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Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, speaks during a press conference celebrating his primary victory on July 2. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Last weekend, my colleague Christian Paz wrote about how the Democratic Party could be on the brink of a grassroots takeover, similar to what the GOP experienced with the Tea Party movement. It’s a fascinating piece that could have huge ramifications for Democratic politics, so I sat down with him to chat about his reporting for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained.

Our conversation is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.

Hey, Christian, how are you? Remind us what the original Tea Party was. What is this movement we’re talking about?

The movement that I’m talking about started before Obama was elected. It was a mostly libertarian, grassroots, localized, not-that-big movement — a reaction to the bailouts at the end of the Bush administration. The idea being there’s too much deficit spending and government is becoming way too big and becoming unmoored from constitutional limited-government principles.

It evolved when Obama was elected into a broader anti-Obama backlash and then a major explosion because of the Affordable Care Act fights. It basically turned into an effort to primary incumbent Republicans, an effort to move the party more toward this wing and eventually try to win back control of Congress.

After it took off, what happened to the GOP?

They were able to win, I believe, five out of the 10 Senate seats that they were challenging. Something like 40 members of Congress were Tea Party-affiliated.

The primary thing was that they were successful in massively mobilizing Republican voters and getting people to turn out in the 2010 midterms, which turned out to be one of the biggest “shellackings,” as Obama called it, that Democrats or that any incumbent president and their party had sustained. Democrats lost control of the House and lost seats in the Senate, and that was a massive setback.

From then on, what happened was a successful move by more conservative primary challengers in future elections, the most iconic one being in 2014 — the primary that ousted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, in favor of a Tea Party activist. It also forced the party as a whole to move to the right, making it more combative, more extreme, and more captive to a more ideological part of the Republican base.

Why are we hearing about this now with the Democratic Party?

The underlying idea is that there’s a divide between the establishment Democrats and populist-minded progressive Democratic candidates. And that’s part of the reason why we’re hearing this now, because there was a victory in New York City’s mayoral primary by Zohran Mamdani, a candidate who is fully in that latter category — a self-described democratic socialist appealing to this idea of bringing out new parts of the electorate, mobilizing people with populist appeal, with targeted, non-polished messaging, and taking more left-leaning positions on policy.

The big thing fueling talk about this Tea Party moment for Democrats is that the base has never really been as angry as it is right now. What we’re seeing is a combination of anti-Trump anger, wanting a change in direction, wanting a change in leadership, and also some folks who are like, Maybe we should become more progressive as a party.

So tell me about that. A change in leadership, a change in the establishment — what does this movement actually want?

It’s interesting. Because at least back with the original Tea Party movement, you could point to a core list of priorities there were about repealing Obamacare, about never repeating a bailout, about limiting the federal government’s ability to spend.

Something like that doesn’t exist right now, because it is a pretty disparate energy. The core thing is Democratic voters do not want the current leadership in Congress. They don’t like Hakeem Jeffries’s style of leadership in the House. They don’t like Chuck Schumer’s style of leadership in the Senate. There’s frustration at older members of Congress being in Congress and serving in leadership capacity right now.

In the polling, over and over again, we see, Democrats should be focused on providing a working-class vision for Americans. They should be more focused on kitchen table affordability issues. And that is the thing that most Democratic voters can actually agree on, and basically saying that that’s not what they think their current leadership is focused on.

What would it look like for the Democratic Party if this actually happens?

There are some strategists and activists who are drawing up lists of potential candidates to primary. There are already some challenges underway. I’m thinking of some House seats in Arizona, House seats in Illinois. There’s talk, especially after this New York City mayoral contest, about primarying Kirsten Gillibrand or Chuck Schumer and finding challengers to some more moderate House members in the New York area.

I’d be looking to see if there actually are younger people launching primary campaigns targeting older or centrist Democratic members of Congress. Once we get to primary season next year, how successful in fundraising are these candidates? Is there an actual effort by some established progressive members of the House to try to support some of these younger candidates?

Basically, just seeing if there’s money there, if there’s actual interest there in supporting these candidates, and whether we do see primary challenges in New York, in Massachusetts, be successful.

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Kendrick Lamar performs onstage during Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show on February 9, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana. | Patrick Smith/Getty Images

Imagine your average Fourth of July party. There are probably hot dogs on the grill, everyone is clad in red, white, and blue, and it culminates in a fireworks show. It may sound like a lovely way to spend a day off. But for a lot of Americans, the celebration, and the flag itself, are more complicated than that.

That’s the question that Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in show, is setting out to tackle this holiday weekend: What’s the relationship like between Black people and the American flag?

Specifically, one listener wanted to know, in the wake of the red-white-and-blue spectacle of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, how that conversation has evolved over time.

This is something Ted Johnson thinks a lot about. Johnson, who is Black, is an adviser at the liberal think tank New America, a columnist at the Washington Post, and a retired US Navy commander. “The flag has sort of been hijacked by nationalists — folks who believe either America is perfect and exceptional, or at the very least, anything that it’s done wrong in the past should be excused by all the things that it’s done well,” Johnson told Vox. “And that is not my relationship with the flag. It’s much more complicated because there has been tons of harm done under that flag.”

How do Black Americans square that harm and that pride? And how has that relationship changed through the years? Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Johnson, edited for length and clarity.

You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.

One way to tease out this relationship between Black Americans and the flag is to talk about the experience of Black service members. What’s that history?

One of the earliest instances is the story of an enslaved man named Jehu Grant in Rhode Island during the Revolutionary War. The man that owned him was a loyalist to the Brits. Grant was afraid that he was going to be shipped off and sold to the Brits to fight for them. So he runs away, joins Washington’s army and fights in the Continental Army, and then his master shows up and says, “You’ve got my property, and I want it back.” And the Army turns him back over to the guy that owns him, where he serves for many years and eventually buys his freedom.

When Andrew Jackson becomes president in the 1820s, he makes it policy to provide pensions for those Revolutionary War folks still alive. And so Grant applies for his pension and is denied. The government says that services rendered while a fugitive from your master are not recognized.

That is the relationship of Black service members to the flag. It represents a set of principles that many would be willing to die for and also a way of life that intentionally excluded Black folks for no other reason than race and status of their servitude. And so if you look at any war, you will find Black folks in uniform who have both been oppressed in the country they represent, and are willing to die for that country because of the values it stands for and for their right to be able to serve and benefit from the programs that the military has made available to folks.

My grandfather served in the military and I never got the chance to really talk with him about that experience. But I’m curious if you can speak to the motivations of Black Americans who continue serving, especially during the Jim Crow era.

Pre-Civil War, a lot of enslaved Black folks that decided to fight did so because they believed their chances at liberty, emancipation, and freedom were connected to their willingness to serve the country. Then we get the draft and a lot of the Black folks that served in the early part of the 20th century were drafted into service. They weren’t eager volunteers lining up as a way of earning their citizenship, but the fact that the vast majority of them honored that draft notice even though they were treated as second-class citizens was a sort of implicit demand for access to the full rights of the Constitution.

“There is a belief that the United States is ours as well. We have a claim of ownership. And to claim ownership also means you must sort of participate in the sacrifice.”

I’d be remiss if I say that folks joining today, for example, are doing so because they love the flag. The military has a great pension program. The military offers great programs if you want to buy a home or if you want to get an education. So there’s a sort of socioeconomic attractiveness to the military that I think explains why Black folks continue to join the military post-draft.

But it is also because there is a belief that the United States is ours as well. We have a claim of ownership. And to claim ownership also means you must sort of participate in the sacrifice.

When a lot of those service members came back from war, they were met with systemic institutionalized racism. How were people continuing to foster that sense of patriotism despite all that?

When Black folks were coming home from World War I and II, many were lynched in uniform.They weren’t even excused from the racial dynamics by being willing to die for the country.

One of the most famous genres of music in this period was called coon music. One of the songs was about Black people not having a flag. They talked about how white folks in the Northeast could fly flags from Italy, Ireland, wherever they’re from. And white people in the States could just fly the American flag. Black people could fly none of those because we didn’t know where we were from and the United States is not ours. And so in this song, they say the Black flag is basically two possums shooting dice and that would be an accurate representation.

Wow. That is some classic old-school racism.

Yeah, the song is called “Every Race Has a Flag, but the Coon.” And so we are very familiar with the red, black, and green pan-African flag. This was Marcus Garvey’s response to this coon genre of music.

There’s this idea among Black Americans of, We built this. Of course I’m going to reclaim this. Of course I’m going to have pride in it because I built it. I think that’s what we’re seeing with a lot of the imagery now.

But what about Black artists and also Black people in general who say, Our ancestors may have done all this work, but there really is no way to be a part of this and maybe we should not be trying to be a part of this?

If you take pride in the flag because you believe America is exceptional, you’re going to find a lot fewer subscribers to that belief system than one where your pride in the country means being proud of the people you come from and proud of the arc of your people’s story in this country.

On the latter, you will find people who are very proud of what Black people have accomplished in this country. For me, patriotism means honoring those sacrifices, those people that came before us. It does not mean excusing the United States from its racism, from its perpetuated inequality, or for putting its national interests ahead of the people that it’s supposed to serve. So it is very complicated, and there’s no easy way through it.

I will say that I think part of the reason we’re seeing more folks willing to sort of reclaim the flag for their own is because of Gen X. My generation was the first one born post-Civil Rights Act of 1964, so Jim Crow was the experience of our parents. Those experiences connected to the hijacking of the flag to connect it to explicit statutory racism feels generations removed from folks who have grown up in America where opportunity is more available, where the Jim Crow kind of racism is not as permitted. And while the country is not even close to being the kind of equal nation it says it was founded to be, it’s made progress.

I think a reclamation of that flag by Beyoncé and others is a sort of signal that yes, we built it. Yes, we’ve progressed here. And no, we’re not leaving. There’s no “go back to Africa.” This is home. And if this is home, I’m going to fly the flag of my country. There’s lots to be proud of about what the country has achieved and by Black Americans in particular. And for me, that is all the things that patriotism represents, not the more narrow exclusive version that tends to get more daylight.

I think one thing we need to discuss is the definition of Black we’re using here. I am what they would call Black American. My ancestors are from Alabama and Arkansas. They were formerly enslaved.

But Blackness in America now has a much wider net. I have so many friends whose parents are immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa. And it’s interesting in this moment where there are lots of conversations about what it means to be Black, and who gets to claim it, we’re also seeing this flag resurgence.

I think probably true that there are more Black people who are first-generation Americans today than there have been since they started erasing our nations of origin during slavery. That means Black American doesn’t just mean people who descended from slaves. It means Black people of all kinds.

When we talk about Black politics, we don’t consider the Black immigrant experience. When we talk about Black Americanism or Black patriotism, we often don’t account for the Black immigrant experience, except to the extent that that experience is shed and the American one is adopted. Those views sort of get thrown into this pot of Blackness instead of disaggregated to show how Black folks from other places who become Americans have a distinct relationship with the country that also affects their relationship with the iconography of the country like the flag, the national anthem, and this reclamation of red, white, and blue.

There may be some Black artists — I think of Beyoncé — who are reclaiming this imagery, but we also can’t ignore who has a majority stake in it. When people think of the flag, they think of white people. Is that changing?

It is, but slowly. If you ask people from around the world to picture a stereotypical American, they’re not picturing LeBron James, despite the medals he’s won at the Olympics. They’re probably picturing a white man from the Midwest.

The fact that so much of our nation’s history is racialized means that many of the nation’s symbols are also racialized. And to deracialize the things that were created in its origin is a long-term process. I do think it’s beginning to happen. I think it’s going to be some time before we get to a de-racialized conception of the United States.

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Cabinet containing an automatic external defibrillator in Austin, Texas, on March 9, 2023. | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

A day before my 47th birthday last month, I took the subway to Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a coronary artery calcium scan (CAC).

For those who haven’t entered the valley of middle age, a CAC is a specialized CT scan that looks for calcium deposits in the heart and its arteries. Unlike in your bones, having calcium in your coronary arteries is a bad thing, because it indicates the buildup of plaque comprised of cholesterol, fat, and other lovely things. The higher the calcium score, the more plaque that has built up — and with it, the higher the risk of heart disease and even heart attacks.

A couple of hours after the test, I received a ping on my phone. My CAC score was 7, which indicated the presence of a small amount of calcified plaque, which translates to a “low but non-zero cardiovascular risk.” Put another way, according to one calculator, it means an approximately 2.1 percent chance of a major adverse cardiovascular event over the next 10 years.

2.1 percent doesn’t sound high — it’s a little higher than the chance of pulling an ace of spades from a card deck — but when it comes to major adverse cardiovascular events, 2.1 percent is approximately 100 percent higher than I’d like. That’s how I found myself joining the tens of millions of Americans who are currently on statin drugs, which lower levels of LDL cholesterol (aka the “bad” cholesterol).

I didn’t really want to celebrate my birthday with a numerical reminder of my creeping mortality. But everything about my experience — from the high-tech calcium scan to my doctor’s aggressive statin prescription — explains how the US has made amazing progress against one of our biggest health risks: heart disease, and especially, heart attacks.

A dramatic drop in heart attack deaths

A heart attack — which usually occurs when atherosclerotic plaque partially or fully blocks the flow of blood to the heart — used to be close to a death sentence. In 1963, the death rate from coronary heart disease, which includes heart attacks, peaked in the US, with 290 deaths per 100,000 population. As late as 1970, a man over 65 who was hospitalized with a heart attack had only a 60 percent chance of ever leaving that hospital alive.

A sudden cardiac death is the disease equivalent of homicide or a car crash death. It meant someone’s father or husband, wife or mother, was suddenly ripped away without warning. Heart attacks were terrifying.

Yet today, that risk is much less. According to a recent study in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the proportion of all deaths attributable to heart attacks plummeted by nearly 90 percent between 1970 and 2022. Over the same period, heart disease as a cause of all adult deaths in the US fell from 41 percent to 24 percent. Today, if a man over 65 is hospitalized with a heart attack, he has a 90 percent chance of leaving the hospital alive.

By my calculations, the improvements in preventing and treating heart attacks between 1970 and 2022 have likely saved tens of millions of lives. So how did we get here?

How to save a life

In 1964, the year after the coronary heart disease death rate peaked, the US surgeon general released a landmark report on the risks of smoking. It marked the start of a decades-long public health campaign against one of the biggest contributing factors to cardiovascular disease.

That campaign has been incredibly successful. In 1970, an estimated 40 percent of Americans smoked. By 2019, that percentage had fallen to 14 percent, and it keeps declining.

The reduction in smoking has helped lower the number of Americans at risk of a heart attack. So did the development and spread in the 1980s of statins like I’m on now, which make it far easier to manage cholesterol and prevent heart disease. By one estimate, statins save nearly 2 million lives globally each year.

When heart attacks do occur, the widespread adoption of CPR and the development of portable defibrillators — which only began to become common in the late 1960s —  ensured that more people survived long enough to make it to the hospital. Once there, the development of specialized coronary care units, balloon angioplasty and artery-opening stents made it easier for doctors to rescue a patient suffering an acute cardiac event.

Our changing heart health deaths

Despite this progress in stopping heart attacks, around 700,000 Americans still die of all forms of heart disease every year, equivalent to 1 in 5 deaths overall.

Some of this is the unintended result of our medical success. As more patients survive acute heart attacks and life expectancy has risen as a whole, it means more people are living long enough to become vulnerable to other, more chronic forms of heart disease, like heart failure and pulmonary-related heart conditions. While the decline in smoking has reduced a major risk factor for heart disease, Americans are in many other ways much less healthy than they were 50 years ago. The increasing prevalence of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and sedentary behavior all raise the risk that more Americans will develop some form of potentially fatal heart disease down the line.

Here, GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic hold amazing potential to reduce heart disease’s toll. One study found that obese or overweight patients who took a GLP-1 inhibitor for more than three years had a 20 percent lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or death due to cardiovascular disease. Statins have saved millions of lives, yet tens of millions more Americans could likely benefit from taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs, especially women, minorities, and people in rural areas.

Lastly, far more Americans could benefit from the kind of advanced screening I received. Only about 1.5 million Americans received a CAC test in 2017, but clinical guidelines indicate that more than 30 million people could benefit from such scans.

Just as it is with cancer, getting ahead of heart disease is the best way to stay healthy. It’s an astounding accomplishment to have reduced deaths from heart attacks by 90 percent over the past 50-plus years. But even better would be preventing more of us from ever getting to the cardiac brink at all.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

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What’s the point of college if no one’s actually doing the work?

It’s not a rhetorical question. More and more students are not doing the work. They’re offloading their essays, their homework, even their exams, to AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude. These are not just study aids. They’re doing everything.

We’re living in a cheating utopia — and professors know it. It’s becoming increasingly common, and faculty are either too burned out or unsupported to do anything about it. And even if they wanted to do something, it’s not clear that there’s anything to be done at this point.

So what are we doing here?

James Walsh is a features writer for New York magazine’s Intelligencer and the author of the most unsettling piece I’ve read about the impact of AI on higher education.

Walsh spent months talking to students and professors who are living through this moment, and what he found isn’t just a story about cheating. It’s a story about ambivalence and disillusionment and despair. A story about what happens when technology moves faster than our institutions can adapt.

I invited Walsh onto The Gray Area to talk about what all of this means, not just for the future of college but the future of writing and thinking. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s talk about how students are cheating today. How are they using these tools? What’s the process look like?

It depends on the type of student, the type of class, the type of school you’re going to. Whether or not a student can get away with that is a different question, but there are plenty of students who are taking their prompt from their professor, copying and pasting it into ChatGPT and saying, “I need a four to five-page essay,” and copying and pasting that essay without ever reading it.

One of the funniest examples I came across is a number of professors are using this so-called Trojan horse method where they’re dropping non-sequiturs into their prompts. They mention broccoli or Dua Lipa, or they say something about Finland in the essay prompts just to see if people are copying and pasting the prompts into ChatGPT. If they are, ChatGPT or whatever LLM they’re using will say something random about broccoli or Dua Lipa.

Unless you’re incredibly lazy, it takes just a little effort to cover that up.

Every professor I spoke to said, “So many of my students are using AI and I know that so many more students are using it and I have no idea,” because it can essentially write 70 percent of your essay for you, and if you do that other 30 percent to cover all your tracks and make it your own, it can write you a pretty good essay.

And there are these platforms, these AI detectors, and there’s a big debate about how effective they are. They will scan an essay and assign some grade, say a 70 percent chance that this is AI-generated. And that’s really just looking at the language and deciding whether or not that language is created by an LLM.

But it doesn’t account for big ideas. It doesn’t catch the students who are using AI and saying, “What should I write this essay about?” And not doing the actual thinking themselves and then just writing. It’s like paint by numbers at that point.

Did you find that students are relating very differently to all of this? What was the general vibe you got?

It was a pretty wide perspective on AI. I spoke to a student at the University of Wisconsin who said, “I realized AI was a problem last fall, walking into the library and at least half of the students were using ChatGPT.” And it was at that moment that she started thinking about her classroom discussions and some of the essays she was reading.

The one example she gave that really stuck with me was that she was taking some psych class, and they were talking about attachment theories. She was like, “Attachment theory is something that we should all be able to talk about [from] our own personal experiences. We all have our own attachment theory. We can talk about our relationships with our parents. That should be a great class discussion. And yet I’m sitting here in class and people are referencing studies that we haven’t even covered in class, and it just makes for a really boring and unfulfilling class.” That was the realization for her that something is really wrong. So there are students like that.

And then there are students who feel like they have to use AI because if they’re not using AI, they’re at a disadvantage. Not only that, AI is going to be around no matter what for the rest of their lives. So they feel as if college, to some extent now, is about training them to use AI.

What’s the general professor’s perspective on this? They seem to all share something pretty close to despair.

Yes. Those are primarily the professors in writing-heavy classes or computer science classes. There were professors who I spoke to who actually were really bullish on AI. I spoke to one professor who doesn’t appear in the piece, but she is at UCLA and she teaches comparative literature, and used AI to create her entire textbook for this class this semester. And she says it’s the best class she’s ever had.

So I think there are some people who are optimistic, [but] she was an outlier in terms of the professors I spoke to. For the most part, professors were, yes, in despair. They don’t know how to police AI usage. And even when they know an essay is AI-generated, the recourse there is really thorny. If you’re going to accuse a student of using AI, there’s no real good way to prove it. And students know this, so they can always deny, deny, deny. And the sheer volume of AI-generated essays or paragraphs is overwhelming. So that, just on the surface level, is extremely frustrating and has a lot of professors down.

Now, if we zoom out and think also about education in general, this raises a lot of really uncomfortable questions for teachers and administrators about the value of each assignment and the value of the degree in general.

How many professors do you think are now just having AI write their lectures?

There’s been a little reporting on this. I don’t know how many are. I know that there are a lot of platforms that are advertising themselves or asking professors to use them more, not just to write lectures, but to grade papers, which of course, as I say in the piece, opens up the very real possibility that right now an AI is grading itself and offering comments on an essay that it wrote. And this is pretty widespread stuff. There are plenty of universities across the country offering teachers this technology. And students love to talk about catching their professors using AI.

I’ve spoken to another couple of professors who are like, I’m nearing retirement, so it’s not my problem, and good luck figuring it out, younger generation. I just don’t think people outside of academia realize what a seismic change is coming. This is something that we’re all going to have to deal with professionally.

And it’s happening much, much faster than anyone anticipated. I spoke with somebody who works on education at Anthropic, who said, “We expected students to be early adopters and use it a lot. We did not realize how many students would be using it and how often they would be using it.”

Is it your sense that a lot of university administrators are incentivized to not look at this too closely, that it’s better for business to shove it aside?

I do think there’s a vein of AI optimism among a certain type of person, a certain generation, who saw the tech boom and thought, I missed out on that wave, and now I want to adopt. I want to be part of this new wave, this future, this inevitable future that’s coming. They want to adopt the technology and aren’t really picking up on how dangerous it might be.

I used to teach at a university. I still know a lot of people in that world. A lot of them tell me that they feel very much on their own with this, that the administrators are pretty much just saying, Hey, figure it out**. And I think it’s revealing that university admins were quickly able, during Covid, for instance, to implement drastic institutional changes to respond to that, but they’re much more content to let the whole AI thing play out.**

I think they were super responsive to Covid because it was a threat to the bottom line. They needed to keep the operation running. AI, on the other hand, doesn’t threaten the bottom line in that way, or at least it doesn’t yet. AI is a massive, potentially extinction-level threat to the very idea of higher education, but they seem more comfortable with a degraded education as long as the tuition checks are still cashing. Do you think I’m being too harsh?

I genuinely don’t think that’s too harsh. I think administrators may not fully appreciate the power of AI and exactly what’s happening in the classroom and how prevalent it is. I did speak with many professors who go to administrators or even just older teachers, TAs going to professors and saying, This is a problem.

I spoke to one TA at a writing course at Iowa who went to his professor, and the professor said, “Just grade it like it was any other paper.” I think they’re just turning a blind eye to it. And that is one of the ways AI is exposing the rot underneath education.

It’s this system that hasn’t been updated in forever. And in the case of the US higher ed system, it’s like, yeah, for a long time it’s been this transactional experience. You pay X amount of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and you get your degree. And what happens in between is not as important.

The universities, in many cases, also have partnerships with AI companies, right?

Right. And what you said about universities can also be said about AI companies. For the most part, these are companies or companies within nonprofits that are trying to capture customers. One of the more dystopian moments was when we were finishing this story, getting ready to completely close it, and I got a push alert that was like, “Google is letting parents know that they have created a chatbot for children under [thirteen years old].” And it was kind of a disturbing experience, but they are trying to capture these younger customers and build this loyalty.

There’s been reporting from the Wall Street Journal on OpenAI and how they have been sitting on an AI that would be really, really effective at essentially watermarking their output. And they’ve been sitting on it, they have not released it, and you have to wonder why. And you have to imagine they know that students are using it, and in terms of building loyalty, an AI detector might not be the best thing for their brand.

This is a good time to ask the obligatory question, Are we sure we’re not just old people yelling at clouds here? People have always panicked about new technologies. Hell, Socrates panicked about the written word. How do we know this isn’t just another moral panic?

I think there’s a lot of different ways we could respond to that. It’s not a generational moral panic. This is a tool that’s available, and it’s available to us just as it’s available to students. Society and our culture will decide what the morals are. And that is changing, and the way that the definition of cheating is changing. So who knows? It might be a moral panic toda,y and it won’t be in a year.

However, I think somebody like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is one of the people who said, “This is a calculator for words.” And I just don’t really understand how that is compatible with other statements he’s made about AI potentially being lights out for humanity or statements made by people at an Anthropic about the power of AI to potentially be a catastrophic event for humans. And these are the people who are closest and thinking about it the most, of course.

I have spoken to some people who say there is a possibility, and I think there are people who use AI who would back this up, that we’ve maxed out the AI’s potential to supplement essays or writing. That it might not get much better than it is now. And I think that’s a very long shot, one that I would not want to bank on.

Is your biggest fear at this point that we are hurtling toward a post-literate society? I would argue, if we are post-literate, then we’re also post-thinking.

It’s a very scary thought that I try not to dwell in — the idea that my profession and what I’m doing is just feeding the machine, that my most important reader now is a robot, and that there’s going to be fewer and fewer readers is really scary, not just because of subscriptions, but because, as you said, that means fewer and fewer people thinking and engaging with these ideas.

I think ideas can certainly be expressed in other mediums and that’s exciting, but I don’t think anybody who’s paid attention to the way technology has shaped teen brains over the past decade and a half is thinking, Yeah, we need more of that. And the technology we’re talking about now is orders of magnitude more powerful than the algorithms on Instagram.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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President Donald Trump, joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other lawmakers, holds up an executive order he signed in June. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A strange thing happened on the way to Republicans’ passage of their big Medicaid-cutting bill: We learned that President Donald Trump seems unaware the bill will cut Medicaid.

Trying to line up support for the bill in a private call Wednesday with House Republicans, Trump offered his advice that, if they want to win elections, they shouldn’t touch Medicare or Social Security — or Medicaid. His comments were reported by Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman of NOTUS.

This is a bizarre thing to say, because Medicaid is the single program being cut the most in the bill. Estimates suggest that its spending could end up cut by as much as 18 percent, causing about 8 million people to lose Medicaid coverage.

And this isn’t a one-off thing. For months, Trump has publicly promised to protect Medicaid, and reports have described him as queasy about Congress’s plans to do otherwise.

This puts Vice President JD Vance, who has talked a big game about changing the GOP to appeal more to low-income voters, in an awkward place. On X this week, he attempted to change the subject from the bill’s Medicaid cuts, arguing they were “immaterial” and “minutiae” compared to the immigration enforcement money that really matters.

Privately, many Republicans know differently. “Group texts are blowing up and frantic phone calls are being exchanged among GOP lawmakers alarmed about the Senate Medicaid provisions,” Politico reported this week.

It would be no surprise if Trump and Republicans misled about these cuts in public — GOP officials have been claiming that the Medicaid cuts are purely about limiting waste, fraud, and abuse. But the fact that Trump misstated this so blithely in private, to a friendly audience, is more strange. It suggests he truly is unaware what his “big, beautiful bill” will do.

Why the bill ended up cutting Medicaid deeply despite Trump’s repeated promises not to

To at least try to understand what’s going on here, it’s worth grappling with why this bill cuts Medicaid in the first place.

Trump’s priorities for his bill were tax cuts, immigration enforcement money, and raising the debt ceiling. This is all very expensive, and most of it will just add to the debt.

But conservatives in the House insisted that at least some spending cuts had to be included, to partially offset the bill’s cost. So GOP leaders searched for cuts that would be sizable — in the hundreds of billions of dollars range. Joe Biden’s clean energy subsidies were one obvious target.

It’s hard, though, to come up with big cuts that aren’t politically toxic. As budget wonks know, the real money in the federal budget is in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. Trump had no desire to cut defense, and the Trump-era GOP has deemed the senior-focused Social Security and Medicare politically untouchable.

Medicaid, aimed at low-income people, is a different story. Conservatives have long viewed it, along with food stamps and welfare, with suspicion, arguing that government benefits like these disincentivize work and get exploited by the lazy and undeserving. Medicaid beneficiaries are also believed to be less likely to turn out at the polls.

These longstanding conservative arguments have been slow to adjust to the news that Medicaid recipients have been an increasing share of the Trump coalition, as he’s helped the GOP gain among low-income voters. Many low-income whites in rural areas are on Medicaid, as are low-income Latinos in areas where Trump has done well, such as California’s Central Valley.

That dissuaded congressional Republicans from even more extreme Medicaid cuts some had wanted — but they still hit the program hard. The Medicaid cuts that made it into the bill were, however, crafted in roundabout ways that Republicans argued were just aimed at waste, fraud, and abuse.

These included new work reporting requirements. In theory, a requirement to document your working hours in exchange for coverage may not sound like a cut; in practice, the process will likely be arduous and error-filled and result in many working people losing coverage.

The bill also limits the “provider tax” states may change — a key way many states help finance Medicaid, since provider taxes are reimbursed with federal matching funds — among other changes.

All that added up to hundreds of billions in savings, on paper. But behind those savings is 8 million people losing their Medicaid coverage, as well as a potentially devastating impact on rural hospitals that rely on Medicaid payments.

Trump may not be aware of this, but many in the party are — that’s why they set the most painful Medicaid cuts to happen only after the 2026 midterms. And eventually, many Medicaid recipients will feel the pain, too.

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How we tell the story of the United States — and who’s included in it and how — has been an ongoing battle in the country for decades. It’s one currently being waged by the Trump administration, such as when it scrubbed references to Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from government webpages in the name of clamping down on “DEI.”

And in the 1990s, Disney had a particularly zany idea of how to tell the story of America — one that set off a culture war as the company sought to create an amusement park focused on US history, warts and all.

Disney’s America, the doomed amusement park, would have contained the story of immigration told through the Muppets’ musical-comedy stylings. It would have had sections dedicated to the Industrial Revolution, Native America, and the Civil War. It would, as Disney executives put it at the time, “make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave.”

The ensuing battle over Disney’s America would be one of Disney’s biggest failures — and a precursor to battles we’re still fighting today.

To learn more about what Disney tried to do, what ended up happening, and what it all means, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with historian Jacqui Shine.

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.

Where does this story begin?

It begins with Michael Eisner, who came to Disney as its CEO and chairman in 1984. Eisner is ambitious, aggressive. Over the next 10 years, in what Disney buffs called the Disney Renaissance, the company has this enormous critical and commercial success with a run of animated movies. The juggernaut of this is The Little Mermaid, followed by Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Aladdin.

Maybe high on that supply, Eisner announces this plan for what he calls the Disney decade, which is this broad expansion of the company’s parks and resorts. The most high-profile project here was Euro Disney Resort, which is now Disneyland Paris. And there’s high expectations for the Disney decade and for the success of the Parks program.

This doesn’t go quite the way that they hope it will. Euro Disney doesn’t do well at opening. It loses nearly a billion dollars in its first year. So the failure of Euro Disney leads the company to want to pivot to more US expansion on smaller park projects.

In 1991, the head of the parks division brings Eisner and Disney’s president Frank Wells to Colonial Williamsburg. This inspires this plan for a history-themed Disney Park, Disney’s America.

They want to put it in Virginia because they imagine that it can become part of the DC-area tourist economy, and that a Disney theme park that is about American history will fit really well into this context. This is not a project that was supposed to involve Mickey Mouse or any of the Disney icons. Disney was starting work on Pocahontas.

Eisner says that he was reading a lot about John Smith and Pocahontas and that internally, the company was interested in democracy as a sort of, as a thematic subject.

So Eisner and Disney have an idea of what they don’t want to do, and perhaps more importantly, what they do want to do with this park. To build it, obviously you’re going to need some land. I imagine Disney just didn’t already have a huge parcel of property in northern Virginia-ish. Do they buy some?

They do. Between 1991 and 1993, Disney secretly begins buying up parcels of land in the area through shell companies. The guy who was in charge of buying apparently used a fake persona; this was very undercover, this is all happening secretly. It is also less than five miles from a National Park Service Civil War Battlefield: Manassas. This is a place where about 3,700 men died and where there were about 25,000 total casualties.

They’re doing this secretly. At what point does Manassas find out that Mickey Mouse is buying up their land?

Almost everybody finds out in November 1993 when Disney announces the project.

I think initially people receive this warmly, because Disney’s promising a significant amount of economic development for the region and Disney is promising a complex experience of American history there. The guy who heads the Disney’s America project, Bob Weis, says in the press release they envisioned Disney’s America as a place to debate and discuss the future of our nation and to learn more about the past by living it.

And they are quick to say that this is a project that is not going to whitewash American history. Eisner is interviewed in the Washington Post the next day. He says that the park will present painful, disturbing, agonizing history. We’re going to be sensitive, but we will not be showing the absolute propaganda of the country. We will show the Civil War with all this racial conflict.

This was a very serious, very powerful, very successful entertainment executive saying, “We’re gonna make a kiddy theme park that will take our most brutal history seriously.”

Yes. And I think, like you, a lot of people had trouble with that contradiction. The day after this press release is issued, Disney holds a press conference in Haymarket. At this presser, Bob Weis, who is the senior vice president of imagineering, which is Disney’s creative division, says, “This will be entertaining in the sense that it would leave you something you could mull over. We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the underground railroad.”

This moment, I think, comes to define this conflict in the public eye.

It’s such a nutty thing to hear a serious person say. Your kids could come to our theme park, home of Mickey Mouse, and find out what it’s like to be a slave. I imagine at this point, people are just like, “I’m sorry, I’m gonna need some more specifics.”

Yes. They put out a brochure, which is where a lot of the information that we have about what this would’ve been like comes from.

“Any kind of debate about public history is always going to be about trying to stake some sort of political or ideological claim about the meaning of American history.”

You enter at Crossroads USA, and there you board an 1840s train that takes you first to President Square, which they say celebrates the birth of democracy. It’s about the Revolutionary War.

You follow that to Native America. They say, “guests may visit an Indian village representing such eastern tribes as the Powhatans, or join in a harrowing Lewis and Clark raft expedition through pounding rapids and churning whirlpools.” We’re going to be educating people about Manifest Destiny here.

We move from Native America to the Civil War fort, where they say you’re going to experience the reality of a soldier’s daily life. After the Civil War fort, you go to a section on American immigration. And they’re going to build a replica Ellis Island building. Some sources indicate they would’ve done a show called The Muppets Take America.

The next section is a factory town called Enterprise that centers on a high-speed adventure ride called the Industrial Revolution. That involves a narrow escape from its fiery vat of molten steel.

Then you go to Victory Field, where guests may parachute from a plane or operate tanks and weapons in combat.

You then hit the last two areas, State Fair and Family Farm, to learn how to make homemade ice cream or milk a cow and even participate in a nearby country wedding, barn dance, and buffet.

This sounds like one doozy of a brochure. Does it work? Does it convince everyone?

Yes and no.

Does that slow down Michael Eisner? Is he ready to give up?

No. And that is where the fight begins. People hook in, in particular, to this idea that Disney’s going to include some element about American chattel slavery. And he is aggressive about saying, No, we weren’t going to do that. Why would you think that?

He is really persuaded that Disney’s big swing can work, that this idea has value and merit, and that the people who are standing against it are misguided.

At this point, is this fight relegated to Virginia, or is it getting bigger? This is obviously an international company with a huge cultural footprint.

It’s getting bigger. One of the things that contributes to this is that the Washington Post does a lot of coverage of this, which makes it go national. And it starts this debate in editorial pages about whether or not Disney can responsibly represent American history and whether or not the Disneyfication of American history is advisable.

And what happens when national papers, opinion columns start weighing in on this debate?

A few things happen. In early 1994, a strong coalition of opponents develops, including people who are concerned about preserving the environment there.

But then the historians get involved. The big guns come out when this group called Protect Historic America launches. This is a group of big-name, high-powered academic historians. This group of major figures stepped forward to say they’re concerned about education around the Civil War and about the park’s location near Manassas. In very short order, dozens and dozens of historians volunteer their time to write editorials, to comment to the media. They’re really fired up about this.

I read that this fight also somehow made it to the United States Congress. Why is this even Congress’s business?

This is one of the interesting things that comes out of Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee hearings. The entree into this is that this involves public lands of national importance. Five hundred people come to the Senate hearing, and Eisner’s really combative. He says about the people who are opposed to this, “I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff and I didn’t learn anything. It was pretty boring.”

At this point you’ve got historians speaking out about this. You’ve got op-ed columns being written, it sounds like all over the country. You’ve got a hearing on Capitol Hill. Are people out in the streets protesting this somewhere?

They are. Eisner is on the Hill trying to make nice with DC politicians and invites them to a special screening of The Lion King. But when they leave the theater, there are about a hundred protestors outside. Bigger than this though, in September 1994, 3,000 people march on the National Mall to protest Disney’s America.

Nationally, public support for the park has dropped to like 25 percent. At the end of September 1994, the company announces that Disney is withdrawing from the Virginia site. It’s clear that people don’t want it to be sited where it is, and they’re giving up. It’s over for Disney’s America. It is curtains for Disney’s America.

How do you think what happened in the ’90s connects to the kinds of fights we’re having about our history right now?

Any kind of debate about public history is always going to be about trying to stake some sort of political or ideological claim about the meaning of American history. Right now we see this very direct, very aggressive effort to insist on a positivist narrative about American history.

One of the things that I think people found puzzling about the early days of the Trump administration was that the National Endowment for the Humanities cut an enormous amount of active grants. And they issued new guidelines seeking projects, they say, that instill “an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.” I think partly this is the administration’s backlash to efforts in the last decade to bring a more nuanced and complex understanding to structural oppression in US history.

We fantasize about American history in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of places. I don’t know that Disney in seeking to do that was necessarily doing anything out of step with how we represent the American story.

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Americans aren’t used to having to defend democracy. It’s just been a given for so long. After all, it’s the country’s 249th birthday. But now, with experts warning that US democracy may break down in the next three years, many people feel worried about it — and passionate about protecting it.

But how do you defend something when you don’t quite remember the justifications for it?

Many intellectuals on both the left and right have spent the past decade attacking America’s liberal democracy — a political system that holds meaningfully free, fair, multiparty elections, and gives citizens plenty of civil liberties and equality before the law.

On the left, thinkers have criticized liberalism’s economic vision for its emphasis on individual freedom, which they argued feeds exploitation and inequality. On the right, thinkers have taken issue with liberalism’s focus on secularism and individual rights, which they said wrecks traditional values and social cohesion. The common thread is the belief that liberalism’s core premise — the government’s main job is to defend the freedom of the individual to choose their path in life — is wrong.

These arguments gained mainstream success for a time, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has documented. That’s in part because, well, liberalism does have its problems. At a time of rising inequality and rampant social disconnection, it shouldn’t be surprising when some people complain that liberalism is so busy protecting the freedom of the individual that it neglects to tackle collective problems.

But awareness of these problems shouldn’t mean that we give up on liberal democracy. In fact, there are very compelling reasons to want to uphold this political system. Because Americans have gotten used to taking it for granted, many have forgotten how to make the intellectual case for it.

It’s time to remember.

Liberal democracy does have a good defense. It’s called value pluralism.

When you think of liberalism, you might think of philosophers like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or John Rawls. But, believe it or not, some people not named John also had very important ideas.

Prime examples include the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar, who are strangely underappreciated given their contributions to liberal thought in the Cold War period. Associated thinkers like Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor are also worth noting.

Let’s focus on Berlin, though, since he was one of the clearest and greatest defenders of liberal democracy. Born to a Jewish family in the Russian Empire, he experienced the political extremes of the 20th century — the Russian Revolution, the rise of Soviet communism, the Holocaust — and came away with a horror for totalitarian thinking. In all these cases, he argued, the underlying culprit was “monism”: the idea that we can arrive at the true answers to humanity’s central problems and harmoniously combine them into one utopian, perfect society.

For example, in Stalin’s communism, monism took the form of believing that the key is to establish a classless society — even if millions of people had to be killed to achieve that vision.

If it were possible to have a perfect society, any method of bringing it about would seem justified. Berlin writes:

For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever — what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken — that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao.

But this utopian idea is a dangerous illusion. The problem with it, Berlin argued, is that human beings have lots of different values, and they’re not all compatible with each other. In fact, they’re inherently diverse and often in tension with each other.

Take, for example, justice and mercy. Both of these are equally legitimate values. But rigorous justice won’t always be compatible with mercy; the former would push a court to throw the book at someone for breaking a law, even if no one was harmed and it was a first offense, while the latter would urge for a more forgiving approach.

Or take liberty and equality. Both beautiful values — “but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs,” Berlin writes, “total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.” The state has to curtail the liberty of those who want to dominate if it cares about making room for equality or social welfare, for feeding the hungry and providing houses for the unhoused.

Some ethical theories, like utilitarianism, try to dissolve these sorts of conflicts by suggesting that all the different values can be ranked on a single scale; in any given situation, one will produce more units of happiness or pleasure than the other. But Berlin argues that the values are actually incommensurable: attending a Buddhist meditation retreat and eating a slice of chocolate cake might both give you some sort of happiness, but you can’t rank them on a single scale. They are extremely different types of happiness. What’s more, some values can actually make us less happy — think of courage, say, and intellectual honesty or truth-seeking — but are valuable nonetheless. You can’t boil all values down to one “supervalue” and measure everything in terms of it.

If human values are incommensurable and sometimes flat-out incompatible, that means no single political arrangement can satisfy all legitimate human values simultaneously. To put it more simply: We can’t have everything. We’ll always face trade-offs between different goods, and because we’re forced to choose between them, there will always be some loss of value — some good thing left unchosen.

Berlin says it’s precisely because this is the human condition that we rightly place such a high premium on freedom. If no one can justifiably tell us that their way is the one right way to live — because, according to Berlin’s value pluralism, there can be more than one right answer — then no government can claim to have uncontestable knowledge about the good and foist its vision on us. We should all have a share in making those decisions on the collective level — as we do in a liberal democracy. And on the individual level, we should each have the freedom to choose how we balance between values, how we live our own lives. When others come up with different answers, we should respect their competing perspectives.

Value pluralism is not relativism

“I do not say, ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps,’” Berlin memorably writes. Although he argues that there’s a plurality of values, that doesn’t mean any and every possible value is a legitimate human value. Legitimate values are things that humans have genuine reason to care about as ends in themselves, and that others can see the point in, even if they put less weight on a given value or dispute how it’s being enacted in the world.

Security, for example, is something we all have reason to care about, even though we differ on the lengths the government should go to in order to ensure security. By contrast, if someone said that cruelty is a core value, they’d be laughed out of the room. We can imagine a person valuing cruelty in specific contexts as a means to a greater end, but no human being (except maybe a sociopath) would argue that they value it as an end in itself. As Berlin writes:

The number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite — let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.

Contemporary psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have made a similar case. His research suggests that different people prioritize different moral values. Liberals are those who are especially attuned to the values of care and fairness. Conservatives are those who are also sensitive to the values of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. It’s not like some of these values are “bad” and some are “good.” They’re just different. And even a liberal who strongly disagrees with how a conservative is applying the value of sanctity (for example, as a way to argue that a fetus represents a life and that life is sacred, so abortion should be banned) can appreciate that sanctity is, itself, a fine value.

Berlin anticipated this line of thinking. Although he acknowledges that some disagreements are so severe that people will feel compelled to go to war — he would go to war against Nazi Germany, for example — by and large, “respect between systems of values which are not necessarily hostile to each other is possible,” he writes.

Liberalism can’t just be about warding off totalitarianism. Is there more to it?

Berlin’s analysis offers a highly effective vaccine against totalitarian thinking. That’s a huge point in its favor — and defenders of liberal democracy would do well to resurface it.

But there’s more to a good society than just warding off totalitarianism — than, to put it in Berlin’s own terms, guaranteeing “negative freedoms” (freedom from things like oppression). We also care about “positive freedoms” (freedom to enjoy all the good things in life). In recent years, critics have alleged that Berlin and other Cold War liberals neglected that part of the equation.

It’s fair to point out that American liberalism has done a poor job of ensuring things like equality and social connection. But Berlin’s account of value pluralism never pretended to be laying out a timeless prescription for how to balance between different priorities. Just the opposite. He specified that priorities are never absolute. We exist on a seesaw, and as our society’s concrete circumstances change — say, as capitalism goes into hyperdrive and billionaires amass more and more power — we’ll need to repeatedly adjust our stance so we can maintain a decent balance between all the elements of a good life.

And on the global scale, Berlin fully expects that different cultures will keep disagreeing with each other about how much weight to put on the different legitimate human values. He urges us to view each culture as infinitely precious in its uniqueness, and to see that there may be “as many types of perfection as there are types of culture.” He offers us a positive vision that’s about respecting, and maybe even delighting in, difference.

Nowadays, a new generation of philosophers, including American thinkers influenced by Berlin like Ruth Chang and Elizabeth Anderson, is busy trying to work out the particulars of how to do that in modern society, tackling issues from ongoing racial segregation to rapid technological change.

But this can’t just be the work of philosophers. If America is going to remain a liberal democracy, everyday Americans need to remember the value of value pluralism.

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Zohran Mamdani’s policy ideas might not always be the answer voters are looking for, but the dignity underlying his whole agenda is. | Madison Swart/Hans Luca /AFP via Getty Images

Last week, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani sent shockwaves through the political establishment after he clinched the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor. Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, defeated a crowded field, which included former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by double digits. Turnout was higher than usual, especially among younger voters, indicating that Mamdani’s campaign energized New York City residents in ways few people expected.

Throughout his campaign, and especially since the stunning upset, Mamdani has faced attacks from both Republicans and centrist Democrats that paint him as far too extreme for New York City, let alone America. Part of that caricature is clearly fueled by racism — Mamdani is a Muslim immigrant born to Indian parents in Uganda — with Republicans sharing photos of the Statue of Liberty dressed in a burqa, saying Mamdani is uncivilized for eating with his hands, and calling for the 33-year-old candidate to be denaturalized and subsequently deported. It’s also part of the backlash to Mamdani’s support for Palestinian rights, as even members of his own party baselessly accuse him of peddling antisemitism.

But much of the criticism has also centered on Mamdani’s campaign promises, which pledge to make New York City more affordable in small but meaningful ways with rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, and fare-free buses. Some of that criticism is very heated: Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for example, called Mamdani’s rent stabilization proposal “the second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing.”

Many argue that Mamdani is only offering pie-in-the-sky proposals — nice policies in an ideal world, but unachievable in our not-so-ideal reality. But Mamdani’s splashy policies aren’t exactly foreign ideas, nor is he the first to try to implement them. They’ve been tried before, often with promising results.

Mamdani’s policies aren’t reckless; they’re tested

Let’s take three of his policies that have gotten some of the most attention:

1. Rent freeze

Mamdani has proposed to impose a rent freeze. That means that landlords would be unable to raise the rents on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments across the city. This mostly falls within the mayor’s jurisdiction: Rent hikes (or freezes) are decided by the Rent Guidelines Board, whose nine members are appointed by the mayor. And if elected mayor in November, Mamdani can appoint members to the board who pledge to freeze the rent.

As dramatic as the negative response has been, this isn’t exactly a novel idea. In just the past decade — during Bill de Blasio’s tenure as the city’s mayor — the board froze the rent on three occasions: in 2015, 2016, and in 2020. (Those freezes, it should be noted, are hardly, if ever, blamed for worsening the city’s housing problems.) Mamdani’s proposal also doesn’t mean that a rent freeze will be permanent. The idea is to hold rents where they are to give tenants a chance to catch up to the rising cost of living. (In Mayor Eric Adams’s first three years in office, for example, the board raised the rents by a combined 9 percent.)

Opponents to this plan often point to the piles of literature that show the pitfalls of rent control in the long run — that it disincentivizes landlords to provide services and ultimately leaves apartments in disrepair. But those arguments conveniently leave out some key parts of this debate. Under New York’s rent stabilization laws, landlords who invest in meaningfully improving their apartments are allowed to increase rents beyond the guidelines set by the board, meaning that landlords can’t really use a rent freeze as an excuse to leave their apartments in bad conditions.

More than that, Mamdani’s plan for a rent freeze doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of a broader plan to spur investment in housing and improve renters’ lives, which include changing zoning laws, cutting red tape to get more housing built more quickly across the city, and cracking down on crooked landlords by more strictly and efficiently enforcing New York’s housing codes.

Put another way, Mamdani’s rent freeze is not presented as the solution to New York’s housing crisis. It’s just one part of a bigger toolkit that can help tenants in the near term while the other tools finally put housing costs under control in the long run.

2. City-owned grocery stores

Mamdani’s suggestion of city-owned grocery stores has irked some entrepreneurs to the point that one supermarket mogul threatened to close down all of his stores if Mamdani becomes mayor. The rationale behind this proposal is that a publicly owned grocery store would make food more affordable. The store wouldn’t have to worry about making a profit or paying rent, and those savings would be passed onto consumers by lowering the price of goods.

Realistically, this is unlikely to have a significant impact on grocery prices across the city — after all, grocery stores famously run on very slim profit margins to begin with. But Mamdani’s plan is also a means to address some of the city’s food deserts, where there aren’t enough grocery stores to serve residents. (While some argue that New York City doesn’t really have food deserts, the reality is that it’s hard to argue that residents have equal access to healthy and fresh foods across the city.)

Some of Mamdani’s critics have seized on this plan to call him a communist who would put private businesses and consumer choice at risk. The government, they argue, shouldn’t be operating businesses because governments are an inefficient alternative to the private market. The reality is that public-owned stores aren’t exactly new, let alone a threat. Several states, from Alabama to Virginia, have publicly owned liquor stores — a product of the post-prohibition period where states took more control over the sale and distribution of alcohol — and boast of their success. (Virginia’s government website, for example, notes its state-owned liquor stores’ “history of giving back to Virginians” and highlights that it has generated more than $1 billion in revenue for six consecutive years.)

Other cities across the country are also trying their hand at publicly owned grocery stores. In St. Paul, Kansas, for example, the municipality-owned grocery store helped end the city’s nearly two-decade run without a grocery store. In Madison, Wisconsin, a municipally owned grocery store is set to open later this summer, and other cities, including Chicago and Atlanta, are planning to dabble in this experiment as well.

Mamdani’s proposal for publicly owned grocery stores is also far more rational and modest than the state-monopoly model of liquor stores: He’s merely proposing a pilot program of just five city-owned grocery stores — one in each borough — in a sea of some 15,000 privately owned grocery stores. If the pilot program succeeds and satisfies New Yorkers’ needs, then it could be expanded.

3. Fare-free buses

One of Mamdani’s signature wins as a New York State Assembly member was his push for a fare-free bus pilot on five lines in New York City. As mayor, he promises to expand fare-free buses across the city to make public transit more accessible. It’s also good environmental policy that helps alleviate traffic because it encourages people to ditch their cars and ride the bus instead.

Fare-free transit experiments in various cities have already shown promising results. In Boston, a fare-free bus pilot after the pandemic found that bus lines without fares recovered ridership much faster than the rest of the transit system. A year-and-a-half after the initial Covid lockdowns — when transit ridership cratered across the country — one fare-free bus line in Boston saw ridership bounce back to 92 percent of pre-pandemic levels, while the rest of the city’s transit system was stuck near 50 percent.

According to an article by Mamdani and his colleague in the state legislature, in New York City, the lines included in the fare-free bus pilot showed an increase in ridership across the board, and of the new riders those lines lured, the highest share was among people making less than $28,000 a year.

Of course, fare-free transit should be a secondary goal. After all, what good is a free fare if the buses won’t get you to where you need to go, let alone get you there in time? But Mamdani’s plan makes clear that he’s not just interested in making transit free, but fast and reliable as well.

His fare-free proposal is packaged with a commitment to invest in improving infrastructure — like building more dedicated lanes — to make bus trips more efficient. There are plenty of avenues to raise revenue for that kind of investment, from imposing a new tax to introducing schemes like congestion pricing, as New York already has. Plus, if making buses free makes people more likely to get out of cars and ride public transit instead, then that is a worthwhile investment.

What Mamdani’s policies could mean for the future of Democratic politics

Ultimately, Mamdani’s policies also proved to be good politics, at least good enough for a Democratic primary. Part of the reason Mamdani’s policies might have resonated with so many voters is that they are, in many ways, a promise to reshape government — not into a communist haven on the Hudson, but into a government that owns up to its responsibility to provide all of its people with a dignified life.

That’s why ideas like fare-free transit aren’t solely about saving $2.90 on a bus ride. It’s true that there are plenty of reasonable arguments against fare-free transit: Eliminating fares would get rid of a reliable source of revenue for transit agencies. Solely relying on taxes to fund public transportation potentially makes transit systems more volatile and susceptible to politics, where they can be used as a bargaining chip in the legislature’s tax bills. And there are other ways to make transit affordable to those in need, including existing subsidies that reduce fares for low-income commuters.

But these arguments miss the broader appeal of agendas like Mamdani’s, which are a commitment to expand the government’s role in our daily lives in positive ways. Despite the depiction of Mamdani as a radical socialist, his agenda, at its core, actually promises something much more ideologically modest: making government more likable by making it work well. So his overarching goal as mayor, it seems, would be to make people believe that effective governance is possible — that local government can tangibly improve the quality of life in a city by being more present and, not to mention, pleasant to deal with.

This is not to say that Mamdani’s primary win will reshape American politics — or even Democratic primaries in other cities. But Mamdani is onto something, and Democrats might be well-served by looking at his not-so-radical agenda and understanding that people want more from their own governments. Mamdani’s ideas, like publicly owned grocery stores, might not always be the answer voters are looking for, but the dignity underlying his whole agenda is.

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From Vox via this RSS feed

President Donald Trump with Education Secretary Linda McMahon at the White House on March 20, 2025. | Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

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: Today, I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s decision to withhold nearly $7 billion in federal education funding.

What just happened? The Trump administration refused to release congressionally mandated funding to support a variety of education initiatives: after-school and summer programs, programs for students who are learning English, teacher training, classroom technology, and more.

The nearly $7 billion was allocated to states and local schools, and should have gone out on Tuesday. Its loss will be particularly harmful because school districts have already made plans with the assumption that the money would be there, only to have it pulled at the last minute.

What is the administration saying? The Trump administration argues the withholding isn’t a freeze and is instead because the funds are under review. But this argument is likely a fig leaf, given the administration’s opposition to the programs in question and its previous efforts to withhold funding for programs it disagrees with. What the administration appears to be doing is called impoundment — the decision not to spend money that Congress has already appropriated for a specific purpose.

Can they do that? Not really — but we’ll see how the courts rule, since the administration’s decision is almost certain to be challenged in court. Though the president can request Congress withdraw funding — and making that request would trigger a temporary freeze — the administration hasn’t done so in this case.

What’s the big picture here? The Trump administration is waging a war against the congressional power of the purse, led by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought (of Project 2025 fame).

The decision to withhold education funding is one of a number of efforts to wrest spending power from Congress, and recent reporting suggests the administration is considering ways to step up its attack and challenge restrictions on impoundment more broadly. If it’s successful, it will be a major expansion of Trump’s powers — and another blow to Congress’s.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I absolutely loved this story from my colleague Bryan Walsh about the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which just last month shared its first images of the cosmos. The telescope itself is a scientific marvel that has already provided useful data to researchers, but, as Bryan points out, it’s also the “ultimate perspective provider,” a reminder of our place in a vast, beautiful universe. I hope you enjoy his piece — and the photos — as much as I did, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow!

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President Donald Trump signs a bill on June 12, 2025. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Republicans are close to passing President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut taxes, slash programs for low-income Americans, ramp up funding for mass deportation, and penalize the solar and wind energy industries.

Oh, and it adds enormously to the nation’s debt — but who’s counting? (Independent analysts are, and they estimate it will add at least $3 trillion.)

The sprawling, 887-page bill contains far too many provisions to name here. But to get a better sense of the bill’s impact, it’s worth running down what it does in a few key areas.

The big picture, though, is that Trump is targeting Democratic or liberal-coded programs and constituencies — programs for the poor, student borrowers, and climate change — to cover part (but nowhere near all) of the cost of his big tax cuts and new spending.

Taxes: The current tax rates stick around – plus there’s some new tax cuts

The bill makes a variety of changes to tax law, some of which are about keeping tax breaks set to expire soon, others of which are adding new goodies in the tax code.

1) Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent: In Trump’s first term, Republicans lowered income and other tax rates with his 2017 tax law. However, in a gimmick to make that law look less costly, the new lower rates they set were scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 — meaning that, if Congress did nothing, practically everyone’s taxes would go up next year.

So the single most consequential thing this bill does, from a budgetary perspective, is making those 2017 tax levels permanent, averting their imminent expiration.

That saves Americans from an imminent tax hike, but notably, it just keeps the status quo tax levels in place. So, in practice, many people may not perceive this as a new cut to their taxes.

2) New “populist” tax cuts:The bill also creates several new tax breaks meant to fulfill certain Trump 2024 campaign promises, such as “no tax on tips.” There will be new deductions for up to $25,000 in tip income, $12,500 in overtime income, $6,000 for seniors, and a deduction for interest on loans for new US-made cars. The bill also creates savings accounts for children called “Trump accounts,” in which the government would invest $1,000 per child.

3) Tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses: Wealthy Americans wanting to pay less in taxes have the most to be happy about from this bill, because they benefit hugely from making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.

Other wealthy winners in the bill include owners of “pass-through” businesses (partnerships, LLCs, or other business entities that don’t pay the typical corporate income tax); they get their tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 bill made permanent. Some wealthy heirs stand to gain too, as the exemption from the estate tax was raised to inherited estates worth $15 million).

Affluent blue state residents got a big win. The 2017 Trump tax law had sharply limited a deduction that typically benefited them — the state and local (SALT) deduction, which it capped at $10,000. (People in blue states tend to have more state and local taxes they can deduct.) The new bill raises that limit to $40,000.

Businesses also get some big benefits, as the bill makes three major corporate tax breaks permanent: bonus depreciation, research and development expensing, and a tax break related to interest deduction.

All this, combined with the cuts for programs for poor people, is why many analysts calculate the impact this bill would be regressive overall — it will end up financially harming low-income Americans, and benefiting the rich the most.

The safety net: Big cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans

Trump has repeatedly promised that he wouldn’t cut Medicaid, and this bill breaks that promise bigly. Its new work reporting requirements and other changes (such as a limit to the “provider tax” states may charge) could end up cutting Medicaid spending by as much as 18 percent. The bill also makes changes to the Affordable Care Act individual insurance marketplaces. Altogether, these provisions would result in 12 million people losing their health insurance, per the Congressional Budget Office.

Food stamps are another target. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could be cut by as much as 20 percent, due to new work requirements and new requirements states pay a higher share of the program’s cost. One bizarre last-minute provision, aimed at winning over swing vote Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), seemingly gives states an incentive to make erroneous payments, because states with higher payment error rates get to delay their cost hikes.

Student loans also come in for deep cuts, as the bill overhauls the existing system, ending many repayment plans, requiring borrowers to repay more, and limiting future loan availability.

Clean energy: The bill singles out solar and wind for harsh treatment

Three years ago, with the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats enacted a swath of new incentives aimed at making the US a clean energy powerhouse. Trump’s new bill moves in the exact opposite direction. It repeals many of Biden’s clean energy benefits, but it doesn’t stop there – it goes further by singling out clean energy, particularly solar and wind, for harsh treatment.

Under the bill, new Biden-era tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency will be terminated this year. Biden’s clean electricity production tax credits, meanwhile, will be gradually rolled back, though solar and wind will see their credits vanish more quickly. The bill also requires clean power projects to start using fewer and fewer Chinese-made components, which much of the industry heavily relies on.

Things could be worse, though. A recent draft of the bill included far harsher policies toward solar and wind, which could have had truly apocalyptic consequences for the industry — but some of them were dropped or watered down to get the bill through the Senate.

Trump’s new spending goes to the border wall, mass deportation, and the military

Counterbalancing some of these spending cuts on the safety net and clean energy, Trump’s bill also spends a bunch more money on two of his own top priorities: immigration enforcement in the military.

About $175 billion will be devoted to immigration, including roughly $50 billion for Trump’s border wall and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities, $45 billion for expanding the capacity to detain unauthorized immigrants, and $30 billion for enforcement operations. This is a lot of money that will now be devoted to Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda, and the question will now be whether they can put it to use.

The military, meanwhile, will get about $150 billion from the bill, to be used to start construction on Trump’s planned “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, as well as on shipbuilding, munitions, and other military priorities.

The debt: It goes up a whole lot

In the end, Trump’s spending cuts were nowhere near enough to balance out the enormous cost of the tax cuts in this bill. So, estimates suggest, at least $3 trillion more will be added to the debt if this bill becomes law.

Every president this century has come in with big deficit-increasing bills, dismissing concerns about the debt, and the sky hasn’t yet fallen. But all these years of big spending are adding up, and interest payments on the debt are rising. This could make for a significant drag on the economy in future years and make even more painful cuts necessary.

Republicans are betting that the tax cuts in this bill will juice business and economic activity enough to keep the country happy in the short term — and that the cuts, targeting mainly low-income people or Democratic constituencies, are unlikely to hurt them too much at the ballot box.

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President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has big Medicaid cuts. | Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images

Republicans in Congresshave passed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing a work requirement for the first time and restricting states’ ability to finance their share of the program’s costs. The Senate approved the plan on Tuesday; the House gave its approval on Thursday. Once the bill receives Trump’s signature, American health care is never going to be the same.

The consequences will be dire.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would slash Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion and that nearly 12 million people would lose their health insurance. Senate Republicans added a last-minute infusion of funding for rural hospitals to assuage moderates skittish about the Medicaid cuts, but hospitals say the legislation will still be devastating to their business and their patients.

When combined with the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year, which were not addressed in the budget bill, and the other regulatory changes being made by the Trump administration, the Republican policy agenda could lead to an estimated 17 million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, according to the health policy think tank KFF.

Fewer people with health insurance is going to mean fewer people getting medical services, which means more illness and ultimately more deaths.

One recent analysis by a group of Harvard-affiliated researchers of the House Republicans’ version of the budget bill (which included the same general outline, though some of the provisions have been tweaked in the Senate) concluded that 700,000 fewer Americans would have a regular place to get medical care as a result of the bill. Upward of 200,000 fewer people would get their blood cholesterol or blood sugar checked; 139,000 fewer women would get their recommended mammograms. Overall, the authors project that between 8,200 and 24,600 additional Americans would die every year under the Republican plan. Other analyses came to the same conclusion: Millions of Americans will lose health insurance and thousands will die.

After a painful legislative debate in which some of their own members warned them not to cut Medicaid too deeply, Republicans succeeded in taking a big chunk out of the program to help cover the costs of their bill’s tax cuts. They have, eight years after failing to repeal Obamacare entirely, managed to strike blows to some of its important provisions.

So, for better or worse, they own the health care system now, a system that is a continued source of frustration for most Americans — frustrations that the Republican plan won’t relieve. The next time health care comes up for serious debate in Congress, lawmakers will need to repair the damage that the GOP is doing with its so-called big, beautiful bill.

How the Republican budget bill will drive up health care costs for everyone

The effects of the budget bill won’t be limited only to the people on Medicaid and the people whose private insurance costs will increase because of the Obamacare funding cuts. Everyone will experience the consequences of millions of Americans losing health coverage.

When a person loses their health insurance, they are more likely to skip regular medical checkups, which makes it more likely they go to a hospital emergency room when a serious medical problem has gotten so bad that they can’t ignore it any longer. The hospital is obligated by federal law to take care of them even if they can’t pay for their care.

Those costs are then passed on to other patients. When health care providers negotiate with insurance companies over next year’s rates, they account for the uncompensated care they have to provide. And the fewer people covered by Medicaid, the more uncompensated care hospitals have to cover, the more costs are going to increase for even people who do have health insurance. Republicans included funding in the bill to try to protect hospitals from the adverse consequences, an acknowledgement of the risk they were taking, but the hospitals themselves are warning that the funding patches are insufficient. If hospitals and doctors’ offices close because their bottom lines are squeezed by this bill, that will make it harder for people to access health care, even if they have an insurance card.

The effects of the Republican budget bill are going to filter through the rest of the health care system and increase costs for everyone. In that sense, the legislation passage marks a new era for US health policy. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats have primarily been held responsible for the state of the health care system. Sometimes this has been a drag on their political goals. But over time, as the ACA’s benefits became more ingrained, health care became a political boon to Democrats.

Going forward, having made these enormous changes, Republicans are going to own the American health care system and all of its problems — the ones they created and the ones that have existed for years.

The BBB’s passage sets the stage for another fight on the future of American health care

For the past decade-plus, US health care politics have tended to follow a “you break it, you buy it” rule. Democrats discovered this in 2010: Though the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions did not take effect for several years, they saw their popularity plummet quickly as Republicans successfully blamed annual premium increases that would’ve occurred with or without the law on the Democrats and their new health care bill. Voters were persuaded by those arguments, and Democrats lost Congress in the 2010 midterms.

But years later, Americans began to change their perception. As of 2024, 44 million Americans were covered through the 2010 health care law and two-thirds of the country say they have a favorable view of the ACA. After the GOP’s failed attempt to repeal the law in 2017, the politics of the issue flipped: Democrats scored major wins in the 2018 midterms after successfully campaigning against the GOP’s failed plan to repeal the ACA. Even in the disastrous 2024 election cycle for Democrats, health care policy was still an issue where voters trusted Kamala Harris more than Trump.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is already unpopular. Medicaid cuts specifically do not poll well with the public, and the program itself is enjoying the most popularity ever since it was first created in 1965. Those are the ingredients for a serious backlash, especially with government officials and hospitals in red states railing hard against the bill.

Democrats have more work to do on explaining to the public what the bill does and how its implications will be felt by millions of people. Recent polling suggests that many Americans don’t understand the specifics. A contentious debate among Republicans, with several solitary members warning against the consequences of Medicaid cuts, have given politicians on the other side of the aisle good material to work with in making that case: Democrats can pull up clips of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on the Senate floor, explaining how devastating the bill’s Medicaid provisions would be to conservative voters in Republican-controlled states.

Republicans will try to sell the bill on its tax cuts. But multiple analyses have shown the vast majority of the benefits are going to be reserved for people in higher-income brackets. Middle-class and working-class voters will see only marginal tax relief — and if their health care costs increase either because they lose their insurance or because their premiums go up after other people lose insurance, then that relief could quickly be wiped out by increased costs elsewhere. That is the story Democrats will need to tell in the coming campaigns.

Medicaid has served as a safety net for tens of millions of Americans during both the Great Recession of 2008 and since the pandemic recession of 2020. At one point, around 90 million Americans — about one in four — were covered by Medicaid. People have become much more familiar with the program and it has either directly benefited them or helped somebody that they know at a difficult time.

And difficult times may be coming. Economists have their eyes on concerning economic indicators that the world may be heading toward a recession. When a recession hits — that is, after all, inevitable; it’s just the normal cycle of the economy — people will lose their jobs and many of them will also lose their employer-sponsored health insurance. But now, the safety net is far flimsier than it was in previous crises.

Republicans are going to own those consequences. They took a program that had become an essential lifeline for millions of Americans and having schemed to gut the law ever since the Democrats expanded Medicaid through the ACA more than a decade ago, have finally succeeded. This Republican plan was a reaction to their opponent’s most recent policy overhaul; the next Democratic health care plan will need to repair the harms precipitated by the GOP budget bill.

In the meantime, the impetus is on Democrats and truth tellers in the media to help Americans understand what has happened, why it has happened, and what the fallout is going to be.

Update, July 3, 2:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on July 1 was updated after the House’s passage of the budget reconciliation bill.

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From Vox via this RSS feed

California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference at Gemperle Orchard on April 16 in Ceres, California.

California just demolished a major obstacle to housing construction within its borders — and provided Democrats with a blueprint for better governance nationwide.

On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a pair of housing bills into law. One exempts almost all urban, multifamily housing developments from California’s environmental review procedures. The second makes it easier for cities to change their zoning laws to allow for more homebuilding.

Both these measures entail restricting the reach of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a law that requires state and local governments to research and publicize the ecological impacts of any approved construction project. Individuals and groups can then sue to block these developments on the grounds that the government underestimated the project’s true environmental harms.

At first glance, these events might seem irrelevant to anyone who is neither a Californian nor a massive nerd. But behind the Golden State’s esoteric arguments over regulatory exemptions lie much larger questions — ones that concern the fundamental aims and methods of Democratic policymaking. Namely:

Is increasing the production of housing and other infrastructure an imperative of progressive politics that must take precedence over other concerns?Should Democrats judge legislation by how little it offends the party’s allied interest groups or by how much it advances the general public’s needs (as determined by technocratic analysis)?

In making it easier to build urban housing — despite the furious objections of some environmental groups and labor unions — California Democrats put material plenty above status quo bias, and the public’s interests above their party’s internal harmony.

Too often in recent decades, Democrats have embraced the opposite priorities. And this has led blue cities and states to suffer from exceptionally large housing shortages while struggling to build public infrastructure on time and on budget. As a result, Democratic states have been bleeding population  — and thus, electoral clout — to Republican ones while the public sector has fallen into disrepute.

California just demonstrated that Democrats don’t need to accept these failures. Acquiescing to scarcity — for the sake of avoiding change or intraparty tension — is a choice. Democrats can make a different one.

California Democrats were long hostile to housing development. That’s finally changing.

Critics of California’s CEQA reforms didn’t deny their state needs more housing. It might therefore seem fair to cast the debate over those reforms as a referendum on the importance of building more homes.

But the regulatory regime that the opponents of CEQA reform sought to preserve is the byproduct of an explicitly anti-development strain of progressivism, one that reoriented Democratic politics in the 1970s.

The postwar decades’ rapid economic progress yielded widespread affluence, ecological degradation, and disruptive population growth. Taken together, these forces spurred a backlash to building: Affluence led liberal reformers to see economic development as less of a priority, environmental decay prompted fears that humanity was swiftly exhausting nature’s bounty, and the swift growth of booming localities led some longtime residents to fear cultural alienation or displacement.

California was ground zero for this anti-growth backlash, as historian Yoni Appelbaum notes in his recent book Stuck. The state’s population quintupled between 1920 and 1970. And construction had largely kept pace, with California adding nearly 2 million units in the 1950s alone. As a result, in 1970, the median house in California cost only $197,000 in today’s dollars.

But millions of new people and buildings proved socially disruptive and ecologically costly. Many Californians wished to exclude newcomers from their towns or neighborhoods, so as to preserve their access to parking, the aesthetic character of their area, or the socioeconomic composition of their schools, among other concerns. And anti-growth progressivism provided both a high-minded rationalization for such exclusion and legal tools with which to advance it.

In 1973, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his team of researchers prepared a report on land-use policy in California. Its overriding recommendation was that the state needed to make it easier for ordinary Californians to block housing construction. As one of the report’s authors explained at a California Assembly hearing, lawmakers needed to guard against both “the overdevelopment of the central cities” and “the sprawl around the cities,” while preserving open land. As Appelbaum notes, this reasoning effectively forbids building any housing, anywhere.

The California Environmental Quality Act emerged out of this intellectual environment. And green groups animated by anti-developed fervor quickly leveraged CEQA to obstruct all manner of housing construction, thereby setting judicial precedents that expanded the law’s reach. The effect has been to greatly increase the amount of time and money necessary for producing a housing unit in California. Local agencies take an average of 2.5 years to approve housing projects that require an Environmental Impact Report. Lawsuits can then tie up those projects in court for years longer. Over the past decade, CEQA litigation has delayed or blocked myriad condo towers in urban centers, the construction of new dormitories at the University of California, Berkeley (on the grounds that the state’s environmental impact statement failed to account for noise pollution), and even a bike lane in San Francisco.

CEQA is by no means the primary — let alone, the only — reason why the median price of a California home exceeded $900,000 in 2023. But it is unquestionably a contributor to such scarcity-induced unaffordability. Refusing to amend the law in the face of a devastating housing shortage is a choice, one that reflects tepid concern for facilitating material abundance.

Anti-growth politics left an especially large mark on California. But its influence is felt nationwide. CEQA is modeled after the National Environmental Policy Act, which enables the litigious to obstruct housing projects across the United States. And many blue states — including Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York — have their own state-level environmental review laws, which have also deterred housing development.

In sum, California Democrats’ decision to pare back the state’s environmental review procedures, so as to facilitate more urban housing, represents a shift in the party’s governing philosophy — away from a preoccupation with the harms of development and toward a greater sensitivity to the perils of stasis. Indeed, Governor Newsom made this explicit in his remarks on the legislation, saying, “It really is about abundance.”

Democrats elsewhere should make a similar ideological adjustment.

California Democrats put the public above “the groups”

If anti-growth progressivism helped birth CEQA’s excesses, Democrats’ limited appetite for intraparty conflict sustained the law’s defects.

In recent years, the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement has built an activist infrastructure for pro-development reform. And their cause has been buttressed by the energetic advocacy of myriad policy wonks and commentators. One of this year’s best-selling books, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is dedicated in no small part to making the case against California’s housing policies.

Nevertheless, environmental organizations and labor unions have long boasted far greater scale and influence than “pro-abundance” groups.

And past efforts to curtail CEQA’s reach have attracted vigorous opposition from some greens and unions. Democrats typically responded by scaling back their reform ambitions to better appease those constituencies.

The hostility of green groups and the building trades to CEQA reform is as much instrumental as ideological. Some environmentalists retain the de-growth impulses that characterized the 1970s left. But environmental review lawsuits are also the stock and trade of many green organizations. CEQA litigation provides these groups with a key source of leverage over ecologically irresponsible developers and — for environmental law firms — a vital source of billings.

The building trades unions, meanwhile, see CEQA as a tool for extracting contracts from housing developers. Such groups have made a practice of pursuing CEQA lawsuits against projects until the builders behind them commit to using union labor.

For these reasons, many environmentalists and labor leaders fiercely condemned this week’s CEQA reforms. At a hearing in late June, a representative of Sacramento-Sierra’s Building and Construction Trades Council told lawmakers that their bill “will compel our workers to be shackled and start singing chain gang songs.”

Roughly 60 green groups published a letter condemning the legislation as a “backroom Budget Trailer Bill deal that would kill community and environmental protections, even as the people of California are faced with unprecedented federal attacks to their lives and livelihoods.”

The opposition of these organizations was understandable. But it was also misguided, even from the standpoint of protecting California’s environment and aiding its construction workers.

The recently passed CEQA bills did not weaken environmental review for the development of open land, only for multifamily housing in dense urban areas. And facilitating higher rates of housing development in cities is vital for both combating climate change and conserving untouched ecosystems. All else equal, people who live in apartment buildings by mass transit have far smaller carbon footprints than those who live in suburban single-family homes. And increasing the availability of housing in urban centers reduces demand for new exurban housing development that eats into open land.

Meanwhile, eroding regulatory obstacles to housing construction is in the interest of skilled tradespeople as a whole. A world where more housing projects are economically viable is one where there is higher demand for construction labor. This makes CEQA reform unambiguously good for the 87 percent of California construction workers who do not belong to a union (and thus, derive little direct benefit from the building trades CEQA lawsuits). But policies that grow California’s construction labor force also provide its building trades unions with more opportunities to recruit new members. Recognition of that reality led California’s carpenters’ union to back the reforms.

Therefore, if Democrats judged those reforms on the basis of their actual consequences — whether for labor, the environment, or the housing supply — they would conclude that the policies advanced progressive goals. On the other hand, if they judged the legislation by whether it attracted opposition from left-coded interest groups, then they might deem it a regressive challenge to liberal ideals. Too often, Democrats in California and elsewhere have taken the latter approach, effectively outsourcing their policy judgment to their favorite lobbies. But this time, the party opted to prioritize the public interest over coalitional deference.

Importantly, in doing so, California Democrats appeared to demonstrate that their party has more capacity to guide its stakeholders than many realized. In recent years, Democratic legislators have sometimes credited their questionable strategic and substantive decisions to “the groups” — as though the party were helplessly in thrall to its advocacy organizations.

But these groups typically lack significant political leverage. Swing voters do not take their marching orders from environmental organizations. And in an era of low union density and education polarization, the leaders of individual unions often can’t deliver very many votes.

This does not mean that Democrats should turn their backs on environmentalism or organized labor. To the contrary, the party should seek to expand collective bargaining rights, reduce pollution, and promote abundant low-carbon energy. But it should do those things because they are in the interests of ordinary Americans writ large, not because the electoral influence of green groups or building trades unions politically compel them to do so. Of course, all else equal, the party should seek to deliver victories to organizations that support it. But providing such favors should take precedence over advancing the general public’s welfare.

And pushing back on a group’s demands will rarely cause it to abandon your party entirely. After seeing that Democrats would not abandon CEQA reform, California’s Building Trades Council switched its position on the legislation to “neutral,” in exchange for trivial concessions.

Rome wasn’t upzoned in a day

It is important not to overstate what California Democrats have accomplished. Housing construction in the Golden State is still constrained by restrictive zoning laws, various other land-use regulations, elevated interest rates, scarce construction labor, and a president who is hellbent on increasing the cost of lumber and steel. Combine these constraints on housing supply with the grotesque income inequalities of cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and you get a recipe for a sustained housing crunch. CEQA reform should reduce the cost and timelines of urban homebuilding. But it will not, by itself, render California affordable.

Democrats cannot choose to eliminate all of blue America’s scarcities overnight. What they can do is prize the pursuit of material abundance over the avoidance of disruptive development and intraparty strife. And California just provided the party with a model for doing precisely that.

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Is boredom over?

This story originally appeared in***Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone.Sign up here for future editions***.

As a millennial, I had my fair share of ’90s summers. I rode my bike, I read, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. My friends from home like to tell the story of the time they came by my house unannounced and I was staring at a wall (I was thinking).

Now, as a parent myself, I’ve been highly invested in the discourse over whether it’s possible for kids to have a “’90s summer” in 2025. This year, some parents are opting for fewer camps and activities in favor of more good old-fashioned hanging around, an approach also described as “wild summer” or “kid-rotting.”

On the one hand, sounds nice! I liked my summers as a kid, and I’d love to give my kids more unstructured playtime to help them build their independence and self-reliance (and save me money and time signing up for summer camp).

On the other hand, what exactly are they going to do with that unstructured time? Like a majority of parents today, I work full time, and although my job has some flexibility, I can’t always be available to supervise potion-making, monster-hunting, or any of my kids’ other cute but messy leisure activities. Nor can I just leave them to fend for themselves: Norms have changed to make sending kids outside to play til the streetlights come on more difficult than it used to be, though those changes started before the ’90s. The rise of smartphones and tablets has also transformed downtime forever; as Kathryn Jezer-Morton asks at The Cut, “Is it really possible to have a ’90s summer when YouTube Shorts exist?”

After talking to experts and kids about phones and free time, I can tell you that the short answer to this question is no. But the long answer is more complicated, and a bit more reassuring. Yes, kids today reach for their devices a lot. But especially as they get older, they do know how to put them down. And hearing from them about their lives made me rethink what my ’90s summers really looked like, and what I want for my kids.

Kids’ free time is different now

Parents aren’t imagining the differences between the ’90s and today, Brinleigh Murphy-Reuter, program administrator at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. For one thing, kids just have less downtime than they used to — they’re involved in more activities outside of school, as parents try to prepare them for an increasingly competitive college application process. They’re also more heavily supervised than in decades past, thanks to concerns about child kidnapping and other safety issues that began to ramp up in the ’80s and continues today.

Free time also looks different. “If you go back to the ’80s or early ’90s, the most prized artifact kids owned was a bicycle,” Ruslan Slutsky, an education professor at the University of Toledo who studies play, told me. Today, “the bike has been replaced by a cell phone.”

The average kid gets a phone at the age of 10, Murphy-Reuter said. Tablet use starts even earlier, with more than half of kids getting their own device by age 4. If kids are at home and not involved in some kind of structured activity, chances are “they’re on some kind of digital device,” Slutsky said.

It’s not as though all millennials had idyllic, screen-free summers — some of my best July memories involve Rocko’s Modern Life, for example. But kids’ screen time is qualitatively different now.

According to a Common Sense Media report published in 2025, 35 percent of viewing for kids up to the age of 8 was full-length streaming TV shows, while 32 percent was on platforms like YouTube. Sixteen percent were short-form videos like TikToks, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Only 6 percent of kids’ viewing was live TV, which honestly seems high (I am not sure my children have ever seen a live TV broadcast).

It’s not completely clear that YouTube is worse for kids than old-fashioned TV, but it can certainly feel worse. As Jezer-Morton puts it, “kid rotting in the ’90s was Nintendo and MTV; today’s version is slop-engineered for maximum in-app time spent.”

It is undeniably true that in the ’90s, you’d sometimes run out of stuff to watch and be forced to go outside or call a friend. Streaming means that for my kids’ generation, there is always more TV.

And the ubiquity of phones in both kids’ and adults’ lives has made enforcing screen time limits more difficult. “It’s tough to take away something that they have become so dependent on,” Slutsky said.

Older kids can be remarkably savvy about their screen time

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that a lot of what kids do on their devices isn’t actually watching YouTube — it’s gaming. Kids in the Common Sense survey spent 60 percent of their screen time playing games, and just 26 percent watching TV or video apps.

Gaming can actually have a lot of benefits for kids, experts say. “Video games can support relationship building and resiliency” and “can help to develop complex, critical thinking skills,” Murphy-Reuter said. Some research has found that educational media is actually more helpful to kids if it’s interactive, making an iPad better than a TV under certain circumstances, according to psychologist Jacqueline Nesi.

“Just because it’s on a screen doesn’t mean it’s not still fulfilling the same goals that unstructured play used to fulfill,” Murphy-Reuter told me. “It just might be fulfilling it in a way that is new.”

Meanwhile, kids — especially older teens — are actually capable of putting down their phones. Akshaya, 18, one of the hosts of the podcast Behind the Screens, told me she’d been spending her summer meeting up with friends and playing pickleball. “I spend a lot of my days hanging out outside,” she said.

Her cohost Tanisha, also 18 and a graduating senior, said she and her friends had been “trying to spend as much IRL time as we can while we’re still together this summer.” She, Tanisha, and their other cohost Joanne, also 18, have been enjoying unstructured summers for years — though they had internships last summer, none of them has been to camp since elementary school.

Joanne does worry that the ubiquity of short videos on her phone has affected her attention span. “I feel like it’s easy to just kind of zone out, or stop paying attention when someone’s talking,” she said.

At the same time, she and her cohosts have all taken steps to reduce their own device use. Tanisha deleted Instagram during college application season. Akshaya put downtime restrictions on her phone after noticing how often she was on it. “In my free time, if I ever feel like I’m doomscrolling, like I’ve been on social media for too long, I usually try to set a specific time when I’ll get off my phone,” she said.

Overall, 47 percent of kids have used tools or apps to manage their own phone use, Murphy-Reuter told me.

The sense I got from talking to Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya — and that I’ve gotten in interviews with teenagers and experts over the last year — is that teens can be quite sophisticated about phones. They know, just as we do, that the devices can make you feel gross and steal your day, and they take steps to mitigate those effects, without getting rid of the devices entirely.

Kids “really are very much in this digital space,” Murphy-Reuter said. And many of them are adept at navigating that space — sometimes more adept than adults who entered it later in life.

All that said, Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya are 18 years old, and talking to them made me realize that “wild summer,” at least of the unsupervised variety, may just be easier to accomplish for older kids. I can’t quite imagine letting my 7-year-old “rot” this summer. Yes, he’d want to watch way too much Gravity Falls, but he’d also just want to talk to me and play with me — normal kid stuff that’s not very compatible with adults getting work done.

It’s certainly possible that kids were more self-reliant — more able to occupy themselves with pretend play or outdoor shenanigans for long stretches of time — before they had devices. But I’m not sure how much more.

While writing this story, I realized that the lazy, biking, wall-staring summers of my youth all took place in high school. Before that, I went to camp.

What I’m reading

The Trump administration is declining to release almost $7 billion in federal funding for after-school and summer programs, jeopardizing support for 1.4 million kids, most of them low-income, around the country.

An American teen writes about why Dutch kids are some of the happiest in the world: It might be because they have a lot of freedom.

A new study of podcast listening among low-income families found that the medium fostered creative play and conversations among kids and family members, which are good for child development.

Sometimes my older kid likes to go back to picture books. Recently we’ve been reading I Want to Be Spaghetti! It’s an extremely cute story about a package of ramen who learns self-confidence.

From my inbox

A quick programming note: I will be out on vacation for the next two weeks, so you won’t be hearing from me next week. You will get a summery edition of this newsletter on Thursday, July 17, so stay tuned. And if there’s anything you’d especially like me to cover when I get back, drop me a line at [email protected]!

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From Vox via this RSS feed

President Donald Trump speaks during an address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump is about to achieve his biggest legislative victory yet: his “one big, beautiful bill” — the massive tax– and Medicaid-cutting, immigration and border spending bill passed the Senate on Tuesday — is on the verge of passing the House of Representatives.

It’s a massive piece of legislation, likely to increase the national debt by at least $3 trillion, mostly through tax cuts, and leave 17 million Americans without health coverage — and it’s really unpopular. Majorities in nearly every reputable poll taken this month disapprove of the bill, ranging from 42 percent who oppose the bill in an Ipsos poll (compared to 23 percent who support) to 64 percent who oppose it in a KFF poll.

And if history is any indication, it’s not going to get any better for Trump and the Republicans from here on out.

In modern American politics, few things are more unpopular with the public than big, messy bills forged under a bright spotlight. That’s especially true of bills passed through a Senate mechanism called “budget reconciliation,” a Senate procedure that allows the governing party to bypass filibuster rules with a simple majority vote. They tend to have a negative effect on presidents and their political parties in the following months as policies are implemented and campaign seasons begin.

Part of that effect is due to the public’s general tendency to dislike any kind of legislation as it gets more publicity and becomes better understood. But reconciliation bills in the modern era seem to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: forcing presidents to be maximally ambitious at the outset, before they lose popular support for the legislation and eventually lose the congressional majorities that delivered passage.

Presidents and their parties tend to be punished after passing big spending bills

The budget reconciliation process, created in 1974, has gradually been used to accomplish broader and bigger policy goals. Because it offers a workaround for a Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break, it has become the primary way that presidents and their parties implement their economic and social welfare visions.

The public, however, doesn’t tend to reward the governing party after these bills are passed. As political writer and analyst Ron Brownstein recently pointed out, presidents who successfully pass a major reconciliation bill in the first year of their presidency lose control of Congress, usually the House, the following year.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan lost his governing majority in the House after using reconciliation to pass large spending cuts as part of his Reaganomics vision (the original “big, beautiful” bill). And the pattern would repeat itself for George H.W. Bush (whose reconciliation bill contradicted his campaign promise not to raise taxes), for Bill Clinton in 1994 (deficit reductions and tax reform), for Barack Obama in 2010 (after the passage of the Affordable Care Act), for Trump in 2018 (tax cuts), and for Biden in 2022 (the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act).

The exception in this list of modern presidents is George W. Bush, who did pass a set of tax cuts in a reconciliation bill, but whose approval rating rose after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Increasing polarization, and the general anti-incumbent party energy that tends to run through midterm elections, of course, explains part of this overall popular and electoral backlash. But reconciliation bills themselves seem to intensify this effect.

Why reconciliation bills do so much political damage

First, there’s the actual substance of these bills, which has been growing in scope over time.

Because they tend to be the first, and likely only, major piece of domestic legislation that can execute a president’s agenda, they are often highly ideological, partisan projects that try to implement as much of a governing party’s vision as possible.

These highly ideological pieces of legislation, Matt Grossman, the director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, and his partners have found, tend to kick into gear a “thermostatic” response from the public — that is, that public opinion moves in the opposite direction of policymaking when the public perceives one side is going too far to the right or left.

Because these bills have actually been growing in reach, from mere tax code adjustments to massive tax-and-spend, program-creating bills, and becoming more ideological projects, the public, in turn, seems to be reacting more harshly.

These big reconciliation bills also run into an issue that afflicts all kinds of legislation: It has a PR problem. Media coverage of proposed legislation tends to emphasize its partisanship, portraying the party in power as pursuing its domestic agenda at all costs and emphasizing that parties are fighting against each other. This elevates process over policy substance. Political scientist Mary Layton Atkinson has found that just like campaign reporting is inclined to focus on the horse race, coverage of legislation in Congress and policy debates often focuses on conflict and procedure, adding to a sense in the public mind that Congress is extreme, dysfunctional, and hyperpartisan.

Adding to this dynamic is a quirk of public opinion toward legislation and referenda: Proposals tend to get less popular, and lose public support, between proposal and passage, as the public learns more about the actual content of initiatives and as they hear more about the political negotiations and struggles taking place behind the scenes as these bills are ironed out.

Lawmakers and key political figures also “tend to highlight the benefits less than the things that they are upset about in the course of negotiations,” Grossman told me. “That [also] occurs when a bill passes: You have the people who are against it saying all the terrible things about it, and actually the people who are for it are often saying, ‘I didn’t get all that I wanted, I would have liked it to be slightly different.’ So the message that comes out of it is actually pretty negative on the whole, because no one is out there saying this is the greatest thing and exactly what they wanted.”

Even with the current One Big Beautiful Bill, polling analysis shows that the public tends not to be very knowledgeable about what is in the legislative package, but gets even more hostile to it once they learn or are provided more information about specific policy details.

Big reconciliation bills exist at the intersection of all three of these public image problems: They tend to be the first major legislative challenge a new president and Congress take on, they suck up all the media’s attention, they direct the public’s attention to one major piece of legislation, and they take a pretty long time to iron out — further extending the timeline in which the bill can get more unpopular.

This worsening perception over time, the public’s frustration with how the sausage is made, and the growing ideological stakes of these bills, all create a kind of feedback loop: Governing parties know that they have limited time and a single shot to implement their vision before experiencing some form of backlash in future elections, so they rush to pass the biggest and boldest bill possible. The cycle repeats itself, worsening public views in the process and increasing polarization. For now, Trump has set a July 4 deadline for signing this bill into law. He looks likely to hit that goal, or at least come close. But all signs are pointing to this “beautiful” bill delivering him and his party a big disappointment next year. He’s already unpopular, and when he focuses his and the public’s attention on his actual agenda, it tends not to go well.

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From Vox via this RSS feed

It’s okay to be scared of AI. You should learn to use it anyway.

ChatGPT’s most advanced models recently served me a surprising statistic: US productivity grew faster in 2024 than in any year since the 1960s. Half that jump can be linked to generative AI tools that most workers hadn’t even heard of two years earlier.

The only problem is that it’s not true. The AI made it up.

Despite its much-documented fallibility, generative AI has become a huge part of many people’s jobs, including my own. The numbers vary from survey to survey, but a June Gallup poll found that 42 percent of American employees are using AI a few times a year, while 19 percent report deploying it several times a week. The technology is especially popular with white-collar workers. While just 9 percent of manufacturing and front-line workers use AI on a regular basis, 27 percent of white-collar workers do.

Even as many people integrate AI into their daily lives, it’s causing mass job anxiety: A February Pew survey found that more than half of US employees worried about their fate at work.

Unfortunately, there is no magic trick to keep your job for the foreseeable future, especially if you’re a white-collar worker. Nobody knows what’s going to happen with AI, and leadership at many companies is responding to this uncertainty by firing workers it may or may not need in an AI-forward future.

“If AI really is this era’s steam engine, a force so transformative that it will power a new Industrial Revolution, you only stand to gain by getting good at it.”

After laying off over 6,000 workers in May and June, Microsoft is laying off 9,000 more workers this month, reportedly so the company can reduce the number of middle managers as it reorganizes itself around AI. In a note on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees that the company would “roll out more generative AI and agents” and reduce its workforce in the next few years. This was all after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the same timespan, a prediction so grim that Axios coined a new term for AI’s imminent takeover: “a white-collar bloodbath.”

This is particularly frustrating because, as my recent encounter with ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate makes clear, the generative AI of today, while useful for a growing number of people, needs humans to work well. So does agentic AI, the next era of this technology that involves AI agents using computers and performing tasks on your behalf rather than simply generating content. For now, AI is augmenting white-collar jobs, not automating them, although your company’s CEO is probably planning for the latter scenario.

Maybe one day AI will fulfill its promise of getting rid of grunt work and creating endless abundance, but getting from here to there is a harrowing proposition.

“With every other form of innovation, we ended up with more jobs in the end,” Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of the newsletter One Useful Thing, told me. “But living through the Industrial Revolution still kind of sucked, right? There were still anarchists in the street and mass displacement from cities and towns.”

We don’t know if the transition to the AI future will be quite as calamitous. What we do know is that just as jobs transformed due to past technological leaps, like the introduction of the personal computer or the internet, your day-to-day at work will change in the months and years to come. If AI really is this era’s steam engine, a force so transformative that it will power a new Industrial Revolution, you only stand to gain by getting good at it.

At the same time, becoming an AI whiz will not necessarily save you if your company decides it’s time to go all in on AI and do mass, scattershot layoffs in order to give its shareholders the impression of some efficiency gains. If you’re impacted, that’s just bad luck. Still, having the skills can’t hurt.

Welcome to the AI revolution transition

It’s okay to be scared of AI, but it’s more reasonable to be confused by it. For two years after ChatGPT’s explosive release, I couldn’t quite figure out how a chatbot could make my life better. After some urging from Mollick late last year, I forced myself to start using it for menial chores. Upgrading to more advanced models of ChatGPT and Claude turned these tools into indispensable research partners that I use every day — not just to do my job faster but also better. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

But when it comes to generative AI tools and the burgeoning class of AI agents, what works for one person might not be helpful to the next.

“Workers obviously need to try to ascertain as much as they can — the skills that are most flexible and most useful,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. “They need to be familiar with the technology because it is going to be pervasive.”

For most white-collar workers, I recommend Mollick’s 10-hour rule: Spend 10 hours using AI for work and see what you learn. Mollick also recently published an updated guide to the latest AI tools that’s worth reading in full. The big takeaways are that the best of these tools (ChatGPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic, and Google Gemini) can become tireless assistants with limitless knowledge that can save you hours of labor. You should try different models within the different AI tools, and you should experiment with the voice features, including the ability to use your phone’s camera to share what you’re seeing with the AI. You should also, unfortunately, shell out $20 a month to get access to the most advanced models. In Mollick’s words, “The free versions are demos, not tools.”

“If I have a very narrow job around a very narrow task that’s being done repetitively, that’s where the most risk comes in.”

You can imagine similar advice coming from your geeky uncle at Thanksgiving circa 1984, when personal computers were on the brink of taking over the world. That was the year roughly the same percentage of white-collar workers were regularly using PCs at work as are using AI today. But the coming AI transition will look different than the PC transition we’ve already lived through. While earlier digital technologies hit frontline workers hardest, “AI excels at supporting or carrying out the highly cognitive, nonroutine tasks that better-educated, better-paid office workers do,” according to a February Brookings report co-authored by Muro.

This means AI can do a lot of the tasks that software engineers, architects, lawyers, and journalists do, but it doesn’t mean that AI can do their jobs — a key distinction. This is why you hear more experts talking about AI augmentation rather than AI automation. As a journalist, I can confidently say that AI is great at streamlining my research process, saving me time, and sometimes even stirring up new ideas. AI is terrible at interviewing sources, although that might not always be the case. And clearly, it’s touch-and-go when it comes to writing factually accurate copy, which is kind of a fundamental part of the job.

That proposition looks different for other kinds of white-collar work, namely administrative and operational support jobs. A Brookings report last year found that 100 percent of the tasks that bookkeepers and clerks do were likely to be automated. Those of travel agents, tax preparers, and administrative assistants were close to 100 percent. If AI really did make these workers redundant, it would add up to millions of jobs lost.

“The thing I’d be most worried about is if my task and job are very similar to each other,” Mollick, the Wharton professor, explained. “If I have a very narrow job around a very narrow task that’s being done repetitively, that’s where the most risk comes in.”

It’s hard to AI-proof your job or career altogether given so much uncertainty. We don’t know if companies will take advantage of this transition in ways that produce better products and happier workers or just use it as an excuse to fire people, squandering what some believe is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform work and productivity. It sucks to feel like you have little agency in steering the future toward one outcome or the other.

At the risk of sounding like your geeky uncle, I say give AI a try. The worst-case scenario is you spend 10 hours talking to an artificially intelligent chatbot rather than scrolling through Instagram or Reddit. The best-case scenario is you develop a new skill set, one that could very well set you up to do an entirely new kind of job, one that didn’t even exist before the AI era. You might even have a little fun along the way.

A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter.Sign up hereso you don’t miss the next one!

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From Vox via this RSS feed

Eating a hot dog on July Fourth isn’t just traditional. It’s patriotic.

From iconic red, white, and blue rocket pops (hello, Red Dye 40!) to nitrate-loaded hot dogs and the all-day parade of sugary drinks and alcohol, this quintessential American holiday is a celebration of freedom — and, often, dietary chaos.

And yet these days, many of us seem to be having second thoughts about the American diet. Our food is too processed, too loaded with dyes and preservatives. The country’s obesity and diabetes epidemics, which have led to an explosion in the diagnoses of related chronic health conditions, have put the issue front and center, with much of the blame being placed on what we eat and all of the additives and preservatives it contains. About half of US adults believe food additives and chemicals are a large or moderate risk to their health — higher than the perceived risks of infectious disease outbreaks or climate change, according to a recent poll from Ipsos, a global market research firm.

We all worry about microplastics, nitrates, food dyes, and ultra-processed foods. And US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made improving Americans’ diets and our food supply a top priority. It’s a policy emphasis that’s popular with the public: Two-thirds of US adults believe artificial dyes and pesticides make our foods unsafe to eat — and these are opinions that transcend political leanings, according to Ipsos.

And regardless of our entrenched food system, people are trying to make healthier decisions in their daily lives: 64 percent of US adults say they pay more attention to food labels than they did five years ago, according to the public health nonprofit NSF International. But we are frustrated: Only 16 percent of Americans say they find claims on food labels trustworthy.

It may sound unbelievable on a holiday when Americans will gladly stuff their faces with ultra-processed junk while wearing flag-laden paraphernalia, but these days, many of us actually wish the products in our grocery stores looked a little more like the ones across the Atlantic. Just 37 percent of American adults said in the NSF International survey that our food labeling was better than in other countries. Most Americans say they want changes to how foods at our grocery stores are labeled.

American food really is different from what can be found in Europe, both in its substance and in its packaging.

But while we’re probably not doing any favors to our health by consuming ultraprocessed foods loaded with artificial ingredients that are banned elsewhere, the biggest source of our health woes isn’t necessarily these artificial dyes and preservatives. It’s the cholesterol and saturated fat in that hot dog, the sugar in that lemonade, and those ultra-processed potato chips. Americans consume about twice as much sugar as other rich countries do on average, eat more ultra-processed foods, and consume more trans and saturated fats than Europeans. We also eat enormous portions, and calories, no matter where they come from, are a big part of the problem.

Americans are generally in poorer health than our peers in Europe, and US life expectancy continues to trail behind other wealthy countries. Rich Americans actually fare worse than poor Europeans, according to one study.

A new era of American greatness starts at the picnic table this July Fourth. Yes, we ostensibly rebelled against an English monarchy in order to be able to do whatever we want, even eat whatever we want. But if we want to catch up to our European rivals again in how healthy we feel, how productive we are, and how long we live — we need to take a closer look at the stuff we’re putting in our bodies.

American food really does have different stuff in it

Doctors widely agree that ultra-processed foods and food additives are bad for children’s health. Yet they have become more and more readily available over the decades: One 2023 study found 60 percent of the food that Americans buy has additives, a 10 percent increase since 2001.

Kennedy, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the country’s top health agency, has made overhauling US food production a top priority. His department’s recent MAHA report highlights steps taken by other countries, including France and the Nordic countries, to discourage people through their dietary guidelines from eating ultra-processed foods. The report lists several additives and artificial ingredients that are permitted in American food but are banned or heavily restricted across the pond. Kennedy suggests that the US should follow suit.

So where might we begin?

Let’s start with Red Dye 40, the color additive found in foods such as Froot Loops and M&Ms that has been linked to hyperactivity in children and, according to some animal studies, has been shown to accelerate tumor growth in mice. The US has not placed any special requirements on Red Dye 40, aside from its listing alongside other ingredients. But the European Union has required a clear warning label on any food with the dye, and some countries (including Germany, France, and Denmark) have banned it outright. A similar warning could be adopted here.

There are other additives casually lurking in American foods that have been restricted in other countries. Here are a few:

Titanium dioxide: Another food coloring that can be added to candies like Skittles and coffee creamers for a bright white effect. The EU banned it in 2022 because of evidence it could affect the human body’s genetic material, while the US continues to allow its use.Propyl paraben: This preservative is regarded as safe in the US, often added to mass-produced American baked goods such as Sara Lee cinnamon rolls or Weight Watchers lemon creme cake. But its use has been prohibited in the EU because of research indicating it could mess with hormone function.Butylated hydroxytoluene: Another preservative that’s sometimes added to breakfast cereals and potato chips to extend their shelf life. It’s generally regarded as safe for use in the United States despite evidence that it could compromise kidney and liver function and concerns that it could cause cancer. In the EU, however, its use is subject to strict regulation.

There are some artificial sweeteners, too — aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin — that are permitted in the US and the EU, but generally, Europe puts many more restrictions on unhealthy artificial ingredients than the US does.

Kennedy is pledging he’ll do something about it. His biggest win so far is securing voluntary commitments from food manufacturers to remove a variety of artificial dyes — yes, including Red Dye 40 — from their products before the end of 2026. If they fail to comply, he has suggested new regulations to put a limit on or outright prohibit certain substances of concern.

But are these ingredients the most important problem with our July Fourth cookouts? They are part of the issue. But there’s more to it.

The real problem is the American diet, dyed or not

Here’s a revealing comparison: In 2018, the United States banned trans fats, an artificial ingredient derived from oils that has been linked to heart disease and diabetes — 15 years after Denmark did the same thing. For more than a decade, Americans kept eating a ton of trans fat — something that is so bad for you that it can simultaneously increase bad cholesterol while lowering good cholesterol.

While that is probably not the entire reason that the US has double the obesity and diabetes rates as Denmark does, it is a telling example. A fatty and highly processed ingredient that is linked to two of the biggest health problems in the United States persisted for years in American food, long after the Europeans had wised up.

It’s a pattern that, across the decades, explains the enormous gulf between the typical American’s diet and the Mediterranean diet that dominates much of Europe. During the 20th century, amid an explosion in market-driven consumerism, convenience became one of the most important factors for grocery shoppers. Americans wanted more meals that could be quickly prepared inside the microwave and dry goods that could last for weeks and months on a pantry shelf, and so these products gained more and more of a market share. But that meant that more American food products were laced with more of the preservatives and additives that are now drawing so much concern.

Americans have also always eaten more meat, cheese, and butter, animal products high in saturated fats as opposed to the unsaturated fats that come from oils like olive oil and are more common in European diets, for years. Our meat obsession was turbocharged by a meat industry that tapped into patriotic sentiments about pioneering farms making their living off the frontier. Eating a diet with more animal products is associated with a long list of health problems, particularly the cardiovascular conditions that remain the biggest killers of Americans.

We should push our policymakers to pass regulations that get rid of artificial additives, but that alone is insufficient. You can find too much fat and too much sugar around the picnic table. Some of it is unnatural, but plenty of it is. America has to figure out how to encourage people to eat low-fat, low-sugar, whole-food diets. That’s the real path to better health.

MAHA has some good ideas. Its emphasis on whole foods, not processed ones, is a step in the right direction. But Kennedy’s prescriptions are contradictory: Kennedy wants to make it easier for people to find whole foods at their nearby store, while Republicans in Congress propose massive cuts to food stamps. Kennedy’s MAHA report rails against the overuse of pesticides, but Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is rolling back restrictions on their use.

Those contradictions are a reminder that, though Kennedy has shone a light on a worthwhile issue, we can’t and we shouldn’t expect the government to fix our food problems all on its own. This is America, after all, where we pride ourselves on individualism.

The occasional indulgence is not a big deal. It’s what we do on July 5 that really matters.

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From Vox via this RSS feed

Sean “Diddy” Combs accepts the BET Lifetime Achievement Award on stage during the 2022 BET Awards at Microsoft Theater on June 26, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. | Leon Bennett/Getty Images for BET

Jurors in the federal criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs reached a mixed verdict Wednesday, finding the rapper and music mogul not guilty of the three most serious charges levied against him.

The jury deliberated for 13 hours across three days before reaching the verdict and found Combs guilty of two of the five charges against him, both for transportation to engage in prostitution.

They found Combs not guilty of the more serious offenses: sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. Combs will avoid the harshest sentence — life in prison — but could still face up to 20 years if given the maximum sentence for his remaining convictions. The outcome was seen as a victory for Combs, who responded by falling to his knees before his courtroom chair, applauding the courtroom gallery, and crying out, “Thank god” and “I love you” several times.

The verdict concludes a seven-week trial that contained plenty of lurid details about Diddy’s decades of “freak-offs” and other sex parties, along with shocking anecdotes of his bizarre and controlling behavior toward both his girlfriends and his employees. The defense ultimately chose not to present any witnesses for Diddy but rested after cross-examining the prosecution’s case, relying largely on a strategy of persistently hammering away at the credibility and motivations of the prosecution’s witnesses.

With all that hammering away, the Diddy trial resurfaced some of the very same rape myths that the Me Too movement worked to dismantle a few short years ago, including the one about the perfect victim. The fact that the defense’s tactics appear to have been by and large successful is just the latest indication that America is prepared to put the lessons of Me Too in the rearview mirror.

1. What was the verdict? What does it mean?

Jurors convicted Diddy on two charges under the Mann Act of transporting his then-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, and another woman known in the courtroom only as Jane for the purposes of prostitution. He was found not guilty, however, of sex trafficking Ventura or Jane.

Effectively, that means while the jury accepted the state’s argument that Diddy illegally transported the women for purposes of engaging in sex work, they were not convinced that the women were actually coerced into participating in these acts.

Legal analyst Paul Mauro, who correctly predicted this split verdict, emphasized that the prosecution had to prove coercion. Given that Judge Arun Subramanian excluded all discussion about coercive control — the overall environment of controlling behavior that can have a coercive effect upon an abuse victim — from the trial, the jurors may not have had enough context to accept the prosecution’s framing of events.

Jurors revealed that they were most divided on the first charge of racketeering conspiracy, telling Judge Subramanian on Tuesday that they were deadlocked before ultimately finding him not guilty. This is a lesser charge than racketeering itself, but it requires that prosecutors prove the defendant participated in a criminal enterprise and agreed to commit crimes to further that enterprise.

This is a complicated charge, however, since it requires the jury to accept that Combs intended to run a criminal enterprise. The defense instead portrayed Combs as a swinger with a troubled history of incidents of domestic abuse rather than a controlling, powerful mogul who systematically used his many businesses to support illegal sexual activities.

2. What happens next?

Prosecutor Maurene Comey has stated the government will seek the maximum on the remaining two counts, which means Combs could still face up to 20 years in prison — 10 years for each count.

Judge Subramanian, a federal district court judge, is currently weighing whether to release Combs from detention while awaiting his sentencing hearing.

3. What new information did we learn from Diddy’s trial?

From the moment testimony in the case kicked off May 12, the trial was packed with one jaw-dropping anecdote after another. Ventura, Combs’ ex-girlfriend, played an inadvertent role in jump-starting the federal investigation into Combs when 2016 surveillance footage surfaced in 2024, that appears to show Combs violently beating her in a hotel hallway.

In addition to that harrowing moment, a litany of Combs’ former girlfriends and staff testified to experiencing what amounted to decades of abusive and controlling behavior from Combs. Bryana Bongolan, a friend of Ventura’s, testified that Combs once allegedly hoisted her to the balcony ledge of a 17th-story apartment and then threw her into the balcony furniture. One longtime staffer, Capricorn Clark, testified that Combs threatened to kill her on the first day she worked for him, physically assaulted her, and at one point, forced her to come with him to stalk Kid Cudi, whose car he later allegedly firebombed out of jealousy over Cudi’s relationship with Ventura.

Multiple former Combs staffers testified to having been required to take polygraph tests by Combs to keep their jobs, sometimes including days of grueling interrogations before he was satisfied. Often, the abuse staff allegedly endured was every bit as terrifying as the incidents against his girlfriends. One former staffer, using the pseudonym Mia, testified that she was forbidden to lock the doors or leave the property while she was staying at Combs’ residence. At one point, she alleged on the stand, Combs began a pattern of intermittently sexually assaulting her over the eight years she worked for him.

Even though Combs was acquitted on the most serious charges against him, it will be hard — justifiably so — for the public to erase many of these stories and allegations from their collective memory.

4. What does the mixed verdict mean for Me Too?

The jury’s mixed verdict represents, in a sense, the fraught place the Me Too movement holds in America’s public consciousness these days.

Me Too arguably opened the door for the federal investigation into Combs, which appears to have kicked off after Ventura filed a civil lawsuit against him in 2023. In it, Ventura made the first shocking public accusations that Combs was involved in human trafficking and sexual assault, launching the stream of accusations that would end in a criminal trial and a mixed verdict.

Ventura filed her lawsuit under the New York Adult Survivors Act (NYASA), a law explicitly passed as a response to the Me Too movement. It offered survivors of sexual violence a one-year window, from November 2022 to 2023, to file civil lawsuits against their alleged attackers, even if the statute of limitations had lapsed.

The idea behind the NYASA was to acknowledge the unusual cultural moment that Me Too created. It’s well established that survivors of sexual assault frequently face too much shame to acknowledge what happened to them, which is part of why sex crimes are so difficult to prosecute: By the time a survivor decides to come forward, the statute of limitations may well have lapsed. The Me Too movement briefly created a space in which survivors were able to acknowledge what had happened to them, which meant that suddenly, a lot of people were coming forward about sex crimes that could no longer be prosecuted. The NYASA was designed to allow survivors to get closure for their attacks in civil court, without reopening the door to criminal charges.

Although Ventura eventually settled her civil lawsuit with Diddy, it led to more accusations. It turned out that some of the charges were still prosecutable in criminal court, and that’s where the federal case began. Me Too and its legal victories made the whole thing possible.

All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse.

Yet at the same time that the NYASA was making it possible for survivors to face their attackers in court, a backlash against Me Too was mounting across America. Cultural consensus began to coalesce around the opinion that Me Too had gone too far. Coverage of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard domestic violence case in 2022 devolved into a gleefully misogynistic spectacle. The status of feminism dropped precipitously in public opinion polls. Most traumatically of all, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, depriving generations of women of the reproductive freedom with which they were born.

Now, the cultural energy that animated public interest in the first wave of Me Too trials has faded away. All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse, especially the one about how no true rape victim will appease their attackers. During Ventura’s cross-examination, lawyers for Combs dwelled at length on text messages in which Ventura appeared to speak positively about the encounters Ventura now says she was coerced into participating in. If she were really raped, their argument implied, she would never have been willing to pretend otherwise.

In real life, it’s extremely common for victims of sexual assault to maintain contact with their attackers, even sometimes covering for them. Most perpetrators of sexual violence know their victims, and in many cases — especially in these celebrity trials — they hold professional or financial power over their victims, too. All of those facts combine to leave survivors frequently unwilling to completely sever ties with their attackers. All of this was discussed at great length in Me Too discourse back in 2017.

Yet Harvey Weinstein has high-profile supporters who make much of the fact that his victims maintained contact with him after he attacked them. Combs’s lawyers relied on the same argument in this case, and the judge blocked prosecutors from presenting expert testimony on coercive control. Apparently, the angle convinced enough members of the jury that they felt no need to convict Combs of the most serious charges he faced.

Me Too achieved real legal victories, but they were temporary — a one-year statute here and there. Its great achievements were its cultural changes. And every day, it seems they are chipped away more and more. The mixed verdict in Combs’s case, and Combs’s partial victory, show just how badly they’ve already eroded.

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The Senate budget bill pares back incentives for renewable energy and aims to boost fossil fuels like coal.

The first solar cell ever made was built in the United States. Tesla, based in the US, was once the largest EV manufacturer in the world. The lithium-ion battery was codeveloped in the US.

But today, China — not the US — is the largest manufacturer of solar cells and batteries. China’s BYD — not Tesla — is the largest EV manufacturer in the world. And China is starting to outrun the US on research and development investment.

The US has a long history of taking the lead in clean energy, and a long history of losing it. And President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which passed the Senate on Tuesday, would again leave the US on the margins of a global clean energy revolution that it could have dominated.

For years now, clean power has been the largest source of new electricity in the US. Solar, batteries, and wind are on track to make up more than 90 percent of new electricity capacity on the US power grid this year. Wind and solar now produce more electricity on the US power grid than coal. Almost twice as many Americans work in clean energy compared to fossil fuels, and the sector is still growing.

But thanks to the bill, that may not be the case for much longer.

Some of the more extreme provisions in earlier drafts of the bill have been removed, like an excise tax targeting renewable energy. But the latest version of the bill rolls back many of the investments from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the single-largest US investment to address climate change by giving the energy transition a boost. It calls for more rapid phaseouts of tax credits for wind and solar power and eliminates a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of a new electric vehicle. The spending bill working its way through Congress doesn’t just undo incentives for clean energy — it also creates a new tax credit for coal.

These provisions are in line with Trump’s longstanding antipathy toward renewable energy and disbelief in climate change. But they stand to hobble the US economy more broadly.

The US is facing significant load growth on the power grid for the first time in decades as the tech industry scrounges for electrons to power their electricity-devouring data centers. Energy demand is rising and the cheapest, most readily deployable supplies of energy are being throttled.

The alternatives, however, are not likely to make up the gap in time. Fossil fuels take longer to ramp up. The US is currently the largest oil and gas producer in the world, but it can take years to site, permit, and acquire the materials to build power plants that burn these fuels. Since these are internationally traded commodities, their prices can fluctuate based on factors beyond the US’s control.

Right now, oil prices are at four-year lows and natural gas prices are falling, and when prices are low, it’s much harder to make the business case for more mining, drilling, and power plants, even with incentives. Trump may have some levers to pull — he can, for example, open up more federally managed lands for energy production — but many of those leases sit unused because energy companies don’t want to create a supply glut. Meanwhile, employment in the oil and gas industry remains volatile, while coal jobs are continuing their decades-long decline.

“We’re in this moment of surging demand and you can’t build another gas turbine for at least five years beyond what’s already been booked,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director for modeling and analysis at the think tank Energy Innovation. “We have this demand growth that’s going to have to be met. The only thing you can build to meet it on the timeline needed over the next five to 10 years is solar, wind, or battery storage.”

The Senate bill does extend tax credits and loan programs for nuclear energy and geothermal power. However, the cuts in the bill would also slow efforts to build up the domestic energy supply chain needed to bolster other zero-emissions technologies, from raw materials like lithium and rare earth minerals to battery factories. It would do little to relax the bottlenecks for connecting new power plants to the grid, which are adding years to project timelines. The US is also dismantling research and development that could yield the next energy breakthrough. On top of all this, Trump’s tariffs are raising operating costs not just for renewables, but also for the fossil fuels he loves so much.

The net result is a policy suite that will not only hamper clean electricity, but energy overall, making it more expensive for everyone across the country. According to Energy Innovation, the Senate bill would reduce how much energy the US adds to the grid in the years to come compared to the current trajectory, thereby increasing household electricity prices on average by $130 per year, eroding almost a trillion dollars in economic productivity, and costing 760,000 jobs by 2030.

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While the US is putting clean energy in reverse, other countries are racing ahead. Clean energy technology investment is poised to increase to $2.2 trillion this year around the world. Renewables are on track to overtake coal as the biggest power source in the world this year. Wind, solar, and batteries are still getting cheaper. Effectively, the US is ceding one of the biggest growth industries in the world to China, particularly as developing countries industrialize and other wealthy countries look to decarbonize their economies.

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The case for more clean energy — lower costs, faster deployment, fewer greenhouse gas emissions — remains robust. Even with all the deliberate obstacles the Trump administration is placing ahead, there are some wind, solar, and battery projects still poised to come online in the US as they work their way through the pipeline, albeit at a much slower pace than before.

But without continued investment, the US will lose ground to the rest of the world and condemn itself to dirtier, more expensive energy while worsening a problem that will extract a dear toll from the economy.

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From Vox via this RSS feed

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and the stakes are high.

The bill has four major pillars: renewing his 2017 tax cuts, implementing new tax cuts, spending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the military, and increasing the debt ceiling. The bill itself is a smorgasbord of policy and could also affect clean energy programs, student loans, and food assistance, but perhaps the most consequential changes will be to Medicaid.

The bill was approved by the House in May and passed a key Senate vote on Saturday. Republicans are divided over competing priorities; some want to extend Trump’s tax cuts and boost immigration and defense spending, while others worry about the $2.6 trillion cost and cuts to Medicaid. Republican lawmakers aim to pass the bill by Friday using budget reconciliation, but it’s unclear if all 53 Republican senators will agree.

This is a developing story. Follow along here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.

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The Congressional Budget Office estimates that defunding Planned Parenthood would raise the deficit by about $300 million. | Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images

Three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republicans in Congress are poised to further erode access to abortion and reproductive care.

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would not only directly threaten reproductive care by defunding Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, it would also incentivize insurers for Affordable Care Act plans in some states to drop abortion coverage or make it significantly more expensive.

And it would slash Medicaid coverage, impacting Americans’ ability to access medical care of all sorts. Though Medicaid funds cannot fund abortions except under very narrow circumstances, the cuts would threaten access to non-abortion reproductive care. Many abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, also offer health care in the form of contraceptives, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and cervical cancer screenings.

GOP lawmakers are targeting a July 4 deadline to pass the bill. It passed the House in May and cleared a key procedural vote in the Senate on Saturday. Following a rapid-fire vote on a series of amendments, the bill could go up for a final vote in the Senate as soon as Monday night. GOP lawmakers have faced many internal disagreements about the bill, but there’s a strong push to include both attacks on Planned Parenthood and cuts to Medicaid.

If the initiatives go through, they’ll come at a time when abortion rights and access are under attack, but the actual number of abortions has increased.

Monthly abortions in the US are up about 19 percent nationally since the Supreme Court struck down Roe in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

That’s driven almost entirely by the increasing prevalence of medication abortion. It also comes despite the fact that accessing in-person abortion care has become significantly harder, with many women having to travel much further to their nearest clinic due to closures.

Republicans in Congress are trying to create additional hurdles to accessing such care and other women’s health services, both in-person and via telehealth — even in states that have sought to protect reproductive rights. A Supreme Court ruling on Thursday allows states to move forward with their attempts to defund Planned Parenthood will make their task easier.

“What we’ve heard from a lot of anti-abortion politicians since Dobbs is that this was just the way to return the issue to the states,” said Katie O’Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “It indicates that their ultimate goal is what we’ve always known: They want abortion to be out of reach for everybody, everywhere, and under every circumstance.”

Republicans are trying to close even more abortion clinics

There are now 37 fewer brick-and-mortar abortion clinics in the US than there were in March 2022, before the end of Roe. Many of the closures have been in states that have passed laws that ban abortions in all but narrow circumstances.

That has resulted in women across large tracts of the southern US and Midwest now having to travel much further to go to an abortion clinic in person. That has limited the options available to people who can’t just rely on medication abortion prescribed via telehealth or who sought other forms of reproductive care at these facilities.

The GOP spending bill would bring on the closure of additional clinics by defunding Planned Parenthood, the single largest abortion provider in the US, and other abortion clinics for at least 10 years. That would be disastrous not only for abortion access, but also for access to non-abortion reproductive care for low-income people.

The organization estimates that almost 200 of their clinics could close as a result of the legislation, affecting 1.1 million patients, the vast majority of whom live in states where abortion is legal. That includes its two clinics in Alaska, the only remaining abortion providers in the state, said Laurel Sakai, Planned Parenthood’s national director of public policy and government affairs.

Since 1977, the Hyde Amendment has banned the use of federal funds for abortion, with some narrow exceptions for when the life of the pregnant person is endangered or when pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. But Planned Parenthood, as a provider of general reproductive services, receives reimbursements from Medicaid, as well as federal grants through the Title X program, which funds affordable family planning and related preventative care for low-income families.

If Republicans were to cut off those funds, as proposed in the draft Senate bill, “there just simply aren’t enough other providers to be able to take on the care that Planned Parenthood gives,” Sakai said.

The reproductive rights think tank Guttmacher Institute found that federally qualified health centers — often pointed to as an alternative to Planned Parenthood by proponents of measures to defund the organization — would have to increase their capacity to administer contraceptive care by 56 percent to fill the gap.

Planned Parenthood closures could affect not just the availability of in-person abortions, but also medication abortion.

“A lot of the doctors who provide medication abortion care do so through Planned Parenthood and other brick-and-mortar clinics,” O’Connor said. “We certainly have a lot of providers who are doing telehealth now, but there’s still a good number of providers who provide medication abortion at brick-and-mortar clinics.”

The provision to defund Planned Parenthood, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would raise the deficit by about $300 million, faced procedural hurdles.

Because Republicans are trying to pass their bill via a process known as budget reconciliation, there are certain rules about what kind of provisions can be included. That includes a requirement that a provision included in a reconciliation package must have a “more than incidental” impact on the budget.

Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough reportedly determined Monday that the Planned Parenthood provision qualifies.

That clears the way for Congress to defund the organization, along with last week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing states to do the same. On Thursday, the justices ruled that Planned Parenthood and one of its patients could not challenge South Carolina’s efforts to deny Medicaid funds to the organization.

Coverage for abortion could also shrink or become more expensive

In its current form, the Republican spending bill would not only cause abortion clinics to close. It would also affect insurance coverage for abortion and reproductive care.

For one, 10.3 million fewer Americans are projected to be enrolled in Medicaid by 2034 if the bill passes. That may make it prohibitively expensive for them to access reproductive care other than abortion care, which is not covered under Medicaid.

The bill also excludes Affordable Care Act marketplace plans that offer abortion coverage from cost-sharing reductions, which decrease out-of-pocket costs for lower-income individuals. That won’t affect ACA marketplace plans in the 25 states that currently prohibit those plans from offering abortion coverage. But elsewhere, it will incentivize insurers administering ACA plans to either drop coverage for abortion or, in states where they are legally required to offer such coverage, increase premiums.

It’s not clear exactly how much premiums could increase in those states, which include California and New York, or whether insurers may find ways to make up for the loss of cost-sharing reductions.

But O’Connor said that reproductive rights activists anticipate that the provision is just an “opening salvo in a continuing fight that would ultimately pit those states that require coverage against the federal government and put insurers in an impossible position.”

“What we assume is that this is just the first of many tactics that this Congress and this administration might take to make it more difficult for insurers to cover abortion,” she added.

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From Vox via this RSS feed

Christina Vallice.

Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma and vice president of development Nisha Chittal announced today that veteran video journalist Christina Vallice has joined the brand as head of video. She begins her new role on July 7.

“I’m thrilled to welcome Christina to Vox. She is an exceptionally talented video journalist and newsroom leader who will be instrumental in shaping the next chapter of Vox video,” Chittal said. “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and understands how to break down complex topics in an accessible way. I can’t wait to see how she will take Vox’s explanatory video journalism to new heights.”

In her role, Vallice will oversee Vox’s award-winning video department, continuing the brand’s signature explainer videos as well as leading expansion and experimentation with new formats in vertical shortform video and podcast video. She will oversee video strategy and publishing across all of Vox’s platforms, including Vox’s flagship YouTube channel with over 12 million subscribers, Instagram, TikTok, and website and owned platforms.

Vallice joins Vox after serving in leadership roles at the Wall Street Journal*,* Yahoo Finance, and Vice, following more than a decade producing at NBC News.

Most recently, Vallice was the director of video series and events at Yahoo Finance. There she led a team to deliver in-depth, original reporting on the investments that are leading to advancements in tech, science, and AI, newsmaker interviews with prominent CEOs and business leaders, and spearheaded the cross-newsroom coordination for major coverage events.

At the Wall Street Journal*,* Vallice served as the senior executive producer of news and specials, directing a global team spanning New York, London, and Singapore to produce daily news videos, in-depth explainers, international  features, video investigations and documentaries across various platforms. Under Vallice, theJournalearned two national Emmy nominations for its first feature-length documentary and  its first video investigation.

Before her time at Yahoo Finance and the Journal, Vallice was a supervising producer at Vice, and helped launch the award-winning HBO broadcast, Vice News Tonight. Prior to that, Vallice spent 11 years at NBC Nightly News, delivering fast-turn stories under tight deadlines both in edit and in the field, producing coverage on a wide variety of major news stories.

Vallice received her master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications after earning her undergraduate degree at Binghamton University.

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President Donald Trump takes part in a press conference on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House on June 27, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Republican Party’s saving grace is supposed to be its commitment to economic growth and consumer abundance.

Sure, the GOP may see unemployed cancer patients as shiftless mooches — and the Lorax as literature’s greatest villain — but for precisely those reasons, Republicans are allegedly able stewards of industrial development: Unconstrained by concerns about inequality, the environment, or social justice, the GOP will unleash the private sector’s productive potential. Republicans won’t balance Americans’ hunger for cheap gasoline against their enlightened interest in cleaner air or a cooler planet — they’ll get you the cheap fuel now. And they won’t weigh America’s stake in technological supremacy against the risks of unregulated innovation — they’ll give cutting-edge companies whatever they need to achieve global dominance.

At least, this is the impression that Republicans have tried to cultivate, and which voters largely bought last November. According to polling by Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Americans in 2024 believed that the GOP would be better than Democrats on the economy and cost of living — but worse on income inequality and the environment — and considered the former issues more important.

But the GOP’s priorities aren’t as advertised. President Donald Trump’s agenda does not ask Americans to accept a dirtier atmosphere and more inegalitarian social order in exchange for cheaper goods, faster technological progress, and national industrial dominance. Rather, it asks us to accept not only greater inequality and environmental degradation, but also, higher prices, slower technological progress, and worse industrial performance for the sake of…I’m not sure what. Perhaps the conservative movement’s cultural grievances? Or Trump’s odd ideological fixations?

In any case, Trump has long made his disregard for affordability and economic growth plain. As of mid-June, Trump’s tariffs were still poised to increase Americans’ annual cost of living by $2,000 on average, while knocking 0.6 percent off of economic growth. His administration’s assault on funding for scientific research, meanwhile, has undermined US tech companies. And his crackdown on immigration is both chasing top-tier talent out of the US and exacerbating labor shortages in the construction industry, thereby slowing the pace of housing and infrastructure development.

Now, with his inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) — which is poised to clear the Senate this week — Trump is rounding out his “worst of both worlds” agenda.

Predictably, his tax cut package would exacerbate inequality, taking health care and food assistance away from poor people in order to shower tax breaks on the wealthy. And the legislation also evinces contempt for the environment, offering new subsidies to American coal producers. More remarkably, however, BBB would also increase electricity prices for consumers while undermining America’s competitiveness in a range of critical sectors.

Specifically, the latest version of Trump’s bill aims to throttle the production of renewable energy in the US. The legislation not only phases out federal subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027, but also imposes a new excise tax on renewable projects that use inputs made in China. Since Chinese firms dominate green energy supply chains, a very high percentage of all wind and solar development in the United States would be adversely impacted by the tax. What’s more, Trump’s legislation would actually reinforce American green energy companies’ dependence on Chinese suppliers by curtailing subsidies to domestic manufacturers of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. (As of this writing, some Republican senators are pushing an amendment that would strike the excise tax from the bill. But that amendment’s fate is unclear. And even if it is adopted, Trump’s legislation would still curtail subsidies to the solar and wind industries.)

Taken together, these measures could slash the amount of new clean energy capacity added to America’s grid over the next 10 years by more than 72 percent, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group.

That scarcity will translate into higher electricity costs for consumers. According to a variety of recent studies, merely ending federal tax credits for wind and solar could push up the average family’s energy bill by as much as $400 per year within a decade.

While increasing US households’ costs, Trump’s bill also reduces American firms’ competitiveness in some of the world’s fastest-growing industries. On one level, this is obvious. Renewables accounted for more than 90 percent of all newly added electricity generation last year. Even if America clings tightly to fossil fuels, demand for wind and solar energy is going to surge worldwide in the coming decades. If the United States actively sabotages its clean power industry, it will cede a larger share of the global energy market to China and other rival nations.

Less intuitively, the BBB also undermines America’s artificial intelligence industry. AI companies need vast amounts of new electricity to power their data centers. And renewables are uniquely well-suited to provide such power. At present, utilities can build wind and solar much faster than new natural gas plants, as there is a years-long backlog in the global market for natural gas turbines. Likewise, nuclear energy takes an enormous amount of time and regulatory wrangling to expand. Thus, if the federal government makes building renewables slower and more expensive, then American AI firms’ progress could also be stymied.

This has led some in the tech industry to criticize the bill. “We urge the Senate to prioritize a reliable and resilient energy mix that advances AI innovation and growth and reject provisions that will harm the U.S.’s ability to compete in the global race for AI and energy dominance,” Janae Washington, a spokesperson for the Information Technology Industry Council, told the Washington Post on Sunday.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, declared Saturday that “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country! Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

Even one of the bill’s strongest proponents — the pro-fossil fuels advocate Alex Epstein — has lamented its new tax on renewables with Chinese inputs, as has the US Chamber of Commerce.

Nevertheless, as of this writing, that tax remains in the legislation.

It is therefore a mistake to see Trump’s agenda as prioritizing innovation over equality or affordability over the environment. The BBB doesn’t concentrate wealth or degrade the climate in pursuit of some higher objective. Rather, it treats increasing inequality and boosting carbon emissions as ends in themselves — goals that it is prepared to pursue even at great cost to America industrial competitiveness and living standards.

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The Moscow, Idaho, house where four University of Idaho students were found dead on November 13, 2022, is shown on November 29 after vehicles belonging to the victims and others were towed away earlier in the day. | Ted S. Warren/AP

Update, June 30, 2025, 6:30 ET: Bryan Kohberger has agreed to plead guilty to all charges in the murders of the Idaho Four. The plea deal allows him to avoid the death penalty in exchange for serving four consecutive life sentences for the murders.

What made their deaths all the more terrifying was how elusive their killer seemed — until a sudden arrest made everything even scarier.

Sometime after midnight on November 13, four University of Idaho students — Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves — were all viciously attacked while sleeping in an off-campus townhouse. They were each, as eventual criminal charges would reflect, “stabbed and murdered with premeditation with malice and forethought.”

Throughout the seven tense weeks that followed, the case now known as the Idaho student murders rocked the small town of Moscow, Idaho, became a riveting true crime obsession, and sparked a global media frenzy.

But although everything that happened after their deaths would become international news, the lead-up to the quadruple homicide was completely uneventful. And so, nothing seemed to stick: There were no suspicious actions, changes, or alarming behaviors prior to the murders, and no immediate suspects, no big compelling clues, no key witnesses in the aftermath. An unknown intruder or intruders had simply entered the house, stabbed to death four of the six sleeping students inside, and then quietly slipped into the night.

Still, as the University of Idaho community struggled to come to terms with the killings and cope with their fear of the perpetrator, local and federal investigators were hard at work. By late December, despite the massive amount of resources devoted to the investigation, along with a stream of steady case updates, the case appeared to be on the verge of going cold. But on December 30, Moscow police announced they’d made an arrest in the case.

Bryan Kohberger, 28, had no apparent connection to any of the victims. Instead, he was a graduate student at a neighboring university, with an unsettling history and an obsession with true crime. The abrupt identification of the alleged killer, and the excavation of his personal background, meant that one of the most senseless, shocking crimes in recent memory became even more tragic.

Had four devoted friends — two of whom were dating, two of whom were lifelong best friends — lost their lives to a would-be serial killer?

The probable cause affidavit for the arrest, as well as the wealth of information that has since trickled out about the case and the alleged perpetrator, sheds new light on an extraordinarily horrific crime and the equally extraordinary criminal investigation that followed it. What finally led to Kohberger’s arrest was simply excellent investigative work: a mix of well-organized policing, groundbreaking forensics using genetic genealogy, and old-fashioned detective work. As Kohberger heads to trial this fall, the secrets of the criminal they caught are still being unearthed.

The murders

Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves were all University of Idaho undergraduates, all involved in the campus Greek system, and all fast friends. Kernodle, 20, was a bubbly junior majoring in marketing; she was dating Chapin, 20, a triplet and a fun-loving sports management major. Mogen and Goncalves, both 21, had been inseparable since the sixth grade. They did everything together: lived together, went to school together, and, ultimately, died side by side.

On the night of Saturday, November 12, 2022, everything seemed normal. Kernodle and Chapin went to a party at the Sigma Chi fraternity; Mogen and Goncalves went out to a bar, then hung out at a food truck for a bit. By 2 am Sunday, according to the probable cause affidavit, everyone had gathered at the house on King Road where Mogen, Goncalves, and Kernodle lived with two other roommates. Goncalves, as reported in January by Dateline, had recently moved out of the townhouse as she prepared to graduate early and take a job in Austin, Texas, but she’d returned for the weekend to hang out with Mogen. Months later, this news would fuel public speculation that whoever was watching the house saw her return — and saw it as an opportunity.

The three-story house was accessible primarily by a secure door with a coded entry on the bottom floor, as well as by a sliding glass door on the main level (second floor) of the house. The lower entry was locked, but the sliding glass door might have been more easily accessible.

At 4 am, Kernodle ordered Jack-in-the-Box; at 4:12 am, she was on her phone, surfing TikTok. Sometime in the next few minutes, the attack began. She tried to fight off her attacker — but by 4:25 am, she and her boyfriend would both be dead.

Note: the following section contains disturbing details of the crime.

The killer attacked on the second and third floors of the house, entering each of the victims’ rooms for separate attacks — but he left the roommates on the main and lowest floors alive. He used a large Ka-Bar knife of the style used by the US Marine Corps.

Nearby surveillance footage captured audio of the attacks around 4:17 am, including distressed sounds and barking from Goncalves’s dog. As revealed in the affidavit, one roommate told police she heard noises and crying, but didn’t understand what she was hearing. Although she opened her door repeatedly to see what was happening, she saw nothing alarming — though she did report hearing Goncalves say, “There’s someone here.” Some time later, over sounds of crying coming from Kernodle’s room, she heard a male voice saying, “It’s okay, I’m going to help you.”

The third time she opened her door, it was to the sight of a man clad all in black and wearing a mask, walking toward her. As she stood in “frozen shock,” the killer walked by her room; it’s unclear whether or not he saw her. With his face mostly covered, the roommate noted the only thing she could see clearly: the suspect’s “bushy eyebrows.” That detail would later prove accurate.

Still stunned, the roommate returned to her room and locked her door, while the killer exited through the sliding glass door on the apartment’s main floor.

Then he vanished.

The aftermath: A media frenzy and public speculation run amok

On Sunday, at 11:58 am, 911 received a phone call from a roommate’s phone, during which multiple people at the scene spoke to the dispatcher.

This 911 call has not been released, but there’s been considerable confusion due to reports of “an unconscious person” at the scene. Police clarified that “the surviving roommates summoned friends to the residence because they believed one of the second-floor victims had passed out and was not waking up”; this statement, however, led to widespread bafflement from the public about how a bloody crime scene involving multiple fatalities could have been so misunderstood and misreported.

The murders immediately made national headlines and left the community in disbelief. Despite police initially stating there was no “ongoing community risk,” the panic was real. Once news of the deaths broke, so many students on the 11,000-member University of Idaho campus fled the school that the university decided to allow students an optional early Thanksgiving break. Concerned calls to 911 spiked, and residents expressed fear of a Ted Bundy-like predator stalking and choosing their victims randomly. Early police statements didn’t help clear this up; after initially releasing contradictory statements about whether the attack had been personal or random, police settled on the inclusive conclusion that it was “an isolated, targeted attack,” but that they had “not concluded if the target was the residence or its occupants.”

Online sleuths immediately latched onto the murders, with speculation running rampant both locally and online. Police released bodycam footage taken the night of the murders, from unrelated nearby interactions. It’s unclear if the footage led to tips that proved useful in Kohberger’s eventual arrest, but it did lead to a flurry of rumors and speculation that brief, blurry motion in the background of the video might be a group of people running from the crime scene.

On the hunt for clues, people pored over the four victims’ social media, accusing everyone from their friends to random people who showed up in the background of Instagram photos. The food truck, which ran a Twitch livestream, became a huge source of public speculation, with people examining footage of Goncalves and Mogen hanging out by the truck, looking for any clues that someone may have been stalking the two women.

Police had to issue statements formally clearing multiple people (and one animal) of suspicion, including the surviving roommates, an ex-boyfriend of one of the victims who she had repeatedly called the night of the attack, a random man who was at the food truck, and, most bizarrely, a University of Idaho professor who was fingered for the crime by the “inner spirit” of a tarot reader on TikTok. (The tarot reader continues to insist the professor ordered Kohberger to carry out the murders.)

That bonkers sidebar in this morbid case lends an idea of how chaotic things looked from the sidelines: a heinous crime, with an apparent lack of witnesses, no significant leads, and a lack of serious suspects — but plenty of distracting, obfuscating, unhelpful social media noise. When, on December 7, police asked the public for help locating a white Hyundai Elantra that had allegedly been spotted at the crime scene, it seemed to many people to be less like a real, promising lead and more like busywork: After all, a generic white car? What could be more of a needle in a haystack?

But as improbable as it seemed, police focus on that generic white car was exactly right.

Five days after the murders, a criminology doctoral student at Washington State University changed the title on his white 2015 Hyundai Elantra, before driving it cross-country from Idaho to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania. His attempts to prevent authorities from tracing the car, however, overlooked one thing:

Police had his DNA.

The investigation and arrest of Bryan Kohberger

What’s striking about the investigation into Kohberger, as the affidavit makes clear, is both how quickly police homed in on him as a person of interest, and how seamlessly multiple law enforcement agencies worked together to apprehend him — collaborating across multiple states, jurisdictions, and even the country.

The first big lead in the case came from nearby surveillance footage, which captured a “white sedan” repeatedly circling the neighborhood between 3:20 am and 4:20 am.

Police tracked the car to Pullman, Washington, about 10 miles away, home to the Washington State University campus. Meanwhile, an FBI expert identified the make and model, and even narrowed down the year range of the car: a 2014-2016 Hyundai Elantra.

With that detail in hand, WSU campus police officers quickly tracked down a Hyundai Elantra owner who attended the school and lived near the last place the car had been seen on surveillance the night of November 13: Kohberger.

By November 29, just over two weeks after the murders, the Moscow Police Department had a copy of Kohberger’s driver’s license photo, complete with his “bushy eyebrows.”

Cell phone records showed Kohberger’s phone traveling from Pullman in the direction of Moscow the night of the murders, before it was shut off completely between 2:47 am and 4:48 am — “consistent with Kohberger attempting to conceal his location during the quadruple homicide,” according to the affidavit. They also showed Kohberger apparently returning to the scene of the crime in Moscow at approximately 9 am that day — still several hours before authorities would be alerted to the scene — and then immediately returning to his house in Pullman.

But while authorities had strong circumstantial evidence tying Kohberger and his white car to the crime, the smoking gun in this case had been recovered from the crime scene on the first day of the investigation: an empty knife sheath with a trace of DNA from an unknown male.

Armed with this clue, authorities turned to the groundbreaking technique that’s led to arrests in many cases since the 2018 arrest of the Golden State Killer: genetic DNA matching. In this process, investigators upload DNA to genealogy websites and then build out a potential family tree for a suspect (or, in many cases, an unidentified missing person). Then, using context clues and other practical detective work, they follow the family tree and trace which member is most likely to be a match.

The use of genetic genealogy is controversial. Currently, only two genealogy websites, GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, allow law enforcement to use DNA from their users. Both are opt-in, meaning the user has to give explicit consent for the use, though GEDmatch encourages users to opt in and boasts that its genetic DNA matching has assisted in closing over 500 cold cases. That number seems accurate given how regularly genetic DNA matching is now used to solve crimes — and it may soon be even higher thanks to a recently developed predictive algorithm that could allow police to more quickly zoom in on the correct branch of a DNA family tree.

Police were able to match the DNA on the knife sheath with DNA from Kohberger’s father, gathered from trash at Kohberger’s parents’ home. And that match was definitive, excluding 99.99 percent of the population from being the father of the suspect.

Meanwhile, Kohberger and his dad embarked on a multi-day road trip from Washington to Pennsylvania. License plate readers across the country mapped them traveling from state to state: Colorado, Indiana, Pennsylvania. On December 15, they were stopped twice by Indiana patrol officers in a very short timespan for tailgating. A law enforcement source later told Fox News that a task force, which had Kohberger under surveillance requested that the Indiana troopers pull him over specifically so that they could get a glimpse of his hands to see if there were any cuts or other injuries. (In bodycam footage of one of the two stops, Kohberger and his father appear only briefly on camera.) The FBI, allegedly part of the task force, later denied to Fox that it had given any orders to waylay Kohberger; it’s unclear if the task force was acting independently, or if the two stops were a complete coincidence.

On December 30, after surveilling Kohberger for several days, the Pennsylvania State Police executed a raid on the home of his parents in the largely rural Chestnuthill Township, complete with smashed windows and broken doors. After being extradited back to Idaho, all the while under constant media scrutiny, Kohberger appeared in the Latah County District Court in Moscow on Thursday, January 5, and documents related to his arrest were unsealed by the court.

That was the first time the world had heard of Bryan Kohberger. But internet sleuths quickly got to work uncovering his strange and ominous background.

The fallout: Kohberger, his background — and what’s next

Kohberger was a Pennsylvania native who grew up in the suburbs. His high school classmates described him as “analytical,” interested in human behaviors — but one friend described a physically and emotionally abusive friendship to the New York Times that “got so, so bad that I just shut down when I was around him.”

Kohberger graduated from Northampton Community College in 2018 with an associate degree in psychology; two years later, he graduated from DeSales University, then went on to study criminology there as a grad student. While there, he took classes under legendary forensic profiler Katherine Ramsland, a household name in the world of true crime thanks to her long career and dozens of books covering famous cases. He also participated in a research study into criminal behavior, for which he recruited on Reddit using a retroactively chilling descriptor: “This study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience.” After getting his master’s degree in 2022, he began studying at Washington State as a criminology and criminal justice doctoral student.

There are striking parallels between Kohberger and the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo Jr. Both men gravitated to law enforcement: DeAngelo was a police officer; Kohberger worked as a security guard for a local school district and had recently applied for an internship with his local police department, claiming he wanted to aid rural law enforcement with data collection and analysis. Both had glowing newspaper write-ups for small acts of valor they had performed.

Both men also cased their crime scenes extensively: phone records showed Kohberger returning to the area of the King Road house again and again — “on at least 12 occasions” per the affidavit — beginning in June 2022, the earliest date that police could obtain records. That might be significant for multiple reasons. One of the rumors police downplayed about the case was that Kaylee Goncalves had expressed fear of a “stalker” in the weeks prior to the murders. This led to heated speculation that Goncalves was the focus of the attack, but authorities have never confirmed this. The evidence, instead, might point toward Kohberger being fixated, as authorities originally suggested, on the house itself.

Kaylee’s father, Steve Goncalves, who’d been critical of police during the many weeks of scant updates, had nothing but praise for the investigation after the arrest, stating in a January 5 interview that “all is forgiven.”

“People think Idaho is so old-fashioned and outback, but these guys — they hit a home run, man,” he said. “That affidavit is impressive.”

“Impressive” might be an understatement: The swiftness with which police managed to identify, carefully build a strong case against Kohberger, track him across the country, and arrest him, all while working with multiple agencies and somehow managing to keep his identity from leaking to the public, is extremely rare. It’s even more extraordinary given how many victims were involved, how unusual the crime was, how many agencies were involved, and how intense the public and media scrutiny was.

The triumph of the investigation, however, is tempered by the realization that Kohberger seems to have been working the criminal justice system in order to become a better criminal. Each half of the resolution to this case is a cold counter to the other: On the one hand, a picture of what we all, desperately, want policing to look like; on the other, a picture of what the criminal justice system too often becomes: exploitable.

Still, it’s easy to imagine this investigation becoming a major case study for what effective policing can and should look like: law enforcement working with the community and with each other, and building the case methodically, based solely on the evidence.

Perhaps most unusual of all is just how strong the case against Kohberger appears from the outset. Eyewitness? Check. Video surveillance of his car? Check. DNA match? Check. Implicating cell phone records? Loads. As of May, the prosecution has produced roughly 10,000 pages of documents and over 10,000 photos, along with massive amounts of video and audio data in the case. Even without the added circumstantial evidence of Kohberger’s own obsession with criminal psychology, this would be a hard defense to mount.

In May, apparently in order to avoid a preliminary hearing, the prosecution impaneled a secret grand jury which indicted Kohberger on May 16. Kohberger was indicted on four felony charges of first-degree murder and one charge of burglary.

At his subsequent arraignment on May 22, Kohberger chose to “stand silent” when asked to plead to the charges; the court entered a plea of “not guilty” on his behalf. His trial is tentatively scheduled to begin on October 2, 2023.

For now, apart from the probable cause affidavit, the details of the case against Kohberger are still limited. The case is currently under a restrictive gag order that’s led to repeated courtroom challenges from both victims’ families and media outlets. At a May 22 hearing on the gag order, Latah County Judge John C. Judge commented on the “irreparable harm” the media had done to the case, without going into specifics. The judge worried the case’s high-profile media coverage would make it impossible for Kohberger to receive a fair trial, and told the Associated Press, one of the litigants requesting the gag order to be lifted, to “tone it down.”

Despite the gag order, new information continues to trickle out about Kohberger himself. In January, the New York Times reported that Kohberger had long struggled with mental health issues and drug addiction, as well as, allegedly, a rare neurological condition called visual snow.In February, the Times further reported that Kohberger’s university had investigated him for various complaints, including following one student to her car, and getting into repeated altercations with his supervising professor. That ultimately resulted in his termination shortly after the murders.

News Nation also reported allegations that Kohberger received complaints for condescending behavior and harsher grading toward female students. During that same period, Kohberger allegedly broke into the home of a woman and then offered to install security cameras on her behalf.

And perhaps most damningly, after he went home for the holidays, according to Dateline, Kohberger acted suspiciously and constantly wore latex gloves around the house, alarming his family members so much that at one point, his disturbed relatives searched his car, looking for evidence of his involvement in the Idaho murders.

Even as media coverage inevitably shifts away from the four deceased victims and their surviving roommates to focus on Kohberger, it’s important not to let his story supersede theirs.They leave us a legacy of living life to the fullest, of unabashed joy and camaraderie that shines throughout the wide digital footprint of the students’ social media. In a now-famous Instagram post, made on the day of the murders, Goncalves snapped several photos of her roommates, including Kernodle, Mogen, and Chapin. “One lucky girl to be surrounded by these ppl everyday,” she wrote.

Update, May 23, 3:50 pm: This story was originally published on January 7 and has been updated several times to include new details about the case.

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President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the US Capitol in May to promote his signature bill. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Republicans are barreling ahead to try to pass President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” — legislation that somehow manages to combine massive fiscal irresponsibility with devastating spending cuts.

The bill would keep the “Trump tax cuts” originally passed in 2017 in place, while adding some new tax breaks and new spending on immigration enforcement and the military.

It would also make deep cuts to government spending on Medicaid, the clean energy industry, student loans, and food stamps, though exactly how deep these cuts will be isn’t yet clear, as the GOP continues to debate the bill.

Yet under any scenario, these cuts will be insufficient to get anywhere near covering the bill’s massive cost — one estimate suggests it will add $3.9 trillion to the debt.

Republicans are trying to rely on only their party’s votes to pass it through Congress and hope to send it to Trump’s desk this week. Democrats are uniformly opposed.

On Monday, the Senate began considering amendments on its version of the bill (the House passed its own version last month). But much remains unsettled as they attempt to hammer out a final compromise.

Why does Trump want to pass this bill so much?

Trump is pushing hard to ram this bill through because he wants to take care of four things at once.

First, if Congress does nothing, the lower income tax rates Trump signed into law in 2017 are set to expire at the end of this year. That would mean higher taxes for practically everyone — a political disaster.

Second, the bill fulfills a few Trump campaign promises by creating some tax breaks, such as new tax deductions for tip wages and overtime pay.

Third, the bill includes new spending on immigration enforcement (such as Trump’s border wall) and certain military priorities (like his planned “Golden Dome” missile defense shield).

Fourth, the bill raises the US debt ceiling — the limit on new debt the government can issue, which Congress periodically squabbles over raising — by $5 trillion.

Who gets hurt by the bill

All of this tax cutting and new spending is very expensive — it amounts to about $5 trillion over the next decade. So the bill also does some spending cuts: about $1 trillion. These cuts are overwhelmingly targeted at Democratic or liberal-coded priorities and constituencies.

For one, Medicaid would be cut deeply — perhaps by as much as 18 percent, due to new work reporting requirements and other changes that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would push 12 million people off the program.

The clean energy industry would also be hammered. The current Senate bill not only rolls back Biden-era tax credits but also imposes a painful new tax on wind or solar projects using Chinese components.

Student loans and food stamps are the other areas that would face particularly steep cuts.

The exact extent of all these cuts is yet to be determined. Some in the GOP are seeking to soften the Medicaid and clean energy cuts at least somewhat, but conservative hardliners are pressing to slash spending even more.

The public spectacle this week will be on the Senate floor as amendments get votes, but the real action will happen behind the scenes as GOP leaders attempt to cut a deal that can win over nearly every House and Senate Republican.

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The biting midge spreads Oropouche virus.

Oropouche virus disease was a relatively rare illness for decades, lurking on the margins of tropical rainforests in the Caribbean and South America.

Sporadic reports of an infection causing fevers, coughs, chills, and body aches emerged among people living near or moving into the jungle. A tiny insect called a midge spreads the disease, and the earliest known case dates back to 1955 in a forest worker near a village called Vega de Oropouche in Trinidad. Since most people who were infected with the virus recovered on their own and since cases were so infrequent, it barely registered as a public health concern.

But a few years ago, something changed.

A major Oropouche fever outbreak beginning in 2023 infected at least 23,000 people across Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Peru. It wasn’t just confined to remote wilderness areas but was spreading in metropolises like Rio de Janeiro. In some cases, travelers were infected and then brought the virus home: So far, Oropouche fever has sprung up in the US, Canada, and Europe in people returning from the afflicted region. The outbreak has killed at least five people.

The sudden rise of Oropouche disease startled scientists and health officials. Since its discovery, there have only been around 500,000 known cases. By contrast, there are upwards of 400 million dengue infections each year. It’s likely then that many more Oropouche infections have gone undetected, especially since its symptoms overlap with those from other diseases and there’s little active screening for the virus.

What you’ll learn from this story

What Oropouche fever is, how you can identify is and what spreads the disease.What researchers know about the startling outbreak across South American in 2023 and 2024.The threat the disease’s spread poses to the United States.

Now, researchers are looking back at the outbreak to try to find out what they missed and what lessons they can apply to get ahead of future epidemics. Oropouche virus is a critical case study in the complicated factors that drive vector-borne diseases. Dynamics like deforestation, urban sprawl, international travel, and gaps in surveillance are converging to drive up the dangers from infections spread by animals.

And as the climate changes, new regions are becoming more hospitable to the blood suckers that spread these diseases, increasing the chances of these seemingly-remote infections making it to the US and getting established. That means more people will face threats from illnesses that they may never have considered before.

“It’s very likely that these public health problems that people before called ‘tropical disease’ are not so tropical anymore and are basically everywhere,” said William de Souza, who studies arboviruses — viruses spread by arthropods like insects — at the University of Kentucky. “Vector-borne disease is not a local problem; this is a global problem.”

The rising specter of Oropouche fever comes at a time when the United States is cutting funding for research at universities, pulling back from studying vector-borne disease threats, and ending collaborations with other countries to limit their risk.

The Oropouche virus is a classic case study in how humans worsen vector-borne disease

The Oropouche virus belongs to the family of bunyaviruses. They appear as spheres under a microscope, and they encode their genomes in RNA, rather than DNA as human cells do. RNA viruses tend to have high mutation rates, making it harder to target them with vaccines and increasing the odds of reinfection. Oropuche’s relatives include the viruses behind Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, spread by ticks, and Rift Valley fever, spread by mosquitoes.

“Vector-borne disease is not a local problem; this is a global problem.”

William de souza

Oropouche spreads mainly through the bites of a 1- to 3-millimeter-long insect called, appropriately, a biting midge (Culicoides paraensis). Midges are sometimes called sand flies or no-see-ums in the US, and they breed in damp soil, rotting vegetation, and standing water. Like mosquitoes, they feed on blood to drive their reproduction, but their minuscule bodies can easily slip through mosquito nets. When a midge bites an infected host, it can pass on the pathogen to a human during a subsequent bite. There’s also evidence that the virus may be sexually transmissible, but no such cases have been documented yet. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that male travelers from regions where Oropouche is spreading should not have sex for six weeks if they show symptoms of the disease.

Vector-borne diseases like Oropouche continue to surprise us because there are so many variables that have to align in order to spread them — the pathogens, the vectors, the hosts, and the environment.

Unlike diseases like Covid-19 or influenza, vector-borne illnesses don’t spread directly from person to person. Instead, they require an animal, often arthropods like ticks, midges, and mosquitoes. The range, reproduction, and behavior of these organisms add another confounding factor in the spread of the diseases they carry. Globally, vector-borne diseases account for 17 percent of infectious diseases, leading to more than 700,000 deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization. But not every part of the world is equally vulnerable.

In cooler regions, vector-borne infections are often a minor public health concern, but in countries like Brazil, “it’s at the top,” said Tatiane Moraes de Sousa, a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Rio de Janeiro. “Oropouche before 2024 was concentrated just in the Amazon. Last year, we saw the spreading of Oropuche in almost all Brazilian states.”

That gets to the first obstacle in tracking Oropouche: Which animals are the reservoirs for the virus and where are they? So far, researchers have detected the virus in animals including sloths, capuchin monkeys, marmosets, domestic birds, and rodents. These organisms form what’s known as the sylvatic, or forest, cycle of the virus. How the virus jumps between all these animals and which ones are most concerning for people is not known.

Additionally, it may be possible that other insects may be able to carry the Oropouche virus, but it’s not clear whether they can spread it to humans.

The pattern that does emerge is that when people spend more time inside and around the fringes of tropical rainforests, where the animals that harbor the virus and the insects that spread them reside, they’re more likely to get infected. With deforestation and development, more people are moving into areas where the disease naturally spreads.

“This is a classical example of how human behavior can lead to the emergence of a pathogen,” said Natasha Tilston, who studies Oropouche virus at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

People can travel great distances, and as people move back and forth from the wilderness to cities, they can unwittingly carry viruses like Oropouche. If enough of them gather in cities where vectors are present, they can trigger an urban epidemic cycle as the virus travels from person to midge to person. This was likely the pattern in the 2023–24 outbreak in major cities in South America.

It’s also true that more health workers were on guard for Oropouche and thus identified more infections. “The outbreak is probably a combination of one, there are more cases, and two, we’re also looking for a lot more than we did before,” Tilston said, noting that some past outbreaks of dengue may have actually been Oropouche as well.

What set off the outbreak?

One factor is that the virus likely evolved. Viruses mutate all the time, and most mutations are either inconsequential or detrimental to the virus, slowing or stopping its reproduction. But occasionally, a change can confer an advantage or make the pathogen more destructive. The Oropouche virus has a genome structure that makes it even more prone to a type of mutation called reassortment.

“Reassortment is when you have two similar viruses infect the same cell and they mix genomes,” explained University of Kentucky’s de Souza. “People previously infected by the old virus are now susceptible to new infection. This could help explain why the Amazon region, where this has been circulated for a long time, saw this emerge, because people were probably reinfected.”

The strain behind the outbreak appears to reproduce faster and cause more severe illness than prior varieties as well.

Part of the reason this outbreak racked up so many infected people is that health officials were starting to deploy the tools to identify on a wider scale. Particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, more health departments across the region built up their tools to detect viruses.

But researchers still aren’t sure exactly what spurred the virus to spread so suddenly across so many countries. Travel restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic started relaxing in 2023 and made it easier for people to move back and forth from the rural areas where the virus is endemic to the cities where it became established.

The 2023 to 2024 outbreak also coincided with a powerful El Niño event that brought gargantuan amounts of rain and triggered unprecedented flooding across many parts of South America. These were also years that set new temperature records. Higher temperatures can speed up the reproduction of the virus inside midges. But scientists aren’t exactly sure how this heat and water affected the vectors, though Brazil has seen outbreaks of other infectious diseases in the aftermath of floods.

“El Niño and other climate phenomena have been associated with the change of the patterns of many different vector-borne diseases,” de Souza said. “For Oropouche specifically, we don’t have the answers yet, but the likelihood of impact is very high.”

On top of all this, there aren’t any specific ways to keep an outbreak in check once it ignites. There are no vaccines or treatments for Oropouche fever yet. So when all the factors align to spread the disease, there isn’t much people can do to target the disease, and when it reaches a new area, there aren’t as many people with immunity and few health workers who know what they’re dealing with.

How the US is preparing for diseases like the Oropouche virus

Fortunately, the Oropouche outbreak has died down, but a variety of infections are gaining a toehold in new places as infected people travel and as vectors move into new habitats, and the US is increasingly vulnerable. According to the CDC, the number of vector-borne disease cases per year has doubled in the US since 2001.

Last year, the US saw transmission of mosquito-borne diseases like Eastern equine encephalitis and West Nile virus. Malaria, a disease once eradicated across the country, saw the first local infections in 20 years in 2023 in Florida and Texas. Vectors like the Asian tiger mosquito are spreading further north as the climate changes and expands favorable conditions for its survival.

With travelers moving back and forth from regions where diseases are endemic, many will unwittingly bring back dangerous souvenirs, whether a stowaway insect in their luggage or an infection in their blood. And with midges, mosquitoes, and ticks spreading to new regions, dangerous pathogens are extending their reach.

There are ways to slow the spread of these diseases, however, and the US has managed to do so before. The US famously launched a successful campaign to eradicate malaria within its borders.

The first step is to simply acknowledge the threat. As Oropouche showed, there may be diseases lurking closer than we realized that we simply haven’t bothered to look for.

It’s fairly simple to do things like dump standing water where insects can breed or spray insecticides on midge breeding grounds. But some places are getting creative, working to build up habitats for fish, bats, birds, and dragonflies that are natural predators of mosquitoes and midges to limit their spread. Limiting the destruction and development in wilderness areas can reduce the likelihood of diseases spilling over from animals into humans.

Some regions are looking at even more drastic ways to stymie vectors. One measure that’s gaining traction is deploying sterile male mosquitoes. When they mate, they produce eggs that won’t hatch, thus reducing the population of the insect. Brazil recently inaugurated a factory that breeds mosquitoes to carry a bacterium known as Wolbachia that prevents the mosquitoes from reproducing easily, slowing the viruses that cause dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, a disease that can cause fever and joint pain, now established in the Americas. Hawaii is using these mosquitoes to arrest the spread of avian malaria.

Vaccines and treatments are critical tools for addressing the diseases directly. Many pathogens can be controlled with these measures, but because they more commonly spread in poorer countries, there is less investment in containing them. Many vector-borne diseases like Oropouche are considered “neglected,” and so when they do spread beyond their typical range, there isn’t much available to help those who get sick. But the growing burden of these diseases demands a new generation of tools that can target multiple threats. “We are seeing so many outbreaks that we need broad vaccines,” said Fiocruz’s Sousa.

Additionally, vector-borne diseases aren’t each waiting for their turns. Countries can have multiple outbreaks at the same time on top of all the other health concerns that emerge during severe weather like extreme heat or the healthcare disruptions in the wake of a disaster like a major storm. “We are seeing cumulative threats because we are seeing not just one vector-borne disease,” Sousa said. “In a lot of scenarios, we are also maintaining high levels of communicable diseases.”

Right now, some health departments are being proactive, keeping an eye out for sick travelers, collecting mosquitoes in the wild to see what kinds of germs they’re carrying, and coordinating with researchers across the country.

“We’ve been having bi-weekly meetings with CDC to talk about the potential for Oropouche coming into the US and spreading,” said Bethany Bolling, zoonotic virology group manager at the Texas Department of State Health Services. “We’ve seen in the past that Florida and Texas are some of the primary areas where these new viruses start to establish, so in Texas, we’re trying to be aware of Oropouche and what the vectors are.”

For the US, Brazil’s experience with Oropouche is an important lesson that could help health officials prepare and counter the disease when it inevitably arrives.

“There is a real threat to the United States,” Tilston said. “I think we have all the right settings, and I think it’s just a matter of everything being in the right place at the right time. With climate change, it’s just really a matter of when it’s going to happen.”

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