You’ve surely heard “First They Came,” German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the road to Nazi Germany. It’s one of those texts quoted so often that it can feel cliché. “First they came for the communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a communist” the poem begins, listing […]

An earlier version of this story appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. A Vox reader asks, “Why do children often have imaginary friends?” Sometime in the doldrums of Covid lockdown, when day care was closed and social life felt like a distant memory, I caught my then-toddler […]

All across the world, people are having fewer children. The birth rate is declining quickly in countries ranging from the United States to Finland to Mexico and Turkey. Fertility data used to be a fairly esoteric concern. Not anymore. Vice President JD Vance talks about it regularly, Elon Musk calls it civilization’s greatest threat. There’s […]

If you’re anything like me — a policy dork who spends too much time on X — you’ve been unable to escape discussion of a new book called Abundance.  Written by the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and the New York Times’s Ezra Klein (also a co-founder of Vox), Abundance is one of those policy books with […]

There’s a thought experiment that has taken on almost mythic status among a certain group of technologists: If you build an artificial intelligence and give it a seemingly innocuous goal, like making as many paper clips as possible, it might eventually turn everything — including humanity — into raw material for more paper clips.  Absurd […]