For decades my life was soundtracked by comedy duos, mostly male, discussing their friendships. When I gave them up, I felt as if I was having a mental reboot

I have always loved podcasts. The genre of audio I have come to think of as Two Men Talking (In Excessive Detail About Their Lives) has been one of my favourite forms of entertainment for decades. It started with a semi-religious devotion to a Sunday morning XFM show hosted by Jimmy Carr and the comedy writer Iain Morris, but as the years progressed and podcasting boomed, I was soon spoilt for choice. Eventually there were enough comedy duos candidly discussing their hopes, fears and awkward social interactions to fill every moment of my day.

I was initially drawn to these podcasts because they made me laugh, but from the start I also found them hugely comforting: there was a period in my teenage years when I couldn’t fall asleep without mainlining episodes of Adam and Joe’s BBC 6 Music show, waking up each morning relieved I hadn’t been strangled by my iPod earphones in the night.

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© Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

© Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

© Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Quite a few music artists are in their flop era right now. Think about it: Drake hasn’t been the same since Kendrick Lamar knocked him out in their 2024 beef. Katy Perry once dominated the charts, but her recent releases haven’t been fireworks. And there was once a point where it felt impossible to step foot in a workout class without hearing Lizzo, but her latest album fizzled out. 

Some examples, in other words, are obvious. But what does it really mean for a song to flop? According to Tom Breihan, executive editor at StereoGum and author of the book The Number Ones Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music, it’s all relative. 

“There’s a million songs on Spotify that nobody will ever hear,” he told Vox. “Those songs are not necessarily flops because they did not necessarily come with expectations. When a major artist does not reach whatever benchmark they or their fans or their label expect for them, it can be embarrassing. People love to seize upon that embarrassment and take off running with it.”

Why do some songs flail while others succeed? And how does an artist bounce back from those unmet expectations? We find out that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

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

Are the songs that flop bad? Is that why they’re flopping? 

In some cases, yeah. You can definitely pick out a few and be like, “That wasn’t the one.”

A lot of it is just timing and luck. Sometimes an artist comes along at the exact right moment and builds up goodwill and puts out the right song for themselves. Sometimes they misread the room in sort of howlingly, clangingly obvious ways, and they end up not doing well. 

It’s happened to plenty of great people. Plenty of stars have bounced back from having flops, but it does happen. 

What are some really good songs that have flopped? 

As an online indie music critic, my prototypical example is Emotion by Carly Rae Jepsen. She had had this gigantic global breakout smash with the song “Call Me Maybe.” The album that she put out after this is this brilliant, layered, excellent pop record that became, I would say, influential upon the idea that you could be a pop star who was a cult artist, like an indie rock band or an underground rapper. But it didn’t sell. It didn’t do numbers. So in its moment, it was a critically beloved flop. 

How much of becoming a hit is about the music itself and how much of it is about virality and marketing? 

Those things are so bound up with each other. A lot of the time, artists are making songs that are engineered to go viral, or they’re making songs that comment on their own public perceptions. 

When someone like Lizzo comes along and puts out a record that doesn’t do well, it becomes a bigger story than just, “Oh, people weren’t feeling this song.” It becomes, “Oh, people don’t like this person,” or “This person has run out of goodwill.”

Like a Lizzo song: You hear her persona jumping through the speaker, whether the song does well or not. So the song and the artist become inextricable from each other. The song and the marketing become inextricable. 

There is another example of an artist who has gone from really high highs to very low flops that I would love to get into, and that’s Katy Perry. I feel like we’ve come a long way from Left Shark at the Super Bowl. What happened there? 

Katy Perry has had the career that pop stars used to have, where they have a crazy dominant stretch where they’re knocking out hit after hit after hit, and they’re unstoppable. Then everything kind of tails off over time. One album has five No. 1 hits. The next album has two No. 1 hits. The next album has no significant hits at all, but a couple top 10s. 

She put out an album right at the beginning of the pandemic. You can say, “Well, that one didn’t do well, and that’s not her fault.” Then she spent a long time on American Idol as a judge; she spent a long time playing Las Vegas residencies. And then she was like, “That’s it. I’m quitting American Idol. I’m coming back. I’m being the pop star that you all want me to be.“

She made a bad album. She also reunited with Dr. Luke, who was the co-writer and producer of lots of her big hits but who, in the time since she stopped working with him, accusations were made. Kesha, who was friends with Katy Perry when she came up, was the person making those accusations. So there’s a lot for the internet to glom onto there.

“Especially now, a song can debut at No. 1 based on streams and conversation, and then it can disappear from the charts.”

That’s how a song goes from being a bad song to a notorious flop — when not only does the song not perform, it actually burns up a lot of the goodwill that this person has had. 

What songs did everyone maybe expect to be huge, but then bombed? 

It is possible for a song to be a No. 1 hit and still a flop. Especially now, a song can debut at No. 1 based on streams and conversation, and then it can disappear from the charts. 

In 1996, Michael Jackson released “You Are Not Alone.” The song debuted at No. 1. It fell pretty quickly. The album didn’t do that well. The song ultimately is not remembered that well, and has really entered the notorious shadow zone over the years. 

Are there examples of songs that critics hated initially, and then over time became classics?

So many. The songs that were hits and were universally regarded as irritating in their time have a great hit rate. People were annoyed by “MMMBop,” by Hansen, or “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls. 

There were certainly critics who understood ABBA when they were popping off, but they were, I would say, widely regarded as a punchline. Now that is just an impeccable, beautiful, influential pop catalog. 

A song like the Quad City DJ’s “”C’mon N’ Ride It (The Train)” was not a song the critics were really lining up to praise in the 1990s, but as a person who was a child then, I can tell you that song goes so hard and never stopped going hard. 

What’s the biggest misconception people have about pop music success? 

I think the biggest misconception is the idea that a label or a corporation can engineer a giant hit. They can observe trends. They can put their money into promotion. But you never know what people are going to actually grab onto and what they’re not. 

There are things that they can do to create the impression that something is connecting, but you need to have real sustained success to have everybody be like, “Okay, no, this actually is huge.”

How do artists tend to respond if they’ve entered a flop era?

There’s a grand, beautiful history of artists who instead of trying the same thing over and over again, they become behind-the-scenes figures. They write songs for other people, or they produce, or they become managers. 

Max Martin, who is now ahead of John Lennon, but behind Paul McCartney in terms of songwriters with No. 1 hits, he was the lead singer for a Swedish band in the ’80s that was trying to be Bon Jovi, and they never caught on. His band was called It’s Alive. You can look their songs up online. They’re not that great, but he wound up making all these incredible records with all these different people. 

There’s a lot of that. That has happened many, many times throughout pop history. It’s certainly one way to deal with the flop problem.

Until recently, Natalie Harp was an omnipresent but low-profile aide to President Donald Trump: always there, but rarely part of the story herself. That changed abruptly earlier this month, when Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who is currently running for reelection, name-dropped her in a speech. 

Trump “doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” Ossoff told supporters at a rally.

The line was a reference to reporting on Trump’s catering-cart maneuver as he was flying back from Turkey in July; Harp and other Trump aides joined the president on an alternate plane by way of a catering cart, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was left behind on Air Force One. 

The “Natalie” jab from Ossoff quickly took on a life of its own, spurred by a furious response from the Trump White House and right-wing media. Somewhat lost in the flurry of attention on Harp was Ossoff himself — but Greg Bluestein, chief political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-host of the Politically Georgia podcast, told Today, Explained that the remark was “by design.”

Bluestein spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about Ossoff’s disciplined, savvy messaging strategy, his political rise, and why his rhetorical jabs at Trump are fueling speculation about an Ossoff 2028 presidential run.

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

It’s time on this show, Greg, that we remind people who Jon Ossoff is. I’m told that is a job with which you can help.

I go way back with Sen. Ossoff. The first time I met him, or at least I talked to him, was way back in early 2017 where I got a call out of the blue from a name, a number I didn’t recognize, and the voice on the line said, “Hi, I’m Jon Ossoff and I’m running for US House, this special election.” And I said, “Well, welcome to the show. There’s about 17 other candidates already in the race.” 

And he goes, “Well, I’ve got something they don’t. I have John Lewis’s endorsement, and I have about $250,000 in cash commitments.” So I was like, “Okay.” 

It still was an uphill battle because we’re talking about a deep red Republican seat in the northern suburbs of Atlanta at a time when all those suburban seats were still Republican. So I said, “Okay, good luck, sir.”

But lo and behold, he became a national figure in that loss. 

So you’ve been covering Sen. Ossoff just about as long as anybody. At any point over the course of that almost-decade, did you expect “Natalie” from him? 

No. I mean, look, you expect him to be really, really careful and calculated about what he says. Even back then, he rarely uttered an imprecise statement. There have been times where folks have caught him off-message, but it’s been very, very rare even at the beginning of his political career, certainly now. 

When he uttered the “Natalie” line that sparked a thousand thought pieces and national takes and all that, that was done by design. 

Tell us a bit about his backstory for people who have forgotten who Jon Ossoff is.

When I first got that call in early 2017, I had no idea who he was. Little did I know he’d become a national figure that we’d be talking about in the context of a presidential campaign not even a decade later. 

He’s a former documentarian, a former intern of the legendary Georgia Congressman John Lewis, whose parents, especially his mom, were involved in Democratic politics in Georgia, but definitely not household names — definitely not a known quantity when he called me all those years ago to say “I’m running.” 

Ossoff came within a whisker of an outright win, which would’ve been a huge, monumental upset. But in the process, he showed that Democrats have a path with suburban voters that long voted Republican in the Trump era. He started with the sort of campaign slogan of “Make Trump Furious.”

He was leaning into the Democratic activism, but then within weeks shifted his message toward a more friendly, more mainstream argument about bringing jobs to the district, bringing more tech-savvy investment to the district. 

When he announced for US Senate against David Perdue, very few people gave him a shot when he got in the race. But that race ended with this epic double-header runoff because Rev. Raphael Warnock was also in the race against [Sen.] Kelly Loeffler. Democrats hadn’t won in Georgia in decades. So it was an epic election and a real nail-biter to the end. 

Ossoff becomes the first Jewish US senator in Georgia history, Warnock becomes the first Black US senator in Georgia history, and together they flip control of the Senate and allow Joe Biden to to actually implement some of his broad-ranging agenda those first two years that they were in office.

It makes a lot of noise when Ossoff helps flip the US Senate along with Warnock. And he’s making a lot of noise now with “Natalie.” But I can’t say that I feel like he’s made a lot of noise in the intervening six years. What’s he been like as a senator?

That’s by design. It’s only been really recently where he’s been very willing to go on the national cable shows, to talk to national reporters more, to do a lot of the things that you see other nationally prominent Democratic figures do much more regularly. 

We both know there are folks in Washington who love going to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and they love going to this or that luncheon or this or that dinner. Sen. Ossoff is much more likely to quietly go home and spend time with his two kids. 

I’m not just saying that because that’s the senator I know. He is much more reserved and guarded about his private life and will bend over backwards to figure out ways to get back to Georgia — even when there are important votes, [he’ll] find ways after those votes to get back for events with his kids and that kind of thing.

It feels a little contrary to think about this guy who keeps a low profile, who wants to go back home to Georgia to be with his family, who doesn’t want the limelight, because as you’ve already mentioned, he isn’t just running for reelection in the Senate right now. Everyone seems to believe that he’s running for president.

I’m going to go out on a limb saying that I believe him when he said publicly — and privately too — to folks all over the spectrum, media folks and activists and supporters and you name it, that he is focused on this election and he’s not running for president.

If someone like Sen. Ossoff wins by a huge margin over Mike Collins in an important battleground state that is tilted both ways the last decade, the chatter will not stop. It’ll only get louder. 

[He is] someone who is adept at making the arguments that so many core Democratic voters want to hear about President Trump, but at the same time can win over swing voters like he has in 2021. And he’s already seeming like he’s certainly making that outreach to them in 2026.

Do you think that if he does end up there, we’ll look back at Nataliegate as a big moment for him where it was just clear that this guy had the stuff? Or does this feel like, a week and a half out or whatever it is now, that it’s already fading into the background?

The biggest takeaway from that to me was how — and I think Jonathan Martin from Politico was the first to say it — Ossoff was essentially the nation’s assignment editor because it spurred countless stories for the next week and a half about who Natalie Harp is. 

It was Ossoff who showed that he has this extraordinary staying power in the media. These rallies — he doesn’t hold them every day or every week. These are like once every month or so rallies.

The stagecraft is impressive. He’s got these multi-camera shots that are immediately farmed out to all these social media accounts who amplify them. It’s very, very impressive how he pulls this off. And they’ve become these sort of national spectacles that have inevitably given rise to more ruminations about whether he’ll run for president or not, but also of course boost his campaign itself. 

That to me was one of the takeaways — that he has this impressive grip on not only what the media’s covering, but triggering them to cover even more of it.

If you haven’t yet heard about how a certain fella is choosin’ a woman from Texas over Ella Langley, it’s only a matter of time. 

Langley’s massive hit, “Choosin’ Texas,” began dominating the Billboard Hot 100 charts a few months ago — and never looked back. It’s still sitting at No. 1 after 19 weeks, tied for the longest time spent atop the charts among non-holiday songs. In a few more weeks, Langley could shatter the all-time record and dethrone Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

It’s a runaway success for Langley, who is relatively new to country music but has quickly vaulted to a new tier of stardom. To break down how it happened, Today, Explained turned to Marissa Moss, a senior writer at Rolling Stone and the author of Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be.

Moss talked with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about where Langley’s success came from, what it means for women in country music, and why many fans don’t know what to make of Langley, who has maintained a low profile for a star artist. 

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

Tell me about “Choosin’ Texas.” 

“Choosin’ Texas” is a song about a woman who is essentially losing her man in real time. She goes to a bar or a honky-tonk in Texas. She’s from Tennessee. She suddenly realizes that he sees his ex who’s from Texas and drifts away from her to this woman. It’s that feeling of knowing when you see it in someone’s face that they’re going to be leaving you and figuring out whether it’s worth it to hold on or to let go.

How big is this song, exactly?

It is huge. It is up there right now in competition with Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which owns the record for the most weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with 22 weeks. Her only [other] competition is from Shaboozey and Lil Nas X, which are country-adjacent songs. 

She really could blow by Mariah Carey. Of course you get a boost every time Christmas comes around, but we’re a little ways off from Mariah Carey declaring once and for all that it’s Christmas season. So I think Ella has plenty of time to catch up. And it could be the biggest song of all time, which is crazy.

You’re a music writer and you’re based in Nashville. How big a deal is Ella Langley in a place like Nashville and in the country industry?

She’s a big deal. And it’s exciting because she’s a relatively newish artist in terms of how long she’s been putting out music. She only released her debut album in 2024, called Hungover. 

It’s really exciting because as a lot of people know, it can be really hard for a woman to make it in Nashville. Usually under 10 percent of songs on country radio are by women, so having someone like her out there and having so much country radio airplay and presence on the Hot 100 and breaking all these records, you really hope that it’s going to help influence people in Nashville to sign more women, platform more women, do all of those things to try to sort of flip this longstanding sexism that has existed in Nashville. 

Not to put all of our hopes and dreams on one woman, because it’s not up to her to do this. It’s up to the industry to respond. But you sure have to hope so.

Was it a surprise that “Choosin’ Texas” became such a big hit?

I would’ve never predicted this. I loved the song when I heard it, but I don’t think I ever thought that something this country could be this popular. 

“Despite the lyrical content, which may be a little bit of a bummer, the song does just feel so good. And it’s like a little bit of a brain weed gummy.”

And yes, country music is becoming so much more popular nationwide, worldwide. But it is also country music in a lot of ways that is a little bit more pop-leaning. Morgan Wallen is extremely popular, but he’s not putting out super-twangy tears-in-your-beer kind of country music songs. 

“Choosin’ Texas” is kind of sad, but more than sad, I think it’s relatable. It taps into this feeling that a lot of people have, especially in the summer. If you’re thinking about a summer romance, of losing something that you once had, of letting go, of nostalgia, I think that’s something that we really want to feel right now. 

And despite the lyrical content, which may be a little bit of a bummer, the song does just feel so good. And it’s like a little bit of a brain weed gummy. The second it comes on and you hear that little guitar lick it relaxes you. It gives you that summer feel of airy and fresh and a lot of people want to feel that way right now. 

You’ve said she’s not a person who shares a ton about herself. Probably smart in this day and age. But country music often does get politicized. And I’ve seen that happening a bit around her and around this song. Tell me about the way she is being slotted into certain perspectives in the US, whether she wants to be or not.

One thing I’ve seen is a lot of people from the far right wanting to use her as an example of a return to sort of this anti-girlboss era. They like to take the fact that she speaks about her faith on stage and warp that into that being sort of her overriding agenda and that she wants this return to traditional values.

And then on the left, I’ve seen some people sort of play with the same. I personally think you could just as easily make a case that she’s a feminist who had Miranda Lambert produce her album and writes with women and takes all these women on tour.

So many people want this moment to serve their own narrative and want Ella Langley to stand for something on every side. And if you don’t give people a little, they’re going to go wild. But maybe that’s better than putting your personal views out there and having them ripped apart. I can’t say I really blame her, to be honest. 

At 78, the cookbook author and Food Network host knows what she likes, knows what she wants and isn’t stopping anytime soon.

© Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

On Wednesday, Harry Styles begins his 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, making him the latest in a wave of celebrities who are turning away from conventional touring and changing the experience of live music as a result.

In recent years, Adele, Bad Bunny, and Billy Joel have all had sold-out residencies in Munich, Puerto Rico, and New York, respectively. This means that fans can’t just wait for a visit to their hometown — they have to buy a ticket and book a trip, sometimes a very expensive one.

Residencies have become a high-profile example of how the economics of entertainment are changing how we experience culture, and who can even afford to have that experience. 

There are a number of reasons for the trend: residencies are more cost-effective for musicians and crew, and they’re a lot easier in other ways. Burnout, exhaustion, and substance abuse have long been features of touring musicians’ stories from the road, and residencies alleviate some of that physical and mental toll — at least for the superstars who can book them.

The fans, however, especially the ones coming in from out of town, have to pick up that tab now. Today, Explained host Astead Herndon interviewed Billboard writer Robert Levine about this topic back in February. They discussed why this has happened — and how, for many fans, these costs can actually be worth it. Residencies create increased pressure to create a “sense of event,” and ensure every show offers something special — really delivering for the handful of people who can make the trip, and creating FOMO for those who can’t make it, which is kind of the goal of all of it.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

I’m based in New York, so Harry Styles’s tour really perked my interest. He’ll be here for a 30-night residency and he has no other US shows on his tour. Can you explain to me the business of Harry staying put like this? Why has this become a thing for artists? What do we think this tour represents?

What’s interesting is all the writing and all the talk about the concert business focuses on the money that’s going in. Hardly anyone thinks about the money going out. As always, they have crew, they have musicians, they have expenses. The most expensive part is getting it all around. So imagine if you could minimize that expense and make the same amount of money.

So is that why we’re seeing someone like Harry Styles sit for 30 nights at MSG? It’s to lower travel costs?

Well, look, I mean haven’t talked to Harry Styles, so I’m just making an educated guess, but yes, I think so. And there’s the sort of capital-R residency that he’s doing. He’s declaring this a residency, and he’s making an event of it. But if you look at the concert business in general, you are seeing a trend — and sometimes people don’t notice it — toward playing more shows at fewer venues. The same kinds of economic forces are changing the nature of what we might call regular tours. Now you’re seeing more two-night stands, more three-night stands, more four-night stands. 

And there’s also…this isn’t economics, but there’s also lifestyle considerations. All those classic rock songs about the romance of being on the road; “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger where he was talking about how burnt out he is. … There used to be a romance to being miserable and now there’s not. 

Rock stars on tour, the crazy bus, all of that stuff.

We’re coming to your town, we’ll help you party down. Now you have to come to them and help them party down. And I think people realize a lot of the performers are getting older. They might not want to move around so much. But also remember when Elvis was in Vegas? This is not Elvis the teen sensation who wouldn’t be filmed below the waist. This is Elvis the middle-class performer, and in Vegas, he could stay in a really nice hotel rather than be in a van. 

I’m going to ask about the New York piece. When we think about Harry Styles specifically, I think back to the fame, and I don’t have to go all the way back to Elvis for famous residencies in Vegas. Think about Celine Dion, or more recently, folks like Adele or even Usher.

Vegas had an advantage in that a lot of people were there with expense accounts always. That’s probably less the case today, but it’s still a convention in a conference town. If you’re charging people that amount of money, it doesn’t just need to be a great show. It needs to be part of a great weekend. It has to be a city with a lot to do. It has to have great air connections and a lot of hotel rooms. New York scores on all of those. 

It seems as if from what you’re saying, it makes sense for the artist in terms of reducing travel costs. It makes sense because maybe resale markets have made it clear to the entertainment industry that the demand for higher prices is there. But it does, as you mentioned, also raise expectations of what fans expect to experience at the concert. I wonder: in your opinion, are fans getting more for their money at these shows since they’re more expensive now? 

I think that’s so much in the eye of the beholder, right? For Adele in Munich, where she had a residency two summers ago, they built the biggest video screen in the world. Bigger than a football field. It was gigantic. I’m not that interested in a big screen. I don’t care if it’s the biggest screen. I’m not counting. She performed with fantastic musicians, and the staging was really creative. I thought it was an incredible show. I took the train four or five hours to go from Berlin. I thought it was fantastic and well worth it. Was I excited about the Ferris wheel? Honestly, not really.

What limits artists outside of the Adeles or Harry Styleses from adopting this residency model?

I think it’s less about the size of the artist and more about the implied specialness of it. It’s about FOMO. These are the biggest concerts, but there’s a lot of great concerts. How do you sell this as a special thing? Well, you play your marquee album, you promise two shows, two nights, no repeats. Metallica did that.  

You really have to create a sense of event. You have to have a claim on people’s souls. In the modern concert business…it’s not so much, why do you want to see them? but, why now and not next year or the year after?

How do you see these residencies having an influence on the way the live event industry operates as a whole? Part of what we’ve been looking at are the changes that have occurred in the industry post-pandemic. Where do you see this piece fitting in?

I have to admit that a lot of people in the business and who write about the business have been very cautious about the boom in the industry. Look at the price spike post-Covid. But what happens when that ends? When will that bubble burst? Look at how high prices get, will people still have the money to go to other concerts? 

And the truth is…the demand to see shows has proven all of this wrong. There’s always this idea that it’s a winner-take-all business: you’re going to travel to see Harry Styles, you’re not going to see other shows…logically, that money ought to be not spent on other concerts. But you don’t see that. And this is at a time when the economy is very, very good for some people and pretty lousy for most people. So that might be another reason why people are so interested in playing New York and LA because you get more people with disposable income. Other people can fly there, but at some point, I don’t know what the limit is. We don’t seem to get there.

People who might buy a cheaper pair of jeans or a cheaper television don’t seem to look at…concerts are not a competitive good. Who’s your second if you can’t go see Harry Styles? Who’s the artist most like Harry Styles, who’s also playing a concert? Who’s most like Beyonce, who’s not Beyonce? The answer is nobody.

Yeah. If Kelly Rowland was doing concerts, I would be moving in the same way. Right? It’s specific to that artist. And I can kind of see your point…that is what has made this shift be more permanent than folks expect now.

By the way, I bet some of those artists that you would say don’t compare to Beyonce, put on great shows.

For sure.

Health insurance enrollment through the Affordable Care Act is plummeting.

Nearly 3 million fewer Americans now have insurance through the program, popularly known as Obamacare, compared to last year, according to federal data released in June. After congressional Republicans allowed enhanced subsidies for the program to expire in January, many Americans saw their health insurance premiums spike by an average of about 30 percent. 

As a result, many Americans have been forced to drop their coverage entirely.

With affordability among the top concerns on voters’ minds heading into the midterms, healthcare costs have become a central issue for candidates.

“A lot of policy experts say, look, when you raise the price of something, demand goes down. And that’s what’s happening here,” KFF Health News senior correspondent Julie Appleby told Today, Explained. “It’s the prices — people are dropping out.”

Appleby has been reporting on healthcare policy for decades, and she joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down the latest changes to the Affordable Care Act, why enrollment is plummeting, and how the ACA crisis is teeing up healthcare as a central issue in the upcoming midterms. 

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

Sixteen years ago, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Julie, what was the situation at the time that made it feel so necessary? What did the Affordable Care Act aim to do? 

There was a lot going on. We had a lot of people who were uninsured. We had premiums going up. Many times in the past there had been some effort to do some kind of health reform, but nothing ever really passed. We had Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s, but no major legislation since then.

People had employer coverage, like they do now, but there were a lot of people who were on their own and buying in what’s called the individual market.

The individual market was really tough. They could tell people, “Hey, you’ve got a health condition, we’re not taking you.” They could you could sign up for an individual plan and later, if you did get some kind of health condition, they could go back through your medical records and see, “Hey, did they tell us about every single thing that had happened to them in the past five or ten years?” And if not, they could retroactively cancel your plan.

What did the Affordable Care Act do exactly?

It allowed young people to stay on their parents’ insurance plan up to age 26, and that was a really big deal and also a very popular provision in the Affordable Care Act.

It created these subsidies to help people purchase coverage on the individual market. It pays for part of your premium. After you pay a certain percentage of your household income, the subsidies kick in and it picks up the rest, up to a certain up to a certain income level. 

“They used to be able to charge women more than men. They can’t do that anymore.”

It did some other things, like they can’t tell you, “You have a preexisting condition, so we’re not going to take you.” They’ve got to take you.

It created a benefit package that covers all these essential things like hospitalization and drug costs and maternity care, which might not have been in plans before. They used to be able to charge women more than men. They can’t do that anymore.

What was the conversation around passing the Affordable Care Act? Remind us how and why it got so toxic and pitched.

It was super polarized, kind of like what we have now. There was a lot of discussion around whether this is going to be too much government or if it was just the right amount. A lot of people thought, “No, this is terrible, it’s gonna destroy things.”

And I think polls reflected that for the first four or five years or more of the Affordable Care Act. It was pretty evenly divided, when you looked at opinion polls, between people who thought it was a good thing and people who didn’t think it was a good thing.

In more recent years, that has changed and the favorability ratings have gone up for the Affordable Care Act and now majorities do favor the Affordable Care Act.

If you had told me that 16 years ago, I would not have believed you. Here we are. And how is the Affordable Care Act doing?

To use medical terminology, is it on life support? No, it’s actually doing fairly well. But there are some symptoms that there are problems. 

Remember at the end of last year, there was all the discussion about these things called enhanced premium tax credits and whether they were going to be extended or not. The government shut down over this. Those were not extended. As a result, it costs more this year for most people in the plan, and what we’ve seen is during open enrollment last year we had about a million people fewer sign up and that was about a five percent drop. 

That was 5 percent just in signups at the end of last year. Since then, the first few months of the year, we’ve seen about 3 million people drop off. Some people are finding that they can’t afford it and they are not paying their bills and they are getting dropped. A 3-million-person drop-off is pretty substantial.

There’s also a group of folks, particularly conservatives and Republicans, who say, “You know what, the numbers were inflated.” There was all this improper enrollment. People were getting these zero-premium plans and so there was fraud, there was improper enrollment, the subsidies were too generous or there were other factors that led to some fraudulent activity. And so these drop-offs just represent people who were fraudulently enrolled dropping out for one reason or another. 

There’s this real split right now between what are the reasons for the drop off. But most policy folks, most people who study the situation here say the main reason is people just aren’t able to afford it.

Why is it so expensive? Why are healthcare costs so high? 

That’s the $64,000 question, right? 

And if you get it right, you win. You’re in charge.

That’s been the question since I’ve been covering this debate. Look, it’s not just Affordable Care Act costs going up. Employer plans are going up. Everything’s going up. 

Generally, healthcare costs go up faster than inflation and that’s driven by a lot of things. It’s driven by drug costs, it’s driven by hospital costs, it’s driven by labor costs. So all of those things go into the mix with the Affordable Care Act. But also this year, there’s this additional factor of the subsidies that went away. 

Insurers were looking at that saying, “You know what, the subsidies are going down. We expect to have lower enrollments next year. The people most likely to stay enrolled are the ones who have health problems because they don’t want to take the risk of being uninsured.” So insurers were calculating that in when they set their premium rates for this year: We might have sicker people in our pool that we’re gonna have to cover. 

That’s part of what we’ve seen with costs in the Affordable Care Act. But everybody is seeing health inflation go up right now and that’s affecting premiums.

Here we are 16 years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Has it accomplished what it set out to do?

You have to look at that in a number of ways. It aimed to expand coverage and reduce the uninsured. I think the answer there is yes, the number of uninsured has gone from 13 or 14 percent to as low as just under 8 percent a couple of years ago. It’s ticked up a little bit since then.

Did it control costs? That’s a harder one to answer. And it’s back to that $64,000 question. How do you do that? Costs have continued to go up. Premiums are definitely higher than they were pre-ACA. To be fair, the plans are very different. They cover more, they’re more generous, they’re better coverage, but they are more expensive.

The big question is: What is going to be put forward as an alternative and how palatable will that be to consumers, lawmakers, the healthcare industry? It’s going to be challenging, but I think we’re going to hear a lot more discussion this year. Whether or not we see actual proposals that could pass, I think that’s a little more questionable.

Particle’s new podcast intelligence platform transcribes and analyzes more than 130,000 podcasts, making their conversations searchable on the web and accessible to AI agents through an API and MCP.

The internet kind of sucks right now. And it’s been getting harder and harder to use over the past several years.

Imagine you’re training for a marathon, or just trying to get in better shape, and you want to buy a new pair of shoes. Well, good luck! You’re going to have to wade through sponsored links, affiliate marketing, AI summaries, and websites seemingly engineered for search engines instead of human shoppers.

Maybe you just want to connect with friends on Instagram or discover recipes on TikTok. But even there, everyone is selling something. “Get Ready With Me” videos are sponsored by CeraVe, movie reviews are actually ads for the movies being reviewed, and the guy who posts your favorite mobility routines really wants you to try his protein powder.

So people have developed a workaround: Simply add “Reddit” to the search.

Looking for a shoe with high energy return? Reddit. Want to know if an Airbnb you’ve been eyeing has a sketchy listing? Reddit. Trying to figure out the fastest way to the international terminal in Atlanta’s humongous airport? Chances are someone on Reddit has shared very specific thoughts and instructions.

It’s a strange situation. Reddit is filled with pseudonymous strangers, and yet these people can somehow feel more trustworthy recommending a skincare product than an influencer hawking cleansers to millions of followers. Why? Because the random person on Reddit doesn’t seem to have anything to sell you.

That’s why, for many people, Reddit feels like one of the last “real” places on the internet. The site has become so integral to navigating the internet that Google took notice; in recent years, it’s begun surfacing Reddit threads more prominently in search results.

Then came artificial intelligence. Chatbots need massive amounts of human language to learn how we communicate. AI-powered search also needs somewhere to turn when we ask the kinds of hyper-specific questions that newspapers, Wikipedia, and government websites haven’t answered. Reddit has plenty of both.

Unfortunately, whenever something online becomes valuable, people and companies figure out how to exploit it.

The stakes go far beyond a brand tricking someone into buying a lousy face cream. Reddit works because people trust that there’s a real person on the other side of the screen. It doesn’t have to become totally overrun by bots or marketers for that trust to disappear. We just have to start questioning who — or what — we’re talking to.

To break down how Reddit is changing, what the platform and its moderators are doing to push back, and what it could mean for the increasingly blurry line between human conversation, marketing, search, and AI, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with the Verge’s Mia Sato, who recently wrote about the new wave of AI spam beleaguering the platform.

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

Are you a big Reddit user?

Yeah, I think so.

What do you mainly use it for?

I think it’s become a big part of finding information on the internet. I usually use Google as the sort of doorway into Reddit, but if I search something on Google, really, it’s a high likelihood that I will end up on Reddit in the end.

That’s a trend that you write about in your piece, which I thought was very interesting because it was something that has also been happening to me and it happened without me realizing how often it was happening. 

You start this piece in the Verge with an example from a post on a skincare-focused subreddit, a place you write that you visit often. Can you take us through what happened?

The skincare subreddits that I mentioned in my story are actually subreddits that I often read because I want unfiltered or true opinions about products before I buy them. And I go to Reddit for skincare recommendations quite a bit. 

I suspected that if you are a skincare brand and you want people to be talking about your product, you will go to these subreddits because some of these subreddits get like one and a half million viewers a week. They’re doing crazy numbers and they have a very committed and active community. So I was like, if I were a brand and I wanted to market myself, I would probably post on Reddit. 

I was curious how the moderators of these skincare subreddits were handling that, because also marketing firms had told me, “Yeah, all our clients, they really want to know how to crack Reddit. It’s really hard. They want to figure out Reddit.”

And so I talked to a subreddit moderator who does one of the skincare subreddits, and she gave me a ton of detail about the amount of spam that they were getting. She sent me one example, which was a thread of someone asking about a certain spray that people use for acne treatment. 

The person who posted it asked, like: “Magic Molecule Hypochlorous Acid Spray – is it really that good? Recently I have seen a lot of good reviews about this product. Any of you tried? Do you recommend? What is your take on this?”

And, you know, it got like dozens of answers. Some people said, “Yeah, it’s great.” Others said, “They all work the same.” But one of the answers was from just a random account that said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any experience with that product, but I have tried this other one that I was skeptical of, but I really like it actually.”

If you’re reading that comment, you probably would think nothing of it. But what you don’t see unless you click over to the profile and do some digging is that this random account had actually — over the course of several days, maybe even months, and across different skincare subreddits — been recommending the same product over and over and over, and using very specific terminology, saying, “It has all these recommendations from certified dermatologists, which made me feel a bit more confident trying it on sensitive skin.”

It was very controlled messaging. Of course, the moderators were like, “What normal person is going to go across different subreddits and keep pushing this product? For no reason?”

So that is one of the ways that this new type of spam on Reddit takes shape, which is brands pretending to be normal users on Reddit.

For Reddit moderators, I’m thinking they can’t individually suss it out immediately or it wouldn’t be happening. Are they doing the search themselves to try to figure out, like, is everything on here real? How are they dealing with this? 

They have a bunch of tools. Some of them are auto-moderator tools, where basically a bot will look at every submission that comes through and move some things to a filtered folder where moderators can look at [it]. 

One of the funniest things that several moderators actually told me was they keep shit lists of companies that they think have spammed them in the past. The skincare subreddit told me about this. A weight-loss subreddit moderator whom I interviewed also said this. They have a running list in the background where if they think you’ve spammed or astroturfed their community in the past, they keep all those brands’ names. And now if you mention that brand name, your post will automatically get filtered out.

Wow. Okay. 

The moderators are trying to send a message: “If you spam us, all of the posts that are not even your spam will get filtered out and we will take a closer look at them.” They’re pretty strict with it. Some moderators that I spoke to said that they’ve really seen an increase over the last six to eight months, maybe. 

I can give you a couple of the numbers that Reddit has released publicly because Reddit has said also that they know that this is a growing problem. The company said that it removes 25,000 spammy posts and comments a day. They block something like 23 million spam views. And they also tackle spam upvotes — a way on Reddit to sort of signal agreement. 

But Reddit knows that it is kind of a new era of spam, and they’ve said that they’re using LLMs and other AI-powered moderation tools to try to catch this stuff better.

Let me ask you something. Maybe it comes down to what Reddit is and always has been, but I will go on Instagram, I will go on TikTok, and my sense is like half of it is just crap that’s trying to sell me something. It might not be real. It just all feels pretty garbagey to me. 

I feel like when you wrote this piece, you were saying there are stakes here to Reddit being the thing that must kind of stay pure, must stay away from this. What is it about Reddit that makes it important? 

One part is that the concept of influencers doesn’t really exist on Reddit in the same way that it exists elsewhere. 

And if you are an influencer, there are very few places that you can post without getting in trouble. Many, many subreddits have explicit rules saying, “You may not self-promote here, and we will ban you if you do.” That is a totally different environment than Instagram, where sort of the expectation is that someone is selling you something.

The other part that makes Reddit unique, I think, is that for better or for worse, and deserve it or not, Reddit, in the minds of people using the internet, has come to sort of be associated with real opinions or real people. Which is funny because the platform is anonymous, you know? Most people are using just a random username, not their full name. So it’s kind of stumbled into this reputation of being filled with real, helpful opinions and perspectives. 

Reddit has deals with certain AI companies where they allow LLMs to be trained on troves of Reddit data, of real people having conversations. And so I think over the last few years as Google search feels like it’s gotten worse and people have gone to places like Reddit to answer their questions, Reddit’s stock literally has skyrocketed as a place where you can find information where people aren’t trying to sell you something all the time. Or are they? That’s kind of the part that I wanted to untangle. 

Does Reddit actually have to become overrun with marketing, fake posts, people saying, “Oh, you should definitely buy this skincare,” because they’re getting paid to say that for this to be a big problem? Or does it just have to get to the point where I am suspicious that I’m not talking to an actual person on Reddit and I start doubting a platform itself? 

For me personally, in the course of reporting this story, I was like, “Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t buy things based on a recommendation from Reddit.”

It’s a new type of problem and a new way of looking at a platform. As it relates to AI search, if these chatbots love to cite Reddit so much for their answers, can the AI systems detect when something is spam? Can they detect when a comment is coming from a brand or when the person who left that comment, if you go to their account, they’re always promoting that product? 

I am not convinced that Google’s Gemini or ChatGPT can suss out when something is promotional and when it isn’t. Because I’ve written about this before and I know that they can’t.

Hmm!

It’s a strange thing where I think the deception on one platform ends up trickling through other places as well, as the Reddit thread gets cited by search features and LLMs. 

Have you changed your buying habits based on what you’re seeing now on Reddit?

I feel like I’m just way slower to buy things. I’m just like, let me keep this in my head. Let me put it on my wishlist and do some research to see what other people, what real people think, and also make sure that they have a good return policy.

In March 2023, Jason Arday, a rising star in British academia, became a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge. At 37, he was the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship in the university’s history.

Arday’s personal story also attracted widespread attention. He claimed that autism left him unable to speak until he was 11 and unable to read or write until he was 18. Nonetheless, Arday eventually received a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University and continued to rise through the ranks of British higher education.

Soon after starting his position at Cambridge, Arday was accused of plagiarizing portions of his 2015 doctoral thesis. And that was just the beginning. The British press began to comb through his personal story and discovered there were more questionable claims.

This all reached a fever pitch earlier this month, when Arday announced that he would be resigning his position, writing that the intense scrutiny and personal attacks had taken a profound toll on him and his family. Nine days later, Arday was found dead in his home.

To understand what to make of a story of alleged academic plagiarism turned media frenzy turned tragedy, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper, whose recent essay, “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday,” examines what we can learn from Arday’s story.

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

You wrote that everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I don’t think everyone following this story necessarily feels like they should be engaging in some reflection. So I wanted to ask you why you wanted to convey that thought.

I would say blame is not a finite resource and I think there’s plenty of it to go around in this case in particular. I think blame that belongs to conservatives and that belongs to Republicans and that belongs to various kinds of institutions. And that of course belongs to Jason Arday, the man.

I think this is a person who is clearly a serial fabulist, and I think one could fairly say a con artist, who was able to, through an increasingly implausible array of stories about his background — that he was mute until age 11, that he was illiterate till age 18, that he ran 600 miles in six days, a feat which is just 50 miles shy of a world record — flatter the vanities of people at Cambridge University who were very desperate to get a magical minority in the door. And they were so hell bent on their desire to engage in diversity politics that they overlooked what should have been very obvious flaws.

I think it’s also true simultaneously though, that you cannot just blame Arday or liberal institutions for this, and particularly for how this ended. This was, it’s worth noting, an academic scandal that — on the order of academic scandals — is not one that perhaps should be international news, but that’s very much what it became, in no small part because the British press turbocharged it.

If you look at any major British outlet, there were many, many, many, many articles written, each one chronicling every minute of this entire affair. And I think it’s worth noting that it’s hard to imagine that this degree of scrutiny would be applied to an academic scandal if Jason Arday had been white. It’s also hard to imagine that Jason Arday would’ve been hired if he was white. I think people would’ve asked more questions about his implausible claims if they weren’t so predisposed to just try to get him in the door.

What compelled Jason Arday to make up so much of his backstory?

It’s hard to know what’s inside his mind, but one imagines that he correctly understood that a certain kind of elite liberal would be very willing to overlook quite a lot and that [they] would be willing to swallow a whole lot of implausibilities to get him in the door. And I think he understood how the system works.

One of my frustrations with the way discourse of this story has unfolded, particularly after his tragic death, is he is being treated as somebody with no agency. And I think Arday, if you look at what he did, was clearly relatively savvy. He understood that there was a market, that he was being branded as the youngest Black professor in the 800-year history of Cambridge. And he fabricated a story that told people what they wanted to hear.

Not only was he Black coming from rough circumstances, but he was disabled, he was severely autistic, he had this miraculous recovery, also all sorts of medical ailments. He survived a brain tumor, testicular cancer, epilepsy, et cetera. He clearly knew how the game was played. He knew that he could leverage these various identity claims in service of advancement, which is what happened.

The story was not nearly as big in the United States as it was in the UK, understandably. But a lot of people want to place blame for Arday’s death on the British press. American Ibram X. Kendi said [Arday] was “lynched by the media.” Do you think that’s going too far?

I think that’s going way too far. First of all, there are few things I find more grotesque, at least in terms of everyday discourse, than treating lynching as a metaphor, which is something I think you see quite a lot. I think anyone who has seen a hanging tree knows that throwing the term around — “lynching” — for mere journalistic scrutiny is vile beyond measure.

Was the British press scrutiny far too intense? Yes. Do I think it was racist in the sense that I have a hard time imagining there would be this much scrutiny on a white academic who did the same thing? Yes, I think you can absolutely say that. To me, there is a question about, “Okay, what is the line between appropriate journalistic scrutiny and obsession?”

But I also think it’s worth noting, to be fair to the British press, that they’re responding to the way in which he was marketed to them nationally. He was marketed by Cambridge as the youngest Black professor in the 800-year history of this very venerable institution. To some extent, when you brand someone that way, when you film BBC specials with a closeup on his Black hands nestled in the white ones of the head of the Faculty of Education, I think some degree of scrutiny is warranted.

I think it was excessive. But at the same time, Jason Arday was a public figure. I think that is fair to say. His memoir is poised to make a splash. And he took this position that made him a minor academic celebrity. And again, I think it’s very fair to ask whether the degree of attention on what is ultimately an academic scandal in which no one was hurt was far too much. But the idea that we would place the blame on the media rather than on Simon and Schuster, who clearly overlooked obvious inconsistencies in his story, and on Cambridge — I find that absurd.

I think we need to blame the people who put him on the mountaintop rather than the people who ripped him down, even as I think some of those people putting attention on him were unscrupulous.

In your piece at the Atlantic, I thought you bravely related your own experience to that of Jason Arday. Did that come naturally to you or did you have to hold your breath?

Look, I am a Black guy who has been the beneficiary of various kinds of DEI and affirmative action initiatives. And I certainly have encountered a certain kind of white liberal who is very eager to metaphorically grasp my Black hands in their white ones and stare lovingly into my eyes like the Cambridge Faculty of Education person did. So I had some degree of sympathy with him.

I find those kinds of encounters revolting. But I also can understand from Arday’s point of view, coming from a relatively disadvantaged background, he’s the children of immigrants. Then you have all of these people paying attention to you, showering you in accolades — and I think fetishizing you, but it probably didn’t seem that way to him. And you tell a small lie, and maybe that small lie then becomes a bigger lie and then a bigger lie and a bigger lie and a bigger lie.

What he did was wrong, but I can imagine the kind of incentive structure he saw laid out before him. And it’s not hard to see that he made a decision that could in some sense be understood as yes, self-serving, but also giving people what they wanted.

Do you think we’ll learn anything from it?

No. I think people have retreated into their camps. I think progressives are blaming the media for doing what I’ve seen thrown around as a digital lynching. I think conservatives are blaming academic institutions or Jason Arday or just gleefully basking in the glow of having torn this guy down a peg. I haven’t seen a single lesson really learned.

I’ve seen a lot of blame being apportioned. I don’t think there’s much reflection about whether or not these policies are good or bad — the kind of policies or the kinds of extremist versions of affirmative action that go well beyond the spirit of what most people understand as affirmative action.

Whether those kinds of initiatives are good, whether the press scrutiny was fair. I don’t see a lot of self-reflection. I see a lot of blame. And even as I’m wanting to say that there’s lots of people to blame, I also think we should be a little more self-critical.

My first impulse on learning of the Jason Arday affair was to find it somewhat amusing, I will be honest. Here was this guy who managed to tell all of these obvious lies and these very, very smart people believed them hook, line, and sinker. It was objectively funny, but it became unfunny very quickly. And so I think, like I said in the piece, we could all stand to do some reflection about how we ended up in this situation, how Jason Arday ended up in this situation. But will that reflection happen? I highly doubt it.

It’s the Democrats who have mostly had to answer questions about electability this midterm season, but why are there so few questions about the “E” word for the other side?

Gas prices are still skyrocketing. A number of Republican candidates, such as Ohio Rep. Max Miller and former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s running for a Senate seat, are mired in scandal. The Iran war was unpopular from the start, but it is getting even less popular as it drags on. And Trump’s approval rating recently hit 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency yet.

On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon speaks with one of Trump’s most vocal defenders, conservative influencer CJ Pearson, about whether we’re seeing Trump’s brand slip even among his supporters and the young people who helped him win in 2024, and how that could affect the midterm elections. 

Pearson, a conservative content creator and influencer, first went viral when he posted himself, then 12 years old, criticizing Barack Obama in a YouTube video. Now 24, Pearson is one of MAGA’s most prominent Black voices.

In this episode, Astead and Pearson discussed how Republicans should answer questions about whether voters’ lives are better than they were two years ago; whether Trump still has any cultural cachet left over from his last presidential campaign; and when Pearson started to see young Republicans turning away from the MAGA movement.

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

That “E” word’s been thrown around a lot about Democrats, but we want to think about how Republicans are on their own. If you could rate Donald Trump’s second term one through 10, what would you give it?

I think the president’s doing incredibly well for the American people. Promises made, promises kept in many ways. 

I think if you look at this president who ran on securing our southern border, he’s done it. You look at this president who’s talked about bringing down costs, he’s brought down the cost of dairy, eggs. He’s achieved that. 

And I think also this president is only just getting started. He ran on “no tax on tips.” He did that. He ran on “no tax on overtime.” He did that. Oftentimes I tell people the challenge of this administration is keeping up the messaging at the same pace as the accomplishments of this president.

And so I think that there’s a lot more work to do. Thankfully, we have two more years to do it.

Can I get a number?

I think he’s doing well. I will say I grew up in a place where there’s always room for improvement, so I’ll give him an eight.

You’re giving him an eight. I wanted to just start there because Trump’s approval rating has fallen, as I’m sure you have seen. Why do you think the country isn’t maybe on the same page as you?

I think a lot of people are focused on their pocketbooks, right? They’re focused on domestic issues, and I think that we have been very internationally focused over the course of the past few months as we’ve navigated and dealt with the Iran conflict. 

But I think that as we get ready to get through this last wave of primaries, I think you’re going to see a change in his messaging and a reset at the midterm convention in Dallas next month in September. 

And I think you’re going to hear this president talking about how he’s made America more affordable, how he’s kept Americans safe, far safer than they were under President Joe Biden.

And I think that you’ll see those numbers start to change. And a reminder, the only poll that matters is on Election Day. There are many polls that had Kamala Harris beating President Trump, in 2024, and that didn’t happen.

Yeah, I don’t want to be overly poll-reliant, but we’ve heard some of this directly from Republicans even. 

We were at Donald Trump’s UFC event in DC talking to young men, and even there we heard people really come to be critical on three issues specifically: tariffs, the Iran war, and the handling of the Epstein files.

You mentioned the question of affordability. Donald Trump has said, quote, “I love the inflation.” And when asked by reporters about the public strain that has come from the conflicts with Iran, he said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

How can you say that Republicans are gonna run on affordability if the president’s saying he doesn’t care if Americans’ lives are unaffordable?

Well, I’ve often said that we can’t cede this entire affordability debate to the Democrats. The reason that I think a lot of young people are giving a little bit, even a flirtatious nod to the DSA and their socialist and communist candidates, is because they’re talking about an issue that’s top of mind for them.

In the same way that when President Trump won in 2024, he was talking about issues that were top of mind of the American voter, which was the cost of living. 

And so I think that we need to get back to that messaging. I think that this president has continued to deliver on that front. Costs are coming down.

The economy is resurging. We’re seeing economic and global investment in this country unlike anything we’ve seen before. In Oklahoma, we’re bringing back manufacturing with the aluminum smelting plant.

But the president’s not saying this. The president’s saying, “I love the inflation, and I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” Do those words help Republican midterm candidates?

Well, I think the president has a lot of time to say a lot more things because Election Day is pretty far away from now. I think we have two or three months left, and I think the president will make this case. 

But I think what will also make the case is that the candidates that the Democrats are running and nominating all across this country, who are now affiliating themselves with the socialist movement, are not actually fighting for things that will actually ever work.

Socialism has never worked anywhere it’s been tried, and I think that this is going to be an election between common sense versus crazy. Do you wanna run a candidate that hates Thanksgiving?

For the record, that candidate lost in the primary. She will not be on the ballot in November.

She did. She almost was there, though, and that’s the thing. I’m glad common sense won the day in Wisconsin, that the good people there love turkey.

I know that you say that the argument is based on how Democrats are out of touch, but we have talked about some ways in which Donald Trump has not lived up to folks’ expectations, particularly on things like prices and on things like the Iran war.

How does the GOP overcome that electability question? What is their message when folks ask, is their life better than two years ago?

I think we’ve got to lock in. I think we also need to prosecute the case that it’s going to be a lot worse under the Democrats if these crazy communists get into office. And so I think that when you’re looking at costs, we need to make that argument central. We need to make that what we lead with.

And I think that we have to pump the brakes on a lot of the international stuff. And I think that we need to talk about the things that are actually affecting people’s everyday lives at grocery stores, at gas stations, wherever it may be. And I think that is how we can kind of turn the ship around.

When we talk about the Democratic candidates, you’re saying the DSA candidates are far left, and we’ve certainly explored some electability questions for them and some ways that I think they might have stances that are misaligned with the American people. But so does Donald Trump, and he’s endorsed scandal-plagued candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas, like Max Miller in Ohio.

Why is that not just as much a sign of a conservative version of extremism, just as you are arguing that there’s a Democratic or leftist version of that?

Because I think you’re talking about folks who have dealt with issues in their personal lives, not necessarily their voting record.

Okay, maybe I should say Tom Tiffany, who didn’t vote to certify the 2020 election, but I imagine you agree with him.

Well, no, I think that was six years ago. I don’t think about 2020 anymore. I think about 2026 and I think about 2028. So when I look at that … it’s important that we really make the case for crazy communism versus common sense. And I think that the American people are not going to vote for that.

I guess I’m saying, does Donald Trump win the commonsense argument? Like, isn’t crazy versus commonsense an argument that Democrats can make and say Donald Trump is said crazy?

No, because I think Donald Trump definitely wins the common sense argument when we’re running against folks who belong to a party that is now, you know, waging a war against Thanksgiving, who believe that biological men should be playing women’s sports. Again, these are 80/20 issues, and so I actually really like our odds here.

It’s going to be hard, right? It’s always hard for the party that controls the White House to fare all too well in any midterm election. But I think that we’re going to overperform. I think we’re going to hold onto the Senate. The House will be a dogfight, but I like our chances.

On the court, the WNBA is thriving. After 30 years, its players are receiving a historic payout, along with a massive TV distribution deal that will mean more games, and hopefully even more fans. But off the court, all that attention has some downsides. Most recently, it means that the culture war has come for the WNBA.

Specifically, the league has found itself at the center of a debate over transgender athletes and women’s sports, one that Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham ignited last month. 

Cunningham, 30, has gained a reputation as an “enforcer” for her All-Star teammate, Caitlin Clark. In July, she told ESPN that “I think that I am here to extend love, but I also think that with love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

No known trans athletes have ever played in the WNBA, but that hasn’t much deterred pundits from weighing in. It’s the latest instance of the WNBA playing a central role in conversations about race and gender — even as most of the outrage is happening outside the court, while players and coaches would rather focus on basketball.

To get a better sense of what’s going on in the league — and why — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Ringer staff writer Seerat Sohi, who covers the NBA, WNBA, and women’s college basketball, about why the WNBA can’t seem to escape the culture wars.

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

What is it about the WNBA ?

The WNBA is a league that invites, frankly, a lot of distraction, both because of its own institutional failures — I do think the WNBA really struggles at telling its own story and has at times run away from its own story — but I think in general, the WNBA has become fertile ground for the culture wars, as we put them, because the league has exploded in popularity at the same moment in the country where we are embroiled in this cultural, political, legal fight over what the role of women is in society. 

Let’s break this down to the two pieces you mentioned. You referenced institutional failures. What do you mean? 

The WNBA, from the top down, has been understaffed, and it has historically been marketed in a way that is obsessed with trying to bring in some apocryphal average American, the nuclear family. And at the same time, this has been a league that has been defined by people who have historically existed on the margins. They are female athletes at a time when historically female athletes were not paid much attention to, and in fact were mocked.

It’s the league that is primarily Black, that is openly queer, that is politically outspoken. And the league has always tried to toe the line of marketing the faces that feel more like a girl-next-door type of vibe.

To the point that early on, we can look at, for example, Sue Bird, who, when she entered the league [in 2002], was encouraged to not come out. 

And if you look back at pictures of her, she is dressed in a way that not only is it feminine, but it is also not the issue. The issue is that she’s very clearly uncomfortable in her own skin. Diana Taurasi, whose jersey was just retired — if you look back at her awards, it’s the same thing. 

Fast-forward to 2026, these are queer icons who are highly marketable in the media environment that we are in right now, but the WNBA has always been behind the eight ball in that regard because it has run away from its identity.

So by institutional failures, what we mean is maybe a lack of bravery or a lack of spine. You also said this exploded because the WNBA is of great interest at this moment to right-wing figures. What do you mean by that?

The right cares about the WNBA in the same way that it cares about who becomes a Disney princess. It understands the power of a good story. It understands symbolism. To see women on that stage thriving, to see them sweaty, to see them wanting, to see them be the main character instead of the object of somebody else’s affection or interest, to see them be the subject and be the ones that are going for something as opposed to being on the sidelines. 

That in and of itself alone is very, very powerful. And then you think about where the WNBA is politically. This has always been a league that has been very outspoken. This is a league that in 2020 helped flip a Georgia Senate election and actually ousted their then-owner of the Atlanta Dream who spoke out against the Black Lives Matter movement. 

I always understood the WNBA to have a smaller fan base. But the situation with Sophie Cunningham has made me realize it is much larger and much more middle-of-the-road than I would have thought. Did something change recently? Did the fan base of the WNBA grow? 

[Indiana Fever All-Star] Caitlin Clark was an explosive figure. Caitlin Clark was really a gateway drug for WNBA fans. The sheer amount of eyeballs that she has brought to the game, the attention, her logo threes. She is the type of player that makes children out of all of us. And then there’s also this right-wing movement that has latched onto her as a symbol. 

Why is that? For someone who doesn’t watch many games, what’s going on? 

Caitlin is white and straight. That is a demographic that I guess you could say is maybe underrepresented in the WNBA. And there was a feeling when she came into the league that she wasn’t welcomed in the same way that maybe other stars in the past have been. There was a sense that maybe there was some resentment. 

Now, I don’t know if that’s true. I would imagine, look, these are human beings that we’re talking about. There was probably a spectrum of feelings when you think about it. This was a league that didn’t have charter flights. Caitlin Clark comes in, they get charter flights. 

Now, obviously that’s great for the players, but I also think that there was a feeling of, “Oh wait, the WNBA could have done these things that we’ve been advocating for for a long time. Now they’re finally listening because Caitlin is here.”

She is, ironically, an organic phenomenon that is bringing to light the manufactured failures of the WNBA in the past. 

Caitlin Clark goes to the WNBA. The WNBA grows its fan base to include people who traditionally were not watching. And then what is the leap from that fact? More people at games, more eyeballs on games. More eyeballs on players, to a conservative movement seizes upon the WNBA and says, “We’re gonna make something out of this.” How did you see that play out? 

It started with the 2023 college national title game, when Caitlin was still in college. And she went up against Angel Reese from LSU. LSU won that game. And after the game, Angel Reese did the “You can’t see me” taunt by John Cena, and it was actually something that Caitlin did [previously] in the Elite Eight. It was taken as trash talk. Angel then repeated that symbol to Caitlin after they won and pointed at her ring.

In the aftermath of that, Angel Reese was called all kinds of things by not only conservative commentators — a lot of this was conservative commentators, but you also had people like Keith Olbermann, who’s a former SportsCenter anchor and probably somebody who’s a little bit more in the middle of the road, calling her classless.

I think a lot of the WNBA fans took those things to be dog whistles, that it was a form of racism. And there was also just overt racism. There were just words that you and I would not say and would not repeat here that were thrown at Angel Reese, who has also dealt with a lot of vitriol since that moment. 

That moment changed both of their lives, frankly. And that was really the inciting incident. From then on, I think that there were a lot of people in the new media landscape that recognized that the WNBA was a fault line for a lot of our modern discourse in America. 

It is a league that you can use as a proxy to talk about race, gender fluidity, femininity, DEI, labor politics. It is probably the most modern American league that we have.

And if you look back at the history of sports, I think Americans have always used sports as a proxy to talk about things that aren’t actually about the sport. And the WNBA is really just the latest vessel of that.

Have you been hearing a lot about Flock recently? You’re not alone: The surveillance company has put 120,000 cameras on roads in every US state except Alaska, and people are mad about it — online, at city council meetings, and out in the world, where the cameras have become the target of vigilante vandalism.

Flock’s automated license plate readers — cameras that scan the license plates of every car that passes, along with the car’s make, model, bumper stickers, and other identifying characteristics — aren’t really new technology. What makes Flock unique is its use of AI to power a nationwide database that law enforcement can search with very few restrictions.

Founded in 2017, Flock was most recently valued at $8.4 billion. Its aggressive growth strategy has led to widespread adoption: 7,000 law enforcement agencies across the country use Flock cameras, representing a whopping 40 percent of the nation’s police departments.

Flock says its cameras have been used in a million criminal investigations a year. Police say the ability to track suspects across jurisdictions has been a critical tool for solving thousands of crimes including car thefts, missing persons, and abducted children.

But recent reporting also shows how the system is ripe for abuse, with dozens of reported cases of police officers illegally conducting searches on Flock to track the movement of current or former romantic partners. Those stalking cases have led to some arrests, but the instances only came to light after journalists and concerned citizens filed public records requests for the data.

The company recently unveiled several reforms that it says will help avoid improper uses of its system. Critics say the changes are merely window dressing for a surveillance system that threatens the privacy of everyone, regardless of whether they have committed a crime — and they haven’t helped to quell widespread outrage about the cameras, which has caused dozens of cities and counties across the country tohave cut ties with Flock. 

“There’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.”

To get a better sense of where the Flock backlash is heading — and whether the company will be able to survive — Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who has reported extensively on Flock and has broken several stories about its misuse.

The Today, Explained team also reached out to Flock for comment and received an out-of-office reply that said: “Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

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

Cops are using Flock in a really creepy way to stalk their exes. You’ve been writing about other potential misuses and existing misuses of Flock. What are you seeing?

I’ve been reporting on Flock for a few years now and there’s been several high-profile cases and trends that we’ve been reporting on. 

Last year, we learned that local police were helping ICE surveil undocumented immigrants using the Flock network. Police in Texas and South Carolina and Tennessee were searching the entire Flock network for either “immigration” or “ICE” in the reason field in the Flock system. And they were searching not just in the states and communities that they were in, but they were searching throughout the entire country. So these searches happened in, notably, Illinois and California, where it is against the law to use this technology for immigration enforcement. An investigation by the Illinois secretary of state found that these searches broke state law and Flock had to do some reform after that. 

There was also a case in Texas where a woman’s partner reported that she had a self-administered abortion and more than 80,000 cameras across the entire country were searched for that woman. This is a nightmare situation for people who are worried about access to reproductive freedom. In that case, Flock wasn’t able to track down the woman, but the searches were done nonetheless and police there considered whether they would be allowed to charge her with a crime while they were doing that investigation. 

And then earlier this month, I reported on a case in Wisconsin where police used the Flock network to track a man who drove from Wisconsin, where weed is not legal, into Michigan, where it is legal. They then waited for him to drive back into Wisconsin, pulled him over, and then used the fact that he crossed state lines as the pretext to search his car for weed.

So this isn’t just cops and their domestic relationships or former relationships. This is ICE, this is abortion. This is invasive, is the long and short of it. How are people responding to this new era of surveillance that no one signed up for?

People are really mad about it. I think that there are a lot of communities that signed on to this technology because they thought it would primarily be used to recover stolen vehicles, to find missing children, for property crimes, things like that. And what we’ve seen is a real mission creep. 

We are seeing it used to surveil protesters. We’ve seen it used for immigration enforcement. We’ve seen it used for all these stalking cases. People think that this is the surveillance state. And so there’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.

Tell me about the vigilante backlash.

Basically, people are putting masks on and they are cutting Flock cameras down. These are mounted on poles, and so they are buying pole saws and they’re cutting the poles down. Flock cameras have been shot with shotguns. Industrial foam has been sprayed on the lens of Flock cameras. 

I also got an email from a man who was arrested for what he said was “changing the angle of a Flock camera.” And what he meant by that is he drove his truck into the pole of a Flock camera and had it face the sky. He was like, “I made it not able to surveil people. Now it’s surveilling the sky.”

There’s something called DeFlock, which is a crowdsourced map to track all of the Flock cameras in the United States. This map has become incredibly popular. 

What we’re seeing are people forming these groups to talk at city council meetings to determine, “Is this a technology that we want in our town?” It’s been people standing at a podium saying, “I don’t like this technology. Let’s talk about it.” And then on the other hand, you have vandals who are destroying Flock cameras and cutting them down.

The backlash is happening across the political spectrum. There have been towns in Silicon Valley that have banned Flock cameras. There was a town in Texas called Bandera that is like a Wild West tourism town that banned Flock cameras. 

Conservatives will say, “This is invasive government. This is Big Brother. Don’t surveil me. I don’t want you seeing where I drive my car or my truck.” The left is saying much the same thing, but they’re saying, “This is being used to surveil Black and brown people. It could be used to surveil women seeking abortions. It could be, and has been, used to surveil undocumented immigrants.” And so the backlash is coming from all angles at this point. 

“I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried.” 

There have been dozens of cities and towns that have canceled their contracts. Los Angeles allowed its contract with Flock to lapse. Denver canceled its contract with Flock. Some of these have been quite large cities. You’ve also seen pretty small towns cancel their contracts as well.

This is a multibillion-dollar company. They don’t want to remove cameras. They want to install more cameras. Are they doing anything meaningful to address these concerns?

The backlash has been so strenuous that Flock has started to say that it will proactively flag anomalous searches. So if a police officer is searching the same license plate over and over again, it might automatically flag an audit for the police department to see, “Hey, is this police officer abusing the system?” 

They also are changing the default retention time from 30 days to seven days, meaning that your Flock data will stay in its system for only a week rather than a month.

Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union say that these changes are not super meaningful and that the main requirement that most people are asking for would be a requirement for police to get a warrant before they search the system, which would take these searches from being extremely routine — there are hundreds of thousands of searches done on this system every single month — to where there would be a higher bar, where a judge has signed off that this is a crime that warrants this type of search.

If Flock goes down or if the backlash grows to the point where they’re at least far less relevant in this field, are there a dozen other companies doing the same thing ready to take its place?

This technology is really old. It’s been around for decades. And what Flock has done is networked it and added AI to it. But there are other companies that offer similar technology. Motorola is in many cities in the United States. They make similar tech. Axon, which makes taser and body cameras and cameras for police cruisers, also has an [automated license plate recognition] product. And some of the cities that have ditched Flock have actually just replaced it with an Axon contract, meaning they’ve ditched one surveillance vendor and they’ve added a different one.

I don’t know that surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers are ever going to fully go away, but I don’t think it’s clear that Flock itself is going to survive this backlash. I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried. 

We can see it in how their CEO, Garrett Langley, has been talking about the tech. A year ago he was calling journalists who covered the company activists and he was calling activists who protested the company terrorists. And he’s had to apologize for that rhetoric. He’s had to go and say, “We are not Big Brother. We are trying to improve your communities.” And they’re really on a PR tour right now to clean up their image. 

I don’t know where this goes from here, but I haven’t seen much fatigue from the public on this story. I opened my Instagram feed and I’m just inundated with video after video that has millions and millions of views about Flock. This seems to be something that has really captured the public’s attention and that they really seem to care about.

No matter how hard we try, remembering anything that happened to us before the age of, say, 3 or 4 years old feels impossible. Even memories before 7 years old feel hazy and fragmented.

Our brains just aren’t built to store specific memories from our first few years, something known as “infantile amnesia.”

And chances are, even the earliest memories we think we have might just be amalgamations of stories we’ve been told, images cribbed from old family snapshots and home videos, or scenes we’ve borrowed from movies or TV shows.

So does it really matter if it happened, if we can’t really remember it?

Yes, science says. Even if we don’t have a specific memory of what happened when we were babies, those experiences leave lasting impressions on us of being safe and being loved, which shapes how we form relationships later in life. But whether babies are able to encode and store permanent memories is still an open question.

Columbia University cognitive psychologist Tristan Yates put babies in MRI machines and showed them a series of images, and found that the babies tended to stare longer at an image they’d been shown before, suggesting that they remembered seeing the image the first time.

“We are showing that they’re able to form some memories,” Yates said. “The hippocampus is capable of forming specific memories over a few minutes, but now we need to start doing the research that can get us at longer durations, that can get at more complex memories.”

One theory for infantile amnesia is that an infant’s brain is prioritizing learning general skills, like how to walk or talk or eat, or learning to detect patterns like a bedtime routine, rather than storing specific memories that aren’t necessary for survival.

Noam Hassenfeld spoke with Yates and Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Suskind studies early childhood development and the important role that parents and caregivers play, and she told Noam about how our early childhood experiences can shape us.

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

You started out as a cochlear implant surgeon and now you’re working on childhood development. How did that happen? What’s the connection there?

It actually makes a whole lot of sense. When I first started our pediatric cochlear implant program at the University of Chicago, I started implanting cute little kids who all look like they had the same potential to thrive after implant surgery, and found very quickly that I could implant two children who looked very much the same, who had parents who loved them equally, with the same technology, but they would have very different outcomes, with one of them really thriving after surgery in terms of language learning and trajectories, and others barely able to communicate. 

It was that experience and seeing these huge differences in outcomes after the same surgery that led me into this incredible world of childhood development and the importance of the early years and the importance of parents.

Humans come out with brains that are literally only one-third the size of adult brains. That’s very different than any other species. It’s why the puppy can start feeding itself pretty quickly and start walking, whereas the human infant is helpless. In those first three years of life, 85 percent of the physical brain is built during those periods of time. 

A million new neural connections happen every second. The environmental input, the input from parents and caregivers — every serve and return, every touch, every gaze — literally is helping shape and strengthen the neural connections that happen in our brain. 

The brain isn’t being just built for your child’s vocabulary development or their literacy ability. It’s building their social brain, their ability to relate to and connect to the rest of the world. The relationships and the expectations for relationships are built in those early years.

Tell me if this is maybe an oversimplification, but I’m a parent of a young son; he’s a little over 7 months old. And I feel like what I’m doing when I’m raising him is building the structure of his brain, or building the architecture, and all the other stuff, all the specific things, are going to fill in all the rooms of the big building that we’re constructing together. But he’s not going to start filling those in with specific ideas or specific memories until later on in his development. 

The analogy you make is exactly right. I think of building the physical brain — if you were thinking about it through a computer lens — as building the hardware, the firmware, the memory, the RAM. I think of K-12 as really important, but I think of those as software updates. But these early years are building that infrastructure.

“I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence.”

At the end of the day, it’s your attachment with him, being the perfectly imperfect parent. I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence. So feel okay every time you misstep, misunderstand and repair, because that is, for him, building the understanding of, “I can be loved by another human who missteps but is able to repair.” He is starting to understand how to expect to be treated. 

That’s why it’s almost like you’re building the relationship map for him that’s going to allow him in the future to have expectations of how he’s going to be treated and loved by an imperfect human: building that strong bond, showering him with rich language, that back and forth, looking at him as a conversational partner from day one. 

It’s interesting you brought up AI and friction. What do you think this idea of a more frictionless existence is going to start meaning for kids?

I had a book that just came out on this called Human Raised, and that’s a lot of the argument of the book. Children learn from imperfect parenting through friction, through the productive struggle. And we’re seeing that friction that we’ve always looked at as a bug in the system — like, “Oh my gosh, I wish this was a more frictionless existence with the other humans in our world” — what we’re finding is that it is key for relationships development, learning to have relationships, and actually even learning. 

That’s why, writing an essay with an LLM — you don’t remember it at the end of the day. There’s something about what happens in the brain that we’ve discounted on the friction side of things. So I actually think in some ways friction should be the word of the year, and we need to embrace it a little bit more. We don’t need to friction-max, but we do need to see the power of the friction.

It sounds like even if my son is going to forget all of this, maybe on a deep level it’ll stick with him. But should I still have a nice big 1-year-old birthday party?

Heck yes. Because you’re doing it partially for you — and the grandparents, let’s be clear. Those are wonderful moments that they do remember at some level. My son, who’s now 20-something in medical school, was obsessed with Thomas the choo-choo train. I still have the box of the Thomas the choo-choo train. 

He may not remember exactly that birthday party and the cake that I worked very hard on, but it’s even fun to talk about it now in his twenties. So yes, do enjoy every moment. Don’t get obsessed, like everything has to be perfect, but those are memories for everyone.

Hasan Piker has for years now been both an asset and a liability for Democrats. The Twitch streamer has elevated base-energizing progressives, such as Darializa Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in interviews and with endorsements. But he’s also stoked controversy with past anti-Israel commentary and generally caused headaches for establishment Democrats who would rather not see Hasan’s favored candidates get any more oxygen. 

Why? A familiar concept for these kinds of centrist Democrats: electability.

That concept has been on many left-leaning voters’ minds over the past few weeks, as primaries have put progressive candidates to the test — with very mixed results. Last week, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost her primary to establishment favorite David Crowley. Not long before that, though, progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won his primary against the more mainstream Democratic candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — albeit by a much smaller margin than many polls predicted.

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Piker to talk about whether the recent primary results have refined his understanding of how prepared Americans are to vote for democratic socialists, what support for unabashedly progressive candidates tells us about the changing working class in America, and the “pundit brain” problem in the Democratic Party.

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

The last two weeks have produced mixed results for left-wing candidates: a big win in Michigan and a win this week in Minnesota for Peggy Flanagan, but a loss for Francesca Hong, which was a surprise in Wisconsin.

What have been your takeaways from the last set of results?

I think the ground game is phenomenal. There’s a lot of excitement on the platform. There’s a lot of excitement for the first time for “Change Candidates.” It’s still a good environment to be in if you are a socialist.

The establishment does have a lot of juice still, for sure. And when they can put together a similar strategy to what happened in 2020 against Bernie Sanders with Joe Biden, especially in a place like Wisconsin where Tony Evers is very clearly still a very popular governor, they were able to elevate David Crowley’s campaign, who actually had dropped out and consolidated support behind Sara Rodriguez initially. And he had to drop out because he was only performing at, like, 6 percent.

Yeah, the consolidation was swift, and it was complete. I mean, you’re comparing it to 2020, in which the establishment lined up behind Joe Biden and kind of nixed that Bernie Sanders campaign in the blink of an eye. I imagine you were surprised at the result.

I never underestimate my opponents, whether they be Republicans or whether they be establishment Democrats. You have to always operate as though you’re down 10 points. I don’t believe in the notion that we are going to win easy victories at the end of the day.

There are a lot of powerful interests at play here. There are a lot of people in positions of power that don’t wanna lose their seats. So they’re gonna fight like hell, so we have to also fight like hell. We have to fight extra hard, as a matter of fact, because we’re almost always outspent, right?

I got an alert right before we started talking from the New York Times that said, “A democratic socialist lost in Wisconsin, which shows the movement’s surging wave might crash before rippling out from big cities.” Is that wrong?

Oh, I love that. Look, people are gonna have their opinions. I’ll just say it like this.

Abdul El-Sayed’s one-point victory margin showed that the Democratic socialist-aligned movement or the progressive movement was in tatters. It was obviously a failure. And now, David Crowley’s less-than-one-point victory proves that the centrist bulwark is still here, and that the Democratic socialist movement is dying.

It kind of feels like it’s wish-casting for the most part, from a lot of people who maybe want to go back to the way things used to be. My assessment on this is definitely a little bit different. I think, at the end of the day, these are insurgencies, right? These are insurgent candidacies.

We’re talking about no name recognition for a state legislator that was entirely propped up by local Wisconsin DSA chapters. These people didn’t have a lot of money necessarily, and they were able to defy the odds, and they continued defying the odds all the way until the end.

The idea that the polls showed that Francesca was a clear frontrunner and was running away with this race is utterly irrelevant. Especially if you were to look at this with a broader perspective, like thinking about where Democratic Socialists of America have gotten to in the last two years.

I mean, I remember how I felt in 2024, in the aftermath of the DNC, about where the American socialist movement was as opposed to where it is now. We are clearly a force to be reckoned with, and that’s precisely the reason why a lot of people are paying close attention to what’s going on.

And I’ll say it like this. The fact that the Hong campaign did not have any major progressive national endorsements, and that I was like their top surrogate.

There was no Bernie Sanders endorsement, there was no AOC endorsement. That did make the Hong campaign unique on that front.

I think there were a couple other races that I was also involved in where my candidates lost, right? 

I mean, Saikat Chakrabarti was another great example of this as well. It wasn’t a statewide race, and obviously, there’s always clear local differences that play a formative role in how these races turn out.

But we’ve looked back at this data. There are a couple different endorsement trackers out there, and they’ll put my endorsement up there, and they’ll put, like, AOC and Bernie Sanders. And it’s very clear that the best likelihood of success usually comes from a consolidation of national progressive forces, whether it be outside expenditures coming from Justice Democrats or things like that. And with the Francesca Hong campaign, I think it’s a testament to their success. It’s a testament to how popular the platform is in general.

And one thing I will have to stress here is the salience of the electability narrative. I think that’s still a real motivator for a lot of people.

Yeah, I hear that. Both El-Sayed’s campaign and Hong’s campaign did better among middle-class voters — I should say, than the data would tell us, among working-class voters. Considering how central working-class and bottom-up issues are to the DSA message, why has it not produced results that actually get it more working-class votes? Because that does seem to be something we’ve learned over the last three, four weeks.

I think that we have to dramatically reconstruct how we understand what it means to be working-class in this country. I think a lot of people will disagree with what I’m about to say here, but we have to do away with this fantastical notion that the working-class is one specific thing.

I think for the longest time, people have thought about this hardhat-wearing coal miner as the true working class, oftentimes White as well. And the working class is unbelievably diverse in this country, and it’s also a lot more college-educated than people actually give it credit for.

I think partially this is because if you look back to the ’90s as opposed to right now, yes, if you had a college education, you were upwardly mobile. You were probably a professional managerial class individual that was going to be able to retire at a reasonable age. You were doing fairly well. It was a guarantee for getting a good job, right? 

That’s not the case in America any longer. There are a lot more people who have a college degree who are downwardly mobile, who are having a very tough time in the current job market, who do not own a home, and it’s seemingly less likely than before that they will ever be able to own a home.

And that is the actual working class. It’s much broader, right? So we’ve seen in Zohran’s race and in Abdul’s race, there’s this massive group of working-class folks that constantly get cast aside as not being a true representation of the American working class, when I think like, No, that is the true representation.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee — better known by its short name, AIPAC — bills itself as a bipartisan advocate “for policies that strengthen the US-Israel partnership.” In 2026, it’s become something else: a major — and seemingly, losing — issue in Democratic politics. 

Progressive Democratic candidates in primaries across the country are explicitly calling out their opponents’ relationship with AIPAC, often using the connection as a rallying point to persuade voters about the problem of “dark money” in politics. Most recently, in Michigan, AIPAC spent about $30 million boosting Rep. Haley Stevens in her bid for the state’s Democratic Senate nomination. Her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, drew attention to it again and again. She lost. 

As one of the biggest spenders in US elections, the group has gone well beyond its origins lobbying members of Congress to support its agenda. According to David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, AIPAC is spending millions of dollars against candidates who speak out against Israel’s actions in Palestine — sometimes using advertisements that have nothing to do with Israel, and may appear unrelated to AIPAC.

Dayen spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the backlash surrounding AIPAC’s spending, the group’s complicated web of shell PACs,  and what it all means for the Democratic Party’s quickly evolving stance on Israel.

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

What is AIPAC?

AIPAC started out as a lobbying organization. It was inaugurated in the 1950s. It has historically been seen as one of the more powerful lobbying organizations in Washington. And its goal is to strengthen and maintain the relationship between the US and Israel.

They have annual conventions where pretty much everybody across the political spectrum attends and gives speeches. But something changed about five years ago. AIPAC was not content to just lobby members of Congress. They wanted to influence who actually got to Washington. And they began to engage in the use of super PACs to run advertising and other forms of political engagement in campaigns, and particularly in primary campaigns that determine who actually gets to a general election.  

Why did they want to influence who got to Washington? Maybe that sounds like an obvious question, but it wasn’t happening before, so why did it start happening?

One thing that happened is in 2018, we saw the rise of what is known as “The Squad,” and that included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — people who had very strident views, particularly about the US-Israel relationship. Those progressive Democrats were very successful in winning safe seat races. And I’m not in their head, but it could be that AIPAC wanted to try to provide a counterweight, and stop that from happening, and use their resources — very prodigious resources — to spend money in these campaigns and to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Once upon a time, an endorsement from AIPAC was a powerful thing. It could be a huge benefit to a candidate. What exactly did it get you when AIPAC said, “This is our guy, this is our gal?”

I mean, in practical terms, it probably got you $5,000 because that’s the limit on a corporate PAC. But because AIPAC was powerful and also a bipartisan organization, getting your name on the list of AIPAC endorsees was something that you could tout in your election. It was something that showed that you had a commitment to what has historically been an important bond between the US and Israel. 

It certainly wasn’t as controversial in the years before 2023 as it is today. After October 7, we saw what a lot of people have termed a genocide against the Palestinian people. The changing attitudes around the US-Israel relationship more broadly, where large numbers of Americans now view that relationship negatively, have changed what the meaning of an AIPAC endorsement really is.

I know that you’ve dug into the numbers. What do we know about how much money AIPAC is specifically spending this midterm cycle?

It’s a hard question to answer. If you go by the Federal Election Commission disclosures, AIPAC has raised about a hundred million dollars this election cycle, and has spent in independent expenditures — that’s TV ads and mailers and these kinds of things — about $28 million. 

But that is an undercount for a couple different reasons. When I say those numbers, I am going by the specific super PAC that AIPAC has created. It’s called United Democracy Project. United Democracy Project has sent money to other PACs — about $9 million worth.

Is this a lot of money?

I think the real innovation here is the transfer of money from, in this case, pro-Israel PACs, to these pop-up PACs, these shell PACs that are created specifically for a particular election and then funded through AIPAC and, in some cases, other other pro-Israel PACs. 

They are sort of laundering this money through to other PACs, so those other PACs run the ads and it doesn’t look like it’s coming from AIPAC. A perfect example was the first real major primary state of the cycle, which was Illinois.

There were four open seats in the Chicago area that are pretty strongly blue. A Democrat is going to win the general election. And so these primaries were highly contested. AIPAC set up two PACs, one called Elect Chicago Women and the other called Affordable Chicago Now. And millions of dollars went from AIPAC’s super PAC, which is called United Democracy Project, into these two pop-up PACs. 

And those two PACs then funded ads for four candidates in those four open seat races. Now, if you were watching that on television, you would say, “Hey, elect Chicago women. That sounds like a good idea. I’m gonna watch this ad” or “Affordable Chicago now. I like affordability.” The truth is that this money was coming from AIPAC into these ads and supporting candidates that were generally supportive of the US-Israel relationship. 

Now, those four races — AIPAC won two of them and they lost two of them. And it was really interesting, I think, where they were successful, and where they weren’t. In one race up in the Evanston area, it became a big issue that AIPAC actually was behind these ads from Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now. 

The [AIPAC] candidate, a state senator named Laura Fine, actually was harmed, I think, in the election by this fact that this got out, and that this became a major issue in the campaign. And she ended up finishing third in that primary, despite having millions of dollars supporting her. There were other races where this wasn’t sort of as explicit a factor in the election itself, and those candidates were able to win. 

This all sounds quite shady and yet I wonder — how unusual is it for an interest group in politics to be doing something like this?

I think it’s pretty unusual. It’s not something I’ve seen a whole lot of. We saw it to a smaller degree in some other election cycles — two years ago, four years ago — but it has become a concerted strategy this time. 

And so there are these pop-up PACS that are specific to a campaign, but also some established PACs that have been around for a while are receiving money from AIPAC and affiliated groups and using that in campaigns. 

Emily’s List is a very well-known political organization that supports pro-choice women. They took [hundreds of thousands of dollars] from an organization called Democratic Majority for Israel that is not affiliated with AIPAC per se, but aligns on similar candidates. 

There are other examples of this, more obscure examples. Like there’s a PAC called Crush MAGA PAC. And it’s affiliated with a different, I’m gonna sound crazy when I say this, but Crush MAGA PAC is affiliated with a different pack called Save Democracy, and Save Democracy has received $100,000 from United Democracy Project, which is AIPAC Super PAC. So sometimes the layers here are two or three or even four PACs deep. 

And it can be really hard to untangle all this and figure out where the money has come from, because AIPAC certainly isn’t saying, “We’re funding that campaign.” They’re releasing disclosures as required by the Federal Election Commission, but they’re not saying where the money is earmarked for, if it’s for a specific race, if it’s for a specific candidate.

AIPAC at times has responded to criticism of it by appearing to conflate it with criticism of Israel or criticism of Jews. Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders comes out with a statement. He denounces Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for what he says is the “extermination of Gaza.” He calls for an end to military aid to Israel. He says people are starving to death.

AIPAC attacks Sanders’s statement, calling it a hate-filled rant and blood libel, and pointing out that in his statement, he didn’t mention Hamas’s attack on Israel. So AIPAC is now public in a way that historically it has not been. And it is tying criticism of Israel to antisemitic sentiment. Does this help or hurt AIPAC’s cause, do you think?

It depends on the messenger, but the issue is that there’s a very straight line between how this money is being used, transferred, spent, concealed, and a broader critique that I think a lot of Democrats have about money in politics. And so when AIPAC decides, “Okay, we’re going respond to criticism that is rooted in what AIPAC believes, and the conditions in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, et cetera,” to saying, you know, “Any criticism of what we’re doing is antisemitic — I think people who see this as a broader problem about money in politics see that as an extremely cynical take.”

I don’t think that really connects to one of the big reasons why people are really objecting to this, which is that they don’t want to see their politicians essentially bought.

But it’s additionally fraught because there are antisemitic tropes where, you know, a cabal of Jews is secretly controlling the government and finance, right? It feels triply complicated.

Look, I’m Jewish, and in having to cover this, I have to try to follow money from Jewish groups from one place to another, and that can certainly be uncomfortable. And it does add some weight to this issue. 

But I feel like we are talking here not about somebody’s religion, but about a policy. And it’s a twofold policy. One is the policy of the US government funding, to the tune of billions of dollars, the destruction of an entire region, and also the policy of allowing super PACs to dictate who ends up making decisions in Washington.

When the Russia-Ukraine conflict erupted into full-scale war in 2022, things looked grim for Ukraine. Its capital, Kyiv, was under threat almost immediately, and there were questions about how long the smaller country could hold out, even with US support. More than four years later, however, the dynamic is changing. US military support has waned, but not only has Ukraine held its own in years of grinding, attritional fighting, it increasingly has Russia on the defensive.

According to Marcus Walker, who covers Ukraine as South Europe Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, “it’s certainly possible for the smaller country to survive and have a chance of winning only because it is more nimble and and better at improvising and for large periods of the war has had the edge in terms of innovation.” 

Walker, who, last month, reported on how the war is beginning to shift against Russian President Vladimir Putin, talked with Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain how Ukraine has held on this long — and how it’s successfully improvising on the battlefield to press its advantage.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, including how Ukraine has recently gained a new ally on the American right who has Trump’s ear. You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

You recently wrote that Ukraine has Russia on its back foot. How?

To understand what happened this year, we have to go back to the very beginnings of the war, which were in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the Eastern Donbas region in a smaller-scale war. And, at the time, Ukraine was a militarily weak country. Its army was pretty backward and had outdated equipment; although, it fought as hard as it could. The society was politically divided, especially over its relationship with Russia and with the West and with Europe. And Russia seems to have drawn the lesson that Ukraine would be a pushover when it launched its full scale invasion in 2022. And, at the time, now four and a half years ago, even most Western governments and intelligence services thought that Russia would win the war easily.

Instead, the very fact of Russian pressure on Ukraine had somehow welded Ukrainians together and created a stronger, more united society and state that shared — whatever the internal differences — at least the determination to have a country called Ukraine. And, in the meantime, they did a lot of reforms to their country and to their military. 

And so, when Russia launched a full scale invasion — thinking, “this will be easy,” — instead they found themselves in a full-scale war that they’ve been unable to win. On balance, Russia is really struggling to get any military result despite the investment of massive resources and the loss of incredible numbers of soldiers in trying to win this war. It just isn’t able to turn its advantage in numbers into victory. 

Right now, it’s hard to see Ukraine collapsing. However, Ukraine’s a long way from winning outright. And the outcome of this war is ultimately still open.

Ukraine must be doing something right on the battlefield. What is it doing right?

It has found ways to counteract Russia’s advantage in numbers, in manpower, and in equipment. And, above all, the asymmetric war that Ukraine has been fighting has come to rely heavily on drones, on its know-how, and on its skill at improvisation to develop a new form of drone warfare that other countries around the world have been trying to learn from, including the US military, including Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, and including other NATO countries in Europe — and, of course, the Russians, too. 

There is a constant arms race here in terms of drone technology and tactics. And both sides are now using incredible numbers of these often very tiny weapons — often 12 or 15 inches big with four little propellers — that can kill at ranges of 20 to 30 miles.

What is Ukraine using the drones to do, exactly?

They’re the most important tactical weapon at the front for killing Russian infantry. They are also using larger bomber drones with propellers or with wings to try and destroy Russian logistics, to blow up trucks transporting ammunition or other supplies on the supply roads far behind the front. They’re using long-range drones that can fly for a thousand miles or more to destroy Russian oil refineries deep inside Russia in an attempt to cut off the oil revenues that are vital for the Russian state and for Putin’s ability to finance the war. 

On the front line, drones are also doing all sorts of work that humans used to do, such as transporting ammunition, and food, and water to infantry soldiers on the front line. So, if you go to frontline areas now, or anywhere near them, you can see ground drones: little remote-control vehicles with big chunky wheels trundling along on their own with no human in sight. 

They also, for example, evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers. They will lie down on these ground drones and be ferried out, because that is better than having six men carry you out on a stretcher where, if you’re hit again, then you might have seven casualties.

How did Ukraine end up using drones in so many areas — and so successfully? Is this just weaponry evolving the way it tends to?

Obviously, in all wars, innovation happens very fast under the pressure of necessity. But there is something very particular about Ukraine. It is a country of people who like to improvise. It’s also a country with a large software sector, a large IT sector. And it’s a place where large parts of the military have a culture of, as we journalists sometimes put it, trying to MacGyver solutions. You take what you have, and you improvise. 

It so happened that the drone revolution started with consumer drones, the same kind of quadcopters that people were using to take pictures on holiday. And they worked out ways to attach a claw to them that can then drop a grenade or strap some explosives to it and crash the whole drone into a Russian vehicle. That was how it began at the start of this war in 2022. But, now, these things have become really a deadly fleet of flying killer robots that saturate the frontline area. 

Of course, the Russians are doing the same. So, on both sides of the front line, it has become extremely difficult and dangerous to move under a sky full of these killer robots.

I was reading this weekend that Ukraine has been using drones to target warehouses for this company called Wildberries. It’s kind of like Amazon for Russia. What’s the strategy there?

There are a couple of aspects to that. One is that Wildberries has also been selling a large amount of military gear, such as body armor or drone components. It’s more like an Amazon from which the soldiers can order a lot of gear to continue the war, so it is a way of disrupting military logistics. 

But, also, it strikes a blow to Russian civilian perceptions of the war, because, for years, Putin tried to tell the Russian population that this war is something happening far away, and it wouldn’t touch them directly. Now, it turns out that their equivalent of Amazon deliveries are not going to be arriving, because the warehouse burned down. 

At the same time, it’s a way of damaging the Russian economy, because Wildberries also owes a lot of money to banks. And so, if the company is in trouble, then it also causes trouble for the Russian banking system. And it hurts the tax revenues of the Russian government that pay for the war.

Is Russia showing evolution on the battlefield, as well?

Yes, they have. They have also come up with their own innovations. For example, in the last couple of years, since about 2024, they’ve been using large numbers of drones on fiber optic cables. That means the pilot that’s flying them is attached via a long thin plastic cable or fiber optic cable to a drone that carries a spool and is unspooling this cable as it flies. Now, what does that do? It means that electronic interference with the radio signal is no longer possible, because there is a physical connection between the pilot and the drone. So, that was an innovation that bypassed electronic warfare or the interception of the radio signal of the video feed that pilots need to fly their drones. 

They’ve had other innovations too. The Russians last year, for example, came up with a whole new class of medium-range drones — cheap, fixed-wing drones. The Ukrainians have now responded and made their own versions, which are better, but it really is a constant race of innovation and adaptation. And every time I come back and talk to military units here, everything’s changed. The tactics that worked last year no longer work. And the drones that work now didn’t exist three months ago.

Is there some possibility that Ukraine can win this war by not losing it?

Yes. Winning in war means achieving political war aims. And Ukraine’s aim is to survive as an independent nation state. It can do that. It can achieve that even if it loses currently about 20 percent of its territory that’s under Russian occupation. 

I think it’s hard to see how Russia can achieve its own central war aim, which was to reimpose political control over Ukraine to turn it into a kind of protectorate — really to take back control of the place that was once Russia’s largest colony. It’s very hard to see how the Russians can achieve that. The Russians seem to be counting on the West, on the US and the Europeans getting tired of supporting Ukraine, of sending financing and loans and weaponry. Putin seems to believe that, without this international support from the West, Kyiv won’t be able to carry this on forever.

I have to be honest about something that is a great source of personal shame: I am really, really bad at taking time off of work.

Despite working at a company with unlimited PTO, the last time I took a weeklong vacation was about a year ago, making me a walking cliche of the American who never goes on holiday. You could argue that the reason is cultural, that the Protestant work ethic has me in a chokehold. But I think the root cause is much simpler: For something allegedly relaxing and fun, vacations require a lot of planning and even more money. The price of flights is up, hotel rooms aren’t cheap, you need to factor in the cost of meals, and even that corny souvenir shot glass isn’t going to pay for itself. 

Hannah Sampson, who writes about travel for the Washington Post, says one answer is to take a staycation. “It’s taking the time to do things you normally wouldn’t do in your regular life and put on hold all of the burdensome things that you would do in your daily life,” she told Vox. “You’re enabling yourself to discover something that you might have taken for granted.” 

Plus, she says, a staycation can be “really fun and rewarding while also being budget-friendly and hopefully allowing you to put money aside for the bigger trip that you want to take sometime.”

So how do you make the most of a staycation? And how do you keep your typical day-to-day life from creeping in? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

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

It sounds like the key to a successful staycation is all about mindset. How do you achieve that mindset shift?

The way to really get into the staycation zone is planning and preparing and getting yourself hyped for what you’re going to do. This is something that I love about going on vacation and it applies to staying home too. 

Read reviews for places that you might want to go. If you’ve picked a restaurant, look at the menu and start to drool over what you’re going to eat. Think about your favorite bookstores or paths or discover a new corner of your neighborhood that you want to explore in advance. The anticipation of that experience will give you that vacation high. 

It’s so hard though, because you’re around the house. How do you make your home feel a little more special?

I think we all got too much practice on this during the pandemic, but there are a lot of things you can do to change the vibes of your house. I have a candle that’s national park-scented, so it’s piney. In my house, we do a lot of things like use audio to set the mood. I have small kids, so we’ll play audio of a ride at Disney World or just ambient sound from a park that we like. 

During the pandemic, my husband and I meant to spend our anniversary at the beach where we got married, but I was pregnant. We couldn’t travel. So we found a webcam that showed the sunset on that beach and we got takeout. It was really sad, but we watched the sunset.

It’s sad, but it’s also quite sweet. It’s like, “We’ll bring the beach to us.”

Exactly. And it was a beautiful sunset.

For me, one of the challenges of a staycation — and for all vacations, if I’m honest — is not letting real life creep in. And that’s beyond taking time to do administrative tasks around the house. That Slack goes off. I get that email. A news alert goes out and I’m just like, “Well, what if I just take a little gander?” How do you keep from letting that happen?

Unplugging is so hard. You could have a couple of small kids and teach them to tell you to get off your phone, which mine have learned to do. My husband actually has a Brick device, which locks your phone for you. The discipline is real there. 

It takes work to force yourself out of that constant need of scrolling through TikTok or just seeing what’s up at work. You don’t need to be on there. If there’s an emergency, they know how to reach you at work. So trust that process. Be super in the moment with whatever you’re doing because you need that mental break, even if you haven’t gone somewhere. 

You need to make the most of the time that you have, especially if you’re taking vacation time and spending it at home. Vacation time is a precious resource that you should be using to the best of your ability. 

Of all the extinction-level threats vying for our attention, AI, climate change, and nuclear war tend to get most of the airplay. But Annie Jacobsen thinks biological war should be near the top of our mental list of doomsday scenarios, too.

She should know — Jacobsen has carved out a unique niche as America’s foremost reporter on the ways we could end the world. Her bestselling 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario terrified readers and experts alike, and has been optioned by Hollywood. 

It was while conducting dozens of interviews with high-level government sources for Nuclear War that Jacobsen was told repeatedly that biowarfare should be her next focus.

She took their advice. Her gripping new book Biological War: A Scenario follows a similar ticking-clock format that shows, step by step, just how a humanity-threatening man-made biological catastrophe could play out. (Spoiler alert: not great.)

The result feels like dystopian science fiction, albeit the kind that comes heavily footnoted with government studies that come to similarly grim conclusions. The fact that tech CEOs are also sounding the alarm that advanced AI could make creating killer germs even easier only adds to the growing sense of anxiety. And this book has also been optioned by Hollywood for a TV adaptation. 

Jacobsen sat down with Today, Explained host Noel King to talk through the plot of her nightmare scenario, why we’re still developing biological weapons despite the clear risks, and what needs to happen to avoid disaster. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How does your book start?

The inciting incident in the book is an accident at a Biosafety Level 4 lab, shorthand BSL-4, in Siberia called Vector. And it’s an actual BSL-4 lab, the highest classification. … And there was an actual accident, an explosion there in 2019. 

In that real-life incident, a deadly pathogen was not released that we know of. But of course, in Biological War: A Scenario, a deadly pathogen is released. And it’s a form of pneumonic plague, which is a nightmare pathogen and sits at the top of the Tier 1 select agent list of the CDC. And so in the first act of the book, I show the scrambling of the intelligence community and the Defense Department, trying desperately to determine if something got out and what it is. … The release of the pathogen widens, and so once you have escape. You do not have mitigation, which has to happen in the first 24, 48 hours. Now you have a situation which is unstoppable.

You say this is now an unstoppable scenario. What is it?

A plague itself, of course, conjures up images and ideas of the bubonic plague of the 14th century, the Black Death. That killed between one half and one third of Europe. The bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And pneumonic plague is the airborne version of plague. The problem with an airborne pathogen is that because the delivery system is the human lungs, it can move very quickly from a scientist in that lab who now has Yersinia pestis in his lungs out to the general public. And that is precisely what happens in the scenario.

How does it spread from there? The city where this BSL-4 lab sits isn’t Moscow. What happens once the pathogen is in the lungs of the people who work in that lab, or the janitor who was cleaning it that night?

That’s right. Well, suddenly it’s in everyone’s lungs, and those people go out into their community. And even though Koltsovo, the science town where Vector is located, is a small town, it is just 12 miles from Novosibirsk, which is the third-largest city in Russia. And, also, there happens to be in this scenario a group of international hunters on a hunting trip in that area who come across a dying scientist in the snow. One of them gives him CPR, being the Good Samaritan that he is. And lo and behold, those travelers suddenly are now getting on an airplane in Novosibirsk, flying home to where they reside in five or six of the continents.

What makes this form of plague so novel, so dangerous?

I pull this information from actual facts of the Soviet Cold War-era biological weapons program that we know about from Soviet defectors. And I want you to keep in mind: This is 40 years ago when gene editing was in its infancy. But there are two things specifically that the Soviet bioweapons engineers did to plague. 

Their idea was to create a super plague weapon. And one of them has never been revealed before. They were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the plague pathogen. … When you get a disease, a pneumonic-type disease, pneumonia, tubercular, you want to go home and get under the covers because you feel terrible. And when you do that, you’re infecting a lot less people than you would if a gene for euphoria had been inserted into the pathogen, which would make you feel terrific, which would make you want to go out and socialize with people, perhaps even go to a crowded disco. 

And the other thing that the Soviet scientists were working on was a way to defeat medical countermeasures, but with an added component of psychological distress. They inserted a gene into the pathogen that would be triggered by the taking of antibiotics. And that second pathogen would give you encephalitis, which is a swelling of the brain. The psychological part of it, according to the Soviet scientists, was that they wanted the last thought of the person dying of what they thought was pneumonic plague, but would in fact be encephalitist to be, “My government and Western medicine has failed me.”

Those of us who try to remain optimistic think there’s a way to stop it. In the movies, there’s an outbreak, then the government gets it under control, and okay, maybe a lot of people die, but we’re all right. That is not where your book is headed. How does your scenario end?

So in the book, I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Anarchy is what will happen according to Pentagon war gaming and pandemic planning. And this is because fear of infection becomes a secondary weapon, if you will. People begin to behave like they are about to die, which is most certainly underpinning everyone’s mind. And so after those first six days, the Principals Committee, the President’s Biodefense Committee, must make a decision. The president has to declare the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to step in as a law enforcement agency. 

“Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.”

What happens to the president really blew my mind as a reporter. He goes somewhere in the United States very far away from everyone. Because the idea, the goal, is to make sure that the president doesn’t get the airborne pathogen in his lungs. So maybe I’ll leave you with an image. Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.

In the book, the people who survive are the ones who have gas masks. Everyone else is gone.

And look, we hope we never get to that, by all means. But yes, the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its military personnel. And that is a spooky thought in and of itself, coupled with the idea that the military is predominantly male. There’s something like 17 percent women in the military. And so, unlike the Nuclear War scenario in which I had science-based nuclear winter theory to work from, in Biological War, nothing has been written on the science record about what it might be after. And so the one imaginative part of the book is the very end where I write about biological twilight. … And it is a very, very ugly world.

Let’s back up. We did outlaw biological weapons at some point, right?

That’s right. Very mysteriously in 1969, President Nixon just unilaterally declared that the arsenal was going to be destroyed. At the same time that all of the nations of the world were working to sign this treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which would outlaw bioweapons. Soviet Russia at the time signed it but immediately began work on an illegal biological weapons program that was colossal. And this went without notice, without any idea really by the CIA and the Pentagon all the way until 1989, when one of the Soviet scientists named Vladimir Pasechnik had a crisis of conscience and he defected and he told British intelligence all about the program.

Where have we seen biological weapons used?

Maybe the most important example of a biological attack in the past, certainly here in the United States, are the anthrax attacks, which occurred right after 9/11. Weaponized anthrax was sent through the mail to US senators and a number of media outlets. So five people ended up dying; 22 got sick in four states. But that really kicked off what can be considered the biological military-industrial complex, if you will, which led to this buildup in BSL-4 labs around the world today. There are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world. There are more than 3,500 BSL-3 labs.

Your book has a map of where those labs are, which I found weirdly comforting, mainly because I don’t live too near any of them. If one of these things is going to be released, either accidentally or deliberately, where is the threat coming from? A rogue nation? Terrorists?

Certainly, bad actors getting a hold of a biological weapon was the great concern of the post-anthrax situation. And that is why so much emphasis was put on bioterrorism. Now I avoided that specifically in the book. … And I didn’t even have an attack. Rather, I had an incident. I had a lab leak because I have learned in the decades since that really is the greatest concern. So many of these BSL-3 and 4 labs are in places without a lot of security, including in countries where there are wars going on.

Could somebody be making a biological weapon in a basement somewhere, off books?

Absolutely. And another disturbing document I came across, unclassified in the Pentagon, was a threat spectrum that showed weapons of mass destruction in terms of destructiveness. And of course, nuclear weapons sit at the far end of the spectrum. They are the most destructive. But very close behind were biological weapons. And even more startling was the notion that biological weapons present the greatest overall threat. 

Nuclear weapons have an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material. … You have to have a weapons delivery system like an ICBM or a submarine. … That creates a situation where most nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons, if you will, are in the hands of a command-and-control system within a nation. 

Biological weapons have no such barriers. In fact, the barriers for entry are getting lower literally by the day. You now can have a situation where someone with very limited knowledge of biology can create a biological weapon in their basement with the use of computational systems like an AI system, for example.

Your book reads like a thriller. How much have you exaggerated? How much have you novelized in order to hold our attention?

Everything in the book is based in science fact, meaning all of the facts, all of the figures. I write a hundred or so pages of notes in the back of the book for readers to be able to answer the question that you are asking me. … In the notes, you can find that answer.

Did any of those people give you good recommendations for how to avoid a disaster scenario, or at least how to avoid these things proliferating?

Well, you know, the ticking clock scenario that I write has an even more urgent ticking clock, which is the public’s pressure on lawmakers to absolutely do something about this nightmare scenario before it happens. Look, we have a world right now where you have the CEOs of the largest AI companies in the world admitting publicly that the lane of bio mixed with AI is of their top concern. You don’t hear that about nuclear. You hear that about bio.

How do you sleep through the night?

Anyone who knows me personally can vouch for the fact that I am an optimist at heart. I really believe that information is king. Once you know things, it gives you a lot of power. Perhaps that’s whistling by the graveyard, but that’s what works for me.

Do you have a biohazard suit?

I do not. I do not. But I do have a few gas masks. I must tell the truth.

With the 2026 midterm elections quickly approaching, President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is ongoing and gas prices remain high. 

Americans are taking note: On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon visits Allentown, Pennsylvania in the state’s bellwether Seventh District, to hear how persistently high gas prices — almost $4.20 per gallon in Pennsylvania — are showing up in residents’ lives. Many said the economy and prices were at the top of their list of issues, and laid the blame at Trump’s feet.

Still, gas is just one expense of many, for voters who are likely also feeling the pinch with the cost of groceries, housing, electricity, and more. So how much power do gas prices really have to shape the outcome of an election — and, potentially, a presidency? And after decades of renewable energy growth, technological disruption, and new existential worries, why are gas prices still so core to the American political conversation?

To learn more, Herndon spoke with Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They discussed the history of gas prices as a salient political issue, why Americans feel high prices so acutely, even compared to other commodities, and whether voters are ever willing to overlook gas prices when they go to the polls.

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

When did the price of gas become such a political weapon in America? Does this date all the way back to the Model T?

It really dates to the 1970s. That’s when the United States will have two energy crises, in 1973 and 1979, and the price of gas becomes a huge political issue for Americans. It affects presidents, it affects Congress, and it becomes a manifestation in that decade of the problems facing the country.

I think that’s when we start to realize we don’t have unlimited resources and it’s gonna be a political problem.

Can you go in more detail about that? What happened in the ’70s to make it so clear to Americans that this party might not last forever?

Production of oil here peaks in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then in 1973, OPEC, which is the cartel of oil-producing countries in the Middle East, imposes an embargo on the US because the United States had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. And as a result of the embargo, prices go up and supplies go down, and that’s when Americans start to face gas lines.

Then, in 1979, we have another round of this after the Iranian Revolution, and that leads to even bigger gas lines and more stringent rations and government mandates in ’79, and many people think it really helped bring down Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Carter in 1979 is really reeling from what Americans experience. And it’s not simply gas prices, it’s waiting in line for gas. It’s hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days. It’s reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring over getting this commodity. 

There’s a lot of things that go into the mix with Carter — the hostages in Iran — but certainly his difficulty dealing with this fundamental is a big part of what happens in 1980 when Reagan wins the presidency.

Of course, presidents have little control over the global price of oil, yet they are blamed for it seemingly every time. How have politicians and particularly presidents dealt with that reality, considering the price at the pump is so important to their political futures while not always in their control?

In the ’70s they tried with legislation. Carter pushes legislation that deals with energy, but it’s limited in its success. Americans want a lot of oil and it was hard to get them to conserve.

He put solar panels on the White House. There’s really not much that presidents can do. We have the strategic reserves. And other than that, I think presidents just wait it out and hope the timing works in their favor and the gas prices go down again.

Is there an example of a president who beat the gas prices trap? Do we have any example of someone successfully convincing the country, “Hey, look away from the price of the pump”?

I think we have presidents who say, “Just look away for a little while,” and when reelection comes around again, they’re doing better. Even President George W. Bush struggled with some of this after 9/11 and after the war started. But in the end, he doesn’t make an announcement about it so much as focus on other issues such as national security.

And now we see how prices fluctuate, so you just wait for those moments.

Why is it always gasoline rather than other commodities when we think about the priorities for the electorate?

There’s a few things. One is that, historically, the automobile really symbolizes American freedom and American consumption. And so when something impinges on our ability to drive a lot…

Second, it’s a price you just see. It’s just very visible when it goes up or down, more than groceries even.

I think that kind of recurring image for people becomes very politically potent if that number gets too high. So it’s a real struggle, but it’s also symbolically right in front of us. And these days, I think even more so now than in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s become something that the reporters and the media track.

I want to talk specifically about this summer. We’ve crossed $4/gallon again this summer, the highest since 2022, and this time it’s pretty clearly tied with the ongoing war in Iran.

Donald Trump has tried to make the argument that some short-term pain at the pump is worth a long-term national security focus. But his energy secretary said pretty clearly that gas won’t be back to $3 until 2027. Obviously, that puts us after the midterm elections. It sounds like he’s running the exact playbook you just told me has never worked, which is to get people to just pretend this is not happening.

What have you thought about how the president has handled the spike in gas prices?

In part it strikes me as a president who doesn’t really care about the fate of his party. I think it’s a big issue. I think most Republicans understand that. And it’s tied to a war that really doesn’t have public support.

It’s a war without the kind of clarity that many people felt after 9/11 with Afghanistan, and Iraq for a while. It’s the worst of all worlds. And so I think he’s really fumbled on this issue, and there was part of him that hoped people either wouldn’t care even if they noticed, or somehow the prices would diminish. It’s certainly not looking that way.