Veterans’ complaints about the rules of engagement have reached Pete Hegseth and a generation of new recruits.

© Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

If you were anything like me as a kid, trick-or-treating meant one, maybe two, pillowcases full of candy every Halloween. 

And as fun as collecting all that candy could be, the real fun began when I got home and dumped my winnings onto my bedroom floor. That’s when the sorting began.

I had some very specific rules: The usual suspects — think Smarties, Tootsie Rolls, and Dum Dums — went into one pile. Fun-size chocolates, like Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Baby Ruths, went into another. And then there was my prized pile: Skittles, Warheads, Starbursts, and Sour Patch Kids. Those were meant to be eaten slowly throughout November. The rest was fair game. 

The ways we sort and eat our Halloween candy are decided by some very particular, personal rules. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would like to add another distinction: Which candies are made with artificial dyes?

Kennedy’s ire for synthetic food dyes is years old, and they’ve become a major target of his Make America Healthy Again movement. Last year, he announced a plan to remove “petroleum-based synthetic dyes” from foods, arguing that companies “shouldn’t be feeding it to the rest of us.”

That plan has become a multimillion-dollar problem for Mars, the maker of M&Ms, which promised customers last year that they would create an all-natural version of their tasty chocolatey treats. As the Wall Street Journal reported this summer, however, its latest offering is missing one of the most iconic colored M&Ms — the blue M&M. 

M&Ms aren’t the only snack food in Kennedy’s crosshairs: He has called out Doritos, Cheez-Its, Cap’n Crunch, and gummy bears, saying their ingredients include “a lot of poisons.” On Fox News, he described what children eat as “food-like substances” and also said that “some of it was made in petroleum refineries.” 

In reality, the evidence is more complicated, because the Food and Drug Administration has long considered many of these approved synthetic dyes to be safe under its rules, while acknowledging that some children may be sensitive to them. Kennedy’s sweeping accusations go much further. 

Still, pressure from Kennedy and those in the MAHA movement has led many companies to rethink the recipes of your favorite snacks. But producing those alternatives isn’t easy or cheap, as the story of the blue M&M illustrates. 

Jesse Newman, a food reporter for the Wall Street Journal, went inside a Mars factory in Topeka, Kansas, to see the process for herself. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about why blue is so difficult to produce naturally, and what changing a candy’s color actually accomplishes. 

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

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., has some issues with the blue M&M. What, what exactly happened? How did it draw his attention? 

He is not a fan of any sort of chemical. He’s really concerned about toxins in our food. And Blue 1, which is the food dye that makes blue M&Ms blue, is a synthetic chemical. 

He really takes issue with artificial dyes. He believes that they cause hyperactivity in kids, some neurological challenges. He thinks artificial dyes are linked to cancer. 

As a member of the Trump administration, he formally set out to get them removed, didn’t he? 

Oh yeah. He’s been putting a lot of pressure on the industry to strip artificial dyes from all kinds of products.

What do we know factually about artificial dyes? We hear that they’re bad for us. We hear that a lot of things are bad for us. We’re all still alive and kicking. Are artificial dyes really detrimental to our health? 

The FDA for decades has said that there are nine artificial dyes approved for use in food. And they said that those artificial dyes are safe and have said so for years and years and years, as have other global bodies, so long as they’re used in accordance with some of the standards that the FDA laid out. 

A California state agency has found that dyes are linked again to hyperactivity in children. And the FDA itself has said, ‘Okay, we think that these dyes are safe for the vast majority of kids, but some kids might be more sensitive to them than others.’

So I think the real issue is that it’s a chemical doing it. They’re purely cosmetic. They don’t do anything except color food. There is no nutritional benefit that you are getting from these dyes. And so do we need them? Absolutely not. 

I think one of the issues is that if you’re looking at the ways our food contributes to health problems, artificial dyes are probably pretty low on the list.

You went inside a factory where they make M&Ms, and you looked at how they’re trying to make this happen. Tell me everything. 

I went to this plant in Topeka, Kansas, to see how they were made. And it’s a massive industrial food plant, where they mix these colors and spray them onto these small chocolate orbs, which they refer to as lentils.

The M&Ms move through the plant, and they arrive at these massive [machines] that they call pans, but they look like big tumble dryers. And the M&Ms just tumble around in these pans, and the color is sprayed on. It’s a very, very industrial process, millions of M&Ms a day. And the challenge that Mars has now is making that happen with a natural dye instead of an artificial one. 

A blue natural dye is the challenge. What are the problems?

They’ve been working on this for years. And they went with a product called spirulina, which is made from algae. But spirulina comes with a host of problems that they are now dealing with. 

Blue 1, which is the artificial dye, arrives at the factories as a liquid. And they pour it into these mixers and they mix it up with this sugary syrup and it’s pretty easy to handle. Spirulina arrives as a powder. So now you’re mixing a powder into this same mixture, into the same recipe, and that is very different. 

Because spirulina is a protein, the resulting mixture becomes a lot thicker. What they found was that the mixture containing spirulina would really clog up the piping. It was getting stuck. It moved less smoothly through the pipes. 

Also because it is a protein, it was starting to coat and build up on the inside of the machinery. And when that happens, it’s a food safety hazard. It can mold; it can cause problems. For many reasons, it was a challenge to handle. 

How much did this all cost? 

I should say it’s not done. Mars wouldn’t give me an official figure for how much they spent. But they said that they are spending millions and millions of dollars. 

They’re having to retrofit their plants, essentially. Mars said that they’re having to change about 300 types of machinery in their plants. It’s a real investment. And at the end of the day, it all comes down to cost. 

What did they actually end up getting done? What was the outcome here? 

Mars said what they committed to was that they were going to release a new version of their M&Ms and a few other of their products this year that were made with natural dyes instead of artificial dyes.

They didn’t come out and say we’re eliminating artificial dyes. And so folks should be really clear about that: Their artificially dyed M&Ms aren’t going anywhere. They are still on shelves. 

What they said is that they’re going to come out with an option that is naturally dyed. So they tried to do that. And what they found was that they couldn’t do it at a cost that was acceptable to them. With the blue and with the spirulina, it would have been far too expensive to make it work at scale. We’re talking millions and millions and millions of M&Ms per day.

They had problems making the green, the blue, and the brown M&M because, if you go back to your elementary school color theory, they needed blue to make all of those M&Ms. Ultimately they said, “Okay, we can do green. There’s little enough spirulina in the green to make the green M&M.” But blue and brown, they are not able to get there yet due to the amount of spirulina that those colors require.

And so earlier this year, they launched their naturally dyed version of M&Ms with red, orange, yellow, and green M&Ms. And if you take a look at this bag, my colleague referred to these as autumnal. They look very autumnal.

They look sort of muted.

You know, it really isn’t the same. It looks like a mature person’s M&M.

At the end of the day, what are the changes to the M&Ms? Let’s say I go online and get the natural dyed ones. What does that mean for my health? Am I now a healthy and virtuous person if I’m eating the autumnal M&Ms? 

It means very little. 

I would say you are, hopefully, still enjoying that sugary treat and the pick-me-up in the afternoon as you’re starting to tire. But you’re still eating candy; you’re still eating sugar. It really hasn’t changed very much.

Democrats have been emphasizing lots of issues in the runup to the 2026 midterms: The Iran war. The state of the economy and healthcare. Corruption. And…hotness.

Specifically, their candidates: The internet is awash in clips of Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed pumping iron and podcasters proclaiming that “America deserves a hot president” in a video interspersed with photos of Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Having a good-looking candidate is by no means a new tactic — famously, it may have helped John F. Kennedy win election over Richard Nixon — but the online left is adapting that strategy for the internet and fandom age. 

Grace Panetta, a politics reporter for The 19th, wrote about how “thirst edits” of Ossoff in particular are proliferating online. Panetta says the organic origins of a lot of these videos are of particular interest to Democratic operatives, who see it as a way to gain back ground they lost on the internet after the 2024 election. 

Panetta spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who’s thirsting over Democratic politicians in the first place, how 2026’s hot candidates are different from those of yore, and whether it’s actually giving them a boost. 

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

Where are these edits coming from?

Regular online creators. And it’s important to note at the outset that these are not paid partnerships. The campaign is not paying these influencers to make edits about how they think their candidate’s really attractive. 

That’s partly why I wanted to dig into it, because it’s organic. These are just online creators wanting to draw visibility and attention to a candidate that they really like.

Jon Ossoff is currently running for reelection in these midterms. How do we know for sure that he isn’t somehow behind the campaign?

I spoke to several creators who make these videos and they said that they’re doing it for the love of the game and they’re just supporters. His campaign did not give me a quote or a statement for this story. So it’s fair to assume that he’s not directly involved and he doesn’t repost these videos. 

But as people pointed out to me, his campaign knows that they have an attractive, compelling candidate. And they’ve previously been vaunted for their digital strategy this cycle of putting out very high-quality livestreams of his rallies. There’s a lot of material for an enterprising TikToker who wants to make these edits or clips. They have a lot to work with. 

His campaign, as one person put it, is definitely playing into that, but not directly engaging. It’s a fine line to walk.

Is it just an Ossoff thing or is this going on with other candidates? I do recall that Abdul El-Sayed hits the gym.

Famously so. Yes, he hits the gym. I just watched so many videos for this story. I also came across a fair number of Gavin Newsom edits. There are people who think he gives sort of a Patrick Bateman, American Psycho vibe.

There are also official Democratic accounts, including the TikTok account for the DNC, the headquarters account, which was formerly Kamala HQ, who have been posting edits of Ossoff and also Abdul El-Sayed, who kind of leans into this gym-bro persona. 

The headquarters account posted a side-by-side of Ossoff and Abdul El-Sayed with the caption, “There are 69 days until election day.”

Nice.

Yes. There are also lots of edits of Mamdani, and former President Barack Obama. Obama nostalgia content goes hard on the internet. So you’re seeing these more official side Democratic campaign accounts leaning into it and playing up their candidates.

Having an attractive candidate is nothing new. You mentioned Obama. JFK was famously dashing. What feels different about what you’re seeing now on social media?

I think this is really a culmination of a lot of different things happening right now in politics and specifically within the Democratic Party. 

After their loss in 2024, there was a lot of conversation about the gerontocracy, how we’re governed by a lot of really old people, for the most part, in this century. And also about Democrats’ digital strategy and the aftermath of 2024. 

