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

I passed five Flock cameras on my drive to work today, entirely without realizing it. The AI-powered license plate readers have metastasized on light poles and roadside posts across the country over the past few years, building a vast national database of vehicle movements that law enforcement agencies can access with few restrictions. 

What are they doing with all that data? Who has access, and for how long? We don’t have clear answers to these questions — and lawmakers on both the right and the left increasingly want them.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans opened an inquiry into Flock’s data “collection, retention, and dissemination” practices — a first step that could eventually lead to federal regulation. State officials have also called for restrictions: The technology is “out of control,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a Wednesday press conference. 

It is one of maybe three times, I would hazard, that DeSantis and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have agreed on anything. Earlier this month, the independent senator also warned that Flock knows when you’re going to the doctor or dropping your kid off at school, among other things. 

For many Americans, his warning was no exaggeration: There are now 120,000 Flock cameras on US roads. You can use the crowdsourced map DeFlock to check your area.

Go a little deeper

As the existence of a crowdsourced anti-Flock map might attest…people really do not like these cameras. In Tennessee this month, one conservative county commissioner went so far as to call for the hanging of Flock’s CEO. Even data centers rarely attract that level of vitriol.

But as with data centers, both sides can find something to hate here, the longtime tech reporter Jason Koebler recently told Vox. On the right, critics typically attack the cameras as government overreach: “‘This is invasive government. This is Big Brother. Don’t surveil me,’” Koebler paraphrased. 

On the left, critics frequently link the cameras to corporate surveillance, racist policing, the erosion of abortion rights, and immigration enforcement: “This protest is about more than license plate readers,” one progressive activist recently put it. “It’s about…mass surveillance as a tool for fascism and political persecution.”

The issue has surfaced in midterm races in states including Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, where some candidates have sought to link their opponents — fairly or unfairly — to Flock. In Michigan, for instance, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed released a campaign video last week that suggested voters could “thank” his opponent for the proliferation of the cameras. That video includes footage from a hearing Rogers chaired in 2013, before Flock was even founded; Rogers has not publicly responded.

Political responsibility for the cameras is complicated, of course: Flock typically inks its contracts with cities, counties, and local police departments, which state and national lawmakers don’t approve. 

But they could certainly limit the use of automated plate readers in other ways, like requiring warrants for accessing data, limiting how long information is saved, and banning the cameras near schools, churches, abortion clinics, and other sensitive places. 

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➨ Put your phone away. Clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are increasingly hosting “phone-free” gatherings — an attempt to break free from the distraction and surveillance of our screens. These things are popping up everywhere, so chances are you can find one somewhere near you. But if not, it’s pretty easy to throw your own phone-free game night or book club, too. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that women experiencing cardiac arrest are 14 percent less likely than men to receive CPR? Bystanders are apparently less comfortable performing the procedure on people with breasts, which has prompted calls for better-endowed CPR training manikins.
• Today’s trivia: What city serves as the headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the stage name of the singer Paul David Hewson. That would be Bono, which is short for “Bono Vox” — a childhood nickname inspired by a Dublin hearing-aid shop. 

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

You’ve probably read a lot about Dolly Parton over the last 24 hours: her songwriting genius, her generosity, her incredible hair. The country icon and philanthropist died Tuesday at age 80 after having cancer. Her hits have been playing in my head ever since.

Parton’s influence extended far beyond her music, though. She was also a singular, centripetal force in American culture — a rare, unifying icon beloved on both the right and the left. 

Her ability to project radical kindness without sounding naïve, and to address moral questions without looking partisan, inspired near-universal adoration at a time when Americans can agree on virtually nothing and no one else. And her strategic ambiguity around both her personal life and her political views allowed everyone from Christian conservatives to New York City gays to claim her as their personal representative. 

Parton was, as Constance Grady wrote for Vox in 2021, “a secular American saint.” Now it’s hard to think of any living American who might be said to merit that praise. José Andrés? LeVar Burton? Tom Hanks, perhaps…? But they lack the glitter, the candor, the theme park — and the six decades of iconic music.

Go a little deeper

Core to Parton’s cultural canonization was her incredible generosity, which — on the wide spectrum of celebrity philanthropic giving — was both unusually down-to-earth and apparently, charmingly spontaneous. 

“I just give from my heart,” Parton said in her 2022 acceptance speech for the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. “I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m gonna do it. I just see a need and if I can fill it, then I will.”

The needs she saw were many and varied: children’s books. High school band uniforms. Bald eagle conservation. Research into the novel coronavirus, which eventually yielded Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine — a vaccine that Parton then vocally and memorably promoted.  

I asked my colleague Sara Herschander, who has written a lot about philanthropy — including Parton’s! — to characterize how the later icon’s philosophy of giving jibes with norms in the space. As in so much of her life, Parton stands out.

“I think when many celebrities engage in giving, it can feel like a publicity stunt, or like someone swooping in,” Herschander said. “But the way Parton let her childhood and personal connections guide her giving gave hers a unique character and a sense of authenticity and optimism — even as it was also, in many cases, quite effective and ambitious.”

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➨ Play your heart out. Playful adults are less stressed out and more satisfied with their lives than their dour, self-serious neighbors. And yet, society tends to encourage playfulness almost exclusively among children. To tap into that state of levity and curiosity as an adult, experts suggest reflecting on the last time when you laughed so hard you cried, or when you truly lost yourself having fun. Then try dipping into that activity again, without any standards or expectations. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that almost half of US adults don’t drink alcohol? The current US drinking rate — just 54 percent — is the lowest it’s been since pollsters started tracking it after Prohibition. 
• Today’s trivia: Singer Paul David Hewson is better known as what? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for Minnesota’s state bird. That would be the loon, recently immortalized as a symbol of the state’s anti-ICE resistance. 

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

Football season kicks off soon, and there’s an elephant on the field. Not the University of Alabama’s pachydermal mascot, alas — but a new study on the incidence of brain injury in football players.

The startling paper, published this morning in the journal BMJ, examined the brains of 235 of the 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. It found that at least one in four of those players — and, in all likelihood, many more than that — had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at their time of death.

CTE is an ugly disease. It’s a progressive, degenerative brain disorder caused by repeated blows to the head. It can be debilitating in its advanced stages, with symptoms including memory loss, confusion, depression, erratic behavior, and personality changes.

Researchers have long linked CTE to the recurrent head trauma common in football and other contact sports. But this study offers one of the clearest estimates yet of just how widespreadthe disease is. It’s not a freak occurrence confined to an unlucky few — it’s a significant occupational hazard, akin to black lung disease in coal miners. 

Go a little deeper

Federal regulators have intervened to protect coal miners and other people in hazardous jobs, of course — but they’ve stayed on the sidelines when it comes to sports. Football is an American institution, after all. And regulators have few obvious ways to make the game safer.

