Figure skating is nothing without tension. Humans speed across slick ice, balancing on a thin metal blade and making sharp turns. The athletes defy physics, jumping and twisting their bodies in the air, seemingly faster than you can blink. Millimeters can mean the difference between success and splat, risk goes hand in hand with reward, […]

America’s era of big public housing projects was a grand experiment whose period of favor was remarkably short-lived. The austere, often high-rise complexes rose across US cities in a few decades, mostly from the 1930s to 1960s. But as they became marooned by chronic disrepair and concentrated poverty, the political consensus to tear them down […]

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here. Vox loves the Olympics. Absolutely loves them. We briefly debated popping up a limited-run Winter Olympics newsletter this week, but then remembered that we are not in fact a sports site and have no […]

Rapper Bad Bunny will perform Sunday at the Super Bowl halftime show, becoming the first solo male Latin American artist to headline. He’s arriving at the peak of his popularity: The performance comes just a week after receiving the Grammy’s highest honor for his genre-defining album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which deals with themes of […]

I grew up in the Maryland suburbs and spent much of my childhood in the woods. I would turn over rocks to find shiny centipedes and watch small schools of fish glide through the creek as box turtles sunbathed on the banks. A squirrel’s frenzied search for a nut would capture my full attention.  I […]