In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, temper expectations for a "blue wave," and belatedly learn how to meditate. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

This was already a record-breaking election, even before the polls opened today.

Campaigns and their allies poured record sums into political advertising. A near-record number of lawmakers are retiring or running for a different office, creating an unusually high number of open seats. And President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are approaching record lows, giving Democrats a rare opportunity: the chance to retake control of both chambers of Congress by cutting through some traditionally Republican states.

Both parties are framing the election in existential terms. Democrats have cast the midterms as an emergency brake on Trump and his agenda. And Republicans have characterized the election as a sort of firewall against far-left activists.

Unsurprisingly, given those stakes, turnout has been historic. More than 59 million Americans voted early this year, which — you guessed it! — completely blew past the midterm early-vote record set by the 2022 elections.

In-person turnout looked similarly brisk in many places Tuesday, including Georgia, Florida and Maine. But it could be days or even weeks before we have full results, especially in very close races. And it will take much longer to figure out what those results mean for the rest of us.

Winning Congress is just half the battle

Democrats are really jazzed — almost queasily so — by the hope that they could retake Congress. Polls have consistently favored their candidates in the House, and they need to pick up four new seats to take control of the Senate.

Even if that happens, however, there are limits to what even a very large “blue wave” can achieve. Voters who expect their new lawmakers to ride into DC on white stallions and raze Trump’s agenda might find the next two years…a bit disappointing.

How disappointing? Well: My colleague Andrew Prokop recently asked congressional aides and outside experts what a Democratic majority could do over the rest of Trump’s second term. They “painted a picture of a grim slog akin to trench warfare.” Oof.

Much of that prediction is simple mathematics. Most legislation requires 60 Senate votes to overcome a filibuster. And even the most optimistic predictions put Democrats short of that 60-vote threshold, which means that most bills they want to pass will need to attract (via compromise or political strong-arming) some number of Republican senators.

Contrary to my recollections of Schoolhouse Rock!, however, Congress’s powers don’t begin and end with the passing of bills. A majority in either chamber would give Democrats more leverage over congressional investigations and the ability to issue subpoenas. And if Dems win the Senate, they’d gain control over the confirmation process for senior administration officials and federal judges.

Subpoena power could allow for more robust investigations into things like the Trump family’s crypto investments and Trump’s fundraising for the White House ballroom. That Senate majority, meanwhile, would let Democrats block Trump’s nominees for judgeships and administration posts — a tantalizing prospect, since lower courts are growing alarmingly partisan and two of the conservatives on the Supreme Court are approaching 80 years old.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that he would not expect a Democratic victory to persuade Trump to “change his ways.”

“But we’re going to fight Trump tooth and nail…no matter what he does,” Schumer said.

• Israel aid: President Trump announced Tuesday that the US would soon cut off military aid to Israel.

• Healthcare headaches: Rising healthcare costs have become a problem for Republicans this election season, thanks to Medicaid cuts and increased employee premiums.

• On the podcast: A new era of American populism kicked off with Donald Trump in 2016. Ten years later, Americans don’t have much to show for it. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Take a moment to yourself. Today seems like as good a day as any to embrace the calming art of meditation! Set three minutes aside, find a quiet room, and focus on your breath. If you need a little more guidance, try a tool like Calm, Ten Percent Happier, Headspace, or the UCLA Mindful app.

• Did you know…that polar bears in Norway are absolutely thriving, despite the literal disappearance of their habitat? Researchers think the bears have learned to adapt their diets.

• Today’s trivia: What dog breed has been beloved by both England’s Queen Victoria and American metal singer Rob Zombie? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you which US pharmaceutical giant was founded by a Union army veteran after the Civil War. That would be Eli Lilly, which still bears the name of its 19th-century founder.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, thank our lucky stars we're not pollsters — tough gig! — and brace for political arguments with not-so-well-meaning relatives. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

We’re at T-minus eight hours until Election Day — at least here on the East Coast — and Democrats are likely feeling good about their electoral odds right now.

The party is strongly favored to win the House and make big gains in the Senate, with a serious chance of retaking both chambers. The final New York Times/Siena polls, released Sunday, put Democrats ahead of Republicans in at least five of the seven battleground states that will determine who holds the Senate. That includes Kansas and Texas, two states that haven’t elected a Democratic senator in generations.

The picture appears so dim for Republicans that even President Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge it during remarks this afternoon: “For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms. We gave this a very strong shot.”

But while many, many polls and pundits are forecasting a blue wave…I’m a little more cautious about making definitive predictions. Polling has only grown more difficult in recent years, as we saw especially clearly in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Why polling still misses

Polling methodology sounds complex. (And it is!) But one of the field’s biggest challenges is actually pretty easy to grasp: Some people enjoy chatting with pollsters and filling out little surveys on their phones…and some people could not care less.

The poll-takers tend to be older, more educated, and more invested in politics. The poll-avoiders are often younger, less educated, and — in recent presidential contests — more likely to support Trump. Pollsters are aware of these imbalances and try to correct them by applying statistical adjustments after the fact, but it’s not a perfect science.

It’s difficult to gauge, for instance, how the Republicans who do respond to polls might differ from the ones who don’t. And it’s impossible to know for certain how many people who say they’re going to vote will actually drag themselves to their nearest school gymnasium or fire hall tomorrow.

There are a few new wrinkles this year, too. Pollsters conducted fewer late-cycle surveys than they do in the typical midterm cycle, according to the Washington Post. That not only means that we have less data overall, but that the data we do have may not account for late-breaking developments, such as Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens’s surprise endorsement of a Republican in the Michigan Senate race or a ballot-stacking scandal in Alaska.

Several close Senate contests are also in rural states — think Alaska, Maine, and Iowa — where reaching a representative mix of voters can be especially difficult for pollsters.

But even if the polls are right and a blue wave is likely, that doesn’t mean it will actually come to pass. My colleague Astead Herndon sees another possibility: The fear of a liberal takeover could motivate large numbers of Republicans to vote, even if they’ve soured on Trump or had previously planned to sit out this election.

None of this is to say that the blue wave won’t happen, to be clear, or that it won’t happen on the scale that some pundits have predicted. But I wouldn’t take any victory laps yet. Polls just aren’t the same thing as elections.

• Last-minute appeal: The Trump administration has taken its effort to set aside 20,000 California mail ballots to the Supreme Court.

• JD’s judgment: Vice President JD Vance has embraced some of Republicans’ most inflammatory campaign rhetoric, raising questions about his political instincts as he eyes a potential 2028 presidential run.

• On the podcast: Is it even possible to make groceries cheap again? Voters going to the polls this week hope so, but solutions will require some out-of-the-box thinking. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Brace for political fights with your family. They are, after all, an election-year tradition! Instead of clapping back at relatives with different politics, try to get curious about their positions. If in doubt, deploy the line “why does that matter to you?” Then explain your own views with an “I” statement, rather than a put-down or accusation.

• Did you know...that we’ve unwittingly dosed the world’s fish with anti-anxiety meds? Our bodies don’t entirely absorb these drugs, so trace amounts end up in our urine...and from there, in rivers and coastal habitats.

• Today’s trivia: Which US pharmaceutical giant was founded by a Union army veteran after the Civil War? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the name of the reclusive neighbor in Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. That would be Arthur “Boo” Radley, played by Robert Duvall in the 1962 film adaptation.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, look at the debate over daylight saving time, and ask why some right-wingers are getting really into Richard Nixon. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at cameron.peters@voxmedia.com.

Hi readers, happy Friday! We have a big weekend coming up: Halloween, the New York Marathon — and the end of daylight saving time. At 2 am on Sunday, our clocks will fall back one hour, returning us to standard time for the next four and a half months or so.

Depending on who you ask, it’s either the welcome return of before-work sunshine, or the start of a dreary slog through 4:30 pm sunsets. (The good news, though, is that however you feel about falling back, it’s not nearly as hard on the body as springing forward will be in March, when we return to daylight saving time.)

