Vox

From Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s promotional ICE videos to Vice President JD Vance, Kash Patel, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s confessional-style interviews with former Trump official Katie Miller, the line between Trump’s administration and the Wild-West world of pop culture influencers and pseudo-celebrity has gotten thinner and thinner.

With all this in mind, Vox decided to reach out to Danielle Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University who has done exemplary work on the rise and power of reality TV.

Lindemann suggests that there’s a lot of value in comparing the average MAGA voter to a Bravo viewer who “will root for one Housewife, ride or die, despite all evidence and never admit to any flaws.”

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Vox

“When a president gives a primetime televised speech, it is typically about something of serious import: to make the case for a major new policy or to announce the beginning of a war.

President Donald Trump’s speech on Wednesday night had no grave significance. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much of a point at all,” writes senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp.

“The speech was a jumble of his usual false or even impossible claims — like a promise to reduce prescription drug costs by an impossible 400% — smashed together in no particular order. The speech began with a discussion of the cost of living, a subject he would drop and then return to as if just remembering that it was the number one reason his polls were low. Even the delivery was weird: Seemingly under network time constraints, the president read off the teleprompter angrily and quickly, speaking with the motormouth intensity of a 20-something banker who just discovered cocaine and now has a really great idea for a new restaurant.

So why am I writing about it at all?

Because the fact that it happened at all tells us something much more important: that the Trump administration is sinking, and his White House has no idea what to do about it.”

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Vox

Would you work out at the airport? You may have the option soon.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that they would invest $1 billion in making airports a wellness space. That would include, the administration says, installing gym equipment, more children’s play areas, and healthier food options. More broadly, the investment follows proclamations from Duffy that he wants to bring more “civility” to the flying experience, and as a first step in that mission, he encouraged travelers to dress better.

This didn’t go over too well, and it’s not difficult to understand why: Airports are a bad place and exercises or dressing better will not fix their badness.

Airports are where people want efficiency. The best airports are ones where everything feels less painful — less waiting in lines, less delays, less fluorescent lighting, and everything in between.

📸: Heather Diehl/Getty Images

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Vox

Between the emerging details surrounding the gruesome deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner and the inflammatory remarks made by President Donald Trump in response, it’s been hard to sit and reflect on the legacy Reiner left behind as a filmmaker.

During his directorial peak in the ’80s and ’90s, Reiner built a diverse catalog that few filmmakers of today’s more risk-averse Hollywood can emulate. His greatest hits from that run include the adventure comedy The Princess Bride, the iconic rom-com When Harry Met Sally, critically acclaimed Stephen King adaptations Stand by Me and Misery, and the political drama A Few Good Men.

And yet, arguably his most influential movie is his 1984 directorial debut This Is Spinal Tap, the rare project he authored himself, alongside his frequent collaborator Christopher Guest. It’s also the most emblematic of Reiner’s witty, sardonic sensibility as a comedian. The “mockumentary,” about a fictional heavy-metal band is frequently referenced by A-list comedians as a crucial reference point and site of inspiration. More significantly, it helped popularize a blending of genres — comedy and nonfiction — that’s become omnipresent in pop culture.

📸: John Lamparski/Getty Images

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Vox

The defining style of the second Trump administration is an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.

“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”

📸: Tom Brenner/Getty Images

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Vox

By May 2024, Ebony Dupas knew she had a problem. She had started to feel a mild anxiety about her sense of direction and purpose in life earlier that year, but within a couple months, that had spiraled into a paranoia that she could neither shake nor explain.

Referred by her doctor, Dupas began consulting with different psychiatrists, all of whom considered diagnosing her with generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Most wanted to put her on medication right away. But one psychiatrist first ordered bloodwork to see if something else might be going on. “I was mostly depleted of magnesium,” Dupas says.

Most people being treated for mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression typically use a mix of just two strategies: medication (usually an SSRI) and psychotherapy. But there’s increasing interest in the connection between food and the brain, and especially how nutrition could affect psychiatric conditions.

While researchers have long understood that nutrition is important for brain health, people don’t typically look to their diets as a way to improve their mental health, and doctors don’t always think to connect mental health with diet. The link between food and the brain “is overlooked by most people,” says Uma Naidoo, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of the 2023 book Calm Your Mind With Food. Future research to clarify the link between micronutrients — through either food or supplements — and mental health outcomes could help us stop underestimating that link.

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Vox

Around a decade ago, the US implemented new rules to limit the widespread use of antibiotics in meat and dairy production, in an effort to combat the nation’s antibiotic resistance crisis. The regulations helped; antibiotic sales for use on farms plunged by 43 percent from 2015 to 2017 and plateaued thereafter.

But now, that progress appears to be backsliding. According to recently published data from the Food and Drug Administration, sales of antibiotics for use in livestock surged by an alarming 15.8 percent in 2024 from the previous year.

Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine, used to treat common bacterial infections. But in the US and around the globe, most antibiotics aren’t used in human medicine and, instead, are fed to farmed animals as a means to prevent and treat illness in unhygienic, overcrowded factory farms where disease is prevalent and spreads quickly.

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Vox

Health insurance premiums on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces are set to soar after Congress failed Thursday to pass a last-minute plan to avert the rate hikes. This means that as many as 4 million people could be forced to go uninsured, because they can no longer afford their health plan.

The only reason this happened at all is that the two parties agreed to end the government shutdown earlier this fall on the condition that the Senate would hold a vote by mid-December on a then-unspecified plan to restore the subsidies.

Democrats had been pressing Republicans to address the assistance ahead of the shutdown and during the shutdown. Republicans, however, refused to negotiate at the time and failed to come up with a unified plan to fix the issue — until only a few days before the planned vote.

Now, patients will have to pay their new, much higher premiums when coverage begins on January 1. And unless Democrats are willing to shut down the government again on January 30, when the current funding bill runs out, there likely won’t be another chance to fix the problem any time soon.

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Vox

Statistically, today’s job market is not great. But more than that, the inevitable creep of AI has made the process of applying for jobs even more of a headache than it was before. Never has the application felt more crapshooty (and crappy), when it seems like so many recruiters and employers are using AI to sift through applicants. The idea that someone’s life-changing opportunity could all depend on the way a computer responds to a prompt feels equal parts dehumanizing and maddening.

Even more demoralizing is when you realize how fickle and faulty AI can be.

A study from researchers at Columbia Business School tested three generative AI models — GPT-3, GPT-4, and Llama 3.1 — and found that, when there are multiple options (e.g., a person in HR plugging in multiple candidates), the AI models can show “order bias” and will default to the first option (candidate) listed.

Essentially, the more the job market turns to AI, the more we should think about how to be more human to stand out. And no one may do that better than personality hires.

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Vox

Joseph Clifton Smith, who is on death row in Alabama, argues that it is unconstitutional to execute him because of an intellectual disability.

The Supreme Court heard his case (Hamm v. Smith), and it is unclear whether a majority of the justices will vote to save him. But several key justices appeared sufficiently skeptical of Alabama’s arguments in this case that it is, at least, possible that Smith could prevail.

Significantly, all of the justices appeared to take the Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), which held that people with intellectual disabilities may not be executed, as a given.

It’s safe to say that Smith’s claim that he has a disability is fairly marginal. It is neither so ridiculous that sensible judges would reject it out of hand, nor so compelling that no fair judge could reject it. Previous Supreme Court decisions applying Atkins v. Virginia (2002) — which held that people with intellectual disabilities may not be executed — established that courts should apply the clinical definition of intellectual disability in order to determine if a particular criminal defendant has that disability. And the evidence in Hamm v. Smith indicates that Smith presents a borderline case.

So, while Smith could still lose, it seems likely that such a loss would be relatively narrow. Even the most pro-death penalty justices pushed for relatively incremental changes to the law governing executions, rather than calling for a revolution.

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