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Ticks are one of humanity’s most dastardly adversaries: tiny, often invisible, and capable of transmitting debilitating disease before disappearing without you ever knowing they were there. And lately, there seem to be more reasons than ever to fear them. Their range is expanding into cities and new regions across the US. Lyme disease cases remain high, and tick-borne illnesses now include concerns like alpha-gal syndrome, a condition that can trigger serious meat allergies. Scientists say ticks are on the move. Climate change appears to be part of the story, but it’s not the whole explanation. People who’ve never had to think about ticks before now have to. The good news? This is still a fight we can win. Read more at the link in bio. 🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images

The Juneteenth flag, explained

Did you know there’s a specific flag for Juneteenth? In fact, it has a backstory that goes back to the late 1990s. Ben Haith, the flag’s creator, explains more about its history and impact. Haith, a community organizer and activist known better as “Boston Ben,” created the flag in 1997. Haith said once he learned about Juneteenth, he felt passionately that it needed representation. “I was just doing what God told me,” Haith said. “I have somewhat of a marketing background, and I thought Juneteenth, what it represented, needed to have a symbol.” Learn more at the link in our bio. 📸: KaCeyKal! for Vox

I read JD Vance’s new book. It reveals more than he realizes.

Every few years, presidential hopefuls go through certain rites of passage: ramping up fundraising, visiting early primary states, bulking up policy credentials, and, of course, dropping a memoir. This week, Vice President JD Vance released Communion, a book tracing his faith journey and relationship with Christianity. It’s an introspective effort to define what he believes, lay out the role he sees for religion in public life, and offer some hints at what a President Vance might do in office. For Americans wondering how — or if — Vance reconciles his Christian faith with serving President Donald Trump and leading today’s right-wing movement, it’s a revealing read. Spoiler alert: Communion doesn’t really resolve the contradiction between Vance’s faith and politics. Instead, it lays bare a tension shared by many Republican voters and shows how easy, if not necessary in modern America, it can be to subordinate faith to politics. 📸: Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Why your kid is obsessed with squishy toys

The NeeDoh Nice Cube is a lump of soft plastic, a little over 2 inches tall. It comes in blue, pink, or purple, and retails for $5.99. When you squeeze it, it produces a pleasing, squishy sensation, subtly relieving the stress of the day and replacing it with a sense of calm and peace. Or, at least, that’s what people who can get their hands on it say. The Nice Cube — and other NeeDoh variants, like globs, donuts, and kittens — are so popular that it’s become nearly impossible to find them. The toys are sold out at toy stores. The manufacturer, Schylling, no longer sells them through its website. This craze for NeeDoh is part of a larger trend: the rise of sensory and “fidget” toys over the past decade. While kids (and adults) have always fidgeted, the marketing of toys explicitly for this purpose has exploded in recent years, as objects for squeezing, popping, stroking, and shaping fill kids’ bedrooms and classrooms alike. Read more at the link in our bio. 🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox

First comes marriage. Then comes a flirtatious colleague.

What do you do when your partner wants to open your marriage and you don’t? That’s the question a reader asked Sigal Samuel, who writes our Your Mileage May Vary column. Here’s part of the advice she gave: “You don’t have to want ethical non-monogamy just because your partner does. And saying no doesn’t mean you’re controlling or closed-minded. But it’s also worth asking whether this conflict is really about non-monogamy at all. If you already feel like your partner isn’t giving you enough attention, energy, or presence, opening the relationship can feel less like freedom and more like distance. Before changing the terms of a relationship, make sure the relationship itself feels strong.” Read the full column at the link in our bio. 🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox

Pet snakes have a hidden body count

There might be more mice and rats factory farmed globally than cows. You've probably never heard about it because they're not feeding humans. They're feeding pet snakes. Vox's Kenny Torrella breaks down one of the biggest sources of animal suffering in the world. Read his reporting at the link in bio.

Will Trump ruin America’s birthday?

Are President Donald Trump’s America’s 250 celebrations a chance to celebrate the country, or himself? The whole thing is being presided over by not one but two groups: America250, Congress’s decade-old initiative to celebrate the country, and Freedom 250, which is the Trump administration’s very own. “I think President Trump is trying to celebrate America as he sees it, which is not totally separate from celebrating himself,” said Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Read more at the link in our bio or listen to the episode of Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts. 📸: Al Bello/Getty Images

