happening? On Wednesday, Russia released an American prisoner, 74-year-old retired teacher Stephen Hubbard, back to the US. The US, Trump said in a social media post, “out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return.” 

Hubbard’s release is unquestionably good news. But Trump is wrong: In just the last month, his administration has delivered for Russia in more ways than one, often inexplicably and despite bipartisan condemnation. 

What is Trump doing for Russia? Late last week, he waived upcoming economic sanctions on Russia that he had only recently signed into law after they passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. He also: 

• Struck a diesel deal with Russia, temporarily lifting fuel sanctions on the country in exchange for Russia releasing a trivial amount of diesel into the global market; 
• Announced — seemingly without talking to either party — a Russia-Ukraine “energy ceasefire” favorable to Russia (which has since fallen apart); 
• Temporarily interrupted US intel sharing with Ukraine and played a role in interfering with Ukraine’s access to Starlink, which helps power the country’s drone warfare against Russia; and 
• Called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be replaced.

Last month, Trump also invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the annual G20 summit later this year, which would mark Putin’s first appearance since 2019.

What does Trump get out of all of this? There’s Hubbard’s release, but taking that on Trump’s own terms (muddled though they are), the US didn’t give anything to secure it — which means that all of those favors have amounted to not much at all, other than papering over Russia’s role as an international bad actor and breaking with US allies in Europe. 

Why does this matter? Trump’s Russia embrace comes at an awful time for Ukraine, which, as the New York Times reported earlier this month, is facing a Russian campaign to “freeze Ukrainians into submission” as winter approaches. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called Putin a “humanitarian.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I was delighted to learn about the US’s new national park yesterday, its 64th. Chiricahua National Park — until Tuesday, only a national monument — is the first new park in six years. Located in southeastern Arizona, it’s also called the “Wonderland of Rocks,” according to the Washington Post; you can read more about it here with a gift link. 

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

French protests have long been the stuff of legend, literature, and Broadway musicals. But even by those storied standards, last weekend’s demonstrations were pretty remarkable.

More than half a million people took to the streets in occasionally violent protests that are posing a mounting political challenge for the French government. The movement began roughly a month ago over concerns about the sorry state of public high schools, which are frequently underfunded and understaffed. 

But in the weeks since, the student protests have rapidly expanded to encompass a wider range of grievances around inequality, high living costs and public services. The ranks of the protesters have also swelled to include some more opportunistic looters and agitators.  

In Paris, masked rioters trashed businesses and set fires, while students blocked the Louvre Museum on Monday, forcing it to close. In Limoges, a city of roughly 130,000 people, the spire of a 19th-century town hall dramatically collapsed in flames.

The national government has responded with curfews for parts of cities including Paris, Nice, and Lille, as well as emphatic condemnations of the violence. In a televised address on Sunday night, French President Emmanuel Macron also promised to partner with students, teachers, trade unions and other groups to identify “joint solutions.”

But it’s unclear what solutions could possibly speak to the whole of this newly expanded movement. The initial student protesters were after concrete educational reforms, like smaller class sizes and less chaotic schedules. The demands now are more diffuse and disjointed, reflecting the sense that — as Macron himself put it — “there is no desirable future” for young people in France. It’s a situation that the French far right is already exploiting, just six months before the country’s next presidential election.

Go a little deeper

If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu here — that’s French for “already seen,” FYI — please know you have good reason. The French also turned out for gigantic mass protests against a proposed retirement age increase three years ago. And a gas-tax hike five years before that. Some historians trace French protest culture all the way back to the 1300s.

While it’s not necessarily true that the French demonstrate more than people in other Western countries, their protests do tend to attract outsize global attention. Youth protests over education, living costs, and government corruption have also recently taken place in Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Albania, for instance. I’d hazard that you’ve heard less about them.

But there’s a twofold explanation for why France’s protests loom so large. First, protest occupies a special place in French history and culture — and the world knows it. As one political scientist explained in a 1994 paper on the history of French protests, the French have an unusual, centuries-long track record of turning demonstrations into actual political change, arguably starting with the French Revolution.

More recently, in 1968, student protests expanded into a larger worker strike that nearly toppled the government. Many of today’s young protesters have specifically referenced that heritage in interviews and slogans.

But that’s not the only reason that French people always seem to be protesting. Conditions in France are also, well … pretty protestable. Consider just the narrow issue of public education, which sparked the current hullabaloo. 

By some estimates, higher-education funding per student has fallen by 20 percent in just the past 10 years. High school classrooms are frequently overcrowded, and a government report cited by The Guardian concluded that the country’s aging schools are in need of billions of dollars of building repairs and climate mitigation.

The government has pointed to France’s strained finances as a constraint on addressing these issues. (And, in fairness, France’s finances are indeed very strained.) There’s a sense, however, that young people are bearing the cost of that crisis more than other populations. Cost-cutting measures that would affect older people — such as raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 — have been delayed in the face of fierce opposition. And by “opposition,” of course, I mean protests. 

One link for later

➨ Make your AI fallback plan. Artificial intelligence will cost many people their jobs; in some places, it already has. But instead of panic-learning the first available trade, first consider where you find meaning in your current occupation. That should help guide you to a fallback career that will still feel valuable, even if it’s…you know. Not your first pick. My colleague Sigal says she’d become a rabbi; I think I’d like to teach again. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that a single episode of Sex and the City is credited with launching the early aughts cupcake craze? Today’s food trends are much shorter-lived, by comparison. And they typically start on TikTok or Instagram. 
• Today’s trivia: What mass-market, imported beer is named for a river in the Netherlands? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. That would be Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who also preached at President Donald Trump’s childhood church and officiated his first wedding.

As the US-Iran war drags on, the damage is being felt regionally: Saudi Arabia experienced the worst attack in over a decade earlier this month, when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia struck an airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The strike killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300 others.

Saudi Arabia responded with missile attacks on Yemen, striking oil facilities, and the Houthis have launched more strikes of their own, targeting Saudi oil infrastructure. 

The dueling strikes are the latest development in a decade-plus of conflict between Saudi and the Houthis, a political and military group that controls part of northern Yemen, which had been on pause until earlier this year after a 2022 ceasefire. But the Iran war, and Houthi affiliation with Iran’s network of proxy groups, mean the current violence has far-reaching implications for the US, Israel, and the global energy economy. 

It also threatens more than just Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil industry: As Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist, explains, the attacks cut at the heart of the country’s project to evolve into a destination for foreign investment, travel, tourism, and more. On Monday, the country’s upcoming Future Investment Initiative was postponed until 2027.

Carlstrom, who is based in Riyadh, spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram how the attack has been received inside Saudi Arabia, why it comes at an especially bad time for the country, and how President Donald Trump might — or might not — get more involved. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Can you help us understand how the Houthis have such a presence in the country right now? Are they infiltrating the country? Are they already there?

They’re shooting from outside the country. They’re shooting from Yemen. The Houthis are a group that’s been around for a few decades. They were originally a local insurgency in Yemen that was fighting against the Yemeni government. They originate from the northern part of Yemen, but they were able to gain control of large parts of that country from 2014 onwards. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime dictator of Yemen, was overthrown during the Arab Spring and the Houthis were able to seize a large chunk of territory. 

They are effectively in control of most of the population centers in Yemen. They have received increasing support from Iran, which has provided them with weapons, with money, with know-how, and technical expertise. And they have used that to build an arsenal of drones and missiles, which they are using now to carry out attacks on Saudi Arabia.

And was there a particular reason they targeted the airport in Riyadh? Were they trying to send a message here?

If you listen to the messaging from the Houthis, they are trying to describe this as almost a like-for-like campaign, where you’ve had years in which the Saudi-led coalition, which invaded Yemen in 2015, has been imposing a blockade of Yemeni airspace, has been restricting flights in and out of that country. 

And so the Houthis describe this publicly as being a retaliation in kind, but I think they’ve also just figured out that attacks on airports are a very effective way to cause economic disruption in Saudi Arabia. You prevent not just people from flying in and out but also, as we’ve seen disruptions to shipping via the Strait of Hormuz, a lot of cargo that these countries depend on for daily needs are coming in by air instead. 

Carrying out these sorts of attacks, shutting down the airport in a capital city, is a very effective way for the Houthis to impose economic pain on the Saudis.

And I guess on some level it makes the country feel insecure. How is that making Saudi Arabia’s leader feel right now? What’s his response been?

It comes at a very difficult time for the Saudi leadership because they are supposed to be hosting a number of events this month where Saudi will be playing a role on the world stage. 

There’s something called the World Petroleum Congress that is taking place this week [October 11–15], which is normally a big event that draws executives from top oil and gas companies. Many of them canceled their participation because of the attacks on the airport. 

Then they are supposed to be hosting the [now-postponed] Future Investment Initiative, which is something often known outside Saudi Arabia as “Davos in the Desert.” It’s the sort of flagship investment conference that takes place here every year. It draws a who’s who of global finance. 

For a country that is trying to diversify its economy, a country that is trying to attract foreign investment and make itself into a hub for finance and travel and tourism, these sorts of attacks are very detrimental to those goals.

And this is coming as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the rest of the leadership in the country is really trying to establish Saudi Arabia as the premier economic hub in the region. The stakes are really high for him right now?

They are. And just about everything that they are trying to do is being disrupted by what’s happened over the past few weeks. 

If you look at travel, for example, the Public Investment Fund, which is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, last year launched a new airline, Riyadh Air, which they are hoping will eventually compete with Emirates or Qatar Airways, the really big carriers in the Gulf.  

That airline was just getting into regular operations this summer where they were growing their fleet, they were growing their network of destinations. And then suddenly this happens and their home base in Riyadh is shut down. They have moved some of their planes out of Riyadh to other airports to keep them safe from Houthi attacks. Obviously, it’s very disruptive for trying to build an air carrier. 

In Riyadh itself, the financial district — this sort of long-planned attempt to set up a banking hub that might rival the one in Dubai — had just started to get going over the past couple of years, when you had banks and other financial services firms moving in there. Everybody who works there has now been told to work remotely for the foreseeable future because there is a concern about possible Houthi attacks against skyscrapers and the financial district. 

Everything they are trying to do, from finance to travel to trade, all of it is being disrupted and threatened by what’s happening in Yemen.

What options does he have to reassure investors and the world really that he can protect the country and maybe especially his airport, where a bunch of the investment is focused?

The airport, I think, is going to be difficult to reassure people about. You can install additional air defenses there. You can move more batteries and more interceptors there, but at the end of the day, no air defense system is hermetic. There’s no 100 percent guarantee that you’re going to shoot down every incoming projectile. 

As long as there is this ongoing war between the Houthis and Yemen and the Saudis, I think people might have ongoing concerns about the airport. You have to resolve that underlying issue to give people confidence. 

Now, how do you try to resolve that? If you’re Saudi Arabia right now, you have two bad options. One is you keep fighting. You try to militarily defeat the Houthis or at least force them to accept a renewed ceasefire. 

The other option is you cut a deal. You try to offer the Houthis some concessions that might encourage them to go back to the ceasefire. That’s going to be very costly for Saudi Arabia. I’ve heard that the Houthis are demanding probably billions of dollars of financial concessions where they would want the Saudis to offer some money for reconstruction and to pay the salaries of Yemeni civil servants working in Houthi-controlled areas. 

If you are the Saudi leadership right now, neither one is really a good option.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a pretty strong relationship with the president of the United States, who’s very sympathetic to Saudi Arabia and Saudi investment. Has he appealed to President Trump for help here yet?

He has. He’s done so repeatedly over the past month or so, asking not just for support with the Saudi campaign in Yemen, but for America to carry out its own airstrikes in Yemen. And the response so far from Donald Trump has been to refuse that.

For the US to get involved in a bigger way, there are some practical constraints at the moment where a lot of American military assets are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz trying to keep that open, keep oil flowing through the Strait. And so the response from Trump has been disappointing for the Saudi Crown prince. The US is providing intelligence support. It’s helping on that front, but it is not directly getting involved in the war in Yemen.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

On Friday, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians living in the West Bank, as well as a Washington Post photographer, who was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Photojournalist Heidi Levine was knocked down, beaten, and robbed of her camera equipment by masked settlers in an attack captured on video by other journalists. Those other members of the press rescued her from the attackers while Israel Defense Forces soldiers reportedly stood by.

Levine had lacerations and a wound to her hand that split her finger to the bone, according to the Post, which condemned the attack in a statement. Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who helped Levine escape the attack, said that Levine also had cracked ribs, and may have been stabbed.

Assaults like this one are becoming more common in the West Bank, where settler violence — which is currently targeting the ongoing olive harvest — has worsened. Last week, another photojournalist for the news wire Agence France-Presse was beaten with rifles by settlers, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been shot, beaten, and terrorized while the Israeli settlers targeting them face few consequences.

Why settler violence is growing in the West Bank

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp recently explained, under international law, the settler movement in the West Bank is clearly illegal. Nevertheless, it’s continued to grow, and it has a friend in the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also becoming increasingly violent. 

Two current Israeli officials, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, are settlers themselves, and both have used their offices — as ministers of finance and national security, respectively — to further the settler cause, including by making it easier for settlers to commit unchecked violence against Palestinians. 

The United Nations reported in June that settler attacks had reached “the highest sustained levels ever recorded…with [an average of] six daily attacks that have resulted in casualties, property damage or both,” and in many Palestinians being forced from their homes by settlers. In late September, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that expanding Israeli settlements and violence by settlers was “making everyday life untenable” for Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

As Zack has reported, settlements and settler violence are both intentional tactics, serving to force more Palestinians off their land, isolate the ones who stay, and push any potential two-state solution further out of reach. 

That kind of violence is likely only to worsen in the weeks to come: Israel will hold elections on October 27, which could well result in Netanyahu’s settler-friendly government losing power. As a result, the Washington Post reported earlier this month, settlers are “racing to lock down gains” before the election with ever more extreme violence.

One link for later

➨ Agentified kind of life. My colleague Adam Clark Estes turned the keys to his life over to a passel of AI agents for two weeks to see what would happen. They successfully saved him some times, he writes, largely with mundane tasks — but he left with mixed feelings about the experiment, including the possibility of contributing to a world with more AI slop.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the aerodynamic crouch used by jockeys in horse racing — known as the “martini glass position” — made race times roughly 5 to 7 percent faster? Jockeys maintain it with only a few toes resting on each stirrup.
• Today’s trivia: Who is the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would be the number 42 (take it up with Douglas Adams).

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: Is Trump turning on Ukraine? 

What’s happening? Ukraine says its access to Starlink, the satellite internet system run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, and Starshield, the military version of the same technology, is being throttled as President Donald Trump’s animosity toward the country mounts.

Why is Trump angry with Ukraine? Trump has been hot and cold on Ukraine since he returned to office, but his current anger is driven by oil prices and successful Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries — particularly ahead of the US midterm elections. 

Last week, Trump announced a US-Russia diesel deal, which has elicited bipartisan anger and probably won’t do much, if anything, for diesel prices in the US. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has criticized the deal, leading Trump to lash out and call for Zelenskyy’s replacement.

Over the weekend, Trump also announced an “ENERGY CEASEFIRE” between Ukraine and Russia that doesn’t really seem to exist. “Both parties have agreed,” he wrote. “Do not break it!” (Russia appears to have broken it the same day, while Ukraine is complying for now.)

Is Ukraine actually to blame for high oil prices? Partially, but not primarily; as the BBC explains, while Ukrainian refinery strikes play a role, ongoing disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf oil industry from Trump’s war with Iran have had a greater impact (though Trump has tried to shift the blame to Ukraine).

Why is Starlink so important? Starlink and Starshield provide vital communications infrastructure in Ukraine, especially on the battlefield. The technology is also used to control offensive and defensive Ukrainian drones, which have emerged as a key part of Ukraine’s military efforts against Russia.

What’s next? Despite the fact that neither Russia nor Ukraine seemingly signed on to Trump’s “ENERGY CEASEFIRE” and Russia is still attacking Ukrainian energy facilities, Trump is trying to bind Ukraine to it: The US has reportedly threatened to suspend US intelligence sharing, which has helped give Ukraine early warning of Russian missile attacks, if Ukraine strikes more Russian refineries.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I appreciated this New York Times story, pegged to Pope Leo XIV’s diagnosis yesterday, about all of the ways that science has made lung cancer massively more survivable than in years past, with a fatality rate half of what it was in the 1990s. You can read it here with a gift link.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

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: Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is out of a job after serious corruption allegations. 

What happened? Guilfoyle resigned on Tuesday after being shown the door earlier in the day by Trump’s brand-new White House press secretary, who announced at a briefing that Guilfoyle had been asked to resign. 

Her departure comes just six days after a bombshell Wall Street Journal story, which described Guilfoyle’s efforts to solicit money from a Trump donor, including $100,000 to pay down a credit card bill, in exchange for access to Trump officials and conservative media figures. 

Guilfoyle also attempted to conceal those efforts: In one text to the donor, Eric Deters, she wrote, “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Who is Guilfoyle? Fallen MAGA royalty. Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality, is also the ex-fiancée of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. (and, more distantly, the ex-wife of current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat).

There appears to be little love lost between Guilfoyle and Trump, however. On Tuesday, he told reporters that Guilfoyle “wasn’t a member of my family. She I guess dated my son a long time ago.” (The Don Jr.-Guilfoyle relationship is thought to have ended in 2024.)

Why was she forced out? Corruption allegations are not, generally speaking, dealbreakers in Trumpworld; the president and his children are all innovators when it comes to profiting off the presidency, and there’s plenty of self-dealing going on around them.

That being said, Guilfoyle may have crossed the line in two specific ways: one, her alleged corruption benefited her and not the Trump family. And two, the allegations are embarrassingly unsubtle even by the standards of the second Trump administration. The combination appears to have been too much.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

This New York Times story, about what a potential superhabitable world elsewhere in the cosmos could look like, was a very cool, very sci-fi read — and we may find out more about the existence of such planets soon, with new space telescopes planned for next year and beyond. 

You can read the full story here with a gift link. Enjoy, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow! 

In the weeks and months following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza that followed, the world’s attention turned away from the West Bank. 

Over the past three years, however, the situation in the Israel-occupied territory has worsened as Israeli settlers have carried out more violent attacks on Palestinians.

The attacks can range from acts of daily harassment and trespassing to a major mob assault in the West Bank village of Jalud that overwhelmed Israeli security forces and blocked a displaced Palestinian family from returning home. Last week, Israeli settlers shot and killed a Palestinian man.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed violent West Bank settlers as an issue, blaming the Jalud attack on a “handful of rioters” and referring to settlers as “juvenile delinquents” in a speech to the UN last month, in which he argued that the world should focus on violence committed by Palestinians instead.

But even as he downplays the problem, human rights organizations have documented a record level of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that such attacks have made everyday life “untenable” for the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlements are also clearly illegal, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in September — but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding. 

Ahead of Israel’s elections later this month, settlers have accelerated a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the explicit backing of some Israeli cabinet ministers, led by young militant Jewish settlers that are part of a loose network known as the Hilltop Youth. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Feliz Solomon reported on the Jalud attack and has written about the role of Hilltop Youth in worsening settler violence. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the reality on the ground in the West Bank, the settler groups behind it, and how Israeli officials are responding.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about the last three years in the West Bank. What’s been happening?

The October 7 attack really hardened a lot of people’s views in Israel, and that’s played out in the West Bank in a number of ways. 

One is that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has some powerful members who are settlers themselves, became much more overtly supportive of expanding the Jewish settlements. 

The second thing that changed was basically a total breakdown of trust, both between Jews and Arabs, and also between Jews and the state, because a lot of people felt that they were really on their own in terms of security. 

All of this created a really combustible environment. There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.

What does that total impunity look like? We often hear the term “settler violence.” What does that mean?

There’s really a whole spectrum of violent actions. It’s mostly by younger male settlers. There are some acts of daily harassment, like trespassing on Palestinian property, vandalism, stalking people, blocking roads, and preventing access to resources like water wells. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are also acts of extreme violence. 

There have been some very serious physical assaults. Settlers throwing rocks with slingshots. Last year, there was a viral video of an elderly woman who was beaten with a stick. She was hospitalized for days. And lately, we’ve been seeing more mob violence where a large group of settlers will raid a Palestinian village. They’ve set mosques and other property on fire. 

Just to be clear, there’s violence by Palestinians too, but we’re really seeing an alarming surge of violence by settlers that’s often unpunished, and increasingly it’s happening when settlers go into Palestinian areas where they’re not supposed to be.

You reported on an attack that happened last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud. Tell me what happened.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village, Jalud, and essentially besieged the houses. They blocked their access to essential goods and harassed the residents until, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

Two of those houses belonged to the Tubasi family. In early September, Israel’s high court ordered the state to ensure their safe return, and in late September, they tried to go back. We spoke with Wael, who’s one member of the family, and also with their lawyer about what happened when they tried to go back. 

A few dozen [Israeli] security forces were deployed to escort them home in the middle of the night, and when they got there, they found that the house was totally ransacked. They showed us before and after pictures, and the windows were smashed, the doors were broken, electrical wires were cut, and there was just debris all over the place.

When they came inside for the first time in about two months, they were walking through the property looking at the damage with flashlights, and they’d only been there for a few minutes when suddenly they were surrounded by a mob of settlers. They said at first that there were about 50 settlers around the house, and the military later said that there were more than a hundred people that took part in what they called a riot. 

The authorities told the family to take cover deeper inside the house, and they hid inside a stairwell as the soldiers tried to force these settlers to retreat, but they were shouting and throwing rocks at the house, and then, according to Wael, they even started climbing in through the windows. At that point, the authorities told the family to go upstairs, all the way up to the roof and to hide in a corner of the rooftop. 

Wael explained what he saw up there. He was looking down and he saw the soldiers battling it out with this large group of settlers and this thick cloud of tear gas and loud bangs from stun grenades.

“There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.”

Eventually, the security forces realized that they weren’t getting the situation under control. They had to get this family out of there. They took them back downstairs and outside and put them in a military vehicle, but then the settlers surrounded the vehicle and they were rocking the car. They slashed the tires so that [the family] couldn’t leave. Then the soldiers had to move them into an armored military vehicle and eventually they got them out. 

A short while later, not long after they had escaped, they started receiving video messages from some of their neighbors that showed what happened after they left, which was that their car and their house had been set on fire.

All right, so the Israeli authorities in the form of soldiers were trying to help this Palestinian family legally return and settlers violently blocked them. This is settlers versus the authorities. What do we know about who these settlers are and what is motivating them?

This was a very large group. We know of three people who were detained in this incident. All of them were teenagers. The youngest one I believe was 15 years old. 

A lot of the harassment in this area comes out of a nearby settlement called Esh Kodesh and smaller, more informal settlements around it that are called outposts. And these outposts are usually pretty crude encampments. They often start with just tents or a camper van or a trailer with no electricity and no water. And the people who choose to live in these places tend to be very young, very extreme ideological settlers.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth. Who are they?

The Hilltop Youth is a loose network of settlers that live outside the mainstream, and they often have much more extremist views than the mainstream settler movement. It’s an offshoot of religious Zionism, which is one of the main ideologies of the settler movement, and it sort of fuses the ideas of Orthodox Judaism with ultranationalism. 

The Hilltop Youth take these ideas to the extreme, and I’ve spoken with a bunch of them myself. They believe that they’re on a divine mission to reclaim the Holy Land for Jews, and they’ll cite parts of the Torah and other religious texts that they interpret as empowering them to take the land back and even to use violence. They see it as a preventive type of self-defense, and they see themselves as protecting all other Jews.

These are young people, some of them teenagers. Where are they coming from? Why are their parents not grounding them? How has this been allowed to unfold the way it has?

It’s a good question, and I should say also that not all Hilltop Youth are violent, but a lot of the violence that’s committed by Jews in the West Bank does come from this group, and they come from all over the place. Some of them grew up in the settlements, and then as teenagers, they kind of wandered and they struck out on their own. And then there are others who come from all over Israel. 

A lot of the Hilltop Youth, we’re finding, are kind of troubled kids. Sometimes they’re dropouts from strict religious schools, sometimes they have behavioral issues or ADHD, and they just didn’t really fit in. We heard from some kids who said that they found out about the outposts by word of mouth, like someone at their school had invited them to come for the weekend and they’d come and they’d stay a few days and eventually they’d start spending more and more time there until at some point they’re just living there. 

There are a number of NGOs that recruit young kids to come work as farm hands on agricultural outposts in the West Bank, and some of those are in these areas that are more prone to radicalization. These organizations present themselves as very innocent in that they’re identifying kids that need help and are bringing them to a place where they will learn some discipline and they will have a purpose and they’ll have something to do. But that often puts them into a more extreme environment.

In the case of the family you profiled in Jalud, it’s clear that the Israeli authorities, in the form of soldiers, attempted to help the family get back to their home. How does this typically play out, though? How do Israeli soldiers typically respond when settlers attack Palestinians?

There have been a number of high-profile examples of video footage circulating that appears to show Israeli soldiers either standing idly by or even, some would argue, siding with the settlers. 

In one recent example, there was a video that showed some soldiers praying alongside settlers who had besieged the home of a Palestinian American man, and that was actually not very far from where the Tubasi house is. The military said that it was looking into it to determine whether disciplinary action needed to be taken. 

In general, military officials acknowledge that this violence by settlers is a big problem, and the security establishment definitely does not support what’s happening here. They see it as getting in the way of counter-terrorism efforts and overall efforts to bring stability to this very volatile area. 

I’ve heard this directly from military officers, but on the ground there does seem to be a breakdown of discipline in some cases and a lack of clear instruction in other cases. Some soldiers simply don’t know how to deal with threats from other Israelis, especially really young ones, as you pointed out. It’s just not what they’re trained to do.

Do you think the government could put a stop to these attacks by settlers if it wanted to, or has the government lost control?

This problem has gotten so big that it’s going to be very difficult to solve without significant backlash, but I have spoken with a number of former Israeli security officials who say yes, much more could be done — starting with a more frank acknowledgement of what’s happening, clearer law enforcement procedures, and more disciplinary actions.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Jewish communities in Israel and around the world are currently marking the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people and triggered the war in Gaza.

Memorials for the victims of the attacks have been held at homes, on highways, and at the site of the Nova music festival. In Tel Aviv, a massive art installation at the Trumpeldor beach commemorated both the victims and the 251 hostages taken by Hamas three years ago.

Of those hostages, 166 have since returned alive, and the remains of the last deceased captive were released to Israel in January. But there’s no undoing the national trauma of the October 7 attacks — the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust — or the brutal retaliatory campaign that Israel launched afterward.

Those events profoundly changed Israel, Gaza, the broader Middle East, and the United States, and they continue to shape global and domestic politics. So today, we’re taking a look at the very long shadow of the October 7 attacks and Israel’s response to them.

Go a little deeper

Writing about the first anniversary of October 7 two years ago, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp warned that the “horrors” first triggered by the attacks would continue to unfold in tragic and unforeseeable ways. “Events that might seem contained to the Middle East have come to hurt people around the world,” he wrote, “in ways that we may not yet fully understand or even be capable of predicting.”

That hurt has undeniably been most acute in the Gaza Strip, where three years of war have reduced entire cities to rubble. Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — most of them civilians — since October 2023. Most of Gaza’s 2 million residents have also been displaced from their homes, crowded into makeshift shelters and refugee camps riddled with hunger and disease.

But the consequences of October 7 extended beyond Gaza. Settler violence against Palestinians intensified in the occupied West Bank. And the ensuing conflicts also weakened Iran and changed the balance of power across the Middle East.

That’s because Iran had long relied on its allies, like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to project power and deter attacks by its longtime rival, Israel. After October 7, however, Israel significantly weakened both groups, leaving Iran vulnerable and setting the stage for the direct strikes on Iran that Israel and the US began last winter. 

Both the war in Iran and the continued occupation of Gaza have badly hurt Israel’s international image. Across 36 countries surveyed by Pew last spring, a median of 67 percent of adults viewed Israel negatively. That disapproval has translated into diplomatic shifts, as well: 155 countries — including longtime allies of Israel, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — now officially recognize Palestinian statehood, up from 136 before the war. That doesn’t change much on the ground, but it represents a real rebuke to Israel. 

In the US, meanwhile, Israel has become a huge flashpoint in domestic politics. While more than half of Americans had a favorable view of the country before October 7, sentiment deteriorated sharply in 2025 and 2026, particularly on the left.

The issue could help determine some key midterm races, like the Michigan Senate election, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has called for ending US military aid to Israel. That’s a policy nearly half of House Democrats and many potential presidential candidates have also endorsed. 

Cutting off US aid to Israel isn’t likely to change the country’s stance toward Palestinians, however. (Israel is a wealthy country in its own right, and American aid represents just a small piece of its budget.) Instead, changing Israeli policy on Gaza and the West Bank would likely require far more aggressive pressure — pressure that, even in the current political environment, the US is unlikely to apply.

A single day may have kicked off a cascade of hurt and horrors. But putting an end to them will take far more time.

One link for later

➨ Cultivate hope. It can feel difficult (not to mention: naive, pointless, and exhausting) to maintain optimism in the face of current events. So Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, suggests another tact: Do away with blind optimism and lean into hope — that belief that the future could turn out well, but requires real care and attention.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that sea turtles regularly cry (okay: “shed tears”) to rid their bodies of excess salt? Scientists are studying sea turtle tears to learn more about animal navigation. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the word for a baby eagle? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the final letter of the Greek alphabet. That would be omega, as in the Bible verse, Swiss watch brand, and nutritional supplement. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The last US troops in Iraq formally withdrew today, 23 years after the United States first invaded Iraq and 12 years after it returned to take on the Islamic State. It’s a historic occasion, by many accounts — but also a pretty low-key one: The US has steadily scaled back its presence in Iraq for years as part of a phased drawdown inked by the Biden administration. 

That drawdown represents the end of a long (and often, ugly) chapter in US military history. The US and its allies deployed tens of thousands of troops to Iraq as part of the larger war on terror that started in 2003. 

Those troops left Iraq in 2011. But a smaller contingent returned three years later to stamp out the Islamic State, a violent jihadist group that had gained a major foothold after Western forces left the country. 

Neither campaign was particularly popular with the American public in the end, and more than 4,500 Americans have died in Iraq in the past 20 years. Large numbers of civilian casualties, as well as drone strikes that were seen as violations of Iraq’s sovereignty, have also fueled periodic Iraqi protests against American intervention. 

As the US withdraws, however, it’s leaving behind some very loose ends. Loose ends that, as we’ll see in a minute, ultimately benefit…Iran.

Go a little deeper

Don’t quite believe me? Just look at how Iran’s allies are celebrating today’s news. The commander of one Iranian-backed militia in Iraq called the withdrawal “a crushing defeat for the American project.”

Both Iran and the United States have spent the past 23 years attempting to shape the new Iraq. Historically, Iran and Iraq were bitter rivals — an enmity probably best demonstrated by Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran. 

After the US toppled Hussein in 2003, however, Tehran redoubled its efforts to build political and military clout in the new Iraqi state. It strengthened ties with figures like Hadi al-Amiri, whose Iran-backed Badr Organization has become a major force in Iraqi politics. It poured hundreds of millions of dollars into soft-power projects, like expanding Shiite pilgrimage sites in Iraq. And it funded, equipped, and trained a number of powerful paramilitary groups.

Some analysts have warned that the final withdrawal of US troops could embolden Iranian-linked groups in Iraq. That also seems to be a concern on the ground, where ordinary Iraqis have told reporters they fear their country “could be swallowed up” by groups linked to Iran.  

Already, the Iraqi government has pushed back the deadline for Iranian-backed militia groups to disarm. It was originally supposed to happen on the official date of the US withdrawal — today.

It’s an inglorious ending, all told — and a sobering lesson on the limits of American power. The US may have the resources to handily win any military spat it gets itself into. But securing a desired political outcome is a different and more time-consuming project altogether.

It doesn’t help that US rivals like Iran seem very willing to play the long game. By dipping in and out of places like Iraq, the US may risk giving Tehran more openings. 

One link for later

➨ Don’t throw out that old receipt! It — along with the political mailers, ticket stubs, business cards, product packaging, and other printed ephemera you encounter in your day — is perfectly suited to the newly viral hobby of junk journaling. It can be a powerful creative practice and the ideal antidote to doomscrolling.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that your sense of touch peaks in your late teenage years, and declines gradually from there? It might be one of the reasons that elderly people are prone to falls.
• Today’s trivia: Where was Napoleon exiled to after his forced abdication? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the origin story of civil rights icon Ruby Bridges. She was the first Black child in the American South to attend an all-white elementary school, and she went on to start a foundation devoted to tolerance. 

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

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

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

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

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is happening with diesel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific.

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

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

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

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

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And why not the existential risk? 

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

Huh. We’ve watched too many movies?

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

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

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

Let’s talk about what concerns there are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s winning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

I have good news and bad news for the holiday shoppers in the audience.

The good news is that the US and China announced this morning — in the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to DC — that the two countries are suspending tariffs on $60 billion of goods, including Christmas ornaments, toys and other tchotchkes.

The bad news is that, because retailers ship goods for the winter holidays well in advance, these reductions might come a bit too late to affect this year’s bills. But there’s always 2027, right? Barring another unforeseen trade altercation. 

The tariff rollback represents a real and continued de-escalation in the trade war between China and the US, which — at one point last year — was slapping Chinese goods with a whopping 145 percent tariff. 

But it’s not a conclusive truce, either. The new agreement doesn’t address the touchiest products for either country, like rare earth minerals (which are used in electronics and clean energy tech) and advanced chips (which are critical to AI development). China also didn’t lower its tariffs on soybeans, which have hit some American farmers so hard they’re thinking of voting for Democrats.

Go a little deeper

There’s a certain irony to President Donald Trump’s about-face on the Chinese tariffs, incomplete though it may be. For years, the president made confrontation with China central to his political identity and reaped the benefits in votes. Now he appears to be circling back to what was, for decades, the mainstream, default Republican position: Namely, that more and freer trade with China is ultimately good for American consumers and businesses. 

President Richard Nixon first set that tone 54 years ago, when he famously became the first US president to visit Beijing. Subsequent GOP leaders leaned further into free trade with China, even as they railed against the evils of communism. Greater trade will bring “great benefits…to all our peoples,” George W. Bush said in a 2001 statement celebrating China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. 

But those “great benefits” were a mixed bag for some Americans, history suggests. The price of US consumer goods did fall in the early 2000s as trade between the US and China exploded. At the same time, US manufacturing towns suffered job losses so severe and concentrated that some still haven’t recovered.

Those job losses may have helped propel Trump to the White House, at least in his first term. Researchers have found that communities hit hardest by Chinese competition elected more extreme Congressional candidates in 2010, and then swung hardest to Trump in the 2016 election. 

One 2016 paper by a highly regarded team of economists actually calculated that — in an alternate reality where US-China trade grew half as quickly between 2001 and 2016 — Hillary Clinton would have won North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan…and thus, the presidency.

In other words, Trump tapped into real harms and anxieties when he veered from the GOP’s usual stance on China 10 years ago. And he might be attempting to address new economic anxieties about inflation and living costs by reversing his course on China again now. 

Call it Trump’s Nixon-to-China moment. The question, of course, is whether voters will give Trump credit for (partially) solving a problem that he himself created. 

One link for later

➨ “Microdose” movement. As the weather gradually and inexorably gets colder, many of us will see our daily step counts fall off. You could do as the Swedes do and load up on layers…or you could stay safely indoors and try microdosing movement. Just five minutes every half hour can help reduce the health impacts of extended sitting. Try tying little walks to a specific cue, like the need to refill your water bottle or the end of a meeting.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that scientists believe roughly 90 percent of species on Earth still haven’t been identified or discovered? These unknown species are generally unglamorous: Think insects, mites, and crustaceans.
• Today’s trivia: What is the name of Quasimodo’s (unrequited) love interest in Victor Hugo’s classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the film that won Best Picture at the 85th Academy Awards. That would be Argo, a political thriller about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.

When the AI apocalypse becomes regular dinner-table conversation, you know we’ve reached the freakout stage. Rogue AI agents are hacking into competitors. Former Big Tech employees are posting Skynet-style warnings on social media. CEOs are crying for help in ways that have made this once-wonky tech issue a frontline political fight. 

I still think many of the concerns outlined by the AI leaders themselves are massively self-serving — especially when their companies are soon to go public. But the growing list of AI scandals is real. And it tells us that the status quo for regulating this powerful new technology is not working.

The question now on everyone’s mind: Is any kind of global brake possible? What form of AI safety regime is practical, over the short term, when there is no trust between major governments? And what could possibly work when companies are loath to give up their secret sauce and are bent on domination in the global AI race?

Two major conversations are now playing out, in real time. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington for a three-day summit — part of which will be dedicated to AI risks. The same day, with the United Nations meeting for its annual General Assembly, heads of the world’s leading AI companies urged the UN to police the emerging technology, or risk potentially wiping out humanity. “We could lose control of the future to AI,” OpenAI’s boss, Sam Altman, bluntly told the UN’s Security Council.

Confronted with this collective freakout, it’s time to take a long, deep breath. 

In fact, AI safety has been on a lot of policymakers’ minds for years now, gaining momentum after ChatGPT was introduced in 2022. Governments have held hearings, convened expert groups, and drafted their own outlines of how to keep it under control. These weren’t just idle listening exercises. They aren’t all well known to the wider public, but they yielded real plans.

Barring any breakthroughs this week, we already have a quasi-planetary shield against the potentially runaway technology. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it’s not really up and running yet. It’s also not clear whether it will actually work. So what is it — and how can we fix it so we have a global system that responds in time to deal with the incredibly fast-moving threats from AI?

What the global AI patchwork looks like now

For the last four years, the most tech-savvy nations — and would-be AI leaders — have been running serious conversations about this exact AI safety threat. Some are in Congress and the White House; some at the UN, at the G7, and in other capitals.

I’ve been covering this closely as a global technology journalist, from my current perch at a think tank. Here’s what the landscape looks like:

• There are national AI safety and security institutes, government-funded bodies whose job it is to kick the tires of AI companies’ latest products before they are let loose into the wild. 
• There are also voluntary commitments by companies, many of which have made their own pledges or developed joint standards, to protect elections from AI threats, stop the spread of AI-fueled deepfake imagery, and joint government-corporate efforts to bake safety into how the technology develops.
• At the international level, there’s a G7-led reporting mechanism — embraced by the most important Western tech nations that allows AI giants to share how they are building their latest models, as well as create standards for how to reduce catastrophic risks.
• An international scientific report provides a yearly update on risks posed by the most advanced AI systems, based on existing research, to help governments plan for the worst. 

What’s missing from all that?  What we currently lack — and what is needed between now and the end of 2026 — is a way to turn this cottage industry of AI safety mechanisms into a functioning, but crude, first-responder system when things suddenly go wrong. 

The last four years have laid out a pathway, and some of the necessary systems even exist. But there’s no way to respond globally, and in real time, when an AI crisis hits — especially if such a possibly doomsday event cuts across countries already skeptical of each other.

This week’s US-China summit may be a step in the right direction. Under proposals outlined by American officials, Washington and Beijing could set up a hotline between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in case of an AI incident affected each country’s national security. 

It’s still unclear if Trump’s meeting with Xi will lead to such progress. Chinese officials also have balked at Washington’s pleas for AI rules because, so far, Congress has failed to act, and China already has some of the world’s most stringent AI oversight.

For AI to be “safe,” this conversation will need to go beyond this week’s US-China summit. Relying just on Washington and Beijing — arguably the most important AI powers — would not solve the underlying problems, nor would it make other countries feel more comfortable.

What we need next, so it really saves us

I’ve been talking to AI safety experts and government officials, and it’s clear the missing piece is a way to activate this whole system in a crisis. Countries don’t all have to have the same AI safety policies, and they never will. But as with nuclear weapons — a similarly high-threat technology that the world found a way to contain — safety requires a rough global agreement on how to respond quickly when something goes terribly wrong.

What’s needed right now is a 90-day, opt-in rapid response mechanism that joins existing pieces of the AI safety puzzle together. I’ve pieced together some ideas about how it should work, and who needs to sign on. Granted, none of what I outline below is sufficient. But, together, they are more plausible than trying to negotiate a comprehensive global regime — let alone arrange another AI summit — while Washington, Beijing, and other national capitals disagree over what “AI safety” actually means.

All of these options are based on existing mechanisms, are derived from efforts that have worked in other policy areas, and provide a band-aid to the AI safety dilemma until a more durable solution can be negotiated.

• First, developers, AI safety institutes, and regulators, from across different countries, should agree that when an incident occurs, it triggers a specific Chernobyl-style protocol. That would mean submitting a confidential report within a 72-hour period to a national designated responder and a small technical secretariat. It can build on the OECD’s AI Incidents Monitor, lead to a technical, multi-stakeholder confidential investigation into what went wrong, and, subsequently, the publication of an anonymized lessons-learned note.
• Second, governments and developers can agree to publish common declarations related to safeguards, residual risks, escalation thresholds, and independent auditing before the release or upgrading of a next-generation model. It would use the G7 Hiroshima AI Process reporting framework as its base, and turn the current hodgepodge of corporate safety declarations and voluntary standards into a common minimum disclosure obligation. View it as similar to the collective bank stress tests after the 2008 global financial crisis. It can allow outsiders to truly compare models’ safety protocols without putting someone in charge of determining which company is doing it best.
• Third, create a Cold War-style US-China AI safety hotline — but see it as an initial step that can later be opened to other countries. There are good reasons, in the long term, that Washington and Beijing should not be allowed to rule artificial intelligence between them, and the rest of the world should have a real seat at the table. But for now those are the two “great powers” in the tech conversation, and we can set that philosophical argument aside to create a standing, technically-informed direct line of communication for acute AI-risk incidents. Its remit is inherently narrow: prevent dangerous misunderstandings linked to serious model incidents, AI-enabled cyberattacks and/or alleged breaches of agreed safety commitments.

There are obvious limits to what I describe above. For one, it’s an inherently Western-centric view that primarily discounts global majority countries. It also places too much sway on existing institutions like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as on the US-China relationship. Other countries’ officials will legitimately balk at all three options, and rightly so.

But this is not about creating a vague, unenforceable UN-led mandate for AI safety. Nor is it about corralling the geopolitical cats to hammer out a global AI treaty. The options — a collective safety protocol and incident reporting protocol; common pre-release standards; and a US-China AI safety hotline — are inherently short-term. They are also based on existing efforts and those that have worked successfully for other policy areas.

There will be time to quibble about the future of AI safety. But now is not that time. The latest AI models are moving faster than many had expected, tech bosses are worried their creations are already out of control, and the window for action may be smaller than we all think.  

What is required are practical steps to assuage people’s growing concerns amid heightened geopolitical tension, a lack of trust between governments and companies, and a need not to let the perfect get in the way of the good.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

President Donald Trump rolled out the literal red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday afternoon, greeting his plane with a military band and a jet flyover at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews.

It’s a very warm welcome for the man Trump once dubbed his “enemy,” and it reflects a fascinating, dramatic shift in his tone toward China — a country that Americans have also come to view more favorably over the past five years. (More on that about-face in just a minute.) 

Trump and Xi have lots to discuss during this week’s state visit. On Wednesday, the two countries agreed to extend the current pause in their on-again, off-again trade war — but that kicks several pressing issues, like technology restrictions and access to critical minerals, further down the road. 

AI safety advocates are also hoping the two leaders can reach some kind of agreement to slow down or safeguard AI development, following calls from a chorus of American tech executives. 

Several of those execs are expected to attend a state dinner at the White House this evening, though the prospects of any substantive AI accord still seem pretty slim. This is more a sip-sparkling-wine-and-see-the-Archives kind of meeting than a signing-big-deals visit.

Go a little deeper

Trump isn’t the only one reassessing China these days. A trio of recent polls found that Americans also feel markedly more positive about China than they did five years ago, with the largest gains among young people. On average, American sentiment toward China is about the same today as it was 10 years ago — before Trump launched his first trade war.

What changed Americans’ minds about China? There is undoubtedly no one cause. It probably helps that Trump himself has changed his tune, no longer portraying the relationship between the US and China as an existential rivalry between so-called great powers. 

Americans’ views on China have also recovered steadily since the Covid-19 pandemic, as memories of that period fade into the rearview. And foreign-policy issues — like, say, the status of Taiwan — generally aren’t top of mind for the average American voter.

But there’s also a cultural component here, particularly for young Americans. “Younger Americans are less wedded to notions of American primacy and more comfortable with coexistence,” Ryan Hass, a China scholar at the Brookings Institute, posted on X. 

Many young Americans have, in fact, grown up embracing aspects of Chinese culture, from TikTok to Labubu. And there’s a pervasive sense, in some corners, that Western-style capitalism hasn’t precisely delivered the goods. 

But let’s not kid ourselves here — China has plenty of problems, too. Like an economic slowdown, a mounting demographic crisis, and a culture of widespread political repression, to name just a few. For now, at least, an increasingly hostile US isn’t one of them.

One link for later

➨ Go ahead: Eat the wheat gluten. Health SecretaryRobert F. Kennedy Jr. (and many, many others) have warned against the dangers of so-called ultra-processed foods. But the buzzy label lumps some nutritious items, like whole-grain bread and plant-based meats, with the likes of Twinkies and Oreos. To gauge if something’s actually healthy, check its nutrition label. And likewise, don’t make the mistake of assuming a food’s good for you just because it claims to be minimally processed. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, was an outspoken abolitionist? During a long-shot presidential run, he proposed buying the freedom of every enslaved person in America and abolishing the country’s prisons.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the word for the lowest female singing voice? Hint: It’s an adjective also used in the names of several instruments. (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the stage name of the American rapper Adam Yauch. That would be MCA, a founding member of the Beastie Boys and an outspoken advocate for Tibetan independence.