F1 races are exhilarating. While racing alongside 21 other cars, an F1 driver can reach speeds of up to 231 mph, making it one of the world’s most dangerous sports.
And F1 drivers need to be physically prepared to prevent disaster. Over the course of a single race, they experience hundreds of pounds of force, temperatures up to 130°F, and risk extreme dehydration that can lead to lowered brain function. In order to stay on the road and not pass out, F1 drivers have to be in peak physical condition.
In order to find out how F1 drivers can survive a sport that is so physically demanding, I hit the gym. Since F1 is such an international sport, there aren’t many specialized trainers in the US. So with the help of an F1 performance expert currently based in the United Arab Emirates, I worked out with David Dunlop, a strength and conditioning coach who works with NFL players. And it turns out that training for F1 is surprisingly similar to training to be a linebacker.
Read more about the fitness required to drive in an F1 race:
Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. | Universal Pictures
After the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of The Odyssey dropped, a wave of conversation followed, part amused, part outraged: Why were all the actors, even the British ones, doing American accents? And why did the dialogue sound so contemporary?
“My dad is coming home,” declares Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, with tight-mouthed American vowels despite Holland’s natural English accent.
“You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know,” returns Robert Pattinson, another British actor hitting hard American r’s.
“Let’s gooooooo!” yells Matt Damon’s Odysseus as he leads his men to battle, Boston o’s in their full splendor.
“Dude,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote. “Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.” The comments section below the trailer is filled with jokes about seeing Odysseus waiting outside Starbucks.
It makes sense that audiences were so surprised at Nolan’s choice. We’re used to seeing actors in period pieces and fantasy epics speak with British accents, a trope sometimes called “The Queen’s Latin.” But there’s no logical reason that characters who, in-universe, are speaking ancient Greek should sound to us like they’re talking in mannered BBC English, says Erik Singer, the dialect coach who helped Austin Butler nail his Elvis accent. The Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old, and on that scale, contemporary American English is just as close to Homer’s language as the elevated old-timey English diction we often see in period films.
“Accents do not in fact inherently mean anything,” Singer says, “but we really think that they do.”
To understand why the accents in The Odyssey sound so strange to so many people, you first have to understand why British accents became the default for any period piece. The answer has a surprising amount to do with what American audiences think power sounds like.
“Why is the empire British when we’re in outer space and there is no Britain?”
As the Hollywood epic emerged starting in the 1930s and evolved in the 1950s, Singer says, studios developed a convention of coding the past in different accents. In films like Spartacus and Ben-Hur, the villainous elites were mostly played by British theater actors in Received Pronunciation English, whereas the heroic peasant protagonists were played by Americans with American accents.
“I do think that it is not an accident that…there still was a British Empire in the ’30s and ’40s,” Singer tells Vox. “There’s something [there] that makes sense…the popular conception of the Roman Empire bestriding the world, like the British Empire.”
“British accents have been closely associated with imperialism for a very long time for obvious reasons,” says Mike Walsh, a dialect coach who worked with Brian Geraghty for 1923: A Yellowstone Origin Story. “When you’re dealing with some sort of war effort that takes place in something that feels like fantasy, most often the characters become British.”
Over time, this practice calcified into a convention. In fantasy worlds based on medieval Britain, like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, the American and Australian actors speak in British accents. They also speak in British accents in period films that are supposed to take place in France (Ever After, Les Miserables), Russia (Anna Karenina), and the ancient past (Gladiator, 300). In The Borgias, the Italians have British accents, but the French have French accents.
Even in Star Wars, the Empire uses the Queen’s English, while the scrappy resistance army has American accents. “Why is the empire always the British one when we’re in outer space and there is no Britain?” Walsh asks. “Britain has become associated with this high-fantasy war conqueror image.”
Avoiding “British period movie accent”
When Hollywood avoids a British accent in a period or fantasy film, it’s usually for a specific reason. Often, it has to do with which characters the audience is supposed to perceive as powerful, and which ones they are supposed to relate to.
In the 1984 film Amadeus, director Miloš Forman had Tom Hulce use his usual American accent to play Mozart. Forman “wanted the Mozarts to feel like out-of-place Americans in Vienna,” Hulce explained in 2023. F. Murray Abraham also kept his American accent to play Salieri, but the Viennese characters around them were primarily played by Brits in their natural accents.
