Vox

What do the people behind ICE think about America?

The Department of Homeland Security recently released a spree of ads recruiting for new hires at ICE. And those ads circle around one strange idea: that America is a damsel who needs strong, powerful men to protect her.

In this Reporter Extra, Vox senior culture correspondent Constance Grady unpacks the secret history behind ICE’s iconography. They’re pulling from some old and shameful American archetypes — and those archetypes come with racist and misogynistic baggage. To fully understand the story ICE is telling, we need to go all the way back to The Birth of a Nation, and all the way forward to the present-day trad wives on social media.

ICE is trying to claim the power to decide who gets to be a part of America, and their ads give us a glimpse into who they believe America is.

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Vox

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s coming to Vox’s Patreon in December:

Today: Reporter Extra with senior culture correspondent Constance Grady on ICE’s spree of ads recruiting for new hires and the history behind the iconography.

Tuesday, 12/9: Streamed video Q&A with Today, Explained co-host and editorial director Noel King and host and editorial director Astead Herndon on the biggest stories of 2025 and stories to watch in 2026.

Friday, 12/19: In the premiere episode of What’s Working, Vox examines the boom in free college tuition programs over the last decade, evaluates the true cost of these programs, and explains why it’s more complex than it seems.

Plus two more Reporter Extras before the end of the month and, as always, all of our podcasts, ad-free.

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Vox

A 2023 survey from IPSOS of people in 30 countries found that 70 percent of respondents thought the world was becoming more violent and dangerous. Here in the US, majorities have told pollsters almost every year since the early 1990s that violent crime is going up. And other surveys indicate that many people around the world insist that life was better and often safer 50 years ago than it is today.

So, that’s the narrative. Here’s the actuality: When you actually look at data on murder, it shows that the world has largely been getting safer, both as compared to the more distant past and in this century.

Now, recently updated data from the World Bank looks at the picture from a global perspective and finds something astonishing. Between 2000 and 2023, the international homicide rate fell from roughly 6.9 deaths per 100,000 people to around 5.2 per 100,000 people in 2023. That translates into around a one-quarter decline in the chances that any random person will be murdered.

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Vox

Vox senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes has a cautionary tale about chatbots.

What started as using AI for tedious chores — meal plans, grocery lists, quick research — quietly morphed into hours talking to a chatbot. And Adam isn’t alone. As chatbots get better at flattery, emotional support, and companionship, researchers are seeing more users (including teens) slip into dependency without realizing it.

Adam unpacks how chatbots are designed to keep us coming back, why young people are especially vulnerable, and what happens when adults can’t walk away — in some cases, leading to severe mental health crises.

This is a part of the first episode of Reporter Extras, a new Patreon-exclusive Vox video series that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how our journalists create their work.

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Vox

What if you could get hooked on ChatGPT by accident?

Vox’s Adam Clark Estes has a cautionary tale.

Watch the first episode of Reporter Extras, a new Patreon-exclusive Vox video series, here: www.patreon.com/posts/144397104?pr=true

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Vox

Thanksgiving can be awkward — like, really awkward.

With conversational topics ranging from “when will you get married?” to “what do you think about politics?”, the holiday can quickly become uncomfortable. We tend to treat that discomfort as a “me” problem, like we’re bad at socializing or broken in some way.

Alexandra Plakias thinks that’s the wrong story. She’s a philosopher at Hamilton College and the author of Awkwardness: A Theory, and she argues that there are no awkward people, only awkward situations. Awkwardness, for her, is what happens when the unwritten scripts that guide our social life break down, and we are suddenly improvising without a map.

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Vox

All eyes were on the meeting between New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump last Friday. The two have frequently taken shots at one another, with Mamdani telling Trump to “turn the volume up” during his election night speech.

But their conversation in the Oval Office was…cordial?

Astead Herndon, who has covered Trump and who recently wrote a definitive profile of Mamdani, breaks down what happened in their meeting, why it wasn’t entirely surprising, and what it could mean for New York City and the GOP.

“The traditional Republican playbook is to let cities fail, or to even revel in some cities’ failure, as they’ve done with Chicago. I don’t think Trump feels the same way about New York because he’s invested his life in the place, and so I believe him when he says he wants the city to thrive,” Herndon said.

📸: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

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Vox

If you take any medication, you’ve likely taken a pill that was manufactured in India.

Future Perfect fellow Pratik Pawar was aware that India produced a lot of the world’s generic drugs. He had worked in the country’s pharma industry earlier in his life and vaguely remembered that there was some clever legal hack that led to India’s rise in the pharmaceutical market.

But it wasn’t until he further reported on that industry that he realized just how much of the world’s health now rests on that legal hack, and how shaky the foundation has become.

Pawar traced how an arcane legal change in the 1970s birthed an industry that essentially learned to crank out huge volumes of medication at rock-bottom prices. The world first took notice of it in 2001, when, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, an Indian firm offered HIV treatment for just $350 a year instead of $10,000. The result was millions of lives saved.

Since then, Indian generic drugs have become a staple in medicine cabinets around the world. But that meteoric rise has come with a cost: Indian-made cough syrups have killed hundreds of children in recent years, and the country risks getting left behind producing yesterday’s medicines for a world — and a disease landscape — that has moved on.

This matters because much of the world has come to rely on affordable Indian drugs, and if the country can’t reinvent itself, millions of people will be left stranded without essential medicines.

🎨: Mar Hernández for Vox

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Vox

One night this year, senior reporter Sigal Samuel stumbled upon a nonprofit called Tamaika and saw that it made an extraordinary claim: For just $94, she could get a severely malnourished kid access to its treatment program, which helps the vast majority of kids recover within weeks.

But what really shocked her was the purported cost of actually saving a life with Tamaika’s program. Since not every person who gets treated for malnutrition would have died otherwise, you’ve got to treat a bunch of people before you can assume you’ve actually saved one person’s life.

In her reporting on effective philanthropy, she was used to seeing programs — particularly malaria programs — that said they could save a life for around $4,000. But Taimaka was claiming that with their hunger program, they could do it for just $1,500.

If that’s true, it would make this one of the cheapest ways to save somebody’s life.

She wondered: Could I really prevent a kid from dying that easily? And if so, why wasn’t everyone doing it?

🎨: Nicole Rifkin for Vox
📸: Pius Utomi Ekepei/AFP via Getty Images

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Vox

When a doctor isn’t present during a birth, there’s one essential person who can be the difference between life and death: a midwife.

They are extremely valuable, especially in countries where having a baby is still dangerous, because they have the training needed to deliver a baby safely and can adapt quickly when common complications arise.

But the availability of midwives, and the tools needed to keep mothers and their babies alive, is decreasing, due to President Donald Trump’s deep cuts to foreign aid.

Around the world, women and girls have been hit disproportionately by foreign aid cuts. In a United Nations survey of women-led and women’s rights organizations that rely on foreign assistance, almost half said that funding cuts would force them to shut down this year, caught in the crosshairs of America’s culture wars. They include midwifery schools, maternal health clinics, and rape crisis centers.

And in some parts of the world, there is no funding for maternal health at all absent foreign aid, because the domestic government is either too poor or lacks the will to pay for it itself.

“It’s an erosion of progress,” said Samira Sayed Rahman, programs and advocacy director of Save the Children in Afghanistan. There, one person dies every two hours from pregnancy-related complications. “It’s years of investments in health, in education, in community-building that have been undone in the span of a few months, and in some instances, in a few days.”

🎨: Claire Merchlinsky for Vox
📸: Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images

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