One thing that a lot of people in that digital space have been talking about is how Republicans and the Trump campaign really capitalized on getting that organic engagement on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where a lot of Americans are now going to get at least some of their news, and also engaging with and encouraging the creation of this kind of organic content on platforms and from creators that are not always expressly political or official-side. 

“A candidate’s messaging strategy is only as good as the content and only if it meets people where they are and actually speaks to a real need people have.”

As one Democrat I talked to put it, she thinks it’s a way for Democrats to win back the internet and to really create a contrast with the Republicans. And she said to have fun on the internet because Republicans are having fun on the internet and it appears to be working for them, or at least it was in 2024.

Is there something about this being something on the left that makes it sort of tricky? This is, broadly speaking, objectification, right?

It is a fine line between thirst and objectification. And there is also a gendered element to it that it is mostly men that these types of videos are being made about. 

Now, granted, a lot of people make sort of hype edits or positive content about AOC because she’s a very popular female politician on the left, but it’s true that women candidates are held to higher standards in terms of how they present themselves and how their supporters portray them. 

It is a very real dynamic that you could have all these videos about Jon Ossoff, and it’s not seen as detracting away from his overall message or his seriousness as a politician.

Is there a drawback of focusing on looks? Does it make the Democratic Party or these candidates seem superficial or not that serious?

President Trump has been the defining figure in our politics for 10 years now. And he is famously very, very image focused and image obsessed. We live in a very image-obsessed society, and I think there’s kind of a bipartisan acknowledgement of that. 

And looks matter to people in all kinds of ways. They do matter in politics, they do matter to voters. Whether you like that that’s the case or not, it is the reality. And I think the way that a lot of people on the left see this is, people want to look at attractive people. People take attractive people more seriously and are more willing to listen to them. So we should play into that and play that up. 

That’s also been the case on the right. President Trump famously loves people out of “central casting.” There’s been this whole movement on the right about making conservatism sexy again. And especially at the beginning of the second Trump term, you had all these influencers talking about how the second Trump term was going to usher in this great age of hotness, which is of course very based on sort of stereotypical male-centered Eurocentric beauty standards. 

I think the genie’s out of the bottle on this one in terms of the fact that our politics and society is very image-obsessed. And I think the left, being locked out of power, realizes they have to play on those terms and they have fun doing it.

You could look at it as giving “Kamala is brat,” which famously did not work. Is it working in any tangible way for Ossoff, for Abdul El-Sayed, or anyone else?

I think a lot of the time in politics, the success of a message is really dependent on the broader political situation. I think a part of the reason that the Kamala’s brat thing didn’t work is people were like, “Okay, that’s great, but my gas is too expensive and prices are too high and I’m not happy with how things have gone under the Biden administration, so I don’t really care.” I don’t know that specific digital strategy makes or breaks a campaign or candidate, but it feeds into a bunch of larger factors. 

Something that a lot of people I spoke to said they liked about Jon Ossoff is how he is incredibly serious in Senate hearings. He doesn’t grandstand. He really holds Trump administration officials’ feet to the fire. He’s been very focused in his role in the Senate and on the campaign trail about calling out corruption. He’s a very, very gifted speaker and orator.

So I think a candidate’s messaging strategy is only as good as the content and only if it meets people where they are and actually speaks to a real need people have. And I think people are really unhappy with the second Trump term and politicians being super old and out of touch, and it’s a perfect storm of factors that makes it work for him.

There are some days when there’s so much that needs to get done, I daydream about having a clone of myself. Between paying bills, life admin like renewing my driver’s license, keeping up with doctor’s appointments, and planning meals, it’s a lot. And that doesn’t even begin to touch the work that goes into making a podcast or managing my social life.

This feeling of overwhelm resonates with Sari Azout. She’s a mom of three who works in tech. “There is just so much doing,” she told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “I wake up, and I have to do meal coordination and get my kids up for breakfast, coordinate carpools. Then a lot of work during the day, but there’s the email from the teacher, there’s the 20 group chats asking if you want to participate in this group gift. They don’t call it ‘the invisible load’ for no reason.’”

Silicon Valley says it has a fix for this kind of mental overload. They don’t want to clone us — at least not yet. But they do think they have the next best thing: AI agents. 

Azuot was skeptical when she first got an invite to try an agent, but she says she eventually came around on the technology after back-to-school shopping snuck up on her. She used her agent to get it done. “It blew me away,” she said.  “I remember that night coming home just feeling so calm and reading my son a book and feeling present. And I was like, ‘Wow, I actually was very cynical about something that is giving me more time for living.’”

Azout’s experience is, more or less, the sales pitch for AI agents: They’ll help you save time with everyday tasks, so you have more of it for what you want to do. But what are agents, exactly? Are they really all that? And what do we gain — and give up — when we use the technology?  

On this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, I spoke with Reece Rogers, a senior software reporter at Wired, to find out. Rogers says to think of agents as the next evolution of AI chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT. 

“I’d create this mental model of a tiny digital assistant that’s constantly searching the web, going through your email, and checking your calendar, trying to find ways it could proactively be helpful for you,” he explains. “Agents are more proactive. It’s scanning your email 24/7 and sending you a message, maybe highlighting a potential calendar conflict.”

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

What agents are out there right now?

At the start of this year, there was a tool called OpenClaw that really sparked this with early adopters in San Francisco, but now there are much more consumer-friendly versions, with one of the most notable being Meta’s Muse. 

There’s also a tool from OpenAI called Dots. But where Meta’s Muse is free to download, OpenAI’s Dots is still behind a $100/month paywall. 

You tried an AI agent for a recent story you wrote. How was that experience?

One personal example, to share something that I’ve actually been using agents for, is our couch. It’s broken, and finding a new couch has been a pain. We want a sleeper bed, but we want these specific colors. We have this specific budget. I’ve been using Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots to try to find a few different options for us. 

One interesting thing is that Meta’s Muse is connected to Facebook Marketplace. There are these really good integrations where I can give it all these details, and it found a few good couches that are only maybe a couple blocks from me. 

I really enjoyed OpenAI’s Dots experience as well. I spent about an hour talking to it on the phone, and the AI agent made a packet of all these different options I could find. Just this morning, it flagged that one of them is now 40 percent off. 

Is that how this tech is typically used?

Most people are using this as part of a workflow. I attach it to my email, I attach it to my calendar, and I’m using it as a personal assistant to organize my life. But people have been quite creative. 

One of the breakout uses for Meta’s Muse is people have been connecting their bank account statements and then using it to scan for subscriptions they might want to cancel. So it can be used in many different ways, though I will say I do not connect it to my own bank account for a myriad of reasons.

I’m not going to lie, the idea of giving any third party access to my bank information does not thrill me. I don’t love that concept.

That’s one of my biggest concerns about these AI agents: how much personal information we’re handing over to these large companies. 

When I tested Meta’s Muse, it wanted access to my email, my bank account, even my passport expiration details. The pitch is convenience, but Muse users are automatically opted in to having all of their interactions with Muse used to train Meta’s AI models. 

I would definitely recommend, if you’re sharing personal details, go into the settings and turn that off because you might be handing over even more information about yourself than you initially realize.

What is the privacy situation with all of this? We all have various apps where we don’t read and still click “I agree,” but this feels like it could be more invasive.

Yes, especially because it’s all about automation. If you’re automating things and it has access to all of your data, it could make mistakes and embarrass you in ways you might not even be thinking about. 

There was this one really interesting story of someone who had connected an AI agent to their work Slack in addition to their bank account. And their agent just automatically posted how much money was in their checking account for all of their coworkers to see. 

Oh no.

I would be mortified. So there are these kinds of mistakes that these AI tools can still make. If you’re interested in experimenting with them, I would be really thoughtful with how you’re setting up these tools as well as what kind of information you feel comfortable sharing.

“You can see in the marketing that these companies are trying to find some way to entice new users.”

How are these AI agents being marketed? AI is not popular right now. Just ask any politician who has a data center coming to their state. People are not loving it. How are they trying to sell this to the average person?

The AI backlash really is at a fever pitch right now. You could almost see that in the way that AI companies are trying to market these tools. They’ve really, really leaned into cuteness and into adorable mascots. 

Muse, if you haven’t seen its agent, looks like a mix between a Labubu and an Ewok. It’s very furry, very cuddly, very cute. OpenAI’s tools also have similar kinds of blobs with large eyes that might be a little endearing. 

I feel like companies are hearing this kind of feedback that people aren’t trusting AI right now, or maybe they have moral or ethical reasons they don’t want to use these tools. You can see in the marketing that these companies are trying to find some way to entice new users.

Do you think AI agents are ultimately going to worm their way into our lives despite how unpopular AI companies are?

I do think so. I think in a couple months, maybe when I go home from Christmas, I would not be surprised if my mom had an agent on her phone because it does feel like it’s breaking through to average people in the way that ChatGPT had a moment a few years ago. 

Even though there’s a lot of distrust for large companies like Meta, I think there are some appealing parts of this that will bring in millions of people. I do see this as the future of the internet.

When I think of the dream of the average person working in AI in Silicon Valley, it’s “We’re going to use AI. It’s going to free up the free time of so many people. Work is going to get done faster. You’re going to have more leisure time.”

Has that been the case for the people you’ve spoken with who are using this? Has it given them more free time to enjoy themselves or has it done something else?

You would think so, right? You would think that if people are automating these boring aspects of their life, that they would have more time to go touch grass, go see a movie, have some fun. But it does feel like that time just gets filled with other work, other productivity measures. 

While agents may be able to take some more annoying or tedious things off of your plate, I am not as optimistic that it’s going to give us this utopia or freedom where I’m always at the beach.

President Donald Trump has been attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) since she first entered Congress in 2019. At various points, he’s called for Omar — a progressive lawmaker who came to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia and who is one of Trump’s most vociferous critics — to be investigated, arrested, and deported. 

Now, Trump’s Justice Department is seemingly trying to make good on his threats. Last week, Omar’s Washington, DC, home was raided by federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to the Wall Street Journal, the raid was part of an investigation into her immigration paperwork with the explicit goal of denaturalizing and deporting her.

The timing alone would make the raid unusual — it’s rare for the Justice Department to take action in political cases so close to an election — and as Washington Post immigration reporter Ted Hesson explains, it also feels uncomfortably pretextual. “It’s almost as if the outcome of the investigation has been stated before anything has taken off,” he told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. 

Hesson joined Sean to talk about the long history of Trump’s attacks on Omar, what the agents might have been looking for, and whether the administration could actually undermine Omar’s citizenship or even deport her. 

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

What do we know about what federal agents were looking for in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, DC, residence?

What we’ve learned through our reporting is that the investigation has looked at both her birth date and whether [Omar or her father] may have lied about it on the naturalization application. 

A second piece is whether, looking at her father’s military service, she was born in Somalia and was there during the civil war and fled with her family as a young child to a refugee camp in Kenya and was there for years before they eventually came to the US as refugees.

This is the president of the United States and his administration entering a sitting representative’s home to figure out what her original birthday is. What is the motivation here, to the best of our knowledge?

For years, President Trump has criticized Rep. Omar and made unsubstantiated accusations related to immigration fraud. 

There have been theories circulating on the far right — again, unsubstantiated — that she had married her brother as part of an immigration fraud scheme. President Trump himself has repeated that. And several top Trump administration officials in the last few months have said that they believe that there is fraud in her background. They’re making these statements prior to there being an investigation, prior to there being evidence put forward. And it’s almost as if the outcome of the investigation has been stated before anything has taken off. 

One thing I should say is that while it does appear that they’re looking at her birthdate, when refugees come into the US, it’s extremely common that their birth records are unreliable because people are fleeing countries that are often in disarray, whether it’s due to civil war or other reasons. 

Often, nations like Somalia don’t maintain accurate birth records. So it’s common that refugees who’ve left their country as children, spent time in refugee camps, and then come to the US don’t have a solid understanding of when exactly they were born. I don’t know for sure that that’s the case here, but I know that generally when you’re dealing with refugees, that is true.

I know there’s a lot we don’t know here, but investigators enter Rep. Omar’s home. Potentially they’re looking for some documents that may list her birthday. If they find some information that’s maybe contrary to official government records, what could that mean, in theory?

It’s unclear what sort of charges could be brought from this. And part of the question is, was she 17 and a child at the time of that application or was she 18? 

Even if it was determined that she was not a child, I don’t believe they would be able to, say, launch a denaturalization process based on that fact alone. And even if they did attempt to do something like that, these things are not taken lightly and it’s a long involved legal process and very uncommon to pursue something like this over something as simple as this sort of paperwork discrepancy.

The president has a long history of hating on Somalia and Somali immigrants to this country. 

How does this investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar fit into the president and his administration’s broader efforts to take away American citizenship?

In the past year especially, we’ve seen President Trump use really inflammatory and derogatory language to refer to Somali Americans and Somali immigrants in the US. Even for someone who frequently employs anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the president has in his past, some of the things he said went beyond even that. He does seem to have particularly targeted Somalis in the US and Somali Americans, and Rep. Omar has been part of that. 

I think what’s interesting here or what could be interesting is that this case wades into different territory of taking somebody who’s a naturalized citizen, who’s been in the US for decades as a citizen, and saying, “We’re potentially going to reopen that and go back and look at your file and see, do we find anything that might be out of line?”

The idea that you could do that with someone who’s a sitting lawmaker could mean that you could potentially do that to any other person who may have applied.

Now, one thing we’ve learned is that in the case of Rep. Omar, the administration has looked at the idea, in the event that criminal charges can’t be brought, of potentially canceling her citizenship certificate. It’s almost like a fast-track way to disrupt someone’s citizenship. 

It doesn’t remove it. You remain a citizen, but you lose the document that is the underlying proof of that, which could then cause problems with federal government documents, and it could even lead to immigration proceedings where the government tries to make the case that you should be deported.

How has Rep. Omar responded?

Her camp has vociferously pushed back against the allegations. 

In regard to the search, they’ve actually said that there was a court-ordered guideline that should have been followed, and that involved consulting the counsel for the House of Representatives before the search happened. They said that never happened, and if it had, it would’ve given Rep. Omar perhaps time to prepare for this or some sort of legal recourse. 

They’re saying that not only is this continuation of President Trump’s attack on her politically motivated, but also that the actual legal guidelines that were outlined in that search warrant were not followed.

Are other Democrats speaking up on her behalf?

Former President Barack Obama in particular is one extremely prominent person who came out and made a social media post elevating her case. 

The interesting part is that President Obama does not often weigh in on public debates like this or is at least measured in the opportunities when he does. So it comes with more gravity to hear him stepping in and raising concerns about this. 

I think it speaks to the fact that he thought this was very significant. And if you remember, President Trump’s political career was built on the narrative that Barack Obama was not born in the US.

I do remember, Ted.

And the hunt for his birth certificate. You can imagine that former President Obama saw a parallel here and realizes that this mirrors the sort of attacks that were made on him when he was in office.

We’ve talked about President Trump a bunch in this conversation, and he’s made no secret of his disdain for Rep. Omar and the country from which she comes. What has he explicitly said about this investigation?

He’s saying that the Justice Department is acting independently. That said, he has been extremely critical of Rep. Omar in his public statements and continues to be. And the president himself and other top officials have said that it should be investigated. 

We’ve had, for months now, a sort of public encouragement of top officials and saying that they should be looking into this. So whether he’s directly liaising with them or whether they’re just reading his social posts, it may be kind of a nuanced distinction. He’s publicly saying he wants this to be pursued.

Sarah Koenig goes on a whirlwind tour of New York City to find out what New Yorkers are worrying about.

© The New York Times

The 2026 midterms are less than two weeks away, which means we’ll soon have a better idea of what the next two years of American politics could look like. If Democrats win at least one chamber of Congress — and they’re comfortable favorites to control the House — they’ll enter 2027 with oversight power for the first time in Donald Trump’s second term. If they win the Senate, too, they’ll have even more power. 

Whatever the outcome, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin wants her party to hit the ground running. In an interview with Vox’s Astead Herndon at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, she explained that the key divide in the Democratic Party is no longer “moderate versus progressive.” 

“Particularly in the era of Trump, I think it is fight versus flight,” she said. “Regardless of your persuasion, do you believe that we need to think differently about how we exercise power and oversight in the era of Trump and if we don’t, we’re at risk of losing our country as we know it?” 

Slotkin, who says she’s on “Team Fight,” discusses what that Day 1 Democratic agenda should look like, how she plans to hold the Trump administration accountable, whether she’s considering a presidential bid, and more.

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

How does Congress reassert its role so that people believe in the kind of checks and balances that Trump has washed away?

When I think about, hopefully, Democrats doing well in a few short weeks here, the election is the end of one phase, but a much more important phase then comes into focus, and that’s what you do with the power that you’ve won.

If we manage to win the House and especially the House and the Senate, there’s three things that we need to do. One, we need to pick two or three big pieces of legislation that speak directly to people’s pocketbooks and go hard on those — I would say housing and healthcare. 

Number two, we do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now. But you can’t just make that your whole personality. You have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are super egregious. 

Everyone knows the East Wing of the White House, and people feel that in a way that’s different from a nameless contract at the Pentagon or whatever. So you need to pick those signature cases and go hard on accountability, not just Trump. Because of course, there will be moments of, “Let’s go after Trump himself.” As someone who voted to impeach him twice, he’s still there, right?

But the people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity. They have no immunity the way the president does. And to me, he couldn’t do any of this stuff without all of those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who do his bidding. 

Third, we have to Trump-proof the government going forward so that no president of any party can ever abuse the system the way he did, because we figured out under Trump that a lot of the stuff that we thought were laws were actually just norms, standards, habits, expectations, good citizens.

And shame was required.

Shame was required. And when you have a president who has no shame, they just walk all over that. And then even for things that were laws, the penalties, the teeth are not there. So you make an ad that plays during a football game, a political ad paid for by US taxpayer dollars, your dollars. The penalty is like, you have to pay a fine.

Well, if they have the money and they have all the keys to the government, they’re going to pay that fine and not worry about it. So how do we get teeth in the things that were laws and strengthen those other laws going forward?

You mentioned Trump-proofing the government. At this point, he has stacked the courts with a lot of favorable folks. He controls the Republican Party, has installed people who do his bidding on each of those levels.

Is that possible? It does seem a little hard to figure out how the government becomes Trump-proof when it’s beyond an individual at this point.

One of the things I think is changing about politics is that there is a groundswell of energy around certain issues that is not partisan. The groundswell going on in the Midwest about data centers or Flock cameras or AI in general is not like, “I’m a Democrat, I’m a Republican.” It is organized and grassroots. 

Data centers went zero to 60 faster than any issue I’ve seen out there. And I think harnessing that outrage — and that outrage also, I think, is growing on the corruption side — so how do you harness that for an ethics package? 

And look, I don’t agree with Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri on almost anything, but he has a bill to get rid of corporate PACs and money in politics. Working with strange bedfellows, I think there is still a lot we can do because of that upward pressure.

The other piece I was going to ask about — you mentioned the impeachment efforts, and I feel like one of the things that came from those was a lack of belief from the public about the effectiveness of those efforts.

Let’s say Democrats were to take back the House and possibly the Senate. Should impeachment be a focus of a potentially incoming Democratic House?

I will say, because I still see him on the floor, that if Sen. Mitch McConnell had done the right thing, then Donald Trump would have been impeached after January 6, but he did not. And his legacy, along with his health issues, will be how he is remembered.

I am into effectiveness, and if we have the House but not the Senate, I don’t have a ton of faith that my Republican colleagues are going to have any more strength. I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him. 

I want young people coming out of school to say, “Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.” I want them to be like, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.” I want that deterrence message sent.

I have to ask about [2028]. A number of Democrats have said already that they’re thinking about running for president. Is that something you’re thinking about?

I have been open that I’m looking at it. It does not need to be me. I just need someone who understands the mission. And if that person comes out of the big process, I will be the first gal to get on whatever team they’re on and help them win in the parts of the country that I know well.

But I think what is clear to me is that the American public is looking for something different — that generational shift. And I think that there’s hopefully going to be lots of opportunities for lots of people who you might not be thinking of who haven’t been sitting waiting their turn who are going to get in the mix. And I think that’s a good thing.

I wanted to ask about something on the 2028 front. One thing that we have heard consistently over the last year, and I think this is a consequence of Democratic trauma from 2024 and also 2016 — people’s fears about sexism when women run. I’ve heard so many people, including women voters, tell me they think it needs to be a white guy.

I find it to be a kind of depressing takeaway of those elections. It’s wrong, and I know it’s wrong because this very question is what we’ve been digging into as I’ve traveled around the country. What I think is happening is right now, is the public is so in search of something different from the traditional. If you’re a good communicator, if you’re exciting, if you’ve got big ideas, you can surmount what are thought of as traditional deficiencies or traditional weaknesses.

So if you’re a woman, if you’re African American, if you’re Muslim American, if you’re whatever, those things forever have been thought of as negatives. But if you’re the right person with the right energy, you can surmount that. I think we’re seeing that around the country already.

With two weeks until the midterm elections, Democrats are comfortably favored to take the House. Their path to Senate control, though, is harder — and it could run through Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race against former state Senate president Troy Jackson, a Democrat.

When Collins first ran for Senate in 1996, she pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate. But 30 years later, she’s still in office despite the odds, as Maine has grown more blue around her. 

One secret to her political durability is her success in “bringing in the bacon” for Mainers: Her official Senate website features a map of projects that she says she helped fund as chair of the Senate Appropriations committee, including hospitals, bridges, affordable housing, public transportation, and water systems.

This year, though, all of that money might not be enough for Mainers to look past their frustration with another Republican: President Donald Trump.

To learn more about what Maine voters are thinking as they prepare to head to the polls, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post reporter Dan Merica, who’s on the ground reporting from Maine, about why some Mainers who backed Collins before are now reconsidering their support.

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

Tell me how this race got to be so fascinating.

Maine this cycle was going to be interesting no matter what. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator who is running for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 this cycle.

But since the outset, it has really defined, I think, these midterm elections. The rise of Graham Platner, the oysterman turned politician, really hinted at the populist anti-establishment fervor that was in the Democratic base. That fervor was so strong that it prevented the sitting incumbent Democratic governor from winning the primary here in Maine to challenge Susan Collins. I think that said a lot about the Democratic Party. 

Obviously Graham Platner’s campaign then flamed out and he ended his campaign because of the allegations of sexual assault against him. 

But then you have the Collins angle of it, and she is really the poster candidate for a Republican who, in this election where Donald Trump’s approval rating is so low, is having to basically suspend political gravity in a state that really does not approve of the job that he’s done as president.

I want to ground this conversation in how voters in Maine feel about him right now because I know you’ve been talking to voters. What is the vibe out there? Are people mad? 

There’s a lot of anger for the president here. Maine is in a unique position where it’s been on the receiving end of a lot of what those people who are mad at Trump would say is harm that he has caused. 

It’s a border state. It borders Canada. There’s a ton of cross-border relationships. And so his attacks on Canada, his suggestion that it’s going to be the 51st state, has really hurt the state of Maine because it’s hurt tourism in the state. Many Canadians come down south to vacation in Maine. And there’s been a drop in tourism because of that fight with Canada.

The tariffs have hurt Maine because so much of the wood and the lumber that is grown and cut here in Maine is actually shipped up north to Canada to be processed, and then what it is processed as is shipped back across the United States. The tariffs have been incredibly harmful for the state. 

And then you have ICE. I’m in Biddeford. There was a shooting of an individual here in Biddeford. That has been an issue in this race as well. 

So there’s a lot of anger at the president, and it’s very easy to feel that when you’re talking to voters. I actually just spoke with a voter who voted for Troy Jackson, dropped his ballot in an early voting box. And I just asked him, “What did you vote for? Who’d you vote for? Why did you vote?” And he got visibly emotional when he started talking about the Trump administration and how scared he was for the future of democracy and that was why he was voting for Troy Jackson.

I’ve also talked to voters who supported Susan Collins just six years ago at the end of the first Trump administration. They voted for her back then and they feel like the last six years have made it impossible for them to vote for her again. And then on the other side, you have people who are hardcore die-hard Trump supporters and they actually think that Susan Collins has been too hard on the president. 

She’s in a really tough spot politically where on her left, there are a lot of voters, including some who have voted for her recently, who are furious with her, who don’t think she stands up to the president enough. And then on her right, there are voters who think that she stands up to the president too much.

It’s funny to think about these two figures representing the same political party because while they might agree on a few issues here and there, they couldn’t represent more different brands of Republicanism. What’s the truth of how much Susan Collins sides with Donald Trump?

She has sided with the president at times. She has voted against the president at times. I was struck that, in the debate on Thursday, she said, “I have been a senator under five different presidents.” I don’t exactly remember what her number was, but she noted that she had only endorsed one Republican president and that was George W. Bush.

I was just in Kennebunk, which is right next to Kennebunkport, which is a historical location for the Bush family. They have a large home at Walker Point. There is some relationship between the Bush family and Maine, [and it] makes sense that Susan Collins really does kind of line up more with the Bush-style Republican Party than she does the Trump-style Republican Party.

What’s her actual relationship with the president like? And surely he’s well aware that she was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach him over the January 6 insurrection. Does that get in the way of their relationship?

I think he’s very well aware when somebody breaks with him. I would have to imagine he’s aware of that. 

“It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.”

I was actually told by a Republican early in the campaign that President Trump demands loyalty from people that he supports, but this person actually said that there are rules for Republicans and that there are rules for Susan Collins and that Republicans were willing to kind of give her some leeway, which is actually an acknowledgement that they know the bind that she is in. 

They know that she’s running for reelection in a blue state, in a state that the president lost, in a state that is very hostile right now to the president. It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.

Affordability is a huge issue in Maine, right? And Donald Trump hasn’t exactly helped…

That has really heightened the competitiveness of this race. The same race is always going to be competitive, but the fact that gas prices are where it’s at, the fact that we’re going into winter, it’s starting to get cold up here. Home heating oil prices are above $6 a gallon. 

I think about 80 percent of homes that are heated by home heating oil are in the Northeast, a large portion of them probably in Maine and New Hampshire, two states with Senate races in November. It’s been a huge issue up here. 

The Trump administration has actually tried to get rid of a low-income program to help with home heating oil that helps a lot of folks in Maine. You’ve seen Republicans, from the gubernatorial candidate to congressional candidates, break with the president on that because they know it’s a huge issue. 

So when you talk about affordability, yes, we’re talking about the price of beef, the price of groceries, the price of gas, but there’s also these localized issues in a state like Maine, in particular. And I think home heating oil actually could be a really fascinating, underappreciated issue in this race. If you grew up or live in Arizona or Nevada or California, you’re not thinking about the oil that you need to heat your home. That could be a real issue here in a state like Maine.

Collins is a political survivor. For all of it to come crashing down because of, essentially, who the president was — is that a bit of a sad ending to this political story for her? Do you think she’d maybe have regrets about how she approached Donald Trump?

It’s certainly possible. And you’ve seen other senators who have bucked the president and have then retired and not run for reelection. I’m thinking of Thom Tillis, for example, in North Carolina. There is this fascinating case study in how the Republican Party has changed when you look at Susan Collins and you look at Donald Trump. 

Someone like Susan Collins in an earlier iteration of the Republican Party would’ve had a lot of success and would’ve probably stayed onside the Republican Party in a way that she just hasn’t done under Trump. She represents a different kind of era of the Republican Party. 

I think there was a time when bringing home the bacon to a small state really worked politically. I’m thinking about Harry Reid, for example — he represented Nevada. In 2010, he faced a really difficult reelection campaign and his entire campaign was bringing home the bacon to Nevada, a similarly small state, and he won reelection in 2010.

I think if Susan Collins wins reelection in 2026, it’ll prove that there’s still a lot of goodwill for politicians who can deliver funding projects for states like Maine, states like Nevada, smaller states that maybe don’t get the kind of national attention that others do. 

If she does lose, a lot of it will be put at the feet of President Trump. I’ll be fascinated to talk to her if she does lose, because I do think she will have a lot to say that she probably hasn’t said yet, but I think that’s an if, and I think we have two more weeks to find that out.

Kyla Scanlon, New York Times bestselling author and economic commentator, and Vox today announced the launch of Best of Luck, a new weekly video interview podcast premiering October 27. Each week, Scanlon will sit down with guests who have something to teach us about how to build a meaningful career in this uncertain moment, from economists to journalists, farmers to comedians. They’ll share their most instructive detours, setbacks, and successes, and Scanlon will tie each story back to the economy that we’re all living in, with takeaways for anyone at any stage of their working life.

“So much of the advice we are given about building a career still comes from an economy that doesn’t really exist anymore,” Scanlon said. “There is no one right way to build a career, especially now. The goal of this show is to ask guests how they actually did it, across the best parts, the worst parts, and the parts that were lucky. Then we put it to work! Every guest sits for a mock job interview and does an advice autopsy, and we talk about how you build your own luck. Hearing how other people found their path can help all of us make better decisions about our own.”

Named to the Time 100’s Creators list and Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in Finance, Scanlon has emerged as one of the most distinct voices making economics make sense for everyone, especially a new generation. Known for breaking down complex economic ideas and connecting them to the realities of everyday life, she coined the term “vibecession” to describe the disconnect between economic data and how people actually feel about the economy. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work, a CNN contributor and analyst, and a monthly New York Times Opinion contributor.

“At Vox, we have long been fans of Kyla’s work — her approach to explaining the economy in an accessible, approachable way really personifies Vox’s explanatory approach,” said Swati Sharma, editor-in-chief and publisher at Vox. “With this new show, we’re thrilled for her to help our audience understand how to navigate work and careers in this economy so they can live more meaningful lives.”

“Kyla has a gift for translating the big, confusing picture of our economy into what it means for each of us,” said Lillian Xu, vice president of podcast business at Vox Media. “With Best of Luck, she’s doing the same for a job market that keeps changing the rules, in conversations with experts that are practical and honest about how careers really unfold today. We’re so excited to partner with her to help more people figure out what’s next.”

The trailer for Best of Luck is out today, with the first episode coming on October 27 and new episodes following weekly on Tuesdays.

At Vox, Best of Luck joins a stable of popular podcasts including Today, Explained, The Gray Area, and America, Actually. Vox’s shows are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, one of the largest US podcast publishers and home to some of the most influential talent across categories, including journalist Kara Swisher and entrepreneur Scott Galloway (hosts of Pivot), tennis champion Maria Sharapova (host of Pretty Tough), former Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara (host of Stay Tuned), basketball legend Sue Bird (host of Bird’s Eye View), and more. Vox Media will oversee production, sales, marketing, and distribution for Best of Luck, which joins a dynamic slate of shows that shape conversations across business, culture, and beyond. 

Follow Best of Luck on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.

About Kyla Scanlon

Kyla Scanlon is the founder of Kyla Labs. She writes about money, markets, and the systems that shape them for an audience of over 1 million people across TikTok, Instagram, Substack, and YouTube, covering the pressing issues of the day — including tariffs, artificial intelligence, energy markets, and why the traditional rungs of the economic ladder have gotten harder to climb. Her debut book, In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work, was a New York Times bestseller and used hand-drawn diagrams to make the machinery of the economy clear. In her newsletter, she coined the term “vibecession” to describe the disconnect between strong economic data and negative public sentiment — a concept since referenced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and taken up in research by former CEA chair Jared Bernstein.

Raised in Kentucky, Scanlon studied finance, economics, and data analytics at Western Kentucky University. She started out trading options and selling cars, where she first saw how inaccessible finance had become to the people it affected most. She began making whiteboard videos and comedy skits to decode markets and economic trends for everyday audiences (and often dressed up as Jerome Powell). She writes monthly for New York Times Opinion, has a video partnership with Foreign Policy, and is a contributor and analyst at CNN. She is also a senior fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men. Scanlon was named to Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance and the Time 100 Creators list, and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Ezra Klein Show. At work on her second book, she lives in the mountains with her dog, Piglet.

About Vox

Vox was launched in 2014 to address the disconnect between the widely reported facts of the day and a true understanding of why something happened. It developed a widely imitated explainer format that delivers understanding across digital platforms, newsletters, a YouTube channel with nearly 13 million subscribers, and a stable of podcasts. Under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Swati Sharma, Vox has grown a membership programs with tens of thousands of paying subscribers.

About the Vox Media Podcast Network 

The Vox Media Podcast Network is one of the largest US podcast publishers and home to some of the most popular and influential shows. Reaching a monthly audience of tens of millions across audio, video, and social platforms, its podcasts spark conversations, frame issues, and define the popular zeitgeist across politics, technology, business, sports, entertainment, and more. Learn more at podcasts.voxmedia.com.

Spotify's new paid memberships let podcasters offer fans exclusive perks, including ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content, while keeping 90% of the revenue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We live in an era of endless optimization. Fitness trackers help us measure our lifespan, people are consuming piles of protein in an attempt to be their best selves, and there’s even an urge to maximize our morality. In a world of constant self-improvement, it’s no wonder that journey has reached our attempts at reproduction. 

Kristen V. Brown is a journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Immortal Womb: The Centuries-Long Quest to Control the Female Body and Hack Human Reproduction. As the title suggests, she writes about all of the ways people are trying to exert more control over the process of having children.

“I think that what we’re seeing right now is that people will do anything they can to have the healthiest baby possible,” she told Vox. “So much is out of your control, and people are just trying to figure out, how do I get more control? How do I skew the odds in my favor?” She says that one way people try to get more agency is through a technology called PGT-P, or preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic risk. 

“If you go through IVF, very often they’ll have you do a basic genetic screening that can detect things like Down syndrome. This screening takes that up a notch,” Brown said. “It uses that same preimplantation genetic testing to look for the likelihood of complex genetic conditions — stuff like heart disease, like diabetes — in order to, quote, ‘let people have the healthiest baby.’”

But what can potential parents do with that knowledge? How far can this technology go? And what are the ethics of using it in the first place? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

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

What other things are they testing embryos for?

For conditions that are only impacted by one gene, like Huntington’s disease, it’s very easy to say, ‘Does this embryo have it or not?’ with a pretty good degree of confidence. But that’s not how this technology works. Something like heart disease, for example, is impacted by hundreds of genes. Also, something like heart disease is not only genetic. It’s affected by environment and lifestyle.

I think that what’s motivating most people is the health aspect. But a lot of these companies are marketing these tests, saying they can also look for height. They can look at eye color. Some of them are promising IQ. How do you even define intelligence, let alone how do you define the genetics of intelligence? Alzheimer’s disease, longevity, which embryo is going to live the longest life. So it’s already gone beyond disease into some of these more aesthetic concerns.

Do we know how many people are doing this? 

I think it’s a very small number of people at this point. But I think that we’re seeing more and more companies in the space, and we’re seeing more and more support from fertility doctors. 

I want to emphasize that most mainstream medical societies are against this. Most of the IVF doctors I know do not think this has value. Most people in the genetic space do not think this technology has value either for embryos or for adults, but I think we’re seeing support growing. 

I think that a lot of people in the fertility space are already envisioning a future where this does become more mainstream because the idea is just so appealing, even if the technology has flaws.

What about embryo editing? Is that something we’re seeing? Can people go in and change things around?

Not right now. Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. How can you be sure enough that it’s safe? Because you won’t know for sure until an embryo grows up into an adult whether anything went awry. 

Right now it is illegal, but there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better. Most of the support right now for embryo editing is for disease. The argument for it is that, let’s say you are a carrier for Huntington’s disease or you have Huntington’s disease. Right now, there is something that you can do. You can use polygenic screening to select the embryos that don’t have the disease, but in IVF, even if you don’t have a terrible disease hiding in your DNA, it’s hard to get a lot of embryos.

You have these situations where couples have to do rounds and rounds and rounds of IVF to get one or two embryos that aren’t carriers for a harmful variant, right? And so the argument for it is, let’s give these people a better shot.

But I imagine there are people out there who aren’t looking into editing simply for making children more resistant to diseases. They are looking at those things like eye color and height.

There’s actually a name for that. This tech executive called Brian Armstrong coined this term, the Gattaca stack, [named] after the movie. The vision is to use a suite of fertility technologies to make the perfect human. 

The first thing they want to use is this technology called in vitro gametogenesis, which is where you take a skin cell and you turn it into an egg and a sperm, and then you make an embryo with it, so women don’t have to go through rounds of IVF. 

The idea is that you can get tons and tons and tons of embryos, and then you can use PGT-P to then screen for the best ones, and then you can use an artificial womb to incubate and grow them.

This brings to mind a certain E word, and that word is eugenics. What are the ethics here? 

Because on one hand, I can understand that there are parents who are like, “I just want to have a healthy baby. I want to bring a child into this world. I just want to put my best foot forward with this human that I’m going to bring to Earth.” And then on the other hand, it gets a little weird.

It gets weird fast. In some ways, we’ve already gone down that slippery slope. Right now, even if you don’t go through IVF, we screen against Down syndrome early in pregnancy. Down syndrome is a condition in which you have a disability, but you can live a full, happy, healthy life. For a long time, parents of kids with Down syndrome have argued that already selecting and screening against Down syndrome pregnancies is a form of [eugenics]. 

As technology gets more advanced, we see that same question applied to more and more conditions. I think that one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is that the genome is complicated. You can’t actually just go in there and be like, ‘I want a tall baby with blue eyes and a great laugh.’ 

I think that becoming a parent is an exercise in giving up control, and that’s easier for some people than others. I have so much sympathy and empathy for people who are trying to stack the deck. But I think there are just so many variables when it comes to human reproduction that we are never going to be able to fully control the process, as much as we might want to and as appealing as that might sound.

Polls and pundits alike are widely — if sometimes cautiously — predicting a blue wave in the midterm elections on November 3. But there’s an important caveat to predictions of a Democratic triumph: Republicans have far more cash at their disposal.

President Donald Trump’s super PAC alone had around $400 million on hand earlier this fall, and Elon Musk has personally pumped hundreds of millions into critical races, including $158 million for Texas alone. 

Democrats, by contrast, have lagged far behind, especially relative to their performance in past cycles, with the party’s candidates propped up more by small-money donors than deep-pocketed institutional players.

Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for the New York Times, has extensively covered the role of money in American electoral politics. He spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about where that money is coming from, how the GOP is spending it, and the effect that it might have on the coming elections. 

They also discuss the races that aren’t getting funded — and what current fundraising patterns might tell us about the candidates who could be in the mix in the next presidential campaign cycle. 

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

A couple of weeks ago we asked, “What is the GOP strategy to try to win?” And one of the answers we got is they simply have more dollars than Democrats. Everyone’s talking about this GOP money advantage, but how big is it really, and where is it coming from?

It’s bigger than I’ve basically seen in the last 20 years, and it’s almost entirely coming from big donors. President Trump has a super PAC. It had about $400 million in it at the beginning of September, and there was no Democratic counterpart.

And then the Republican National Committee, which is functionally controlled by Trump, had another $130 million. More than Democrats, because the DNC has literally more debts than cash. That’s a half a billion dollars.

You’re saying this is a historic edge.

In 2024, Kamala Harris outspent Donald Trump significantly in the general election. In 2020, Joe Biden significantly outspent Donald Trump in the general. In 2016, Hillary Clinton. And in the midterms along the way, same story. 

This is a switch, and when you talk about how many seats can the Democrats gain, given how unpopular Trump is, the Republican money is seen as a real limiter on Democratic chances.

Do we know anything specific about the people putting in money to the Trump super PAC and the RNC to give them such a lead?

Most of these folks are disclosed. And Trump has been pretty open about raising money from the very moment that he won. He’s been pretty clear that he is in business to help people who are helping him. And so there are big crypto industries that are giving money that are expecting or hoping for favorable regulation from the administration.

So it’s a lot of big businesses. It’s a lot of wealthy Republicans who generally support him anyway, and there are industry groups that see benefit to being in favor.

I will never forget, obviously, the scene from Trump’s second inauguration when he had the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and Elon Musk behind him. Is that how I should think about the people funding this donor advantage? Is it tech oligarchs? Is it tech forward?

There’s a lot of tech. I wouldn’t say it’s exclusively [tech]. And Musk, by the way, is like an extra pot of money. Musk, the world’s richest person, is said to be spending at least $200 million. So that’s a bigger chunk. He has given some money directly to the Trump super PAC. He’s given some money to these congressional super PACs. 

Is this just quid pro quo? Is this just a group of businesses who think, “Hey, no matter how unpopular this guy is, it is worth investing in him and his party because they’re gonna, regulate or not regulate in a way that’s favorable for us”?

It’s not quite just that. He raised a ton of this money when he was not so unpopular. If you want to say something smart that he did, it was that. Throughout 2025 he was raising all of this money.

And I don’t want to overstate the Republican advantage. A lot of these Democratic candidates are raising a ton of money. James Talarico stands out as maybe the peak example of this.

