Editor’s note, August 25, 10:15 am ET: This article was originally published in 2018 and has been updated for the start of the new PSL season.

August 25 is not a day that is particularly known for feeling especially crisp or autumnal in most parts of North America. And yet it’s the day this year — the earliest release date ever — that Starbucks, contending with a slowdown in sales, will unleash its annual run of pumpkin spice lattes upon its customers.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this tone for one of disdain. Since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become something of a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of “basic,” resulting in widespread hatred for an otherwise innocuous beverage.

For example, back in 2014, at the height of pumpkin spice mania, this very website described the PSL as “an unctuous, pungent, saccharine brown liquid, equal parts dairy and diabetes, served in paper cups and guzzled down by the liter” — even though clearly the pumpkin spice latte is a highly delicious treat that pairs well with wearing vests and making dorky comments about how crisp the air feels today. Yes, it contains 380 calories; yes, it will make your coffee a rather unappetizing orange color; no, you should not “guzzle it down by the liter.”

But contempt for the PSL and other items of the seasonal pumpkin spice variety is often not really about the flavor itself. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be way more furious about. (There is a shop in Scotland that serves mayonnaise ice cream, people!) Too frequently, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of savvy marketing. After all, the PSL is doing something right: It’s Starbucks’ most popular seasonal beverage, with about 424 million sold worldwide. In 2019, the chain leaned in further with the introduction of the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, finally admitting to the world that late August is still iced coffee weather.

The history of the PSL

The pumpkin spice latte almost didn’t exist. As former Starbucks veteran Tim Kern told Quartz, “A number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn’t put Starbucks’ coffee in the best light.”

Fortunately for Starbucks, the Tim Kerns of the company were ultimately overruled, because within a decade of its launch in 2003, the PSL became its top-selling drink, with more than 200 million of them sold. In 2015, Forbes estimated the PSL brought in around $100 million in revenue over a single season.

2015 was also the year that Starbucks changed its decade-old formula to include actual pumpkin for the first time, rather than simply caramel coloring and pumpkin pie spices (like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves). By all accounts, it tasted pretty much the same, just, according to its inventor, “cleaner.”

At that point, the PSL wasn’t just a cash cow — it was a cultural phenomenon. In part, that’s thanks to its marketing: There is nothing inherently seasonal about the spices that go in pumpkin pie, but Starbucks is able to convince us that the drink should only be consumed during the fall months, thereby increasing demand.

But there’s another reason the PSL exploded so much over the past decade. Culinary food trend analyst Suzy Badaracco told Vox in 2014, “Pumpkin became recognized as part of the comfort food trend during the recession in 2008,” due to its association with Thanksgiving and the holidays. In tough times, we’re more likely to crave foods that bring back happy memories.

Surely, though, the reason we all began talking about PSLs to begin with was their prevalence on social media. It’s not that they’re inherently photogenic — a Starbucks cup is a Starbucks cup regardless of what’s inside it, and the PSL doesn’t get its own specially designed cup the way the holiday drinks do.

It’s because when you add a PSL to a photo of, say, your new fall boots standing atop crunchy-looking leaves or a selfie featuring a festive dark lip color, it adds to the autumnal aesthetic. It’s not a coincidence that Instagram — the epicenter of cutesy fall tableaus — happened to blow up in the early 2010s, which is the same time it became cool to claim you despised pumpkin spice.

But maybe that’s not the whole story.

The backlash is about our anxieties around capitalism

The fact that the pumpkin spice latte — which, to many, conjures the scents and imagery of Thanksgiving — is released in increasingly hot weather year after year is often touted as an ominous harbinger of the evil forces of seasonal creep. “It’s agricultural revisionism!” argue some, citing the fact that pumpkins aren’t actually in season until autumn proper.

A viral John Oliver clip from 2014 declares as much, noting that “that bottle of pumpkin-flavored science goo sits behind the counter of Starbucks, never aging, like Ryan Seacrest”:

Perhaps in response to such criticism, in 2019 Starbucks released its second pumpkin spice beverage since the PSL’s introduction, but this time, it’s cold. The Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew is a vanilla cold brew with pumpkin cold foam and topped with pumpkin spice, which CNBC describes as “less sweet and has a stronger coffee taste than a pumpkin spice latte.”

The success of the PSL is also largely responsible for the barrage of pumpkin spice-flavored everything else, including cream cheese, dog treats, Kahlua, and an especially wacky seasonal crossover, Peeps. There have also been air fresheners, deodorant, even Four Loko (okay, that one ended up being a joke), resulting in the expected amount of hand-wringing about a food trend “gone too far.” (Indeed, back in 2010, the spice brand McCormick forecast that pumpkin spice would be a popular flavor for the holiday season, which in turn likely exacerbated the rush.)

When a food trend is as in-your-face as pumpkin spice is — ever been to a Trader Joe’s in October? — it forces us to think about how the free market is essentially designed to create this kind of phenomenon. If a product like the pumpkin spice latte sells, it’s natural under capitalism for other companies to attempt to replicate that success. But it’s uncomfortable when we see it happening on such an exaggerated scale.

Actually, the backlash is about our contempt for women

Well, maybe, but maybe what pumpkin spice backlash is really about is our dismissal of trends that are coded as feminine. As Jaya Saxena wrote in Taste in 2017, in a piece titled “Women Aren’t Ruining Food,” “When men enjoy something, they elevate it. But when women enjoy something, they ruin it.”

She continues, on the topic of “girly” food crazes like açai bowls, rosé, and pumpkin spice versus “manly” ones like barbecue, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and IPAs:

When those foods blow up, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that because they like something other women like, they don’t have minds of their own. And on top of that, women are asked to reckon with, consciously or unconsciously, the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods.

Plus, “masculine” foods are almost never chastised for being “basic,” the ever-nebulous term used to describe someone with average, predictable taste that’s usually reserved for women.

In the most stereotypical (and by now probably outdated) terms, a “basic bitch” wears North Face, leggings, and Uggs, and absolutely adores hashtag-PSLs, marking her as a woman with “a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet,” as The Cut noted back in 2014.

There are often classist implications, too. In a 2014 BuzzFeed piece about “basic” and class anxiety, Anne Helen Peterson wrote:

Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should.

Essentially, hating pumpkin spice lattes is our way of othering those who drink them, and in the process, marking ourselves as decidedly un-basic.

Of course, this notion of what “basic” means is not the same way black people have been using it for decades, which, as Kara Brown explained in 2014 in Jezebel, pretty much just translates to “I think that the stuff you like is lame and I don’t really like you.”

“Rihanna could become the official spokesperson for Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes and nobody would think of her as basic,” she wrote. “You know why? Because Rihanna does what she wants and what she thinks is cool and doesn’t give a damn about anybody else.”

Or maybe nobody cares anymore

Even if Rihanna suddenly became the official spokesperson of PSLs, however, there is also the possibility that, quite frankly, nobody really cares that much anymore. We seemed to have hit peak “pumpkin spice hot take” in the year 2014, with searches for “pumpkin spice latte” peaking in 2015.

trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("TIMESERIES", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"pumpkin spice latte","geo":"US","time":"2004-01-01 2018-08-28"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=all&geo=US&q=pumpkin%20spice%20latte","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"});

Maybe that’s because we’ve all been stricken with a case of seasonal beverage fatigue in general. Starbucks is constantly coming out with random gimmicky drinks, from the Unicorn Frappuccino to the so-called secret menu.

We also aren’t seeing the same kind of anger directed at what is arguably replacing pumpkin spice as autumn’s de facto flavor. In 2017, both Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts released maple pecan lattes. And according to restaurant menu data from that year, “mentions of maple as a flavor in nonalcoholic beverages on menus are up 86 percent this year over last. … Pumpkin mentions, on the other hand, are down 20 percent.” Yet nobody’s complaining about how stupid maple syrup is.

And these days, tweets about PSLs are way more in the vein of “Screw you and let me enjoy my shitty drink in peace, because everything is terrible.”

Pumpkin Spice Latte comes back tomorrow and I am 100% getting one in 91 degree weather because this world is a shitshow and I take joy where I can get it, like in delicious flavored coffee drinks.

— kelsey (@drunkhaught) August 27, 2018

People have also expressed exhaustion about the “actually-ing” over what pumpkin spice even is, as if anyone really wants to talk about it.

"pumpkin spice refers to the spices used in pumpkin pie and doesn't actually taste like pumpkins" is the "Frankenstein was the name of the doctor" of this decade

— Kyle 🌱 (@KylePlantEmoji) August 27, 2018

There are even ironic tweets poking fun at the automation of feminist responses to the anti-pumpkin spice brigade:

Women's unabashed enjoyment of a thing has always led to wholesale dismissal of said thing as frivolous and/or bad. From early examples like needlework to more current cases like pumpkin spice and romance novels, we can track this trend throughout history. In this paper I will –

— The Ripped Bodice (@TheRippedBodice) August 27, 2018

Anyway, this is all to say that maybe by now pumpkin spice has finally returned to signifying the autumnal blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves, and nothing more: not basic, not everything wrong with capitalism, and not gross. Because it’s not! It’s delicious.

Update, August 26, 2026, 10 am ET: This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with the 2026 PSL return date.

Less than two months after the Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors — a move that would have allowed him to seize control over the nation’s central bank if it had succeeded — Trump is once again trying to fire the very same member.

Earlier this month, Trump sent a letter to Lisa Cook, a Joe Biden appointee to the Federal Reserve, demanding that she respond to exceedingly flimsy allegations that she committed mortgage fraud. This is the first step in a process that is likely to end in Trump attempting to remove her from the Federal Reserve’s board a second time — which means that the courts will inevitably have to get involved once again.

Cook has until Wednesday to respond to Trump’s allegations.

It’s tempting to blame this bout of déjà vu on Trump, but the Supreme Court is at least as responsible for his actions as the president itself. If the Court didn’t want Trump to thumb its nose at their decision in Trump v. Cook (2026), they should have written that decision clearly enough that lawyers could actually figure out what the president is and is not allowed to do.

This is a perennial issue with the Court’s current majority, which is unusually bad at explaining themselves. They invent bold new doctrines that give them a near-complete veto power over the executive branch, then only apply this doctrine to Democratic presidents. They once handed down an anti-abortion decision that, if taken seriously, would allow any state to nullify literally any constitutional right. Every single one of their Second Amendment decisions are so incoherent that it is impossible for lower court judges to figure out how to apply them.

The Cook decision, which involved Trump’s first attempt to fire Cook, is similarly incomprehensible. It was handed down the same morning as Trump v. Slaughter (2026), which seems to hold that Trump can fire anyone who leads a federal agency. But Cook does not even cite the Slaughter decision, much less explain why the two cases are different.

Slaughter was grounded in the “unitary executive,” a theory shared by all six of the Court’s Republicans which claims that the president must have full control over federal agencies, including the power to fire their leaders — and thus agencies that have some ability to act independently of the president, such as the Federal Reserve, are unconstitutional. Cook suggests that there’s a Federal Reserve exception to this theory, although the opinion does not offer a clear explanation of why this exception exists.

There are very good policy reasons why Trump should not be able to fire Cook, or any other member of the Federal Reserve’s board. The Fed has the power to inject cocaine into the US economy, temporarily giving it a boost at the price of much greater turmoil and higher inflation down the road. If presidents are allowed to fire the Fed’s leaders, they can remove anyone who refuses to give the economy a bump during an election year — boosting the president or his party’s reelection chances, and triggering consequences that won’t be felt until after the election is over.

But the fact that preserving the Fed’s independence from the president is a good idea does not mean that the Constitution permits it. And, in Slaughter and several related cases, the Court’s Republican majority endorsed an interpretation of the Constitution that is completely incompatible with the idea of an independent Federal Reserve.

That means that, until the Court resolves this tension between Slaughter and Cook, there’s likely to be a great deal of confusion about who really controls the Fed — Trump or its current board — and whether Trump may effectively order the Fed to take actions that benefit him, but that could cause lasting harm to the US economy.

The unitary executive, briefly explained

The issue at the heart of Cook was whether the president is able to fire a member of the Federal Reserve.

Federal law provides that the Federal Reserve’s governors may only be fired “for cause,” and not simply because the president does not like them or disagrees with their policy views. The Republican justices have also long argued that Congress is forbidden from limiting the president’s power to fire federal agency leaders, because this would give the president less than full control over the federal government’s executive branch.

These justices point to a line in the Constitution that states that “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” According to the Court’s Republican majority, this means that the president must have full control over any federal agency that wields power that is “executive” in nature, including the power to fire that agency’s leaders for any reason whatsoever. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an influential 1988 dissenting opinion, this constitutional provision “does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power” is held by the president.

There are numerous problems with this unitary executive theory. The biggest one is that, while the Constitution does say that there is something called the “executive power” that belongs to the president, it does not define what this power is, and the Court’s decisions embracing the idea of a unitary executive often rely on dubious historical claims.

But, regardless of whether the unitary executive rests on a sound reading of the Constitution, it is now the law. And Slaughter suggests that this Court’s definition of the term “executive power” is quite expansive. In that case, the Court indicated that any agency leader who “enforces and administers” a federal statute wields “executive” power, and thus must be fireable at will by the president. 

But then, almost immediately after the Court handed down Slaughter, it ruled in Cook that Trump could not fire one of the Fed’s leaders — or, at least, that he could not do so right away. 

The Cook decision is word salad

Under the Republican justices’ definition of which officials wield executive power, and thus must be fireable at will by the president, Cook clearly should qualify. But five justices, the three Democrats plus Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined a majority opinion by Roberts that, at least, temporarily delayed Trump’s ability to fire Cook. Three other justices took the coward’s way out, arguing in dissent that Trump should win on narrow procedural grounds that would have allowed him to fire Cook, but that also might permit a court to reinstate her at some point in the future.

Only Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to fully embrace the unitary executive theory, in Cook, and with it the idea that firing Cook is well within Trump’s power. 

As Thomas wrote in his dissent, the Federal Reserve enforces or administers numerous federal statutes. It can “change the fees on consumer debit-card transactions,” or “impose monetary penalties, levy assessments, and examine private books and records.” Its power to set interest rates flows from federal statutes requiring it to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” 

Thus, if Slaughter is correct that an agency leader who “enforces and administers” a federal statute must be fireable at will by the president, Trump should have the power to fire Cook.

Roberts’s majority opinion doesn’t really make a legal argument. But it does make a couple of  historical and policy claims that point in the direction of allowing an independent Federal Reserve to exist. Roberts begins his opinion with a history of nationally chartered banks, noting that the first such bank “predates even our Constitution “And he alludes to a “‘long tradition’ of ‘monetary policy … exercised independent of … executive influence.’” 

But it’s hard to tell why this tradition matters, at least in a world where every other federal agency is subject to the unitary executive. The Republican justices have previously claimed, for example, that the president must have full control over all federal prosecutions. But historical evidence suggests that, at the founding, prosecutions were often led by private attorneys or by judicial appointees — that is, not by the president or his appointees. So why doesn’t this historical evidence exempt the Justice Department from the unitary executive?

And, if the legal reasoning in Cook is thin, the decision’s actual holding is largely toothless. After laying out his half-baked argument for why the Federal Reserve is unlike any other federal agency, Roberts doesn’t actually write that Trump may not fire Cook. He simply says that “Cook was entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond prior to her termination” — although Roberts also writes that, once Cook has a chance to respond to the allegations against her, “only then can the courts assess the validity and sufficiency of such charges.”

So, by sending a letter to Cook informing her of the allegations against her and giving her a little bit of time to respond, Trump has complied with the Supreme Court’s decision. He will likely then attempt to fire her no matter what she says in response, and then there will be another round of litigation where some poor trial judge will have to “assess the validity and sufficiency” of the allegations against Cook without any guidance from the Supreme Court regarding how strong those allegations must be.

That said, it is likely that when Cook does respond to Trump’s allegations, those allegations will prove quite flimsy indeed. Trump alleges that Cook committed mortgage fraud by claiming two separate properties as her principal residence in bank documents. But Reuters examined those bank documents and discovered that she disclosed to the lender that one of those properties would be used as a vacation home. So it appears that no fraud actually occurred.

Will that be enough for Cook to keep her job? The short answer is “probably” — why would the Supreme Court have handed down such an incoherent opinion in Cook if it intended to apply the unitary executive to her anyway? But the Cook opinion itself offers little guidance to the judges who will need to sort through this mess.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada is back in full force. 

What’s happening? Remember last week, when Trump said that the US and Canada had a trade deal in place? It turns out they do not. After negotiations fell through on Friday, Trump responded with a 50 percent tariff on some $20 billion in Canadian goods, plus threats of higher tariffs on cars, car parts, and steel to come in 2027. 

Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other administration officials are also leaning into ever more inflammatory rhetoric, with Vance taunting Canada on Monday as “a state” that “quite literally would get invaded by a foreign country were it not for the umbrella of protection provided by the United States of America.” 

How is Canada responding? With outrage, as my colleague Caitlin Dewey explains, and with tariffs of their own: On Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that his country would match US tariffs “dollar for dollar,” starting early next month. 

“We cannot accept what the U.S. has offered,” he wrote, “and we will not give what they have asked.”

In addition to trade terms, the US allegedly made requests to weaken Canada’s French-language protections, which Carney said would have infringed on Canadian “sovereignty.”

Why does this matter? Immediately speaking, tariffs make things more expensive at a time when voters are already incensed over prices and the Iran war is making inflation worse; their impact could be especially felt in border states like Maine and Michigan, which also happen to have high-stakes, closely contested Senate races coming up in 72 days. 

On a longer timeline, the Trump administration is doing damage to the US-Canada relationship that goes far deeper than specific tariffs and will be far harder to reverse. Already, in January, Carney delivered a speech charting a plan to move past relying on the US as a global partner; Trump’s latest trade war will only accelerate that rupture.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Violent crime rates in the US are falling across the board, according to new 2025 statistics released by the FBI, including the murder rate, which just hit a 70-year low — tied for the lowest ever recorded. That’s good news in any context, but if you want to learn more, my colleague Bryan Walsh took a crack at explaining how it happened. You can read his article here with a gift link. 

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

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

President Donald Trump is putting the “war” in “trade war.” Or so his senior officials really want you to believe. 

“At dawn begins an economic D-Day,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote Sunday night, previewing the latest round of sanctions against Iran. 

“It’s a country that doesn’t have a military,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, incorrectly, of Canada over the weekend. “To think that they’re going to go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war…is foolish.”

The war with Iran is literal, of course. The war with Canada, slightly less so. But in both cases, the Trump administration is trying to weaponize America’s economic might to get its way in otherwise stalled negotiations. 

Iran and the US have been locked in on-again, off-again talks for almost the entire six months since the US-Israeli strikes began. And last week, trade negotiations between the US and Canada collapsed amid disputes over tariffs on key Canadian industries, as well as US demands that Canada weaken protections for its culture and the French language. Now, both countries are promising steep retaliatory tariffs on goods ranging from cars and steel to anoraks. 

Trump is betting that economic pain will produce the concessions diplomacy hasn’t. But Americans also suffer the fallout from these kinds of tactics. 

Go a little deeper

I am one such American. Hello! Bonjour! I am planning to visit Montreal over Labor Day weekend…and have begun to fear that my New York plates might provoke some patriotic ne’er-do-well to key my car. 

As someone who grew up on the Canadian border, with Canadian friends and Canadian radio stations and Canadian flags on most every pole, the notion that I might be newly unwelcome — or, quelle horreur, despised — in Canada is a new and unpleasant one.

Not to fear, said my colleague Zack Beauchamp. (Zack lives 90 minutes northwest of me in Ontario, and is Vox’s go-to expert on Canadian concerns.) Most Canadians “are actually quite chill toward individual Americans,” he said, and he therefore rates it “unlikely” that anyone will vandalize my vehicle. 

At the same time, Zack said, most Americans fail to realize how dramatically, and perhaps permanently, Canadians have turned on the US as a country. To many of us, the trade war is a tedious or incomprehensible policy dispute. To Canadians, it’s seen as a real threat to their sovereignty. 

Zack shared this example from his own family, which — existential stakes notwithstanding — kind of cracked me up. His wife, who is Canadian, is participating in a popular boycott movement and has “shifted literally everything she purchases” to avoid American products.

That includes buying terrible Canadian-made dishwasher pods whose wrapping doesn’t dissolve in the machine. Or purchasing him a deodorant from the puzzlingly named brand Green Beaver, which is “somewhat worse at repelling smell,” Zack said. 

“Whenever I ask her about why she does these things, she points to those World War II posters about reducing gas use — carpooling so you aren’t riding with Hitler,” Zack said. “Because that is literally how Canadians think about these things: as a war for their survival.”

The rupture is existential for Americans, too, I think — albeit in a different and less urgent way. It has to do with what American identity represents in the world today. 

That’s more abstract than something like the cost of a car (which, by the way, will likely rise dramatically if Trump implements the tariffs he threatened this morning on Truth Social). But the way the world sees America also matters.

One link for later

➨ Hold the eggs. A new study found that raising cage-free hens generates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional egg farming. If you don’t want to choose between animal welfare and climate change…may we suggest switching your eggs out for tofu or beans? (Sorry, sorry! But not every tip in this newsletter can be uplifting.)

Before you go…

• Did you know…that researchers believe young children’s brains don’t record permanent memories because they’re busy prioritizing other patterns and skills? It’s a phenomenon called “infantile amnesia,” and we’re still a long way from fully understanding it. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the traditional, three-letter nickname for students and graduates of Yale? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the insect stage after the larva. That would be the pupa or pupal stage — basically, insect adolescence.