Football occupies a strange place in American life. It’s the most popular sport in the country by an absurd margin, but it’s also the most controversial. It’s treated as a civic ritual in some places, a primitive distraction in others, and a kind of background noise almost everywhere.  For millions of people, football Sundays (and […]

A heavy feeling has loomed over the Today show for the past week: Co-anchor Savannah Guthrie has been noticeably absent while dealing with an extremely public nightmare.  On February 1, authorities began searching for Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother, Nancy Guthrie, following what is now believed to be an abduction from her home outside of Tucson, Arizona. […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s racism is making his party antsy.  What happened? Overnight, Trump posted a racist, 62-second video to his personal Truth Social feed depicting […]

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 […]