Vox

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority effectively gutted a key 1982 Voting Rights Act protection that required some states to draw a minimum number of majority-Black and majority-Latino districts. The ruling has already reignited the gerrymandering wars — and critics say it’s part of a much longer trend.

The groundwork was laid in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), when the Court ruled federal courts could no longer step in to stop partisan gerrymandering. Before then, the Court had kept a kind of “strategic ambiguity,” refusing to fully endorse extreme maps even while allowing many to stand. That uncertainty mattered: lawmakers pushed boundaries, but rarely to the absolute limit.

Now, with cases like Rucho, Citizens United, and Trump v. United States, the Roberts Court has increasingly moved from tolerating controversial behavior to explicitly signaling it won’t intervene. The result, critics argue, is a political system where partisan map-drawing, unlimited election spending, and even the weaponization of government power face fewer guardrails than ever before.

📸: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

5 hours ago | [YT] | 892

Vox

Spirit Airlines is out of the game, so which airline will inherit the ignominious title of most-hated airline in America?

Among large carriers, the title passes to American Eagle, a network of regional flights operated by American Airlines, according to YouGov. If you’re looking at all US airlines, then Allegiant — a low-cost carrier that mostly services vacation destinations — was already less popular than Spirit was.

Don’t underestimate the airline industry’s ability to give you new reasons to hate it, though. Some analysts predict that Spirit’s closure will push other airlines’ fares up: CBS found average fares rose roughly $60, or 23%, when Spirit exited a route.

That’s on top of rising fuel costs from the war in Iran, which could lead airlines to cut flights, raise fares, and impose further fees. And you’ll still pay for your carry-on.

📸: Giorgio Vera/AFP via Getty Images

1 day ago | [YT] | 892

Vox

Fertility rates in the US are down 23% since the most recent peak in 2007, according to the CDC.

It’s the latest data point in a long global trend toward fewer children, which means our already aging populace will get even older over time, with fewer young workers to handle the economy and take care of the elderly in their twilight years.

No low-birth country in the world, from the most repressive misogynistic regimes to the most progressive governments offering generous leave and free childcare, has been able to put their society on a path back to “replacement level” fertility.

Establishing the enabling conditions so people can form the families they desire is a worthy goal deserving attention, but the hour grows late and it’s time to start talking seriously about how to adapt for an aging, low-birth society.

It won’t happen on its own, though. America needs a national-level effort to futureproof the country against demographic changes, with all the physical, economic, political, and cultural shifts that will entail.

1 day ago | [YT] | 2,188

Vox

For years, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement was driven by moms.

Concerned about the safety of childhood vaccines and about chemicals in the food their kids were eating, they helped propel Donald Trump to the White House — and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the role of the nation’s top health influencer — with a message centered on fear for the next generation.

Now, that next generation is here.

The latest MAHA advocates to gain public attention are women in their teens or early 20s. Lexi Vrachalus, 20, posts videos of her seed-oil-free, sugar-free meals, snacks, and shopping trips. In a post around Easter, she made her own Peeps with maple syrup and beef gelatin.

Her message: “You can take back health into your own hands,” she told me. “You have the power to heal your body.”

Read more: www.vox.com/the-highlight/486154/maha-teens-kenned…<media_url>

🎨: Naomi Elliott for Vox

3 days ago | [YT] | 1,499

Vox

There are many ways you could measure the health of a city — its air quality index, its population growth, the number of jobs it added last year. But another one not often high on the priority lists of city governments in the US: How safe is it to walk?

The US has the grievous distinction among peer countries as being one of the most dangerous places in the developed world for walking down the street. American pedestrians are killed by cars at three times the rate of Canadians, four times the rate of Brits and Australians, and more than 13 times the rate of Norwegians.

While we finally got a bit of good news about pedestrian safety in America — About 11% fewer pedestrians were killed in the first half of 2025, according to a preliminary report published by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) — the question still remains: Why did it suddenly become so much more dangerous to be a pedestrian in America?

There’s almost certainly no single reason, but most experts Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova spoke to over the years have pointed to the growing popularity of SUVs and pickup trucks, which now make up an overwhelming share of car purchases in the US. These vehicles often make it harder for drivers to see pedestrians, and they’re more likely to seriously injure or kill people on foot because of their added weight and height.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, University of New Mexico engineering professor Nick Ferenchak, one of the country’s leading researchers on pedestrian and bicyclist safety, pointed to another, intriguing theory: Maybe there are just more pedestrians now. Not because Americans have suddenly discovered a love of long walks, but because an increasing number of people living outside pedestrian-friendly city centers can’t afford to get around any other way.

Find out more reasons: www.vox.com/future-perfect/486864/pedestrian-death…<media_url>

4 days ago | [YT] | 5,347

Vox

When the Trump administration began dismantling US foreign aid in January 2025, many global health experts feared that the consequences would be catastrophic, with models projecting thousands of deaths as a direct consequence of the cuts.

It has now been more than a year since that upheaval began, and we finally have official data on what it did to PEPFAR, one of the biggest and most successful US-funded HIV programs in the world.

At first glance, the numbers offer some relief. The US still delivered HIV treatment, in the form of antiretroviral drugs, to about 20 million people from July through September 2025, the only period for which the administration has released data. That was roughly the same number of people receiving treatment as in the same period a year earlier.

But other numbers tell a different and less positive story. A closer look at the data suggests that PEPFAR was far less successful at doing the rest of the work that keeps HIV from spreading: finding people who don’t yet know they’re positive, and stopping new infections before they happen.

The data shows that fewer people were tested for HIV, fewer people newly started treatment, and far fewer started or stayed on PrEP, the drugs that help prevent infection in the first place.

Read more: www.vox.com/future-perfect/487139/pepfar-trump-cut…<media_url>

5 days ago | [YT] | 1,973

Vox

It’s exceptionally rare that the tiny, perpetually marginal, and politically outmatched animal rights movement manages to capture national attention.

A lack of attention is that movement’s core problem and central organizing question. How can it convince the public to make space in their minds for something they’d really, really prefer not to: the industrialized torture of animals by the billions for food, research, and other human ends?

One coalition of grassroots activists has offered one possible answer. It has recently mounted one of the most audacious and most news-making animal rights campaigns in recent memory, and, in the process, turned an obscure breeder of beagles for biomedical experimentation into an issue of national political significance.

On March 15, dozens of activists stormed Ridglan Farms, a dog facility outside Madison, Wisconsin, that raises beagles for research labs across the country and has been accused by state regulators of hundreds of animal welfare violations. The activists entered one of the company’s buildings and extracted 30 of the dogs held in cages there (who are, under the law, Ridglan’s property). Twenty-two beagles were driven off the site and have since been placed in homes, while eight were seized from activists by police and believed to be returned to Ridglan.

That event produced an arresting set of images seen by tens of millions of Americans in the news and on social media, and it reached the agenda of political leaders all the way up to Congress and the Trump administration.

This next rescue attempt, on April 18, unfolded much differently, when more than 1,000 activists arriving at the facility were caught off guard by a major show of force from law enforcement.
One woman had her nose broken. A 67-year-old Navy veteran was pinned to the ground, covered with tear gas, and struggled to breathe as an officer pressed a knee into his back.

📸: Yash Mangalick/Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs

6 days ago | [YT] | 4,084

Vox

Across the US, animal control officers and shelter staff are overworked and underpaid. Turnover is incredibly high, as many of them become burnt out from bearing the immense emotional and physical burden of the job.

Collectively, these workers euthanize an average of over 1,600 dogs and cats each day, while responding to countless cruelty and neglect cases; rounding up millions of strays; routinely putting themselves in harm’s way; and dealing with indifferent, difficult, and even hostile pet owners.

They are the frontline workers of America’s long-running and ever-evolving pet overpopulation crisis, currently fueled by a decline in spay and neuter rates, the rising costs of veterinary care, and a chronic lack of government funding.


🎨: Mary Kirkpatrick for Vox

1 week ago | [YT] | 2,422

Vox

For more than a century, the world has run on coal.

When Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electrical station in Lower Manhattan fired up in 1882, it ran on coal. Coal survived the oil era, the nuclear era, the dash for natural gas, and decades of back-and-forth climate policy. From the 1970s through the mid-2010s, coal supplied somewhere between 35 and 40% of the planet’s electricity, a steady if sooty presence powering modern life.

Then last year, it lost the lead. As coal has declined, solar power has increased.

For 21 years running, solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet. In 2025 it surpassed wind for the first time, and is now on pace to pass nuclear this year.

Find out more: www.vox.com/the-highlight/486845/climate-change-co…<media_url>

1 week ago | [YT] | 5,382

Vox

When you kill the bugs that crawl their way into your home, should you feel guilty?

Here’s what Sigal Samuel, the writer of Vox’s advice column Your Mileage May Vary, has to say:

“I love that you’re sensitive to the potential suffering of Earth’s teeny-tiny, creepy-crawly creatures. I hope you never lose that. But I do hope you lose the guilt you’re feeling,” she writes.

“But the key thing to realize is this: Bugs may have some kind of sentience, and sentience may confer some moral status, but that doesn’t mean that provides the last word on how we should act toward them.

Just because another creature might have moral weight, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how to treat that creature when its welfare conflicts with the welfare of a creature you know has moral weight: you.”

🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox

1 week ago | [YT] | 2,276