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Vox
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Vox
The steamy, subversive rise of the summer novel
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. As a kid, one of the highlights of my summer vacation was sitting underneath a tree in my grandmother's backyard and getting lost in a book. I don't get a three-month summer break anymore, but tucking away with a juicy novel when it's hot outside is a ritual I still return to. So what makes for a good summer read and how did this practice even emerge in the first place? That's what we set out to find out on this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast. Next Page Book recommendations — both old and new — that are worth your time, from senior correspondent and critic Constance Grady. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. To find the answer we spoke with Donna Harrington-Lueker, author of Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading. Summer reading is a practice she knows well. 'As a teenager, let's just say I was a bit bookish,' she says. 'That meant that when my family went for its one-week vacation a year — which was a big treat — they were on the beach and I was in some kind of a bunk bed with Moby Dick or Siddhartha.' Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. How did this idea of summer reading even start? Have we always grabbed books when it's hot out? No, not really. My research focused on the 19th century, and I started looking at newspaper articles, advertisements from book publishers, and the like. And I divided it into two periods: before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, summer reading was constructed as a masculine practice. The idea was that men would get away from the heat and the pressures of their lives, and they should read something cool. So the essays of Charles Lamb; poetry was mentioned often as well. That all changes after the Civil War, when there's an increase in travel and tourism. The performance of summer leisure becomes an aspiration for a growing middle class, so you have many, many more people engaging in this practice. You have an increase in railroads as well. So you've got an easy way for people to get from point A to point B, and hotels begin to spring up. And as a result of that, publishers start really promoting summer reading. It takes a very specific form, and increasingly it becomes something that women do. It becomes a rather gendered space. Can you talk about that idea of performing leisure a little bit? I think that's really interesting. Publishers would advertise a variety of things as summer reading, but one of the central things was what I call the summer novel. It would be a novel that would be set in Saratoga Springs or Newport or Cape May, at a summer resort. Regardless of how wealthy or not people were, they always seemed to stay there for an entire summer as opposed to a week or a weekend. It would involve a courtship and over the course of the novel, two young people would meet, they would resolve their differences, they would visit various places, and at the end they would be married. By reading these, you'd get an idea of what these resorts were about, and you'd get an idea of how you performed leisure, what you did once you got there, and what the expectations were. So they were serving that purpose as well. There's also a good bit of fashion, so for the young woman, you'd get an idea of how you're supposed to dress. That's so interesting. So it sounds like it's serving the purpose of a mixture of a Hallmark movie with your romance but the drama and intrigue of White Lotus. Definitely the Hallmark characteristic of it. Absolutely. Were these books purely escapist, or did they get at larger themes too? One of the things that I found interesting was that yes, they are escapist in the sense of allowing you to experience another lifestyle, but they were very, very much kind of a liminal space, a space of betwixt in between. For young women especially, it's doing the cultural work of asking, 'What does it look like to have more freedoms as a young woman?' Because there was markedly more freedom — or at least as these books constructed it — during the summer and at summer resorts. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. Now, admittedly, at the end of all these, order is reasserted. People go back to their normal lives. Marriage as the ultimate institution of tradition gets reasserted. But for the space of the novel there are more freedoms. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. The novels weren't spaces that were necessarily completely out of touch either. There would be references to a very violent Pullman strike that appeared in one of the summer novels. In the preface to one about Saratoga Springs, there's questions about American imperialism. There's questions about treatment of Native Americans. And so when you take the book as a whole, it's nation-building in a way as well, and it's questioning that in some of them. What was the reaction to the rise of summer reading at the time? Was everyone just ecstatic that people were reading? The publishing industry had a very serious marketing challenge on its hands. Post-Civil War especially, you have rising literacy rates – especially among young women – but you have a very solid and profound discourse that says novel reading is evil, that it is dangerous, especially for young women. The fear was that it would be sexually arousing, that the morals would be questionable. And so you get a lot of criticism, especially among clerics and also a real fear of French novels. They were considered the most problematic. Do we still have a lot of these summer reading conventions in book publishing?
Vox
5 hours ago
- Business
- Vox
Cutting five words from this law could make houses cheaper
is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade. There exists an almost absurdly simple fix that could help ease the housing crisis. It would cost the government nothing, require deleting just five words from a 50-year-old federal law, and has enjoyed quiet support from housing researchers and leaders for decades. The target is an obscure regulation that requires every manufactured home to be built on a 'permanent chassis' — a steel trailer frame that can attach to wheels. The idea was that the chassis was necessary — even after the home was installed and the wheels taken off — because manufactured houses, which trace their roots to World War II trailers, could theoretically be moved. Yet by the mid-1970s, most never left their original site, and the chassis remained unused, notable only as a design feature that made the homes stick out. Getting rid of this 'permanent chassis' mandate could make manufactured homes — already home to 21 million Americans, most of whom earn under $50,000 a year — more attractive, more socially accepted, and even more affordable than they already are. Roughly 100,000 new manufactured homes are produced each year, but production is down sharply from the 1970s, just before the rule took effect. With 152 existing factories already capable of producing these types of homes, industry leaders say striking the chassis requirement could help scale up manufacturing by hundreds of thousands of houses, especially if paired with zoning reforms. The policy tweak could offer real relief for the housing crunch, especially for first-time buyers and older adults looking to downsize. Although the change seemed simple to implement, lawmakers failed to amend the mandate for over three decades. There wasn't overwhelming opposition to the proposal, but just enough resistance to nudge politicians toward issues more likely to boost their political capital. But as the housing crisis has intensified nationwide, pressure on Congress to use one of its few direct tools to boost housing supply has become harder to ignore. Advocates of eliminating the chassis rule think victory might finally be in reach: The Senate Banking Committee is expected to take up the issue in a hearing later this month, as part of a housing package sponsored by Tim Scott, the committee's Republican chair. The permanent chassis rule and its history offer a window into how smart ideas that could solve real problems can still languish for decades in the fog of federal process. But it also shows what it takes to move even obvious reforms from inertia to action. The rule Nearly 40 years ago, policy experts began to notice a troubling trend: For the first time since the Great Depression, homeownership rates were dropping and home prices were going up, partly due to higher interest rates. In 1990, the typical first-time homebuyer earned about $23,400 annually — enough to afford a home up to $59,600, according to the Los Angeles Times, citing data from the National Association of Realtors. But the median price of a new single-family home was roughly $129,900, and existing homes weren't much cheaper, with a median price of $97,500. But there was a bright spot: manufactured homes. Built in factories on assembly lines, these homes benefit from standardized materials, streamlined labor, and weather-controlled conditions, making them significantly less expensive than traditional site-built housing. Though long associated with dingy mobile trailers, by the late 20th century many manufactured houses were nearly indistinguishable from site-built ones, offering full kitchens, pitched roofs, and front porches. Nearly 13 million people lived in them. Consumers buying manufactured homes 'are demonstrating a preference for new construction that is less spacious, has a simpler design with fewer amenities, and uses less expensive materials,' read one HUD-commissioned report from 1998. 'Any perception that consumers today would not be interested in new conventionally-built starter homes with very basic designs and fewer 'extras' is mistaken.' Yet despite evident consumer demand, the chassis mandate held the sector back. It made production more expensive, restricted architecture flexibility, and gave state and local governments a pretext to exclude the homes through zoning. The permanent chassis feature allowed cities to more easily ban the housing in a given area for being 'mobile' structures, even when they were permanently installed. The chassis requirement originated in the Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act of 1974, Congress's first and only national housing code. Lawmakers justified the need for federal standards both to streamline manufacturing and to protect consumers, especially from fire hazards. The law was modeled on the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, reflecting the industry's roots in homes on wheels. RIVERSIDE, CA – SEPTEMBER 23: Workers weld a chassis together at a Fleetwood Enterprises, Inc. factory on September 23, 2005 in Riverside, California. Getty Images Yet many advocates believe that the chassis rule was included as sabotage by the powerful National Association of Home Builders, which saw manufactured housing as a fast-growing rival to its site-built homes. 'They put it in the original law in 1974 because they were worried about a competitive disadvantage and it's lived there ever since,' said Lesli Gooch, the head of the Manufactured Housing Institute, the largest trade group for the industry. Regardless of whether one believes the site-built housing industry was originally responsible for hobbling manufactured housing with the chassis rule, it's indisputable that NAHB was one of the most ardent champions for keeping it there. The fight Following a failed lawsuit in the mid-1980s to eliminate the rule, the first major legislative attempt came in 1990, when Rep. John Hiler, a Republican from Indiana, introduced amendments to the law. Despite backing from the manufactured housing industry and initial subcommittee approval, the effort ultimately died. Democrats caved to consumer groups concerned that striking the requirement could lead to lowering other safety standards and to opposition by both the site-built housing industry and HUD. Whether through bureaucratic complacency or regulatory capture by traditional homebuilders, the federal housing agency rarely pressed, and in some cases actively opposed, amending the law, despite its own research detailing again and again the problems a permanent chassis posed for manufactured housing. Four years later, the National Commission on Manufactured Housing formally recommended eliminating the chassis requirement, affirming that the homes could be built just as safely without one. (Homes without a chassis would still be subject to all HUD construction standards.) But the report arrived just months before the 1994 midterm elections, and Congress was already consumed by fierce partisan battles over budget and crime bills. Some critics believe the two main trade groups — the Manufactured Housing Institute and the less prominent Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform —often failed to be as politically aggressive about removing the chassis rule as they could have been. When I asked Gooch why it's taken so long for Congress to tackle this issue, she acknowledged her group didn't really start applying pressure until eight years ago. 'In 2017, I had a dialogue with our technical activities committee, and we said, 'Okay, what is it that we need to do to move manufactured housing forward?' and the chassis issue was raised,' Gooch recalled. It was then, she said, that MHI started to really discuss how to change the legislation. MHI now takes credit for neutralizing opposition from traditional homebuilders, and notes some of its biggest members are also members of NAHB, which likely helped too. Other advocates I spoke to argue that NAHB just is in a weaker place politically to fight these kinds of reforms than in the past, given the scale of the housing crisis. Liz Thompson, a spokesperson for NAHB, told me that while her group is not 'publicly lobbying' against changing the chassis rule, they do still have 'concerns' that the manufactured housing sector is being held to less stringent wind and energy standards, creating 'an economic disadvantage' for their site-built home members. Mike Kinsella, who leads Up for Growth, a federal housing supply advocacy group, said his lobbying over the last eight years has led him to conclude there's no such thing as a straightforward fix in Congress. 'Even the most practical and well-reasoned proposals face uphill battles and significant delays,' he said. Many housing advocates working at the state level are used to a more linear legislative process, where bills move predictably through committees to a governor's desk, Kinsella noted. But in Congress, where standalone bills rarely advance, the whole process becomes a more intense battle of competing priorities on larger, must-pass packages. So for decades, the issue has languished, too technical to generate public pressure, too threatening for quiet passage, and not high-profile enough for any politician to really champion it. New urgency to solve the housing crisis Manufactured housing has never lacked a compelling economic case — but today, it's become far harder to dismiss. Factory-built homes stand out as one of the most obvious ways to move the needle on affordability—and one of the few housing tools within the federal government's reach. That it doesn't deepen the deficit is an added plus. The buzzy 'abundance' movement, fueled by Ezra Klein (a Vox co-founder) and Derek Thompson's bestselling book, has also helped shift the politics around regulatory reform — including most recently in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to weaken a state environmental law long blamed for blocking housing construction. And Barack Obama, who spoke about the need to build more housing at the Democratic National Convention last August, came out harder this month with a blunt assessment, telling donors that 'I don't want to know your ideology, because you can't build anything. It does not matter.' Removing the old rule? Even with everyone supposedly on board, legislative reform can still move surprisingly slowly. In 2023, Republican Rep. John Rose of Tennessee introduced a bill to strike the five words 'built on a permanent chassis' from the definition of a manufactured home in federal law. But MHI withdrew its support. The trade group, which represents not just manufacturers but also lenders, retailers, and insurers, cited the need to further study the proposal to assess potential ripple effects that could hurt state and local players. This vague stance puzzled advocates, given that any federal change would still include a transition period for states and cities to align their regulations. Similarly stymied — though for different reasons — was Sen. Scott's Road to Housing Act last year, a package of bills aimed at boosting affordability that included striking the chassis rule. Then-Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, blocked the package because it also included a bill that could have required minor changes from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and possibly the Dodd-Frank Act — a can of worms Brown preferred not to open. Brown lost his election in November, and Scott now sits as chair. Scott's bill proposes a somewhat softer version of Rose's 2023 legislation. Scott's would offer states flexibility around chassis requirements, with the idea that states would have time to harmonize whatever other laws and rules they needed to. Though this offers a less immediate fix, most advocates are cautiously hopeful about this state opt-in strategy, so long as it doesn't include legislative poison pills — meaning provisions that would make the policy unworkable in practice. 'We're open to multiple approaches, we just want to make sure that there aren't any drafting errors in a state-by-state certification approach that might permanently prevent states from certifying their compliance…in the event that they miss their first certification deadline,' said Alex Armlovich, a Niskanen Center housing analyst who has been advocating for the change. Sean Roberts, the CEO of Villa, a company that produces factory-built accessory dwelling units, says removing the permanent chassis rule will result in more homes getting built across the board. 'People could afford the homes more easily. Kind of everybody wins, you know, there's not a whole lot of downside to it,' he said. 'So we're very supportive of it, and we see it as being a really positive thing.'
Vox
2 days ago
- Health
- Vox
The brain tech revolution is here — and it isn't all Black Mirror
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. When you hear the word 'neurotechnology,' you may picture Black Mirror headsets prying open the last private place we have — our own skulls — or the cyber-samurai of William Gibson's Neuromancer. That dread is natural, but it can blind us to the real potential being realized in neurotech to address the long intractable medical challenges found in our brains. In just the past 18 months, brain tech has cleared three hurdles at once: smarter algorithms, shrunken hardware, and — most important — proof that people can feel the difference in their bodies and their moods. A pacemaker for the brain Keith Krehbiel has battled Parkinson's disease for nearly a quarter-century. By 2020, as Nature recently reported, the tremors were winning — until neurosurgeons slipped Medtronic's Percept device into his head. Unlike older deep-brain stimulators that carpet-bomb movement control regions in the brain with steady current, the Percept listens first. It hunts the beta-wave 'bursts' in the brain that mark a Parkinson's flare and then fires back millisecond by millisecond, an adaptive approach that mimics the way a cardiac pacemaker paces an arrhythmic heart. In the ADAPT-PD study, patients like Krehbiel moved more smoothly, took fewer pills, and overwhelmingly preferred the adaptive mode to the regular one. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic agreed: The system now has US and EU clearance. Because the electrodes spark only when symptoms do, total energy use is reduced, increasing battery life and delaying the next skull-opening surgery. Better yet, because every Percept shipped since 2020 already has the sensing chip, the adaptive mode can be activated with a simple firmware push, the way you'd update your iPhone. Waking quiet muscles Scientists applied the same listen-then-zap logic farther down the spinal cord this year. In a Nature Medicine pilot, researchers in Pittsburgh laid two slender electrode strips over the sensory roots of the lumbar spine in three adults with spinal muscular atrophy. Gentle pulses 'reawakened' half-dormant motor neurons: Every participant walked farther, tired less, and — astonishingly — one person strode from home to the lab without resting. Half a world away, surgeons at Nankai University threaded a 50-micron-thick 'stent-electrode' through a patient's jugular vein, fanned it against the motor cortex, and paired it with a sleeve that twitched his arm muscles. No craniotomy, no ICU — just a quick catheter procedure that let a stroke survivor lift objects and move a cursor. High-tech rehab is inching toward outpatient care. Mental-health care on your couch The brain isn't only wires and muscles; mood lives there, too. In March, the Food and Drug Administration tagged a visor-like headset from Pulvinar Neuro as a Breakthrough Device for major-depressive disorder. The unit drips alternating and direct currents while an onboard algorithm reads brain rhythms on the fly, and clinicians can tweak the recipe over the cloud. The technology offers a ray of hope for patients whose depression has resisted conventional treatments like drugs. Thought cursors and synthetic voices Cochlear implants for people with hearing loss once sounded like sci-fi; today more than 1 million people hear through them. That proof-of-scale has emboldened a new wave of brain-computer interfaces, including from Elon Musk's startup Neuralink. The company's first user, 30-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh, told Wired last year he now 'multitasks constantly' with a thought-controlled cursor, clawing back some of the independence lost to a 2016 spinal-cord injury. Neuralink isn't as far along as Musk often claims — Arbaugh's device experienced some problems, with some threads detaching from the brain — but the promise is there. On the speech front, new systems are decoding neural signals into text on a computer screen, or even synthesized voice. In 2023 researchers from Stanford and the University of California San Francisco installed brain implants in two women who had lost the ability to speak, and managing to hit decoding times of 62 and 78 words per minute, far faster than previous brain tech interfaces. That's still much slower than the 160 words per minute of natural English speech, but more recent advances are getting closer to that rate. Guardrails for gray matter Yes, neurotech has a shadow. Brain signals could reveal a person's mood, maybe even a voting preference. Europe's new AI Act now treats 'neuro-biometric categorization' — technologies that can classify individuals by biometric information, including brain data — as high-risk, demanding transparency and opt-outs, while the US BRAIN Initiative 2.0 is paying for open-source toolkits so anyone can pop the hood on the algorithms. And remember the other risk: doing nothing. Refusing a proven therapy because it feels futuristic is a little like turning down antibiotics in 1925 because a drug that came from mold seemed weird. Twentieth-century medicine tamed the chemistry of the body; 21st-century medicine is learning to tune the electrical symphony inside the skull. When it works, neurotech acts less like a hammer than a tuning fork — nudging each section back on pitch, then stepping aside so the music can play. Real patients are walking farther, talking faster, and, in some cases, simply feeling like themselves again. The challenge now is to keep our fears proportional to the risks — and our imaginations wide enough to see the gains already in hand. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
2 days ago
- General
- Vox
The real reason everyone's so mad over the Gen Z stare
is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic. According to many Zoomers, concerning reports of a 'Gen Z stare' may be overblown. If it exists, they say, it's simply a response to the idiocy of their elders. Somehow, though, the concept — recently articulated on TikTok — gained instant recognition from millennials, Gen X, and boomers, who describe it as a blank, if not worried, look as a response to a direct question or interaction. Sometimes, it can be a lack of any greeting or reply from Zoomers in customer service specifically. Further reports point to a potentially related trend, where the group born between 1997 and 2012 don't say hi when they pick up the phone. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. But the 'stare' dogpile is also a reflection of the social skills we value and how we learned to value them; concerns that go beyond eye contact and active listening. In examining our hangups and the backlash, it becomes clear that the Gen Z stare is actually as much about Zoomers as it is the people who are frustrated by them. Does the Gen Z stare exist? The most difficult thing about the Gen Z stare is finding Zoomers who will actually admit — on record — to doing it. In speaking to a few Gen Z people, the main response I got was that they didn't believe that they or any of their friends were guilty of committing the Gen Z stare. Sam Delgado, a freelance journalist and former Vox fellow, does not relate to giving what she understands to be 'deadpan stare during conversations.' 'I was a little confused at first because I hadn't heard of it before or didn't immediately understand,' Delgado says. 'And while my other Gen Z friends aren't as chatty as I am, I've never seen any of them do this stare.' Kat Swank, a young person born in 1997 — the Gen Z cutoff — who says she does not fix upon people with a lightless gaze, was also skeptical. 'My TikTok For You Page is certainly telling me that it's real,' Swank tells Vox. 'But I don't think I've ever really encountered it, though.' Obviously, asking people whether they do an embarrassing thing is not going to elicit a rush of admissions. Psychology experts I spoke to said that while there's obviously no peer-reviewed research on the origins of the stare or its intent, they believe that at least some Gen Z starers are unaware that they're doing it. There's also reason to believe that the way young people look at older people now has plenty in common with past generations. Michael Poulin, an associate psychology professor at the University at Buffalo researches how people respond to adversity, and says that he's seen 'tons' of Gen Z stares. He's very familiar with the vacant gaze and felt its heavy void first hand. But he raises the point that part of being a college professor is looking around the room into a sea of young adults who would rather be somewhere else. Since Poulin has been teaching, and perhaps since time immemorial, students, regardless of generation, have given him that blinkless gaze. Poulin, who says he's seen stares from millennial students in the past, raises the point that the Gen Z stare might not be specific to Gen Z but rather a manifestation of the tradition of older adults complaining about the newest, youngest adults. It's not unlike the way some of our parents told us to look people in the eye and respond to them in full sentences, or the way some of us were reminded not to slouch at the dinner table, or to greet people with firm handshakes. No one sees more Gen Z stares than a teacher. Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images Clearly, even in the distant past, some of us weren't making sufficient eye contact, were being too curt, slumped and ruining our posture, and doling out flimsy shakes to adults around us. 'To some degree, it's a comforting myth that all of us who are adults — who've gotten beyond the teens and 20s — that we tell ourselves that we were surely better than that,' Poulin says, asserting that older adult complaining about Gen Z probably have a few interactions in their younger years that were also complained about. 'This isn't the first generation to fail' at behaving like a responsive adult. Still, Poulin says, 'I would be willing to speculate that it may be a little worse for Gen Z,' noting that complaining about Gen Z en masse on social media is a sort of new phenomenon. Bemoaning how annoying young people are used to be kept in smaller social circles like after church or at soccer practices or lunches, but now it's all online, documented and magnified with the possibility of going viral. That's probably an issue millennials, at least, can relate to. The Gen Z stare isn't totally made up One of the reasons why Gen Z might not be totally aware of their stare might be the same reason older generations are so sensitive to it: an unavoidable difference in number and types of human interactions. Older adults have years or even decades of social experiences, most of which notably came before the pandemic lockdowns cut us off from one another and changed how we interact. Many also remember a pre-internet age of interaction, another sea change in the way that people relate to one another. For millennials and older, having learned the social skills to navigate a wider variety of in-person dealings, it can feel abrupt, even jarring, to encounter someone without them. While it's true that possibly every generation possesses social behavior that, in some way or another, irked previous ones, there may be factors at play as to why Gen Z's has manifested itself in a vacant glance. It all comes back to those two big shifts: the internet and the pandemic. 'It's sort of almost as though they're looking at me as though they're watching a TV show,' says Tara Well, a professor at Barnard College. Well's research is primarily in social perception, cognition, and self-awareness. Like Poulin, she has seen the Gen Z stare coming from some of her students. If your social interactions are largely dependent on scrolling through an endless amount of faces or staring into a lens, it might affect the way you interact with humans face-to-face. Well explained to me that the stare has made her think about the idea of 'self-objectification' a concept in psychology where people see themselves as an object or solely by their physical appearances, and begin to see other people as objects and images. 'We don't see them as dynamic people who are interacting with us, who are full of thoughts and emotions and living, breathing people,' Well tells Vox. 'If you see people as just ideas or images, you look at them like you're paging through an old magazine or scrolling on your phone.' It's not difficult to see a connection between social media and self-objectification. If your social interactions are largely dependent on scrolling through an endless amount of faces or staring into a lens, it might affect the way you interact with humans face-to-face. On social media everyone just bleeds into an endless swipe if they haven't captured your attention. On top of that, Gen Z is the first generation to grow up with fully built out iterations of Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms. They also have largely experienced so many customer-facing interactions — ordering a pizza, speaking to customer service rep, buying movie tickets — as automated. Of course, technological developments weren't the only thing happening during Gen Zers' time in high school and college. Many were also navigating those crucial years for social development during the pandemic, when life and school was shut down and held virtually. Swank, the millennial-Gen Z cusper, said that during her high school years, she had full access to Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram ('the old Instagram where you're putting the worst photo you've ever seen of yourself with a sepia filter'). At the time, she didn't yet have TikTok and those social media platforms hadn't unspooled their now-sophisticated algorithms into the apps. But her younger peers did. I didn't mean for this photo to be so ominous, but since we're talking about the decline of an entire generation's social skills… Getty Images As a zillennial, she suspects she avoided the worst: access to TikTok combined with the pandemic. All that and 'your social life is all fully all online? I can only kind of imagine, like, where your social skills kind of go from there,' Swank says. 'Online, you can just stop engaging with someone, and you don't need to talk to them — I can totally see that bleeding into real life.' While many of us had our social lives affected by lockdowns (and all have access to social media), Gen Z is the only generation who didn't get to experience what adult social life felt like before it. Why the Gen Z stare is so off-putting Part of what Well studies is how humans react to each other. She looks into the small things, like how we modulate our voice when we talk to someone or how we react to small cues — the beginning of a smile, the small raise of an eyebrow, the end of a laugh, etc. These details help us decipher an interaction, to keep a good conversation going or end one that's run its course. The Gen Z stare seems like the antithesis to these things. The person giving the stare may not know or want to reciprocate these cues; they may not have the practice or knowledge to help their conversational partner. At the same time, the person they're staring at has nothing to work with. That may explain why people may find the stare so irksome, regardless of whether or not the starer's intention. 'People interpret it as social rejection,' Poulin, the professor at Buffalo, told me. 'There is nothing that, as social beings, humans hate more. There's nothing that stings more than rejection.' If there's any solace for those feeling the frustration, or for Gen Z tired out of the discourse, it's that there that younger generation will likely give up its signature stare. 'Gen Z will grow out of it because people are going to keep having in person interactions,' Poulin says, noting that it might not be at the same rate as older generations who grew up with face-to-face interactions. 'They will have more in person interactions, and they will experience consequences of engaging versus not engaging.' When they do, older generations will probably find something else to complain about.
WIRED
2 days ago
- Politics
- WIRED
Why It's Taking LA So Long to Rebuild After the Wildfires
Jul 19, 2025 7:00 AM Reforming California's environmental rules is only a small step to rebuilding Los Angeles after the fires in January. Sisters sit together on the front porch of what remains of their home on January 19, 2025, in Altadena, California. Photograph:This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the wake of the record-breaking wildfires in Los Angeles in January—some of the most expensive and destructive blazes in history—one of the first things California governor Gavin Newsom did was to sign an executive order suspending environmental rules around rebuilding. The idea was that by waiving permitting regulations and reviews under the California Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), homeowners and builders could start cleaning up, putting up walls, and getting people back into houses faster. But that raised a key question for housing advocates: Could California do something similar for the whole state? Earlier this month, Newsom took a step in that direction, signing two bills that would exempt most urban housing from environmental reviews and make it easier for cities to increase housing by changing zoning laws. Newsom also signed another executive order that suspends some local permitting laws and building codes for fire-afflicted communities with the aim of further speeding up reconstruction. Housing reforms can't come soon enough for the City of Angels. Blown by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds over an unusually dry, grassy landscape, the wildfires that tore through LA burned almost 48,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including more than 9,500 single-family homes, 1,200 duplexes, and 600 apartments in one of the most housing-starved regions of the country. Los Angeles is a critical case study for housing for the whole state, a test of whether the Democratic-controlled government can coordinate its conflicting political bases—unions, environmental groups, housing advocates—with a desperate need for more homes. Revising the state's environmental laws was seen by some observers as a sign that the Golden State was finally seeing the light. But despite the relaxed rules, progress in LA has been sluggish. More than 800 homeowners in areas affected by wildfires applied for rebuilding permits as of July 7, according to the Los Angeles Times. Fewer than 200 have received the green light, however. The City of Los Angeles takes about 55 days on average to approve a wildfire rebuild, and the broader Los Angeles County takes even longer. (Los Angeles County has a dashboard to track permitting approvals in unincorporated areas.) 'LA's process is super slow, so that's not surprising,' said Elisa Paster, a managing partner at Rand Paster Nelson, a firm based in Los Angeles that specializes in land use law. 'Anecdotally, we've heard that a lot of people have decided they don't want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.' Now, half a year after the embers have died down, it's clear that changing the rules isn't enough. Advocates for CEQA say the 55-year-old law is really a scapegoat for bigger, more intractable housing problems. Other factors, like more expensive construction materials and labor shortages, are still driving up housing construction costs, regardless of permitting speeds. And some environmental groups worry that the rush to rebuild everything as it was could recreate the conditions that led to the blazes in the first place, a dangerous prospect in an area where wildfire risks are only growing. How CEQA Reforms Can and Can't Help Communities Harmed by Wildfires CEQA is one of California's tentpole environmental laws, signed by then governor Ronald Reagan in 1970. It requires that state and local governments preemptively look for any potential environmental harms from a construction project, like water pollution, threats to endangered species, and later, greenhouse gas emissions. Developers need to disclose these issues and take steps to avoid them. The law also allows the public to weigh in on new developments. In the years since, CEQA has been blamed as a barrier to new construction. Many critics see it as a cynical tool wielded to prevent new housing construction in wealthy communities, even being invoked to challenge highway closures and new parks on environmental grounds. It's one of the villains of the 'abundance' movement that advocates for cutting red tape to build more homes and clean energy. However, CEQA isn't necessarily the gatekeeper to rebuilding single-family homes after wildfires, according to Matthew Baker, policy director at the Planning and Conservation League, a nonprofit that helped shepherd CEQA in the first place. For one thing, CEQA already has broad exemptions for replacing and rebuilding structures and new construction of 'small' structures like single-family homes. 'Our general take is that the executive orders around revoking environmental review and environmental regulations around the rebuilding [after the fires] did little to nothing beyond what was already in existing law,' Baker said. He added that the vast majority of projects that face CEQA review get the go-ahead, and less than 2 percent of proposals face litigation. An aerial view shows homes burned in the Eaton Fire on February 05, 2025, in Altadena, California. U.S. Photograph:But the mere threat of a lawsuit and the precautions taken to avoid one can become a significant hurdle on its own. 'CEQA can be an expensive and lengthy process, especially for large or complicated projects. This is true even if there is not litigation,' according to a 2024 report from California's Little Hoover Commission, the state's independent oversight agency. 'Preparation of an Environmental Impact Report under CEQA can take a year or longer and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even, in some cases, more than $1 million.' In addition, CEQA does come into play for people who want to make more extensive changes to their property as they rebuild, like if they want to expand their floorspace more than 10 percent beyond their original floor plan. The law is also triggered by broader wildfire risk-reduction initiatives, namely brush clearance and controlled burns, as well as infrastructure upgrades like putting power lines underground to prevent fire ignitions or installing more pipelines and cisterns for water to help with firefighting. Exempting these projects could help communities build fire resilience faster. For multifamily homes like duplexes and apartment buildings, CEQA can be an obstacle, too, if the developer wants to rebuild with more units. 'We have multifamily buildings in the Palisades that had rent-controlled units, and what we've been hearing from some of these property owners is like, 'Yeah, sure. I had 20 rent-controlled units there before, but I can't afford to just rebuild 20.' Those people want to go back and build 50 units, 20 of which could be rent-controlled, or all of which are rent-controlled.' By bypassing CEQA, higher-density housing has an easier path to completion. Environmental Regulations Aren't the Only Barriers to Rebuilding Rebuilding after fires is always going to be expensive. Your home may have been built and sold in the 1970s, but you'll have to pay 2025 prices for materials and labor when you rebuild. California already faces some of the highest housing costs in the country and a shortage of construction workers. The Trump administration is pushing the price tag higher with tariffs on components like lumber and its campaign to deport people. About 41 percent of workers in California's construction industry are immigrants, and 14 percent are undocumented. But even before they can rebuild, one of the biggest challenges for people who have lost their homes is simply becoming whole after a loss. 'From the clients that I've spoken to, they've had to argue with their insurance company to get full replacement value or reasonable compensation, and that's where they're getting stuck,' said David Hertz, an architect based in Santa Monica. On top of the tedious claims process, insurance companies in California have been dropping some of their customers in high-fire-risk areas, leaving them no option besides the FAIR Plan, the state's high-priced, limited-coverage insurer of last resort. But after the multibillion-dollar losses from the Los Angeles fires, the FAIR Plan had to collect an additional $1 billion from its member companies, a move that will raise property insurance prices. People who can't get property insurance can't get a mortgage from most lenders. There's also the concern of exactly where and how homes are rebuilt. In 2008, California updated its building codes to make structures more resistant to wildfires, but bringing burned-down old homes to new standards in high-fire-risk areas adds to the timeline and the price tag. 'There's this tension between all of us wanting to have people be able to rebuild their homes in their communities, and there's the question of 'Are we just going to build back the same thing in the same unsafe place? Are we going to try to do things better?' Baker said. All the while, wildfires are becoming more destructive. Wildfires are a natural part of Southern California's landscape, but more people are crowding into areas that are primed to burn, and the danger zones are widening. That increases the chances of a wildfire ignition and makes the ensuing blazes more damaging. With average temperatures rising, California is seeing more aggressive swings between severe rainfall and drought. The 2025 Los Angeles fires were preceded in 2024 by one of the wettest winters in the region's history, followed by one of the hottest summers on record, and bookended by one of the driest starts to winter. It created the ideal conditions for ample dry grasses and chaparral that fueled the infernos. 'The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that's designed to burn?' Hertz said. Reducing wildfire risk on a wider scale requires coordination between neighbors. For example, Hertz said that in many of the communities that burned, there are likely many residents who won't come back. Neighbors could coordinate to buy up and swap vacant land parcels to create a defensible space with fire-resistant trees like oak to serve as fire breaks and water storage to help respond to future blazes. Hertz himself leads a community brigade, trained volunteers who work to reduce wildfire risk in their neighborhoods. He also cautioned that while there's a lot of well-deserved pushback against regulations like CEQA, the reasoning behind it remains sound. Development without any environmental considerations could put more homes in the path of danger and destroy the ecosystems that make California such an attractive place to live. 'I think there's a balance,' Hertz said. 'Nature doesn't have its own voice.' At the same time, without speeding up the pace at which California restores the homes that were lost and builds new ones, the housing crisis will only get worse. The state will become unlivable for many residents. Long after the burn scars fade and new facades are erected, communities will be altered permanently.
