Everyone knows how much gasoline prices matter. The recent spike in gas prices triggered by the war with Iran has fueled deep pessimism about the economy and weighed heavily on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings.

But diesel fuel — the lifeblood of shipping, agriculture, and heavy industry — usually flies under the radar. Its price has surged too, and while truckers and farmers are feeling the initial blow, the rest of the country won’t be far behind.

“Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”

On the podcast, Bomey discusses what’s driving the price spike, how quickly it’s going to become a problem for everyday consumers, and whether electric semi trucks could offer a way out.

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

What is happening with diesel?

There was one major geopolitical event this year that disrupted the entire energy economy, which is the US and Israel attacking Iran. Iran is at the center of the oil economy in some ways, but primarily you have to look at the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the jockeying over it that has happened in the months since.

Once they closed the strait, it disrupted the entire global energy economy because it handles a substantial portion of the shipping bringing supplies out of the Middle East. That affected diesel prices, gasoline prices, jet fuel prices, and effectively everything based on crude oil.

Who are the people right now that are profoundly freaked out about the cost of diesel?

First off, truckers are freaked out because their cost of doing business is going much higher. Farmers are also freaked out because they’re already facing real pressures from trade wars and things that are out of control, like climate issues, that have caused their costs to go higher. 

The price of diesel affecting farmers eventually affects the price they charge, which ultimately gets to the consumer because it ends up costing more to pay for things like an ear of corn.

How stark do you think this might be? In a month or two, do you think I could go down to Walmart and see that something I buy all the time is now a dollar more expensive? 

I think the impact is imminent. This flows through very quickly. We’re not talking about months; we’re talking about weeks, if not days, before people will start to notice increases, especially in the grocery aisle. That’s the first place people will notice it because fresh food has to be shipped on a weekly basis. Diesel prices are going to have a big effect on food inflation. This is coming off of several years of food price increases that we experienced in the wake of the pandemic.

We’re also barreling toward the holiday shopping season, which is going to be affected by this as well. If a toy, for example, is made with a resin affected by the cost of crude oil, which also affects the cost of diesel, and then it’s shipped over the road to Walmart in a truck that uses diesel, all of these things add up and will probably lead to higher prices.

We’ve also got an issue with heating oil, which is a fuel used primarily by households in the Northeast to heat their homes. Heating oil, diesel, and all of these oil-based products are caught up in this vortex right now. Ultimately, it is not something the ordinary person can do much about.

Do the industries that rely on diesel have any other options?

There are definitely alternatives to diesel, but in many cases, they cannot be switched to quickly. If you think about the trucking industry, they are invested heavily in big rigs that take products from place A to place B. If you are invested in a truck, yes, you could theoretically switch, but you would be scrapping this huge investment you’ve made. Diesel trucks are not really going anywhere immediately. A lot of times, they’re simply still the best way to get somewhere.

You can switch to rail; railroads are definitely a competitor to trucking, but really only best for certain types of products. There are other types of trucks you can buy. Compressed natural gas or liquid natural gas is an alternative fuel for some trucks, and biodiesel can actually be good. Hydrogen is more of a futuristic thing down the road.

In the short term, there is the possibility of using electric trucks. That is starting to become more realistic. In fact, in recent days, Tesla began major production of the Tesla Semi, an electric semitruck we’ve been waiting for for years. I remember covering this in 2018 when Tesla debuted the semi, and we all thought it was going to be coming out soon.

It has taken nearly a decade for this to finally become a reality in large proportions, but the Tesla Semi is an electric truck that could be an alternative for some. There are other companies making electric trucks too, so that could be viable. But the problem with electric trucks is that the battery is so heavy, making it tough to compete with diesel on shipping heavy items.

It was often joked that when the Tesla Semi first debuted, the very first thing it shipped was a bunch of bags of Cheetos because they were so light and the truck couldn’t handle extra weight. They had a deal with PepsiCo, and it wasn’t ready at the time to ship anything heavy. 

It’s a lot better now, but the issue is still how heavy electric truck batteries are, which will make them somewhat limited in capacity. However, we are seeing some demand for the Tesla Semi that indicates it might become more competitive because of the price of diesel.

So when prices are high, generally somebody somewhere is benefiting. Who is it, in this case?

The people benefiting from diesel prices being so high are the refineries, which a lot of people don’t think about much because they’re the middle person in this entire process. They take the crude oil and turn it into usable diesel for a pickup truck, a semi truck, or farming equipment. 

The refinery business is experiencing high demand right now, and there’s limited capacity to do this because of issues in Russia, Iran, and other places throughout the world. There’s really nowhere else to do this, and therefore they can charge higher prices. That means higher profits for the refineries.

All of this is shaping up to potentially mean a really ugly winter. One thing I think about a lot is that American consumers will accept a lot of pain. We had Covid — the inflation, and shortages of literally everything. Then we had the war in Ukraine, and prices went up again. 

People still keep spending money, even as we predict this one’s going to get bad. People go to the store and spend money, and maybe they gripe, but it’s not like we’re out in the streets. Do you think this coming diesel shock — imminent, in your words — is going to be different?

I’m not an economist, but there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the economy where consumer sentiment is at rock bottom, but consumer spending is actually really strong. There’s a gap emerging between what people say they feel and what they’re actually doing — in this case, they’re still spending. 

Maybe it’s YOLO spending. They’re thinking they don’t have much going for them, so they’re just going to keep spending. I’ve experienced that a little bit, so I don’t blame anybody.

At the end of the day, the numbers matter a little bit more than what people say they feel. But I do think people are going to hit a breaking point because they simply cannot continue this level of spending if the underlying fundamentals of the economy start to collapse.

Maddie Kowalski is a student at the University of Florida. Last November, someone found nonconsensual intimate images and videos of her, stitched them together, and uploaded them to X, where they were viewed millions of times.

“Can you imagine?” asked Ej Dickson, a senior culture writer at Wired who reported on Kowalski’s story earlier this month. “You’re 19 years old and a video that you don’t even remember shooting, let alone consenting to, goes viral nationally along with your name and your sorority, and your parents, your grandparents, everybody in your life sees it. It’s a humiliation and a privacy violation that is kind of incomprehensible.”

The video was followed by a campaign of intimidation and harassment. Kowalski and her parents received threatening phone calls and texts. People on the internet posted old photos of her, her father’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap. Kowalski sought help from the police, from the university, and from X. But the video was being shared faster than the posts could be removed, and her name became a trending topic on X.

What made the video go viral, Dickson explains, is something called the “burnerverse”: a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X. The community mainly exists to discuss college sports, but sometimes it disseminates videos and rumors aimed at shaming young women and ruining their lives. The burnerverse has harassed Kowalski and her family for nearly a year, sometimes encouraging her to kill herself.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Dickson about the online network that targeted Kowalski, and why it’s been so difficult to do anything to stop it. 

Below is an excerpt of the 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.

Your story describes how Maddie has, without even realizing it, entered into something called the burnerverse. This is something I think a lot of us, prior to your piece, had not heard of. What is the burnerverse?

I hadn’t heard of it either. The burnerverse is an online community of anonymous accounts, and ostensibly these are college sports fan accounts. They talk about the coaches, the players, new recruits, they share memes after their team loses, but there’s a corner of the community that has emerged that is pretty violently racist and misogynistic and antisemitic. And one of the things that they’ve started doing in recent years is doxxing young college-age women like Maddie.

Why is it called the burnerverse?

Because it consists of burner accounts, anonymous accounts.

Okay. So the reason that whoever is spreading these videos of Maddie and others feels comfortable doing that is because they’re anonymous. Nobody knows who’s behind them?

Yes, exactly. And I also want to be clear: This is a small segment of the college sports burner community. 

There are a lot of these accounts that are pretty innocuous and would never dream of doing something like this to a young woman. I would say probably the vast majority of these accounts are not like that, but it is a sizable enough segment that they’re able to make these types of narratives go viral.

What do we know about who is part of the burnerverse? Who is likely to be a part of this?

That was one of the most shocking things that I learned from my reporting, actually. I had assumed that these were largely frat kids. I assumed that they were largely SEC frat kids because a lot of these young girls who have been doxed were students at SEC schools. But when I actually started looking into these accounts and who was behind them and who was sharing these images and making these jokes about Maddie, I learned it was way more wide-ranging than that. 

There are a lot of college students who are involved in the burnerverse, but it’s also men who are 10, 20, 30 years out of college. Sometimes they have wives. Sometimes they have children. Sometimes they have grandchildren. They’re from all over the country. It’s not limited to one race or economic demographic. It’s really very wide-ranging, which is kind of what makes it so terrifying.