Last year, the Trump administration also advanced a claim that, in my mind, gets straight to the heart of the moral dilemma of being a football fan. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed formally excluding from standards enforcement hazards that are “inherent and inseparable from the core nature of a professional activity.” (That proposal has not been finalized yet.)

Is danger inherent to the “core nature” of football? And, if it is, how do fans reconcile their love of the sport with the substantial harm that it inflicts? 

“Part of what makes football interesting is that it refuses to resolve itself morally,” the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman told Vox earlier this year. “It doesn’t let you land comfortably on one side or the other.”

Klosterman, who recently published a book about football, is one of these people who believes that danger is inherent to the sport: Remove it, he said, and the stakes diminish — the whole game gets less meaningful. 

At the same time, football arguably does a lot of good, too: It creates shared rituals and civic pride; it gives millions of people a sense of belonging in an otherwise atomized world. 

So where does that leave fans? Somewhere uncomfortable, I suppose. But we can draw a couple practical conclusions: Kids should not play tackle football. And both the NFL and college football programs should keep working to improve helmets and cut down on contact, especially in practices. 

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➨ Treat yourself to a PSL. Yep: It’s (somehow, already) that time again. Since Starbucks debuted the divisive seasonal beverage in 2003, it’s become “a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of ‘basic.’”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that humans’ closest invertebrate relative is the lowly sea squirt? As one biologist put it to Vox: “They just decided to take a different route on evolution.”
• Today’s trivia: What is the state bird of Minnesota, recently embraced by anti-ICE protesters as a popular symbol of their movement? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the traditional, three-letter nickname for students and graduates of Yale. That would be “Eli,” as in “Elihu Yale” — the wealthy 18th-century merchant whose donations helped found the school. 

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.

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➨ 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. 

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

Do the words “data center” make you want to drop everything and call your congressional representative? You’re not alone, if we judge the nation’s mood by the actions of politicians who poll-test what they eat for breakfast (and there are worse ways). 

This looks like the week that the data center backlash broke containment and became the defining issue of this political moment. 

In the Texas governor’s race, Democrat Gina Hinojosa went up with an ad against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott over data centers with the punchline: “Greg Abbott is selling you out.” In a critical toss-up House race, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) launched an attack against her Republican challenger over his support for data centers. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a likely contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination who had previously touted data center investments, signed an executive order to limit their construction. He also bashed his opponent on data centers in a new campaign ad — a response to the Republican attacking him over those same facilities.

In my home state of Ohio, national Republicans are so worried about data centers damaging Sen. Jon Husted’s reelection chances that they sent a memo this week to top AI companies to warn that they could lose the seat because of the issue. And Mike Rogers, the Republican trying to win the Michigan Senate race for the GOP, went so far as to endorse a moratorium on data center building.

Go a little deeper

In one image, this is why politicians are screaming at anyone who will listen that they loathe these data centers just as much as you do and want to stop Big Tech from building any more. It is a stunning turnaround: The percentage of Americans who “strongly oppose” a data center being constructed in their area has more than doubled in a single year.

As Molly Taft documented in a recent feature story for Wired, the relationship between the ubiquitous data-center backlash and the fears about AI is becoming hard to ignore: Most people still say they oppose data centers even when they don’t live anywhere near one, and most people opposed to data centers are also more likely to be skeptical of AI. And those sentiments are clearly bipartisan, which is why you have a Democrat and a Republican in the Michigan Senate race striking the same tone on data centers.

The merits of both sides in the data-center debate are probably more nuanced than the political slogans popping up around it. But this phenomenon is clearly about something bigger than the brick-and-mortar buildings that have become these political boogeymen. As Marina Bolotnikova put it in a story for Vox earlier this summer: Americans don’t know how to fight AI. So they’re fighting data centers instead.

And now the politicians are following their lead.

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➨ Print your photos like it’s the 1990s. When everybody carries a camera in their pocket and snaps candids as casually as taking a sip of water, it’s easy to become jaded about all those pictures. Don’t be. The best way to appreciate them, Adam Clark-Estes argues in his latest piece on living in our tech-dominated world, is to print those images out like you did a few decades ago. Cherish your memories by holding them in your hands.

Before you go…

• Did you know…Cuba has more than twice as many doctors per capita as the United States? But that hasn’t stopped the island nation’s healthcare system from deteriorating to the point of crisis, as Ananya Rupanagunta writes for Vox.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the insect stage after larva? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Survivor contestant who holds the franchise’s record for most appearances. That would be Cirie Fields, who appeared on six seasons between 2006 and 2026.

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

America’s national debt cleared $40 trillion for the first time ever on Wednesday, a number so comically large as to feel imaginary. Seriously — look at it in all of its comma-strewn glory: $40,203,821,194,241. And because the US racks up tens of thousands of dollars of new debt every second, that number was outdated even as I typed it.

On some level, the steady ballooning of the national debt is basic math, familiar to anyone with a budget of their own. The government’s expenses — particularly the costs of Social Security and Medicare — are growing, while successive rounds of tax cuts have reduced the revenue available to cover them. As the government accumulates more debt, it also has to spend more just to cover the interest. 

But national debt also functions very differently from household debt, because a government is very different from an individual or family. For one thing, it doesn’t have a set lifespan or retirement age, which means it can roll its debt over indefinitely. For another, government borrowing can boost the economy’s productivity in the future, which changes some trade-offs. Rising national debt isn’t a big deal if the economy is growing alongside it.

That isn’t the case right now, though…and it hasn’t been for a couple of years. America’s debt is outpacing its economic growth, with increasingly tangible consequences for your personal finances.

How the national debt makes your life more expensive

The mechanisms here are a little wonky, but — in short — when the federal government borrows more money, it tends to push up borrowing costs for businesses and consumers. Government deficit spending can increase competition for loans — because the government is now borrowing more in addition to individuals and businesses — as well as prompt investors to demand higher rates on long-term loans and contribute to inflation, which can lead the Fed to nudge rates higher. 

As a result, mortgages, car loans, credit cards, and business loans all become more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the increase in federal debt over the past decade has added roughly $2,500 a year to the cost of a mortgage on a typical home. 

That’s not a trivial amount of money. And over the life of a 30-year loan, it adds up to roughly $76,000, which — if HGTV does not deceive me — is enough for a down payment on a modest lakefront home.

Unfortunately, the solutions for slowing the growth of the national debt are not terribly popular. You could hike taxes, for instance. Or you could overhaul Social Security, which runs $1.38 trillion a year. But few politicians have historically had the stomach for the combination of spending cuts and tax increases that righting this ship requires.

