Vox

Every day it seems scientists are making breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s disease.

New treatments that actually slow the disease’s progression have finally appeared on pharmacy shelves in the past few years, delivering real-world results for patients and their families. New blood tests promise to identify at-risk patients earlier in their lives, giving them the chance to make lifestyle changes and potentially start treatment to stave off symptoms.

But hype has outpaced the science of treating Alzheimer’s disease before. For those of us who don’t work in the field, that confusing history can make it hard to make sense of these recent developments. It sounds like we are entering a new age for Alzheimer’s prevention and treatment — but are we actually? And, if we are, how can people benefit from it?

Vox’s Dylan Scott called a couple of leading experts to find out.

Here’s the good news: They say scientists are genuinely shifting the paradigm for treating, detecting, and ultimately preventing Alzheimer’s disease. The two drugs on the market can actually slow down cognitive decline for many patients, something that had been out of reach for decades. And more treatments are coming.

Learn more: www.vox.com/the-highlight/501710/alzheimers-diseas…<media_url>

🎨: Clare Owen for Vox

22 hours ago | [YT] | 1,124

Vox

Courtney E. Martin is trying to figure out how to donate her 78-year-old dad’s brain. He has advanced dementia and is living in a memory care community.

Certainly, the demand is there for Courtney’s dad’s brain. The World Health Organization describes dementia as “one of the greatest health challenges of our generation” and reports that 78 million people will have dementia by the close of this decade (a 188 percent increase since 2000), for an annual global cost of over $2.8 trillion.

And yet, research into what causes it and how to cure it remains stymied by a lack of funding, high-quality data, and poor coordination with people suffering from dementia and their caregivers.

So how does one go about donating a brain?

Find out more: www.vox.com/the-highlight/500394/highlight-brain-d…<media_url>

🎨: Clare Owen for Vox

2 days ago | [YT] | 575

Vox

Loneliness has become a business venture.

Today, consumers can spend thousands on friendship coaches and adult summer camps, pay $300 a month for loneliness-fighting coworking spaces, or buy an AI pendant that promises companionship. But experts who study social connection remain skeptical that loneliness can, or should, be solved by products.

So is it possible to disrupt the slow burn that is making a friend? To outsource the intimacies of friendship to AI? To put a price tag on human connection?

The cost of solutions by businesses may be far greater than their chances of making us feel less alone.

Read more: www.vox.com/the-highlight/499619/loneliness-big-bu…<media_url>

🎨: Clare Owen for Vox

3 days ago | [YT] | 675

Vox

A new report from the risk analysis firm Baron Public Affairs LLC assembles a list of the top 20 “super influencers” who “most inform the policy leaders of the nationalist-populist movement.”

While only three names on that list are publicly available — Aaron Renn, Brad Wilcox, and Michael Lind — Baron’s report paints a fascinating picture of today’s conservatism, shining a light on some of its most thoughtful, relevant, and interesting quarters.

Yet in doing so, the report also skates over divisions inside the group under consideration — splits that matter immensely for the American right’s future.

Read more: www.vox.com/politics/501238/conservative-super-inf…<media_url>

📸: Win McNamee/Getty Images

3 days ago | [YT] | 710

Vox

Hasan Piker gained national prominence in the 2024 election and its aftermath, initially as an anti-Trump counterweight to the manosphere.

Piker remains one of the few genuinely popular streamers explicitly discussing politics and news — roughly 3 million Twitch followers, north of 20,000 people watching on an average day, and many more seeing clips, and No. 3 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 25 most influential creators of 2026.

His newfound access to the mainstream rubbed some the wrong way. The New York Times ran a profile in April 2025 headlined “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’.” The New Yorker made him a central figure in “The Battle for the Bros.”

He’s often been compared to Joe Rogan and Rush Limbaugh. But Vox’s Astead Herndon sees him more as someone like The Breakfast Club’s Charlamagne Tha God: an audience inside the party, some access to elected officials, and a persistent criticism of its ideological direction.

But what makes Piker different from all of these characters is his anti-Zionism — and the corresponding fear among the Democratic establishment that his views represent an emerging wing of the party’s own base rather than a fringe of it.

Subscribe to The Midterms, Actually newsletter and read more: www.vox.com/politics/501626/midterms-actually-mode…<media_url>

📸: Florencia Tan Jun/Web Summit via Sportsfile via Getty Images

5 days ago | [YT] | 2,026

Vox

Sometimes the best way to make friends is to lie.

Around the world, people are gathering together to try to figure out if the person next to them is on their side — or is trying to double-cross them. By the end of the process, trickery or no, they’re deeply bonded.

Social deduction games (and the related sister category social deception games) have been around for decades and come in a myriad of formats, including Mafia, Werewolf, and the newer entry, Blood on the Clocktower.

Their defining trait is that some players have hidden roles, and the rest of the players have to work out who those people are through social interactions: hinting, lying, interrogating, deducing, obfuscating. If you’ve seen The Traitors, you get the gist.

Right now, this whole category is trending up. The most recent season premiere of The Traitors in the US drew 638 million viewing minutes in January on Peacock.

These games give players a way to practice conflict in a low-stakes space — an especially powerful tool at a time when Americans are so isolated and polarized.

Read more: www.vox.com/the-highlight/499862/social-deduction-…<media_url>

🎨: Jess Hannigan for Vox

5 days ago | [YT] | 433

Vox

If you haven’t yet heard about how a certain fella is choosin’ a woman from Texas over Ella Langley, it’s only a matter of time.

Langley’s massive hit, “Choosin’ Texas,” began dominating the Billboard Hot 100 charts a few months ago — and never looked back. It’s still sitting at No. 1 after 19 weeks, tied for the longest time spent atop the charts among non-holiday songs.

In a few more weeks, Langley could shatter the all-time record and dethrone Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

It’s a runaway success for Langley, who is relatively new to country music but has quickly vaulted to a new tier of stardom.

📸: Jason Kempin/Getty Images

6 days ago | [YT] | 647

Vox

Do you find yourself going with other people’s ideas even if you don’t agree? How about avoiding confrontation to avoid hurting the other person’s feelings?

You may be a people pleaser.

Guest Your Mileage May Vary columnist Shayna Love gives this advice for anyone who considers themself a “chameleon” in the world around them and is trying to live with more individuality:

“Wanting to please other people is an incredibly prevalent motivation for lying; it’s more common than lying for personal gain or pleasure. When psychologists evaluated the top reasons that people lied in their everyday life, many wanted to seem more agreeable. Their lies support seemingly magnanimous goals, like complimenting a friend or making sure a social interaction went well. But they were lies all the same, defined by the researchers as a ‘message that one gives to another in which they are deliberately deceiving them.’”

“I find this shift in perspective helpful, if a little harsh, if you’re looking to break a people-pleasing habit. It’s one thing to think about yourself as dedicated to keeping other people pleased. But when you consider that actually, all of your interactions are suffused with lies, the approach becomes a bit more unsavory.”

🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox

1 week ago | [YT] | 785

Vox

With a smile plastered on his face, Zohran Mamdani has filled potholes at a faster rate than any New York City mayor in years.

In cities where everything seems to take forever to build, literally covering over these sites of everyday urban friction has become a powerfully visible form of political currency.

But the bigger question is whether Mamdani or others like him can borrow from the public trust they earn from filling them to help move the needle on the hard stuff, “especially when those next things aren’t going to be what your constituents like as much,” like large-scale zoning reforms or tax hikes, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, a public policy professor at Harvard, said. “They might be tougher policies to swallow.”

Read the first edition of the Nice Things newsletter: www.vox.com/future-perfect/500652/zohran-mamdani-p…<media_url>

📸: Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 5,243

Vox

Across the country, clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are encouraging attendees to lock their phones away — or, at least keep them out of sight — for screen-free gatherings.

Musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles banned phones at their concerts; comedians John Mulaney and Bill Burr have followed suit. Clubs from Los Angeles to Miami are creating camera-free dance floors. Bars and restaurants in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that have long prohibited phone and camera use have been joined by newer establishments in Charlotte, North Carolina and Fort Worth, Texas.

The rise of phone-free socializing speaks to a growing exhaustion with an always-connected world. More than half of US adults say they use their smartphone too much, according to a 2022 Gallup survey.

Screen-free events are the natural evolution of this cultural desire to break up with tech. By transforming physical spaces, ridding them of distracting devices, event organizers and bar owners aim to foster connection, reclaim attention, and maintain a sense of privacy. Even a short detox from smartphones has the ability to dramatically shape the tenor of a get-together for the better.

Find out more: www.vox.com/life/500453/phone-free-social-events-d…<media_url>

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,747