It’s also a topic that draws strong opinions, including in the pages of Vox (which has both pointed out the awfulness of daylight saving time and argued that it should go on forever).

President Donald Trump, of all people, is a strong proponent of the latter view: Several times this month, he’s harangued the US Senate to pass a bill making daylight saving time — that is, the time we’re in from March to early November, with later sunrises and later sunsets — permanent year-round, even posting the personal cellphone number of permanent DST opponent Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).

Despite his lobbying, the Senate hasn’t taken action. But should it? Is there a better solution, or are we best off the way things are, despite the burrs? We get into that and more below.

Time for the daylight saving time debate

As we mentioned above, a bill to establish permanent daylight saving time — the Sunshine Protection Act — is currently on hold in the Senate after passing the House by an overwhelming margin this summer. Nineteen US states have also passed laws that would do the same thing, though they won’t be able to take effect until or unless Congress acts, too. (Two US states, Arizona and Hawaii, are currently on permanent standard time, which is allowed.)

Advocates say that more daylight in the evening gives Americans more time to pursue leisure activities after work (the golf industry is a big fan), plus it may even have some positive effect on crime rates and the economy.

But the utopian ideal of no more darkness before 5 pm may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Critics of the permanent time change point out that the US has tried permanent DST before, and it was not well received.

As the Washingtonian reported in 2022, “While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later.”

That’s because there’s still only so much sunlight to go around, and permanent DST makes for very dark winter mornings — think sunrises after 9 am along the western edges of time zones. When it took effect in the ’70s, it quickly proved dangerous for children heading to school in the dark.

As Vox reported in 2016, courtesy of the cartographer Andy Woodruff, the change would leave most people with a markedly worse sunrise situation in exchange for an after-work boost.

If we still want to escape the biannual time change, though, the opposite solution might be preferable: Permanent standard time leaves more people with a reasonable sunrise time, and has less of an impact on what people described as a reasonable sunset time (really — check out the maps in the story here).

It’s also considered the healthiest option by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which notes that permanent standard time better aligns with our circadian rhythms.

The most likely option, though, is that we keep muddling along like this: Darker evenings are a hard political sell, and Congress abandoned its last permanent DST experiment after less than a year. At least we mostly won’t have to reset our clocks manually on Sunday morning.

• Chicago pope: Pope Leo XIV has cast a mail-in ballot in the Illinois midterms, becoming the first pope to vote in a US general election.

• Final sprint: The White House says Trump’s rallies in Kansas and Iowa are back on after the president appeared to pull out of the events in the final days of the midterms.

• On the podcast: The consumer experience is getting worse even as everything is getting more expensive. AI agents could make things better...or much, much worse. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ How to do Halloween in a hurry. If you’re short on time and/or money and still in need of a Halloween costume, my colleague Allie Volpe has some advice on ways to tap your creativity (and closet) to pull something off at the last minute.

• Did you know…that some right-wingers, including Vice President JD Vance, are trying to rehabilitate the reputation of President Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after the Watergate scandal and his attempts at a cover-up came to light?

• Today’s trivia: Who is the reclusive neighbor to the Finch family in the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked about the name of the vast Andean empire that ruled from its capital in Cusco. That would be the Inca Empire, which covered much of western South America in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Cameron Peters. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at cameron.peters@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, nurse a little glimmer of election optimism, and fend off the first signs of seasonal depression. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

No sooner had early voting started this year than analysts noticed a curious trend: Democratic voters were choosing to vote a lot like…Republicans.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats who cast their ballots early have most commonly done so by mail. But this year, they’re voting in person, and in huge numbers — even narrowing Republicans’ traditional early voting lead in states like Florida and Texas.

The abrupt shift may have something to do with President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the mail voting process, and it almost definitely reflects the anxiety and vigilance that many Americans feel about the midterms this year. In less than a week, they’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices.

The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. So as we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’ve been partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for a series of weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms.

Previously, we dug into the ways both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, the politics of high costs, and the changing mood toward Israel. This week, for our final installment, we’re tackling something a little more fundamental: the integrity and security of the voting process itself. It’s a worrying subject, but by no means a hopeless one. Let’s get into it.

The surprising resilience of America’s elections

Let me begin with a metaphor that may or may not reassure you: Imagine there’s a serial killer outside your house, and they’re trying to get in and kill you.

That’s pretty terrifying, under any circumstance. But also: Your house is an absolute vault. You have reinforced steel doors. You have good locks on all the windows. And the police are actually on its way now.

“I don’t want to understate the threat” of election interference, Benjy Sarlin, Vox’s editorial director of politics said when he relayed this metaphor on the America, Actually podcast last month. But if Trump is the serial killer trying America’s doors and windows…then understand this house is pretty well-defended.

Take mail voting, the issue that has so (literally) moved Democrats this year. You’ll recall that Trump tried to sabotage the practice by implementing new, last-minute rules that would have effectively canceled mail-in voting in some places.

But the Constitution clearly assigns the power to regulate and administer elections to the states and Congress, and courts blocked the administration’s rules. In mid-September, the Supreme Court declined to let them take effect for this election. So there’s one lock made good.

The Trump administration has also demanded unprecedented access to states’ voter rolls, suing 30 states and Washington, DC, to obtain them. Of those cases, courts have dismissed 27 of them (though many dismissals are being appealed).

Earlier this month, the DOJ went further and demanded that California officials set aside the ballots of some 20,000 registered voters that it alleged were likely noncitizens. In the predictable legal battle that followed, courts sided with the state. A federal judge excoriated the administration in an opinion on Wednesday, ruling that the ballot segregation order “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election.” The Trump administration has already appealed the ruling.

Other forms of meddling are possible. Asked in August about declaring a national emergency to impose new voting requirements, Trump replied — unnervingly — that “stranger things have happened.” And the president and his allies have floated drastic measures like deploying federal agents to polling sites or seizing “suspect” ballots, a threat tangible enough that it’s reportedly unsettled a number of FBI agents.

Just last week, the Trump administration attempted to preemptively contest the results in Alaska’s Senate race, claiming that the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot — the incumbent Republican and an independent newcomer — risked confusing voters. The New York Times has since reported that Democrats enticed Dan Sullivan 2.0 to run for exactly that reason. In some corners, the ensuing scandal has raised concerns that Republicans could refuse to seat Democrat Mary Peltola if she wins.

But even that possibility is fairly remote. While there are mechanisms for both state officials and US lawmakers to challenge election results, those procedures are pretty regimented. And any attempts to disrupt voting, vote-counting, or the certification of results would likely face both a flood of lawsuits (which voting groups have already prepped) and a public outcry that could ultimately and lastingly hurt Republicans.

Trump might not care overmuch about democratic norms or the rule of law, but he does likely care about the risks of a longer-term political backlash. To this day, Benjy said, a lot of Republicans still blame Trump for losing them Georgia’s Senate seats: His election denialism after 2020 helped drive huge numbers of Black Georgians to the polls, where they voted in two Democrats.

The number of Democrats voting early and in-person suggests the possibility that a similar dynamic is at play now. In other words, there is real risk — but lots of people are fighting to keep the proverbial bad guys out.

Races to watch:

• Alaska Senate race, where Trump is ready to contest a Democratic win;

• Wisconsin governor’s race, where Republican Tom Tiffany has promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election;

• Nevada’s secretary of state race, which could similarly put an outspoken election denier in charge of the state’s voting system.

More from Vox:

• How election officials are thinking about Trump’s threat to the midterms

• The one thing everyone can do to fight for free and fair elections

• Trump has a plan to steal the midterms. It will probably fail.

• Historic election: Deb Haaland’s bid to become New Mexico’s governor could make history, as Indigenous candidates across the country make record gains in this year’s elections.

• Delivery giant: DoorDash’s $17 billion bid for Instacart would bring two major delivery platforms under one roof as they face growing competition from Walmart and Amazon.

