Vox

Zohran #Mamdani — a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — just became mayor of the largest city in the US.

His election marks a major triumph for America’s long-suffering #socialist movement — possibly, the most significant in its history.

Naturally, it raises some big questions: What do #democratic socialists actually want? How would their vision work in practice? Do Mamdani and his allies want to make America into Norway — or a kinder, gentler Soviet Union?

Those questions have no single answer. But Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of the socialist magazine Jacobin, has outlined one of the clearest blueprints for what a democratic socialist society might look like — something he calls “market socialism.”

To understand that vision (and how it holds up under scrutiny), senior correspondent Eric Levitz spoke with Sunkara this week. They also discussed Mamdani’s victory — and what Democrats can, or can’t, learn from it.

📸Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

4 hours ago | [YT] | 287

Vox

Just one year after President Donald Trump and Republicans’ victories nationwide, the Democratic backlash has arrived in Tuesday’s elections.

Democrats won both governor’s races on the ballot, in Virginia and New Jersey — that was expected. But they won by a lot. Though votes are still being counted, at the time of this writing, Mikie Sherrill was winning New Jersey by 13 percentage points and Abigail Spanberger was winning Virginia by 14.

So what does this Democratic romp mean for the midterms?

Typically, it’s best to be cautious about what these off-year elections can tell us about how next year’s midterms will go. There is, after all, a whole year between now and then in which things can change. And the states with high-profile elections today are not representative of the country as a whole.

But there was a striking consistency to Tuesday’s results across states that really fits just one possible explanation: people are mad at Trump and voting for the opposition party.

One part of the story is that the Democratic base turned out. But another part is that swing voters, well, swung.

📸: Reps. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, seen here in 2019, will both be governors next year. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

18 hours ago | [YT] | 1,226

Vox

If you’re a parent of a young child, you’re probably afraid of something much, much smaller than you: the humble peanut. 🥜

Even if your child isn’t allergic to the nuts, past surveys have shown as many as 4.5 percent of kids in the US are, which means consistently scouring lunchboxes and snack packs for even traces of peanuts. And for a long time, this problem was getting worse; the self-reported prevalence of peanut or tree nut allergies among children in the US more than tripled between 1997 and 2008.

But now, infants and toddlers are being diagnosed with far fewer food allergies.

The sharp reduction in peanut allergies doesn’t just make it easier for parents to pack lunches across the country. It represents “prevention of a potentially deadly, life-changing diagnosis,” Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, a pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told the New York Times. And it happened because public health researchers looked hard at the science, realized what they were doing to prevent allergies wasn’t working, and changed tack.

1 day ago | [YT] | 578

Vox

How does the White House handle crises across the world? Former top national security advisers Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer are giving you the inside scoop in their new podcast.

The Long Game is a new show from the Vox Media Podcast Network that will break down how these consequential decisions get made and why they matter. You can catch the first few episodes here on Vox’s YouTube channel starting this Friday. Check out the trailer below.

www.youtube.com/shorts/-QxHv5...

1 day ago (edited) | [YT] | 11

Vox

It’s pretty clear that Latino voters have soured on President Donald Trump in his second term. But has their increasing displeasure resulted in a new interest in the Democratic Party?

We’re now leading up to the first real trial of this question: In a few days, voters in New Jersey will decide on new leadership for their state. The Garden State is a test case: About 16 percent of the electorate is Latino; the Democratic state has been trending more Republican in the Trump era, nearly electing a GOP governor in 2021, and barely voting for Kamala Harris last year.

Contributing to that shift was the gradual swing of Black and Latino voters away from the Democratic Party. And as we’ve seen across the country since Trump’s first term, the more that a place is working class and diverse, the more likely it is to have shifted toward Trump.

Plenty of signs are suggesting that trend might reverse this year: Trump isn’t on the ballot, his party is overseeing a historically unpopular agenda that seems to be targeting and upsetting Latino and Hispanic Americans more than most voters, and his new converts aren’t necessarily thrilled to run back their Republican vote.

📸: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

5 days ago | [YT] | 869

Vox

Elon Musk’s newly launched Grokipedia — powered by Musk’s xAI and fact-checked by Grok, the company’s right-leaning AI assistant — appears to use Wikipedia as its primary source, but injects some far-right politics and conspiracy theories into certain topics before presenting the information as fact.

Vox senior correspondent Adam Clark Estes was quite surprised to see there was no article for “apartheid,” but if you looked up “white genocide theory” — one of Musk’s ideological obsessions and the center of many unhinged Grok rants earlier this year — you’ll find an article that bemoans academia’s tendency to “relegate the theory to fringe conspiracy status despite the observable data on population trajectories.”

Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, refers to this theory as a conspiracy theory in its article’s title.

📸: Leon Neal/Getty Images

6 days ago | [YT] | 1,940

Vox

#HurricaneMelissa, already one of the strongest hurricanes in history, made landfall in #Cuba, resulting in at least seven deaths as of Wednesday morning.

Behind the storm, 2.8 million Jamaicans are reeling from the strongest hurricane to ever lash the island. Melissa landed on #Jamaica on Tuesday with winds at 185 miles per hour, putting it firmly in Category 5. Ahead of landfall, the National Hurricane Center issued a blunt warning for Jamaica: “THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS AND LIFE-THREATENING SITUATION! TAKE COVER NOW!”

The capitals and exclamation points are warranted. Hurricane Melissa is an extraordinary #storm, even among the many massive, fast-growing, devastating cyclones that have been erupting in the Atlantic Ocean in recent years.

📸: Matias Delacroix/AP

1 week ago | [YT] | 340

Vox

#ZohranMamdani has placed universal child care at the center of his New York City mayoral campaign, returning to it again and again as one of a few key policies that could redefine what City Hall delivers. He’s promising to make child care free for every New Yorker from 6 weeks to 5 years old while raising child care workers’ wages to match public school teachers.

It’s easy to see why the city’s child care system needs reform. Families with #children under 6 are leaving #NewYorkCity at twice the rate of everyone else. More than 80 percent of families with young children can’t afford care that runs upward of $20,000 a year, and the flight of young families is costing the city an estimated $23 billion annually in lost economic productivity.

Still, it’s an unusual gamble. It’s popular in theory, but #voters don’t always resonate with the challenge, especially if they’re past the stage of needing it or never had kids at all. Mamdani’s bet is that, by talking about child care as part of the city’s affordability crisis — not as a moral appeal or a benefit for parents per se — he can pull it out of that gray zone.

📸: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 912

Vox

There is real and growing recognition — at conservatism’s highest levels — that they have an #antisemitism problem.

#ChrisRufo, the Trump right’s leading activist on social issues, warned in March of “influential online commentators” who were selling “diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory” in which Jews “have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.”

#BenShapiro offered a similar diagnosis in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post. “There is a part of the Right that is extraordinarily conspiratorial and sees Jews as a conspiratorial force,” he said. “You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda than if you are doing the opposite.”

Yet this raises a deeper, and more troubling, question: Why is it that they’ve been able to build such a large audience? Why do “you get a lot more clicks” nowadays if you promote right-coded antisemitism? And why is it that so many of the party’s youth operatives get seduced by neo-Nazism?

The answer, according to both publicly available research and my own conversations with prominent right-wingers, is distressingly simple: President #DonaldTrump has turned the right into the premier home for conspiratorial extremism.

Read more: voxdotcom.visitlink.me/NwO-ok

📸: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 730

Vox

You probably know us for our explainer videos, but did you know Vox also makes podcasts? Starting today, we'll be posting new episodes of The Gray Area on this channel weekly. The Gray Area, hosted by Sean Illing, takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. If you like our videos, you should give it a try. You can check out today's episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Oc_w...

6 months ago | [YT] | 87