Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2026-04-20T19:30:08+00:00 https://www.vox.com/rss/index.xml https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Sigal Samuel <![CDATA[Why it feels like there’s never enough time for your relationships]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=485921 2026-04-20T15:30:08-04:00 2026-04-20T15:30:00-04:00 Illustration of a kid in the foreground with a busy parent in the background

The idea that you need to save up a certain amount of money before having kids is so common it can feel almost like a moral law. 

But it isn’t, and I said as much recently when a reader wrote in to my advice column asking if she’s too poor to have a baby. I argued that we don’t owe our kids a certain level of material wealth. 

And then I got a question from another parent: my editor, Katie Courage. She pointed out that what also plagues her as a parent is time poverty. Maybe we don’t have to guarantee kids a certain amount of money, but what about a certain amount of time?

Here’s Katie’s question, and my response below. 

Your latest column, responding to the reader who asked if she was too poor to bring another kid into the world, was refreshingly hope-inducing! Money questions around raising kids feel so ubiquitous no matter what circumstance your family is in, so this was really worth reading for a totally flipped framework on the issue. 

The resource-scarcity concern that is perpetually circling in my mind, alongside the financial one, is time. As a working parent, I constantly feel time-poor, especially when it comes to quality time with my kids. 

So much of the time I get to have with them is consumed with the simple logistics of life. Evenings really only have room for dinner and bedtimes. Mornings are a blur of breakfasts, navigating clothing choices, work meetings, and school dropoffs. And a good portion of weekends go to simply fighting entropy (that is, laundry, cleaning, yardwork). We do pack in plenty of kid activities, time with friends, and weekend camping trips. But it seems like it would be so much better for my kids if I could materialize more undirected hours of puzzle-doing, book-reading, and rambling nature walks by the creek together. 

I was raised in the early days of intensive parenting (with so many amazing creek walks!), and I had my first child around the culmination of Instagram parenting influencers pushing this sort of style. If you’ve watched more than two episodes of Bluey, you’ve seen how this era calibrated expectations for parents to be almost constantly available for child-focused, child-directed activities. But if I let dishes pile up in order to play all weekend (as I read as an actual suggestion in a 2010s parenting book) or if I skip out on exercise to pick the kids up early, I know I won’t be showing up for the time together as energized and as minimally stressed as I can be. 

So I find myself in a constant inner battle, and the only winner is seemingly constant indistinct guilt. Is there a way of looking at this that feels less zero-sum? 

I really sympathize with this feeling of time poverty — and I bet almost every working parent does, too. But I want to share some research that might make you feel better. 

First, you’re actually spending a lot of time with your kids, relative to middle-class parents of the not-too-distant past. Moms now spend more time with their kids than they did in 1965, even though the majority of moms weren’t in the paid workforce then. Dads are also doing more than they did back then.

So why does everyone I know still feel like they’re not hanging out with their kids enough? 

The problem has to do with that word “enough.” To know what constitutes enough of something, you have to know what goal you’re aiming for. Historically, this was pretty simple: Your goal was to raise kids who could work — typically on your farm, or maybe in a factory, mill, or mine. Sure, you also felt love for your kids, but at the end of the day children were an economic asset. You needed to feed and shelter them so they could produce income for the family. 

But in the 1930s, the United States banned oppressive child labor, and kids stopped being wage earners. Now that they were economically worthless, we had to ask ourselves: What role do they play in our lives? Our collective answer was to sentimentalize them more than ever before — to treat them as precious, not financially, but emotionally. 

As author Jennifer Senior has documented, our collective script about parenting flipped upside down in the decades between then and now. Kids no longer work for their parents; instead, parents work for their kids. And what’s the ultimate goal of the modern parent? Buttonhole one of them in the street and they’ll tell you: “I just want my kids to be happy!!” (potentially with some soul-rattling desperation in their voice).

Trouble is, happiness is a very elusive goal. Even a single ingredient of it, professional success, is elusive — and getting more so by the day. And so we end up with the intensive parenting culture you described, where parents expect themselves to spend endless hours on stuff that they hope will enrich their kids, boosting their self-esteem, their skills, and ultimately, their success. Music lessons, soccer games, karate, chess, elaborate craft projects, and the long et cetera of child-focused activities. 

But pursuing happiness is an unbounded search process. You could spend every waking hour doing child-focused activities with your kid and it still might not be “enough” to make them a happy adult (in fact, it very well may backfire). 

An outcome is impossible to guarantee. But a capacity? That’s something you can much more reliably cultivate.

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So, what if you don’t see it as your goal to guarantee your kids’ happiness? What if instead the goal is to show them love and build their capacity to love others?

In that case, quantity of hours will matter much less than — you guessed it — quality. And we all know what “quality time” means. Right? 

Honestly, I don’t think we do. Many American parents tend to assume that “quality time” means time explicitly dedicated to Activities For Kids. But as books like Hunt, Gather, Parent and The Importance of Being Little show, there’s reason to believe that much more mundane stuff works wonders, too. 

Young children can learn a whole lot from being woven into whatever their parents happen to be doing — cooking, yardwork, errands. They can learn practical life skills, yes, but also things like perseverance, cooperation, and emotional regulation. And they can benefit immensely from exactly the kind of low-key interaction that parents dismiss as “not counting.” I’m talking about all the stuff you called “the simple logistics of life” — dinnertimes, bedtimes, school drop-offs. That’s because any of that stuff can be the site of loving, playful interaction.  

I was raised by my dad and grandmother, and the moments that stand out in my mind now aren’t the ones that happened on special outings. They’re banal in the extreme. My very first memory is of my dad tucking me in at bedtime and telling me a story, and me feeling so happy that I said, “I love being 4 — I get all of the fun and none of the responsibilities!” I also remember helping my grandmother make dinner, and how she laughed with extreme delight when I picked up a cucumber and began talking into it like it was a phone. And I remember her walking me to school and how we checked out the neighbors’ amazing gardens on the way, making a game out of noticing the best one and giving it an imaginary award. 

Nothing “special” was happening during these moments. There was no “activity.” There was no set-apart “quality time” bucket, or even an explicit goal of hanging out together. We were just life-ing. 

But in these brief moments, there was a loving attunement to what I was doing and feeling. There was a wholeness of attention.

Contrast that with “time confetti” — a term, coined by author Brigid Schulte, to describe how our time now often gets fragmented into tiny little pieces that end up feeling unproductive and unfulfilling. We may think we’re “multitasking.” But when you’re trying to do bathtime with your kid while simultaneously attending to intermittent pings on your work Slack or worrying about the half-dozen emails you need to send and the three playdates you need to schedule and all the group texts you need to respond to…well. It’s not just your time but also your attention that gets carved up into little splinters. 

If you recognize yourself in this description, it’s not your fault. Both our work culture and our technological culture conspire to shred our time like this. 

What I find helpful about the idea of time confetti is that it explains why, even though the objective amount of time that we spend with our kids is actually greater now than it was a few decades ago, the subjective feeling of time poverty is going up, not down. Feeling time-poor is not just about the brute quantity of time we’ve got, but about the kind of attention we can bring to it.

A short moment of bathtime where a parent is truly present is small but whole. And that tends to feel more fulfilling for both adults and children. (Not to brag, but little kids love me, and I’m convinced it’s because the style of loving attention my caregivers gave me really modeled for me how to lovingly attend to others in turn.) 

What all this indicates to me is not that we need to spend more time with our kids, or that we need to spend more time doing Activities for Kids, but that we can do a whole lot of good by focusing on the quality of attention we offer while we do literally whatever we happen to be doing when our kids are around. 

And this is actually good news, because, while it’s hard to manufacture more time in the day, we can train our attention. My personal favorite ways of doing that are through meditation, birding, reading longform fiction, and observing a tech-free Sabbath, but there are plenty of other ways. 

Do I think it’s fair for the burden to fall on the individual to counter the massive societal pressures that push us all toward fractured attention? No, absolutely not. And because this is a structural issue, we’ll all inevitably have moments when we don’t manage to be mentally present. That’s okay. 

You can’t control every outcome for your child, and you can’t fully control how you show up for every moment you’re with them, either. The most you can do is try, as much as possible, to infuse focused loving attention into the moments you’ve got. 

]]> Julia Sullivan <![CDATA[How to make unemployment suck a little less]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=486081 2026-04-17T16:11:33-04:00 2026-04-20T08:00:00-04:00 Illustration of a figure with long hair flopped on a red couch looking bored. A clock is overhead

When I was laid off from my role as an editor for a magazine in late 2024, logically, I knew what I was supposed to think: Don’t tie your self-worth to a job. After all, it’s just a job. 

While I did my best to believe that optimistic mantra, most days — and especially on the ones I scooped up dirty, sweaty towels from rich people at a local gym to make ends meet — I felt hopeless. I had little money coming in for several months, and on more mornings than I’d care to admit, fewer and fewer reasons to wake up. I barely felt human.

As Aja Evans, a New York City-based financial therapist and author of Feel Good Finance, tells Vox, feeling terrible about yourself during a period of unemployment or underemployment is super common. “We really do base a lot of our identity on what we do,” she says, to the point that a career can seem like “the most important aspect of who we are and how we present ourselves.” According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, about 4 in 10 Americans who aren’t self-employed see their careers as a crucial part of their overall identity. 

So when you’re out of work, your perception of yourself — and how you’re supposed to present yourself to other people — becomes skewed. There’s obviously a lot more to any human than their job status, but with social structures that value financial success over other attributes (say, how kind or adventurous you are), unemployment can feel painful and confusing. 

There’s also a good chance that, as you’re navigating a new budget, you probably don’t have as much extra money to spend on pleasure — perhaps you have to decline dinner and drink invites, or put off long-anticipated trips or concerts. Making the (smart!) decision to pull back on certain expenses can feel extra isolating. 

If any of this is resonating with you, know that you’re not alone: Layoffs are incredibly common across all industries, and a lot of people are struggling right now. Here are some tips from people who have gone through it (or who are there right now).

Allow yourself time to grieve the job — and the life — you had

Though Domenica Davis, 47, had an inkling that layoffs were going to affect her role as a national broadcast TV meteorologist almost two years ago, that didn’t make the news any less difficult to digest. “It was shocking,” she tells Vox. “I thought, Oh my god. What am I going to do?” 

Felicia Penza was 30 years old, pregnant with twins, and preparing to relocate from Scottsdale, Arizona, to Los Angeles in 2010 when she was unexpectedly let go from her job as a graphic designer. “Getting laid off is devastating,” the now-46-year-old tells Vox. “It’s like an unexpected breakup in a relationship meant to endure, to last.” 

“Take a beat, feel your feelings, and potentially grieve a job that is no longer in your life.”

Aja Evans, NYC-based financial therapist

As Evans notes, it’s really important to sit with those uncomfortable emotions for a bit. Sure, it might initially feel productive to scour LinkedIn 24/7 with hopes of finding your dream role immediately, but you’re likely to get burned out fast if you do this. 

“A job search, especially in this economy, often feels like screaming into the void,” Amy Wilson, a 39-year-old digital marketer who’s experienced a handful of layoffs since 2020, tells Vox. “A lot of effort for no results. And to anyone who would say, Every no gets you one closer to your yes, I’d like to say, Shut the fuck up. … It’s actually demoralizing.’”

That’s exactly why it’s important not to jump in immediately. “Take a beat, feel your feelings, and potentially grieve a job that is no longer in your life,” Evans says. What does that look like? Call a friend or your therapist, or just sit on your ass and do nothing for a couple of days — whatever feels right. There will be a time for applications and networking, but give yourself a minute.

“Let’s get out of crisis mode; let’s get out of the stress cycle so that we can move into a place of making longer-term decisions,” Evans says. 

Tend to your bruised ego

If you were lucky to receive some sort of severance package, you might be able to grieve a job loss a little longer than someone who didn’t. But at some point, even with unemployment checks (which only last, at best, about 26 weeks), you’ll probably need a steady form of income to cover basic living expenses. And earning that might look different than what you’re used to. 

When one 36-year-old living in New York City (whom Vox granted anonymity to avoid professional repercussions), was let go from her director-level marketing role for a fashion brand, her ego took a major hit as she searched tirelessly for work. Though she was able to eventually secure a new job, she considered it a step down in her career. The woman told Vox via email: “I TOOK A $50K PAY CUT (screams from the mountain tops). So I feel poor AF. Going from director to a specialist — yikes!” 

Penza, on the other hand, didn’t take a job that she didn’t want to, but she still felt the stigma of being out of work and needing help to make ends meet. “I applied for state assistance, including health care and food benefits,” she says. “I had never done that before, and I didn’t even fully understand what SNAP benefits were.” As a Black woman, Penza says, she was “deeply aware of the stereotypes” associated with government assistance: “I was unmarried, pregnant with twins, unemployed, and now standing in line at the grocery store using food stamps to buy milk, cereal, and fruit. That moment stayed with me. It still stays with me. It forced me to confront a lot of internalized shame and pride simultaneously.”

Whether you’re receiving unemployment or working odd jobs to stay afloat, you may feel guilt, shame, or like you’re regressing in your career. In those moments, Evans says it’s important to always stay focused on next steps and remember that you’re not going to be in this predicament forever. “Why are we doing this?” she says to ask yourself. “I want to live in this place. I am able to afford my rent. I am able to make groceries. I am supercharging my debt payoff. … Let’s ground ourselves in that.”

Penza tried to do exactly that when things felt unbearable. “I had to reframe it,” she says. “I had to remind myself that I wasn’t a failure. It was a bridge for me. I was doing what I needed to do to take care of my children.”

Plus, it never hurts to focus on the present positives, even the small ones. The woman who lost her fashion job describes the boss who laid her off as “the devil who wore Zara.” Now, she says, she works for “actual angels” who do “mission-driven work.” 

Take advantage of your newfound freedom — while trimming some financial fat 

When Michael Young, a worker in his 40s in the AI and industrial technology space, was laid off at the start of the year, he took a close look at his spending and realized he was paying for streaming services and apps he was barely using. “I also cut back on food delivery,” Young says. “With more time to breathe, I started cooking again and remembered how much I enjoy it.”

And as someone whose weeks had been packed with meetings, Young welcomed his new daily itinerary. “For many of us in transition, the gift is schedule control,” he says. “I was finally able to get back to the gym three times a week.”

Young also sought free or low-cost ways to have fun, and says watching your budget more carefully can help you notice things you may have previously overlooked. “I also started paying attention to what local libraries, art centers, and community organizations were offering, and was delighted by how much is out there that’s free or nearly free,” he says. “It made me realize how much I’d been spending on convenience rather than actual enjoyment.”

That last bit — being more purposeful with your spending — can be an unexpected bonus in unemployment, Evans says. “A lot of times people don’t realize that sometimes that spending was a little mindless,” she says, adding that unemployment can be a “beautiful reset” to be more intentional about what brings you joy. 

Jeff R., 56, reignited some forgotten interests, like guitar, woodworking, and volunteering, after he was laid off from his automotive logistics job in 2023. “While resuming neglected hobbies, learning new skills, and volunteering have certainly helped, I took more joy from simply not having to deal with the high expectations I set for myself (and that were set for me) at work,” he tells Vox.

Talk openly about your situation  

Yes, your job gave you something to do throughout the day, but it also provided structure and an opportunity to socialize, even if you were remote. So once that goes away, it’s important to bring some semblance of community back into your life. “Reconnect with old friends,” Katie Dow, a financial planner from Bozeman, Montana, tells Vox. “Get more involved at a nonprofit. Meet new people.”

“It could be community centers, libraries, trivia nights if that’s something you’re into, book clubs,” Evans adds. “Finding community is going to be really important.” Wilson, for example, joined a choir after one of her layoffs. “I realized I needed to do something that I enjoy that would get me out of the house to make some new friends,” she says. “The side bonus I didn’t think about is that reigniting a hobby like this would give me a tangible sense of accomplishment and progress in the midst of near constant rejection from a job search.”

Plus, you never know who knows someone who is hiring. Davis recalls that many folks in her life jumped at the chance to help her and ask around their circles for job leads once they knew about her job loss. “People actually do think of you and care,” she says. 

Losing a job doesn’t have to illuminate some serendipitous silver lining — the combo of losing your income and your identity for who knows how long can be particularly cruel. In the moments when I felt like a shell of my former self, I called my mom or made lunch with my best friend, a stay-at-home mom with a similar open schedule. Unemployment is extremely isolating, but knowing that I wasn’t in it alone helped me get to the next day. 

]]> Jolie Myers Noel King <![CDATA[Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader explains his radical faith]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=486032 2026-04-17T14:57:55-04:00 2026-04-20T07:15:00-04:00 Pete Hegseth, wearing a patterned blue suit with a striped blue tie, stands in front of an American flag.
“I don’t hear anything from him that contradicts what we teach, and I believe that he’s a consistent Christian gentleman,” Pastor Doug Wilson said about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the Today, Explained podcast. | Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

War is nothing new for America — but the way Pete Hegseth talks about it is. President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense often styles the US’s actions in Iran as being blessed by God. As being holy.

He likened the recovery of a downed Air Force member in Iran on Easter Sunday to the resurrection of Christ. He quoted a Bible verse about God blessing war at a recent press conference on Iran. Famously, he has a tattoo that says “Deus vult,” which is Latin for “God wills it,” and it was a rallying cry for Christian armies during the Crusades. 

The head of Hegseth’s church, Pastor Doug Wilson, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that “I like the job he’s doing, and I like how he speaks.” Wilson said that he can hear his teachings coming through when Hegseth talks about the war. 

It’s been a long road for Wilson to achieve this level of influence. The evangelical pastor founded Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, in the late 1970s. The church has since spread across the country under the umbrella of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. 

Recently, it opened a branch in Washington, DC: An ideal spot to serve a conservative faithful increasingly warming to Wilson’s ideas around Christian nationalism and Christian theocracy, which hold that the US should be governed by Christians according to Christian principles.

Wilson told Vox that he’s been on the fringes for decades. Now, he’s being invited into the halls of power. He recently led a prayer service at the Pentagon, he’s been on Tucker Carlson and Ross Douthat’s podcasts, he’s spoken at Turning Point USA events and at the National Conservatism Conference. Not so fringe anymore.

In a wide-ranging conversion, Wilson and Noel discussed what his ideal Christian theocracy would look like; his desire to ban abortion, same-sex marriage, repeal the 19th Amendment; and why he thinks Trump is laying the groundwork for his Christian nation.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Right now the seat of power in America is President Donald Trump. Do you like President Trump’s leadership? 

Two thirds of the time, I like it a lot. A third of the time, I think: What is he doing? 

A good thing to compare Trump to is: America’s got cancer and Trump is chemo. Trump is a radical chemo treatment and chemo is toxic. Chemo is a system where it kills the cancer before it kills the patient. 

I like the progress that Trump has made on the cancer. And I’m aware of some of the damage that’s done to the healthy tissues by his management style, his leadership style. But politics is the art of the possible.

I hear you saying: President Trump is getting us closer to the Christian nation that I want. He also acts in ways that contradict what Christ preaches in the Bible. And he is often a bad role model, right? Do you have any reservations, being a pastor, about letting Trump off the hook? 

If I did let him off the hook, then I would have reservations about that. But I really haven’t. The president needs Christ. But we live in a topsy-turvy world, because there are some of his policies that are far closer to the biblical Christian position than some sanctimonious Christians who disapprove of his mean tweets and his behavior. 

In the congregation I pastor, we don’t have any Trumpkin, wild-eyed supporters where no matter what Trump does, it’s always good. When Trump misbehaves, everybody laughs. We budgeted for that. That’s bad. And we know it’s bad and we say it’s bad. But we don’t have Trump derangement syndrome. 

When he does good things that thrill us, we’re thrilled. I don’t mind saying that there are a whole range of issues where Trump’s behavior has thrilled me, and others that I just heartily disapprove of. And I don’t think I’m setting a poor example for our people. When I say what I think for, of, about both of those categories.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, attends a Communion of Reformed Evangelical Church. And that’s why I think people mention you in the same breath. 

“In the world I live in, conservative, evangelical leaders are willing to oppose Trump where they think he’s wrong and they’re willing to support him where they think he’s right.”

Correct.

The secretary of defense has had opportunities — ample opportunities of late — to speak publicly in front of the American people. Do you hear your church’s teachings when he speaks? 

Yes. 

How so? 

Let me flip it around. I don’t hear anything from him that contradicts what we teach, and I believe that he’s a consistent Christian gentleman. I like what he’s doing. I like the job he’s doing, and I like how he speaks. I’ve not heard anything that contradicts what we would teach from the pulpit. 

He has spoken of the war in Iran in religious terms. He also suggests that God is on America’s side. God is rooting for America in this war. I think the thing that people struggle with is the idea that God would be on board when you see civilian casualties like this school in Iran with the children — [more than] 150 people killed. 

That happens, and then the secretary of defense says: God’s on our side. Can you help us understand why that feels right to you? 

The first thing I would say is that no answer should try to pretend that war isn’t horrible, okay? In any war, horrible things will happen.

But when you look at a regime that killed, what, 35 to 40,000 of their own people in the last month or so, if you’re looking at a regime where a woman can be executed for having been raped? We have a lot of problems, a lot of moral problems. We are not a moral paragon. But if you put this, the Western civilization that we have and the Islamic Sharia state that they have in Iran, I believe that it’s not a morally ambiguous situation at all. 

The war has certainly divided Christians. Pope Leo wrote, “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” What do you make of his statements? 

I’d say he needs to read his Old Testament more. Psalm 144:1, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my fingers for battle.” Pope Leo, before he was the pope, was just sort of an ordinary Democratic leftist critic of Trump. 

Hmm.

And in the recent spat that Trump and the pope had, it was just Trump dealing with a political opponent, which is what the pope was being. I don’t think the pope was acting in the role of a religious leader executing the scripture there. I think he was just stating his political convictions. 

“God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” 

That strikes you as just a political opinion, just a criticism of President Trump?

Yeah, absolutely. Because when you have people who are very selective in their indignation…when you look at the kind of violence that the Iranian regime perpetrates against their own people — like 40,000 people dead — and they did it on purpose as opposed to blowing up a school by accident, and the pope is silent on that kind of thing, and then he turns to go after Trump for conducting this war. I don’t see equal weights and measures there. I don’t think Pope Leo is being honest. 

President Trump posted a meme depicting himself as Jesus Christ. He deleted it, but it struck many Christians, including many conservative Christians, as really appalling. What was your gut reaction to that? And then when you had time to think it through, where did you land on that? 

My first reaction [was] — I tweeted about it, I said: Somebody needs to figure out how to put this picture onto black velvet so that it can be blasphemous and tacky. The picture was blasphemous. The president’s explanation afterward was that he thought it was a doctor figure, not Jesus. 

Do you believe him? 

I find that’s a stretch, but I’m willing to accept it. If he took the picture down and said that portraying himself as Jesus is not what he intended, at least we got that. That was a very good thing. But I think they’ve gotta do better when it comes to social media management. That was a blasphemous image. And blasphemy is no good, no matter who does it. 

What is the penalty for blasphemy? 

It would depend. It’s like first-degree murder down to manslaughter. So there are varying degrees. The worst penalty in the Old Testament for blasphemy was capital punishment. 

Let me ask you one last question. There’s a writer, Tim Alberta. He comes from an evangelical background. He tweeted this the other day in response to President Trump and the image: “My conviction remains: God did not ordain Donald Trump to rescue the American church, or revive the American church, or redeem the American church. God ordained Donald Trump to test the American church. And the American church has failed.” What do you think God is trying to do with President Trump? 

I agree with everything in that tweet right up to the last line. I disagree with the last line. I think that Trump is a test. This goes back to what I said earlier about chemo. I think that the tumultuous times that we’re living in really are a test. But in many ways, I’ve been greatly heartened at how many Christians have gotten to work taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the chaos of our times. 

I think Tim Alberta’s tweet seemed to indicate that we failed because all the Christians fell in lockstep behind Donald Trump and, and didn’t stand up and challenge him. But in the world I live in, conservative, evangelical leaders are willing to oppose Trump where they think he’s wrong and they’re willing to support him where they think he’s right. And I wouldn’t call that failure.

]]> Ian Millhiser <![CDATA[The Supreme Court will decide when the police can use your phone to track you]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=485973 2026-04-17T09:48:23-04:00 2026-04-20T06:30:00-04:00 Vance holds a smartphone up to a microphone at an event.
Vice President JD Vance holds a highly sophisticated tracking device that the government can use to monitor his every move. | Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images

Check your pocket. You’re probably carrying a tracking device that will allow the police — or even the Trump administration — to track every move that you make.

If you use a cellphone, you are unavoidably revealing your location all the time. Cellphones typically receive service by connecting to a nearby communications tower or other “cell site,” so your cellular provider (and, potentially, the police) can get a decent sense of where you are located by tracking which cell site your phone is currently connected with. Many smartphone users also use apps that rely on GPS to precisely determine their location. That’s why Uber knows where to pick you up when you summon a car.

Nearly a decade ago, in Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court determined that law enforcement typically must secure a warrant before they can obtain data revealing where you’ve been from your cellular provider. On Monday, April 27, the Court will hear a follow-up case, known as Chatrie v. United States, which raises several questions that were not answered by Carpenter.

For starters, when police do obtain a warrant allowing them to use cellphone data, what should the warrant say — and just how much location information should the warrant permit the police to learn about how many people? When may the government obtain location data about innocent people who are not suspected of a crime? Does it matter if a cellphone user voluntarily opts into a service, such as the service Google uses to track their location when they ask for directions on Google Maps, that can reveal an extraordinary amount of information about where they’ve been? Should internet-based companies turn over only anonymized data, and when should the identity of a particular cellphone user be revealed? 

More broadly, modern technology enables the government to invade everyone’s privacy in ways that would have been unimaginable when the Constitution was framed. The Supreme Court is well aware of this problem, and it has spent the past several decades trying to make sure that its interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which constrains when the government may search our “persons, houses, papers, and effects” for evidence of a crime, keeps up with technological progress. 

As the Court indicated in Kyllo v. United States (2001), the goal is to ensure the “preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” More advanced surveillance technology demands more robust constitutional safeguards.

But the Court’s commitment to this civil libertarian project is also precarious. Carpenter, the case that initially established that police must obtain a warrant before using your cell phone data to figure out where you’ve been, was a 5-4 decision. And two members of the majority in Carpenter, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are no longer on the Court (although Breyer was replaced by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who generally shares his approach to constitutional privacy cases). Justice Neil Gorsuch also wrote a chaotic dissent in Carpenter, suggesting that most of the past six decades’ worth of Supreme Court cases interpreting the Fourth Amendment are wrong. So it’s fair to say that Gorsuch is a wild card whose vote in Chatrie is difficult to predict.

It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the Supreme Court is still committed to preserving Americans’ privacy even as technology advances — and whether there are still five votes for the civil libertarian approach taken in Carpenter.

Geofence warrants, explained

Chatrie concerns “geofence” warrants, court orders that permit police to obtain locational data from many people who were in a certain area at a certain time. 

During their investigation of a bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, police obtained a warrant calling for Google to turn over location data on anyone who was present near the bank within an hour of the robbery. The warrant drew a circle with a 150-meter radius that included both the bank and a nearby church. 

Google had this information because of an optional feature called “Location History,” which tracks and stores where many cellphones are located. This data can then be used to pinpoint users who use apps like Google Maps to help them navigate, and also to collect data that Google can use to determine which ads are shown to which customers.

The government emphasizes in its brief that “only about one-third of active Google account holders actually opted into the Location History service,” while lawyers for the defendant, Okello Chatrie, point out that “over 500 million Google users have Location History enabled.”

The warrant also laid out a three-step process imposing some limits on the government’s ability to use the location information it obtained. At the first stage, Google provided anonymized information on 19 individuals who were present within the circle during the relevant period. Police then requested and received more location data on nine of these individuals, essentially showing law enforcement where these nine people were shortly before and shortly after the original one-hour period. Police then sought and received the identity of three of these individuals, including Chatrie, who was eventually convicted of the robbery.

Chatrie, in other words, is not a case where police simply ignored the Constitution, or where they were given free rein to conduct whatever investigation they wanted. Law enforcement did, in fact, obtain a warrant before it used geolocation data to track down Chatrie. And that warrant did, in fact, lay out a process that limited law enforcement’s ability to track too many people or to learn the identities of the people who were tracked.

The question is whether this particular warrant and this particular process were good enough, or whether the Constitution requires more (or, for that matter, less). And, as it turns out, the Supreme Court’s previous case law is not very helpful if you want to predict how the Court will resolve Fourth Amendment cases concerning new technologies.

The Court’s 21st-century cases expanded the Fourth Amendment to keep up with new surveillance technologies

The Court’s modern understanding of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” begins with Katz v. United States (1967), which held that police must obtain a warrant before they can listen to someone’s phone conversations. The broader rule that emerged from Katz, however, is quite vague. As Justice John Marshall Harlan summarized it in a concurring opinion, Fourth Amendment cases often turn on whether a person searched by police had a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The Court fleshed out what this phrase means in later cases. Though Katz held that the actual contents of a phone conversation are protected by the Fourth Amendment, for example, the Court held in Smith v. Maryland (1979) that police may learn which numbers a phone user dialed without obtaining a warrant. The Court reasoned that, while people reasonably expect that no one will listen in on their phone conversations, no one can reasonably think that the numbers they dial are private because these numbers must be conveyed to a third party — the phone company — before that company can connect their call.

Similarly, while the Fourth Amendment typically requires police to obtain a warrant before searching someone’s home without their consent, if a police officer witnesses someone committing a crime through the window of their home while the officer is standing on a public street, the officer has not violated the Fourth Amendment. As the Court put it in California v. Ciraolo (1986), “the Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares.”

As the sun rose on the 21st century, however, the Court began to worry that the fine distinctions it drew in its 20th-century cases no longer gave adequate protection against overzealous police. 

In Kyllo, for example, a federal agent used a thermal-imaging device on a criminal suspect’s home, which allowed the agent to detect if parts of the home were unusually hot. After discovering that parts of the home were, in fact, “substantially warmer than neighboring homes,” the agent used that evidence to obtain a warrant to search the home for marijuana — the heat came from high-powered lights used to grow cannabis.

Under cases like Ciraolo, this agent had a strong argument that he could use this device without first obtaining a warrant. If law enforcement officers may gather evidence of a crime by peering into someone’s windows from a nearby street, why couldn’t they also measure the temperature of a house from that same street? But a majority of the justices worried in Kyllo that, if they do not update their understanding of the Fourth Amendment to account for new inventions, they will “permit police technology to erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.” 

Devices existed in 2001, when Kyllo was decided, that would allow police to invade people’s privacy in ways that were unimaginable when the Fourth Amendment was ratified. So, unless the Court was willing to see that amendment eroded into nothingness, they needed to read it more expansively. And so the Court concluded that, when police use technology that is “not in general public use” to investigate someone’s home, they need to obtain a warrant first.

Similarly, in Carpenter, five justices concluded that law enforcement typically must obtain a warrant before they can use certain cellphone location data to track potential suspects. 

Under Smith, the government had a strong argument that this data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Much like the numbers that we dial on our phones, cellphone users voluntarily share their location data with the cellphone company. And so Smith indicates that cellphone users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding that data.

But a majority of the Court rejected this argument, because they were concerned that giving police unfettered access to our location data would give the government an intolerable window into our most private lives. Location data, Carpenter explained, reveals not only an individual’s “particular movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’” Before the government can track whether someone has attended a union meeting, interviewed for a new job, or had sex with someone their family or boss may disapprove of, it should obtain a warrant.

Why a cloud of uncertainty hangs over every Fourth Amendment case involving new technology

One of the most uncertain questions in Chatrie is whether the Kyllo and Carpenter Court’s concern that advancing technology can swallow the Fourth Amendment is still shared by a majority of the Court. Again, Carpenter was a 5-4 decision, and two members of the majority have since left the Court. One of those justices, Ginsburg, was replaced by the much more conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in Carpenter, was also replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Chatrie is Kavanaugh’s first opportunity, since he joined the Court in 2018, to weigh in on whether he believes that advancing technology demands a more expansive Fourth Amendment.

And then there’s Gorsuch, who wrote a dissent in Carpenter arguing that Katz’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” framework should be abandoned, and that the right question to ask in a case about cellphone data is whether the phone user owns that data. After a long windup about Fourth Amendment theory, Gorsuch’s dissent concludes with an unsatisfying four paragraphs saying that he can’t decide who owned the cellphone data at issue in Carpenter because the defendant’s lawyers “did not invoke the law of property or any analogies to the common law.” 

Because Gorsuch’s opinion focuses so heavily on high-level theory and so little on how that theory should be applied to an actual case, it’s hard to predict where he will land in Chatrie. (Though it’s worth noting that Chatrie’s lawyers do spend a good deal of time discussing property law in their brief.)

All of which is a long way of saying that the outcome in Chatrie is uncertain. We don’t know very much about how several key justices approach the Fourth Amendment. And the Court’s most recent Fourth Amendment cases suggest that lawyers can no longer rely on precedent to predict how the amendment applies to new technology.

But the stakes in this case are extraordinarily high. If the Court gives the government too much access to this information, the Trump administration could potentially gain access to years’ worth of location data on anyone who has ever attended a political protest. As the Court said in Carpenter, the government can use your cellphone to track all of your political, business, religious, and sexual relations. 

At the same time, the police should be able to track down and arrest bank robbers. So, if there is a way to use cellphone data to assist law enforcement without intruding upon the rights of innocents, then the courts should allow it. The Fourth Amendment does not imagine a world without police investigations. It calls for police to obtain a warrant, while also placing limits on what that warrant can authorize, before they commit certain breaches of individual privacy.

The question is whether this Court, with its shifting membership and uncertain commitment to keeping up with new surveillance technology, can strike the appropriate balance.

]]> Andrew Prokop <![CDATA[Israel’s critics are winning the battle for the Democratic Party]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=486053 2026-04-17T17:03:33-04:00 2026-04-20T06:00:00-04:00 Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stand together.
Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put forth a resolution to block a military sale to Israel that won support from 40 of 47 Senate Democrats Wednesday. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The politics of Israel have shifted inside the Democratic Party — and staunch defenders of the Jewish nation are growing scarcer and scarcer. 

On Wednesday, 40 out of 47 Democratic senators voted to block a military sale to Israel — far higher opposition than had been previously seen on any similar measure. It was the most dramatic sign yet of the party’s rapid turn toward a more confrontational approach, and one that Democratic supporters and critics of Israel alike believe is nowhere near finished.

The tally left pro-Israel Democrats “shocked and disillusioned,” Marc Rod of the publication Jewish Insider reported. These divides were on display on Thursday, when voters in New Jersey’s 11th District elected Analilia Mejia, who ran as a fierce left-wing critic of Israel in a special House election. While she won handily, historic Jewish towns like Livingston and Milburn swung against her by massive double-digit margins compared to their presidential vote, a rarity in an otherwise strongly Democratic year. 

“It’s disturbing for supporters of Israel who’ve long needed and counted on bipartisan support — and had it,” a Democratic operative who has long been involved in Jewish causes told me. “It’s growing, and it’s hard to tell where it’s going to end up, but it’s not good.” 

But while the old pro-Israel consensus of bipartisan unconditional aid is clearly dead, reaching a new one will be harder. Operatives in different camps across the Democratic spectrum are unsure how far the current trend will go, and whether Israel faces a mere correction in its relationship or risks fully falling out of the US orbit in a future administration.

The reason for the change, however, is straightforward: Democrats’ voters have shifted. 

Back in 2022, a slight majority of Democratic voters — 53 percent — viewed Israel unfavorably. Since then, the devastation Israel brought about in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks gravely damaged the country’s reputation — as has the new Iran war President Donald Trump launched alongside Israel this year.

Now, a whopping 80 percent of Democrats or adults who lean toward Democrats view Israel unfavorably, per Pew Research polling conducted last month. 

As a result, politicians are responding — and not just those in safe blue states or progressive jurisdictions. The 40 senators who voted to block the military sale Wednesday included several who are from swing states and are rumored to have presidential ambitions: Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego from Arizona, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.

The shift has been slower among leaders of the party and its key organizations: the DNC, House and Senate leadership, and party fundraising committees. These officials, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who voted to approve the arms sales to Israel Wednesday, have condemned the Iran war and criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, while trying to make clear they still support the country as an ally.

But this may not be tenable, given how their party has moved underneath them. The issue will likely play a significant role in the 2028 primaries. The stakes are enormous — and activists critical of Israel feel encouraged by their success so far, and emboldened to push further.

Why and how Democratic voters turned against Israel

The collapse in Democratic support for Israel played out in three main phases.

Back during Barack Obama’s presidency, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party increasingly soured on Israel, as Netanyahu clashed with the Obama administration over Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank and, most notably, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Indeed, Netanyahu came to Congress to give a speech condemning the Iran deal, seeming to align himself with Republicans and infuriating many Democrats. Still, outside of the activist world and plugged-in elites, Israel was rarely front-of-mind for Democratic voters in Trump’s first term or the first few years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

That changed with the Gaza war, which made Israel a constant topic on news and social media for years. An initial surge of sympathy for Israel after the October 7 attacks gave way to increasing horror over the civilian toll of its reprisals in Gaza — and Biden seemed either unwilling or unable to stop it. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders continued to disparage any talk of an eventual Palestinian state, which had long been the centerpiece of Democratic hopes for a durable peace in the region.

“This was a genocide that played out in real time and that had an impact. Kids were watching it,” James Zogby, a Democratic pollster who has advocated for the Palestinian cause inside the party since the 1970s, argued. Still, there was an age divide, with older Democrats much more likely to view Israel favorably.

Now, the events of Trump’s second term — in which the US has twice attacked Iran alongside Israel — has shaken that up, too. 

“Once Trump won, we started to see really massive polling changes among older Democrats who had supported Israel,” Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told me. “Part of that is the partisan-ization of Israel, seeing Netanyahu as a Trump ally.” 

The consequences playing out in Congress

Now, it’s increasingly a consensus inside the Democratic Party that tougher pressure tactics against Israel are called for — but there’s still disagreement over how far to go, with those on the left of the party pushing further.

With increasing opposition inside the party to financing “offensive” weapons for Israel, the left flank is now pushing to go further.

One idea is to cut off US financing for “defensive weaponry,” such as the interceptors used in the Iron Dome missile defense system that defends Israel from rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah (and which the US has spent billions to help finance). Some House progressives have recently backed this idea — though some of them stress that Israel should still be allowed to purchase defensive weaponry from the US with its own money.

Another is to end all direct US funding for Israel’s military, which the progressive Jewish group J Street called for this week. Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) recently voiced support for that idea. Many observers believe US policy is headed here, in part because Israel is now a very wealthy nation that doesn’t really need US aid.

“There’s a growing understanding that aid money is fungible and that any amount of aid that the US is giving frees up [Israel’s] own money to spend on things we don’t like,” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told me. (Duss has reportedly been briefing Ocasio-Cortez, a potential 2028 presidential contender, on foreign policy this year.)

Asked what the next Democratic president should do upon taking office, Duss said he or she should immediately “halt all arms sales — not just to Israel, but generally to governments that have been engaged in human rights abuses.”

Some left activist groups have other priorities, such as urging Democrats to call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Bendaas said his polling shows increased support for using sanctions on Israel similar to those used against apartheid South Africa.

“I do think that’s probably where the conversation is headed by 2028,” Bendaas said. “But the realms of possibility are moving so fast, it’s kind of hard to pin down sometimes.”

The deeper disagreement

The agreement among progressives that Israel needs to be pressured more masks a deeper disagreement over: to what end?

Several advocates I interviewed pointed to a divide between the progressives hoping to salvage the US-Israel relationship, versus the leftists who are willing or even eager to outright end it. 

What if the pressure tactics fail to change Israel’s security calculus, as they have so many times before?

Often these debates touch on fundamental differences in opinion about the legitimacy of the state — between “liberal Zionist” critics of Israel who also see a democratic Jewish nation as an important refuge for a historically oppressed minority and under dire threat from its neighbors, and “anti-Zionist” critics who are gaining ground in left-wing activism and see Israel as an inherently repressive entity built on ethnic supremacy and colonialism.

On the progressive side, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami told me that while there’s a need to reassess the terms of the US-Israel relationship, he was not seeking to reassess “the friendship” or “the notion that the United States is going to have Israel’s back.”

But on the left, said Bendaas, “There’s a set of folks who are more interested in: how do we actually separate and make the US and Israel less enmeshed in the future.”

The primary in New Jersey’s recent special election was emblematic of this split. The pro-Israel group AIPAC’s campaign arm spent millions to defeat not Mejia, but Tom Malinowski, a more moderate Democrat who was critical of Netanyahu and open to putting conditions on aid. Malinowski described himself as a “pro-Israel” voice seeking to correct a wayward ally; Mejia, the winning candidate, was harsher in her rhetoric and accused Israel of “genocide.” 

