Vox

A lot of humans are feeling very down on humanity these days. Maybe you’ve met them. Or maybe you’re one of them.    I’m talking about those who look around and say: Humans are destroying the planet — causing climate change, making other species go extinct. Soon enough we’ll be mucking up the cosmos, too — […]

It often feels like we’re on the brink of disaster: Diseases lurk behind every corner and global instability threatens the economy. But beyond the doomsday scenarios, it’s important to be prepared for more practical reasons: Extreme weather events, for example, have become a fact of life. It can all be a lot to worry about […]

Make no mistake: Americans hate data centers. A recent poll from Gallup shows 70 percent of Americans oppose a data center in their local area, including 48 percent who are strongly opposed. That 70 percent number is tied to several concerns, environmental questions and quality of life chief among them, and it’s up 18 percent […]

However you feel about AI writing, it has a few giveaways. According to the writer Imogen West-Knights, “there’s things like negative parallelisms…or excessive use of metaphor and similes, especially ones that don’t quite make sense or that come very rapidly, one after another. Every noun having an adjective attached, certain kinds of repetitive syntactical blocks […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump may have found a new way to repurpose taxpayer money to his own ends. What’s happening? Earlier this year, Trump, along with […]

Last year, nearly 130 million pigs were raised for meat in the US, but they didn’t come out of nowhere; they had parents. Or as pork producers call them, “breeder pigs.”  Since the 1970s, producers have been keeping most of the breeding females — known as sows — in tiny enclosures called gestation crates. It’s […]

Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s once thriving tech bromance. On Thursday, closing arguments wrapped up in Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, leaving a jury to deliberate next week whether Altman and other executives “stole a charity” (as one of Musk’s […]

Left activists who love Sen. Bernie Sanders have this year flocked to a surprising new champion: hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer. In his campaign for California governor, Steyer has racked up the endorsements of Our Revolution (a group founded by Sanders 2016 campaign notables) and the California Nurses Association (the state’s leading champions of single-payer […]

A common abortion drug survived a second brush with the Supreme Court, leaving it accessible while justices decide its fate in a future ruling. The Court issued a brief order Thursday evening, which indefinitely blocks a lower court order targeting the drug mifepristone.  The Court’s order in Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana is not permanent, but […]

If you talk to folks in the anti-abortion movement, they’re pretty disappointed about the state of things in the US. Despite the headline victories they’ve achieved in recent years — like, say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) — they thought they’d be accomplishing a lot more. Granted, they have a few things going […]

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from […]

I’ve been getting my hair braided ever since I was a little girl. In elementary school my Moesha obsession meant Brandy-style box braids; in middle school, Alicia Keys was the reason behind my cornrows, and even now, a vacation is not a vacation without a head full of boho braids.  I always thought of braids […]

There are few news subjects more reliably depressing than nutritional science.  A glance at the headlines will tell you that sugar is bad for you, red meat is bad for you, and alcohol is really, really bad for you. The message seems to be that if a food or drink gives you even an iota […]

For years, one of the bedrock adages of electoral politics was “it’s the economy, stupid.” The quip, coined by former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville, warned party leaders that economic concerns will always outrank other issues in the mind of voters But recently, Carville’s iconic advice feels like it’s been forgotten. In President Joe Biden’s […]

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded. […]

It’s been four months since the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the US to stand trial. His vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is now in charge, but the Trump administration has been largely silent on what comes next for the country. In the meantime, Missy Ryan, a staff writer at the […]

We’re making this story accessible to all readers as a public service. Support our journalism by becoming a member today. The details of the ongoing outbreak of hantavirus may sound uncomfortably familiar to all of us who lived through Covid-19: an aggressive pneumonia-like infection, a cruise ship quarantined with sick passengers, the world’s public health […]

It’s hard to imagine modern life without glycols. They are used in cosmetics, fog machines, and food. As you read this, you’re almost certainly wearing or drinking from something they were used to produce — polyester fabric or plastic bottles, for example. If you brush your teeth with toothpaste or top your salad with bottled […]

So, what’s a guy got to do to become a billionaire around here? Greg Brockman scribbled the question in his diary, recently unsealed as trial evidence, just two years after co-founding OpenAI as a charity in 2015: “Financially, what will take me to $1B?” For Brockman, now OpenAI’s president, the answer was a yearslong restructuring […]

On Wednesday, when FBI agents raided the office of one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, Fox News just happened to have one of its Washington-based foreign correspondents on the scene in the small city of Portsmouth. What an extraordinary coincidence! The raid targeted state Sen. Louise Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of […]