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➨ Put a price tag on your memories. (Or maybe…don’t?) In the era of super-pricey concert tickets, some fans are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to see live shows. Vox spoke to one man who’s spent $15,000 on Beyoncé tickets alone. “My mom’s big motto in life was, ‘We’re making memories,’” he said, by way of explanation. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that, as late as 2007, American cellphone users still placed more calls each year than they sent text messages?
• Today’s trivia: Which competitor from the reality TV show Survivor holds the record for most appearances in the long-running franchise — though she’s never actually won? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for Jackie Robinson and Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s shared alma mater. Both trailblazing athletes attended UCLA, albeit 40 years apart. 

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

Name a disgraced former Congress member, not originally from Florida, whose time in office was marred by shady financial dealings and who ran in yesterday’s GOP primary for Florida’s 19th District. 

…This is, amazingly, a trick question. Because TWO candidates who fit that bill ran in FL-19, and neither of them won. (They were Madison Cawthorn and Chris Collins.)

Florida is — how do I put this? — one hell of a drug. And its primary results were no less surprising or chaotic. On the Democratic side, a socialist candidate for Senate came out of (literal) left field to topple an opponent who out-fundraised her 16 to 1. Meanwhile, progressive challengers lost decisively in two other races.

On the Republican side, President Donald Trump’s picks won most of their contests, including the race to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis. But two endorsed candidates also lost in surprising upsets. Republicans ousted Rep. Cory Mills, for instance, who has been accused of assaulting one woman he dated and threatening another. And Trump’s pick in FL-19, Catalina Lauf, fell not to Cawthorn or Collins, but to the founder of a conservative talk-radio station. Florida!!! 

Go a little deeper

This all makes for a pretty muddled cup of tea leaves. So rather than generalize about Florida’s results, let’s zoom in on one primary race you might not have followed.

That race — the Republican primary in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District — pitted an open Islamophobe (Rep. Randy Fine, who won) against an avowed antisemite (the manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian). 

Both men are shocking in their bigotry, even for a party that has inured itself to shock. Bilzerian, a self-described sex addict and former professional poker player, has fantasized about “exterminating Israel” and “revisiting” the ideologies that precipitated the Holocaust. Fine, meanwhile, has repeatedly compared Muslims to dogs and said that Israel should let Gazans starve. 

How did men with such repugnant views emerge as this race’s top finishers? The first reason is dark, but fairly obvious: a significant share of Republicans hold Islamophobic or antisemitic opinions.

The second reason is maybe more interesting: Republicans increasingly treat any perceived limit on speech as an intolerable form of censorship. That new norm has made it less likely that party leaders will condemn hateful views, since the appearance of policing speech is often considered just as bad as bigotry or extremism. As a pair of conservative writers warned in the New York Times last week, this reflex has created “a subculture of racism, sexism and antisemitism” in the GOP. 

Some on the left hold hateful views too, of course. But Democrats don’t have those same norms against policing speech. 

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➨ Stop trying to “sell” yourself to new people. That’s advice from my colleague Allie Volpe’s evidence-backed guide to optimizing your online dating profile, but I’d argue it applies to most social interactions. Other all-purpose gems from Allie: be selective with how much you share about yourself and convey your willingness to get to know other people. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the length of the average middle-grade book ballooned from 175 pages in 2006 to 290 pages a decade later? It’s one of the unexpected reasons that kids aren’t reading as much as they used to. 
• Today’s trivia: Jackie Robinson and Jackie Joyner-Kersee attended the same college. What college was that? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you which Dutch astronomer theorized “a cloud that constantly creates comets.” (Say that three times fast!) That would be Jan Oort, namesake of the Oort Cloud — an immensely distant band of billions of icy objects that are thought to surround our solar system. 

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

As someone with a 401(k), I tend to prefer it when financial news doesn’t reference the 2008 financial crisis. Unfortunately, that was not to be on Tuesday: the US bond market is having a tough go of things right now, and the 30-year Treasury yield just hit a 19-year high last reached in June 2007. Other countries, including Japan, Germany, and France, also hit multi-year highs.

So what does that all mean? It sounds technical, but bond yields underlie the cost of borrowing for just about anything, from mortgages to car loans. Essentially, they’re the rate the government pays to borrow money on different time horizons (10-year Treasury notes or 30-year bonds, for example, often just called Treasuries). When investors sell government bonds, the price falls, and bond yields go up. A combination of weak demand and heavy supply right now means the problem is particularly acute.

The current shakiness in bond markets reflects the broader set of problems facing the US and global economies right now: The Iran war is dragging on with no end in sight after the US and Iran blew through a 60-day deadline to reach a more permanent peace deal yesterday, inflation is still a problem, and the national debt in the US and elsewhere is rising. Huge volumes of corporate borrowing for AI data centers in the US also play a role.

A deepening debt problem

Here’s an uncomfortable problem: Part of the reason for climbing US bond yields is investors feeling antsy about the national debt. But the higher those yields go, the more it costs the government to service that debt, and the more quickly it’s going to accrue. And the US has a milestone approaching: $40 trillion. 

It’s expected to reach that mark sometime this week, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, months sooner than expected. Shortly after that — sometime early in 2027 — the US could once again be staring down the debt ceiling, which Congress will have to raise (it previously acted last year to raise it by $5 trillion, to $41.1 trillion total). 

Whenever that rolls around, it’s likely to be a major political fight, especially if Democrats win back one or both chambers of Congress this fall (unless Republicans do so this fall, as Trump has urged). 

But as my former colleague Dylan Matthews wrote in 2024 (when the national debt was merely $35 trillion or so), there are very good reasons to address the growing national debt beyond the political: Not only can it weigh on the overall economy over time, but if things get really serious, it can also spiral into a debt crisis. It’s never happened in the US before, which has some things going for it that make such a crisis far less likely than in other countries. As Dylan pointed out some $5 trillion ago, though, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

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➨ Environmental law at risk. Trump is asking the Supreme Court to clear the way for construction to continue on his East Wing ballroom/“Military Complex,” which has been blocked by lower courts. But the case goes much further than that: As my colleague Ian Millhiser explains, if justices rule in Trump’s favor, “numerous environmental, conservationist, and historical preservation laws could effectively cease to function.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that most pet hamsters are Syrian hamsters, native to the northern part of the country? It’s just one of many great details in this nuanced piece from my colleague Kenny Torrella, about the complicated story of Mollie, the hamster uploading his runs to Strava.
• Today’s trivia: Which Dutch astronomer theorized a cloud that constantly creates comets? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you for the title of Iran’s ruler before the 1979 revolution. That was the shah; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the last to hold the title.

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

Hi readers, it’s me again! Caitlin will be back on Wednesday. Now, for today’s news: President Donald Trump, South Korea, and the state of the US’s military alliances.