Progressives hoping to salvage the relationship are optimistic that Israel’s elections this year will depose Netanyahu for good, allowing for a reset with a fresh face. However, the more dovish Israeli left has long been in decline and polls show many of Netanyahu’s policies on Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran retain strong support among the Israeli people — making a sharp change in approach seem unlikely.

So what then? What if the pressure tactics fail to change Israel’s security calculus, as they have so many times before?

If the Democrats retake power in 2028, they’ll have to try and answer that question.

]]> Jonquilyn Hill <![CDATA[What to do about burnout at work]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=485932 2026-04-17T15:44:21-04:00 2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00 One burnt match is seen in a row of unused matches with red matchheads.

Jonathan Malesic knows burnout firsthand. He was working his dream job, teaching at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. He was publishing papers, working toward tenure — doing all the things on the professor checklist. He was happy; until one day, he wasn’t.

“I was constantly exhausted. I dreaded going to work,” Malesic told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. A combination of unenthusiastic students, a budget crisis, and seeing colleagues let go had him on edge and feeling “sort of useless.” He didn’t recognize himself.

Eventually, he realized something had to give. He left academia, but remained curious about what derailed his career. It turns out, the answer was burnout. He discovered the work of psychology professor Christina Maslach, who literally wrote the book on burnout. 

“There are three dimensions to burnout,” Malesic explained. “The first is exhaustion, and the exhaustion is something that has to be chronic. You can’t be burned out for a week or a month. It’s a kind of exhaustion that does not improve with rest. The second dimension is called cynicism or sometimes depersonalization: You treat people as not full persons. And that can manifest itself in anger, gossip, and frustration. And the third dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness, a feeling that your work is not accomplishing anything.”

Malesic took the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the standard test that measures burnout, and he found he was in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. “In American society, we value work so highly,” he said. “We put so much of our identity and self-worth into work.” Eventually, he wrote a book called The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives.

Danielle Roberts had a similar experience. After a pandemic layoff, she started to seek out balance. She found it, and now, as a career coach, she helps other people find it too. Or as she likes to say: as an anti-career coach. 

“I think we are at a point where dream jobs don’t exist,” she told Explain It to Me. “We have to start questioning the systems and the structures that are causing burnout in the first place, rather than making it a personal problem or a professional weakness.”

So how do you do that? And what are the different ways burnout has manifested itself through the decades? Roberts breaks it down for the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

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Has burnout always been a thing? Or is it just a young person’s game? 

I grew up in a blue-collar family and was one of five kids. My dad did tile and marble for a living for 40 years. He just retired and what he got for a lifetime of hard work was a broken body and a pin to say “thank you for your service.” 

For older generations, their burnout often looked more physical. Gen X, their burnout often looks more mental. And then millennials and Gen Z, our burnout often looks more emotional and existential because we were taught that our work equals our worth and to pour so much of ourselves into it. 

It’s not that one generation is more burnt-out than the other; it’s just that it manifests differently based on the world in which we grew up.

What do you notice about how Gen Z is approaching burnout differently?

We can learn so much from Gen Z and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries that would’ve prevented all of us from burning out in the first place. 

We often hear that they’re lazy and entitled and that nobody wants to work anymore, but think about what they witnessed growing up. They saw their parents or their friends’ parents be loyal to companies that laid them off. They saw millennials put themselves through college and get a tremendous amount of student debt just to be laid off or have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. I think they are looking at everything that other generations have done and saying, “No, thank you.”

Are there ways to avoid burnout at work in the first place?

It all starts in the interview process and being mindful of what to look out for in the language that your team uses. If people are describing their company like a family, run. That is a red flag. I don’t know about anybody else’s family, but mine is full of dysfunction and you’re expected to give a lot, and not always get a ton in return. 

Then when you are in the onboarding process, start talking about what you need from your manager early on. There’s something called a working styles worksheet, and it includes questions like, “When I’m stressed, what I need most from my coworkers is blank. The best way I receive feedback is blank. My meeting participation style is blank.” That will give you a lot of agency and autonomy in how you show up in your work and how you allow other people to treat you. We teach other people how to treat us.

These days, it’s hard to get a job in the first place, on top of the cost of housing and health care and so many things. That makes leaving a job or even having boundaries at the job you have now really, really hard. 

If you can’t afford to quit your job, are there steps you can take to prevent burnout?

The world is a dumpster fire right now and the job market is trash. That said, you do still have agency within your days. 

There’s something called an energy management audit where for a week, you track your time from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed and you figure out what your energy patterns are, then see what you can do to either redesign your time or change up your environment to sustain your energy levels. 

In a workplace that could look like taking a meeting with your camera off or going on a walk. Or if you know you have a particularly draining meeting at 12 pm every single day, you take a five-minute block and get up and just shake out your nervous system, do some jumping jacks, put on your favorite song. You can just close your eyes and give yourself that rest for 30 seconds. You can set a reminder on your phone to do a breathing exercise just to get back into your body a little bit more.

Is there anything you’d recommend not doing? Maybe something that feels good now, but ultimately in the long run is going to make it harder. 

Pushing when you have no more capacity or resources to push. And also thinking that you need to do it all by yourself. We live in a highly individualistic society. We take on so much emotional labor on top of the day-to-day. 

If you are feeling stuck on a problem at work or you’re feeling super stressed, the solution is not to push through and put in more hours. That is going to be not only a disservice to the work itself, it’s going to be a disservice to you. Look at your workload realistically and say, “What can fall off?” We can’t self-help our way out of systems of oppression or burnout. 

I think sometimes we really just need to let some of the plates fall and break, because if we continue to take on everything and our employers are like, “Oh, Danielle’s got it. She can keep doing all of this and it’s fine,” then they’re just going to continue to expect that out of me. But if I say, “I’m letting these two things fall and break and it’s the company’s responsibility to fix them,” then maybe I’ll actually finally get some help.

]]> Astead Herndon <![CDATA[Rubén Gallego on why he defended Eric Swalwell — and why he regrets it now]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=486180 2026-04-18T16:53:18-04:00 2026-04-19T06:00:00-04:00 Gallego walks with a reporters phone pointed at him
Gallego in the US Capitol on October 23, 2025. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

This month, Rep. Eric Swalwell faced a flood of sexual misconduct allegations, pushing him to drop out of the California governor’s race. But the scandal’s blast radius has also ensnared Sen. Rubén Gallego of Arizona, a potential presidential candidate in 2028 and one of Swalwell’s close allies before the stories broke. Gallego had endorsed Swalwell’s gubernatorial bid, chaired his 2020 presidential campaign, and invested in Swalwell’s AI startup.

But now, Gallego is distancing himself from the Congress member and arguing that he had no prior knowledge of the allegations. Gallego has also denied that he heard any rumors of Swalwell’s alleged sexual misconduct.

Recently, I sat down with Gallego for an upcoming episode of America, Actually. The conversation focuses on themes that have made Gallego a national name: immigration reform, outreach to Latino voters, and his advocacy for Democrats to do more outreach to men of color. However, considering the flood of questions about his close relationship with Swalwell, and the fact that Gallego has now earned the ire of some of the voices who helped bring the allegations to light, I also wanted to ask him about his former friend and ally.

Here’s what he said. The full episode will air Saturday, April 25, but will be available earlier this week for Vox Members. Join now on Patreon and get notified when it publishes. 

I don’t want to go too much longer without asking about the recent flood of sexual assault allegations against Congressman Eric Swalwell, who had called you his best friend.

You chaired his 2020 presidential campaign. You were financially involved in his AI startup. Did you have any knowledge of these allegations of misconduct or had you heard rumors of predatory behavior on the Hill? I wanted to ask you directly.

No. No clue, no knowledge of any of the allegations or predatory behavior. That was definitely not what any of us… and look, we’ve all been having conversations since we’re all actually going back…

Who do you mean by we?

Friends, members of Congress, other supporters. We’re all talking to each other to see: What did we do wrong? What did we not see? 

I want to just follow up, though, because it seems as if the scale of the allegations makes that — I guess it causes a gut check on that, because it seems as if this was a known thing among some on the Hill. This seems as if, certainly, there was a community of women who were organizing around this. You hadn’t heard anything about any of that?

Not about the allegations we’re talking about, the sexual assault, the predatory behavior. You know, there is a culture in DC that certainly exists — where not just him, but many other politicians — we heard of someone that’s being, you know, flirty. But never inappropriate, never predatory, never toward staff, and things of that nature. But look, this is the kind of thing that makes all of us relook at what we have been accepting versus not accepting. 

Part of the reason some of this has come back on you, though, is that you went out of your way to defend Swalwell just this month, writing recently on X that “Eric is a fighter.” 

Considering now what you know, or considering that you’re saying you heard rumors about him being flirty, why proactively defend him?

Well, for two reasons: [First] because we had heard this, about him, about other politicians, for a long time, and nothing had ever surfaced, right? Number two, he knew exactly what to say to me, because I had just gotten off a very hard 2024 campaign, where I had some of the worst things said about me on commercials that my kids have to see.

And [Swalwell’s team] and some of his staff pushed that button on me. And it was a mistake. I mean, without a doubt, it was a mistake. Let’s be clear: Knowing now everything I know of, I would never have done it. But knowing now everything I know, especially of sexual assault, sexually predatory [behavior], we would not have had the relationship that we had.

There have been some that have said that this is also a question of your judgment. I wanted you to respond to that. I mean, you’ve been kind of openly embracing the question of a 2028 race. What do you say to someone who looks at this situation and sees it as a cause to question you?

To be a hundred percent honest, you know, I am more human first than a politician. And my judgment was off because of many reasons. But number one, because I knew this man as a family man, first. We weren’t just work colleagues. Our families ate dinner together; our kids were in camps together. And I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. 

But you know, for me, it’s not a 2028 question. It’s about what it means to be a better, first boss in my office, and also a better senator to my constituents.  

]]> Bryan Walsh <![CDATA[The simple question that could change your career]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=486107 2026-04-17T17:03:09-04:00 2026-04-18T08:30:00-04:00 Career Fair sign
Job seekers attend a career fair in Harlem hosted by Assemblymember Jordan Wright on December 10, 2025, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Devon Fritz had his midlife crisis a little early. 

He spent his 20s writing tax software, staying on track to hit all the life targets he’d set for himself: house, kids, financial security. And then, one day, he did the math and projected forward what the next 20 years of his life would look like. But instead of relief, “I had this weird feeling that I’d totally missed the target,” he told me recently. 

“I looked around at my colleagues, who kind of felt stuck in this place,” he said. “They had gotten to this cushy job where things were good, pay was good, benefits were good, but nobody seemed happy.”

This might sound familiar. Who among us hasn’t had the occasional crisis of meaning, perhaps mentally scored to the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”? (The last part might just be me.) But most of us shake off those existential doubts and press on, for better or for worse. 

Devon Fritz, however, is not like you or me. Searching for a more meaningful life and career, he tried volunteering with refugee-aid groups in Germany during the 2015 migrant crisis — only to be discouraged by how slow, unresponsive, and ineffective he found the nonprofit world. 

Eventually, at a conference in Oxford, England, he discovered effective altruism, or EA. EA is built on the idea that we should use rigorous evidence and cost-benefit analysis to do the most good possible, very much including how we donate to charity. A dollar to one organization might save a life; a dollar to another might buy a commemorative tote bag. EA takes that gap in impact seriously and follows the math wherever it leads, always searching for the donation or the act that can create the most measurable positive impact, especially in terms of lives saved. 

The idea clicked with Fritz, and over the next several years, he rebuilt his career around a single, very EA-inflected question: How can you build a career that really matters? The result is his book The High-Impact Professional’s Playbook, the manual Fritz says he wished he’d had during his early existential crisis. The book lays out concrete paths through which a person with a regular job can actually create outsized positive impact on the world. 

What follows are five of the most useful ideas from it. And while Fritz’s framework comes out of effective altruism — which, with all its hyper-rationality, can sometimes seem cold or weird to outsiders — he argues that the lessons have value for everyone.

“Being impactful — in its best form — doesn’t tell you what to do,” he told me. “It just says do stuff. Figure out what’s good, and do something that’s really good.” 

Next best may be better than best

The intellectual spine of Fritz’s book is a concept called “counterfactuality,” which, I’ll admit, may make you want to stop reading now. But while it’s a 22-point word in Scrabble, counterfactuality is actually pretty simple. For any action meant to do good, ask yourself: What would have happened if I hadn’t done it? If the honest answer is “basically the same thing,” your actual impact is smaller than you think.

Haindavi Kandarpa, one of the case studies in Fritz’s book, was at Boston Consulting Group working on public health and education projects in India and Bangladesh. That sounds both important and good, but when Kandarpa asked the counterfactual question about her own role, the answer was devastating: Nothing would really change. If she wasn’t doing it, someone equally competent would have taken her slot and done roughly the same work. That realization led her to leave for a charity startup incubator.

A lot of the standard advice about doing good falters when faced with the counterfactual. If 500 people apply for a job at an elite nonprofit and one gets it, the actual impact of the hire is the often-small gap between them and the closet runner-up. Fritz’s paradoxical conclusion is that you can have more counterfactual impact in obscure places nobody is looking — like the charity ranked fifth on the effectiveness list, not first. That can be hard to hear, especially for high performers used to competing for every top prize, but the status hit is worth it for the sake of actually making a difference.

It’s not just what you do — it’s what you do with your money

Unless you’re a full-time volunteer or are extremely bad at salary negotiation, you get money for your work. And what you do with that money can be just as impactful as what you did to get it.

According to a 2024 GiveWell analysis cited in his book, you can statistically save one human life if you give just $3,000 — provided it’s to the most effective charity. Switching just 10 percent of your charitable giving from a typical charity to an evidence-backed one can help up to 100 times more people or animals, all for the same cost. That is a life-saving impact.

This is the move with the lowest barrier to entry in the entire book, and the one most influenced by effective altruism. You don’t have to quit your job, move countries, or learn a new skillset. You keep doing what you’re doing but write the check — or, better, set up a recurring transfer — to an organization on a credible evaluator’s list. (GiveWell is a great place to begin.) You can start at 1 percent of income and see how it feels.

Your workplace is a lever

Most people don’t think of their workplace as something they can change. But if you have any influence over procurement, hiring, 401(k) match programs, charitable giving policies, or the company’s public positions, you have access to budgets and decisions that could dwarf what you can do on your own. 

A mid-level manager who convinces their company to enroll in a workplace-giving program that defaults to effective charities can route more money in a single policy change than they could personally donate over a decade.

Nonprofits desperately need people who know how things work

The most consistently surprising path in Fritz’s book is trusteeship and advisory work. Charities and NGOs are often filled with well-meaning people who desperately want to do good, Fritz told me, but “they don’t have anybody even thinking” about quotidian details like finance. Luciana Vilar, another case study in the book, spent years in corporate finance before joining two nonprofit boards and was routinely the only person in the room who knew how to build a real budget.

If you are a competent finance person, lawyer, HR professional, or operations manager — which includes basically anyone who has worked inside a functioning company — you probably have skills that even well-funded nonprofits are desperate for. Giving few hours of your week to board or advisory time can unlock capacity an organization can’t buy, and it doesn’t require a career switch.

Your network has more leverage than you think

Fritz’s most striking claim is that the most time-efficient path to making a difference isn’t your career or your donations; it’s the people you already know. 

If an effective but under-resourced charity is trying to fill a role, and you spend an hour emailing the five people in your network who’d be a good fit, and one gets hired, the counterfactual math of what you’ve done is absurdly high. And it didn’t require you to change jobs or write a check. All you had to do was send some emails. 

It’s the path Fritz himself has taken, starting High Impact Professionals, which has placed dozens of mid-career people into higher-impact roles, all while rigorously measuring its own counterfactual impact. (When a candidate in the network takes a job, they ask the employer how good the next-best candidate was. When it’s very close, they count less impact.)

The same network effects can work with donations. Fritz describes people raising $1,000 or more by posting on social media a few weeks before their birthday, asking friends to donate to an effective charity instead of sending a gift. A lot of “how can I make a difference” agonizing is really about not wanting to look at the lever that’s already in your hand.

I’ve talked to enough people lately, including myself in the mirror, to know that low-grade despair is becoming our default setting. The problems of the world feel too large, individual action feels too small, and it can feel like the honest move is to just tend your garden. But when I pushed Fritz on this, he gave me an answer I keep coming back to. “There are big problems,” he acknowledged. “But that means it’s a great time to jump in and try to solve them.” 

That can sound naive — but it’s also right. A world without problems wouldn’t need any of us. The world we actually have needs all the help it can get, and the bar for being useful in it is lower than we think.

]]> Astead Herndon <![CDATA[How Americans really feel about immigration]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=486155 2026-04-17T18:15:05-04:00 2026-04-18T07:00:00-04:00 Construction crews work near a stretch of wall along the southern border of the US.
Construction crews install panels of the border wall near La Casita-Garciasville, Texas, on November 26, 2024. | Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images

Immigration enforcement was once one of President Donald Trump’s strongest issues, driving his victories in the 2016 and 2024 presidential contests. But these days, most Americans seem to hate just about everything Trump’s administration has done to actually address the issue. 

Polls show Americans have shifted dramatically on immigration since Trump returned to office — and about half of all Americans now want to abolish ICE, the deportation force Trump has empowered since returning to office.  

But what do Americans really think about immigration, beyond their feelings about the current administration? And as we build toward the 2026 midterm elections (and eventually the 2028 presidential elections), how will both parties wrestle with an electorate that has often seemed to agree with Trump’s diagnosis of a problem while also rejecting his proposed solutions?

In this week’s episode of America, Actually, I talk with two people with different perspectives on America’s immigration conundrum. Caitlin Dickerson, Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter at The Atlantic, has reported on how both parties have helped build the immigration system that they now agree is broken. And Yana Kuchinoff, a reporter with Arizona Luminaria and corps member with Report for America, has followed how Trump’s actions have roiled local communities she covers on the Arizona border. 

Here are some takeaways from the episode that stuck out, and read on for an excerpt from my conversation with Caitlin.

The data: Gallup found last year that the share of Americans who want immigration reduced had dropped significantly, from 55 percent in 2024 to 30 percent today. The same poll also found a record-high 79 percent of US adults say immigration is a good thing for the country, suggesting that Trump’s enforcement actions have had the opposite effect on the electorate.

The quote(s): “Obviously there’s a lot that is novel that Donald Trump is doing on interior enforcement of our immigration laws right now. But if I think about your question, most of what we’re seeing and most of the issues, frankly, that the public is taking with the current system come from many, many presidents ago.” —Caitlin Dickerson 

“When I was covering the election in 2024, the concerns about border security and people’s feelings about what was happening were really big, emotional talking points. But I think some of the enforcement in the Tucson-area communities is a lot less abstract.” —Yana Kuchinoff

What comes next: The shift in sentiment on immigration has already impacted the landscape for this year’s midterm elections. Trump’s approval rating with Latino voters has cratered since returning to office, and Democratic wins in special elections across the country (including recently in New Jersey) have capitalized on that vulnerability. 

But the biggest tests for both parties on the issue will likely come next year, as the presidential race begins in earnest. Republicans have let Trump (and his adviser Stephen Miller) define their immigration policy for a decade, and have unanswered questions on where they stand on issues like H-1B visas, avenues for legal immigration, and ICE’s massive credibility loss among the general public. Democrats have big questions, too, which mostly center around finding a middle ground between embracing enforcement efforts and spearheading a broader immigration reform bill in Congress. 

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Below is an excerpt of my conversation with The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson, edited for length and clarity. You can watch America, Actually on YouTube or find it wherever you get your podcasts.

It feels like the Democrats’ one principle around immigration is: we don’t like what Donald Trump does. Why do you think this has remained broken for so long? I mean, why not fix something?

There are a few different theories as to why Democrats have really not shown leadership on this issue. One is this idea that you’ll hear Democrats talking about: They feel like the party is fighting scared. 

Democrats are always susceptible to this criticism that they’re soft on crime, that they’re open to lawlessness, that they are prioritizing DEI and people of color over public safety. And so immigration very much falls into that kind of easy beating that they can take on a campaign trail. 

And forces Democrats to have to—

Come from a defensive crouch. 

Come from a defensive crouch and show this ability to have a [stronger] image.

I think another, probably more important and of course, more cynical issue is, it’s just politics. 

Donald Trump saw a very clear upside in focusing on immigration for himself from his earliest campaign rallies, and he smartly intuited, these people are going to show up and vote for me if I keep talking about this. And he has continued to talk about it. 

Look at the calculation on the Democratic side: Democrats aren’t sticking their neck out for a population of people who by nature cannot vote for them.

Not only can this constituency not vote, but Americans generally tend to really underestimate, I think, how interconnected we all are with the immigration system. That is being challenged right now.

What do you mean?

People are seeing that they personally are affected by this deportation campaign. Even if it’s not someone in their family who’s being arrested, because their kid is scared, because their kid’s friend got arrested, or their kid’s friend’s parent got arrested. People aren’t showing up for church. Their employees aren’t showing up for work. Their patrons aren’t showing up to buy things from them. 

The interconnectedness is becoming more clear now, but generally speaking, I think what holds Democrats back is if you have two years or four years, or maybe six years, depending on how long you might have the advantage in Congress to push forward just a couple of priorities, why are you going to focus on one that Americans tend to think of as for those people over there?

Yep. 

Not for us. Even if the public is sympathetic to the issue, it’s not going to be number one or number two on their list of concerns.

[Sen. Ruben] Gallego has talked about the need to embrace practical [reforms] rather than something like the dramatic step of abolishing ICE. I wanted to know, from your perspective as someone who has done kind of systemic work, what is the biggest gap you see in the political conversation about immigration that could be really tangibly impactful for folks’ lives? 

Something that Gallego has been one of the few people to talk about, I think, is largely absent from the conversation and pretty key to how stuck we are. We don’t have a lot of legal pathways to the United States and we especially don’t have legal pathways to the United States for the jobs that we tend to rely on undocumented workers for. 

Construction, restaurant work, hospitality, domestic work. These jobs are dominated by immigrant workers and by and large, do not have visas available to do them. I mean, we now have a couple hundred thousand guest worker visas for agriculture. We have millions of agriculture workers in the United States, and so [Gallego] actually has talked at different times about a need for legal pathways and balancing that with border security. I think that’s smart because historically, when you’ve seen these attempts at cracking down on the border, they’ve never been able to overpower the draw on the other side.

]]> Cameron Peters <![CDATA[Is the Strait of Hormuz really open?]]> https://www.vox.com/486168/the-logoff-template 2026-04-17T18:10:25-04:00 2026-04-17T18:10:00-04:00 Donald Trump, wearing a navy suit with a pink tie, is seen outside the White House.
President Donald Trump walks over to speak to the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on April 16, 2026. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is open — but there’s no peace deal yet, and there are plenty of unanswered questions. Here’s what we do know: 

What’s happening with Hormuz? On Friday, Iran said that it was reopening the Strait of Hormuz for at least the remainder of the US-Iran ceasefire, which is currently set to expire next week. In a post announcing the move, Iran’s foreign minister cited Thursday’s ceasefire in Lebanon as a reason for the reopening. 

It’s another positive sign in ongoing US-Iran talks, which have yet to produce a deal, and it could have a quick impact on gas prices in the US, NPR reports, as oil prices also fall.

But plenty of hurdles remain. For one, President Donald Trump says he intends to keep the US blockade of the strait in place until a deal is reached. That means that while the strait might be reopened to much commercial traffic, Iranian oil likely won’t be able to get out. 

There’s also the question of how open the strait really is, Friday’s announcement aside. As the BBC reports, while Iran has previously shared a map with two ostensibly open maritime routes, trackers suggest that few vessels have actually passed through so far. Part of the problem might be the naval mines Iran has laid in the strait, some of which it reportedly cannot locate or remove.

Is a peace deal close? No one seems to know. Trump has suggested that the US and Iran have reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear material (Trump calls it “dust”), which he wants removed from the country. But Reuters reported Friday that there are still “significant differences” preventing a deal, including around Iran’s nuclear program. 

We’re likely to learn more about where things stand this weekend, as talks continue. Right now, the two countries are staring down a Wednesday deadline, after which the current ceasefire expires. However, if negotiations are ongoing and the Strait of Hormuz remains open, it’s not hard to see that deadline getting extended.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, a quick programming note: I will be off on Monday, but this newsletter will be in your inbox like normal in the trusty hands of one of my colleagues. 

Now, to log off: I learned about a new sport — “Uppies and Downies,” a sort of medieval proto-rugby with Calvinball characteristics (i.e., no rules) — from this excellent Athletic article, which visits a town in northwestern England where it’s still played. You can read the full piece here with a gift link.

Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Tuesday!

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