President Donald Trump is approaching the halfway point of his second term, raising the question of what — and who — comes next. And, more existentially: Can the MAGA movement survive without him?

To answer that question, some younger conservatives on the “New Right” are looking to a past US president for inspiration: Richard Milhous Nixon. 

In June, Vice President JD Vance spoke at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, downplaying the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency. If Watergate happened today, Vance said, it would be “like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Watergate, of course, is the most famous scandal in presidential history and the reason so many of our contemporary imbroglios get tagged with the -gate suffix. It began with a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex by operatives linked to Nixon’s reelection campaign. Investigations — and a huge volume of Oval Office tapes recorded by Nixon — exposed Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up, and he resigned in 1974 facing the prospect of impeachment and removal from office.

Nevertheless, some conservatives are now embracing a rehabilitation of Nixon’s image dubbed “Nixonmaxxing.” They portray him as a president brought down by the “deep state” — an entrenched network of unelected government officials that they believe also tried to undermine Trump during his first term (and is still trying today).

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with political historian Michael Koncewicz, the associate director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, about what actually brought Nixon down, why Watergate was, in fact, a big deal, and why some conservatives are undeterred and looking to the 37th president for inspiration today.

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. 

Because we live in a fallen world, we are here today to talk about something they’re calling Nixonmaxxing. Why are young conservatives interested in former President Richard Milhous Nixon? 

Nixon’s ultimately known for Watergate, and Watergate for decades was the ultimate scandal in American politics. And younger conservatives are starting to revisit this history and they’ve started to compare the Watergate scandal to numerous attempts to bring down the Trump presidency. 

Nixon is a martyr for the cause. Nixon is the guy who was successfully brought down by the liberal establishment. And so if younger conservatives can rescue Nixon from liberal historians and liberal journalists, they think that they can protect the current president for decades to come. 

In the last decade or so, more and more media figures — and this has seeped down into conservative activists — have questioned a story that most Americans accept, which is that Watergate was a moment where the system worked. It’s a moment where Congress, the media, and the American public helped bring down a corrupt president. 

Conservative activists want you to believe that that’s not true. And the main reason is that if they can make you believe that that’s a lie, then they can make you question any future scandal that could affect any one of their guys.

What was the Watergate scandal? What did Richard Nixon actually do?

Watergate can best be understood as a story that begins, at least, in the summer of 1971. After the release of the Pentagon Papers, which was a secret history of the Vietnam War compiled by figures in the Johnson administration, Richard Nixon is enraged. 

In the summer of 1971, the reason that this matters and why it’s linked to Watergate is that in the wake of the Pentagon Papers coming out, Nixon authorizes the creation of the “Plumbers” unit: a group of shady guys with CIA and FBI on their resume, people who have experience doing black bag jobs.

“It remains to be seen how influential Nixonmaxxing is as a political phenomenon. Richard Nixon is still seen as one of the worst, most corrupt presidents in American history.”

The first operation that they pull off is breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office — he’s the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. It’s referred to by Nixon historians as Watergate West. But when they pull this off, they are not caught and it’s dismissed as just a weird moment. No one knows that at the time these are guys being paid by the White House to break into buildings and spy on political opponents. 

There’s a lot of other activities that happened between summer of ’71 and June of ’72, but the Watergate burglars, the Plumbers, are caught at the Watergate Hotel. And what is at the Watergate Hotel? It is the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

They’re caught in June of ’72, and even then it’s dismissed as a so-called third-rate burglary because this just seems like some overeager campaign staff members who have nothing to do with the Nixon White House.

But on the tapes, we know that Richard Nixon, even if he didn’t have any link to the Watergate break-in, knows that he created this team. He knows that his advisers are aware of different parts of their activities over the previous year. That was not uncovered until 1973, which is when most of the American people and most people in Congress started to take this scandal seriously. Watergate ends Nixon’s presidency when it becomes clear to the American people that he has something to hide. 

The famous phrase attached to Watergate is that it was not the crime, it’s the coverup. That’s true to an extent, in terms of what was on the tapes that made it very clear that Nixon was obstructing justice. But he was covering up pretty serious crimes. He was covering up a lot of improper uses of presidential power. 

And so in the summer and fall of 1973, that is when Richard Nixon’s approval rating started to decline — a 25 percent approval rating. And when people ask why Richard Nixon stepped down, that’s the No. 1 reason. When his approval rating is that low, members of Congress feel the pressure to take on an unprecedented action, which is impeachment. The House was going to impeach Richard Nixon and the Senate was going to convict Richard Nixon. 

And so in subsequent years and decades, there’s this understanding that Watergate was a bad thing. Watergate was a serious constitutional crisis and that it was good that Richard Nixon stepped down, that our democracy was strengthened as a result of Watergate. And today’s conservatives are increasingly questioning that narrative.

Richard Nixon wouldn’t be in the position he is in currently if he hadn’t done some things that a certain type of conservative today thinks is noble or laudable or important. 

What was he doing at the time that makes a guy like Chris Rufo or the vice president say, “Hey, you know what? We need to reconsider Nixon”?

Figures like Christopher Rufo are drawn to Richard Nixon because the historical record shows that behind the scenes, he was a fierce culture warrior. 

Other presidents in the post-World War II era were certainly guilty of improper uses of presidential power. Nixon’s key difference was he wanted to bring that into the White House and micromanage the hell out of it. And Christopher Rufo loves that about Richard Nixon. He believes that presidents should use their powers to go after groups that he thinks are hurting the country. 

We now know that Nixon was a far more aggressive culture warrior behind the scenes. 

He was someone who wanted to create a new establishment, one that would weaken liberals in the media. Richard Nixon said on the Nixon tapes in a meeting with his closest advisers, [“The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”]

Both Christopher Rufo and our current vice president, JD Vance, love the quote. JD Vance, when he was running as a Senate candidate in late 2021, gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference and he used that quote.

This was just five years ago, and it would’ve been unthinkable for any conservative politician to favorably quote Richard Nixon, especially if they had aspirations to be president of the United States someday. But our current vice president, JD Vance, someone who will likely run for president in 2028, has publicly embraced Richard Nixon’s legacy.

President Trump is apparently in decline and his hold on the Republican Party over the next couple years will weaken, right? With so many of these stories, you wonder whether it’s like a handful of coconuts being nutty or whether this kind of effort means something for the future of the Republican Party. 

Do you think that this is notable, important, or significant?

It remains to be seen how influential Nixonmaxxing is as a political phenomenon. Richard Nixon is still seen as one of the worst, most corrupt presidents in American history. 

I used to lead school tours at the Richard Nixon Library 10, 15 years ago, and I would regularly talk to high school students, sometimes even middle school students, and they came in with a little bit of knowledge about Richard Nixon, and that knowledge was usually centered around the fact that Nixon got in trouble and Nixon was bad.

I am slightly encouraged by that fact because it shows you that Watergate is still viewed as an exceptional period of time. 

However, as I told people during Trump’s first administration, Watergate should be seen as a product of a very different political culture. It wasn’t just that the system worked — it did — but it worked because our democratic culture was far stronger than it is today. Our civic institutions were far stronger than they are today. You had a broader culture of dissent and a broader culture of questioning our president that contributed to Nixon’s downfall. 

Unfortunately, our political culture today is far more divided and far less willing to rally around a single narrative that would lead to another Watergate resignation happening in the same way [as] what we saw in the summer of 1974.

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

No sooner had early voting started this year than analysts noticed a curious trend: Democratic voters were choosing to vote a lot like…Republicans. 

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats who cast their ballots early have most commonly done so by mail. But this year, they’re voting in person, and in huge numbers — even narrowing Republicans’ traditional early voting lead in states like Florida and Texas.

The abrupt shift may have something to do with President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the mail voting process, and it almost definitely reflects the anxiety and vigilance that many Americans feel about the midterms this year. In less than a week, they’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. 

The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. So as we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’ve been partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for a series of weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. 

Previously, we dug into the ways both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, the politics of high costs, and the changing mood toward Israel. This week, for our final installment, we’re tackling something a little more fundamental: the integrity and security of the voting process itself. It’s a worrying subject, but by no means a hopeless one. Let’s get into it.

Go a little deeper

Let me begin with a metaphor that may or may not reassure you: Imagine there’s a serial killer outside your house, and they’re trying to get in and kill you.

That’s pretty terrifying, under any circumstance. But also: Your house is an absolute vault. You have reinforced steel doors. You have good locks on all the windows. And the police are actually on its way now.

“I don’t want to understate the threat” of election interference, Benjy Sarlin, Vox’s editorial director of politics said when he relayed this metaphor on the America, Actually podcast last month. But if Trump is the serial killer trying America’s doors and windows…then understand this house is pretty well-defended. 

Take mail voting, the issue that has so (literally) moved Democrats this year. You’ll recall that Trump tried to sabotage the practice by implementing new, last-minute rules that would have effectively canceled mail-in voting in some places. 

But the Constitution clearly assigns the power to regulate and administer elections to the states and Congress, and courts blocked the administration’s rules. In mid-September, the Supreme Court declined to let them take effect for this election. So there’s one lock made good. 

The Trump administration has also demanded unprecedented access to states’ voter rolls, suing 30 states and Washington, DC, to obtain them. Of those cases, courts have dismissed 27 of them (though many dismissals are being appealed).

Earlier this month, the DOJ went further and demanded that California officials set aside the ballots of some 20,000 registered voters that it alleged were likely noncitizens. In the predictable legal battle that followed, courts sided with the state. A federal judge excoriated the administration in an opinion on Wednesday, ruling that the ballot segregation order “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election.” The Trump administration has already appealed the ruling. 

Other forms of meddling are possible. Asked in August about declaring a national emergency to impose new voting requirements, Trump replied — unnervingly — that “stranger things have happened.” And the president and his allies have floated drastic measures like deploying federal agents to polling sites or seizing “suspect” ballots, a threat tangible enough that it’s reportedly unsettled a number of FBI agents. 

Just last week, the Trump administration attempted to preemptively contest the results in Alaska’s Senate race, claiming that the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot — the incumbent Republican and an independent newcomer — risked confusing voters. The New York Times has since reported that Democrats enticed Dan Sullivan 2.0 to run for exactly that reason. In some corners, the ensuing scandal has raised concerns that Republicans could refuse to seat Democrat Mary Peltola if she wins. 

But even that possibility is fairly remote. While there are mechanisms for both state officials and US lawmakers to challenge election results, those procedures are pretty regimented. And any attempts to disrupt voting, vote-counting, or the certification of results would likely face both a flood of lawsuits (which voting groups have already prepped) and a public outcry that could ultimately and lastingly hurt Republicans.

Trump might not care overmuch about democratic norms or the rule of law, but he does likely care about the risks of a longer-term political backlash. To this day, Benjy said, a lot of Republicans still blame Trump for losing them Georgia’s Senate seats: His election denialism after 2020 helped drive huge numbers of Black Georgians to the polls, where they voted in two Democrats. 

The number of Democrats voting early and in-person suggests the possibility that a similar dynamic is at play now. In other words, there is real risk — but lots of people are fighting to keep the proverbial bad guys out. 

Races to watch:

• Alaska Senate race, where Trump is ready to contest a Democratic win;
• Wisconsin governor’s race, where Republican Tom Tiffany has promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election; 
• Nevada’s secretary of state race, which could similarly put an outspoken election denier in charge of the state’s voting system.

More from Vox: 

• How election officials are thinking about Trump’s threat to the midterms
• The one thing everyone can do to fight for free and fair elections
• Trump has a plan to steal the midterms. It will probably fail.

One link for later

➨ Turn on the (early morning) lights. It’s getting darker earlier and earlier these days, and it’s often pitch black when my alarm goes off. That means it’s time for an annual tradition: digging out my bulky, 10,000-lux light box. Bright morning light, from a box or the sun, sets your body’s internal clock and helps regulate your sleep. It can also mitigate seasonal affective disorder, which starts plaguing many sufferers around Halloween.  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there’s an extremely rare and spooky form of lightning that can appear indoors? It’s called “ball lightning,” and it’s one of the most mysterious weather phenomena in the world.  
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the vast Andean empire that ruled from its capital in Cusco? (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 where you might find an arroyo. These seasonally dry streambeds cut through deserts, where they can serve as a “highway” for wild animals. 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton could have picked any number of messages for his first Senate campaign ad of the general election back in May. Texans care a lot about cost of living, border security, healthcare, and corruption, among other issues. But Paxton’s very first ad went with something that pollsters don’t generally ask about. He accused his opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, of being “Too Low-T for Texas.” Too low in testosterone. Not manly enough. 

Voters generally don’t rank masculinity as a top issue in any race, but Paxton’s opening salvo wasn’t completely out of left field. Young men broke for President Donald Trump by a shocking margin in 2024. During that campaign, Trump played to the “manosphere”, appearing on many a bro-y podcast and leaning on his macho, politically incorrect image for an audience burned out on the politics of Woke 1. 

Paxton, whom Trump endorsed over incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the primary, is as closely linked to the president as any candidate on the ballot — so it’s not all that surprising to see him attempt the same strategy.

And Texas, after all, has its stereotypes: rugged individualism. Cowboy boots. Smoked meats. Texas Rangers. The list goes on.

Starting with the “Low-T” ad, the Paxton campaign has been all in on exploiting the politics of masculinity and traditional ideas about gender and gender roles to cast Talarico as not man enough to serve as senator — and the rest of the Republican ecosystem has followed suit. 

In May, Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller tweeted that “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” Vice President JD Vance recently walked right up to the line of calling Talarico gay at a rally in the state. Elon Musk’s super PAC has flooded the state with AI slop commercials like this one, in which an adult drag queen in a sparkly jersey dunks on some female athletes. The commercial attacks Talarico for being supportive of trans athletes. Trump himself has also weighed in, accusing Talarico of veganism — fighting words in some Texas circles. (Talarico, 37, is a cis man, says he has a girlfriend, and denies being a vegan.)

Attacks are one thing, though, and an effective political strategy another. To figure out whether Paxton’s masculinity campaign is working, the Today, Explained team headed to Texas.

“People are mad about other things”

At a Paxton rally in Fort Worth, Texas, on a recent Monday night, Jacenta and Susan Sims were riling each other up, seeing who could get the best dig in at Talarico’s manhood. 

Susan pointed to her own chest. “My shirt says ‘No Tala-freaking-way.’ Because he is kind of a freak,” she said. She listed some of Talarico’s past comments on gender to support her statement. “Like, how are you talking about God like he’s nonbinary and there’s six sexes?” 

Talarico said God was nonbinary during a Texas legislative session in 2021, making what he later described as a “cringey” point about God being above human categorization. Also in 2021, he claimed during a debate over trans kids in sports that there were six sexes. He recently walked that statement back, saying there were only two sexes.

Jacenta Sims at the Paxton rally wasn’t having it: “If you really had to look deep, he’s probably got some lace on his panties. There’s nothing masculine about him.” Susan piped in, “He looks like a little boy. He’s not tough enough.” Back to Jacenta: “And we need masculinity back in Texas.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that voters who are already all in on Paxton would also be all in on this line of attack. But those are not the voters Paxton needs to convince.

“I don’t care if Talarico’s gay or not. I don’t believe he is, but it wouldn’t matter to me if he is.” Jesse Sandoval said outside the Tarrant County Elections Center in Fort Worth. He’d just cast his ballot in early voting. “I just felt that they were doing that to try to deflect from the real issues.” 

Another early voter, Michael, didn’t want to give his last name, and works as a cook at a local restaurant. “I just feel like this whole toxic masculinity thing is so unnecessary,” he said. “I was raised by someone who was very, very aggressive and just a very macho man. And I feel like you have to educate yourself as to why those things are not — why saying stuff like that isn’t okay, you know?”

Walt Thompson, also at the polling place, said, “Because he’s soft-spoken, they feel that he’s gay. And you know, he’s not. He’s just not this big rugged looking guy. They can’t accept that.”

Nate, a 32-year-old construction worker who also declined to share his last name, said 2026 is a whole different moment from the last presidential election. “If this was 2024, those [messages] are effective. But I think this year it’s not gonna be effective,” he said. “People are mad about other things. When people care about gas prices, they can’t run on that.”

In other words, the culture wars hit differently when you can’t afford to feed your family or drive to work. 

It’s (still) the economy, stupid

Matt Angle is director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic research PAC and communications firm. He says these attacks on Talarico’s masculinity are a tell from Republicans. 

“What the Republicans are worried about is people staying home,” Angle told Today, Explained. “Those people, they’re mad about the economy, they’re mad at Trump, and [Republicans] are trying to motivate them by playing to their prejudices. … They desperately need fear to be the motivator rather than anger and frustration.” 

So far, it doesn’t seem to be working. Most recent polling puts Talarico in the lead. The Cook Political Report is calling the race a toss-up. The last time Texas elected a Democratic senator was 1988, but Talarico appears to have a real shot at breaking decades of Republican dominance. 

Angle says Talarico’s laser focus on a message of affordability is breaking through to voters.  

“They’re understanding that their salaries aren’t going as far as they should. And they like that somebody’s talking to them about the cost of groceries, the cost of housing, the cost of healthcare,” he said. 

Who gets to own masculinity, anyway?

There’s another key factor in how the GOP’s masculinity attacks are landing: the messenger. Paxton, after all, isn’t exactly a paragon of traditionally masculine virtue. (Just ask Trump, who can’t stop needling his hand-picked candidate for the way he dresses, looks, and talks.)

According to Jill Tate, president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, many of her members had grown skeptical of Paxton’s candidacy. That’s because his wife, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on what she described as “biblical grounds.” The actual filing listed adultery as the reason for divorce. 

“I’ve been involved in Texas politics over 30 years,” Tate said, “and this is the first time I’ve truly been concerned we could lose a statewide [race] since the Republicans took over in the ’90s.” 

Angela Paxton recently did her ex a solid, giving a speech to the Republican women in Tate’s group called the “elephant in the room” speech. She also cut an ad boosting “the Republican ticket,” though not Paxton by name.

“She talked about the fact that while our candidates may fall down and they may do things that are disappointing and morally wrong, it is extremely important to remember that that is the human side. And that’s not what they’re going to do in office,” Tate said of the speech, which urged the audience to vote for the team — for Republicans — rather than on the moral failings of one person. 

Tate believes that the speech changed some minds and could push women in the room to vote for Ken Paxton instead of just staying home. But outside of a room of diehard Republicans, that message — vote for Ken Paxton despite Ken Paxton — may not be a compelling one, no matter how much ads try to paint his opponent as less masculine.

“Texas is a knife fight uphill every day for Democrats,” Angle, the Democratic strategist, said. But in 2026, the mix of a weak Republican candidate and anger at the economy might be enough to give Democrats a chance — and help neutralize Paxton’s efforts to turn the race into a referendum on a very specific view of masculinity.

Ryan Rusak, a veteran Texas politics writer, agrees. “I think that where Talarico can use this to his benefit is to turn it around to say, ‘Okay, well, these guys who wear the boots and eat all the brisket are the ones that got us $5 gas. They’re the ones that got us into a war in Iran. They’re the ones that have gotten it to where you can’t buy a house even in a place where we still make it fairly easy to build houses.’”

“Had we not had an environment like this,” Angle said, “I think it might have been harder for James to break through.”

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

Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again. 

He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.

Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)

The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”

Go a little deeper

When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans. 

That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations. 

But the Epstein story has lodged in the brains of some voters who helped elect Trump — including young voters whose growing disillusionment could make a big difference in next week’s elections.

Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office. 

Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.” 

Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.) 

Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.) 

These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations. 

Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.

One link for later

➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that concrete is the second-most-used material on Earth? (The first is water!) Mixing and pouring concrete is responsible for a huge share of global emissions, but there are efforts underway to make it more sustainable.
• Today’s trivia: An arroyo is a stream — or at least, a streambed — found in what type of environment? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield. That would be Odie, whose look evolved over the years as illustrator Jim Davis sought to distinguish him from his iconic canine rival Snoopy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much did this all cost? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They look sort of muted.

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

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

It means very little. 

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

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

Another day, another hugely consequential foreign election. (If you’re wondering why all the world seems to be voting now, there’s no conspiracy — it’s largely coincidence!) 

Today we’re jetting off to Israel, where voters turned out in record numbers for what some analysts have called the most important legislative election in the country’s history. It’s an election that will determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stays in power — and could shape the future of Israeli democracy.

These are, after all, the first national elections since the October 7, 2023, attacks, and they’re a referendum on everything that’s happened since: the devastating war in Gaza, the widening conflict across the Middle East, and Netanyahu’s attacks on independent watchdogs, foreign media, and his political opposition.

Both Netanyahu and the opposition have depicted the election in existential terms. Quite literally, in some cases. Campaign banners for Netanyahu’s Likud party warned Israelis that they could cast a vote for a right-wing party…or for Palestine. Opposition leaders, meanwhile, are framing the election as a fight to preserve Israeli democracy.

Go a little deeper

Some of you, I realize, may question whether Israel qualifies as a democracy at all, given its treatment of Palestinians. Listen: I appreciate the complexity here! That complexity is central to the stakes of this election. 

Israeli democracy — whatever its asterisks — faces both an immediate threat and a more foundational problem. The immediate threat is, of course, Netanyahu and his more authoritarian impulses. A record seventh term would give him more time to weaken checks on his power.

The foundational problem, meanwhile, concerns who gets a say in how Israel is governed. The state rules over Palestinians who cannot vote in its national elections, while its own Arab citizens — who make up one-fifth of the population — face well-documented discrimination in areas including housing, land use, and family reunification. That marginalization also shows up in politics. Both Netanyahu and several opposition leaders have vowed not to work with Israel’s Arab parties to form a governing coalition. 

But that’s where this election could get interesting. Under Israel’s parliamentary system, Israelis essentially vote for a party, and parliamentary seats are allocated proportionally. Aligned parties then band together to try to form a coalition that can command the majority of parliamentary seats. 

A Netanyahu coalition would likely include, for instance, a number of right-wing, nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, while an opposition coalition would likely include Jewish parties from the left, center, and center-right. 

Either bloc could win enough seats today to govern without additional partners. (Polls closed at 4 pm ET, and we’ll have a fuller picture as the evening goes on.) But if the opposition falls short, it might need support from one or more of the Arab parties that some of its leading figures have lately sworn off. 

Should no one form a governing coalition, Israelis may have to vote again. But more importantly, for our purposes, the debate over partnering with Arab parties goes back to that “deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy,” as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp once put it. 

As Zack argues, most Israeli Jews want to live in a democracy — but paradoxically, they want to live in a democracy that privileges some citizens over others. Netanyahu has tried to resolve that paradox by weakening Israel’s democratic institutions. 

Today’s election and its aftermath could show whether there’s appetite in Israel for a very different, pro-democratic approach. Democracy is 2-0 this week! We’ll soon see if it puts a third win on the board. 

One link for later

➨ Treat your bot banker with care. Research shows that AI tools like ChatGPT dispense pretty good financial advice, on the whole. But you should still approach these tools with caution. Sharing specific financial information with a chatbot raises privacy concerns, and chatbots are not licensed or regulated the way human advisors or accountants are. Think of them as financially savvy friends: helpful…but fallible!  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that a desire to please other people is one of the most common reasons people tell lies? It’s more common than lying for both personal gain or pleasure.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield? (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 first predominantly white community in the US to vote in favor of school integration. That would be Teaneck, New Jersey, which in 1964 began bussing all of its sixth-grade students to a new central school building.

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

Vox isn’t typically in the business of covering elections in far-flung locales like the central Balkans. (No offense whatsoever to anyone from the central Balkans!) But on Sunday, an insurgent student-backed movement in Serbia successfully toppled the country’s ruling right-wing political machine, creating an unexpected opening for democratic reform. 

Then, in another upset halfway around the globe, Brazilian voters reelected incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over his far-right challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro. “Democracy always, dictatorship never again,” Lula said in his victory speech.

That’s two big repudiations of the nationalist right in 24 hours. Not quite enough to declare a trend, maybe, but sufficient to remind us that there’s still hope for the world’s embattled democratic institutions. 

More than that, these results offer evidence of something that sounds naive and Pollyannish in our current moment, but can (apparently!) still prove true: Organizing can be a powerful force for electoral change — both abroad and maybe here at home.

Go a little deeper

To be fair, the two elections differed considerably, and I don’t want to suggest it’s all sunshine and democratic renewal ahead for Brazil and Serbia. Bolsonaro is refusing to concede, for instance. And in Serbia, the victorious Student List still has to stand up a government, a prime minister, and a full policy platform — something the nascent movement has never done before. 

But academics and elections-watchers in both countries have credited the results in large part to mass protests and grassroots organizing that helped mobilize unexpected numbers of voters.

Serbian students began their movement in 2024, following the partial collapse of a railway station that killed 16 people. The government’s failure to fully explain the cause of the collapse — or hold anyone responsible — fueled months of marches, protest bike rides, and other demonstrations. That movement eventually grew into the Student List: an opposition electoral slate that fielded 250 candidates in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. 

The story in Brazil is quite different. Lula, the country’s leftist president, was actually poised to lose. Brazil uses a two-round popular vote to elect its president, and if no candidate secures more than half the vote in the first round, then the top two candidates proceed to a runoff election. Lula placed second in that first vote, after Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the heir to his father’s far-right political movement. 

To many Brazilians, that second-place finish served as a kind of wake-up call. “No runoff campaign in Brazil has ever brought so many people to the streets and onto social media,” Guilherme Casarões, an associate professor of Brazilian studies at Florida International University, wrote in an analysis of the surprise results. One WhatsApp channel dedicated to turning voters out for Lula grew to nearly 11 million followers, up from just 50,000 after his first-round loss. 

Looking at these projects abroad, I’m struck that American pro-democracy movements like No Kings haven’t achieved that kind of influence. Arguably, that’s in part a consequence of their failure to turn protest energy into actual political organizing — things like registering voters, knocking on doors, and fielding candidates. 

But there are some signs that may be shifting. No Kings has lately pivoted its focus, for instance, from mostly organizing protests to urging Americans — of both parties — to vote in the midterms. And Indivisible, one of the groups behind the movement, claims that early voting surged during the latest protests in the zip codes where they occurred.

It’s not exactly a central Balkan moment, but maybe it’s a hint of things to come. Elections can surprise you, after all. Just ask a Serb or a Brazilian. 

One link for later

➨ Leave your big life decisions to chance. (Sort of.) A team of researchers invited people to make a big life decision by flipping a coin and then tracked their happiness with the outcome. They found that, of the people who obeyed the results of the toss, the ones who changed something big were overwhelmingly happier. That doesn’t literally mean we should all resort to coin tosses, but it should tell us something important: We often tend to be too cautious about making major changes. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that in the 1870s and ’80s, spectators flocked to Madison Square Garden for long-distance walking competitions? Athletes walked up to 600 miles in six days, just going round and round the stadium. 
• Today’s trivia: Which New Jersey city was the first predominantly white community in the US to vote in favor of school integration? (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 radioactive noble gas with the chemical symbol Rn. That would be radon, once a trendy (deadly) ingredient in quack medicines. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are these edits coming from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we living through “Black October”? Maybe, according to cybersecurity experts who are raising the alarm about AI’s increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching hacking abilities. 

This week alone has seen a string of alarming incidents where AI uncovered previously unknown security flaws deep in the infrastructure of the internet. The most concerning involves something called PHP —  a programming language that, according to The Atlantic, is used by “as much as 70 percent of websites.” Cybersecurity researchers used AI to locate a major security breach in the technology.

It’s the kind of thing that, when it’s working, is practically invisible. When it stops, though, you really notice it: Government websites in the UK and Europe briefly went down earlier this week after the PHP vulnerability was discovered, as did some sites in the Wikipedia family, the Internet Archive, and many others.

The outages weren’t actually the result of a hack, but rather preventative action as web engineers took sites down to fix the vulnerability before it was exploited. But not every PHP-like issue will necessarily be uncovered before it can be exploited by someone using AI tools less ethically, and older websites relying on PHP might go unpatched. 

The problem doesn’t stop there, either: Concern is also rising around AI cybersecurity risks to ubiquitous conveniences like online banking. As Axios reported on Thursday, banks are detecting more and more “unauthorized third-party AI agents” operating inside of their systems. 

Those agents are mostly unauthorized by the banks, Axios explains — the holders of the bank account might have given them permission — but it still creates a security risk that executives described as “horrifying,” in part because banks can’t necessarily tell if an agent doesn’t have permission. 

It’s a lot to take in, all of it moving extremely quickly, and it’s hard to tell what any of us can do about it as AI labs continue to forge ahead with ever more competent AI models and agents. Luckily, my colleague Adam Clark Estes has some simple recommendations to shore up your own cybersecurity.

How do I respond right now?

One problem with hackers — even those that happen to be AI agents — is that they can be unpredictable. You won’t know to, say, lock down your Quest Diagnostics records before a breach happens. But whenever you find yourself wondering if your data is safe, that’s a good time to double check that you’ve at least covered your bases.

The National Cybersecurity Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to the safe use of technology, maintains a list of basic online safety practices that everyone should follow. In no particular order, here’s what to pay attention to now:

1. Keep your guard up. AI makes it difficult to know the difference between humans and robots. It’s a fact of life in the year 2026. So be extra careful to avoid engaging in potential phishing scams. Don’t reply to unknown texts, and do due diligence on texts or emails that look like they’re from people you know but just seem off. Don’t click weird links. Don’t give out personal info over the phone, even if it sounds like it’s someone you know. They might be scammers using AI to clone a loved one’s voice.
2. Update your software. Yes, it’s annoying to pause your phone or computer use for a few minutes to update your software, but this is one of the best ways to get rid of vulnerabilities. Companies like Apple and Google employ huge teams of security experts to spot these in their software and fix them with software updates. Do the updates.
3. Use a password manager or, even better, passkeys. Each of your online accounts should have a unique password that’s at least 16 characters. Yes, it’s impossible to remember that many passwords, so you should also use a password manager like 1Password or the app built into your iPhone or Android device.
4. Turn on multifactor authentication. Just in case you don’t already do it, make sure you use multifactor or two-step authentication for all your accounts, including email and social media. It can be annoying to type in a code or check your email while logging in, but hackers, including AI agents, will have a much harder time getting into your accounts if you take this step.

Taking all these measures is not a one-time affair. You have to be vigilant in keeping yourself safe online. Security experts have a term for this that’s almost too specific: cyber hygiene. Like brushing your teeth or taking a shower, take good care of your online life, and do it often.

One link for later

➨ Is it still possible to ban gerrymandering? The current US Supreme Court is very, very hostile to getting politics out of congressional map-making. But if Democrats win back power, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. My colleague Ian Millhiser gamed out how they could do it in a way that survives the Court — as well as some approaches that almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But, he writes, the real trick will be finding a solution that functions the way Congress wants it to and can’t be exploited by mapmakers.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the disease multiple sclerosis is misdiagnosed with surprising frequency? As many as 15 percent of diagnoses could be false positives — including that of Christina Applegate, who found out this week that she does not have MS despite a 2021 diagnosis.
• Today’s trivia: Which noble gas is radioactive and has the chemical symbol Rn? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked what the plural was for multiple Toyota hybrids. That would be Prii, which Toyota officially confirmed in 2011 after holding a vote.

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

Israel felt inescapable in the midterm primaries, especially for Democrats, where centrists and progressives clashed — memorably! — over military aid, Gaza, and (of course) AIPAC.

But with the Election Day almost upon us, the subject seems less prominent. When I Googled “Israel US elections” this morning, all the top results concerned next week’s Israeli parliamentary elections.

In less than two weeks, however, Americans will also head to the polls. They’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. 

As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Previously, we dug into how both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, and the politics of high costs. This week, we’re tackling Americans’ growing disillusionment with Israel — and how that will (or won’t) show up at the midterm ballot box.

Go a little deeper

You know the first part of this story already, because we’ve discussed it quite a lot: Americans’ views of Israel have nosedived over the past 18 months. 

That shift helped shape the Democratic primaries and will likely figure prominently in the coming presidential contest. But how much Israel matters in a general midterm election, to people outside the political left…well, November will really test that.

Voters rarely rank Israel policy among their top priorities. In a poll that the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted earlier this month, about 80 percent of registered voters said Congress should highly prioritize the cost of living during its next term, and roughly 70 percent said the same about ending the Iran war. By comparison, less than a third of voters said they prioritized cutting off aid to Israel. 

There’s another way that Israel factors into US elections, of course — and that’s in fundraising. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has become one of the biggest spenders in US elections and a repeat flash point in this year’s Democratic primaries. 

But in the general election, even AIPAC has been overshadowed by the GOP’s big-business donors, many of them in tech, who have given Republicans a historic spending advantage in this year’s contests. On Wednesday, the lobbying group actually announced it would no longer endorse political candidates or make direct campaign contributions.

In either case, whatever happens in the midterms won’t likely transform US policy toward Israel. President Donald Trump is still in charge of foreign policy, after all, and even if Democrats take back the House, they’ll have little ability to reverse his agenda. 

But a Democratic majority would gain “new congressional tools to act on Israel-Palestine issues,” Hady Amr, the former US Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, wrote in a new analysis for Chatham House. Those tools aren’t flashy (think: hearings, funding restrictions, and reporting requirements), but they could certainly set the stage for a broader policy shift under a Democratic president.

Races to watch:

• Florida’s Senate race, where Democrat Angie Nixon has criticized her party’s ties to the pro-Israel lobby;
• Michigan’s Senate race, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign grew out of pro-Palestinian activism; 
• Michigan’s (deeply purple) Seventh District, where progressive William Lawrence has vocally criticized US support for Israel. 

More from Vox: 

• The left is winning the argument on aid to Israel. The next step will be harder.
• The first true swing-state test for the Bernie left
• What American Jews want from the midterms

One link for later

➨ Gather ye roast spuds while ye may. Vegan restaurants appear to be experiencing a downturn of sorts: According to one online directory, the number of establishments fell from 1,717 last October to 1,509 now. But the news isn’t entirely or unambiguously bad. One added pressure on plant-based restauranters, for instance, is growing competition from mainstream restaurants that have started offering vegan dishes. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that North America’s largest wind farm has more than 900 turbines, each as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and encompasses an area roughly the size of Chicago? It just came online in June. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the plural of Prius, as in Toyota’s hybrid hatchback car? (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 after the definition of the word “cartomancy.” That’s the practice of fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. Witchy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How has Rep. Omar responded?

Her camp has vociferously pushed back against the allegations. 

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

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

Are other Democrats speaking up on her behalf?

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

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

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

I do remember, Ted.

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

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

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

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

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

There are low blows, and then there are rock-bottom blows. The latest attack ad in the Ohio governor’s race is undoubtedly the latter.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is spending $4 million to air a 60-second spot, which features the long-estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton, repeatedly calling her daughter a liar as somber instrumental music plays in the background.

The accusation is pretty dark, given the circumstances of Acton and her mother’s estrangement. Acton has disclosed in interviews that she was sexually abused by her stepfather between the ages of 10 and 12 — an allegation backed up by actual, contemporaneous evidence.

Police and court documents obtained by the Associated Press show that Acton’s stepfather was arrested and charged with her rape in July 1978, when she was 12 years old; he left the state after posting bond and died in Pennsylvania in 2004 without facing trial. 

According to both Acton and her mother, who remained married to Acton’s stepfather until his death, the two haven’t spoken in the almost 50 years. But that rift didn’t deter Acton’s mother from insisting, in the new Ramaswamy ad, that Acton had “lied her entire life” and was unfit to serve as governor. And it certainly hasn’t prevented Ramaswamy’s campaign from trumpeting the ad as proof that Acton is a “serial fabulist.”

Go a little deeper

This may be the ugliest ad in what has arguably become the country’s ugliest midterm election. Even before this latest attack, Ohio Republicans had branded Acton “violent” and “unstable,” sometimes portraying her as a drunk or a horror-movie character. One longtime political observer in the state called the tenor of the campaign “alarming,” noting that Ohio is no stranger to negative ads — but that this cycle’s ads were markedly more personal. 

That’s not just an Ohio phenomenon, either. In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has faced nonstop attacks on his religion, including accusations that he belongs to an Islamic terrorist group. In Texas, Republicans have variously suggested that Senate candidate James Talarico is effeminate, gay, transgender…and/or pedophilic. 

Broader studies of how politicians communicate also suggest that political rhetoric in the US has grown measurably more negative over time. One new paper, published last month in the journal American Political Science Review, analyzed 4.7 million tweets, 2.4 million Facebook posts, and 184,000 email newsletters written by members of Congress between 2009 and 2022. Across three channels, the researchers found, the vibes grew increasingly partisan and negative. 

That isn’t to suggest that US political rhetoric is the worst it’s ever been. (We had a Civil War in this country, after all.) But it’s certainly the worst it’s been since I’ve been old enough to vote, and there’s no reason to hope that it’ll slow down. 

President Donald Trump is part of the problem: When he first began campaigning for the White House more than 10 years ago, he adopted a bare-knuckled tone that helped shift rhetorical norms in US politics. It would appear they never shifted back. 

But social media also bears some blame, the research suggests. Across platforms, political posts that skew partisan and negative tend to attract the most engagement — a powerful currency in modern politics. In one study published in 2022 that analyzed posts to X, formerly Twitter, between 2009 and 2019, researchers found not only that “uncivil” tweets earned the most engagement, but that politicians who got lots of likes and retweets on their nasty posts went on to make more of them. 

That might help explain, in part, why many Republican officials seem undaunted — even emboldened — by the blowback to this new Ramaswamy ad. The ad might be “dastardly” and “pretty damn low,” as critics have put it. But for some politicians, the outrage may be well worth the attention. 

One link for later

➨ Notice the change you want to see in the world. The hostility in our politics can feel overwhelming. Depressing. Utterly insolvable. But you can advance the cause of civility by not only modeling respect and consideration in your own interactions, but also noting those behaviors in other people. “Looking for the good moments of behavior that you see out in the world, starts to remind you that they’re there,” one etiquette expert told Vox. Think of it as a small antidote to hopelessness. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that elephants are one of the few animals to show interest in their dead? They frequently linger, and sometimes become agitated, around the remains of other elephants.
• Today’s trivia: Cartomancy is a form of what seasonally relevant practice? (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 currency of Poland. That would be the złoty, which — as of this writing — is worth about 26 cents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me how this race got to be so fascinating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (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 mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

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

French protests have long been the stuff of legend, literature, and Broadway musicals. But even by those storied standards, last weekend’s demonstrations were pretty remarkable.

More than half a million people took to the streets in occasionally violent protests that are posing a mounting political challenge for the French government. The movement began roughly a month ago over concerns about the sorry state of public high schools, which are frequently underfunded and understaffed. 

But in the weeks since, the student protests have rapidly expanded to encompass a wider range of grievances around inequality, high living costs and public services. The ranks of the protesters have also swelled to include some more opportunistic looters and agitators.  

In Paris, masked rioters trashed businesses and set fires, while students blocked the Louvre Museum on Monday, forcing it to close. In Limoges, a city of roughly 130,000 people, the spire of a 19th-century town hall dramatically collapsed in flames.

The national government has responded with curfews for parts of cities including Paris, Nice, and Lille, as well as emphatic condemnations of the violence. In a televised address on Sunday night, French President Emmanuel Macron also promised to partner with students, teachers, trade unions and other groups to identify “joint solutions.”

But it’s unclear what solutions could possibly speak to the whole of this newly expanded movement. The initial student protesters were after concrete educational reforms, like smaller class sizes and less chaotic schedules. The demands now are more diffuse and disjointed, reflecting the sense that — as Macron himself put it — “there is no desirable future” for young people in France. It’s a situation that the French far right is already exploiting, just six months before the country’s next presidential election.

Go a little deeper

If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu here — that’s French for “already seen,” FYI — please know you have good reason. The French also turned out for gigantic mass protests against a proposed retirement age increase three years ago. And a gas-tax hike five years before that. Some historians trace French protest culture all the way back to the 1300s.

While it’s not necessarily true that the French demonstrate more than people in other Western countries, their protests do tend to attract outsize global attention. Youth protests over education, living costs, and government corruption have also recently taken place in Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Albania, for instance. I’d hazard that you’ve heard less about them.

But there’s a twofold explanation for why France’s protests loom so large. First, protest occupies a special place in French history and culture — and the world knows it. As one political scientist explained in a 1994 paper on the history of French protests, the French have an unusual, centuries-long track record of turning demonstrations into actual political change, arguably starting with the French Revolution.

More recently, in 1968, student protests expanded into a larger worker strike that nearly toppled the government. Many of today’s young protesters have specifically referenced that heritage in interviews and slogans.

But that’s not the only reason that French people always seem to be protesting. Conditions in France are also, well … pretty protestable. Consider just the narrow issue of public education, which sparked the current hullabaloo. 

By some estimates, higher-education funding per student has fallen by 20 percent in just the past 10 years. High school classrooms are frequently overcrowded, and a government report cited by The Guardian concluded that the country’s aging schools are in need of billions of dollars of building repairs and climate mitigation.

The government has pointed to France’s strained finances as a constraint on addressing these issues. (And, in fairness, France’s finances are indeed very strained.) There’s a sense, however, that young people are bearing the cost of that crisis more than other populations. Cost-cutting measures that would affect older people — such as raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 — have been delayed in the face of fierce opposition. And by “opposition,” of course, I mean protests. 

One link for later

➨ Make your AI fallback plan. Artificial intelligence will cost many people their jobs; in some places, it already has. But instead of panic-learning the first available trade, first consider where you find meaning in your current occupation. That should help guide you to a fallback career that will still feel valuable, even if it’s…you know. Not your first pick. My colleague Sigal says she’d become a rabbi; I think I’d like to teach again. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that a single episode of Sex and the City is credited with launching the early aughts cupcake craze? Today’s food trends are much shorter-lived, by comparison. And they typically start on TikTok or Instagram. 
• Today’s trivia: What mass-market, imported beer is named for a river in the Netherlands? (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 author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. That would be Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who also preached at President Donald Trump’s childhood church and officiated his first wedding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Friday, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians living in the West Bank, as well as a Washington Post photographer, who was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Photojournalist Heidi Levine was knocked down, beaten, and robbed of her camera equipment by masked settlers in an attack captured on video by other journalists. Those other members of the press rescued her from the attackers while Israel Defense Forces soldiers reportedly stood by.

Levine had lacerations and a wound to her hand that split her finger to the bone, according to the Post, which condemned the attack in a statement. Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who helped Levine escape the attack, said that Levine also had cracked ribs, and may have been stabbed.

Assaults like this one are becoming more common in the West Bank, where settler violence — which is currently targeting the ongoing olive harvest — has worsened. Last week, another photojournalist for the news wire Agence France-Presse was beaten with rifles by settlers, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been shot, beaten, and terrorized while the Israeli settlers targeting them face few consequences.

Why settler violence is growing in the West Bank

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp recently explained, under international law, the settler movement in the West Bank is clearly illegal. Nevertheless, it’s continued to grow, and it has a friend in the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also becoming increasingly violent. 

Two current Israeli officials, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, are settlers themselves, and both have used their offices — as ministers of finance and national security, respectively — to further the settler cause, including by making it easier for settlers to commit unchecked violence against Palestinians. 

The United Nations reported in June that settler attacks had reached “the highest sustained levels ever recorded…with [an average of] six daily attacks that have resulted in casualties, property damage or both,” and in many Palestinians being forced from their homes by settlers. In late September, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that expanding Israeli settlements and violence by settlers was “making everyday life untenable” for Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

As Zack has reported, settlements and settler violence are both intentional tactics, serving to force more Palestinians off their land, isolate the ones who stay, and push any potential two-state solution further out of reach. 

That kind of violence is likely only to worsen in the weeks to come: Israel will hold elections on October 27, which could well result in Netanyahu’s settler-friendly government losing power. As a result, the Washington Post reported earlier this month, settlers are “racing to lock down gains” before the election with ever more extreme violence.

One link for later

➨ Agentified kind of life. My colleague Adam Clark Estes turned the keys to his life over to a passel of AI agents for two weeks to see what would happen. They successfully saved him some times, he writes, largely with mundane tasks — but he left with mixed feelings about the experiment, including the possibility of contributing to a world with more AI slop.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the aerodynamic crouch used by jockeys in horse racing — known as the “martini glass position” — made race times roughly 5 to 7 percent faster? Jockeys maintain it with only a few toes resting on each stirrup.
• Today’s trivia: Who is the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would be the number 42 (take it up with Douglas Adams).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can I ask where you are?

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

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

Yeah, absolutely. 

Which side are you on?

I’m on the side of responsible development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has saddled his party with no shortage of political liabilities — from the mass pardons of January 6 convictions to ICE killings of US citizens to questionable Reflecting Pool redesign choices.

For voters, however, there is one stain on Trump’s record more unsightly than all the rest: his failure to reduce Americans’ cost of living.

As the midterm campaign enters its home stretch, Americans’ expenses are rising — and the GOP’s prospects are consequently dimming.

Last month, consumer prices were 3.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier, according to a Consumer Price Index report released on Wednesday. That represented an acceleration in the inflation rate, one driven largely by skyrocketing fuel prices: Gasoline was 9.1 percent more expensive in September than it had been in August. As a result, America’s average real wage has fallen by 44 cents since January.

In less than three weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, this newsletter is partnering with our colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Last week, we tackled the data center backlash. And this week, we’re digging into affordability.

Go a little deeper

These upward trends in prices aren’t lost on voters. In a recent Pew Research survey, just 21 percent of Americans said economic conditions were “excellent” or “good” — while 65 percent said that Trump’s policies had made the economy worse.

The high cost of living is weighing on Republican candidates in all battleground races. Maine provides just one example of how potent the issue could prove on Election Day.

From one angle, the state’s Senate race might seem like a gimme for Democrats. Kamala Harris won Maine by nearly 7 points in 2024. Thus, in 2026 — when Democrats are poised to win in a national landslide — one might expect the party to easily triumph.

But Republican incumbent Susan Collins is an unusually formidable foe. The race has been a dead heat, with Democratic nominee Troy Jackson leading by just 2 points in a recent Suffolk University poll.

Fortunately for Jackson, Mainers’ energy bills are expected to soar in the campaign’s final weeks, plausibly increasing voters’ appetite for change in the process. 

Maine is America’s second coldest state and unusually reliant on oil for home heat. As autumn advances, its residents will use more heating oil, thereby driving up both their personal bills and market prices. Thanks to the global energy crunch, a gallon of such fuel is already nearly twice as expensive as it was this time last year. 

Jackson has been hitting Collins on the issue relentlessly. That could put a chill in Collins’s reelection odds — and thus, the GOP’s hopes of retaining Senate control.

➨ Other races to watch:

• Similar dynamics are playing out in perennially icy Alaska, where Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has hammered incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan for his complicity in sky-high diesel prices, which many Alaskans use for home heat.  
• In Ohio’s Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown has tried to pin rising electricity bills on Republican Sen. Jon Husted, due to his support for data center development. 
• And in Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has attacked his Republican rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for supporting “this disastrous war in Iran that’s driving up our costs.” 

In other news

• A brief ceasefire ends: Ukrainian drones attacked a Russian oil refinery early Thursday, days after Trump demanded both Russia and Ukraine halt such attacks.
• Execution livestream canceled: Trump canceled a plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad.
• On the podcast: A recent rash of violence between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis threatens to destabilize the region — and make the Iran war much larger. Listen to the whole thing here.

One link for later

Rethink confidence. Research shows confidence is good for your job and good for your romantic prospects. Unsurprisingly, then, a whole industry has sprung up teaching people to be more confident. One writer signed up to work with a confidence coach for the first time, and ended up doubting that her self-doubt was all that bad.

Before you go…

• Did you know…there are four state laws regarding real estate and paranormal activity in the US? That’s because purported hauntings are just one of many factors that can affect home prices.
• Today’s trivia: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games. That would be the cowbell.

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

Flu season is starting earlier than usual this year, which I know from reviewing federal data. But I also know it because I woke up with body aches and chills last night, mere days before I’d planned to get my flu vaccination (!).

Already, some parts of the country are seeing levels of flu activity typically associated with late fall or early winter. In Washington state, for instance, doctors are reporting seeing as much flu now as they usually would around Christmas. 

Flu activity overall is still low, to be clear. But as of October 7, infections were rising in all 50 states. And flu is spreading before many people — like, say, me — have received their annual vaccine.

Epidemiologists don’t yet know why the flu arrived early this year, or why cases first started rising in Western states like Washington, California, and Nevada. It’s possible that a mutation is helping this year’s flu variants evade existing immunity, one virologist told NPR. International travel could play a role, too: Flu cases also spiked early in Japan and other parts of Asia.

We don’t need to know why the flu arrived early to take some basic precautions, though. So today, we’re talking through some practical tips for coping with an early flu season.

Go a little deeper

An early flu season doesn’t necessarily mean a worse season — but even a moderate season can do serious damage. Last year, influenza sent hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital and caused tens of thousands of deaths, including almost 200 among children.

The first and best way to avoid those kinds of harms is by getting the flu shot, which reduces the risk of serious illness by an average of 40 to 60 percent. In the US, people aged 6 months and older are typically told to get the vaccine by October’s end. 

In light of the early onset, however (it takes two weeks to build up full immunity), you might instead want to get your shot ASAP.

There are some everyday precautions you can take, too — many of them familiar from the Covid-19 era. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, for slightly longer than feels appropriate. Mask when you’re sick or might encounter someone else who is. 

And don’t neglect the good habits that support your overall health: getting enough sleep, drinking a lot of water, and eating a balanced diet. (There’s very little evidence for trendier interventions, like supplements, saunas, cold plunges, or the infused herbal baths that my kooky former yoga teacher used to recommend.) 

If you do get flu symptoms, reach out to your doctor early — especially if you’re older, pregnant, immunocompromised, or otherwise at higher risk for complications. Prescription antiviral medications, like Tamiflu, prevent the flu virus from spreading inside your body so that your immune system can clear it. But they work best within 48 hours of symptom onset. 

To be clear, you needn’t take my word on any of this; I’m just another voice in the public health cacophony! Besides, recent polling suggests that my particular voice — that is, the voice of someone who works in media — is not quite as persuasive as it used to be. (Ditto medical websites and government health agencies.)

But if you have doubts or questions about vaccines, there is someone much closer to home you can consult: Ask your doctor (or nurse or pharmacist) about the flu shot’s risks and benefits. They’re best positioned to break the science down and apply it to your health. In hindsight, mine surely would have told me to stop delaying my shot for a more convenient weekend.

One link for later

➨ Get creative in the fight against inflation. The latest inflation numbers are out today, and they are pretty bad. The cost of many goods and services is rising more quickly than both consumers’ incomes and economists’ expectations. For me, this news brought to mind a question that Vox’s former personal finance columnist tackled a few years ago: Namely, am I cursed to keep spending more money on more things forever?! Her answer was essentially “yes,” but she offered a few ways to help offset those costs: things like moving to a cheaper area or pooling resources via initiatives like tool libraries and community gardens. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Colombia is home to almost 20 percent of all the avian species on Earth? That’s the most of any country, at nearly 2,000 birds.
• Today’s trivia: Which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the name of the 2025 Pixar film set in the “Communiverse.” That would be Elio, a movie you may well never have heard of: It had the worst opening weekend of any Pixar film, ever.