Vox

Tens of millions of Americans live on top of, below, or directly next to their neighbors — which means, statistically speaking, some of us are going to end up in close proximity to an extremely irritating stranger.

While phone calls, texts, and friendly in-person conversations are all tried-and-true ways to address proximal nuisances, many partake in the dreaded form of communication known as the neighbor note. Judging from the multiple, hand-wringing posts on social media and Reddit about the labor of writing one, as well as an unfathomable number of messages about the anxiety of receiving them, these letters are a bit of a trap.

Most people don’t really want to scold another adult, or be scolded — especially anonymously — for things they’re not aware that they’re doing.

Read more about how to best communicate with an annoying neighbor, even if it does end up being through a neighbor note: www.vox.com/culture/494514/neighbor-annoying-notes…<media_url>

🎨: Laura Simonati for Vox

1 hour ago | [YT] | 77

Vox

Meet the new Today, Explained newsletter — a daily, curiosity-driven guide to the bigger, weirder, and more fascinating ideas shaping the news cycle. 💡

Every afternoon, we’ll catch you up on the two or three headlines you need to know to feel grounded and informed.

Then we'll pull on one thread until it takes us somewhere unexpected — deep into the history, science, economics, politics, and culture that explain both the day’s news and the wider world.

Subscribe to Today, Explained: www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter-signup

1 day ago | [YT] | 214

Vox

Neighbor relationships have the potential to be either fruitful or fraught.

They sit at a unique intersection of intimacy and distance: You may be geographically close to them, but they aren’t owed the same sort of emotional vulnerability as family or friends. The couple next door or the folks down the street might carry institutional knowledge of the building or neighborhood; they can help you out in a pinch and can be a pleasant source of social interaction.

They can also be a little nosy, standoffish to newcomers, and, at worst, harbor biases, upping the chances for years of awkward or contentious run-ins.

It’s well established that gossip facilitates social connection, and swapping stories with a neighbor can be super beneficial in spurring collective action in your community. Find out how to gossip effectively with your neighbors: www.vox.com/advice/494002/gossip-neighbors-secrets…<media_url>

🎨: Laura Simonati for Vox

2 days ago | [YT] | 377

Vox

Would you consider yourself friends with your neighbors? 🏡

A 2025 Pew Research report found that about two-thirds of US adults know at least some of their neighbors. But a lot of those folks are older adults in suburban, home-owning environments, the report showed, and they’re more likely to maintain relationships with the people next door.

Millennials and Gen Z, on the other hand, aren’t nearly as likely to know who lives beside them, data suggests.

“The importance of neighbors literally cannot be understood until we recognize how much of our health and our lives depend on them,” Daniel P. Aldrich, Dean’s Professor of Resilience at Northeastern University, explained. While a large chunk of adults rely on social media and digital communication to meet our social needs, Aldrich said that “if anything goes wrong…those online communities that we are so wedded to can’t do anything at all.”

Find out how to befriend your neighbors — and why it could save your life — here: www.vox.com/advice/494399/how-to-talk-to-befriend-…<media_url>

🎨: Laura Simonati for Vox

3 days ago | [YT] | 980

Vox

Rahm Emanuel — a chief of staff in the Obama White House and widely rumored 2028 candidate — went to Tel Aviv to deliver a stern message to the Israeli public: If Israel wants to keep America as an ally, it needs to change.

That a Jewish Democrat like Emanuel is now comfortable with once-marginalized rhetoric and policies is a marker that the old pro-Israel consensus is well and truly dead among Democrats. What’s coming in 2028 and beyond is going to be very different — and much tougher for Israel — than what came before it.

“I think [Rahm’s position] becomes the baseline of Democratic primary candidates,” Ilan Goldenberg, the chief policy officer at the liberal J Street lobby, said. “You can’t go to the right of this.”

📸: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

3 days ago | [YT] | 3,433

Vox

Many of us are wearing a device on our wrists that claims to unlock a trove of real-time information about our body’s performance.

We can click a button and check our heart rate and review how much it’s varied over the course of the day. It can tell us how many steps we’ve taken, how many minutes we’ve been “active” throughout the day, and — if we wore it while we slept — just how well we rested, according to the data its sensors can pick up from our arms.

It’s a remarkable piece of technology, but exactly how much should we be relying on it to track our health? Vox’s Dylan Scott explores how being too obsessed with your smartwatch can actually be a bad thing in this week’s Good Medicine newsletter.

Read more and sign up to receive the Good Medicine newsletter: www.vox.com/good-medicine-newsletter/494789/apple-…<media_url>

4 days ago | [YT] | 343

Vox

AI is scaling faster than any past tech boom, and it’s likely to produce an economic emergency — a moment when policymakers will suddenly accept big risks and big changes.

The US is currently not ready for that moment. Find out why — and what you can do to help — here: www.vox.com/future-perfect/494579/artificial-intel…<media_url>

📸: Erin Schaff/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

4 days ago | [YT] | 809

Vox

Leather has often been defended in the fashion industry as an essentially harmless by-product of meat production — a waste material that would otherwise be thrown in the trash.

But if you think about it, that assumption is kind of weird: The global leather market is valued at hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and hides are an important revenue stream for cattle producers. We wouldn’t say that paper is a waste product of timber production just because the most valuable parts of the tree are used for lumber.

Likewise, animal hides help support extra profits for cattle farming and also carry a share of that industry’s emissions and other planetary impacts.

📸: A worker processes leather at a tannery factory in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, on June 21, 2025. Xinhua via Getty Images

5 days ago | [YT] | 1,928

Vox

When Graham Platner met with Democratic senators last month to try to assuage fears that his troubled personal history would doom his Senate campaign, they pressed him on whether any additional allegations — such as those of sexual assault — were coming. Platner said there would be nothing credible.

But on Monday, Politico published a lengthy, detailed report in which a woman who dated Platner accused him of coming to her house drunk and sexually assaulting her in 2021.

Within hours, Platner’s support started melting away — with everyone from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) calling on him to drop out.

To many critics and even some recent supporters, Platner looks in retrospect like a predictable disaster — one with red flags all over him (even tattooed on his body). Progressive commentators are asking themselves if they should have listened to those concerns earlier, and debating whether the left-wing operatives who recruited Platner to run almost blundered away a crucial Senate contest with magical thinking and poor vetting.

Yet it’s also true that Platner captured a real, widespread desire among Maine Democratic primary voters for a different kind of candidate.

📸: Platner speaks during a town hall at Leavitt Theater on October 22, 2025, in Ogunquit, Maine. Sophie Park/Getty

6 days ago | [YT] | 755

Vox

In little more than a decade, the term “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs) has risen from an obscure academic coinage to one of the most potent ideas in the American food imagination.

It has saturated media coverage of diet and disease, spawned a profusion of guides teaching shoppers how to spot UPFs at the supermarket, and animated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to remake American food policy.

It might also be kind of fake.

📸: Bloomberg via Getty Images

6 days ago | [YT] | 867