And it is not just Maddie Kowalski. What did you learn about other young women who are targeted by this?

No, it’s not. So perhaps the most well-known case is this girl named Mary Kate Cornett, who was a student at Ole Miss in February 2025 when this salacious campus rumor about her sex life started going viral. And the rumor was false and it was clearly defamatory, but it went so viral that it kind of escaped containment from Ole Miss and went viral among SEC schools and then went viral nationally, to the point where her name was trending nationally on X. 

This very famous ESPN personality, Pat McAfee, talked about her without using her name, but talked about her and the details of this rumor on his podcast. And a lot of these athletes and college sports personalities tweeted about it as well. What started as an unverifiable and false rumor about a college girl’s sex life was just blown up and amplified to the degree that it was a national news story within a couple of hours. 

The speed with which this happens — [Cornett]she was telling me that basically a few hours after she learned that she was going viral, her parents’ house was swatted. The speed with which this community works toward making these women’s lives a living hell is really, really rapid.

Did you come away with an understanding of how an online community that is meant to be talking about college sports descends into this?

Part of it is just a consequence of how internet subcultures work. Even fairly innocuous, large internet subcultures and communities, there’s always going to be a small part of any online subculture that splinters off and forms its own community that is going to skew a little bit more extremist. 

That’s not surprising in itself, but I do think that there is something about the discourse surrounding college sports, particularly the media ecosystem that’s represented by Barstool, that does create a space for this type of rampant misogyny to foment. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the accounts that I have seen posting really horrible defamatory content about Maddie are smaller Barstool accounts that are associated with individual colleges. I do think that has definitely played a role.

Why did Maddie become the target of these people in the burnerverse?

Because she’s young and she’s attractive. Basically, the criteria is these women are young, attractive, they’re usually white for some reason, and they are perceived to have departed from a sexual norm in some way. 

They’re either subject to some sort of rumor about their sex life or their sexual behavior or maybe a text message leaks about them or a photo. Then these guys take it and they blow it up and it goes viral nationally. 

They’re very purposeful about it too. I can’t tell you how many tweets I’ve seen that are just tweets of a girl’s name and they’re like, “Make her famous, make her go viral.”

In an ideal world, this kind of thing would be stopped before it even happened. So, knowing that there is not much that victims can do, what are the methods of preventing this?

That’s a very complicated question. I know that there are platforms developing various AI tools in order to prevent nonconsensual intimate images from spreading. But I imagine that would be pretty difficult to regulate, especially with the rise of deepfakes and with the rise of-AI manipulated nonconsensual images, so I don’t have a lot of faith in that. 

Honestly, I think that the biggest path toward prevention is — can I say this? Parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit.

You can say that. You can absolutely say that.

I think that the biggest course of prevention is parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit, honestly. To just set a clear line and say, “It’s not okay to view women as commodities. It’s not okay to talk about women like this. It’s not okay to view social media engagement as the ultimate goal without thinking about the lives that you’re impacting by spreading this content.” I think that parents need to have conversations with their kids about that. 

I think that there needs to be education within fraternities and sororities and universities because it’s not like what happened to Maddie Kowalski is an isolated incident. I was able to identify almost a dozen other young women who have been targeted by the burnerverse in this way. 

I think that there needs to be more discussion of this in general because it’s not just the burnerverse. It’s this larger ecosystem that is socially ordained at this point of men saying horrible things and doing horrible things to women with impunity. That’s the real problem.

At the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, the documentary NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it’s all anyone’s talking about, even though few have actually seen it. 

Made by two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the movie takes place on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, where 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence agents and soldiers discuss things that they did in Gaza and how they did them.

As Bilge Ebiri writes in his Vulture review of NAZA, “One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll.”Another interviewee agrees that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. 

Since its reception in Venice, the film has faced harsh criticism from the Israeli government — with at least one politician issuing a call to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. 

Shany Littman is a journalist for Haaretz in Israel and has been reporting on the film’s reception. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the conversation around the movie in Israel. 

Below is an excerpt of the 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.

Have you seen the documentary NAZA?

I haven’t. I asked the PR person of the movie to send me a link and it’s not possible. I mean, considering the huge storm that came out, they’re probably rethinking how to handle the distribution of the film.

