Last week, the US Department of Agriculture proposed a strikingly cruel policy, even for this administration: speeding up the kill lines at America’s chicken, turkey, and pig slaughterhouses. The plan will make one of the country’s most dangerous jobs — working in a meat processing plant — even more unsafe, labor advocates argue. The new […]

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here. Twenty-four-year-old Polish activist Dominika Lasota remembers waiting in anxious silence for the 2023 election results to come in. Since 2015, Poland had been governed by a conservative, authoritarian-leaning party that curtailed women’s rights and […]

In the spring of 2015, few outlets predicted that the US would soon face a democratic crisis. Barack Obama was the president, and the conventional wisdom was that he’d be succeeded by Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. Donald Trump wouldn’t announce his presidential bid until June, and most people in Washington treated it as a […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Had William Foege been a military general or a CEO or a politician, his death on January 24 would have been bold-type, front-page news. Elementary schools and highways would have been named […]

The world is hungrier than ever for energy.  Demand for heating, cooling, lighting, computing power, and just getting around is rising. In particular, the buildout of data centers to power technologies like AI has set off a rush for new power plants in countries like the US and China. Fossil fuel consumption reached a record […]