In 1965, then-French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came up with the “mot juste” for describing the way that the supremacy of the dollar provided the foundation for the financial supremacy of the US. The fact the dollar was so dominant in international transactions gave the US, d’Estaing said, an “exorbitant privilege.” Because every country […]

Elon Musk is stepping back from his Trump administration work with a trail of wreckage — and failure — behind him. Musk said Wednesday that his time as a White House employee — already scaled back to one or two days a week — was now coming to an end. But he’d already had his […]

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Earlier this year, I went to Career Day at my older kid’s school. The experience was sometimes humbling — at an elementary school career fair, no one can compete with the firefighters — but it was also incredibly […]

Somewhere between asking Google’s new advanced AI to explain, in detail, how to become an expert birdwatcher in my neighborhood and using Google’s new AI moviemaking tool to create cartoons of my 4-pound Chihuahua fighting crime, I realized something. Either Google is having a midlife crisis or I am. It could be both.  Google has […]

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. Michael Eliason was an undergraduate studying architecture at Virginia Tech University when he went to live for a year in Germany. While interning in Freiburg in 2003, he worked on projects […]