What I hear you saying is it’s safe to assume most people in Israel have not actually been able to see the movie. Is that right?

Yes, that’s correct.

But they are aware of what is in it. Let’s talk about the conversation around this movie in Israel. What’s the reaction been like?

You can find many different types of criticism from all sides of a political range. It’s not only right-wing people or people who are supporting the war. The claims are first that maybe the film itself is not verified. They have witnesses that are anonymous that they didn’t verify well enough. But I think most people — they just feel that this is an opportunity for all the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and [antisemitic] people in the world to attack Israel. Israelis from all sides are afraid of the way the world is seeing us at the moment. 

Is anybody in Israel saying, “Hey, we’re glad that they did it. We’re glad that they made this movie”?

Yes. There are people who are supporting Yuval and Rachel, the filmmakers, supporting their right to criticize, to investigate. As a liberal country, we should be able to investigate ourselves, to criticize ourselves. They are doing their work as journalists. 

There has also been a reaction from the Israeli government at a more official level. What has the Israeli government said about this film?

“There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening.”

The first person to react was the minister of culture. He said that the nationality of Yuval and the filmmakers should be revoked. That they should not be Israeli citizens anymore. There’s a really long history of films that were criticized, especially by different culture ministers. But I haven’t seen anything like this, like what is happening now. This is really frightening. I’m completely horrified by this. 

I already saw some clips on social media by people who were filming themselves where…you could see a house [in the background] and someone was saying, “You can all come here. This is the house of Rachel Szor’s parents. They live here and you can come and do whatever you want. I invite you all to come here and take revenge.” And there were several clips with the same message. 

I’m guessing they’re not coming back to Israel at the moment. I think it has become really dangerous for them to be here, and it’s a new level. I published an article about this. I didn’t do the movie. I just published an article supporting them in Haaretz and my mother is afraid that someone will attack me. The echoes of this event, they’re going very far now.

Are you frightened for the filmmakers if they choose to return? Do you fear for their safety?

Yes, absolutely. Especially because the elections are coming in a month. Many Israelis see this day as like the red line or the moment where we will be able to know if we can still live in Israel as a democracy, as a liberal democracy, or that the country has changed in a way that many [civil] rights and liberties that we think we have are gone. And that this country is not a democracy anymore. And so I think this is also why the blood is boiling.

This is a very, very tense and fragile moment. And for them I assume it is even more crucial and I hope they will not do anything that will put them in danger.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

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.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.

In the last decade, the cost of youth sports has skyrocketed. Cheaper, more local rec leagues have lost out premium travel leagues funded by private equity. The Covid-19 pandemic made things worse. As a result, some families are now paying thousands of dollars to keep their kid in a sport that they love.

Caitlin Moscatello wrote about the phenomenon last month for New York magazine. She says the shift started during the pandemic when park and rec budgets were slashed and the premium leagues became the only game in town. Private money saw the opportunity and seized it. Now, participating in youth sports means you’re caught in a pay-to-play model. 

In return, elementary-aged children are being railroaded into a professionalized environment before they’re ready. More children are suffering from overuse injuries and are getting locked into a sport before they even have time to decide if they love it. 

Moscatello joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down what happened to youth sports, the impact on children, and whether it’s possible to reverse this trend. 

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

Private money in youth sports doesn’t seem to make a ton of sense. Who’s going to make money off of an 8-year-old playing soccer? And yet what you found is there’s a lot going on here. Give me a broad sense of what’s been happening.

It was a little over a decade ago that you really started to see this influx of big money coming into the youth sports sector. And what you see right before and then certainly after Covid is investors using what’s called a roll-up strategy — where they own, or have a financial stake in, different touch points that families would have in the sport that their child’s playing.

For instance, they might have a stake in the league itself, but also the apparel company where families are required to buy the uniforms, and the software or the app that families need to go on to look at the team’s schedule, and in some cases look at updated stats and standings. There can be a hotel partner, so even though there’s a less expensive hotel down the street, they’re required to stay at this specific hotel. 

There’s also money to be made on what’s being called the media side of all this. Parents described to me not being able to record video at their child’s game, but then being sold a package of photos and videos, which, again, is just another financial touchpoint.

How much are parents spending on sports?

But ultimately, in their quest to do something good for their kids, the way that the sports ecosystem has changed and is continuing to change can potentially set them up for long-term harm.