Remember Trump’s first-term “love letters” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un? Trump was so fond of them that he took them with him when he left the presidency in 2021 (the National Archives did not approve). Now, it seems like the two leaders are taking up where they left off.

Over the weekend, Trump announced in a social media post that he would “substantially reduce” scheduled joint military exercises between the US and South Korea, which get underway today. The reason? His “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” 

But there may have been another reason. Trump also wrote that “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!””

The US-South Korea exercises “are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!),” Trump wrote, “but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

That last part — “unthreatening and respectful” — is not exactly true; in 2017, Kim called Trump “a mentally deranged US dotard” whom North Korea would “tame…with fire.” But in the present day, Trump’s announcement is a boon to the North Korean leader, who has denounced the military exercises. 

It’s also just the latest incident in the historically close US-South Korea relationship (the two countries have held military exercises annually for more than 70 years). Earlier this year, Trump lashed out with new tariffs, accusing South Korea of “not living up to its Deal,” referring to a 2025 agreement on trade and security between the two countries that South Korea’s legislature had not yet approved.

Go a little deeper

The US has more permanent troops in South Korea than it does almost anywhere else in the world, behind only its deployments in Japan and Germany. Under Trump, though, those once-durable commitments have started to look a lot shakier.

Europe — and Germany in particular — has borne the brunt of Trump’s second-term harassment: In May, Trump announced his intent to remove 5,000 US troops from Germany and threatened to go “a lot further”; the Pentagon has said that withdrawal will take place within 12 months. The US currently has more than 38,000 troops stationed in Germany.

Trump has made similar threats about US troops stationed in Italy and Spain, and even suggested removing all US troops from Europe.

Most of these threats have been triggered by Trump’s unhappiness with European defense spending, which he’s eternally trying to boost. 

But in his second term, the threats have grown much more tightly tied to Trump’s personal ambitions and grievances. Trump’s Germany announcement followed a clash with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the US war with Iran, which Trump has tried — unsuccessfully — to drag US allies into. Spain, in particular, has also drawn Trump’s ire for vocally opposing the war. 

Last month, he also tied the US troop presence in Europe to his insistence that the US be allowed to take over Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, a US ally and founding NATO member.

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➨ A low-tech way to save coral reefs. My colleague Benji Jones visited the island nation of Palau, in the western Pacific Ocean, to learn about a new approach to reef restoration. Scientists there are testing species of coral specifically for heat resistance to find better options for replanting reefs — all using some plastic picnic coolers and a bit of hot water. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the Chilean Andes has the largest digital camera ever made? It captured its “first light” last year in staggering high-definition. 
• Today’s trivia: What was the title of Iran’s ruler until 1979? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Friday’s trivia: On Friday, we asked you which US president responded to inflation by ordering wage and price freezes. That was President Richard Nixon.

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

The 2026 wildfire season on the West Coast is shaping up to be an especially bad one: In Oregon, more than 2 million acres have already burned, breaking a record set just a few years ago, in 2024. In neighboring Washington state, suburbs around the city of Spokane recently burned in an increasingly common example of fires reaching urban and suburban areas (as my colleague Caitlin Dewey covered recently). And the consequences are spreading far beyond where the fires are burning, with hazardous smoke from the Pacific Northwest drifting as far away as New England. 

Much of this is a story about climate change, as increasingly dry, hot summers provide ample fuel for fires. But the crisis is also being made worse by the Trump administration: Staff cuts to the US Forest Service have left the agency stretched thin and unable to respond as effectively to fires, while a planned reorganization is also set to shutter Forest Service labs researching and tracking wildfires. EPA research into wildfires and wildfire smoke has also been slashed. 

All of this — plus a Trump administration shift away from letting some fires burn themselves out, which has further increased the workload on wildland firefighters — has also resulted in a more dangerous fire season for firefighters; Reuters reported this week that firefighters are “being overrun by wildfires at the highest rate in two decades” — with months still to go until the end of the season.

Go a little deeper

As if the above weren’t enough to worry about, lawmakers are also raising a brand-new fire season concern: prediction markets. Specifically, the possibility that bettors could turn to arson in order to manipulate prediction markets — and earn themselves some money. 

Polymarket, on its international platform, has offered users the chance to bet on everything from when and where a fire might spread to when it could be contained or extinguished, which resulted in more than $1 million in bets on major fires in California last year. High Country News reported in June that a new prediction market, called Wyldfyre, had launched specifically for betting on wildfires.

Legislators like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have pointed out that, unlike most other natural disasters, fires are easily started or spread by humans, creating a real risk that people could attempt to manipulate markets. 

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” Merkley and eight other Democratic senators wrote in a letter to the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful. By offering contracts on fires, prediction market sites run the risk of encouraging people to influence fires that have already started, creating additional concerns around public safety and insider trading.

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➨ Build (your attention span) back better. Beset as we are by short-form video and tweets, it can often feel like our attention spans are slipping unavoidably away. The good news, it turns out, is that decline doesn’t have to be permanent — there are ways to rebuild attention, including by simply letting your brain rest more.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that feral pigs are a serious problem for parts of rural America? After a tweet about “30 to 50 feral hogs” went viral in August 2019, my former colleague Dylan Matthews embarked on a serious consideration of how the pigs impact the US — and how we impact them in turn. It’s still one of my favorite articles on the Vox site. 
• Today’s trivia: Which US president responded to inflation by ordering wage and price freezes? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you for the first woman to perform hip-hop at the White House. That was MC Lyte, who performed at the Obama White House in 2014.

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

Karoline Leavitt, the 28-year-old firebrand who became the nation’s youngest-ever press secretary in 2024, is stepping down to “spend more time with her beautiful young children.”

President Donald Trump announced the news on Wednesday night in a Truth Social post, adding that Leavitt would remain an adviser and “an influential voice within the Republican Party.”

It feels fitting that Leavitt — whose public persona required her to perform both her job and her role as a wife and mom — is stepping down to parent. In MAGA’s conception of womanhood, there can be no higher calling. Not even serving the president. 

For more than two years, however, Leavitt made a show of trying to do both. She returned to work on Trump’s reelection campaign only days after the birth of her first child and regularly shared photos of herself working while holding her son. 

Leavitt also welcomed a daughter over the spring, amid what Fox News dubbed a White House “baby boom.” Officials and conservative media quickly turned the new mothers into advertisements for the pro-natalist movement: Proof that women could, and should, have both careers and children. 

Leavitt is still being held up that way, even — perhaps especially — as she departs. “She’s been a role model to millions and millions of young women,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News on Wednesday. “A mother, a family woman, a press secretary, a patriot.”

MAGA’s rules for women

The MAGA movement tends to glorify traditional female roles — wife, mother, homemaker — while simultaneously (and confusingly) elevating ambitious, career-driven women like Leavitt. 

