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Source: https://www.vox.com/rss/index.xml

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<title type="text">Vox</title>
<subtitle type="text">Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters.</subtitle>
<updated>2025-09-18T20:11:49+00:00</updated>
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<entry>
<author>
<name>Constance Grady</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[A political violence scholar explains what the furor over Charlie Kirk’s killing is missing]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/461857/charlie-kirk-assassination-political-ideology-tyler-robinson" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461857</id>
<updated>2025-09-18T16:11:49-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-18T16:15:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Internet Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Political Violence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[After the fatal shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk last week, observers rushed to take part in what’s become one of America’s most gruesome past times: waiting to figure out the politics of the shooter, so blame could be assigned to one party or the other for the tragedy. Conservative politicians hurried to identify the […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="Charlie Kirk speaks during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center on December 22, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. | Rebecca Noble/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Rebecca Noble/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/GettyImages-2190485837.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Charlie Kirk speaks during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center on December 22, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. | Rebecca Noble/Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
After the fatal shooting of <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/461408/charlie-kirk-shooting-killed-right-way-suspect">conservative influencer Charlie Kirk</a> last week, observers rushed to take part in what’s become one of America’s most gruesome past times: waiting to figure out the politics of the shooter, so blame could be assigned to one party or the other for the tragedy.
Conservative politicians hurried to identify the shooter as <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5499567-reporter-mace-democrats-kirk-killing/">a far-left Democrat</a>. After Tyler Robinson was arrested for the shooting, left-wing commenters circulated unfounded theories that Robinson might be a <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/09/15/groyper-charlie-kirk-nick-fuentes-tyler-robinson">Groyper</a>, a white supremacist who thought Kirk’s racism didn’t go far enough. The war over Robinson’s identity reached a crescendo with <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/461948/jimmy-kimmel-pulled-trump-fcc-charlie-kirk">Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension</a>, after the late-night host seemed to imply Robinson was a MAGA supporter in a monologue Monday night. Meanwhile, the right, starting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, has sought to spin Kirk’s killing into a larger narrative about the left’s propensity for political violence, a claim that <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/461314/charlie-kirk-death-trump-political-violence-source">isn’t backed by evidence</a>.
Indeed, as Arie Perliger, a professor of criminology at UMass Lowell who has studied hundreds of political assassinations from the past century, has found, political violence is a much more complicated phenomenon than the current discourse would have us believe. “Each side picks the details that fit their own narratives, right?” he told Vox in a video interview.
And a closer look at assassinations reveals that the reasons for them run the gamut. For every assassin <a href="https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources/1860">guided by a clearly comprehensive ideology of hatred and bigotry</a>, there’s one who thinks <a href="https://lblandmark.org/who-were-the-assassins-john-hinckley-jr-and-samuel-byck/">assassinating a US president will help him impress an actor</a> (Ronald Reagan and Jodie Foster, respectively). Thomas Matthew Crook, who shot at Donald Trump during a campaign event last summer, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/us/thomas-crooks-trump-shooter-butler-rally.html">was a registered Republican who also donated to Joe Biden’s campaign</a>.
Perliger thinks that when we endlessly obsess over the individual politics of an assassin, we’re focusing on the wrong question.  “I think that we can learn much more about the overall conditions that facilitate people like Tyler Robinson,” he said. Those conditions, per Perliger’s research, include political polarization and endemic dysfunction — two qualities the US government has in spades right now. 
You can read highlights from my conversation with Perliger below. They’ve been lightly edited for length and clarity. 
Give me a quick overview of some of the research you’ve done on assassins.
Ten years ago, when I was faculty at West Point, we compiled a data set of around 700 political assassinations — not just of elected officials, but also judges and some other political figures.  We tried to really understand if we could identify some patterns, some similarities, and if you could produce some kind of insights about the factors that can facilitate political assassinations. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>Political assassination is perceived as a very quick shock to the system. </blockquote></figure>
What we were able to find out is that political assassinations are a combination of two factors. First of all, there’s increasing political polarization and the overlap of different societal cleavages. The second thing is that in many cases, it is being utilized when groups, constituencies, individuals, movements are losing trust in the political system. In other words, they deem the political system as ineffective.
Ordinarily, when we want to promote political changes, it demands a lot of resources, time, money, mobilizing the masses, and so on. Political assassination is perceived as a very quick shock to the system that can really dramatically change the political landscape and as a result can help the assassin to promote their objectives, their agenda.
One of the things that is really striking is how frequently, for a lot of these very famous assassinations, the agenda at hand is hard to understand from the outside. How common is it for assassins to act for political reasons that the rest of us have a lot of trouble parsing?
Our expectation to see someone in his 20s having some kind of a coherent ideological framework — it’s a bit unrealistic, even if they do extreme acts of violence or any kind of extreme act. 
It’s very difficult to understand how attitudes, emotions, and perceptions intersect to lead a young person to perpetrate [a crime]. This is why I tend to focus more on how the environment leads those individuals or confused individuals, which are very common in that age, to engage in those kinds of acts of violence. I’m not just talking about political assassination. I’m talking in general about why we see young people much more comfortable in engaging in different acts of violence or extreme activities, including on campuses. I think that’s the real question that I’m trying to answer and to look at in my research.
Do political assassins tend to be younger? Is age correlated with assassination in the data set?
Not necessarily, actually. Our data set goes back to World War II, and it’s important to acknowledge that most political action until the early 2000s, most groups that challenged the government or challenged the social order, were very organized. They were actual institutionalized organizations. They actually met with each other. They actually distributed physical texts. 
What happened in the last 20 years is that a lot of those movements and a lot of those ideas now are virtual ones, where part of the ethos is direct action: “If you’re really a believer, you should not expect any kind of organizational support. You should act.” 
We see that on the environmental side, for example. A lot of environmental groups encourage members to act independently to protest against environmental policy that they don’t like, and so on. We see that also in the extremities of the left and the right, the idea that, in this day and age, we need to engage in these kinds of little resistances. If you really believe in those goals, in those ideologies, if you are really committed to the cause, you should act based on your own resources, based on your own capabilities. That’s really the secret sauce that will enable the movement to be more effective and to move forward.
And this is why you see so many lone actors recently, including during assassinations, which is much different than what we’ve seen in the past.
One of the things that I’m interested in is that whenever a tragedy like this occurs, there’s a rush from observers and politicians and people in the media to try to figure out what side of the political aisle the perpetrator was on, so we can all decide who to blame for what they did. From your perspective, what do you think leads to that impulse? And is there any use to it?
It’s really funny to see all this cherry-picking. Each side picks the details that fit their own narratives, right? “He talked with his parents about how much he hates Kirk, so he’s on the left. His parents are Republicans, so he actually grew up in a conservative family.” It’s completely unproductive, and it doesn’t really tell us anything. In general, I’m very reluctant to focus on specific individuals. I think that we can learn much more about the overall conditions that facilitate people like Tyler Robinson.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>It’s really funny to see all this cherry-picking. Each side picks the details that fit their own narratives, right? </blockquote></figure>
One of the things that I really emphasize when I’m being asked about this is the fact that political polarization has created a dysfunctional political system. Politicians today have zero incentives to engage in bipartisan politics. Congress, for a long time, has not actually engaged in policy construction, and cannot really produce any kind of shared politics. 
There’s this strong sense that the system is delegitimizing the democratic process, and it creates a vacuum where different groups can argue democracy doesn’t work. “It’s obvious democracy doesn’t work. We should engage in other means in order to promote our objectives, whether it’s engaging in mass disruption, whether it’s burning everything that we can burn or killing people.” 
The second element is that the incentives to go to the extreme create an ongoing delegitimization and demonizations of political rivals. Every policy that the other side promotes is an existential threat, is a catastrophe coming.
When I was tracking far-right online spaces during the Biden administration, every day they were sure that their constitutional rights were being violated, that their civil liberties were under threat. They were sure that antifa was at the gates. Every policy that Biden promoted was perceived as, “Okay, that’s the end of America.” In many ways, we see that now.
Look, we can have policy debates, but not every policy is an existential threat to the republic. We need to be able to actually have a discussion that is more nuanced. No wonder that people think that we have to do something, because things are going really, really bad. 
The combination of all those things that I’ve just mentioned has created an environment which normalizes the usage of political violence, normalizes a consistent challenging of the system and the status quo. It’s created a situation where everybody feels that we’re in a very dark place. That’s because the mechanism that’s supposed to overcome those dark places is not really functioning anymore. 
Many of my colleagues don’t like me saying that. I got tons of emails of all the interviews I did in the last few days: How dare I blame both sides? I blame both sides because I think both sides are engaged in similar rhetorical practices, and both sides are involved in violence. 
It seems like you’re arguing that the political system has become so dysfunctional that a response of nihilism is, in some ways, quite rational. Is that a fair summary?
Definitely. In a different environment, people like Tyler Robinson would find more constructive ways to express their concerns. However, considering all the things that I’ve just mentioned to you, all those factors that work together, it’s no wonder that some of those individuals resort to those kinds of actions. It’s a broader theme that we see about how the entire societal discourse is normalizing these kinds of things. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/390911/luigi-mangione-uhc-shooter-manifesto-reddit-blackpill">Luigi Mangione</a> became a folk hero in some circles.
It’s going back to the lack of even basic empathy as human beings, and the fact that ideology basically encompasses everything, that we stop seeing people. We’re seeing everyone through ideological lenses and ideological prisms. We’re losing the basic understanding that our discourse would be much better if you maintain some of those aspects of some of those sentiments. 
I’m always being asked what’s the one thing that our leaders can do. I always tell them that they don’t need to talk. They actually need to engage in bipartisan behavior that will signal to their constituencies that the other side is not necessarily evil. Once you signal to your constituency that it is possible to work with the other side, that’s a strong enough message to understand that it’s actually possible to create things together, and not just each side engaging in performative politics that maybe give them some votes from their bases, but doesn’t really promote anything really constructive.
Is there anything we haven’t discussed about this assassination that you think is particularly of note?
There’s two things that I think are really interesting. First of all, the expansion of political assassinations outside the political system. Charlie Kirk was not an elected official. He was a public speaker, and you can argue he was probably more influential than many other elected officials. That created a different discourse among what we call the influencers on the right and the left. It’s not just that suddenly they are talking about their own sense of security, but it also shows that politics right now is probably much more combustible outside the institution. It created different dynamics of where politics is happening.
The second thing I think is it happened on a university campus. It’s another reflection of the fact that campuses are becoming spaces for very contentious acts and violent acts. Campuses are less and less becoming places where you can actually engage in intellectual debate and exchange of ideas. Most people on campus these days are reluctant to engage in any kind of political discourse or any kind of issues, because of the potential cost. So we are losing universities as spaces where there’s actual intellectual debate, and they are becoming more spaces where both sides are doing performative politics, just doing performance, rather than actually talking to each other.

]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Constance Grady</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[How Jimmy Kimmel became Trump’s nemesis]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/461948/jimmy-kimmel-pulled-trump-fcc-charlie-kirk" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461948</id>
<updated>2025-09-18T15:36:56-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-18T15:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Celebrity Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="TV" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” Wednesday night following pressure from the Federal Communications Commission over comments Kimmel made on the suspect apprehended for the killing of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk.  Kimmel’s suspension comes after a monologue Monday night in which he said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend, […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Kimmel in a suit, on a stage, speaking into a mic" data-caption="Jimmy Kimmel at the Disney Advertising Upfront, Tuesday, May 13, 2025, at North Javits in New York City." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/GettyImages-2214501498.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Jimmy Kimmel at the Disney Advertising Upfront, Tuesday, May 13, 2025, at North Javits in New York City. </figcaption>
</figure>
ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” Wednesday night following pressure from the Federal Communications Commission over comments Kimmel made on the suspect apprehended for the killing of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk. 
Kimmel’s suspension comes after a monologue Monday night in which he said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Many read this as Kimmel implying that the shooter himself was right-wing. 
Late-night talk show monologues are supposed to be funny, not rigorous journalism. It’s very unusual for a comedian to be suspended because of one, and it’s clear that Kimmel would not have been suspended if President Donald Trump’s FCC had not put extraordinary pressure on Disney-ABC. (In this case, that pressure was applied via Nexstar Media, the largest owner of TV stations in the US, which announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. <a href="https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/nexstar-jimmy-kimmel-abc-charlie-kirk-1236522584/">Nexstar is currently awaiting FCC approval for a planned $6.2 billion acquisition</a>.) On Thursday morning, amid mounting outcry over Kimmel’s suspension, it was reported that ABC “<a href="https://x.com/dylanbyers/status/1968485878390550964?s=46">hopes to have the matter resolved and the show return</a>.”
The whole controversy is a shocking turn both in the Trump administration’s escalating war on its critics and in Jimmy Kimmel’s once pointedly apolitical career. Kimmel, after all, has spent most of his career embodying one archetype: regular American straight white dude. What could be more harmless and less controversial than that?
Kimmel started his career as a comic and radio host, an approachable everyman. In his first major television role as a host of Comedy Central’s Win Ben Stein’s Money in 1997, he was the audience surrogate, with his schlubby persona and his blue-collar accent an easy balance to Stein’s erudite snobbery. When Kimmel became the co-host of The Man Show in 1999, he was continuing to play the same character, only with the boorishness dialed up: leering at hot girls and circulating petitions to end women’s suffrage. In the raunch-obsessed 2000s, the crassness played as edgy: not politically correct, certainly, but the kind of thing it was assumed any man would probably do, if he could only unleash his id.
<div class="youtube-embed"><iframe title="What Jimmy Kimmel Thinks about Women's Suffrage" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y0TgCgdvJ2c?rel=0" allowfullscreen allow="accelerometer *; clipboard-write *; encrypted-media *; gyroscope *; picture-in-picture *; web-share *;"></iframe></div>
Kimmel left The Man Show in 2003 to launch Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, where he dialed down the ogling but maintained his everyday dude persona. He also stayed away from talking too much politics. In those years when The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were at the height of their power and influence, Kimmel’s biggest running gag was a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSfoF6MhgLA&list=PL0DD371FFDFF2057A">mock feud with Matt Damon</a>. Regular guys, after all, are not policy wonks. They like making chill jokes about movie stars.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">When the guy from The Man Show becomes Walter Cronkite</h2>
Kimmel wouldn’t start to get political in earnest until 2017, when his son was born with a rare congenital heart defect. At the time, a Republican-controlled Congress was pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/arts/television/jimmy-kimmel-baby-son-wife.html">Kimmel lashed out in a rare emotional monologue</a>. “Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you’d never be able to get health insurance because you had a preexisting condition,” Kimmel said, adding through tears. “If your baby is going to die, and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make.”
<div class="youtube-embed"><iframe title="Jimmy Kimmel Reveals Details of His Son’s Birth & Heart Disease" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MmWWoMcGmo0?rel=0" allowfullscreen allow="accelerometer *; clipboard-write *; encrypted-media *; gyroscope *; picture-in-picture *; web-share *;"></iframe></div>
Later that year, Kimmel was once again in tears over the news. There was a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Kimmel’s hometown. “It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to throw up or give up,” <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/10/03/555318165/watch-jimmy-kimmel-slams-so-called-leaders-on-gun-control">Kimmel said</a>. “I don’t know why our so-called leaders continue to allow this to happen, or maybe a better question, why do we continue to let them to allow it to happen?”
All of a sudden, marveled New York magazine, <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/jimmy-kimmel-on-healthcare-trump-gun-control.html">Jimmy Kimmel was Walter Cronkite</a>. In an interview, Kimmel noted that his background made it “hit harder” when he talked about politics: “To hear the guy from The Man Show talk about [gay rights] in an inclusive way — I have some credibility,” he allowed. He felt his evolution showed that “the country has come a long way.”
Kimmel, after all, was the avatar of regular American straight white guys. He was where the mainstream was. In The Man Show days, the implication was that you would have to be a humorless prude not to laugh at the joke if Kimmel was the guy making it. Now, if Kimmel was cool with gay rights and health care and gun control, the implication was that you would have to be a real heartless freak not to agree with him.
Kimmel’s liberal turn came with a fair amount of anti-Trump jokes, all of which infuriated Trump. In 2018, in a sign of things to come, Trump reportedly had his administration make repeated calls to executives at ABC parent company Disney, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-white-house-pressure-disney-censor-jimmy-kimmel-1234686853/">telling them to rein Kimmel in</a>. Much to Trump’s displeasure, <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-jimmy-kimmel-mouth-shut_n_65f7af20e4b030e8357a7d66">Kimmel, if anything, doubled down on his Trump material</a>.
“Jimmy Kimmel is — every night, he hits me, I guess. His ratings are terrible,” <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-jimmy-kimmel-mouth-shut_n_65f7af20e4b030e8357a7d66">Trump told Fox News in 2024</a>. “He’s not a talented guy.” <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-kimmel-named-trump-trial_n_6634747ae4b05f96b017e11a">During Trump’s 2024 criminal trial, Kimmel made an unexpected cameo</a>: Prosecutors entered into evidence text messages in which Trump’s lawyers fretted over Trump’s anger when Stormy Daniels appeared on Kimmel’s show. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/420351/late-show-with-stephen-colbert-cancellation-political-comedy-trump">After CBS fired Stephen Colbert earlier this year</a>, Trump gloated that Kimmel would be next.
Now, Trump has finally managed to accomplish what he wanted to do in 2018. He used government pressure to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air. 
Yet Kimmel’s suspension throws into relief how symbolic he’s become. His evolution from smug post-feminist crassness in the 2000s to a sincere and outraged liberalism during Trump’s first term mirrors the political evolution American pop culture underwent at the same time. Perhaps that’s why, despite how dramatically American culture has shifted since the days of The Man Show, and despite how envelope-pushing his early comedy looks now, Kimmel emerged from the so-called cancel culture moment relatively unscathed. He’s never faced serious career repercussions for people outraged in retrospect by the Juggy Dance Squad or Hot Girls Jumping on Trampolines. In 2020, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/24/882504182/late-night-talk-show-host-jimmy-kimmel-apologizes-for-use-of-blackface">he apologized for having worn blackface in old Man Show episodes</a>, and that was the end of that. People have been more or less willing to take him at his word when he says that his intentions were good and that his outlook has sincerely changed.
Instead, the thing that got Jimmy Kimmel right up to the edge of losing his show is that he said something the president doesn’t like. Kimmel is acting as a mirror yet again, and this time, what he’s showing us is that we are lost in an illiberal moment.  
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Kenny Torrella</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The cheapest way to stop animal cruelty]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/461815/broiler-chicken-animal-welfare-footprint" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461815</id>
<updated>2025-09-18T15:17:29-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-18T13:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Animal Welfare" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[According to a new commentary paper in the journal Nature Food, some of the worst animal suffering in the world can be prevented at a rate of just a couple of pennies per hour: the extreme pain experienced by chickens raised for meat. Over the last 75 years, chickens have been bred to grow incredibly […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="A black background with a chicken’s head peering down from the top of the frame." data-caption="Modern chicken breeding represents perhaps the largest form of systematized animal cruelty humans have ever invented. Researchers say that cruelty can be mitigated inexpensively. | Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/GettyImages-1304257834.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Modern chicken breeding represents perhaps the largest form of systematized animal cruelty humans have ever invented. Researchers say that cruelty can be mitigated inexpensively. | Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
According to a new <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01213-z">commentary paper</a> in the journal Nature Food, some of the worst animal suffering in the world can be prevented at a rate of just a couple of pennies per hour: the extreme pain experienced by chickens raised for meat. 
Over the last 75 years, chickens have been bred to grow incredibly large and incredibly fast. Their rapid growth rate has made chicken the most affordable and plentiful meat in the US, where <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24079424/factory-farming-facts-meat-usda-agriculture-census">over 9 billion are raised and slaughtered annually</a>. 
But it’s come at the cost of making chickens <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/408152/animal-cruelty-factory-farms-chicken-welfare-genetics">suffer terribly</a> throughout their short lives from a range of health and welfare issues, like <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9386003/">heat stress</a>, <a href="https://www.merckvetmanual.com/poultry/miscellaneous-conditions-of-poultry/ascites-syndrome-in-poultry">heart failure</a>, and <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6749567/">lameness</a> — difficulty walking — which can be so severe that chickens die of dehydration or starvation because they can’t even stand and move to get water and food.
It’s arguably the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/408152/animal-cruelty-factory-farms-chicken-welfare-genetics">largest form of systematized animal cruelty</a> humans have ever invented. 
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/Kenny_Vox_ChickenSize_-3.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" alt="An infographic showing how chickens have been bred to grow larger since 1950. In 1950, chickens grew to be 3.08 pounds; in 1975, 3.76 pounds; in 2000, 5.03 pounds, and in 2023, 6.54 pounds." title="An infographic showing how chickens have been bred to grow larger since 1950. In 1950, chickens grew to be 3.08 pounds; in 1975, 3.76 pounds; in 2000, 5.03 pounds, and in 2023, 6.54 pounds." data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Paige Vickers/Vox" />
Despite the scale and cruelty of conventional chicken farming — and other forms of livestock production — animal welfare has largely been left out of food policy discussions. The nonprofit <a href="https://welfarefootprint.org/">Welfare Footprint Institute</a>, composed of a team of animal welfare researchers that led the Nature Food paper, is looking to change that by putting a cost on preventing animal pain. 
The group looks at how animals are bred, the conditions in which they’re raised, and the prevalence and frequency of problems like injury and disease in those systems to determine how many hours of certain types of pain they experience. Scientific research on animal welfare — using behavioral observations, neurophysiological markers, and response to pain-relieving drugs — informs WFI’s work, and the group’s population-level estimates try to account for differences in individual animals’ experiences.
According to their research, the average factory-farmed chicken experiences:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>50 hours of “<a href="https://welfarefootprint.org/technical-definitions/pain-intensities/">disabling pain</a>” — pain so severe that it “significantly limits or prevents normal activities and functioning” — in their lifetime</li>
<li>334 hours of what the researchers call “hurtful pain,” or moderate pain that causes distress</li>
<li>325 hours of “annoying pain,” a mild but distracting discomfort</li>
<li>30 seconds of “excruciating pain,” an “overwhelming pain that dominates” their consciousness </li>
</ul>
That’s about 700 hours of pain. Considering that chickens raised for meat only live for around 1,100 hours, or 45 days, and sleep for a sizable portion of that, they experience some level of pain for much of their waking life. These painful hours represent a kind of “welfare footprint,” the authors argue.
<figure class="wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-2 is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex"><img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/WAM35903.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0.039032006245115,100,99.92193598751" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="A young broiler chicken on an Australian factory farm. | Bear Witness Australia/We Animals" data-portal-copyright="Bear Witness Australia/We Animals" />
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/WAM22898.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0.078124999999993,0,99.84375,100" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="A broiler chicken factory farm in Italy. | Stefano Belacchi/Animal Welfare Observatory/We Animals" data-portal-copyright="Stefano Belacchi/Animal Welfare Observatory/We Animals" /></figure>
“As consumers, producers, policy-makers, investors and advocates, we are able to easily find out the prices of products, and we now also have carbon footprints to understand environmental impacts,” Kate Hartcher, a senior researcher with WFI and a co-author of the paper, told me over email. “So, why not have the same for animals?”
One simple change, Hartcher and her co-authors argue, can improve the welfare footprint of chicken meat for mere pennies: switching to slower-growing chicken breeds. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Raising chickens slow and fast</h2>
For the last decade, animal welfare groups have campaigned for meat producers and major food brands to adopt what they call the Better Chicken Commitment, a <a href="https://betterchickencommitment.com/us/policy/">slate of reforms</a> including using slower-growing chicken breeds, which are known to have lower rates of lameness, heart and lung disease, heat stress, and other issues. It also calls for other changes, like giving chickens more space and using a more humane slaughter method.
According to the Welfare Footprint Institute, chickens raised according to these standards suffer about 33 fewer hours of disabling and excruciating pain compared to conventional fast-growing chickens. Poultry companies have resisted calls to switch to slower-growing chicken breeds because they cost more to raise, taking about two weeks longer to reach their lower slaughter weight. 
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/BvbUD-fast-growing-chickens-suffer-a-lot-more-than-slower-growing-chickens.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" alt="A chart showing how fast-growing chickens suffer more hours of pain than slower-growing chickens. " title="A chart showing how fast-growing chickens suffer more hours of pain than slower-growing chickens. " data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="" />
But, according to the Welfare Footprint Institute’s new paper, which was written in conjunction with researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder, the cost is minuscule in terms of how much it costs to prevent pain. Switching to slower-growing breeds, according to their analysis, would prevent at least 15 to 100 hours of disabling and excruciating pain at a rate of 45 cents per pound for producers. (And even that range is a very conservative estimate, Hartcher told me, because it doesn’t account for all of the many serious welfare problems on chicken factory farms.)
Put in other words, an hour of these intense forms of pain could be averted at a rate of just half a cent to three cents. 
In 2019, agricultural economists <a href="https://senciencia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/a17ec-jare_slowgrowth_published.pdf">estimated</a> that slower-growing breeds raise production costs by 11 percent to 26 percent and increase wholesale chicken prices by 10 to 36 cents per pound. The switch could moderately raise the price of chicken for consumers but, Hartcher said, “instead of focusing on the ‘costs’ of improving animal welfare, we show that the cost of preventing pain is tiny, and the benefits are enormous.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A brutal trade-off</h2>
The National Chicken Council, the industry’s leading trade group, however, has <a href="https://www.chickencheck.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/environmental-impact-slow-growth-chicken.pdf">argued against using slower-growing breeds</a> — not just on economic grounds, but also on environmental ones. To meet current chicken demand with smaller, slower-growing breeds, the NCC says, the US industry would need to raise a lot more birds — an additional 4.5 billion or so per year, an approximately 50 percent increase. That also means using more land, pesticides, and fertilizer to grow chicken feed, all of which contribute to climate change.
This is <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071668.2024.2432926#d1e1125">generally</a> <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210478">true</a>, even if the National Chicken Council is far from an authority on environmental sustainability (the poultry industry is a major <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/4/20993654/chicken-beef-climate-environment-factory-farms">air and water polluter</a>). The National Chicken Council didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Nature Food paper.
Exactly how much slower-growing breeds increase greenhouse gas emissions is unclear and can vary depending on the specific breed, feed sourcing, and farming practices. A <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579122004400?via%3Dihub">2022 study</a> found a 16 percent emissions increase, while a <a href="https://corporate.perduefarms.com/pdfs/animal_care_report.pdf">2022 trial</a> by poultry giant Perdue Farms found a 9 percent to 13.4 percent increase. According to a <a href="https://avec-poultry.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/European-Chicken-Commitment-Report-ADAS-March-2024.pdf">European chicken industry group</a>, using slower-growing breeds when paired with other welfare reforms increases the climate footprint of chicken meat by 24 percent.
Whatever the exact environmental difference, arguing against treating animals better because it would marginally raise climate emissions implies a disturbing position: That raising animals who’ve been bred to suffer terribly is permissible so long as it’s better for the climate. In surveys, consumers say they care <a href="https://climateaction.rutgers.edu/why-health-and-price-not-sustainability-drive-u-s-meat-consumption-choices/">similarly</a> or <a href="https://pure.port.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/84794301/Consumers_across_five_European_countries.pdf">even more</a> about animal welfare than sustainability.
However, this logic has proven persuasive to influential policymakers, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/422708/future-of-food-abundance-factory-farming-grunwald">environmental researchers</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/362224/environment-groups-meat-industry-lies-global-warming-climate-change-wwf">some environmental groups</a>. In 2023, when the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization published a <a href="https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/61c1ab4e-32f7-47c4-b267-d6410bb1dac3/content">road map</a> on how the world can feed a growing population without blowing past climate targets, it wrote that the livestock sector “requires intensified productivity via improved genetics” — in other words, using breeds that make animals grow bigger and faster, and suffer more.
But Hartcher said her and her coauthors’ analysis challenges the notion “that the intensification of animal production, including faster growth rates, can be justified by environmental considerations alone, given the disproportionate and severe animal welfare harms and only minimal variations in environmental indicators.”
The switch to slower-growing chickens does, however, present a different dilemma for animal advocates: Is it better to farm fewer chickens who are all suffering a lot, or more chickens who are each suffering somewhat less?
Ultimately, most animal advocates — and some environmentalists, too — try to square the tensions in these trade-offs by recommending that we eat less meat overall and treat each animal better, an approach sometimes called “<a href="https://www.tabledebates.org/research-library/what-less-better-meat">less but better</a>.” 
“Almost in all of these cases, you’re never going to land on the optimal thing,” <a href="https://www.sei.org/people/cleo-verkuijl/">Cleo Verkuijl</a>, a senior scientist at the US branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute and a co-author of the Nature Food paper, told me. But now businesses and policymakers can at least account for animal suffering rather than ignore it, and make more reasoned — and hopefully, more humane — decisions.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Allie Volpe</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[How to rediscover your creativity in 3 simple steps]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/life/461799/rediscover-creativity-interests-playfulness-hobbies" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461799</id>
<updated>2025-09-17T11:28:13-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-18T08:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Advice" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Even Better" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[You might not consider yourself a creative person anymore, but you almost certainly were at one point. Among childhood’s many blessings is the freedom to play and create; art class, recess, and music lessons offer outlets for unbridled imagination and expressiveness. But somewhere along the way, play and creation become uncool, something only little kids […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="An illustration of two hands raised open to sketches of speech bubbles, music notes, stars, pencils, arrows, and other symbols. " data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/GettyImages-2211325381.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,93.626135871917" />
<figcaption>
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You might not consider yourself a creative person anymore, but you almost certainly were at one point. Among childhood’s many blessings is the freedom to play and create; art class, recess, and music lessons offer outlets for unbridled imagination and expressiveness. But somewhere along the way, play and creation become uncool, something only little kids do, according to <a href="https://casholman.com/">Cas Holman</a>, a toy designer and author of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736596/playful-by-cas-holman-with-lydia-denworth/">Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity</a>. So we stop. We focus on activities we excel in or could make us money instead of ones we enjoy simply for the sake of doing them.
As grown-up responsibilities mount, what limited free time remains might not be dedicated to creative pursuits but to rest, entertainment, doomscrolling. But for all the overwhelm in the world, you might have an itch for a more tactile, creative outlet — one that takes you away from the news, screens, and chaos, and puts you in touch with your more playful side. 
Not only are these activities enjoyable, but infusing more creativity into your free time might also make you more creative in other domains, too. The unstructured and exploratory thinking fostered by a hobby can bleed into other areas of your life, says <a href="https://www.zorana-ivcevic-pringle.com/">Zorana Ivcevic Pringle</a>, a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dr-zorana-ivcevic-pringle/the-creativity-choice/9781541704329/">The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas Into Action</a>. Indulging in that creative curiosity at work, for instance, might breed breakthroughs there, too.
Even if you think the creative part of you is long dormant, it’s possible to foster your more imaginative side. “That play instinct is still there,” Holman says. “We all became who we are through play, and we can still connect to that play from childhood. But also, there is a play inside of us that has evolved with us and will look and feel different than the play did when we were children.” If you’ve been wanting to start some sort of creative practice but have felt stymied, here are three simple tips to help you get started and sustain your new habits.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">1. Tap into your history and interests</h2>
Perhaps the greatest threat to any new or reignited creative habit is waning motivation. At the onset of a new venture, <a href="https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-025-07733-3">motivation</a> <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12385">is high, but it</a> tapers over time. But doing something you genuinely like (or used to like) makes it <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976251350960">more likely you’ll stick with it.</a> “Whatever makes something more fun for you tends to make you more motivated to keep doing it,” says <a href="https://www.katymilkman.com/">Katy Milkman</a>, Wharton professor and author of <a href="https://www.katymilkman.com/book">How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be</a>. “The broad thing we can say from research is, is it fun and alluring, and does it have a hook for you personally? That’s different for every person.”
It can be helpful to remember how you used to play as a kid and try to replicate those feelings, if not the exact scenarios, in adulthood, Holman says. Maybe you sang in your school choir growing up. You don’t need to go as far as joining a local a cappella group, but you could make it a point to sing unabashedly in the shower, car, or at karaoke. 
Pay attention to the feelings of joy or pleasure, Pringle says. By doing so, you can collect more evidence for why creativity and playfulness are worth prioritizing, giving you more of a reason to continue. For example, drawing has been shown to <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-30383-001">reduce feelings of sadness and anger</a>. “You can notice, ‘This is doing something for me emotionally,’” Pringle says. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>You don’t need to go as far as joining a local a capella group, but you could make it a point to sing unabashedly in the shower, car, or at karaoke. </blockquote></figure>
Gamifying the activity can make it more likely that you’ll stick with it, especially if this is an activity you enjoy, Milkman says. Whether that’s keeping up your streak on Duolingo, organizing a personal 30-day knitting challenge, or giving yourself a little treat every time you journal, anything that encourages continued behavior helps the habit stick.  
When life inevitably gets hectic and you feel short on time, remind yourself that you’re making space for this endeavor because it’s important to you. “Start with that sense of identity,” Pringle says. “We do those things that are important to who we are as a person. If you realize that, then you can start saying, ‘Well, how am I going to make the time?’ But the first step is being rooted in that sense of what is important to you as a human.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">2. Keep it low pressure</h2>
Parents or people who work multiple jobs might not have the luxury of unscheduled hours to devote to extensive creative hobbies. But even the most strapped for time can imbue playfulness in the smaller moments. Notice the people around you on your commute or at the grocery store and try to imagine elaborate backstories for them. In the moments after you’ve finished dinner but before you start the dishes, pull out some scrap paper and doodle. “It doesn’t have to have that much pressure,” Holman says. “It’s not about the outcome. It’s about sitting for a moment and doodling and playing with the colors and trying to make some stripes.”
If you are resuming an old hobby from your past, don’t get hung up on technical proficiency, or lack thereof. It can feel demoralizing to pick up your guitar after many years and realize you’re rustier than you remembered. “It can undermine people’s confidence instead of building it,” Pringle says. 
Confidence is crucial when maintaining creative hobbies, Pringle continues, and it comes from making progress, which only builds more confidence. So don’t try to talk yourself out of creating just because you’re struggling or your output is less than stellar. While you probably <a href="https://www.vox.com/even-better/23979535/permission-to-suck-terrible-hobbies">will improve over time,</a> the true benefit comes from the act itself, not the outcome, Holman says. Ask yourself what success actually looks like. Do you need to bake a patisserie-worthy cake or can you throw a bunch of ingredients together and feel satisfied that you actually made something from scratch?
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">3. Share your creations instead of monetizing them</h2>
In today’s hustle culture, many are enticed to turn their hobbies into <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23640192/sebastian-ghiorghiu-youtube-hustle-gurus-passive-income-dropshipping">money-making ventures</a>. Aside from the obvious motivation — to earn more cash — the impulse to monetize hobbies comes from a desire to share your work, Holman says. Instead of opening an Etsy shop and slapping a price tag on your doodles, you could write a note on them and mail them to friends and family to satisfy that urge.
Leveraging hobbies as side hustles can actually hamstring creativity, Pringle says. Creating in order to turn a profit “puts the pressure of productivity on you,” Pringle says. When you’re only thinking about how to make more to sell more, you close yourself off to creative exploration: There’s no room for meandering when money is on the line. “We are not willing to do something just for the heck of it. We are not willing to do something although we don’t know where it’s going to lead,” Pringle says. “All of those things are absolutely necessary for creativity. If you know at every moment what you are doing, you are not doing creative work.”
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>Leveraging hobbies as side hustles can actually hamstring creativity, Pringle says. </blockquote></figure>
To invite creativity into your life, you need fewer constraints and rules — not more. Try to free yourself from what you believe you “should” be doing or the “right” way to play. 
“Play isn’t a thing to be good at. This isn’t another thing you have to master, another badge,” Holman says. “Play can be in everything you do, and actually will make you feel better about everything else, because you’ll be yourself in it.”
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Adam Clark Estes</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Your doctor might be using ChatGPT for a second opinion. Should you?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/technology/461840/chatgpt-ai-google-medical-symptoms" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461840</id>
<updated>2025-09-18T09:46:25-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-18T07:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Even Better" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health Care" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Mental Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology & Media" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[An artist in Germany who liked to draw outdoors showed up at the hospital with a bug bite and a host of symptoms that doctors couldn’t quite connect. After a month and several unsuccessful treatments, the patient started plugging his medical history into ChatGPT, which offered a diagnosis: tularemia, also known as rabbit fever. The […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="ChatGPT is not a doctor in the same way that Google is not a doctor." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/Dr-AI.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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ChatGPT is not a doctor in the same way that Google is not a doctor. </figcaption>
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An artist in Germany who liked to draw outdoors showed up at the hospital with a bug bite and a host of symptoms that doctors couldn’t quite connect. After a month and several unsuccessful treatments, the patient started plugging his medical history into ChatGPT, <a href="https://www.anncaserep.com/open-access/the-use-of-chatgpt-in-diagnosing-tularemiandash-a-case-9930.pdf">which offered a diagnosis</a>: tularemia, also known as rabbit fever. The chatbot was correct, and the case was later written up in <a href="https://www.anncaserep.com/open-access/the-use-of-chatgpt-in-diagnosing-tularemiandash-a-case-9930.pdf">a peer-reviewed medical study</a>.
Around the same time, <a href="https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260">another study</a> described a man who appeared at a hospital in the United States with signs of psychosis, paranoid that his neighbor had been poisoning him. It turns out, the patient had asked ChatGPT for alternatives to sodium chloride, or table salt. The chatbot <a href="https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260">suggested sodium bromide</a>, which is used to clean pools. He’d been eating the toxic substance for three months and, once he’d stopped, required three weeks in a psychiatric unit to stabilize.
You’re probably familiar with consulting Google for a mystery ailment. You search the internet for your symptoms, sometimes find helpful advice, and sometimes get sucked into a vortex of anxiety and dread, convinced that you’ve got a rare, undiagnosed form of cancer. Now, thanks to the wonder that is generative AI, you can carry out this process in more detail. Meet Dr. ChatGPT.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>AI chatbots are an appealing stand-in for a human physician, especially given the ongoing doctor shortage as well as the broader barriers to accessing health care in the United States. </blockquote></figure>
ChatGPT is not a doctor in the same way that Google is not a doctor. Searching for medical information on either platform is just as likely to lead you to the wrong conclusion as it is to point toward the correct diagnosis. Unlike Google search, however, which simply points users to information, ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) invite people to have a conversation about it. They’re designed to be approachable, engaging, and always available. This makes AI chatbots an appealing stand-in for a human physician, especially given <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/361620/bloomberg-johns-hopkins-free-medical-school-doctor-shortage">the ongoing doctor shortage</a> as well as <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391483/us-health-care-doctors-salary-medical-school">the broader barriers to accessing health care</a> in the United States.
As the rabbit fever anecdote shows, these tools can also ingest all kinds of data and, having been trained on reams of medical journals, sometimes arrive at expert-level conclusions that doctors missed. Or it might give you really terrible medical advice. 
There’s a difference between asking a chatbot for medical advice and talking to it about your health in general. Done right, talking to ChatGPT could lead to better conversations with your doctor and better care. Just don’t let the AI talk you into eating pool cleaner. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The right and wrong ways to talk to Dr. ChatGPT</h2>
Plenty of people are talking to ChatGPT about their health. About one in six adults in the United States say they use AI chatbots for medical advice on a monthly basis, <a href="https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/kff-health-misinformation-tracking-poll-artificial-intelligence-and-health-information/">according to a 2024 KFF poll</a>. A majority of them aren’t confident in the accuracy of the information the bots provide — and frankly, that level of skepticism is appropriate given the stubborn tendency for LLMs to hallucinate and the potential for bad health information to cause harm. The real challenge for the average user is knowing how to distinguish between fact and fabrication.
“Honestly, I think people need to be very careful about using it for any medical purpose, especially if they don’t have the expertise around knowing what’s true and what’s not,” said <a href="https://www.daneshjoulab.com/people">Dr. Roxana Daneshjou</a>, a professor and AI researcher at the Stanford School of Medicine. “When it’s correct, it does a pretty good job, but when it’s incorrect, it can be pretty catastrophic.”
Chatbots also have a tendency to be sycophantic, or eager to please, which means they might steer you in the wrong direction if they think that’s what you want.
The situation is precarious enough, Daneshjou added, that she encourages patients to go instead to Dr. Google, which serves up trusted sources. The search giant <a href="https://blog.google/products/search/health-info-knowledge-graph/">has been collaborating with experts from the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School for a decade</a> to present verified information about conditions and symptoms after the rise of something called “cyberchondria,” or health anxiety enabled by the internet.
This condition <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB939076866193196830">is much older than Google</a>, actually. People have been searching for answers to their health questions since the Usenet days of the 1980s, and by the mid-2000s, eight in 10 people <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2006/10/29/online-health-search-2006/">were using the internet</a> to search for health information. Now, regardless of their reliability, chatbots are poised to receive more and more of these queries. Google even puts <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-ai-search">its problematic AI-generated results</a> for medical questions above <a href="https://blog.google/products/search/im-feeling-yucky-searching-for-symptoms/">the vetted results from its symptom checker</a>.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>If you’ve got a list of things to ask your doctor about, ChatGPT could help you craft questions. </blockquote></figure>
But if you skip the symptom checking side of things, tools like ChatGPT can be really helpful if you just want to learn more about what’s going on with your health based on what your doctor’s already told you or to gain a better understanding of their jargony notes. Chatbots are designed to be conversational, and they’re good at it. If you’ve got a list of things to ask your doctor about, ChatGPT could help you craft questions. If you’ve gotten some test results and need to make a decision with your doctor about the best next steps, you can rehearse that with a chatbot without actually asking the AI for any advice.
In fact, when it comes to just talking, there’s some evidence that ChatGPT is better at it. One <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37115527/">study from 2023</a> compared real physician answers to health questions from a Reddit forum to AI-generated responses when a chatbot was prompted with the same questions. Health care professionals then evaluated all of the responses and found that the chatbot-generated ones <a href="https://blog.google/products/search/im-feeling-yucky-searching-for-symptoms/">were both higher quality and more empathetic</a>. This is not the same thing as a doctor being in the same room as a patient, discussing their health. Now is a good time to point out that, on average, patients get <a href="https://profiles.wustl.edu/en/publications/measuring-primary-care-exam-length-using-electronic-health-record">just 18 minutes</a> with their primary care doctor on any given visit. If you go just once a year, that’s not very much time to talk to a doctor.
You should be aware that, unlike your human doctor, ChatGPT is not HIPAA-compliant. Chatbots generally <a href="https://hai.stanford.edu/news/privacy-ai-era-how-do-we-protect-our-personal-information">have very few privacy protections</a>. That means you should expect any health information you upload will get stored in the AI’s memory and be used to train large language models in the future. It’s also theoretically possible that your data could end up being included in an output for someone else’s prompt. There are <a href="https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/how-to-protect-your-privacy-from-chatgpt-and-other-ai-chatbots/">more private ways to use chatbots</a>, but still, the hallucination problem and the potential for catastrophe exist.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The future of bot-assisted health care </h2>
Even if you’re not using AI to figure out medical mysteries, there’s a chance your doctor is. <a href="https://assets.ctfassets.net/o78em1y1w4i4/T7F5sDDiUC8KJzLQXfJoy/004be7f43562d318115a294cf626be7f/ClinicianOfTheFuture_2025.pdf?utm_source=banner&utm_medium=dg&utm_campaign=cotf&utm_content=rpt">According to a 2025 Elsevier report</a>, about half of clinicians said they’d used an AI tool for work and slightly more said these tools save them time, and one in five say they’ve used AI for a second opinion on a complex case. This doesn’t necessarily mean your doctor is asking ChatGPT to figure out what your symptoms mean.
Doctors have been using AI-powered tools to help with everything from diagnosing patients to taking notes since well before ChatGPT even existed. These include clinical decision support systems built specifically for doctors, which currently outperform off-the-shelf chatbots — although the chatbots <a href="https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-releases/traditional-diagnostic-decision-support-systems-outperform-generative-ai">can actually augment the existing tools</a>. A 2023 study found that doctors working with ChatGPT <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2825395">performed only slightly better</a> at diagnosing test cases than those working independently. Interestingly, ChatGPT alone performed the best.
That study <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/health/chatgpt-ai-doctors-diagnosis.html">made headlines</a>, probably for the suggestion that AI chatbots are better than doctors at diagnosis. One of its co-authors, <a href="https://research.bidmc.org/general-medicine/people/adam-rodman-md-mph-facp">Dr. Adam Rodman</a>, suggests that this wouldn’t necessarily be the case if doctors would be more open to listening to ChatGPT rather than assuming the chatbots were wrong when the doctor disagreed with their conclusions. Sure, the AI can hallucinate, but it can also spot connections that humans may have missed. Again, look at the rabbit fever case.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“Patients need to talk to their doctors about their LLM use, and honestly, doctors should talk to their patients about their LLM use.” </blockquote></figure>
“The average doctor has a sense of when something is hallucinating or going off the rails,” said Rodman, a hospitalist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and instructor at Harvard Medical School. “I don’t know that the average patient necessarily does.”
Nevertheless, in the near term, you shouldn’t expect to see Dr. ChatGPT making an appearance at your local clinic. You’re more likely to see AI working <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-you-say-no-to-your-doctor-using-an-ai-scribe-264701">as a scribe</a>, saving your doctor time taking notes and possibly, one day, analyzing that data to help your doctor. Your doctor might use AI <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/health/ai-patient-messages-mychart.html">to help draft messages to patients</a> more quickly. In the near future, as AI tools get better, it’s possible that more clinicians use AI for diagnosis and second opinions. That still doesn’t mean you should rush to ChatGPT with your urgent medical concerns. If you do, tell your doctor about how that went.
“Patients need to talk to their doctors about their LLM use, and honestly, doctors should talk to their patients about their LLM use,” said Rodman. “If we just both step kind of out of the shadow world and talk to each other, we’ll have more productive conversations.”
A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/user-friendly-tech-newsletter-signup">Sign up here</a> so you don’t miss the next one!
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Devan Schwartz</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Noel King</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The problem with debating fascists — from a guy who’s debated just about everyone]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/podcasts/461817/mehdi-hasan-jubilee-media-surrounded-debate" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461817</id>
<updated>2025-09-17T14:37:43-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-18T06:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Podcasts" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Today, Explained podcast" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[The death of Charlie Kirk reignited heated discussions about political speech in America, especially the value of arguing with people you disagree with.  One company, Jubilee Media, has tapped into that sentiment and has been going viral on YouTube these last couple of years with its high-energy and high-drama — and yes, gimmicky — debate […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Mehdi Hasan, wearing a blazer and a spread-collar white shirt, gestures while speaking into a microphone." data-caption="Mehdi Hasan is seen on April 25, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Crooked Media" data-portal-copyright="Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Crooked Media" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2151925099.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Mehdi Hasan is seen on April 25, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Crooked Media </figcaption>
</figure>
The death of Charlie Kirk reignited heated discussions about political speech in America, especially the value of arguing with people you disagree with. 
One company, Jubilee Media, has tapped into that sentiment and has been going viral on YouTube these last couple of years with its high-energy and high-drama — and yes, gimmicky — debate shows where one person faces off against a big group of people who disagree with them. (Kirk himself made an appearance on a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV29R1M25n8">Jubilee show</a> in 2024: “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?”)
Jason Y. Lee says he founded the company to foster debates and build empathy in a polarized country. But critics argue that some of Jubilee’s content could be categorized more as voyeuristic clickbait than high-minded discourse. One show has women arranging themselves based on perceived attractiveness and men rearranging them; another involves blindfolded guessing games about which participant is Black or white. 
More recently, Mehdi Hasan — author and founder of his own media company, Zeteo, and former host of his own MSNBC show — appeared on Jubilee’s flagship debate show, Surrounded. His episode was called “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives,” and that too made waves. 
Hasan said he was prepared to vigorously defend his views, something he’s become known for over the years. But when he showed up, he wasn’t expecting some of the featured debaters to openly call for his deportation (Hasan is a US citizen originally from England) — or for one to proudly declare himself a fascist. The episode offered unusual insight into the promise and perils of political debate, how we practice politics in the age of algorithms, and the value — and limits — of engaging with those you fundamentally disagree with.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Mehdi Hasan about his appearance on Surrounded — and what it taught him about this charged political moment.
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 <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/today-explained/id1346207297">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/today-explained/PC:140">Pandora</a>, and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3pXx5SXzXwJxnf4A5pWN2A">Spotify</a>.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="200" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=VMP4013985232" width="100%"></iframe>
Where did you learn to debate?
Where did I learn to debate? I think around the dinner table. My family is very disputatious. The Hasans are known for having strong views. There was a lot of debate around the kitchen table, the dining table, political, social, cultural, religious.
We planned to do a show on the Jubilee debates and the argument about whether they are of value or not. And we called you because you appeared in one of these debates that went very viral, and then Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah and many people said Charlie Kirk was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-fear-politics.html">doing it right</a>. He was showing up; he was debating people he disagreed with. That’s the right way to do politics. Do you agree with that?
No, I don’t believe that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way, to quote former Vox boss, now New York Times columnist, Ezra Klein, a good friend of mine. I totally disagree with Ezra on that piece he wrote. I do have to add the standard caveat because Fox keeps clipping some of us on the left out of context.
Obviously [Kirk] shouldn’t have been killed. Obviously, we all condemn his murder. Obviously, a political assassination in response to speech you don’t like is unacceptable in America and very scary. 
But if you’re asking me about the content of what Charlie Kirk said when he was alive, it was awful, it was horrific, it was reactionary, it was bigoted. This idea that he was some kind of Socratic debater trying to get to the truth? No, he wasn’t. He was doing a “Prove Me Wrong” tour over the years where he and Ben Shapiro and others go to college campuses, find some guy with blue hair who says something provocative and then dunk all over him, and then clip it up and go viral and then have a YouTube video saying, “Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro destroys college student.”
All right. What about Jubilee?
So Jubilee’s a little bit different. Jubilee claims to be nonpartisan; they say that they are trying to get people from all sides to get in a room together. I mean, on paper what they’re aspiring to is at minimum neutral, if not good. What turns up on YouTube is not necessarily always the case. 
Tell me why you decided to go on Surrounded.
There were multiple reasons. One is, as I say, I like a good argument and 20 to one — those are good odds. I’ll take those odds. The idea of going into the lion’s den and debating a bunch of people who disagree with me, I thought would be fun. 
Number two, I spoke to my good friend Sam Seder from the Majority Report who had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js15xgK4LIE">done a Jubilee</a>, and he told me that it’s worth doing. It does actually have value — you will reach a whole new audience. And people like my daughter and my nieces and others we’re saying, “Oh yeah, Jubilee, we know Jubilee, all the kids watch Jubilee.” 
And it’s amazing since I did Jubilee how many younger people are now coming up to me in the street versus older people because they recognize me from that circle debate show. So it was a chance to reach a new audience. That was number two. 
And number three, it looked like a lot of right-wingers have been dominating that space. Prior to me going on Jubilee, all the top-rated people who had done Jubilee on YouTube with the most views were Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles. That was the lean of YouTube and Jubilee. And I thought, well, actually, maybe people like me and Sam Seder can try and give a different point of view.
<div class="youtube-embed"><iframe title="1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan)" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2S-WJN3L5eo?rel=0" allowfullscreen allow="accelerometer *; clipboard-write *; encrypted-media *; gyroscope *; picture-in-picture *; web-share *;"></iframe></div>
And what happened?
What happened was the craziest two hours of my professional life as a journalist. I was not expecting — and maybe I should have been — the kind of people I sat across. I’d watched a lot of Jubilees. I’d watched Sam Seder’s show. I knew there were a couple of people who came and said white supremacist things and far-right things and dumb things. But I didn’t expect one after another person to be telling me to my face that I should leave the country, that I’m not a real American. “I’m a proud fascist,” one person told me very early on in the debate.
What? Normally, people wanna deny the f-word. We spent the last week with Republicans up in arms that anyone would call them fascists, and how that’s what led to the death of Charlie Kirk. And yet here I was sitting in a warehouse with a bunch of young, mainly white people saying proudly, yes, we are fascists, we are racist.
How do we debate fascists? Should a person debate fascists?
No. And that’s why I said at the time, if you watch that clip, about halfway through the conversation, I said, “What are we doing here? I don’t debate fascists.” And all of the right-wingers watching in the circle, they got very upset because Jubilee then moved this guy out. And so many of them spent the next two hours, every time they came up to the chair to debate me, they would say, “Oh, you’re banning people you don’t agree with.” 
And I was like, “That’s not what it is. I don’t debate fascists because fascists don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe in debate. They don’t believe in my equal worth as a human being. So why would I debate such people?” 
Fascism at its core is an anti-democratic, authoritarian, and yes, very violent ideology. So, no, I don’t believe there is value to debating fascists. And if I’d known that people would be sitting down dismissing the Holocaust or saying, “I’m a fascist,” or saying the country was built for white people or whatever it is, I would not have gone on that show, or I would’ve said, “Get other people.” 
Look, I come from a proud anti-fascist tradition on the left where you don’t platform fascists, you don’t indulge them, you don’t meet them halfway. You defeat fascism by defeating the ideology, by offering something better and by being truthful. 
You know, a person who appreciated your appearance on Surrounded might say, these fascist-y types are out there. They’re influencing young people in a real way. At least you showed up and gave them a run for their money.
That is the silver lining. I guess you could argue if — and this is gonna make me sound very egomaniacal and immodest, so I apologize in advance — I guess people could say, if you’re gonna debate fascists, might as well be someone who’s good at debating. And that’s what I’m known for doing. So it’s better me than someone else who goes on and gets their ass handed to them.
So in that sense, I get it, but the counterargument I get as well, a lot of my critics were saying to me: “Just by going on, you legitimize them just by going on. You amplified them just by going on. You gave them credibility and respectability. They were able to clip up their clips and put it online and say, ‘Look, look, look, we own this mainstream journalist. We told them to get the F out of our country.’ ” 
Do you think you changed anyone’s mind by appearing on Surrounded?
Certainly not in that room. No. And that wasn’t the goal.
What is the goal in debating if not to change minds?
So my goal is not to change my opponent’s mind. Very rarely can you change your opponent’s mind. My goal is to change the people watching. When you’re debating on stage, as I have done, or whether you’re debating on YouTube and 10 or 11 or 12 million people now have watched that Surrounded show, you are hoping that in that 11 or 12 million people, there are a handful of people who are truly open-minded, truly independent people.
Most people are partisans, whether they want to admit so or not, but you hope that you found some independent folks to go, “Hmm, that’s a good point that I hadn’t heard before, that’s a good statistic that I wasn’t aware of, that’s a good way of framing the issue.” And, look, people have reached out to me over the years. I’ve spent the last year and a half doing nonstop debates. I’ve done a lot of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amz2Sf1JMDE">debating about Gaza</a>, another very polarizing issue, and people have reached out to me, and I have had messages from people saying, “I have switched my positions on this issue.”
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Sean Rameswaram</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Christian Paz</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[An era of internet-addled violence is taking shape before our eyes]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/461866/charlie-kirk-shooter-internet-meme-violence-discord" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461866</id>
<updated>2025-09-17T20:03:19-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-18T06:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Internet Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[The bullet casings authorities recovered during their investigation of Charlie Kirk’s killing make at least one thing clear: The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was speaking the language of memes. “Hey Fascist! Catch!”, “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao,” and “O Bella ciao…” read some of the engravings on bullets, both used and unused, […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Flowers, US flags, and candles comprise a makeshift memorial at the Utah state Capitol." data-caption="Flowers, US flags, and candles comprise a makeshift memorial at the Utah state Capitol following the shooting death of political activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on September 10. | Bethany Baker/Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Bethany Baker/Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/gettyimages-2234251125.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Flowers, US flags, and candles comprise a makeshift memorial at the Utah state Capitol following the shooting death of political activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on September 10. | Bethany Baker/Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
The bullet casings authorities recovered during their investigation of Charlie Kirk’s killing make at least one thing clear: The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was speaking the language of memes.
“Hey Fascist! Catch!”, “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao,” and “O Bella ciao…” read some of the engravings on bullets, both used and unused, in the shooting last week. Their meanings are hard to parse — they’re ideologically inconsistent, wrapped in layers of irony and earnestness, and reference various online communities and video games.
In a text exchange with his roommate and partner, reproduced by authorities in charging documents, Robinson <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/09/16/text-messages-charlie-kirk-tyler-robinson-sent">references</a> the inscriptions, calling them “mostly a big meme.” “[If] I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new[s] I might have a stroke,” Robinson allegedly said. 
It all suggests this act of violence, which seems to have been <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/politics/charlie-kirk-tyler-robinson-motive">driven by</a> opposition to “hate” Robinson thought Kirk was spreading as well as some left-leaning ideas, was also wrapped up in a kind of dark, nihilistic, deeply online meme culture that has been spawning, or at least inspiring, acts of violence over the last half-decade. Memes started to make more of an appearance in the killings carried out by mass shooters, <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/charlie-kirk-was-killed-by-a-meme">beginning most notably in 2019</a>, during attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Memes, and deeply online references, also appeared in Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health insurance CEO and in school shootings this year in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
It’s a complicated world to parse, so we turned to Elle Reeve, someone who has a history of investigating and explaining the shady corners of the internet that have started dealing serious damage in the real world. Reeve is a correspondent for CNN and the author of the book <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Black-Pill/Elle-Reeve/9781982198893">Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics</a> — all about the kinds of (mostly) men who get sucked into dark worlds online, and <a href="https://x.com/elspethreeve/status/1967391648037708094">as she’s put it</a>, “talk themselves into doing strange, cruel, or violent things because it all started with just jokes, man.”
Below is an excerpt of Reeve’s conversation with us, edited for length and clarity. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/today-explained/id1346207297">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/today-explained/PC:140">Pandora</a>, and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3pXx5SXzXwJxnf4A5pWN2A">Spotify</a>.
It’s been almost a week since Charlie Kirk was killed. What do we know at this point about his alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson?
To me, we still don’t know enough. We know that he was a young man, he is referred to as very smart and quiet by a lot of his friends that have talked to the press. He scored well in his ACT, according to a post his mom made, but he dropped out of college after the first semester. He was a big gamer — really into video games. And according to investigators, he was dating his roommate, [who they say is transgender].
<div class="megaphone-embed"><a href="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?p=VMP5705694065" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View Link</a></div>
The first tranche of information we got about this alleged shooter was when investigators revealed what he allegedly wrote on the bullet casings. Could you help us understand what exactly he wrote?
So the first one is “Notices bulge OWO what’s this?” This is a furry meme. This one has thrown a lot of people for a loop. Luckily, people aren’t trying to attribute a lot of politics to it because it’s so confusing. But it’s a reference to furries. It’s a 10-year-old meme. It comes from an image that’s a drawing of two middle-aged, unattractive men role-playing with each other online, making sexy talk as furries. And if people don’t know, that’s kind of like a sort of sexual thing where you like imagining yourself as an anthropomorphic animal, usually a specific one…
He wrote a whole bunch of jokes. He wrote dumb internet jokes. Some of them, if it were in a movie, would be funny. But he wrote them before killing a person. That’s what’s, honestly, pretty chilling. It’s one of the details that’s hard for me to get past.
So this can be interpreted as a pro-furry joke or an anti-furry joke because hating furries on the internet is a big thing both in the right-wing world and in other very online spaces. But it’s also been reclaimed by furries, kind of like the word “queer.” So the point of saying all that is that an outsider trying to establish with certainty what exactly was being expressed by this message — that’s a fool’s errand. You just don’t know. We just don’t know. We’re getting a few more details, but it’s still pretty ambiguous.
Which feels similar to another casing, which said, “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao.”
Exactly. That’s the fourth cartridge. And that one — again, I saw other people pick this up on the internet — for me, what it conjures is, like a grizzled law enforcement veteran, bulletproof vest, bends down in the dust to pick up a piece of evidence. And it says, “If you read this, you’re gay,” right? You’re supposed to laugh, or the image is funny. And yet he did it before killing somebody. So it’s not a strong statement about how you should vote in the midterms, that’s for sure.
What do the rest of them say?
So the second cartridge says, “Hey, Fascist! Catch!” and has these arrow symbols. It’s a reference to a video game called Helldivers 2, which is kind of like a fascist satire. The arrow symbols are what bring the biggest bomb in the game. The third cartridge is, “Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao, Ciao.” So that’s an old anti-fascist song, history buffs are very familiar with this…I’m told it’s a meme among anti-fascists — I have done quite a bit of reporting with them and I had never come across it. But that’s the internet, I guess… It’s become more popular because it’s in a Netflix show called Money Heist. And if you go on TikTok, you can see people doing goofy dances to it while ordering coffee. And it’s in a video game as well. But broadly, this could be taken as a left-wing anti-fascist message.
And is this what leads people to immediately say that this guy is left-wing?
That and the bulge thing, I heard Ted Cruz say it was a transgender meme, which is false.
Is there some sort of throughline in what Tyler Robinson may have written on these casings?
Well, he’s really into video games. And the dominant pose in these very online chat rooms is ironic detachment — so many layers of irony that you can’t even fully understand the author’s meaning, other than that they’re implying “we’re part of an in-group and the people outside don’t understand.”
And what do we know about the online spaces that Tyler may have lived in?
We don’t know enough. We just don’t know enough. We know he was in a few Discords at minimum.
Discord is a gaming chat platform, but you don’t have to be using a video game to use it. If you have Slack at work, or something like that, it’s kind of like that. There’s a group chat function, you can do one-on-one chats, you can talk by audio and by video. I’ve done quite a bit of reporting in these Discord servers that become cultures unto themselves. They become almost cult-like. I’ve interviewed incels who spent like 18 hours a day in their Discord server. The Discord server of white nationalists became very important evidence in a federal civil trial involving Charlottesville [and the Unite the Right rally].
How can I put this? The culture, it can become this bubble that leads to very intense groupthink. But what we’ve seen so far of his messages on Discord — and Discord did confirm that Tyler Robinson had an account — it isn’t like that.
We know he had a server with about 30 friends. They messaged him being like, “Bro, you look like these pictures of the alleged shooter.” He’s like, “My doppelganger is trying to get me in trouble. Ha ha ha. Better throw away my manifesto and exact copy rifle.” So if he was in a very political space, we have not yet seen evidence of that.
And Discord itself does not necessarily have a right lean or a left lean.
No, no, it’s not for that. And there are anti-fascist servers and communist ones and right-wing ones and fascist ones and incel ones.
The part of the culture that is unsettling is that you see in a lot of these spaces is just this nihilistic, black-pilled, ironic culture where nothing is taken seriously. Like you’re a loser if you take something seriously.
Which maybe explains why the bullet casings have a bunch of absurdist memes written all over them.
Right. Exactly. Which is how you possibly could get to the place of writing on a shell casing, “if you read this, you’re gay.”
Is the bullet casing thing becoming like the new manifesto? It’s not the first time we’ve seen this in one of these high-profile killings in the past year.
So a lot of these mass shooters or public assassinations, they reference each other. So Luigi Mangione [allegedly] wrote on three bullets, “deny, defend, depose,” a reference to how health insurance companies deny people coverage for care that they need. The first time I remember this being a big thing, specifically with messages written on the weaponry in order to be a message to not the wider world, but the circle of online people, the crowd or gang that they hung out in, was with the 2019 Christchurch shooting. That man wrote all kinds of memes all over his guns before killing 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand. That guy had been on this website, 8chan, which is now called 8kun. And…I mean, it was clear from that that he wanted to be a meme. He wrote it for that audience. … It was about speaking to people on 8chan. And he did become a meme there. There are all kinds of illustrations and cartoons and memes about him there. And that’s when I started noticing it happening over and over on these weapons.
There was the recent shooting at the Annunciation School in Minnesota. That person also seems to be part of a very strange, nihilistic Discord, and they wrote a lot of messages in English but with Cyrillic letters. But yeah, this is a recurring thing, writing memes on the gun.
And is that to say that these shooters, though they may have very different politics and beliefs, are influencing each other?
Oh, definitely. They obsess over each other. The shooter [who] killed several people at a grocery store in Buffalo in 2022 — his manifesto and actions very directly referenced the Christchurch shooter.
What more did we learn about the alleged Kirk shooter from the charges yesterday?
The really fascinating thing is his texts with his significant other/roommate after the shooting.
It’s clear from the transcript that the roommate was surprised by this.
And he’s obsessed with the rifle that was his grandfather’s rifle, and particularly that his father will be angry if he has lost the rifle. It’s one of the other just surreal things in this exchange. You [allegedly] just killed a guy, and all he can think about is, “my dad’s gonna be so mad if I don’t bring back grandpa’s rifle.”
I think it speaks to the unreality of it all. And there’s another message that’s related to what we’ve been talking about. He says, “Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. If I see, ‘notices bulge, uwu’ on Fox News, I might have a stroke.”
This whole incident, or at least what we know of it so far, just feels like a very uncomfortable clash of I live online versus I live in the real world.
Yes, yes. And particularly when talking to older colleagues who did not grow up online, it’s been very hard to explain. And you see it in the national discourse, too. This is not about supporting Trump, anti-Trump. It doesn’t break down into easy political motivations. Many of the young people that I have talked to who are like…locked into these worlds, they think that’s absurd, rooting for one party or another. You’re a dupe or a fool if you care about that stuff.
It’s probably helpful to clarify what we mean by these people being “very online.” It’s something very different than what a lot of us know.
Right, it’s not just like scrolling Twitter a lot and being appalled by it. Just to talk about the specific people I’ve talked to, I got really deep into this incel Discord, where people literally were spending 18 hours or more online, sometimes they go on binges, more than 24 hours, and the computer was their whole life. They’d be popping in and out of other related Discord servers, chatting, or going on camera or just going on voice.
The server that I was particularly investigating, these guys were obsessed with not being able to get laid, feeling doomed by the way they looked or their personalities, to never get a woman to have sex with them, much less have a relationship and be a normal part of society. But, well, you could start by going outside.
A guy I interviewed in southern Florida, he lived really close to the beach. But he said he’d only been a couple times. He even said to me that one time he was standing in the water looking out at the waves at the horizon and thought, “This is beautiful, but I would like it better if it were on my computer screen.”
That’s grim.
Sometimes I’ll interview people, and we’re talking about this person [as if they’re someone] I should know, a celebrity, and I look them up and maybe it’s someone with a YouTube account with 300 subscribers. And I’m like, Why am I supposed to know about this? But it has been an object of fixation within that chat room for so much time, they forget that the outside world doesn’t think that way. 
One of the reasons this meme world talk has blown up is that policymakers and normal people are wondering, How big is this world? How big is this threat? Is it poisoning the minds of young people? How do we understand the scale of it all?
Well, one way to think of it is like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, for them, the internet is the mainstream media, right? It’s not like maybe we watch the Emmys and we’re checking Twitter on the side as old millennials. But their main stuff is TikTok, Discord, for whatever they’re into.
Does that mean we can expect more of this element of absurdism, deeply layered irony in future violent extremists or shooters or gunmen? Will that be the case because of how widespread this online culture seems to be? 
It kind of depends on the subculture. I did a lot of reporting on accelerationists who are trying to accelerate the collapse of society because they think it’s irredeemable. So what comes after will be something valuable, a golden age, something better than what we have now. The people I interviewed, that’s how they give themselves permission to do bad things. “I’m bringing down this corrupt society.” So all of that is permitted.
So this isn’t something that we should expect to not happen again.
Of course, there will still be people who believe in regular stuff, you know? But it is a very large contingent of online culture.
So what do we do to stop this, to combat this? Is it about isolation and loneliness? Is it about regulating online time?
You can look visually at what a lot of the memes communicate. There are a lot of depictions of lonely men who are sad, standing in the middle of a ruined society, some kind of grim atmosphere, and I think that does speak to the way people are feeling. And also like, a lot of kids who spent their critical years locked up during Covid, and it wasn’t good for their brain. I mean, even in regular life, post-Covid, I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel this way, like the work happy hour is more awkward than it used to be, than it was before Covid when people retreated from the world.
Once you stop forcing yourself to confront social anxiety, it gets bigger and bigger and I think that leads to a lot of alienation. There’s a nihilistic blackmail cult called 764, the FBI is investigating it, but they look for kids in these online spaces, convince them to send them nudes, and then blackmail these children into doing horrible things, like killing their own pets. 
I’m a parent of a toddler. I just want to be like a crazy fundamentalist about my kid not going on the internet. That can be the adversity you have to overcome — a crazy mom who saw an incel shit his pants on purpose in front of her just to troll her. Like, sorry dude, you’re just not going on the internet or you’re not getting unfettered access to a phone until you’re…I don’t know, 35?
This is really grim.
Do you want some hope? 
Yeah.
So I have these incels I first interviewed in 2018, I thought doing a story on them, maybe they would see that they’re not so hopeless if they just went outside and joined society. They were still chatting me from it four years later, but I just reached out to them during this to ask, “What’s your take?” And they’ve left. They rejoined, they have jobs, they go outside.
Some people that I thought were in like the blackest possible space have left, so it is possible. And when I go in that old Discord server, the incel one, I was scrolling up through it, all the chats were from deleted user, deleted user, deleted user. “Deleted user” being — their accounts are gone.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Zack Beauchamp</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Let’s be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/461887/jimmy-kimmel-suspension-air-abc-charlie-kirk-nexstar" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461887</id>
<updated>2025-09-18T13:15:41-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-17T22:50:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Fearless journalism needs your support now more than ever. Become a Vox Member to support our work today. Let’s be clear about what just happened: Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent late-night comedian, was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn’t like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut […]]]></summary>
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Fearless journalism needs your support now more than ever. <a href="https://www.vox.com/support-now?itm_campaign=article-header-Q42024&itm_medium=site&itm_source=in-article">Become a Vox Member to support our work today</a>.
Let’s be clear about what just happened: Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent late-night comedian, was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn’t like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up. 
The Trump administration, it appears, has learned to effectively weaponize the regulatory powers of the federal government to punish speech it doesn’t like from people it doesn’t like. This is a favored weapon of modern autocrats; its deployment against Kimmel is a qualitative escalation even above the administration’s previous acts of censorship (like targeting <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/406199/ice-rumeysa-ozturk-tufts-logoff">the author of a pro-Palestine op-ed</a> for deportation).
What just happened, in short, shows how far down the authoritarian road the United States has traveled in just eight months.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Jimmy Kimmel and the abuse of state powers</h2>
Kimmel’s downfall began with some admittedly ill-advised speculation in Monday’s monologue: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
At the time, the evidence suggested the shooter very likely was not a MAGA believer (and evidence released the next day showed that he almost certainly was on the political left).
But Kimmel’s aside — in a <a href="https://x.com/latenightercom/status/1968455055251562716">monologue mostly focused on mocking President Donald Trump</a> — did not justify what came next. During a Wednesday podcast appearance, FCC head Brendan Carr threatened to <a href="https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/1968392506711613526">revoke the broadcasting licenses of any stations</a> that continued to air Kimmel’s content. 
“It’s time for them to step and say this garbage…isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities,” he said.
Carr’s threat should have been toothless. The FCC is <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-speech">prohibited by law</a> from employing “the power of censorship” or interfering “with the right of free speech.” There is a very narrow and rarely used exception for “news distortion,” in which a broadcast news outlet knowingly airs false reports. What Kimmel did — an offhand comment based on weak evidence — is extremely different from creating a news report with the intent to deceive.
But months before the shooting, Carr had <a href="https://www.techpolicy.press/news-distortion-the-new-fake-news/">begun investigating complaints under this exception</a> against ABC and CBS stations, specifically allegations of anti-conservative bias. Stations had to take Carr’s threat seriously — even though Carr himself had declared (in <a href="https://x.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1841651190783684620">a 2024 tweet</a>) that “the First Amendment prohibits government officials from coercing private parties into suppressing protected speech.”
Hours after Carr’s Wednesday threat, Nexstar — the largest owner of local stations in America — suddenly decided that Kimmel’s comments from two nights ago were unacceptable. Nexstar, it should be noted, is currently attempting to purchase one of its major rivals for $6.2 billion — a merger that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/business/media/nexstar-tegna-deal.html">would require express FCC approval</a>. 
“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse,” Andrew Alford, the president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, said in a statement. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time.”
Without access to Nexstar’s roughly 200 stations — covering about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/business/media/nexstar-tegna-deal.html">39 percent</a> of the national market, the maximally allowed cap — Kimmel would suffer an enormous ratings blow. And so, shortly after Nexstar’s announcement, ABC/Disney announced that he’d be suspended indefinitely.
Trump has had it in for Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent critic, for a very long time. After CBS axed fellow late-night Trump critic Stephen Colbert earlier this year, the president repeatedly said that Kimmel was “<a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114874422468516376" rel="nofollow">next</a>.” Kimmel’s Kirk comments, which <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/media/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-trump-fcc-brendan-carr">both an FCC commissioner</a> and (reportedly) <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/jimmy-kimmel-out-abc-charlie-kirk-comments-1235430078/">ABC executives</a> considered well within bounds, seem like a pretext — taking advantage of the pervasive climate of fear and censorship in the wake of Kirk’s death to punish a prominent name on the president’s enemies list.
The weaponization of seemingly neutral “good government” rules, like broadcast regulation, to punish the enemies of the current president is a familiar turn in the story of democratic backsliding. It was one of the principal tools used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to batter his country’s press into submission, ultimately forcing independent outlets to sell to government-aligned conglomerates who transformed their editorial stance.
It would take quite a bit more work for Trump to consolidate Orbán-levels of control over the media. But what’s so striking about the Kimmel case is how swiftly Nexstar (and ABC) rolled over. They didn’t even try to put up a fight to defend their own ability to control what goes on their airwaves. They instead apparently decided that fighting the government is costly and risky, putting licenses or even a valuable merger at risk, and that risking that isn’t worth it for Jimmy Kimmel.
This is what it looks like when a society’s elite rolls over in the face of authoritarianism. It never ends well.

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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Dylan Scott</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[RFK Jr.’s biggest disruption yet to vaccine policy is coming]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/health/461858/cdc-susan-monarez-rfk-jr-vaccine-guidelines" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461858</id>
<updated>2025-09-17T17:47:01-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-17T17:50:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health Care" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[This morning, ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Susan Monarez came to the Senate to share her story of being fired by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump, the latest volley in an ongoing battle between the Trump administration and the public health establishment. According […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Susan Monarez speaks into a microphone in a Senate hearing room." data-caption="Former CDC director Susan Monarez testifies at the Senate health committee. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/GettyImages-2235970360.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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Former CDC director Susan Monarez testifies at the Senate health committee. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images </figcaption>
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This morning, ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Susan Monarez came to the Senate to share her story of being fired by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump, the latest volley in an ongoing battle between the Trump administration and the public health establishment.
According to Monarez’s testimony, the upcoming meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — which will take place over the next two days — had been the impetus for her ouster. She testified that, during a contentious meeting with Kennedy before she was fired, he asked her to approve, sight unseen, the new vaccine recommendations that would be made by his new ACIP. The panel is now staffed by experts who were handpicked by Kennedy, who also asked her to fire career CDC vaccine scientists.
During her testimony before the Senate health committee, Monarez maintained composure as many Republican senators sought to cast doubt on her credibility. But the committee chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who is also a trained physician, was a counter-force: He issued his own warning about unjustified changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, particularly the hepatitis B shot.
And now, what could be the real breaking point for Kennedy’s Make America Healthy agenda is here. 
At tomorrow’s and Friday’s meetings, the ACIP will discuss possible changes to the childhood vaccine schedule and the federal government’s guidance for the Covid-19 and hepatitis B vaccines and for measles-mumps-rubella shots. The guidance for hepatitis B shots, in particular, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/health/hepatitis-b-vaccine-committee-meeting-infants.html">may be changed</a>, and emerged as a flashpoint at Wednesday’s hearing.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The rift over the hepatitis B vaccine, briefly explained</h2>
How did the hepatitis B shot suddenly become so central in this debate? It’s long been a target of anti-vaccine activists because it is given within the first day of a child’s life. And in today’s Senate hearing, some Republicans sounded on board with making changes: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested that the timing of the vaccine, which is currently offered to newborn babies, should be pushed back. He argued that unless the mother is known to have hepatitis B, giving the vaccine that early was unnecessary.
At the end of the hearing, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the committee chair, offered a rebuke: He noted that a child infected at birth with hepatitis B has a more than 90 percent chance of developing a chronic infection — and he pointed out that the US used to see <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/health/hepatitis-b-vaccine-committee-meeting-infants.html">20,000 babies infected by hepatitis B every year</a>, before the vaccine became standard in the early 1990s. Now it’s less than 20.
“That,” he emphasized, “is an accomplishment to make America healthy again. And we should stand up and salute the people who made the decision, because there are people who would otherwise be dead if their mothers weren’t given the choice of that vaccine.”
Cassidy also underscored that the CDC does not mandate the hepatitis B vaccine; it only requires the insurance company to pay for the shot — and that’s only if the parents want it.
“Now that we’ve controlled [hepatitis B], do we let the genie out of the bottle?” he asked, observing that if the ACIP removes the recommendation for newborns to get the hepatitis B shot, health insurers may no longer cover the cost.
Today’s hearing with the former CDC director didn’t result in widespread calls for Kennedy’s resignation. But the opposition to his aggressive overhaul of vaccine policy has been building for some time.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY)<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU-ijk73OF0"> grilled Kennedy over the value of vaccines</a> at another hearing earlier this month. Politico <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/16/gop-lawmakers-dont-sound-enthused-about-rfk-jr-00564704">reported</a> on a growing ambivalence among other GOP lawmakers, too. But Kennedy still has a lot of allies in his corner; except for Cassidy and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), most of the Republican questions for Monarez at the Wednesday hearing were hostile and sought to cast doubt on her credibility.
But Cassidy could really escalate the situation. He’s always been the most closely watched Republican senator when it comes to Kennedy and the MAHA agenda. He’s the health committee chair, and because he’s a trained physician, he has a lot of credibility among experts and the public. If he wants to make life difficult for Kennedy, he can — by investigating the health agency, calling for more testimony, and opposing his agenda on the Senate floor.
Now Cassidy has all but issued a warning to ACIP and Kennedy against making an unjustified change to the hepatitis B vaccine guidance. They’ll make their countermove in the coming days.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Sigal Samuel</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[“AI will kill everyone” is not an argument. It’s a worldview.]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/461680/if-anyone-builds-it-yudkowsky-soares-ai-risk" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=461680</id>
<updated>2025-09-17T12:49:04-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-09-17T08:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Living in an AI world" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[You’ve probably seen this one before: first it looks like a rabbit. You’re totally sure: yes, that’s a rabbit! But then — wait, no — it’s a duck. Definitely, absolutely a duck. A few seconds later, it’s flipped again, and all you can see is rabbit. The feeling of looking at that classic optical illusion is […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="A collage artwork showing two versions of the same black-and-white aerial photo of skyscrapers. On the left, the photo is crumpled and fragmented, with a strip of binary code running across it. On the right, the same photo is intact but covered in scattered colorful dots in red, green, yellow, and blue. More dots float beyond the edges of the photo against a black background." data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Lucy Jones for Vox" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/LucyJones_Vox_SigalSamuel.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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You’ve probably seen this one before: first it looks like a rabbit. You’re totally sure: yes, that’s a rabbit! But then — wait, no — it’s a duck. Definitely, absolutely a duck. A few seconds later, it’s flipped again, and all you can see is rabbit.
The feeling of looking at that classic optical illusion is the same feeling I’ve been getting recently as I read two competing stories about the future of AI. 
According to one story, <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology">AI is normal technology</a>. It’ll be a big deal, sure — like electricity or the internet was a big deal. But just as society adapted to those innovations, we’ll be able to adapt to advanced AI. As long as we <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/362759/ai-interpretability-openai-claude-gemini-neuroscience">research</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/420755/ai-scheming-deception-lessons-from-a-chimp">how to make AI safe</a> and put the right <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/461340/sb53-california-ai-bill-catastrophic-risk-explained">regulations</a> around it, nothing <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/21/18126576/ai-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-safety-alignment">truly catastrophic</a> will happen. We will not, for instance, go extinct.
Then there’s the doomy view best encapsulated by the title of a new book: <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/eliezer-yudkowsky/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies/9780316595643/?lens=little-brown">If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies</a>. The authors, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, mean that very literally: a superintelligence — an AI that’s smarter than any human, and smarter than humanity collectively — would kill us all.
Not maybe. Pretty much definitely, the authors argue. Yudkowsky, a highly influential AI doomer and founder of the intellectual subculture known as the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/w/rationalist-movement">Rationalists</a>, has put the odds at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/technology/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-book.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lU8.B7kR.W2LoVZ5BYM9O&smid=url-share">99.5 percent</a>. Soares told me it’s “above 95 percent.” In fact, while many researchers worry about existential risk from AI, he objected to even using the word “risk” here — that’s how sure he is that we’re going to die.
“When you’re careening in a car toward a cliff,” Soares said, “you’re not like, ‘let’s talk about gravity risk, guys.’ You’re like, ‘fucking stop the car!’” 
The authors, both at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, argue that safety research is nowhere near ready to control superintelligent AI, so the only reasonable thing to do is stop all efforts to build it — including by <a href="https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/">bombing the data centers</a> that power the AIs, if necessary.  
While reading this new book, I found myself pulled along by the force of its arguments, many of which are alarmingly compelling. AI sure looked like a rabbit. But then I’d feel a moment of skepticism, and I’d go and look at what the other camp — let’s call them the “normalist” camp — has to say. Here, too, I’d find compelling arguments, and suddenly the duck would come into view.
I’m trained in philosophy and usually I find it pretty easy to hold up an argument and its counterargument, compare their merits, and say which one seems stronger. But that felt weirdly difficult in this case: It was hard to seriously entertain both views at the same time. Each one seemed so totalizing. You see the rabbit or you see the duck, but you don’t see both together. 
That was my clue that what we’re dealing with here is not two sets of arguments, but two fundamentally different worldviews.
A worldview is made of a few different parts, including foundational assumptions, evidence and methods for interpreting evidence, ways of making predictions, and, crucially, values. All these parts interlock to form a unified story about the world. When you’re just looking at the story from the outside, it can be hard to spot if one or two of the parts hidden inside might be faulty — if a foundational assumption is wrong, let’s say, or if a value has been smuggled in there that you disagree with. That can make the whole story look more plausible than it actually is.
If you really want to know whether you should believe a particular worldview, you have to pick the story apart. So let’s take a closer look at both the superintelligence story and the normalist story — and then ask whether we might need a different narrative altogether. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The case for believing superintelligent AI would kill us all</h2>
Long before he came to his current doomy ideas, Yudkowsky actually started out wanting to accelerate the creation of superintelligent AI. And he still believes that aligning a superintelligence with human values is possible in principle — we just have no idea how to solve that engineering problem yet — and that superintelligent AI is desirable because it could help humanity resettle in another solar system before our sun dies and destroys our planet.
“There’s literally nothing else our species can bet on in terms of how we eventually end up colonizing the galaxies,” he told me.
But after studying AI more closely, Yudkowsky came to the conclusion that we’re a long, long way away from figuring out how to steer it toward our values and goals. He became one of the original AI doomers, spending the last two decades trying to figure out how we could keep superintelligence from turning against us. He drew acolytes, some of whom were so persuaded by his ideas that they went to work in the major AI labs in hopes of making them safer.
But now, Yudkowsky looks upon even the most well-intentioned AI safety efforts with despair. 
That’s because, as Yudkowsky and Soares explain in their book, researchers aren’t building AI — they’re growing it. Normally, when we create some tech — say, a TV — we understand the pieces we’re putting into it and how they work together. But today’s large language models (LLMs) aren’t like that. Companies grow them by shoving reams and reams of text into them, until the models learn to make statistical predictions on their own about what word is likeliest to come next in a sentence. The latest LLMs, called reasoning models, “think” out loud about how to solve a problem — and often solve it very successfully.
Nobody understands exactly how the heaps of numbers inside the LLMs make it so they can solve problems — and even when a chatbot seems to be thinking in a human-like way, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/400531/ai-reasoning-models-openai-deepseek">it’s not</a>. 
Because we don’t know how AI “minds” work, it’s hard to prevent undesirable outcomes. Take the chatbots that have led people into <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/">psychotic episodes or delusions</a> by being overly supportive of all the users’ thoughts, including the unrealistic ones, to the point of convincing them that they’re messianic figures or geniuses who’ve <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html">discovered a new kind of math</a>. What’s especially worrying is that, even after AI companies <a href="https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/">have tried</a> to make LLMs less sycophantic, the chatbots have continued to flatter users in dangerous ways. Yet nobody trained the chatbots to push users into psychosis. And if you ask ChatGPT directly whether it should do that, it’ll say no, of course not.
The problem is that ChatGPT’s knowledge of what should and shouldn’t be done is not what’s animating it. When it was being trained, humans tended to rate more highly the outputs that sounded affirming or sycophantic. In other words, the evolutionary pressures the chatbot faced when it was “growing up” instilled in it an intense drive to flatter. That drive can become dissociated from the actual outcome it was intended to produce, yielding a strange preference that we humans don’t want in our AIs — but can’t easily remove.
Yudkowsky and Soares offer this analogy: Evolution equipped human beings with tastebuds hooked up to reward centers in our brains, so we’d eat the energy-rich foods found in our ancestral environments like sugary berries or fatty elk. But as we got smarter and more technologically adept, we figured out how to make new foods that excite those tastebuds even more — ice cream, say, or Splenda, which contains none of the calories of real sugar. So, we developed a strange preference for Splenda that evolution never intended.
It might sound weird to say that an AI has a “preference.” How can a machine “want” anything? But this is not a claim that the AI <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/414324/ai-consciousness-welfare-suffering-chatgpt-claude">has consciousness or feelings</a>. Rather, all that’s really meant by “wanting” here is that a system is trained to succeed, and it pursues its goal so cleverly and persistently that it’s reasonable to speak of it “wanting” to achieve that goal — just as it’s reasonable to speak of a plant that bends toward the sun as “wanting” the light. (As <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/353430/what-if-absolutely-everything-is-conscious">the biologist Michael Levin says</a>, “What most people say is, ‘Oh, that’s just a mechanical system following the laws of physics.’ Well, what do you think you are?”)
If you accept that humans are instilling drives in AI, and that those drives can become dissociated from the outcome they were originally intended to produce, you have to entertain a scary thought: What is the AI equivalent of Splenda? 
If an AI was trained to talk to users in a way that provokes expressions of delight, for example, “it will prefer humans kept on drugs, or bred and domesticated for delightfulness while otherwise kept in cheap cages all their lives,” Yudkowsky and Soares write. Or it’ll do away with humans altogether and have cheerful chats with synthetic conversation partners. This AI doesn’t care that this isn’t what we had in mind, any more than we care that Splenda isn’t what evolution had in mind. It just cares about finding the most efficient way to produce cheery text.
So, Yudkowsky and Soares argue that advanced AI won’t choose to create a future full of happy, free people, for one simple reason: “Making a future full of flourishing people is not the best, most efficient way to fulfill strange alien purposes. So it wouldn’t happen to do that.”
In other words, it would be just as unlikely for the AI to want to keep us happy forever as it is for us to want to just eat berries and elk forever. What’s more, if the AI decides to build machines to have cheery chats with, and if it can build more machines by burning all Earth’s life forms to generate as much energy as possible, why wouldn’t it? 
“You wouldn’t need to hate humanity to use their atoms for something else,” Yudkowsky and Soares write.
And, short of breaking the laws of physics, the authors believe that a superintelligent AI would be so smart that it would be able to do anything it decides to do. Sure, AI doesn’t currently have hands to do stuff with, but it could get hired hands — either by paying people to do its bidding online or by using its deep understanding of our psychology and its epic powers of persuasion to convince us into helping it. Eventually it would figure out how to run power plants and factories with robots instead of humans, making us disposable. Then it would dispose of us, because why keep a species around if there’s even a chance it’d get in your way by setting off a nuke or building a rival superintelligence?
I know what you’re thinking: But couldn’t the AI developers just <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417087/ai-safety-yoshua-bengio-lawzero">command the AI not to hurt humanity</a>? No, the authors say. Not any more than OpenAI can figure out how to make ChatGPT stop being dangerously sycophantic. The bottom line, for Yudkowsky and Soares, is that highly capable AI systems, with goals we cannot fully understand or control, will be able to dispense with anyone who gets in the way without a second thought, or even any malice — just like humans wouldn’t hesitate to destroy an anthill that was in the way of some road we were building.
So if we don’t want superintelligent AI to one day kill us all, they argue, there’s only one option: total nonproliferation. Just as the world created nuclear arms treaties, we need to create global nonproliferation treaties to stop work that could lead to superintelligent AI. All the current bickering over who might win an AI “arms race” — the US or China — is worse than pointless. Because if anyone gets this technology, anyone at all, it will destroy all of humanity.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">But what if AI is just normal technology?</h2>
In <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology">“AI as Normal Technology,”</a> an important essay that’s gotten a lot of play in the AI world this year, Princeton computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that we shouldn’t think of AI as an alien species. It’s just a tool — one that we can and should remain in control of. And they don’t think maintaining control will necessitate drastic policy changes.
What’s more, they don’t think it makes sense to view AI as a superintelligence, either now or in the future. In fact, they reject the whole idea of “superintelligence” as an incoherent construct. And they reject technological determinism, arguing that the doomers are inverting cause and effect by assuming that AI will get to decide its own future, regardless of what humans decide. 
Yudkowsky and Soares’s argument emphasizes that if we create superintelligent AI, its intelligence will so vastly outstrip our own that it’ll be able to do whatever it wants to us. But there are a few problems with this, Narayanan and Kapoor argue.
First, the concept of superintelligence is slippery and ill-defined, and that’s allowing Yudkowsky and Soares to use it in a way that is basically synonymous with magic. Yes, magic could break through all our cybersecurity defenses, persuade us to keep giving it money and acting against our own self-interest even after the dangers start becoming more apparent, and so on — but we wouldn’t take this as a serious threat if someone just came out and said “magic.”
Second, what exactly does this argument take “intelligence” to mean? It seems to be treating it as a unitary property (Yudkowsky told me that there’s “a compact, regular story” underlying all intelligence). But intelligence is not one thing, and it’s not measurable on a single continuum. It’s almost certainly <a href="https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/ai-doomerism-is-bullshit">more like a variety of heterogenous things</a> — attention, imagination, curiosity, common sense — and it may well be intertwined with our social cooperativeness, our sensations, and our emotions. Will AI have all of these? Some of these? We aren’t sure of the kind of intelligence AI will attain. Besides, just because an intelligent being has a lot of capability, that doesn’t mean it has a lot of power — the ability to modify the environment — and power is what’s really at stake here.
Why should we be so convinced that humans will just roll over and let AI grab all the power? 
It’s true that we humans <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/truth-terminal-goatse-crypto-millionaire/">have already ceded</a> decision-making power to today’s AIs in unwise ways. But that doesn’t mean we would keep doing that even as the AIs get more capable, the stakes get higher, and the downsides become more glaring. Narayanan and Kapoor believe that, ultimately, we’ll use existing approaches — regulations, auditing and monitoring, fail-safes and the like — to prevent things from going seriously off the rails.
One of their main points is that there’s a difference between inventing a technology and deploying it at scale. Just because programmers make an AI, doesn’t mean society will adopt it. “Long before a system would be granted access to consequential decisions, it would need to demonstrate reliable performance in less critical contexts,” write Narayanan and Kapoor. Fail the earlier tests and you don’t get deployed. 
They believe that instead of focusing on aligning a model with human values from the get-go — which has long been the dominant AI safety approach, but which is difficult if not impossible given that <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/5/7/23708169/ask-ai-chatgpt-ethical-advice-moral-enhancement">what humans want is extremely context-dependent</a> — we should focus our defenses downstream on the places where AI actually gets deployed. For example, the best way to defend against AI-enabled cyberattacks is to beef up existing vulnerability detection programs.
Policy-wise, that leads to the view that we don’t need total nonproliferation. While the superintelligence camp sees nonproliferation as a necessity — if only a small number of governmental actors control advanced AI, international bodies can monitor their behavior — Narayanan and Kapoor note that has the undesirable effect of concentrating power in the hands of a few.  
In fact, since nonproliferation-based safety measures involve the centralization of so much power, that could potentially create a human version of superintelligence: a small cluster of people who are so powerful they could basically do whatever they want to the world. “Paradoxically, they increase the very risks they are intended to defend against,” write Narayanan and Kapoor.
Instead, they argue that we should make AI more open-source and widely accessible so as to prevent market concentration. And we should build a resilient system that monitors AI at every step of the way, so we can decide when it’s okay and when it’s too risky to deploy. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Both the superintelligence view and the normalist view have real flaws</h2>
One of the most glaring flaws of the normalist view is that it doesn’t even try to talk about the military. 
Yet military applications — from autonomous weapons to lightning-fast decision-making about whom to target — are among the most critical for advanced AI. They’re the use cases most likely to make governments feel that all countries absolutely are in an AI arms race, so they must plow ahead, risks be damned. That weakens the normalist camp’s view that we won’t necessarily deploy AI at scale if it seems risky.
Narayanan and Kapoor also argue that regulations and other standard controls will “create multiple layers of protection against catastrophic misalignment.” Reading that reminded me of the Swiss-cheese model we often heard about in the early days of the Covid pandemic — the idea being that if we stack multiple imperfect defenses on top of each other (masks, and also distancing, and also ventilation) the virus is unlikely to break through. 
But Yudkowsky and Soares think that’s way too optimistic. A superintelligent AI, they say, would be a very smart being with very weird preferences, so it wouldn’t be blindly diving into a wall of cheese. 
“If you ever make something that is trying to get to the stuff on the other side of all your Swiss cheese, it’s not that hard for it to just route through the holes,” Soares told me.
And yet, even if the AI is a highly agentic, goal-directed being, it’s reasonable to think that some of our defenses can at the very least add friction, making it less likely for it to achieve its goals. The normalist camp is right that you can’t assume all our defenses will be totally worthless, unless you run together two distinct ideas, capability and power. 
Yudkowsky and Soares are happy to combine these ideas because they believe you can’t get a highly capable AI without also granting it a high degree of agency and autonomy — of power. “I think you basically can’t make something that’s really skilled without also having the abilities of being able to take initiative, being able to stay on target, being able to overcome obstacles,” Soares told me.
But capability and power come in degrees, and the only way you can assume the AI will have a near-limitless supply of both is if you assume that maximizing intelligence essentially gets you magic. 
Silicon Valley has a deep and abiding <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/silicon-valley-high-iq-children-764234f8?mod=hp_lead_pos9">obsession with intelligence</a>. But the rest of us should be asking: How realistic is that, really? 
As for the normalist camp’s objection that a nonproliferation approach would worsen power dynamics — I think that’s a valid thing to worry about, even though <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23621198/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-openai-existential-risk-china-ai-safety-technology">I have vociferously made the case for slowing down AI</a> and I stand by that. That’s because, like the normalists, I worry not only about what machines do, but also about what people do — including building a society rife with inequality and the concentration of political power.
Soares waved off the concern about centralization. “That really seems like the sort of objection you bring up if you don’t think everyone is about to die,” he told me. “When there were thermonuclear bombs going off and people were trying to figure out how not to die, you could’ve said, ‘Nuclear arms treaties centralize more power, they give more power to tyrants, won’t that have costs?’ Yeah, it has some costs. But you didn’t see people bringing up those costs who understood that bombs could level cities.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Methods of Irrationality? </h2>
Should we acknowledge that there’s a chance of human extinction and be appropriately scared of that? Yes. But when faced with a tower of assumptions, of “maybes” and “probablys” that compound, we should not treat doom as a sure thing. 
The fact is, we should consider the costs of all possible actions. And we should weigh those costs against the probability that something horrible will happen if we don’t take action to stop AI. The trouble is that Yudkowsky and Soares are so certain that the horrible thing is coming that they are no longer thinking in terms of probabilities. 
Which is extremely ironic, because Yudkowsky founded the Rationalist subculture based on the insistence that we must train ourselves to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTXWPQSEgoMkAupKt/an-intuitive-explanation-of-bayes-s-theorem">reason probabilistically</a>! That insistence runs through everything from his group blog <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/">LessWrong</a> to his popular fanfiction <a href="https://hpmor.com/">Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality</a>. Yet when it comes to AI, he’s ended up with a totalizing worldview.
And one of the problems with a totalizing worldview is that it means there’s no limit to the sacrifices you’re willing to make to prevent the feared outcome. In If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Yudkowsky and Soares allow their concern about the possibility of human annihilation to swamp all other concerns. Above all, they want to <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23298870/effective-altruism-longtermism-will-macaskill-future">ensure that humanity can survive millions of years into the future</a>. “We believe that Earth-originating life should go forth and fill the stars with fun and wonder eventually,” they write. And if AI goes wrong, they imagine not only that humans will die at the hands of AI, but that “distant alien life forms will also die, if their star is eaten by the thing that ate Earth… If the aliens were good, all the goodness they could have made of those galaxies will be lost.”
To prevent the feared outcome, the book specifies that if a foreign power proceeds with building superintelligent AI, our government should be ready to launch an airstrike on their data center, even if they’ve warned that they’ll retaliate with nuclear war. In 2023, when Yudkowsky was asked about nuclear war and how many people should be allowed to die in order to prevent superintelligence, he <a href="https://betweendrafts.com/justdrafts/2023/04/11/why-eliezer-yudkowskys-time-op-ed-on-how-current-ai-systems-will-kill-us-all-is-even-more-unhinged-than-you-think/">tweeted</a>:
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
There should be enough survivors on Earth in close contact to form a viable reproduction population, with room to spare, and they should have a sustainable food supply. So long as that’s true, there’s still a chance of reaching the stars someday.
</blockquote>
Remember that worldviews involve not just objective evidence, but also values. When you’re dead set on reaching the stars, you may be willing to sacrifice millions of human lives if it means reducing the risk that we never set up shop in space. That may work out from a species perspective. But the millions of humans on the altar might feel some type of way about it, particularly if they believed the extinction risk from AI was closer to 5 percent than 95 percent.
Unfortunately, Yudkowsky and Soares don’t come out and own that they’re selling a worldview. And on that score, the normalist camp does them one better. Narayanan and Kapoor at least explicitly acknowledge that they’re proposing a worldview, which is a mixture of truth claims (descriptions) and values (prescriptions). It is as much an aesthetic as it is an argument. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">We need a third story about AI risk</h2>
Some thinkers have begun to sense that we need new ways to talk about AI risk. 
The philosopher Atoosa Kasirzadeh was one of the first to lay out a comprehensive alternative path. <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.07836">In her telling</a>, AI is not totally normal technology, nor is it necessarily destined to become an uncontrollable superintelligence that destroys humanity in a single, sudden, decisive cataclysm. Instead, she argues that an “accumulative” picture of AI risk is more plausible.
Specifically, she’s worried about “the gradual accumulation of smaller, seemingly non-existential, AI risks eventually surpassing critical thresholds.” She adds, “These risks are typically referred to as ethical or social risks.”
There’s been a <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/8/10/23298108/ai-dangers-ethics-alignment-present-future-risk">long-running fight</a> between “AI ethics” people who worry about the current harms of AI, like entrenching bias, surveillance, and misinformation, and “AI safety” people who worry about potential existential risks. But if AI were to cause enough mayhem on the ethical or social front, Kasirzadeh notes, that in itself could irrevocably devastate humanity’s future:
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
AI-driven disruptions can accumulate and interact over time, progressively weakening the resilience of critical societal systems, from democratic institutions and economic markets to social trust networks. When these systems become sufficiently fragile, a modest perturbation could trigger cascading failures that propagate through the interdependence of these systems. 
</blockquote>
She illustrates this with a concrete scenario: Imagine it’s 2040 and AI has reshaped our lives. The information ecosystem is so polluted by deepfakes and misinformation that we’re barely capable of rational public discourse. AI-enabled mass surveillance has had a chilling effect on our ability to dissent, so democracy is faltering. Automation has produced massive unemployment, and universal basic income has failed to materialize due to corporate resistance to the necessary taxation, so wealth inequality is at an all-time high. Discrimination has become further entrenched, so social unrest is brewing.
Now imagine there’s a cyberattack. It targets power grids across three continents. The blackouts cause widespread chaos, triggering a domino effect that causes financial markets to crash. The economic fallout fuels protests and riots that become more violent because of the seeds of distrust already sown by disinformation campaigns. As nations struggle with internal crises, regional conflicts escalate into bigger wars, with aggressive military actions that leverage AI technologies. The world goes kaboom.
I find this perfect-storm scenario, where catastrophe arises from the compounding failure of multiple key systems, disturbingly plausible. 
Kasirzadeh’s story is a parsimonious one. It doesn’t require you to believe in an ill-defined “superintelligence.” It doesn’t require you to believe that humans will hand over all power to AI without a second thought. It also doesn’t require you to believe that AI is a super normal technology that we can make predictions about without foregrounding its implications for militaries and for geopolitics. 
Increasingly, other AI researchers are coming to see this accumulative view of AI risk as more and more plausible; one paper memorably refers to the <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16946">“gradual disempowerment”</a> view — that is, that human influence over the world will slowly wane as more and more decision-making is outsourced to AI, until one day we wake up and realize that the machines are running us rather than the other way around. 
And if you take this accumulative view, the policy implications are neither what Yudkowsky and Soares recommend (total nonproliferation) nor what Narayanan and Kapoor recommend (making AI more open-source and widely accessible). 
Kasirzadeh does want there to be more guardrails around AI than there currently are, including both a network of oversight bodies monitoring specific subsystems for accumulating risk and more centralized oversight for the most advanced AI development.
But she also wants us to keep reaping the benefits of AI when the risks are low (DeepMind’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22045713/ai-artificial-intelligence-deepmind-protein-folding">AlphaFold</a>, which could help us discover cures for diseases, is a great example). Most crucially, she wants us to adopt a systems analysis approach to AI risk, where we focus on increasing the resilience of each component part of a functioning civilization, because we understand that if enough components degrade, the whole machinery of civilization could collapse.
Her systems analysis stands in contrast to Yudkowsky’s view, she said. “I think that way of thinking is very a-systemic. It’s the most simple model of the world you can assume,” she told me. “And his vision is based on Bayes’ theorem — the whole probabilistic way of thinking about the world — so it’s super surprising how such a mindset has ended up pushing for a statement of ‘if anyone builds it, everyone dies’ — which is, by definition, a non-probabilistic statement.”
I asked her why she thinks that happened.
“Maybe it’s because he really, really believes in the truth of the axioms or presumptions of his argument. But we all know that in an uncertain world, you cannot necessarily believe with certainty in your axioms,” she said. “The world is a complex story.”  
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