In 2005, Sofia Coppola directed the cast of Marie Antoinette to use their natural accents. “We weren’t going to do the movie in 18th-century French, so it didn’t make sense to have them do British period movie accent,” she said at the time, adding that she was influenced by the way the natural accents in Amadeus made the characters feel “like real people.” As in the old Hollywood epics, Coppola cast British theater actors as the old guard of Versailles and young Americans as Marie Antoinette and her friends, so that Kirsten Dunst’s California drawl became another anachronism, bringing Marie Antoinette’s youth and modernity to life.
In the 2017 film The Death of Stalin, each character in 1950s Russia has a different accent. Director Armando Iannucci told most of the cast to speak as they normally would, so that Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev keeps Buscemi’s Brooklyn intonations, while Adrian McLoughlin’s Stalin is Cockney. (The exception is Jason Isaacs, who tweaks his Liverpool accent into something more Yorkshire). Iannucci told Metro in 2017 that he considered having the cast perform in Russian accents, but ended up feeling it would detract from the comedy. “I thought it would just kill the pace and spontaneity of it,” he said. “I wanted a range of English accents, to indicate the geographic spread of this Empire.”
Nolan’s Odyssey, however, does not appear to be aiming for the shocking anachronism of Marie Antoinette, the fish-out-of-water humor of Amadeus, or the black comedy of The Death of Stalin. Whatever Nolan’s doing with his accent work, it’s something else entirely.
“Language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people”
Nolan has said he was inspired by Emily Wilson’s portrait of Odysseus in her radically stripped down 2017 translation. While most English translations of The Odyssey use heightened, highly poetic language, Wilson’s is severe in its simplicity. She rejects any flowery invocations of “the muse” at the beginning of her translation, rendering the first line starkly as “Tell me about a complicated man.”
“The notion that the Homeric epic must be rendered in grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated English has been with us since the time of Alexander Pope,” Wilson writes in her introduction to The Odyssey, referring to Pope’s grandiloquent 1725 translation. “It is past time, I believe, to reject this assumption.” Her argument is that the original Greek is “not difficult or ostentatious,” and she wants to honor the fact that “stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric.”
Following suit, Nolan told the Los Angeles Times that he wanted “an earthy narrative” for his Odyssey, and that he prioritized “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people.”
“He’s attempting to go closer to that idea of what would have been colloquial for the time,” Walsh says. “Though it is a heightened story told in song, that doesn’t mean that it was told with a filter or a distance applied to it, or that it was only meant to apply to smart people.”
What seems to be jarring to people, though, is that while Nolan’s characters might sound relatable, they are still powerful classical figures: kings and queens and gods and goddesses.
We’re used to thinking that power sounds like the British Empire. Nolan’s Odyssey shows that might not hold true anymore.
“If it’s changing…it could well be because for folks, maybe Americans younger than 40, those associations between [Received Pronunciation] and Empire aren’t really there anymore strongly,” Singer says. “Or even between RP and high falutin’ fanciness or something aren’t there as much anymore.”
The British Empire is passing out of living memory now, and the American empire is here. In Nolan’s Odyssey, if not for the rest of Hollywood, power sounds like a guy from Boston, loitering outside a Starbucks.
Starmer was right that British voters wanted change; unfortunately for him, they pretty quickly wanted him out too. Starmer is stepping down on Monday — making him Britain’s sixth prime minister in less than a decade.
“We’re just not used to this,” Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesmanmagazine, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world…and now we have become Italy only with bad weather and worse food.”
McTague talked to Rameswaram about why Starmer flamed out so fast, the far-right candidate angling to take the top job, and why the incoming prime minister, nicknamed “the King of the North,” might be Labour’s best shot at turning things around.
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.
Why is Britain on its way to a seventh prime minister in a decade?
We are living through very, very weird times here in Britain. We’re just not used to this. We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world — we could smugly look out on countries like Italy or Australia as they churned through their prime ministers, and we just held steady with Margaret Thatcher for 10 years or Tony Blair for 10 years. Now we have become Italy, only with bad weather and worse food.
I think, big picture, we’re actually not that different to the rest of the Western world in this regard, in that all of the same reasons that cause disquiet in the United States or in France or in Germany are the same kind of reasons that are causing political disquiet here. Immigration, poor economic growth, living standards not improving as quickly as we’re used to, inflation post-pandemic — all of that comes together and it creates similar forces that you see in the US. So we have electoral coalitions, the rise of people who can communicate super well on social media in the new age who grab hold of attention.
It’s just that what is happening here is happening in our parliamentary context rather than a presidential context, where you elect a president and they are there for a full term whether they’re unpopular or not. Here, if you lose the confidence of the public or the confidence of members of parliament, then suddenly you can be out on your ear within weeks or months.
