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

The American economy lost some steam this spring as the war in Iran pushed up energy prices. But don’t let that slower growth, or the downer vibes, fool you: The economy is actually…doing all right.

The latest report out Thursday from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which covers the months of April, May, and June, finds that consumers and businesses have been feeling surprisingly spendy, despite the drag of inflation.

Inflation does remain well above the Federal Reserve’s annual target of 2 percent. And a surge in imports — largely semiconductors and other gear related to the AI boom — pulled the economy down on paper. Overall, the US gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 1.5 percent, slower than economists expected. 

But imports and exports can swing dramatically from quarter to quarter, and cleaner measures of underlying demand (like the dreadfully named “real final sales to private domestic purchasers,” which filters out some of the noise of quarter-to-quarter swings) showed stronger growth. “It’s an economy that’s doing okay,” summed one economist to the Washington Post.

The US economy is surviving Trump

This raises an obvious question that President Donald Trump somehow has not posted about yet: If the economy is chugging along, does he deserve the credit?

After all, in addition to these GDP numbers, unemployment is pretty low. And wages rose faster than inflation last year, helping offset higher prices. 

But many economists argue that the economy has held up despite Trump’s policies, not because of them. Without Trump’s meddling, today’s “okay” economy might have been fantastic.

Let’s take a closer look at inflation to see how this shakes out. Trump has famously imposed massive and ever-changing tariffs on virtually all of America’s trading partners — including, most recently, a 50 percent levy on many goods from Canada. If I run a liquor store and want to stock Canada’s iconic Crown Royal, each $25 bottle now costs me $37. I either eat that cost, drop the product…or pass some of the increase on to customers. 

Repeated across the economy, these little pass-throughs add up. The Dallas Federal Reserve calculated that, as of March, America’s core inflation rate would have been just 2.3 percent — instead of 3.2 percent — without Trump’s tariffs. Put another way, Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that tariffs cost the average US household $1,100 a year. 

So maybe the economy is doing okay…but it could also be better. Personally I’d like an extra $1,100. And a Canadian whisky, for that matter. 

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➨ Don’t rent the new iPhone. Apple rolled out a new “upgrade” program a few days ago, partnering with Klarna to offer customers the ability to rent smartphones for $35 a month. The scheme may make sense for diehards who always want the latest phone and switch devices frequently. But for most other people, it’s not worth it. “How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here?” one law professor said. “If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that stroke patients can sometimes relearn speech by singing their sentences first? The treatment is called melodic intonation therapy, and it grew out of research into how the brain processes music and language.
• Today’s trivia: What kind of fruit is an ugli? (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 name of Hercules’s stepmother. That would be Hera, who in Greek mythology — and contrary to her Disney movie portrayal — absolutely hated Hercules and repeatedly tried to kill him.

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

Surely Anthony Fauci has earned the right to party with Robert De Niro in peace. But instead, America’s embattled former Covid-19 czar was hauled before the Senate today to defend five-year-old diary entries. 

Senate Republicans subpoenaed Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as part of a broader effort to dispute the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fauci is the longtime face of American infectious disease research and has appeared in front of Congress more than 250 times. But this morning — in a tense, highly partisan spectacle — he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify. 

Fauci accused Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who’s leading this circus, of nursing an “unhinged” and “obvious obsession” with him. Paul recently released Fauci’s unredacted diary, which includes lots of deeply cringe tidbits about the immunologist’s celebrity hobnobbing…but nothing that materially alters our understanding of the pandemic or Fauci’s handling of it. 

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”

Why we’re still arguing about Covid-19

Fauci occupies an uneasy spot in American politics. To some people, he’s a hero who helped steer the country through a terrifying pandemic. To others, he’s a villain who imposed damaging policies, concealed inconvenient facts, and never answered for his various missteps.

The evidence doesn’t back that darker story. But Fauci’s vilification points to one possibility that is worth taking seriously: As a country, we never adequately reckoned with the mistakes and uncertainties of Covid-19.

