Jonathan Hale was ready to lay down his paint rollers. Hale, a law student turned viral road safety advocate, had run into legal trouble for painting his own DIY crosswalks across some of Los Angeles’s most dangerous intersections. In a meeting with LA Mayor Karen Bass earlier this year, he told her that if the city could commit to making its own streets safer for pedestrians, then he would stop his own vigilante activism. 

“Dude, you’re the mayor. Do something about this. It’s you, dude,” he recalls insisting to Bass — in so many words — after she apologized for his arrest on vandalism charges for a paint job last December. For months, Hale upheld his end of the bargain and stopped painting, believing in her office’s emailed assurances that a new executive order was coming soon. 

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But, eventually, after weeks of unresponsiveness, Hale grew tired of waiting, just as he had the first time he picked up a stencil and a bucket of white paint. “We’re so focused on looking for reasons why we can’t do stuff instead of ways that we can,” he said, “and it’s just paralyzed our institutions.” 

Across the country, such civic paralysis has compelled a legion of guerrilla urbanists to take their city’s matters into their own hands. In Boston, a group of cyclists used strips of green and white duct tape to build a bike lane at an intersection where a truck struck and killed 36-year-old Louisa Gag in July. In Nashville, Kansas City, and across the Bay Area, volunteers have built and installed their own public benches at bus stops where city officials had slowly removed places to sit, after years spent curating increasingly hostile public spaces. 

Every time one of these friendly neighborhood vigilantes paints a crosswalk, fills a pothole, or builds a bench, they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live. Though our local governments may seem incapable of getting these basic tasks done, they are probably less constrained by money than they are by a sluggish status quo. And in some cases, they’re so afraid of being sued that they’d rather build nothing at all. 

“We see the fear of litigation and liability” so thoroughly sabotaging mundane municipal projects that “a crosswalk takes half-a-million dollars in five years to do when it’s really a bucket of paint in an afternoon,” said Anthony Garcia, a Miami-based urban planner who, with his longtime collaborator Mike Lydon, pioneered the study of tactical urbanism, or low-cost, quick-fix interventions often led by ordinary citizens themselves. Both Garcia and Lydon now advise cities nationally on how to integrate the practices of guerrilla urbanists into the ways they govern and pilot their own new policies. “You don’t have to hold a crosswalk to the same standard that you hold a bridge,” Garcia said.

It can be inspiring when a random citizen feels compelled to pick up a paintbrush and finish what their city can’t seem to start, but it is also an infuriating embodiment of just how stunted some of our most basic systems of governance have become. These industrious urban vigilantes show that making our cities more livable can be an easy, and even joyous practice. But if their work is going to serve as more than mere symbolism, cities themselves will need to learn from their example — or, as some municipalities have recently demonstrated, find new ways to collaborate.

“The point of the crosswalks is the protest. It’s to draw awareness to the issue,” not to create a permanent class of illicit crosswalk painters, Hale told me. “We need to hold the government to a higher standard.”

The quasi-legal case for taking your street into your own hands

While there are some reasons that a municipality would take longer to install a bench or paint a crosswalk than a crew of local residents — compliance with regulations and the installation of proper signage comes to mind — they rarely need to take as long as they often do now.

Take Los Angeles, where even the most basic road safety projects can take years to build, racking up eye-popping bills along the way. Some of these delays have proved deadly. For over a decade, the city sat on funds to improve a perilous intersection in Koreatown, according to Streetsblog, an intersection where, last summer, a drunk driver hit and killed 9-year-old Nadir Gavarrete. 

As the city twiddled its thumbs in the days that followed, the Crosswalk Collective LA — a DIY group that gave Hale his start — started painting. It wasn’t until three months after Gavarrete was killed that the city scrubbed the guerrilla crosswalks, replacing them with “official” crosswalks and a tiny, temporary traffic circle. A permanent solution is supposedly on its way this year.

It shouldn’t take this long, and though cities like LA have the resources and expertise to pull off more permanent and often more effective solutions than a group of vigilantes could, it also shouldn’t take a profound tragedy to convince them to finally act. And just as importantly, they should be capable of also making the sort of small, low-cost, even temporary interventions in the interim, ones that don’t require bespoke planning and a prolonged procurement process.  

As much as Hale has come to enjoy painting crosswalks along with the group he founded, People’s Vision Zero, he does so not as a hobby, but as an expression of discontent with a government that rarely seems to take the safety of his streets as seriously as he’d like them to. Painting a rogue bike lane or giving bus riders a place to sit might not do all that much to fix what’s wrong with our cities directly, but every single DIY urbanist I’ve spoken to has told me that their efforts have helped them reclaim a sense of collective agency over how their cities function, after years of frustration with seemingly impenetrable civic institutions. 

“It’s very easy to feel small, and that nothing that you do matters,” said Carter Lavin, co-founder of the TransBay Coalition, a transit advocacy group with ties to the San Francisco Bay Area Bench Collective, but “one thing about building benches is that every screw you drive, every board you sand makes your neighbor’s life better, and it does it for hundreds of people.”

Unfortunately, getting a city to formalize these often quasi-legal urban interventions is no easy feat, as Pastor Robin Owen, a local nonprofit leader in Nashville who writes a Substack called Jesus Urbanist, knows all too well.

For the past year, Owen has been embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with the city of Nashville in which she and her growing bunch of bench-building acolytes install a DIY bench that the city later removes, after which they replace it with another bench, which the city will inevitably remove again. For many municipalities, getting rid of useful changes proves far easier than simply implementing them in the first place.

As ill-fated as that dance might seem, it can still feel more meaningful to locals, Owen told me, than the even more hapless task of prodding the government to get something done itself. 

“When you care about a place and want to make it better, you’ve very likely spent hours in meetings or emailing elected officials, and progress is just really complicated and slow,” she told me, “and building a bench and then putting it on a street corner, you actually do something that impacts someone’s life.”

How cities can learn to build the simple stuff quickly

Advocates tell me that in almost every case they would much prefer to work with their city governments than against them. And sometimes they do: For well over a decade, the local transit advocacy group Reconnect Rochester has partnered with Rochester, New York to lay out boxy, brightly colored “bus stop cubes” at transit corridors around the city. Critically, these boxes were permitted.

“If we were to have just kind of gone out there and done this in the dark of night without following any sort of process,” Mary Staropoli, co-executive director of Reconnect Rochester, told me, “I think those bus stop cubes would have been quickly removed.”

Owen has tried for months to convince her city to issue a similar permit for her benches. Nashville happens to boast one of the nation’s only programs dedicated explicitly to facilitating tactical urbanism, which should have made this an unusually straightforward process. And yet, because of a new requirement compelling such projects to pay for liability insurance, she says that she cannot obtain a permit without paying thousands of dollars to protect benches that cost just $35 a pop to build. 

With the exception of some disability protections, cities are indeed far likelier to get sued over the infrastructure they build than over the infrastructure they never bothered to build at all. A crosswalk that never gets painted is one less crosswalk to worry about. A bench that never gets built can’t lead to a lawsuit. But if they never get built at all, then they also have no chance of protecting a pedestrian from a speeding car, or giving an elderly commuter a place to sit. 

“There is this massive moral disconnection where cities are not concerned about liability when it comes to people dying in traffic violence, but are concerned about liability when citizens take action ourselves,” Owen said. “We should be more concerned about our moral liability of people having to suffer as they navigate our cities.” 

Nevertheless, when a citizen paints a crosswalk or builds a bench, whether as a stopgap as an act of protest, it can also exert a sort of “productive tension” on a city, said Lydon, one that can compel a static government to act much more quickly than it would otherwise, even if such changes takes time to materialize.

It wasn’t until a group of local wheelchair users took sledgehammers to sidewalks and began pouring their own cement ramps in the 1970s that Berkeley, California became one of the first cities in the nation to mandate curb cuts, now a hallmark of nationally mandated accessible design that benefit almost everyone at some point: parents pushing strollers, travelers pulling roller bags, and the rest of us in one way or another. 

And in another famous example, a graduate student named Matt Tomasulo zip tied a few dozen wayfinding signs to street poles around Raleigh, North Carolina in 2012, telling passerby how far away various destinations were by walking. While the city initially tore down the signs, they proved popular enough that Raleigh changed course, eventually integrating them into its own planning.

“We’ve documented this over and over,” Lydon said, noting the shift that comes when a city stops fighting a guerrilla intervention and opts to embrace or iterate upon it instead. “You can do these small things, and it can very much lead to transformational change.”

They have fun names like Feel Free, Smurphs, and Hazy Tabz. They come in colorful packages and in gummy form. They’re widely available at gas stations, corner stores, and smoke shops across the country.

They’re also highly addictive, largely unregulated, and in the news after they were found near the bodies of two dead University of Mississippi students.

The drugs are called Kratom and 7-OH. The first, kratom, is derived from the leaves of a coffee-like plant in Southeast Asia. When taken in small doses, kratom causes a low-key buzz. In higher doses, the high is described as euphoric. It operates like an opioid — a chemical in kratom called mitragynine binds to opioid receptors in the brain, which leads to that euphoric high. It also can lead to addiction and overdose. 

Social media is full of videos of people trying to kick the drug, with harrowing stories of dependence and withdrawal. 

7-OH is a highly concentrated compound derived from kratom, which dials up both the high and the danger. The drug has caught the attention of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who warned in a press conference last year that 7-OH was “marketed for children.” 

“They’re gummy bears, they’re bright colors, they’re candy-flavored,” Kennedy said. “This is really a sinister, sinister industry.” In August, federal agencies announced they were taking steps to effectively ban 7-OH nationwide. 

To break down the increasing prevalence of both kratom and 7-OH, what the drugs do, and what to do about them, Today, Explained spoke with Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist who covers drugs and drug policy and who wrote about kratom earlier this year. 

As Busby explains, kratom and 7-OH are “definitely in the zeitgeist. It’s in the news and for good reason. To have these 7-OH gummies just in gas stations is a really potentially problematic thing. Without the drug education alongside it, this drug has just popped up out of nowhere.”

Busby also talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the business interests behind the drugs, why they’re a complicated topic for the Make America Healthy Again movement, and how industry lobbyists have teamed up with several Trump administration officials to try to sway the results of regulatory decisions. 

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.

Is there an important distinction between kratom and 7-OH? Is 7-OH found in kratom?

7-OH is found in relatively small quantities within kratom, but this businessman, Vince Saunders, who is the self-styled American shaman out of Kansas City, basically figured out how to extract the 7-OH and blow it up into entire pills.

I’ve never tried 7-OH and I’m not interested, just for the record, since I’ve been talking about how I don’t mind kratom, but these 7-OH tablets are uber, uber strong. I think the large number of people that are taking it are using it instead of opioids. And maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. 

Is 7-OH something you can also easily find at your neighborhood gas station?

Yeah. It’s much the same as the kratom formulations, so you’re talking gummies, little shots, capsules, and the brand names for the 7-OH companies are perhaps even more kind of out there — 7-OHeaven is one. 

It’s certainly not heaven when you’re going into withdrawals.

And do we know that people are? Are people becoming addicted to 7-OH?

People are becoming addicted to kratom and 7-OH. I think the whole thing, the concern originally sprung up with the Feel Free tonics that are like a mix of kava and kratom. And people just got habituated into drinking several of them per day and realized that it’s very unpleasant if they don’t continue to do that on a daily basis.

We have a federal government that loves to police drugs of all sorts. What are they doing about 7-OH? 

It’s this MAHA dilemma, right? Because their ethos is very “natural medicines and freedom.” The idea that this Feel Free tonic, whose owner JW Ross recently gave, or a company related to him recently gave, like $500,000 to the MAHA PAC, and he’s been photographed next to RFK Jr. — he’s perhaps predictably come out on the side of the kratom industry, which is lobbying for a ban of 7-OH. 

RFK Jr. called it sinister and said that it targets children, which it appears to do in some cases with the gummies. There’s kratom gummies too and clearly gummies are an easier way, especially for older people, to ingest the medicine or substance, so we shouldn’t just blame the gummies here. 

But clearly, when you’ve just got packets of these gummies that are called like 7-OHeaven just on the shelf or indeed behind the counter at the gas station, there’s going to be concern about that. 

There are other MAGA figures like Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who’s got a million-dollar investment in the parent company of Feel Free. There’s definitely this nexus of figures in the government that have got some interest, potentially, or relationships with the kratom industry. And indeed the department when I was writing my Wired story reminded us and readers that everything he’s done is ethical and I’m sure it has been.

We usually think of liberal drug policies as a lefty thing. Markwayne Mullin’s about as right as they come. Are kratom and 7-OH making friends across the political spectrum because there’s a big business opportunity here?

You look at Trump’s executive order on psychedelics and then rescheduling cannabis, and it seems that the right has really seized the mantle and is looking at it from a more libertarian perspective of, “Hey, what happens in a man’s head is his own business.” 

They’re also being probably more business friendly than people on the left would be, so it’s a really interesting moment, especially with RFK Jr. as health secretary.

Trump has spoken at length about the opioid crisis in the United States and how it’s tearing our communities apart and whatnot. Here we have readily accessible opioids at our gas stations. 

Yes, they’re not killing nearly as many people as prescription drugs are. However, they’re a lot easier to get than prescription drugs. Help me understand this administration’s position in relation to what could be a real terror for some people.

They are in the process of banning 7-OH. Last month, the Department of Justice set out an emergency scheduling, so that’s open for comments at the moment. When they ban something, it doesn’t just happen overnight. 

I think by the beginning of next year, it’s quite possible that these 7-OH products won’t be in gas stations and indeed some states have already taken action.

And just to get ahead of any confusion here, 7-OH may be banned from gas stations and probably other convenience stores, but not kratom?

Exactly.

Why one and not the other? Obviously 7-OH is stronger, but you could take a lot of kratom and it might feel like taking a little 7-OH, no?

Absolutely. You just need to take a lot and it’s in powder form. So you need to consume a prodigious quantity of it or drink a bunch of these seltzers. 

I think that they’re not going to ban kratom because there’s an obvious recognition of the good it does for people that are recovering from opiate addictions and that they do have a kind of natural off-ramp, [which] is very unlikely to kill you even though you might take a huge amount. Whereas, if you’re taking like 26 different medications, including a bunch of opioids for your chronic pain, you might die. 

Who do you think wins the argument at the end of the day? We have some strong lobbying forces involved here. You’ve got a lot of people who have come to enjoy or depend on these substances that are, as we’ve established many times now, readily available all over the country. 

Do you think we see fewer or more kratom products in our gas stations and convenience stores in the years to come?

The kratom advocates are a lot more eloquent and suited and booted than the 7-OH folks. What I see is that 7-OH will be forced underground and that kratom will continue its long and illustrious ascent in American culture. 

We do really have a gas station culture in this country, and I wonder if these substances being so available in them is a particularly American thing. You live in the UK. Are gas station drugs a US thing?

It’s an American thing for sure. But you guys take a lot of drugs!

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Black Democrats are facing a crossroads

One thing I’m thinking: A party that once said “representation matters” is watching Black power recede — and two of my recent interviews show the fork in the road.

The civil war roiling the Democratic Party has typically been defined by ideological camps. Moderates vs. progressives. Establishment vs. DSA. But ahead of a wide-open presidential primary, where the party hopes to define who and what it’s fighting for, there are other fault lines as well.

A big one: Where does the party’s changing electorate leave its traditional bases of power — like Black voters and the elected officials who represent them? 

Black voters have been one of the most reliable Democratic constituencies for generations, and their elected officials, at least, have enjoyed the perks of access. Looking back, there’s an argument that the Black Democratic class had more voice in the Joe Biden version of the Democratic Party than in the years of Barack Obama. Biden had long maintained close relationships with Washington’s Black elected officials, going back to his decades representing Delaware. And in the wake of the outcry for racial justice that came after the murder of George Floyd, and the important role Black voters played in his primary campaign, Biden made clear that focus would follow him into the presidency.

“When this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African American community stood up again for me,” I watched President-elect Biden tell a crowd soon after he was elected. “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”

Biden followed up by prioritizing Black representation in his administration: He nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, fulfilling the promise he made to James Clyburn ahead of his all-important endorsement in 2020. He installed Jaime Harrison, another Clyburn mentee, as DNC chair, and made Karine Jean-Pierre the first Black and openly LGBTQ+ person to serve as White House press secretary. There was Lloyd Austin, the first Black man to run the Defense Department. And of course, there was Kamala Harris — the first Black and South Asian vice president and leader-of-the-Democratic-Party-in-waiting.

Importantly, Black elected officials were winning outside of Washington, too. As Politico noted in 2022, the Biden years marked the first time that New York City, Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles — America’s four most populous cities — all had elected Black mayors.

But fast-forward to now, and it’s all gone a bit bleak. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a core Biden-Harris promise, never materialized. Harris lost to Trump in the 2024 election. And Democrats have broadly backlashed against any explicit focus on Black racial politics. Two of those mayors (Eric Adams of New York City and Lori Lightfoot of Chicago) were bounced after one term. Houston elected a white mayor, John Whitmire, who defeated Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a longtime member of the Congressional Black Caucus. And this November, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles is at risk of becoming the latest political casualty, as she faces a tough race from an insurgent Democratic socialist, City Council member Nithya Raman.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais may put as many as 19 members of the Congressional Black Caucus — nearly a third of the caucus — at risk of losing their seats, with a particular impact on the American South. And the current energy in the Democratic Party has come from its progressive left, which has found a winning formula for winning in primaries that essentially goes around Black voters — as seen in races like Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City, or even James Talarico’s defeat of Jasmine Crockett in Texas.

I could go on. But here’s the point: Just a few short years after Democrats declared that “representation matters,” the Black elected officials who benefitted from that priority have largely receded into the background, and it reflects the larger crossroads facing many Black Democrats in a changing party. On one side, the choice is a failed establishment that historically made space for (some) Black causes; on the other is a progressive wing that is often working from a deficit of trust, with little history in Black communities and connection with Black political leaders. 

Earlier this year, two interviews on America, Actually showed the divergent paths. One with Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina. The other with Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate seat in Florida. 

The power broker

If you haven’t watched my interview with Clyburn, I’d encourage you to — because the anguish on my face is pretty palpable throughout the whole thing.

It made news because of what Clyburn said (or didn’t) about artificial intelligence, but the conversation on Black politics is what most stuck with me. The Congress member explicitly blamed Black voters for Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, saying they let her and the party down — not the other way around:

Me: “So is the argument that Black people let Kamala Harris down?”

Clyburn: “In many instances, absolutely…if that 59 percent had been 69 percent, she would’ve won.”

He defended taking corporate dollars even as polling says most Democrats, including Black voters, wish their politicians did not. And when I asked about his two most notable endorsements since the 2024 election: supporting Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race, and backing Haley Stevens against Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race — here’s what he said:

So I’m supposed to throw away all these relationships for somebody I never saw before, never heard of before…come on. Why don’t they just get off of that?

At one point, I asked Clyburn whether Mamdani’s enduring popularity, including among Black New Yorkers, caused any reflection: “Oh, I’m not paying attention to that. I got 90 percent. I just ran for reelection. I got 90 percent.”

Clyburn didn’t just defend centrist ideology. He defended a way of politics that was fundamentally unresponsive to voters, and he plainly articulated the lack of accountability at the heart of establishment politics: We didn’t fail, the voters failed us. 

But importantly, Clyburn’s policy positions — and those of the larger Congressional Black Caucus — are increasingly out of step with public opinion. Voters, including Black ones, want corporate money out of politics. And like much of the Democratic base, Black voters have also shifted left on Israel and are skeptical of things like Big Tech. Meanwhile, CBC members like Crockett are awash in crypto-industry money — from the likes of Marc Andreessen and the Winklevoss twins. At the CBC’s recent legislative conference, one of the “top sponsors” was Palantir Technologies — the data firm with major ICE contracts — even as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus canceled its financial relationship with the group. 

Black Democrats have never lived in a world where corporate cash was this unpopular, anti-Israel sentiment was this high, and their relationship with Big Tech was so under scrutiny. And in talking to Clyburn, I felt that distance. 

The upstart

Contrast that to Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Florida. 

After Nixon won her primary — a 12-point victory (56-44) against a candidate who outraised her roughly 17-to-1 — all the focus went to why she couldn’t win the general election. She became a DSA member this year, making it easy for Republicans to tag her as a socialist (she says she’s not). There was her pro-Palestinian advocacy. Her lack of fundraising. And Democratic commentators used that to write her off on primary night, before the candidate had any chance to introduce herself to the general public. 

However, since the primary, Nixon has seemingly won those same people over — through what feels like sheer force of personality. She’s gained kudos from the commentariat with viral tweets aimed at Republicans, Emily’s List, which stayed neutral in the primary, has endorsed her, and progressives led by Bernie Sanders have begun steering real money into the race. Most importantly, she has taken advantage of the new media environment, doing interview after interview in a Mamdani-style blitz that prioritizes authenticity over polish:

“As a former single mom for 12 years, I know how to make a dollar stretch,” she told me, explaining her victory against long odds. “And clearly I know how to make one stretch to like 18.”

This is not to say Nixon is going to win — because I don’t think that’s the point. At a time when so many Black Democrats are trying to figure out where they fit in the party’s changing landscape, she represents an important lesson in how to blend personality with policy. The reason Nixon can be so “authentic” is that she’s clearly not thinking about how to calibrate to appease donors. She’s not thinking about whether her honesty upsets party leaders. Her distance from corporate money, or the party’s pro-Israel wing, has afforded her a freedom many Black politicians do not have. She is leading with Angie Nixon. Not Palantir. Or the DSA.

It’s essentially the opposite of what Clyburn did — not blaming the voters, but blaming the structures that have historically oppressed black communities. Which would of course also include the Democratic Party and its corporate donors. 

“I am a team player when you are playing for the team of hardworking people,” Nixon told me. “But when you start playing for corporations, I can’t get down like that.”

Looking ahead to 2028, there are several Black Democrats priming to run for president — including Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore. Each will likely try to stake a middle ground between the Clyburns of the world and the Angie Nixons, and with South Carolina set to go first in the Democrats’ presidential nominating calendar, it would seem each would have a distinct advantage heading into the primary. However, even as Black voters were a key part of Hillary Clinton’s win in 2016, and Biden’s primary win in 2020, I don’t think we can assume this is a boon for centrists and establishment candidates.   

As I wrote earlier this summer, the Black electorate has historically moved in unison, but there is no guarantee that continues — particularly if Harris does not run again. For one, South Carolina going first in the primary may diminish its predictive power, since it’s further away from Super Tuesday. And most importantly, the electorate has changed. There’s now a rising generation of Black millennials — less committed to traditional party politics and less defined by the civil rights movement — and growing in number.

TL;DR: Democrats have long said Black voters aren’t a monolith. I think they’re about to learn what that means.

One thing I’m hearing 

This week we connected with Ryan Oehrli, a statewide accountability reporter at NC Local who has been covering election security in that state, and the state’s all-important Senate election. I wanted to ask him how state officials are dealing with election security concerns, and what he’s hearing from North Carolina voters on the ground.

You reported that some North Carolina election officials have promoted conspiracy theories about the elections they’re now helping run. How did these people get into those positions, and how much power do they have?

In North Carolina, the state board of elections appoints two Republicans and two Democrats to county election boards every other year. 

Chairs are the tie-breakers, so to speak. Historically, the governor appointed those chairs. In 2024, though, our Republican-led General Assembly stripped Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, of that power and gave it to State Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican. Under the new law, every election board in the state flipped from Democratic to Republican control in one fell swoop in 2025.

One person I reported on was a “voter integrity” activist long before he was appointed to his county’s election board last year. Others were already serving on boards, then appointed chair by the state auditor even after they promoted conspiracy theories — in one instance by alleging in an email to lawmakers that there was some widespread effort to undermine the 2024 elections and help Democrats.

These are important positions. County election boards investigate ballot irregularities, decide where polling places are, conduct election protest hearings, and much more. 

You covered an effort in Lee County to eliminate Sunday voting. What have you seen these officials actually change, or try to change, about how people vote, and how have communities responded?

“Politics here feel more nationalized than even a few years ago, and there’s a lot more attention on us.”

From what I can tell, the people we wrote about haven’t had much of an effect individually, at least so far.

A chair who once called on President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act because of the 2020 election results told me he’s found “no proof” of widespread voter fraud in his own county. 

The “voter integrity” activist I mentioned above, Jay DeLancy, told me that he’s tried to cut some names from voter rolls in his county (he claims they are “duplicates”). But the usual guardrails have stopped him. He complained that too many lawyers were involved in the process.

DeLancy did play a part in the effort to eliminate Sunday voting in Lee County. When he made his case to the state board, one of his arguments was that it would be wrong to order election workers to violate the Fourth Commandment, to keep the sabbath, “all because of politics.” The state board did not side with him.

Beyond the people we reported on, the ones who have promoted conspiracy theories, there was more controversy this year as counties drafted their early voting plans. These plans have to be agreed to unanimously, or they get passed on to the state. It emerged that an employee of the state auditor’s office, who was also the former director of the North Carolina GOP, had been texting Republican county election board members and telling them what positions to take on early voting plans.

DeLancy acknowledged that he got the idea to eliminate Sunday voting from him.

Beyond the fights over how elections are run, what are you hearing from people in North Carolina about this year’s midterms? What issues are coming up most in your reporting?

Across party lines, it’s agreed that Hurricane Helene recovery has not been handled well. You can see this in the Senate race between Roy Cooper and Michael Whatley. Whatley blames Cooper, who was governor when Helene hit in September 2024, a few months before his term ended. Cooper blames Whatley, who Trump once said would be “very much in charge” of the administration’s recovery effort and is on the FEMA Review Council.

The state has received less than half the money it requested from the federal government. This is a bipartisan, deeply felt source of frustration in the region. 

North Carolina gets a lot of attention as a battleground state. What does the national coverage miss about the politics you’re seeing locally?

North Carolinians are worried about the same issues as much of the country, like the cost of living, but the state has been through a lot on its own in the last few years. 

Hurricane Helene, of course, devastated much of the mountains, and recovery for some places will take years. The killing of Iryna Zarutska resparked a national conversation about mental health, the courts, and public safety. It’s largely been forgotten because it was overshadowed by what happened in Chicago and Minneapolis, but Border Patrol agents spent a week in Charlotte last year and arrested hundreds of people. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stayed busy here.

Just recently, President Trump said North Carolina has become “one of the most violent and one of the worst” states in the country.

Politics here feel more nationalized than even a few years ago, and there’s a lot more attention on us. This is a big change, and I wonder what it means for both major parties, at the state level, in the long run.

Most of America’s major cities have made little to no progress reducing racial segregation in their public schools over recent decades. Many have slid backward, and are more polarized today than they were at the turn of the century.

These challenges were highlighted in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s wrenching New York Times Magazine piece in September about her experience sending her daughter to poor, intensely segregated public schools in New York City as part of a campaign to fix them — only for her child to fall behind in her education and demand a change to a more selective school with few Black and Hispanic students. The essay ends with both the writer and subject frustrated: Hannah-Jones with the seemingly insurmountable barriers to improving and integrating schools, and her daughter, with the burden of confronting these structural barriers on her own. 

But Washington, DC, the city I’ve called home on and off for most of my adult life, is one of the few standout exceptions to these trends. 

During the 2000s and 2010s, its public schools underwent a dramatic set of reforms that helped improve teaching and student achievement. At the same time, the number of white students leapt up, and the share of schools that had been almost uniformly Black or Hispanic plummeted by about 20 percentage points, the largest drop among the country’s 50 biggest cities.

Recently, I called Kaya Henderson, DC’s former top schools official, to ask about that era of progress, and whether she thought the policies she implemented had helped encourage integration. If not, what had? Her answer surprised me a bit: It simply wasn’t a question she had ever really pondered. 

“For me, integration was never the point,” Henderson said. “Giving our citizens of the district, no matter where they come from or what they look like, a high-quality school system, that was the point.” 

It’s always perilous to read too much into a single example of success in education. Each state and school district is different, and seemingly small differences in how reforms are implemented can make or break them. 

Each state and school district is different, and seemingly small differences in how reforms are implemented can make or break them.

But I think DC’s story is an instructive and hopeful counterpoint to the pessimism that seemed to pervade Hannah-Jones’s discourse-devouring essay. Having witnessed the dysfunction of these schools firsthand and concluding she was wrong to sacrifice her daughter’s education in a noble attempt to address it, Hannah-Jones doesn’t offer any explicit solutions. But she does seem to suggest that we won’t be able to fix the deep-seated problems in our education system unless we find a way to end de facto segregation, which she has long argued is a critical prerequisite to improving school quality for historically disadvantaged minority students. In her media tour, she has been more explicit, calling for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to produce “a plan to address and dismantle school segregation in the city.” 

“Nothing can help the working class change its material condition more than actually having access to an equal and quality education,” she told radio host Brian Lehrer.

I agree with much of that sentiment. But I can’t help but feel like Hannah-Jones is reversing the order of operations. As DC’s example suggests, the most realistic way to desegregate our schools today might actually be to focus on improving their results first. We don’t need to wait. And while Hannah-Jones famously sought to do that by rallying better-off parents to enroll and advocate for their children on a school-by-school basis, DC shows that, with the right plan, school administrators and teachers can deliver gains as well. 

Integrating schools is hard

One of the many reasons integrating public schools has proven so historically difficult is that most modern-day segregation is driven by differences between districts, rather than within them. Well-to-do and white families decamp to wealthy suburbs when it’s time for kindergarten or middle school, while Black and Hispanic families remain within city limits, or in working-class suburbs.  

Overcoming municipal boundaries tends to be an insurmountable challenge, both politically and legally. Forced bussing was never popular, and in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that court-issued integration orders that required swapping students between districts were effectively unconstitutional, taking away one of the few tools activists thought they had to break through borders. 

Today, ideas like redrawing school boundaries to make them more diverse poll well when Americans are asked about them in the abstract, but it’s at best unclear how many suburbanites would tolerate such a thing if it was proposed in their town. 

Those sorts of options were never available to DC, anyway. It’s a politically isolated city bordered by neighbor-state suburbs like Arlington, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, where the region’s well-off professionals have long moved for the school systems. The only way to meaningfully integrate its own schools racially and economically was to lure more white or high-earning families into the district and keep them there. 

How DC saw a major drop in segregated schools

And that is in fact what happened. 

Starting in the early 2000s, DC’s population started to balloon with Gen X and millennial professionals of all races, which had the net effect of raising the overall share of white residents. Many flocked to the city after the financial crisis and Great Recession, since Washington was one of the few places where jobs remained plentiful. And they eventually set down roots. Public school enrollment — including both charters and traditional schools — grew alongside the city’s population, and the share of those students who were white jumped from 3.9 percent in 2000 to 13.7 percent in 2023. 

The influx led to a large drop in the number of what the Civil Rights Project at UCLA has defined as “intensely segregated” schools — where fewer than one in 10 students are white. In 2000, 90 percent of DC’s traditional public and charter schools fell into that category, the most of any district covering the country’s 50 largest cities, according to data from the Segregation Tracking Project at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project. By 2023, it had fallen to 69 percent, leaving it in the middle of the pack. 

Over that same period, only five of the 50 largest saw any decline at all. 

I don’t want to oversell DC’s progress. It went from among the worst in the country on this measure to looking more like a typical urban school district — similar to New York City today, where 71 percent of schools remain “intensely segregated.” I doubt many are satisfied with that status quo. There are also obvious downsides to the kind of gentrification that made these gains possible — the city lost thousands of Black families during the 21st century to rising housing prices (though the decline was even larger in the ’80s and ’90s, as its economy was in collapse). 

DC’s white students still tend to cluster in public schools serving affluent neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill or the famously leafy areas west of Rock Creek Park, and there are vanishingly few white families in the city’s poorest wards, east of the Anacostia River. Using the Segregation Tracking Project’s “normalized exposure” index, I found that there were only three other large cities where white students were spread less evenly across their school district. But because white enrollment grew so much, it still spilled out of those enclaves, and helped diversify schools that had previously been overwhelmingly low-income, Black, and Hispanic. As a result, the city became a rare example of progress on one of America’s most stubborn social ills. 

The city’s school performance improved

During the same period in which its schools became less segregated, DC was also embarking on a high-profile education reform effort.

That drive began with the arrival of charter schools in the late 1990s, which put new competitive pressure on the district’s traditional public schools; today the charter sector teaches almost half of the city’s students. But the pace of reforms hastened after 2007 when then-Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the city’s schools. His major changes included a controversial pay-for-performance system for teachers known as IMPACT, as well as stronger curriculum standards tied to the Common Core. Later leaders adopted more rigorous standardized tests that allowed parents to easily compare results between schools, a single citywide school lottery, and the city’s much celebrated universal pre-K program.

These changes did not work miracles — but they did lead to a major rise in students’ reading and math scores. DC became the fastest-improving large urban school district in the country on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), considered the gold standard for measuring learning gains, with both Black and white students seeing significant progress. Again, this was largely a game of catchup: Washington went from among the very worst performing urban school districts on the NAEP to matching the large city average. But it led to a broad sense that schools were on the upswing. 

It’s difficult, and maybe impossible, to say how much any one of the reform policies actually affected parents’ decisions to stay in the city, or helped reduce segregation in schools. Some have had an obvious impact: DC’s universal pre-K program, which began in 2008, anchors professional families here when their children are young, then acts as a funnel into the public school system. Others are probably less consequential on their own: Studies have found that centralized lotteries like the one DC adopted have only small impacts on integration. 

Regardless, the total package seems to have worked. It’s theoretically possible that the army of Sweetgreen-chomping, DC-Brau-chugging millennials who showed up to DC in the Obama era would have decided to raise their kids here no matter what the state of the city’s schools had been. The more reasonable reading, however, is that DC created a virtuous cycle, by taking steps to improve its K-12 system just as its economy was attracting a new influx of relatively well-off transplants. One telling fact: While the number of white children in DC roughly doubled in this time, the number in public and charter schools more than quadrupled, meaning parents were choosing to send them at higher rates. 

Still, it’s a model, one that shows how a city can change the makeup of its school system when it realistically can’t just make kids commute in from the suburbs. 

It seems telling that one of the only other cities to see similar declines in segregation, Atlanta, put a similar emphasis on education reform early in the century. Although those efforts were eventually sidetracked by a cheating scandal in which schools and teachers were caught faking standardized test scores, it did notch real improvements, as shown on the NAEP. 

Some will ask how much of a model DC can really be, given the uniqueness of its circumstances — not every city will have a chance to capitalize on a boom in young professionals. Still, it’s a model, one that shows how a city can change the makeup of its school system when it realistically can’t just make kids commute in from the suburbs. 

What Henderson, who served as DC schools chancellor between 2010 and 2016, emphasized to me was that insofar as DC has succeeded more than other cities at integrating in its schools, it was at best a side effect of education reform policies, rather than an explicit goal. At one point in our chat, I started reading a few of the stats I had dug up about the decline in “intense” segregation before she stopped me.

“I don’t even know if people collected that kind of data,” she said. “We prided ourselves on ‘what gets measured, gets done.’ If integration was a goal, that would have showed up on some of my [performance indicators]. And we just literally never had that conversation.” I suspect she was exaggerating slightly — Henderson and her deputy celebrated DC’s increase in white enrollment back in 2011. But it’s hard to think of a deeper contrast with Hannah-Jones’s view — where unless cities take politically implausible steps to desegregate, we’re doomed to failing children.

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

Jewish communities in Israel and around the world are currently marking the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people and triggered the war in Gaza.

Memorials for the victims of the attacks have been held at homes, on highways, and at the site of the Nova music festival. In Tel Aviv, a massive art installation at the Trumpeldor beach commemorated both the victims and the 251 hostages taken by Hamas three years ago.

Of those hostages, 166 have since returned alive, and the remains of the last deceased captive were released to Israel in January. But there’s no undoing the national trauma of the October 7 attacks — the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust — or the brutal retaliatory campaign that Israel launched afterward.

Those events profoundly changed Israel, Gaza, the broader Middle East, and the United States, and they continue to shape global and domestic politics. So today, we’re taking a look at the very long shadow of the October 7 attacks and Israel’s response to them.

Go a little deeper

Writing about the first anniversary of October 7 two years ago, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp warned that the “horrors” first triggered by the attacks would continue to unfold in tragic and unforeseeable ways. “Events that might seem contained to the Middle East have come to hurt people around the world,” he wrote, “in ways that we may not yet fully understand or even be capable of predicting.”

That hurt has undeniably been most acute in the Gaza Strip, where three years of war have reduced entire cities to rubble. Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — most of them civilians — since October 2023. Most of Gaza’s 2 million residents have also been displaced from their homes, crowded into makeshift shelters and refugee camps riddled with hunger and disease.

But the consequences of October 7 extended beyond Gaza. Settler violence against Palestinians intensified in the occupied West Bank. And the ensuing conflicts also weakened Iran and changed the balance of power across the Middle East.

That’s because Iran had long relied on its allies, like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to project power and deter attacks by its longtime rival, Israel. After October 7, however, Israel significantly weakened both groups, leaving Iran vulnerable and setting the stage for the direct strikes on Iran that Israel and the US began last winter. 

Both the war in Iran and the continued occupation of Gaza have badly hurt Israel’s international image. Across 36 countries surveyed by Pew last spring, a median of 67 percent of adults viewed Israel negatively. That disapproval has translated into diplomatic shifts, as well: 155 countries — including longtime allies of Israel, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — now officially recognize Palestinian statehood, up from 136 before the war. That doesn’t change much on the ground, but it represents a real rebuke to Israel. 

In the US, meanwhile, Israel has become a huge flashpoint in domestic politics. While more than half of Americans had a favorable view of the country before October 7, sentiment deteriorated sharply in 2025 and 2026, particularly on the left.

The issue could help determine some key midterm races, like the Michigan Senate election, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has called for ending US military aid to Israel. That’s a policy nearly half of House Democrats and many potential presidential candidates have also endorsed. 

Cutting off US aid to Israel isn’t likely to change the country’s stance toward Palestinians, however. (Israel is a wealthy country in its own right, and American aid represents just a small piece of its budget.) Instead, changing Israeli policy on Gaza and the West Bank would likely require far more aggressive pressure — pressure that, even in the current political environment, the US is unlikely to apply.

A single day may have kicked off a cascade of hurt and horrors. But putting an end to them will take far more time.

One link for later

➨ Cultivate hope. It can feel difficult (not to mention: naive, pointless, and exhausting) to maintain optimism in the face of current events. So Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, suggests another tact: Do away with blind optimism and lean into hope — that belief that the future could turn out well, but requires real care and attention.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that sea turtles regularly cry (okay: “shed tears”) to rid their bodies of excess salt? Scientists are studying sea turtle tears to learn more about animal navigation. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the word for a baby eagle? (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 final letter of the Greek alphabet. That would be omega, as in the Bible verse, Swiss watch brand, and nutritional supplement.