Vox

There’s no doubt that 2026 will be a rough launch for new college grads.

Recent graduates ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of about 5.7% in early 2026, above the national average of 4.3%. Hiring has slowed to the lowest rate outside the pandemic since 2014, while entry-level postings have fallen roughly 35% over the past 18 months.

But a rough launch doesn’t mean a rough life, and while the longer-term impact of AI is unknowable, it’s far from the worst time, even in recent memory, to graduate into the workforce.

The data still says, for most graduates, a college degree is more than worth the investment.

Read more: www.vox.com/future-perfect/490383/college-graduati…<media_url>

1 day ago | [YT] | 913

Vox

New Mexico has touted itself as the first state to offer universal no-cost childcare, thanks to a long, 15-year fight led by parents, childcare providers, advocates, and voters. In 2022, they achieved an iconic, grassroots win, unlocking unprecedented, permanent funding for early education through a ballot initiative.

This financing victory accounted for the vast majority of the 130% growth in the state’s early childhood budget since 2019, enabling the state to more than double the number of children served in its childcare and prekindergarten programs and to make these programs free for families using them.

But the decisions about how to implement the state’s Universal Child Care program have continued to dig New Mexico deeper into policies that have proven elsewhere to fail. In the rush to claim victory, the state has prioritized expanding demand-side subsidies, giving parents vouchers for free childcare.

However, by flooding the market with demand without sufficiently increasing the number of actual places for families to bring their children, or by paying educators enough to stay in the field, the state is creating a textbook policy failure.

And if New Mexico stumbles, it could drag down similar efforts around the country.

🎨: Celia Jacobs for Vox

1 day ago | [YT] | 1,305

Vox

For more than 50 years, through the “adjustment of status” process, visa holders in the United States have been able to remain in the country while applying for permanent residency.

This was no small thing.

For legal immigrants, the alternative to securing an adjustment of status is not taking a short sojourn abroad while Uncle Sam inspects their paperwork. Rather, due to various quirks of US immigration law, some immigrants must wait more than a decade for their green card applications to be approved.

But this could be changing as the Trump administration announced last Friday that US visa holders who want a green card must first return to their home countries and apply from there, “except in extraordinary circumstances.”

Whether this will actually happen is unclear. Both the memo officially laying out the policy — and the administration’s messaging about it — contain ambiguities and apparent contradictions.

Find out more: www.vox.com/politics/490186/green-cards-trump-adju…<media_url>

2 days ago | [YT] | 2,325

Vox

The Affordable Care Act has greatly decreased the number of uninsured Americans, taking it from 16% in 2010 to 8.3% in 2025, according to estimates.

But now, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is causing millions of Americans to lose their coverage. The bill established work requirements to target the people covered by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and allowed subsidies that had helped millions of people to buy private coverage on the ACA marketplaces to lapse.

The uninsured rate has spiked before, but it’s usually the byproduct of an economic crisis; people lose their jobs, and they lose their coverage. What makes the current turmoil different is that it is entirely a matter of policy choices.

Now, millions of Americans will pay the price.

Read more: www.vox.com/good-medicine-newsletter/489937/us-hea…

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3 days ago | [YT] | 2,131

Vox

Now that Ken Paxton, the conservative attorney general of Texas, has defeated incumbent John Cornyn for the Republican Senate nomination, we may see something unusual in modern American elections: a theological throwdown.

In a closely watched and competitive race, Paxton will be facing off against James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and the Democratic nominee. The race is now set to be a battle between two very different worldviews about the role of Christianity.

Talarico has centered the concept of “radical love” in his political identity and campaign platform: He wants to heal political divisions, welcome Americans who aren’t typically Democrats to his campaign, and move beyond anger toward any one person (like President Donald Trump or Paxton) toward a forward-looking agenda that goes after oligarchs, the political establishment, and the “corrupt” elite.

Paxton is solidly in the Christian nationalist camp. Generally, Christian nationalists oppose the separation of church and state; seek to make Christianity the official religion of the state; call for Biblical morality to determine the law; and argue that the United States has God’s unique blessing among other nations.

He has made a name for himself as a proponent of an aggressive form of religious liberty, arguing not just that the state should pull back and cede space to the faithful, but that the state should actively promote a specific version of Christian ethics and morality. He supported efforts to bring Christian prayer and Scripture into public schools, to set aside time for Bible readings and prayers, and to display the Ten Commandments on public property.

4 days ago | [YT] | 2,488

Vox

The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox.

But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of mortality and injury to everyday life, a risk that falls most heavily on the world’s poor. It kills about as many people as the world’s deadliest infectious disease — tuberculosis — and it’s the leading cause of death globally for people in the prime of their lives, aged 5 to 29.

It is one of the defining technologies of modern life, one of the 20th century’s most dangerous gifts: the car.

Around 1.19 million people globally are killed by road crashes every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (some estimates put the number higher), and many times more — likely between 20 and 50 million — are injured, sometimes leaving them with life-altering disabilities.

More than 90% of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations, although these countries contain only around 60% of the world’s cars.

5 days ago | [YT] | 996

Vox

The questions Vox's Sigal Samuel tackles in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house.

Her partner is due to give birth to their first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. Sigal decided to tackle her dilemma in her last column before beginning her parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward.

“If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?” Sigal’s partner asks.

“Your goal is not to control every possible outcome,” Sigal responds. “The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome.

Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.”

Read the full column: www.vox.com/future-perfect/489426/moral-luck-ethic…<media_url>

🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox

6 days ago | [YT] | 2,837

Vox

In case you didn’t notice, the Antichrist is back.

All right, forgive the hyperbole — this biblical agent of Satan hasn’t actually returned to lead a rebellion against God before Christ’s second coming. But a curious surge in chatter about this herald of the apocalypse seems to be underway.

It’s the most the end times have saturated our political culture since the aughts, when the new millennium brought an explosion of renewed interest, spurred on by the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and related Christian media depicting a “realistic” modern Antichrist. Later on, former President Barack Obama became a fixation of related theories on the religious right depicting him as the Antichrist.

Yet just like in past periods of panic and perturbation over the centuries, there’s a lot of uncertainty in these discussions over who or what the Antichrist is, when this figure is to return, or even if this biblical character is supposed to be a real thing.

📸: Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,161

Vox

Packing the Supreme Court is being floated by Democrats like former Vice President Kamala Harris as a way to reverse a series of recent policy losses, including the Republican Supreme Court’s recent decision repealing a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act.

But is adding seats to the court actually a good idea?

The primary advantage of court-packing is that it would be difficult for the Court’s current majority to sabotage a court-packing law if it actually passed the Congress — once the Court was packed, the Republican justices who control it right now would become a powerless minority.

Realistically, however, the newly constituted Court would struggle to impose its will on red states and on other Republican Party power centers.

Read more: www.vox.com/politics/488987/supreme-court-packing-…<media_url>


📸: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,899

Vox

Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat.

Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her comments made sense, though they set off a heated, weeks-long debate among X and Instagram users, who responded with a flood of strange justifications for eating meat, despite the terrible treatment of farmed animals.

The spat vividly illustrated a psychological phenomenon called the “meat paradox”: the cognitive dissonance and deep discomfort people feel when their behavior of eating meat and other animal products clashes with their fondness for animals.

Read more: www.vox.com/future-perfect/488861/meat-paradox-fac…<media_url>

🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 9,085