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Vox
20-04-2025
- Vox
Luigi Mangione and the long legacy of the Unabomber Manifesto
is a producer for daily news podcast and radio show. Before joining Hady worked in public media as an editor, reporter, and producer. Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of brazenly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson turned celebrated vigilante, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday. The federal charges include stalking, a firearms offense, and murder through use of a firearm, according to NPR. If convicted, the murder charge makes Mangione eligible for the death penalty. Mangione is also facing additional charges from state prosecutors in New York and in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently directed prosecutors at the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for Mangione. 'If there was ever a death case, this is one,' Bondi told Fox News. 'This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him.' Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day, compiled by news editor Sean Collins. 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. In the months since Thompson's murder in December, Mangione has become a lightning rod of controversy. For many, he represents the resentment and disappointment many Americans harbor about the US health care system. Mangione's online activity has also become the subject of intense scrutiny, from his banner photos on X to his more than 200 Goodreads reviews. His review of the so-called 'Unabomber Manifesto' has attracted particular attention. 'It's easy to quickly and thoughtless [to] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,' he wrote. 'But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.' Related Luigi Mangione and the blackpilling of America Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham who studies ant-tech radicalism, has been trying to better understand that essay's author, Ted Kaczynski, who he's currently writing a book about. Although Fleming is cautious about saying Mangione was inspired by Kaczynksi, it's hard not to notice a few parallels in their cases. 'Assassinating corporate executives to create a media spectacle is straight out of the Unabomber's playbook. The assassin of Brian Thompson also left some engravings on the shell casings, which reminds me of the engraving that Kaczynski left on the components of his bombs,' Fleming says. 'And more generally, Kaczynski and Mangione are both disaffected overachievers with backgrounds in STEM fields.' Fleming shared some of his insights about the Unabomber with the host of Vox's Today, Explained podcast, Sean Rameswaram. Read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below. And listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. What stood out most to you when you first read the manifesto? What struck me is how unconspiratorial it was. Kaczynski doesn't think there's an evil cabal of technocrats plotting to oppress us all. His entire worldview is evolutionary. And so I thought: This is interesting as political theory. It's extremely radical and there's a lot I disagree with, but as a historian of political ideas, I thought it would make an interesting side project. And then it took on a life of its own. For those who don't remember, who was he, what did he do, and how did people come to know him? Ted Kaczynski was born in Chicago in 1942, and he started out as a child prodigy in mathematics. He went to Harvard on a scholarship at the age of 16, and then he went on to do a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. And he was then hired as an assistant professor in math at Berkeley, and at that time he was the youngest in the institution's history. The reason we're still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings. But after two years at Berkeley he abruptly resigned, and after a little while, he bought himself a piece of land outside Lincoln, Montana, where he built himself a one-room cabin that was 10 feet by 12 feet with no electricity or running water. And from there, he launched his one-man war against modern technology. He began sending bombs to corporate executives and scientists in 1978. And his bombs killed three people and injured 23 others by the time he was arrested in 1996. Why are we still talking about the Unabomber all these years later? The reason we're still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings. In April 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times promising that he would stop bombing if his 35,000-word essay titled 'Industrial Society and Its Future' were published in the Times or some other major newspaper. The Manifesto was published in the Washington Post on September 19th, 1995. Which is, I think, hard to imagine today, but hundreds of thousands of people in this country were mailed this dude's manifesto. Yes, that's right. Without exaggeration, it might be one of the most read manifestos since The Communist Manifesto. Soon after that, it was published in paperback. It also was uploaded to Time Warner's Pathfinder platform. It became what might be the first ever internet manifesto, and set the template for the manifestos that have become all too common in the aftermath of violent attacks. Not long ago, the Unabomber Manifesto was still a bestseller on Amazon. In the philosophy category, it was ahead of classics by Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine. Kaczynski writes that 'There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.' I think a lot of people could find some truth in that statement. What was he trying to get across with this manifesto? In the passage, you've just quoted, what he's arguing is basically that human beings are biologically maladapted to the modern world. This is a big claim from evolutionary psychology. The argument is that, biologically speaking, we're still Stone Age hunter-gatherers. We evolved hunting large animals on the savannah and in the span of just 10,000 years — the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms — we've constructed this world of concrete, steel, and screens. So Kaczynski argues that because of this, we suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and so many other psychological pathologies that so-called primitive human beings do not. And what's his solution? His solution is to destroy all modern technology and return ourselves to a more primitive condition, to crash out of the modern world. What he envisions is a group of anti-tech revolutionaries sabotaging the electric grid, blowing up the gas pipelines, and attacking the nervous system, so to speak, of modern society. He wanted to plunge us back into, if not the Stone Age, then something like small-scale agriculture and a shepherd society. How was this manifesto received in the '90s when it was published by the Washington Post and delivered to front porches around the country? And how has his reputation changed over time? Well, there was a lot of debate about it. Many journalists treated Kaczynski as a serious intellectual, and many members of the public, in letters to the editor and on talk radio shows, hailed him as a folk hero. He was often described as a modern-day Thoreau. His warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people. Kaczynski fell out of fashion from the late '90s until the early 2010s. But then he was rediscovered as concerns about climate change, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of digital immersion became so much more salient. And his warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people. So there's been a Unabomber revival. Who are the types of people who are glomming on to this manifesto? During the Unabomber mania of the mid-1990s, Kaczynski gained a following on the radical left, especially among green anarchists. But he's returned to cultural prominence with the opposite political valence. Today he's seen more as a figure of the right. As you may have noticed, he spends the first 3,000 words of his manifesto railing against leftism. And in the context of the culture war in the 2010s, conservatives rediscovered and rehabilitated him and co-opted him onto their side in the culture war. So Kaczynski has now been appropriated by neo-Nazis, eco-fascists, far-right accelerationists, a rag bag of people on the right who are drawn to his critique of leftism. Which is so interesting because Luigi Mangione has been hailed as something of a hero on the left, right? How is it that Kaczynski appeals to a figure like Mangione but also neo-Nazis? What makes Kaczynski appealing to so many different sorts of radicals is that he defies easy categorization. And this makes his ideology like an à la carte menu of ideas. For instance, green anarchists were enthralled with his critique of technology while neo-Nazis, generally speaking, ignore the critique of technology and focus solely on the critique of leftism. Related Why conservatives condemn Luigi Mangione and celebrate Daniel Penny Does Kaczynski ever show any remorse for murder? No, he doesn't. He doesn't show any remorse for the people he killed and his bombings. He says they're not innocent. At one point, he says the people who are responsible for the advancement of technology are worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler. What they're doing to humanity is even more grotesque, he says. But he does acknowledge that his anti-tech revolution would kill millions if not billions of people. This is an extremely apocalyptic vision. Many people accept his argument up until the point where he suggests that we should blow up the electric grid and knock ourselves back to the Stone Age. In other words, many people accept parts of his diagnosis of the problems with the modern world. But they're completely unwilling to take his prescription seriously. Do you think the ideas in Ted Kaczynski's manifesto will stand the test of time? I think the points about evolutionary mismatch will stand the test of time and will become increasingly appealing to a new generation of radicals. The parts about intelligent machines look especially prophetic in our current moment.
Vox
05-04-2025
- Automotive
- Vox
Why are car headlights so blindingly bright now?
is a producer for daily news podcast and radio show. Before joining Hady worked in public media as an editor, reporter, and producer. Glaringly bright, blue-hued headlights filled my hatchback earlier this year as I drove 80 miles an hour on the highway between San Antonio and Austin. The headlights shone so brightly that their reflection in my rearview mirror burned my eyeballs, causing me to look away from the road and rapidly slow down. The large luxury SUV behind me began riding my tail — causing an even more intense glare to engulf my car — before aggressively whipping around to pass me. For a moment, all was fine. My eyes adjusted. And I began to pick up speed again — only to be visually assaulted by a lifted truck with even brighter headlights and flood lights atop its roof, then an electric vehicle with the whitest lights I'd ever seen, and an onslaught of others. Fearing my car being slammed from behind every time I was forced to slow down and look away from the road, I got off the highway and took an alternative route. The headlights felt like they'd become especially hard on my eyes in recent years. Maybe I was just getting old, I thought, or my eyes had been weakened by working on a computer for a living. Then a listener of Vox's Explain It to Me podcast named Reed called and asked, 'Am I going crazy? Or does every new car on the road have the world's brightest headlights? I'm wondering why this is suddenly happening? And are there any limits? Can people just put whatever they want on the front of their car and blind everyone else?' He wasn't alone. Our show has received multiple emails with similar inquiries from listeners and Vox readers. And there's even a subreddit dedicated to the topic, where people complain, make jokes, and work together to find solutions. So in hopes of helping Reed, myself, and the many other upset drivers, Explain It to Me took on Reed's question. Are car headlights getting brighter? There are two ways to answer that question, lighting scientist John Bullough, who leads the Light and Health Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Vox. The first has to do with the color of LED lights, the kind now overwhelmingly used in car headlights. 'You've probably noticed that a lot of them look a lot more of a bluish white compared to the yellowish white of halogen headlights,' Bullough said, which used to be more common in headlights. The concepts we use to measure light intensity — lumen and candela — were created by scientists long ago, and don't fully align with how different parts of our vision have different sensitivities to different-colored lights, Bullough said. That means that even though a light meter might say a pair of halogen headlights has the same light intensity as a pair of LED headlights, our eyes will see the bluish LED one as brighter because it's more likely to be picked by our peripheral vision, making our brains prioritize it as important or alarming. The second factor, Bullough said, is that the intensity of headlights really has increased over the last 10 to 20 years. 'If we think about the reason we have headlights, they're not to create glare — they're to help us see things along the road so that we can avoid collisions,' he said. But the result has been that moves to make cars safer for their occupants, like the ever-increasing size of American vehicles and the increasing intensity of headlights, have created a new set of safety problems for anyone outside the car. Who's responsible for the brighter lights? 'Headlight intensities have actually been increasing in part because of things like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's safety ratings,' which the insurance company-backed nonprofit doles out to help customers choose which car to buy, Bullough said. Carmakers also use the ratings as a selling point. When IIHS first started evaluating headlights nearly a decade ago, 'they were giving headlights pretty poor grades in terms of their ability to help us see things at night.' Of 95 car models tested by IIHS in 2016, just two earned a good rating. A desire to improve safety ratings, combined with the growing dominance of LEDs in the broader lighting market, has driven carmakers to rapidly brighten their lights. 'LEDs are a new technology that took over pretty much everything in the lighting world in the last 15 years. It's arguably the biggest change in lighting technology since they first fired up an incandescent light bulb,' said Nate Rogers, a freelance writer who wrote an extensive story in 2024 about headlight brightness. 'LEDs are more energy efficient. They last longer. It was a total sea change in the lighting world when LEDs came out, and over time they've started to replace pretty much everything, and that includes car headlights.' But Rogers also believes the federal highway safety czars, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), share some of the responsibility for why bright LED lights have become the norm on roads. 'They are the ultimate authority,' he said. 'Any car that is driving on the road has to meet NHTSA standards.' 'Several people I spoke to [from NHTSA] told me that the most complaints from drivers that the NHTSA gets are about car headlights [and] headlight brightness,' Rogers said. But NHTSA has not created rules to limit the intensity of bright lights.' Nor do federal safety ratings for car models consider the safety of anyone outside the car, as Vox contributor David Zipper explained last year — only the safety of a given car's occupants is included. Are brighter lights actually dangerous? During his reporting, Rogers said, he never really found anyone disputing safety concerns tied to headlight glare. While he was often pointed to an IIHS study finding a 19 percent reduction in crashes for cars that have good safety ratings for their headlights, he added, it's really hard to track whether or not someone else got into a crash after being blinded by another driver's headlights. 'Without that strict measurement of how dangerous car headlight brightness is, it seems that NHTSA is a little stuck and a little unsure about how to fix it,' he said. Driver safety is just one aspect of the problem. The other has to do with people sharing the roads — pedestrians and cyclists. The number of people killed by cars while walking has risen precipitously in the US in the last decade: According to a new report from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), pedestrian deaths are up 48 percent from 2014. Another GHSA report found that in 2022, 'approximately three-quarters (77%) of pedestrians killed in fatal crashes were struck at night.' Mark Baker, founder and president of the advocacy group the Soft Lights Foundation, which aims to protect people from the harmful effects of LED lighting, thinks headlight intensity, in addition to the increasing prevalence of large cars on American roads, might be linked to the uptick pedestrian deaths at night. He theorizes that drivers blinded by bright headlights at night struggle to see pedestrians, and pedestrians may struggle to see as well. 'There's just way too much light now,' he said. 'Nobody can see you.' Baker has lobbied Congress to get a hearing on the adverse impacts of LED headlights, and he's tried working with states to pass laws limiting headlight intensity. He has yet to score a victory, but has gotten more than 70,000 people to sign a petition called 'Ban Blinding Headlights and Save Lives!' 'I have filed two petitions to the federal government: one to set a limit on maximum intensity,' Baker said. 'Right now there is no overall limit on maximum intensity. And then there's no limit on the blue wavelength light. That's the most debilitating light. It causes glare in your eyes. It's harder to see. It's also hazardous to our eyes.' The fight is personal for Baker. 'I got knocked out of teaching,' he said. LED headlights on the road and in his classroom tormented him — an experience that eventually led to a diagnosis of mild autism. 'I couldn't go to work,' he said. 'So I started devoting my time to try and figure out what's wrong with these LEDs. I've since met other people that have similar reactions so severe that they're considering thoughts of suicide because it's just it's torture for those of us that have autism.' Will we ever stop headlight glare? So if safety ratings incentivize carmakers to equip new cars with bright LED headlights, what do we do? There are a couple of solutions that could help protect drivers from glare, Bullough said. The first has to do where headlights are aimed. The light that comes from low-lights, the lights we drive around with most often, should be pointed down and toward the road, and not into the rear window of cars. But headlights can become misaligned after they've been replaced, or after accidents. 'Headlight aim is something that some states, but not most, actually require as part of their safety inspections,' Bullough said. 'So drivers could ask their mechanic once a year to have their headlight aim checked and to adjust it if needed.' Headlight aim is often especially poor with older cars that have aftermarket LEDs on their cars, automotive and tech journalist Tim Stevens said. He thinks better enforcement of traffic safety laws could help. 'A lot of states like Michigan, for example, don't have any kind of annual inspection at all,' he said. 'So it becomes an issue for the police to basically pull someone over if they think that someone's headlights are too bright.' NHTSA could also create headlight intensity limits, which state and local authorities could then use as a baseline for enforcement, Bullough and Baker pointed out. 'Certainly what could be done is some upper limits on the overall intensity from low-beam headlights,' Bullough said. Stevens said carmakers are introducing new technologies that could help with the problem, like high beam assist or adaptive beam technology, which are supposed to dim headlights instinctively and automatically when the cars are coming up on traffic, pedestrians, and dark corners. 'It's been available in Europe and in the rest of the world for quite a few years,' Steven said. 'It's only been made legal in the US since 2022, but because it takes a long time for auto manufacturers to bring new technology to market, it's still taking some time for them to be able to bring these new headlights to the American market.' For now, he added, the tech 'is only going to be on the newest and highest-end cars. So it's going to be a long time before we see this on the majority of cars on the road.' There are other tools and techniques that the average person can use to deal with headlight glare, like looking down and to the right while driving when there are bright lights passing you, or picking up a pair of blue light-blocking glasses. But Baker believes meaningful change will only come through civic action. 'The empowerment comes from listeners contacting the government, contacting me, joining up with the Soft Lights Foundation, and getting involved,' he said. 'Let's fix this systemic problem.'