• On the podcast: Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat for Senate since 1988. James Talarico has a shot, but Republicans have launched a full culture war to try to prevent it. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Turn on the (early morning) lights. It’s getting darker earlier and earlier these days, and it’s often pitch black when my alarm goes off. That means it’s time for an annual tradition: digging out my bulky, 10,000-lux light box. Bright morning light, from a box or the sun, sets your body’s internal clock and helps regulate your sleep. It can also mitigate seasonal affective disorder, which starts plaguing many sufferers around Halloween.

• Did you know…that there’s an extremely rare and spooky form of lightning that can appear indoors? It’s called “ball lightning,” and it’s one of the most mysterious weather phenomena in the world.

• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the vast Andean empire that ruled from its capital in Cusco? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you where you might find an arroyo. These seasonally dry streambeds cut through deserts, where they can serve as a “highway” for wild animals.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, watch campaign ads until we can't, and endeavor to up our small talk game by asking better questions. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again.

He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.

Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)

The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”

Why Epstein is everywhere this election

When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans.

That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations.

But the Epstein story has lodged in the brains of some voters who helped elect Trump — including young voters whose growing disillusionment could make a big difference in next week’s elections.

Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office.

Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.”

Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.)

Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.)

These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations.

Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.

• Remembering Huerta: Dolores Huerta, a pioneering labor organizer who helped win better conditions for farmworkers and championed immigrants’ and women’s rights, has died at 96.

• Spanish crash: Two high-speed trains collided in central Spain, killing at least 68 people and suspending rail service between Madrid and southern Spain.

• On the podcast: MAGA-aligned conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance, are trying to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s image. That’s evidence of where they want to take their party. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious.

• Did you know…that concrete is the second-most-used material on Earth? (The first is water!) Mixing and pouring concrete is responsible for a huge share of global emissions, but there are efforts underway to make it more sustainable.

• Today’s trivia: An arroyo is a stream — or at least, a streambed — found in what type of environment? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield. That would be Odie, whose look evolved over the years as illustrator Jim Davis sought to distinguish him from his iconic canine rival Snoopy.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, parse the implications of Israel's elections, and (cautiously!) ask a chatbot to optimize our investments. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

Another day, another hugely consequential foreign election. (If you’re wondering why all the world seems to be voting now, there’s no conspiracy — it’s largely coincidence!)

Today we’re jetting off to Israel, where voters turned out in record numbers for what some analysts have called the most important legislative election in the country’s history. It’s an election that will determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stays in power — and could shape the future of Israeli democracy.

These are, after all, the first national elections since the October 7, 2023, attacks, and they’re a referendum on everything that’s happened since: the devastating war in Gaza, the widening conflict across the Middle East, and Netanyahu’s attacks on independent watchdogs, foreign media, and his political opposition.

Both Netanyahu and the opposition have depicted the election in existential terms. Quite literally, in some cases. Campaign banners for Netanyahu’s Likud party warned Israelis that they could cast a vote for a right-wing party…or for Palestine. Opposition leaders, meanwhile, are framing the election as a fight to preserve Israeli democracy.

Israel at a crossroads

Some of you, I realize, may question whether Israel qualifies as a democracy at all, given its treatment of Palestinians. Listen: I appreciate the complexity here! That complexity is central to the stakes of this election.

Israeli democracy — whatever its asterisks — faces both an immediate threat and a more foundational problem. The immediate threat is, of course, Netanyahu and his more authoritarian impulses. A record seventh term would give him more time to weaken checks on his power.

The foundational problem, meanwhile, concerns who gets a say in how Israel is governed. The state rules over Palestinians who cannot vote in its national elections, while its own Arab citizens — who make up one-fifth of the population — face well-documented discrimination in areas including housing, land use, and family reunification. That marginalization also shows up in politics. Both Netanyahu and several opposition leaders have vowed not to work with Israel’s Arab parties to form a governing coalition.

But that’s where this election could get interesting. Under Israel’s parliamentary system, Israelis essentially vote for a party, and parliamentary seats are allocated proportionally. Aligned parties then band together to try to form a coalition that can command the majority of parliamentary seats.

A Netanyahu coalition would likely include, for instance, a number of right-wing, nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, while an opposition coalition would likely include Jewish parties from the left, center, and center-right.

Either bloc could win enough seats today to govern without additional partners. (Polls closed at 4 pm ET, and we’ll have a fuller picture as the evening goes on.) But if the opposition falls short, it might need support from one or more of the Arab parties that some of its leading figures have lately sworn off.

Should no one form a governing coalition, Israelis may have to vote again. But more importantly, for our purposes, the debate over partnering with Arab parties goes back to that “deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy,” as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp once put it.

As Zack argues, most Israeli Jews want to live in a democracy — but paradoxically, they want to live in a democracy that privileges some citizens over others. Netanyahu has tried to resolve that paradox by weakening Israel’s democratic institutions.

Today’s election and its aftermath could show whether there’s appetite in Israel for a very different, pro-democratic approach. Democracy is 2-0 this week! We’ll soon see if it puts a third win on the board.

• Coral crisis: A new study found that nearly all of the world’s coral reef ecosystems face a high risk of collapse within 50 years as ocean temperatures rise.

• Billionaires fight back: Some of Silicon Valley’s richest people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat a proposed tax on billionaires in California.

• On the podcast: Trump’s recent moves seem to pit the US squarely on the side of Russia rather than Ukraine. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Treat your bot banker with care. Research shows that AI tools like ChatGPT dispense pretty good financial advice, on the whole. But you should still approach these tools with caution. Sharing specific financial information with a chatbot raises privacy concerns, and chatbots are not licensed or regulated the way human advisors or accountants are. Think of them as financially savvy friends: helpful…but fallible!

• Did you know...that a desire to please other people is one of the most common reasons people tell lies? It’s more common than lying for both personal gain or pleasure.

• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the first predominantly white community in the US to vote in favor of school integration. That would be Teaneck, New Jersey, which in 1964 began bussing all of its sixth-grade students to a new central school building.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

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Milos Milanovic/AFP via Getty Images

In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, let the edges of our cynicism melt just a smidge, and make an argument for big life changes. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

Vox isn’t typically in the business of covering elections in far-flung locales like the central Balkans. (No offense whatsoever to anyone from the central Balkans!) But on Sunday, an insurgent student-backed movement in Serbia successfully toppled the country’s ruling right-wing political machine, creating an unexpected opening for democratic reform.

Then, in another upset halfway around the globe, Brazilian voters reelected incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over his far-right challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro. “Democracy always, dictatorship never again,” Lula said in his victory speech.

That’s two big repudiations of the nationalist right in 24 hours. Not quite enough to declare a trend, maybe, but sufficient to remind us that there’s still hope for the world’s embattled democratic institutions.

More than that, these results offer evidence of something that sounds naive and Pollyannish in our current moment, but can (apparently!) still prove true: Organizing can be a powerful force for electoral change — both abroad and maybe here at home.

Some good news for democracy that nobody saw coming

To be fair, the two elections differed considerably, and I don’t want to suggest it’s all sunshine and democratic renewal ahead for Brazil and Serbia. Bolsonaro is refusing to concede, for instance. And in Serbia, the victorious Student List still has to stand up a government, a prime minister, and a full policy platform — something the nascent movement has never done before.

But academics and elections-watchers in both countries have credited the results in large part to mass protests and grassroots organizing that helped mobilize unexpected numbers of voters.

Serbian students began their movement in 2024, following the partial collapse of a railway station that killed 16 people. The government’s failure to fully explain the cause of the collapse — or hold anyone responsible — fueled months of marches, protest bike rides, and other demonstrations. That movement eventually grew into the Student List: an opposition electoral slate that fielded 250 candidates in Sunday’s parliamentary elections.

The story in Brazil is quite different. Lula, the country’s leftist president, was actually poised to lose. Brazil uses a two-round popular vote to elect its president, and if no candidate secures more than half the vote in the first round, then the top two candidates proceed to a runoff election. Lula placed second in that first vote, after Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the heir to his father’s far-right political movement.

To many Brazilians, that second-place finish served as a kind of wake-up call. “No runoff campaign in Brazil has ever brought so many people to the streets and onto social media,” Guilherme Casarões, an associate professor of Brazilian studies at Florida International University, wrote in an analysis of the surprise results. One WhatsApp channel dedicated to turning voters out for Lula grew to nearly 11 million followers, up from just 50,000 after his first-round loss.

Looking at these projects abroad, I’m struck that American pro-democracy movements like No Kings haven’t achieved that kind of influence. Arguably, that’s in part a consequence of their failure to turn protest energy into actual political organizing — things like registering voters, knocking on doors, and fielding candidates.

But there are some signs that may be shifting. No Kings has lately pivoted its focus, for instance, from mostly organizing protests to urging Americans — of both parties — to vote in the midterms. And Indivisible, one of the groups behind the movement, claims that early voting surged during the latest protests in the zip codes where they occurred.

It’s not exactly a central Balkan moment, but maybe it’s a hint of things to come. Elections can surprise you, after all. Just ask a Serb or a Brazilian.

• AI IPO: Anthropic is preparing for a potential record-breaking IPO as questions grow about whether the AI boom can last.

• Redistricting regret: Republicans redrew congressional maps to help protect their House majority, but they’re now pouring millions into races they thought they’d win easily.

• On the podcast: Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in over 90 years, but moderate pastor Adam Hamilton might break the losing streak. And his approach to religion could help Democrats around the country. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Leave your big life decisions to chance. (Sort of.) A team of researchers invited people to make a big life decision by flipping a coin and then tracked their happiness with the outcome. They found that, of the people who obeyed the results of the toss, the ones who changed something big were overwhelmingly happier. That doesn’t literally mean we should all resort to coin tosses, but it should tell us something important: We often tend to be too cautious about making major changes.

• Did you know…that in the 1870s and ’80s, spectators flocked to Madison Square Garden for long-distance walking competitions? Athletes walked up to 600 miles in six days, just going round and round the stadium.

• Today’s trivia: Which New Jersey city was the first predominantly white community in the US to vote in favor of school integration? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the radioactive noble gas with the chemical symbol Rn. That would be radon, once a trendy (deadly) ingredient in quack medicines.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, offer some cybersecurity tips to fend off the AI cyber-pocalypse, and ask whether it’s still possible to ban gerrymandering. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at cameron.peters@voxmedia.com.

Are we living through “Black October”? Maybe, according to cybersecurity experts who are raising the alarm about AI’s increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching hacking abilities.

This week alone has seen a string of alarming incidents where AI uncovered previously unknown security flaws deep in the infrastructure of the internet. The most concerning involves something called PHP — a programming language that, according to The Atlantic, is used by “as much as 70 percent of websites.” Cybersecurity researchers used AI to locate a major security breach in the technology.

It’s the kind of thing that, when it’s working, is practically invisible. When it stops, though, you really notice it: Government websites in the UK and Europe briefly went down earlier this week after the PHP vulnerability was discovered, as did some sites in the Wikipedia family, the Internet Archive, and many others.

The outages weren’t actually the result of a hack, but rather preventative action as web engineers took sites down to fix the vulnerability before it was exploited. But not every PHP-like issue will necessarily be uncovered before it can be exploited by someone using AI tools less ethically, and older websites relying on PHP might go unpatched.

The problem doesn’t stop there, either: Concern is also rising around AI cybersecurity risks to ubiquitous conveniences like online banking. As Axios reported on Thursday, banks are detecting more and more “unauthorized third-party AI agents” operating inside of their systems.

Those agents are mostly unauthorized by the banks, Axios explains — the holders of the bank account might have given them permission — but it still creates a security risk that executives described as “horrifying,” in part because banks can’t necessarily tell if an agent doesn’t have permission.

It’s a lot to take in, all of it moving extremely quickly, and it’s hard to tell what any of us can do about it as AI labs continue to forge ahead with ever more competent AI models and agents. Luckily, my colleague Adam Clark Estes has some simple recommendations to shore up your own cybersecurity.

How do I respond right now?

One problem with hackers — even those that happen to be AI agents — is that they can be unpredictable. You won’t know to, say, lock down your Quest Diagnostics records before a breach happens. But whenever you find yourself wondering if your data is safe, that’s a good time to double check that you’ve at least covered your bases.

The National Cybersecurity Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to the safe use of technology, maintains a list of basic online safety practices that everyone should follow. In no particular order, here’s what to pay attention to now:

1. Keep your guard up. AI makes it difficult to know the difference between humans and robots. It’s a fact of life in the year 2026. So be extra careful to avoid engaging in potential phishing scams. Don’t reply to unknown texts, and do due diligence on texts or emails that look like they’re from people you know but just seem off. Don’t click weird links. Don’t give out personal info over the phone, even if it sounds like it’s someone you know. They might be scammers using AI to clone a loved one’s voice.

2. Update your software. Yes, it’s annoying to pause your phone or computer use for a few minutes to update your software, but this is one of the best ways to get rid of vulnerabilities. Companies like Apple and Google employ huge teams of security experts to spot these in their software and fix them with software updates. Do the updates.

3. Use a password manager or, even better, passkeys. Each of your online accounts should have a unique password that’s at least 16 characters. Yes, it’s impossible to remember that many passwords, so you should also use a password manager like 1Password or the app built into your iPhone or Android device.

4. Turn on multifactor authentication. Just in case you don’t already do it, make sure you use multifactor or two-step authentication for all your accounts, including email and social media. It can be annoying to type in a code or check your email while logging in, but hackers, including AI agents, will have a much harder time getting into your accounts if you take this step.

Taking all these measures is not a one-time affair. You have to be vigilant in keeping yourself safe online. Security experts have a term for this that’s almost too specific: cyber hygiene. Like brushing your teeth or taking a shower, take good care of your online life, and do it often.

• Election lawsuit: The Justice Department wants to block Alaska from certifying its US Senate election results if a similarly named candidate’s votes change the outcome of the race.

• Cancer vaccine: A new mRNA vaccine for the deadliest form of skin cancer, melanoma, could reduce the risk by nearly half.

• On the podcast: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pressured food companies like Mars, which makes M&M’s, to stop using artificial dyes. Easier said than done. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Is it still possible to ban gerrymandering? The current US Supreme Court is very, very hostile to getting politics out of congressional map-making. But if Democrats win back power, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. My colleague Ian Millhiser gamed out how they could do it in a way that survives the Court — as well as some approaches that almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But, he writes, the real trick will be finding a solution that functions the way Congress wants it to and can’t be exploited by mapmakers.

• Did you know…that the disease multiple sclerosis is misdiagnosed with surprising frequency? As many as 15 percent of diagnoses could be false positives — including that of Christina Applegate, who found out this week that she does not have MS despite a 2021 diagnosis.

• Today’s trivia: Which noble gas is radioactive and has the chemical symbol Rn? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked what the plural was for multiple Toyota hybrids. That would be Prii, which Toyota officially confirmed in 2011 after holding a vote.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Cameron Peters, and by senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at cameron.peters@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, check in on the fast-approaching midterm elections, and autopsy the decline of America's vegan dining movement. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

Israel felt inescapable in the midterm primaries, especially for Democrats, where centrists and progressives clashed — memorably! — over military aid, Gaza, and (of course) AIPAC.

But with the Election Day almost upon us, the subject seems less prominent. When I Googled “Israel US elections” this morning, all the top results concerned next week’s Israeli parliamentary elections.

In less than two weeks, however, Americans will also head to the polls. They’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits.

As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Previously, we dug into how both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, and the politics of high costs. This week, we’re tackling Americans’ growing disillusionment with Israel — and how that will (or won’t) show up at the midterm ballot box.

What a blue wave would mean for Israel

You know the first part of this story already, because we’ve discussed it quite a lot: Americans’ views of Israel have nosedived over the past 18 months.

That shift helped shape the Democratic primaries and will likely figure prominently in the coming presidential contest. But how much Israel matters in a general midterm election, to people outside the political left…well, November will really test that.

