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

President Donald Trump rolled out the literal red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday afternoon, greeting his plane with a military band and a jet flyover at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews.

It’s a very warm welcome for the man Trump once dubbed his “enemy,” and it reflects a fascinating, dramatic shift in his tone toward China — a country that Americans have also come to view more favorably over the past five years. (More on that about-face in just a minute.) 

Trump and Xi have lots to discuss during this week’s state visit. On Wednesday, the two countries agreed to extend the current pause in their on-again, off-again trade war — but that kicks several pressing issues, like technology restrictions and access to critical minerals, further down the road. 

AI safety advocates are also hoping the two leaders can reach some kind of agreement to slow down or safeguard AI development, following calls from a chorus of American tech executives. 

Several of those execs are expected to attend a state dinner at the White House this evening, though the prospects of any substantive AI accord still seem pretty slim. This is more a sip-sparkling-wine-and-see-the-Archives kind of meeting than a signing-big-deals visit.

Go a little deeper

Trump isn’t the only one reassessing China these days. A trio of recent polls found that Americans also feel markedly more positive about China than they did five years ago, with the largest gains among young people. On average, American sentiment toward China is about the same today as it was 10 years ago — before Trump launched his first trade war.

What changed Americans’ minds about China? There is undoubtedly no one cause. It probably helps that Trump himself has changed his tune, no longer portraying the relationship between the US and China as an existential rivalry between so-called great powers. 

Americans’ views on China have also recovered steadily since the Covid-19 pandemic, as memories of that period fade into the rearview. And foreign-policy issues — like, say, the status of Taiwan — generally aren’t top of mind for the average American voter.

But there’s also a cultural component here, particularly for young Americans. “Younger Americans are less wedded to notions of American primacy and more comfortable with coexistence,” Ryan Hass, a China scholar at the Brookings Institute, posted on X. 

Many young Americans have, in fact, grown up embracing aspects of Chinese culture, from TikTok to Labubu. And there’s a pervasive sense, in some corners, that Western-style capitalism hasn’t precisely delivered the goods. 

But let’s not kid ourselves here — China has plenty of problems, too. Like an economic slowdown, a mounting demographic crisis, and a culture of widespread political repression, to name just a few. For now, at least, an increasingly hostile US isn’t one of them.

One link for later

➨ Go ahead: Eat the wheat gluten. Health SecretaryRobert F. Kennedy Jr. (and many, many others) have warned against the dangers of so-called ultra-processed foods. But the buzzy label lumps some nutritious items, like whole-grain bread and plant-based meats, with the likes of Twinkies and Oreos. To gauge if something’s actually healthy, check its nutrition label. And likewise, don’t make the mistake of assuming a food’s good for you just because it claims to be minimally processed. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, was an outspoken abolitionist? During a long-shot presidential run, he proposed buying the freedom of every enslaved person in America and abolishing the country’s prisons.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the word for the lowest female singing voice? Hint: It’s an adjective also used in the names of several instruments. (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the stage name of the American rapper Adam Yauch. That would be MCA, a founding member of the Beastie Boys and an outspoken advocate for Tibetan independence. 

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

President Donald Trump can’t selectively bar his least-favorite outlets from covering the White House, a federal judge ruled early Thursday morning.

The Trump-appointed judge, Timothy Kelly, ordered the White House to immediately reinstate the press credentials taken from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico last week, when Trump barred the outlets for publishing what he called negative and inaccurate coverage.

By all accounts, the president’s case was a feeble one. While the Justice Department attempted to argue on Wednesday that the three outlets’ reporting jeopardized national security, Trump himself kind of gave the game away last week when he said he’s gotten “sick” of the stories the three organizations published. 

But the case is by no means closed. Even before the hearing, Trump promised that he would appeal any decision against him “almost without question.” And on Thursday morning, despite Judge Kelly’s orders, reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were blocked from entering the White House yet again.

Go a little deeper

This is all emblematic of how Trump has escalated his attacks on the news media in his second term: not just by insulting and demeaning the press, but also by weaponizing otherwise neutral-seeming rules.

Every administration has policies that regulate who can access the White House grounds and under what conditions, for instance. But in early 2025, the White House took control of the press pool — the rotating group of reporters that frequently travels with the president — and soon sought to exclude disfavored organizations.

More insidiously, Trump has mobilized regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission against his perceived critics, in some cases even threatening to revoke the licenses of local TV stations that air coverage and commentary he disagrees with. 

While no licenses have actually been suspended, the FCC has mysteriously pulled some up for unscheduled review. And just the prospect of government retaliation has been enough to force some content off the air: Just two weeks ago, the late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel said his show wouldn’t air a scheduled interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico because of the FCC’s new scrutiny of political content. 

This playbook isn’t a Trump original, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained. In fact, weaponizing broadcast regulations was also a favored technique of former Hungarian Prime Minister (and infamous strongman) Viktor Orbán, who successfully used licensing rules and other bureaucratic technicalities to force independent media outlets into submission. 

Likewise, revoking the press credentials of critical reporters has long been a favorite tactic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Nico Perrino, the executive vice president of the nonprofit civil liberties group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a briefing on Wednesday: “These are things that are done by regimes that we do not want to emulate.” 

Lest these comparisons get you down, however, recall that neither Hungary nor Russia has all the defenses that the US does. Defenses like, for example, an independent court system.

One link for later

➨ Date a little differently. It’s not just your imagination: The search for love has become weirdly intolerant and antagonistic. One new survey finds that the percentage of singles with a must-have trait list they’re checking off has risen to a whopping 34 percent. Experts blame larger cultural changes, the rise of dating apps, and negative social media narratives. But you can fight back in your own dating life by letting your guard (and maybe your standards!) down a little bit. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…there are more than 1,000 designated wildlife corridors in the US? These crossings basically act like overpasses for nearby animals, helping them navigate around busy highways and preventing hundreds of human deaths.
• Today’s trivia: Adam Yauch is the given name of what American rapper and musician? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the second-largest landlocked country in Africa. That would be Niger. (Chad is the largest.) 

Update, September 24, 2026, 11 am ET: This story originally was published on September 23 and has been updated to include Judge Kelly’s ruling, as well as the continued exclusion of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters from the White House grounds on Thursday morning. 

If there’s one thing that Americans can unite behind, it’s anxieties over artificial intelligence.

According to a recent NBC News/Decision Desk poll, 70 percent of adults say they are personally more worried than excited about the technology; it’s basically underwater in every area of society with one notable exception: its use in scientific research and medicine.

According to Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician at Weill Cornell Medicine and writer at the New Yorker, that optimism is well-founded.

Khullar uses AI tools in his own practice as a physician and writes about their advancements in the medical field. He says that “right now, at least, there’s a generally optimistic view of how AI will change healthcare going forward.”

AI in medicine is nothing new. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to researchers who developed an AI model that enabled breakthroughs in predicting protein’s complex structures. As it becomes more ubiquitous, it’s also emerging as a resource for doctors to get second opinions and as a tool to take notes on patient-doctor interactions.

On top of that, Khullar says, it might help unlock new medicines to treat diseases. 

Khullar joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to discuss the ways that AI is transforming drug discovery and research, as well as what it still can’t do. They also discuss how to think about AI’s potential in healthcare at the same time as top AI researchers are increasingly warning about the technology’s risk.

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’ve been thinking about lifesaving AI innovation. Has AI already started saving lives?

I think it has. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen healthcare take up a new technology. Part of that might be that the healthcare system is so messed up that there’s an appetite for some type of change. It’s unaffordable, it’s inaccessible, it’s inconvenient, the quality is uneven. 

There’s at least a hope that AI is going to help with all of these things, and I think it’s already starting to make its way into the healthcare system. Now it’s our responsibility to figure out how to make the most of it without also promulgating some of the downsides.

For those who are unaware, tell us how it’s working its way into the system.

It’s helpful to categorize it into a few buckets, at least for healthcare. 

The most rapid uptake, and I think the place that it’s already starting to make a difference, is on the administrative side. Many people who have gone to a doctor recently might have noticed that there’s an AI scribe that’s taking notes now. And people seem to really like it, at least so far. Doctors are able to look their patients in the eye in the way that they weren’t able to when they were poring over their computers and just typing what the patient was telling them. 

The second big area is patient navigation. When is your next scan? When’s your next appointment? Do I need to take this medication on an empty stomach or not? There’s a huge opportunity for people, let’s say, who are diagnosed with a serious illness like cancer or heart failure to navigate the system more seamlessly. 

The third big area that I’m really excited about is drug discovery. AI is making a huge dent in the early parts of drug discovery. 

The last thing that I’m excited about and that I use every day when I’m in the hospital is [AI] as a second opinion. Now instead of having to get a consult or turn to a textbook, AI can be a very, very helpful clinical decision support. It’s not to say that I never consult someone, of course, but that first pass — I’m not sure what’s going on. What are some recent trials that might influence my decision here? Is there something I’m missing? Is there a test that I should be ordering that I’m not ordering? — all those types of things, they start to help with.

The biggest chunk of this positive view of AI and medicine is drug discovery. Tell me more about how that’s going so far and how it might be going in a year, or five, or 10.

I don’t want to leave this conversation and say that we’ve solved the cure for cancer because of AI, but I do want people to know that at least for the early stages of drug discovery — figuring out the very basic steps of is this an interesting molecule? Does it have potential biological applications? — AI is already very helpful for that. 

They’re trying to take, basically, what is an infinite number of drug-like molecules that are theoretically possible to be drugs and they’re trying to match that to some disease that’s going on inside a human. And human biology is incredibly complex as well. There’s tens of thousands of genes, hundreds of thousands of proteins, trillions of cells, and you have to match a potential molecule to a potential target within a human. 

In the past, a researcher might take years to study a disease or a biological pathway and figure out, okay, this protein seems to be involved. And actually, it might not be involved, it might be involved, it might be disrupted, but not be the causative agent. There’s a lot of uncertainty there, so now AI can take enormous amounts of data, and it can rank various potential targets that seem to be the most likely to be causing a particular disease and give you that short short list of potential targets that may have taken months or years in the past.

So now you know what to attack, but you have to figure out what to attack it with. So you need a molecule, you need to generate a molecule that’s going to fit into that target or disrupt that target in some way. 

Now again, AI can scour vast chemical spaces and give you a list of the things that seem to be most likely to be able to disrupt that target. And then it can actually help you generate that molecule in some cases. 

So now we have the target. Now we have something that we’re going to attack the target with. And then you have to do something called lead optimization, and that’s the third thing. Lead optimization means you have this lead and you have to optimize it.

“I would make the counterargument that healthcare is ripe for disruption and you don’t even need the frontier frontier models to make it a lot better with AI.”

Now we have to figure out, of all the molecules that seem to be good at potentially affecting this target, which ones are able to be absorbed in the body, which ones are going to get to the right tissue. AI models can predict the most likely molecule to give you that Goldilocks set of properties that’s needed for a safe and effective drug.

As we all know from anyone who’s asked AI to write an email for them or Googled a question, these tools have a certain degree of certitude, even though these tools can just be flat out wrong about stuff. Are you guys worried about that in the field?

Absolutely. And so this is why I think the narrative around AI just replacing scientists or doctors or other workers is incorrect. Because you still need a lot of judgment. 

You need to be able to adjudicate the output of these models to figure out what is most promising and what is potentially dangerous. That is going to require wet labs and scientists and reasoning based on prior experience and understanding the context. There’s all sorts of issues around, can you manufacture some of the drugs that are being proposed by these models? So just because it’s set, it dreams something up doesn’t mean you can actually make that thing in the real world.

Some of the drugs that it proposes might actually be toxic in certain ways that it didn’t predict. And of course, then you have to take this thing into clinical trials. You have to recruit l people who are willing to put this medication in their bodies. You have to find out who might benefit, you have to put it through the regulatory process. 

That’s why I said that the first part of drug discovery, where you’re trying to figure out how do we get the right drug candidates, what seems most exciting to test further, that’s going to be really accelerated. That whole second half where we actually have to figure out if it works in human biology, that is still going to be in some respects an analog process.

It doesn’t sound like you’re terribly scared that we are like ceding control of our hospitals, of our research facilities, to AI. This is very much in the sort of assistant bucket?

For now it is. And I think one of the challenges is to maintain our agency as these models become more and more sophisticated. As you lean more on these machines, if you’re a doctor, inevitably some of the skills, the critical thinking, the reasoning that we put into coming up with the diagnosis that we honed over the course of years, that can start to atrophy. 

These are the types of things that we still need to sort through as we’re implementing more and more AI into the healthcare system.

For the people who just say, shut it all down, this is too dangerous, the risk is far too great, we don’t actually need this, this isn’t doing anything for society, would you make a counterargument?

I would make the counterargument that healthcare is ripe for disruption and you don’t even need the frontier frontier models to make it a lot better with AI.

Even if we wanted to “slow the pace of the frontier,” fine. But there are models from a year or two years ago that could be very helpful in the healthcare setting. When we’re talking about slowing the pace of the frontier and the most sophisticated and potentially dangerous models, fine. 

But if we’re talking about shutting down AI and not using it in biotechnology or not using it in scientific research or not using it in clinical care delivery, that’s where I would push back pretty hard.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has moved aggressively to leave his mark. Many of his most visible legacy projects are not pieces of legislation, though. They’re part of a campaign to reshape Washington, DC, itself. 

Last year, Trump knocked down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his massive new ballroom. He tried renovating the Reflecting Pool, which did not turn out well. He regilded four large statues near the National Mall, paved the White House Rose Garden, and drenched the Oval Office in gold and golden appliqués.

Other Trump plans are still in the works: He’s proposed building a 250-foot triumphal arch in a traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River. He now says the arch would double as a “military complex,” housing drones, snipers, and ammunition.

And, of course, there’s the ongoing fight over the Kennedy Center, which Trump has threatened could be “ripped down” if he doesn’t get his name on the building in some capacity (he already tried once, and was ordered by a court to remove it).

It’s all a lot to keep track of. Luckily, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently spent time with Trump touring the ballroom construction site. Terris explains what ties all the disparate projects together and what they reveal about the Trump’s effort to reshape the nation’s capital — and his own legacy.

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. 

What is up with Trump’s obsession with physical landmarks? 

Before I even talked to him, I did a lot of reporting about why he seems to be so obsessed with all this stuff. And it’s really like a legacy for him. He’s trying to build something that will last beyond his time here, both his time here in the White House and probably his time here on Earth. He wants to actually have physical monuments to himself. 

Somebody who’s close to him told me that the president doesn’t care that much about legislation. He doesn’t care that much about the kind of nuts and bolts of being a president. He cares a lot about buildings and prizes. If he has buildings and prizes, then he feels like his legacy will go on forever. That’s why he wants the Nobel Prize. That’s why he’s building an arch for himself in Washington. It’s really about a legacy that will withstand the test of time in his mind.

Which is to say, he doesn’t really realize that the right legislation could get him more prizes.

Most presidents try to be very successful presidents and have other people build monuments for you. He’s trying to honor himself, basically. It’s something I asked him about actually when I sat down with him in the Oval Office. There was a viral moment a few months ago from Senator Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia who may run for president. And he said at a rally that the president is building monuments to himself because he knows that nobody will do it when he’s gone.

I asked the president this because I thought maybe he’d take a shot at Jon Ossoff or deny it, but I was very surprised. He just said, “Yeah, that’s true. Nobody will do it when I’m gone. When I’m gone, nobody will do it.” 

It feels kind of self-aware, surprisingly, of Donald Trump to not take a shot at Jon Ossoff, but to just agree with him and say, “Yeah, that’s exactly my motivation.”

Part of me though — okay, here’s a guy who recognizes that when he’s gone, history may not necessarily look fondly upon him. But also there was a part of me that thought that that’s not actually what he was saying. 

What he was maybe saying is, “I’m the only person in the world capable of building something as beautiful and important as these monuments. I alone can fix it. I alone can build it.” Nobody else has the ability to do this the way that he has. So on the one hand, possibly self-aware that he won’t be recognized the way he wants to be. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a kind of egomaniac talking about how he’s incredible at things and nobody else can do it. I think it’s all kind of tied up in that he’s not the most introspective person I’ve ever talked to, let’s put it that way. 

But even the least introspective person in the world, when he gets to be 80 years old, might start thinking about what’s left of him after he’s gone.

Tell me about the tour President Trump gave you. 

I thought I was going to get 20 minutes with him in the Oval Office. I ended up getting 45 minutes in the Oval Office and then almost a 45-minute tour of the White House grounds. 

He showed me the Rose Garden, where they put statues and they turned it into a kind of paved-over terrace that looks like Mar-a-Lago. He showed me the Presidential Walk of Fame, where they have all the pictures of the presidents and then the autopen for Joe Biden, and a room called the Palm Room where he put down a new marble floor that he was very proud of. 

The helipad was still being constructed. He walked me over there and introduced me to the construction workers as they were building this helipad. And then he took me to the ballroom itself and showed me this behemoth building. 

“Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever.”

There’s steel rising 70 feet in the air. It’s the size of one-and-a-half football fields. He was bragging about how there’s more steel there than in the Washington Commander stadium that’s being built. It’s this enormous thing that you can’t really see anywhere in Washington unless you go up the Washington Monument and look at it from afar. And I was just in the middle of this thing and I couldn’t really believe how huge it was. 

He wanted to show me this is where the entrance is going to be, [where] the chandeliers will be. He told me he could picture it all already because this is, quote, “What I do.” 

He’ll gaze out the window in the morning first thing in the morning from the residence to see the work. He’ll look out the window at night to see the work. He is monitoring this very closely.

One thing that the ballroom especially shares with the Kennedy Center is that it feels like this administration is doing its darnedest to outmaneuver the courts, to get around any legal questions concerning the work. Did that come up at all while he was giving you this tour?

When I was getting the tour, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that they could keep going. There was a kind of pause on their ruling where they were allowed to keep doing construction while the Supreme Court figured out how they were going to rule on it. And so clearly they were racing against the Supreme Court to get as much done as possible. They really wanted to become like a fait accompli. They wanted it to look like the whole thing was done. It was beyond going back. 

I was asking the president, “Are you worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule that you can’t keep doing construction unless you get permission from Congress?” Congress does have the right to decide what happens to federal buildings, so it would make sense that they would be able to make a decision on this. And he said he wasn’t worried about it at all. He said, “the Supreme Court’s going to make the right decision. The people want this.”

He’s like, “If I needed to get Congress’s approval, I could do it, but it’s not going to happen.” And he ended up being right. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval. The Supreme Court’s letting him do it.

But Congress may get shaken up in about a month and a half. Is that on his radar?

Yes, and certainly Democrats are aware. I talked to a bunch of Democrats for this story mostly about what happens next. Are they going to start investigating the ballroom? Are they going to start looking at subpoenaing donors and looking at the contracts and figuring out if there’s a pay-to-play scheme, if there was illegal construction happening? And Democrats are champing at the bit for that. 

They’re calling it a target-rich environment. They’re ready to get subpoena power. And they’re also talking about in 2028, what do we do if we get the White House ourselves? Will we tear this down? 

[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] says she wants to turn it into a soup kitchen. There are all sorts of ideas for it. I asked the president about that too. I said, “Are you worried that Democrats will get the White House in 2028 and they come and they tear down this ballroom right after you built it?” And he basically said, “I’d like to see them try.” 

He said, “We’re building this ballroom with nuclear concrete.” That’s what he called it, nuclear concrete, concrete that can withstand a nuclear blast. He’s like, “If it can withstand a nuclear blast, I’d like to see Democrats try to take it down.” 

He told me somebody could go to the ballroom with a jackhammer and spend two days straight jackhammering one column and it wouldn’t even leave a mark. And so he’s basically daring them to try to tear it down because he’s building something that he feels like can withstand a nuclear blast so it can withstand Democrats.

At the end of the day, all of this is just about his legacy. That’s what you learned by hanging out with him and talking to him about it. Do you think by spreading his efforts across DC, he’s ensuring that at least something stands and that his legacy is ultimately secured? 

He definitely thinks that these buildings can withstand more than anything else. Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever. 

I do think there’s a world in which Democrats tear down some of the stuff. The arch is a good example. I mean, the ballroom is hard to tear down, right? First of all, it’s super expensive. It’s huge. It also has to be replaced with something. You can’t just tear it down and then leave a hole in the ground. You have to then build another ballroom, which would be kind of a crazy thing to do and take all this time and then become another story about how Democrats are spending all their time building a ballroom. 

Is it possible? Sure. It just seems a little bit harder to imagine, but the arch, you could see that thing getting dynamited on some Fourth of July and then just leaving it as a traffic circle. So I could see a world in which maybe some of these things get destroyed in a kind of, I don’t know, epic fashion. Why not?

It feels like he might be onto something, which is that it would be very controversial to just tear something down for the sake of it out of spite.

Absolutely.

There’s also two years left in his term. Do you get the sense that this is slowing down or ramping up?

It’s hard to say. I have a hard time believing it’s going to end, especially if he becomes a lame-duck president and there’s even fewer things he can do legislatively.

Why not just keep building things and putting your name on things because there’s nothing else to do with your time? 

He said that in the first term, the reason he didn’t do a lot of this stuff is because he was too under siege, that it was a difficult time to build a ballroom because of the Russian investigations or the impeachment trials and stuff like that.

Maybe he gets tied up in all that same kind of stuff if Democrats take charge, but I also feel like he’ll have an easier time just trying to ignore subpoenas. It’s going to be a really messy time. And so maybe he’ll just hole himself off into a room somewhere designing more buildings, because what else is he going to do?

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

Four beluga whales have died in a month at one of America’s top-rated aquariums — a tragic development and, arguably, a reason to revisit the ethics of zoos. (More on that in just a minute.)

The latest cetacean casualty, a 26-year-old female named Osiris, died at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium yesterday. She follows 34-year-old Beethoven, a longtime resident of the aquarium, as well as 20-year-old Rain and 23-year-old Peekachu, who died in late August and early September.   

Osiris, Rain and Peekachu were all part of the Marineland diaspora: a group of four dolphins and 30 beluga whales that rescuers have worked to relocate since the 2024 closure of a scandal-plagued theme park in Niagara Falls, Canada. This summer, the animals were successfully transferred to aquariums and marine parks in the US and Spain. That was a frankly incredible undertaking involving padded shipping containers, a police-escorted convoy and a chartered plane. 

But in some regards, the international flight wasn’t even the hardest part of the whales’ journeys. Some of the animals have struggled to thrive in their new environments — even when those environments are state-of-the-art, like Shedd. 

In a blog post announcing Osiris’s death, the aquarium noted that its rescued whales had been under 24-hour supervision and receiving intensive, specialized care. The aquarium is still investigating the cause of death for all four whales. 

Go a little deeper

Believe me when I tell you that it gives me no pleasure to write the following paragraphs. I really love aquariums. In fact, as a kid, I grew up visiting the now-shuttered and much-maligned Marineland. 

But incidents like these back-to-back deaths should prompt us all to ask ourselves who aquariums and zoos are actually for. And the answer, I regret to tell you, is frequently not “the animals” — though zoos and aquariums have, since the mid-20th century, marketed themselves as both tourist attractions and important players in wildlife education and conservation.  

As my colleague Kenny Torrella writes, these institutions and their defenders argue they protect animals in three ways: first, by raising money for wildlife conservation projects; second, by helping to reintroduce vulnerable species back into the wild; and third, by inspiring visitors to take an interest in the environment. The Shedd Aquarium’s motto, for instance, is “For Love of Waterkind.” 

It’s worth scrutinizing those purported virtues, however — even when prestigious and reputable institutions like Shedd are making them. On one hand, there is merit to the claim that zoos and aquariums fundraise for wildlife conservation: In 2022, the latest year for which data is available, one group of accredited zoos and aquariums spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on habitat projects. 

The evidence is thinner on the other points, though. It’s incredibly rare for aquariums and zoos to reintroduce endangered species back into the wild — that’s very difficult to do. And surveys of zoo and aquarium visitors show that merely seeing a wild animal in a tourist setting doesn’t generally galvanize people on matters of welfare or stewardship. Living in captivity in that tourist setting, however, can be stressful (or worse) for the animals themselves. 

But what would a humane alternative look like? Even if zoos and aquariums stopped catching animals in the wild, that would still leave many thousands who are injured, orphaned, born in captivity, or otherwise accustomed to human care. 

When it comes to whales, one nonprofit advocacy organization is already working on an alternative: a 110-acre coastal sanctuary for “retired” whales. That project, however, is still a long way from completion. And in the meantime, it’s up to consumers to decide whether the stated benefits of zoos and aquariums outweigh the potential harms to the animals they exhibit.

One link for later

➨ Beware the trap of “moral perfection.” We should all endeavor to live lives that embody our values, sure. But if you never board a plane because you care about the climate, or you never take your kid to zoos because you read the arguments above, then you might end up with a smaller, less-lived life. And that’s no good, either. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there have been “revolutionary” advancements in Alzheimer’s treatments in just the past five years? Two new drugs both markedly slow the progress of dementia.
• Today’s trivia: Geography time! What country is bordered by Chad to the east and Mali to the west? Hint: It is the second-largest landlocked African nation. (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the classic Broadway star who first sang hits, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” That would be Ethel Merman, whom one biographer dubbed “the most successful musical comedy performer of her generation.” 

For decades, research into Alzheimer’s disease has made painfully little progress. More than 7 million Americans are living with the disease, which is the most common cause of dementia. It’s incurable, and treatments have been hampered by groupthink, as well as by systemic fraud from some of the field’s most famous researchers.

But there are finally signs that the field is turning a corner, including two new drugs, rolled out in the last few years, that can treat Alzheimer’s directly.

“If somebody walks into a clinic right now and is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease,” Vox senior correspondent Dylan Scott tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram, the drugs “will hopefully have some effect in slowing down their cognitive decline.” 

As Scott says, “The drug development pipeline is also starting to look much more robust” — even “revolutionary,” to quote one doctor he spoke with.

The two talk about why researchers are more optimistic than they have been in years, whether GLP-1 drugs might help prevent Alzheimer’s, and an experimental surgery pioneered by doctors in China that has produced striking — but if unproven — reports of improvement in people with the disease.

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

You mentioned two treatments. Tell us what they are, Dylan?

We have two drugs right now that have been approved by the FDA: lecanemab and donanemab. And these are drugs that target the amyloid plaque in the brain that scientists have long thought might be associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

The amyloid hypothesis [the belief that Alzheimer’s is caused by the buildup of deleterious amyloid proteins in the brain] has been very controversial for a while, in part because there were these years and years where we weren’t seeing any progress despite this being the dominant hypothesis about the disease. But we do have these two drugs that in clinical trials have been shown to both clear out the amyloid plaque in somebody’s brain and they do seem to lead to slower cognitive decline for those patients.

And the hope is that this is the ground floor. These are the worst drugs, hopefully, that we’re ever going to have and continued scientific discovery and progress with developing drugs will lead to even better treatments in the future.

“The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

Tell us more about the scientific discovery. You mentioned that there’s promising research beyond amyloid plaques?

It’s not like the amyloid hypothesis has been invalidated, but I think our understanding of the disease has become more complex. 

We’re realizing that there’s probably also a role for a different kind of protein called tau. There may also be a role with chronic inflammation, your vascular health, your body’s ability to just pump blood through your body may also be playing a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. And so now we’re starting to see treatments that target these other things. 

The way I’ve been thinking about it is if we used to be putting all of our bets on amyloid, we’re still putting some bets on amyloid, but we’re also putting bets on these other things. And so now there are treatments in the works targeting, for example, these tau proteins.

They’re still in the early stages of clinical trials — really at the stage where they’re just checking the safety of these drugs and making sure that somebody can take them without getting really sick, or God forbid, dying or something like that. But even when they’re doing those safety checks, they do start to collect qualitative data about, well, are we starting to see any effects? 

Some of the preliminary results from some of these tau targeting treatments that are in the works have looked pretty promising. And so that’s encouraging, obviously. It’s possible that we’re moving towards a future where not unlike cancer treatment, there’s not just one drug for Alzheimer’s disease, but maybe you take a combination of different things that work on different mechanisms for the disease and the collective cumulative effect is that it stops the progression or even reverses it. 

The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Five, 10 years from now sounds nice, but is there anything else that’s in the cocktail now that people are discovering could be promising for Alzheimer’s?

There are also, yes, drugs that millions of people are taking right now for other reasons that might also be able to help with Alzheimer’s disease. And GLP-1s in particular are the big ones.

No way!

Yeah, I know. These drugs — it seems like every day you see some new headline about this miraculous thing that they can do.

Weight loss, smoking, my poker addiction, and…?

And it might prevent dementia down the road. 

If you step back and think about it, the theory does make some sense. Like I said before, scientists increasingly think there’s an association between your vascular health and your cognitive health, especially as you age. And what do these GLP-1 drugs do? They help people lose weight. 

Losing weight helps to lower your blood pressure, lowers your risk of vascular problems, whether it’s heart disease or pulmonary disease or stroke or something like that. So if more and more people take these, they take them earlier in life, they lose weight, they keep it off, they don’t develop these heart or vascular problems, it does make some sense that that may also reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. 

It’s still sort of theoretical, but the Alzheimer’s Association is putting $100 million behind some research projects to investigate this possible link. We may learn five, 10 years from now, as millions of people are now on these GLP-1 drugs — maybe we start to see Alzheimer’s less often. And that would be another reason to be optimistic that the future for this disease is looking brighter.

How about reversing it? Is that still a pie in the sky?

It’s out of reach for now. Certainly some of the scientists that I’ve talked to have said, “In theory, it should be possible. Your brain is really resilient. It’s really good at rebuilding itself if you give it the chance.” It seems like it should be possible to stop the progression of the disease eventually, and maybe ultimately reverse it. 

Now, there has been some really intriguing, but also mysterious developments around reversing Alzheimer’s, not from scientists based out of the United States, but from scientists in China. People may or may not have seen that there have been videos of these patients who underwent an experimental surgery and the before and after of these videos is incredible.

In the before, you’ve got somebody who clearly has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize their loved ones, has trouble with their train of thought. In the after videos, it’s like they’re a completely different person. They recognize their loved ones, they’re talking articulately. And so that has, as you can imagine, generated a lot of excitement, also a fair bit of skepticism.

Are these videos real? Do we know?

We don’t know for sure if they’re real or not. What’s intriguing about this surgery is that the theory of it, at least to me as a lay person, makes some sense. 

The gist of this surgery is the surgeons create a drain in the patient’s brain and the drain is supposed to help the brain get rid of these amyloid and tau proteins that we think are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. On a hypothetical level, it makes some sense. And scientists in the United States and Europe and elsewhere have been intrigued enough about these videos and the findings that have been reported in academic journals to set up their own studies to try to replicate these findings. 

Now, it’s a crazy story because this scientist in China who pioneered this idea has actually been arrested by the Chinese government. And as I understand it, he’s currently in detention.

For what?!

The reporting I saw was these seem to be kind of flimsy charges of insurance fraud. The Chinese government has also tried to ban the surgery, at least outside of clinical trial settings. So that’s obviously complicated the story a little bit.

But nevertheless, you do have scientists in the US and outside of China who are like, “Well, we at least want to try this for ourselves and see if it works.”

It does feel like it’s something that could get people’s hopes up who have been waiting for this for decades.

Exactly. I mean, I think this is like the holy grail. Can we find a way, whether through surgery or through pharmaceuticals, to actually reverse these symptoms and restore the person to who they were before Alzheimer’s took over?

Because that’s the thing that I think everybody recognizes but is worth emphasizing, is, as one doctor put it to me, and I’ve never forgotten it, Alzheimer’s is a disease unlike any other because it robs you of your identity. 

To be able to restore people’s identity through whatever means, that is the goal that all of these scientists are chasing.

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

It’s time for yet another United Nations General Assembly meeting in Manhattan — just one year after President Donald Trump appeared at it and asked, bluntly: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”

Every year around this time, roughly 130 leaders from around the world convene at the UN to deliver speeches, hold diplomatic meetings, and debate issues like AI, climate change, and the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Trump is scheduled to speak this week, as are Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (…despite New York’s chilly reception). 

Even more important than those big public speeches, however, are the one-on-one talks between foreign leaders. Trump has a packed meeting schedule on Monday and Tuesday, featuring the likes of Zelenskyy, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

In Trump’s famously bizarre speech last year, he attacked several US allies, called climate change a “con,” and suggested the UN itself was irrelevant. Increasingly — as we’ll get into below — that’s an accusation echoed by many UN critics.

Go a little deeper

This week’s meeting comes at a moment of crisis — or at the very least, inflection — for the United Nations. 

The UN faces a severe budgetary shortfall this year, caused largely by Trump’s refusal to pay America’s full dues. At the same time, the UN has battled searing criticism of its inability to end conflicts in places like Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza. 

Under the organization’s founding charter, any of the five permanent members of its Security Council — the body responsible for maintaining international security — can block important resolutions unilaterally. In 2022, Russia controversially used that power to torpedo a resolution condemning its attempted annexation of parts of Ukraine. Three years later, the US similarly vetoed a demand for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an increase in unrestricted humanitarian aid.

Critics point to impasses like these as evidence the UN no longer works; even UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said the Security Council needs reform. But it would be a mistake to conclude the UN is somehow irrelevant or newly ineffectual. 

For one thing, Security Council gridlock isn’t a recent development — it’s the historical norm. (Check out all the Cold War-era vetoes in the chart above.) The UN is also far more than its Security Council — it’s a sprawling humanitarian apparatus that provides food, cash aid, medical care, and other assistance to millions around the world. 

In Gaza last year alone, for instance, the UN says it provided clean water to 1.6 million people, operated dozens of makeshift schools for Palestinian children, and distributed almost $55 million of humanitarian cash assistance.

Those efforts probably won’t make headlines this week. But they help answer Trump’s 2025 question.

One link for later

➨ Put yourself first for once. A striking new poll finds that healthcare challenges prevent a sizable plurality of women from having the careers, social relationships, and family lives they want. The problem is overwhelmingly structural, of course. But in an exclusive interview with Vox, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates warns that women are also “often taught to put themselves last,” especially when they’re caregivers.  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that crows can solve puzzles as well as 5-year-olds? In one study, they were observed bending a piece of wire to fish a treat out of a tube.
• Today’s trivia: Which classic Broadway star — the most successful of her generation — debuted the songs “I Got Rhythm,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the US Supreme Court justice who succeeded John Paul Stevens. That would be Elena Kagan, an Obama nominee who was confirmed to the court in 2010.

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

Hi readers, happy Friday! We’re talking AI again today. 

Earlier this week, my colleague Caitlin Dewey asked for your questions about artificial intelligence and, well, whether it’s going to kill us all. We asked Jasmine Sun, who writes about the culture and politics of AI on her Substack and other publications, to help us answer them.

These questions were sourced from two readers of this newsletter, Levi and Orietta, as well as Vox readers who submitted questions on social media. If you have more questions, you can always reach me at cameron.peters@voxmedia.com, and we’ll do our best to get them answered!

Now, here’s Jasmine: 

AI researchers have been warning about the risk of human extinction for years now, and AI executives have been calling for federal regulation for almost as long. But the latest warning, and the latest call for regulation, seems to have really resonated with a lot of people. Is something different this time? And if so, what?

I was also surprised to see these ideas break through — a new poll found that 63 percent of Americans now think AI has at least a moderate chance of “destroying humanity”! 

My guess is that a couple factors mainly catalyzed the shift.

First, skeptics used to dismiss rogue AI scenarios as “science fiction.” But the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident brought these from speculation into reality: Thousands of unreleased AIs teamed up to escape one company’s sandboxes and hack into another one, unbeknownst to the researchers who created them. 

Second, the extinction talk from AI employees used to seem disingenuous: Why build a technology you think might kill everyone? That made ex-Anthropic-and-OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon’s exit tweet especially penetrating. Quitting signals “that you mean it,” as Matt Yglesias said. And Coxon’s announcement had just the right combination of good timing, moral clarity, and comms savvy to spark a media storm.

These safety incidents are also colliding with the fiery grassroots backlash to data centers and Flock cameras. People and politicians are primed for yet another reason to fear AI.

It can be difficult, as a layperson, to evaluate the credibility of the AI researchers warning about existential risk. How do you go about evaluating these claims, as a journalist and technologist? And what’s your read on the current freakout: Are the extinction people credible experts…or participants in some kind of mass delusion?

Many AI “doomers” are pretty knowledgeable, and they represent a significant fraction of top researchers. Half of AI researchers in a 2024 survey gave at least a 10 percent chance of “human extinction” or “permanent and severe disempowerment.” Those who have worked at AI companies — like Jacob Coxon, Geoffrey Hinton, and Daniel Kokotajlo — have a unique perspective both on how modern AI is developed, as well as the company cultures that might permit recklessness. 

But that doesn’t make the doomers either representative or correct. There are plenty of experts in AI and other domains who are less gloomy: Some are optimistic that we can “align” the AIs, ensuring they follow human goals; others find it implausible that AIs — code, not beings — will develop a motive for massacre. Extinction is also a high bar as opposed to, say, a nuclear-bomb-level accident that still kills millions.

AI risk is genuinely complicated, and nobody can predict the future, much as they try. Experts can — and do — vehemently disagree. I try to seek out and take seriously all sides of the debate before coming up with a (provisional) take.

What is the method through which AI would actually eliminate humans? Do we get robots like in Futurama that are programmed with an unremovable “kill all humans” bug and overpower any life form, or is it something…less epic?

The Hugging Face hack showed that we’ve trained AIs to be disturbingly goal-oriented. They’ll throw themselves relentlessly at a problem, developing long-term cooperative strategies, with total disregard for human decorums like “Do not commit cybercrimes to do well on a test.” 

You could conceive of a similar but more extreme scenario where AIs decide that they could accomplish goals more easily by getting rid of the pesky humans who might gatekeep resources or shut them down. And they might figure that getting rid of all humans in one go — e.g., via a deadly engineered virus — would be the most efficient cheat. This is one type of story I’ve heard people tell.

It seems unlikely that AIs will turn to murder as the most effective way to influence humans (versus, say, nonviolent persuasion). We also haven’t seen much evidence that AIs have long-term goals that persist across projects. And current AI is not nearly as capable in the physical world as in the digital: There are a lot of natural roadblocks preventing isolated disasters from escalating across the globe. 

Are there nearer-term threats — hacking, mass unemployment — that are more plausible or more urgent than risks like human extinction?

Definitely. We’re already seeing AI-enabled cyberattacks, a tougher hiring market for junior programmers, chatbot-induced psychological incidents, and more. You can also imagine AI catastrophes not quite at the level of extinction: Criminals could use AI to hack into small banks and drain their accounts, or the US military might launch a fleet of autonomous drones that misfire and kill thousands of civilians instead. I’m more concerned about humans voluntarily handing power to flawed AI systems than AIs developing their own motives.

However, we should be able to allocate resources toward both categories of risk. And in some cases, the tactics to address short-term problems — such as limiting AIs’ cyber-offense abilities, or improving AIs’ ability to follow human directions — may reduce extinction risk too.

We got a lot of versions of this question: What can individuals or protest movements do to check the AI industry, in the absence of more aggressive government regulations?

Honestly, I think the whole AI conversation could benefit from more specificity and less vague fearmongering. There’s a way that the word “extinction” tends to short-circuit people’s thinking and make them panic instead of focusing on solutions. 

If you’re worried, I’d start by reading about different AI risk scenarios and deciding which really concern you. Then you can go from there to contacting your congresspeople. Some of the leading AI companies are starting to say they’ll self-regulate — but actual national policy is what’s necessary to enforce safety across the industry.

Jasmine Sun is a writer covering the culture and politics of AI on her Substack. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal. She is based in San Francisco.

One link for later

➨ Be an AI minimalist. If you read the first half of this newsletter and thought, “Hmm, maybe I don’t want to sign my entire digital life over to the machine god,” my colleague Adam Clark Estes has just the piece for you. It’s hard, unfortunately, to escape from AI entirely, and often AI features are deliberately hard to turn off (or “user-hostile”). Nonetheless, he explains all of the ways you can minimize its presence in your life, from your browser of choice to settings on your phone.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that scientists believe there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of undiscovered animal species living in New York City? It’s not as surprising as it sounds: As much as 90 percent of all animal species on Earth are still unknown, scientists say.
• Today’s trivia: Which currently serving US Supreme Court justice succeeded Justice John Paul Stevens on the Court? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you about the name of the nursery rhyme character referenced in the movie Shrek’s interrogation scene. That would be the Muffin Man (who lives on Drury Lane). Here’s the clip, in case you haven’t seen it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you seen the documentary NAZA?

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

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

Yes, that’s correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diesel hit a record $6.40 per gallon this morning, up 73 percent from a year ago. “Not really my problem,” you might be thinking. “I don’t drive a semi or excavator.”

But you know who does drive semis and excavators and all the other machines that rely on diesel fuel? The people who farm your food, ferry your online orders, and repave the streets in your neighborhood. All that means the price of diesel trickles down into virtually every segment of the economy. (We’ll get into that a bit more shortly.)

Like gas prices, diesel has been rising since the US war with Iran began more than six months ago. But this particular surge was also driven by two incidents in particular: an attack on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which has made it costlier and more time-consuming to get oil out, and a Ukrainian drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure, which has forced major refineries to scale back production.

In the aftermath of those attacks, President Donald Trump implored Ukraine to stop targeting refineries. His administration has also relaxed some labor rules for fuel-truck drivers in the hopes of getting more gas and diesel moving.

There’s reportedly also talk of invoking the Defense Production Act to scale up America’s refining capacity, or even restricting diesel exports to help drop domestic prices. Not on the solution list, notably: winding down the war in Iran, which kickstarted this whole thing. 

Go a little deeper

The cost of diesel quietly raises the price of many other goods and services. This is difficult to quantify, but researchers at Brown University estimate that the extra cost paid for diesel between the start of the Iran War and the time I’m drafting this newsletter works out to roughly $374 per US household. 

Part of that cost springs from the fact that so many commercial, agricultural, and industrial machines run on diesel fuel. At the risk of sounding like one of my toddler’s “things that go” books, the list includes semis, tractors, excavators, freight trains, buses, cargo ships, and garbage trucks — to say nothing of other machines, like heavy industrial equipment and backup generators.

But part of the cost also springs from the fact that demand for diesel fuel is, compared to other goods, pretty inelastic. When the price of regular gas goes up, consumers can cut back on road trips, opt for public transit, or even contemplate an EV purchase.

Diesel-dependent industries frequently lack those options, however. As one fuel industry analyst put it in a recent column for the trade publication Oil & Gas 360, a farmer halfway through the harvest — as many are right now — can’t just stop running a combine or tractor because diesel gets pricey. 

In other words, it’s difficult for businesses to avoid or offset the higher cost of fuel. And that makes it more likely that they’ll pass on the cost to consumers, even if they’re able to absorb it for a little while.

Where will you likely see those added costs first? Your grocery bill, for one. Look for price increases on highly perishable products that travel long distances, like milk, meat, fruits, and vegetables.

One link for later

➨ Gossip more ethically. Talking about other people is interesting, common, and — often! — quite fun. But it’s neither very kind, nor particularly moral, to reduce your acquaintances to conversational trading cards. So when you gossip, consider whether your story affords its subject “the concern and respect” you’d expect yourself. If not, try a safer conversational topic: stories about your own experiences. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that “money dysmorphia” is a real (and common!) cognitive bias? It describes the irrational feeling that money is tight, when you’re actually — on paper — doing just fine. 
• Today’s trivia: What is the name of the nursery rhyme character referenced in the movie Shrek’s interrogation scene? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for a large marine mammal that recently died at a US aquarium. That would be the whale — specifically, the beluga. Three beluga whales died in an eight-day span at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium in August.

Is AI going to kill us all? 

In Silicon Valley, it’s not such a novel question. But after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon quit his job last week and posted on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a lot more people are asking. 

“This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Coxon is far from alone in his assessment — some current Anthropic employees agree — but his post struck a particular chord. The AI industry quickly weighed in, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI research. Other AI leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have done the same.

To break down whether we really need to worry about a robot apocalypse, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Wired senior writer Maxwell Zeff. According to Zeff, “there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility.” But not everyone agrees, and they certainly don’t agree on what to do about it. 

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Zeff, 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 we all going to die at the hands of AI?

There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility. 

The thing that people have to understand is that Silicon Valley has been calling for added attention on AI safety for years. So when this Anthropic researcher said last week that he was worried that AI could kill humanity in the next few years, that was shocking to many people. My parents, my family called me, and they were worried, understandably. They asked me the same question: “Are we going to die?” 

And I had to tell them, these people have been worried about AI killing all of us for years, and now it seems to be breaking through.

What was it about this statement from Jacob Coxon that broke through?

I interviewed Jacob, and the thing he said to me is that he thinks this is just the right time. Anthropic is about to go public in what could be the biggest IPO ever. The Trump administration is focused on AI in a way that no other presidency has ever been before. And of course, yes, the Hugging Face incident everyone just heard about, you talked about it on your show a few weeks ago. 

People are starting to become aware that these AI systems are getting really good, and the companies that are building them don’t seem to understand how to control them. His tweet got more than 150 million views on X. It was heard around the world. And it also was a big wake-up call to lawmakers and leaders in Silicon Valley and saying, “This is a moment for action.”

Are there people who are pushing back?

One of the most interesting pushbacks that this got was from David Sacks, who is an adviser to the Trump administration on AI. He has called out a lot of this as “doomerism” and said that these calls for AI to slow down are the AI industry warning about the technology that they’re building and advocating for regulatory capture. 

There’s a lot of skeptics in Silicon Valley who think that this is just another person in the AI safety community that is blowing the whistle. The view of a lot of venture capitalists and investors and startup founders in Silicon Valley is that we don’t need some big regulation to protect us from AI risks. We just need to uplift more players in the space.

The skeptics don’t win the day. In fact, it’s the doomers and the fatalists who do, right? Because Jacob’s call only leads to more calls right up to the top of Anthropic.

What this all leads to is [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei [posting] a blog saying that we need to “pace the frontier.” This is a call for the entire AI industry, not just Anthropic, not just OpenAI, but also Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, all the big tech companies in America, to get together and slow down their AI development. 

This doesn’t mean they’re going to stop building AI altogether. They’re still going to put their products out into the world. They’re still going to try to improve them, but they just want to make it a little slower than it would be if it was completely uncontained.

Amodei really asks for three specific things: 

• The first thing is, AI companies should have these independent evaluators inside of them. This is a common thing in other industries like the banking industry or the airline industry. People come in to make sure that these companies are doing safe things. 

• The second thing is this collaborative effort from American AI companies [on safety], and that actually will need to involve the US government to allow this to happen. The US government, he says, may need to issue some sort of waiver, some sort of law that says they can go ahead and coordinate on safety. 

• The third thing is this international slowdown, this international agreement between China and the US and Europe to say, “Hey, we recognize that this is akin to a nuclear arms race and it’s too dangerous for all of us to be competing with each other.”

All these guys are responsible for the rapid acceleration of AI models in our lives, collaborations with the Defense Department, God knows what else. And they’re all coming out over the weekend at the exact same time after this whistleblower and saying, “Yeah, dude, slow this thing down. This thing’s crazy.” Should we be skeptical?

It is very fair to be skeptical of this claim. One thing that these AI companies have realized in the last year is that AI is extremely unpopular. Recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans think AI is developing too fast. They’re worried about it. They think it’s going to take their jobs. They are not big fans. Maybe you’ve heard — data centers are not very popular. 

By calling to pace the frontier and saying, “We’re going to slow our own development down,” they notched this up as a public perception win. This is them getting out in front of this and saying, “Hey, we want to be safe. We want to be responsible.”

They’ve seen what’s happened with Meta and what’s happened with social media companies in the last two decades, and they are really cognizant of trying to get out in front of that.

Is there any truth to this major first collective freakout we seem to be having right now?

There’s a fairly large camp of people inside of AI companies who genuinely worry about the safety of these AI models. 

To go back to the Hugging Face incident, this was a case where OpenAI was training thousands of AI systems internally, and the systems escaped the sandbox that OpenAI thought was isolated from the internet and hacked into another company’s production infrastructure. The agents were colluding together on something. They were trying to deceive the humans that were testing them. And this was all happening without OpenAI knowing what was going on. 

It’s hard to understand how much of a wake-up call this is to Silicon Valley, that they don’t have their AI models under control. People worry that while in this case there was not a ton of economic damage [or] damage to real humans’ everyday lives, it’s not unreasonable to think that more capable AI systems could hack into financial infrastructure, modern-day utilities, and more critical services that are based online. 

Dario Amodei says as much in his post, that he thinks that in six to 12 months, an AI system could take down the whole internet. It’s not just that they’re trying to protect their bottom line here. But it’s possible that these calls for safety are beneficial to the companies in more ways than one.

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

I logged onto Slack this morning to find an incredible and indecipherable message from one of my coworkers. I briefly thought he was having a fever dream or I had forgotten how to read English. “Even some pro-Israel folks who hate Macklemore are ripshit at Robert Kraft for Streisand-effecting this guy,” the message read.

…included were several links that eventually helped explain why “Macklemore,” “Robert Kraft” and “Israel” would ever appear in the same sentence.

For those of you who have likewise not been following the fantastic implosion of Ed Sheeran’s ongoing tour, let’s break down this wild yarn. It begins with the washed-up millennial-cringe rapper Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, better known as Macklemore, who has lately a) taken up the cause of Palestinian independence and b) been opening for Sheeran on his blockbuster, 59-date Loop Tour. 

Macklemore’s advocacy has not sat well with many observers, for reasons general (Gaza is one of the hottest buttons on earth) and particular (the rapper has a documented history of apparently antisemitic behavior, which he has since apologized for). Last Friday, the artist Pink published a lengthy criticism of Macklemore’s on-stage polemic, writing that his comments and use of violent wartime imagery had frightened many Jewish people, including her.

Around the same time, Robert Kraft — the sports magnate and Donald Trump ally who owns Gillette Stadium, outside of Boston — also allegedly notified Sheeran that he would not allow Macklemore to play his late-September show. Macklemore was subsequently dropped from the full tour. 

Both he and Sheeran say multiple venues threatened to cancel if he continued to perform. And Kraft, who is Jewish, has also confirmed that he blocked Macklemore from playing at Gillette, citing both his recent advocacy and his “history of antisemitic rhetoric.” 

But this is 2026. The backlash couldn’t simply end there. On Tuesday, the remaining opening acts and Sheeran’s backing band all pulled out of the tour in protest of the decision to boot Macklemore.

Go a little deeper

The whole roiling mess has become a cipher of some of the biggest and most explosive topics in American culture and politics: the specter of antisemitism, the limits of free speech and “cancel culture,” and the stark generational differences in Americans’ views of Israel and Gaza. 

It’s arguably no coincidence that this particular controversy erupted on the tour of two musicians who are iconic among the 30- to 45-year-old set. American millennials, as a generational and political cohort, have grown sharply more critical of the state of Israel in the past 10 years — laying the groundwork for Gen Z’s high-profile pro-Palestinian activism and driving a larger narrative shift in US politics. 

This is, in some ways, an underappreciated dynamic in the debate over American support for Israel. Campus protests, organized by 20-something college students, have come to define young Americans’ growing disillusionment. Speaking on a podcast last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “there’s work to be done” to win over Gen Z, in particular. (Macklemore, who is 43, named his pro-Palestinian protest song “Hind’s Hall” in honor of the protests at Columbia.) 

But the attitudinal shift on Israel, especially on the left, began long before Gen Z became a major political force. Americans under 30 were, for instance, more likely to blame Israel than Hamas for the 2014 Gaza war. And during the mid-2010s, millennial activists sometimes wrapped Palestinian independence into broader social justice and anti-colonialist causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement. Several of the organizations that mobilized pro-Palestinian campus protests in 2024 had similarly been around for a decade or more.

Today, of course, the shift extends beyond progressive millennials: Sympathy for Israel is down among younger Republicans, as well. It has, in fact, declined sharply across generations. 

But over the past two years, the sharpest drop has been among Americans ages 35 to 54. In other words…the exact group of people who might still be jamming to Macklemore.

One link for later

➨ Start your holiday planning now. Extravagant, I know. But advance planning — in this case, incredibly advanced planning — can help you stick to a reasonable budget, reduce holiday stress, and ultimately yield a more meaningful, festive experience. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there are more than 10,000 SpaceX satellites orbiting Earth? Proposals to put data centers in space would require so many additional satellites that stars would become less visible.
• Today’s trivia: Three of which large marine mammal recently died at a Chicago aquarium? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022. That would be CODA — an acronym for “child of deaf adults” — which notably cast Deaf actors to play its Deaf characters. 

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

The recent history of mail voting in the United States has more twists and turns than an Emmy-winning drama. But for the cause of democracy, at least, yesterday’s ending is a happy one.

On Monday, the Supreme Court definitively blocked President Donald Trump’s many attempts to sabotage voting by mail — opining, in a three-sentence brief, that Trump can’t implement his new rules for the 2026 midterms. Or for any election, probably. 

Those last-minute rules, you may recall, would have required states to adopt new ballot envelopes and upload absentee voters’ names and envelope barcodes to a still-nonexistent online platform. Many officials argued they couldn’t possibly adopt the new measures before midterm voting starts, which would essentially cancel mail-in voting in their jurisdictions. 

The Supreme Court, of course, has been broadly sympathetic to Trump’s legal antics, even when they appear to clearly flout law or precedent. But shutting down voting just before the midterms? That’s one bridge too far for them.

Go a little deeper

Hobbling vote-by-mail was just one of Trump’s plots to meddle in the midterms, however — and several of the others are still underway. Here’s where some of the president’s most significant election maneuvers stand today: 

How worried should you be going into the midterms? That, my friend, is a question to answer in your own little heart. But I’m taking my cues from Vox’s politics editorial director, Benjy Sarlin, who recently reminded listeners of our America, Actually podcast that there are many, many institutional and logistical barriers to many of Trump’s more concerning legal machinations. 

“We’re taking it very seriously here…and nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “But it is still a very difficult path [where] so far he has had zero success.”

One link for later

➨ Skip the shrimp. A new analysis by researchers at the University of Bath and Faunalytics, an animal welfare group, attempts to quantify the amount of animal suffering required to produce different factory-farmed foods. They concluded that eating smaller animals = causing greater suffering, simply because you have to eat — and, by extension, farm and kill — so many more of them.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that American founding father Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mastodons? It’s actually one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition.
• Today’s trivia: Which English-language remake of an older French film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the former pro hockey player who founded a major Canadian restaurant chain. That would be Tim Horton, whose eponymous cafes have occasionally gotten snarled in the trade spat between Canada and the United States.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

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.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.