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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>2025-09-15T22:25:02+00:00</updated>
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<name>Sean Illing</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Why free speech can be so contentious]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/461597/free-speech-charlie-kirk-death-first-amendment-incitement-misinformation" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461597</id>
<updated>2025-09-15T16:39:57-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-16T07:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Podcasts" /><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 Gray Area" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Free speech is the foundation of democracy. It’s the lifeblood of a liberal society. Saying what you want to say, what you need to say, is the top spot in the bill of rights for a reason, right? But speech is also powerful. And slippery. And people can use it in dangerous, unpredictable, chaotic ways. […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Kirk and a student stand across from each other holding microphones, security men in suits and leather chairs in the background. Kirk speaks and points at the student, who listens with his elbows on a lectern across a wooden table" data-caption="Charlie Kirk debates with students at the Cambridge Union on May 19 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom. | Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union" data-portal-copyright="Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2215976877.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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Charlie Kirk debates with students at the Cambridge Union on May 19 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom. | Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union </figcaption>
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Free speech is the foundation of democracy. It’s the lifeblood of a liberal society. Saying what you want to say, what you need to say, is the top spot in the bill of rights for a reason, right?
But speech is also powerful. And slippery. And people can use it in dangerous, unpredictable, chaotic ways. So how do we manage that tension? Should free speech be a little less free? Or is it truly an unimpeachable right?
The dangers and virtues of free speech have gained new relevance after the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. He has been praised in death by those on <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/charlie-kirk-memorialized-dozens-house-lawmakers-condemning-political-violence">the right</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-fear-politics.html">beyond</a> as <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5503033-mark-kelly-charlie-kirk-free-speech/">an exemplar</a> of free speech — debating his ideological foes on college campuses and speaking his mind on his podcast. But he has also been held up as <a href="https://defector.com/this-is-who-charlie-kirk-was">an enemy of free speech</a> <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/charlie-kirk-legacy-ezra-klein-2020-election-trump-turning-point/">by his critics</a> — having set up a “<a href="https://www.professorwatchlist.org/">watchlist” online of college professors</a> deemed insufficiently deferential to conservatives, explicitly encouraging visitors to intimidate and report them, and having frequently denigrated the democratic value and participation of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination.html">minorities</a>, <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/davmicrot.bsky.social/post/3lykq3uvta224">women</a>, and <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/15/how-should-republicans-respond-to-fulton-county-indict-the-left/">his political opponents</a>. Now, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/11/charlie-kirk-killing-foreign-nationals-trump-administration/86099329007/">politicians</a>, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/charlie-kirks-allies-warn-americans-mourn-him-properly-or-else-2025-09-13/">businesses</a>, and <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2025/09/13/matthew-dowd-charlie-kirk-msnbc-firing/86137170007/">media</a> <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/15/washington-post-karen-attiah-kirk-00564027">organizations</a> are firing and threatening people who have criticized Kirk after his death — in other words, punishing them for their speech.
Fara Dabhoiwala is a historian at Princeton and the author of a new book called What Is Free <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987319">Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea.</a> A few weeks ago, before Kirk’s death, I invited Dabhoiwala onto <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area">The Gray Area</a> to talk about the contradictions at the heart of free speech, how the concept was invented, who it empowered, and what it’s become in the digital age.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area">The Gray Area</a> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/PC:30793?source=stitcher-sunset">Pandora</a>, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="250" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=VMP7916640155&light=true" width="100%"></iframe>
I want to start with the myth of free speech. Most people treat it as a timeless, universal, almost sacred ideal. Your book takes a hammer to that. Why did you think it was important to challenge that story?
Because it’s central to modern culture and because the way we talk about it is often wrong. We all believe in freedom of expression, and rightly so. But two things get missed. 
First, psychologically, no one likes being told what to say or not to say. That instinct is powerful. Second, we misunderstand free speech if we try to define it purely from first principles — philosophical or judicial. You can’t really grasp it without history.
A decade ago, I toured with a previous book on the history of sex. I saw how differently people could — or couldn’t — speak about it in different cultures. In China, where it was translated, the text itself was censored; I saw up close how comprehensive the censorship apparatus is. That trip made me ask: If we in the West value free expression so deeply, where does that idea come from? Why do we disagree so sharply about what it means? Those are historical questions, so that’s where I went.
If you asked most people to define free speech, they’d say it’s the absence of censorship. Simple and clean. What’s wrong with that?
It’s seductive and incomplete. We presume that if you remove censorship, you automatically expand freedom. But freedom of speech has a shape: It’s about who is speaking, to whom, and in what context. Some people’s freedom is greater than others, even within the same society. Historically, for example, women’s voices were less likely to be taken seriously than men’s. That’s not solved by simply abolishing a censor’s office. Power and context still shape expression.
Part of your argument is that free speech has never been a coherent ideal — and it can’t be — because it denies two basic facts about communication: speech is an action in the world, and it’s context-dependent. Can you lay that out?
Speech is an action. Voltaire once wrote to a friend, “I write in order to act.” We speak and publish to have effects in the world. Free speech doctrine — especially in its hardest American form — pretends there’s a neat line between speech and action. That’s just not true. Speech is a particular kind of action. Often it’s trivial, but it can be consequential.
And communication is exquisitely context-dependent. Meaning changes depending on who speaks, where, why, and to whom. A president’s remarks on television aren’t the same as a late-night bar conversation. A joke about a sensitive topic lands differently depending on the speaker and the audience. A content-only approach — “the right to say X words” — ignores the reality that those same words can mean very different things in different contexts.
Many people call themselves free speech absolutists. To be one, do you have to deny those realities?
If you’re an absolutist, you’re forced to wave away questions of harm and context. And there’s a further point: because speech is action, it can be harmful to individuals and to the public good. Defamation can destroy reputations and livelihoods. Conspiracy theories can wreck public discourse and incite violence. Societies have always known this and regulated speech accordingly.
Absolutism feels virtuous — you’re for freedom and against censorship. But it also spares you the hard thinking about the real effects of communication. In practice, nobody is truly absolutist. Even the most libertarian judges in US history have drawn lines about disrupting a courtroom, about targeted harassment, about time, place, and manner. Everyone balances, whether they admit it or not.
The hard question is where to draw the line between offense and harm. Offense has to be permitted in a free society. Harm is trickier, and that border will always be contested. 
Yes. We’re always balancing on slippery slopes. That’s what living in a free, democratic society means. The boundaries should be as capacious as possible, and “harm” should be defined narrowly. Laws are blunt tools; they can’t capture the nuance of communication and are easily weaponized.
But one way to be less confused is to distinguish kinds of expression. Artistic expression should get the broadest latitude: offense isn’t harm, and literal truth isn’t the point. Political speech is different. Truth matters in democratic discourse. If we allow conspiracy and intentional falsehood to swamp the public sphere without guardrails, democracy corrodes. Different arenas call for different considerations.
It’s striking how people’s views on “harmful speech” map onto their place in the power hierarchy. The movement that shouts “free speech” when it’s out of power often suppresses it when it’s in power.
That’s perennial. “Free speech” has always been a weaponized slogan. It’s invoked to advance whatever one’s current political aims happen to be. That hypocrisy isn’t new; it’s built into the incoherence of the slogan.
Let’s talk about amplification. Not just the right to speak, but the power to be heard. Is that a form of power?
Absolutely. And it’s the missing piece in most modern debates. We tend to imagine free speech as a duel between an individual speaker and the state. We ignore the media — the institutions that amplify or muffle voices. In the 19th century, people already saw that mass media shape whose voices are heard and what counts as legitimate opinion. Their incentives — profit, political influence — often run against truth-seeking.
Today, online platforms play that role. Their algorithms constantly elevate some speech and bury other speech. If free speech aims to advance truth and enable an equitable public sphere, then the power of amplification has to be part of the equation.
Before the First Amendment, was free speech ever treated as an inherent, fundamental, limitless right?
No. Before the 18th century, the focus was on limiting the harms of expression — to individuals and to the community. People had learned from grim experience that unpoliced rumor and falsehood lead to riots, pogroms, and chaos. The English-speaking world passed its first <a href="https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=301">law against “false news” in 1275</a>.
Modern “liberty of the press” emerges in early 18th-century England for contingent reasons. Prepublication censorship lapses; print explodes; parties use newspapers as weapons. The slogan “liberty of the press” catches on, but it’s always paired with anxiety about “licentiousness” and abuses of liberty. No one believed the right was absolute.
Most Americans have never heard of <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/catos-letters-300-years">Cato’s Letters</a>, yet you argue they’re foundational to our tradition. What were they?
A weekly column that ran in London starting in 1721, written by two anonymous journalists. Much of it recycled republican theory — Locke, Machiavelli — into bite-sized attacks on the government. But in the middle of this very derivative project was something strikingly original: a proto-absolutist theory of free speech. They argued that free speech is the most fundamental right; any restriction is a slide into tyranny; and speech can’t cause real harm compared to the harms of censorship.
It was tailor-made for colonial America. The rhetoric suited revolutionaries who wanted to portray imperial authorities as tyrants. The ideas from Cato’s Letters flowed into American pamphlets and, ultimately, the First Amendment’s rhetoric.
And your research suggests the authors weren’t exactly disinterested philosophers.
Far from it. The text doubled as a defense of their own partisan practices. They denounced corruption while participating in it — switching sides for money, seeking government patronage. One of the authors even became a government propagandist. The irony is that their simplistic theory outlived the grubby reality that produced it, crossing the Atlantic and lodging in American political culture.
John Stuart Mill is the modern giant here. What’s his role?
Mill’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm">On Liberty</a> is a landmark and remains inspiring, and his defense of “experiments in living” is profound. But as a theory of speech, it’s less coherent than people remember. He grounds free expression in individual self-realization and treats speech as so akin to thought that it’s nearly immune from scrutiny. That elides the fact that expression does affect others; that’s the point of expression.
There’s also the imperial context. Mill spent his career as a senior official of the British Empire in India. He explicitly limits his ideal of near-limitless expression to “advanced” civilizations. For “lesser” ones, he thinks the risks of harm are too great. His critics at the time called this out. We remember Mill’s gorgeous rhetoric; we forget the caveats that undermine it.
Then there’s the “marketplace of ideas.” If we just get out of the way and let speech collide, truth will win. Is this a metaphor you’d like to kill?
I understand the appeal; I wish it were true. But a genuine marketplace of ideas would require equal access to truthful information, shared norms about evidence, and roughly equal ability to participate. That’s the opposite of our current media environment.
There are institutions that try to approximate a truth-seeking marketplace: scholarship, serious journalism, high-standard publishing. They have guardrails — fact-checking, peer review, professional norms — and over time they do converge on truth. The scientific consensus on climate change is a good example. But in the wider political sphere, “marketplace” is a fig leaf for the elevation of spectacle, grievance, and profitable falsehood.
Is the American approach exceptional now?
Yes, now. One of the surprises of my research is that from the late 18th century through the 1940s, American practice wasn’t so different from Europe’s. There was a balancing model:  freedom paired with responsibility and an acknowledgment of potential harms. In 1789, just weeks after the First Amendment text was agreed, news of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man reached America. It enshrined freedom of expression and the responsibility not to abuse it. American commentators praised that formulation as superior. Pennsylvania promptly adopted that balancing language in its state constitution, and other states followed.
What changed was the Cold War. In a struggle against totalitarianism, Americans recoiled from anything that sounded like “collective” thinking. The Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence swerved toward a harder, more absolutist line. Noble intentions — simplifying doctrine, protecting dissidents — had unintended effects: widening the gap between legal theory and communicative reality and opening the door to legally protected harms in the public sphere.
To defend the First Amendment for a moment: It’s been a crucial safeguard against state overreach, protecting dissidents and civil rights leaders. I’d rather live with the chaos of too much speech than the dangers of too little. But I admit that the digital era has made me less certain.
Both models — absolutist and balancing — have flaws. The difficulty with the contemporary American version is that it refuses to grapple with speech as action and with amplification power. That refusal has been embraced by corporations that govern online discourse globally.
