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Source: https://www.vox.com/rss/index.xml

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<title type="text">Vox</title>
<subtitle type="text">Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters.</subtitle>
<updated>2025-10-23T13:35:29+00:00</updated>
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<entry>
<author>
<name>Adam Clark Estes</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Can AI fix the web AI broke?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/technology/465795/chatgpt-atlas-google-chrome-gemini-perplexity-comet" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=465795</id>
<updated>2025-10-22T17:36:44-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-23T07:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Big Tech" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Even Better" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Google" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology & Media" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="User Friendly" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[At least twice a year, I’ll download a new browser, open it up, and see if the web looks better through a different window. It never does — or at least it didn’t until recently. We’ve entered a new era of AI-powered browsers. They have names like Comet, Dia, and Neon, and they all make […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="" data-caption="The web is broken, increasingly full of AI slop, and surfing it sucks." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/AI-browser.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
The web is broken, increasingly full of AI slop, and surfing it sucks. </figcaption>
</figure>
At least twice a year, I’ll download a new browser, open it up, and see if the web looks better through a different window. It never does — or at least it didn’t until recently.
We’ve entered a new era of AI-powered browsers. They have names like <a href="https://www.perplexity.ai/grow/comet">Comet</a>, <a href="https://www.diabrowser.com/">Dia</a>, and <a href="https://blogs.opera.com/news/2025/05/opera-neon-first-ai-agentic-browser/">Neon</a>, and they all make the same promise: to do things for you on the web. 
The <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/at-35-the-web-is-broken-but-its-inventor-hasnt-given-up-hope-of-fixing-it/">web is broken</a>, increasingly full of <a href="https://www.vox.com/technology/464097/meta-openai-sora-slop-ai">AI slop</a>, and surfing it sucks. Maybe AI agents should do the searching, clicking, and thinking instead? Or at least, maybe they can speed things up. That might mean summarizing a news article, filling out a form, or buying your groceries. <a href="https://chatgpt.com/atlas/">ChatGPT Atlas</a>, <a href="https://chatgpt.com/atlas/">which</a> OpenAI launched on Tuesday, operates as a search engine of sorts, replacing the ubiquitous Google Search bar at the top with a ChatGPT prompt box. Even Google Chrome offers Gemini as a sidekick that will follow you around the web and explain things to you, <a href="https://lifehacker.com/tech/someone-made-ai-clippy">like Clippy</a> but less annoying.
If you can get past the irony of AI agents swimming through AI slop, the sales pitch for this new take on web browsers is enticing. So far, as with AI in general, the promises don’t quite match the reality of the software. I’ve tried the agentic AI features in all of these new browsers, and none can do things any faster or better than I can with eyeballs and fingertips. 
Nevertheless, I can see the vague outlines of a better web through these browser windows, one that’s more natural to use and less littered with popups and garbage. I can see something that looks a bit like Google Chrome the first time I used it nearly 20 years ago.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What it’s like to surf with AI</h2>
The experience of using these AI-first browsers is quite similar — both to each other and to existing browsers. They also look a lot like Chrome on the outside, since most of them are built on the Chromium platform, the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/reference/what-is-chromium">open-source project founded by Google</a>. What’s different, however, is the generative AI chatbot bolted on the side. 
You can ask the chatbot questions about what’s on the page at any given time, including calendars and emails. They can draft text for you or gather information, all the while learning about your interests. There are generally free versions of these browsers and paid ones. Basic features, like the ability to summarize a webpage, are largely available for free. In order to get access to agentic AI features and more memory, you’ll have to spend $20 a month to upgrade to pro accounts for ChatGPT Atlas or Perplexity, which makes Comet. (Neon, by Opera, is also $20 and currently invite-only, and Dia doesn’t have agents yet.)
What’s really different is that Google takes a back seat in all of the AI-first browser experiences. For as long as I can remember, finding anything online has started with a Google Search that led to a list of blue links or, if you were lucky, the information you were looking for in the form of a map, an image, a video, or, more recently, an AI-generated answer. Sure, the prompt in the AI browser looks just like a Google Search page, but the results are better organized, laid out in bullet points or paragraphs, depending on your query. Google’s search results page, meanwhile, has long been littered with <a href="https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/">ads, spam, and affiliate marketing links</a>.
Regardless of whether you want an AI agent to book your next vacation, you have to admit that it’s easier to ask ChatGPT for cheap hotels near the best beaches in Maui — spoiler: There are none — than it is to Google it. When you do it in an AI-first browser, like ChatGPT Atlas, you’re supposed to get results that are personalized, based on what the bot knows about you from your previous chats. In other words, you get exactly what you’re looking for on the web faster.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">It all comes back to Chrome</h2>
If you think back in internet history, this was the original premise of Google Chrome. The official blog post <a href="https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html">announcing the first Chrome Beta</a> in 2008 billed the browser as “streamlined and simple,” especially since you could fire off a Google Search right from a big box at the top of the browser window. In an update three years later, Google also introduced the <a href="https://chrome.googleblog.com/2011/11/take-your-chrome-stuff-with-you-in-new.html">ability to sign into Chrome</a> so your personal data followed you wherever you went. Of course, all that personal data helped Google grow its online advertising business and serve you even more personalized ads. Over the years, that led to more bloated search results and a less streamlined web browsing experience in Chrome.
Google has maintained its dominant global market share for both search and web browsers at <a href="https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-google-dominates-the-search-engine-market/">about 90 percent</a> and <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share">70 percent</a>, respectively. Still, I would argue that you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who absolutely loves using Google Search these days. And by proxy, I have to question anyone who’s still enthusiastic about Google Chrome, which helped cement Google’s position as the front door to the web. I actually <a href="https://gizmodo.com/i-ditched-chrome-for-safari-and-you-can-too-1832817469">switched back to Safari</a> years ago, when Chrome stopped feeling as fast, and Google started getting hit with antitrust lawsuits.
The funny thing is, these AI-powered browsers remind me of Chrome in its early days. Back then, Google bragged about building a browser from the ground up, and in some ways, AI-first browsers represent a gut renovation. Chrome was fast because it redesigned the workflow that loaded webpages and kept tabs running. AI-first browsers are fast because they reconsider how you interact with a browser. There’s no need to dump keywords into a Google Search, although you can do that if you want. You can explain what you need to a chatbot, which can then explain what you’re seeing on the web. The whole experience ends up being quite simple and streamlined.
I’ll be the first to admit that chatbots aren’t for everyone. It took me <a href="https://www.vox.com/technology/390866/technology-artifical-intelligence-chores-burnout">many hours of experimenting</a> before I figured out how to make this new technology work for me, and now I find myself discovering new ways that tools like ChatGPT can be helpful almost every day. I will also confess that I expect to remain a loyal Safari user, who uses Google Search for all kinds of things.
AI browsers don’t exactly work as advertised right now, but they offer the possibility of a better web, one that’s cleaner and faster. It’s also very possible that companies like OpenAI will suddenly realize, like Google once did, that they can make lots of money by collecting massive amounts of data about their users and using it to sell ads on the web. There are signs that <a href="https://searchengineland.com/openai-staffing-chatgpt-ad-platform-462554">it’s already happening</a>.
A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/user-friendly-tech-newsletter-signup">Sign up here</a> so you don’t miss the next one!
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Peter Turchin</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out.]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/462226/end-times-crisis-history-lessons-cliodynamics-collase-society" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=462226</id>
<updated>2025-10-23T06:08:11-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-23T06:08:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Political Violence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="The Highlight" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[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. Anti-establishment parties and politicians are surging in Western Europe and Japan. In the United States, the MAGA movement, led by President Donald Trump, has seized power. Political violence is rising and […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Jon Han for Vox" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/Wealthpumpfinal.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
</figcaption>
</figure>
This story was originally published in <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/463044/welcome-to-the-october-issue-of-the-highlight">The Highlight</a>, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, <a href="https://www.vox.com/support-membership?itm_campaign=article-header-Q42024&itm_medium=site&itm_source=in-article">join the Vox Membership program today</a>.
Anti-establishment parties and politicians are surging in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/21/revealed-one-in-three-europeans-now-votes-anti-establishment">Western Europe</a> and <a href="https://time.com/7306873/japan-elections-japanese-first-sanseito-sohei-kamiya-trump-far-right/">Japan</a>. In the United States, the MAGA movement, led by President Donald Trump, has seized power. Political violence is rising and by several measures — <a href="https://seshat-db.com/crisisdb/uspvdb/">violent riots, anti-government demonstrations</a> — the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Our current predicament is not unprecedented. We can learn from how past societies survived through, and ended, their crisis periods. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The “wealth pump”</h2>
The collapse of ancient empires, the revolutions that convulsed early modern Europe, or the tensions tearing apart today’s democracies are often treated as products of unique historical circumstances. But <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703238/end-times-by-peter-turchin/">my analysis of more than a hundred past crises spanning the last two millennia</a> shows that these outbreaks of societal instability are driven by a mechanism that operates with surprising regularity across different historical eras and places:      the wealth pump. The term describes a set of conditions — economic and political — that transfer wealth from the broad base of the population to the elite, a small proportion of people who concentrate power in their hands.
The wealth pump consists of various means by which the fruits of economic growth are, instead of being shared equitably, siphoned upward the social ladder. In the past, this was from peasants to landlords; today, from workers to business owners and corporate executives. First, economic inequality rises. Then political inequality follows, as the wealthy convert their riches into influence. This development erodes democratic institutions, making it harder for the non-elite majority to defend their interests through formal politics. Eventually, systemic stability is threatened.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Undermining society </h2>
The wealth pump undermines the stability of societies in three ways. 
<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">1) It causes growing popular discontent. </h4>
The obvious effect of the wealth pump is that it enriches the upper strata and increases their numbers via upward economic mobility — for example, enabling CEOs of large companies to enter the ranks of uber-wealthy. However, this happens at the expense of the majority. To understand this, consider the relative wage, defined as the wage earned by typical workers (technically, the median wage) relative to the GDP per capita. When the relative wage declines, non-elite workers receive less and less of the fruits of economic growth. This decline in relative wages means that while wages stagnate, the costs of housing, education, and healthcare soar.
In the United States, for example, <a href="https://peterturchin.com/population-immiseration-in-america/">the relative wage began falling from the 1970s onward</a>. Even as the economy grew, most Americans fell behind. This results in anger and increased mass-mobilization potential.
<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">2) The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.</h4>
This is most clear when we consider that some top wealth holders are interested in translating their economic power into political office (think Trump, but also Michael Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, and so on). <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28383/w28383.pdf">There are 10 times as many decamillionaires today</a> (and the number of billionaires has increased even more), but still the same number of political positions — one president, 100 senators, and so on.
<h4 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">3) The wealth pump creates too many youths pursuing not just college but even more advanced degrees in hopes of escaping looming “precarity.”</h4>
Increasing the number of elite wannabes (stemming from the overproduction of both wealth-holders and degree-holders) who compete for a fixed number of power positions results in a game of musical chairs. As the proportion of aspirants who are frustrated in their quest for power positions swell, many are tempted to start breaking the rules of the game. 
This all creates an explosive mixture: raw energy and mass action, coupled with organization and charismatic leaders. We are thus left with a paradoxical coalition: alienated elites from above, and angry masses from below. Historical revolutions — from the late Roman Republic to 18th-century France to the Russian Revolution — have often emerged from this volatile combination. It is not just the poor who revolt; revolutions are incubated among those who are downwardly mobile or shut out of power despite their elevated status and aspirations.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The long arc of instability</h2>
Of course, human societies are complex systems and the road to state breakdown is affected by other factors.  And this dynamic — wealth concentration, elite overproduction, mass immiseration — does not lead to collapse overnight. But there is a point at which the contradictions can no longer be contained. Eventually, something gives.
We can <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Revolution-and-Rebellion-in-the-Early-Modern-World-Population-Change-and-State-Breakdown-in-England-France-Turkey-and-China1600-1850-25th-An/Goldstone/p/book/9781138222120">trace this cycle</a> <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691136967/secular-cycles">through history</a>. In ancient Rome, the wealth pump destroyed the class of independent citizen farmers, while the elite class ballooned with equestrians and senators jockeying for position. The result was a century of civil wars that ended with the Republic’s death and the rise of autocracy. The original populist party (populares in Latin), was launched by the Gracchi brothers, and its most successful (for a while) leader was Julius Caesar. The careers of Roman populists, who channeled the discontent of non-elite Romans, are eerily similar to the modern populists, most notably Trump.
In 17th-century England, decades of population growth, declining wages, and dramatic expansion of the landed gentry numbers led to civil war, regicide, and a revolutionary reordering of the political economy. In pre-revolutionary France, the aristocracy and clergy entrenched their privileges while the rural and urban poor bore the burden of taxation — until the whole system exploded in 1789.
These were not isolated incidents. They are manifestations of a recurring structural dynamic. To end a crisis, a society, first and foremost, needs to shut down the wealth pump.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What can we learn from history about ending crisis periods?</h2>
Once a society steps on the road to crisis, it resembles a massive ball rolling down a narrow valley with steep slopes. It’s very difficult to stop or even deflect its rush to an impending disaster. But when the ball arrives at the crisis point — for example, when counter-elites seize power — the valley opens up.     
In the past, most exits from crisis had to pass through a lengthy period of disintegration and disunity, lasting many decades and sometimes longer than a century. An example is the early modern crisis in France, which began in 1562 with the Wars of Religion and ended with the start of Louis XIV’s personal rule in 1661. The next disintegrative period in France, the Age of Revolutions, also lasted many decades — from 1789 to 1870. 
Most commonly, wealth pumps were turned off by a major epidemic, calamitous civil war, or transformative revolution. “Death is the great leveler,” as the historian <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691271842/the-great-leveler">Walter Scheidel argued in his eponymous book</a>. The Black Death in 14th-century Western Europe carried away half of the population. Collapsing labor supply drove up real wages, reversing the wealth pump. In France and England, this was followed by many decades of internecine wars, in which overproduced elites partly exterminated themselves, driving large swaths into the commoner class. In the next cycle, known as the General Crisis of the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) killed off more than one-third of German population, also resetting the structural conditions that then ended the crisis.
But there are <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rk4gd_v1">other ways to exit the crisis</a> and some trajectories manage to avoid a revolution or a civil war.            <a href="https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mw3d3r7">Analysis by my research group</a> suggests that at the cusp of the crisis the massive ball of the state can be nudged to achieve better outcomes. This insight is highly relevant to us today — in fact, a high degree of unpredictability and historical contingency is grounds for optimism. It means that we collectively can really shape the future.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>We should be ready for years and perhaps even decades of social turbulence and political infighting (and I hope we will avoid hot civil war).</blockquote></figure>
My colleagues and I review several examples that successfully avoided revolution or civil war. In <a href="https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mw3d3r7">one article, </a> we discuss the Conflict of the Orders in ancient Rome, which brought the Roman Republic to the brink of civil war, but was resolved when the patricians agreed to share power with the plebeians.  
During the reform period in England (1838–1857), political reforms removed “rotten boroughs,” thus shifting the balance of power away from the landed gentry in favor of the upwardly mobile commercial elites. Later reforms increased the electorate by broadening who could vote. Another key legislation that alleviated immiseration was the repeal of the Corn Laws that had imposed tariffs on the import of grains, which benefited large landowners but inflated the price of staple food in domestic markets.
The Great Reforms in the Russian Empire (1861–1874) not only abolished serfdom, but also relaxed censorship of the media and revamped the judicial system. Other reforms include military modernization, local self-government, education reforms, reform of the Russian Orthodox Church, and economic modernization.
<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343312442078">The US was in crisis before the New Deal</a> (1933–1938). But the New Deal instituted a broad array of redistributive policies: steeply progressive tax rates, strong labor rights, regulation of finance, large-scale investment in infrastructure and education, and the expansion of social safety nets. These reforms didn’t happen overnight. They were the product of hard-fought political struggles (beginning during the early decades of the twentieth century), often driven by mass movements and reform-minded segments of the elites who recognized that continued extraction risked systemic collapse. Social Democratic movements in northern and western Europe, such as Denmark, did an even better job of turning off their wealth pumps, over the same period of time.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Finding a way out</h2>
Unfortunately, <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0402">analysis of 150 of past crises</a> showed that they avoided substantial bloodshed only in about 10 to 15 percent of cases. But it is encouraging that successful crisis resolutions, rare in the distant past, become more frequent as we get closer to today.
Our societies are different from Imperial Rome and from even our mid-20th century predecessors. But the principles behind a successful exit from crisis remain relevant. While the specific policies will differ across societies, the overarching goal remains the same: to rebalance the distribution of wealth and power in a way that promotes long-term stability, not short-term elite enrichment.
One principle is the need to emphasize the importance of productive, and not just extractive, economic activity. In recent decades, financialization and monopolization have shifted the economy’s center of gravity away from industries that produce real goods and services toward those that merely rearrange ownership or extract rents. To reverse this, we need tax and regulatory structures that reward innovation, job creation, and sustainable enterprise — while discouraging speculative asset bubbles, predatory lending, and corporate hoarding.
Progressive taxation is another cornerstone of any effort to slow the wealth pump. This may include not just higher income tax rates on the top brackets, but also wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, and the closing of loopholes that allow billionaires to pay lower effective tax rates than their employees. 
Equally important is the restructuring of the labor market from below. For decades, the decline of organized labor has weakened the bargaining power of the majority, resulting in wage stagnation. When workers are empowered to demand their fair share of economic gains, the upward suction of wealth slows — and the society becomes both more equitable and more resilient.
Another key front may be the regulation of political power itself. As wealth has concentrated, so has influence — often in ways that distort democracy. Campaign finance reform, lobbying restrictions, anti-corruption measures, and increased transparency in government are all essential to ensure that public policy serves the broad citizenry rather than narrow elite interests. A democracy dominated by oligarchic donors is a contradiction in terms — and a recipe for social unrest.
But policies alone are not enough. The wealth pump is also sustained by narratives: the belief that extreme inequality is the price of progress, that markets always know best, that poverty reflects moral failure rather than structural disadvantage. These cultural frames must be challenged and replaced with a new ethic of social solidarity and reciprocal obligation. No society can thrive when it abandons the idea of a common good.
The thoughts above should not be taken as a concrete reform program. Historically, different societies used a variety of ways to end their disintegrative periods. Often, finding a way out requires many decades of experimentation and political conflict. The main problem is that the continuing operation of the wealth pump is extremely lucrative for most elites. Institutional inertia and vested interest will resist every step of the rebalancing. This is why I wouldn’t expect rapid action. Instead we should be ready for years and perhaps even decades of social turbulence and political infighting (and I hope we will avoid hot civil war). But the longer we fail to tame the wealth pump, the longer our own disintegrative period will be.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Christian Paz</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[How to translate No Kings energy to actual political power]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/465779/democrats-resistance-liberal-no-kings-energy-midterms-protest-stop-trump" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=465779</id>
<updated>2025-10-23T09:35:29-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-23T06:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Democracy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Final estimates are still pending, but early reports suggest that Saturday’s “No Kings,” anti-Trump protests were the biggest single-day protest event since 1970 — and perhaps the largest nonviolent protests in US history. Over 2,700 events were held in all 50 states, according to organizers, which means as many as 7 million Americans joined. Sen. Elizabeth […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
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<img alt="People participate in a “No Kings” national day of protest in Boston, carrying signs that read “NO KINGS” “STOP TRUMP” and “NOPE!”." data-caption="People participate in a “No Kings” protest on October 18, 2025, in Boston. | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/gettyimages-2241482740.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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People participate in a “No Kings” protest on October 18, 2025, in Boston. | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
Final estimates are still pending, but early reports suggest that Saturday’s “No Kings,” anti-Trump protests were the <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/second-no-kings-day-protests-likely">biggest single-day protest</a> event since 1970 — and perhaps the <a href="https://ash.harvard.edu/resources/the-resistance-reaches-into-trump-country/">largest nonviolent protests</a> in US history. Over 2,700 events were held in all 50 states, according to organizers, which means as many as 7 million Americans joined.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren encapsulated this message during her speech at the Boston rally, saying that “standing up to a wannabe dictator — that is patriotism. … Saying no to troops that occupy our cities — that is patriotism. And peacefully protesting to protect our democracy — that is patriotism.”
But for all that energy and enthusiasm, the anti-Trump resistance still faces a dilemma: despite the protests and mass mobilizations of the first Trump term, he was ultimately reelected — with greater support. It leaves a few open questions: just how effective can organized protest be? What can protestors learn since then, and what are the limits to what mass mobilization can do? And how can these movements adapt in the face of an administration that seems eager to wield every power of the state against its perceived enemies?
To answer these questions and more, I spoke with <a href="https://thedaskocpol.scholars.harvard.edu/">Theda Skocpol</a>, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and a renowned expert on both the history and the nuts-and-bolts of political organizing in the US. And although Skocpol, who is decidedly not a Trump supporter, is optimistic about what the No Kings protests could suggest, she is doggedly focused on what she sees as the ultimate goal of mass protests. (Hint: In the American context, she doesn’t think it has much to do with <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world">that 3.5% figure you may have heard about</a>).
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The No Kings protest happened again this weekend. What was your initial reaction to it? What were your expectations? Were they met, or did anything surprise you?
It was inspiring to see such a large number of people in so many [different] kinds of places. I thought that was likely to happen, but you never know for sure until it does. But, clearly, a lot of people came from different places and expressed alarm at what’s happening in the country — and [with] a kind of humorous tone, which under the circumstances is probably a good thing. So I think it’s probably a moment of mutual-reinforcement for the majority, really, of Americans who aren’t happy with the way things are headed.
Was there anything that distinguished the protests this weekend from the kind of mass protests that we saw during the first Trump administration?
My research colleagues and I looked at both the wave of Tea Party protests that spread in 2009, starting with Tax Day, which was the biggest [single-day protest] in the sense of size and numbers of places across the country. And we also looked, four years later, at the Resistance to Trump, which got going a little faster and where the peak-moment of both size and spread was the post-inaugural Women’s Marches in January 2017. And in that respect, the No Kings protests that we’ve seen so far are similar to both the Tea Party and Resistance movements, in that these were all nationwide demonstrations that were synchronized and happening everywhere. They come, obviously, from different partisan directions — 2009 compared to 2017 and now — but what they share is that they were all very widespread and very large.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“You have to have people who are prepared to fight very hard — sometimes against threats to policy priorities, sometimes against threats to their sense of what makes America America…”</blockquote></figure>
I’ve seen criticism of the No Kings protests that suggest the sprawling and de-centralized nature of the whole thing, as well as its laser-focus on opposition to Trump — rather than a more positive vision — is a problem. What do you make of that argument?
It’s interesting that civic resurgence in our time has taken the form of these big waves from both sides of the spectrum — with the Tea Party protests as the first big wave and then the anti-Trump resistance four years later as the second. In both cases, these [protests] were not really policy-focused. They were really expressions of alarm about the direction of the country. The sense that these were authentic expressions from people who were alarmed about where the country was headed was what gave them their force.
Now, I will say that there’s a difference that I’m concerned about this time: The research that my colleagues and I did on the 2009 and 2017 protests found that they gave way to organizing. There were 2,000 to 3,000 local groups that were formed in both cases all over the country, and in almost every congressional district in every state, that carried on meeting face-to-face and helped the protests transform those connections into policy and political effects. In both cases, there were people who came forward and ran for office and created congressional waves, first for the Republicans (in 2010) and then for the Democrats (in 2018).
What do you make of the idea — which is credited to professor Erica Chenoweth, even though, to be fair, her argument is much more complicated than this — that in order for there to be tangible political consequences, these protests need to get at least 3.5 percent of the population involved?
A lot of the media that I saw after the protests was saying things like, Well, we got to get to 3.5 percent of the population in the next big no King’s Day. And I really think that’s a misdirection. I understand the research that says that getting to that threshold is correlated with overthrowing weak autocratic monarchies and arresting parliamentary democratic backsliding, but that’s not the point in the United States. The point is whether we’re going to see — as we saw from the right and left in the earlier big waves — a follow through in political and electoral organizing.
To judge these protests as a success, they have got to feed into electoral results and to prod America’s elite institutions to stop caving in to the administration’s corrupt demands. And that’s a bigger lift than anything that we’ve seen before. In the end, it doesn’t matter if 3.5 percent of people turn out one time or another. What matters is political power. People on the right know that.
Your concerns here seem connected to your critiques of Indivisible’s approach during Trump’s first term. Can you expand a little on where you think they made some mistakes and whether you see evidence of them adjusting in the time since?
My comments on Indivisible grew out of a very careful empirical analysis. I think that in the beginning, during year one, when Indivisible created a website in 2016 and provided encouragement for people to find one another in thousands of locations around the country, provided a kind of framework for organizing to flow into and flow out of public protest events, and played a role in orchestrating the congressional pressures that saved the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term — that was all splendid.
But by year two, the organizers had built a huge advocacy organization of paid people in Washington. They were using the money for that, not to sustain the grassroots groups or link them up in states, and they were also urging people to run against Democrats who were not progressive enough. But the kind of politics that works in this context is broad-tent.
Does “broad-tent” mean more moderate? 
No. What I’m going to say it means is “militant inclusion.” You have to have people who are prepared to fight very hard — sometimes against threats to policy priorities, sometimes against threats to their sense of what makes America America, sometimes against threats to the rule of law, sometimes against blatant corruption. You don’t need to [pick and choose what to fight for] and you do not need to prioritize getting rid of Chuck Schumer.
In that vein, what do you think about the ongoing debates about how much, if at all, the Democrats need to “moderate”?
I don’t think any resistance movement needs to make any collective decisions about that right now. If people are coming forward to run for office, that’s a good thing. Let the primaries play out. But when the primaries are over, if it’s a banana Democrat or an orange Democrat — so what! If it’s an independent or if it’s even a non-MAGA Republican, get behind the people that have the best chance to put a stop to this.
And so that is a source of some concern for me, because these movements always have a top-down, bottom-up dynamic, and if the top takes over on the left, it usually wanders off into unproductive signaling rather than claiming power. 
And I have to tell you: These Trump Republicans and their allies, they do not believe they need majority support. They believe they can wait out massive street demonstrations, or use them to invoke the Insurrection Act. That does not mean we should all stay home; but it does mean we shouldn’t mistake the demonstrations as power.
Do we expect too much from mass protests?
Mass protests — particularly the synchronized ones with an inspiring but inclusive and therefore slightly vague phrasing — they really seem to be very important to civic engagement in this entire era, for left and right. That’s certainly what my research shows, and so I don’t want to say that they’re not important. I think they are important, and they may be especially important now, because liberals and moderates — not to mention progressives — are really depressed about the drum-beat of horrors that are happening.
So, yes, they’re important. It’s just that social scientists and media people and partisans who romanticize street protest as the be-all and end-all are wrong to do so.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Cameron Peters</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Trump’s East Wing demolition, briefly explained]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/465805/east-wing-white-house-demolition-donald-trump-ballroom" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/465805/the-logoff-template</id>
<updated>2025-10-22T18:26:44-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-22T18:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="The Logoff" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[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 is demolishing the East Wing of the White House without review, recourse, or an approval process. Why is this happening? Trump announced […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="The East Wing of the White House is partially torn down, with an American flag on a pole overhead." data-caption="The East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews on October 22, 2025. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/gettyimages-2242630313.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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The East Wing of the White House is demolished by work crews on October 22, 2025. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images </figcaption>
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This story appeared in <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Logoff</a>, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/logoff-newsletter-trump-administration-updates" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Subscribe here</a>.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump is demolishing the East Wing of the White House without review, recourse, or an approval process.
Why is this happening? Trump announced plans over the summer to build a privately funded ballroom adjacent to the White House. At the time, Trump said that the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it, but not touching it.” 
Is he allowed to do this? It’s not clear who can, or will, stop him, especially with the East Wing already substantially destroyed. (It’s set to be entirely demolished by this weekend.) There are at least two commissions that are usually involved in changes to the White House; neither has reviewed plans for the demolition.
Why does this matter? It’s hard to keep the partial demolition of America’s most famous building a secret, but this is as close as it comes. The East Wing is newer than much of the complex, but it’s still a key piece of American history being destroyed with no chance for lawmakers or the public to weigh in, all in service of one of Trump’s personal projects. This isn’t the first change Trump has made to the White House — he paved over the historic Rose Garden and <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/459397/trump-rebranding-america-style-aesthetic-taste">festooned the Oval Office with gold</a> earlier this year — but it’s by far the largest and the most permanent.
What’s the big picture? The destruction of the East Wing is just the latest example of how Trump is governing. His administration’s blitzkrieg evisceration of the US Agency for International Development is another, as is the hollowing out of the Education Department and scientific agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 
It all points to a larger asymmetry that the administration has exploited to the fullest: It’s far easier to destroy than to put something back the way it was, whatever a court may later say. In the case of the East Wing, it will be impossible. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">And with that, it’s time to log off…</h2>
<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/easter-islands-moai-statues-may-have-walked-to-where-they-now-stand/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">This story from Wired</a>, about Easter Island’s massive moai statues, was a fascinating read. The short version — scientists think they have a theory for how the centuries-old, multiton statues were transported to where they now stand: They were “walked,” essentially rocked back and forth with ropes to move them slowly along a road. You can read the full story — and watch a video of scientists moving a replica statue — <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/easter-islands-moai-statues-may-have-walked-to-where-they-now-stand/">here</a>. Have a great evening!
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Cameron Peters</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Umair Irfan</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[How you’re paying for big tech’s AI speculation]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/technology/465749/electricity-costs-ai-data-centers-speculation" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=465749</id>
<updated>2025-10-22T13:14:41-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-22T13:15:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Climate" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Energy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Today, Explained newsletter" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[If you’ve noticed your electricity bill is higher than normal recently, you’re not alone. Power is getting more expensive everywhere, outpacing inflation. One major culprit? The flurry of new data centers being built to meet demand from the AI sector. To find out more, I asked my colleague Umair Irfan, who covers energy policy, for Vox’s […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="An Amazon Web Services data center in Haymarket, Virginia, on July 9, 2025." data-caption="An Amazon Web Services data center in Virginia. | Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/gettyimages-2223681645.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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An Amazon Web Services data center in Virginia. | Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
If you’ve noticed your electricity bill is higher than normal recently, you’re not alone. Power is getting more expensive everywhere, outpacing inflation. One major culprit? The flurry of new data centers being built to meet demand from the AI sector.
To find out more, I asked my colleague Umair Irfan, who covers energy policy, for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/today-explained-newsletter-signup">here</a> for more conversations like this.
What’s been going on with energy prices lately?
Electricity prices have been going up pretty dramatically over the past year. In some places, they’re rising by double-digit percentages, and they’re projected to rise even further. We’re talking about prices that are paid by consumers, so this is actually showing up on people’s power bills, which is why it’s getting a lot of attention.
There’s a couple reasons behind this. One is that electricity prices were kept artificially low during the Covid-19 pandemic, because the electricity industry is heavily regulated. A lot of regulators were under public pressure to prevent the utilities from raising prices because we were already dealing with inflation and other cost-of-living issues. Now some of those restrictions have become uncorked, and we’re seeing a rebound. 
On top of that, all of the inputs for electricity have gotten a lot more expensive. Materials costs are rising in general, and then the Trump administration’s tariffs on things like steel and aluminum are making it harder to get the hardware to do things like build power lines or even replace existing power lines. Fuel prices for coal and natural gas are pretty volatile, and there’s been a rise in natural gas prices. Natural gas is the number one way we produce electricity here in the US.
We’re also seeing a pretty big increase in overall energy demand for the first time in a very long time. For the past 20-odd years, we’ve been seeing efficiency counteract energy demand increases, and so our overall energy demand has held fairly flat. Just in the past couple of years, we’ve seen a big increase in electricity usage, and that’s driven by this proliferation of data centers, particularly those there to power the AI industry.
You have <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/465032/data-center-electricity-power-bill-increasing-maryland-pjm">a big story out</a> about how these data centers are contributing to the price spike, in some cases even when they’re not built. What’s happening there?
Just last week, the public advocate for the state of Maryland sent a letter to the grid operator for the region, telling them that they really need to rein in energy speculation, because it’s starting to raise people’s prices. 
The way that works is that in order to build a data center, you have to procure a certain amount of power in order to make sure that you can actually keep it running. And so what you’re seeing is, these tech companies are going to different utilities and shopping around and asking them, What price can you give me for this quantity of electricity? And how soon? 
It turns out that in some cases, these tech companies are shopping to multiple utilities, and those utilities, in turn, are telling the grid operator, Hey, we’re going to need this much electricity in the next few years. The concern is that they’re double counting, because these tech companies are going to multiple utilities and multiple jurisdictions telling them that they’re going to need this much electricity, and they’re just window-shopping at the moment, but utilities are treating these as real bids.
The other thing is that we’re not entirely sure that a lot of these data centers are going to be built. There are some pretty wild estimates for how many more data centers we’re going to need. It’s not clear that the current trends we’re seeing are going to continue.
All that means is that you’re going to be building a lot of infrastructure to support data centers whose demand may not be there to actually pay for that infrastructure. And what that means, ultimately, is that normal customers will end up holding the bag.
This is in Maryland, but the grid operator covers much of the East Coast. We’ve got two big gubernatorial races coming up in Virginia and New Jersey. Is that coming up on the campaign trail?
It has definitely become a big issue in the New Jersey governor’s race. Both sides are blaming policies from the other party for raising energy prices. The Republican in the race is blaming renewable energy for driving up electricity costs, and the Democrat is blaming the Trump administration for canceling a lot of incentives for more renewable energy to be on the grid, as well as the infrastructure to support it. Renewable energy is right now the cheapest and fastest way to add electricity to the power grid, and by taking that off the table, you’re taking out one of the cheapest and easiest ways to bring more electricity onto the market.
In Virginia, the added complication is that it’s home to one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the world. Loudoun County, just outside of DC, has what’s called Datacenter Alley, where a huge chunk of internet traffic goes through; it’s also home to the largest concentration of hyperscale data centers for powering AI technologies. This is a very big, energy-hungry sector, and it’s a contributor to the local economy, but it also requires a lot of water, a lot of electricity, and now there’s been pushback. Many customers in Virginia and in neighboring states like West Virginia have started to protest against data centers because they’re concerned about electricity prices and other environmental costs being imposed by them.
What can consumers expect to happen with electricity prices going forward?
In the near term, electricity prices are likely to continue to go up. There doesn’t seem to be an easy out, because all the same factors that are driving up electricity prices continue to be in place. 
But the thing to remember is that electricity is a subset of energy spending. If you look at the overall energy picture, consumers are actually likely to end up saving money on household energy over time, and that’s because we’re switching from fossil fuels to electricity. The biggest share of this is switching from gasoline cars to electric cars: As we connect more electric cars to the power grid, they are going to use more electricity, but electric cars are more efficient than gasoline cars, so the overall energy we use per household will eventually start to decline. We’ll see that with other appliances, like stoves and furnaces, as we switch to electricity. Electricity usage will increase, but the overall energy footprint will decrease. And we can expect over the middle and long term for people to actually start to save money, provided that these trends continue.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Jan Dutkiewicz</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[No, your protein powder isn’t poisoning you]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/465552/protein-powder-lead-poisoning-fda-supplements-consumer-reports" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=465552</id>
<updated>2025-10-22T15:41:21-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-22T10:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Food" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Americans’ love affair with protein powders may slowly be poisoning them with the known neurotoxin lead.  That, at least, is the implied conclusion of a viral investigation published last week by Consumer Reports on levels of lead and other heavy metals in popular protein supplements. Many brands, the article reported, “carry troubling levels of toxic […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Black plastic container for supplements, sport powders, pills and medicine with a scoop of protein powder. A bit of noise added." data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/GettyImages-155387152.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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Americans’ <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/410565/protein-muscle-gain-weightlifting-plant-based-vegan">love affair with protein powders</a> may slowly be poisoning them with <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24115827/lead-poisoning-symptoms-exposure-children-cinnamon-paint-battery-pollution-global">the known neurotoxin lead</a>. 
That, at least, is the implied c<a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/">onclusion of a viral investigation</a> published last week by Consumer Reports on levels of lead and other heavy metals in popular protein supplements. Many brands, the article reported, “carry troubling levels of toxic heavy metals” including lead: “For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day — some by more than 10 times.”
It is a finding that, in a country in the grips of “<a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/410565/protein-muscle-gain-weightlifting-plant-based-vegan">protein mania</a>,” has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/well/lead-protein-powder.html">spread</a> like wildfire across both traditional and social media. The problem is that it’s more scaremongering than science — not because there isn’t some lead found in these protein powders, but because Consumer Reports uses an almost impossibly low level of lead exposure as its baseline, which makes its findings seem much scarier than they really are.
For its investigation, Consumer Reports, which has long performed independent tests of lead levels in different <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/cassava-flour-chips-bread-more-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a7817220954/">foods</a>, <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/heavy-metals-in-baby-food-a6772370847/">baby foods</a>, <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/high-lead-levels-in-cinnamon-powders-and-spice-mixtures-a4542246475/">and</a> <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herbs-and-spices-might-contain-arsenic-cadmium-and-lead-a6246621494/">spices</a>, tested 23 protein powders and pre-made protein shakes for heavy metals, and then compared their findings to lead levels that “CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day.” That level is the so-called maximum allowable dose level (MADL) of 0.5 micrograms per day that was established by <a href="https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65">California’s Prop 65</a>, a 1986 law designed to inform consumers about exposure to harmful chemicals in everyday products.
The results were damning for many of the products. Sixteen were found to contain unsafe levels of lead, with plant-based supplements faring particularly badly, including Huel’s Black Edition protein powder, which was found to exceed safe levels by a shocking 1,288 percent, and deemed by the magazine as unsafe to consume. 
Lead exposure, to be clear, is a <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/14/23868347/lead-poisoning-death-toll-world-bank-pure-earth">very serious health threat</a>. It can stunt brain development in children, leading to lifelong disability. It can also damage the nervous system and kidneys, and increase the risk of heart disease and stroke in adults. It is considered such a dangerous substance that the general expert opinion is that there is no truly safe level of exposure.
But while Consumer Reports’ figures sound scary — 1,288 percent! — the devil is in the details, and specifically, the choice to use Prop 65 levels as the baseline.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Closer to zero</h2>
To understand why, you need to understand the science of lead safety limits. The Food and Drug Administration has launched an initiative to bring lead levels “<a href="https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/closer-zero-reducing-childhood-exposure-contaminants-foods">closer to zero</a>” to mitigate children’s exposure. But zero itself might be unachievable. Lead is naturally present in numerous foods, and found especially in some plants, which absorb lead from contaminated soil, air, and water. The FDA’s <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/19440049.2019.1681595?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed">studies of dietary lead exposure</a> show that the average American adult consumes between 1.7 and 5.3 micrograms daily through their normal food intake.
Exposure to some amount of lead — be it through food, air, water, or the built environment — is unavoidable, so regulatory agencies tend to use estimates of relatively safe exposure called “reference levels” to guide policies. Such estimates take the lowest amount of lead that is known to be harmful and divide it by a so-called safety factor, a sort of statistical buffer.
The FDA, as part of its “Closer to Zero” campaign and using a 10X safety factor, has set its <a href="https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/lead-food-and-foodwares#:~:text=(2018)-,Interim%20Reference%20Level,-An%20interim%20reference">reference levels</a> at 2.2 micrograms per day for children and 8.8 for women of childbearing age (to protect against accidental fetal exposure). This means that regularly exceeding these might pose health risks.
<a href="https://www.canr.msu.edu/people/wu">Felicia Wu</a>, professor of food safety, toxicology, and risk assessment at Michigan State University, told me that the reference levels for lead represent “an acceptable level in food or water, based on a combination of reducing risk to populations while making it economically feasible for water utilities or food companies” to operate.
California’s Prop 65, however, used a far higher 1,000X safety factor (1,000 times lower than minimal known unsafe levels) to arrive at 0.5 micrograms of lead per day as its reference level.
This is an unachievable safety target, significantly below the lead you get from average daily food consumption, especially for people who eat more legumes, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91554-z">fruits, and vegetables</a>, all of which grow in the soil and inherently pull in some amount of heavy metals. As one clinical dietician I spoke with told me of the Prop 65 level: “You literally can’t eat food from the Earth if you want to achieve this.”
Drying and processing foods can further concentrate those heavy metal levels. Take Huel Black Edition powder, which has pea protein as a principal ingredient. Consumer Reports’s tests show that one serving of Huel has 6.3 micrograms of lead, or about 12.6 times more than Prop 65’s reference level 0.5. That’s how the magazine gets to the astounding claim that Huel contains around 1,288 percent of the maximum safe dose of lead.
But compared to the FDA’s more realistic numbers, 6.3 micrograms is 71.6 percent of the reference level for women of childearing age, meaning it’s safe even for at-risk individuals. For adult males, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4118305/#:~:text=Body%20mass%20index,-%3C%2025%20kg/m&text=The%20CC%20gym%20users%20who,women%20(p%20%3C%200.001).">who are more likely to glug protein shakes</a>, the risk is negligible. Children, <a href="https://fitwize4kids.org/should-parents-give-their-kids-protein-shakes/">with some exceptions</a>, shouldn’t be consuming protein powder at all.
And that’s one of the two products with the highest levels of lead — the other is Naked Nutrition’s Vegan Mass Gainer — which means that every single one of the 23 products that Consumer Reports tested is relatively safe by FDA standards. If you’re doing the math at home and have found that adding 6.3 micrograms from a Huel shake to the high end of average daily intake at 5.3 micrograms would take you beyond the reference level for at-risk people, remember that the reference level is ten times less than the minimum observably unhealthy amount. There’s a built-in cushion. (While the CR report noted that an FDA spokesperson told them that there is “sufficient evidence” that the 8.8 micrograms of lead level should apply to all adults, not just women of childbearing age, that would still mean that even the products with the most lead would fall beneath that standard.)
And it bears noting that Consumer Reports’s tests showed levels of lead that were higher than tests of Huel <a href="https://huel.com/pages/heavy-metals-in-protein-powders">carried out</a> by the National Sanitation Foundation, an independent testing body, which showed that a serving of Huel Black came in under 3.6 micrograms. And while it’s true that plant-based protein powders like Huel do have higher lead levels than whey protein that comes from dairy, the differences are trivial if we get away from the Prop 65 baseline. Switching from plant-based to animal-based protein powders to reduce lead exposure, as Consumer Reports tells readers to consider doing, is an unnecessary precaution.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">It’s regulation, not contamination</h2>
The bottom line is that Consumer Reports’s protein lead scare is — pardon the pun — a big nothingburger. But the questions still remain: Are protein supplements completely safe? And should you be consuming them? The answers are a little more complicated.
Consumer Reports might be overstating the threat posed by lead in protein powders, but their reporting does bring up an important problem that applies to all supplements: They are troublingly under-regulated in the United States. 
The FDA is responsible for food supplement safety just as it is for food safety. But the two operate under completely different regulatory regimes. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>While an entire cottage industry of health and fitness gurus exists purely to convince people that they need more protein, most Americans already get more than enough of it through their normal diet.</blockquote></figure>
Food is governed by the <a href="https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/laws-enforced-fda/federal-food-drug-and-cosmetic-act-fdc-act">Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act</a>, under which all foods have to be tested for safety before being allowed to be sold to the public. But supplements fall under the <a href="https://ods.od.nih.gov/About/DSHEA_Wording.aspx">Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act</a> (DSHEA) of 1994, which states that supplements like protein powders do not require pre-market approval. It is then up to the government to test or follow up on complaints, and remove offending products found unsafe, all of which it must do with constrained staffing and budget. In 2024, the <a href="https://www.supplysidesj.com/supplement-regulations/fda-increases-annual-domestic-foreign-dietary-supplement-inspections">FDA inspected</a> only 600 of the over 10,000 supplement manufacturers that sell products to Americans.
This means that while supplements might be legally regulated, most are de facto unregulated. Unsurprisingly, the supplement market has boomed in the wake of DSHEA, widely considered to be <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-hatch-20180105-story.html">the result of lobbying</a> by the supplement industry. The result has exposed consumers to supposedly healthy products whose health benefits (and risks) are for the most part unverified.
<a href="https://nutrition.tufts.edu/academics/faculty/william-masters">William Masters</a>, a food economist at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition, told me that to call supplement companies snake oil salesmen may be too kind. “If I sell snake oil as oil for your salad dressing, it has to have snake oil in it,” he said. “If I sell snake oil as a supplement, it doesn’t even have to have snake oil in it.”
Others offered a more tempered assessment. Kevin Klatt, a nutrition research scientist at the University California Berkeley, told me that he would steer consumers who insist on protein powders toward larger and more reputable brands, which are more likely to, like Huel, have done outside testing like getting NSF certification — and are more concerned about bad press and potential litigation.
But all the experts I spoke with for this story argued that supplements should be more strongly regulated. Rob Shewfelt, a professor emeritus of food science and technology at the University of Georgia and the author of <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-45394-1">In Defense of Processed Food</a> told me that it’s important for the public to recognize that the problem with supplements is not that they are processed foods, but that they are not regulated as stringently as other foods — including actual processed foods. “Supplements [in the US] wouldn’t be trusted by me as a food scientist,” he said. It’s the regulatory process, not whether something is processed, that matters.
And then there’s the question of whether people need to be consuming protein supplements in the first place. While an entire cottage industry of health and fitness gurus exists purely to convince people that they need more protein, most Americans <a href="https://www.wri.org/data/people-are-eating-more-protein-they-need-especially-wealthy-regions">already get more than enough</a> of it through their normal diet. Supplements, as their name suggests, exist to supplement deficiencies in diets, but the average person, including the average athlete, can quite easily meet protein targets on a diet without supplements, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/410565/protein-muscle-gain-weightlifting-plant-based-vegan">including a plant-based one</a>.
So no, your protein shakes are not giving you lead poisoning. And if you want to have them, that’s probably fine. Whether you need to is a different story.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Rachel Cohen</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The buzzy word that Democrats have pinned their hopes on]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/465634/democrats-zohran-politics-affordable-affordability-inflation-economy-campaign" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=465634</id>
<updated>2025-10-22T10:38:30-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-22T09:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Economy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Housing" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Money" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[The buzziest political word of the year is “affordability” — it’s the mantra that carried the insurgent progressive candidate Zohran Mamdani to victory in New York City’s mayoral primary, and that Democrats across the country have since raced to claim as their own. “Affordability is the central issue, the central reason to be a Democrat,” […]]]></summary>
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<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Boys holding campaign signs for Zohran Mamdani." data-caption="Boys holding campaign signs for Zohran Mamdani on October 19, 2025, in New York City. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/gettyimages-2241797253.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Boys holding campaign signs for Zohran Mamdani on October 19, 2025, in New York City. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
The buzziest political word of the year is “affordability” — it’s the mantra that carried the insurgent progressive candidate <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/419913/democratic-agenda-abundance-zohran-mamdani-project-2029">Zohran Mamdani</a> to victory in New York City’s mayoral primary, and that Democrats across the country have since raced to claim as their own.
“<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/04/talk-about-affordability-warren-boosts-mamdani-as-model-for-democratic-victory-00493026">Affordability is the central issue</a>, the central reason to be a Democrat,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared in August. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has similarly placed “affordability” at the center of his state housing reforms and his administration’s <a href="https://www.chhs.ca.gov/blog/2025/10/17/governor-newsom-announces-affordable-calrx-insulin-11-a-pen-will-soon-be-available-for-purchase/">plan to manufacture generic insulin pens</a>. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison launched his reelection bid this week under the banner of “<a href="https://www.postbulletin.com/news/minnesota/keith-ellison-says-hes-running-for-a-3rd-term-as-attorney-general">Afford your life</a>.”
Few candidates or elected officials are willing to acknowledge what many economists say quietly: that prices tend to be “<a href="https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2024/03/01/the-inflation-rate-is-falling-but-prices-are-not">sticky</a>,” and that absent a major economic slowdown, costs are unlikely to fall much from where they are today. Still, Democratic strategists who worried that the party under Joe Biden had for too long ignored <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/463277/power-bill-expensive-utility-rising-price-trump">cost-of-living issues</a> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/poll-cost-living-groceries-expense-stress-worry-cd183c59f034f6e87525675f3ca04864">and the growing</a> <a href="https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/03/priced-out-affordability-pyramid">frustration</a> around inflation have been happy to see “affordability” take center stage. That the cry is being led by a candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America has even given the term leftist validation — despite the fact that a decade ago “affordability“ stood as the vague, squishy descriptor socialists blamed for watering down the goal of universal health care with the Affordable Care Act.
But when it comes to the explanation for today’s affordability crisis, the party has found itself embroiled in seemingly endless factional debates — with each camp insisting their diagnosis is the primary one. Is the crisis because, as the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/405403/abundance-ezra-klein-building-costs-housing-energy-democrats-polarization">Abundance theorists argue</a>, we’re not building enough? Or is it, as some populists allege, <a href="https://www.vox.com/money/23641875/food-grocery-inflation-prices-billionaires">due to corporate greed and Wall Street recklessness</a>? Or because we’ve shirked on antitrust enforcement, <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/354668/biden-economy-antitrust-junk-fees-consumer-protection">allowing monopolies to take over</a> and artificially raise prices? Or because, as <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5627630/occupational-licensing-is-replacing-labor-unions-and-exacerbating">progressives argued in the 2010s</a>, unions were decimated and too much was left to the market? Rather than acknowledge that multiple factors might be at play, each faction has largely dug in around its preferred explanation.
One attempt to unify these debates comes from the Economic Security Project (ESP), a progressive organization focused on direct cash support and the broader social safety net. It <a href="https://economicsecurityproject.org/resource/affordability/">offers a new analysis of affordability</a> in hopes that a comprehensive framework might lead to clearer political solutions, and perhaps more harmonious political consensus. Though Mike Konczal, one of the report’s co-authors, emphasized in an interview that their work represents an “honest assessment“ of structural problems and not a political compromise, it’s clear that the analysis aims to offer a more constructive path forward than the in-fighting so many have grown used to.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Broken markets, broken incomes</h2>
The analysis divides the affordability crisis into two categories: problems with markets and problems with incomes.
Markets, ESP argues, fail in three main ways
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>First, “gatekeepers” constrain supply — for example, drug companies <a href="https://www.uclawsf.edu/2020/09/24/patent-drug-database/">stacking up patents to stop competition</a>, <a href="https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/hospitals-monopoly">hospitals merging</a> to reduce choices, and <a href="https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/06/confronting-nimby-attitudes">NIMBYs blocking housing</a>. </li>
<li>Second, “fragmented markets” falter when the lack of customers makes services unprofitable, leaving rural areas without hospitals or broadband. </li>
<li>Third, “manipulated signals” obscure true costs through features <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/366838/biden-subscription-membership-junk-fees">like junk fees</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/money/370351/realpage-doj-lawsuit-rent-algorithm-pricing">algorithmic pricing</a>, which prevent consumers from comparison shopping and cost them thousands a year. </li>
</ul>
On the income side, ESP argues that three forces make essentials unaffordable even when markets function well. 
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>“Life-cycle mismatches” mean costs peak when earnings are low — <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/415095/fertility-birth-rates-reproductive-rights-biological-clock-parents-motherhood-ivf">child care arrives early in careers</a> when paychecks are smaller, while health care expenses surge in retirement. </li>
<li>Inequality keeps incomes too low for many families: 43 percent of families can’t cover basic necessities, and since 1979, wages have risen only 29 percent while productivity climbed 83 percent. </li>
<li>Lastly, economic shocks like recessions leave lasting scars; for example, workers displaced in downturns can lose up to three years of lifetime earnings.</li>
</ul>
The framework covers most of the leading theories and treats all six causes as equally important, declining to rank any theory against another. It builds on a different framework <a href="https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/building-affordable-economy-three-legged-stool-strategy">published in September by Jared Bernstein</a>, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Biden, and Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economist. The Bernstein-Mahoney report laid out more specific policy recommendations than ESP, though ESP says it plans to issue those types of proposals beginning next year.
Both analyses arrive as Democrats sort through competing ideas for understanding why costs are so high. The most prominent this year has been Abundance, popularized by Vox co-founder Ezra Klein and journalist Derek Thompson, which <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/405063/ezra-klein-thompson-abundance-book-criticism">focuses on supply constraints</a>: zoning laws blocking housing, permitting delays slowing infrastructure, regulatory barriers limiting competition. Their diagnosis is that government-imposed bottlenecks are preventing us from building enough of what we need.
ESP incorporates those arguments but argues it’s incomplete. In the case of child care, for example, even if you removed every supply constraint (like licensing requirements that limit the number of providers or zoning rules that restrict home-based day cares) families would still struggle to afford care early in their careers. Building more housing, similarly, is not enough to protect families when job losses or inflation erode real incomes.
As proof that these various approaches aren’t really in tension, ESP points to California. In the past two years, state lawmakers <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418679/california-ceqa-housing-newsom">passed major YIMBY upzoning laws</a> while also enacting anti-monopoly measures, including a ban on algorithmic rent-setting software like RealPage and <a href="https://buddycarter.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=15782">reforms targeting prescription-drug middlemen</a> who mark up prices. The same Democratic legislators — progressives like state Sen. Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks — championed both sets of policies. “At the state level, at the personnel level, we often don’t see these conflicts as much as you might suspect,” Konczal said.
The framework tries to show that addressing broken markets in one area doesn’t preclude addressing broken incomes in another. Or, put differently, the conflicts that often dominate online debates may be more about interpersonal feuds and factional positioning than actual policy trade-offs. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The future of affordability</h2>
Konczal acknowledged that because the framework doesn’t prioritize among causes, “people will obviously have disagreements on which is more important,“ calling that “a very useful disagreement to have.” By not making those judgments itself, the framework lets each camp find validation without forcing trade-offs about which problems deserve the most urgent action. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote> If political battles are ultimately about resource allocation and legislative priorities, what’s gained by a unifying framework that sidesteps the hardest choices?</blockquote></figure>
This raises an obvious question: If political battles are ultimately about resource allocation and legislative priorities, what’s gained by a unifying framework that sidesteps the hardest choices?
Some, like Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, think the ESP framework gets the logic generally right but badly misweights the causes. “As far as magnitude goes, income distribution dwarfs everything else,” he told Vox. Broken incomes bear most of the blame for lack of affordability, he argues, while theories like monopolistic pricing get more attention than the evidence warrants.
The weighting question connects to a deeper issue. When should markets be fixed and when should they be replaced? This is arguably the key question for affordability and one that the various factions have not yet squarely confronted. 
Should health care be made more affordable through competition and transparency, or guaranteed through universal coverage? Should housing costs come down through supply increases, or should housing be partially decommodified through social housing? 
Ironically, “affordability” once meant something very different to progressives. A decade ago, Democrats fought over whether the government should guarantee services or simply make them cheaper. The Bernie Sanders wing pushed for universality — Medicare-for-all, free college, housing as a right — while moderates framed goals around access: less costly insurance, debt-free college, homeownership incentives. “Affordable“ became the compromise word, often dismissed by the left as a disappointing cop-out — a promise of market participation instead of universal provision.
Now you have a progressive organization embracing “affordability” while explicitly invoking Social Security-style guarantees for life-cycle costs. 
Does one need to pick? Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign showed how “affordability” can cover both approaches. She ran on an “opportunity economy“ centered on market-based solutions: small business tax credits, housing supply increases, cutting red tape. But she also proposed banning price gouging on groceries, capping prescription drug costs, and expanding the Child Tax Credit. “Affordability” let her do both without having to explain when markets needed fixing versus when they needed bypassing.
That’s either sophisticated politicking or strategic ambiguity. The optimistic read is that the left has evolved beyond the false binary of guarantees versus opportunity. You can fix markets and provide universal goods — they’re complementary, not contradictory. Recognizing that markets can work for some things if we fix them, while other things need decommodification, is arguably progress.
The pessimistic read is that “affordability” is doing too much work, covering for a lack of clarity about priorities. Without a theory of when to use which approach, you get a “do everything” framework that risks defaulting to market-based solutions because they’re easier and more politically palatable, even when the right answer might be to fight for universal programs.
When I asked the report authors whether they had a theory for when something should be guaranteed versus made more affordable, they demurred. “It depends,” Konzcal said, saying that “most economic problems involve both” sides. He pointed to public options as a balanced approach, but offered little clarity for when to deploy them. “Markets can innovate and scale, while public options can anchor supply, set benchmarks, and ensure universal access,” he said.
Their sector-specific reports planned for 2026 will be a clearer test of where this framework ultimately goes. That’s where we’ll see if this can tackle the thorniest questions: What should we stop trying to make people afford at all?
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Pratik Pawar</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Global health is facing major cuts. We still scored some surprising wins.]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/465486/global-health-maldives-hepatitis-b-ebola-trachoma" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=465486</id>
<updated>2025-10-21T15:54:17-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-22T08:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[It’s not an exaggeration to say that hope is in short supply these days in global health. The steep cuts to lifesaving global health programs, the burning of emergency food supplies, the renewed politicization of vaccines are just a few of the bleak developments that have happened since the start of the year. But that […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Group of healthcare workers clapping outdoors in celebration, symbolizing hope and progress in public health." data-caption="Health care workers applaud outside a hospital in September 2021 in Cape Town. | Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/gettyimages-1235270217.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Health care workers applaud outside a hospital in September 2021 in Cape Town. | Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
It’s not an exaggeration to say that hope is in short supply these days in global health. The <a href="https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/state-global-health-funding-august-2025">steep cuts to lifesaving global health programs</a>, the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/07/usaid-emergency-food-incinerate-trump/683532/">burning of emergency food supplies</a>, the renewed <a href="https://apnews.com/article/vaccines-fluoride-kennedy-trump-science-antiscience-legislation-73af8e65f407331e8f31b2909812a004">politicization of vaccines</a> are just a few of the bleak developments that have happened since the start of the year.
But that narrow view misses the quiet progress happening around the world.
Just last week, the Maldives — a tiny archipelago in the Arabian Sea — became the first country in the world to <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/13-10-2025-maldives-becomes-the-first-country-to-achieve-triple-elimination-of-mother-to-child-transmission-of-hiv-syphilis-and-hepatitis-b">eliminate the transmission of hepatitis B, HIV, and syphilis</a> from mother to child. That’s no small feat. Across Southeast Asia, thousands of pregnant women still pass on these infections to their babies each year. Hepatitis B alone affects more than 42 million people in the region, according to the World Health Organization.
<div class="wp-block-vox-media-highlight vox-media-highlight">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">This story was first featured in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup">Future Perfect newsletter</a>.</h2>
Sign up <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup">here</a> to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.
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For one country to shut down the transmission of all three is a genuine public-health moonshot. 
That was possible because of the country’s universal health coverage, which has enabled almost every expectant mother to receive antenatal care during her pregnancy that includes a test for HIV, syphilis, and hepatitis B. And over 95 percent of newborns in the country receive the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of delivery. (Meanwhile, the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/16/nx-s1-5542405/rfk-jr-acip-vaccine-advisory-panel-vote-delay-hepatitis-b-shot-in-infants">US is pushing to delay</a> that childhood dose of hepatitis B.) The Maldives also spends about 10 percent of its GDP on health — among the highest in Asia — a number that’s climbed steadily since it introduced universal health coverage in 2012. (My colleague, Dylan Scott, has written about <a href="https://www.vox.com/health-care/2020/1/29/21075388/medicare-for-all-what-countries-have-universal-health-care">how other countries make universal health care</a> work, and what the US can learn from it.)
It’s a remarkable achievement for a small island nation with limited resources. “This historic milestone provides hope and inspiration for countries everywhere working towards the same goal,” WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/13-10-2025-maldives-becomes-the-first-country-to-achieve-triple-elimination-of-mother-to-child-transmission-of-hiv-syphilis-and-hepatitis-b">said</a> in a press release.
But even countries that don’t spend 10 percent of their GDP on health are making meaningful progress to stop deadly infectious diseases.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that has faced recurring Ebola outbreaks since the late 1970s, has managed to swiftly get its latest one under control. The latest outbreak, declared on September 4, infected 64 people and killed 43. 
But on Sunday, the WHO announced that the country’s <a href="https://www.afro.who.int/news/last-ebola-patient-democratic-republic-congo-discharged">last patient had been discharged</a>. There have been no new cases since September 25 — a notably quick containment for a virus that, in past outbreaks, has lingered for months.
Containing the virus wasn’t easy, as the outbreak largely unfolded in remote, rural communities. Yet the response from local health workers and teams from the WHO kept it from spreading further. Now, a 42-day countdown — twice Ebola’s 21-day incubation period, long enough to be sure no new infections emerge — is underway. If no new cases emerge during that window, the outbreak will be officially declared over.
There’s progress too, against lesser-known but equally consequential infectious diseases. 
Fiji, an island nation in the South Pacific Ocean, recently became the 26th country to <a href="https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/item/20-10-2025-fiji-becomes-the-26th-country-to-eliminate-trachoma-as-a-public-health-problem">eliminate trachoma</a>, a bacterial infection that affects the inner layer of the eyelid and can lead to permanent blindness if untreated. (In 2021, trachoma blinded an <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/trachoma-how-a-common-cause-of-blindness-can-be-prevented-worldwide">estimated</a> 400,000 people globally.)
The win didn’t come out of nowhere. Since 2012, researchers with the <a href="https://www.sightsaversusa.org/programmes/digital-health/global-trachoma-mapping-project/">Global Trachoma Mapping Project</a>, funded in part by USAID, have surveyed over 2.6 million people across 35 countries to pinpoint where trachoma infections still persist. That data has allowed countries to target antibiotics to high-risk populations, improve access to clean water and sanitation, expand access to surgery, and to promote hygiene education. Fiji used the same set of strategies to join the growing list of countries free of trachoma.
Maldives, Congo, and Fiji are vastly different countries — in geography, resources, and the diseases they face — but together they tell a hopeful story in global public health: With a sustained investment in health, the political will to match, and relentless community-level work, progress against even the most persistent problems is possible.
A version of this story originally appeared in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Future Perfect</a> newsletter. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sign up here!</a> 

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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Avishay Artsy</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Noel King</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[What Young Republicans say when they think no one’s listening]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/podcasts/465648/young-republicans-group-chat-racist-antisemitic-jd-vance" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=465648</id>
<updated>2025-10-22T12:22:44-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-22T07:30:00-04:00</published>
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<summary type="html"><![CDATA[The political fallout is continuing from the leak of the Young Republicans group chat. A Politico investigation found that young GOP leaders from Arizona, Kansas, New York, and Vermont sent each other thousands of Telegram messages that included racist, antisemitic, and violent rhetoric. The authors of the messages repeatedly used slurs and epithets to describe […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Vance, at an askew angle, talks to reporters at night" data-caption=""We have to really pay very close attention to how JD Vance speaks, because he may be speaking to his echo chamber, but he is expecting that chamber to get much larger and encompass everything around us,“ said Jamie Cohen. | Oliver Contreras/Pool/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Oliver Contreras/Pool/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/gettyimages-2241790821.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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"We have to really pay very close attention to how JD Vance speaks, because he may be speaking to his echo chamber, but he is expecting that chamber to get much larger and encompass everything around us,“ said Jamie Cohen. | Oliver Contreras/Pool/Getty Images </figcaption>
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The political fallout is continuing from the leak of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/465329/young-republican-leaked-groupchat-antisemitism-shapiro-walsh">Young Republicans group chat</a>. A <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146">Politico investigation found</a> that young GOP leaders from Arizona, Kansas, New York, and Vermont sent each other thousands of Telegram messages that included racist, antisemitic, and violent rhetoric.
The authors of the messages repeatedly used slurs and epithets to describe Black people and other people of color, said “I love Hitler,” joked about putting their political opponents in gas chambers, and threatened rape and violence.
First reported last week, the Politico story instigated a conversation among conservatives about whether blatantly bigoted language had become too normalized among young people on the right.
Some members of the chat have been <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/its-revolting-more-young-republican-chat-members-out-of-jobs-as-condemnation-intensifies-00608791">fired or resigned</a> from their positions in the party. Democrats were quick to condemn the messages, but the response from Republican pundits and politicians has been divided, with some denouncing the statements and others minimizing and excusing them, or pointing to violent messages coming from the left.
Vice President JD Vance, notably, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/15/jd-vance-racist-messages-young-republicans-chat-leak">said he refused</a> to “join the pearl clutching” and referred to the chat participants as “kids” and “young boys,” even though the participants are in their 20s and 30s.
The leaked Young Republicans chat was followed by <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/465616/paul-ingrassia-leaked-groupchat-nazi-streak" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.vox.com/politics/465616/paul-ingrassia-leaked-groupchat-nazi-streak">another leaked chat</a> in which Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, told a group of Republicans that he has “a Nazi streak,” that Martin Luther King Jr. Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell,” and used an Italian slur for Black people. On Tuesday, Ingrassia withdrew his nomination in the wake of these reports and after it became clear he wouldn’t have the backing of several GOP senators.
Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with <a href="https://www.jamesncohen.com/">Jamie Cohen</a>, an associate professor of media studies at Queens College CUNY in New York who researches visual culture and online extremism, about why Republicans keep getting caught saying offensive things to each other when they think no one else is listening.
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 <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/today-explained/id1346207297">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/today-explained/PC:140">Pandora</a>, and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3pXx5SXzXwJxnf4A5pWN2A">Spotify</a>.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="200" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=VMP9930897909" width="100%"></iframe>
Why do you think those Young Republicans were saying what they were saying?
I think they’ve normalized this speech in their communities. It’s sort of the way that we code switch into our group chats. We each have our own type of language when we talk to each other, and the sites and places that they communicate or find themselves around online are speaking like this. They’re just dragging that type of language into their group chats. 
That brings us to the question of — if you think that talking this way is normal — whether you really mean it. And we’re not inside their heads; we don’t know if they really mean it. But one way of determining whether they really mean it is to ask: Is this exclusive to young people on the right?
There is a space where people test the people around them while using speech. The Overton window is the overall borderlands of acceptable speech. But I think each person who holds their ideologies — whether they’re left ideologies or right ideologies — tests people by using language that is pretty specific to their space and ideology. And so in these cases, you often hear these words to see if somebody pushes back or not. And if nobody pushes back, you know that that’s an acceptable form of speech inside those communities.
So it isn’t always ideologically [exclusive] to the right; it is ideologically [exclusive] to what is an in-group or what you find as a sense of belonging. So it’s the way that we test each other to figure it out.
Jay Jones, a Democrat who’s running for attorney general in Virginia, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-attorney-general-debate-jay-jones-jason-miyares-texts/">said in some texts</a> that he seemed to think were private, that a former House speaker in Virginia, a Republican, should get two bullets to the head. He talked about his rivals’ kids being killed by gun violence. What do we take from the example of Jay Jones?
So this example is interesting, because the difference here is the Young Republicans aren’t running for office. [Editor’s note: One member of the group chat is a Vermont state senator.] They might hold positions in their state, but when you’re running for attorney general, you really are the person who’s responsible for that type of justice. There’s that sentence of “wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” When you’re running for that position, being inconsequential about that is irresponsible. [Jones] said he was embarrassed and sorry for what he said. But that is also abhorrent speech and it falls under what would be considered threat, and that isn’t protected by our First Amendment rights.
What I’m hearing from you is that everybody is behaving badly in the chats. And by everybody, I don’t obviously literally mean everybody, but I myself have said things in private group chats — nothing along these lines, I assure you and our listeners — that I would not want anyone to see. 
This makes me, Jamie, open to the idea that a group chat is essentially harmless. We talk this way in private, but we don’t act on this. And we live in 2025. Everyone has the group chat, and everybody is trying to impress their friends with the clever or salty or spicy things that they say. But we need to remember that it’s not real life. What do you think about that?
In the past several years and probably the last decade, we’ve replaced community into these digital spaces. We’re allowed to be more free inside of them. And I think, to be clear, if we lose that freedom, then we’ve lost connectivity. We do need an ability to express ourselves freer with our group chats, in terms of private spaces, in terms of what we would consider in-group — and I mean small in-group. What we would consider [our] community should have the ability to have a flexibility of language that is acceptable among friends. That is how it is.
Those gray areas are part of how we moderate space in general. It isn’t a danger that translates from text directly to action. That is completely different. Text to action takes many, many years. I think where I feel this happens is when you normalize any type of slow violence — meaning these are just jokes at this point, when you normalize that amongst a group of friends. 
[But] sometimes the borders of your group chat spill out into real life. You forget who you’re talking to. You’ve normalized it so much in your head that your filters have been worn down. And I think that’s where the borderlands become soft. And I worry about that with internet culture in general, because so many people that consider themselves extremely online or very online since the pandemic have lost the idea of what the filter is between their online friends and how they communicate to their parents, to their friends offline, or in classes, to be honest. I’ve heard things that come out of [my students’] mouths which result in a little bit of a red face. So I think sometimes that normalcy creates an accidental okayness that isn’t with the right ingroup.
These were young Republicans who were chairs of the Young Republicans in <a href="https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/politics/state/2025/10/14/kansas-young-republicans-make-offensive-remarks-in-a-groupchat/86693271007/">Kansas City</a> and <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/18/new-york-republicans-racist-texts/86768122007/">New York</a>. You look at their online profiles, and these are not particularly charismatic people. They don’t seem as if they’re bound for greatness. And so maybe — and we’ve heard conservatives make this argument — they are people at the lower echelon who weren’t really headed anywhere, and therefore it’s not so much to worry about. What do you think about that?
I would ask where JD Vance was in the echelon 10 years ago. If you assume that he was in the lower echelons of politics a decade ago — coming off of a book deal and telling his story, and 10 years ago today being <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/15/jd-vance-donald-trump-comments-00168450">fairly anti-Trump</a> — and then figuring his way into a point where today he uses Twitter and his accounts quite aggressively, with his language. And in [his] defense of these text messages, it just tells you that yes, at this point they may be lower echelon in their speech, but there’s a likely trajectory of them moving up to potentially the vice presidency or the presidency itself.
Vance is a fascinating case because he is young. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/02/09/vance-millennial-white-house-gen-x-president/77906038007/">He’s a millennial</a>. He’s a member of the emo community. He almost certainly will run for president in 2028, and he’s defending this. This man who’s very ambitious, who would probably like to be president someday, is the loudest voice saying, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/jd-vance-dismisses-bipartisan-outrage-over-racist-and-offensive-young-republican-group-chat">this is no big deal</a>. That’s really striking. What do we take from that?
I guess it surprised me the most when the vice president <a href="https://x.com/JDVance/status/1964341436096057502?lang=en">replied in a quote tweet</a> to the Krassensteins: “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” when the Krassensteins called the Trump administration’s bombing of a Venezuelan boat a “war crime.” The vice president is a very online character, but the Krassensteins are well known as reply guys on X, and they clap back. That’s their main goal. They speak directly back to politicians and try to get that type of attention. So they’re popular figures.
I thought to myself, in what part of history, at least modern history, would you hear a vice president saying that to a citizen? That would be considered something that would be a gaffe or something that would be so problematic. I mean, I grew up when Dan Quayle <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/june-15-1992-dan-quayle-misspells-potato-48017343">misspelled potato</a>. So I was fascinated by that level of aggressive mockery of somebody just saying something on Twitter, or on X, and how much that type of speech has become normalized, not just by politics, but by culture and media as well.
I do believe that Vance is speaking, when he talks about this or covers for these Young Republicans — I feel in many ways he’s speaking towards <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/maga-vance-election-denial/">the future of the party</a> that he is likely to or imagines himself to inherit. And in that way, we’re kind of seeing what the new baseline at the bottom is, the normalcy of that lower level as it’s going to become something more aggressive in the future. People still see the internet as another place. But JD Vance and this chat group shows that the internet is everywhere. Internet culture is running our politics and our culture at this point. And we have to really pay very close attention to how JD Vance speaks, because he may be speaking to his echo chamber, but he is expecting that chamber to get much larger and encompass everything around us.
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<name>Allie Volpe</name>
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<title type="html"><![CDATA[The upside to ranking your friends]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/461697/best-friends-adults-relationship-qualities-ranking" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461697</id>
<updated>2025-10-22T06:09:08-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-10-22T06:09:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Advice" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Even Better" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Explainers" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Friendship" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Relationships" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="The Highlight" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[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. Derek Gregory hasn’t been in the same state, let alone in the same room, as his best friend Ringo in nearly two decades. Their relationship dates back to the early 1980s, […]]]></summary>
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This story was originally published in <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/463044/welcome-to-the-october-issue-of-the-highlight">The Highlight</a>, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, <a href="https://www.vox.com/support-membership?itm_campaign=article-header-Q42024&itm_medium=site&itm_source=in-article">join the Vox Membership program today</a>.
Derek Gregory hasn’t been in the same state, let alone in the same room, as his best friend Ringo in nearly two decades. Their relationship dates back to the early 1980s, when Gregory and Ringo met as teens in high school, bonding over a shared taste in music and similar haircuts. With Ringo, there was always something to talk about.
“He was big and expressive and larger than life and fell in love with things and people and ideas and music and whatever it was that he was into at the time,” Gregory says, “and could communicate that passion in a way that is hard to ignore.”
After graduating, Gregory moved away from Southern California, where he and Ringo grew up, but they’ve kept up their long-distance relationship ever since. Now 56, Gregory, a content creator in Denver, still maintains daily conversations with Ringo, despite the fact that the latter currently lives in Australia. They’ll send each other voice notes while sitting in traffic, bits of music they’re working on, the minutiae of their days. Ringo’s lust for life, his “spark” as Gregory puts it, their ability to make one another laugh, to cheer one another on during their best days and to support each other on their worst, is the tether connecting the two men across continents and time zones.
Most <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/12/what-does-friendship-look-like-in-america/">people</a> <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0305834">have</a> <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/">friends</a> — people to confide in, support, gas up, with whom to laugh, grab dinner, mutually despise the same things. Plenty of studies have underscored the benefits of these relationships: <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9902704/">Having friends promotes</a> physical <a href="https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/chopik2017pr.pdf">health</a> and well-being, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032714008350?via%3Dihub">staves off depression</a> and <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316">even early death</a>. But what special perks does best friendship confer? What qualities do the top confidantes inhabit that others don’t?
The term “best friend” can hark back to the days on the playground when kids ranked and quantified social relationships for sport. You might think: Do you really need a best friend as an adult? But having — or being — a best friend can be an important signifier. Knowing who rises to the level of a “best” friend can be helpful when weighing the amount of relational upkeep a relationship requires. Fostering <a href="https://www.vox.com/23130613/fewer-friends-how-many">a few quality connections</a> may also be more beneficial for happiness than having dozens of less close friends.
“What research has consistently shown in the past three decades is friendship is a reliable marker and predictor of individual well-being,” says <a href="https://scholars.csus.edu/esploro/profile/meliksah_demir/overview">Meliksah Demir</a>, an associate professor of psychology at California State University Sacramento. “However, it is not necessarily the number of friends that you have, but it is the quality of your best friendship, along with other friends that you have, that makes a difference in your well-being.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Centuries of best friends</h2>
Although the term “best friend” didn’t enter public consciousness until the 20th century, the concept has been around since antiquity. Among Aristotle’s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friendship/">three classifications of friendship</a> — pleasure, utility, and virtue — relationships of virtue are supreme. Beyond just being fun or useful, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/26718/chapter/195542923">these friendships are stronger</a>, more durable, because each member strives to make the other better. Roman politician Marcus Cicero <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/cicero-friendship-and-social-distancing">dedicated his treatise</a> on friendship, “De Amicitia,” to his best friend Atticus. As early as the fourth century, best friendships were ritualized through a <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/04/22/1245859170/siblings-brotherhood-sisterhood-greece-china">marriage-like ceremony called “adelphopoiesis,”</a> or “brother-making.” For centuries, women wrote to their friends <a href="https://www.vox.com/even-better/416230/friendship-romantic-relationship-balance-jealousy">using passionately affectionate language</a>.
Best friendships were especially pivotal for women who, historically, left their homes and communities to join those of their husbands, says <a href="https://www.psych.ucla.edu/faculty-page/jkrems/">Jaimie Arona Krems</a>, an associate professor of psychology and the director of the <a href="https://www.center-for-friendship.com/">UCLA Center for Friendship Research</a>. Without blood relatives to depend on, friends — especially best friends — <a href="https://archive.org/details/mindofherownevol0000camp_x2i4/page/156/mode/2up?q=natal">were crucial for support.</a> Today, with young adults increasingly moving farther away from their families of origin for school or work, friends carry many of the same functions as kin.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote> It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, when friendship emerged as an arena of serious academic study, that the term “best friend” exploded in popularity.</blockquote></figure>
But these connections weren’t always referred to as best friends, according to <a href="https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/clist.aspx?id=497">Rebecca Adams</a>, a sociology professor and gerontologist at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. “Close friend” or “confidant” were more common. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, when friendship emerged as an arena of serious academic study, that the term “best friend” exploded in popularity, Krems notes. In recent decades, expanded vocabulary, like “BFF” and “bestie,” has further normalized the notion of having one, or few, supreme friendships.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Qualities of best friendship</h2>
In research, there are a number of attributes participants use to describe their friends: <a href="https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/e0891fde-37aa-4b4e-8941-897979d5c0cf/content">trustworthy, honest, supportive</a>, <a href="https://www.psypost.org/what-makes-someone-a-perfect-friend-heres-what-new-research-says/">loyal, reliable</a>, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-022-00329-w">ethical, pleasant, available</a>, <a href="https://commons.und.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=psych-fac">positive, open</a>, <a href="https://leaflab.austenanderson.com/Papers/An%20exploratory%20study%20of%20friendship%20characteristics%20and%20well-being,%20Anderson%20&%20Fowers,%202020.pdf">sympathetic, efficient, outgoing</a>. Best friends, Krems says, exhibit all of those qualities, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11196206/#sec25-21676968241248877">but to a deeper degree</a>. “It’s more trust, more disclosure, more understanding, more intimacy, a greater sense of sort of shared reality,” she says. You can have multiple best friends in varying contexts, too: a best friend from work, a best friend from childhood, a best friend from the gym.
Best friends are also those you’re willing to go to bat for, even when it’s inconvenient. In friendship studies, says <a href="https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/psychology/faculty-staff/beverley-fehr.html">Beverley Fehr</a>, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg, researchers will often ask participants to rank relationships on a scale of acquaintance, casual friend, good friend, close friend, and best friend. What differentiates these levels of friendship is the level of support you offer them. “You might help a close friend with moving, but you might not be as likely to support that person in an intimate way during a divorce, for example,” Fehr says. “Whereas with best friends, the expectation is that we’re there for them, they are there for us, across situations, regardless of what the need is.”
Having at least one person who knows you intimately and has your back can be enough to stave off what’s known as <a href="https://www.vox.com/even-better/24006316/feeling-lonely-social-emotional-existential-loneliness-epidemic">emotional loneliness,</a> Fehr says. Distinct from the experience of social alienation where you long for a larger community of friends, emotional loneliness can arise when you lack a strong, deep connection with one or a few people. “Very often, people think of that close, intimate connection as having to be a romantic partner,” Fehr says, “but it also could be a very close connection with a friend. To feel that you have a best friend probably helps with reducing the emotional loneliness of wishing you had a close tie with someone.”
The question of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/well/family/husband-wife-best-friend.html">whether</a> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Marriage/comments/1evre5w/should_your_spouse_be_your_best_friend/">your spouse</a> <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@kighleyyy/video/7541116137996619038?q=should%20husband%20wife%20be%20your%20best%20friend&t=1757965030731">should be your best friend</a> has been the subject of heated debate. In Adams’s early studies, she says <a href="https://www.vox.com/even-better/458700/single-men-mental-health-romance-friendship-relationships-masculinity">men would list their wives as their best friend</a>, while women would not — they’d name other women. Similarly, Krems’s research participants often don’t consider a romantic partner or family member their best friend, she says, despite the fact that many say <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/well/family/husband-wife-best-friend.html">they want their significant other to be their best friend</a>.
Time may also play a role in who you consider a best friend. A 2020 study of US college students found that participants, on average, <a href="https://leaflab.austenanderson.com/Papers/An%20exploratory%20study%20of%20friendship%20characteristics%20and%20well-being,%20Anderson%20&%20Fowers,%202020.pdf">were friends with their bestie for nine years</a>, suggesting that these relationships are ones of longevity. In the absence of extended history, Adams believes best friends might also be those you see most often.
The researchers of the 2020 study also found evidence supporting Aristotle’s ancient theory that best friendships might be ones of virtue: “Our results suggest that there may be a form of friendship in which the primary value lies in the good qualities of the friend and in the friendship itself rather than solely in the instrumental benefits the friend provides,” the authors write.
The crux of best friendship, according to 27-year-old Jay Palmer, is trust. Palmer, a warehouse operations specialist, met his two best friends, whom he refers to as E and Z, online while playing XBox a few years ago. A few months into their friendship, they encouraged Palmer, who hails from Michigan, to visit them in Colorado. Soon enough, he was moving in with Z in Aurora. 
Palmer felt comfortable uprooting his life to be closer to E and Z because of the basis of loyalty on which their friendship was built. They opened up to one another, shared secrets, vulnerabilities, personal histories. They give each other space to be upset with each other. “We trust that each of us have each other’s best interests at heart,” Palmer says. Although they live under the same roof, Palmer says he misses Z when he’s not around.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Should we rank our friends?</h2>
To claim a best friend, you also admit to having less-best friends, people that fall further down in the pecking order. This might seem cold and calculating, but friendship researchers have found we tend to subconsciously rank our connections. One theory, put forth by British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, posits that humans can only maintain around 150 social connections — strangers, family, and friends included — called Dunbar’s number. Those people are <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/05/robin-dunbar-explains-circles-friendship-dunbars-number/618931/">stratified into various tiers</a> ranging from best friends in the inner circle to people you’d recognize on the street on the outermost rung.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>You’re more likely to invest time and emotional resources in the friends you’ve already devoted significant time and energy to: the three to five people in your closest friend circle.</blockquote></figure>
Because everyone has <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/02654075231154937">limited social energy</a> — it’s impossible to meaningfully interact with every single person you’ve ever met — you’re more likely to invest time and emotional resources in the friends you’ve already devoted significant time and energy to: the <a href="https://www.vox.com/23130613/fewer-friends-how-many">three to five people in your closest friend circle</a>.
For Heather Kelliher, having a clear picture of with whom she needs to put in the most effort is crucial. Though she met her four best friends in the US, Kelliher, 36, now lives outside of London where she works in cybersecurity. To maintain her friendships, the group plays games virtually over Zoom once a month, regularly exchange texts in a group chat, and FaceTimes whenever they can. 
Initially, she worried her inner circle might forget her, but after over two years abroad she’s relieved to have a regular cadence with her best friends. Because she understands exactly who her inner circle is, she knows when it’s time to get another call on the books. “I haven’t talked to Rachel in a month,” Kelliher says, “I should probably check to see how she’s doing.”
A second framework, the <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2688027/">alliance hypothesis of friendship</a>, claims that people track their friends’ other relationships to see where they rank relative to those other friends. If a pal considers you their best friend — either they’ve said as much in conversation or your relationship is particularly close — <a href="https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/research-suggests-friendships-are-built-alliances">you’re more likely to call them your best friend in return</a>.
These rankings can sometimes play out painfully and publicly. Take bridal parties, for example, where one friend is singled out as the best man or maid of honor. That may come as a shock to some because people often conceal their friend hierarchy, the researchers found, to “make multiple people think that we’re their best friend,” Krems says. 
That may make it difficult to know where you really stand with your friends. “Saying, ‘This person is my best friend,’ that’s putting your cards on the table,” Krems says, “and putting your cards on the table — that’s a real signal of commitment, that you are all in on that person, because it cuts off the possibility of alternatives.”
But is it fair or ethical to order friends so concretely? Krems says she’s seen evidence in her studies that when people refer to someone as their best friend, they’re more satisfied with the relationship and feel even closer to them. Beyond the obvious upsides of friendship, having a best friend in particular confers added psychological benefits, Krems notes: higher well-being, resilience, and satisfaction. 
The term “best friend” provides Rachel Taylor and Kariyona Craighead, besties since middle school, clarity on how to sufficiently prioritize one another. Since their friendship holds more weight than others, they know how much time to devote to one another. Even during 12-hour days on set as a cinematographer, Taylor, 24, will make time to send quick texts to Craighead, also 24, and other friends letting them know she got their message and will respond thoughtfully when she has time.
Throughout their decade-long friendship, Taylor and Craighead have gone through countless transitions, from adolescence in Charlotte, North Carolina, to adults working full time — or in Craighead’s case, in law school. Other friends from their middle school group have grown distant, but their bond remains steadfast. “Just having that safety within that other person, you know that you can always go to them,” Craighead says. “Having that emotional safety and reliability.”
Best friendship is, in essence, the greatest return on your emotional investment. Because it does take effort to maintain relationships, and is thus not possible to be a best friend to everyone, we inherently pour ours into those who we know will return it in kind. 
“Knowing people do put different levels of effort into their friends, and knowing which people value you, can help you invest where that investment does best,” Krems says. “You maintain the relationship that is best for you to maintain.”
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