Vox

The questions Vox's Sigal Samuel tackles in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house.

Her partner is due to give birth to their first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. Sigal decided to tackle her dilemma in her last column before beginning her parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward.

“If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?” Sigal’s partner asks.

“Your goal is not to control every possible outcome,” Sigal responds. “The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome.

Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.”

Read the full column: www.vox.com/future-perfect/489426/moral-luck-ethic…<media_url>

🎨: Pete Gamlen for Vox

22 hours ago | [YT] | 1,728

Vox

In case you didn’t notice, the Antichrist is back.

All right, forgive the hyperbole — this biblical agent of Satan hasn’t actually returned to lead a rebellion against God before Christ’s second coming. But a curious surge in chatter about this herald of the apocalypse seems to be underway.

It’s the most the end times have saturated our political culture since the aughts, when the new millennium brought an explosion of renewed interest, spurred on by the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and related Christian media depicting a “realistic” modern Antichrist. Later on, former President Barack Obama became a fixation of related theories on the religious right depicting him as the Antichrist.

Yet just like in past periods of panic and perturbation over the centuries, there’s a lot of uncertainty in these discussions over who or what the Antichrist is, when this figure is to return, or even if this biblical character is supposed to be a real thing.

📸: Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images

1 day ago | [YT] | 1,013

Vox

Packing the Supreme Court is being floated by Democrats like former Vice President Kamala Harris as a way to reverse a series of recent policy losses, including the Republican Supreme Court’s recent decision repealing a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act.

But is adding seats to the court actually a good idea?

The primary advantage of court-packing is that it would be difficult for the Court’s current majority to sabotage a court-packing law if it actually passed the Congress — once the Court was packed, the Republican justices who control it right now would become a powerless minority.

Realistically, however, the newly constituted Court would struggle to impose its will on red states and on other Republican Party power centers.

Read more: www.vox.com/politics/488987/supreme-court-packing-…<media_url>


📸: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

3 days ago | [YT] | 1,884

Vox

Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat.

Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her comments made sense, though they set off a heated, weeks-long debate among X and Instagram users, who responded with a flood of strange justifications for eating meat, despite the terrible treatment of farmed animals.

The spat vividly illustrated a psychological phenomenon called the “meat paradox”: the cognitive dissonance and deep discomfort people feel when their behavior of eating meat and other animal products clashes with their fondness for animals.

Read more: www.vox.com/future-perfect/488861/meat-paradox-fac…<media_url>

🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images

3 days ago | [YT] | 9,041

Vox

The past four years have witnessed an unprecedented boom in the construction of data centers, driven by AI firms’ insatiable thirst for computing power.

Between 2022 and 2025, annual spending on the creation of data centers in the United States jumped from $15 billion to over $35 billion, in constant dollars.

And many Americans have had enough. They have come to think that these industrial complexes offer little to their host communities beyond economic burdens and ecological devastation. Judging by activist rhetoric and viral media accounts, data centers invariably slurp up localities’ water, pollute their air, despoil their landscapes, and poison their residents with “infrasounds” — all while driving up municipalities’ electricity bills and sponging off their tax dollars.

So, how do you decide whether your community should welcome hundreds of acres of computing hardware?

We examine the (real and imagined) environmental harms and material upsides point by point — and how the balance between them shifts with local conditions — here: www.vox.com/politics/488754/data-centers-ban-elect…<media_url>

📸: An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center (C) with closed-loop cooling system on April 14, 2026, in Vernon, California. Getty Images.

4 days ago | [YT] | 1,555

Vox

If there’s one thing Americans can agree on, it’s that we’re busier than ever, and it’s all too much.

We don’t have time to socialize, we don’t have time to sleep, and we don’t have time for fun. We’re a uniquely overworked and overbooked people who now get more joy out of canceling plans than we do following through with them.

Except that narrative is not quite true. For one thing, Americans actually work far fewer hours than our great-grandparents did, with annual hours worked in the US falling from around 2,300 per worker in the 1920s to about 1,750 today; the average American work week is now 34 hours, not 40.

We all get the same amount of time in a year: 8,760 hours. Subtract about 1,750 hours for work and around 2,700 hours for sleep, and that still leaves over 4,300 waking, non-working hours.

And while some of us have responsibilities that occupy much of our “free” time — and some of us decidedly don’t — almost all of us have more free time than we may realize.

Read more about how to manage your free time: www.vox.com/future-perfect/488838/time-management-…<media_url>

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5 days ago | [YT] | 3,175

Vox

President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Cuba escalated at the beginning of this year with his removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January and the announcement of a hemispheric “Donroe Doctrine.”

Since then, Cuba has been under a US oil blockade (with some exceptions), resulting in widespread blackouts and a humanitarian crisis impacting the island’s 10 million residents.

Cuba is also a particular cause of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long wanted to topple the country’s communist regime.

So is this recent indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro the start of the next regime change? Read more: www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/489269/cub…<media_url>

📸: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

6 days ago | [YT] | 886

Vox

There are few animals humans fear more than sharks. This is understandable: Sharks are big, dramatic creatures that have been permanently lodged in our culture as underwater killers since Jaws.

They also kill about six people in a given year. Snakes, on the other hand, kill roughly 100,000. After mosquitoes, which spread diseases like malaria, and humans, who just murder each other, snakes are the deadliest animals on Earth.

The surprise isn’t just that snakes kill so many people, but that the scale of this death and suffering has only recently become clearer. In India, where roughly half of the world’s snakebite deaths happen, official reports had long recorded only about 1,000 snakebite deaths a year.

1 week ago | [YT] | 2,442

Vox

In an age where it feels like we should all know less about each other, there’s at least one place on the internet where you just want to know more: It’s called r/GirlDinnerDiaries.

As its name suggests, the subreddit consists of women posting a photo of their meal accompanied by a brief story about what’s happening in their lives.

While our collective social media fatigue is high, people are still naturally curious about other people’s lives. And while GDD fulfills that desire, it’s also just a robust and thriving community in its own right — one that can teach us something about the power of a good story, our own curiosities, and the connections we allow ourselves to make.

“They’ve done a really nice job of creating community,” Melanie Green, a social psychologist at the University at Buffalo, said. “They’ve sort of set this social norm of people being kind to each other and supportive of each other.”

🎨: Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 1,014

Vox

In the past three decades, African countries have made great strides to limit HIV infections.

In some parts of Uganda, as many as one in four infants were once infected with HIV at birth, leading to 32,000 new childhood HIV infections annually in the mid-1990s. Today, that infection rate has plummeted to fewer than 5,000.

This changed because Uganda — along with much of the world — has diligently perfected the simple interventions needed to keep babies safe from the virus: repeated HIV testing for all expectant parents, and widely available anti-retroviral therapies for those who test positive, which makes the virus virtually untransmittable.

In the most successful countries like Botswana, new childhood infections are now so exceedingly rare that every new baby born with HIV prompts a comprehensive federal audit.

But finishing the job would mean building a world where no babies are born with HIV at all, and many African countries with the highest HIV burdens remain far from that goal — even before cuts to assistance from the US and other countries began hampering progress.

Read more: www.vox.com/future-perfect/488805/hiv-free-generat…<media_url>

📸: Gideon Mendel/Getty Images

1 week ago | [YT] | 7,827