2026-04-03 04:00:00
Early in the first Trump administration, the legal journalist Benjamin Wittes coined one of the best descriptions of how President Donald Trump governs: “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” Trump, as Wittes originally wrote, often issued executive orders that were not vetted by lawyers or policy experts — and thus were vulnerable to lawsuits and often achieved very little. And this penchant for taking seemingly bold actions that fall apart once they are exposed to the real world pervades both of Trump’s administrations.
No one embodied Trump’s brand of incompetent malice more than outgoing Attorney General Pam Bondi, who, as Trump announced Thursday, “will be transitioning” to a “new job in the private sector.” In her 15 months as the country’s top legal official, Bondi flouted norms, stretching back to the end of the Nixon administration, which sought to insulate federal prosecutors from political control by the White House. But her actual attempts to use the Department of Justice to seek revenge against Trump’s perceived enemies frequently floundered on the shores of bad lawyering.
Bondi may be best known for saying, in a February 2025 interview with Fox News, that a list of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s clients was “sitting on my desk right now” — months before the DOJ later claimed that this list doesn’t exist. After she was asked about her mishandling of the Epstein files in a congressional hearing, she told lawmakers that they shouldn’t even be talking about Epstein because “the Dow is over 50,000 right now.” (As of this writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average sits at 46,371.57.)
Consider, as well, the Trump DOJ’s attempts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two officials who Trump loathes because they investigated allegedly illegal activity by the president. Both prosecutions were dismissed by a federal court, however, after a judge determined that Lindsey Halligan, the former insurance lawyer that this administration tried to install as a top federal prosecutor in Virginia, was never lawfully appointed.
Similarly, when the Trump administration ordered thousands of federal law enforcement officers to occupy the city of Minneapolis and to arrest many immigrants in that city, a competent attorney general would have recognized that these mass arrests would trigger an array of legal proceedings, and would have preemptively detailed additional lawyers to Minnesota to handle the increased caseload. Instead, the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota was almost comically understaffed, and completely unprepared for an array of court orders, requiring the administration to release many of the immigrants it had just arrested.
Federal judges criticized the Justice Department’s incompetence in their opinions — the chief judge of the local federal district court wrote that the Trump administration “decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.” One DOJ lawyer, who was assigned an impossible workload of 88 cases in a single month, told a judge that she sometimes wished she’d be held in contempt of court so that she could sleep in jail.
At times, the ineptitude of Bondi’s Justice Department even endangered the Republican Party’s ability to hold onto political power. Last November, a federal court in Texas struck down a Republican gerrymander that is expected to gain the GOP five more US House seats after the 2026 midterms. The court’s opinion, authored by a Trump-appointed judge, relied on a letter from one of Bondi’s top lieutenants, which effectively ordered the state of Texas to redraw its maps for racial reasons that are forbidden by the Constitution.
Though the Supreme Court eventually reinstated the gerrymander, the lower court’s decision was well-rooted in Supreme Court precedents questioning racially motivated laws. All of this drama would have been avoided if Bondi’s DOJ had never sent its letter, which the judge said was “challenging to unpack” because “it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” Texas’s Republican gerrymander would have never been in any danger.
This list is just the beginning. Not every Republican attorney general loyal to Trump would have made such basic errors in carrying out his agenda. And there’s no guarantee that Bondi’s successor will share her ineptitude. So Trump’s opponents may want to wait and see what comes next before they celebrate Bondi’s humiliation.
Bondi’s bumbling management of the Justice Department would have mattered more if Republicans didn’t have a firm grip on the federal judiciary. For the moment, at least, lawsuits challenging many illegal detentions in Minnesota are on hold thanks to a decision by two Republican appellate judges holding that these detentions are, in fact, legally mandated. The Texas court’s decision against that state’s gerrymander was blocked by a Republican Supreme Court.
Still, Bondi’s incompetence is likely to plague the DOJ for a long time, even though she no longer leads it. Federal judges have historically treated Justice Department lawyers with a degree of deference, because for decades the DOJ held a well-deserved reputation for being candid with judges and for hiring highly skilled lawyers. But now many judges are openly questioning the Justice Department in their opinions. That means that rank-and-file Justice Department lawyers will have to spend countless hours shoring up claims that federal judges would have simply believed in the past.
Meanwhile, the worst-case scenario for Trump’s political enemies, and for anyone else who the Justice Department decides to target for political reasons, is that Bondi could be replaced by a capable advocate. (The full list of possible candidates to replace Bondi is not yet known, but some early news reports indicate that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is under consideration).
A competent attorney general would have made sure that a lawfully appointed prosecutor brought charges against Comey and James. A competent attorney general might have selectively leaked Epstein documents that mention Democrats, rather than inspiring an act of Congress requiring all of the documents to be released. And a competent attorney general would treat DOJ lawyers’ time as precious, because every minute a prosecutor spends on unnecessary work is time they can’t spend advancing Trump’s agenda.
It remains to be seen who Trump will pick to replace the maladroit Bondi. But there’s hardly a shortage of highly partisan Republican lawyers who are actually good at their jobs. Trump could find someone like his first-term Attorney General Bill Barr, who was an extraordinarily capable advocate for MAGA’s agenda. And, if that happens, anyone unfortunate to wind up on Trump’s enemies list will miss Pam Bondi.
2026-04-03 04:00:00
A lot of people are looking for ways to improve, preserve, and prolong their brain’s health. Just look at the seemingly endless amount of self-help books, podcasts, phone apps, TikToks, and Instagram Reels dedicated to the subject.
And, frankly, it makes sense. Alzheimer’s disease and dementia — conditions that fundamentally involve the loss of one’s sense of identity and sense of time and place — are distinctly terrifying compared to physical ailments. They rob a person and their loved ones of what should be a special period of their lives. After all, Americans are living longer than ever. It’s only natural that we want to be as present as we can be to enjoy it.