The case that Florida is ready to turn blue again

For decades, Florida was the archetypal presidential swing state — and as recently as 2016 and 2018, Democrats came close to winning statewide elections there. Then things took a turn. After Ron DeSantis was elected governor in 2018, the Sunshine State moved solidly right of the country in 2020, and 2022 and 2024 brought double-digit drubbings for Democratic candidates — convincing many that Florida was just purely a red state now. Could the blue wave building in 2026 change all that? David Jolly thinks so. A former Republican congressman who quit the party back during Trump’s first term, Jolly officially became a Democrat last year — and is now the party’s likely gubernatorial nominee in the contest to succeed the term-limited DeSantis. (The Republican primary is still contested, but the Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds has a large lead in polls.) Like other Democrats across the country, Jolly’s message is laser-focused on affordability. But as a former Republican trying to win a reddened state, his pitch is a bit different from what we’ve seen in blue territory. He’s also coming off years as a frequent MSNBC commentator, and has many thoughts on what ails our politics. Senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop sat down with Jolly on Monday for a conversation about the race, to ask him about the key issues ailing the state — and whether Democrats actually have a chance at winning Floridians back to their side. Check out the interview at the link in our bio. 📸: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Smartphones broke dating. AI might finish the job.

Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence. Across the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. In 2023, the average number of births per woman worldwide fell beneath 2.1 — the minimum level necessary for averting population decline (also known as the “replacement rate”). And this collapse is not concentrated in just a handful of places; more than two-thirds of all nations now have below-replacement fertility. If these trends continue, the consequences will be transformative — and possibly, catastrophic, as graying populations place unprecedented burdens on the remaining young. Vast countries will swiftly shrivel into city states. And it’s partly your phone’s fault. Or so one leading theory goes. To make sense of recent fertility trends, some analysts have turned to the devices in their pockets. In the view of the journalist John Burn-Murdoch and social scientist Alice Evans, the smartphone helped birth the global spike in singledom. Read more at the link in our bio.

The Iran war’s end is being greatly exaggerated

One should never underestimate President Donald Trump’s ability to use sheer obfuscation to extract “victory” from a situation where the outcome is ambiguous at best. In the days to come, following Sunday’s announcement of a US-Iran ceasefire deal, the Trump administration will undoubtedly face questions about why it was worth killing thousands of people and spending more than $30 billion, not counting the extra costs Americans and people around the world have paid at the gas pump and the supermarket, on a war that succeeded only in reestablishing the prewar status quo: reopening a strait that wasn’t closed before the war, getting Iran to pledge not to build a nuclear weapon — a pledge it has made for decades — and replacing the country’s hardline regime with an ever harder line one. Trump can claim the US and Israeli bombing campaign set back Iran’s nuclear and missile programs — though just how far set back they are is still unknown without inspectors on the ground — and that unlike Barack Obama, he won’t be sending planes full of cash from the US to Iran. (The money will probably be coming from Dubai instead.) The deal will likely come under criticism from the Iran hawks who backed the war — some are already expressing concerns — but Trump may not face all that much pushback given how many of his opponents as well as his supporters simply want the war to end. The bigger problem for the administration is that the agreement leaves so many issues unresolved that it’s far from clear that the war is actually over. And even if it is, we may just be witnessing the setup for future conflicts that keep the United States on an indefinite war footing in the Middle East. Read more at the link in bio. 📸: AFP via Getty Images

A DNA test upended my family. Do I side with my grandmother — or her secret child?

What do you do when a DNA test reveals a family secret that was supposed to be hidden forever? That’s the question that a reader asked Sigal Samuel, who writes our Your Mileage May Vary column. Here’s the advice she gave: “As technology shifts over the generations, moral norms shift along with it. When your grandmother gave up the baby for adoption, she had no idea DNA testing would become commonplace — but it has. And as cheap testing kits like 23andMe have exposed all kinds of family secrets, more and more kids who’d been kept in the dark are making their experiences known. Some were never bothered by their obscured origins, but discover an extra measure of joy and connection once they meet long-lost relatives. Others say they always suffered from an uneasy sense that they’re different from their siblings. Still others say it’s important to know your biological family’s medical history, especially with the advent of precision medicine. All this has led to an increasing belief that children have a right to know where they came from — a right to self-knowledge.” Read the full column at the link in our bio. 🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox

How the Iran war could drive conflicts in countries thousands of miles away

Comoros, an island nation of less than a million people, more than 3,000 miles away from Iran, might not seem to have much at stake, politically, from the current conflict in the Middle East. Donald Trump has never publicly mentioned it. It is neither an ally nor a target of the Iranian regime. But as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, no country is totally insulated from the fallout of the war launched by the United States and Israel, and that includes Comoros. Last month, the country’s government attempted to raise gasoline prices by 35%, blaming the price shock caused by the Iran war. The public response included protests, roadblocks in the capital, and clashes with security forces during which one person was killed. The government suspended the fuel price increase in response. It’s not the only place where Hormuz shockwaves have caused social unrest. Four people were killed in Kenya in May in protests sparked by rising fuel prices. Bus drivers in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, have gone on strike over a 46 percent increase in diesel prices, grinding the city to a halt. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Motorcycle taxi drivers ride past a burning barricade on a road blocked with stones to prevent traffic from passing during a nationwide transport strike over rising fuel prices in Nairobi on May 18, 2026. Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images

Trump’s cuts at sea could make the coming super El Niño harder to predict

The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the United States, European and American scientists have warned. Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month. As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so,” according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Supreme Court invented a special legal rule solely to screw Planned Parenthood

A year after its controversial Medina v. Planned Parenthood decision, the Supreme Court is facing new questions about whether it applies legal rules consistently. In Medina, the Court's conservative majority blocked Medicaid patients from suing South Carolina after the state cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, even though the law appeared to give patients the right to choose their healthcare providers. Critics argued that the decision ignored long-standing Supreme Court precedent, which says people can sometimes sue to enforce federal laws written to protect them. Now, a new case called FS Credit Opportunities v. Saba Capital seems to rely on the very legal principles that the Court appeared to sidestep in Medina — without even mentioning the earlier decision. This contradiction raises a bigger question: Is the Court applying neutral legal principles, or changing the rules depending on the outcome it wants? Find out more at the link in our bio. 📸: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

Everyone’s a girl’s girl on TV. Until they’re not.

Summer House cast member Amanda Batula linked up with her friend Ciara Miller’s ex, so therefore reality TV fans have deemed her not a girl’s girl. In contrast, Love Island season 6 stars Leah Kateb, Serena Page, and JaNa Craig prioritized their friendship, deeming themselves the “Powerpuff girls” and earning the title of girl’s girls in the process. But as reality TV popularizes the term, does it still do what it’s meant to in lifting women up and fostering a culture of support? Not exactly. Read more from Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos at the link in our bio. 🎥: @sydneybergan #GirlsGirl #RealityTV #SummerHouse #LoveIslandUSA #RHONY

9 reasons to watch the 2026 World Cup

The FIFA World Cup is the largest, most-watched single-sport event in the world — a cultural, economic, and geopolitical phenomenon with ripples far beyond mere athletics. And this year’s tournament, hosted jointly by the US, Mexico, and Canada, has been especially bedeviled by questions of accessibility, safety, and fairness. We’re previewing some of the players, teams, issues, and controversies that could define this year’s tournament, which kicks off at 3 pm ET, when Mexico plays South Africa. (The first American game will be tomorrow, June 12, when the US team plays Paraguay in Los Angeles.) Read more about the nine storylines we’re watching at the link in our bio. 📸: Getty Images

Political Typology 2026

MAGA and the progressive left together make up less than 40% of Americans. So who makes up the rest? Vox’s Christian Paz took the new @pewresearch political typology quiz, which breaks Americans into nine distinct political groups. He found that the results paint a much more nuanced picture of why the country feels so divided. Take the quiz yourself at the link in our bio.

Rolling the dice on Graham Platner

Graham Platner’s primary victory in Maine means Democrats officially have their candidate in a race that is pivotal for their hopes of retaking the Senate. But Platner isn’t a typical Democratic nominee. For reasons both personal and political, his candidacy has captivated national attention and become arguably the most-covered race happening this year. First off, he is indisputably a fresh (bearded) face for the party — a 41-year old populist who’s never run for anything before, who’s worked as an oyster farmer, who did three tours in Iraq with the Marines and also served in Afghanistan, and who presents as having a tough-guy affect. There are complications to Platner’s working-class credentials (he attended prep school and has relied on wealthy parents), but still, if he does well in November, it could strengthen the case for more outsiders who don’t fit the typical candidate mold. And finally, there’s his messy personal history — Nazi skull tattoo, crude Reddit posts, volatile past relationships, drinking, and sexting other women while married. A fresh round of these reports in recent weeks has heightened Democrats’ fears about his general election chances — and even opened discussion about whether he could still be replaced on the ballot if more damning scandals emerge. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Laura Brett/Getty Images

The US just got its first new sunscreen in almost 30 years

For the first time in the 21st century, the United States has approved a new sunscreen ingredient. Well, new to us. It’s called bemotrizinol, also known as BEMT, and it’s been available in Europe and Asia for years. But the peculiar way that sunscreen is regulated in the United States — as an over-the-counter drug rather than a cosmetic — had long prevented it from coming to American store shelves. In 2020, however, Congress ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to overhaul its sunscreen approval process, and in 2024, DSM Nutritionals, which manufactures a bemotrizinol-based sunscreen, asked the FDA for approval. After a review of relevant safety and efficacy data, bemotrizinol has become the first new sunscreen ingredient to be approved for sale in the US since the late 1990s. The Environmental Working Group, which has lobbied for bemotrizinol’s approval since 2019, called its approval “a monumental victory for health and wellness.” Find out more at the link in our bio.

Men who looksmaxx are also brutally fertility-mogging themselves

Testosterone prescriptions have jumped 154% since 2020. And a growing number of men aren't taking it for medical reasons. They're taking it to look like the guys they see on social media. The catch? Testosterone therapy can cause infertility, which some men already know and don't care about. Vox's Anna North breaks down the looksmaxxing trend and what it reveals about how masculinity is changing. Read the full piece at the link in our bio.

There’s a new threat to the World Cup. FIFA might not be ready.

Players in the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup in June and July face an even greater risk of unsafe temperatures than they did in 1994 — the last time the World Cup was held in the United States — according to estimates from researchers at Imperial College London. Human-induced climate change has made these conditions significantly more likely in the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico, and Canada, according to the report. Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at the Imperial College London and one of the authors of the report, said the increased risk for hotter temperatures shows climate change is having a real and measurable impact on the viability of holding World Cups during the northern hemisphere summer. “That the World Cup Final itself — one of the biggest sporting occasions on the planet — faces a non-insignificant risk of being played in ‘cancellation-level’ heat [28°C or 83°F] should be a wake-up call for FIFA and fans, highlighting the urgent need to realize that there is no aspect of society not affected by climate change,” Otto said. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Nuno Mendes of Paris Saint-Germain wipes away sweat from his forehead during the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 final match between Chelsea FC and Paris Saint-Germain at MetLife Stadium on July 13, 2025, in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Robin Alam/ISI Photos/ISI Photos/Getty Images

The couples using ChatGPT as their therapist

Just because you can use AI chatbots like ChatGPT as an intermediary in a spat with a loved one, should you? It’s complicated. While couples often felt less divided when AI was mediating, AI platforms lack the emotional intelligence to adequately read a couple’s body language and tone, understand cultural context and power dynamics, and incorporate a couple’s past into the fight at hand. Read more at the link in our bio. #CouplesTherapy #AI #Relationships #RelationshipAdvice #Advice

How the Pentagon picked a fight with Mormons

Over the weekend, the Department of Defense stepped into one of the more delicate questions in American religiosity: who gets to be called “Christian.” More specifically, does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the Mormon Church), fit the bill? The brouhaha started with Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to simplify and reform the work of military chaplains — those religious and spiritual advisers who tend to the faithful within the military’s ranks. A new list of categories of religious affiliation for military service members was shrunk from over 200 to 31 labels, and though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was included as a religion, it was not labeled “Christian.” On Monday, the Pentagon said the move was unintentional — and amended the original document that blew open this controversy. But the fiery response from LDS leaders spoke both to the LDS church’s long battle for acceptance in America’s faith community and to deeper tensions within the religious right in President Donald Trump’s second term. Even as the administration tries to privilege Christianity in America, its coalition is suspicious about which kind is taking the lead. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: George Frey/Getty Images

The most hopeful cancer news in years

In the last decade, there have been steady, compounding victories over cancer. The US death rate from cancer has fallen 34% from its 1991 peak through 2023, and the five-year relative survival for all cancers combined reached 70% for people diagnosed between 2015 and 2021, up from 50% in the 1970s. One major driver of the shift is immunotherapy. Rather than attacking a tumor directly as conventional chemotherapy does, these treatments use a patient’s own immune system to hunt and kill cancer cells. And scientists’ ambitions are growing, from treating cancer to stopping it before it starts. Read more at the link in our bio, and sign up for the Good News newsletter for more stories like this one. 📸: This microscope image from USC via the NIH shows pancreatic cancer cells, nuclei in blue, growing as a sphere encased in membranes, red. Min Yu/Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, File.

I don’t want children. I do want children. What should I do?

Parenthood ambivalence is one of those experiences that so many people quietly share. As a reader wrote into Sigal Samuel’s advice column, Your Mileage May Vary: “I don’t dream of parenthood or filling my days with caregiving for a young child. But, does anyone?! That doesn’t seem like a good way to decide whether I truly want to be a parent. But then what is?” Here’s what Sigal had to say: “You’re just not well-positioned to predict whether kids will make you happier or more miserable! As the philosopher L.A. Paul notes, you can’t quite know what it’ll be like to have a kid until you have one, and besides, the ‘you’ might become transformed in the process, so that the things that make you happy now are not the same as the things that will make you happy as a parent. So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: If you want to arrive at a decision, you have to go beyond your own interiority. You have to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What is it that you find awesome, thrilling, and intrinsically valuable about being in the world? I’m not asking because I think the key is deciding which values you want to transmit to your kid. Like you said, there’s no guarantee that your kid will embrace your values. Instead, I’m asking because this is the basis on which you can make a choice — not ‘find the answer’ but make a choice — about whether to have kids.” Read more of her answer in the full column at the link in our bio. 🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox

To make friends, join a club. To join a club, find an activity fair.

From the dawn of civilization, humans have hung out in group settings. But participation in these groups has declined, as political scientist Robert Putnam famously explained in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, first published in 2000. Putnam found that enrollment in clubs of all kinds had dropped since the 1960s. Conditions have seemingly not improved. The inaugural Social Connection in America report, released last year, found that two-thirds of participants don’t belong to or never attend a meeting of any sort of organization or club. And the 2025 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey found that about half of US adults reported feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship at least some of the time. Against this backdrop, a crop of community-minded organizers stumbled into a similar train of thought: People are disconnected (perhaps I am one of these people). My city has a treasure trove of hobby clubs and civic organizations. If I lead a horse to water, can I get it to drink? From this seed of an idea, a genre of connectedness events was born — the activity fair, stuff to do fair, joining fair. Find out more at the link in our bio. 📸: Hannah Beier for Vox

AI is ruining children’s books

Forty-one years ago, the late singer, songwriter, and education activist Whitney Houston urged us to teach children and let them lead the way. Decades later, some believe that this means instructing kids to use scissors as forks; teaching them that zookeepers can sweep under water; and leading them to believe that magical, mystical, rainbow-hunting unicorns speak like an HR manager delivering a performance review. There’s also video after video and post after post claiming that it’s not just easy to write and illustrate a children’s book using AI prompts, but also that you can make thousands of dollars doing so. The good news for authors and illustrators — as well as parents who do not want their children to eat salad with office supplies — is that AI in kids’ books is still relatively easy to spot, particularly in illustrations. But the willingness of so many adults to outsource such a foundational and joyful piece of childhood to a computer speaks to a bigger issue: the fundamental misunderstanding of what makes children’s books meaningful and distinctly human. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Jess Hannigan for Vox

A flesh-eating parasite has arrived in the US. Can we stop it?

A flesh-eating parasite that the United States spent decades eradicating, and even longer trying to keep at bay, has now shown up in Texas. Federal officials confirmed this week that New World screwworm, a fly whose larvae burrow into living tissue, had been found in a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County in Southwest Texas. Texas has been watching for this moment. The Texas Animal Health Commission told Vox it has had fly traps along the Texas-Mexico border since July 2025, which has since collected over 54,000 suspicious flies. None of them were confirmed to be New World screwworm. But the detection of this case in Zavala County has moved the state from precautionary work to containment. State officials are now trying to answer the most urgent question: Was this a single stray case, or a sign that adult screwworm flies are already in the area? Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Angela Piazza/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images

How AI could make wars go nuclear

Experts are increasingly worried that AI-enabled systems could cause military conflicts to escalate faster than any human can control or anticipate — or that a miscalculation could lead to AI taking military actions that humans never intended, with deadly consequences. And the risks are especially acute when it comes to nuclear-armed countries like the US and China. To date, AI-enabled systems have been used mainly by militaries like America’s and Israel’s in conflicts where they already had overwhelming advantages over their opponents, or by countries like Ukraine to level the playing field against a much larger foe. But what would it look like in a war between two “near peer” superpowers like the US and China? This is no longer just a theoretical question. Under an initiative that began in the Biden administration, the US is working to develop fleets of small, cheap AI-enabled drones that could create a cost-effective “hellscape” to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Find out more at the link in our bio. 🎨: Mark Harris for Vox

A simple way to lower everyone’s property taxes

Compact neighborhoods cost cities half as much to maintain as sprawled out ones. So why don’t we build more of them? Vox’s @mbolotnikova explains how building densely packed neighborhoods can lower everyone’s property taxes. #Housing #PropertyTax #Sprawl #Cities

When did getting prescriptions start feeling like online shopping?

A generation or two ago, when Americans had an important but nonemergency medical need, many of them would have called on their family doctor, somebody who had treated them for years. These days, patients aren’t visiting the family doctor nearly as frequently. They’re instead heading to what you might think of as drive-thru clinics — some physical, some entirely online — where they order off a menu, undergo a cursory and formulaic interaction with a healthcare provider they’ll never see again, and head out with the product they came to get. It’s like ordering a Big Mac at McDonald’s: When you pull up, you already know exactly what you want. In some cases, this drive-thru healthcare approach is filling genuine holes in healthcare access for Americans who are in need, such as people in the United States who live in states with restricted access to reproductive and abortion services, and who have had no choice but to seek help online from other providers out of state. Beyond that, we’re dealing with a doctor shortage. But replacing the traditional doctor-patient relationship with something brief and transactional presents real risks to patients and their long-term well-being. Some of the most common reasons for seeking these services — erectile dysfunction medications or hair loss treatments — could be signs of an underlying health condition that would benefit from a more serious conversation with a personal physician. Read more at the link in our bio. 🎨: Celia Jacobs for Vox