Consider the narrative trajectory of the lab-leak theory, which is central to Paul’s vendetta against Fauci. Early in the pandemic, Paul and other proponents argued that the novel coronavirus might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory. Some people went even further, claiming that Fauci had funded the lab’s research and then covered it up. Both theories were treated as ridiculous.

To be clear, the second theory is ridiculous. (There’s absolutely no evidence that Fauci was somehow, improbably involved in the making of Covid-19.) But the consensus around the lab-leak theory has changed. While most researchers still believe the virus spread naturally from animals to humans, a laboratory accident has never been definitively ruled out — and many now allow for the possibility in a way that they didn’t four or five years ago. 

The same is true of other pandemic controversies, too. Reasonable people can now debate whether lengthy school closures did more harm than good. Guidance on masks and other measures changed repeatedly, sometimes without a ton of explanation. 

None of that means officials acted in bad faith. But we’ve arguably never had the kind of serious, bipartisan examination of the pandemic’s missteps that a once-in-a-century public health crisis deserved. And in the absence of that (naive? impossible?) shared reckoning…we’re getting Fauci’s leaked journals. 

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➨ Check for ticks. Ticks are responsible for a whopping 90 percent of vector-borne disease in the US, but local and county health departments do very little to stop them. To protect yourself, use permethrin spray when you go outside and examine your body for the little buggers when you get home. Throw your clothes in the dryer after a hike, too — ticks hate heat! Who knew. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that in Wisconsin, placing certain bets on the prediction market Kalshi can cost you your right to vote? The law dates back to 1849, and it’s one of several state laws that bar voters from gambling on elections. 
• Today’s trivia: In Greek mythology, who is Hercules’s stepmother? (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 the name of the Dutch cheese typically coated in red wax. That would be the Edam. In the 15th century, Edam reportedly helped make its namesake city one of Europe’s most important cheese markets. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
An underappreciated surreality of climate change is the incredible sense of déjà vu: Every heat wave seems to be the new worst; every hurricane season seems to break records. 

The wildfires sweeping France and Spain this week are the latest entries in that grim catalog. They are the largest blazes either country has faced in modern history — and they could worsen as temperatures spike above 100 degrees later this week.

Already, France has evacuated more than 250,000 people from their homes in the southwest, outside Bordeaux. Spain, meanwhile, ordered some 100,000 residents to relocate as fires swept rural and wooded areas to the west of Madrid. 

Both countries have experience with wildfires. What’s new, however, is the scale of the fires: Wildfire season is lasting longer across Europe, and the blazes are burning larger areas. Climate scientists say that a series of record heat waves this summer — there’s that apocalypse déjà vu again! — helped make this year’s wildfire season particularly brutal in Spain and France.

Dry hot European summer

Every continent on Earth is getting warmer. But Europe is riding the express bus. The region has seen its average temperatures rise twice as quickly as the global average over the past 30 years, according to the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme. 

This dubious honor begs a question, however: Why does “global warming” vary between regions if it is, ya know…global? 

The answer relates to local geography and weather patterns. In broad strokes, the same climate story is playing out everywhere: When humans burn fossil fuels, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Those gases make it harder for heat to escape into space.

But some places warm faster than others. Land heats up more quickly than oceans, for instance — so coastal waters can provide a bit of insulation. 

Local weather patterns matter, too. One reason Europe has been hit especially hard is that air currents have increasingly allowed hot air to stall over the continent, fueling intense heat waves like the ones we’ve seen this summer. 

Ironically, another major reason for Europe’s rapid warming springs from an environmental victory: In the 1980s, European countries cracked down on sulfur pollution from coal plants and factories. That pollution had been reflecting sunlight back into space and slightly cooling the continent. But as the pollution disappeared, more sunlight reached the ground — and revealed the warming that pollution had previously masked. 

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➨ It is possible to wear Meta’s “pervert glasses” in a non-creepy way. Namely, and respectfully: by oneself. The polarizing $300 smartglasses come equipped with dual cameras, multiple microphones, and a whole lot of well-deserved cultural baggage. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that, in the US, the age-adjusted death rate from cardiovascular disease has fallen by three-quarters since 1950? It’s one of several pretty incredible signs that modern medicine is trouncing heart disease.
• Today’s trivia: What is the name of the Dutch cheese typically coated in red wax? (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 singer of the 1988 song “Orinoco Flow.” That would be Enya, the reclusive New Age artist who became one of Ireland’s wealthiest and most successful musicians without ever going on tour. 

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

America formally eradicated measles in the year 2000. But like many other remnants of the 1990s — flip phones, CDs, baggy pants — measles is now regrettably and undeniably back. 

More than 2,300 Americans have come down with measles so far this year — the highest number since 1992. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that there’ve been more cases in the country in the last two years than in the 24 years prior. 

Many of the cases trace back to large outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, some of which have ended. But the underlying problem is both much broader and much trickier to address: As more parents pass on routine childhood vaccinations for their kids, these once-eradicated viruses have more chances to spread.

For measles, which is incredibly — almost frightfully — contagious, 95 percent of people in any given community must be immune to stop its transmission. But today, only 28 percent of US counties vaccinate enough of their kindergarteners to meet that threshold. 

Another record-setting year for measles

Lower vaccination rates are, in large part, a result of political polarization, misinformation, and declining trust in health authorities and institutions. But there’s another, more ironic reason for measles’ resurgence: We did such a good job getting rid of it.

As late as the 1950s, virtually every American child contracted measles before age 16. Roughly 48,000 patients were hospitalized each year with measles, which is among the most contagious infections known to humanity. 

But the development of a highly effective vaccine in the 1960s, and a series of aggressive public immunization campaigns in the decades after that, all but eradicated a once-common childhood illness. The federal government poured millions of dollars into vaccination programs, especially for low-income kids. Everyone from Michael Jackson to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles championed measles immunization. 

All that campaigning worked. By the end of the 1990s, more than 90 percent of Americans had received the measles vaccine, and a similar percentage agreed that it was important to vaccinate children. As a result, most people born in the last 40 years have no firsthand experience of how dangerous measles is.

“We’ve done too good of a job,” one doctor joked to Vox last December. In other words, ironically, America’s success at vaccinating against measles … has made Americans complacent about measles vaccination. 

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➨ Go with your gut. The hashtag #GutTok has over 6 billion views on TikTok, and viral trends that promise to “hack your gut” through miracle products and cleanses are all the rage. But you don’t need an influencer-endorsed supplement for digestive wellness. Instead, actual experts recommend basic lifestyle steps like eating a high-fiber diet and reducing stress. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there are more endangered species in California than in any other US state? But more surprising is the runner-up: After California, Alabama has the most endangered species. 
• Today’s trivia: Which Irish musician sings the song “Orinoco Flow”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: On Friday we asked you for the four-letter university located in Athens. That would be Ohio. But there are more than two dozen Athenses in the US, and a rival Athens is also home to the University of Georgia. 

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 (!).

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➨ 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. 

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…? 

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➨ 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.

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

President Donald Trump seemed visibly irked when asked about his plans for Iran on Tuesday. “You don’t know anything,” he snapped at a reporter who said Iran showed no signs of deescalating. 

You have to forgive the man his vexation — he is in something of a bind. The war in Iran, never popular to begin with, has only become more of a lemon since a tenuous ceasefire collapsed earlier this month. In the two weeks since, Iran has bombarded targets across the Middle East with missiles and drone strikes. The onslaught badly damaged US bases and, just last week, killed three American soldiers’ lives.

Now Iran and its allies, metaphorically drunk on their recent successes (…alcohol is technically illegal in Iran!), appear to be revving for a new round of attacks. Iran launched strikes on Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain this week, reportedly targeting both US bases and civilian infrastructure. And on Monday, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia also threatened to shut down a second key waterway that could further strain global oil markets. 

The world is running out of soldiers

The latest US casualties are a grim reminder that — for all the talk of drones and precision missiles — wars are still fought by actual, human people. 

But major military powers are running short on soldiers: The US, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have all recently struggled to recruit troops. And the forces driving that shortage aren’t easily reversed. 

For starters, falling birth rates and aging populations have left many countries with fewer military-age adults. Being the right age is also only half of the equation. In the US, factors including weight, drug use and physical or mental health conditions would disqualify an estimated three-quarters of young Americans from military service.

Then there’s the military’s image problem: Polls show that young people around the world are becoming less willing to fight for their respective countries. And young Americans, in particular, have more negative views of both the military and the war in Iran than do their parents or grandparents.

There is another way to fill the ranks, of course…but it isn’t popular. The US ended its draft in 1973, and most Western militaries have similarly transitioned to all-volunteer forces. If the US did ever need to restart its draft, both the politics and the logistics could prove formidable. 

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➨ Treat yourself to a froyo. The go-to dessert of my misspent 20s is apparently very much back in vogue. But this time, it’s less about the zany flavors and maximalist toppings and more about wellness buzzwords like…protein and probiotics. Hmmmm. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that carrots don’t actually improve your vision? The myth originated as part of a World War II propaganda campaign to conceal Britain’s development of radar technology.
• Today’s trivia: How many countries are in North America? Don’t look it up — just guess! (Our daily trivia generally comes from Vox’s daily crossword, but today’s tidbit comes from my colleague Sean Rameswaram.) 
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday I asked you to name the Mesoamerican civilization that spoke Nahuatl. That would be the Aztecs — though 1.5 million people in central Mexico still speak the language now.

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

The first thing you need to know about the UK’s new prime minister is that he’s previously moonlighted as a DJ. 

Okay: probably not the first thing you needed to know. And sure: That DJ gig was for charity. 

But it still tells you a little something about Andy Burnham, who today became the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years. He’s widely seen as a pragmatic, affable, down-to-earth kind of guy — more Zohran Mamdani than Keir Starmer. 

As the long-time former mayor of Manchester, the UK’s second-largest city, Burnham won adoration for his focus on improving public transit and affordable housing. His vocal advocacy for England’s post-industrial cities even earned him the nickname “The King of the North.”

Burnham’s first speech as prime minister, delivered (without notes!) on Monday morning, doubled down on some of those populist themes — including the need to bring down Britain’s cost of living and address homelessness.

Political observers don’t expect Burnham’s policies to actually differ all that much from those of Starmer, his predecessor. (They’re both members of Britain’s center-left Labour Party.) And the fundamental relationship between the UK and US is also expected to stay much the same. 

Asked how he’d relate to President Donald Trump, Burnham said: “I like to think I’ve got some personality myself.” You can be the judge of that! There’s video of his 2022 DJ set.

Will Britain’s new PM reverse Brexit?

Here’s one place where Burnham does break from his predecessor: He wants Britain to rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. (Though he’s also promised not to relitigate Brexit.)

Call it a breturn or a brejoinder — it’s a tantalizing prospect for the majority of Britons, who now either have soured on their country’s 2016 vote to depart from the EU or never supported Brexit to begin with.

But undoing Britain’s break with Europe would be a monumental undertaking. First, the government would likely need a clear political mandate from British voters, either through a second referendum or a general election where a breturn figured heavily. 

Then the UK would have to negotiate its way back into the bloc…and convince all 27 member states to give it another go. Some could approve accession with parliamentary votes. But others, including France, could require national referendums of their own. 

“Countries have very different views of Britain,” one European observer told Vox last month. “There are those that still think that the EU is better off without Britain.”

One link for later

➨ Slow down time — or at least your subjective experience of it. Neuroscience research shows that both novelty and strong emotions seem to stretch time out a bit. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that despite all the evidence to the contrary — license plates, hip-hop lyrics, etc. — a minority of American peaches are actually grown in the great state of Georgia? 
• Today’s trivia: Nahuatl is still spoken by millions of people today. But it was also the primary language of which former Mesoamerican civilization? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Friday’s trivia: On Friday, my colleague Dylan Scott asked you for a Russian name that means “holy.” That would be Oleg, as in Oleg Cassini — the Russian count turned designer who dressed Jackie Kennedy. 

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

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week that the Pentagon would begin testing the testosterone levels of all military members over the age of 30 as part of their regular, annual physical exams. And — if their levels are low — service members could choose to receive testosterone replacement therapy.

“It’s not about artificial enhancement,” Hegseth said. “It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

The High-T Department of War. pic.twitter.com/hlAUq3j2cD

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) July 15, 2026

It’s another example of the performative masculinity that has defined Hegseth’s time atop the US military. He has sought to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of “War,” preached a “warrior” ethos, rolled back DEI initiatives while blocking promotions for women, and taken an unusual interest in the beard-grooming standards of service members.

The testosterone obsession is just one of several ways that the military is having a Make America Healthy Again movement. Hegseth announced over the spring that service members would no longer be required to get an annual flu vaccine. (The military later reinstated the mandate for new recruits, after a major flu outbreak at a boot camp.) And also this week, he launched a new investigation into the Defense Department’s decision in 2021 to mandate the Covid-19 vaccine — shades of the efforts being made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Go a little deeper

The “T” trend is not just a fixation of Kennedy’s, who has said that he takes testosterone supplements, and Hegseth. More Americans of every age group are taking testosterone. By one count, prescriptions grew from 7.3 million in 2019 to more than 11 million in 2024.

So, is getting more people to take supplemental testosterone actually a good idea? Should everybody be screened, as Hegseth is suggesting for service members over 30?

The Endocrine Society said in a statement after Hegseth’s announcement that there was “insufficient evidence” to support testosterone-level screening for asymptomatic Americans. Previous research suggests that, if anything, testosterone is already overprescribed in the US; only 12 percent of men receiving a prescription had received appropriate diagnostic testing.

Testosterone levels indeed fall as men age, and there has been a general decline in testosterone among men today compared to men of the past. But what’s not clear is whether widespread testosterone testing and supplementation is the solution. 

For one, distinguishing between a natural decline in testosterone and a decline that warrants clinical intervention is the subject of ongoing debate among doctors. Low T can also be a sign of other chronic health conditions that it would be better to treat. If your T is dropping because of obesity, for example, it would be better to lose weight (or take a GLP-1 drug instead of a testosterone supplement). The evidence is mixed on how much taking T actually improves things like mood, energy, sexual performance — or military effectiveness — and taking too much testosterone could come with its own health risks.

The dialogue around T supplements is still evolving. Doctors used to worry that extra testosterone could cause cardiovascular problems, but more recent research has allayed those fears, leading  proponents in the Trump administration to call for more prescribing. But the evidence right now does not appear to support the widespread T testing and supplementation that the military’s new program would suggest.

One link for later

How to keep your cool on a bad day: As a parent of three children, I’m always on the lookout for better ways to manage my stress — and took heart in the four strategies suggested by Vox’s Allie Volpe in her piece this week. If we can take the time to acknowledge how we’re feeling and really reflect on what has led us to feel that way, we might be able to avoid a full-blown meltdown. That’s news you can really use.

Before you go…

• Did you know: Prediction markets correctly guess the winner of reality TV shows upward of 90 percent of the time? It’s a trend that raises questions about insiders using insider knowledge to make a buck — and risks ruining the fun of following these shows.
• Today’s trivia: What is a Russian name meaning “holy”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you what animal can be as narrow as a few millimeters or as wide as 13 feet. That would be crabs, the various species of which can range from tiny and adorable to monstrously terrifying.

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

Canadian wildfire smoke is pouring over the US border today, blanketing much of the Northeast and Upper Midwest in fine particulate. 

When I went outside to water plants in Buffalo this morning, the air tasted like campfire and glowed with a faint amber haze. My colleague Zack Beauchamp, who lives in Ontario, said “the sky looked genuinely apocalyptic” in Toronto yesterday.

The heavy smoke comes from both the hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada and a meteorological phenomenon known as a “heat dome,” which traps hot, smoky air close to the earth. 

Those conditions are expected to linger through Saturday, exposing more than 115 million people to dangerously polluted air. Stay indoors, if possible. (AC and air purifiers can help maintain your indoor air quality.) And if you must go outside, wear an N95 mask and avoid strenuous activity. 

The pollution success story everyone forgets

Smoky, polluted summer weeks like this one still feel like outliers on the East Coast. But they were actually pretty common before the passage of the Clean Air Act 63 years ago. 

Pollution from cars, factories, and power plants had exploded in the boom years following World War II. Major US cities were routinely blanketed in falling ash, yellow smog, and a toxic “smaze” — that’s “smoke” + “haze” — that, during flare-ups, killed dozens of people. 

The Clean Air Act spurred early research into monitoring and control, however, and laid the groundwork for an ambitious federal regulatory system that set limits on polluters. Over the next 50 years, those efforts significantly slashed US air pollution and, according to some estimates, prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. The effort was so successful, in fact, that many Americans no longer remember a time when cities like New York regularly looked like this. 

But the news here isn’t all good. After decades of progress, some air pollutants — like the fine particulate matter released by wildfires — have experienced year-to-year increases. And the politics of addressing climate change, which makes wildfires larger and more intense, are far thornier than the politics of cleaning up car tailpipes or smokestacks. 

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➨ Today is a great day to buy a produce brush. (Online, obviously. Don’t go outside for one!) Cyclosporiasis, the explosive-diarrhea parasite, continues to wreak havoc on America’s bowels. And the best way to reduce your risk is by washing raw fruits, vegetables, and herbs under running water.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that “pins and needles” numbness you sometimes feel in your limbs isn’t caused by a lack of blood flow? It’s probably related to nerve compression, and for most of us, it’s pretty normal. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s an animal that can be as narrow as a few millimeters or as wide as 13 feet? (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 to name a famous Indo-Caribbean wrap-style sandwich. That would be the roti, versions of which also exist in many Asian and African cooking traditions. 

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): 

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➨ 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.

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

Two fatalities, a surge in arrests, large protests in the streets — the past two weeks of US immigration news have given me flashbacks to January. 

But this time, something’s different. Or at least appears to be different. This time, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fatally shot two men during traffic stops…the agency ordered most traffic stops to temporarily cease. 

The directive is a far cry from the denials and smears ICE lobbed last winter, after agents killed two American protesters in Minneapolis. At the time, administration officials went so far as to baselessly claim the victims were “domestic terrorists.”

The circumstances of these new shootings are different, though early reports from eyewitnesses have raised similar alarms. Yesterday, agents shot and killed a Colombian man — identified as 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero — after he exited a home they’d been surveilling. Guerrero was reportedly not the target of the surveillance.

Days earlier in Texas, ICE agents fatally shot another man, 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, as he drove three fellow construction workers to a Houston job site. DHS claimed Araujo tried to ram the officers’ vehicle. But the other men in Araujo’s van said the agents never even identified themselves as law enforcement.

How Trump remade ICE

The fatal shootings in Maine and Texas underscore an important reality: President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign might’ve faded from the headlines, but it never actually went away.

In March 2026, the most recent month with complete data, ICE arrested nearly 30,000 people, according to Syracuse University research. And just this month, ICE arrested 10,000 people in a single five-day sprint — more detentions than the agency booked per month for long stretches of the Biden administration. 

The quiet persistence of the crackdown reflects Trump’s priorities: His desire to deport tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants hasn’t actually changed, even if the PR calculus has. 

But it also speaks to a profound administrative shift: ICE is a fundamentally different agency than it was under prior administrations.  

Consider ICE’s budget, for instance, which shot up eightfold between 2024 and 2025. ICE now receives more money than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives…combined. 

For the first time in at least 20 years, ICE is also charged with entering communities to make proactive arrests, as opposed to merely picking up undocumented people detained on other charges by local or state police. That’s how we ended up with agents surveilling homes and making traffic stops in the first place. 

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➨ If you’ve never read The Odyssey, there’s no time like the present. Christopher Nolan’s movie of the same name comes out this week and seems destined to be a gigantic hit. Also, Vox’s Constance Grady says, it’s “funny, gripping, and sexy.” That’s not exactly my recollection from 11th-grade English, but I’m willing to give another translation a read!  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the name of the popular cosmetic drug “Botox” comes from the Latin word for sausage? The bacteria that the drug is made from, Clostridium botulinum, was discovered in Germany in the early 1800s after it caused an outbreak of food poisoning in people who ate spoiled sausages. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the bizarre human nickname that San Franciscans give their heavy summer fog? (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 the name of the third US vice president. That would be Aaron Burr, sir — who is, of course, far more (in)famous for shooting Alexander Hamilton.

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

Hi, friends, and good afternoon — I’m delighted to be coming to you, for the very first time, at this far more civilized and adequately caffeinated hour. 

As I previewed here on Friday, Today, Explained has undergone a little makeover: We’re now shipping this newsletter on weekday afternoons. And we’ve tweaked the format to make it more useful, entertaining and elucidating, with a renewed focus on exploring the fascinating, big ideas and hidden forces that drive the news cycle. 

Every afternoon, my pal Cameron or I will catch you up on the two to three big stories you need to know to feel grounded and informed about the day. Then we’ll go deeper on one thread from one story: a fascinating bit of related science, an economic concept that might change the way you think, or the little-known context behind a pop culture fad that suddenly and surprisingly explains everything. 

My goal here isn’t to help you “keep up” with the news — as if the news were some terrible, never-ending treadmill you could fly off the back of — but to find better, smarter, more durable ways to think about the fast-moving infopocalypse that is our inescapable reality now.

Speaking of inescapable realities: What better place to start, really, than with an…unexpected death? South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham died on Saturday of likely complications from heart disease, shortly after traveling from Ukraine back to the US.

Graham was 71 years old, and — at the risk of sounding ever-so-slightly macabre — no one had the late senator on their Congressional death watch bingo card. A number of other high-profile national politicians are in visibly poor health: Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, for instance, who on Sunday finally explained that his mysterious, weeks-long hospitalization followed a minor fall. Or President Donald Trump himself, who often appears in public with visible bruising on his hands, and who is maybe/probably receiving a high-powered, experimental obesity drug to treat pulmonary hypertension. 

The White House strenuously disclaims all speculation about Trump’s health, of course. But in America’s so-called gerontocracy, health problems are something of an occupational hazard.

How Congress got so old

You’re not imagining it: Congress has never been this old. In January 2025, the median age for a sitting US senator was 64.7 — up more than a decade from 40 years ago.

The simplest explanation is basic demographics: America is getting older as a whole. 

But there’s also another, more troubling reason for Congress’s demographic shift. Over the past century, growing political polarization and partisan gerrymandering have made congressional elections far less competitive. 

As a result, many races are essentially decided by the primaries, where older, incumbent candidates have huge advantages: More voters recognize their names and more donors contribute to their reelection funds, for instance. Despite some high-profile upsets — like the recent triumph of political newcomer Melat Kiros in Colorado — only a handful of incumbents lose their primaries each cycle. 

Critics have floated a number of interesting remedies, including term and age limits for federal lawmakers. Lots of Americans say they’d support those types of reforms. But the problem with the gerontocracy isn’t actually lawmakers’ ages — after all, older people benefit from a lifetime of accrued experience! — but the sense that voters don’t really have the opportunity to elect younger candidates, even if that’s their preference.

Changing that would require sweeping structural reforms that help newcomers challenge incumbent politicians and that make it more possible for either party to win a given district. Unfortunately, that’s not at all the direction the US is moving in.

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➨ Keeping up with friends is hard. A weekly photo dump can help. Vox’s Allie Volpe observes this little digital ritual in her own group chat. Every Friday, her friends share a handful of casual, lo-fi photos from the preceding week to keep up with the small stuff in each other’s lives. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s actually in keeping with recent research about the most effective ways to nurture friendships online.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that axolotls, those adorable smiling amphibians, can regrow limbs, spinal cords, and even portions of their brains? It’s made them particularly popular in laboratory studies. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the American politician and businessman, recently portrayed (but not necessarily spotlighted) in a hit Broadway musical, who served as the third vice president of the United States? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.
• Something to watch: The Vox podcast Unexplainable is now on Netflix! You can catch new episodes there every Monday (and still listen every Monday and Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts).