To the average observer concerned with the future of American democracy, it might be easy to conclude that religion has been part of the problem — particularly over the last few years. Right-wing religious leaders, including the leading Southern Baptist televangelist Robert Jeffress, have endorsed “Christian nationalism”; other evangelical pastors and conservative Catholic intellectuals have been openly pondering if America should become more of a theocracy; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who once called for an “American crusade,” evoking bloody medieval religious campaigns, has referenced Christian theology in statements about the Iran war.

To critics, these examples show that American religion is becoming an active threat to pluralism and tolerance — the ideas that make American democracy work. 

But what if the solution to this anti-democratic slide is also religion — more religion than the US currently has?

A new book by two thinkers from opposing ends of the ideological spectrum argues that declining levels of religiosity across the board, but particularly among liberals, have deepened political polarization, which in turn has corroded democratic norms. Now, they argue, one of the most effective ways for liberals to stand up for democracy is to engage with religious communities and their scriptural traditions with more respect, openness, and curiosity. The authors also urge liberals who are believers themselves to embrace organized religion and return to it themselves.

Conservative evangelical Christian Matthew Kaemingk and liberal Muslim writer Shadi Hamid argue in Can Religion Save Democracy? that there’s a necessary and unique role that religious institutions and organized religion must play in American public life. Religion serves a fundamental regulating purpose, tempering emotions, fundamentalism, and nihilism. And when that fades away, those base instincts and emotions get channeled into our politics.

They write:

As Americans exit churches in droves, they’re not leaving behind their religious passions. Instead, they’re transferring those passions to the political battlefield. In this new post-religious context, Christian faith and Scripture function less as moral constraints within evangelical circles and more as political cudgels to use against one’s opponents.

“We’re not trying to convert [nonbelievers],” Hamid told me in an interview. “Believing is one thing, but believing that religion can play a positive role is another. And we want to encourage secular readers to embrace the second proposition, even if they don’t believe religion is true or don’t believe God exists.”

What happens when religion recedes from the public square

At the core of Kaemingk and Hamid’s argument is a simple case: There is an innate religion-shaped hole in people in the 21st century, which has been slowly replaced with politics, unbridled passions, and secular ideologies. The loss of religion hasn’t meant a loss of religious convictions, but instead has meant the rise of a new fanaticism, either secular or fundamentalist, while depriving everyone of the good things that organized and institutional religion can do.

It’s not a completely novel argument; it’s a combination of St. Augustine’s famous line that “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God]” and of the political scientist Robert Putnam’s modern case that churches and religious communities provided the third spaces that fostered civic partnership, trust, meaning, and belonging. 

But they also connect these lines of thinking to what the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper used to argue around the turn of the 19th century: that all people are religious, and that something very similar to religious fervor quietly powers all political movements. Religion is “pervasive, public, and pluriform” — an essential part of being human, whose absence leaves nihilism, fear, and distrust in isolated, but still fanatical, individuals.

“If Kuyper is correct that all human beings desire ultimate belief and belonging, then erasing or sequestering religion won’t extinguish our spiritual passions. They will simply shift elsewhere,” Kaemingk and Hamid write. And that shift has been toward politics, candidates, elections, and secular “creeds” that provide identity, belonging, moral certainty, and salvific promises without the accountability, guidance, and caution that religious traditions can provide.

It’s not hard to find examples of what Kaemingk and Hamid mean here. From 2016 to 2024, many observed elements of quasi-religious fervor in movements powering Trump and Woke 1.0. Trump’s strongman appeal generated a cult of personality around him, while anti-Trump resistance efforts and progressive social movements often took on qualities people also found quasi-religious: in-group markers, language, and customs, BlueAnon theories. What’s left is a stalemate, with more conservative religious believers bunched up on one end, and nonreligious but equally passionate citizens on the other end.

Kaemingk and Hamid argue that people on the left often respond by denigrating religion and religious people, dismissing those who try to defend or practice it in the public square, or forcing them to adopt secular language and thinking instead of letting religious people bring their full selves to the public space. But the way out of this current stalemate, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest, is for people on the left to be open, curious, and respectful with the devoutly faithful, whether they’re neighbors or candidates running for office. 

“For that audience, my desire is to say, ‘Hey, you don’t have to believe in religion, but you can recognize the positive aspects of religion,’” Hamid told me.

That involves practical, daily activities and more high-minded appeals. In regular life, the authors recommend prayer, or prayer-like practices for nonbelievers, to help better understand and forgive opponents. They suggest there can be benefits for both nonreligious and religious people to meditate on scriptural and theological teachings about forgiveness, debate, disagreement, salvation, and why earthly politics shouldn’t be taken so seriously. 

And they urge liberals in particular to reengage with religious communities and congregations. Religious liberals should avoid isolation or solitary, individualized faith, the authors recommend, and instead return to congregations and specific churches or places of worship to become part of a community and find purpose. For nonreligious liberals, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest they reexamine their own ideological priorities and be open to the possibility of being wrong on some of them, and potentially engage with organized religion to better understand a religious worldview.

Kaemingk and Hamid offer a specific challenge for liberals and secular Americans that might seem a bit unsavory: They have to realize that they are not blameless for the polarization and radical religious fervor that exists right now through their dismissal of organized religion. Their earlier denigration of organized religion around the turn of this century (think of the New Atheist movement), combined with many leaving institutional churches or failing to participate in religious life, has all contributed to the capture of these institutions by unsavory political opponents, or helped in the decline of more moderate congregations. And any attempt to stop this continued slide away from pluralistic democracy hinges on a collective effort between religious and nonreligious Americans to reverse these trends.

This argument has its limitations

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already? The most loyal Republican voters over the past few cycles have tended to be evangelical and nondenominational Christians, followed by white Catholics — both of which tend to report above-average levels of religious participation. They’ve stuck with Trump and the GOP over the last decade, which has been defined by polarization, authoritarian policies, and even moments of political violence, that both Kaemingk and Hamid say religion can fix. 

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already?

More generally, while there is evidence to suggest that evangelicals who leave their churches become more cynical and individualistic — a point in Kaemingk and Hamid’s favor — there’s not much evidence to suggest that the converse is true: that religious participation has actually tempered emotions, passions, and politics. Instead, there’s a case to be made, as the writer Robert P. Jones laid out recently, that the opposite seems to be true: The most religious folks tend to still be the most likely to support harsher Trump-era policies.

Hamid acknowledged that this is a challenge, but argued this isn’t about the religion itself — rather a Trump-specific phenomenon: “Many evangelicals have let partisan loyalties take precedence over religious commitments,” he told me. “This is the distorting effect that Trump has had on the evangelical movement.”

He emphasized that evangelicalism has suffered because many of the most fervent MAGA supporters who identify with that religious movement are not actually very religious. “Evangelicals aren’t going to church as much as they used to on average,” he said. “There has been a kind of process of de-institutionalization in the kind of Protestant domain. And the people who tend to be more fervent MAGA supporters tend to go to church less.” He compared the level of evangelical support that Ted Cruz and Trump got in 2016: Trump had an upper hand among unchurched evangelicals.

Beyond this, the practical reality is that, as things stand today, religiosity does not seem likely to bounce back to the levels it was at two decades ago — at least, not without the help of secular Americans.

What the authors prescribe for politics and elections

Still, it’s an attractive idea, and it’s not hard to see why people might be open to it. Even Democrats themselves seem to understand that writing off religious voters for years was a bad idea. Some of the most promising Democratic candidates in red states in upcoming midterm elections are religious, including Texas Senate nominee James Talarico and Kansas Senate nominee the Rev. Adam Hamilton. A dozen other pastors or believers are running in down-ballot races across the country, while potential 2028 presidential candidates like Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro talk openly about their personal faiths, the role of organized, institutional religion, and seem comfortable doing so.

“It’s promising,” Hamid told me about this trend. “Part of what we argue in the book is that Americans should be able to bring their full convictions into the public arena. If they’re editing themselves or suppressing their religiosity out of fear of alienating constituencies, that’s not good for democracy.”

And Kaemingk and Hamid also have a very influential intellectual ally in this mission: Pope Leo XIV just made a similar case in France for secular liberals to reexamine their understanding of religious liberty and how to balance it against the rise of right-wing religious politics.

“A Christian engaged in public service and guided by the light of his or her conscience, illumined by faith, cannot be considered a proselytizer or a threat to the unity of the nation,” he said in Paris, appealing directly to France’s fiercely secularized civic leaders. “Indeed, authentic secularity does not exclude religion but is capable of valuing it as an educational resource.”

Aboard a plane back to Rome, Leo continued, arguing that religion must have a role in the public square and pointing to the decline of religion in Germany as something that may have facilitated the rise of a far-right movement that cloaks itself in religious language.

“It would be interesting to study, analyze if and how there may be a relationship, for example, between the growth of these groups on the far right,” Leo said mid-flight, “…with some expression of a combination of these far-right points of view with a certain kind of religion, which…is not an authentic expression of Christianity.”

This may be an unsavory ask for liberals and secularists most upset about creeping religious nationalism in the Trump administration and around the country. The recent creation of a new Office of Religious Affairs in the Pentagon, the invocation of God and Scripture to support military action and immigration enforcement, and the attacks on the wave of religious candidates running as Democrats this year all make it understandable why there may be hesitancy in accepting this challenge. But Kaemingk and Hamid are undeniably right about one thing: In a diverse and pluralistic nation, we have no choice but to live with each other.

What can an economist teach us about misery? 

I had that question in mind while reading the new book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, by eminent researcher George Loewenstein. The field is not exactly known for its facility with human emotions, but Loewenstein is a co-founder of behavioral economics, the subdiscipline that studies the many ways that people depart from the ideal of the perfectly rational actor. He’s spent a career investigating how psychology and emotion shape our judgments, and his latest book offers a sweeping account of how suffering structures human life. 

That might sound very bleak, like the opposite of a fun read. But the book itself isn’t distressing — it’s a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive. It emerged from a period of profound suffering in his own life, one where, he writes, he “thought about suicide constantly.” Writing it, he told me in a recent interview, was “kind of a silver lining for my own misery.” 

In Loewenstein’s own words, The Opposite of Happiness is not a self-help book. To him, understanding is its own reward. Though he adamantly refuses to dispense life advice, I still think the book offers much that can help us live more wisely, a little less at war with our emotions.   

“Misery is inescapable,” Loewenstein writes. “It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system.” Negative emotions are “more powerful, persistent, and pervasive than positive ones.” That is because, he argues, unpleasant feelings — hunger, pain, anger, loneliness — are how evolution motivated us to do the things we need to survive and pass on our genes. They still heavily shape our conscious experience, however mismatched they may feel to our modern circumstances. 

Some version of that insight, that dissatisfaction is woven into the human condition, has been known to humans for eons, of course, captured in philosophical teachings like Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. The father of economics himself observed that people work hard to earn riches, only to discover the result offers no lasting contentment. “It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind,” Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts.” 

Loewenstein puts this understanding into the language of modern psychology, speaking to a current of anxiety and unhappiness running through American life today. It also points to enduring questions about what the purpose of human progress and prosperity is, anyway. 

Many of us could particularly benefit from the concept of negative “meta-emotions,” or the judgmental feelings we have about our negative feelings. “At the heart of so many of our miseries is not the fact that we feel bad, but the belief that we should feel otherwise,” he writes.  That line immediately rang true to me — merely acknowledging to myself that it’s not a big deal if I feel terrible from work stress, or my cat’s deteriorating health, or whatever else happens to be weighing on me, helps to lighten the load. What if we really tried to wryly embrace the reality that it’s extremely normal for life to suck sometimes? The reward might not be happiness, exactly (an elusive and poorly understood state anyway, Loewenstein points out), but a little less misery.  

I recently spoke with Loewenstein about his book — he had a gentle, faintly melancholic air, and took a surprisingly generous interest in some of the choices I was weighing in my own life. Part of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below. 

Americans seem pretty unhappy right now. There has been endless discourse about that. Do you think that your book adds something to that conversation?

I do — I was just an expert on the Meta case that recently settled. I was an expert on the side that was against Meta. I think one of the causes of declining mental health is, in fact, social media. It really exacerbates the types of social comparisons that lead to envy and loss of self-esteem. I would like to think that I provide some new insights into how these modern technologies help to exacerbate the mental health crisis. 

One analysis of that, based on what I’ve learned from your book, might be: We as humans are so guided by negative emotions, and often those emotions are relational in nature and have to do with how we compare to other people.  Social media is then quite naturally going to tap into and amplifying negative emotions that we’re easily manipulated by.

That’s right. I think of it in two ways. One is there’s kind of a mismatch between the circumstances in which we evolved and the modern environment. And the other is that in the capitalist economy, there are, especially in the internet age, all these entities that are trying to exploit our evolutionary programming for their own good and not for our good. 

The premise of the book, as you write, is that “misery is inescapable. It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system” — it’s like our default state. Can you unpack what that means? 

I agree with everything you said until “default.” Different people have different set points, and there are some happy people around. I happen to be a glass-half-empty person. My natural state is a little bit below zero. But there are very few people who don’t experience some form of misery frequently and intensely. 

The evolutionary function of most negative emotions is pretty obvious, whereas the evolutionary function of happiness is sort of murky. And misery is so dominant that all it takes is a little bit of misery, a little bit of negative emotion, to wipe out any positive emotion. You go out to a really nice dinner at a fancy restaurant with your significant other, and you say something thoughtless and they get offended or they say something thoughtless and you get offended. All of a sudden you can’t even taste the food or appreciate the beautiful surroundings. 

Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania referred to this as the “roach effect”: If you drop a roach into a vat of fine French wine, you don’t want to drink the wine. But if you take a roach, you can add as much wine as you want to it and you’re not going to want to eat the roach.

One of the strongest positive emotions is relief — which is interesting and not a coincidence, because it’s relief from negative emotions. It’s telling that maybe the strongest positive emotion involves the elimination of negative emotions.

You can think of misery as a stick trying to get you to do things that evolution thought were good for you; the stick is very immediate, and you know exactly what it’s telling you. If you are hungry, it’s time to eat. If you’re in pain, you’re injured, you’ve got to do something about it. But the carrot is different. The carrot, which is positive emotions, you have to think ahead, Oh, if I did this, then I would experience this positive emotion. It requires a kind of second-order thinking, whereas misery is just immediate. Evolution figured out probably very rapidly, probably when we were single-cell protozoa or something, that sticks are a way better way to get an organism to do what it needs to do than carrots.

How confident are you that the evidence base we have about the psychology of negative emotions generalizes to humanity as a whole and that it’s not culturally biased?

“What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings.”

Emotion researchers have looked across cultures, and they tend to observe the same basic emotions in a very, very wide range of cultures. What does vary across cultures is what induces the emotions. For example, shame — something that we would be unashamed of, somebody in a different country might be very ashamed of, and vice versa. A lot of these emotions are self-conscious emotions. They have to do with how we interpret the world and whether we’re living up to some kind of standard. Often we get it from culture, from religion, things like that.

But I think the emotions themselves are not universal, but pretty close to universal. My guess is that all 12 negative emotions that I write about are manifested in pretty much all different cultures, from those that have very little connection to Western civilization to advanced economies. 

Another timely thread that your book is in conversation with is this idea that American culture has become intolerant of ordinary negative emotions in a way that’s maladaptive. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s recent book The Age of Diagnosis, for example, covered our obsession with medical labels and how they might make us prone to thinking that feeling bad means that there’s something medically wrong with us. What do you think about that? Have we gotten bad at feeling bad?

It is striking to me how it seems like all the young people I meet talk about their therapist, and a lot of them talk about the drugs that they take. Young people also talk about anxiety and depression almost like one word, “anxiety-and-depression.” In my generation, anxiety and depression were two entirely different things. 

I think it’s good that younger generations are more comfortable talking about these things and getting help. I do worry that it can be, to some degree, pathologizing. There’s an awful lot of self-focus there. And I kind of worry that if you are dealing with your mental health problems by taking drugs, that it reduces your motivation to figure out things like how to reorganize your life to feel better. But I don’t want to sound too much like a dinosaur.

There’s a contingent of people who might read your book and think, “Yes, isn’t it terrible that humans are built to be unhappy and our evolved instincts don’t serve us well anymore? And that’s why we should engineer humans in such a way that we don’t feel this way all the time.” Someone with a strong utilitarian philosophy might think that if your life sums up to more negative feelings than positive ones, then it’s not even worth living. But that’s not really the vibe that I get from you. 

No, yeah. And one of the things I talk about in the book are what psychologists call meta-emotions. These are emotions that one experiences about emotions. I think the single best example is envy. If you envy your friend — almost everyone has friends that they envy, but they’re still your friends. But you might feel that you’re not supposed to envy your friend, and you feel guilty — the guilt is a meta-emotion. Or you can also have meta-emotions about a lack of emotion. So something bad happens to someone, or even somebody dies, and you don’t feel all that bad, and you feel guilty because you’re not grieving. 

I think all the societal focus on happiness creates a kind of a meta-meta-emotion, which is that we think we’re supposed to be happy. And then we feel ashamed and guilty about the fact that we aren’t happy — we feel like we failed. That compounds and adds another level of depth to our misery. So I think it can be liberating at some level to understand that misery just is a constant in human existence. 

I also think that my book is militantly anti-self-help. There’s no self-help in it whatsoever. But I don’t think it’s a depressing book to read, and it wasn’t particularly depressing to write, though some of the stories that I wrote about were a bit wrenching. 

I like that — but what, then, ought people to do with the information that you’re presenting?

What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings. To me, insight is valuable in its own right. 

The reason I read sad novels is not because they make me happy, but because I feel like I gained some kind of insight into people and into the world. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the saddest book you could ever imagine, but it’s very meaningful to read, and it definitely feels like you’re a different person after you read it. I love novels, but I have no skill as a fiction writer. So this book was almost like a surrogate for me. Instead of writing a novel, I wrote this book.

I think the lack of self-help drives some people crazy. I did a podcast where the podcaster kept asking me questions about how reading the book would improve somebody’s life. And I kept saying it’s not a self-help book.

I’m just very skeptical of self-help talks and books and things like that. And I know that there’s certain things you are supposed to do to feel good, like you’re supposed to wake up and think of three things that you should be thankful for. And maybe if I did that, maybe I would get happier, but I’ve never been able to actually get myself to do that.

But you do have some insights that people could apply in their lives, like the idea that striving intentionally for happiness or meaning doesn’t really work, and that meaning often comes to us in unforeseeable spontaneous moments. On one hand, that implies a kind of randomness, and maybe there’s not a lot we can do about it. On the other hand, I can predict that I’m more likely to feel a deep sense of meaning in some scenarios than others, and I can put myself into those situations more, like choosing to be social on a weeknight.

A lot of the time the good things in life are just surprising, and sometimes you have to get dragged kicking and screaming into things that ultimately end up being the most fulfilling things in your life. So much of parenting is trying to get your kids to do things that they don’t want to do that you are absolutely convinced that if they started to do them, they would end up loving.

You argue, drawing from economist and philosopher Adam Smith, that human beings are constantly striving to achieve the next thing because we imagine it’ll satisfy us, though it never does. That helpful delusion is what leads us to build cities and cure diseases and all the rest. 

Adam Smith is best known for the invisible hand, which is the idea that each person single-mindedly pursuing their own well-being inadvertently promotes the public good. But if you read Adam Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he didn’t believe at all that people pursue their own personal interest. He believed that people are driven by this illusion that the next raise, the next accomplishment, will bring happiness, and it never does. I love that contradiction between the conventional interpretation of the invisible hand and what Adam Smith really believed.

So civilization is powered by this dissatisfaction that never resolves itself. But I don’t think you would say the lesson we ought to take from the book is that we’ll always revert back to being miserable, so there’s no point in doing anything.

That’s absolutely not the point of the book. Misery evolved for good reasons, and the whole point of misery is that we’re supposed to take actions to lessen our miseries. That’s what we should be doing, because who wants to be miserable? 

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

The Trumpy tech billionaire Larry Ellison has wrapped his tentacles around the US branch of TikTok, an entire Hawaiian island — and now, officially, a very large share of the world’s news and entertainment production. 

On Tuesday, the media behemoth Paramount — which is headed by Ellison’s son — completed its $110 billion mega-merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, in a controversial and hard-fought deal backed by the elder Ellison. 

The merger combines a sprawling collection of brands, including HBO, CBS, and Paramount Pictures under one rebranded umbrella. It also concentrates much of the US film and television business in the hands of just five companies. Unions, theater owners, media watchdogs, and several state attorneys general were accordingly concerned: Combining two major competitors in any industry inherently concentrates power over what gets made, what consumers pay, and what workers earn. 

Critics of this deal argued that, in the media industry, the fallout could be particularly intense. In addition to layoffs, opponents warned the new company could produce fewer, more boring movies, raise subscription prices for its combined streaming services, and inject political bias into news programs on CBS and CNN. (We’ll review the evidence for some of these claims in a minute.) 

The new company agreed to address some of these concerns in a September 21 settlement agreement with 12 state attorneys general, which let the merger proceed. A group of consumers also launched a last-minute bid to block the deal, but the Supreme Court declined their emergency request on Monday.

Go a little deeper

One of the conditions of that September AG settlement was a minimum film guarantee: The merged company agreed to release at least 30 films a year for the first two years after the merger, then 32 films a year for three years after that. The requirement was designed to address one of the major fears around the deal: namely, that mergers can result in fewer films. 

Recent history, and the basic economics of acquisitions, help explain the concern. Debt-financed acquisitions, like this one, can leave companies under pressure to cut costs. There are a few ways to do that, such as producing fewer new films or cancelling unreleased films that they don’t want to promote. According to Cinema United, a theater industry group, Disney and 21st Century Fox put out about half as many theatrical releases after their 2019 merger as they did before it, excluding 2020 and 2021.

But that doesn’t mean the new Paramount/Warner Brothers (formally rebranded Skydance) would do the same thing. Disney, for instance, makes a lot of its money from properties and products that aren’t movies. When the European Commission took up the question of whether this new merger would reduce output earlier this year, it concluded that Paramount and Warner were comparatively more dependent on film revenue. In other words, cutting back the number of movies they make post-merger “would not make economic sense” the way it did for Disney after its acquisition. 

Still, consolidation could certainly change which movies get produced. Critics argue that fewer studios mean fewer opportunities for Hollywood creatives and less pressure on the remaining players to take creative risks.

In a report released over the summer, academics with the Media and Consolidation Research Organization at UC San Diego warned this particular deal would likely result in less diverse and more formulaic films. I, for one, won’t be holding my breath for a Larry Ellison biopic.

One link for later

➨ Resist the temptation of the Prime Day “deal.” Today marks the start of Amazon’s twice-yearly discount days, which have spilled over to many other retailers. But before you load up your cart, double-check that the sale is actually a good one…and that you truly want or need the item in question. The psychological rush of scoring a deal is so strong that it can lead you to buy things you never planned to purchase.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Hollywood (and communism) brought the Reagans together? The pair met when Ronald was the president of the Screen Actors Guild and Nancy was a young actress trying to prove she wasn’t a communist sympathizer. 
• Today’s trivia: What is the 24th and final letter of the Greek alphabet? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Indian Ocean island where the UK displaced inhabitants roughly 55 years ago. That would be Diego Garcia, which was forcibly cleared to make way for a joint US-UK naval base. 

Climate change, cyber-attacks, geopolitical shifts, and energy shocks could put Britain’s food supply at great risk

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.

Horse racing can be an unusually dangerous profession for both the jockey and the horse: Riding a half-ton animal at nearly 40 miles per hour means your fate depends on the health and performance of both athletes. And the horse can be at risk of catastrophic injury if the jockey doesn’t have the required physical fitness to maintain proper technique and lightning-quick reflexes. 

But new wearable technology and advances in sports medicine are enabling everyone involved in the sport of horse racing to identify risks earlier and prevent injuries to horses and jockeys alike.

In order to find out more about both of these athletes, I took a trip to Belmont Park, to watch competitive horses train and to speak with Dr. Sara Langsam, an equine veterinarian and chair of the American Association of Equine Practitioners Racing Committee. And to learn about the jockey side of the equation, I talked to Michaela Keener, a jockey health researcher at University of Kentucky, and ReyLu Gutiérrez, a jockey who has started in over 6,000 races.

Read more about horse racing safety and health:

• Article about wearable biometric sensors as a horse injury detection system
• “Physiological Demands and Muscle Activity of Jockeys in Trial and Race Riding”
• New York Racing Authority’s page on equine safety
• Horseracing Wrongs, a nonprofit committed to ending the horse-racing industry for reasons of animal welfare
• Information about the new Belmont Park racetrack, including details on its new, technologically advanced surfaces

This video is presented by Colgate. Colgate doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this one possible.

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.

My favorite restaurant, here in Madison, Wisconsin, closed this week. 

It was not my favorite because it had the greatest food I’d ever had, nor the most memorable ambiance. But I loved the Mad Rabbit Cafe because it had become my anchor in the neighborhood — it felt like home to me and a core group of friends as surely as the century-old houses lining the surrounding city blocks. Most importantly, it was entirely vegan — a rarity in this city, which, despite its ultra-progressive politics, embraces Wisconsin’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” It was a refuge where my most closely held values found expression.

That closure is part of a national trend. US plant-based restaurants appear to be going through a contraction, amid the tumultuous aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and, perhaps, an anti-plant-based cultural vibe shift.

VegNews magazine reported that data from HappyCow, an app that lists vegan and vegetarian restaurants, finds the number of vegan restaurants in three of the country’s top destinations for vegan dining — New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon — decreased by between 21 and 25 percent from 2022 to late 2024. Those cities alone make up a significant share of America’s vegan restaurants. Then, in 2025 and 2026, some of the country’s most renowned, long-running plant-based restaurants also announced that they’d shut down: Modern Love and Candle in New York City, the Vegan Joint in LA, Millennium in Oakland, a more than three-decade-old institution (though it later reopened as a leaner operation), among many others. 

According to a Vegan Society report, in October 2025, HappyCow (which is like Yelp but for plant-based dining) listed 1,717 all-vegan restaurants in the US. As of this writing, HappyCow lists 1,509.

Madison has never had anything like the vegan riches of New York or San Francisco, but even we are having our own vegan recession. When Mad Rabbit opened in early 2024, the city had four fully vegan restaurants; now, depending on how you count, one or two remain (and even the one that’s unambiguously vegan is a food-court-style stall). I visited Mad Rabbit at its last Sunday brunch, where it served what many people have described as the best tofu scramble they’ve ever had, and a crowd-pleasing rotation of crepe specials (this month, it was mango lassi). It’s a culinary niche that, once gone, is hard to replace in a mid-tier city like this one. 

Mad Rabbit’s owner, Nate Anger, told me the business hadn’t been in particularly bad financial shape; it was profitable for each of the three years in which it operated, but not profitable enough to justify the punishing time commitment required to run it. Managing it had taken over his life, as it’s wont to do for many people in the food service industry. “I live here. I spend far more time here than anywhere else,” he told me in a recent interview at the restaurant. “I’ve missed my kids’ baseball game and tournaments and school band recitals.” I looked around at the oddball, DIY space he’d conjured — walls covered in houndstooth print, an Alice in Wonderland-like vortex, and art of rabbits in mischievous-looking moods, one brandishing a pair of large knives (the sort of room you wouldn’t want to encounter while stoned). 

The animal rights movement has two very different emotional registers: the grief and terror of looking squarely at factory farming, and the joy of discovering how much creativity, abundance, and pleasure can exist outside it. All-vegan restaurants represent perhaps the fullest embodiment of that second feeling — like “a little heaven,” as Krupa Panchal, co-owner of Bombay Food Junkies, a vegan Indian spot in suburban St. Louis, put it to me. 

Even as vegan businesses struggle to survive, plant-based options at non-vegan restaurants have become far more mainstream than they were a decade or two ago. Set against the stagnating (if not declining) share of Americans who identify as vegan or vegetarian, that raises difficult and even paradoxical questions for the animal movement.

For that reason, the mass die-off of plant-based restaurants has been much dissected and lamented in the vegan community. As I faced losing my own — a possibility I’d always feared and tried to forestall by supporting it as much as possible — the problem became much more visceral for me. I found myself thinking about why it mattered to me so much: What is lost when these places disappear, and what does that tell us about whether the plant-based movement can grow and endure?

What vegan restaurants are for

The vegan restaurant predates the word “vegan” itself — and so, apparently, do questions about whether they can be financially viable. More than a century ago, French anarchist Georges Butaud co-founded the Foyer Végétalien in Paris, writing in a 1923 letter that he was unsure whether it would attract a sufficient “clientèle végétalienne” to sustain itself. Why start such a business at all, when the audience for plant-based food is so vanishingly small? “I already have some positive results. A few people have become vegan since we opened,” Butaud wrote. The restaurant “is a school where we reciprocally teach one another…I have believed in the usefulness of creating it, and I will be happy if, over the months to come, the number of vegans increases.” 

Many vegan restaurant proprietors today still share that ambition — to be good enough to help the movement grow. 

Long before it became routine to find plant-based options on normie restaurant menus (iceberg lettuce leaves don’t count), plant-based restaurants compensated for vegans’ exclusion from mainstream cuisine. But they have also aimed to provide proof of concept of the diverse, surprising possibilities of plant-based food for a larger audience, showing that plant-based food need not be confined to marginalia. 

Today, of course, restaurants are far more central to our daily lives than they were in Butaud’s time. Americans consume about a third of their calories and the majority of their food budgets outside the home, and food-serving businesses are perhaps our most important third spaces. Meanwhile, the problems associated with animal agriculture and overconsumption of animal products grow unabated in America and around the world. The US alone slaughters 10 billion land animals for meat every year, the overwhelming share of them raised in appalling conditions, and those farmed for milk and eggs endure no better. Reciting these grim facts tends not to be a very fruitful path toward making friends or convincing people that veganism can be a positive and enjoyable lifestyle. Plant-based restaurants, on the other hand, make veganism feel less like a prohibition than an invitation; hospitality rather than horror. 

Anyone who has ever gone vegan knows what it’s like to incessantly be asked the well-meaning but bewildering question: “What do you eat?” (And, I get it! It’s confusing for those of us who grew up viewing food free of animal products as side salad or overcooked green beans.) Plant-based businesses have long been laboratories for answering it, developing techniques that draw richness and variety from ingredients not often treated as the main event in Western cuisines.

The more than 50-year-old Moosewood Restaurant (although mostly vegetarian, not fully vegan) was an early conduit between restaurant experimentation and home cooking, its recipes spreading far beyond Ithaca, New York, through its enormously popular cookbooks. Soul Vegetarian in Atlanta, opened in 1979, developed a plant-based soul food repertoire that helped cut a path for dozens of other vegan soul restaurants across the US; the Chicago Diner, in the city long identified with stockyards and slaughterhouses, helped popularize plant-based versions of American diner and deli staples. And chef Miyoko Schinner, at her erstwhile San Francisco restaurant Now & Zen, experimented with plant-based cheeses long before launching Miyoko’s Creamery, one of the most acclaimed and influential vegan dairy companies of the past decade. 

The 21st century in particular has seen a flowering of vegan restaurants serving every palate and national cuisine, in every possible aesthetic — punk, hippie, psychedelic, fussy and upscale. They still expand my mind today, showing that a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to discover all the ways we can eat without the exploitation of animals.

The longtime Grasshopper restaurant in Boston, whose pan-Asian fare draws partly from Vietnamese Buddhist temple cuisine, makes mock meats that are worlds away from the rubbery substitutes that many Americans associate with the category (it closed its beloved, homey restaurant space in 2024, later reopening a stall inside a food court). Mad Rabbit changed even this longtime vegan’s idea of what tofu could be. Chicago-based Penelope’s Vegan Taqueria makes, as far as I’m concerned, the most exceptional Mexican food — vegan or not — this side of the Rio Grande. V-Grits, a Southern comfort spot in Louisville, Kentucky (RIP, 2024), provided evidence that some of America’s most exciting plant-based food could be found far from the big coastal cities best known for it. 

So why are so many of these places shuttering now? 

The vegan restaurant death spiral? 

Theories abound about the great dying of vegan restaurants.

Some of the casualties, it must be said, just weren’t very good in the first place. The raw vegan boom of the 2000s and 2010s, for example, produced numerous establishments built around that especially unforgiving constraint — no cooking. The result was often less-than-thrilling food (which isn’t to say it’s never good!), all in service of a restriction with scant evidence of health benefits to support it. Lots of these restaurants have closed in the 2020s, reflecting diminishing demand for that particular variant of vegan food. 

But the 2010s weren’t merely a golden age for zucchini noodles and date-walnut brownies — vegan restaurants of all stripes were multiplying, as was interest in the new generation of plant-based meats (Beyond and Impossible). It really did appear, for a minute there, that the future might be plant-based, vindicating decades of animal advocates’ work to push veganism into the mainstream. 

“I felt like veganism had really hit a big stride” in that period, Anger, the Mad Rabbit founder, said. Everyone was streaming documentaries advocating for plant-based diets — Forks Over Knives, Cowspiracy, What the Health, among others. Some polls suggested the share of Americans who called themselves vegan was growing. Anger said his market research led him to believe that the overall trend line for veganism would continue going up, even a little. Instead, “it just rolled right back over.” His restaurant had a core customer base of committed vegans, but its heavy reliance on regulars also showed how limited its reach was; stagnating interest in veganism may have been putting a ceiling on its growth. Keith Uruski, owner of Nooch, a vegan restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, open since 2018, told me that the business had thrived in its first few years, but has since slowed considerably, and he hasn’t paid himself in three years.  

In the years leading up to the pandemic, the assumption that the audience for vegan food would keep growing shaped much bigger bets than Mad Rabbit. Vegan chain restaurants including Veggie Grill, Native Foods, and Planta had pursued aggressive growth plans in the 2010s and early 2020s but eventually retrenched, closing locations and abandoning the scale they’d once envisioned. (Again, some of this may be merit-based rather than evidence of a broad rejection of veganism — YMMV, but I found Veggie Grill, at least last time I had it pre-Covid, to be mid.) “Most dedicated vegan chains are now in kind of a managed decline,” Lizzy Bartlett, senior director of menu research and insights at Technomic, a food service industry research firm, told me.  

The cultural winds have certainly shifted. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has probably contributed to a thermostatic swing away from “unnatural”-seeming diets and simulacra of traditional foods, like plant-based meat and milk. I also think society has deep carnist antibodies that activate whenever meat-eating faces heightened moral scrutiny. In the last few years, that’s taken the form of a protein obsession that has hijacked the minds of otherwise rational people, convincing them tofu and beans lack sufficient protein to build muscle.

But perhaps my favorite explanation was articulated by Financial Times journalist Henry Mance last year: “The decline in idealism,” reflected in the reelection of Donald Trump — the triumph of our collective id.  

There’s a risk of reading too much into all this, however. Many restaurants, vegan or not, suffered during Covid and from prolonged inflation in food and energy prices. This year, consumers are spending less at restaurants because of elevated fuel prices due to the war in Iran. Panchal, of Bombay Food Junkies, said that her sales have been down in 2025 and 2026 compared to the years prior, but she doesn’t believe vegan restaurants have been faring worse than non-vegan ones. Some vegan businesses have recently closed in St. Louis for personal reasons rather than failing in the market, she told me.

This is part of the natural life cycle of independent restaurants — many disappear within a few years, and even highly successful ones eventually run their course. US cities had many vegan restaurants open in the 2000s and 2010s, so we might now be seeing a wave of closures that reflects the aging of that cohort. 

Preliminary results shared with Vox from a 2026 survey of the global vegan restaurant industry, by the nonprofit Vegan Hospitality, also complicate the idea that plant-based restaurants are being killed off because of waning demand for vegan food. In responses from about 59 vegan restaurants (a self-selected group, to be sure), mostly in the US and Mexico, roughly four in five said they’d still choose to be fully vegan if they were opening today. Of 13 businesses that were closing or had been sold, six said that being vegan actually helped them, and four said it made no meaningful difference.

And there’s some tension between the “death of veganism” hypothesis and what may be one of the biggest forces now disadvantaging dedicated vegan restaurants: the widespread adoption of plant-based options on omnivorous restaurant menus. That it’s now easier to be vegan at mainstream establishments is “unquestionable,” Anger said. He viewed Mad Rabbit’s competitors as not just fully plant-based businesses, but any restaurant that offers “more than two or three” vegan options; it was located just a block away from one of Madison’s best-regarded restaurants, a Laotian place with several very good plant-based offerings.

Likewise, Michael Fifelski, general manager of Red Sushi in downtown Madison, which has a solid list of vegan options, told me, “Our vegetarian and vegan rolls actually are quite popular” — a foundational part of the menu. There can be a real advantage to simply letting vegan food blend in — Amanda Byrd, the manager of Everly, an eclectic, globally inspired restaurant in Madison, told me that its top dish, a butternut squash and forbidden rice curry, is incidentally plant-based. In many cases, “if you de-emphasize the vegan statement, but the dish happens to be vegan,” it will sell better, Claire Conaghan of the food industry research firm Datassential said.

Though nothing compares, for me, to the feeling of total alignment that comes with dining at an all-vegan restaurant, there is also something affirming about seeing plant-based food finally taken seriously by the wider culture — and vegan dishes surviving on their own merits alongside everything else on the menu.

Do vegan restaurants still matter?

In a world where you can find a satisfying vegan entrée at Chipotle or Taco Bell or your local brewpub, are fully vegan restaurants still needed? What purpose do they serve?

The most fundamental problem beneath the downturn in vegan businesses is simply that the vegan population does not seem to be growing much at all. Polling on the question is messy and often inconsistent, but according to Gallup’s 2026 survey, 2 percent of Americans call themselves vegan, the same figure as in 2012, when the firm first started asking the question. If expanding the number of people who abstain from animal products remains an important goal (a point debated within the animal movement, though I think dietary change still matters a great deal), then which is more likely to move that objective forward: vegan restaurants, or an abundance of vegan options at omnivorous ones? Which does more to increase the number of plant-based meals consumed rather than animal-based ones and generate excitement about vegan food?  

I put those questions to Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, who writes the Substack “Regression to the Meat.” He’s one of the most intellectually honest researchers anywhere on meat reduction. His answer, via email, is that we don’t really know: “I have no idea how to weigh the pros and cons of, when I’m choosing between meals, 1) signaling to the world that vegan businesses are viable or 2) signaling to a particular business that their vegan options are viable. That’s a hard problem!” (It might be “a microeconomic structural equation modeling paper waiting to be written,” he added.)

Reducing prevailing levels of meat consumption even a tiny bit, much less convincing people to become vegan, is really, maddeningly hard, as Green has written. One frequently cited obstacle to growing the animal rights movement — its “central unsolved problem,” as one movement leader recently put it — is that it lacks much in the way of an in-person social world and sense of community. Vegan restaurants alone can’t fix that, of course, but they are among the few physical institutions the movement has. At their best, they provide a space where a private dietary choice can be reinforced by a shared sense of identity — a place to run into someone you already know or meet someone new, at a speaker event or social mixer. These spontaneous, embodied connections made Mad Rabbit such a warm presence in my life, and its final days all the more melancholy.

That function may be especially useful when plant-based restaurants are rooted in traditions people already belong to — cultural, religious, or otherwise — and help them view veganism as continuous with an identity they already have rather than as something alien to it. As Green has suggested, “let’s tap into pre-existing identities, explain how plant-based diets are consistent with them, and then take folks somewhere to enjoy convenient, delicious plant-based food together.” 

On the other hand, plant-based options at omnivorous establishments matter for almost the opposite reason. People often struggle to stay vegan because eating differently isolates them from non-vegan friends and family; restaurants that can accommodate mixed-diet social groups help remove that social penalty. These options also need a customer base — if no one orders them, they’re unlikely to remain on menus. 

I’m enough of a weirdo that I try to almost exclusively support plant-based restaurants whenever I eat out. I desperately want them to survive, and at the end of the day, no one is more invested in advancing the craft of plant-based cooking than vegan restaurants themselves.

Not everyone needs to be like me — in a world where almost all people still eat animal products, a healthy ecosystem needs both places built entirely around veganism and those where plant-based food is woven into broader food culture. It needs, most of all, excellent vegan food, wherever it might be found. And now that veganism has made at least a small breach into mainstream dining, vegan restaurants still offer something their meat-serving counterparts cannot. They’re like miniature utopias where the normal order of things is inverted and, for the length of a meal, we can see what a future without animal exploitation would look like. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Meanwhile, Madonna wins seven awards and British singer Sienna Spiro named Best New Artist

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.

There is a kind of terror-tinged embarrassment that comes from dozing off on your beach towel on the sand, only to find a rising tide intrude upon your mid-nap bliss, lapping at your toes and sweeping away your sunglasses.

It is a truth I relearn every June, one that arrives like the season’s first sunburn: The ocean is inevitable, and Poseidon always reclaims his own. Actor Nicolas Cage learned a far more serious — or more expensive, certainly — version of that lesson earlier this month, when a furious high surf siphoned the ground beneath his Malibu, California, mansion, collapsing his driveway and front porch into a gigantic 30-foot-by-30-foot sinkhole. The cave-in ruptured a gas main, swallowed an access road, and forced dozens of locals to evacuate. In the process, it put into stark, cinematic relief the unyielding threat of coastal erosion in every community in the nation with a view of the sea.

It’s impossible not to imagine Cage standing on the edge of that yawning pit as he might in one of his films, bombastic in his bafflement, every outsize gesture a pantomime of confusion. But no one should have been surprised. As far back as 1976, the California Coastal Commission denied a proposal to build a home on the lot where Cage’s Malibu home now teeters over the void, citing “concerns over wave hazards.” In 1986, the same commission rejected another residential proposal on the land, deeming it an “extremely hazardous area” threatened by waves and erosion. 

So why, just a few years later, was a home built there anyway, one that would eventually come to be owned by a certain Hollywood eccentric? A few years after their initial rejections, the waterfront lot’s original owners were able to convince the commission that with enough clever engineering, including a sea wall and concrete stilts, the home, its septic system, driveway, and access road could be protected from the sea god’s wrath. But much like Odysseus before him, Cage has found the hard way that the lord of waves does not easily forget his due. “What is the Grail but Earth itself?” he once told the New York Times, characteristically mythologizing his real estate acquisitions. “The divine object is Earth.”

In this case, at least, Cage chose the wrong cup. But Cage is hardly alone in laying out his home atop the wrong stretch of sand. Nearly all of the nation’s coastal communities — from ritzy enclaves like Malibu to working-class quarters of the Rockaways in New York — rely on coastal engineering to remain inhabitable, dumping sand or erecting sea walls to put off a perpetually and increasingly rising tide. 

To put this into perspective, almost one-third of Americans live along a coastline, and while few of us have the kind of luxury oceanfront views that Cage and his neighbors enjoy, our beachside apartment complexes, utility lines, and coastal highways suffer from the same risks his driveway does. Most of us, however, lack the benefit of a second home or a private island to flee to if something goes catastrophically wrong. 

When a sinkhole opens underneath a celebrity’s driveway, or a stilted home collapses into the sea, it is a reminder that we have built huge swaths of our beloved coastal communities on land that was never meant to sit still. If we want them to survive, we will need to learn to embrace new ways of packing our beach towns up and wheeling them further upshore. Logistically implausible as it may sound — difficult as, say, stealing the Declaration of Independence — it’s a process that several American communities have become much better at in recent years. 

“This is not a problem that is unique to Malibu, which just so happens to be some of the most spectacularly beautiful and spectacularly expensive real estate in America,” said Kara Murphy Schlichting, an environmental historian at Queens College in NYC. “This is a question that is coming for all of America’s coastal communities.”

Say it ain’t sinkhole

The void that swallowed Cage’s driveway with the gusto of the actor chewing scenery in one of his films was no ordinary sinkhole. In fact, if you asked a geologist, they would tell you that it was not, technically speaking, a true sinkhole at all. 

“It’s not what I typically would consider a sinkhole,” Michael Sukop, a hydrogeology professor at Florida International University, told me. That’s because most sinkholes form when rainwater or a leaky pipe slowly seeps into the porous bedrock beneath our highways, homes, and soccer fields, creating a cavern that screeches open during a heavy downpour or when the infrastructure above it becomes too heavy to bear. 

There is no accurate accounting of every sinkhole in the US, but geologists widely believe that they have become more frequent globally, driven by extreme weather linked to climate change, aging infrastructure, and what Sukop calls “people moving into sinkhole country,” meaning places like Florida where the bedrock is highly soluble. Some of the worst places for sinkholes in the country are in landlocked states like Missouri, whose unique landscape boasts upward of 16,000 sinkholes, which often open after heavy rainfall.   

But Cage’s sinkhole was formed not from hidden cavities in the bedrock, but from a high surf strong enough to slip under his sea wall and wash away the soggy soil beneath his asphalt and, presumably, his Rolls-Royce Phantoms. It was spurred not by rainfall or a leaky pipe but by a tidal force akin to the one that can put a damper on — or literally dampen, anyway — a beach spot that seemed perfectly sandy when the surf was low. 

@accuweather

A homeowner on North Carolina’s Outer Banks paid to move their beachfront home away from the shore to prevent it from collapsing into the ocean, as several neighboring homes have.

♬ original sound – AccuWeather

But while I can learn to lug my sodden towel and cooler a little further upshore, the same cannot easily be said for Cage’s $10.5 million abode, built — like much of Malibu — atop a constantly shifting coastline. Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be a good idea to try.

“It’s a fiction that we can keep a coast in a single place,” said Schlichting. And it is a fiction upheld by hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on temporary solutions meant to hold the ocean still, and protect the luxury homes and boardwalks we’ve built along it. 

The pristine, sandy beaches that most of us think of when we think of the word “beach” are often heavily manufactured for our pleasure, much like an urban park might be seeded with carefully cultivated trees and brush. In fact, the federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to dump sand atop eroded coastlines, a process known as beach renourishment, in addition to many more billions spent on sea walls and other structures that can keep a coastline in place for a little while. 

“The most endangered species on the coast is not a turtle or a piping plover; it’s an unengineered beach,” said Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, who has been tracking beach renourishment projects since the 1980s. “And it’s unsustainable because as sea level continues to rise, we are having to pump that sand more and more frequently.”

How to save coastal neighborhoods

Earlier this year, Malibu released a long-awaited Coastal Vulnerability Assessment that twice called out the acute dangers that erosion poses for Sea Level Drive, a small stretch of private road, upon which a gaping crater now sits where Nicolas Cage’s driveway used to be. As this year’s goliath El Niño gets into full swing, his misfortune is unlikely to be the city’s last. 

Already, the spectacular seafront Pacific Coast Highway faces a gauntlet of exigencies, among them landslides, wildfires, and, of course, a coastline that simply won’t sit still, creeping further and further inland each year. Just this weekend, officials in Malibu issued a warning about hazardous conditions at local beaches, with “severe beach erosion” exposing steel and concrete debris sticking across the coastline.  

“Nature itself does not destroy the coast. It moves the coast,” said Young, but if infrastructure like the Pacific Coast Highway lies in the way of that movement, then there is only so much that building a sea wall or dumping 300,000 cubic yards of sand every five years will do. “No matter where you are, whether you are in California or South Carolina or New Jersey, we are still building in dumb places.”

Much like laying a log in front of your beach towel won’t hold the tide back for very long, these measures are often only a temporary balm. But there is another way, one that involves moving the proverbial towel — or permanent infrastructure — away from the shore, a process known as managed retreat.

As implausible as it may sound, when you take into account just how much money has gone into keeping the coast still, lugging a few celebrity mansions, a beachside school, or a sliver of highway across town might be a Herculean labor worth attempting. 

“It’s totally doable,” said Young. “We can move just about everything.” On the coast of North Carolina, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, one of the tallest brick lighthouses in the world, was moved in 1999, a feat that Young helped pull off. At the time, he said, locals  “wanted to shoot us over” the effort, sure that the centuries-old structure would fall down. “And you know what? It’s safe now,” he said, noting that just down the beach in Buxton and in nearby Rodanthe, dozens of homes have collapsed into the ocean since 2020.

But even in places where such coastal relocations were once commonplace, it’s still not an easy sell for most coastal policymakers and their constituents, especially in places like Malibu, whose density and geography make it all but impossible to move things nearby. But sooner or later, they might not have a choice. 

“I can’t tell you how many coastal elected officials have said to me, ‘Rob, you know, retreat is not an option from this place.’ And I’m like, well, actually, you are retreating here, here, here, and here,” Young told me. “It’s just you’re doing it in the worst way possible. You’ve got septic tanks rolling around in the sea. That is not a great Chamber of Commerce moment.”

At the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, the documentary NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it’s all anyone’s talking about, even though few have actually seen it. 

Made by two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the movie takes place on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence agents and soldiers discuss things that they did in Gaza and how they did them.

As Bilge Ebiri writes in his Vulture review of NAZA, “One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll.”Another interviewee agrees that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Since its reception in Venice, the film has faced harsh criticism from the Israeli government — with at least one politician issuing a call to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. 

Shany Littman is a journalist for Haaretz in Israel and has been reporting on the film’s reception. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the conversation around the movie in Israel. 

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.

Have you seen the documentary NAZA?

I haven’t. I asked the PR person of the movie to send me a link and it’s not possible. I mean, considering the huge storm that came out, they’re probably rethinking how to handle the distribution of the film.

What I hear you saying is it’s safe to assume most people in Israel have not actually been able to see the movie. Is that right?

Yes, that’s correct.

But they are aware of what is in it. Let’s talk about the conversation around this movie in Israel. What’s the reaction been like?

You can find many different types of criticism from all sides of a political range. It’s not only right-wing people or people who are supporting the war. The claims are first that maybe the film itself is not verified. They have witnesses that are anonymous that they didn’t verify well enough. But I think most people — they just feel that this is an opportunity for all the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and [antisemitic] people in the world to attack Israel. Israelis from all sides are afraid of the way the world is seeing us at the moment. 

Is anybody in Israel saying, “Hey, we’re glad that they did it. We’re glad that they made this movie”?

Yes. There are people who are supporting Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, supporting their right to criticize, to investigate. As a liberal country, we should be able to investigate ourselves, to criticize ourselves. They are doing their work as journalists. 

There has also been a reaction from the Israeli government at a more official level. What has the Israeli government said about this film?

“There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening.”

The first person to react was the minister of culture. He said that the nationality of Yuval and the filmmakers should be revoked. That they should not be Israeli citizens anymore. There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening. I’m completely horrified by this. 

I already saw some clips on social media by people who were filming themselves where…you could see a house [in the background] and someone was saying, “You can all come here. This is the house of Rachel Szor’s parents. They live here and you can come and do whatever you want. I invite you all to come here and take revenge.” And there were several clips with the same message. 

I’m guessing they’re not coming back to Israel at the moment. I think it has become really dangerous for them to be here, and it’s a new level. I published an article about this. I didn’t do the movie. I just published an article supporting them in Haaretz and my mother is afraid that someone will attack me. The echoes of this event, they’re going very far now.

Are you frightened for the filmmakers if they choose to return? Do you fear for their safety?

Yes, absolutely. Especially because the elections are coming in a month. Many Israelis see this day as like the red line or the moment where we will be able to know if we can still live in Israel as a democracy, as a liberal democracy, or that the country has changed in a way that many [civil] rights and liberties that we think we have are gone. And that this country is not a democracy anymore. And so I think this is also why the blood is boiling.

This is a very, very tense and fragile moment. And for them I assume it is even more crucial and I hope they will not do anything that will put them in danger.