At first glance, her prominence — and that of other women in Trump’s administration — would seem to rebut the charge that the movement is misogynist. In fact, that’s a line of defense that Trump himself has advanced. 

But look a little closer, and you’ll see the structural contradiction at the heart of MAGA femininity: Female power is only legitimate when it’s exercised on behalf of Trump, and by women who conform to traditional expectations around gender, marriage, motherhood, and physical appearance.

To Trump, a female White House correspondent was a “piggy,” for instance. But a female press secretary who defended the slur was “knocking them dead.” 

A female employee at a Trump golf course was asked to sign an NDA after reporting harassment. But the female attorney who allegedly pressured her to sign it was, according to Trump, “a rocket ship.”

A female politician rose to prominence championing the president’s deportation agenda. But to get there, she had to find her “Mar-a-Lago face” — and she was ousted after showing signs of personal ambition. (In fairness, she was also very bad at her job.) 

It’s a very tricky little tightrope to walk. And lately, that strain has begun to show. While Trump began his second term with an unusually high number of female Cabinet members for a Republican president, women now hold only four of 23 Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions. 

Trump’s support is also down among young women. In Congress, a bloc of prominent conservative female lawmakers recently broke from their party to censure Republicans accused of misconduct. Now, the MAGA movement is losing one of its fiercest female proxies in Leavitt. 

Even at the height of her powers, however, Leavitt never really got her due. The luxurious office traditionally reserved for the White House press secretary instead went to another White House staffer. A dude.

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➨ Meet the latest and greatest exercise cult. It’s called HYROX — yes, in all caps — and it’s an eight-round agility and strength competition. Participants spend thousands of dollars on training, registration, and travel for these events, which tend to “subsume your entire existence.” That’s a very hard no for me, personally…but a lot of very fit and competitive people are apparently into it. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the US attempted to assassinate longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by poisoning his ice cream? And that’s somehow not even the weirdest or most far-fetched Castro assassination scheme. 
• Today’s trivia: Who was the first woman to perform hip hop at the White House? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the German philosopher who wrote Critique of Practical Reason. That would be Immanuel Kant, whose work also arguably inspired one of the core conflicts in the Avengers films.

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

Wisconsin won’t be the very first state to get a socialist governor, after all. In Tuesday’s gubernatorial primary, Democrats there narrowly selected David Crowley, a moderate county executive, over the democratic socialist and reformed Thanksgiving-hater Francesca Hong. 

This contest was widely seen as a test of the progressive movement’s strength beyond deep-blue cities…and a bit of a mess. Two candidates dropped out amid scandal just weeks before the election. Crowley himself suspended his campaign and endorsed another candidate, only to reenter the race with less than a month left. That teed up a chaotic, last-minute showdown between establishment Democrats and the party’s upstart left-wing contingent.

That contingent was expected to win in Wisconsin, where Hong campaigned on practical issues like universal childcare, free school meals, and opposition to new data centers. But she also struggled to explain controversial positions that she staked out at the height of the pandemic — positions that both pro-Crowley groups and Republicans pilloried in well-funded attack ads. 

The furor certainly riled up Wisconsin Democrats: They turned out in huge numbers on Tuesday. And while Hong performed well in Madison and other liberal strongholds, voters in both Milwaukee and most rural counties went for Crowley. 

Go a little deeper

The Wisconsin primary was weird and messy, so I wouldn’t generalize its results too much. But there’s little doubt that Hong suffered from her association with “Woke 1” — a strain of early-2020s social justice activism that many on the left now want to disavow.

You’d probably recognize Woke 1, even if you haven’t heard the term. More than a movement or a policy agenda, it was a strident, binary way of talking about race, class, and social justice that peaked after the racial reckoning of 2020…and that ultimately alienated many centrist and working-class voters, including some in minority communities. 

“Defunding the police” = classic Woke 1. So are calls to abolish police or prisons — or, as Hong proposed in one infamous 2020 tweet, to cancel Thanksgiving.

Many Democratic voters agreed with the impulses behind these slogans — police and prisons need reform; colonialism bad — but felt alienated by the rhetoric around them. And even in Woke 1’s heyday, issues like immigration and racial justice mattered less to most Americans than things like healthcare and inflation. 

As left-wing candidates attempt to build new and broader coalitions, many seem to have gotten that message. Politicians like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed have both walked back comments about defunding the police, for instance. 

Instead, they’ve centered issues like affordability and healthcare and begun openly discussing how their positions changed. “There was a huge opening of the Overton window” during the pandemic, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday. “Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

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➨ Spend more intentionally. Frugality was all the rage in the wake of the Great Recession, when a generation of popular, thrift-focused bloggers taught Americans to do more with less. Pop culture has since turned on frugality, as a value — in part because people feel so pessimistic about their long-term economic prospects — but it’s still worth mining the old-school frugalsphere for relevant lessons. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that since 1980, the number of fires in the US has fallen by more than half? Thank more effective smoke alarms, automatic sprinklers, and fire-resistant furniture and finishes. 
• Today’s trivia: Which German philosopher wrote Critique of Practical Reason? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the country whose capital is Vientiane. That would be Laos, which — together with China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam — has one of the world’s only one-party communist governments. 

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

It’s not exactly the stuff of Netflix spy thrillers, but…it’s also not every day that the president makes a covert getaway in a catering truck. 

White House officials revealed on Monday that, before a flight from Turkey to the United Kingdom last month, President Donald Trump used the truck to secretly move between planes, then switched aircraft again after landing in Britain. 

The ruse deceived both Trump’s press corps and many of his staff, who weren’t warned of the last-minute plan in advance. But the deception was undertaken, officials said, in response to an assassination threat from Iran. 

Such plots are one tool weaker powers can wield in asymmetric warfare, or conflict between unevenly matched opponents. Iran can’t strike the US homeland with conventional military force the way the US can strike Iran.

As the catering truck caper attests, however, that doesn’t put Americans entirely beyond Tehran’s grasp. Instead, Iran is finding other, less conventional ways to inflict damage on US turf — from assassination plots to cyberattacks. 

We might need a bigger catering truck to escape all of that. 

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply.” 

— Joshua Corman, founder of I Am the Cavalry, a digital security nonprofit

Iran doesn’t appear able to launch the kind of major cyberattacks that would seriously disrupt Americans’ daily lives en masse. But over the past five months, attacks linked to Iran and pro-Iranian groups have targeted US medical device makers, social networks, public transit agencies, and — most recently, and perhaps most alarmingly — small-town utilities.

Unknown hackers compromised the water and wastewater systems of municipalities in at least 12 states last month, prompting water shut-offs, flooding and boil-water notices in a handful of locations. Cybersecurity experts think Iran is most likely behind the breaches. And American water systems — which are overwhelmingly run by small, local agencies — are especially vulnerable to this type of attack. They have little in the way of IT support, and relatively few state or federal laws require them to take cybersecurity precautions. 

It isn’t just utilities at risk, either. Over the past 10 years, Iranian hackers have also breached US targets ranging from satellite companies to political campaigns. And if the war continues to stretch on, some analysts believe the country’s hacks could grow more aggressive. 

The Trump administration hasn’t shown any great desire to address this risk, alas. Just a few months ago, it proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — the people responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyber threats. 

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➨ Ignorance can truly be bliss. Many of us feel the very modern compulsion to suck up all the information we can: about the news, about our bodies, about random subjects we encounter on the internet. But that deluge of daily data can overwhelm both your mental bandwidth and your mental health. Try letting go of some of these low-stakes tidbits so you can focus on subjects that most deserve your attention. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that pigs are smart enough to use tools without human prompting? 
• Today’s trivia: Vientiane is the capital of which Southeast Asian country? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for Dorothy’s last name in The Wizard of Oz. That would be Gale. Author L. Frank Baum is believed to have borrowed the name from either the victim of an 1879 tornado or his late infant niece, who died in 1898 at just over five months old.

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 may have to settle for the hand-me-down Nobel Prize medal that he scored several months ago. Despite their best efforts, his envoys don’t seem to be having much luck advancing a peace deal in Gaza. 

Over the weekend — just days after Trump announced a “HISTORIC” agreement to gradually disarm Hamas and stand down Israeli troops — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the framework. 

The plan, brokered by Trump’s Board of Peace, would have seen both sides ramp down in tandem. But that’s apparently a nonstarter for Netanyahu, who said Hamas must disarm before Israeli troops withdraw. Israel still controls about 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, according to NPR — and has continued launching attacks in the territory, even after an October ceasefire.

What happens if the US cuts off aid to Israel?

It’s the latest setback in what has been a long and ugly conflict — a conflict that has turned many Americans against their longtime ally, Israel. Against that backdrop, some Democratic lawmakers and pro-Palestinian activists are advancing a once-fringe policy in the hopes of forcing Israel to end the war in Gaza and change its course in the occupied West Bank: cutting off military aid to Israel. 

It’s an intuitive approach to behavior modification, familiar to any parent who has denied a child a desired toy or treat: withhold something they want until they behave. But Israel, in this admittedly imperfect metaphor, is not a toddler. It’s a full-grown adult with a $600 billion economy and a mind of its own…and it can absolutely buy its own drones and missile-defense systems.

Here’s a statistic that really drove that point home for me: In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on its military, plus US aid. To sustain that level of military investment without US support, Israel would need to allocate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. Not exactly a massive change. 

There are other valid arguments for the US to end Israeli aid, of course. (Among the most common: to avoid complicity in war crimes and possible genocide in the Gaza Strip.) But if US lawmakers hope to force Israel’s hand, on the two-state solution or anything else, then cutting military aid probably won’t provide enough leverage. 

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➨ About that organic chicken…many consumers shell out twice as much for organic poultry because they believe it was raised humanely. But while an organic certification does, on paper, require more space, fresh air and outdoor access for chickens, farms that supply Costco and other major retailers have been accused of serious animal welfare violations. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that migratory birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate? But scientists still don’t know which body part the birds use to do that sensing.
• Today’s trivia: What is Dorothy’s last name in The Wizard of Oz? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: On Thursday, we asked you for the fourth-largest Great Lake. That would be Lake Erie, which ranks as the 11th largest lake globally. 

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

The Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this week — a major public health breakthrough for an administration that’s been troublingly down on vaccines. 

The flu is a gigantic and costly illness, causing 1 billion infections and 300,000 deaths each year. But this new shot, built on advances from the Covid-19 pandemic, is expected to outperform the standard flu vaccine that we’ve used, largely unchanged, for the past 80 years.

The new shot fixes a problem that has long bedeviled the traditional vaccine: the gap between how quickly the flu virus mutates and how slowly vaccines are produced. The flu is changing constantly. But under current methods, manufacturing a flu vaccine — which, to my enormous fascination, most commonly involves secret chicken farms — takes six to eight months. 

That long lag often means the virus circulating during flu season isn’t the one the vaccine was designed to target. But the new mRNA vaccine works differently: Instead of using a weakened or dead virus to trigger an immune response, mRNA vaccines contain genetic instructions that train the immune system to fight influenza. 

mRNA vaccines also take less time to manufacture, so they can be produced closer to flu season. In a clinical trial, older adults who received Moderna’s mRNA vaccine were 27 percent less likely to get the flu than those who received the standard vaccine.

Heads up: Vox’s offices are closed tomorrow, so Today, Explained is taking a day off. We’ll be back in your inbox on Monday.

A world without flu?

Public health experts are justifiably hyped about mRNA technology. In addition to this new flu shot, researchers are developing mRNA vaccines against diseases including malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV.

But when it comes to influenza, mRNA isn’t the endgame. The real white whale is a “universal flu vaccine” — a shot that’s at least 75 percent effective against influenza A, the most dangerous type of flu virus, and lasts at least a year.

The challenge, again, is that the virus keeps mutating. Flu vaccines, whether mRNA or conventional, teach the immune system to recognize a viral protein called hemagglutinin and then fight off the virus. 

But hemagglutinin is a part of the flu virus that mutates often. To make a more durable vaccine, researchers are trying to either target parts of the virus that rarely change or teach the immune system to simultaneously recognize many different strains.

Several vaccines that use these approaches are already in clinical trials. And if they succeed, the flu shot could hypothetically become more like the measles vaccine — providing years of protection in one go, instead of requiring annual updates.

In other words, we’re used to thinking of the flu as a routine winter hazard, but that might not always be the case. If you can persuade people to get their shots, at least.

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➨ Go ahead, take your time. Three etiquette experts tell Vox that, in most casual situations, you can run 10 to 15 minutes late without appearing inconsiderate. But that guideline is very culturally and contextually dependent, which is bad news for chronically late people like myself. I prefer to think it’s a result not of rudeness, but of polychronicism.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the Fast & Furious franchise, now on its 10th movie, is (loosely) based on a 1998 magazine article? The author of that piece is still a working journalist, so it would not appear he got his money’s worth from Hollywood. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the fourth largest Great Lake? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers. That would be Double Dare, which just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first episode. The show is credited with influencing a generation of children’s media. 

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

The progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed won Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan — though the vote was so close that most outlets didn’t call the race until this morning.

It’s not exactly the resounding triumph progressives expected. In the lead-up to Election Day, El-Sayed’s campaign boasted of a “massive” polling lead over centrist Rep. Haley Stevens that they said definitively proved the mainstream appeal of his style of politics.

In reality, the takeaways from one of the midterms’ bitterest and most consequential races are probably more mixed. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public health official who has championed policies like Medicare-for-all and an end to military aid for Israel, appeared to struggle in some of Michigan’s lower-income and less-educated districts. 

That said, his win is still a big deal, especially given the forces arrayed against him. Democratic heavyweights and big-money donors both threw their considerable weight behind Stevens. 

The left’s big swing-state test

The Democratic primary in Michigan centered on a lot of interesting issues: money in politics, a whole bunch of -isms, and the role of “the establishment,” to name just a few. But the upcoming general election will test one question above all: Can a left-wing populist win over swing-state voters the way right-wing populists have been doing for years now? 

We have some left-wing populists in office already, of course — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-NY), who both campaigned for El-Sayed this cycle. Progressives represent a number of cities and urban congressional districts. And over the past few months, the left wing of the Democratic Party has notched some notable primary wins.

But all of these candidates have run to represent solidly Democratic communities, where winning the primary effectively meant winning the seat. An out-and-proud, Sanders-style, left-wing populist arguably has yet to prove that this platform can win a statewide general election in a state that isn’t deep-blue already. 

That makes Michigan a high-stakes test. The state went for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. Winning Michigan as a Democrat means cobbling together a coalition from a broad and varied range of constituencies, including Black Detroiters, swing suburbanites, college-town progressives, blue-collar union workers, and both Jewish and Muslim Americans. 

“Michigan is like a microcosm of America,” one Detroit reporter told my colleague Astead Herndon. If a left-wing populist can win there, in other words, the Democratic Party will really have to pay attention. 

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➨ Have that second cup of coffee; there’s a strong case to be made for its health benefits. In contrast to other, highly publicized food studies of this arena — many of which are sponsored by industry groups — a number of large, rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have found that coffee reduces your risk of developing dementia, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that for most people, physical fitness peaks around age 33? I wish I didn’t know that, but now that I do: Misery loves company! 
• Today’s trivia: What was the name of the Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you how many states have legalized marijuana. That would be 41, if you count medical use, and 24 if you do not.

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

The Spokane, Washington wildfires have destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced 65,000 people from their homes — and with high winds forecast for later this week, the crisis probably isn’t over. 

As of Tuesday afternoon, three separate blazes were still burning uncontained to the north and west of the city center, according to a data clearinghouse managed by the US Forest Service. And heavy smoke from the blazes continued to spill across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. 

Meanwhile, investigators appear to have made progress in determining the cause of the largest fire: On Tuesday, local sheriff’s deputies arrested a 37-year-old Arizona man on charges of first-degree arson. The vast majority of US wildfires are started by humans…but typically through carelessness or by accident.

Go a little deeper

I was struck by an observation that one longtime Spokane resident made to NPR this week: “Obviously, we’ve had wildfire seasons,” she said. But she “never, ever imagined” having to evacuate, because she lived so deep inside of the city. 

Living in a city is no protection from climate change, though. And the destruction caused by wildfires in cities and suburbs is very much on the rise. Consider the devastation caused by recent fires in Colorado (2021), Hawaii (2023), and Los Angeles (2025). 

Why are wildfires causing more damage in cities and suburbs? It’s not because they’re new. One recent study found urban wildfires have remained a fairly stable share of all US fires over the past generation. 

What has changed is the scale of their damage, thanks to factors like climate-driven increases in extreme fire weather and human incursion into forests and grasslands. As a country, we are increasingly building homes and other structures in the “wildland-urban interface” — a liminal zone where neighborhoods and nature overlap. 

While housing isn’t dense in these areas, the buildings that exist can serve as tinder that helps fires spread. And putting more people, roads, and power lines into these zones creates more opportunities for ignitions.

All this means that city-dwellers and suburbanites will likely face more wildfire risk in years to come. And for those of you in the Midwest or on the East Coast, like me, don’t assume that wildfires are someone else’s problem. “Every single state” with wildland-urban interfaces also holds the potential for fire disaster, one pyrogeographer told Vox in 2023. That includes communities like Spokane, sure — but also Florida, Minnesota, and Mississippi.

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➨ Go ahead, save that tiny glass jar! It’s apparently a bona fide pop culture craze. But don’t bother doing it for the environmental benefits: One policy professor (disappointingly!) tells Vox that consumer decisions like choosing glass over plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there’s a special branch of medical science devoted to the physiology of space travel? It’s appropriately called “space medicine.” (Alas, practitioners aren’t called Space Doctors.) 
• Today’s trivia: How many US states have legalized marijuana? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Pennsylvania-based singer/songwriter who’s sometimes called the godmother of punk. That would be Joan Jett, who shares the contested honorific with (New Jersey-born) Patti Smith and (German-born) Nina Hagen. 

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

We always like a bit of good democracy news — such news being in overall short supply — and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared to deliver some last night. 

Blanche is currently jockeying for the permanent AG gig, which would put him in charge of the Justice Department. But his confirmation process stalled over bipartisan objections to President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” a $1.8 billion reparation program for people who claimed the government had wronged them. 

On Sunday, in acknowledgement of those objections, Blanche confirmed in writing that the Justice Department had rescinded the fund and had no plans to revive it. It’s a rare reminder that the Senate’s confirmation power can still constrain the White House, even if many Republican lawmakers would rather not rock the boat. And the presidential boat was very much rocked by the dustup over Blanche’s confirmation. 

In a post on Saturday, Trump insisted that he’d get some version of the fund even over senators’ objections. And on Monday, he told reporters that he didn’t sign off on the rescission. Notably, the two Republicans who forced that surrender — North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Texas’s John Cornyn — will both depart the Senate in early 2027.

All the president’s slush funds

The anti-weaponization fund is just the latest of Trump’s attempts to siphon federal money into an account that he or his allies control. In fact, the quest to secure such a slush fund is a defining feature of his presidency — and several of his previous, less egregious attempts have been more successful. Those include: 

1. Venezuelan oil accounts: Since the US toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil have gotten routed into special US Treasury accounts, which are labeled as Venezuela’s sovereign property — but only released at the direction of the secretary of state.   
2. The Board of Peace: Trump’s controversial coalition for rebuilding Gaza was conceived as a pay-to-play operation: Member countries get seats for a mere three years unless they pony up $1 billion to the Trump-controlled organization. While more than 20 countries have signed on, Reuters reported in April that only two had actually made contributions.  
3. US sovereign wealth fund: Trump first floated this idea of a government-owned wealth fund, which would allow him to direct federal investment in private companies, during his first term. While it never got off the ground as such, the administration has since acquired equity stakes in at least a dozen firms.

