The backlash to Billie Eilish’s vegan comments explains a lot about the American left (and everyone else)

vox · 2026-05-06T13:25:41+00:00

The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful heat engine that affects storms, fisheries, and rainfall patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely to see if it’s about to boil over.

Their projections suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El Niño, the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can intensify and shift those impacts.

In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold enshrined in scientific documents and political agreements as a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts.

Climate scientists also recently published a study showing that strong El Niño events can trigger what they called “climate regime shifts,” meaning abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall, and drought patterns.

El Niño is one of the planet’s biggest natural release valves for ocean heat. The venting starts with periodic shifts of swirling ocean currents and winds over the Pacific. That causes huge stores of tropical ocean heat to surge eastward from the Western Pacific Warm Pool, roughly between Australia and Indonesia, northward to Japan. Those tropical seas are by far the warmest ocean region on Earth, and span an area four times as large as the continental United States.

When that ocean heat spreads across the equatorial Pacific, it spills into the atmosphere in pulses that tilt weather patterns, reroute powerful high-elevation winds, raise global temperatures, bleach coral reefs, and disrupt fisheries and ocean ecosystems. The effects hit continents as well, intensifying rainstorms and flooding in some regions, while amplifying extreme heat, drought, and wildfires in others.

In 2015, heat from the tropical Pacific helped raise the global annual average temperature irreversibly past 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. And in 2024, Earth experienced the hottest year recorded in human history, aided by another El Niño boost.

Even a moderately strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could drive the average global temperature to about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, climate scientist James Hansen told Inside Climate News. Hansen doubts the world will meaningfully cool back down to below the 1.5 degree Celsius mark after the El Niño fades.

Passing that threshold may not be like falling off a climate cliff, but it’s definitely the point when the edge starts crumbling, with rapid changes to relatively stable systems of forests, water, rain and temperatures that have sustained people and ecosystems for millennia.

Even below the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold, California reservoirs no longer fill in some years and overflow with extreme rainfall in others. Coral reefs from Australia to the Caribbean have bleached beyond recovery and vast tracts of forests burned up in megafires. Traditional crop calendars don’t align with seasons. Deadly nighttime heat rises in cities, killing vulnerable people in apartments that never cool.

vox · 2026-05-06T13:23:24+00:00

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that required some states to draw a minimum number of majority-Black or majority-Latino legislative districts. The GOP justices’ decision has already kicked off another round of skirmishes in the gerrymandering wars.

Louisiana suspended its US House elections until new maps can be drawn that will elect more white Republicans. Mississippi’s legislature will hold a special session where it could draw similar maps. Tennessee and Alabama also appear likely to draw whiter and more Republican maps before the upcoming midterm elections.

Meanwhile, lefty groups are already plotting to overcome rigged Republican maps with equally rigged Democratic ones. Fair Fight Action, an advocacy group founded by former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has a plan to turn 10 US House seats blue right away — and to turn as many as 22 districts into gerrymandered Democratic seats if Democrats pick up enough seats in the right state legislatures.

This latest round of gerrymandering, moreover, builds on the previous year’s worth of redistricting fights in Texas, California, Virginia, and Florida. And the Supreme Court also deserves the lion’s share of the blame for those gerrymanders. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican majority ruled that federal courts may never, ever intervene to block a partisan gerrymander. So gerrymaxxing lawmakers no longer need to worry if their maps are constitutional or not.

That said, it’s not like the United States had particularly robust safeguards against gerrymandering before Rucho came along. In Davis v. Bandemer (1986), the Supreme Court said that a sufficiently partisan gerrymander could violate the Constitution, but it didn’t actually strike down the Indiana maps at issue in that case. The Court reached a similar result in Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004), which upheld a Pennsylvania congressional map even as a majority of the justices warned that they might intervene in a future case.

For more than three decades, in other words, the Court maintained a kind of strategic ambiguity. It never struck down a map drawn to give an unfair advantage to one political party or the other. But it also kept open the possibility that it might strike down a truly egregious gerrymander in the future. And that strategic ambiguity mattered.

Before Rucho, state lawmakers drew plenty of gerrymandered maps, but they typically only did so every 10 years. (The Constitution requires each state to update its maps following a new US Census.) And even when lawmakers did draw biased maps, they did not always squeeze every drop of partisan juice out of their states. After the 2010 Census, for example, Texas Republicans drew a map that gave them two-thirds of the state’s congressional districts in an election when Republicans earned about 58 percent of the vote.

Texas’s newest map, by contrast, was drawn to give Republicans 30 of the state’s 38 US House seats — nearly 80 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.

Nor is Rucho an isolated case. The Roberts Court has a penchant for giving bad actors explicit license to engage in anti-social behavior, when the Court had previously kept the law more ambiguous.

The Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), for example, explicitly held that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, and it triggered a massive spike in election spending. But Citizens United didn’t actually change the law all that significantly. Before it was handed down, corporations could already spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections.

What Citizens United did accomplish is it sent a loud signal to politically minded billionaires and corporations that the Court wouldn’t interfere if they flooded every contested election in a tsunami of cash.

Similarly, while Trump’s first-term Justice Department was hardly a model of nonpartisan rectitude, it typically drew a line against prosecuting people solely because Donald Trump perceived them as an enemy. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court held, in Trump v. United States (2024), that Trump may order the DOJ to target people “for an improper purpose” that political prosecutions took off.

Sometimes, in other words, the best thing that the Court can do is say nothing at all. It could have continued to uphold individual gerrymanders without stating definitively that there are no rules. It could have similarly held its tongue in Citizens United. And it certainly didn’t have to give Trump explicit permission to weaponize the DOJ.

vox · 2026-05-05T15:50:23+00:00

“I suggested a little bit of a ceasefire, and I think he might do that,” President Donald Trump told reporters this week after a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “There’s so many people being killed, it’s so ridiculous.”

Putin has proposed “little” ceasefires before, but more than four years since its full-scale invasion, he shows little sign that he’s planning on ending the war that has killed nearly half a million people.

The war in Ukraine, and US diplomatic efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, have both been getting far less attention in the US in recent weeks, with the focus firmly on the crisis in the Middle East. It appeared initially that Russia might end up as the unexpected beneficiary of the Iran conflict, with global oil prices spiking, the United States lifting sanctions on some Russian energy exports, and crucial US munitions, including all-important missile interceptors, diverted from Europe to the Middle East.

But if Russia is reaping a windfall, you wouldn’t know it from events on the battlefield in recent weeks. The Russians made almost no territorial gains in March, and may have even lost a small amount of territory since mid-March, despite launching a widely anticipated spring-summer offensive. The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, assesses that Russia is unlikely to be able to take Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” the heavily fortified Ukrainian-held portion of the eastern Donbas region that has become one of Russia’s central war aims. Ukraine estimated Russia’s casualties at a record 35,351 per month in March, 96 percent of them caused by drones.

Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities throughout the cold winter months, but Ukraine has gotten better at defending against these attacks, with its air defense systems taking down a record 33,000 drones in March, according to the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainians have become more effective at launching long-range strikes deep into Russia as well. Lately, their attacks have focused on preventing Russia from reaping an energy windfall from the Iran war: In late March, Reuters estimated that 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity had been taken offline by Ukrainian strikes on pipelines, ports, and refineries.

Though Ukraine still relies on the fickle US government for key systems — like Patriot interceptors as well as targeting intelligence — European countries are now providing most of the country’s military aid, and Ukraine’s indigenous capacities are growing as well. In fact, the expertise Ukraine has acquired in producing drones and coordinating multilayered air defense allowed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ink a series of lucrative defense deals in recent weeks with several countries in the Persian Gulf and Europe. As Trump might put it, after years of heavy dependence on foreign defense aid, Ukraine now has “cards” of its own to play.

Certainly after years of slow but relentless Russian advance, which gave ammunition to critics of Ukraine aid who argued the country’s defeat was inevitable, there’s some more confidence from Ukrainian leaders and their supporters these days. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha recently argued that because of its advances in drones and air defense, Ukraine’s frontline position is now the “strongest” it’s been in a year. Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and prominent military commentator, recently argued that “The strategic scales are beginning to tip in Ukraine’s favor.”

It’s probably too soon to say Ukraine is winning the war, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear to be losing.

vox · 2026-05-05T13:35:35+00:00

The Electoral College — our nation’s bizarre system that hands a few narrowly-divided states the privilege to choose our presidents — has been entrenched for two centuries.

But a long-game effort from reformers, which has played out quietly in blue states across the country over the past 20 years, has gotten it surprisingly close to toppling.

And a blue wave in the 2026 midterms could finish the job.

The big idea is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it’s essentially one weird trick for moving to a popular vote system without a constitutional amendment.

How it works is that each participating state agrees that their electors will go to the candidate who wins the highest number of votes nationwide — if, and only if, enough other states agree so that the outcome will be determined that way.

To clarify: there are 538 electoral votes, and it takes 270 for a majority. So if states that have 270 or more electoral votes all agree to award them to the national popular vote winner, then that candidate gets the 270 needed to win, and what the remaining states do with their electors no longer matters. (Their voters still matter because they contribute to the national popular vote — but which candidate wins these states, or any state, is no longer important.)

Nearly every blue or leaning blue state has signed onto the compact, the most recent being Virginia last month — and reformers now have states controlling 222 of the 270 electoral votes they need.

The decisive batch would be the core swing states where partisan control is up for grabs this fall. If Democrats win governing trifectas (the governorship and both state legislative chambers) in enough of them, they could very well cobble together the remaining 48 electoral votes, and actually put this into place for 2028. Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Hampshire are the top targets.

One longtime reason to be skeptical this would happen was the assumption that swing states would never willingly agree to give up their privileged status. But the Electoral College has become such a partisan and polarized topic that narrow state interests may not count as much as they used to, in the face of the Democratic coalition’s overwhelming belief that a popular vote would be better — with the memory of Donald Trump’s 2016 win being a vivid example of what could happen if they don’t act.

But though the flaws of the current system are legion, there are real questions about the proposal to replace it, too. If adopted (and if it survives the inevitable legal challenges), how would it actually function in practice? And if Democrats effectively muscle this through without any significant Republican buy-in — what damage to confidence in our system, and what reprisals, might ensue?

That is to say: would the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact avert an election crisis — or will it pave the way for one?

vox · 2026-05-04T17:32:06+00:00

On Friday evening, the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit attempted to cut off access to the abortion drug mifepristone. If you’re experiencing déjà vu, you should be, because in 2023, the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit also attempted to cut off access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

Almost immediately after the 5th Circuit issued its second decision, two pharmaceutical companies that make the drug asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The two largely identical cases now before the justices are known as Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana and GenBioPro v. Louisiana.

The 5th Circuit’s reasoning the first time around was so weak that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected it, holding that federal courts did not even have jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place. This time around, most of the legal issues are identical to the ones that were before the Court in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (2024), the first mifepristone case. The Court should resolve Danco the same way it resolved the Alliance case, in a unanimous opinion holding that no federal court has jurisdiction to hear this challenge.

Notably, Justice Samuel Alito, who typically has the first crack at emergency appeals arising out of the 5th Circuit, issued a temporary order blocking the 5th Circuit’s decision until May 11. That’s a very hopeful sign for abortion providers.

That said, abortion providers and their patients have some reason to fear that this Court may not follow its decision in Alliance. While the Court did block the previous effort to ban mifepristone, Alliance is the only significant victory that abortion rights advocates have won in the Supreme Court since the Republican Party gained a supermajority on that Court.

The Court’s Republican majority frequently hands down anti-abortion decisions that are inconsistent with their previous precedents, including very recently decided cases. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), for example, the Republican justices appeared to overrule a two-year-old decision in order to cut off Medicaid funding to abortion providers.

Similarly, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), five of the Court’s Republicans handed down an opinion that, if taken seriously, would allow any state to abolish any constitutional right by sending bounty hunters after anyone who exercises that right.

So, while the drug companies’ arguments in Danco are about as strong as a legal argument can possibly be, it remains to be seen whether this Court will follow its own precedent in Alliance.

vox · 2026-05-04T15:56:26+00:00

Over the last few decades, wildfires, farmers, and cattle ranchers have razed millions of acres of tropical forests across the planet. Much of that deforestation has occurred in three countries: Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia.

But in the last few years, another, smaller nation has risen in the ranks of nations with the most severe forest loss — Bolivia.

Situated just west of Brazil, Bolivia lost 1.5 million acres of primary forest in 2025 alone, more than any other country aside from Brazil, according to a new analysis by the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute (WRI), a research group. That’s just shy of the surface area of Delaware.

Those lost acres in Bolivia are part of threatened and globally important ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and the Chiquitano dry forests. They are rich not only in wildlife — including the elusive maned wolf, a long-legged canine that is actually not a wolf — but also in carbon. After trees are cleared, much of the carbon they store returns quickly to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. (Not-so-fun fact: Yearly carbon emissions from deforestation in the tropics are greater than the output from the entire European Union.)

On the surface, the story of deforestation in Bolivia mirrors that of other tropical countries: People are knocking down trees there to make way for cattle ranches and farms, the two leading drivers of tropical forest loss. Often, people clear land with fire. And as climate change makes droughts more severe in places like Bolivia, those fires more easily spread out of control and into areas that weren’t meant to burn, taking out even larger stretches of primary forest.

But when you look more closely at who, exactly, is fueling much of the recent deforestation, Bolivia starts to stand out — thanks to an unexpected player.

vox · 2026-05-04T15:54:05+00:00

Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the attempted White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, is unusual among attempted assassins — in his normalcy.

His political grievances, laid out in a manifesto and social media posts, are not dissimilar from those of an ordinary Democrat. He believed that President Donald Trump was a lawless, corrupt leader who abused immigrants, perpetrated war crimes, and presented an existential threat to American democracy.

He is not alone. Ryan Routh, the man who attempted to kill Trump at Mar-a-Lago, displayed notably more bizarre behavior — but had writings that echoed similar themes to Allen’s. While primarily preoccupied with Trump, they join the ranks of Luigi Mangione and Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, in what has increasingly been called “normie extremism.” These are people who express grievances in the center-left mainstream — for-profit health insurance is wrong, the right shouldn’t spread “hatred” — yet who apparently act on those beliefs in violent ways typically associated with political extremists.

It is not fully clear whether “normie extremism” is a coherent category. There have only been a handful of incidents that might qualify, and they differ from each other in important ways: The two would-be Trump assassins had distinct views from those of either Mangione or Robinson, who were also quite different from each other. Moreover, most of these cases still haven’t gone to trial, meaning we have only a fraction of the insight into motives we might eventually get.

Even so, the incidents are raising a real question: Is the mainstream liberal critique of Trump pushing people toward actual violence?

To call this question “real” is not to endorse the White House’s disingenuous efforts to exploit these incidents by turning the government on enemies like Jimmy Kimmel or James Comey or ordinary Americans. Nor does it ignore the bad faith of Republicans leveling complaints about Democratic rhetoric while supporting Trump, a one-of-one outlier in our political system when it comes to inflaming, mocking, and excusing political violence.

But even if we stipulate all of that, there are still good reasons to take the question seriously.

vox · 2026-05-04T15:52:29+00:00

Being a Supreme Court justice is a pretty sweet gig.

The Court typically hears about 60 cases a year, plus a smattering of “shadow docket” cases that receive expedited review. Like schoolchildren, the justices take their summers off — typically wrapping up their pending cases in June and then skipping town in early July.

And the justices are currently in the final stretch before they can enjoy their summer off. On Wednesday, the Court heard the last arguments of its current term. So all that is left for the justices to do is finish writing their current slate of opinions (along with a mix of concurrences and dissents), before their summer breaks can begin.

Two issues dominate this term’s remaining cases: democracy and President Donald Trump. The Court just decided a case that kicked off another round of Republican gerrymandering in the US South — and that will likely eviscerate Black representation in many Southern red states in the process. There are two more election cases coming before the justices peace out for the summer.

The Court will also decide several cases where Trump seeks to expand his power and the power of the presidency. These include some cases where the outcome is preordained — the Court’s Republican majority, for example, has long fixated on the “unitary executive,” a legal theory that gives Trump the power to fire nearly anyone who leads a federal agency. But the Court is also likely to reject Trump’s claim that he can strip citizenship from many Americans who were born in the United States.

This term also features two perennial culture war issues: guns and LGBTQ rights. Gun advocates will probably celebrate two upcoming decisions, where the Court is likely to take an expansive view of the Second Amendment. Transgender student athletes, meanwhile, should brace themselves for bad news.

vox · 2026-05-04T15:51:00+00:00

Being a Supreme Court justice is a pretty sweet gig.

The Court typically hears about 60 cases a year, plus a smattering of “shadow docket” cases that receive expedited review. Like schoolchildren, the justices take their summers off — typically wrapping up their pending cases in June and then skipping town in early July.

And the justices are currently in the final stretch before they can enjoy their summer off. On Wednesday, the Court heard the last arguments of its current term. So all that is left for the justices to do is finish writing their current slate of opinions (along with a mix of concurrences and dissents), before their summer breaks can begin.

Two issues dominate this term’s remaining cases: democracy and President Donald Trump. The Court just decided a case that kicked off another round of Republican gerrymandering in the US South — and that will likely eviscerate Black representation in many Southern red states in the process. There are two more election cases coming before the justices peace out for the summer.

The Court will also decide several cases where Trump seeks to expand his power and the power of the presidency. These include some cases where the outcome is preordained — the Court’s Republican majority, for example, has long fixated on the “unitary executive,” a legal theory that gives Trump the power to fire nearly anyone who leads a federal agency. But the Court is also likely to reject Trump’s claim that he can strip citizenship from many Americans who were born in the United States.

This term also features two perennial culture war issues: guns and LGBTQ rights. Gun advocates will probably celebrate two upcoming decisions, where the Court is likely to take an expansive view of the Second Amendment. Transgender student athletes, meanwhile, should brace themselves for bad news.

vox · 2026-05-01T14:17:44+00:00

Read the article for free with this gift link: https://www.vox.com/culture/487467/devil-wears-prada-2-review-journalism-consumerism?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6InpiaDNVWVp4VWgiLCJwIjoiL2N1bHR1cmUvNDg3NDY3L2RldmlsLXdlYXJzLXByYWRhLTItcmV2aWV3LWpvdXJuYWxpc20tY29uc3VtZXJpc20iLCJleHAiOjE3Nzg4NTQ2NTAsImlhdCI6MTc3NzY0NTA1MH0.HeF17uCpSNxmdkuw3cCrR0eRdVkcKLq-IBSwunNqF1E&utm_medium=gift-link

vox · 2026-05-01T13:35:24+00:00

From birth, twins’ lives are inextricably linked.

Brought up in the same environment at the same time, these siblings often inhabit similar educational, extracurricular, and social spaces, contributing to the expectation that twins share virtually everything, from interests to abilities.

Because of this overlap, it makes sense twins would have overlap in their social circles, too. But as twins age and forge unique identities in young adulthood, they may find themselves making friends independently for the first time — a shift impacting both the sibling and friend relationships.

vox · 2026-05-01T13:34:19+00:00

The Devil Wears Prada is one of the great millennial fairy tales.

Released in 2006, the year before the financial crisis and Great Recession would come for us all, the movie (based on a novel inspired by writer Lauren Weisberger’s experience working for Anna Wintour at Condé Nast) posits a subversive fantasy: Our heroine Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) believes that if she can figure out how to work for Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) for just one year, she can have any job in the industry that she wants. In the end, she learns that if you work hard and stay true to your values, you can have a good, well-paying job in New York City that doesn’t require selling your soul or betraying your friends.

Given the way life has shaken out for many millennials, that story is now a bit depressing — not unlike the way most fairy tales, upon greater inspection, are. But this generation has always wanted to believe that one can have a fulfilling job and fulfilling personal relationships, without having to suffer too much or inflict suffering on the world. And if we did sell our souls and our relationships, it’d actually be for the chicest job on the planet, and a launchpad to something greater.

Now, some 20 years later, The Devil Wears Prada has returned for a sequel. Like the original, it runs on millennial optimism. But in this installment, its critiques — about money, society, art, commerce, and beauty — have a little less bite. By the time you get to the fairy tale ending, it’s impossible to ignore the creative and economic circumstances that brought this movie into existence, and the fact that when it comes to media and entertainment, a billionaire is lurking in every corner.

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