We should also stop pretending platforms are neutral conduits. Their algorithms are constant moderation for profit. Historically, every new mass medium — radio, television, film — came with public-interest regulation. In the 1990s, the U.S. took a different path for the internet. <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/5/28/21273241/section-230-explained-supreme-court-social-media">Section 230</a> gave platforms sweeping protection: They can moderate and also avoid responsibility for what they publish. Combine that with “more speech is the only answer,” and you have a recipe for irresponsibility at scale.
And the standard worry: Do we really want platforms — or governments — deciding what counts as acceptable speech?
It’s a fair worry, but “do nothing” isn’t a solution. The most sophisticated attempts so far are in the European Union. The basic model there is to create independent, arms-length oversight bodies — nonpartisan, public-interest oriented. Then require transparency: What are your rules, and are you applying them consistently? No more black boxes. And then scale obligations to power. A tiny startup shouldn’t face the same burden as a trillion-dollar platform that can afford robust moderation and has global impact. If you profit from shaping the public sphere, you inherit responsibilities to it.
So what now? Do we need to stop treating free speech as a fixed, universal ideal to be perfectly realized and instead see it more clearly as a political tool — one we adapt to our ends?
We need to get more sophisticated. We’re living through a global media revolution; the old rules don’t fit, and that’s why the topic is so hot again. The way we talk about free speech is too simple. We ignore amplification. We collapse distinct spheres — art, scholarship, politics — into one undifferentiated debate. We pretend the ideal has no shape, when in fact it’s always about power: who gets heard; who doesn’t.
We won’t agree on everything. But we can have better arguments if we use better concepts. That’s what I hope the book offers.
However messy it is, the ideal still seems worth defending. I certainly believe that, and I think you do too. No one here is anti–free speech.
Of course. It’s a noble ideal and essential to a free society. But we should always ask: What is the speech for? For art, the aim is imagination — shock, delight, provocation. For democratic discourse, the aim is self-government. There, we have to take the problem of harm seriously — not just the American, very narrow standard of immediate incitement, but the broader, historically well-known ways in which speech can corrupt the public sphere and strip people of equal dignity.
What about the press? What’s our responsibility in a free society?
In the 1940s and after, as people thought seriously about media power, the American response — short of formal legislation — was professionalization: journalism schools, editorial standards, error correction. Those norms, however imperfect, tried to align media power with the public good. If we lose that, we regress to a world of pure rumor and propaganda.
And yes, commercialization distorts incentives. The “capitalist press,” as early socialists sneered, often serves profit before truth. That tension is real, and it matters.
If I put a map in front of you and asked you to point to the country managing all this best, could you?
No. Not the US. Not Britain. Not India. Every system is struggling, which may just reflect the messiness of human communication. We’re also still in the early stages of the most significant communications revolution since print — maybe bigger. Renegotiating the boundaries of speech and power will take time. Let’s hope we sort it out before the lights go out.
Anything you want to leave people with?
The next time you see a “free speech” crisis and feel the urge to pick a side instantly, pause and ask: What is this slogan being used to do? What is it concealing? Often “free speech” short-circuits a deeper political debate we ought to have. Don’t let the slogan preempt the substance.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/americas-lawyers-vs-chinas-engineers/id1081584611?i=1000723410248">Listen to the rest of the conversation</a> and be sure to follow<a href="https://www.vox.com/thegrayarea"> The Gray Area</a> on<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611"> Apple Podcasts</a>,<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP"> Spotify</a>,<a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/PC:30793"> Pandora</a>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Constance Grady</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Trump wants to be a cultural tastemaker. The CIA did it first.]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/461239/trump-smithsonian-art-kennedy-center-cia-cold-war" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461239</id>
<updated>2025-09-15T16:39:03-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-16T06:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Books" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[The modern Republican Party has fully embraced Andrew Breitbart’s maxim that “politics runs downstream of culture.” That seems to be part of why President Donald Trump has spent so much time in his second term trying to take control of American arts: because that’s the water that streams down into politics. If American politics is […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="President Donald Trump holds up a statue he received as a gift while meeting with county sheriffs in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2017." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/GettyImages-634133074.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
President Donald Trump holds up a statue he received as a gift while meeting with county sheriffs in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2017. </figcaption>
</figure>
The modern Republican Party has fully embraced Andrew Breitbart’s maxim that “politics runs downstream of culture.” That seems to be part of why President Donald Trump has spent so much time in his second term trying to take control of American arts: because that’s the water that streams down into politics. If American politics is ever going to be purely Trumpian, American culture had better become so first.
Trump has ordered the Smithsonian to conduct a review that will leave it better aligned with his own understanding of arts and history. (He wants less focus, he’s said, on “<a href="https://www.pittsburghartscouncil.org/blog/trumps-impact-arts-running-list-updates">how bad slavery was</a>.”) <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/399885/trump-kennedy-center-shonda-rhimes">He has installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center</a> and called for an end to drag shows and so-called “woke” history. He cut federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, sending ripple effects through the nation’s arts infrastructure. Some of the funding left in the NEA, Trump has earmarked for his own pet projects: a sculpture garden depicting <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/22/2021-01643/building-the-national-garden-of-american-heroes">Trump-approved</a> national heroes (<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/31/trump-sculpture-garden-american-heroes-china-00372297">no abstract sculptors need apply</a>); <a href="https://www.arts.gov/grants/national-garden-of-heroes">patriotic plays and concerts that are themed to America’s 250th anniversary</a>.
As Trump grabs for influence over the American arts, he’s been straightforward in what he thinks it should look like. He likes big, bombastic, spectacle-driven work that is also fully representational, uncluttered by metaphors or symbolism. He wants nothing that might suggest that America has ever been less than great, except for when it was under Democratic leadership. He wants nostalgic Norman Rockwell-style Americana, not <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/12/17003956/obama-portraits-official-barack-michelle-kehinde-wiley-amy-sherald">Kehinde Wiley</a>. He doesn’t want Hamilton; he wants 1776, and not the all-female 1776 revival from a couple of years ago, either.
Trump isn’t being all that innovative here. The US government has meddled in American arts before. Most famously, the CIA spent decades during the Cold War funding some artists and literary magazines while surveilling and harassing others, the better to shape America’s image on the world stage. The CIA thought that politics were downstream of culture, too — especially when you and your enemy both have nuclear bombs and would like to avoid using them.
“In our eagerness to avoid at all costs the tragedy of open war, ‘peaceful’ techniques will become more vital in times of pre-war softening up, actual overt war, and in times of post-war manipulation,” runs a CIA memo from 1945, anticipating the shift in tactics that the new atom bomb would necessitate. It was clear even this early on, writes historian Frances Stonor Saunders in her authoritative book The Cultural Cold War, that the “operational weapon” the US would use to fight the war with the Soviets “was to be culture.”
Putting the CIA’s cultural cold warfare next to Trump’s arts power grab is a surprisingly revelatory exercise. Previously, when institutions of the US government got mixed up in the arts world, it was usually because they believed it to be of existential importance how America is depicted in the art that it exported to the rest of the world. Going from the CIA to Trump to back again, we can see how America ran a propaganda war in the 1960s, and how it’s trying to do so again today, in 2025.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading"> “Unite the free traditions of Europe and America” </h2>
The CIA’s cultural Cold War was carefully discreet. Many of the artists they helped fund and promote had no idea the CIA was distributing their work; some suspected, and avoided looking the gift horse too closely in the mouth.
The primary vehicle through which the CIA did its work was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international anti-communist organization dedicated to winning the war of ideas against the Soviets. Ostensibly, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was an independent organization, but more than one contemporary noticed that it had surprisingly deep pockets for an arts foundation headquartered in impoverished postwar Europe. The artists and intellectuals it funded could expect to be flown first class to beautiful locations, feted in luxury hotels, and connected with broad and prestigious platforms.
The money was all from the CIA, and it came with strings attached.
The journalist and Army combat historian Melvin Lasky outlined the strategy in a 1947 internal military memo that would come to be known as the “Melvin Lasky Proposal.” Lasky condemned the United States’ postwar failure to win over “the educated and cultured classes” of Europe to the American cause, since it was they who, “in the long run, provide moral and political leadership in the community.” Soviet propaganda, Lasky wrote, had tarred America’s image abroad: “Viz., the alleged economic selfishness of the USA (Uncle Sam as Shylock); its alleged deep political reaction (a ‘mercenary capitalistic press,’ etc.); its alleged cultural waywardness (the ‘jazz and swing mania,’ radio advertisements, Hollywood ‘inanities,’ ‘cheese-cake and leg-art’); its alleged moral hypocrisy (the Negro question, sharecroppers, Okies); etc. etc.”
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>Unsurprisingly, the CIA’s policy of suppressing any art about America’s race problem hit Black writers especially hard.</blockquote></figure>
Against such a campaign, Lasky wrote, it was useless to take the high road and simply let the facts speak for themselves. America needed advocates of its own to counter the Soviet story.
Lasky saw a potential solution to this problem in the establishment of a literary journal. It would be, he wrote, “a demonstration that behind the official representatives of American democracy lies a great and progressive culture, with a richness of achievements in the arts, in literature, in philosophy, in all the aspects of culture which unite the free traditions of Europe and America.” The idea was that America had to prove to Europe that it was more than just a collection of morally depraved hicks with a segregation problem. Only then would it be able to save Europe from the Soviet threat.
After the CIA adopted Lasky’s proposal, his original idea of one journal became 20, all funded secretly by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress at its peak also funded prestigious international conferences, art exhibitions, and public performances. All of them were evaluated by the CIA to confirm that they fit the brief as outlined by Lasky: they showed that the US had a tradition of highbrow culture that would appeal to the aesthetes of Paris and Berlin, and they did not condemn America for its “moral hypocrisy” — for class divides or entrenched systemic racism or anything else. For the CIA, the official and clearly stated goal of these magazines was to present European intellectuals with a vision of American-style capitalism that would seduce them away from a lingering interest in Communism.
A lot of this art and culture was genuinely very good and very important. Via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA became a champion of Abstract Expressionist art as the antithesis of Soviet-style social realism. It supported the Museum of Modern Art (which destroyed an in-progress Diego Rivera mural when Rivera painted in Lenin and declined to paint him out), and the Paris Review, originally established by a CIA agent as part of his cover. (For a full account of the Paris Review’s relationship with the CIA, see Joel Whitney’s deeply researched Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers). It turned the Boston Symphony Orchestra into an internationally celebrated institution.
Art that did engage with America’s race problem, however, or with its flourishing practice of interfering in the democratically elected governments of other countries, was considered highly suspect, and potentially a tool of the Soviets. It received no prestigious CIA funding. Sometimes, it was suppressed entirely.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">“I’ll see to it that it is killed.”</h2>
Unsurprisingly, the CIA’s policy of suppressing any art about America’s race problem hit Black writers especially hard. James Baldwin and Richard Wright both wrote extensively about the sins of the Soviet Union early in their careers, and at the time, the CIA backed them accordingly. Their essays were republished in the Paris Review and in the CIA-funded magazine Encounters, and their novels were distributed internationally using government funds. Yet when they turned their attention from the Soviets to the problem of American racism and the American surveillance state, they lost the CIA’s good wishes. The stable of magazines secretly controlled by the CIA began to decline to publish their writing. The FBI and likely the CIA as well began to infiltrate their lives and assemble files on them. (Wright described the turn as “the CIA’s vacillating between secretly sponsoring and spying.”) W.E.B. Du Bois, meanwhile, who had no anti-Communist credentials, got it worst of all: the State Department simply denied him a passport.
The CIA was also active in Hollywood, where it examined films carefully for any hint of a plotline that could become anti-American propaganda. One CIA report from 1953 describes how the agent has persuaded Paramount to add “well dressed negroes” as extras to films, including one set in a tony golf club, in order to avoid fanning up a conversation about American racism. The agent admits that he couldn’t quite figure out how to pull the move off for a film set in the antebellum South. “However,” he added, “this is being off-set to a certain degree, by planting a dignified negro butler in one of the principal’s homes, and by giving him dialogue indicating he is a freed man and can work where he likes.”
Not every film could be fixed so easily.  One script was found to be beyond the pale for its “implication [that the] wealth of Anglo-Texans [was] built by exploiting Mexican labor.” “I’ll see to it that it is killed each time someone tries to reactivate it at Paramount,” the agent promised. (It made its way to Warner Brothers instead, where it became Giant, James Dean’s last movie.) The now-iconic Western High Noon, too, was condemned for “its unsympathetic portrayal of American townsfolk and its featuring a Mexican prostitute character.” The movie was already out in the world by the time of the CIA agent’s report, but he promised to sabotage its chances at the Oscars anyway. (It still walked away with four trophies, if not Best Picture.)