The average spend is a little over $1,000 a year, but many of the families that I spoke with, especially in this travel private club sector, can spend anywhere from $3,000 a season. It can be $5,000 or $10,000 a season depending on the sport, where you are, the level of play. I spoke with numerous families who were spending $25,000 a year. 

There was one mother that I spoke with. She’s a single mom. She was pet-sitting on the side in addition to her full-time job to help offset the cost of her son’s $25,000-a-year hockey program. I also came across a lot of GoFundMes for families who are trying to get their 6-year-old or their 7-year-old or their 8-year-old who made the travel fill-in-the-blank soccer, baseball team. And they’re fundraising to try to make that happen.

And for your $25,000 or more a year, what are you getting?

It’s a loaded question. Part of what’s drawing families to this in some areas is that they really feel like they have no other choice. Rec programs are sparse. They also don’t extend as long as they used to. 

I’m an elder millennial, I guess I would say, and back in the ’90s, it was still very much that you could play a rec sport through eighth grade and then if you chose to, go on and play in high school. What’s happening is that rec programs now are ending much earlier. In some places it can be difficult to find a rec program after maybe third or fourth grade. And these programs are also getting diluted because the private leagues are incentivized to attract families earlier and earlier.

Now you start to see travel teams and even tryouts for kindergartners, first-graders, second-graders. And what I was hearing from parents over and over again was that there was this fear of missing out: “This isn’t something I would necessarily choose for my kid, but if we don’t get in on the ground floor, the elevator’s going to go up without us and we’re never going to catch up and my kid won’t be able to play and everyone around me seems to be doing this now, so we’re going to do it too.”

What this does to the rec programs is that it dilutes them really early in a couple of ways. One, it just brings the level of play down when kids start leaving in the first and second grade, by third grade. Also, there just aren’t as many kids.   

And then the other factor is that kids and parents both notice that these other leagues exist. And so another thing that I kept hearing was, “Well, the rec programs sort of felt second-rate and we’re looking across the field.” There was this one father, he’s a lacrosse coach and he has two children who now play travel lacrosse. And he’s like, “It’s kind of hard when you look across the field and you see the kids with their shiny helmets and their fancy uniforms and their professional coach.”

What did you find all of this money in youth sports is doing to the youths playing the sports?

The benefits of sports have been really well established. Kids who play sports have everything from higher levels of academic achievement to higher self-esteem, better long-term health outcomes. 

But ultimately, in their quest to do something good for their kids, the way that the sports ecosystem has changed and is continuing to change can potentially set them up for long-term harm. It can be psychological. So they’re seeing stress and anxiety, burnout, but also physical [harm]. 

There’s a surge of overuse injuries now in young athletes, especially because the private programs are incentivized again to get kids playing as much as possible. And so what’s happening now is that you have young children playing in this hyper-competitive year-round environment. 

Medical advice has said that kids should play all different sports, use different muscles, learn different skills. And that’s what’s appropriate for young developing bodies, not playing one sport 10 to 12 months a year, tournaments on the weekends, six games, practices three or four times a week where then you see these overuse injuries, because kids are just doing that same motion over and over again. 

Is there any movement among parents to stop this, to say, “This has gone too far, let’s not do it anymore.”

This is a collective action problem. If more parents stayed in the rec programs, then we would have a more robust rec system: more kids play, it’s more accessible, it’s more affordable. It’s also local and fun.

I don’t want to be so naive and think, “Oh, things could go back to the way they were in the ’90s.” I think you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube entirely. But the good news is that we do have a model for a pathway forward.

Minnesota Ice Hockey is a nonprofit youth sports program, the core of which is 250 public rinks. The cost to play is about $200 to $400. Coaches are volunteers, but they are trained through USA Hockey. And these kids play more in that rec model where they play with other kids from their community. 

This is showing real results. You look at this program and there’s 60,000 kids who play Minnesota ice hockey and Minnesota produces more D1 men’s and women’s ice hockey players than any other state in the country.

And really what this comes down to is it’s accessible to everyone. And so it’s more of a meritocracy, right? Everyone gets to play, and everyone gets to have fun. And then the kids who really do eventually show a high level of ability, they still get to play at that really competitive level because it’s not diluted. That has shown that it can produce really amazing hockey players while giving all these kids a good experience.

Can a love-thy-neighbor, stop-the-division campaign win over masses of rural voters? Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor in Iowa, has his hopes pinned on it. 

Key to Sand’s campaign is a promise to end the red-blue warfare in politics. He’s made embracing independents and disgruntled Republicans a core part of his campaign, in addition to ending government corruption, holding big agriculture and big chemical companies responsible for the state’s high cancer rates, and addressing cost-of-living concerns. And his pragmatic approach seems to be working.

Polls have reliably shown Sand, who currently serves as Iowa state auditor, ahead of his Republican opponent, Zach Lahn — despite the GOP’s significant voter registration advantage. Democrats haven’t won the governor’s mansion in Iowa since 2006.

On top of the gubernatorial race, Iowa also has competitive Senate and House races, which could be key to Democrats’ hopes of gaining control of Congress during this November’s midterm election.

To break down what’s happening in Iowa, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Laura Belin, publisher and reporter for the Iowa political website Bleeding Heartland. 

Noel and Belin discussed Sand’s unique candidacy, whether it could have lessons for other Democrats looking to succeed in Midwestern states that have grown redder, and how President Donald Trump’s policies could be laying the groundwork for a rural backlash in this year’s midterm elections. 

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.

This midterm season, all eyes seem to be on Iowa. Why is Iowa so crucial?

What has happened in Iowa, where we used to be a swing state and we’ve moved into the red column, is not unique to Iowa. Every part of the country that looks like Iowa has seen the same trend of voters moving away from Democrats. It’s happened especially in these working-class communities where the electorate is predominantly white people without a college degree. 

Iowa as a whole voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Donald Trump three times. So if Democrats can figure out how to start winning again, or at least losing by less, in that kind of area, it could have implications not only for the future of Iowa, but for other states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

What are the main issues that people there are voting on and campaigns are campaigning on?

The high cost of everything is definitely the top issue. Democrats have really been hammering on the tariffs and the war in Iran, driving up the cost of everything. 

Also, healthcare costs have skyrocketed. 

We’ve seen healthcare access be an issue, because we’ve already seen some clinics close, and the companies that control those hospitals or clinics have talked about how it’s partly a reaction to the big Medicaid cuts that were passed in the [GOP’s 2025] budget reconciliation bill. 

According to many polls that I’ve seen, Trump is underwater in Iowa. His policies are not popular; the tariffs are not popular in Iowa. They’re widely understood to be hurting the Iowa economy. Anyone can see that the cost of everything has gone up.

So Trump is less popular this year. What are the Democrats doing to campaign on that? Are they running on Trump?

Most of the Democrats are not running directly against Trump. Rob Sand, the candidate for governor, hardly talks about Donald Trump at all. He really focuses on statewide issues. 

Josh Turek, the candidate for Senate, is running [on] the idea that [Republican Senate nominee] Rep. Ashley Hinson has just been a rubber stamp for policies that have hurt Iowa, whether that be the war in Iran [or] tariffs. It’s more running against the Republicans who have been a puppet [for Trump] rather than running against Donald Trump himself.

Let’s talk about that governor’s race and Rob Sand. This guy has gotten a fair bit of national interest. What do you know about him?

I’ve followed his career for a long time, since he was running for state auditor the first time in 2018. He’s been very visible. He’s gone out every year, done a hundred town halls a year, done them in every county. 

He is reaching out to independents because Iowa Republicans have a pretty large voter registration advantage. So he’s talked a lot about trying to empower independents more in our political spaces. He’s talked about getting Iowa back to divided government. He’s talked about how, with the large Republican majorities we have in the legislature, he would be a check on what they’ve done with 10 years of one-party rule.

He used to be a model. 

A long time ago, when he was in college. It’s funny, Republicans post these old modeling photos of Rob Sand from the ’90s and even [Sen.] Chuck Grassley’s campaign account posted some of those over the weekend.

And I always wonder — I mean, Republicans seem to think that they’re going to get traction out of that, but I don’t really see that as something that Iowans care about at all. I think a more common criticism that I hear is that Rob Sand has a very strong social media presence and has for years. In addition to making videos talking about political issues and what needs to be done in state government, he does a lot of things like reviewing pizza and donuts. 

They try to portray him as someone who’s not serious about his job. But I think that that’s just more [that] he has this goofy online persona. And I don’t really think it’s a detriment to his campaign.