Let’s talk about the last time there was a major shift. It was in 2024 when voters had become wary of the Conservative Party in the UK, and that’s when they elected the Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer into office?
They elected them with a landslide — an astonishing majority in the House of Commons, enough to basically do whatever they wanted. But I think once he’d got into power, he didn’t really know how he wanted to change the country. He stood on a manifesto of “change,” in quotes — it was a kind of hopey-changey thing, without much substance to it.
In one sense, he was quite a small-c conservative man. He wanted to just get this thing working again, and he thought you could do that through sensible, incremental, rational, technocratic change. And I think that analysis has proven fundamentally flawed.
What follows Keir Starmer? Does the Labour Party retain control of parliament?
Yes. So the Labour Party fundamentally has kicked out its own prime minister. It’s based on the fact that he was deeply, deeply unpopular in the country, and they thought if they hung around with this guy any longer that they were all screwed, basically, and that they would all lose their jobs. That’s the reason why he’s been removed from power. He lost the support of his members of parliament and his cabinet, who eventually turned on him and looked to the man who’s going to replace him — a guy called Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Greater Manchester.
Tell us a bit about him. I mean, they call him the King of the North?
Yeah, like the Game of Thrones stuff — he’s going to sort of come down with his, I don’t even know what they’re called, White Walkers, is it, or something?
The North of England is, I guess, the equivalent of the Rust Belt Midwest kind of vibe. It’s seen as a place that is a bit more down to earth, a bit more post-industrial. It’s got more economic problems — it’s a place which used to be rock-solid Labour but has moved to the right. And so I think there is an opportunity here for Andy Burnham to win the next election and stick around for a bit longer.
You talk about leaders in the UK thus far having lacked a mandate or perhaps a broad vision for the country. I wonder if the person who has those things right now is Nigel Farage. Could you tell our audience a bit about him?
Nigel Farage was the man that was introduced to America by Donald Trump as “Mr. Brexit.” He is the figure on the populist right of British politics who has stood outside of the Conservative Party — the traditional party of the right here — and challenged it for not being conservative enough, for not being patriotic enough, for not being tough enough on borders and immigration.
All of the things that happened to the Republican Party from the Tea Party or from Donald Trump — it’s just that he did that from outside of the Conservative Party. And he is a kind of charismatic figure, a very good public speaker, very hard to pin down, speaks kind of fluently and off the cuff.
He was finally elected to the House of Commons at the last election for his insurgent populist party called Reform UK. And from that position, he has taken the party into the lead in the polls. But something else is going on now, where because he is a prospective future prime minister, he is facing a level of scrutiny that he hasn’t faced before.
So all sorts of stuff is going on in British politics, which sounds completely wild.
People are looking at this situation — this run of prime ministers, this ascendancy of Nigel Farage — and they say the UK has become ungovernable. What would you argue the situation is, Tom?
Look, I would argue that it’s parliamentary democracy at its messy kind of fundamentals. Britain is a country, like many countries in Western Europe, which is struggling to work out how it’s going to make its way in the world in the 21st century, in a world where so many of the assumptions which we have come to take for granted no longer appear to be holding.
A United States that is a trusted ally — that is changing. Free market economics, global free trade appears to be ending. And you add into that social media, the AI revolution, all of this. It feels like the turmoil in British politics is just a reflection of a kind of turmoil in the world and in the global economy. You can see the same sorts of questions going on in Canada and in Australia and France and Germany. And I don’t think anyone really has the answers yet, and Britain certainly doesn’t.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators argue with Israel supporters outside of the Democratic National Convention on August 22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. | John Moore/Getty
Among Democratic voters, Israel’s reputation is in tatters.
Polls show Democratic voters have dramaticallyunfavorable views of Israel. Three incumbent Democrats who’ve supported Israel lostprimaries in recent weeks; pro-Israel groups are spending millions of dollars to try to defeat high-profile candidates in other races. And there’s been dwindling Democratic support in Congress for weapons sales and even aid to the Jewish nation.
The basic reason is obvious: the devastation of the Gaza war. Yet though Democrats and especially young voters soured on the war soon after it began, rank-and-file Democrats did not initially turn so sharply against the country of Israel itself.
Indeed, a review of years of polling data shows that, in retrospect, the turning point — the year the bottom fell out — was 2025.
That year, a confluence of events — Donald Trump succeeding Joe Biden as president, Trump’s decision to join Israel’s attack on Iran, and that summer’s intense hunger crisis in Gaza — spurred a shift in which hostility toward Israel was no longer just for the Democratic left. Much of the party’s mainstream began feeling it too.
What’s resulted, pollster and University of Maryland scholar Shibley Telhami argued to me, has been “a paradigm shift.” The young generation of Democrats, Telhami said, quickly came to see Israel as “a genocidal villain” — and then many in the older generations came to a similar conclusion.
That’s not to say that Democrats are now all-out opposed to Israel’s existence. In an email, Jake McClory of the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC pointed to his own group’s polling of Democrats from last October, which found that 75 percent say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland.
But as bad as things are for Israel now, there’s still room to get worse. In one alarming sign for those sympathetic to the country, polls show that Democrats are now unfavorably disposed not just to the nation’s leaders — but also to its citizenry. A new Pew Research Center poll found that just 43 percent of Democrats say they view the Israeli people favorably — down from 58 percent in 2024.
This is partly why the question of timing matters. While Israel has struggled to maintain its support over the years, the arc of its decline suggests a complete collapse was not inevitable: Instead, the polling tells a story of Israel’s specific actions and partisan politics mixing together at a sensitive time to turn public opinion decisively against its government — and raise its importance in Democratic primaries.
How mainstream Democrats turned against Israel last year
In a sense, Democrats’ turn against Israel has been in the works for years. Gallup has polled voters about whether they are more sympathetic with the Israelis or the Palestinians for more than two decades. Among Democrats, a historic advantage for Israel tightened in the 2010s and vanished in the early 2020s.
Sympathy for Israel after the October 7, 2023, attacks quickly disappeared, as the country became viewed as the aggressor rather than the victim. In February 2024, 43 percent of Democrats sympathized with Palestinians more, and 35 percent sympathized with Israelis more.
“A few months after October 7, younger and progressive Democrats overwhelmingly took the opinion that Israel was committing a genocide,” Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told me. “But there were still elements of the Democratic Party — people watching MSNBC or NPR — that weren’t convinced. And the Biden administration was going back and forth.”
Indeed, Biden had attempted a kind of “middle ground” approach to the conflict, in which he tried to rein in Israel’s actions in Gaza somewhat while remaining sympathetic to the Israelis’ war aims.
But Biden’s status as the leader of the Democratic Party also complicated the debate. Protests against Israel, like the “uncommitted” movement, were divisive not just because of disagreements over the war, but because many Democrats saw them as undermining Biden (and later Kamala Harris) ahead of the 2024 election. When pro-Israel groups successfully backed challenges to left-wing incumbents that cycle, the ads often focused not on Israel but on their targets’perceived disloyalty to Biden.
Once Trump took office and began working closely with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, this concern dissipated — and what Bendaas calls the “partisan-ization” of Israel took place. The pro-Israeli view of the conflict became much more associated with the GOP — and many older Democrats with more mainstream views began viewing Israel more negatively, as polarization did its work.
Milan Singh, a commentator at the center-left publication The Argument, concurred, recently writing: “When Trump came back into office, it was like a pressure valve was released. Older Democrats no longer felt conflicted between loyalty to their party’s leader and the arguments of elites they trusted.”
Indeed, by February 2025, the gap between Democrats’ sympathy for the Israelis and Palestinians in Gallup polling had turned into a chasm. 59 percent of Democrats now said they sympathized with Palestinians more, and just 21 percent sympathized more with Israelis. (In the same period, the share of Republicans and independents who said they were sympathetic to Israel also decreased, though by much less dramatic margins.)
These changes put public support for Israel on very shaky ground. But the events of the next few months sent it crashing through that floor, while also raising the issue’s importance among primary voters.
All the while, Israel’s polling among Democrats kept on worsening. A Quinnipiac poll last August found that 77 percent of Democrats thought Israel had committed genocide (a sharp increase from earlier polls), and that just 13 percent of Democrats sympathized with the Israelis more than the Palestinians.
But perhaps the most striking shift has been in views of the Israeli people.
In Pew Research Center polls both before and after the October 7 attacks, Democrats’ views on the Israeli people had remained fairly stable — suggesting many were making a distinction between government policies they opposed and affection for the country’s people.
This mirrors the way Democratic politicians often talk about Israel, with many criticizing Netanyahu and his governing coalition while stressing their support for the country’s people and their security. That’s true even of some candidates who’ve made criticism of Israel central to their campaigns: Brad Lander, who defeated Rep. Dan Goldman in New York with left-wing support last month, identifies as a “liberal Zionist.”
By September 2025, though, the number of Democrats saying they viewed the Israeli people favorably had dropped significantly — from 58 percent the previous year, down to 48 percent.
And another Pew poll released last week found that number had dropped yet further, to 43 percent. Conversely, Democrats’ views of the Palestinian people (67 percent favorable, in last week’s poll) haven’t changed much over this period.
This new reality is already having major ramifications in Democratic primary elections across the country — and is likely to weigh heavily on contenders for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination. What once was a split on Israel among the Democratic base has become a consensus: Most of their voters view the country very negatively indeed.
Cargo ships anchored near the Strait of Hormuz. | AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Remember the policy changes we wrote about in this newsletter on Monday and Tuesday? Neither lasted more than 24 hours — both fell victim to presidential posting.
What happened? On Monday afternoon, the Logoff covered how President Donald Trump said he would charge a 20 percent fee to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
But he reversed course on that yesterday morning, posting on Truth Social that he’d “replace” the fee with trade and investment deals that Gulf nations would purportedly make in the US.
Yesterday afternoon’s Logoff then covered how, after two recent deadly shootings, ICE had been ordered to temporarily stop making traffic stops nationwide.
But this morning, Trump declared that traffic stops were back on, posting: “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”
Why did Trump flip-flop? The Hormuz fee was a Trump whim that many of his own aides had deep logistical and political qualms about. For one, they believed the move could push gas prices higher. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said just last month that “no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway.”
As Monday stretched on, Trump was deluged with lobbying from Gulf nations who rely on the strait — such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and ultimately decided to back down.
The ICE traffic stop pause followed the opposite trajectory. This was a decision made by administration officials without Trump’s knowledge — and when he watched press coverage and heard right-wing criticism of it, he was irate, per CNN.
What’s the takeaway? The reversals show whose criticism and feedback Trump actually cares about.
Wealthy Gulf leaders and the spectre of higher gas prices helped talk him down from his Hormuz fee. And on traffic stops, he ultimately cared less about tamping down national outrage over deadly shootings than he did about preserving his “tough on immigration” reputation and agenda.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
A 67-million-year old Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton sold at auction for a record $50.1 million yesterday to an anonymous bidder. Mystery bidder, if you’re reading this, can I stop by and see it?
Boats anchored off Oman's northern Musandam Peninsula near the Strait of Hormuz on June 27, 2026. | AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
If I had a nickel for every time President Donald Trump backtracked or changed course on Iran, I’d have…well, at least enough money for a gallon of $3.89 gas.
Trump has threatened attacks and postponed them. He’s praised Iran’s leaders in one breath and panned them as “scum” in the next. The latest about-face played out Tuesday morning, when Trump canceled a controversial, short-lived plan to charge fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway at the heart of this whole mess.
It’s incredibly easy to get lost in all the back-and-forth. (Even as I write this, the United States is still sanctioning Iranian oil sales, preventing ships from docking at Iranian ports, and bombarding the country with missile strikes.) But if you zoom out far enough, a clear narrative does emerge: Whatever the war might’ve been about in the beginning, it’s now very clearly a strait-up tug-of-war for control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The strait is the world’s most important energy chokepoint: A fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally passes through it. And now that Iran has shown it can shut down that traffic, whoever controls the strait will gain both a major potential revenue source and a powerful economic weapon.
These waterways run the world
The Strait of Hormuz is what’s known as a maritime chokepoint: a narrow waterway that handles an outsized share of global trade. Your daily life is almost definitely filled with and fueled by goods that pass through these channels. But you may never have occasion to consciously think about them until something — like a war or a stuck container ship — gets in the way. Here are a few of the other heavyweights (click to see a larger version here):
One link for later
➨ Health trackers offer a ton of data. And much of it is only good for raising your stress! Instead of obsessing over metrics like your daily resting heart rate or HRV, focus on the long-term trends. And don’t forget to pay attention to how you actually feel, as opposed to deferring to what your wearable says.
Before you go…
Did you know…that singing with a group of other people raises your oxytocin levels? This experiment was conducted in a choir rehearsal, but I’m personally and self-servingly gonna assume it applies to karaoke, as well.
Today’s trivia: Caribbean and Indian cooking traditions combined to yield what delicious wrap-style sandwich? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the bizarre human nickname that San Franciscans give their heavy summer fog. That would be Karl, a reference to the 2003 film Big Fish. The gag started on social media.
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