The artistic world that the CIA built was one of American innocence. It was a world in which Black Americans had free access to wealth and prestige, people of color were never exploited, and the races existed together in a state of beneficent harmony. Aesthetics existed in a pure sphere of their own, one where brushstrokes and colors were celebrated as depoliticized expressions of freedom. Art that was explicitly political was lesser, a form of glorified propaganda. The legacy of Western art was the world’s greatest cultural achievement, and America was now the guardian of that legacy.
In many ways, that’s the artistic world that Donald Trump seems to be trying to build now all over again. Only this time, there’s no reason to pitch the art to the tastemakers of Europe.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">“Mediocrity, hick mentality, the dreaded midcult.”</h2>
Trump’s taste in art tends toward the populist and the kitschy. Aesthetically, the work that he’s promoting as president has less in common with the highbrow work championed in secret by the CIA, and more to do with the favorite art of Joseph McCarthy, the other great Cold War censor of American culture and a Trumpian figure if ever there was one. 
McCarthy, writes Saunders in The Cultural Cold War, “was an autarchist—he wanted ‘Made in America.’ … McCarthyism was a movement—or a moment—fired with populist resentment against the establishment. In turn, McCarthy’s vulgar demagoguery was received as an insult by the ruling elite. He represented what A.L. Rowse in England scorned as ‘the Idiot People’; he offended Brahmin taste, which recoiled at mediocrity, hick mentality, the dreaded midcult.”
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>The artists and thinkers whose works were presented to the public as most urgent and necessary, important as they might have been, were not necessarily the most urgent and necessary artists and thinkers working at the time.</blockquote></figure>
So averse to the highbrow was McCarthy that some CIA agents have claimed they had to promote figures like Pollock in secret, covertly, just to avoid McCarthy’s outcries. “Imagine the ridiculous howlings that would’ve gone up,” one tells Saunders in The Cultural Cold War: “‘They’re all Communists! They’re homosexuals!’ or whatever.”
Trump, too, has no use for the kind of heady intellectualism the CIA pushed during the Cold War. The art he is pushing tends to be heavily representational, and in fact is required to be so. The grant application for his planned National Garden of American Heroes explicitly forbids “abstract or modernist” statues — a problem, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/31/trump-sculpture-garden-american-heroes-china-00372297">as Politico reported in May</a>, because the United States does not currently have a strong tradition of representational sculptures.
Representational art was considered Soviet during the Cold War, so the CIA didn’t support it. Lacking lucrative prizes, prestigious coverage from literary magazines, or appearances in international exhibitions, representational art began to wither away. In artistic circles, it came to be considered unfashionable and unintellectual, like Victorian architecture or mall portraits. We’re still living in the world that choice built: The biggest pool of talent for representational sculpting is now in China.
It’s this kind of lopsided artistic ecosystem that can occur when the government meddles in the artistic world, even decades after the fact. “The government seemed to be running an underground gravy train whose first-class compartments were not always occupied by first-class passengers,” wrote publisher and critic Jason Epstein in 1967, as news of the CIA’s meddling in the cultural world began to make its way into the public. “The CIA and the Ford Foundation, among other agencies, had set up and were financing an apparatus of intellectuals selected for their correct cold-war positions, as an alternative to what one might call a free intellectual market where ideology was presumed to count for less than individual talent and achievement, and where doubts about established orthodoxies were taken to be the beginning of all inquiry.”
The artists and thinkers whose works were presented to the public as most urgent and necessary, important as they might have been, were not necessarily the most urgent and necessary artists and thinkers working at the time. They were the ones who fit the CIA’s stated priorities best.
Now we’re left in the world they made — one where, whatever your thoughts may be on the value of representational art, the fact is that we don’t have much of it, due in part to an artificially-produced devaluation. 
That is one of the more innocent side effects of the kind of state interference with the art world that the CIA performed so covertly and that Trump is doing now with such pointed candor. More troubling is the thing they all seem to agree on, the CIA, Trump, and McCarthy too, the point where they all overlap: the belief that any work of art that engages with America’s sins must be suppressed, and any work of art that papers them over must be lifted up and celebrated. When the government starts interfering with art, it always seems to coalesce around the idea that the government itself is beyond artistic reproach.

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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Cameron Peters</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The US and China have a new TikTok “deal”]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/461621/trump-tiktok-deal-ban-china-bytedance" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/461621/the-logoff-template</id>
<updated>2025-09-15T18:25:02-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-15T18:30:00-04:00</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="Social Media" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="The Logoff" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="TikTok" />
<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: The Trump administration says it has agreed on a deal that would let TikTok avoid a US ban. What’s the context? TikTok, which is owned […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Scott Bessent, wearing a gray suit, stands in a crowd of journalists holding microphones." data-caption="Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent addresses the media as he leaves a meeting in Madrid, Spain, on September 15, 2025. | Gustavo Valiente/Europa Press via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Gustavo Valiente/Europa Press via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2235578288.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent addresses the media as he leaves a meeting in Madrid, Spain, on September 15, 2025. | Gustavo Valiente/Europa Press via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
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: The Trump administration says it has agreed on a deal that would let TikTok avoid a US ban.
What’s the context? TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, was supposed to be subject to a nationwide ban starting in January 2025, after a deadline for ByteDance to sell the app — imposed by Congress in 2024 — passed unmet.
Instead, President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders punting on the ban. The latest of those orders, in June, set the new deadline for September 17 — this Wednesday.
What does the deal say? We don’t know yet, though any deal would require the sale of TikTok to a US-based owner. As is often the case under Trump, the announced deal is currently just a “framework,” according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Chinese officials said Monday that the two sides had reached a “basic consensus” on a deal.
Why did the US want to ban TikTok in the first place? Concern about TikTok boils down to a concern about Chinese influence. ByteDance’s close relationship with the Chinese government, coupled with the app’s proprietary content algorithm and vast reach — TikTok has about 170 million American users — mean China could gain access to huge amounts of American data or use TikTok to spread propaganda.
Why does this matter? TikTok’s massive user base in the US means a potential ban is a politically sensitive topic, particularly with young voters who are becoming increasingly electorally important for both parties.
What comes next? It’s still possible Trump pushes the deadline for the ban back further as terms of the deal — if it holds — are finalized. For now, Trump said he is set to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the deal on Friday.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">And with that, it’s time to log off…</h2>
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: The 2025 World Athletics Championships began over the weekend in Tokyo, Japan, which means nine days of amazing track and field action. But the rest of the schedule is going to have a hard time topping my favorite race of the meet so far, from this morning (East Coast time, at least — Tokyo is 16 hours ahead). 
In the 3,000-meter steeplechase, where runners jump over four barriers and one water jump per lap for seven and a half laps, New Zealand runner Geordie Beamish took a stunning win over double world champion and double Olympic gold medalist Soufiane El Bakkali. It’s the kind of finish you need to see to believe, and you can watch it <a href="https://youtu.be/VtE803k-YeM?feature=shared&t=270">here</a>. Have a great evening!
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Ian Millhiser</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The Supreme Court is about to decide one of the biggest economic policy cases ever]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/461604/supreme-court-lisa-cook-trump-federal-reserve" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461604</id>
<updated>2025-09-15T15:39:47-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-15T15:45:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Economy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Money" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Supreme Court" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[A long-simmering showdown over whether President Donald Trump may seize control over the Federal Reserve appears to be entering its endgame. It is highly likely that the Supreme Court will weigh in on this dispute either Monday evening or Tuesday.  If the Court does side with Trump, that would be one of the most consequential […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Lisa Cook looks over her shoulder while sitting in front of a large projector screen." data-caption="Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2225624346.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook. </figcaption>
</figure>
A long-simmering showdown over whether President Donald Trump may <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/459375/supreme-court-donald-trump-federal-reserve-firing-unitary-executive">seize control over the Federal Reserve</a> appears to be entering its endgame. It is highly likely that the Supreme Court will weigh in on this dispute either Monday evening or Tuesday. 
If the Court does side with Trump, that would be one of the most consequential economic policy decisions in the federal judiciary’s history. And it could potentially have <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/459375/supreme-court-donald-trump-federal-reserve-firing-unitary-executive">disastrous consequences</a> both for investors and for the US economy broadly.
The Fed is one of several federal agencies that are labeled as “independent” from the president. Though the president chooses who will serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors, these governors must be confirmed by the Senate, and they <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/default.htm">serve 14-year terms</a>. By law, the president may only remove a member of the Fed’s board “<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/12/242">for cause</a>,” unlike most agency leaders who serve at the pleasure of the president.
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, however, subscribes to a theory known as the “<a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/397729/supreme-court-unitary-executive-donald-trump">unitary executive</a>,” which claims that it is unconstitutional for Congress to shield agency leaders from presidential control. If you care about the details of this theory, I’ve <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/459375/supreme-court-donald-trump-federal-reserve-firing-unitary-executive">written</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/397729/supreme-court-unitary-executive-donald-trump">more</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/2/14/21135083/justice-scalia-bill-barr-trump-unitary-executive-no-rule-of-law-morrison-olson">explainers</a> on it than I can count, but the gist of it is that the Constitution places all “executive” power in the hands of the president. So any agency leader who wields authority that the Court deems to be “executive” in nature must be fireable at will by the president.
For most of the past two decades, the Republican justices have <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/477/">slowly</a> <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-7_n6io.pdf">expanded</a> the president’s power to fire officials under this theory. And they <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/408848/supreme-court-donald-trump-unitary-executive-wilcox">kicked this process into overdrive</a> shortly after Trump took office for his second term. But, in a May decision, the Court did signal that it was <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/414274/supreme-court-federal-reserve-trump-wilcox">spooked</a> about giving Trump the authority to fire members of the Federal Reserve.
Although the Court’s May decision in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a966_1b8e.pdf">Trump v. Wilcox</a> was cryptic, it’s not hard to suss out why some of the justices feel torn between their loyalty to both Trump and the unitary executive theory on the one hand, and a desire to preserve Fed independence on the other.
The Fed essentially has the power to inject cocaine into the US economy. When the Fed lowers interest rates, it makes it easier for businesses to borrow money that they can use to begin new projects and hire new workers. But it also risks spiking inflation rates. Thus, if the president controls the Fed, he can engineer a short-term, politically advantageous boost to the economy — but at the cost of much greater economic turmoil down the road.
Nor is this concern merely hypothetical. In advance of his reelection bid in 1972, President Richard Nixon <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/459375/supreme-court-donald-trump-federal-reserve-firing-unitary-executive">successfully pressured Fed chair Arthur Burns to lower interest rates</a>. The economy boomed that year as a result, and Nixon won in an historic landslide. But Burns’s capitulation is often blamed for years of “stagflation,” slow economic growth and high inflation, during the 1970s.
In any event, a lawsuit known as <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.42372/gov.uscourts.cadc.42372.01208774677.0_3.pdf">Cook v. Trump</a> is now barreling toward the Supreme Court, and is likely to land on the justices’ doorstep as soon as Monday night. Trump has asked the courts to weigh in on this case on an exceedingly expedited basis, in the hopes that he can gain the power to fire Federal Reserve governors in advance of an important Fed meeting that begins Tuesday.
As of this writing, Cook is pending before a federal appeals court. Trump asked that court to issue its decision “<a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.42372/gov.uscourts.cadc.42372.01208774677.0_3.pdf">by the close of business on Monday, September 15, 2025</a>.” If the appeals court does not comply, however, Trump will almost certainly attempt to bypass it and seek review from the Supreme Court in advance of the Tuesday Fed meeting.
So we are likely to find out very soon if the Court’s Republican majority intends to place the Fed under Trump’s control.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What is Cook v. Trump about?</h2>
Last month, Trump <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/459375/supreme-court-donald-trump-federal-reserve-firing-unitary-executive">attempted to fire Lisa Cook</a>, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022. 
Trump claims he fired her because she allegedly committed mortgage fraud by claiming two separate properties as her principal residence — and thus he is firing her “for cause” — but this claim is an obvious pretext. Trump has raised similar allegations <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/459375/supreme-court-donald-trump-federal-reserve-firing-unitary-executive">against several of his political foes</a>, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James. And, in any event, the allegation against Cook was later revealed to be false.
Last week, Reuters reported that Cook <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fed-governor-cook-declared-her-atlanta-property-vacation-home-documents-show-2025-09-13/">declared one of the two properties as a “vacation home,”</a> so the lender that helped her purchase that property was aware it was not her principal residence.
Nevertheless, Trump claims that he is allowed to fire Cook anyway. In briefs filed in a federal appeals court, Trump’s lawyers argue that the president’s false determination that Cook committed mortgage fraud “<a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.42372/gov.uscourts.cadc.42372.01208775259.0_3.pdf">is not subject to judicial second-guessing</a>,” and thus no court can prevent Trump from firing her based even on a transparently made-up pretext.
Under Trump’s legal theory, he could have justified firing Cook “for cause” by accusing her of being responsible for the <a href="https://www.whitehousehistory.org/bios/james-garfield">1881 assassination of President James Garfield</a>, or for causing the fall of Rome. Trump is asking the Court to neutralize the law protecting Fed governors from political firings in its entirety.
What stands in Trump’s way is the Court’s decision last May in Wilcox, which indicated that the Fed is exempt from the unitary executive theory, and that Trump may not fire its leaders at will.
Admittedly, the <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/459375/supreme-court-donald-trump-federal-reserve-firing-unitary-executive">opinion in Wilcox was gobbledygook</a>. It claimed that the Fed is special because it “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States” — whatever that means. Numerous legal experts, <a href="https://x.com/joshgerstein/status/1963257492927852857">including the Republican chief judge</a> of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, have questioned whether there is actually a principled way to distinguish the Fed from other independent agencies.
Ultimately, however, the question of whether the Court’s decision in Wilcox rests on a principled distinction is academic. This Court frequently hands down <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/358292/supreme-court-trump-immunity-dictatorship">bizarre</a> or <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/458863/supreme-court-nih-public-health-grants-gobbledygook">incomprehensible</a> decisions, and those decisions are no less binding than cases that rest on sound legal reasoning.
The important thing is that, just four months ago, this Court handed down a decision indicating that Trump cannot fire members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. If the Republican justices reverse course after such a recent decision, either by overruling Wilcox explicitly or by defining the term “for cause” so narrowly that it becomes meaningless, that wouldn’t just have stunning implications for the US economy.
It would also be an unusually loud signal that this Court has decided to become <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/460270/supreme-court-republican-partisan-hacks-donald-trump">a wholly owned subsidiary</a> of the Trump Organization.

]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Jonquilyn Hill</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Why 2025 has been a banner year for horror movies]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/explain-it-to-me/461387/horror-movie-box-office-conjuring-weapons" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461387</id>
<updated>2025-09-15T16:52:14-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-15T07:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Explain It to Me" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Podcasts" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Spooky season isn’t here quite yet, but you’d never know looking at the box office. The Conjuring: Last Rites, the latest installment about a (problematic) real-life couple who investigated the paranormal, had a massive $84 million domestic opening weekend. That’s just the latest success for horror films. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Zach Cregger’s Weapons, and Final […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="A group of moviegoers walks past a wall of movie posters inside a movie theater." data-caption="Moviegoers at the AMC Century City in Los Angeles on May 22, 2025. | Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2215950773.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Moviegoers at the AMC Century City in Los Angeles on May 22, 2025. | Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
Spooky season isn’t here quite yet, but you’d never know looking at the box office. The Conjuring: Last Rites, the latest installment about a (<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23939024/ed-lorraine-warren-cases-hoax-real-conjuring-amityville">problematic</a>) real-life couple who investigated the paranormal, had a massive $84 million domestic opening weekend. That’s just the latest success for horror films. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Zach Cregger’s Weapons, and Final Destination Bloodlines also had surprising success in theaters this year.
According to Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends at the media analytics company Comscore, horror movies have already surpassed $1 billion at the domestic box office. The last time that happened was 2017, when It and Get Out took theaters by storm.
Horror films have always been an easy way to make money in movies because their budgets tend to be low. “Even back in the day, you would have a movie like the original Halloween, which had a very modest budget and then just became this box office juggernaut,” Dergarabedian told Vox.
But until recently, that financial success didn’t always come with critical appreciation. Horror, Dergarabedian told Vox, has been “the Rodney Dangerfield of genres. It can’t get no respect.”
What’s striking about 2025’s horror hits is not only their ability to sell tickets at a time when many other movies are struggling. It’s also the critical consensus that these are truly great films. Sinners and Weapons in particular could contend for major Oscar nominations. It’s a swing toward respectability for a genre that encompasses both The Exorcist (a Best Picture nominee) and Friday the 13th (the guiltiest of pleasures).
“If you go through the history of the genre, there’s sort of these peaks and valleys in terms of critical appreciation,” filmmaker and DePaul University film professor Andrew Stasiulis told Vox. “But we now have swung back into a phase of people really respecting horror, respecting its traditions, and you see that in some of the most popular and well-respected directors of today: Jordan Peele with Get Out, Ari Aster with Hereditary and Midsommar, Robert Eggers, and Zach Cregger.”
One counterintuitive trait many of those creators share: They got their start in comedy. “I think that comedy is always paired really naturally with horror,” <a href="https://www.vulture.com/author/alison-willmore/">Vulture film critic Alison Willmore</a> said. 
Why is it that those genres pair so well? And what does our love of horror movies say about us? That’s the subject of this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Willmore, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explain-it-to-me/id1042433083">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1vSUO6Bg4abtjRF7fnGpT1">Spotify</a>, or <a href="https://link.chtbl.com/explainit?sid=site">wherever you get podcasts</a>. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="200" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=VMP2894483465" width="100%"></iframe>
What is a horror comedy? Are they truly scary movies with some comedic elements? 
The best horror comedies are both scary and funny. Even in movies that are pretty straightforwardly horror, I think there’s usually some room for intentional comedy or, sometimes, if the movie’s not going well, unintentional comedy. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“There is definitely a real trend there in terms of the comedy to horror pathway.”</blockquote></figure>
The one I always think about in terms of an early horror comedy is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. That was back in the 1940s. Even back then, you’ve got a classic comedy duo meeting a classic movie monster. Since then you’ve got things like the Evil Dead movies, which are funny as well as very creepy. Or Shaun of the Dead, a zombie movie that is clearly made for and by people who actually have seen zombie movies — including the characters within it.
Why do horror and comedy go so well together? It feels like such an odd combination.
They do feel like they should be opposites, but I think they’re both genres that have been considered a little disreputable; we don’t treat them as seriously as drama. A lot of the same elements that go into making a bit work or a joke work are what makes a scare work. It’s a question of timing. It’s a question of craft. It’s a question of landing that punchline or landing that jump scare.
I think that that speaks to a certain kind of shared spirit in both of those genres. That’s one of the reasons I think they fit so well together and people move back and forth between them.
They both thrive on the unexpected. There’s a sense of surprise with both comedy and horror.
Absolutely. We think a lot about jump scares as trademark experiences of watching a horror movie, but what do you do when you get a really good jump scare? You laugh a bit, right? You build up tension and then there’s a release, and I think that same thing happens with a joke as well.
Some of our most buzziest horror creators right now — Jordan Peele of Get Out, and Zach Cregger of Weapons — they’re comedians. I’m curious what you think about that crossover.
I think that it goes back to that shared DNA of how you set up a scare and how you set up a joke being very similar, even if your aims are different in terms of the response you want from an audience. 
The director of Heart Eyes, which is a movie that is both a riff on slasher movies and romantic comedies, was directed by Josh Ruben, who worked at CollegeHumor. The Philippou brothers who directed the 2022 movie Talk to Me got started on YouTube making goofy sketches. There is definitely a real trend there in terms of the comedy to horror pathway.
One of my favorite things about horror is that it can accommodate so many mixes of tones, I think maybe more so than any other genre. It’s just this incredible container for things that can be really weirdly touching, and then on the other side, outrageous and funny and shocking and grotesque.
It almost seems like it’s the tofu of movie genres.
Absolutely. It picks up the flavors of whatever it’s cooked with.
The main focus of practically every horror movie is escaping death. I wonder what that says about us, the fact that this can be funny, the fact that this can be cathartic in a way.
We want to be able to sample the darkness, to sample the danger. But it has to be in a controlled environment, in a way where you know that the credits are going to roll and then you get to go home. I think that it does offer this safe space in which to explore these dark, really exciting, tense experiences.
Correction, September 15, 4:45 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated Paul Dergarabedian’s title.

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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Cameron Peters</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Christian Paz</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Charlie Kirk was more than a conservative activist]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter/461501/charlie-kirk-gen-z-parasocial-conservative-influencer" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461501</id>
<updated>2025-09-12T18:27:41-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-15T07:00:00-04:00</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="Today, Explained newsletter" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot last week at a campus event in Utah, was a hero to a generation of young conservatives; last week, my colleague Christian Paz wrote about how he and his organization, Turning Point USA, redefined what politics and political media looked like for many in Gen Z. I sat down […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk speaks during a campaign rally for Donald Trump at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, on August 23, 2024." data-caption="Charlie Kirk speaks during a campaign rally for Donald Trump at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, on August 23, 2024. | Rebecca Noble/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Rebecca Noble/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2167287751.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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Charlie Kirk speaks during a campaign rally for Donald Trump at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, on August 23, 2024. | Rebecca Noble/Getty Images </figcaption>
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Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot last week at a campus event in Utah, was a hero to a generation of young conservatives; last week, <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/461498/charlie-kirk-remade-gen-z-transform-conservative-youth-politics-legacy">my colleague Christian Paz wrote</a> about how he and his organization, Turning Point USA, redefined what politics and political media looked like for many in Gen Z.
I sat down with Christian to talk about that appeal for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can also sign up for the newsletter <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/today-explained-newsletter-signup">here</a> for more conversations like this.
Where did Charlie Kirk come from, as a figure in the conservative movement?
He came pretty much from nowhere. Around the time that he was 18, he decides that he wants to start a revitalized movement of conservatism. His idols were Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, and he was a believer in the old “lower taxes, smaller government”-style conservatism. Essentially, the way that a lot of people describe him is somebody who was unique in the talents he had in communicating and talking and connecting with people.
<div class="wp-block-vox-media-highlight vox-media-highlight">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">This story was first featured in the Today, Explained newsletter</h2>
Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Sign up <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/today-explained-newsletter-signup">here</a>.
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You get to 2024 and he goes from being an outsider, somebody who’s never ran for office before, who had no connections, to becoming friends with Donald Trump Jr. He becomes close to Tucker Carlson. He becomes close to the new Republican power center. 
And that’s part of the myth of him: somebody who is not college educated, somebody who started a movement by himself when people doubted that it would take off and slowly builds until it’s more than 800 college chapters and millions of followers. They raised $100 million last year in the presidential election, and they were one of the groups responsible for the Get Out the Vote effort that Republicans used last year.
How did he connect with and then transform youth and Gen Z politics on the right?
A lot of what he did was old-fashioned retail politics: showing up to places, going to centers of liberal elitism and intellectualism, the places where it wasn’t cool to be conservative, where it was weird to be a Republican. He embraced a personality of saying bombastic things, of sparking outrage, and cultivating that outrage and that anger to make an even bigger name for himself on college campuses. 
What he was able to do was like, clip content well, share it widely, and then use that to found more chapters and grow the organization. And once you have people who are fans of you, who have clubs that they’re starting at their schools, they form a sense of community, and they form a sense of not being alone anymore on a college campus. It’s no longer that taboo to say certain things, or to say that you’re a conservative, or to argue conservative positions. That builds a sense of, you know, social connection on campuses.
In that process, you make this a lifestyle, and I think that’s the key here. He wasn’t just building a political movement, he was becoming a lifestyle and a social and cultural identity, and that’s what ends up transforming campuses and Gen Z in general. It becomes a fact of the culture. And once it becomes a fact of the culture, it becomes its own universe, and that’s the big shift.
Why Charlie Kirk? What did he see about Gen Z that helped him achieve this?
The thing that defines Gen Z is how swingable they are, how open to taking in any perspective. Charlie Kirk saw that there was a countercultural response against the doctrine of the millennial era of liberal progressivism that everyone got used to, and assumed that Gen Z would easily hold onto. Gen Z ended up not simply adopting all those views and becoming much more idiosyncratic. He saw a way to feed it, a way to cultivate it, to offer those debating spaces that maybe weren’t proliferating as much on college campuses.
The other thing that I think he understood is the specific nature of Gen Z, social media nativism, of being ready to immerse themselves into parasocial relationships. A whole generation gets their news or gets more informed through podcasters, through influencers. They interpret life around them based on shows or specific people, and not so much a shared sense of monoculture that we were used to in the past. 
Whether you liked him or hated him, you grew to have some kind of a relationship with him, whether it was in disgust or in really liking what he was saying, seeing him not just as a political figure but as an influencer who talked about faith and religion and health and wellness. There were different aspects to what his messages were, and that made it connect with people much more intimately than any politician.
What do you think is misunderstood about what he was doing and what his legacy is going to look like?
He did say a lot of controversial, offensive, in many cases bigoted things, and that wasn’t a disqualifying thing for the way that people consumed his content. 
I think one of the things that was shocking for a lot of people is just how broad his reach was and, essentially, the cinematic universe he created, where so many stars in the conservative movement were connected into the fabric that he built. You could easily consume culture that was connected to Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk without realizing it. And I think that’s the factor that is really interesting. He wasn’t just a political activist. He became a celebrity, he became an influencer. He became somebody who represented various aspects of people’s lives.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Pratik Pawar</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[For the first time, more kids are obese than underweight]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/461396/child-malnutrition-report-unicef" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461396</id>
<updated>2025-09-12T18:30:24-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-15T06:45:00-04:00</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="Health Care" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Something striking just happened in global nutrition: As of 2025, children worldwide are now more likely to be obese than underweight. According to UNICEF’s new Child Nutrition Report, about 9.4 percent of school-age kids (ages 5–19) are living with obesity, compared to 9.2 percent who are underweight. Twenty-five years ago, the gap was much wider: […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="A person walks past a vending machine and appears as a blurred image in the foreground." data-caption="A student walks past a snack vending machine at Bowie High School in Austin, Texas. | Jana Birchum/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Jana Birchum/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-3076176.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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A student walks past a snack vending machine at Bowie High School in Austin, Texas. | Jana Birchum/Getty Images </figcaption>
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Something striking just happened in global nutrition: As of 2025, children worldwide are now more likely to be obese than underweight.
According to <a href="https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/obesity-exceeds-underweight-first-time-among-school-age-children-and-adolescents">UNICEF’s new Child Nutrition Report</a>, about 9.4 percent of school-age kids (ages 5–19) are living with obesity, compared to 9.2 percent who are underweight. Twenty-five years ago, the gap was much wider: Nearly 13 percent of kids were underweight, while just 3 percent had obesity. Over time, those lines have converged and flipped.
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/30UF1-a-historic-flip-in-child-malnutrition-final.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0.67307692307692,0,98.653846153846,100" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="" />
It might feel odd to put obesity in the same bucket as underweight; one has long been seen as a problem of scarcity, the other of excess. But public health experts now define both as forms of malnutrition, which they describe in three dimensions: not enough food, too much of the wrong food, and hidden hunger from micronutrient deficiencies.
There’s a silver lining in this crossover: Fewer kids are dangerously thin than two decades ago. That decline really matters, because being underweight can mean stunted height, impaired brain development, weak immunity, and in worst cases, a higher risk of death. So, the fact that those numbers are falling is genuine progress.
But it’s overshadowed by how quickly obesity has surged, with 188 million children now living with it — though where it shows up most varies widely by region. 
Obesity in children isn’t just about size; it raises risks for Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and even certain cancers later in life. Starting so young makes the costs even higher. By 2035, being overweight and obesity are <a href="https://www.worldobesity.org/news/economic-impact-of-overweight-and-obesity-to-surpass-4-trillion-by-2035">expected</a> to drain more than $4 trillion a year globally — about 3 percent of the world’s GDP.
UNICEF bases that 2025 crossover on projections from survey data through 2022, and while the precise year carries some uncertainty, the trend is clear. And it’s still pointing upward; the report projects child obesity rates will continue to climb through 2030, especially in Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How did we get here?</h2>
The shift aligns with the change in the kind of food environment today’s kids are raised in. Supermarkets, schools, and corner stores are stocked with foods high in calories, added sugar, saturated fat, and salt. Think sodas, packaged snacks, instant noodles — the kind of products that are designed to be cheap, convenient, and irresistible. That’s by design.
“Food companies are not social service or public health agencies; they are businesses with stockholders to please,” said Marion Nestle, a longtime scholar of food politics at New York University, over email. “Their job is to sell more of their products…regardless of the effects on health.” And unlike a generation ago, these foods are no longer confined to wealthy countries; they’re now widely available in LMICs, and are increasingly displacing traditional diets.
Ultra-processed foods — the buzzword taking health circles by storm — tend to encompass such foods. A rare <a href="https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131%2819%2930248-7">randomized trial</a> at the US National Institutes of Health found that people on ultra-processed diets ate about 500 extra calories per day than those on minimally processed ones. Most other <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310">studies</a> show associations between ultra-processed food intake and obesity or poor health, though they can’t prove cause and effect.
But experts also debate about what counts as ultra-processed. The system used by the UN and many researchers to determine what qualifies as ultra-processed is too broad and sometimes lumps together very different foods. That’s why critics like Nicola Guess <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391795/ultra-processed-foods-science-vegan-meat-rfk-maha">say</a> the category “borders on useless,” pointing out that it can group together things as different as Oreos, tofu, and homemade soup made with a bouillon cube.
Still, the debate over definition doesn’t erase the broader finding: Diets heavy in these calorie-dense, heavily marketed products are consistently linked to worse health outcomes. “This is as close as you can get to a causal relationship [in public health],” said Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, a professor of public health nutrition at Yale University.
The other shift in the last 25 years is that kids today are far less active than even a generation ago. In <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/22-11-2019-new-who-led-study-says-majority-of-adolescents-worldwide-are-not-sufficiently-physically-active-putting-their-current-and-future-health-at-risk">global survey reports</a>, more than 80 percent of adolescents fail to get the World Health Organization recommended hour of daily exercise — a sedentary shift that makes the impact of poor diets worse.
The result is a world where no region is untouched, but the picture looks very different depending on where you are. Richer countries like the US (21 percent), Chile (27 percent), and the UAE (21 percent) report strikingly high rates of childhood obesity. In some parts of the Pacific Islands, more than a third of children are obese, a trend linked to growing reliance on imported processed foods over traditional diets. 
But this isn’t universal. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, underweight is still more common.
That regional picture shows we’re in a patchwork of progress and crisis. Some regions are still battling too little food, others too much of the wrong kind, and many face both at once.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What can we do about it?</h2>
The drivers of this flip are structural — pricing, marketing, food availability — and that’s where the solutions are, too.
“Latin American countries are worried that obesity and its consequent chronic disease will bankrupt their health systems,” said Nestle. That concern has pushed governments to act faster than most. Chile’s 2016 warning label law and ad-ban package <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196%2821%2900172-8/fulltext">cut</a> purchases of sugary drinks and snacks, and Mexico this year banned junk food in public schools, reshaping choices for 34 million children. “Impact studies show that they work to a considerable extent,” Nestle added. The UK’s soft drinks tax points in the same direction, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004371">pushing</a> companies to reformulate beverages with less sugar.
By contrast, in the US, the Make America Healthy Again movement has delivered little beyond words. “The MAHA movement is all talk. … The policy document that <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/maha-commission-report-childhood-disease-strategy.html">came out a few days ago</a> is essentially saying we’ll have no regulations or policies, we’ll only do research and voluntary guidelines,” said Barry Popkin, a longtime nutrition researcher at University of North Carolina. As <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/402470/ultra-processed-foods-labels-fda-maha">Jess Craig reported previously for Vox</a>, the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed front-of-package labels are a far cry from the bold stop-sign warnings in Latin America — the kind of measures experts say actually change behavior.
Of course, no single law is going to reverse the obesity curve, and nearly every country has struggled to get a handle on it. But measures like warning labels, soda taxes, and marketing restrictions at least sketch out what a serious policy toolkit could look like.
The decline in underweight is worth celebrating. But the rise of obesity, now surpassing it, reframes what malnutrition means in the 21st century. Calories alone are no longer the main problem; it’s the kind of calories children are consuming. We’re now in a world where we’ve partly solved one old crisis, only to stumble into another created by our food system.

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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>David Zipper</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[A self-driving car traffic jam is coming for US cities]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/461393/self-driving-cars-cities-congestion-avs-parking" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461393</id>
<updated>2025-09-15T09:20:29-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-15T06:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Cities & Urbanism" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Transportation" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[A century ago, a deluge of automobiles swept across the United States, upending city life in its wake. Pedestrian deaths surged. Streetcars, unable to navigate the choking traffic, collapsed. Car owners infuriated residents with their klaxons’ ear-splitting awooogah!  Scrambling to accommodate the swarm of motor vehicles, local officials paved over green space, whittled down sidewalks […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="An animated aerial view of autonomous vehicles causing a traffic jam in a city’s intersection " data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Jared Bartman for Vox" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/Vox_AutoVehicles_R3_01.gif?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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A century ago, a deluge of automobiles swept across the United States, upending city life in its wake. <a href="https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-and-rates/">Pedestrian deaths surged</a>. Streetcars, unable to navigate the choking traffic, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demise">collapsed</a>. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-08-26/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-klaxon-the-world-s-most-annoying-car-horn">Car owners infuriated residents</a> with their klaxons’ ear-splitting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKux880u8PQ">awooogah</a>!
Scrambling to accommodate the swarm of motor vehicles, local officials <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/nyregion/street-wars-park-avenue-redesign.html">paved over green space</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/nyregion/28fifth.html">whittled down sidewalks</a> to install parking, and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Rivals_Jaywalking_and_the_Invention_of_the_Motor_Age_Street">criminalized jaywalking</a> to banish pedestrians from their own streets. Generations of drivers grew accustomed to unfettered dominance of the road. America was remade in the automobile’s image, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/">degrading urban vibrancy</a> and quality of life.
Today, the incipient rise of self-driving cars promises to bring the most tumultuous shift in transportation since cars first rumbled their way into the scene. Just a few years ago, driverless cars were a technological marvel available to a select few in San Francisco and Phoenix, but now, companies including Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox collectively transport hundreds of thousands of passengers <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/24/waymo-reports-250000-paid-robotaxi-rides-per-week-in-us.html">weekly in autonomous vehicles (AVs)</a> across expanding swaths of <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/20/tesla-robotaxi-launch-austin.html">Austin, Texas</a>; <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-battles">Los Angeles</a>; and <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/traffic/zoox-to-provde-robotaxi-service-to-area-15-in-las-vegas-3407297/">Las Vegas</a>, with future service announced in a lengthening list of cities, including <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/28/waymo-plans-to-bring-its-robotaxi-service-to-dallas-in-2026.html">Dallas</a>, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/waymo-heading-to-philadelphia-and-nyc/">New York City, Philadelphia</a>, and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/waymo-alphabet-google-robotaxi-miami-florida/">Miami</a>.
Ride-hail companies are getting in on the action, too: Uber recently signed a deal to deploy at least <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/17/uber-robotaxi-lucid-nuro">20,000 robotaxis</a> powered by the AV company Nuro’s self-driving systems. As the transportation venture capitalist Reilly Brennan recently <a href="https://fot.beehiiv.com/p/trucks-fot-moove-waymo-credits?_bhlid=a2ed1f06ece70e5be81811c4dd228870798836a0&utm_campaign=trucks-fot-moove-waymo-credits&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=fot.beehiiv.com">observed</a>, a “stampede is afoot to autonomize rides.”
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2233379068.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" alt="A white self-driving car equipped with sensors and cameras on the roof waits at an intersection in a city, surrounded by regular vehicles, including a silver hatchback and a dark blue sedan. A red scooter is parked on the side of the street, and brick and glass buildings line the background." title="A white self-driving car equipped with sensors and cameras on the roof waits at an intersection in a city, surrounded by regular vehicles, including a silver hatchback and a dark blue sedan. A red scooter is parked on the side of the street, and brick and glass buildings line the background." data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="A Waymo self-driving car cruises down the street in San Francisco." data-portal-copyright="" />
<a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/411522/self-driving-car-artificial-intelligence-autonomous-vehicle-safety-waymo-google">AVs offer some undeniable benefits</a>: Unlike humans, they cannot drive drunk, distracted, or tired. They make car trips easier, less stressful, more frictionless — in a word, nicer. The growing availability of AVs is likely to make many people respond just as they would to any other improvement in a product or experience: They will use it more often.
But that could prove disastrous for cities, causing crushing congestion (not to mention widening the gulf between those happily ensconced in their AVs and those stuck in buses crawling through gridlock). This is not pure speculation: Over the last 15 years, the rise of ride-hail, a service similar to robotaxis, has <a href="http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/sharingride.pdf">increased total driving</a>, <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2021/ride-sharing-intensifies-urban-road-congestion-0423">thickened congestion</a>, and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-24/do-uber-and-lyft-really-drive-down-transit-ridership">undermined transit</a>. Autonomous vehicles, which offer privacy and service consistency that ride-hail cannot, could turbocharge the number of cars on the road, making a mess of urban streets. (Waymo did not comment on the record for this story, and Zoox and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)
AVs are coming, but they cannot just plug and play into our existing transportation networks. If cities don’t update their rulebooks, they risk repeating the mistakes of the last century. 
While many of the policies governing AV deployments are set by <a href="https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle-safety/automated-vehicles-safety">federal</a> and <a href="https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/">state</a> officials, municipal leaders should not sit on their hands when their public sphere stands on the verge of a tectonic transformation. Cities can — and must — act now to increase the odds that self-driven vehicles enrich urban life rather than undermine it. Even better, doing so will improve current residents’ lives, no matter how long it takes AVs to scale.
Here are a few steps worth considering.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Put a price on congestion</h2>
Today’s robotaxi deployments are still quite modest. Waymo, for instance, operates only <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-battles">around 300 vehicles</a> across all of Los Angeles County. For AVs to be universally available, fleets would need to expand by orders of magnitude, and the cost of self-driving technology would likely have to plunge (Waymo reported an <a href="https://impartpad.com/news/waymo-hits-10-million-robotaxi-rides-but-how-did-it-double-so-fast-this-year/">operating loss of over $1 billion</a> in the first quarter of this year).
If and when that happens, cities should brace for many, many more cars on their streets.
There are several reasons to expect this. First, lots of people freed from the stress and fatigue of driving will use a self-driven car to venture further for a meal or meeting, and they will also take trips they would have otherwise foregone. With human labor costs eliminated, deliveries are also likely to skyrocket. As Anthony Townsend, author of the book <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324001522">Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car</a>, warned, “imagine what happens when it essentially costs as much to send a package as it does to send a text message.”
Then there is the issue of “deadheading”: vehicles driving around empty en route to their next pickup, or while waiting to be summoned. It’s already a problem with ride-hail: Researchers have found that Uber and Lyft vehicles are passengerless around <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-018-9923-2">40 percent of the time</a>.
Beyond the misery of worsened traffic jams, an AV-fueled spike in driving would increase air pollution; even if the entire AV fleet were electrified, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/07/electric-vehicles-tires-wearing-out-particulates/674750/">electric cars shed particles</a> from tires and brakes. They could also make bus trips agonizingly slow and unreliable (which is all the more reason for cities to install bus lanes as soon as possible).
An obvious solution is to follow <a href="https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03612">New York City’s congestion pricing model</a>. Since January, cars entering Manhattan south of 60th Street on weekdays must pay a $9 fee during weekdays. In a matter of months, the policy has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/11/upshot/congestion-pricing.html">quickened traffic, quieted car noise</a>, and reduced the number of automobiles on the road.
Cities could also consider mileage-based fees on both AVs and human-driven ride-hail cars that are not transporting any passengers, incentivizing them to minimize the use of traffic lanes while empty. Jinhua Zhao, a professor of cities and transportation at MIT, suggests going further by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/av-cities-08-measuring-right-thing-jinhua-zhao-ms2se/?trackingId=8aT4Ij35qQLCye2KzjoBcA%3D%3D">imposing ride-hail and robotaxi fees</a> that inversely scale with the number of vehicle occupants, rewarding companies for pooling multiple trips in a single vehicle (and thereby reducing total driving).
There are myriad ways to design road use taxes that mitigate congestion. Once the policy is in place, it can always be adjusted later to keep street traffic moving.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Get a handle on the curb</h2>
AVs will transform our relationship with an unrelenting nuisance of American life: <a href="https://www.vox.com/23712664/parking-lots-urban-planning-cities-housing">parking</a>. A robotaxi does not need to find a parking spot after dropping off a passenger at their destination; it simply moves along to its next assignment (or plies the streets, waiting to be summoned). As self-driving cars replace human-powered ones, “the notion of parking will gradually evolve into the concept of stopping,” Zhao said.
That begs the question of where, exactly, all these AVs will stop. 
“There isn’t always an open curb space where an AV can do a pickup or dropoff,” said Alex Roy, an autonomous vehicle consultant who previously worked at the now-defunct self-driving company Argo.ai. “In that case, the AV is just going to stop in a traffic lane,” potentially obstructing traffic and endangering pedestrians. Given the risks, Roy said, “the AV company should at the outset ask the city where are optimal pickup or drop zones that would be least disruptive.”
At the moment, that is a question many city transportation departments would struggle to answer. Information about loading zones and time-based parking restrictions (e.g., no parking 4 pm to 6 pm) can be dated and incomplete. “It’s very rare for a city to have a proper inventory of the curb,” said Robert Hampshire, who oversaw <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-administration-announces-third-year-smart-grants-funding-transportation">several federal grants</a> supporting curbside management during his time as deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Transportation’s Office of Research and Technology under President Joe Biden.
Creating a current, digital map of all curbs should be a top priority. Doing so can help cities now, too, because those with the ability to collect real-time information about curb use could reduce <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/the-moral-theology-of-double-parking/">double parking</a> while collecting revenue from delivery and ride-hail companies. Philadelphia, for instance, <a href="https://www.phila.gov/2022-10-03-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-loading-zone-pilot-in-center-city/">in 2022 piloted</a> “smart loading zones” that vehicles could reserve through a smartphone app. It’s an approach that can help manage today’s delivery trucks as well as tomorrow’s AVs.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Stop building new parking (and charge market prices for existing spots)</h2>
As AVs proliferate, the demand for car storage will plummet. For cities where parking devours 40 percent or more of available street space, that is a thrilling opportunity. “You can drastically reduce the number of parking spots and reuse them for housing, parks, or any other purpose,” Zhao said.
That’s all the more reason for cities to jettison archaic zoning policies known as <a href="https://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/knowledge-center/parking-minimums-are-a-barrier-to-housing-development/">parking minimums</a>, which require new housing, retail, and other real estate projects to include a fixed number of parking spots. In recent years, <a href="https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/11/18/a-map-of-cities-that-got-rid-of-parking-minimums">dozens of cities</a>, including Austin; Raleigh, North Carolina; and San Jose, California have already implemented reforms, like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/business/city-parking-rules.html#:~:text=In%202022%20alone%2C%2015%20of,city%20to%20eliminate%20parking%20minimums.">scrapping parking minimums</a>, to reduce housing construction costs and encourage travel modes that are more space-efficient and less polluting than driving, like walking, biking, and public transit. Those reforms will also lay the groundwork for a smoother AV transition.
Municipal leaders could go further by charging a dynamic market rate for street parking, creating pickup and dropoff spots that AVs can use throughout the day. “Pricing is how you create availability,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, former director of transportation of the Municipal Transportation Agency of San Francisco, the city that has been ground zero for robotaxi deployments. “The right price for parking is the price that ensures 15 percent availability at all times of day.” Those spots can provide easy and safe places for self-driven cars to pull over when collecting or depositing a passenger, paying the city a fee for the privilege.
San Francisco has already <a href="https://www.sfmta.com/demand-responsive-parking-pricing">experimented</a> with dynamic parking pricing that adjusts to real-time demand. Even at peak times, a spot can be found for those willing to pay a premium to avoid the joyless ritual of circling the block for an opening (an activity that contributes to street traffic and produces emissions).
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Automate enforcement</h2>
In the Bay Area, self-driven cars have sown confusion on public streets by <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/07/18/cities-look-to-stop-robotaxis-from-rolling-into-emergencies">interrupting emergency response vehicles,</a> randomly <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-cruise-block-san-francisco-streets.html">freezing in intersections</a>, and <a href="https://archive.is/20250619181710/https:/www.mercurynews.com/2025/06/19/waymo-robotaxi-stopped-illegally-opened-door-severely-injured-cyclist-claims/">pulling over in no-stopping zones</a>. Since the infractions are often brief and police officers are scarce, AV companies can get away with it. Tumlin said that limited enforcement has led AV companies to program their vehicles to simply ignore the law: “The AVs’ business case says that it’s best to do a pickup or dropoff in the bike lane or in traffic, rather than inconvenience the passenger by having to walk a block or two.”
Humans, of course, also routinely flout traffic laws. Cities should use technology to fine illegal maneuvers reliably, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm is at fault.
In many countries and US states, automatic cameras that identify cars running red lights or breaking the speed limit are common and effective; <a href="https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-cameras-reduce-injury-crashes-in-maryland-county-iihs-study-shows">studies</a> have <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198225000521">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24867566/">shown</a> that the resulting fines deter recurrence, and that a <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24471367/">healthy majority</a> of urban residents support their deployment. Automatic enforcement could be particularly useful with autonomous vehicles, allowing public agencies to batch a company’s infractions before issuing a bill. Raising the expected cost of breaking traffic laws would encourage AV developers to place a higher priority on obeying them.
At the moment, many cities can’t employ automatic enforcement at all, because their state legislatures, wary of driver opposition, have <a href="https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2025/02/state-and-local-lawmakers-take-renewed-look-speed-enforcement-cameras/403223/">strictly limited</a> the use of cameras to issue citations. Loosening those restrictions should be a top priority for city officials lobbying their state capitols.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Solving for the present as well as the future</h2>
There is a world of difference between a city where self-driven cars number a few hundred and one where they run into the tens of thousands. As currently configured, city streets may be able to handle the former, but the latter invites disaster.
Autonomous vehicles might be universally available in a few years, as some believers <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/why-teslas-robotaxi-launch-was-easy-part-2025-06-24/">predict</a> (though such forecasts <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/expect-elon-musk-launches-tesla-robotaxi-service-rcna213546">have</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/9/18/12955162/lyft-gm-self-driving-cars">been</a> <a href="https://www.techinasia.com/baidu-autonomous-car-sales-2020">wrong</a> before). Or maybe that moment is still 20, 30, or 40 years away.
But city leaders need not strive to become Nostradamus, speculating about the evolution of a technology whose future remains wildly uncertain. The problems posed by self-driving cars are not so different in kind from those created by conventional, human-operated ones — and cities that make judicious policy choices now will enhance urban life regardless of how quickly an autonomous future arrives.  There is no need to wait, and every reason not to.
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</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Sigal Samuel</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Obsessing about being a good person can backfire. There’s a better way.]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/461208/moral-scrupulosity-religious-obsession-being-good" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461208</id>
<updated>2025-09-12T14:24:10-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-14T07:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Advice" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Mental Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Religion" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Your Mileage May Vary" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a […]]]></summary>
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<a href="https://www.vox.com/your-mileage-may-vary-advice-column" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Your Mileage May Vary</a> is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/418783/liberal-democracy-value-pluralism-isaiah-berlin" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">value pluralism</a> — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSctX2yDEss1RnRlesUBKc1vmCxneDRvsgJlGQ5pDsef39RKtA/viewform" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">anonymous form</a>. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
The Jewish High Holidays are coming up, and that includes Yom Kippur. It’s a holiday that encourages people to reflect on their behavior and make amends. That’s all well and good, but I’m someone who struggles with scrupulosity — constantly worrying about my morality and if I’m doing The Most Possible Good™.
In practice this is far more paralyzing than motivating. Fixating on the ethical implications of all possible decisions makes it harder to take any action, and I’ve lost hours scouring my memories of my past behavior for immorality like a football player watching footage of their games to analyze what they could do differently. Guilt simply isn’t serving me, but I worry that saying to hell with all that means I’ll stop striving to be a better person and become morally complacent.
I’ve observed Yom Kippur for decades, and don’t want to simply avoid the day. But the holiday is a moral scrupulosity trigger. How do you think I should approach this? I want to stop feeling guilty for letting guilt get in my own way.
Dear Scrupulous, 
Have you ever heard the story about what happened <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.88b.7?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en">when God decided to give the Bible</a> to flesh-and-blood human beings? According to the ancient rabbis, the angels hated the idea. They argued that humans were deeply flawed mortals who didn’t deserve such a holy scripture; only angels could be worthy of it, so it should stay up in heaven. 
It fell to Moses to rebut the angels’ argument. He asked them: What do you angels need the Bible for? The Bible says not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal — do you have jealousy or other emotions that could lead you to do those things? The Bible says to honor your father and mother — but you don’t have parents, so how could you ever do that? And the Bible says to sanctify the Sabbath — but you never do any work, so how could you even honor the Sabbath by resting?
The angels saw that Moses was right. Angels are really great at one thing: being perfect. But perfect creatures are static. They don’t experience painful challenges, they don’t grow, and they don’t make choices that add beauty to the world. We humans do those things. God gives the Bible to humans not to make them into angels — but to make them better at being the unique thing they are: human animals, with feelings, flaws, and all, that can learn to use their capabilities in more beautiful ways.
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? </h2>
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I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this story. And I want you to notice how far it is from demanding that humans do “The Most Possible Good™.” That language suggests a maximizing ethical theory like utilitarianism, which says that we have to do the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words, we have to optimize. 
<a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/387570/moral-optimization">Moral optimization may be possible for angels, but not for humans</a>. We each hold multiple values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other, forcing us to strike a balance as best we can. We’re not omniscient beings who can know with certainty how best to strike the balance. 
What’s more, sometimes different kinds of moral good straight-up conflict with each other. Think of a woman who faces a trade-off: She wants to become a nun but also wants to become a mother. She can’t balance between those options — she has to choose. And what’s the better choice? We can’t say because the options are incommensurable. There’s no single yardstick by which to measure them so we can’t compare them to find out which is greater.
Given that this complexity is baked into the human condition, it’s impossible to be a perfect optimizing machine. And the more you try to force yourself to be that, the harder it’ll be for you to actually help others, because you’ll just be so burned out. As you’ve already discovered, the optimizing mindset is exhausting — you end up expending a lot of precious mental resources that you could be spending on something else. It can even lead to paralysis. And a lot of the time, there’s no knowably best decision.
So instead of trying to optimize everything, you can adopt a goal that’s humbler but more realistic: to live in line with your values as best you can. 
I know that can feel scary. Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control, and therefore a sense of safety. The unspoken premise is that if you optimize, you’ll never have to ask yourself: How could I screw up that badly? 
But there’s another way to feel safe. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re trying our hardest there will be some things that we do not do optimally.
Of course, we should still try to live in line with our values. But in those moments when we fall short, we shouldn’t berate ourselves, thinking, “I sinned!” In Hebrew, the word we typically translate as “to sin” (lachto) actually means “to miss the mark.” It’s the same word we’d use to describe someone with a bow and arrow who’s targeting the bullseye but misses it slightly. This is a useful image, because it reminds us just how normal it is to miss the mark. Just as the archer’s arrow is buffeted around by the wind, we’re buffeted around by all the physical and psychological conditions acting upon us — naturally we won’t always hit the bullseye! And when we do miss the mark, we deserve compassion.
I know what you’re thinking: What if adopting this mindset means you’ll become morally complacent and let yourself off the hook too easily? This is one of the most common objections to practicing self-compassion. But <a href="https://www.vox.com/even-better/23274105/self-compassion-shame-anxiety-depression">research shows it’s not well-founded</a>. In fact, psychologists have found that more self-compassionate people are better able to acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. They’re more likely to want to apologize and make amends to others when they mess up. And they try to do better the next time around. Why? Because, to them, mistakes don’t feel so psychologically damning. That allows them to take more — not less — responsibility for their actions.
Yom Kippur can feel terrifying when any mistake you’ve made over the past year seems damning. But according to the ancient rabbis, Yom Kippur is not meant to be a somber day — it’s <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Taanit.30b.9?lang=bi">one of the happiest days of the year</a>! After all, it was on Yom Kippur that Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying the second set of tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, ready to gift them to the people.
You probably know what happened to the first set of tablets: Moses shattered them after seeing the Israelites engaged in idol worship. What’s less known is that, according to one rabbinic story, God’s response to the shattering of those tablets was to actually <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.87a.6?lang=bi">congratulate Moses</a>. Why did God think breaking them was the right move? And what was different about the second set? 
While the first tablets had been fashioned by God and God alone, the second tablets were a human-divine collaboration: Moses carved the stone and God inscribed the words. And while the first tablets contained only the words of the Ten Commandments — a black-and-white, rule-based morality — the rabbis tell us that the second tablets contained within them all the stories and interpretations that Jewish sages would later develop.
In other words, God recognized that you can’t just give humans a list of moral rules and call it a day. Maybe that would work for angels, who live in a simplified, disembodied world, but our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles. Yet God chose people over angels anyway, inviting us into the collaboration and embracing our humanness rather than rejecting it.
So, to the rabbis, Yom Kippur was a happy day because they fully expected that God would accept and embrace messy humans. 
Please, don’t try to be more zealous than God.
When you’re taking action, by all means, aim your arrows as true as you can — try to hit the bullseye, the place that captures as much of what you value as possible. But once you’ve released the arrow from your bow, let it be. 
If it turns out that you missed the mark, that you acted suboptimally, I put it to you that that is okay. You are not an angel. You are not a perfect optimizing machine. You do not have access to a magical mathematical formula that can consider countless incommensurable variables and spit out the very best move with certainty. You are human and you do the best you can with what you’ve got. 
The wisdom of these millennia-old stories is that that’s good enough for God. Let it be good enough for you, too. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Bonus: What I’m reading</h2>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Writing this column reminded me of <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-mindful-self-compassion-workbook-a-proven-way-to-accept-yourself-build-inner-strength-and-thrive/9781462526789">The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook</a>, written by the psychologists Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. It really helped me develop a self-compassion practice, which has in turn helped me get a grip on my own scrupulosity. I also strongly recommend the eight-week self-compassion course run out of Neff and Germer’s nonprofit, the <a href="https://centerformsc.org/">Center for Mindful Self-Compassion</a>.</li>
</ul>
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<li>I’ve always associated the philosopher Thomas Nagel with questions about consciousness, but this week I learned that he’s also super interested in questions about religion. In a great essay called “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Secular_Philosophy_and_the_Religious_Tem/XHASDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA3&printsec=frontcover">Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament</a>,” Nagel asks: What, if anything, does secular philosophy have to put in the place of religion? More specifically, can it answer the question: What is the underlying nature of the universe, and how can the human individual live in harmony with it? </li>
</ul>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>In <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/what-godels-incompleteness-theorems-say-about-ai-morality">this Aeon essay</a>, philosopher Elad Uzan argues that AI will not be able to solve ethics for us, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/5/7/23708169/ask-ai-chatgpt-ethical-advice-moral-enhancement">despite what some people hope</a>. Drawing on the mathematician Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems, Uzan writes, “just as mathematics will always contain truths that lie beyond formal proof, morality will always contain complexities that defy algorithmic resolution.”  </li>
</ul>
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</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Shayna Korol</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[This California bill will require transparency from AI companies. But will it actually prevent major disasters?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/461340/sb53-california-ai-bill-catastrophic-risk-explained" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461340</id>
<updated>2025-09-13T14:37:50-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-13T11:55:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Tech policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[When it comes to AI, as California goes, so goes the nation. The biggest state in the US by population is also the central hub of AI innovation for the entire globe, home to 32 of the world’s top 50 AI companies. That size and influence have given the Golden State the weight to become […]]]></summary>
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When it comes to AI, as California goes, so <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/as-maine-goes-so-goes-the-nation-sept-8-1958-227727">goes the nation</a>. The biggest state in the US by population is also the central hub of AI innovation for the entire globe, <a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/03/12/icymi-california-is-home-to-32-of-the-top-50-ai-companies/">home</a> to 32 of the world’s <a href="https://www.forbes.com/lists/ai50/">top 50 AI companies</a>. That size and influence have given the Golden State the weight to become a regulatory trailblazer, setting the tone for the rest of the country on <a href="https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94g761c6#:~:text=California%20has%20led%20the%20country,the%20focus%20of%20this%20essay.">environmental</a>, <a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/09/01/happy-labor-day-california-is-1-for-workers-1-economy-in-the-nation/">labor</a>, and <a href="https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#:~:text=The%20CCPA%20requires%20business%20privacy,the%20Right%20to%20Non%2DDiscrimination.">consumer protection</a> regulations — and more recently, AI as well.
Now, following the dramatic <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/01/ai-moratorium-big-beautiful-bill/">defeat</a> of a proposed federal moratorium on states regulating AI in July, California policymakers see a limited window of opportunity to <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/07/state-ai-law-whats-coming-now-that-the-federal-moratorium-is-dead?lang=en">set</a> the stage for the rest of the country’s AI laws. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the California State Assembly voted in favor of <a href="https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb53">SB 53</a>, a bill that would require transparency reports from the developers of highly powerful, “<a href="http://google.com/url?q=https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/frontier-ai-capabilities-and-risks-discussion-paper/frontier-ai-capabilities-and-risks-discussion-paper&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1757530386142596&usg=AOvVaw0S2JeVpaK8Lm-DRzgICfjU">frontier</a>” AI models. The bill, which has passed both parts of the state legislature, now goes to Gov. Gavin Newsom to either be vetoed or signed into law.
The models targeted represent the cutting-edge of AI — extremely adept generative systems that require massive amounts of data and computing power, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude.
AI can <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/402418/artificial-intelligence-good-robot-podcast-openai-chatgpt-ethics-discrimination">offer</a> tremendous benefits, but as the bill is meant to address, it’s not without risks. And while there is no shortage of existing risks from issues like <a href="https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/459234/ai-jobs-market-unemployment-artificial-intelligence">job displacement</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/technology/23738987/racism-ai-automated-bias-discrimination-algorithm">bias</a>, SB 53 focuses on possible “catastrophic risks” from AI. Such risks include AI-enabled biological weapons attacks and rogue systems carrying out cyberattacks or other criminal activity that could conceivably bring down critical infrastructure. Such catastrophic risks represent widespread disasters that could plausibly threaten human civilization at local, national, and global levels. They represent risks of the kind of AI-driven disasters that have not yet occurred, rather than already-realized, more personal harms like AI deepfakes.
Exactly what constitutes a catastrophic risk is up for debate, but SB 53 <a href="https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb53">defines</a> it as a “foreseeable and material risk” of an event that causes more than 50 casualties or over $1 billion in damages that a frontier model plays a meaningful role in contributing to. How fault is determined in practice would be up to the courts to interpret. It’s hard to define catastrophic risk in law when the definition is far from settled, but doing so can help us protect against both near- and long-term consequences.
By itself, a single state bill focused on increased transparency will probably not be enough to prevent devastating cyberattacks and AI-enabled chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. But the bill represents an effort to regulate this fast-moving technology before it outpaces our efforts at oversight.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">SB 53, explained</h2>
SB 53 is the third state-level bill to try to specifically focus on regulating AI’s catastrophic risks, after California’s SB 1047, which passed the legislature only to be <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/369628/ai-safety-bill-sb-1047-gavin-newsom-california">vetoed</a> by the governor — and <a href="https://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/Alex-Bores/story/114363">New York’s Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act</a>, which recently passed the New York legislature and is now awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s approval.
SB 53, which was introduced by state Sen. Scott Wiener in February, requires frontier AI companies to develop safety frameworks that specifically detail how they approach catastrophic risk reduction. Before deploying their models, companies would have to publish safety and security reports. The bill also gives them 15 days to report “critical safety incidents” to the California Office of Emergency Services, and establishes whistleblower protections for employees who come forward about unsafe model deployment that contributes to catastrophic risk. SB 53 aims to hold companies publicly accountable for their AI safety commitments, with a financial penalty up to $1 million per violation.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“The science of how to make AI safe is rapidly evolving, and it’s currently difficult for policymakers to write prescriptive technical rules for how companies should manage safety.”<cite>Thomas Woodside, co-founder of Secure AI Project</cite></blockquote></figure>
In many ways, SB 53 is the spiritual successor to <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/361562/california-ai-bill-scott-wiener-sb-1047">SB 1047</a>, also introduced by Wiener.
Both cover large models that are trained at 10^26 FLOPS, a measurement of very significant computing power <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/california-ai-bill-becomes-a-lightning-rod-for-safety-advocates-and-developers-alike/">used</a> in a variety of AI legislation as a threshold for significant risk, and both bills strengthen whistleblower protections. Where SB 53 departs from SB 1047 is its focus on transparency and prevention
While SB 1047 aimed to <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/355212/ai-artificial-intelligence-1047-bill-safety-liability">hold</a> companies liable for catastrophic harms caused by their AI systems, SB 53 formalizes sharing safety frameworks, which many frontier AI companies, including Anthropic, already do voluntarily. It focuses squarely on the heavy-hitters, with its rules applying only to companies that generate $500 million or more in gross revenue.
“The science of how to make AI safe is rapidly evolving, and it’s currently difficult for policymakers to write prescriptive technical rules for how companies should manage safety,” said Thomas Woodside, the co-founder of <a href="https://secureaiproject.org/">Secure AI Project,</a> an advocacy group that aims to reduce extreme risks from AI and is a sponsor of the bill, over email. “This light touch policy prevents backsliding on commitments and encourages a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom.”
Part of the logic of SB 53 is the ability to adapt the framework as AI progresses. The bill authorizes the California Attorney General to change the definition of a large developer after January 1, 2027, in response to AI advances.
Proponents of the bill were optimistic about its chances of being signed by the governor should it pass the legislature. On the same day that Gov. Newsom vetoed SB 1047, he <a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/09/29/governor-newsom-announces-new-initiatives-to-advance-safe-and-responsible-ai-protect-californians/">commissioned</a> a working group focusing solely on frontier models. The resulting report by the group <a href="https://www.cafrontieraigov.org/">provided</a> the foundation for SB 53. “I would guess, with roughly 75 percent confidence, that SB 53 will be signed into law by the end of September,” said Dean Ball — former White House AI policy adviser, vocal SB 1047 critic, and SB 53 supporter — to <a href="https://www.transformernews.ai/p/sb-53-california-ai-might-actually-pass-newsom">Transformer</a>.
But several industry organizations rallied in opposition, arguing that additional compliance regulation would be expensive, given that AI companies should already be incentivized to avoid catastrophic harms. OpenAI has <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/anthropic-backs-californias-sb-53-ai-bill-rcna229908">lobbied</a> against it, and technology trade group Chamber of Progress <a href="https://progresschamber.org/insights/why-californias-sb-53-still-gets-ai-regulation-wrong/">argues</a> that the bill would require companies to file unnecessary paperwork and unnecessarily stifle innovation.
“Those compliance costs are merely the beginning,” Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the <a href="https://abundance.institute/">Abundance Institute,</a> told me over email. “The bill, if passed, would feed California regulators truckloads of company information that they will use to design a compliance industrial complex.”
By contrast, Anthropic enthusiastically <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-is-endorsing-sb-53">endorsed</a> the bill on Monday. “The question isn’t whether we need AI governance – it’s whether we develop it thoughtfully today or reactively tomorrow,” the company explained in a blog post. “SB 53 offers a solid path toward the former.” (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI, while Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic. Neither organization has editorial input into our content.)
The debate over SB 53 ties into broader disagreements about whether states or the federal government should drive AI safety regulation. But since the vast majority of these companies are based in California, and nearly all do business there, the state’s legislation matters for the entire country.
“A federally led transparency approach is far, far, far preferable to the multi-state alternative,” where a patchwork of state regulations can conflict with each other, said Cato Institute technology policy fellow Matthew Mittelsteadt in an email. But “I love that the bill has a provision that would allow companies to defer to a future alternative federal standard.”
“The natural question is whether a federal approach can even happen,” Mittelsteadt continued. “In my opinion, the jury is out on that but the possibility is far more likely that some suggest. It’s been less than 3 years since ChatGPT was released. That is hardly a lifetime in public policy.”
But in a time of federal gridlock, frontier AI advancements won’t wait for Washington.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The catastrophic risk divide</h2>
The bill’s focus on, and framing of, catastrophic risks is not without controversy.
The idea of catastrophic risk comes from the fields of philosophy and quantitative risk assessment. Catastrophic risks are downstream of <a href="https://www.tobyord.com/writing/the-precipice-revisited">existential risks</a>, which threaten humanity’s actual survival or else permanently reduce our potential as a species. The hope is that if these doomsday scenarios are identified and prepared for, they can be prevented or at least mitigated.
But if existential risks are clear — the end of the world, or at least as we know it — what falls under the catastrophic risk umbrella, and the best way to prioritize those risks, depends on who you ask. There are <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23298870/effective-altruism-longtermism-will-macaskill-future">longtermists</a>, people focused primarily on humanity’s far future, who place a premium on things like <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/459050/space-medicine-astronauts-health-longevity-mars-science">multiplanetary expansion</a> for human survival. They’re often chiefly concerned by risks from rogue AI or extremely lethal pandemics. Neartermists are more preoccupied with existing risks, like climate change, mosquito vector-borne disease, or algorithmic bias. These camps can blend into one another — neartermists would also like to avoid getting <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/killer-asteroid-impact-odds-earth-causes-death-2112762">hit</a> by asteroids that could wipe out a city, and longtermists don’t dismiss risks like climate change — and the best way to think of them is like two ends of a spectrum rather than a strict binary.
You can think of the AI ethics and AI safety frameworks as the near- and longtermism of AI risk, <a href="https://murat-durmus.medium.com/the-difference-between-ai-safety-ai-ethics-and-responsible-ai-8296306af427">respectively</a>. AI ethics is about the moral implications of the ways the technology is deployed, including things like algorithmic bias and human rights, in the present. AI safety focuses on catastrophic risks and potential existential threats. But, as Vox’s Julia Longoria reported in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/402418/artificial-intelligence-good-robot-podcast-openai-chatgpt-ethics-discrimination">Good Robot series</a> for Unexplainable, there are inter-personal conflicts leading these two factions to work against each other, much of which has to do with emphasis. (AI ethics people argue that catastrophic risk concerns over-hype AI capabilities and ignores its impact on vulnerable people right now, while AI safety people worry that if we focus too much on the present, we won’t have ways to mitigate larger-scale problems down the line.)
But behind the question of near versus long-term risks lies another one: what, exactly, constitutes a catastrophic risk?
SB 53 initially set the standard for catastrophic risk at 100 rather than 50 casualties — similar to New York’s RAISE Act — before halving the threshold in an amendment to the bill. While the average person might consider, say, many people driven to suicide after <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html">interacting</a> with AI chatbots to be catastrophic, such a risk is outside of the bill’s scope. (The California State Assembly just <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/a-california-bill-that-would-regulate-ai-companion-chatbots-is-close-to-becoming-law/">passed</a> a separate bill to regulate AI companion chatbots by preventing them from participating in discussions about suicidal ideation or sexually explicit material.)
SB 53 focuses squarely on harms from “expert-level” frontier AI model assistance in developing or deploying chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; committing crimes like cyberattacks or fraud; and “loss of control” scenarios where AIs go rogue, behaving deceptively to avoid being shut down and replicating themselves without human oversight. For example, an AI model could be used to guide the creation of a new deadly virus that infects millions and kneecaps the global economy.
“The 50 to 100 deaths or a billion dollars in property damage is just a proxy to capture really widespread and substantial impact,” said Scott Singer, lead author of the <a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/June-17-2025-%E2%80%93-The-California-Report-on-Frontier-AI-Policy.pdf">California Report for Frontier AI Policy</a>, which helped inform the basis of the bill. “We do look at like AI-enabled or AI potentially [caused] or correlated suicide. I think that’s like a very serious set of issues that demands policymaker attention, but I don’t think it’s the core of what this bill is trying to address.”
Transparency is helpful in preventing such catastrophes because it can help raise the alarm before things get out of hand, allowing AI developers to correct course. And in the event that such efforts fail to prevent a mass casualty incident, enhanced safety transparency can help law enforcement and the courts figure out what went wrong. The challenge there is that it can be difficult to determine how much a model is accountable for a specific outcome, Irene Solaiman, the chief policy officer at <a href="https://huggingface.co/">Hugging Face</a>, a collaboration platform for AI developers, told me over email.
“These risks are coming and we should be ready for them and have transparency into what the companies are doing,” said Adam Billen, the vice president of public policy at <a href="https://encodeai.org/">Encode,</a> an organization that advocates for responsible AI leadership and safety. (Encode is another sponsor of SB 53.) “But we don’t know exactly what we’re going to need to do once the risks themselves appear. But right now, when those things aren’t happening at a large scale, it makes sense to be sort of focused on transparency.”
However, a transparency-focused bill like SB 53 is insufficient for addressing already-existing harms. When we already know something is a problem, the focus should be on mitigating it.
“Maybe four years ago, if we had passed some sort of transparency legislation like SB 53 but focused on those harms, we might have had some warning signs and been able to intervene before the widespread harms to kids started happening,” Billen said. “We’re trying to kind of correct that mistake on these problems and get some sort of forward-facing information about what’s happening before things get crazy, basically.”
SB 53 risks being both overly narrow and unclearly scoped. We have not yet faced these catastrophic harms from frontier AI models, and the most devastating risks might take us entirely by surprise. We don’t know what we don’t know.
It’s also certainly possible that models trained below 10^26 FLOPS, which aren’t covered by SB 53, have the potential to cause catastrophic harm under the bill’s definition. The EU AI Act sets the <a href="https://jack-clark.net/2024/03/28/what-does-1025-versus-1026-mean/">threshold</a> for “systemic risk” at the smaller 10^25 FLOPS, and there’s disagreement about the <a href="https://medium.com/@ingridwickstevens/regulating-ai-the-limits-of-flops-as-a-metric-41e3b12d5d0c">utility</a> of computational power as a regulatory standard at all, especially as models become more efficient.
As it stands right now, SB 53 occupies a different niche from bills focused on regulating AI use in mental healthcare or data privacy, reflecting its authors’ desire not to step on the toes of other legislation or bite off more than it can reasonably chew. But Chilson, the Abundance Institute’s head of AI policy, is part of a camp that sees SB 53’s focus on catastrophic harm as a “distraction” from the real near-term benefits and concerns, like AI’s potential to accelerate the pace of scientific research or create nonconsensual deepfake imagery, respectively.
That said, deepfakes could certainly cause catastrophic harm. For instance, imagine a hyper-realistic deepfake impersonating a bank employee to commit fraud at a multibillion-dollar scale, said Nathan Calvin, the vice president of state affairs and general counsel at Encode. “I do think some of the lines between these things in practice can be a bit blurry, and I think in some ways…that is not necessarily a bad thing,” he told me.
It could be that the ideological debate around what qualifies as catastrophic risks, and whether that’s worthy of our legislative attention, is just noise. The bill is intended to regulate AI before the proverbial horse is out of the barn. The average person isn’t going to worry about the likelihood of AI sparking nuclear warfare or biological weapons attacks, but they do think about how algorithmic bias might affect their lives in the present. But in trying to prevent the worst-case scenarios, perhaps we can also avoid the “smaller,” nearer harms. If they’re effective, forward-facing safety provisions designed to prevent mass casualty events will also make AI safer for individuals.
If Gov. Newsom signs SB 53 into law, it could inspire other state attempts at AI regulation through a similar framework, and eventually encourage federal AI safety legislation to move forward.
How we think about risk matters because it determines where we focus our efforts on prevention. I’m a firm believer in the value of defining your terms, in law and debate. If we’re not on the same page about what we mean when we talk about risk, we can’t have a real conversation.
Update, September 13, 2025, 11:55 am ET: This story was originally published on September 12 and has been updated to reflect the outcome of the California State Assembly vote.
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