Latest news with #Explained
Vox
4 days ago
- Vox
The crisis in American air travel, explained by Newark airport
Air travel is such a common part of modern life that it's easy to forget all the miraculous technology and communication infrastructure required to do it safely. But recent crashes, including near Washington, DC, and in San Diego — not to mention multiple near misses — have left many fliers wondering: Is it still safe to fly? That concern is particularly acute at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, which has recently experienced several frightening incidents and near misses in as radio and radar systems have gone dark. This has left an under-staffed and overworked group of air traffic controllers to manage a system moving at a frenetic pace with no room for error. Andrew Tangel, an aviation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recently spoke to Jonathan Stewart, a Newark air traffic controller. In early May, Stewart experienced a brief loss of the systems showing him the locations of the many planes was directing. When the systems came back online, he realized there'd almost been a major crash. According to Tangel, Stewart 'sent off a fiery memo to his managers, complaining about how he was put in that situation, which he felt he was being set up for failure.' Stewart now is taking trauma leave because of the stresses of the job. After many delayed flights, United Airlines just announced that it will move some of its flights to nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport. To understand how we arrived at our current aviation crisis, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Darryl Campbell, an aviation safety writer for The Verge. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. You recently wrote about all these issues with flying for The Verge — and your take was that this isn't just a Newark, New Jersey, problem. It's systemic. Why? You've probably seen some of the news articles about it, and it's really only in the last couple months because everybody's been paying attention to aviation safety that people are really saying, Oh my gosh! Newark airport is losing the ability to see airplanes. They're losing radar for minutes at a time, and that's not something you want to hear when you have airplanes flying towards each other at 300 miles an hour. So it is rightfully very concerning. But the thing is, what's been happening at Newark has actually been happening for almost a decade and a half in fits and starts. It'll get really bad, and then it'll get better again. Now we're seeing a combination of air traffic control problems; we're seeing a combination of infrastructure problems, and they've got a runway that's entirely shut down. And the way that I think about it is, while Newark is its own special case today, all of the problems that it's facing, other than the runway, are problems that every single airport in the entire country is going to be facing over the next five to 10 years, and so we're really getting a preview of what's going to happen if we don't see some drastic change in the way that the air traffic control system is maintained. We heard about some of these issues after the crash at DCA outside Washington. What exactly is going on with air traffic controllers? The first problem is just one of staff retention and training. On the one hand, the air traffic control system and the people who work there are a pretty dedicated bunch, but it takes a long time to get to the point where you're actually entrusted with airplanes. It can be up to four years of training from the moment that you decide, Okay, I want to be an air traffic controller. Couple that with the fact that these are government employees and like many other agencies, they haven't really gotten the cost-of-living increases to keep pace with the actual cost of living, especially in places like the New York and New Jersey area, where it's just gone up way faster than in the rest of the country. This is bad at Newark, but you say it promises to get bad everywhere else too. The cost of living is still outpacing the replacement level at a lot of these air traffic control centers. And the washout rate is pretty high. We've seen the average staffing level at a lot of American airports get down below 85, 80 percent, which is really where the FAA wants it to be, and it's getting worse over time. At Newark in particular, it's down to about 58 percent as of the first quarter of this year. This is an emergency level of staffing at a baseline. And then on top of that, you have — in order to keep the airplanes going — people working mandatory overtime, mandatory six-days-a-week shifts, and that's accelerating that burnout that naturally happens. There's a lot of compression and a lot of bad things happening independently, but all at the same time in that kind of labor system that's really making it difficult to both hire and retain qualified air traffic controllers. These sound like very fixable problems, Darryl. Are we trying to fix them? I know former reality TV star and Fox News correspondent — and transportation secretary, in this day and age — Sean Duffy has been out to Newark. He said this: 'What we are going to do when we get the money. We have the plan. We actually have to build a brand new state-of-the-art, air traffic control system.' To his credit, they have announced some improvements on it. They've announced a lot of new funding for the FAA. They've announced an acceleration of hiring, but it's just a short-term fix. To put it in context, the FAA's budget usually allocates about $1.7 billion in maintenance fees every year. And so they've announced a couple billion more dollars, but their backlog already is $5.2 billion in maintenance. And these are things like replacing outdated systems, replacing buildings that are housing some of these radars, things that you really need to just get the system to where it should be operating today, let alone get ahead of the maintenance things that are going to happen over the next couple of years. It's really this fight between the FAA and Congress to say, We're going to do a lot today to fix these problems. And it works for a little while, but then three years down the road, the same problems are still occurring. You got that one-time shot of new money, but then the government cuts back again and again and again. And then you're just putting out one fire, but not addressing the root cause of why there's all this dry powder everywhere. People are canceling their flights into or out of Newark, but there are also all these smaller accidents we're seeing, most recently in San Diego, where six people were killed when a Cessna crashed. How should people be feeling about that? There's really no silver bullet and all the choices are not great to actively bad at baseline. Number one is you get the government to pay what it actually costs to run the air traffic control system. That empirically has not happened for decades, so I don't know that we're going to get to do it, especially under this administration, which is focused on cutting costs. The second thing is to pass on fees to fliers themselves. And it's just like the conversation that Walmart's having with tariffs — they don't want to do it. When they try to pass it on to the customer, President Trump yells at them, and it's just not a great situation. The third option is to reduce the number of flights in the sky. Part of this is that airlines are competing to have the most flights, the most convenient schedules, the most options. That's led to this logjam at places like Newark, where you really have these constraints on it. Right before all of this stuff happens, Newark was serving about 80 airplanes an hour, so 80 landings and takeoffs. Today, the FAA's actually started to admit restrictions on it, and now it's closer to 56 flights an hour, and that's probably the level that it can actually handle and not have these issues where you have planes in danger.
Vox
6 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Has the world had it with Israel?
Palestinians clear the rubble of the Azzam family home which was hit in Israeli strikes on central Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on May 29, 2025. Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images In Israel, left-wing politician Yair Golan, a retired general, recently stirred controversy when he said in an interview with Israel Radio that 'Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state' and added that 'a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set itself the aim of expelling populations.' In the face of intense criticism, he has since walked back those comments. But while Golan's comments were condemned across the Israeli political spectrum, they 'also sparked a discussion about Israel's conduct and what it is doing and the toll of the war on civilians,' said Tia Goldenberg, a correspondent for the Associated Press in Jerusalem. In an interview with Vox's Today, Explained, Goldenberg said Golan's comments are indicative of the fact that Israelis are increasingly turning against their country's war in Gaza. That war began on October 7, 2023, when an attack by Hamas fighters left 1,200 dead and 250 captured. Some of those kidnapped have been returned; others have died. There are 58 hostages remaining in Gaza, of which a third are believed to be alive. Israel's attacks on Gaza have killed more than 50,000 people and have devastated Gaza, leaving much of it uninhabitable. In recent weeks, it has expanded its military offensive, with increased air strikes and a goal of capturing the entire Gaza Strip and moving the population of Gaza to the south of the territory. That escalation comes amid a dire hunger crisis. Israel began a total humanitarian aid blockade on March 2 in order to increase pressure on Hamas to return the remaining hostages, leading one critic to accuse the country of using aid as a 'weapon of war' during an April hearing on Israel's war strategy at the International Court of Justice. 'During these few weeks, or nearly three months actually, no aid was being let into Gaza, no food, no medicine, no fuel, and you had a situation where food experts were warning that nearly 1 million Palestinians barely had enough access to food, and nearly half a million Palestinians were at the risk of possible starvation,' Goldenberg said. The escalating strikes and threat of mass starvation haven't just roiled Israeli politics; they've also drawn worldwide condemnation of Israel and created an unlikely coalition of critics. MAGA-friendly podcaster and standup comedian Theo Von recently described the ongoing conflict in Gaza as a 'genocide' and 'one of the sickest things that's ever happened.' Leading children's entertainer and YouTube star Ms. Rachel has used her platform to talk about how the conflict is affecting children in the region. 'It's sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering,' she told Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan. 'I think it should be controversial to not say anything.' The new pope, Leo XIV, like his predecessor, has appealed for a ceasefire in Gaza, the freeing of the remaining hostages, and called on Israel and Hamas to respect international humanitarian law. German leaders have made public comments about changing their country's long-running special relationship with Israel, while French President Emmanuel Macron has floated acknowledging Palestine as a state. Even President Donald Trump, a longtime ally of Israel and of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has started to suggest he's seen enough. 'Israel, we've been talking to them, and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible,' he said last weekend. All of this suggests an inflection point in Israel's long-running war. It has been made possible in part thanks to aid from allies like the US, Germany, and France. If that support were to deteriorate, continuing its operations could become more difficult. That is not to say the war's end is necessarily near. Despite the shift in rhetoric, few of Israel's allies have made any material changes to their relationship with the country. Israel's goal of completely destroying Hamas has not changed. It recently killed Mohammed Sinwar, believed to be the head of Hamas's armed wing. 'It's just been an intense, intense conflict. And yet that hasn't dislodged Hamas from its position. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is under a lot of political pressure from his governing coalition to continue the war,' Goldenberg said. 'It's hard to see how the sides reconcile and come to an agreement that ends this war.'
Vox
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
What happened to the bestselling young white man?
Solid State Books, an independent bookstore in the H Street Corridor, is photographed in Washington DC in February 2019. Calla Kessler for The Washington Post via Getty Images Every generation has a small group of young fiction writers who make it: They top bestseller lists, win prizes, and become household names. And for decades — well, nearly every decade — they have all been straight white men. Philip Roth. Norman Mailer. John Updike. Jonathan Franzen. Jonathan Safran Foer. You get the picture. But in the last decade or so, that's changed: The up-and-coming writers capturing buzz and dominating critics' lists have largely been women. Think Sally Rooney or Emma Cline or Ottessa Moshfegh. And when men do break through, they usually aren't young, straight, or white. It's worth pointing out that, while women now publish more books than men, men are still publishing more books now than they ever have before. But the (relative) decline of the men in letters has led to searching discussions, first murmured, but now increasingly debated in places like the New York Times and the Guardian: Why does the decline of the young, white, male writer matter? And what do we lose — if anything — with this shift? 'We've seen a lot of great work being done to account for perspectives that were left out of literature for a long time,' Ross Barkan, a journalist and novelist, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. 'But I also think it's important to know, for better and for worse, what the men of the 2020s are up to.' Barkan and King talked about how he feels young men have been shut out of literary fiction, what he thinks is lost, and his experience trying to get fiction published. His third novel, Glass Century, was released earlier this month. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Make sure to listen to hear the whole thing wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We are talking to you today because you wrote an essay not long ago called 'From Misogyny to No Man's Land: The Vanishing Male in Contemporary Literature.' What's your argument in that essay, Ross? My argument in that essay is that among young literary writers today, there is a lack of men. This doesn't mean there are no male novelists of prominence under the age of 40 — that's the cutoff I use for young — but there are fewer of them than there were historically. And most of the prominent literary fiction writers today are women. I'm talking about a very specific type of fiction that is vying for awards or trying to vie for awards, trying to attain a certain level of prestige. You're 35, and you're a white man? Correct. I wonder about the kind of driving force for this essay and whether you are the vanishing male writer of which you wrote. I think so, yeah, I think there's less of me for sure. I mean, there'd be an era where there were a lot of novelists like myself, Jewish or not Jewish, but certainly white men. I am inclined to find your argument very compelling. I was a teenager in the '90s, a young adult in the 2000s. That's when you read a lot of fiction, right? And I do remember David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer… Yeah. …Jonathan Franzen. Jonathan Lethem! And so what you're saying actually really does track to me. The question I wonder about is the why. And let me ask you first to answer the why from your personal perspective. You're a novelist. You're 35 years old. You're a straight white guy — do you feel like those identities are holding you back in some way? Not in the real world. In the real world, I have enormous privilege. But in the 2010s, the literary world was less interested in straight men. I think you have a general lack of the heterosexual male perspective in newer fiction. There's a long history of writers portraying toxic masculinity and rough male characters — and it feels like you see less of that today. I also think at the same time, young male writers, white and non-white, were taking less of an interest in fiction. It's a chicken-and-egg challenge: Is it the publishing industry deciding this is no longer something we're going to push or take a real interest in, or is it market forces as well? So some of it is internal — maybe there are fewer men who want to be great novelists, but maybe publishers are saying, 'Hey, we're just less interested in the perspectives of straight white men.' When you approached publishers with your novel Glass Century, did you hear that? I think you hear it behind the scenes. You're never told to your face. I'm not complaining — I don't consider myself a victim. I've had a successful career. I'm very happy with it. But what do you hear behind the scenes? To echo Joyce Carol Oates in a sort of notorious but not wrong tweet from several years ago — and I'm paraphrasing — agents and editors, at least in the 2010s and early 2020s, were just less interested in straight male fiction. I want to broaden it a little bit because you see even among Black, Hispanic, and Asian straight men — there are some, but [they're] less common. And, certainly, the white male is now even less common, so I think publishers in general in that era were trying to diversify, which was fine. You had social justice politics, you had what they call 'woke,' and in a way woke worked because it broadened things out and brought in new voices, but it is also zero sum. Some come up; some go out. And so for me, it's observing that trend. What do you think we lose when we lose the perspective of those young white men? It's a large part of the country. I think you have a lot going on with young men today. White and non-white alike, straight men — they are falling behind academically. They're increasingly alienated. They're increasingly angry. They are increasingly online. And fiction, in my view, is not grappling with all of that. I agree with you, but I did actually see that in one book in the last year, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. There were characters who were highly online. The most acclaimed story was about an incel. That book was incredibly powerful. And it got praise, right? What do you think about that? He's a fantastic writer. I'll start there. He's a great prose stylist. There's a short story I love about a young Asian man who is having these very lurid sexual fantasies about dominating other men. Fantastically written — he's sort of the Roth of our era in terms of his ability to make a sentence really sizzle. But this is the caveat that people seem to be afraid to point out: It's not a straight male fantasy. Could Tony have written a straight male fantasy of wanting to subdue a woman the way that character wants to subdue men? Tony himself is straight. It was an interesting choice there to inhabit a gay character. Nothing wrong with that. Writers should write about whatever sexuality. I don't believe in limiting anyone in that way. But I thought it was a choice, right? Because straight male lust is very disconcerting. It's not easy to write about. What do men think about? The modern novel is not addressing that enough. The nasty, nasty men. The men who are not — maybe they're good at heart, but they have a lot of bad thoughts. And they take bad actions. You don't see that much in fiction today, I would argue. Let me ask you about an argument that I think many people might have in response to what you've said, including many women. If you look at the stats going back to the year 1800, women made up about 5 percent of published authors. It's 10 percent through about the 1900s, and then in 2015, women surpassed men — more women are publishing books than men. Although both genders are still publishing a lot of books, it should be said. Are you at all sympathetic to the argument that you guys had your turn for centuries, the attention, the prizes, the accolades, so we're just leveling the playing field out? Yeah, I'm sympathetic, for sure. I think that it's reasonable to believe that — that's an honest argument. The problem is you'll hear from people who say this isn't happening, and I find that very tiring. I think the honest thing to say is that it's time to rebalance the scales or turn the tables. But there are winners and losers, right? Women were losing; now men are losing. I will say, there's no solace offered to the 26-year-old male who must pay for the sins of the past, right? The young male writer can't sit at home and think, Well, golly, it was good Norman Mailer and John Updike had such a great run.
Vox
25-05-2025
- Health
- Vox
'Baby Botox' and the psychology of cosmetic procedures
is the co-host and editorial director of. Before joining Vox, she was a host of NPR's flagship radio showand the popular news podcast, and in 2020 she received the Radio Hall of Fame's One to Watch award. Botox injections used to be a secret for (largely) women in their 40s and 50s. But growing numbers of (largely) women in their 20s and 30s are turning to 'baby Botox,' or smaller doses that are intended to prevent aging rather than combat it. Baby Botox is just one intervention that doctors say younger people now frequently seek, and some view the trend with concern. Dr. Michelle Hure, a physician specializing in dermatology and dermatopathology, says younger patients aren't considering the cost of procedures that require lifetime maintenance, and are expressing dissatisfaction with their looks to a degree that borders on the absurd. Hure traces the demand for 'baby Botox' and other procedures to the start of the pandemic. 'Everyone was basically chronically online,' she told Vox. 'They were on Zoom, they were looking at themselves, and there was the rise of of TikTok and the filters and people were really seeing these perceived flaws that either aren't there or are so minimal and just normal anatomy. And they have really made it front and center where it affects them. It affects their daily life and I really feel that it has become more of a pathological thing.' Hure spoke to Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the rise of 'baby Botox' and her concerns with the cosmetic dermatology industry. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You told us about a patient that you saw yesterday, and you said you probably wouldn't keep her on because her mentality really worried you. Would you tell me about that young woman? I had this patient who was mid-20s, and really a beautiful girl. I [didn't] see a lot of signs of aging on her face, but she was coming in for Botox. There wasn't a lot for me to treat. And at the end of the session she was asking me, 'So what do you think about my nasolabial folds?' Basically, it's the fold that goes from the corner of your nose down to the corner of your mouth. It's the barrier between the upper lip and your cheek, and when you smile it kind of folds. Of course, the more you age, the more of the line will be left behind when you're not smiling. And she was pointing to her cheek as if there was something there, but there was nothing there. And so I had to tell her, 'Well, I don't see that, you're perfect.' It's a phantom nasolabial fold. It didn't exist. That sort of mentality where someone is perceiving a flaw that is absolutely not there — providers need to say no. Unfortunately, they're incentivized not to. Especially if you have a cosmetic office, if you're a med spa, if you have a cosmetic derm or plastic surgery office, of course you're incentivized to do what the patient wants. Well, I'm not going to do that. That's not what I do. That means you may get paid for seeing her in that visit, but you're not getting paid for putting filler in her face. I think what I hear you saying is other doctors would have done that. Absolutely. One hundred percent. I know this for a fact because many times those patients will come to my office to get that filler dissolved because they don't like it. In the larger practices or practices that are private equity-owned, which is a huge problem in medicine, you are absolutely meant to sell as many products, as many procedures as possible. Oftentimes I was told to sell as much filler as possible, because every syringe is several hundred dollars. And then if they're there, talk them into a laser. Talk them into this, talk them into that. Then you become a salesman. For my skin check patients, I'm looking for skin cancer. I'm counseling them on how to take care of their skin. I was told, 'Don't talk to them about using sunscreen, because we want them to get skin cancer and come back.' I was pulled out of the room by my boss and reprimanded for explaining why it's so important to use sunscreen. And so this is why I couldn't do it anymore. I had to start my own office and be on my own. I can't do that. That goes against everything that I believe in, in my oath. Because there is potential harm on many different levels for cosmetic procedures. What are the risks to giving someone a cosmetic procedure that they don't really need? This is a medical procedure. There is always risk for any type of intervention, right? What gets me is, like, Nordstrom is talking about having injections in their stores. This is ridiculous! This is a medical procedure. You can get infection, you can get vascular occlusion that can lead to death of the tissue overlying where you inject. It can lead to blindness. This is a big deal. It's fairly safe if you know what you're doing. But not everyone knows what they're doing and knows how to handle the complications that can come about. Honestly, I feel like the psychological aspect of it is a big problem. At some point you become dependent, almost, on these procedures to either feel happy or feel good about yourself. And at what point is it not going to be enough? One of my colleagues actually coined this term. It's called perception drift. At some point, you will do these little, little, incremental tweaks until you look like a different person. And you might look very abnormal. So even if someone comes to me for something that is legitimate, it's still: Once you start, it's going to be hard for you to stop. If you're barely able to scrimp together enough to pay for that one thing, and you have it done, great. What about all the rest of your life that you're going to want to do something? Are you going to be able to manage it? I wonder how all of this makes you think about your profession. Most people get into medicine, it has always been my assumption, to be helpful. And you've laid out a world in which procedures are being done that are not only not helpful, they could be dangerous. And you don't seem to like it very much.
Vox
22-05-2025
- Business
- Vox
The most divisive part of the GOP's big bill, explained
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to reporters as he departs for the White House as ongoing negotiations on the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' continue at the US Capitol Building on May 21, 2025.The Republican Party is trying to get a major tax and spending bill done before Memorial Day. It's chock full of President Donald Trump's legislative priorities, and has many provisions the GOP has long been agitating for. But it's nevertheless been a massive struggle to get the bill to the House floor for a vote. One big reason is a tax provision known as SALT — the state and local tax deduction. I asked Today, Explained's Devan Schwartz — who just produced the below podcast about this bill — to explain what SALT is, why it's important, and why it's roiled the GOP. Here's what he had to say: What is SALT? SALT is an acronym that stands for 'state and local taxes' — it allows Americans to deduct some of what they pay, right now up to $10,000, in state and local taxes (like property taxes and sales taxes) from their federal taxes. Once, there wasn't a cap to how much you could deduct, but that changed with Trump's tax cuts in 2017; those brought in the $10,000 cap. Removing the SALT cap is seen as benefiting mostly wealthy earners in high-tax states like California or New York: people who might make $500,000 a year or $10 million a year and pay tens or hundreds of thousands in state and local taxes, the sort of people who don't take the standard deduction. Related What proposed SALT changes could mean for your next tax bill It's not April; why has a tax deduction caused such a stir this week? The SALT cap hasn't been too popular with constituents in these high-tax states; they have been putting pressure on their lawmakers to make changes. Trump initially expressed support for those changes, and many House GOP lawmakers from blue states ran on making changes when Republicans got back in power. Now, House Republican lawmakers are in the middle of putting together a big spending and tax bill, and there was a push to get SALT changes in there. Those that ran on upping the SALT cap said, We're trying to get reelected in the next year, we need a win to go back to our voters with. The GOP leadership in the House set up a somewhat arbitrary deadline to get the bill passed from the House to the Senate by Memorial Day — that's next week. That puts lawmakers in a time crunch, but there's also a numerical problem: the House GOP has very narrow margins. Depending on attendance, they can afford to lose roughly three votes on any one bill. That gives the blue-state GOP lawmakers who want to see changes to SALT a lot of power. If you're one of a small group, and you said, Hey, we're holdouts, we're not voting for this until you give us our SALT reform, you're sinking Trump's 'big, beautiful bill.' And that's what happened this week. That small group of lawmakers got their way, right? Yes. The final details could still change, but a deal was made to raise the cap. Which set off other small groups of lawmakers who want their priorities fulfilled in the bill, and yesterday's scramble by the White House to try to get everyone in line. Right. Trump's stance throughout this has been, stop whining. Don't grandstand. It's more important to get a deal done. So if you don't get a SALT increase, tough luck. If they get their SALT increase, but you don't get your thing, tough luck. The Senate hasn't even weighed in on the bill yet, so we're a long way from getting changes to SALT enshrined in law. But at this point, what should we take away from the SALT saga? SALT is inherently interesting because it's a microcosm of the fragile political process in Congress at this time in which we often see parties with tiny minorities. Congressional leadership is more centralized than ever, but at the same time, small groups of people can really gum up the works. It also shows how complex the Republican coalition is — the fight over SALT is really a battle between lawmakers from high-income states and those from lower-income states. We've seen pro-SALT lawmakers make the claim that their states' tax base makes up a disproportionate amount of revenues, and that their constituents deserve a break because of that. And smaller states or states with lower incomes might say, in response, we have our own needs, and we provide a lot, from farming to the numbers that power our GOP coalition. I wouldn't say that the fight over SALT is a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, but it's definitely a factional fight for power. And overall, it really shows how hard it is to actually legislate right now, in a divided Republican caucus, in a divided America. This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.