Voters rarely rank Israel policy among their top priorities. In a poll that the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted earlier this month, about 80 percent of registered voters said Congress should highly prioritize the cost of living during its next term, and roughly 70 percent said the same about ending the Iran war. By comparison, less than a third of voters said they prioritized cutting off aid to Israel.

There’s another way that Israel factors into US elections, of course — and that’s in fundraising. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has become one of the biggest spenders in US elections and a repeat flash point in this year’s Democratic primaries.

But in the general election, even AIPAC has been overshadowed by the GOP’s big-business donors, many of them in tech, who have given Republicans a historic spending advantage in this year’s contests. On Wednesday, the lobbying group actually announced it would no longer endorse political candidates or make direct campaign contributions.

In either case, whatever happens in the midterms won’t likely transform US policy toward Israel. President Donald Trump is still in charge of foreign policy, after all, and even if Democrats take back the House, they’ll have little ability to reverse his agenda.

But a Democratic majority would gain “new congressional tools to act on Israel-Palestine issues,” Hady Amr, the former US Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, wrote in a new analysis for Chatham House. Those tools aren’t flashy (think: hearings, funding restrictions, and reporting requirements), but they could certainly set the stage for a broader policy shift under a Democratic president.

Races to watch:

• Florida’s Senate race, where Democrat Angie Nixon has criticized her party’s ties to the pro-Israel lobby;

• Michigan’s Senate race, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign grew out of pro-Palestinian activism;

• Michigan’s (deeply purple) Seventh District, where progressive William Lawrence has vocally criticized US support for Israel.

More from Vox:

• The left is winning the argument on aid to Israel. The next step will be harder.

• The first true swing-state test for the Bernie left

• What American Jews want from the midterms

• MAGA recession: Trump merchandise sales are falling, with at least four stores closing this year as demand for MAGA gear declines.

• Record weather: The developing El Niño could reach record strength this winter, with the UN warning of extreme weather and humanitarian consequences across multiple continents.

• On the podcast: The first midterms to feature AI slop ads are also on track to be the most expensive ever. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Gather ye roast spuds while ye may. Vegan restaurants appear to be experiencing a downturn of sorts: According to one online directory, the number of establishments fell from 1,717 last October to 1,509 now. But the news isn’t entirely or unambiguously bad. One added pressure on plant-based restauranters, for instance, is growing competition from mainstream restaurants that have started offering vegan dishes.

• Did you know…that North America’s largest wind farm has more than 900 turbines, each as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and encompasses an area roughly the size of Chicago? It just came online in June.

• Today’s trivia: What’s the plural of Prius, as in Toyota’s hybrid hatchback car? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked after the definition of the word “cartomancy.” That’s the practice of fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. Witchy!

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, quantify America's political nastiness, and attempt to embody the disappearing virtue of civility, ourselves. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

There are low blows, and then there are rock-bottom blows. The latest attack ad in the Ohio governor’s race is undoubtedly the latter.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is spending $4 million to air a 60-second spot, which features the long-estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton, repeatedly calling her daughter a liar as somber instrumental music plays in the background.

The accusation is pretty dark, given the circumstances of Acton and her mother’s estrangement. Acton has disclosed in interviews that she was sexually abused by her stepfather between the ages of 10 and 12 — an allegation backed up by actual, contemporaneous evidence.

Police and court documents obtained by the Associated Press show that Acton’s stepfather was arrested and charged with her rape in July 1978, when she was 12 years old; he left the state after posting bond and died in Pennsylvania in 2004 without facing trial.

According to both Acton and her mother, who remained married to Acton’s stepfather until his death, the two haven’t spoken in the almost 50 years. But that rift didn’t deter Acton’s mother from insisting, in the new Ramaswamy ad, that Acton had “lied her entire life” and was unfit to serve as governor. And it certainly hasn’t prevented Ramaswamy’s campaign from trumpeting the ad as proof that Acton is a “serial fabulist.”

The political upside of being awful

This may be the ugliest ad in what has arguably become the country’s ugliest midterm election. Even before this latest attack, Ohio Republicans had branded Acton “violent” and “unstable,” sometimes portraying her as a drunk or a horror-movie character. One longtime political observer in the state called the tenor of the campaign “alarming,” noting that Ohio is no stranger to negative ads — but that this cycle’s ads were markedly more personal.

That’s not just an Ohio phenomenon, either. In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has faced nonstop attacks on his religion, including accusations that he belongs to an Islamic terrorist group. In Texas, Republicans have variously suggested that Senate candidate James Talarico is effeminate, gay, transgender…and/or pedophilic.

Broader studies of how politicians communicate also suggest that political rhetoric in the US has grown measurably more negative over time. One new paper, published last month in the journal American Political Science Review, analyzed 4.7 million tweets, 2.4 million Facebook posts, and 184,000 email newsletters written by members of Congress between 2009 and 2022. Across three channels, the researchers found, the vibes grew increasingly partisan and negative.

That isn’t to suggest that US political rhetoric is the worst it’s ever been. (We had a Civil War in this country, after all.) But it’s certainly the worst it’s been since I’ve been old enough to vote, and there’s no reason to hope that it’ll slow down.

President Donald Trump is part of the problem: When he first began campaigning for the White House more than 10 years ago, he adopted a bare-knuckled tone that helped shift rhetorical norms in US politics. It would appear they never shifted back.

But social media also bears some blame, the research suggests. Across platforms, political posts that skew partisan and negative tend to attract the most engagement — a powerful currency in modern politics. In one study published in 2022 that analyzed posts to X, formerly Twitter, between 2009 and 2019, researchers found not only that “uncivil” tweets earned the most engagement, but that politicians who got lots of likes and retweets on their nasty posts went on to make more of them.

That might help explain, in part, why many Republican officials seem undaunted — even emboldened — by the blowback to this new Ramaswamy ad. The ad might be “dastardly” and “pretty damn low,” as critics have put it. But for some politicians, the outrage may be well worth the attention.

• Surprise decision: The Supreme Court has declined to let the Trump administration end gender-affirming care for transgender people in federal prisons.

• New park dropped: Chiricahua National Monument is now Arizona’s fourth national park, joining the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Saguaro.

• On the podcast: Can Trump deport Ilhan Omar? His playbook for going after his enemies is evolving. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Notice the change you want to see in the world. The hostility in our politics can feel overwhelming. Depressing. Utterly insolvable. But you can advance the cause of civility by not only modeling respect and consideration in your own interactions, but also noting those behaviors in other people. “Looking for the good moments of behavior that you see out in the world, starts to remind you that they’re there,” one etiquette expert told Vox. Think of it as a small antidote to hopelessness.

• Did you know…that elephants are one of the few animals to show interest in their dead? They frequently linger, and sometimes become agitated, around the remains of other elephants.

• Today’s trivia: Cartomancy is a form of what seasonally relevant practice? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the currency of Poland. That would be the złoty, which — as of this writing — is worth about 26 cents.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, ask ourselves what American power is for, and read a (moderately uplifting?) book about being miserable. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back.

There was that time he panned the Ukrainian president as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, the president blamed his Ukrainian counterpart for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations.

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion.

The true cost of abandoning Ukraine

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to United Nations monitors.

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries.

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (...primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections.

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.)

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again.

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land.

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends.

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess.

• Farm bail: Trump is offering farmers $8 billion in aid as diesel prices hit record highs and rising fuel costs squeeze farms.

• Europe’s youth revolt: Italy is deploying 500 soldiers to Milan after weekend clashes left shops vandalized and looted, while France prepares for another round of demonstrations following violent riots.

• On the podcast: Passive income influencers promise financial freedom with very little work. But these side hustles might just be the new pyramid schemes. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them.

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists.

• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, get "Do You Hear the People Sing?" stuck in our heads, and contemplate a job change for the AI apocalypse. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

French protests have long been the stuff of legend, literature, and Broadway musicals. But even by those storied standards, last weekend’s demonstrations were pretty remarkable.

More than half a million people took to the streets in occasionally violent protests that are posing a mounting political challenge for the French government. The movement began roughly a month ago over concerns about the sorry state of public high schools, which are frequently underfunded and understaffed.

But in the weeks since, the student protests have rapidly expanded to encompass a wider range of grievances around inequality, high living costs and public services. The ranks of the protesters have also swelled to include some more opportunistic looters and agitators.

In Paris, masked rioters trashed businesses and set fires, while students blocked the Louvre Museum on Monday, forcing it to close. In Limoges, a city of roughly 130,000 people, the spire of a 19th-century town hall dramatically collapsed in flames.

The national government has responded with curfews for parts of cities including Paris, Nice, and Lille, as well as emphatic condemnations of the violence. In a televised address on Sunday night, French President Emmanuel Macron also promised to partner with students, teachers, trade unions and other groups to identify “joint solutions.”

But it’s unclear what solutions could possibly speak to the whole of this newly expanded movement. The initial student protesters were after concrete educational reforms, like smaller class sizes and less chaotic schedules. The demands now are more diffuse and disjointed, reflecting the sense that — as Macron himself put it — “there is no desirable future” for young people in France. It’s a situation that the French far right is already exploiting, just six months before the country’s next presidential election.

The French art of protesting

If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu here — that’s French for “already seen,” FYI — please know you have good reason. The French also turned out for gigantic mass protests against a proposed retirement age increase three years ago. And a gas-tax hike five years before that. Some historians trace French protest culture all the way back to the 1300s.

While it’s not necessarily true that the French demonstrate more than people in other Western countries, their protests do tend to attract outsize global attention. Youth protests over education, living costs, and government corruption have also recently taken place in Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Albania, for instance. I’d hazard that you’ve heard less about them.

But there’s a twofold explanation for why France’s protests loom so large. First, protest occupies a special place in French history and culture — and the world knows it. As one political scientist explained in a 1994 paper on the history of French protests, the French have an unusual, centuries-long track record of turning demonstrations into actual political change, arguably starting with the French Revolution.

More recently, in 1968, student protests expanded into a larger worker strike that nearly toppled the government. Many of today’s young protesters have specifically referenced that heritage in interviews and slogans.

But that’s not the only reason that French people always seem to be protesting. Conditions in France are also, well … pretty protestable. Consider just the narrow issue of public education, which sparked the current hullabaloo.

By some estimates, higher-education funding per student has fallen by 20 percent in just the past 10 years. High school classrooms are frequently overcrowded, and a government report cited by The Guardian concluded that the country’s aging schools are in need of billions of dollars of building repairs and climate mitigation.

The government has pointed to France’s strained finances as a constraint on addressing these issues. (And, in fairness, France’s finances are indeed very strained.) There’s a sense, however, that young people are bearing the cost of that crisis more than other populations. Cost-cutting measures that would affect older people — such as raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 — have been delayed in the face of fierce opposition. And by “opposition,” of course, I mean protests.

• Musk bucks: Elon Musk says he’ll give a SpaceX share to every American child in 2027, as tech companies face growing scrutiny over AI.

• Holmes movie: You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, had the biggest opening for a documentary in more than 20 years.

• On the podcast: Maine Sen. Susan Collins has dodged decades of attacks, but President Donald Trump’s low approval ratings could be her political deathblow. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Make your AI fallback plan. Artificial intelligence will cost many people their jobs; in some places, it already has. But instead of panic-learning the first available trade, first consider where you find meaning in your current occupation. That should help guide you to a fallback career that will still feel valuable, even if it’s…you know. Not your first pick. My colleague Sigal says she’d become a rabbi; I think I’d like to teach again.

• Did you know…that a single episode of Sex and the City is credited with launching the early aughts cupcake craze? Today’s food trends are much shorter-lived, by comparison. And they typically start on TikTok or Instagram.

• Today’s trivia: What mass-market, imported beer is named for a river in the Netherlands? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. That would be Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who also preached at President Donald Trump’s childhood church and officiated his first wedding.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we look at why the latest economic data is bad news for Republicans in general — and Susan Collins in particular. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at eric.levitz@voxmedia.com.

Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has saddled his party with no shortage of political liabilities — from the mass pardons of January 6 convictions to ICE killings of US citizens to questionable Reflecting Pool redesign choices.

For voters, however, there is one stain on Trump’s record more unsightly than all the rest: his failure to reduce Americans’ cost of living.

As the midterm campaign enters its home stretch, Americans’ expenses are rising — and the GOP’s prospects are consequently dimming.

Last month, consumer prices were 3.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier, according to a Consumer Price Index report released on Wednesday. That represented an acceleration in the inflation rate, one driven largely by skyrocketing fuel prices: Gasoline was 9.1 percent more expensive in September than it had been in August. As a result, America’s average real wage has fallen by 44 cents since January.

In less than three weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, this newsletter is partnering with our colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Last week, we tackled the data center backlash. And this week, we’re digging into affordability.

The ever-rising price of Trump's affordability blunder

These upward trends in prices aren’t lost on voters. In a recent Pew Research survey, just 21 percent of Americans said economic conditions were “excellent” or “good” — while 65 percent said that Trump’s policies had made the economy worse.

The high cost of living is weighing on Republican candidates in all battleground races. Maine provides just one example of how potent the issue could prove on Election Day.

From one angle, the state’s Senate race might seem like a gimme for Democrats. Kamala Harris won Maine by nearly 7 points in 2024. Thus, in 2026 — when Democrats are poised to win in a national landslide — one might expect the party to easily triumph.

But Republican incumbent Susan Collins is an unusually formidable foe. The race has been a dead heat, with Democratic nominee Troy Jackson leading by just 2 points in a recent Suffolk University poll.

Fortunately for Jackson, Mainers’ energy bills are expected to soar in the campaign’s final weeks, plausibly increasing voters’ appetite for change in the process.

Maine is America’s second coldest state and unusually reliant on oil for home heat. As autumn advances, its residents will use more heating oil, thereby driving up both their personal bills and market prices. Thanks to the global energy crunch, a gallon of such fuel is already nearly twice as expensive as it was this time last year.

Jackson has been hitting Collins on the issue relentlessly. That could put a chill in Collins’s reelection odds — and thus, the GOP’s hopes of retaining Senate control.

➨ Other races to watch:

• Similar dynamics are playing out in perennially icy Alaska, where Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has hammered incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan for his complicity in sky-high diesel prices, which many Alaskans use for home heat.

• In Ohio’s Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown has tried to pin rising electricity bills on Republican Sen. Jon Husted, due to his support for data center development.

• And in Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has attacked his Republican rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for supporting “this disastrous war in Iran that’s driving up our costs.”

• A brief ceasefire ends: Ukrainian drones attacked a Russian oil refinery early Thursday, days after Trump demanded both Russia and Ukraine halt such attacks.

• Execution livestream canceled: Trump canceled a plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad.

• On the podcast: A recent rash of violence between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis threatens to destabilize the region — and make the Iran war much larger. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Rethink confidence. Research shows confidence is good for your job and good for your romantic prospects. Unsurprisingly, then, a whole industry has sprung up teaching people to be more confident. One writer signed up to work with a confidence coach for the first time, and ended up doubting that her self-doubt was all that bad.

• Did you know… there are four state laws regarding real estate and paranormal activity in the US? That’s because purported hauntings are just one of many factors that can affect home prices.

• Today’s trivia: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games. That would be the cowbell.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Eric Levitz. Thanks for reading! Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at eric.levitz@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, learn from our immunological mistakes, and embrace the sharing economy. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

Flu season is starting earlier than usual this year, which I know from reviewing federal data. But I also know it because I woke up with body aches and chills last night, mere days before I’d planned to get my flu vaccination (!).

Already, some parts of the country are seeing levels of flu activity typically associated with late fall or early winter. In Washington state, for instance, doctors are reporting seeing as much flu now as they usually would around Christmas.

Flu activity overall is still low, to be clear. But as of October 7, infections were rising in all 50 states. And flu is spreading before many people — like, say, me — have received their annual vaccine.

Epidemiologists don’t yet know why the flu arrived early this year, or why cases first started rising in Western states like Washington, California, and Nevada. It’s possible that a mutation is helping this year’s flu variants evade existing immunity, one virologist told NPR. International travel could play a role, too: Flu cases also spiked early in Japan and other parts of Asia.

We don’t need to know why the flu arrived early to take some basic precautions, though. So today, we’re talking through some practical tips for coping with an early flu season.

How to fight an early flu season

An early flu season doesn’t necessarily mean a worse season — but even a moderate season can do serious damage. Last year, influenza sent hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital and caused tens of thousands of deaths, including almost 200 among children.

The first and best way to avoid those kinds of harms is by getting the flu shot, which reduces the risk of serious illness by an average of 40 to 60 percent. In the US, people aged 6 months and older are typically told to get the vaccine by October’s end.

In light of the early onset, however (it takes two weeks to build up full immunity), you might instead want to get your shot ASAP.

There are some everyday precautions you can take, too — many of them familiar from the Covid-19 era. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, for slightly longer than feels appropriate. Mask when you’re sick or might encounter someone else who is.

And don’t neglect the good habits that support your overall health: getting enough sleep, drinking a lot of water, and eating a balanced diet. (There’s very little evidence for trendier interventions, like supplements, saunas, cold plunges, or the infused herbal baths that my kooky former yoga teacher used to recommend.)

If you do get flu symptoms, reach out to your doctor early — especially if you’re older, pregnant, immunocompromised, or otherwise at higher risk for complications. Prescription antiviral medications, like Tamiflu, prevent the flu virus from spreading inside your body so that your immune system can clear it. But they work best within 48 hours of symptom onset.

To be clear, you needn’t take my word on any of this; I’m just another voice in the public health cacophony! Besides, recent polling suggests that my particular voice — that is, the voice of someone who works in media — is not quite as persuasive as it used to be. (Ditto medical websites and government health agencies.)

But if you have doubts or questions about vaccines, there is someone much closer to home you can consult: Ask your doctor (or nurse or pharmacist) about the flu shot’s risks and benefits. They’re best positioned to break the science down and apply it to your health. In hindsight, mine surely would have told me to stop delaying my shot for a more convenient weekend.

• Voting clash: The Justice Department threatened legal action against California unless officials review a list of suspected noncitizen voters and hold their ballots until their citizenship is verified.

• Living costs: Social Security benefits will rise 3.6 percent next year as persistent inflation continues to strain retirees’ budgets.

• On the podcast: Data centers have maybe the worst image in America right now. Enter the public relations professionals. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Get creative in the fight against inflation. The latest inflation numbers are out today, and they are pretty bad. The cost of many goods and services is rising more quickly than both consumers’ incomes and economists’ expectations. For me, this news brought to mind a question that Vox’s former personal finance columnist tackled a few years ago: Namely, am I cursed to keep spending more money on more things forever?! Her answer was essentially “yes,” but she offered a few ways to help offset those costs: things like moving to a cheaper area or pooling resources via initiatives like tool libraries and community gardens.

• Did you know…that Colombia is home to almost 20 percent of all the avian species on Earth? That’s the most of any country, at nearly 2,000 birds.

• Today’s trivia: Which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the name of the 2025 Pixar film set in the “Communiverse.” That would be Elio, a movie you may well never have heard of: It had the worst opening weekend of any Pixar film, ever.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, tally the score in Trump's quest for revenge, and throw our Fitbits into the ocean. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

When life gives you lemons, make it rain. Or…something like that! On Tuesday morning, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar launched a fundraising drive in response to the Trump administration’s unusual predawn raid of her Washington, DC, residence.

The raid, which went down Monday, is reportedly part of a criminal investigation into Omar’s immigration history. The Democratic Congress member was born in Somalia and came to the US as a child, becoming a naturalized citizen in 2000 at age 17.

Omar has since become one of the most prominent progressive voices in Congress and a regular thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, who on Monday called her “terrible” and “totally crooked.” Vice President JD Vance has similarly claimed, without evidence, that Omar “committed immigration fraud.” On Monday, the New York Post reported that the investigation may have sprung from mistakes Omar’s late father made while filling out her citizenship application roughly 30 years ago.

Needless to say, decades-old citizenship paperwork is not the kind of threat to public safety that typically commands the resources of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigations branch. (That same branch is charged with investigating transnational gangs and terrorists.)

And the raid is unusual for another reason, too: By longstanding practice, the Justice Department avoids taking any public steps in investigations involving political candidates within 60 days of an election. The midterms are just three weeks from now.

This investigation is unlikely to affect Omar in the midterms, however. In the words of her longshot Republican challenger, John Nagel, Minnesota’s Fifth District is among “the ‘bluest’…in the country.” The raid may have even galvanized Omar’s supporters, dozens of whom rallied at a Minneapolis park on Monday afternoon. Some held banners that read “we stand with Ilhan.” Another sign read, simply, “see you at the polls.”

The bigger project behind the Ilhan Omar raid

Omar now belongs to an unenviable and surprisingly populous club: political opponents of Trump whom his administration has threatened with criminal indictments and investigations.

I initially planned to list them out for you here, but then realized that list would be perilously long. By my back-of-the-envelope count, there are at least 30 Democratic politicians, public officials, and Trump-world defectors who have been accused of, investigated for, or charged with crimes during the second Trump administration.

It’s easy to forget the scale of that campaign, however, because many of these efforts have (thus far!) stalled out or collapsed. In several cases, the administration opened much-publicized and thinly supported investigations that have yet to yield charges. (See, for instance, the criminal probe into writer E. Jean Carroll or former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.)

In at least two cases — that of then-Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and several Minnesota officials — federal judges tossed out subpoenas for lack of evidence. And in one high-profile instance earlier this year, a grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress who released a video reminding soldiers to refuse illegal orders. The legal bar for issuing such an indictment is actually pretty low — which makes this grand jury’s refusal a telling rebuke of the administration.

But these judicial setbacks aren’t exactly reason for optimism. The federal court system is becoming increasingly partisan, and as long as Republicans hold the Senate, they’ll be able to stack it with ever-more conservative and deferential judges. And several of the most partisan judges already on the bench are “openly auditioning” for Supreme Court slots, as my colleague Ian Millhiser recently put it.

In other words, in the not-so-distant future, the court system may provide a weaker check on presidential overreach. And that’s bad news not only for the Ilhan Omars of the world...but also for American democracy.

• Guilfoyle out: Kimberly Guilfoyle has resigned as US ambassador to Greece after the White House asked her to step down.

• “The ship has sailed”: A new poll finds that voters doubt Trump can deliver on major promises or change their minds before Election Day.

• On the podcast: Cornell University’s president is wary of an outright ban, but the school’s sexual assault case has campuses around the country considering the question. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Turn off your sleep tracker. If your sleep hygiene and underlying health are both good, but you still struggle to catch enough ZZs, then you might actually want to tone down your quest for better sleep. “What you see in people with insomnia is that they’re trying too hard,” one sleep scientist told Vox. Analyzing your sleep scores and timing your naps can create anxiety that further fuels insomnia.

• Did you know…that Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper were all invented by 19th-century pharmacists? At the time, it was widely believed that carbonated water could cure illnesses. And sugary syrups made said water vastly more delicious.

• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the 2025 Pixar film set in the “Communiverse”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the three-letter successor of tube TVs. That would be LCD, which stands for liquid crystal display.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition, we check in on Hurricane Isaias mere hours before he's supposed to reach the US mainland, learn a better framework for thinking about all of the ongoing AI hype and hysteria, and get a disquieting update on the world's largest penguin colony. If you want to reach me directly, I’m at dylan.scott@vox.com.

The first hurricane of the fall season is expected to strike the Gulf Coast overnight, marking the latest onset of hurricane season in living memory. As of early Friday afternoon, Hurricane Isaias had grown to a Category 3 storm, with sustained winds of 120 miles per hour. It will strike along the shores of the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, and Mississippi, posing a threat to life and property for millions of Americans. Weather forecasters anticipate between 8 and 12 inches of rain in the areas near where the storm makes landfall.

Isaias’s imminent arrival signals the end of a period of unusual good luck when it comes to hurricanes striking the United States. Last year, no hurricanes reached the US mainland at all. And this year, Isaias is breaking a more than 100-year-old record: October 9 is the latest date since 1905 for the first Atlantic hurricane of the season to take shape. August and September have historically been the busiest periods of hurricane season.

Not lately, though. It’s a strange recent phenomenon, and it’s been even more fortuitous than it would ordinarily be. That’s because the Trump administration has slashed weather forecasting and emergency relief funding over the past two years, leaving us less prepared for a disaster.

And now our luck seems to be running out — with even more rough weather on the way.

Hurricane season may be quieter than usual — but El Niño is on the way

Here’s the secret ingredient that’s pushed off hurricanes even as warming planetary temperatures raise concerns about more extreme weather events: El Niño. This notorious shift in global wind patterns, which occurs every two to seven years, moves warm water around the oceans, disrupting traditional weather patterns and leading to intense rain and sometimes disastrous flooding, as well as droughts. If there is an upside, however, it’s that this temporary change in ocean conditions prevents hurricanes from forming as frequently as they otherwise would.

The downside is, well, El Niño is still on its way. Forecasters expect this year’s version to be historically bad — using words like “super” or “Godzilla” to describe it. The worst of the bad weather is projected to arrive in December: The southern half of the continental US is expected to see unusually rainy and stormy weather, while areas of the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest could see extreme dry spells.

It will also serve as a crucial test of our reduced capacity for predicting and responding to disasters. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather forecasting and public alert programs by $200 million, and 17 percent of FEMA’s workforce left the agency in 2025 amid the administration’s DOGE purge.

For now, if you’re in the danger zone for Isaias, please pay attention to local and national weather alerts this weekend. If you’re not, count yourself lucky — but there are storm clouds on the horizon.

• Cooked-up charges: Trump has launched a new investigation into Fed governor Lisa Cook as he continues his unprecedented effort to remove her from the central bank.

• Food scarcity: Food banks are getting less federal aid as the Trump administration tightens food stamp eligibility and more Americans turn to them for help.

• On the podcast: Football is by far the most popular sport in the US, but that isn’t stopping the NFL from investing in one of the least popular sports in the US.. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ These days, it feels like we’re all swimming in a sea of AI hype and hysteria — all the ways this technology will make our lives better, all the ways it could kill every single one of us. But what if the two are more related than we think? Eric Levitz’s new piece asks whether the AI companies themselves warning us about the apocalypse is part of their own marketing strategy. It’s a useful guide for how to think about all of these existential conversations.

• Did you know…the world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011? Scientists pin the blame on climate disruption and warming sea temperatures.

• Today’s trivia: What’s a three-letter abbreviation for the successor of tube TVs? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you which fruit kills more people than sharks each year, according to long-standing urban legend. That would be the coconut, and the claim (which is unprovable, since there’s no systematic tracking of coconut deaths) appears to have been started by shark scientists.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Dylan Scott. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at dylan.scott@vox.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

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In today’s edition, we run down the biggest headlines of the afternoon, break down how the data center backlash is shaping the midterms, and self-administer electric shocks sit with our thoughts for a few minutes. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

As far as political slurs go, this one is pretty tepid: “Meet Data Center Dave Crowley,” intones the stern-voiced narrator of a recent Tom Tiffany campaign ad.

Tiffany, a Republican, and Crowley, a Democrat, are both running for governor of Wisconsin. And in this very tight race, as in dozens of midterm contests across the country, voters’ growing animus toward AI could potentially make a real difference.

In less than four weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably, unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical limits and launched an unpopular war that has worsened a cost-of-living crisis.

As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Last week, we tackled the dual identity crises that both parties have suffered since 2024. And this week, we’re digging into the dramatic bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers. One analyst recently told NPR the issue “upended politics as we know it.” But it’s less clear how that’ll play out in November’s contests.

The one thing both parties can agree to hate

There was a time not so long ago when “Data Center Dave” might be a neutral nickname for the well-meaning IT guy at work. Then Americans soured on AI and the hulking, cavernous warehouses that supply its computing power.

The hostility crosses geography and party lines. At first, opponents focused on noise, water use, and energy costs — quality-of-life concerns for nearby residents. But increasingly, even voters far from these projects grew leery of them.

Too often, the public got little say in where data centers were built and on what terms. And as Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova reported over the summer, the construction boom gradually became a stand-in for broader fears about artificial intelligence. Would AI cause mass unemployment ( ... or worse, mass extinction)? Would it widen the gap between rich and poor? And do politicians cater to business interests over the needs of ordinary people?

Without clear answers to those questions — let alone a rigorous plan to address AI’s fallout — many voters channeled their unease into stopping, or slowing, data center development.

Candidates have reacted by “falling over themselves to sound tough on data centers,” Washington Post data reporter Jeremy Merrill recently told Vox’s Noel King. He analyzed thousands of social media posts and newsletters to see how elected officials are talking about data centers, and the answer is: not positively!

Some candidates in high-profile midterm races have backed policies that would keep data centers from raising household energy bills. Others have called for ending the facilities’ tax breaks and subsidies or requiring public notice before new construction. Strikingly, both Republicans and Democrats have supported these types of proposals … and both Republicans and Democrats have sought to tar their opponents as “Data Center Daves” of one kind or another.

I asked my colleague Andrew Prokop, who covers politics, if many races will actually turn on this. “Data centers have been a major theme in several races, particularly governor’s races where one of the candidates has taken past pro-data center positions,” he said.

But even when voters say they oppose data centers, very few list the issue among the most important concerns determining how they cast their ballots. In Ohio, for instance — a hub for both data-center development and the grassroots movement opposing it — only 3 percent of voters named data centers as the top issue driving their vote. And that’s the highest share in the entire nation.

Andrew points to the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, where “Data Center Dave” triumphed over Francesca Hong, an outspoken data center critic. “That just goes to show that data centers don’t necessarily crowd out everything else,” Andrew said.

Still...that’s just one race. And voters’ hatred of data centers has only grown since.

➨ Races to watch: Wisconsin’s governor’s race, where both candidates have attempted to distance themselves from data centers without embracing an actual ban; the Texas governor’s race, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott has hastily retreated from his previous, pro-data-center position; and the Ohio Senate race, where Democrat Sherrod Brown has hammered incumbent Republican Jon Husted over his past votes for data center development.

➨ More from Vox:

• Americans don’t know how to fight AI. So they’re fighting data centers.

• The real reason voters hate data centers so much

• Data centers could actually be good for your hometown

• Hurricane season-opener: Millions of people along the Gulf Coast are under hurricane warnings as Isaias is expected to strengthen before making landfall late Friday or early Saturday.

• Maduro charges: Former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is facing new US charges alleging he conspired to torture political opponents while in power.

• On the podcast: The case of a California couple who had more than 20 kids via surrogacy before being charged with child abuse illustrates how a lack of regulation can lead to chaos. Listen to the whole thing here.

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➨ Get better at being alone with your thoughts. According to one oft-cited study from 2014, many people would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes alone with nothing to do. But being alone with your thoughts is good for you! You can practice by making a list of topics to ponder and parking your phone in another room. Then see what kind of cogitation surfaces for you.

• Did you know…that there are more than 96 bags of human waste on the moon? Astronauts with the Apollo missions left them there more than 50 years ago.

• Today’s trivia: Which fruit kills more people than sharks each year, according to urban legend? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)

• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you the word for a baby eagle. That would be eaglet, and they are adorable.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, Caitlin Dewey. Have thoughts or feelings on what you read here? You can reach me directly by email. I’m at caitlin.dewey@voxmedia.com.

And if someone forwarded this email to you, sign up below to get Today, Explained in your inbox, for free!, every weekday afternoon.

Subscribe now