Vox

Navigating the world right now can feel like running into that aunt who comments on your weight at Thanksgiving every single day: When you open up Instagram, take public transit, watch TV, or scroll through TikTok, weight loss and diet discussion is nearly impossible to escape.

Marketing for weight loss-related products has become incessant, with spending for ads increasing by 7 percent just last year, according to the research firm EDO.

The directive is loud enough that a lot of people are wondering whether the optimism of the “body positivity” movement is over. Still, experts say that society’s not totally doomed. If anything, the resounding backlash to the current moment makes it clear that most of us want to feel comfortable in our bodies, no matter what they look like.

If you’re feeling hopeless or overwhelmed by the constant weight loss chatter, read our advice here: www.vox.com/advice/481657/ozempic-glp1s-weight-los…<media_url>

🎨: Ekaterina Bedoeva/Getty Images

4 hours ago | [YT] | 356

Vox

You walk into the room and a whole crowd of people is belting out an uneven but spirited version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.

A former lawyer dressed in a Beatles T-shirt taps his knees as if he were a professional drummer. Another guy, long and lanky in a well-pressed suit, closes his eyes and quietly sings the chorus with real feeling: “Ain’t no valley low enough / ain’t no river wide enough / to keep me from gettin’ to you, babe.”

A woman with long silver hair and a knit hat shouts, “This is my favorite song!”

She said that last time. And the time before. No, this isn’t a dive bar. And no, this woman isn’t in love with every song in the karaoke binder. This is a day program for elders with dementia and Alzheimer’s. And it’s an oasis for so many older people and their families.

There are over 3,100 programs with about 200,000 people nationally, and they are in constant threat of being shut down at precisely the moment when we need them most — as the largest generation of Americans that ever lived ages into retirement, and their children struggle to care for them while often raising children of their own.

Read more about why caregivers should know about this program: www.vox.com/the-highlight/480426/adult-day-care-ca…<media_url>


🎨: Eleni Kalorkoti for Vox

1 day ago | [YT] | 893

Vox

The dairy industry uses cows to make two things: milk and baby cows. The milk, we know its fate. But what of those 9 million babies born to dairy cows each year?

Many get carted off — sometimes over great distances, typically at not more than a few days old — to live out their calfhoods at a place like Grimmius Cattle Company.

Over the course of about six months starting last August, DxE filmed Grimmius’s operations using drone cameras, documenting many of the grim realities ubiquitous in the mass production of animals for food: calves being handled roughly, hit, and pushed to the ground. But perhaps most remarkably, the footage offers a rare view of what is arguably the most overlooked form of extreme confinement of farmed animals in the US.

Read more: www.vox.com/the-highlight/480529/calf-ranches-grim…<media_url>

🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox; Photo courtesy of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE)

2 days ago | [YT] | 2,214

Vox

You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs.

But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry.

Read more: www.vox.com/future-perfect/481920/insect-bug-farmi…<media_url>

3 days ago | [YT] | 3,098

Vox

When a baby is born in a hospital in the US, one of the first things that happens — usually within 24 hours — is a hepatitis B shot, which prevents a virus that can cause liver cancer. The newborn shot has been a standard practice nationwide since 1991, after earlier efforts at prevention kept missing the mark. In the decades that have followed, most parents haven’t thought twice about it.

But over the past two years, more and more parents have started saying no.

This connects to a rise in vaccine skepticism that began during the COVID pandemic. While that happened before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the nation’s health agencies, he’s turned this skepticism into policy.

In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped universally recommending the hepatitis B birth dose — along with five other childhood vaccines. Parents were already walking away from the birth dose, and now the government is too.

Read more: www.vox.com/health/481752/americas-vaccine-skeptic…<media_url>

4 days ago | [YT] | 5,695

Vox

Here is what you need to know about the man known to hundreds of thousands of people as Kismai: Kismai is not his legal name; he is incapable of eating cheeseburgers without getting some on his shirt; and he hates when people are wrong on the internet.

Separately, those three distinct characteristics could describe anyone. Together, those elements make for a hero to the people who seek laundry advice on Reddit.

“You would be more inclined to think I smell like Post Malone. I think that’s part of my charm. I’m not Martha Stewart. I am not stereotypically fastidious. I do this because I am a fat, sweaty slob who eats with wild abandon and apparently never learned to use cutlery as a toddler,” Kismai told Vox (his full username is KismaiAesthetics, a joke from the first season of the sitcom Letterkenny.)

Kismai is a savant when it comes to getting clothes clean, and because of that, he has singlehandedly changed the way people do laundry. He is the reason the word “lipase” has become a topic of conversation across elder millennial group chats. He can move the market. His adherents clamor for their faceless champion to give them advice.

They praise him for a 12-hour process called “spa day” and post their disgusting but satisfying results for the world to see. The small monetary tips they’ve sent him in appreciation have paid for his health insurance for the entire year.

Read more about Kismai’s laundry strategy: www.vox.com/health/481752/americas-vaccine-skeptic…<media_url>

🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox

5 days ago | [YT] | 1,441

Vox

In the less than two weeks since the US and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, the war has already killed over 1,900 people across 11 countries and displaced more than 700,000.

If the escalating conflict feels to you like one more in a long slog of painfully violent, complex global crises, then you are not wrong. Over one-fifth of the world’s kids now live in places warped by conflict, which magnifies poverty and hunger. And conflict doesn’t just worsen conditions on the ground — it makes getting humanitarian aid flowing to those who need it most an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous task.

But difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Local aid workers across the region have been working nonstop to get civilians safely fed and cared for, while new methods of crisis response mean that the world may soon be able to move money much more quickly to the people and places that need it most.

📸: Amirhossein Khorgooei/ISNA/AFP via Getty Images

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6 days ago | [YT] | 3,066

Vox

Cybercrime is not new, but it’s getting worse with the rise of AI.

The FBI reported that the US suffered $16.6 billion in known cybercrime losses in 2024 — up 33 percent in a single year, and more than doubled over three years. Americans over 60 lost nearly $5 billion.

And those are just the reported numbers; Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society, told the Aspen Institute audience that only about one in five victims ever reports a scam. The real number is unknowable, but it’s much worse.

And now comes generative AI to make all of this faster, cheaper, and more convincing. Phishing emails no longer arrive riddled with typos from supposed Nigerian princes; LLMs can produce fluent, regionally specific language. AI image generators can create entire synthetic identities — dozens of photos of a person who doesn’t exist, complete with vacation shots and designer handbags.

1 week ago | [YT] | 2,453

Vox

Japan has a bear problem, at least in the north.

In 2025, bears killed more than a dozen people in the country and injured more than 200 others. That’s way up from the previous record, set in 2023, of six deaths. The threat grew so severe last fall — when bears are out looking for more food in preparation for hibernation — that the government called in the military, deploying troops to help trap bears in the northern Akita prefecture, the epicenter of the attacks.

In November, meanwhile, the US Embassy in Tokyo issued a rare “wildlife alert” warning US citizens to watch out for bears.

Most of the recent incidents involved Asiatic black bears, which are not normally aggressive, according to Hengjun Xiao, an environmental researcher at Japan’s Keio University. That makes what he describes as the recent “bear crisis” all the more extraordinary.

So what’s going on? It comes down to a strange connection between bears and clouds.

📸: Yiming Chen/Getty Images and Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 2,413

Vox

President Donald Trump may have his sights set on Cuba as his next target.

He successfully removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, he took the US to war with Iran late last month, and he told a reporter last week that Cuba is “going to fall pretty soon.”

To learn more about what could happen — and why Trump is eyeing Cuba in the first place — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with The Atlantic’s Vivian Salama, who wrote recently about the administration’s Cuba ambitions.

📸: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,810