One of my favorite books is Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. The book is, in part, a study of people who take altruism so seriously it starts to look almost alien to the rest of us — the kind of people who donate to others the money […]

President Donald Trump rang in Christmas Day by ordering airstrikes against two ISIS camps in Nigeria. The strikes, involving more than a dozen Tomahawk missiles fired from a Navy ship, came shortly after Trump vowed retaliation against ISIS, which allegedly carried out deadly attacks against US troops and civilians around the world last week. But […]

Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor […]

The election was divisive, pitting an established moderate against an upstart progressive in the large, Democratic city. For a while it seemed like it would be close, but in the end the progressive won definitively, powered by a relentless focus on affordability and adept use of short-form video.  Mamdani? New York? You must be confused […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. The most embarrassing thing happened to me recently. It was twilight, and I was walking my dog around the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood where I’ve been living for about a year. Then […]