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Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris attended a town hall style forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey in Michigan Thursday night. Harris received questions on most of the 2024 campaign cycle’s top issues, including guns and immigration — but a segment on abortion proved to be an emotional centerpiece that has continued to generate conversation. That moment […]

During a Thursday Los Angeles Dodgers game versus the Miami Marlins, baseball phenom Shohei Ohtani hit a record that no other player has reached.  In that game, Ohtani became the first baseball player to reach the elusive “50/50” milestone, which translates to hitting 50 home runs and stealing 50 bases in one season. This new […]

In 1888, Eastman Kodak patented roll film and released the Kodak No. 1 box camera. The company’s business model — selling film, then processing and printing the photos taken on that film for their consumers — made photography available to the masses for the first time. Before then, photography was a complicated process requiring knowledge of […]

Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina endorsed by former President Donald Trump, was already known to be an extreme right-wing candidate who appeared to be alienating voters in a key battleground state. New revelations about his inflammatory comments on a porn site and his sexual exploits have now shaken even some […]

An underappreciated fact about large language models (LLMs) is that they produce “live” answers to prompts. You prompt them and they start talking in response, and they talk until they’re done. The result is like asking a person a question and getting a monologue back in which they improv their answer sentence by sentence. This […]

Stuck to rocks, shells, and piers in oceans around the world is a strange little creature called a sea squirt. It resembles a squishy potato and has two valves poking out, which it uses to suck in and expel seawater. Sea squirts are special for a few reasons. They tend to shoot water out of […]

Are we barreling toward a legitimacy crisis in this election? The polls show a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, suggesting that the 2024 election, like the 2020 one, may be decided by narrow margins in a few battleground states. And like last time, polls suggest a sizable proportion […]

Traci Coston, a serious young Christian TikToker, stares directly at the camera.  “One day, an animator was messing around, and he created this picture of a little minion.” Coston points up to an image of a sausage-bodied minion hanging limply from a wooden cross.  Easily among the most recognizable anti-heroes in film history, minions are […]

Every day, the sun’s rays send 173,000 terawatts of energy to Earth, 10,000 times the amount used by all of humanity. Which is to say, the potential for solar energy is immense, and we’re nowhere near the limit. That’s why solar energy is such an appealing prospect, particularly as an alternative to the fossil fuels […]

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the US’s largest and best-known labor unions, has declined to endorse a candidate for president, citing major political divides among its membership, as well as dissatisfaction with each major candidate’s stances on key union priorities.  In a tight presidential race where the vast majority of labor unions have […]

Sometimes, panics are overblown. Sometimes, older generations are just freaking out about the youngs, as they have since time immemorial. That’s not the case, unfortunately, with kids’ learning right now, more than four years after the pandemic shuttered classrooms and disrupted the lives of millions of children. The effects were seen almost immediately, as students’ […]

Now that inflation has cooled, the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it is cutting interest rates by half a percentage point. That should be welcome news for all Americans in need of a loan: business owners, college students, and anyone looking to buy a home. Until March 2022, the US enjoyed historically low interest rates. This […]

Sen. J.D. Vance has fashioned himself as a different kind of Republican. He is an “anti-regime,” “anti-elitist” populist who believes that America’s social order is “tilted toward the few.” He has decried traditional economic conservatism as an ideology that “subordinates human life and community to a false ideal of the market somehow existing independent of […]

A few months ago, I wrote about a proposal called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which seeks to make sure that every one of the more than 135,000 Americans who get diagnosed with kidney failure every year has access to a kidney transplant.  Its method is simple: a federal tax credit worth $10,000 a year […]

Earlier this month, Nevada’s Supreme Court ruled that the Green Party must be removed from that state’s 2024 ballot because of a paperwork error.  Nevada law requires people who collect petition signatures seeking to place a “minor party” on the ballot to “verify that they believe each person signing the petition is a registered voter […]

This week, there’s been yet another wave of extreme weather around the globe. North Carolina was hit with a historic amount of rain. Central and Eastern Europe have experienced some of their worst flooding in decades. And Nigeria has faced unprecedented floods following multiple days of torrential precipitation. Individually, the disasters have been damaging; together, […]

If you need something explained, Vox is the place to go. Now, we’re bringing that ethos to our latest franchise, Explain It to Me, which launches Wednesday, September 18, and focuses on answering your questions through a weekly podcast, a weekly newsletter, and a video series. Every week, we’ll tackle a question from a listener […]

Additional explosions, reportedly involving thousands of walkie-talkies, went off in Lebanon Wednesday, a day after hundreds of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria in an attack that apparently targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Islamist militant organization and Lebanese political party. Israel was reportedly behind both attacks, though it has not taken public credit. […]

On Wednesday, we launched a new way for us to answer your questions. Our Explain It to Me franchise will include a weekly podcast, weekly newsletter, and regular videos that all focus on what our audience wants to know. The first podcast episode answers a listener’s question about whether his dentist is scamming him while […]

Vox reader Gunnar Colleen writes: “So are all the bugs really disappearing? If so, why does it seem like nobody is doing anything about it? Is there anything I can personally do to help out the little guys at the very base of our ecosystems? I’ve been thinking about this a lot and it seems […]

As I’ve been thinking about Donald Trump and JD Vance’s reckless lies about Haitians eating cats in Ohio, I keep coming back to one question: What makes this different from all the other things they’ve said about immigrants? Trump blaming crime on immigrants is, after all, the foundation of his political identity: His 2016 campaign […]

Fresh waves of green and purple auroras may shimmer in the night sky tonight over parts of the continental United States, visible as far south as Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Oregon as a strong geomagnetic storm strikes Earth. It’s the latest display in an already rambunctious year for space weather. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center issued […]

Last Tuesday in Shine, North Carolina, a barn holding over 1,000 pigs caught on fire. Multiple fire departments were called to put out the blaze, but only 200 pigs survived. The cause of the fire is under investigation and hasn’t yet been determined. This is not an isolated incident. Three weeks ago, 1,100 pigs died […]

Just two months after a man tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump, the Secret Service says it stopped what appeared to be a second assassination attempt against the former president. Unlike the July 13 shooting at Trump’s rally, in which a member of the crowd was killed and Trump was injured, no one was harmed […]