2026-03-12 18:30:00
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In the less than two weeks since the US and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, the war has already killed over 1,900 people across 11 countries and displaced more than 700,000. It has destroyed schools, hospitals, and critical infrastructure across the region, and threatens to plunge countries near and far — many of which rely on now-disrupted shipping routes for fuel and fertilizer — into economic and humanitarian crises.
If the escalating conflict feels to you like one more in a long slog of painfully violent, complex global crises, then you are not wrong. There are indeed more wars and armed conflicts today than there have been at any time since the end of World War II. Over one-fifth of the world’s kids now live in places warped by conflict, which magnifies poverty and hunger. And conflict doesn’t just worsen conditions on the ground — it makes getting humanitarian aid flowing to those who need it most an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous task.
But difficult doesn’t mean impossible. Local aid workers across the region have been working nonstop to get civilians safely fed and cared for, while new methods of crisis response mean that the world may soon be able to move money much more quickly to the people and places that need it most. And while just how long this war will continue may only be known to President Donald Trump, these organizations will need support to fuel long-term recovery for those both directly and indirectly affected by the violence. The fighting has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping lane between Iran and Oman that supplies about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and more than a third of the world’s fertilizer. A prolonged closure could quickly devolve into a major global food crisis, including a spike in hunger in the countries most vulnerable to it.
For the average person, thinking about how to help in a conflict like this can feel daunting, to say the least. It might even seem pointless against the sheer momentum of war. If you can’t solve everything — if the war has no end in sight — then why bother with Band-Aid solutions at all?
But people need help now, so they can make it to the day after. And with global aid cuts siphoning off support for humanitarian relief organizations even as conflict spikes, your donations are genuinely more important than ever. Here’s how to help.
One way to think about the complexities of getting aid to a conflict zone is to imagine a natural disaster that lasts not for hours or days, but for weeks, months, or years on end. “With a hurricane or flood, the hazard has likely passed” by the time aid starts pouring in, said Patricia McIlreavy, CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy.
But when it comes to complex manmade humanitarian disasters like war, “that hazard is continuing,” she said, meaning that the damage and logistical challenges of coordinating relief in the fog of war can quickly compound as time goes on.
If you’re in the US, giving directly to organizations based in Iran is complicated by American sanctions on the country, though humanitarian projects are generally exempt. But you can donate to global relief organizations, like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Norwegian Refugee Council, many of which do work in Iran and across the region.
Other groups, like Project HOPE, are actively monitoring the needs of many Iranian refugees, while focusing their relief efforts on the fallout among Iran’s most vulnerable neighbors.
In Lebanon, home to the world’s highest refugee population per capita, escalating hostilities have led to a mounting humanitarian crisis in a country still recovering from its last war with Israel, which technically ended in 2024. Even prior to the new hostilities, Lebanon was experiencing a severe economic collapse, with nearly 70 percent of the country in need of humanitarian assistance.
Many of these organizations are doing their best to actively deploy resources where they anticipate the greatest needs will be. “They don’t know how things are going to settle,” said McIlreavy. “They don’t know where they’re going to have access. And so they’re going to need to be flexible.”
That goes for their supporters as well.
The bulk of humanitarian aid still passes through established charities and agencies like the United Nations. But there’s also the increasingly popular idea of sending cash directly to people, something that has been done informally for centuries through remittances and mutual aid.
A growing body of research shows that even in fragile conflict zones, people often strongly prefer receiving cash — which they can then spend however they need to — over relief items like food parcels, hygiene kits, or blankets. The nonprofit GiveDirectly has pioneered the use of technology to get cash aid to people fast, and is actively exploring how to help those affected by this conflict through a newly launched emergency fund.
Historically, most of GiveDirectly’s work has focused on people living in extreme poverty, rather than specifically targeting those living in conflict zones. But the organization has also more recently expanded to providing emergency relief to families affected by conflicts like the Yemeni civil war and armed clashes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
One way the group works is through cellphone metadata, which can help identify people who are likely in need. In this case, that may include displaced people in Lebanon, Iranian refugees entering Turkey, or Malawians affected by rising fertilizer costs. GiveDirectly then screens those people for eligibility via text, and sends them cash through mobile payment platforms.
The process tends to be “cleaner, faster, more objective, and cheaper” than more traditional outreach methods like knocking door-to-door, said Leith Baker, who runs GiveDirectly’s emergency cash strategy. It’s a “really protective, dignified way to receive money” that “gives the recipient a lot of choice and protection.”
Once the group’s outreach system is in place, it also works exceptionally fast, which makes it an especially promising option for people in rapidly evolving conflict zones. You can help GiveDirectly with its plans to send cash to those affected by the conflict by donating here.
For other ways to send cash directly, plenty of local advocates in Lebanon and across the region have also begun creating and sharing mutual aid funds for local families and organizations, like Nation Station, a volunteer-led community kitchen in Beirut, Lebanon.
While those who live in range of the bombs are at the greatest risk, many of those most affected will include people who don’t live in the region at all. Those in already deeply impoverished countries will be the most vulnerable to the conflict’s economic ripple effects, which already include surging prices on food, fertilizer, and fuel. There are plenty of groups working to support communities in crisis both now and long after the news cycle fades.
Even prior to this escalating crisis, the world was already on the verge of a grim milestone. For the first time in decades, the number of people living in extreme poverty is projected to start increasing by 2030, with most of it highly concentrated in the poorest — and often most conflict-affected — countries.
Global aid cuts have been making a bad situation even worse. And now, for the most vulnerable countries, the Iran war could cause far more than just higher prices at the grocery store, but also prolonged, widespread food shortages. It’s more important than ever to dig deep now to support those suffering the worst fallout.
“Even if the conflict was to end tomorrow,” said McIlreavy, “the recovery will take a long time.”
2026-03-12 05:40:00
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: A US strike killed nearly 200 children on the first day of the Iran war, according to the preliminary findings of a US investigation into the deaths.
What’s going on? The findings are the product of an ongoing US military investigation into the strike, which hit a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran.
It’s the last data point in a growing body of evidence that the strike was the US’s fault, including verified video appearing to show a US-made and launched Tomahawk missile hitting near the school and photos of debris seemingly also from a Tomahawk missile. As recently as Monday, Trump had baselessly tried to suggest the strike could have come from Iran.
What do we know about the strike? At least 175 people, primarily children under the age of 12, were killed by the strike early Saturday. Because of Iran’s six-day workweek, which begins on Saturday, students were in school when it was hit. They were reportedly in the process of evacuating at the time, according to CNN.
How does something like this happen? The strike was likely the result of human error and out-of-date targeting data. The school was adjacent to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy buildings and previously had been part of the same campus.
What’s the big picture? The Trump administration has taken steps that make these kinds of preventable tragedies more likely. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has frequently derided what he describes as “stupid rules of engagement” hindering “lethality.”
And as ProPublica reported on Tuesday, Hegseth’s DOD has dismantled its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) plan, including the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — aimed, as the name suggests, at preventing civilian deaths in war.
If it were still in place, experts told ProPublica, CHMR “could have made a difference.”
Hi, readers, here’s a hopeful story from the Washington Post: The tiny forests that could save endangered trees.
Bonsai, the Post reports, isn’t just a hobby and an art form; the long-lived trees can also serve as a sort of genetic library, preserving in miniature trees that are otherwise threatened in nature — with a long list of conservation benefits.
You can read Kate Morgan’s full Post story on bonsai here with a gift link. And if you’ve never been to the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum at DC’s National Arboretum, I can’t recommend it enough. Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
2026-03-12 01:30:00
President Donald Trump has suggested that the US-Israeli air campaign in Iran will continue until “they cry uncle, or when they can’t fight any longer.” Iran’s foreign minister has said their own military will fight “as long as it takes” and that they have little interest in negotiating a ceasefire.
But continuing the war isn’t just a question of will; it’s a question of means. And one key constraint on how long the conflict might rage is how much ammunition each side has to continue it. Currently, it’s an arms race between Iranian missiles and drones and US, Israeli, and Gulf State countermeasures to shoot them down. And while the answers to questions about their capacity are closely guarded, there are signs of strain on both sides.
With its conventional military overmatched and its network of regional allies badly degraded, Iran’s main remaining means of “fighting” is its missile and drone stockpile.
Iran has fired thousands of missiles and one-way attack drones at 13 countries, killing at least 43 people, according to data compiled by the Israeli think tank INSS. These include seven US servicemembers. Iran has struck a wide range of targets, from US military bases to luxury hotels in Dubai to Amazon data centers. On Wednesday, three ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz came under drone attack as part of Iran’s effort to shut down one of the key chokepoints of the world energy market.
This is dwarfed by the damage that has been inflicted by the US and Israel on Iran, where more than 1,200 people have been killed according to Iranian authorities, and much of the country’s military and political infrastructure has been destroyed.
But Iran’s attacks would have been far worse for the wider region if the countries they were going after didn’t have such strong defenses against missiles and drones. Most of the countries that have been heavily targeted appear to be successfully intercepting over 90 percent of the projectiles Iran has fired at them.
Doing so is not easy, however. Interceptors are among the world’s most sophisticated and in-demand weapons, and the successful interception effort has come at a tremendous cost.
The US burned through an estimated $2.4 billion worth of Patriot interceptors, which cost around $4 million each, in just the first five days of this war. During last June’s conflict, the US used around a quarter of its total stock of THAAD interceptors, which are fired from a mobile anti-missile battery. Only around 11 interceptors are made per year, and the use rate is likely similar this time around.
“You’re on the wrong side of the cost curve if you are doing missile defense in the first place,” said Sam Lair of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “That’s just the reality of how these, these types of wars work. Interceptors are expensive, they don’t have very many of them, and not many of them are produced each year.”
These kinds of interceptors have sometimes been referred to as “the table stakes” of today’s missile and drone-heavy wars, and the reverberations of the current Mideast missile war are being felt well beyond the region. European officials say interceptors needed for the war in Ukraine are being diverted to the Middle East. In a sign of just how pressing the need has become, the US is reportedly moving parts of a powerful THAAD interceptor system from South Korea to the Middle East on the same week that North Korea is test-firing missiles from its latest warship.
Offensive weapons, while a lesser concern, are also an issue: The US may need years to replenish its stocks of Tomahawk missiles, to take one example.
“For years, all of the services have been firing precision stocks much faster than their replacement rates,” said MacKenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.
Heavy US and Israeli bombardment of Iran’s missile facilities is taking a toll on its ability to fire them in the first place. According to the US military, the number of Iranian missile launches is down 90 percent, and drone launches are down 83 percent since the start of the conflict, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called “strong evidence of degradation.”
Some experts believe the drop in launches is evidence that Iran is holding back some of its arsenal, anticipating a long fight, but it’s still safe to say that by any conventional metric, Iran is “losing” the missile war.
But the goal of Iran’s leaders is not to defeat the US and Israel — there was never any question of that — it’s to continue to inflict pain to the point where Trump, facing skyrocketing gas prices, a jittery economy, falling poll numbers, and grumbling allies, decides to call it quits and resist calls to renew the war again later.
Prior to last June’s “12-day war,” Iran was believed to have between 2,000 and 3,000 missiles in its stockpile. It fired around 600 in that conflict, and many more were destroyed on the ground by Israeli airstrikes, but in the months since, Iranian authorities had worked to replenish those stockpiles and harden their defenses.
Many of these were concentrated in vast underground “missile cities.” In the early phase of the war, these were hit heavily, and Iran’s own air defenses proved mostly unable to defend them. Mobile launchers were often destroyed immediately after leaving the facilities. The US has used bunker buster bombs to destroy the entrances to the cities, leaving hundreds of missiles buried underground. Israel estimates that it has destroyed or buried around 70 percent of Iran’s missile launchers. Even if those estimates are on the high end, the speed at which the US and Israel have been able to dismantle much of Iran’s once-feared missile deterrent has surprised many observers.
Iran has also been something of a pioneer in the development of one-way attack drones. The low-cost Iranian “Shahed” has been used extensively by Russia’s military against Ukrainian cities for years. The US is now deploying its own drone closely modeled on the weapon. The size of Iran’s drone stockpile is unknown, but before the war, its production capacity was estimated at around 10,000 per month, though it’s surely less now.
While less powerful, these drones could be pivotal in Iran’s efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed to oil exports. In this campaign, the Iranians may have taken some lessons from their Yemeni allies, who used a relatively small number of drones and missiles to create chaos in the Red Sea during the war in Gaza.
Iran’s choice of targets in this war has been somewhat unexpected. While some feared a massive salvo against Israel that would overwhelm the country’s air defenses, the strikes have been more spread out, with 20 times more total projectiles directed against the Gulf states than Israel. This may partly be the result of the damage inflicted on the command structure of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — Iranian doctrine gives missile commanders wide latitude to choose their targets when they don’t have word from Tehran.
“It was 30 different IRGC, commanders doing their own thing, and that’s why we saw them doing things like launching against Oman, which made no sense to anybody,” said Decker Eveleth, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, noting that Oman was the country that had attempted to mediate a nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States in the lead-up to the war.
Iran may also be targeting the Gulf because those are the missiles it still has available. It used many of its longer-range weapons to strike Israel during the 12-day war. Its shorter-range missiles, aimed primarily at the Gulf and US bases in the region, were relatively untouched and were not as heavily bombed in the early days of this war. They’ve been hit more heavily over the last few days. By striking airports and hotels rather than military targets, Iran may also be aiming to demoralize and frighten local populations, building on similar attacks against Israeli cities during the 12-day war last year. “They started hitting a lot more civilian areas,” Nicole Grajewski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said. “It turned out to have a high psychological cost for the Israelis — it was pretty terrorizing for them at the population level.”
The hope may be that the damage to regional countries may get to the point that their governments start putting more pressure on Trump to end the war, though it could also have the adverse effect of drawing them into the conflict directly.
As for Israel itself, Iran has begun launching missiles fitted with cluster munitions that burst at high altitude, scattering tiny bomblets. While not particularly effective against hardened military targets, these have the advantage of being difficult to intercept. (They’re also banned by more than 120 countries because of the dangers unexploded bomblets can pose to civilians long after conflicts end.)
Despite the high intercept rates, there are signs that the region was not fully prepared for the Iranian onslaught.
Some analysts have questioned why the six US troops killed in Kuwait on March 1 were working in what appeared to be a makeshift operations center, given that it was the US that determined when the war began. Axios has reported that US officials last year rejected a Ukrainian offer to sell the same anti-drone technology it is now installing under fire. There were also reports early in the war that Gulf states were running dangerously short on interceptors and that the US was scrambling to provide them with more. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE rely on advanced US-made systems like Patriot and THAAD for air defense, which, though highly effective, are extremely expensive and ill-suited to take on large numbers of cheap missiles and drones.
The UAE has had success in using helicopters to shoot down drones at a lower cost, and experts from Ukraine — a country that now knows a thing or two about shooting down missiles and Iranian-made drones —have been dispatched to the region to consult. Overall, the fear of running out of interceptors has become less acute as the number of Iranian launches has dropped.
As for Israel, it isn’t publicizing its intercept rate this time around in order to make it harder to assess its stockpiles, but the country was also reportedly running low on stockpiles at the end of the 12-day war.
Iran is still getting some missiles and drones to their targets. On March 10, more than 25 percent of drones fired at the UAE got through, significantly higher than previous days. Iran also now appears to be targeting the radar facilities used by the US to track incoming missiles.
Modern interceptors may be able to take down most of what Iran is firing at US troops and the cities of the Middle East in this war for now. But the impact may be felt in the next one. And even if Iran no longer has enough resources to overwhelm the region’s defenses, they may hope they can keep up the threat long enough for the costs to become intolerable.
2026-03-11 20:30:00
I was fortunate enough to spend several days last week at the Aspen Institute’s Crosscurrent summit on AI and national security in San Francisco. My first takeaway: I very much recommend being in sunny (at the moment, at least) San Francisco rather than slushy, raw New York in early March. The second took a little longer to form.
The conference was full of former national security officials, cybersecurity executives, and AI leaders, and the conversation mostly went where you’d expect: the Anthropic-Pentagon fight, the role of AI in the Iran conflict, the coming of autonomous weapons. But the panel that stuck with me was about something less dramatic. It was about something almost old-fashioned, now supercharged by AI: scams.
At one point, Todd Hemmen, a deputy assistant director in the FBI’s Cyber Division’s Cyber Capabilities branch, described how North Korean operatives are using AI-generated face overlays to pass remote job interviews at Western tech companies — then working multiple remote positions simultaneously, funneling the salaries and any intelligence back to the regime in Pyongyang. They fabricate résumés with AI, prep for interviews with AI, and use AI to wear the “face of someone who’s not the person behind the camera,” Hemmen told the audience. Some of the most proficient actors are holding down several full-time jobs at once, all under fake identities, all enabled by tools that didn’t exist two years ago.
That detail has been rattling around in my head since, not the least because it made me wonder how these industrious operatives can manage multiple jobs when I find just one taxing enough. But Hemmen’s story captures something deeper about the moment we find ourselves in. The AI risks getting the most airtime right now are speculative and cinematic — killer robots, AI panopticons. But the AI threat that’s here right now is a foreign agent wearing a synthetic face on a Zoom call, collecting a paycheck from your company. And almost nobody is treating it with the same urgency.
Cybercrime has been a problem since the days of dial-up, but the scale of what’s happening now is staggering. The FBI reported that the US suffered $16.6 billion in known cybercrime losses in 2024 — up 33 percent in a single year, and more than doubled over three years. Americans over 60 lost nearly $5 billion. And those are just the reported numbers; Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society, told the Aspen Institute audience that only about one in five victims ever reports a scam. The real number is unknowable, but it’s much worse.
And now comes generative AI to make all of this faster, cheaper, and more convincing. Phishing emails no longer arrive riddled with typos from supposed Nigerian princes; LLMs can produce fluent, regionally specific language. AI image generators can create entire synthetic identities — dozens of photos of a person who doesn’t exist, complete with vacation shots and designer handbags.
Voice cloning has enabled heists that were science fiction five years ago: In early 2024, a finance worker at the Hong Kong office of UK engineering firm Arup transferred $25 million after a deepfake video call in which the company’s CFO and several colleagues seemed to appear on screen. All of them, it turns out, were fake. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report found that AI-enabled attacks surged 89 percent year-over-year, while the average time from initial breach to being able to spread throughout a network dropped to just 29 minutes. The fastest observed breakout: 27 seconds.
Why is this problem so comparatively neglected? Partly because we’ve normalized it. Cybercrime has been growing for years, driven by the professionalization of criminal syndicates, cryptocurrency, remote work, and the industrialization of scam compounds in Southeast Asia. (My Vox colleague Josh Keating wrote a great story a couple of years ago on these so-called pig butchering scams.)
We’ve absorbed each year’s record losses as the cost of doing business online. But the curve is steepening: Deloitte projects that generative AI-enabled fraud losses in the US alone could hit $40 billion by 2027. “In the same way that legitimate businesses are integrating automation, so are organized crime,” Marwick said.
That so much of this goes unsaid and unreported adds to the toll. Marwick’s research focuses on romance scams — people targeted during periods of loneliness or transition, slowly bled of their savings by someone they believe loves them. She told the audience that victims often refuse to believe they’re being scammed even when confronted with direct proof. AI makes the emotional manipulation far more persuasive, and no spam filter will protect someone who is willingly sending money.
Can defense keep up? Marwick drew a hopeful comparison to spam, which nearly broke email in the 1990s before a combination of technical fixes, legislation, and social adaptation tamed it, at least to a large extent. Financial institutions are deploying AI to catch AI-enabled fraud. The FBI froze hundreds of millions in stolen funds last year.
But the consensus at the conference was largely grim. “We’re entering this window of time where the offense is so much more capable than the defense,” said Rob Joyce, former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency. Marwick was blunter: “I would say generally I’m pretty pessimistic.”
So am I. As I was writing this story, I received an email from a friend with what appeared to be a Paperless Post invitation. The language in the email looked a little odd, but when I clicked on the invite, it took me to a page that seemed very similar to Paperless Post, down to the logo. Still suspicious, I emailed my friend, asking if this was real. “Yes, it is legit,” he wrote back.
That was enough proof for me, but I got distracted and didn’t click on the next step of the invite. Good thing — a few minutes later, my friend emailed me and others to tell us that, yes, he had been hacked.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-03-11 19:30:00
Let me be frank: I do not have a life insurance policy. I am 37 years old, married, and pregnant with twins. My State Farm agent calls me on a near-monthly basis, encouraging me to secure a life insurance policy because “that is something I really need to do,” but I keep sending her to voicemail.
In my 20s, having a life insurance policy felt like a ridiculous way to spend the barely livable wage I made, especially since I felt invincible and had no dependents (unless you count my perfect rescue mutt). In my early 30s, I entered a serious relationship, but we were establishing our careers — neither of which was all that lucrative — and handled our finances completely separately. My partner’s financial security after my make-believe premature death was not top of mind.
Maybe it’s the pregnancy, or perhaps the impending collapse of society, but I’m finally starting to consider setting up a policy. Still, life insurance remains a total mystery to me. To understand if and when it actually makes sense to have life insurance, I called up a financial therapist and a wealth manager and asked them: When are these things really, truly necessary? Here’s what they said.
Let’s start with the basics. A life insurance policy is a contract designed to pay out money to people you love — known as beneficiaries — in the event that you die. That money, which typically gets paid out within 14 to 60 days, can help your surviving crew pay bills, student loans, childcare, mortgage, property taxes, rent, and so on. “The money that can come through the payout of a life insurance policy can help them weather what is in store for them for life,” Dina Megretskaia, a principal and wealth manager at Modera Wealth Management, tells Vox.
There are two main types of life insurance: term life insurance, which offers protection for a set period of time (like the next 20 years), and permanent life insurance, which is essentially an account you dump savings into throughout your life. Term policies are cheaper and give you flexibility, especially if you are young or expect your circumstances to change in the future. Permanent plans let you build “cash value,” meaning that, based on interest rates and market returns, your savings will grow over time. The key benefit of permanent policies is that, unlike term policies, they last for life, and the premiums are fixed. Those who want a way to build inheritance for their heirs and stable (yet costlier) premiums may prefer a permanent option.
In most cases, a term policy — that can be renewed, though typically with a higher premium — is most affordable and the way to go, Megretskaia says. Working with a financial advisor can help you determine what kind of plan is best for you, based on where you’re at in life.
The price of your premium (aka the monthly or annual fee you pay) for term life insurance, depends on multiple factors, including your age, overall health, job, coverage, and amount of time you want to be covered. Term policies are usually very cost-efficient, amounting to a couple hundred dollars a year for tens of thousands of dollars of coverage, and even hundreds of thousands, especially for younger, healthy applicants. For example, according to Liberty Mutual, a healthy 30-year-old woman can get a $20,000 term policy for less than $8 a month. A 55-year-old can acquire that same policy for $25.50 a month.
Simply put, the smartest time to get life insurance is when you have dependents of any kind, says Nathan Astle, a financial therapist with Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. What is a dependent? Really anyone who relies on you financially. This doesn’t solely mean people who rely on your income; they may depend on your “unpaid” services, too, such as caregiving. “It’s more flexible than you might think,” says Megretskaia. Most obviously, dependents are your spouse or children, but may also include siblings, chosen family, friends, even parents you planned on caring for one day. “These are people who would be struggling if you did die,” says Astle. You get to determine who your dependents are.
If you don’t have dependents, life insurance is not as important. As Astle told me, “realistically, there are only so many things you can spend your money on.”
That said, if you have a bit of wiggle room in your budget, locking down a policy early — even if you’re young, healthy, and feel you don’t need it — can be a worthwhile, financially-savvy move, according to Megretskaia. Many policies have convertability, which gives you the option to switch a term policy to a permanent policy in the event you get sick — with, for example, cancer, heart disease, or type 2 diabetes — during the course of the policy’s term, she says. Why does this matter? Some providers will not issue new coverage to people with chronic illnesses or renew your policy when your term concludes. Or they may require you to take a medical exam and hit you with a sky-high fee. Convertibility, which you’d enact while your term policy is still active, ensures you’ll continue to have coverage for life, and, better yet, without needing to do a medical exam, says Megretskaia.
A life insurance policy provides peace of mind that, even without savings or a juicy trust fund, you will be able to provide for your family, friends, chosen family, whoever for a period of time if and when you are no longer alive. That way, they can let themselves grieve your death without becoming completely overwhelmed about how they’re going to pay that next bill without you around, Astle says. “Most of us don’t have safety nets, and our families don’t have safety nets, so it’s important to have what you can,” he says.
And if you change your mind, you can always cancel your policy, change it, or set new beneficiaries. You aren’t locked in for life.
First, sit down with your loved ones — those dependents — and have an honest, open conversation about what their needs may look like when you’re gone. Knowing how much money to lock in can be a highly emotional decision, says Astle, so you want to really consider “what it would mean for a partner or kids or whoever to receive this amount of money.”
Start by talking about your values and identifying your goals and priorities, says Astle. Do you want to be able to pay off your house? Or cover your child’s college tuition? Maybe pay for your father’s live-in caregiver for 10 years? That will help you evaluate the premiums and figure out what’s affordable. “It’s more of an art than a science,” Megretskaia says.
To find a trustworthy provider, ask your friends, colleagues, or family members for a referral, or check out local ratings on Yelp. You might also want to see if the agent who provides your home, car, or renters insurance offers a life policy that works for you, or look into whether you can opt in to coverage through your employer via a small deduction from your paycheck. If you want to peruse further, head on over to TERM4SALE — this is a website where you can get personalized life insurance quotes, and it’s how Megretskaia personally evaluates the price tag of term policies for her own clients. You could also check out Policygenius or Intelliquote. Before you sign your life away (sorry!), there are a few things to consider.
A few more things to keep in mind: First, Megretskaia always advises her clients to purchase policies with convertibility clauses, just to ensure they’re protected if the unexpected occurs. You also don’t want to skim the fine print. “Read it fully,” Astle says. There are sneaky exceptions and caveats, which vary from state to state, and it’s crucial to know what you’re buying. For example, an insurer can deny paying out your coverage if they detect a “misstatement” — e.g., you claimed you’re a nonsmoker when you do, in fact, smoke. They may also refuse if you die by suicide soon after setting up a policy. Dangerous hobbies, like skydiving, can raise your premiums or result in denied coverage, too.
Astle says it can be helpful to find an agent who is willing to educate you. For ease, you can go with one you’re connected to through your employer or car and renter’s insurer — or, you can work with an independent licensed broker who will share quotes from multiple insurers. Don’t be afraid to ask them questions about what various clauses or language mean regarding your coverage. And, tip from me, pick up the phone when they call.
Finally, be kind to yourself when setting up a policy. Life insurance is inherently confusing and really heavy. “Go into these decisions with some compassion for yourself and some patience,” Astle says.
2026-03-11 18:45:00
At the Academy Awards on Sunday, we will either see one of the longest losing streaks of all time come to an end or see history being made. Songwriter Diane Warren never won an Oscar for Best Original Song, despite being nominated so many times. If she doesn’t clinch it again, she will be 0 for 17, making her the most consistent loser in Oscar history.
Warren’s dry spell is confounding because it’s based on her greatness.
With hits like “How Do I Live” (Con Air) and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (Armageddon), this woman has written some of the greatest movie songs of all time. The fact that she’s been nominated by her peers 17 times seems to signify that she’s doing something right.
How is Diane Warren so incredibly good at making songs that get Oscar nominations, but so incredibly bad at making songs that win?
This year, Warren is nominated for “Dear Me,” a song from Relentless, a documentary about Warren herself. It’s a good time to examine the history of the category, what Oscar voters like in an original song, Warren’s chance this year, and whether she could win in the future if she misses out on Sunday (which seems likely since KPop Demon Hunters’ “Golden” has dominated awards season).
A common descriptor that pops up around certain movies, actors, and actresses is that it’s “Oscar bait.” Slightly insulting, the term refers to the kind of films (epic war dramas, monologues, period pieces, “important” movies) and performances (portrayals of musicians and famous leaders, and roles where actors get “ugly”) that Academy voters have historically rewarded. It can also refer to movies that appeal to voters on paper (see: A Complete Unknown and Maestro) but don’t necessarily win.
It could probably also apply when it comes to the Best Original Song category.
“If you look back at the last 25 years of Best Song winners, what you will find is that they tend to line up in a couple of different categories. Number one is a big popular music name writes a song for a movie,” said Jon Burlingame, a professor who teaches screen scoring at USC’s Thornton School of Music.
Some recent examples of the “big name-big movie song” wins include Billie Eilish’s Barbie hit “What Was I Made For?” in 2024 and “No Time to Die,” which she penned for the eponymous Bond movie; Elton John’s “Love Me Again” for Rocketman in 2020; and Lady Gaga’s “Shallow” for A Star Is Born in 2019.
Pop stars, like revered actors and directors, do have clout with voters. Historically, Burlingame explained, there have been instances in which some voters are “desperate to be seen as hip.” A popular music star like Gaga or Eilish could be seen as the type of cool that voters want, especially since Eilish had such a massive Grammys haul in 2020, prior to her Bond song winning. But sometimes it’s as simple as wanting to reward a big name.
“When Bob Dylan wrote a song for Wonder Boys in 2000, everybody said, ‘God, we got to give Bob Dylan an Oscar,’” Burlingame said.
The other key trend is being a standout song in a musical or musical-ish movie, Nate Sloan, a musicology professor at USC’s Thornton, told Vox. Given the lack of musicals in the Best Picture category this year, it may seem like this sort is rare. But Sloan pointed out that animated features fall into this grouping (see: Disney’s five wins in the early ’90s) and, more loosely, a musical-ish feature like La La Land does too. The two frontrunners for this year’s award would be considered to be musical or musical-ish.
“The odds makers probably put ‘Golden’ [from KPop Demon Hunters] up there because it’s such a smash. Probably right behind it would be, ‘I Lied to You’ from Sinners because music was such an important part of its plot,” Sloan said.
Both Sloan and Burlingame said that there are some exceptions to these general trends. Still, they both expect “Golden” to get the win this year. It checks the “hit song from a musical” box. And while a superstar isn’t attached, “Golden” is just as big as any pop song released in the past year. That ubiquity counts for a lot too.
“I think if you look at the list of the last 10 years or so, how many of those [nominees] were really radio hits,” Burlingame said, pointing out that Original Song nominees don’t usually chart. He did say that when they do, like Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, they’ll usually win. “I think that’s why there’s no way that ‘Golden’ can lose,” he added.
Given how popular “Golden” is and how many awards it’s already won, it’s not looking too good for “Dear Me.” If this isn’t Warren’s year, what might it take for her to finally bring home the award in the future?
Based on what experts said, it would probably look like Warren collaborating with a pop star on a stupendous song for a movie musical. But that, as Sloan, the musicology professor, explained, is something that Warren’s songwriting career has moved away from.
Warren was first nominated in 1987 for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from Mannequin. She then reeled off a trio of hits — “Because You Loved Me” with Celine Dion in 1996, “How Do I Live” with Trisha Yearwood in 1997, and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” with Aerosmith in 1998 — that, under the Oscar-bait rubric of big pop star and big movie song, could’ve easily won.
Unfortunately for Warren, sometimes the Original Song category is stacked.
“How Do I Live” lost to “My Heart Will Go On,” Celine Dion’s Titanic love song. Similarly, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” couldn’t beat “When You Believe,” which was performed by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey for The Prince of Egypt. One could easily make the argument that either of those Warren songs may have had a different outcome in a different year.
“I love Diane Warren, I think she’s a brilliant songwriter. She’s written some of the biggest hits of the 20th century…but I feel like she’s just getting further and further from a win,” Sloan said. “I feel like the sound of movie music is moving further away from what she does.”
Sloan explained that the power ballad love songs that Warren is so good at writing feel a bit outdated in the musical landscape of the 2020s. Contemporary movies are probably not going to be scored and tracked in that ’80s and ’90s style, and those songs might not do as well when it comes to the music charts or streaming services. “I think she’ll keep getting nominated,” Sloan said, noting Warren’s name recognition and history. “But I think it’s just going to get harder and harder to actually get a win.” (Vox reached out to Warren’s publicist to arrange an interview but did not hear back.)
If there was a time for Warren to sneak a win, Sloan said, it might’ve been last year when “El Mal” from Emilia Perez took the prize. But the controversial musical topped Warren (nominated for “The Journey” from Six Triple Eight) and Elton John (“Never Too Late” from Elton John: Never Too Late) too.
The prospect of going 0 for 17, or 18, or 20, raises another question: Would there ever be a point where the Academy rewards Warren for a good enough song that reflects her impressive body of work? Would the Academy ever award a sympathy Oscar? There’s precedent for this. Directors, actors, and actresses have all had wins that are widely considered to be more about rewarding a respected colleague who’s overdue rather than their performance in that year’s specific work. Burlingame, the screen scoring professor, pointed out that songwriter and composer Randy Newman received 16 nominations across score and song before nabbing his first win in 2009 for “If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters Inc.
“It was his time and people thought, oh God, this poor guy, he’s been nominated so many times, let’s just give him an Oscar,” Burlingame said, noting that Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” is considered his career highlight. “And they gave it to him for — I mean, does anybody really remember the song from Monsters Inc?”
Burlingame believes that something similar could happen for Warren.
“It may one day be Diane’s time if she writes a song that’s associated with a big movie and has a big hit on the radio,” he said.
Unfortunately for Warren, that time is probably not this year.