Early in the first Trump administration, the legal journalist Benjamin Wittes coined one of the best descriptions of how President Donald Trump governs: “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” Trump, as Wittes originally wrote, often issued executive orders that were not vetted by lawyers or policy experts — and thus were vulnerable to lawsuits and often achieved […]

After five weeks of muddled messaging, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation on Wednesday night to make the case for his war on Iran. That message was…still muddled. He did not articulate a clear exit plan from the conflict, fobbed the Strait of Hormuz problem off on other countries, and denied that regime change […]

As someone who has predominantly lived in liberal cities, I am largely surrounded by people who share my political views. Guns, no way. LGBTQ+ rights, yes, of course. Abortion, absolutely. Immigration, come on in.  But I also have relatives, most of whom I love and am deeply attached to, in red states, which means I’m […]

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. The Scholastic Book Fair is a big deal at my older kid’s school. A couple of times a year, the auditorium gets transformed into a kid-friendly bookstore, and the elementary-schoolers get out of their regular classes to shop […]

If there’s anything that makes people more uncomfortable than highly advanced AI or nuclear weapons technology, it’s the combination of the two. But there’s been a symbiotic relationship between cutting-edge computing and America’s nuclear weapons program since the very beginning.  In the fall of 1943, Nicholas Metropolis and Richard Feynman, two physicists working on the […]