But despite the many promises you may hear about how to “exercise” or “train” your brain to improve your cognition long-term, there’s still a lot we don’t know. In fact, when I reached out to experts about how to exercise your brain, I received a fair amount of skepticism. Multiple studies that have used tailored tasks or games to test whether they can improve a person’s longer-term general intelligence have found negligible benefits; here’s one from 2019 and another with markedly similar results in 2025.
“It seems to be the case that no one has discovered a way to do cognitive training that transfers from the training task to anything general or interesting,” said Michael Cole, an associate professor in the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University and author of Brain Flows: How Network Dynamics Compose the Human Mind.
Still, the science of brain health has come a long way in the past 20 years, and we have better, evidence-based strategies for staying sharp as you age. There are no simple answers, but by combining frameworks from leading experts on learning, flourishing, and cognitive aging, there is a playbook. Making a point to do these things can make life right now more fulfilling — and it could also pay off as you get older.
First things first: If you want to have a healthy brain, you should take good care of your overall health in the boring-but-effective ways you’ve heard a million times by now: Eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly, do your best to reduce stress, and try to get enough sleep.
High blood pressure is associated with a higher risk of dementia. Chronic inflammation, another modern fixation, could also play a role in cognitive decline. On the flip side, exercise does seem to be associated with cognitive benefits: One major meta-analysis of the relevant research concluded that “exercise, even light intensity, benefits general cognition, memory and executive function across all populations.”
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American health care policy. Sign up here.
Scientists have also repeatedly found that exercise seems to protect against the risk of Alzheimer’s or dementia. One study published last year found that the adults who are active in the middle and later periods of their lives had a more than 40 percent lower risk of all-cause dementia.
So, a heart-healthy diet and exercise are the first steps toward taking care of your mind’s hardware.
But what about exercising your brain itself?
If you do want to know how best to learn anything, you should get familiar with the concept of “desirable difficulty.” Advanced by Nate Kornell, a psychologist focused on memory and learning at Williams College in Massachusetts, the basic idea is this: If something comes too easily, it won’t stick. You need some friction when learning new skills. To do that, you should space out learning and mix it up; Kornell proposes the notions of “spacing” (taking a break from new material and returning to it) and “interleaving” (mixing new material with old material) as effective strategies for learning.
These frameworks are about not improving your cognitive health, per se, but they could make it easier for you to learn something new when that is what you want to do.
“As a larger point in terms of cognitive health, it’s really not changing how your mind processes things,” Kornell told me. “It’s just putting yourself in situations that are more advantageous.”
But even if narrowly defined brain “training” may not have any established long-term benefits, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to challenge ourselves mentally or intellectually. We should just have realistic expectations about what those exercises can do. At the same time, developing new interests is still part of a healthy aging mindset, because it helps nurture some of the good habits that are solidly linked with less cognitive decline, like social connections and curiosity.
Learning a new skill demonstrates curiosity — and research continues to show that curiosity has benefits for the aging mind. Take one paper from last year, co-authored by Alan Castel, a professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA and author of Better With Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.
The researchers uncovered a nuanced relationship between aging and curiosity. They did find that what scientists call “trait” curiosity — your innate interest in seeking out new things to discover — does tend to drop with age. But at the same time, your “state” curiosity — your interest when presented with new or unexpected information — tends to start increasing in your fifth and sixth decades compared to middle age.
“We think that has some implications for cognitive health and brain health,” Castel told me, “that those individuals who are stimulating their brain, who are focusing on hobbies, or interested in lifelong learning, continued engagement with life and learning new things, are less likely to get dementia.”
These findings could lead to more productive forms of “brain training” than a random computer game supposedly designed to improve your intelligence. Instead, based on their findings, an older person may find their curiosity more piqued by something that is relevant to their own self-interest or something they already know about. For example, a person who’s gardened in the past might be stimulated by reading a book or magazine about gardening, joining a gardening club, and learning some new gardening skill — and the research suggests they’ll reap cognitive benefits from that curiosity.
“If you’re interested in gardening and you’re out and doing it and you’re trying to cultivate a new plant or determine how much rainfall there’ll be in the next week, this is all very stimulating, and you’re interpreting it at almost a different level than the novice person,” Castel said. “We think that this sort of engagement is really important as we get older to stimulate knowledge structures that are in place.”
So don’t get stuck in your ways as you age. Castel writes in his book that even changing up your old habits — hiking a familiar trail in the opposite direction, taking your dog for a morning walk, or even shopping at a different market — can benefit your brain.
Despite experts’ initial skepticism, I would still encourage you to learn a new game or pick up a hobby — but think of it less as “training” your brain in a way that will lead to a perceptible increase in your intelligence. It’s more about trying to form connections with other people and feel a sense of purpose as you age.
Experts at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds have characterized this mindset as “flourishing” — and it could also have the long-term benefits to our cognition that so many of us are seeking.
“Cultivating these positive qualities of the mind changes the brain in ways that are very clearly conducive to increased brain health,” Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, told me. “We know, for example, that objective metrics of brain aging are changed by these practices.”
Davidson and his colleague Cortland Dahl recently wrote a book called Born to Flourish: New Science Reveals the Four Practices of Thriving. In it, they say flourishing has four main components:
Each of these qualities can have benefits for your long-term cognitive health, Davidson said, but purpose is a particular area of interest. As Davidson and Dahl write in their book, based on research from their group, “a strong sense of purpose supports healthy aging, particularly in brain regions tied to learning and memory that are susceptible to stress.” People who feel they have a purpose generally experience less severe cognitive decline and better longevity overall. “Having a strong sense of purpose is probably the most important psychological predictor of longevity,” Davidson said.
And as I think about these different strategies for nurturing your mind, both right now and for the long term, I see the ways that learning new skills and taking on new hobbies is good for a healthy mind as you age because it will stoke your curiosity and relieve stress. And if it’s something you can do in conjunction with other people, it may help you feel that sense of connection and purpose that is associated with better cognitive well-being over the course of your life. The synthesis across these neuroscientists was striking at times: Davidson spoke of the value of purpose, while Cole has outlined how pursuing goals that align with your values can lead to more effective learning. Castel, in our conversation, emphasized that stimulating your curiosity is even better when done with a dose of human connection, another pillar of the program Davidson and Dahl laid out. So don’t just dive deeper into birdwatching on your own, but consider joining a nature walking club.
Think of this work less as taking your brain to a mental gym and more as cultivating the strange and wondrous garden that is your mind. You’re training your brain not to be “smarter,” but to be more present, more connected to other people, and more attuned to what gives you an all-important sense of purpose.
I’ve been playing chess lately, for the first time in my life. I do find it prods my brain to think differently. But after reporting for this story, I’m thinking of finding a local chess club. The game itself may not be a prophylactic for my brain, but finding the community of like-minded people, a sense of connection, and a sense of purpose that stokes my curiosity, just might.
2026-04-03 02:55:00
After five weeks of muddled messaging, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation on Wednesday night to make the case for his war on Iran. That message was…still muddled. He did not articulate a clear exit plan from the conflict, fobbed the Strait of Hormuz problem off on other countries, and denied that regime change was the point.
Among those making a clear case against the war is longtime Trump ally and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now hosts a mega-popular podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show.
In an interview with Today, Explained, Carlson told Vox’s Noel King that the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way. And let me just say that if it does in some way serve the interests of the United States, I’d love to hear it.”
Carlson told Noel that he brought his argument directly to Trump, to no avail. “I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person, and made the case,” he said. “And in the end it had no effect. So I tried. But I haven’t been in touch with the president since then.”
In addition to the war, Carlson and Noel discussed the conservative moment’s Nazi problem — and how much blame he bears for it. Plus, whether he’s considering a presidential run, and why MAGA voters support the war.
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.
You don’t think that the US should be at war with Iran. Why not?
I haven’t heard a consistent case from anyone, and I would say it’s not just the Trump administration. My strong sense, having watched it closely, is that there was not a groundswell of support for this war from within the Trump administration. The president made the decision to do it, but he wasn’t surrounded by advisers who were urging him to do it. Just the opposite. I don’t think there was any enthusiasm for it.
So why are we in this war?
He did it, as the secretary of state explained, because we were pushed into it by the Netanyahu government, by Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, to be totally clear, that’s not a way of exculpating the president. He’s the commander in chief of the US military. Trump made the decision; it was the wrong decision.
But if you’re asking why did he make that decision, it’s because he was pushed into it by Benjamin Netanyahu, which raises the second obvious question: Where did Netanyahu get the power as the prime minister of a country of 9 million to force the president of a country of 350 million to do his bidding?
I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you what happened because the secretary of state said it and the speaker of the House said it, and I watched it. And what happened was the Israelis went to the White House and said, We are going to do this. We’re going to move against Iran.
At that point, the US had really only two choices. One is to follow and the other is to tell Israel no and force them not to do it, because as Marco Rubio explained on camera, if you allowed Israel to go alone, you were certain that American forces and citizens and interests in the Gulf would be destroyed.
But either way, Benjamin Netanyahu made the decision on the timing of this. That’s another way of saying he was in charge. And I’m just here to say I think it’s wrong, and I think the majority of Americans think it’s wrong.
President Trump has been talking about Iran since the late 1980s. A Guardian interview recently resurfaced from 1988, and he’s asked, “If you were a politician, what would your platform be?” He says, “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.”
This sounds a lot like the way he’s talking [now] about doing a number on Kharg Island. You’re aware of that. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Can’t this war just be what he wants?
I’m not denying him agency. I stated his agency, which is a matter of fact, not opinion. He’s the commander in chief. He gives the orders. Donald Trump made the decision.
It is also true that Israel forced that decision. That’s what happened. It’s not a question of did Donald Trump hate Iran or love Iran and now hates Iran? He’s been consistent on that.
The question is whether a regime change war against a country of almost 100 million people on the Persian Gulf was a) achievable, h) a good idea for the United States, and c) a good idea for the world. And Trump has said consistently, No, it’s a terrible idea. He’s been really specific about it: Regime change war in Iran is a bad idea. So this is the change. It’s not that he woke up one morning and was mad at Iran. What do you do about it is the question.
Not long after the US took Nicolás Maduro into custody in Venezuela, you did a monologue and you said that the US, an empire, needs serious men to run it, people who are wise and understand stakes, not flighty, silly, emotionally incontinent people.
In light of the way that this war was launched, given the lack of coherent messaging as you’ve described it, the apparent lack of a plan to get out of Iran, do you think we have serious men making wise decisions in the White House?
We’re not seeing wise decisions, obviously.
I think Venezuela, I think the war in Ukraine, I think all of these build on each other, but I think that the Venezuela operation set us up for what happened in Iran. It sent the message that you can achieve regime change at almost no cost. And as we’re learning five weeks in, that’s not possible in Iran, and the consequences are potentially catastrophic.
I don’t think anyone who’s paying close attention has slept well for the last month. I would love to be able to say, Okay, we made our point and we killed their religious leader. And somehow that’s virtuous, I guess. And this is victory and we’re leaving.
As an American, I would like to see that because I want to get out of this with as little damage as possible, but I don’t see how you can do that without leaving Iran stronger than it was in real terms. They have no navy, they have no air force — okay, but they control 20 percent of the world’s energy. How does that not make them stronger than they were in February?
Who are the serious men?
You find out in moments like this. Who can think clearly, who can accept unhappy truths, digest them and make wise decisions on the basis of them or who retreats into fantasy?
Who are you seeing do that? The former. In the White House. In the administration.
I don’t know. I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person and made the case — not too different from the case I’ve just made to you. And in the end it had no effect.
I haven’t been in touch with the president since then, and so I don’t know. But I do think that there are people, I know that there are people in the White House who may disagree with me on all kinds of issues, but they want to do the best for the country. They’re not crazy. And I’m sure that they’re giving, I hope they’re giving good advice. But the question at this point is how do you get out of this?
It’s not easy. This just happened in 2003. I was there, both in Washington and in Iraq in the aftermath. And it shocks me that we are doing this thing again, particularly under a president who understood exactly what happened in 2003, campaigned all three elections against doing an Iraq War again, because it was stupid. He was the only Republican to campaign against the Iraq War. It’s why he won the nomination, in my opinion, in 2016.
It’s amazing to me that the president who knew, and said he knew again and again and again that this was wrong, that he just did the same thing.
2026-04-02 20:00:00
As someone who has predominantly lived in liberal cities, I am largely surrounded by people who share my political views. Guns, no way. LGBTQ+ rights, yes, of course. Abortion, absolutely. Immigration, come on in.
But I also have relatives, most of whom I love and am deeply attached to, in red states, which means I’m regularly exposed to people across the political spectrum. There are liberals, moderates, conservatives, and a few MAGA individuals in my bloodline. And while I’d like to believe I’m a level-headed, logical human being who gets along with everyone, there’ve been times where I’ve completely lost my cool and snapped at them. Like when one sent an offensive meme about ICE. Or when another laughed at President Donald Trump rudely calling a journalist “piggy.”
When such events occur, my blood pressure spikes. I spit out a string of facts in some sort of ballistic effort to prove they’re wrong, and when we inevitably don’t see eye to eye, I storm out of the room. I’m well aware this isn’t productive, but I also don’t know how to effectively deal with people who needle me about Trump.
To get some tips, I called up two pros on conflict and relationship dynamics and asked them how someone in my position can best cope in these situations. My mind was blown by how realistic and practical their advice was, and for the first time since January 20, 2025, I felt legitimately hopeful I could navigate these moments without winding up hurt and angry. If this is something you also struggle with, take a look at their recommendations below; maybe you’ll feel the same.
When I hear a sly comment about, say, the state of reproductive health care in the United States, I don’t merely disagree. Rather, I feel like my personal rights as a woman are being attacked — or, in the case of gender-affirming care or immigration, the rights of my friends and neighbors. Saba Harouni Lurie, a licensed marriage and family therapist and owner of Take Root Therapy in Los Angeles, says this is a very common reaction, as the political climate has created tension and ruptures in many people’s personal relationships. “There’s a very strong feeling of, ‘You’re either with us or against us’ on both sides,’” Lurie tells Vox.
As such, when someone makes a crass remark, you may feel cornered or unsafe and become reactive, Lurie says. Your nervous system goes haywire — your heart rate spikes and stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline surge.
Before you say or do anything, Lurie recommends pausing and taking a few deep breaths — or, if deep breathing isn’t your thing, take a few sips of water, go to the bathroom, or pretend to do a quick chore. Doing so will help you ground yourself so you can reply thoughtfully. By slowing down, “you can be purposeful and responsive instead of reactive” when you do reply, Lurie says.
We’re often quick to judge people based on a quick comment and jump to conclusions about their politics that may not be completely accurate, says Larry Schooler, a professor of conflict resolution and facilitation at the University of Texas at Austin. We also tend to zero in on people’s positions — like how they feel about abortion and gun control — rather than their deeper interests. This sets up a dichotomy where you’re either on the same team or enemies, which can cause the environment to quickly turn hostile, according to Schooler.
People, in general, don’t like to feel judged or criticized and tend to become defensive, angry, or disengaged when they do. They want to feel seen, heard, and respected, Schooler says.
Try his go-to line: “Why is that important to you?”
So, instead of shutting them down, try to get curious about where your family member is coming from. When they share their take, Schooler suggests saying something along the lines of, “What made you say that?” or “What makes you think that?” Or try his go-to line: “Why is that important to you?” If they made a joke that didn’t land for you, Lurie says to go with something like, “I know you’re trying to be funny, but I can’t really laugh at that, but I want to understand what was so funny about it for you?”
Taking this approach can be challenging, especially if you’re fired up and fundamentally disagree with their opinions. But if you can stomach it, you may be able to get someone to expand on their surface level comment or position, giving you a better sense of who they are. Depending on their response, you may see that they formed an opinion based on misinformation they saw on Facebook and are open to learning more about an issue. Or, in the case of abortion, you may discover that they genuinely support access to reproductive healthcare, but feel conflicted religiously or spiritually. You “may not necessarily agree,” Lurie says, “but at least understand what they’re trying to communicate.” And you may even find some common ground instead of solely fixating on your differences, adds Schooler.
Using “I statements” — the concept of sharing your feelings and emotions rather than blaming others for their shortcomings — is a tool commonly used in couples therapy, but it can be an effective strategy in political conversations, too. When you’re having a heated discussion with someone, pointing fingers and saying “you did this” can come off as an attack and put them on the defensive, even if you feel justified and like the other person is in the wrong, Schooler says.
A better approach: Express how their comments affect you without criticizing or blaming them. This conveys compassion and cooperation and shows that you’re open to negotiation (even if you really aren’t), research shows. Maybe say, “When you made that joke, I felt really uncomfortable.” “What you’re trying to do is say, ‘Look, I have feelings and those feelings matter,’” Schooler says. You don’t need to justify your emotions or explain yourself beyond that. Ideally, the person will see they’ve agitated you and lay off. If they don’t? Tack on this line: “If we’re going to broach that subject, I’d love to do so intentionally and delicately since we see it very differently.”
In these scenarios, I often feel an intense desire to change the other person’s mind — but, of course, I never have, probably because I lob out unsolicited facts (something literally nobody enjoys). A better tactic is to ask for permission to engage in a conversation about said topic, Schooler says. He recommends saying something to the effect of: “I really can see how big of a deal this is to you. It’s actually also a big deal to me, and I’m wondering if I can share some things about it that resonate with me?”
You may think that because someone introduced a topic they are down to maturely converse about it further, but that’s not always the case. Asking for permission provides the person with an opportunity to listen while also sparing yourself from potential disappointment if they don’t want to engage, according to Schooler. As he says, “It’s better to wait until someone is in a position to listen, even if that’s days or weeks or months, than it would be to try to force it.” This also sets an example for how you’d like to be treated in the future. Instead of assuming you’re open to political jokes and insensitive comments, maybe they, too, will start broaching politics in a more sensitive manner.
And if they don’t? Or if these tips are a bust and you still blow a fuse? Then it may be time to team up with a certified therapist. They can evaluate your unique circumstances and provide personalized tips to help you deal with difficult people and topics. These are intense, uncertain times — everyone’s on edge, everything feels scary, and, at the end of the day, we all (okay…most of us) are just doing the best we can.
2026-04-02 19:45:00
This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.
The Scholastic Book Fair is a big deal at my older kid’s school.
A couple of times a year, the auditorium gets transformed into a kid-friendly bookstore, and the elementary-schoolers get out of their regular classes to shop for their favorite titles — just like many millennial and Gen Z readers remember from our youth.
This time around, my kid was excited to come home with Buffalo Fluffalo, a bestselling picture book about a self-important buffalo who gets cut down to size. But the real must-have item on my 7-year-old’s list was not a book at all, but this furry capybara diary.
The fur journal (I am trying to make a portmanteau here and failing) is a nationwide sensation, consistently one of the most popular items at book fairs, according to Laura Lundgren, chief marketing officer for the children’s book group at Scholastic. “Kids are obsessed with these diaries,” she told me.
Selling over 4 million copies a year, the journals feel like a sign of the times — for good and ill. On the one hand, elementary-schoolers’ reading scores continue to languish, and kids are less and less likely to pick up a book for fun. In a time of widespread concern about the decline of reading, the idea that kids are choosing a capybara over a storybook feels a little dispiriting.
On the other hand, in the face of increased AI dominance over all of our lives, the popularity of a physical, analog journal may tell us something hopeful about kids’ enduring desire for self-expression. And it’s a reminder that even as adults try to impose our priorities and anxieties on kids, they have their own lives and preferences that have nothing to do with us.
With more than 100,000 events every year around the country, Scholastic Book Fairs are school fundraisers that also aim to encourage student literacy. “It’s inviting kids in to read, even if they don’t think of themselves as readers yet,” Lundgren said.
Though the fairs focus on books, they’ve long stocked a variety of other reading- or writing-related items like pens, pencil toppers, or posters — including the “hang in there” kitten posters that have become a symbol of a certain kind of millennial kitsch.
Journals have been part of the mix for decades, but the fuzzy capybara, in particular, feels very of the moment. As cute animals go, capybaras have surged in popularity in recent years, buoyed by adorable videos of their antics. Just last week, a capybara went viral after escaping from an English zoo and then sunning itself beatifically in the countryside.
“We want to show up with all of the joy and all of the fuzzy capybaras, and we want to really invite kids into the experience.”
Laura Lundgren, chief marketing officer for Scholastic’s children’s book group
It’s not hard to see why kids like journals that effectively mimic stuffed animals — other variants include a fuzzy unicorn, butterfly, and Stitch. Lundgren points to the “tactile nature” of the journals: “It feels special to them. It feels very custom. It’s not like the other school supplies that they might have in their lives.”
The capybara version even has a little pocket containing a tiny baby capybara with a carrot on its head, perfect for getting stolen by a younger sibling and triggering a giant fight. Win-win!
In all seriousness, though, one goal of non-book items at the Book Fair is to bring in reluctant readers who might not yet be excited about books. “We don’t want to show up and feel like homework,” Lundgren said. “We want to show up with all of the joy and all of the fuzzy capybaras, and we want to really invite kids into the experience.”
Right now, getting kids excited about reading feels as hard as it’s ever been. In 2023, the share of 13-year-olds reading for pleasure nearly every day dropped to 14 percent, the lowest ever recorded, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Elementary school kids’ scores on nationwide tests of reading have been on a downward trend for the past 10 years, with little sign of reversing. Many fear that AI is already undermining students’ ability to read, or even think clearly.
At the same time, writing by hand is having a bit of a resurgence. Cursive, omitted from the Common Core standards in 2010, is now required in a growing number of states, and a cursive club at Holmes Middle School in Virginia recently got national attention and waves of fan mail.
Some students “love the slowness and the pacing themselves of writing on their own,” Sherisse Kenerson, a multilingual learning specialist and founder of the club, told me.
Writing by hand is associated with a host of benefits, including better learning and retention. Writing and reading are also deeply linked. When students are unsure about how to spell a word, it can help to write it down a few different ways, Kenerson said. “You’re able to pick it up the correct way by seeing it.”
Kids probably aren’t thinking about literacy skills when they pick up a fuzzy capybara at the book fair. But they may be thinking about the next thing they want to write or draw, which feels like a hopeful sign in a time of concern about AI killing kids’ creativity.
The potential to create is part of the draw of the journals for kids, Lundgren said. “If they see a graphic novel, or if they see a visual illustration that they love, we want to encourage them to express themselves too,” Lundgren said.
Beyond the cute furry exterior and the lined pages within, there’s another feature that draws kids to journals. Anthony Angelillo, 19, remembers his days at the Scholastic Book Fair fondly. Journals were a hot item even then, he told me, and “what made those very compelling was that they always had these little locks on them with these very specific keys.”
The lock made the journal feel secret, Angelillo said: “You lock your thoughts away, and then no one else sees them besides you.”
Scholastic markets the fuzzy journals (many of which also feature a lock) as tools for “creators,” not writers or artists, very intentionally using the language of YouTube and TikTok influencers. But for many kids, writing in a diary isn’t about creating something for public consumption — it’s about keeping a record of their thoughts that’s only theirs to see.
In a time of social media overexposure and adult surveillance of kids’ lives, experts and young people have told me that kids crave spaces that are just for them. Maybe for some kids, a diary can be that space. One that happens to be inside a capybara.
Kids aged 12–17 are broadly confident about their economic futures, with 61 percent believing they’ll be able to afford a house one day, according to a new Common Sense Media survey. Girls, however, are more pessimistic than boys about the future of the country.
New York City schools have rolled out a new digital hall pass system in an effort to keep kids from hanging out and vaping in bathrooms. But high school students and privacy advocates are pushing back against what they call a “creepy” new level of surveillance.
The Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship later this year could affect whether children feel safe in school, and whether they can get federally funded therapies or other services they need.
My older kid is reading the Unico Awakening series, about a unicorn with amnesia navigating new and mysterious realms. I know less about these books because my kid is reading independently now, but I can vouch for the fact that the art is lovely, and the second book includes some cool jellyfish creatures.
2026-04-02 18:30:00
If there’s anything that makes people more uncomfortable than highly advanced AI or nuclear weapons technology, it’s the combination of the two. But there’s been a symbiotic relationship between cutting-edge computing and America’s nuclear weapons program since the very beginning.
In the fall of 1943, Nicholas Metropolis and Richard Feynman, two physicists working on the top-secret atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, decided to set up a contest between humans and machines.
In the early days of the Manhattan Project, the only “computers” on site were humans, many of them the wives of scientists working on the project, performing thousands of equations on bulky analog desk calculators. It was painstaking and exhausting work, and the calculators were constantly breaking down under the demands of the lab, so the researchers began to experiment with using IBM punch-card machines — the cutting edge of computer technology at the time. Metropolis and Feynman set up a trial, giving the IBMs and the human computers the same complex problem to solve.
As the Los Alamos physicist Herbert Anderson later recalled, “For the first two days the two teams were neck and neck — the hand-calculators were very good. But it turned out that they tired and couldn’t keep up their fast pace. The punched-card machines didn’t tire, and in the next day or two they forged ahead. Finally everyone had to concede that the new system was an improvement.”
Today, at Los Alamos, a similar dynamic is taking place, as scientists at the lab increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools for their most ambitious research. Like their punch-card ancestors, today’s AI models have a leg up on human researchers simply by virtue of not having to eat, sleep, or take breaks. Scientists say they’re also approaching tough problems in entirely new and unexpected ways, changing how research is conducted at one of America’s largest scientific institutions.
In recent weeks, in the wake of the feud between the Pentagon and Anthropic, as well as the reported use of AI software for targeting during the war in Iran, the partnership between the US military and leading AI companies has become a highly charged political topic. Less discussed has been the already extensive cooperation between these firms and the country’s nuclear weapons complex, under the supervision of the Department of Energy.
Last year, the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) entered a partnership with OpenAI allowing it to install the company’s popular ChatGPT AI system on Venado, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. As of August, Venado was placed on a classified network, meaning that the AI chatbot now has access to some of the country’s most sensitive scientific data on nuclear weapons.
That wasn’t all. Later last year, the Department of Energy, which oversees Los Alamos and the country’s 16 other national laboratories, announced a $320 million initiative known as the Genesis Mission, which aims to “harness the current AI and advanced computing revolution to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.”
Few people are in a better position to think about the upsides and downsides of revolutionary new technologies than the people who today populate the mesa once occupied by Robert Oppenheimer, Feynman, and the other pioneers of the nuclear age. But when I visited the lab in January, I found that the researchers there were remarkably sanguine about the more existential risks that often come up in conversation about AI, even as they worked on the production of the world’s most dangerous weapons.
“They think we’re building Skynet; that’s not what’s going on here at all,” LANL’s deputy director of weapons, Bob Webster, said, referring to the superintelligent system from the Terminator movies. Geoff Fairchild, deputy director for the National Security AI Office, volunteered that he does not have a “p(doom),” the Silicon Valley shorthand for how likely one believes it is that AI will lead to globally catastrophic outcomes, and doesn’t believe most of his colleagues do either. “We don’t talk about it. I don’t think I’ve ever had that conversation,” he added.
For Alex Scheinker, a physicist who uses AI for the maintenance and operation of LANL’s massive particle accelerator, AI is an extraordinarily useful tool, but a tool nonetheless. “It’s just more math,” he said. “I don’t like to think about it like it’s magic.”
Still, the nuclear-AI comparison is unavoidable. Given the technology’s transformative potential, the dangers it could pose to humanity, and the potential for an innovation “arms race” between the United States and its international rivals, the current state of AI has frequently been compared to the early days of the nuclear age. And how people feel about the Manhattan Project — a triumphant union between the national security state and scientific visionaries? Or humanity opening Pandora’s box? — likely has a lot to do with how they view their work now.
Those making the comparison include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who is fond of quoting Oppenheimer, and expressed disappointment that the 2023 biopic of the Los Alamos founder wasn’t the kind of movie that “would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists.” One of the film’s central conflicts is how a guilt-stricken Oppenheimer spent much of the second half of his life in an unsuccessful quest to control the spread of his creation. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)
The Trump administration has been explicit about the comparison. In the executive order announcing the mission, the White House invoked the creation of the atomic bomb, writing, “In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II.”
But if we really are in a new “Manhattan Project” moment, you wouldn’t know it in the place where the original Manhattan Project took place.
“The world’s nuclear information is right in there. You’re looking at it,” LANL’s director for high performance computing, Gary Grider, told me during my visit to Los Alamos in January.
We were staring through a glass window at a densely packed shelf of magnetic tapes, each of which could be accessed and read via a robotic system that resembled a high-end vending machine more than a hyperintelligent doomsday computer. The machine we were staring into contained nuclear data so sensitive it’s kept on physical drives rather than an accessible network, not that any of the data stored in the room I was standing in is exactly open source.
I was in Los Alamos’s high-performance computing complex, a vast, brightly lit, 44,000-square-foot room in a building named for Nicholas Metropolis, containing six supercomputers with space cleared out for two more. The first thing that strikes visitors to the computing center, the refrigerator-like temperature and the roar of the overhead fans, both evidence of the gargantuan effort, in money and megawatts, that it takes to keep these machines cool. “Going into high-performance computing, I never thought that I’d be spending this much of my time thinking about power and water,” Grider told me. Computing at Los Alamos is an insatiable beast: The average lifespan of a supercomputer, the cost of which can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, was once around five to six years. Now it’s around three to five.
Cutting-edge computing has been intertwined with the American nuclear enterprise from the beginning. Los Alamos scientists used the world’s first digital computer, ENIAC, to test the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon. The lab got its own purpose-built cutting-edge computer, MANIAC, in the early ’50s. In addition to playing a role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, MANIAC was the first computer to beat a human at chess…sort of. It played on a 6×6 board without bishops and took around 20 minutes to make a move. In 1976, the Cray-1, one of the earliest supercomputers, was installed at Los Alamos. Weighing more than 10,000 pounds, it was the fastest and most powerful computer in the world at the time, though it would be no match for a modern iPhone.
I had visited Los Alamos to see MANIAC and Cray’s descendant, Venado, comprised of dozens of quietly humming 8-foot tall cabinets. Currently ranked as the 22nd most powerful computer in the world, Venado was built in collaboration with the supercomputer builder HPE Cray and chip giant Nvidia, which provided some 3,480 of its superchips for the system. It is capable of around 10 exaflops of computing — about 10 quintillion calculations per second. The signatures of executives, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, adorn one of the cabinets.
Last May, OpenAI representative, accompanied by armed security, arrived at Los Alamos bearing locked metal briefcases containing the “model weights” — the parameters used by AI systems to process training data — for its ChatGPT 03 model, for installation on Venado. It was the first time this type of reasoning model had been applied to national security problems on a system of this kind.
LANL’s computers are a closed system not connected to the wider internet, but the OpenAI software installed on Venado brings with it learning it has acquired since the company started developing it. Officials at the lab were not about to let a visiting reporter start asking the AI itself questions, but from all accounts, its users interface with it from their desktop computers essentially the same way the rest of us have learned to talk to ChatGPT or other chatbots when we’re generating memes or brainstorming weeknight recipes.
Those users include scientists at LANL itself as well as the country’s other main nuclear labs — Sandia, in nearby Albuquerque, and Lawrence Livermore, near San Francisco. Grider says demand for the new tool was immediately overwhelming. “I was surprised how fast people became dependent on it,” he told me.
Initially, the system was used for a wide array of scientific research, but in August, Venado was moved onto a secure network so it could be used on weapons research, in the hope that it can become an invaluable part of the effort to maintain America’s nuclear arsenal.
Whatever your attitude toward nuclear weapons, Los Alamos researchers argue that as long as we have them, we want to make sure they work.
Since the 1990s, the United States — along with every other country other than North Korea, has been out of the live nuclear testing business, notwithstanding Trump’s recent social media posts on the subject. But between the original Trinity detonation in 1945 and the most recent blast in an underground site in 1992, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests, acquiring vast stores of information in the process. That information is now training data for artificial intelligence that can help the lab ensure that America’s nukes work without actually blowing one up.
Venado is effectively a massive simulation machine to test how a weapon would respond to being put under unique forms of stress in real-world conditions. We can “take a weapon and give it the disease that we want and then blow it up 1000 different ways,” as Grider puts it.
In some ways this fulfills the vision of Los Alamos’s founder Robert Oppenheimer, who opposed further nuclear tests after Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the grounds that we already knew these weapons worked and any other questions could be answered by “simple laboratory methods.”
Those methods are not so simple today. When Webster, the LANL deputy director of weapons, first got involved in nuclear testing in the 1980s, the “state of computing that we had was extremely primitive,” he said, and not a viable substitute for gathering new data. Today, he says, “we’re doing calculations I could only dream of doing” before.
Mike Lang, director of the lab’s National Security AI Office, suggested that using AI tools to analyze the data kept “behind the fence” could not only ensure the weapons work, but also improve them. “We’re using [the same] materials that we’ve been using for a very long time,” he said. “Could we make a new high explosive that is less reactive, so you can drop it, and nothing happens? [Or] that’s not made with toxic chemicals, so people handling it would be safer from exposures? We can go through and look at some of the components of our nuclear deterrence, and see how we can make it cheaper to manufacture, easier to manufacture, safer to manufacture.”
Whatever your attitude toward nuclear weapons, Los Alamos researchers argue that as long as we have them, we want to make sure they work.
“We don’t build the weapons to do something stupid,” Webster said. “We build them not to do something stupid.”
The Los Alamos lab’s mesa location, an oasis of pines in the midst of a stark desert landscape, is known to locals as “the Hill.” About 45 minutes north of Santa Fe (on today’s roads, that is), it was chosen during World War II for its remoteness, defensibility, and natural beauty. Oppenheimer, who had traveled in the region since his youth, had long expressed a desire to combine his two main loves, “physics and desert country.”
Eight decades after the days of Oppenheimer, the sprawling fenced-off Los Alamos campus feels a bit like a university town without the young people. Los Alamos County is the wealthiest in New Mexico and has the highest number of PhDs per capita in the country. The lab has around 18,000 employees and the population has boomed since the lab resumed production of plutonium pits — the explosive cores of nuclear weapons — as part of America’s ongoing $1.7 trillion nuclear modernization program. Federal officials recently adopted a plan for a significant expansion of the lab, including an additional supercomputing complex, which critics say fails to take account of the environmental impact of the facility’s electricity and water use as well as the hazardous waste caused by pit production.
Officials at Los Alamos are quick to point out that despite what the lab is best known for, scientists there are working on more than just weapons of mass destruction. During my tour, I met with chemists using AI to design new targeted radiation therapies to improve cancer treatment and visited the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, a kilometer-long particle accelerator that, in addition to weapons research, produces isotopes for medical research and pure physics experiments.
Critics point out that the vast majority of its budget is still devoted to weapons research, but still, Los Alamos is one of the best places in the world to observe the seismic impact AI is having on how scientific research is conducted. When the decision was made to move Venado onto a secure network, it cut off a number of ongoing scientific research projects, which is one big reason why two new supercomputers, known as Mission and Vision, are planned to debut this summer. Both are designed specifically for AI applications — one for weapons research, one for less classified scientific work.
AI projects, including at Los Alamos, are often criticized for their power use, but scientists at the lab say their work could ultimately result in safer and more abundant energy. There’s a long-running joke that nuclear fusion technology, which could deliver clean power in vast quantities, is perpetually 20 years away. LANL scientists are hopeful that AI could help crack the remaining scientific breakthroughs needed to get it off the ground. Several researchers mentioned the potential use of AI tools to design heat-resistant materials for use in nuclear fusion reactors. Scientists at LANL’s sister lab, Livermore, achieved the world’s first fusion ignition reaction a few years ago, though it lasted only a few billionths of a second. “The thing that excites me…is the notion that we can move out of this computational world and start interacting with these experimental facilities,” said Earl Lawrence, chief scientist at the National Security AI Office.
Researchers increasingly use AI for “hypothesis generation,” devising new potential compounds or materials for testing. But the main feature of AI that excited the Los Alamos scientists I spoke with the most harkens back to what Metropolis and Feynman discovered about using early computers 80 years ago: It can do more work, faster, and without breaks than any human. Increasingly, it can do the sort of physical real-world experiments that post-docs and junior researchers were responsible for as well.
Asked about how he envisioned the future of scientific research in a world of AI, Lawrence quipped, “I hope it’s more coffee shops and walks in the woods.” Grider, a career computer programmer, said, “I hope to hell we can get out of the code business.”
There are downsides to that ease, as well. The sort of grunt work that AI can now do more efficiently is how scientists once learned their craft, assisting senior scientists with research. As in other fields, the pathways to those careers could narrow.
“We need to be intentional about how we train the next generation of scientists,” Lawrence said.
Reminders of Los Alamos’s history are everywhere on the Mesa. During my visit to the lab, I toured the sites, now eerie abandoned historical monuments maintained by the National Parks Service, where the bomb detonated by Oppenheimer and company in the 1945 Trinity test, and Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, were assembled. They’re possibly the only US National Parks locations where visiting involves a safety briefing on radiation and nearby live explosives testing.
But the heirs to Oppenheimer and Feynman have mixed feelings about the Manhattan Project metaphor when it comes to AI.
Lang felt it was a mistake to characterize AI as a weapon, or frame development as an arms race, with China the main competitor this time instead of Germany. He preferred to think of today’s research as continuing the Manhattan Project’s model of “giving a bunch of multidisciplined scientists a goal to really go after and try to make progress on.” Others pointed to the scientists who were concerned at the time about the risk of a nuclear explosion igniting the earth’s atmosphere as somewhat equivalent to today’s AI “doomers.”
There’s also a fundamental difference between the two in how knowledge is disseminated. “In the very early days of nuclear energy, there were only a handful of people who had the knowledge and understanding to even know what was going on,” said Fairchild, the deputy director for LANL’s National Security AI Office. Plus, supplies of uranium and plutonium could be tightly controlled. “These days, everybody knows what’s going on…and much of it is happening in open source.”
AI is also developing in a very different way from previous technologies with national security implications. In the past, the government and military have often dictated academic research into futuristic tech to meet their own needs, with commercial applications only being found later: The internet may be the prime example. Now, as LANL’s partnership with OpenAI shows, it’s the government and military racing to react to cutting-edge applications developed first by private industry for commercial use.
“For the very first time, I would argue, on a really big scale, we find ourselves not in a leadership role here,” said Aric Hagberg, leader of LANL’s computational sciences division.
There may also be an AI-atomic parallel in the sheer size of investment proponents should be devoted to the advancement of the technology. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist once remarked (maybe jokingly) that in a world of superintelligent AI “it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.” The remark brings to mind another one by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr, who had been skeptical that the United States would be able to build an atomic bomb “without turning the whole country into a factory.” When Bohr first visited Los Alamos, he felt, stunned, that the Americans had “done just that.”
The majority of the Manhattan Project was not the work done on chalkboards on the Hill by physicists, but the industrial scale efforts to enrich uranium and produce plutonium in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. The latter site, carried out in large part by chemical firm Dupont — a “public-private partnership” of its era — produced radioactive waste that is still being cleaned up today. Likewise, the work of producing the AI future is as much or if not more about a massive build-out of data centers and the power needed to keep them cool and humming as it is the cutting edge research coming out of Silicon Valley or government labs.
When you visit Los Alamos, it’s hard not to be struck by the amount of ingenuity — in everything from nuclear physics, to explosive design, to revolutionary new techniques in high-speed photography — as well as the sheer industrial output that turned theoretical physics into a workable bomb in just three years.
You can still see the raw intellectual talent and can-do spirit that built the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen at Los Alamos today, and can easily imagine how it might build an even better one tomorrow. But it’s also impossible not to wonder if you’re seeing something else: Humanity’s thirst for power over the material world meeting with its instincts toward fear and aggression to engineer new nightmares. Perhaps we’ll get an answer soon.
This story was produced in partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners.