In early October, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, went for a classic “politician on the stump” move: He picked up a kid. Or at least he tried to. Ramaswamy fumbled the boy a bit, producing a clip that quickly went viral on social media. 

The next day, Ramaswamy posted a picture of himself with his son in his arms on social media. It was a cute retort. But many of the responses were ugly — racist attacks against Ramaswamy that drew on anti-Indian stereotypes.

It was the latest example of a broader shift on the right, where Indian Americans and Indian immigrants have become a conspicuous target of online conservative anger.

“The people who had negative stereotypes about Indians in their mind said, ‘Hey, look, the guy can’t even pick up a kid…he can’t even act like a normal American family man,’” freelance journalist Zaid Jilani told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Jilani, who recently wrote about the surge in anti-Indian racism for Vox, joined the podcast for a conversation about how he sees the bigotry as rooted in status envy, how Indian Americans and Indian immigrants are responding, and his surprisingly hopeful outlook for the future. 

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.

American racism is very interesting, always has been. And there is a type that says, immigrants are dirty, they come here, they’re uneducated, they leach off the government, they’re taking our resources. 

The stereotype of Indian immigrants to America and Indian Americans is people who go to college, people who often have advanced degrees, people who often live in nice neighborhoods, make good money, are family-values people. 

Why do you think these values that seem as if they mesh with what Republicans want are so triggering to people these days? Is it just yes, but they’re brown?

I think that is a component of it. I spoke to one Indian American advocate who told me that Indians and South Asians more broadly are visible minorities, right? If you think about other minorities who are highly successful, that’s not always the case. 

For instance, I think that Jewish Americans have been known since the late 20th century as being a successful minority group, but they’re not necessarily highly visible. You can’t always identify someone. If [Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate] Bo French saw a bunch of white people in the stadium with the Longhorns, I’m not sure he would be picking out who’s Protestant, who’s Catholic, who’s Jewish. But with Indian Americans, they are highly visible.

That being said, I think you have to think about where Indian Americans are in society and the kind of feelings that can create among everyone else. If you look, for instance, at Silicon Valley, the major tech companies, Microsoft, Google — the head of [Microsoft’s] Xbox division is an Indian American woman now.

You have a group of people who I think are in many ways a very micro minority — we’re talking about 1 percent to 2 percent of the United States — visibly rising into so many positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks. White people generally run the Fortune 500, white folks run the universities, white folks are the most successful doctors and engineers. And that was true for the 20th century. 

But when you start seeing a much larger influx of Asian immigrants, starting with liberalization of immigration laws in the ’60s, but also when there was a rapid growth of the technology sector in the early 2000s, you start to understand a little bit more where the resentment comes from because it’s more, I would say, analogically similar to antisemitism than it is to the racism that Mexican Americans face or the racism that Black Americans face. 

“It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.”

It’s not that Indian Americans are necessarily being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally, so on and so forth. It’s more that they’re being seen as a status threat to a lot of particularly middle-class Americans, people who want their kids to rise to the top of their school, who want their kids to have the corner office. They want their kids to be able to get the most prestigious positions. 

I think in the minds of a lot of these people, not only now does their kid have to compete with all the other normal white kids in their community, they have to compete against the entire world. It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.

When you talked to Indian Americans for this piece, what did you hear from them that surprised you?

Probably the most surprising thing was how much pragmatism they responded to all of this with. Nine times out of 10, when you have stories about racism, the victims of racism are outraged — understandably and justifiably outraged. Nobody wants to be mistreated. Nobody wants to be denigrated. They certainly don’t want to see restrictions on the right to immigration, or other things to limit their numbers, which is the end point of a lot of this.

At the same time, I think a lot of the people I spoke to were very upfront. They’re like, “Hey, look, we have found a lot of success in America. We got the golden ticket to be able to come here, for our kids to study here, to be able to really seek these opportunities, but we understand what’s happening in the economy. We understand there’s a lot of people who are struggling and then they see us rising to the top of all these organizations. They see us with our kind of well-ensconced place in the economy. And I think it’s important for us not to flaunt our success that much.” At least a couple people said something to that respect. They almost empathize with the people who were hating on them.

It struck me as such a classic immigrant pragmatism that you see from the first or second wave of immigrants: people who realize that they are newcomers to a society or maybe their parents were newcomers to a society, and that there is a certain level of grappling they have to do with, “Hey, how can we continue to have success? How can we continue to grind and resist this racism, but also not rub it in people’s faces that we’re doing well because the more they do that, the tougher it can be?”

A number brought up Vivek Ramaswamy in the sense that Vivek happened to go on social media and talk about what he felt like were deficiencies in American culture when it comes to studying, when it comes to working hard.

I think that in bringing that up, they were saying that that wasn’t particularly helpful because whatever positive aspects there may be to Indian immigrant culture, we shouldn’t talk about them in ways that denigrate other people because that’s obviously going to rub people the wrong way.

You’re making the point that some of the surge in anti-Indian racism on the right is about status anxiety. I was listening to this podcast that Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman did. These are two influential right-wing activists. They called it “The Indian Question” — a lot of people’s eyebrows shot up — and they seem to be making the argument that it is about status anxiety. 

They also were making less coherent arguments about how it’s un-American to study for the spelling bee, which is what South Asian kids do, and that white kids are more American because they play football, then they go to a party and get drunk, and then they get 1,500 on the SAT. 

I’m not saying any of this makes sense. I’m saying it was fascinating. I’m assuming you watched that exchange. What did you make of that?

There’s a certain level of coping mechanism being deployed there in the sense that they are trying to explain the success of Indian Americans as a deficiency: “Maybe they’re getting to the top schools, but that’s because they’re shut in all day studying.”

But it’s not really true that Indian Americans are necessarily cloistered into unhealthy habits. They’re actually finding success across society. For instance, I’ve tutored kids for five, six years. I just really enjoy working with kids. And something you’ll find with a lot of the Indian American kids, they are actually getting increasingly well-rounded. 

Part of that is because you have to, to have success, to get college admissions and so on and so forth. They almost always play sports. They’re involved in extracurriculars. You’re seeing a lot more Indian Americans go into the arts, into cultural fields, into Hollywood. I think that’s actually a very normal path for immigrants.

I think the first or second wave of immigrants has to be very pragmatic. They have to keep their heads down. They have to grind, study, and their parents encourage them to do the same thing. Indian American parents are always like, “You got to be a doctor. You got to be an engineer. Don’t be foolish and try to be a journalist or go to Hollywood.”

But as they establish themselves, as they build nest eggs, they have a little more breathing room, and so they can do different things. I know that Christopher Rufo, for instance, is an Italian American, and I believe I read one time that he even speaks Italian at home because he really values that culture so much and he wants to raise his kids in that. The first wave of Italian immigrants were no different than that. They cloistered into a few sectors where they felt they could find success that was necessary for their integration into the economy and to get their footing. But now we don’t think of Italian Americans as stereotyped into just a few parts of the country or a few parts of society — we barely notice, unless maybe you notice from someone’s name that there even are Italian Americans. 

What they’re describing about Indian Americans is very normal. It’s actually very normal for first waves of immigrants to cluster in a few areas and then they spread themselves out as they’re able to get that a little bit of breathing room and room to ground to stand on.

Barring a catastrophic midterm polling miss, Democrats are on track to win a majority in the House of Representatives next month. Come the new Congress in January, that will mean a new House speaker — and if all goes to plan, that will be current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

If elected, Jeffries, from New York, will be the first Black speaker of the House. Though Jeffries has been in Congress for nearly 14 years now — and many of those years have been spent in Democratic leadership — he also remains something of an enigma. 

The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle profiled Jeffries back in May. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who Jeffries really is, his path to what would be a historic speakership, and what he really stands for.  

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.

In your profile of potential future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, you start with a story that people might find surprising. And I was wondering if you could tell us said story.

[Jeffries] was in Florida, raising money, which is one of his central responsibilities as a minority leader. And he was being driven to a Democratic donor’s house in Palm Beach. And while he was being driven there, he got an alert on his phone letting him know that Donald Trump had posted a message to Truth Social in which he rehashed a bunch of the 2020 election conspiracies. More significantly, [Trump] had included a depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. 

Jeffries has this reputation for being a very calm, deliberate, not angry person, oftentimes to his detriment. I think a lot of Democratic partisans wish he would be more angry. But the way he told me the story, he was legitimately pissed off. And he realized that he needed to respond in some way. And he didn’t think that a tweet would be sufficient. 

He wanted to do an Instagram post, and he looked into his aide’s iPhone, and he said, “Fuck Donald Trump.” And as soon as he was done recording the video, I think he started to have second thoughts. And they sent the video up to Washington for a social media team to edit, and he told them, “Let’s bleep out the word fuck.” And for him, it was a smashing social media success.

I was in his office in the Capitol six days later, and he was telling me this story and basking in some of the reflected glory and talking about all the social media love and talking about the real-world love. But then he kind of paused, and he said something like, “You know, but I still haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m a little worried about that.” Which I thought captured him pretty well.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before.”

Why did you want to start your profile of him with that story? What does it tell us about who this individual is?

I thought it captured the dilemma he faces in some ways, just in the sense that he is this very deliberate, calculated political figure, very conventional. And he is operating in a political space these days that doesn’t really reward or appreciate that approach. 

Oftentimes that approach is not successful. I think he’s trying to adapt to the new rules of the road, and he’s kind of doing it in fits and starts, and sometimes he’s more successful than others. But I still think, even when he is successful, he has some qualms about it. 

How long has Hakeem Jeffries wanted to be speaker of the House?

When he got to Congress, in 2012, he definitely wanted to become a player. He wanted to be in leadership, chair a committee, whatever. He was someone who had his eye on that. 

But at the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus had started to think a little bit differently about what they could achieve in Congress. For a long time, they wanted their members to get chairmanships and things like that, or maybe be majority whip. But by the time Jeffries got there, they started to think that we could actually get a speaker. And his arrival kind of coincided with this realization on the part of the CBC. And I think a lot of CBC members viewed Jeffries as a potential future speaker, and they started to groom him for that. 

Pretty soon after that, Nancy Pelosi started to think of him as someone who would be a good member of her leadership team. And I think by 2018, that’s when it really became apparent that he was going to be someone who could potentially be speaker. 

What does he actually stand for as the most powerful Democrat in the House?

I think, quite intentionally, he doesn’t stand for anything. I think that in some ways has been key to his success. He has managed for the most part to avoid being kind of pigeonholed or put anywhere on the ideological spectrum. He is very critical of the far left of the party, especially the DSA. He views the DSA as college-educated young white people who are coming to Brooklyn and displacing older Black working-class people. 

I was talking to this former Democratic congressional aide and basically asking this person the question you’re asking me: What does he stand for? And this person was trying to explain it and finally just was sort of exasperated, and he said he’s intentionally trying not to stand for anything. He’s sort of like hotel art. He just is, and it’s satisfactory.

We don’t have a lot of case studies for how he manages his caucus because they haven’t been in power. But I think maybe one of the most telling examples was the shutdown, because Democrats were, in a way, the power brokers there. Tell us how Hakeem Jeffries managed that.

That was probably his greatest success as minority leader.  When Trump took office for the second time, especially for those first few months, I think all of the congressional Democrats, and Jeffries especially, were really on their heels. They could not figure out how to deal with this guy and what they were going to do to stop him. Jeffries was even complaining that he didn’t have any leverage. But then he eventually realized that a shutdown would be at least a little bit of leverage. 

The real question was, what was the shutdown going to be about? And there were a lot of Democratic members of Congress who wanted it to be about authoritarianism or corruption. They wanted it to be at all these different issues. And Jeffries was really insistent that we need to make this about one issue, and we need to make it about healthcare. 

The Democrats were the ones who caused the shutdown. And normally, the way shutdowns have worked in the past, it’s the party that causes the shutdown that gets the heat from the public. But this time around, I think because Democrats were so consistent in saying that this is about healthcare, and Republicans were so scattered in their own messaging and their own explanations of what was going on, Democrats’ polling numbers went up, Trump’s and Republicans’ went down, and that was a real victory for Jeffries.

Did that whole incident put Jeffries on the president’s radar in a way that he wasn’t? 

It comes, and it goes. For a long time, he wouldn’t mention Jeffries at all. 

I guess the way to tell if Trump is thinking about you is if he posts about you on Truth Social, and he started to post about Jeffries a lot — all the usual kind of insults he lobs, especially at Black politicians, that Jeffries was low IQ and a thug. But yeah, he does seem to be paying a little bit more to Jeffries now than he was before.

And do we think Jeffries is ready to go toe to toe with the president of the United States if that’s what voters decide he’s to do this November?

In his mind, he’s ready. And I think in his own stilted, rehearsed, steady fashion, he will go toe to toe with Donald Trump. He will talk about affordability, and he’ll talk about corruption, and he’ll talk about the “so-called president.” 

I don’t think it will necessarily be satisfying for a lot of Democratic voters out there and Democratic partisans, but I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before. But I think it’s going to take him a little while to figure out how to do the job.

Whenever I have dinner with friends, the conversation always ends up on one of three topics: how hard dating is, the hunt for affordable housing, or an update on everyone’s pets. The last on that list includes cute photos and veterinarian updates. I love hearing about my friends’ cats and dogs. But I also have to admit that I just don’t get it. I don’t have a pet. I never have. (We won’t discuss the ill-fated caterpillar in elementary school.)

I’m in the minority: Over half of American households have pets. Which means that over half of American households have also seen the cost of pet care go up in recent years.  

Helaine Olen is the proud pet parent of a Havanese poodle mix named Barney Rubble. She’s also the managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust organization, and she says people often aren’t prepared for how expensive it can get. 

Some of it is inflation, Olen says, but veterinary care is a major factor. “The same medical advances that have kept us alive longer and we consider miracles — whether it’s cancer drugs or stem cell therapies or various pharmaceuticals — the same is true for your cats and dogs,” Olen says.

Decades ago, a cat having an MRI was unheard of; now, it’s common. But it’s not just expanded access and improved technology that’s driving prices up. Olen says that who’s behind that healthcare is a factor. “Big corporations and private equity have seen all of this, know that people say they will do anything for their pets, know that they think of their pets as children, and they have rushed into the sector,” she told Vox.

So how did private equity get involved in the lives of our pets? And what happens when the prices keep climbing? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Olen, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What kind of costs are we talking about?

When your pet is young, you’re probably spending several hundred dollars a year for various vaccines, spay and neuter, annual checkups. But the real costs start coming in as they get older and they need maintenance. 

For tooth cleaning, pets need to be put under anesthesia. You’ll spend a minimum of $1,000. That will be even higher if a pet’s tooth has to be removed. 

I’ve spoken to people whose pets have back legs that have collapsed or disc herniations. You can easily be out over $10,000 on a surgery. You can easily spend four figures on a 24-hour overnight. I spoke to somebody who was quoted $3,500 a night for just an observational overnight.

You mentioned that some of this comes down to who owns pet clinics and how that’s changing. Who owns them now?

Traditionally, it was an independent practice. But in the past 10 to 15 years, big corporations and private equity have moved into the space. The largest owner of vets in the United States right now is a group called Mars. And if Mars sounds familiar to you, that’s Mars as in Skittles. 

They own around 2,500 vets under the names of VCA, Banfield, and Blue Pearl. I’d say somewhere between a third and 50 percent of vet clinics are owned by corporations. It was 10 percent or less than 10 percent a little over a decade ago.

What caused this spike and why is a candy company behind it?

As people realize how much can be done to help their pets, the corporations and private equity basically saw what one analyst described as low risk, high reward. I’ve spoken to employees of some of the larger chains who have told me that prices went up routinely every six months or every nine months or once a year. 

In Britain, there was a recent government investigation into all of this by the Competition and Markets Authority, their equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission. They determined that private equity and corporate ownership is responsible for a billion pounds spent on pets over a five-year period that otherwise wouldn’t have been spent, and that people were paying about 16 percent more at vets owned by large corporate outfits versus independent vets.

How are people paying for this if it’s so expensive?

I live in Los Angeles, and I wrote a piece for New York magazine a few months ago about all the people here who are now driving their pets down to Tijuana because it is so much less expensive down there. 

Pet insurance is a very mixed bag. It is extremely expensive in many cases. It goes up at very high rates. My own pet insurance increased by 30 percent from last year to this year. And by the way, my dog Barney Rubble is 2 and a half years old.

Wow. He’s still so young.

He has had no issues that I am aware of that would account for a 30 percent increase. 

The other thing with pet insurance, unlike human health insurance, is there is no preexisting [conditions] clause. I have lost count of the number of people I’ve interviewed over the years who discovered too late that their pet health insurer deemed something a preexisting condition.

What do people do when they get to the point where this costs too much? 

In some cases, they run up debt. Buy now, pay later services are increasingly moving into the veterinary area as well.

In other cases, they surrender the animal. If you talk to people at shelters, they will say that they believe that part of the uptick they’ve gotten in surrendered animals has to do with the increase in costs of veterinary care.

I imagine that just feels like such an impossible choice, like choosing between this money you don’t have and the quality of life for something that you love.

The emotions are huge. This is in part why private equity and corporations have moved in: They know people are going to feel very emotional about their pets and that they’re going to want to do anything they can to keep them alive or keep them healthy or keep them pain-free, and that they will pay almost any price. 

When my last dog was diagnosed with heart disease, I was determined to keep her going for a couple of years. I had her on one medication that cost $300 a month. I was like, “I can’t lose my Katie.”

The tragic thing about pets is they are both better than us — in my opinion — and they live shorter lives. You are going to lose your pet eventually. It’s just the most heartbreaking thing in the world.

On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” More than a year and a half later, his administration is instead busy using government power to go after speech it dislikes. 

Last year, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr urged broadcasters to take action against Jimmy Kimmel over his comments following Charlie Kirk’s killing, and in September, Kimmel said the FCC again intervened to stop Kimmel’s late-night show from airing an interview with James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate for Texas.

Also last month, Trump barred three news outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House over their coverage. That ban was quickly blocked by a federal judge, but both CNN and Politico have since been banned from traveling with the press pool on Trump trips.

Outside of the White House, the fight over free speech is also raging on college campuses. In states like Texas, Republican lawmakers have restricted when students can protest and given governor-appointed university boards more say over what gets taught. In 2025, 15 states passed laws that restrict what can be taught or weaken protections for free expression on college campuses.

To break down what all of this means for the state of free speech in the US — and the future of our First Amendment rights — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

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. 

How would you describe the kind of status of free speech on campus these days?

The status of free speech is in great peril, both on and off campus. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and it’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen it. 

When it comes to the Charlie Kirk backlash cases, we saw about 90 of them. It’s a remarkably high number. We saw an ex-cop go to jail for 37 days just for forwarding a Trump meme in response to a request to go to a candlelight vigil for Charlie Kirk. It’s not good.

If you look at the last two years, we’ve done so many episodes about free speech concerns. There was Jimmy Kimmel; there’s CNN being banned from the White House. 

There’s student protesters who are protesting what’s going on in Gaza. 

It really does seem like we’re at a moment where so many different types of people claim that their speech is being restricted in so many different types of ways. What is happening in the country?

My worry is I’m very much a small-L liberal. I come from an old ACLU background. That’s where I interned in law school. I went to law school to do First Amendment law. I hyper-specialize in it. This is my passion. 

For most of my 25-year career, you could rely on a civil libertarian aspect of the left and a libertarian aspect of the right that would often agree on almost nothing except for things like freedom of speech. And right now, I think we’ve become all culture war all the time, and we have more of a progressive left and more of a populist right. 

The only way that you show you believe in freedom of speech is by saying, “I hate that guy, but I think you should have freedom of speech.” If you’re saying, “I think my side should have freedom of speech,” that’s just self-interest. That doesn’t even count. 

All the worst people in history wanted free speech for their side. So I’m afraid we’re losing — or maybe even, I hate to say this dramatically, but maybe even have lost it as a shared value as a society.

Well, that’s quite grim.

Yeah. I’m feeling a little grim. 

The Trump administration came into office with a promise. And I remember it sounding something like this: “The woke left went too far. They canceled people. They restricted speech. They got out of control. President Trump is going to come back in, and we are going to restore sanity to the country. And as part of sanity, that will include your right to freely express yourself.” 

How do you square the promise versus what we’ve seen?

I think Trump is constantly frustrating everyone around him by being Trump. I think there probably were people in the administration who were like, “Yeah, we’re going to be pro-free speech.” And then Trump decides to declare — I mean, I think the recent White House press pool case is hysterical in a lot of ways because he had to get his team to give a sort of constitutional justification for why he was kicking out the press pool. But on Truth Social, he’s like, “It’s because of their viewpoint,” which is, by the way, something you can’t do under the Constitution. 

“I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.”

His instincts are very authoritarian. They’re very top-down. So maybe there were people in the administration who, in their heart of hearts, are good on free speech, but Trump isn’t. And it’s the reason why when it came to the new administration, there were a lot of people on the right, but also people on the sort of heterodox left who were like, “Oh, this is going to be good for free speech.”

I was like, “Don’t kid yourself, guys. This is going to be bad.” Although I will say, it’s even worse than I was expecting.

President Trump at some point will be out of office. And what happens then? What do you think? Is there an optimistic scenario where we’re like, “Okay, we’re kind of tired of this crap. Let’s just go back to the way it was in the ’90s”?

It has been cyclical, to a degree. American society gets out of whack, and usually one of the things that does bring us together is that we were lucky enough to have…I’ll just say it, we have a brilliant Constitution. It is unusually clever about human nature, and the Constitution itself — you can have whatever opinion you want about the founders, but it is something to be proud of. And a lot of times those values kind of bring us back together. 

That’s my hope. But another thing I will say about Trump: He has played havoc with my ability to predict anything. So what it’s going to look like over the event horizon of 2028, I hope it will be better, and we will fight like hell to make sure it’s better here at FIRE, but will it be better? I’m not sure, and it definitely won’t be better if we think of free speech as something that belongs to my side, not yours.

One of the reasons why I do have hope for free speech in the long term is that free speech works really well. It’s how you know what your fellow citizens think. It’s how you get ideas out there. It’s how you actually be your authentic self. 

Societies that actually have freedom of speech are always going to have advantages, real and serious advantages, over ones that don’t. So I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.

The Wisconsin gubernatorial race was one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries in the country this year, pitting a democratic socialist, state Rep. Francesca Hong, against Milwaukee Democrat David Crowley, who received the endorsement of the state’s sitting Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

Hong lost the race, setting up Crowley to face Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in the general election this fall. But she’s already back on the campaign trail, this time trying to help Democrats win a trifecta in the state: the governor’s race and both legislative chambers.

Unifying the state’s voters to achieve that won’t be easy, though. Hong spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about her own loss, Evers’s role in it, and whether or not the voters who felt so passionate about her own campaign would find enough to love in Crowley’s campaign — in particular on the increasingly important issue of data centers. 

Astead and Hong also talked about what Wisconsin means for the Democrats nationally, and what lessons the party should take from her race, including her loss.

“I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around,” Hong said. “But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign. I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic.”

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Hong, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Part of the reason we wanted to come here was because we saw you were getting back on the campaign trail, and specifically around that idea of energizing Wisconsin toward a trifecta.

Now, just tell me the difference in terms of the importance of Democrats winning it all — not only the governor’s mansion, but both houses of the state legislature — versus just the governor’s mansion. How does that change the possibilities of what the party could do?

For the last 16 years, a Republican majority in the state legislature has meant that passing the types of policies that we know can drastically improve the lives of everyday folks here in Wisconsin stalled. And we have a historic opportunity to flip the assembly and the state Senate and hold the governor’s mansion and the entire executive branch to a Democratic majority, meaning the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports — things like increasing minimum wage, things like legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion. 

We also need to repeal Act 10 [which dramatically restricted collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees]. Wisconsin is where workers’ rights, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security were born, and we moved backwards with the Republican majority. That’s all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

It also, though, raises the political standard of what Democrats would have to do to achieve that, and some of it goes through these more rural communities.

Why do we think the party has fallen behind in more rural communities, and what could be done to reverse that?

I think it’s important to look at what’s happened in the rural communities when we’ve seen manufacturing jobs leave the state, when we’ve seen fewer and fewer supports for our small farmers.

And so much of this — what connects it — is actually the growth of massive wealth and corporate control and corporate greed, and more people feeling the impacts of that. There’s an opportunity right now to say, ‘Hey, Republicans have been in the legislature, they’ve been in power, and things have not improved for you or your community … Now’s the opportunity to make sure that we’re actually able to see our shared Wisconsin values of working hard and taking care of our kids be reflected back in Madison through laws.’

So much of your campaign was focused on data centers, stopping data centers. Should I think of that as a rural issue?

I think the issue around data centers is an everyone issue. It’s a democracy issue. It’s people wanting to feel like there are folks who care about what happens to communities, and that they have control and an actual say in what happens in their communities.

To that point, is it a mistake for David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, to have not gone as far as you did and say, “We won’t be building more data centers for a period of time”?

He’s fighting for communities and community control when it comes to data centers.

But it’s not a moratorium.

But it’s not a moratorium. It isn’t, but he’s also committed to 100 percent renewable energy, clean energy to power data centers.

And achieving that is going to be incredibly difficult, and it is going to be the developers having to pay their own way, and these are things that he’s committed to that we know can slow down the growth and development of data centers. 

Have you had time to reflect on your primary loss? If you had to diagnose, why do you think you lost?

I’m still doing a lot of reflection. But I think that I want to continue to look forward. And what I’ve learned from our election is that it’s so important to continue to stay grounded in becoming accessible to people. I think that as an organizer and an elected official, it’s my responsibility to continue to go to the people and remain very in touch with what’s going on on the ground.

I have a couple more questions about the nature of the loss. Evers’s endorsement changed that race, so much so that your opponent David Crowley was able even to win in some smaller communities, like places where you were pitching yourself as the voice of more rural communities.

Does that disprove any of this thesis around, say, data centers? If that was the top priority for Wisconsin voters, wouldn’t you be the nominee?

I think it wasn’t all rural communities. It wasn’t all suburban communities. We saw certain demographics but also ZIP codes where we outperformed David significantly.

And I think that where the governor’s endorsement played a bigger role was areas where he was also more popular. 

Did it surprise you when Evers endorsed Crowley?

I was disappointed.

Why?

I was disappointed because I was getting a lot of feedback from folks who hadn’t committed to any candidate yet that this felt like the governor was putting his thumb on the scale.

I wanted to ask about electability, because it seemed as if Evers’s endorsement was about a fear that maybe you couldn’t win in November.

So much of the primary concern was around the DSA label, even campaigning with folks like Hasan Piker. In retrospect, was any of that a mistake?

We knew going in that we would have to encourage new voters to come out, folks who typically do not come out for primaries, quote-unquote low-propensity voters. And we knew that we would have to campaign in places where folks weren’t expecting to see a gubernatorial candidate. And those included Twitch streams.

Those also included going to dive bars and bowling alleys and making sure that we were accessible and shaping our policies based on what the people were telling us they wanted to see happen and also what they wanted to see out of their governor. I think electability… I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around.

But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign.

I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic, when Democrats need to be inspiring and project a vision where everyone can see themselves in it as everyday working-class folks.

When you’ve got a party that has struggled with elitism to then cave to an establishment narrative … being more afraid of labels when I’m hearing from people on the ground that they’re interested in solutions and solving problems, maybe somebody who knows the hustle of the service industry and running restaurants and has worked across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation. There are ways that we can maneuver around labels and what the loudest narrative might be.

I wish our governor hadn’t fed into that.

To be fair, to your point, the establishment label doesn’t fully fit even someone like Crowley, who comes from a working-class background. But am I hearing that you think Evers’s move made your life in the general election more difficult?

Is it harder to re-inspire if young people who are invested in the Hong campaign think that the establishment squashed them out?

We still had over 300,000 votes. We lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. I had more votes than Evers did during his primary. That’s not squashing our voices.

We’re still here, and it’s so important that people find avenues to continue to exercise their voice and their new organizing power. And I’m definitely going to continue to work to make sure that we get results and that we win the trifecta, and that’s the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

I hear why a trifecta matters in the state context, particularly the state policy.

If I’m someone, though, who’s not in Wisconsin, who’s just worried about Donald Trump running amok in Washington, why should I care if Democrats win the governor’s mansion and the state legislature? Does that matter for folks outside of the state?

Because we will start to see that when you feel government actually working and you see change happening in your lives, these are then voters who are going to continue to come out and vote for Democrats.

We’re a pivotal state when it comes to the federal elections as well. We’re actually in a swing district right now. 

We have an opportunity, through Wisconsin, to actually start improving the brand for Democrats. And if we do that here, this trickles out to the rest of the country.

The premise being that delivering creates a connection for Democrats that is helpful in the presidential election, and it’s helpful in all these other ways too.

Yeah. We’re not going to be fighting every single midterm and presidential for our lives based on what’s happening in just one state.

But I think if we can start showing durable power for Democrats in a state like ours because of the policies that we’re prioritizing, and you have more folks coming out to vote for Democrats, that’s good for the health of democracy.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same amount of processing power?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what is going on with tennis balls? 

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

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

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

We just perceive blues and greens kinda badly or vaguely? 

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

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

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

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

So people really know yellow. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Marriott, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

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

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

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

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

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

What does that ecosystem look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Longwell, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what was the answer? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a good point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is happening with diesel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And why not the existential risk? 

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

Huh. We’ve watched too many movies?

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

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

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

Let’s talk about what concerns there are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s winning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about this app, Whatnot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about the break format.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Post, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

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

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

I think we did some things very well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do you think Democrats are talking less about climate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

More immediate than the Green New Deal.

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

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

Were you surprised Trump won the state in 2024? 

No.

Why not? 

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Some have called it a polycrisis — overlapping crises.

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

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

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

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

But you’re telling a kinda hopeful story. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is it called the burnerverse?

Because it consists of burner accounts, anonymous accounts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can say that. You can absolutely say that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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