A new investigation reveals why you can’t take meat companies at their word

In 2019, Erin Wing worked undercover for the animal protection nonprofit Animal Outlook at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off the coast of Maine, where they were fattened up to be slaughtered and sold under the brand name True North Seafood at grocery stores across the Northeastern US. During her nearly three months there, she uncovered several instances of cruelty. Shortly after Animal Outlook released a video of the investigation, Cooke Aquaculture CEO Glenn Cooke apologized. But since then, nothing much has changed. In some instances, investigations have led to companies making substantive changes, such as phasing out small cages for pigs and chickens. But like with Cooke Aquaculture, most farms and companies promise to make reforms after they’ve been exposed, only for follow-up investigations to reveal continued abuse and miserable living conditions. Learn more at the link in our bio. 🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images 📸: Animal Outlook

This year’s wild NBA Finals, explained

The New York Knicks are facing the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA finals in a matchup that has the internet on fire. Vox’s Benjy Sarlin breaks down what you need to know even if you’re not a basketball fan — and gives a nod to his pick. #NBA #NBAFinals #Knicks #Spurs

How generosity became cringe

It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket challenge — a viral social media trend to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research that involved soaking yourself with ice water and pressuring others to do the same — was in full swing. As if under an icy spell, the world came together in a way it never would again. Today, the ice bucket challenge and the litany of surreal, grainy videos it spawned are a time capsule of a bygone era, or at the very least, a bygone internet. Back then, generosity was trendy for the one percent and 99% alike, and Bill Gates, alongside both his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, was influencer number one. Today’s billionaires appear more cynical than they used to be, and the rest of us seem to be, too. Gone are the days when tech overlords challenged one another to charity stunts rather than cage matches. If social media once seemed poised to save the world one hashtag at a time — think #Movember, #Kony2012, and #BringBackOurGirls — then today, it feels considerably more likely to tear us all apart. For much of the past decade, fewer Americans have chosen to give to charity each year, while most billionaires appear to be giving away a diminishing share of their ballooning fortunes. The Giving Pledge, which held so much promise in 2010, has lost much of its steam and even come under direct attack from techno-cynics like Peter Thiel. The vibes have turned very bad. Read more at the link in our bio. 🎨: Celia Jacobs for Vox

The new fight over raw milk, explained

While it’s easy to buy raw milk at popular grocery stores like Erewhon in California, other states have made it difficult to buy or sell it. The CDC recommends that all milk be pasteurized, but there are over 40 bills in 18 states that would make it more accessible. So what’s going on here? Vox’s Avishay Artsy explains how milk got to be so controversial. #RawMilk #UnpasteurizedMilk #MAHA

Men who looksmaxx are also brutally fertility-mogging themselves

Interest in testosterone therapy has exploded in recent years. Prescriptions for the medication have increased 154% since 2020, with the sharpest rise in men ages 35 to 44, according to market research data provided to the New York Times. With the rise of video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, young men are facing the kinds of pressures to “perfect the face and body” that women have long faced, said Jordan Foster, a sociology professor at MacEwan University in Canada who studies culture, media, and beauty. To achieve the muscular physiques prized on social media, many are turning to testosterone. But it’s a complicated moment for young men to take a medication that reduces their sperm count, with RFK Jr. and other Trump administration officials warning of a “fertility crisis” in America. Read more at the link in our bio.

Our quest for a new species

Can we find a new species in New York City? 👀🐛🐞 We're sure going to try. Working with NYC Parks, Central Park Conservancy, and Prospect Park Alliance, we set up two large bug traps in NYC's Central Park and Prospect Park that will collect insects this summer. Follow along as we uncover our findings! #NYC #CentralPark #ProspectPark #Insects #Science

Americans don’t know how to fight AI. So they’re fighting data centers.

On its surface, the national revolt against data centers seems simple: They are a nuisance, and people do not want them in their proverbial backyards. But Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova hasn’t been able to let go of the idea that there must be something much deeper driving the backlash against them, and few other subjects have confounded her more than trying to figure out what to think about it. These facilities — the massive suburban and exurban warehouses that power AI, along with much of what we do on the modern internet — spew noise, have been accused of guzzling electricity and water, and have a halo of general ugliness around them. But what it really boils down to is a fear of AI. “If you are terrified that AI is ushering in a future that will be miserable to live in, I fully share in that feeling (and would personally prefer to go back to a world before ChatGPT),” Marina writes. “And I think this sentiment, rather than any ecological anxiety, explains much of why Americans are suddenly fighting to ban the physical infrastructure on which AI and tech more generally depends, why they’re so pessimistic about AI in general, and why college seniors graduating this spring have been booing the mere mention of AI off the commencement stage.” Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Demonstrators protest a data center in Tucson, Arizona, in May 2026. Mamta Popat/Arizona Daily Star via Getty Images

New college grads are doing better than the vibes suggest

There’s no doubt that 2026 will be a rough launch for new college grads. Recent graduates ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of about 5.7% in early 2026, above the national average of 4.3%. Hiring has slowed to the lowest rate outside the pandemic since 2014, while entry-level postings have fallen roughly 35% over the past 18 months. But a rough launch doesn’t mean a rough life, and while the longer-term impact of AI is unknowable, it’s far from the worst time, even in recent memory, to graduate into the workforce. The data still says, for most graduates, a college degree is more than worth the investment. Read more at the link in our bio.

How to screw up universal childcare

New Mexico has touted itself as the first state to offer universal no-cost childcare, thanks to a long, 15-year fight led by parents, childcare providers, advocates, and voters. In 2022, they achieved an iconic, grassroots win, unlocking unprecedented, permanent funding for early education through a ballot initiative. This financing victory accounted for the vast majority of the 130% growth in the state’s early childhood budget since 2019, enabling the state to more than double the number of children served in its childcare and prekindergarten programs and to make these programs free for families using them. But the decisions about how to implement the state’s Universal Child Care program have continued to dig New Mexico deeper into policies that have proven elsewhere to fail. In the rush to claim victory, the state has prioritized expanding demand-side subsidies, giving parents vouchers for free childcare. However, by flooding the market with demand without sufficiently increasing the number of actual places for families to bring their children, or by paying educators enough to stay in the field, the state is creating a textbook policy failure. And if New Mexico stumbles, it could drag down similar efforts around the country. Read more at the link in our bio. 🎨: Celia Jacobs for Vox

MAGA’s civil war over immigration is over. Silicon Valley lost.

For more than 50 years, through the “adjustment of status” process, visa holders in the United States have been able to remain in the country while applying for permanent residency. This was no small thing. For legal immigrants, the alternative to securing an adjustment of status is not taking a short sojourn abroad while Uncle Sam inspects their paperwork. Rather, due to various quirks of US immigration law, some immigrants must wait more than a decade for their green card applications to be approved. But this could be changing as the Trump administration announced last Friday that US visa holders who want a green card must first return to their home countries and apply from there, “except in extraordinary circumstances.” Whether this will actually happen is unclear. Both the memo officially laying out the policy — and the administration’s messaging about it — contain ambiguities and apparent contradictions. Find out more at the link in our bio.

A new Supreme Court opinion is terrible news for federal workers

Remember DOGE, the Elon Musk-led “government efficiency” project that spread chaos during President Donald Trump’s first few months back in office, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and then vanished almost as abruptly as it began? If you didn’t lose your job in one of Musk’s federal employee purges, or you aren’t one of the remaining federal civil servants who has to figure out how to do your job without many of your colleagues around, DOGE is probably little more than a memory. But the legacy of this era of arbitrary firings is still being litigated in federal court, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett just handed down some very bad news for nearly every civilian who works for the federal government. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The real lesson of the E. Jean Carroll investigation is Trump’s weakness

The DOJ is reportedly opening a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the woman who won $88 million in damages after a jury found Trump sexually abused her. Vox's Zack Beauchamp breaks down why legal experts say the case is built on shaky ground and what it reveals about how Trump is using the Justice Department against his critics. Read the full analysis at the link in bio.

Millions of Americans are losing their health insurance

The Affordable Care Act has greatly decreased the number of uninsured Americans, taking it from 16% in 2010 to 8.3% in 2025, according to estimates. But now, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is causing millions of Americans to lose their coverage. The bill established work requirements to target the people covered by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and allowed subsidies that had helped millions of people to buy private coverage on the ACA marketplaces to lapse. The uninsured rate has spiked before, but it’s usually the byproduct of an economic crisis; people lose their jobs, and they lose their coverage. What makes the current turmoil different is that it is entirely a matter of policy choices. Now, millions of Americans will pay the price. Read more at the link in our bio.

I asked a billionaire about his environmental philanthropy. It didn’t go well.

Earlier this year, a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan auctioned off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s in New York City. It sold for nearly $18 million. A press release prior to the auction noted that Kaplan would donate the proceeds of the sale to an environmental organization that he co-founded, called Panthera, which conserves wild cats like lions and jaguars. At face value, Kaplan’s gift is extraordinarily generous. But when Vox’s Benji Jones spoke with Kaplan after the auction, their chat exposed a more complicated and sometimes troubling side of big-money environmental giving. Kaplan became a billionaire through exploring for, mining, and investing in natural resources, including silver, gold, and natural gas. He remains active in metals mining to this day. That work sits awkwardly next to what Kaplan told Benji is his primary passion: wildlife conservation, and in particular, the big cats that Panthera works to protect. Mining is, by any measure, an unusually destructive industry for the environment and for wildlife. So he asked Kaplan: Does he see, in any way, his environmental philanthropy as a counterweight to the impact of his industry? “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” he told Benji over Zoom from a car. “First of all, I’m not going to spend time on educating you about why mining has a very, very tiny footprint when you compare it to agriculture and climate change. Everyone knows that if it’s a choice between my business and Panthera, I’m always choosing Panthera. With all due respect, I’m busy, so do you have anything [else] that you’d like to discuss?” The point is that a man who has spent decades profiting from an industry that experts say harms wild animals — and who has also spent decades now giving tens of millions of dollars to protect them — doesn’t see any connection between the two. And he is not alone. Read more at the link in our bio. 🎨: Pete Ryan for Vox

The Texas Senate candidates have two radically different visions of Christianity

Now that Ken Paxton, the conservative attorney general of Texas, has defeated incumbent John Cornyn for the Republican Senate nomination, we may see something unusual in modern American elections: a theological throwdown. In a closely watched and competitive race, Paxton will be facing off against James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and the Democratic nominee. The race is now set to be a battle between two very different worldviews about the role of Christianity. Talarico has centered the concept of “radical love” in his political identity and campaign platform: He wants to heal political divisions, welcome Americans who aren’t typically Democrats to his campaign, and move beyond anger toward any one person (like President Donald Trump or Paxton) toward a forward-looking agenda that goes after oligarchs, the political establishment, and the “corrupt” elite. Paxton is solidly in the Christian nationalist camp. Generally, Christian nationalists oppose the separation of church and state; seek to make Christianity the official religion of the state; call for Biblical morality to determine the law; and argue that the United States has God’s unique blessing among other nations. He has made a name for himself as a proponent of an aggressive form of religious liberty, arguing not just that the state should pull back and cede space to the faithful, but that the state should actively promote a specific version of Christian ethics and morality. He supported efforts to bring Christian prayer and Scripture into public schools, to set aside time for Bible readings and prayers, and to display the Ten Commandments on public property. Read more about why the Paxton-Talarico race is partly a referendum on what Christians will tolerate as Christian-like behavior at the link in our bio. 📸: Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images and Danielle Villasana/Getty Images

The global epidemic of death by cars

The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox. But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of mortality and injury to everyday life, a risk that falls most heavily on the world’s poor. It kills about as many people as the world’s deadliest infectious disease — tuberculosis — and it’s the leading cause of death globally for people in the prime of their lives, aged 5 to 29. It is one of the defining technologies of modern life, one of the 20th century’s most dangerous gifts: the car. Around 1.19 million people globally are killed by road crashes every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (some estimates put the number higher), and many times more — likely between 20 and 50 million — are injured, sometimes leaving them with life-altering disabilities. More than 90% of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations, although these countries contain only around 60% of the world’s cars. Learn more at the link in our bio.

Why so many people are talking about “holding trauma in your jaw” right now

Have you seen videos like this on social media? A young woman lies face-up on a massage table while a practitioner manipulates her cheeks and jaw from inside her mouth. Often labeled “buccal massage,” “jaw release,” or “intraoral massage,” these treatments are marketed as a way to release stored trauma — with clients sometimes shown crying afterward. While the mind and body are deeply connected, there’s little evidence that our jaws literally store trauma the way these practitioners claim.

This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention

On May 17, the World Health Organization declared a rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a “public health emergency of international concern,” only the ninth-ever time the agency has made that designation. In the weeks since, at least 220 people have died of the highly fatal virus, and more than 900 suspected cases have been identified so far. It is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record. And yet, that toll is likely a tremendous undercount because, as the New York Times reported from the ground this week, “only a trickle of tests are being processed every day” in the cities most affected by the outbreak. “The virus is far ahead of us,” Ahmed Mahat, a manager with International Medical Corps, told the Times. “And it’s spreading fast.” What are the reasons for this fast spread? The specific strain of Ebola is harder to diagnose. The outbreak began in a remote province of eastern Congo, an active war zone, where what health systems exist have been ravaged by decades of armed conflict. And the US-funded programs to detect new Ebola cases and dispatch a response were frozen under the Trump administration, according to Stat. Read more at the link in our bio. 📸: Michel Lunanga/Getty Images

You can do everything right and things can still go wrong. “Moral luck” is a way to live with that.

The questions Vox's Sigal Samuel tackles in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house. Her partner is due to give birth to their first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. Sigal decided to tackle her dilemma in her last column before beginning her parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward. “If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?” Sigal’s partner asks. “Your goal is not to control every possible outcome,” Sigal responds. “The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome. Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.” Read the full column at the link in our bio. 🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox