Vox

“Longevity” — a buzzy catchall for the quest for a longer life — is having a moment. Tech titans like Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos are spending billions to fund research into how to slow aging. Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Hailey Bieber are touting peptide use. And the world’s most powerful authoritarian […]

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 […]

In a sense, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is getting what he wanted. Amodei has long argued that AI is becoming dangerously powerful — and thus, that regulatory restrictions on the technology are urgently needed. In an essay published last week, Amodei wrote that the release of cutting-edge AI models “should be blocked or reversed as […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As the midterm elections approach, something strange has happened: Democratic politicians who once talked about climate change as the defining crisis of our time now barely mention it at all. The phrase has begun disappearing from their speeches, social medi…

You might have particular feelings about snakes, but for millions of Americans they’re a member of the household. And their popularity as pets has only been growing: From 2018 to 2024, the number of households that own a pet snake rose from about 810,000 to 1.3 million. And the share of snake-owning households with more […]

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 […]

I turned 48 this week, which meant it was time for my annual physical. After the usual battery of questions from my doctor — How much did I drink? Was I exercising? How was I sleeping? — it was my turn to ask a question. I had one prepared: Should I get the shingles vaccine? […]

It’s been a pivotal last week for the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the United States. The Southern Baptist Convention took a series of moves to the social and theological right at their annual gathering — a shift urged on by an upstart far-right movement that now appears to be in the driver’s seat. Gathered […]

Editor’s note, June 14, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on June 8, 2025. This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each […]

My parents started dating back in the ’80s and for a while, they were long-distance. Since this was before our current era of smartphones and email, one of the ways they kept in touch was mail: My father would send cassette tapes to my mom with songs that reminded him of her, and they would […]

Here’s what’s undeniable: The Democratic electorate has dramatically shifted when it comes to the United States’ relationship with Israel. Earlier this year, a national poll from Gallup found that 41 percent of Americans sympathize with Palestinians and 36 percent with Israelis — the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric in 2001 that Israelis […]

Gas prices are high right now — an average of roughly a dollar more than they were last year for Americans. But considering that we’re not more than 100 days into the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which the International Energy Agency called the “most severe oil supply shock in history,” it seems like […]

About a year ago, the Supreme Court handed down a baffling decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025). In Medina, South Carolina committed an obvious violation of federal Medicaid law, but the Court’s Republican majority seemed to bend over backward to prevent the patients affected by this legal violation from suing to enforce their rights. […]

There’s no such a thing as a truly pristine landscape — humans have, over millennia, shaped every environment on Earth — but the Boundary Waters wilderness of northeastern Minnesota comes pretty darn close.  Stretching across more than a million acres near the Canadian border, about four hours north of Minneapolis, the Boundary Waters is a […]

A new, bipartisan idea is taking Washington by storm: collective ownership of the means of production.  Sort of, anyway. Last Friday, President Donald Trump announced that he would soon be meeting with the executives of top AI companies to discuss a financial “partnership.”  “There are concepts where pieces [of these companies] could be given to […]

AI company CEOs Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) disagree on a lot, like how fast the technology should develop, the best way to regulate it, and how to prepare society for smarter-than-human AI, among other things.  That makes it all the more remarkable that they — along with 85 […]

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: Donald Trump has a new pick for director of national intelligence.  Who’s the new guy? Jay Clayton, currently the US attorney for the Southern District […]

With his new film Disclosure Day, filmmaker Steven Spielberg is returning to the subject that helped make him one of the most successful directors in the world: extraterrestrials (or ETs).  But his movie also focuses on a second topic that has long preoccupied Spielberg and other sci-fi directors: faith. It’s a story about believing in […]

Let’s be frank: When you go to see your personal doctor or stop at an urgent care for a quick visit, you probably don’t always tell the physician the whole truth and nothing but the truth. According to one major study, between 60 and 80 percent of US adults have reported they withheld at least […]

Last fall, Graham Platner — an oysterman running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Maine — landed in hot water, when some of his old Reddit posts, showing him blaming victims of sexual assault and calling himself a communist, surfaced. Then, there was a story about the Nazi imagery tattooed on his chest. […]