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In recent days, Donald Trump has signaled eagerness to reach a trade agreement with China. The president said Tuesday that his 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports will “come down substantially” in the near future.  On Thursday, Trump said that his administration is already negotiating with China over trade, saying, “They had a meeting this […]

About nine years ago, a new organization called Canary Mission released a YouTube video describing their mission: maintaining a blacklist of anti-Israel college students. American campuses, the video warns, had become hotbeds of anti-Israel extremism: safe spaces for students to attend “Jew-hating conferences and anti-American rallies.” To fight this, Canary Mission would build an extensive […]

Clubs are, first and foremost, for dancing. One could theoretically do other things there — drink, meet strangers, conduct important and possibly illicit business deals, anything really — but likely everything but dancing could probably be done more efficiently somewhere else. At the same time, while no one’s stopping anyone from dancing in other places […]

Creatine — yes, the favorite of gym rats everywhere, a supplement many of us have taken ourselves — is a naturally occurring compound that is already found inside each person. Scientists have been studying creatine since the 1830s and, for more than a century, we have known that it was pivotal for producing energy in our […]

A Vox reader asks: Why do so many people believe in astrology? Astrology has been around as long as people have had problems. Frustrated with their terrestrial existence, humans have looked to the stars for answers. A constellation shaped like a goat, an archer, or a virgin could have just as much insight into life as […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. At long last, spring has arrived here in New England, with verdant leaves erupting through soil and piles of brown leaves. That means the return of neighbors who pass by my garden […]

For most of the last 30 years, the story of religion in America has been a pretty steady one: a constant, and consistent, drop in religious affiliation every year.  Starting in the 1990s, the share of Americans who identified as Christian, or identified with any religion at all, began to drop precipitously. At the same […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that takes aim at a longtime core principle of civil rights law known as disparate impact. And though he can’t […]

Almost immediately after he began his second term, President Donald Trump ordered the military to ban transgender people from serving in the US military. Under the Defense Department’s policy implementing this order, the military was supposed to start firing trans service members on March 26, although those firings were halted by a court order. That […]

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general. OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring […]

In his free time, while working as a clerk at a local Australian railway, James Harrison saved millions of lives — with his blood. Harrison had particularly special plasma: It had a rare antibody that doctors used to make a medication for pregnant mothers with different blood types from their newborns. When this happens, it […]

Consider the transistor, the basic unit of computer processors. Transistors can be tiny, down to single-digit nanometers in size. Billions can fit on a computer chip.  Though they have no moving parts, they devour electricity as they store and modify bits of information. “Ones and zeros are encoded as these high and low voltages,” said […]

If anything is safe from the economic chaos caused by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, it’s probably gold — or at least that’s what investors seem to think. The price of gold has increased rapidly in the months since Trump took office, surging particularly since his March 2 announcement of a baseline 10 percent tariff on […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Less than a week after becoming vice president, JD Vance, only the second Catholic to hold the office, had a very public break with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church […]

There’s a bodega on the corner where I live in Brooklyn, New York, with a massive TikTok following and a thick cable almost always stretched out the front door and plugged into a Tesla. In a tiny parking lot around the corner, the local grocery store has a fast charger that looks like a mini […]

Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change.  The US invasion of Iraq had sent gasoline prices skyward. Solar and wind power provided […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Today I’m focusing on the controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as reports of mismanagement and dysfunction in his office suggest he’s unfit for one of the […]

Three years ago, Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters for use in public school classrooms. Not much else is known about these books, how they have been used, when they were used in lessons, or how teachers plan to use them in the future. These questions have come before lower courts, but […]

Over the last few months, the Trump administration has intensified its attacks on elite, Ivy League institutions like Columbia and Harvard, enacting sweeping funding cuts and even threatening to revoke their tax-exempt status. But what’s happening on the campuses of state schools is much less covered. Take for example the public university system in Florida. […]

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could lead health insurance plans to offer narrower coverage. The case, known as Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, challenges the authority of a group within the US Department of Health and Human Services tasked with requiring insurers to cover some forms of preventative care. […]

President Donald Trump ran on a promise of more fossil fuels, fewer environmental regulations, and outright climate denial — and now he’s following through. His administration is gutting clean energy policy, fast-tracking oil and gas projects, and reshaping environmental policy with sweeping consequences. At the same time, though, there’s another force pulling hard in the […]

Back in 2021, far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who supports abolishing American democracy and replacing it with a dictatorship, went on a podcast to discuss how a hypothetical “American Caesar” might successfully carry out a power grab if elected president. His interlocutor, then-former (and now, current) Trump official Michael Anton, argued that any such effort would […]

Many worry that the Trump administration will derail the clean energy transition. But there’s reason to believe otherwise.

At every light switch, power socket, and on the road, an unstoppable revolution is already underway.  Technologies that can power our lives and jobs while doing less harm to the global climate — wind, solar, batteries, etc. — are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant. The pace of progress on price, scale, and performance […]