America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Light rail. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever, if it even happens at all.  Meanwhile, there’s China. A country that builds much faster — high-speed trains, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, drones — all churned out at breakneck speed. Why can China do this, and […]

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Are American kids eating the wrong foods? It’s a question parents and policymakers have worried over for generations, but it’s become especially fraught in recent months as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make American Healthy Again movement […]

For the last few years, we’ve been asking Future Perfect newsletter readers what their biggest questions are. And while we usually answer privately, we figured we’d try something new: a reader mailbag! This week, we’ve answered questions from three readers on classic FP issues: artificial intelligence, animal welfare coverage, and, of course, altruistic kidney donations. […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It has been 20 years since New Orleans’ faulty levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina, causing a flood that claimed almost 1,400 lives and inflicted more than $150 billion in economic damage. The catastrophe was so bad […]

The two and a half weeks since President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Washington, DC, police department have mixed the disturbing and the comical. Combined with the spectacle of the National Guard picking up trash, there’s been a lot of law enforcement activity aimed at unauthorized immigrants. But many residents, though annoyed at Trump’s move, […]