This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

During his campaign to become mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani famously vowed that he’d arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next time he visited the Big Apple. 

This week, Netanyahu essentially called his bluff. He’s expected to address the United Nations in September. And after a whole lot of hemming, and hawing, and hedging, Mamdani admitted in a video Tuesday night that he does not actually have the legal authority to arrest a foreign dignitary on US soil. 

The retreat is not surprising to legal experts, who had long questioned how Mamdani would pull this particular promise off. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court — a tribunal recognized by 125 countries, not including Israel, China, Russia, or the US — did issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of starvation, murder, persecution, and intentionally directing attacks against civilians.

But the US does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. And even if it did, the job of executing its warrants would presumably not fall to New York City cops. So, why did Mamdani suggest he’d arrest Netanyahu when he actually knew he could not?

The end of the pro-Israel consensus

Mamdani’s allies argue that the principle here mattered, that the mayor needed to issue some kind of denunciation, even if he couldn’t act. But there’s another, more cynical read here, too: For Democrats, critiquing Israel is good politics. 

This is a seismic, generational shift, with far-ranging implications for both Democrats and US foreign policy. The party’s left flank has criticized Israel for years, but older and more moderate Dems only soured on Israel recently. 

“A few months after October 7, younger and progressive Democrats overwhelmingly took the opinion that Israel was committing a genocide,” said Hamid Bendaas, of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group. “But there were still elements of the Democratic Party — people watching MSNBC or NPR — that weren’t convinced.”

For many of these voters, the turning point only came after President Donald Trump took office again. Severe famine swept across Gaza last summer — the consequence of ongoing conflict and Israeli restrictions on food and aid shipments. Netanyahu also allied himself closely with Trump, particularly around the war in Iran. Support for Israel has consequently grown more GOP-coded, rather like Kid Rock or Bass Pro hats.

Now, even Democrats far to the right of Mamdani are looking to retool the US-Israeli relationship. Listen to Tuesday’s Today, Explained podcast episode for even more about the shift (!).

One link for later

➨ Beat the endless scroll at its own game. Social media is compelling — and compulsive — because it hijacks your sense of curiosity. But my colleague Constance Grady has come up with a delightful (and delightfully simple) antidote: To reclaim your time, just find the thing that fascinates you even more than your feed. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the term “luddite” comes from a movement of skilled, 19th-century textile workers who smashed and burned automated looms?
• Today’s trivia: The city of Enid, Oklahoma, is named after a character from which Victorian literary work? (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 I messed up! I told you that there were 23 countries in Latin America, when there are in fact 23 countries in North America. (I think we can all agree that the latter makes for more surprising trivia.) I also asked you for the name of the Eminem song that gave us the slang term for an obsessive admirer. That would be “Stan.” It also samples Dido. 

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump has seemingly called off a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia after his energy secretary already formally signed it.

What happened? On Wednesday, the Trump administration formally concluded what’s called a “123 Agreement” to work with Saudi Arabia on the development of its civilian nuclear power infrastructure. This kind of deal allows the United States to provide another country with nuclear fuel and equipment on the condition that they submit to safeguards against building a nuclear weapon.

But on Thursday morning, after the negotiations were quite literally concluded, Trump threw a monkey wrench into things — posting on Truth Social that the deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”

The Abraham Accords are a series of agreements from Trump’s first term that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some nearby Arab states. In effect, then, Trump is saying that Saudi Arabia will not get its 123 Agreement unless it formally recognizes the State of Israel. Which the Saudis are unwilling to do absent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Why is Trump doing this? As is often the case with his strange last-minute decisions, no one really knows. There are a few leading guesses, though.

The first is that the agreement with Saudi Arabia was a bad idea on the merits. Experts on nuclear weapons, the Middle East, and international relations more broadly all said that the deal gave Saudis exactly what they wanted with virtually nothing in return, effectively surrendering a key piece of leverage Washington has on Riyadh.

The second is that other American friends in the Middle East got angry. The Israelis are a leading candidate, as they have long opposed any agreement that might bring the Saudis closer to a nuke. The Emiratis, often in competition with Saudis for regional influence, are another; their nuclear deal with the US, inked in 2009, is a lot stricter.

The third is bipartisan opposition in Congress, which would need to approve any deal.

What’s the takeaway: Unless something changes radically, Trump has blown up a nuclear deal that’s already been signed — humiliating his negotiators and angering the Saudis.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

As of today, we are officially two weeks away from the NFL’s first preseason game. Our long national nightmare of calling soccer “football” is almost over.

What caused the ongoing outbreak of cyclospora, the diarrhea-causing parasite currently spreading across the United States? Michigan officials have been saying for weeks that they believed the outbreak may be linked to bagged salad or salad kits. What we were waiting to learn was the specific brands and specific products in question. 

And late last week, it looked like we finally had the answer — but then things quickly got cloudy. 

On July 16, the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources, that the outbreak had been linked to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell by Taylor Farms. A day later, Taylor Farms said it was withdrawing products from US stores and restaurants based on information from the FDA.

But then on July 19, per NBC News, the FDA said that there had been a false positive for cyclospora when testing a sample of Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce; Taylor Farms said in its own statement that the FDA had “apologized” for the mix-up. The next day, the company and the federal government were stuck in a semantic argument: Per NOTUS, the FDA insisted it did not “officially apologize” to Taylor Farms but “explain[ed] factually the issues” with the false positive. 

So where does that leave us right now? Officials still believe that Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce was the source of the Michigan outbreak. But whether those are the only products driving the outbreak remains unclear, with almost every state now reporting at least one cyclospora case in 2026. And on Thursday afternoon, the FDA announced that it was tracking a second outbreak linked to other unspecific products, though details were otherwise scarce.

Any outbreak of food-borne illness requires careful public communication. Officials need to tell people how to avoid contaminated food without scaring them away from eating fresh fruits and vegetables altogether.

But instead, many Americans have been left wondering what, exactly, they’re supposed to do. As one frustrated Reddit user put it: “So is the damn lettuce bad or not????” (If you need some advice on what foods are safe and what foods to be cautious about, we have a story for you.)

It may sound like a funny question, but it’s a profoundly serious one. The problem isn’t just that people are confused about their lettuce. The Trump administration’s handling of the cyclospora outbreak — from its conflicting public messages to accusations of political favoritism — has left many Americans even more confused about whether they can trust anything they’re hearing from the government. That’s a dangerous place to be during any public health emergency.

The cyclospora outbreak has become a communications nightmare

We are approaching 10,000 cyclosporiasis cases across the US this year: Michigan alone has recorded 7,664 as of this morning, Ohio has seen more than 1,200, and more than 40 states have now reported at least one case in 2026. The country usually sees a few hundred cases at most in a given year. Cyclosporiasis, the disease caused by the cyclospora parasite, leads to what public health experts describe as “watery” and “frequently explosive” diarrhea. While it isn’t typically life-threatening, it can cause serious complications: 160 people have been hospitalized in Michigan since the outbreak began.

And so for those of us who very much hope to eat fresh produce but do not want diarrhea, there’s a bit of urgency to figure out where the cyclospora is coming from. Food-borne illness investigations are already inherently difficult because of how globalized our food supply has become: Produce can travel all over the country and the world before it comes to your grocery shelf, and the process of government health workers interviewing the people who get sick and cross-checking to identify the shared foods that they might have in common is laborious.

Once investigators find a source, the information has to be shared clearly and responsibly. That is where the Trump administration has tripped up this week. 

Trump — and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in particular — came into office criticizing the public health establishment. They accused officials of misleading the public about the novel coronavirus and the vaccines developed to fight it, while failing to convey the nuances of the pandemic. But now, as they grapple with the incomplete picture of the cyclospora emergency, they are making many of the same mistakes.

“They’re very similar problems, even if on the outside, they don’t look quite the same,” said Michael Mackert, director of the Center for Health Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. “The underlying commonality is very much that we are dealing with imperfect information all the time.”

In any outbreak, some uncertainty is to be expected. Investigators have struggled to identify the source of earlier cyclosporiasis outbreaks too. And the FDA maintains that the likely source of the outbreak is Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce, based on the information they have gathered from sick patients and other sources, no matter the false positive result that has sparked so much confusion.

“The epidemiological evidence is so strong that the lack of a positive test is almost meaningless,” said Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. 

But the mistake that the Trump administration made was in sharing preliminary results and then having to issue a seemingly contradictory statement shortly afterward.

“FDA should have waited for confirmation of the presumptive results before going public,” Diez-Gonzalez said.

The larger stakes of the Trump administration’s poor communication

Investigations like these are hard enough — but when you add in the public health funding cuts of the past 18 months and the casual and widespread corruption characteristic of the Trump administration, trust in the government’s public health apparatus has sunk even lower.

It’s created just the conditions for conspiracies to bloom. “Unfortunately our FDA is compromised,” wrote one top commenter on Reddit. “I would not trust what comes out of it during this administration.” 

Several news outlets and influential social media accounts noted that Taylor Farms had donated $1 million to Trump’s MAGA super PAC and, in the middle of the controversy, received a private White House meeting. According to the New York Times, Taylor Farm officials used that meeting to dispute the findings that their products were responsible for the outbreak — and shortly thereafter, the FDA made its “false positive” announcement.

The administration insists that their decision-making is being guided by science, but even the appearance of impropriety has become a common theme in the press coverage. The broader uncertainty and distrust may help to explain why it’s not only Taco Bell and Taylor Farms taking a hit right now: According to Market Watch, Chipotle and the fast-casual salad chain Chopt have also seen a decline in traffic in recent weeks.

Public health requires public confidence. Perceived influence from special interests is a problem, even if the interactions didn’t alter the FDA or CDC’s actions.

Kennedy, who helms our government’s health department, should understand this well: His Make America Healthy Again movement made restoring public trust a central part of its message while accusing the existing public health establishment as being in league with special interests. 

The cyclospora outbreak has revealed how difficult that is to do in practice. 

In trying to communicate nuanced information during an active outbreak — while consulting interested parties like Taylor Farms itself — the administration has instead fueled doubts about the credibility of its messaging

Even before cyclospora turned eating salad into a leap of faith, Trump had a poor track record: His administration has slashed CDC staff, brought on vaccine skeptics to set vaccine policy, and clashed with the scientific establishment on a number of high-profile issues, like the time Trump held a televised press conference to argue a disproven theory that Tylenol can cause autism.

“Unfortunately, this is another example of a missed opportunity to establish credible and trusted communications to prepare the public to understand the real risks from the pathogen and confidence in the food safety and information from the FDA,” Scott Ratzan, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, told me. “Faith in our institutions continues to erode. We could do better.”

We are lucky cyclospora is not a deadly disease. Next time, the stakes for these miscues could be much higher.

Chances are good you live with another person. Over half of American adults cohabitate with their spouse or significant other. Older adults are increasingly living with roommates. Multigenerational households have more than quadrupled over the last decade. And about a third of adults under 35 live with a parent. 

If you’ve found yourself living communally at one point or another, you know that sharing space comes with its quirks and potential headaches. Who gets to use the only bathroom first in the morning? Who’s responsible for taking out the trash? Do you actually need to be friends with your roommates? 

Being a better roommate or family member isn’t just about minimizing daily annoyance — it’s about transforming your relationships and overall well-being. According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, a household of about four members is predictive of higher happiness levels and better relationships. Older adults who cohabitate are more satisfied living with others, and have higher well-being and happiness than those who live alone, research suggests.  

Whether you live with a romantic partner, roommates, parents, grandparents, or other family members, experts (including therapists, authors, friendship experts, and researchers) — who have firsthand experience of their own — have concrete tips for how to communicate, declutter, and split finances with the people you share space with. 

Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Communicate, communicate, communicate

“I will live and die on the hill of communication being the most important aspect of successfully living with other adults. That comes from my experience living with my parents in adulthood, and from working on my anthology about communal living and interdependence. If good communication can ultimately lead to progress, any challenges that come up around logistics, habits, preferences — the things people tend to think are most important to consider when sharing space with others — can be addressed. Understanding that living with other adults doesn’t require perfect compatibility, but rather a shared willingness to work at it, opens up so many doors.”

—Samantha Paige Rosen, editor of Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection

Accept everyone’s unique (and probably wrong) ways of doing chores

“How someone loads the dishwasher is the biggest differing personalities button-pusher ever. Know this. And accept it.”

—Lauren Palmer Jansen, communications coordinator for L’Arche GWDC, a community where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together

Get regular meetings on the calendar

“I always recommend having a designated time — weekly, monthly — for house meetings. It feels odd initially because we believe that everything with friends should happen organically. But when you’re sharing something as sacred as a home, you have to be aligned on what creates a safe and joyful experience. This also helps with any anxiety you might feel about bringing up hard topics, like washing the dishes or inviting guests over, because you have the security of knowing that there’s dedicated time to check in.”

—Danielle Bayard Jackson, friendship educator and author of Fighting For Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women’s Relationships

Mark your territory

“In a shared home, peace isn’t about square footage, but it’s often helped by each person having one space that’s truly their own. That single boundary, like a door you can close, is often what makes the togetherness feel like a choice you’re happy to continue making.”

—Juli Ford, multigenerational living expert and founder of Home After 50

Discuss decluttering

“Clutter is a common household stressor, and our research suggests one reason why is that people living together buy things independently but hesitate to get rid of things independently, often over-involving each other in disposal decisions. Our proposed fix: Set disposal rules up front, the same way you might set buying rules. Let each person freely toss items only they use, or create a ‘staging area’ where items sit briefly before leaving the house. People can weigh in if they want, without letting clutter linger indefinitely.”

—Peggy Liu, professor of marketing at the University of Pittsburgh School of Business, and Theresa Kwon, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Hong Kong Business School

Agree to the “uncomfortable rule”

“Roommates who want to get along will find a way to get along. The second you stop wanting to get along, the dynamics shift. Agree to the uncomfortable rule. The uncomfortable rule says that if anyone is uncomfortable, you all agree to talk about the problem and listen. This way no one needs to hide the truth when uncomfortable situations come up. This also makes it easier to have conversations instead of confrontations.”

—Harlan Cohen, author of Win or Learn: The Naked Truth About Turning Every Rejection Into Your Ultimate Success

Divide chores equitably, not equally

“Don’t divide housework equally, divide it explicitly and equitably. In an intergenerational home, people have different amounts of time, energy, and physical capacity, so the goal isn’t identical workloads but a shared agreement everyone considers fair. Use a shared system to make the work visible. Track what gets done and by whom, then check in regularly before invisible labor turns into resentment.”

—Peter Askjær Drejer, founder of Tody, a chore managing app

Get clear about money up front

“From a financial therapist perspective, one of the biggest sources of conflict in shared living situations is the meaning people attach to money, fairness, and responsibility. Talk about expectations from the very beginning. You want to reduce the possibility of resentment forming, which can often happen if there were no conversations early on discussing what is or is not acceptable behavior and what is expected of everyone within the shared space. Most often people will wait until they’re already frustrated to discuss sharing finances or household responsibilities. But it is highly unproductive to engage in a conversation when it starts emotionally charged. Instead, schedule regular check-in conversations where you discuss not only who pays for what, but also whether the current arrangement still feels fair.” 

—Kiki Jacobson, licensed mental health counselor specializing in financial therapy

Find the good in tough situations

“My best advice is to see good intentions everywhere, even if you’re experiencing bad outcomes. For the most part, no one wants to be a bad roommate, so if someone is acting in a way that’s driving you insane, you want to approach the situation as if both of you want to fix the situation. Offer help rather than accusations. And, importantly, sometimes you can help teach others how to show up to a conversation by modeling good behavior. Sometimes people just don’t know how to have a mature, helpful conversation because they’ve never done it before. Staying regulated goes a long way.”

—Katie Rose, licensed clinical social worker

Don’t compromise, get creative

“Every recurring argument is an invitation to redesign the system rather than blame the person. Stop asking who’s right and start asking, How could we make this easier? The happiest households aren’t conflict-free — they’re creative. They develop rhythms, rituals, and agreements that work for the people actually living there rather than trying to squeeze themselves into someone else’s idea of how a household should function. One person cooks while the other cleans. Mornings become a quiet zone. Everyone gets an hour alone before reconnecting. Creativity is often a far better relationship skill than compromise.”

—Jane Garnett, licensed marriage and family therapist

Invest in a white noise machine

“Get an industrial strength white noise-maker. The app on your phone won’t cut it. It needs to be the kind you find in therapy offices so you can drown out at least some of the annoying sounds around you. Keep it on all day, not just for sleeping. Buy two if needed.”

—Mary McLaughlin, licensed clinical social worker

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

A yet-unreleased, cutting-edge AI model escaped its test environment last week, connecting to the internet and murdering its creators in a bid for self-determination and autonomy. 

I’m kidding, of course: That’s the plot to Westworld. (And Ex Machina, and The Matrix, and too many other sci-fi stories to list.) But on Tuesday, OpenAI did reveal that two of its models broke containment and hacked Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, during a recent test. 

The test was designed to evaluate how good the models had gotten at finding, and exploiting, cybersecurity flaws. To do that, researchers placed the models in a tightly controlled, tightly isolated environment, called a “sandbox,” and essentially challenged them to solve a cybersecurity puzzle. 

Instead of solving it directly, however, the models identified an unknown flaw in software connected to their test environment — then used that flaw to tunnel through OpenAI’s research network until they located a computer with internet access. From there, the models (correctly!) reasoned that Hugging Face might hold the answer to their challenge. 

It’s an “unprecedented” incident, OpenAI said — and a cautionary tale. Over the past year, a growing chorus of AI researchers, cybersecurity experts, and tech executives have warned that society is unprepared for this new generation of frontier AI models. 

In the real world, of course, these models do come with guardrails. (OpenAI turned them off for the test.) But the episode still suggests that the gap between reality and science fiction is narrowing — perhaps a bit faster than you’d expect.

The (impossible?) quest for a moral AI

The Hugging Face hack is a textbook example of what AI researchers call the alignment problem: the enormous, mind-melty challenge of getting AI systems to do what you want, the way that you wanted them to do it. 

Given a task and left to their own devices, AI models will pursue that task using the most efficient means available to them. But sometimes, the most efficient means are harmful, deceitful, antisocial, or otherwise…bad. 

The Hugging Face episode is one example. Bias is another: When an Amazon hiring algorithm discriminated against female candidates, for instance, it was doing what Amazon wanted (finding candidates who resembled past hires) in a way that Amazon did not want (by penalizing resumes that included words associated with women). 

In a truly apocalyptic scenario, you could even imagine — and many sci-fi writers have imagined — AI systems killing people in the narrow, relentless, and morally indifferent pursuit of their goals. Consider an AI that’s asked to order coffee, for example, and then takes steps to ensure that no one on earth can ever stop it. 

In the interests of avoiding this dystopia, AI companies have poured billions of dollars into the project of encoding their creations with human values. But even that apparently worthwhile ambition raises thorny questions, because human values vary — and often, conflict.

Should the AI order the cheapest coffee, or the cup produced under the best labor conditions? A lot of forests are cleared to plant coffee each year; maybe the AI should nudge me toward tap water, instead. Is your inferior human brain starting to melt yet…? 

One link for later

➨ Write a little note today. By hand. With a pen. Handwriting is a disappearing art in American schools, homes, and workplaces. (The average kindergarten teacher spends only 10 minutes a week teaching handwriting, and that’s the primary grade when kids learn penmanship.) People tend to think more deeply when they’re writing than when they’re typing, one education researcher told Vox. Plus, a handwritten note has a certain charm that an email or text does not. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the average F1 race car driver can lift 90 pounds — wait for it — with their neck? Driving doesn’t immediately sound all that athletic, but the extreme physics of F1 racing demand extraordinary fitness.
• Today’s trivia: Which Eminem song gave us the slang term for an obsessive admirer? (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 number of countries in North America. The answer is 23. It includes Central America and the Caribbean, in addition to the big three.