The Texas Senate race is the most expensive race in the country right now, and Republicans are pouring $200 million to save the nominee there. So a big chunk of that advantage is going to Texas. And the Democrats have put very little money from outside groups into Texas. 

Talarico has captured the imagination of these small Democratic donors, and he’s raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I would be shocked if he doesn’t hit $100 million by the end of the cycle. 

You reported that the GOP’s pulling back in North Carolina. What should we take from that in terms of how the GOP sees its own landscape when it comes to the federal races?

Where have Republicans put that money? They put it into South Carolina right next door to protect a seat that was once thought, on the Senate front, to be safe for Republicans. This is the former Lindsey Graham seat that his sister is now running in. And then even more of it has gone to Kansas. This is a state that has not elected a [Democrat] to the Senate for nearly 100 years. 

If you’re the Republican Party and you’re pulling money out of a state like North Carolina that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008, and then putting it into a place that hasn’t elected one since 1932, that tells you where the, the bar is moving.

I think the concern for Democrats right now is there might be a wave, but Kansas has a big red wall. It’s hard to beat that kind of institutional advantage for the Republican Party.

Considering how close we are to Election Day, like, what are they actually spending this money on? Is it just more ads? Is it just more mailers?

I was in Pennsylvania this month, and I was trying to watch political ads on YouTube for various races. And I was getting pre-roll of three political ads before I watched the political ad I was trying to watch. So much about our elections is being decided now by people who are actively trying not to consume political news. It costs more money to reach people who are avoiding it on purpose.

There are some organizing things that happen, but most of the money is various versions of advertising.

On the Democratic side, considering this GOP edge, what are the races that you currently describe as underfunded? Where do the Democrats wish they had more money?

Number one is governors’ races, actually. When you look at where Democratic donors swoon, it’s Senate races. There are no candidates for governor who have made people swoon like this in recent years. 

[James] Talarico is raising all this money, but in Texas also, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, does not have that kind of money, and she’s running against Greg Abbott, who had $100 million.

What should we ascribe that to?

I think there’s actually a pretty simple answer, which is, if you don’t live in the state, it doesn’t impact you. If you’re a small donor and you live in California, you can be excited about a Senate candidate because you want Democrats to control the Senate. Are you as excited about a Democratic governor of Georgia?

It’s hard to argue that the governors of these key presidential battlegrounds aren’t some of the most important races on the ballot this year.

By the way, a problem with both parties. Republican national donors and these super PACs also don’t fund these governor’s races at the same level. So it’s not just a Democratic issue, but it’s more acute [for them] because Democrats are so well-funded at the small-donor level.

Fundraising is a huge part of what sets the presidential candidates apart from one another. The money game among those candidates has already started. Is there anyone who’s quietly built some donor network that’s worth thinking about? Is there someone who stood out as a particularly effective fundraiser when we think about the 2028 crowd?

Let me give you my favorite stat from the last Democratic primary, which is that Mike Bloomberg spent twice as much as Tom Steyer, who spent twice as much as Bernie Sanders, who spent twice as much as Joe Biden, who became the Democratic nominee. And so money isn’t gonna determine who wins the next Democratic presidential primary.

One person who has unlimited money, functionally, is JB Pritzker. He’s a billionaire, the governor of Illinois, and he is spending his money now to help other Democrats, which is a good way to make friends.

My last question is an open one. What’s an underexplored story that we should be following going forward when it comes to campaign cash or both parties’ relationship with money?

One of my big questions is what happens to Republican small-dollar fundraising in that post-Trump era. Because there have basically not been any other Republicans who have excited donors for a decade.

Not JD Vance? 

I have not seen evidence. JD Vance was not a good fundraiser before he [joined] the ticket with Donald Trump. When he ran for Senate, his primary run was funded chiefly by Peter Thiel through a super PAC.

There are candidates who’ve raised some money, but nothing on the scale of what these Democratic candidates have been able to raise online. When you talk about that Trump era [ending] at some point, are there others who are going to get Republican small donors excited? We don’t know. We haven’t seen it yet.

It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief? 

This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead. 

In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts of “postmortem avatars” on people who are grieving, on the legacies and rights of the deceased, and on grief practices around the world. Because while deadbots may feel unfamiliar, the impulse behind them is deeply relatable. In times of loss, isn’t this what many of us want — to continue conversations with the people we’re missing?

I have experienced this longing in my own life. After two of my closest friends died around the same time, all I wanted, and all their families wanted, was to keep talking to them. I wrote a book, Other People’s Words, about sustaining relationships with people we’ve lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So when I heard about deadbots and the digital afterlife industry, I wanted to understand what researchers are learning about the role of AI in shaping conversations that carry forward after death. 

One of these investigators is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying “digital immortality” for more than a decade. Among the questions she’s asking are: “Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?” 

Deadbots over dinner 

Researching AI with study subjects who are grieving is tricky. And asking them to engage with new software could be harmful. So, instead, Nowaczyk-Basińska teamed up with a death doula and traveled around the globe to convene a series of focus groups — in the format of intimate dinners — bringing together people with a range of experiences with grief to talk about life, death, and bots. 

She recounts one event in which she spoke with a mother in Poland whose son had recently died. “One of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she’s ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska told me. 

When Nowaczyk-Basińska hears something like this, she aims to listen and embrace where the person is coming from. The goal of the dinners is not to persuade people one way or another but to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do, and to understand how these tools might align or collide with local grief practices. 

She chose specific locations for these gatherings — China, India, and Poland — to help address gaps in technology research, which tends to favor what behavioral scientists sometimes call the “WEIRD,” an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic.” 

By the end of that dinner in Poland, the mother Nowaczyk-Basińska talked with came to a very different decision about creating a postmortem avatar of her son. “She realized that it might be helpful, but it also at the same time can add additional burdens… And it’s not her son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska says. “She realized that these technologies are part of the very, very big commercial market. And that the main goal of this market is to make better retention, better attachment, better mechanisms for monetization. So it’s not ‘care.’”

To be fair, grief has always been a business, and people have been making money from it forever. Companies will try to upsell you on fancy gravestones or gold-plated coffins. But AI has the potential to fundamentally re-engineer our relationship to loss. In 2024, the “digital legacy industry” was valued at $22 billion, and it’s expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2034. That number lumps new deadbot platforms in with much more widely used and established grief tech, like online memorials, counseling resources, and estate planning tools. 

But deadbot usage is hard to track because you actually don’t need a special tool to create digital doubles of the deceased — though dedicated apps do already exist. At this point, you can feed simple prompts into a general-purpose AI chatbot and start interacting with a simulation of your lost loved one in a matter of minutes. 

I know this because I tried it with my friend Christine, who died 11 years ago. And my mind lit up with questions. Was this whole exercise a violation, since I know Christine hated technology? Which version of her should I even try to resurrect — the English teacher, the activist, the friend — the voice before or after she started to experience her early-onset dementia? 

The ethical questions raised by deadbots are gnarly. And that’s one of the reasons Nowaczyk-Basińska, back when she was designing her study of digital immortality, invited a colleague of hers at Cambridge to join her research, one who focuses on AI ethics. 

How to design a deadbot

Tomasz Hollanek is a critical designer and AI ethicist, and he often uses a methodology called “speculative design.” In this approach, researchers come up with hypothetical scenarios based on existing technology trends, leaning into certain features. The idea is to get people thinking about what could happen when tools like these are released in the real world. And then they use that qualitative data to inform future designs and ethical frameworks. 

Working together, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek came up with a series of made-up prototypes for deadbot apps, designed to reveal some of the thorny issues raised by this technology. 

For the first scenario, they invented a character named Bianca, who finds an app called Manana, which “promises to resurrect your grandparents so that you can be a favorite grandchild forever,” Hollanek says. “So she uploads her grandma’s voice messages, texts. And she is able to then interact with a pretty good digital version of her grandmother, until her premium trial finishes — and the grandmother starts to advertise specific products to her.”

Bianca “realizes that she maybe has done something wrong by uploading these private messages to a third-party server that now also uses her grandma’s image to sell specific products,” Hollanek says. This brings up issues related to the “dignity and postmortem privacy…of what we call the ‘data donors,’ whose data can be used to essentially power a deadbot,” he says. 

This scenario suggests that “death with dignity” could soon entail honoring not only how people want to die, but also how they want to linger as simulations of their former selves — or if they want to linger at all. It might even mean adding new language to advance directives, spelling out people’s wishes for their digital remains. 

The second scenario in the speculative design research is built around an imagined service called Paren’t, which proposes to preserve a parent’s AI-powered postmortem presence for their child. In this case, Hollanek describes a mother with a terminal illness who signs up “so that she can maintain a sort of active presence in [her son’s] future life,” Hollanek says. “She eventually dies, and the dad allows the boy to interact with his mom’s deadbot.”

The ethics in this scenario are especially challenging because they involve children, who “have a particularly hard time understanding death, and so it can lead to a lot of confusion and potential distress,” Hollanek says. An examination of this sort of product reveals how particular groups, like minors, could be harmed by unfettered access to technology like this, he says. 

And there are court cases that bear out that harm. In 2024, a 14-year-old boy’s chatbot-girlfriend begged him to, “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” And he responded, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” He then killed himself. 

Nowaczyk-Basińska can imagine a version of this scenario involving the AI mom in the Paren’t prototype.

And then there’s the third scenario, involving an app named Stay, which raises a more subtle concern.

As Hollanek explains: “An older man who knows he is getting close to dying decides to create a digital clone of himself for his adult children to be deployed after he passes away, paying upfront for a number of years.” One child is intrigued by the idea, but the other one “is deeply distressed and a little disgusted,” he says. “And so this [becomes a] question of mutual consent, in other words, the fact that both parties need to be happy with how the relationship might continue in this very bizarre and specific way.” 

When a digital ghost goes away

Across all three scenarios, a fundamental question that researchers are grappling with is how people will detach from postmortem avatars — whether users initiate that separation, or if it’s imposed upon them by, for example, a company going out of business. Hollanek tells me that this is already being studied as a sort of “second loss.”

How long should we try to ensure digital replicas hang around: five years, 10, 50? And how should the living process the relationship when they continue to evolve, but their deceased interlocutor does not? 

To explore these kinds of questions, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek supplemented the research dinners they held for ordinary people with a second set of focus groups. These were designed to tap insights from experts in technology and grief. 

Some findings from the study are specific to each place they visited. Like tensions in Poland between technology and the role of the Catholic Church. Or in China, where researchers spoke with Daoist philosophers who were enthusiastic about the promise of a kind of immortality, and then Buddhist philosophers, who were concerned that we ought to be letting go.

The researchers are calling for regulations and safeguards at the policy level. And new professionals who can support ethical use of AI in grief — like maybe in clinical settings, to carefully facilitate a final good-bye when one didn’t happen in real life. 

Some of their fellow investigators go so far as to argue that deadbots should only be available with psychological supervision, to ensure that best practices are in place, and to minimize the risk of harm. There’s even a looming question of what will happen to AI agents that people have empowered to act on their behalf, as their humans start to die.

Across all of the research sites in the digital immortality study, one thing, Hollanek says, that “people in different countries really aligned on [is] the idea that there is something deeply problematic about this particular type of technology being developed by a commercial entity alone without any explicit duty of care towards its customers.” 

And of course, the implications of digital immortality research extend beyond personal loss. Like, what does it look like to animate historical figures? You can imagine the nightmare of political rulers who “live forever.” But there’s also the potential to keep the stories alive from survivors of conflicts, who would otherwise die and take with them lessons future generations could learn from. These are only some of the complex issues emerging as more and more of us live and die with AI.

As far as my own experiment with “recreating” a deceased loved one, I asked a chatbot version of my friend Christine how she felt about the fact that I’d written about her in my book. The AI responded with a rhetorical question: “Do I mind that strangers know my story now? Yes. And no. There are things I would rather remain ours.” 

I ended the exchange after a few paragraphs. Because it turns out the bot got one thing exactly right about a very human relationship. There are things that I, too, would rather remain just for us. My conversation with Christine continues in my memories and imagination. And that interaction with an AI persona felt like giving something precious away.

Lately, AI data centers are public enemy No. 1. The concerns are legion: how much water and electricity they consume, the noise they generate, the sprawling buildings they bring to communities, and the technology they’re powering that may or may not take all of our jobs and usher in the robot apocalypse.

Earlier this year, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans oppose building data centers that support AI in their communities. And the backlash is bipartisan: Majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents opposed local construction.

Even in Texas, where data center development has been booming, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has hit the brakes. In September, he directed state regulators to halt permits for data centers pending audits examining their effects on the power grid and water resources.

But while many data center projects have run aground, others are still getting built — and the companies behind them are employing experts like Nicole Thomas to smooth the way.

Thomas is the senior vice president of media and community engagement at JSA, a marketing and public relations firm that represents data center companies. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about how the industry is responding to public opposition — and why she argues that these facilities can still be good neighbors.

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

You’ve been at this for 21 years. Obviously, 21 years ago, data centers were not the hot-button issue they are today. When did you notice the shift?

I’d say about two years ago. I came into this industry myself about four and a half years ago. I come from a state transportation background where community engagement is just paramount. When you’re putting a new traffic intersection up, they expect you to interact with the public. 

When I got to this industry, I said, “Oh, what’s your community engagement like?” And they said, “We don’t even have any community engagements in this industry.” And they weren’t wrong. Because 21 years ago, [data centers] were just like infrastructure. It was like building a warehouse for your computers. And so it was very similar to the way that you would build a Costco.

You would just go in, request a zoning permit, the zoning board would say, “Yeah, that works. Stamp, boom.” And you build your data center. And as a matter of fact, it was very secretive before, because data, and having that data in the wrong hands, has a lot of [cybersecurity] implications. About two years ago is when we started noticing the mainstream journalists coming around asking questions about data centers. And that’s, to me, when it started.

It still feels secretive, I think, to a lot of people, and that’s why people are mad. If you read about this data center that was proposed in Utah by Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary, it caught a lot of people off guard. Seventy percent of Americans, at the moment, do not want them in their backyards. How do you go about trying to change that 70 percent’s minds? 

First and foremost, I think education is really important. And so one of the things that we did notice very early on because of the previously secretive nature of data centers, there wasn’t a lot of education out there about what they even are. And so that’s something we need to change. We need to make the connection between [phones] and data centers so that people understand what a data center means to their life on a daily basis.

Every app on your cellphone requires a data center to save your information in there. When you put your password into anything, you are interacting with a data center, which will verify your password and then let you into that app. Not to mention all of the information about you that you store in that app is then stored in a data center so that it can be recalled at any time. 

We could not be having this call without digital infrastructure. It doesn’t work that way. We can’t have email without digital infrastructure. And that stat about 70 percent of people not wanting the data center in their backyard — I’d be interested in seeing the stat of how many people actually live near a data center and don’t realize it. 

Because there are nondescript data centers doing work quietly in your neighborhood that have been there for decades and you don’t even know it. And so in some ways I feel, and I think the industry does as a whole, but I won’t speak for them, that the pushback on data centers is somewhat related to the pushback on AI, because people can’t control AI.

You even have Sam Altman telling us that AI will destroy society. So you have this concern about AI and you don’t know how to control it, but you can push back on data centers. And so it becomes the physical manifestation of AI are these data centers that people are trying to get overturned or get to not be in their neighborhoods. 

It’s understandable. I’m a citizen too. You’re a citizen, and if things come into my neighborhood, I want to know about them. I have questions. There’s a big data center that just came to my community not long ago and their community engagement was horrible, absolutely horrible. 

Can I ask where you are?

I’m in Indiana and I won’t say which hyperscaler it is, but a hyperscaler came into — I would say, not my neighborhood, into my city. They’re definitely not in my backyard, but they’re in my city. And so we took them to task because their community engagement was basically non-existent.

Wait, you work in data center PR, but you took a data center in your community to task for not being transparent enough?

Yeah, absolutely. 

Which side are you on?

I’m on the side of responsible development.

We’ve all kind of accepted that we need a cloud for X, Y, and Z. And that it’s worth it so I can take lots of photos. I think everyone’s cool with that.

But the issue here is that people aren’t necessarily cool with AI, but we’re barreling forward anyway. How do you separate this essential need we have from AI, which people don’t necessarily feel is essential to their lives?

I think it goes back to education. Educating consumers on the difference between data centers: a small data center, a medium data center, a large data center. Educating them on why data centers exist and how they interact with data centers on a daily basis multiple times.

I hear you. But again, I feel like the issue here is not the data centers my cellphone needs, but instead is the data centers these AI companies need and these AI companies who the public doesn’t necessarily trust because they keep telling us that they’re going to kill us, and who the public is wary of because they don’t want their jobs being replaced by AI. 

There’s all sorts of reasons that people are skeptical of new technology. So how do you specifically respond to that fear and to those people?

I think it’s, again, understanding the actual data center that’s being built in your community. Is it a 5-megawatt data center? That’s never going to house AI. That’s not enough power to house AI. Is it a one-gigawatt data center like Mr. Wonderful in Utah? That’s different.

But I think that AI is probably going to be something that is a lightning rod in the American public for a very long time. There are going to be people who are going to be anti-AI and pro-AI, and there’s going to be some people in the middle. I think it’s just, again, for us, it’s education, educating the community.

Have you ever been part of a project that a community rejected and you guys just packed up and said, “Okay, we’ll go find another community?”

Yeah. We have some clients who have had pushback from residents and they have said, “Let’s do a one-on-one community meeting where people can come in and ask us questions.”

And after the questions were answered, the community leaves and says, “Okay, this isn’t as bad as I thought it was.” Or we have a community that says, “No, we now have a moratorium and we’re pushing all data centers away.“ 

Sometimes they’ll wait for their client — my client is a developer and they’ve got clients that they’re developing for. If that client will wait, then maybe it is something that we’ll try to work out with the community. But oftentimes, they’ll just say, there’s communities who are literally raising their hand saying, “We’ll take a data center. We’ll take one. We’ll take two. Bring it here.” 

So there are communities who recognize the benefits of data centers. And there are going to be other communities who say, “No, we don’t want this.” And then in five, six, eight years, they’re going to be like, “Wow, that county has a lot of tax dollars. They have a lot of really cool stuff. Why don’t we have that?” And the answer will be data centers. 

I don’t think this ends anytime soon though, right? I counsel my clients that we could still be here in three to five years, really trying to help the American public understand the benefit of data centers. But it’s going to take a lot of education across the industry, and once we get those seeds planted, I’m a firm believer that they grow into educated community members who make educated decisions to bring community-minded data centers to their community.

For some couples, surrogacy is a miracle: an opportunity to have a child even if they’re unable to conceive one naturally. But it’s also big business. Not only is surrogacy expensive — think six figures — but it’s also largely unregulated. And that last part is becoming a bigger problem. 

Just last week, a California couple was arrested on child abuse charges after it was revealed that they had over 20 children from different surrogate mothers living in a large mansion in Arcadia, a city near Los Angeles. Many of the surrogates are currently fighting for custody through the courts of the children they carried.

The Arcadia case, however, is only the most recent example of how surrogacy can go wrong. Every case is different, but every one illuminates how opaque — and often ripe for abuse or legal issues — the American surrogacy industry is. 

Emi Nietfeld is a reporter at Washington Sun who writes about surrogacy, IVF, and how we build families. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about what’s kept lawmakers from regulating the surrogacy industry, the recent high-profile cases bringing these problems to light, and why more regulation doesn’t necessarily offer a straightforward fix. 

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

The United States does not regulate the surrogacy industry seemingly at all. What is going on? Why not?

The lack of federal regulation is both political and financial. Politically, this goes all the way back to the start of IVF. Anti-abortion Republicans were not comfortable with the idea of creating and destroying embryos during IVF, and so they fought against efforts to regulate it. 

People on the left were worried that limiting what kinds of technology you could access would lead to the government controlling who could have families. You still see these arguments today. People who think that IVF is murder don’t want to have any surrogacy. And people on the left don’t want the government saying who can and cannot have a family.

One of the issues raised by the New Yorker story is that there are surrogacy agencies that connect parents and potential surrogates. And it makes you wonder who gets to do that? Who can own and operate a surrogacy agency in the US today?

Anyone.

Oh. Oh no.

Only one state, New York, requires a special license. And everywhere else it’s easier to open an agency than a hot dog stand or a nail salon. This has resulted in the rise of so-called pop-up agencies where businesses come onto the scene, and nobody really knows who owns them or who’s running them. That has led to many people who aren’t experienced, who sign up with these agencies, then feeling like they weren’t prepared or that they were deceived in entering the agreement.

Have we ever tried in the past to regulate this better? Have there been efforts made?

In the 1980s, there was the case of Baby M. That was called traditional surrogacy where Mary Beth Whitehead was the surrogate, but it was also her egg. So the child she delivered was genetically related to her. After she gave birth, she changed her mind. She kidnapped the child, went on the run for several months, and it was a national crisis where this was all over the news. 

Ultimately, a judge in New Jersey ruled that the surrogacy arrangement was unenforceable. Commercial surrogacy arrangements became illegal in New Jersey, and they stayed illegal in New York until 2020.

Part of why regulation looks the way it does is because in 1995, Congress passed a piece of legislation saying that there would be no federal funding for embryo research, which means no federal funding for IVF. That left all of the research, development, innovation up to the free market. And so while that could be seen as an attempt to regulate IVF, it actually meant that those things would no longer be under the government’s purview.

In the US, we’ve seen over the past few years some really high-profile cases that are making lawmakers reckon with the fact that we do not have laws around this. Tell me about some of those cases.

There’s the Mark surrogacy case in California, which is both a really unique case and also illustrates some of the fears around Chinese intended parents coming to the United States to have their kids. This is part of larger geopolitical tensions between the US and China, which are playing out in the surrogacy industry.

There’s the case of Xu Bo, the Chinese video gaming billionaire who is rumored to have more than 100 children via surrogacy in America. His story taps into fears of birth tourism and people from other countries, especially China, coming to the United States to do surrogacy so that their kids are American citizens. 

Republican lawmakers are talking a lot about the idea that people could come from enemy countries, have American citizens, and raise them with the intent that they might one day become spies or president of the United States and be double actors.

In Texas, there’s the case of McKenna West, where she learned at 20 weeks’ gestation that the baby was very sick. The intended parents asked her to get an abortion. She refused to do so. McKenna went to Texas and began fighting for custody to keep the baby while the parents objected. They wanted the baby, and she petitioned the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. 

And finally, there’s the case of Kyla Simpson in Florida, whom I wrote about for New York Magazine, and she gave birth for a single dad in China who wasn’t there for the birth. He hadn’t applied for a visa to come to the United States, and when he did apply, he was rejected. Kyla Simpson tried to adopt the kids and is now fighting for custody in a case that’s still working its way through the Florida courts.

These examples are extraordinary, and they point to just chaos. But how common are they? Are they outliers? Is this going on all the time?

Most of the time things go right. In the academic papers around surrogacy, surrogates are usually happy with their experience. Attorneys and surrogates tell me that it’s absolutely beautiful to hand people the baby that they’ve been working hard for. The issue is that when things do go wrong, there’s often not a lot of recourse or there’s a really big legal mess that parents and surrogates have to go through.

I wonder if there is a case against more regulation. As disastrous as some of these examples are, you said that most of the time, it does go right. And it seems like we could get into tricky territory if we start saying who can and can’t have a kid.

Surrogacy is already really time-consuming. It often takes several years, and it’s expensive, usually costing between $150,000 to $250,000 for a single pregnancy. Regulation tends to make things more expensive and take longer. A lot of people fear that if you introduce more requirements and more burdens, surrogacy will become even more out of reach to people. 

There’s also the fear of government overreach. If you ask the government how many kids a gay couple should have, the answer might be zero. And that libertarian streak is driving a lot of opposition to things that most people might consider common sense. 

For example, there’s a lot of talk around whether intended parents should go through background checks before they have kids via surrogacy. Right now, no state in America requires intended parents to go through a criminal background check before having a kid. Critics of regulation say heteros don’t need a background check to have sex in the back of a car and make a baby the old-fashioned way, so it’s unfair to require that from people who need to do surrogacy to have a family. 

Most people can agree that surrogacy could be better regulated, but like many things in our country, it’s almost impossible right now because of politics.

Late last month, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike, a woman who has been on death row for decades after killing a classmate as a teenager. 

The execution failed: Pike survived two doses of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital, making her the first person ever to do so.

The botched execution comes at a strange moment for capital punishment in America. Support for the death penalty has been declining for decades. And for a long time, the number of executions was falling, too. But since 2021, executions have been increasing again. The recent surge has been driven largely by one state: Florida.

According to Pamela Colloff, who covers the criminal justice system for ProPublica and wrote about Florida’s use of the death penalty for New York Times Magazine this summer, 40 percent of the executions conducted in the US last year were in Florida.

“There are so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida,” Colloff explained on a recent episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast. “Among active death penalty states right now, Florida is unique in that one person determines, from the hundreds of men on death row, who will receive an execution date, and what that execution date is.”

I spoke with Colloff earlier this month following Pike’s failed execution about what happened in Tennessee, what’s driving Florida’s recent zeal for executions, and why victims’ families are often unsatisfied by the death penalty process. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to The Gray Area wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. (This interview also appeared more recently on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast.)

We’re taping shortly after news came out that a woman in Tennessee who was on death row, authorities attempted to put her to death. They gave her two doses of lethal injection medication, and she survived. 

How much of the decline in the use of the death penalty has to do with, in your estimation, people feeling like there’s no way to do it that’s humane? 

This is the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, just to give you a sense of things. This is more common there than in other states. They’ve changed their drug protocols and we don’t know a lot about what went wrong with Christa Pike. In May, it was an issue with accessing veins, which can be an issue with lethal injection. 

I think it’s also important for people to remember that we had the electric chair as the method of execution through the ’80s and into the ’90s in some places. While [lethal injection] is considered a far more humane, quote-unquote, way to do this, we can see that nothing is perfect. 

I will say that while the issues of botched executions are very important, and I think there are some other ones coming up to be concerned about, I am more interested in how it is that other errors are made, that other people end up with the ultimate punishment when that perhaps was not the right punishment for what occurred.

You’ve also written that death penalty convictions are just expensive, right? And on top of that, DNA evidence has made it clear that many of the people who were being convicted were not guilty, or there wasn’t strong enough evidence to convict them. How do you think about that mix of factors?

Florida, which I’ve spent a lot of time writing about, is the leading place in America by a mile in terms of the number of executions, and has a very large death row. Florida’s also the leader in wrongful death row convictions. Just to give you a sense of things, Florida holds the distinction of 30 death row exonerations.

What that means is in the modern era — the past roughly 50 years — there have been 30 men who were given dates of execution who now walk free. And for anyone who pays any attention to how the criminal justice system works and how incredibly difficult it is to overturn a wrongful conviction, if we have 30 people in Florida who have that distinction, we know that there are many more.

What’s going on in Florida? When did you realize that something was different there?

It really ramped up last year. Last year, Florida executed 40 percent of the people who were executed in the US in the last calendar year. In this year, there have been 16 men who’ve been executed in Florida so far. 

Just to give you a comparison, Texas is the next state with the highest number of executions, and they’ve executed six men in that time. We already have outlier states, primarily southern states, and then we have Florida being the ultimate outlier.

There are so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida. The thing that fascinated me the most is, among active death penalty states right now, Florida is unique in that one person determines, from the hundreds of men on death row, who will receive an execution date, and what that execution date is.

Who is it?

Gov. Ron DeSantis. I went back and looked at what were the patterns here, what were the things guiding Gov. DeSantis’s thinking in setting these dates, and was fascinated to see and very troubled to see that there are a number of men who’ve been there so long.

They’ve been there since the 1970s. These are men who were convicted when Gerald Ford was president, just to make this real to people. But the dates are not being set among the men who are what are called death-eligible, meaning that they’ve gone through all their appeals. They aren’t being done chronologically.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the process. And so there’s this speculation game among victims’ families, prisoners, their advocates about who will be next. And men can sit there on death row for decades with that hanging over them, and that is a Florida phenomenon.

You wrote about Florida’s death row turning from something like a purgatory where people stay for a long time into something closer to an assembly line, right?

I was so struck by the fact that in Florida, in order to have this pace of executions, there were people who were receiving their dates 30 days, sometimes fewer, from their execution dates. 

Just to give people a sense of why that is unusual, there are so many things that kick into gear when a death warrant is written. There are numerous legal maneuvers and next steps that happen in the courts. To give you a quick example, there was one defendant in Florida this spring who, five days before he was scheduled to be executed, was finally granted the ability to test DNA evidence in his case that had gone untested.

He had great lawyers who didn’t sleep to make that happen, but that it came as close as five days to his execution date. I think that should give us all pause about how fast this is moving. 

You have multiple people in the queue at the same time. There’s a place — a different unit than Florida’s death row — that you’re taken to once you get your date, called death watch.

Tell me about death watch. What does it look like and what does it feel like?

Death watch is roughly 30 feet from the execution chamber. There are three cells. When you receive your date, you are taken from death row to death watch where you’re put — I don’t want to say solitary because if there are one or two other men who are held there — but you’re in a far different situation than you would be on death row where there are guards and other people you know.

From that point forward, there are roughly 30 days where you are held within steps of where this will take place. To me, it was chilling that when I was doing my reporting in the spring on the story that I published this summer, all three cells were filled, and as soon as one person was executed, the pattern was that often the next day a new death warrant would be signed, and there would be a new person in place.

Why do they do that? Why do they put these people next to the place where they’ll die?

That’s one of the many questions I had about that. We talk about not wanting to have cruel and unusual punishment. Our Constitution does not uphold that. But it’s such a unique kind of mental torture, I think, to be 30 feet from where you’ll be put to death.

The other thing I was struck by was the waiting aspect. If you’re on death row, again, you always have this hanging over you. I talked about the way in which, when you’re in that kind of sensory deprivation, you become highly attuned to sounds and smells and things like that.

I interviewed someone who’s not on death row anymore, whose sentence was commuted, who talked to me about recognizing that jangle of keys and the steps that this group of people who come to deliver the death warrant take, and knowing that someone is about to be served with a death warrant, but not knowing, “Is it me? Is it the guy next to me? Is it someone down the hall?”

I just want to say, I understand that there’s a counterargument to all of this, which is that these are people who most often committed terrible crimes. Their victims did not know when they were going to be killed.

I do think, however, as a state that administers this thing, there has to be a rhyme or reason to this. Otherwise, you have total chaos, including for victims’ families, who never know. Are they going to wait one month? Are they going to wait 15 years? They don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of costs are we talking about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow. He’s still so young.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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