“The long-term risk is not just that Trump might be doing something illegal,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, wrote for Vox earlier this year. “The long-term risk is that his presidency is normalizing treating the receipt and disbursement of money as instruments of personal power.”

One link for later

➨ Happiness is overrated. In a new book, the author Ian Bogost argues we should instead pursue sensory gratification: the simple and immediate pleasure found in physical experiences, whether changing gears in a stick-shift car or holding a warm mug in your hands. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that dolphins have been known to beat and kill other animals for fun? I spent much of my weekend watching a baby animal documentary with my sick child, and am actually devastated to learn that many adorable animals “are also murderous monsters.” 
• Today’s trivia: What Pennsylvania-born singer/songwriter is sometimes called “the godmother of punk”? (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 Friday we asked you for the Vietnamese word for festival. That would be “tết,” as in the 1968 Tet Offensive — a brutal military campaign that began during Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations. 

Editor’s note, July 31, 8:15 pm ET: FIFA announced it was scrapping the plan to sell a stake in the World Cup.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup wasn’t perfect, but it was still pretty great. Legions of fans got to experience the US (and Canada, and Mexico), and Americans embraced visiting teams in turn. There was lots of extremely good football (soccer), and Cinderella teams like Cape Verde had a chance to shine. 

Not even two weeks later, though, FIFA president Gianni Infantino is doing his best to kill the good vibes.  He has a new proposal to sell stakes in the World Cup to private equity, attempting to capitalize on an enormously profitable tournament — with record revenue of about $15 billion in this year’s edition.

Specifically, his plan would create a new entity to run the World Cup, with FIFA the majority owner. Up to 21 percent of the company would be offered to private shareholders, in a major departure from FIFA’s current, ostensibly non-profit model. 

And so far, nearly everyone hates it. Many of FIFA’s 211 member associations are in outright revolt; one of its six regional confederations, UEFA, which represents European football, has threatened to boycott FIFA events if the plan goes forward. “We will never lend this model our legitimacy,” UEFA wrote in a statement released Thursday.

Go a little deeper

UEFA is not the only governing body in football that has condemned Infantino’s plan to bring private money into the World Cup, though it has led the charge. Concacaf — which represents North and Central America, plus the Caribbean — and the Asian Football Confederation have also come out against the idea. 

Collectively, they make up nearly two-thirds of FIFA’s member associations, which creates a real math problem for Infantino — the plan would require approval from a majority of FIFA members to take effect. 

The intensity of the backlash has raised questions about Infantino’s future. As the Athletic reported on Thursday, he’s up for reelection as FIFA president in March, but he may no longer have an easy time of it. On Friday, FIFA’s chief operating officer described the proposal as “the project of one person” — Infantino — in a statement coming out against it.

For now, though, FIFA and Infantino say they plan to forge ahead with a “consultation period” for the plan. It sets up an even higher-stakes version of the battle over “hydration breaks” — which double as lucrative commercial breaks — that Roger Bennett, founder of the soccer podcast Men in Blazers, described to Vox in June.

“Ultimately,” Bennett told Vox, “the whole game of football is currently in a battle between its roots and the commercial imperative that comes from being as big as it is. … It is the last megaphone which is faintly audible around the world. And when you have something that big, it becomes deeply desirous to make as much money as you can out of it.”

One link for later

➨ Bail on plans the right way. If you’re currently staring down a weekend engagement you’d rather not attend, Vox’s Allie Volpe has some pointers on canceling without injury or offense. For starters, you can only bail on casual events with someone you either know very well or not that well at all. And you should offer an honest excuse before attempting to reschedule.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that, until 2016, scientists routinely excluded female mice from medical research? The National Institutes of Health now requires that researchers include both sexes to help guarantee that drugs work safely for both men and women.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the Vietnamese word for “festival”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you to identify the “ugli” fruit. Ugli is the registered trademark for the Jamaican tangelo, a natural — and honestly, perfectly good-looking — hybrid that was discovered in the wild in the early 1900s.

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

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

The American economy lost some steam this spring as the war in Iran pushed up energy prices. But don’t let that slower growth, or the downer vibes, fool you: The economy is actually…doing all right.

The latest report out Thursday from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which covers the months of April, May, and June, finds that consumers and businesses have been feeling surprisingly spendy, despite the drag of inflation.

Inflation does remain well above the Federal Reserve’s annual target of 2 percent. And a surge in imports — largely semiconductors and other gear related to the AI boom — pulled the economy down on paper. Overall, the US gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 1.5 percent, slower than economists expected. 

But imports and exports can swing dramatically from quarter to quarter, and cleaner measures of underlying demand (like the dreadfully named “real final sales to private domestic purchasers,” which filters out some of the noise of quarter-to-quarter swings) showed stronger growth. “It’s an economy that’s doing okay,” summed one economist to the Washington Post.

The US economy is surviving Trump

This raises an obvious question that President Donald Trump somehow has not posted about yet: If the economy is chugging along, does he deserve the credit?

After all, in addition to these GDP numbers, unemployment is pretty low. And wages rose faster than inflation last year, helping offset higher prices. 

But many economists argue that the economy has held up despite Trump’s policies, not because of them. Without Trump’s meddling, today’s “okay” economy might have been fantastic.

Let’s take a closer look at inflation to see how this shakes out. Trump has famously imposed massive and ever-changing tariffs on virtually all of America’s trading partners — including, most recently, a 50 percent levy on many goods from Canada. If I run a liquor store and want to stock Canada’s iconic Crown Royal, each $25 bottle now costs me $37. I either eat that cost, drop the product…or pass some of the increase on to customers. 

Repeated across the economy, these little pass-throughs add up. The Dallas Federal Reserve calculated that, as of March, America’s core inflation rate would have been just 2.3 percent — instead of 3.2 percent — without Trump’s tariffs. Put another way, Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that tariffs cost the average US household $1,100 a year. 

So maybe the economy is doing okay…but it could also be better. Personally I’d like an extra $1,100. And a Canadian whisky, for that matter. 

One link for later

➨ Don’t rent the new iPhone. Apple rolled out a new “upgrade” program a few days ago, partnering with Klarna to offer customers the ability to rent smartphones for $35 a month. The scheme may make sense for diehards who always want the latest phone and switch devices frequently. But for most other people, it’s not worth it. “How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here?” one law professor said. “If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that stroke patients can sometimes relearn speech by singing their sentences first? The treatment is called melodic intonation therapy, and it grew out of research into how the brain processes music and language.
• Today’s trivia: What kind of fruit is an ugli? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of Hercules’s stepmother. That would be Hera, who in Greek mythology — and contrary to her Disney movie portrayal — absolutely hated Hercules and repeatedly tried to kill him.