Tell me more about the town halls. We’ve seen a certain type of Democrat emerge in the last few years and become very visible this campaign cycle: angry at the Democratic Party, angry at the direction of the country. 

Rob Sand — from what I’ve seen of him, it does not seem like anger is what he wants to tap into. Tell me what you’ve seen when he’s out in public.

No, he does not strike an angry note. And he’s not really part of this whole debate between progressives and moderates or centrists in the party. He’s really tried to chart, I would say, a completely different course of saying that he wants to get back to common-sense government, focusing on the issues that people can agree on. 

He’s talked about how if he’s governor and the legislature sends him culture war bills, we’re gonna have veto ceremonies instead of bill signing ceremonies. He doesn’t want to do any of this culture war thing. And one thing that he does at the beginning of every town hall is he asks people to raise their hands if they’re a registered Republican or a registered independent, and then he asks everybody to applaud for those people. 

He has everybody in the room sing the first verse of “America the Beautiful” together.

And he talks about how our politics has become so divisive. The way he frames it is that two private clubs, as he frames the major parties, he says, ‘They’re trying to make us hate people we used to love. And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the division.’

Sometimes he asks for a show of hands: How many of you have had a family relationship or a longtime friendship disrupted over the last 10 years because of politics? There are always a lot of hands that go up. And he says, ‘I’m just sick of this.’ So he is running on trying to bring people together, but it’s not really in a kumbaya way, like we’re all going to agree on everything.

When he’s criticizing his Republican opponent, Zach Lahn — and one of his main talking points is that Zach Lahn doesn’t live full-time in Iowa, that he’s a part-time Iowan and spends a lot of time in Kansas — but before he even gets to that, he leads into it by saying, “There’s one thing that I want you to remember about my opponent that’s the most important thing. He’s a human being.”

The Democrats need a type of candidate who can win in red states. Rob Sand is interesting because it seems people have identified him as possibly that template. What do you think?

I don’t know how easy it would be to replicate Rob Sand. He grew up in a small town; he grew up hunting and fishing. He talks about his faith. I don’t know that everybody would be able to pull that off so naturally. 

But sometimes when people ask me, well, what happened to Iowa? It’s not anything specific to Iowa. It’s every part of the country that looks like Iowa has seen the same trend of Democrats losing ground. It’s the same reason Trump was able to win the states that used to be called the Blue Wall: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. It’s the same reason Ohio has moved into the red state category. 

I think people are watching Iowa, especially Rob Sand and Josh Turek, the candidate for Senate, because if Democrats can find a way to turn things around in those types of areas — working-class communities that are predominantly white — there could be lessons that apply to other states.

The data center backlash has entered the midterms conversation. 

Politicians from across the spectrum have changed their minds — or at least their policy positions — about data centers in the past few months as public resistance  to their construction has skyrocketed. A major example is Texas, where just about one year ago, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was proclaiming that his state was the “epicenter of AI development.” 

Now, after months of grassroots organizing and community outcry, Abbott is pushing to slow the roll of new data centers in Texas. He’s imposed a statewide moratorium on new construction pending an audit over the new connections to Texas’s power grid. While he hasn’t explicitly said the change is tied to his reelection campaign this November, the pause is expected to last through the election.

As dramatic as Abbott’s about-face has been, he’s not alone: Democrats and Republicans alike are following suit.

Jeremy Merrill, a data reporter at the Washington Post, analyzed thousands of social media posts and newsletters to see what elected officials on both sides of the aisle are saying about data centers. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about his findings, what they say going into midterm elections, and how the backlash might change the way we think about what politicians owe to their constituents. 

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

What did you find?

Data centers didn’t used to be a big deal. And now, almost all of a sudden, they’re a big issue. Candidates are falling over themselves to sound tough about data centers. And data centers are overwhelmingly portrayed as a problem rather than an opportunity or a benefit. 

A great example is Sen. Jon Husted, who’s a Republican senator from Ohio, who’s up for election this November. He used to praise data center projects that were coming to Ohio when he was lieutenant governor because it would help establish Ohio as “an important tech hub in America.”

He said that data centers are essential to our digital lives. And now he’s saying he’s trying to “protect Americans from having to foot the bill for data centers.”

He’s really emblematic of a shift that happened all across the Republican Party in about February of this year. That’s when the bulk of messages from Republicans about data centers flipped from focusing on them as bringing benefits to their states and communities, to talking about their downsides. 

This is really a case of the anger and unhappiness bubbling up from everyday people up to political elites. And that grassroots anger was all across the political spectrum over a whole range of issues: power bills, claims about how much water data centers may use, air pollution, eminent domain, taxes, subsidies, and a generalized, physical manifestation of the anxiety that people feel about what AI is going to do to our society, to our brains, to our kids and to our jobs.

We know that it’s not just one single candidate, maybe even not just a handful, because you reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that, “Data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.” 

That’s pretty strong language. Is the National Republican Senatorial Committee admitting that the wrong position on data centers is enough to lose a candidate a race at this point?

I think it’s something that they’re certainly worried about. He’s in a tough race. It’s a tossup. And presumably you’re looking for an edge, or to prevent your opponent from getting an edge over you. 

What about President Donald Trump’s messaging on data centers? He, initially at least, was very bullish on AI investment in the US. What has Trump been saying?

This is a story in two or three parts. As President Trump took office again last year, he was overall trying to portray his second term as president as “inaugurating a golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance.” 

As part of that, he issued an executive order trying to make it easier to build data centers in the United States. And I think that’s probably why last year most Republicans across the board were talking about data centers as a benefit to the country and to the communities where they were being built — talking about jobs, talking about investment.

But like I said, the tide turned. And so on the one hand, you have President Trump promoting this bill that would protect people from having data centers cause their power bills to go up. But on the other hand, he just wrote earlier this week on Truth Social, “If [communities] want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”

He’s saying if they don’t want data centers, they’re going to “end up being backwards and poor.” So he’s still very pro-data center, which is fascinating.

Let’s talk about the Democrats. Which Democrats in particular are we seeing change their minds?

There are a lot of governors who used to be very positive on data centers in their states because these bring jobs. These bring construction investments, some amount of permanent jobs, some amount of construction jobs. Examples of folks who are now limiting data centers in their states include Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and [Gov.] J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.

The most striking case of a Democrat whose rhetoric has shifted so much is Rep. Ro Khanna of California, whose district actually includes Silicon Valley. In 2025, he was calling for building more data centers in the United States versus overseas. When the Trump administration did an AI deal with the United Arab Emirates, he said, “Why are we putting data centers and research hubs in Dubai?” 

But now he’s more critical, calling for an end to data center extraction, taking communities’ water and jacking up their bills, sucking all the money into the hands of a few tech billionaires.

Is anyone in either party still coming out strong for data centers?

My favorite example of this is Rep. Eric Burlison, who’s a Republican from Missouri. He’s really focused on the need to build data centers in order to compete with China. In June, he wrote, “Ask yourself who benefits when Americans turn against data centers? China does.”

He’s making the point that I think a lot of people in tech are making, which is, “This is coming whether you like it or not.” And part of politics is dealing with reality. 

In this day and age, it seems constituents don’t want to deal with that reality, but clearly there are people who hold office, or who hope to hold office, who are going to maintain the line that this is something we’ve just got to do.

This is a classic political science dispute about what a politician’s job is supposed to be. If you accept the premise that we need data centers to build a wonderful technological future or keep pace with China or whatever the argument is, is the job of a politician to just do what their constituents want, to be their tribune in Washington? Or is it to be the wise, thoughtful leader who’s willing to push back when constituents are missing something important? 

This is one thing I keep in mind when analyzing — particularly some of these governors who shifted more recently — is that they’re talking about the downsides of data centers. They’re talking about mitigating those downsides. They’re saying, “Oh, we need to get data centers to pay their fair share. We need to make sure that data centers don’t screw up our water. We need to make sure they don’t raise your power bills. We need to make sure they give back.”

But then it’s so that we can build them and still reap the benefits while mitigating the costs.

What is it about this issue, do you think, that has got us to this place? We’re polarized, but we’re not polarized in the same way that we’re often polarized.

One possibility is that this is coming from the grassroots so much and bubbling up to politicians and political elites, that everybody got the signal at the same time that this was something that they ought to oppose. 

The other possibility is people have for a while been saying, “Are we living through a generational political realignment in the United States where a lot of things are up for grabs?”

You don’t see a lot of the libertarian-adjacent pro-business, free markets, free trade Republican Party. And so when all these issues are up for grabs, politicians see opportunity in being innovative rather than sticking with the same traditional views of their party.