2025-12-30 20:00:00
• Conservative policymakers say they want more parents to stay home with their children, but it’s not clear that approaches like baby bonuses or bigger child tax will work.
• One possibility is to pay lower-income parents to stay home, potentially by pairing a national paid parental leave program with no-strings-attached cash allowance for new parents. Such a policy would also help to address infant care shortages.
• The focus of any plan to pay parents to stay home should be on providing a choice, not incentivizing one option or the other.
MAGA thinks the country needs more stay-at-home parents, especially mothers. The goal isn’t just to boost plummeting birth rates, but to help children and families with policies that are more family-focused than work-focused. “It’s not just about increasing the total number of children,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told the New York Times. “It is increasing the number of families, mothers and fathers, and the ability of the family to spend time together.”
Over the past several months, Republican lawmakers and conservative thinkers have offered a number of bills and ideas to help more parents stay home with kids. But as Vox journalist Anna North noted, none are likely to trigger a stampede of moms from cubicles to kitchens. When North asked whether baby bonuses or heftier child tax credits could persuade women to give up the benefits gained through decades of paid work, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin deadpanned: “Are we giving them a million dollars?”
Still, conservatives need not give up the dream. If they want more parents at home, the most effective way may be to focus their efforts and pay on low-wage parents.
My reporting on families has pointed repeatedly to this group of parents as one especially willing to reduce paid work to spend more time with their children, if given the chance, and for whom a little investment could go a long way. Such investment could help address the child care shortage, bolster child development, and create more family-friendly workplaces and more vibrant neighborhoods.
Of course, there is one very obvious hurdle to this idea: historically, poor parents — and especially single mothers of color — are the group that US lawmakers have been most eager to see working for pay.
“There are a lot of folks who pay lip service to believing moms should be home with their kids, but don’t seem to think that applies to people with very low income,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, formerly of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and an expert on public benefits.
Take cash assistance for low-income parents. For decades, the so-called mothers’ pensions were available primarily to white widowed and abandoned moms. Caseworkers routinely discriminated against Black and other nonwhite mothers, often presuming they should work while the white moms shouldn’t. After the civil rights movement made welfare available to all parents who needed it, lawmakers quickly imposed stringent work requirements and time limits on parents seeking financial help. Even in proudly progressive cities like New York, mothers were routinely pushed to take the first job they found, regardless of how long the commute, how late the hours, or how low the pay.
While the Clinton-era reform succeeded in forcing new moms into paid work, their babies and toddlers suffered. In one study, mothers who were pushed into work showed “significant and substantial negative effects on… provision of emotional support” toward their young children when compared to similar mothers in states that had not yet implemented the reform. Another study found that, among young children of welfare-eligible mothers, a mother’s employment led to the child spending less quality time with parents. Children of these working moms were also less likely to be read to, and had more behavioral issues, such as needing constant attention or struggling to fall asleep, as reported by their mothers.
Chris Herbst — an economist at the University of Arizona who conducted the second study — told me that the problem wasn’t that the mothers worked. Most research shows that women’s work has no impact on young children’s child development, he said.
Herbst attributes the welfare studies’ findings to three factors:
But perhaps the most insidious legacy of welfare reform was ideological. The rules allowed a mother to meet her work requirements by caring for other people’s children for pay, but not for caring for her own. It defined parental responsibility solely in terms of financial support, presuming that parenting itself is not labor, Emily Callaci, historian and author of Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise, said.
Callaci sounded alternately skeptical and cautiously optimistic when we spoke about the new conservative-leaning thinkers who are challenging this legacy by arguing that parenting itself is crucial to the entire economy — some referring jokingly to their own kids as “future taxpayers.”
While there are certainly some conservatives who hope to leverage this framing to undo the myriad advances women have made in the workplace, others seem genuinely interested in rewarding and recognizing unpaid caretaking. They understand that high-quality child care is expensive, that low-quality child care can harm, and that the first year of life is a singularly fragile developmental window when many parents who would like to stay home with their children cannot afford to.
Were conservatives to focus their efforts on low-earning parents, it could pay off big.
Poor mothers — and especially those with minimal education, for whom work may be more exploitative than empowering — may be the parents most likely to reduce hours to care for a baby if given more money. And helping low-income parents work less, including single mothers, could alleviate the shortage of infant care, which is especially pronounced in poorer neighborhoods. This could also allow mothers to wait for jobs — and child care — with the hours, location, and set-up that works for their families.
Lower-Basch told me that this is exactly what parents do in states that waive work requirements for new parents. “It’s not necessarily that the parents don’t go back to work within the year, but it lets them hold out for a job that fits better with being the parent of a newborn,” she said.
That, in turn, could prompt employers to compete for workers by creating more family-friendly work environments. Under-resourced neighborhoods, meanwhile, might benefit from having more parents to, say, keep an eye on children as they make their way to and from the school. For example, Wendy Mamola, a parent leader at Raising Illinois and mother of four, began volunteering in her older children’s school and at a family advocacy organization after taking time away from restaurant work following the birth of her twins. This allowed her “to not only be there for [her own kids], but to advocate for everybody’s babies.”
Radical as this might sound to Americans, giving parents of all incomes this kind of breathing room during their children’s first few months has plenty of precedent. Most developed countries offer child allowances along with paid parental leave to care for new family members. Some policies allot more money or time off for single parents, and have floors for how little a parent can get paid when pausing work to care for a baby.
But in the United States, receiving money to stay home with a baby is an option typically available only for wealthier parents with jobs that offer paid parental leave. And while a handful of states do offer paid parental leave programs, they often haven’t worked well for poor families. In California, for instance, the wage replacement given to new parents taking leave was not enough for many low-earning parents to take time off to care for their newborns. This meant these families paid into the program, but then couldn’t afford to use it, said Lower-Bash in an email. (California has since upped the amount it gives parents on leave.)
A handful of innovative programs designed specifically for poor families have failed to gain traction. In the early days of welfare reform, Montana and Minnesota experimented with paying welfare-eligible mothers to stay home — disbursing to parents about the same amount that would have otherwise gone towards subsidizing their child care.
In its first few years, Minnesota’s program served hundreds of families, but neither of the programs ever found reliable funding. Similar programs for low-income parents have been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans in the years since, but have also faltered in large part because policymakers have trouble categorizing them, Joshua McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, said in an email. “It’s not quite childcare, not quite paid parental leave, and not quite welfare so doesn’t have a strong set of champions relative to the more established groups pushing for these other policies.”
So what kind of program would rally support?
Most experts I spoke with recommend offering parents a program that neither incentivizes nor discourages working out of the home, but lets parents choose.
Many suggested that a national paid parental leave program — with a floor specifying a minimum amount that parents be paid — should be coupled with a no-string-attached cash allowance for new parents, similar to what other countries offer for raising children generally. (While Republican lawmakers have suggested forms of cash assistance, they have not shown the same enthusiasm for a national paid leave program.) Such cash assistance programs offer parents the flexibility to use funds as they see fit and are very effective at reducing child poverty. Because low-wage parents must work more hours for the same pay as higher-wage workers, it’s reasonable to assume that extra cash given to all families would enable some parents to spend more time home. Research supports this; when the child tax credit was temporarily expanded during the pandemic to give parents with young children about $300 a month, unmarried mothers with young children and low levels of education were the ones most likely to use the extra cash to spend more time at home.
A permanent increase to the child tax credit, then, could allow more low-wage employees to work less in order to take care of their children. The more generous earned-income tax credit, which is already earmarked for low- and middle-income workers, could also be reworked to include at-home caretakers, including parents, as a few Democratic politicians have proposed.
But to give low-wage parents with newborns more choices, tax credits of any kind must be made fully-refundable so that families with no income, or very low incomes, can receive them, instead of only those who owe taxes. In addition, they need to be made available to families as soon as a baby arrives, so that parents need not wait out the tax year for the money. Otherwise, the funds have less benefit for families without savings to draw from. And any cash assistance program must be generous to single parents, a group that Republican proposals often neglect, and sometimes penalize.
The verdict is still out on exactly how much cash it will take for low-income parents to have the choice to work less. Baby’s First Years, a cash allowance pilot that gave new, low-income mothers about $300 a month, did not impact parents’ employment generally. But it did reduce the time mothers spent working for pay during the peak of the pandemic — a time when parents also received additional funds from the expanded child tax credit.
On the other hand, one study in New Hampshire linked “generous” increases in cash benefits for low-income single- parent families — where a parent with one child received more than $800 a month — to families not only having more food in the fridge, but parents working less. All of this suggests that $300 a month is not enough for a single parent with a new baby to spend more time home, but $800 could be. Families with more children at home would likely need more, while low-income families with two parents might choose to reduce paid work with less generous cash assistance.
Whatever the payment amount, money must be offered not as a handout, but as compensation recognizing parents’ contributions, allowing parents “to enter the workplace in a more empowered position,” Callaci told me.
Herbst, the economist, added that the goal must stay focused on giving parents “power over a bunch of critical decisions: whether to or not to work, when to start working, whether to choose child care, and what kind of child care, and how to pay for it.” For decades, lawmakers have treated low-income families with “a lot of paternalism, whereas high-income families are the ones who get all the choices,” Herbst said, adding that this duality “is not good for policy making, and not good for society.”
Mamola, the mom of four, agrees. She still chokes up talking about how she returned to restaurant work when her son was just three weeks old, waking him after night shifts to nurse and be close. Several years later, when she had twins, their home’s mortgage had been paid off, letting her and her partner take time off work. Her partner was there to support her through postpartum depression, and Mamola was able to breastfeed exclusively, as she’d always wanted, and provide “even just the basic things” like lots of skin-to-skin contact, which babies thrive on, but child care workers “legally cannot provide.” It was “wonderful,” she said, “beautiful.” It’s a choice she thinks all parents should have.
2025-12-30 20:00:00
I can’t tell you the exact moment every other woman on my TikTok feed decided they were “decentering men,” but I’ve never heard the phrase uttered more than this past year.
The term was originally coined in 2019 by content creator and author Charlie Taylor in her book Decentering Men: How to Decenter Men, but it seems to have caught on in 2025.
The term has inspired a lot of content on TikTok — women posting videos encouraging their female followers to deprioritize finding a mate or giving tips on how they can thrive outside of romantic relationships. For a while now, the phrase “divorce him” has also become the go-to advice for married women discussing even the smallest relationship issues online.
So, it wasn’t a shock when a Vogue column titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” instantly blew up on TikTok in October. Chanté Joseph’s piece highlighted several influencers who were hesitant about posting their partners on social media, as having a boyfriend has been considered regressive, even “Republican” to some — sometimes, resulting in angry comments. We’re in a moment in which singlehood has never been more celebrated and heterosexual relationships have been deemed uncool — according to the internet, at least.
Elsewhere in pop culture, several famous women, like actresses Julia Fox and Charlize Theron, have been open about their experiences embracing singlehood. Ross, 53, has played a role in reversing reductive notions around the “spinster,” documenting her jetsetting lifestyle on the popular Roku series Solo Traveling With Tracee Ellis Ross and going viral for her thoughtful nuggets about single living. “Not having long relationships, not having children has allowed me to explore things of my own humanity,” Ellis said in one episode.
The “decentering men” trend has traces of South Korea’s 4B movement, which gained more exposure in the United States following Donald Trump’s reelection — and maybe, not a coincidence that the phrase has gained traction online this year. The Lysistrata-esque boycott requires that participants abstain from four social activities with men — marriage, dating, sex, and childbearing — to combat South Korea’s patriarchal social structure and oppressive beauty standards.
The niche but renowned protest was developed by feminist Twitter users in 2017 and 2018, around the time of South Korea’s #Me Too Movement. It’s notably more strict in its directives than anything the mainstream feminist movements in the US around that time suggested. One of the critiques of the US’s Me Too movement was that it didn’t have concrete political aims or agreed-upon methods to attain them. The fact that Google searches for “4B” spiked after the election exhibits a curiosity for a more radical and plain approach to achieving gender equality.
But “decentering men” also taps into other recent veins of criticism of so-called male-centered women and “pick me’s” — terms used to describe women whose entire existence is about attracting men.
It’s hard to view these anti-men sentiments as anything but a natural response to a tough dating landscape and a world increasingly influenced by misogynistic, far-right politicians and influencers. But, is it a bad thing to watch so many women descend into heterofatalism? Whatever one’s reasoning for “decentering men” might be, it’s striking that being a single adult woman is no longer a death sentence but an increasingly normalized lifestyle choice.
For example, a 2023 Pew Research Center study found that only 34 percent of single women in the US are actively seeking romantic relationships, compared to 54 percent of single men. The notion of “decentering men” has become a useful way to discuss this more pessimistic approach to dating.
But, according to the term’s creator, it isn’t as radical or anti-relationship as it may look on paper. In a blog post titled “Decentering Men: Why You Need To Let Go of Men,” Taylor encourages to let go of the “idea of men” as the ultimate prize but says this doesn’t mean “forgo[ing] romantic relationships, pleasure, or touch because those things are essential for the human experience.” While the phrase has seemingly given women permission to live a life free from men, it literally just means not making men the center of your universe.
Still, the idea of decentering men has provided some young women an exit ramp out of the dating world, which has proven to be particularly dire for Gen Z.
TikTok has essentially become a documentary about the horrors of heterosexual dating for young people. On any given scroll, you can find women recounting their awful dating experiences or sharing screenshots of their weird interactions on Hinge. It’s also become normal for users to expose people who they’ve caught cheating on the platform or expose men for talking to multiple women at the same time. There are also plenty of sentiments about Gen Z men and women sabotaging their own dating lives, with safety apps like Tea that are mostly used for gossip and arbitrary demands and red flags for potential partners.
The “decentering men” movement coincides with some studies that show some members of Gen Z simply have less romantic experience or desire to seriously date than previous generations.
Women are also opting against a relationship during a politically fraught time. For example, an NBC News poll in April found the partisan divide between men and women ages 18 to 29 to be wider than that of any other age range, with 53 percent of Gen Z women identifying as Democrats, compared to just 35 percent of Gen Z men. In addition to young men identifying as more conservative, they’re interacting with a digital landscape that’s pushing misogynistic content and has seen the mainstream rise of the “manosphere.”
As young women on TikTok proudly announce their voluntary singlehood, there doesn’t seem to be as much of a fear of being labeled an “old maid” or the “crazy cat lady” for not settling down with a man.
It’s a far cry from the days when Americans “feared for single women’s safety and psychological health when they chose to delay marriage or reject it altogether,” according to Albright College professor Katherine J. Lehman, who wrote the book Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Pop Culture.
“At least in post-World War II America, we have been taught to see the nuclear family as the primary social unit, and have encouraged women to prioritize marriage and motherhood for both their own well-being and societal stability,” Lehman says.
While some of this stigma has lessened over time, Lehman adds that “single women who pursue independence” are “still warned about losing their femininity or facing loneliness.”
For a lot of Gen Z, though, it seems like women have a collective understanding of finding a partner as a difficult and potentially humiliating pursuit.
Overall, this has allowed many young women to discover the more practical benefits of being a single person, including financial freedom and a lack of household responsibilities that can come with being partnered, says social scientist Bella DePaulo, author of the book Single at Heart. Most of all, there’s the endless possibilities of one’s time solely belonging to themselves.
“Contrary to stereotypes, single life, rather than being a smaller or lesser life, can be a more expansive and psychologically rich life,” she said. “Rather than putting a romantic partner at the center of your life and demoting everyone else, single people can spend as much time as they want with as many different people they want, without worrying that a romantic partner thinks that time belongs to them.”
2025-12-30 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Every year at the Oscars, attendees leave with gift bags so elaborate they have to be reported as income to the IRS. Luxury skincare, personal training sessions, designer apples that never brown, and extravagant trips are standard issue. But in 2025, Academy Award guests also received a grimmer gift: a yearlong subscription to a white-glove disaster recovery service called Bright Harbor, which has grown popular in the wake of the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles last January.
If your house is destroyed in a fire or flood, the basic logistics of righting your upturned life understandably consume your full attention, even if you’re a movie star. Under this level of stress, navigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s byzantine requirements for recovery assistance quickly becomes “a full-time job,” according to Bright Harbor’s chief growth officer, Emily Bush. “We help you understand what your options are and what’s the cost associated with each option that you take.”
Do you stay and rebuild? Does it make more sense to just move? Bright Harbor helps clients freeze their mortgage payments, apply for FEMA aid, navigate seemingly endless paperwork, and secure low-interest small business loans. Bush acknowledged that the company’s luxury services, which can significantly ease the financial burden of disasters, do not come at a cost that all victims can afford to front. (Services started at $300 per month for individuals when the company launched in 2024, but Bright Harbor now sells directly to companies — who purchase coverage for their employees.)
“To be clear,” she said, “I think the government should pay for this.”
It technically does. FEMA money is funneled to disaster relief nonprofits that then hire case managers to guide victims through the recovery process. But even before President Donald Trump took office with an eye toward diminishing the agency, recovery funds couldn’t keep up with victims’ needs. Now, as the administration slashes FEMA funding, withholds aid, and puts more of the onus of recovery onto individual states, victim-assistance organizations feel that they’ve been left totally unprepared, with too few case managers to go around. All of these issues are likely to grow more severe in the coming year, as a review board appointed to reform the agency prepares to make its recommendations.
That a service like Bright Harbor found a strong foothold in the US is not surprising. The private sector’s creeping influence over disaster recovery has been noted since at least 2007, when Naomi Klein published The Shock Doctrine, the book that injected the term “disaster capitalism” into a broader lexicon. But as climate change accelerates and hammers the United States with more billion-dollar catastrophes than ever before, privatization has become more common — and complicated. Private interests can quickly mobilize huge volunteer networks, giving campaigns, and rebuilding efforts in the wake of extreme weather. But, whatever their intentions, such measures are a consequence — and sometimes a cause — of the corrosion of public institutions originally intended to safeguard Americans.
For Klein, Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for disaster capitalism. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that would go on to draft Trump’s Project 2025 policies, held a meeting on disaster relief in New Orleans just two weeks after the storm in 2005. The group recommended suspending wage laws for recovery contractors, replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, and halting environmental regulations to reestablish oil and gas production that had been stalled by the storm.
The vision they set forth would shape disaster recovery for decades. In New Orleans, public housing was demolished, the public hospital was shuttered, and the federal government rapidly took over the public school system and set about turning it over to a charter network funded largely through private philanthropy. Over 7,000 teachers and staff members were fired, forcing veteran educators to reapply for their jobs, competing against a flood of Teach for America recruits who were largely whiter, less experienced, and from outside the city.
Many residents saw this as a mercenary response to the storm, made possible by decades of disinvestment in city services, but they weren’t unilaterally opposed to the charter system. “I think it’s important to avoid romanticizing the system pre-Katrina,” said Jesse Chanin, a professor of sociology at Tulane University and the author of Building Power, Breaking Power: The United Teachers of New Orleans, 1965-2008. Before Katrina, the school district was so underfunded that teachers didn’t have enough books and desks for their students. “A teacher told me the other day, ‘Once, I was walking and my foot just went right through the floor,’” said Chanin. The high school graduation rate hovered around 50 percent, truancy was rampant, and corruption was so widespread that the FBI had set up an office within the New Orleans Parish school board.
But while the charter network was an improvement in many ways — private philanthropy poured money into the new schools and test scores and graduation rates markedly improved — it was also marked by instability. The system ran on a portfolio model: Schools that performed well received increased funding, while schools that struggled were shuttered, their students transferred elsewhere. Because there was such a strong incentive to keep test scores up, struggling students were often pushed out of the best schools into charters that would quickly fold. Such measures, and specifically a lawsuit alleging that the schools were not providing adequate special education services, led the federal government to monitor the city’s charter schools for the past 15 years.
The fact that the charter schools are so siloed — some belong to larger networks, while others operate as one-off schools — has also undermined the strength of the teachers’ union. Critics say that all of this has allowed charter schools to pay employees poorly, eliminate transparency, and provide uneven and inequitable education in exchange for moderately improved test scores. “I think it’s really hard to attribute test score success to the model of charter schools and not to the incredible influx of money and resources into the district,” Chanin said. But Chanin added that undoing the charter system and starting from scratch might not be the answer, either. The city opened its first district-run public school since the storm, and it’s already facing serious challenges.
Schools weren’t the only service that succumbed to the shock doctrine in post-Katrina New Orleans. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shut public housing residents out of their buildings shortly after the storm. Protests erupted, but pleas for help fell on deaf ears. “Many of the powerful players were basically announcing that this [was] the silver lining,” said John Arena, a professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island who was a housing activist in New Orleans at the time. “This is a horrible opportunity to do things that we couldn’t do under normal conditions.” Seventy percent of public housing was ultimately destroyed and replaced with mixed-income developments built by private developers. Reports estimate that roughly half of public housing residents were permanently displaced in the wake of Katrina.
“’Recovery’ has become kind of a misnomer,” said Luis Miron, the former director of Loyola University’s Institute for Quality and Equity in Public Education. “People still haven’t recovered.”
More than 20 years later and 2,000 miles away, disaster capitalism is picking up steam in Puerto Rico. In September, Gov. Jenniffer González Colón held a press conference announcing a new law that would allow more residents of the archipelago to obtain property titles to their homes. Land in Puerto Rico is often passed down through individual families without any formal documentation. This caused a crisis after Hurricane Maria struck in 2017, as many residents couldn’t prove they owned the land they’d lived on for years, and therefore could not collect disaster relief funds.
But in the middle of the press conference, the lights abruptly went out.
Puerto Rico’s electrical grid was in bad shape before Maria, but blackouts have become routine in the years since the storm. Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 155 miles per hour, destroying the archipelago’s power grid, knocking out power for 80 percent of residents, and setting off the largest blackout in United States history.
For many, it took nearly a year for power to be restored. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) declared bankruptcy and became the subject of a federal investigation after it was revealed that the utility operator had handed a $300 million contract to rebuild the grid over to a tiny, two-person Montana-based company called Whitefish Energy, which had little experience and close ties to Trump’s secretary of the Department of the Interior at the time, Ryan Zinke. PREPA was later embroiled in a number of bribery scandals, plus instances in which it extorted customers in exchange for reconnecting them to power after Maria and bought low-quality oil while charging ratepayers high-quality oil prices for roughly three decades. Given the internal drama at PREPA, it wasn’t difficult for authorities to make the case that privatization was the only way to modernize the grid.
“I call it the predator economy,” said Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan. “My grandmother used to say, ‘When people are so desperate, they will drink sand if someone markets it the right way.’” In 2021, then-Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced that the transmission and distribution of electricity, along with the reconstruction of the grid, would be handed off to a company called Luma — a Canadian-American company that has thus far failed to fulfill its promises to deliver reliable electricity. Blackouts and power surges (which often destroy electrical devices) are common.
The result is that Puerto Rico has become “generator island,” said Gustavo García-López, an assistant researcher at the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. “The pollution levels of generators are really high — not only air pollution, which is the main concern, but also noise. I remember after Maria, living in the city with the generators around, the smell and the noise that they make is really unbearable, especially at night.” And even though the grid is often nonfunctional, residents’ power bills have nearly doubled since the storm. The change was sold “under the auspices of ‘if it’s private, it’s better,’” said Cruz. “But, my god — LUMA could not suck more if they tried.”
Luma took control with a vow to decentralize the grid and incorporate more renewable energy, keeping generation in line with Puerto Rico’s 2019 Energy Policy Act, which set a goal of 40 percent renewables by 2025. But as of late 2024, fossil fuels still generated 93 percent of the archipelago’s energy. Luma has argued that it inherited a crumbling grid and a power supply that’s insufficient to meet customer demand. The territory’s power plants are managed by Genera Energy, a subsidiary of the troubled New Fortress Energy, a natural gas company that critics say has kept the territory dependent on fossil fuels at the expense of reliability. According to PREPA’s most recent fiscal plan, performance has grown steadily worse over the past few years, with customers seeing approximately 15 percent more service interruptions and 21 percent longer outages in December 2024 compared to March 2023.
As in New Orleans, Puerto Rico was vulnerable to these tactics because of years of disinvestment. In June 2016, former President Barack Obama signed into law the Puerto Rico Oversight and Management Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which would essentially lead the territory through a court-supervised bankruptcy process. Eight years later, Puerto Rico is still primarily controlled by the unelected financial oversight board established by PROMESA. The board handed many assets over to private interests after the hurricane. Charter schools, previously shut out of Puerto Rico, began to make inroads; the water system was nearly privatized; and toll roads were sold off to multinational corporations like Goldman Sachs.
“There’s a debt crisis, so there’s no public funds to fix anything,” said Marisol Lebron, an associate professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, and the author of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. “Puerto Ricans are left holding the bag in a lot of ways, for both the failures of the state, but also the failures of these private entities that are claiming to be able to do the job better and cheaper than the government.”
But even privatization has its limits. While major cities and territories are lucrative targets for private interests, disasters often devastate remote regions, where asset values are low and labor is hard to come by. “For small towns, the private sector is not going to step in if it’s not a money-making business,” said Divya Chandrasekhar, a professor of city and metropolitan planning at the University of Utah, adding that depopulating areas in particular struggle to attract private investment. In remote parts of California, for instance, an alarming firefighting staffing crisis has left many small towns without adequate protection. Offers of private firefighting services — hired by insurance companies to protect their assets, or the very wealthy to protect their property — have risen accordingly. Critics, including city and state firefighters, have called for the regulation of these private services, arguing that they can hamper rescue efforts and pull badly needed water from public hydrants. During the Los Angeles fires in January, billionaire Rick Caruso hired a private company to protect the Palisades Village mall, which he owns, while nearby homes burned.
While climate change is poised to exacerbate familiar inequities like these, experts point to the opacity of privatized public services as a cause for growing concern. As more companies begin to incorporate artificial intelligence into their daily operations, it’s important for municipalities to look very carefully at the restrictions being placed on contractors and public-private partnerships.
“You can imagine a situation where a community has been impacted by a natural disaster. We’re going to give temporary housing to people, but this AI system is going to make the determination whether they qualify for this or not. I mean, that could be really problematic,” said Shahrzad Habibi, the research and policy director at In the Public Interest, a nonprofit that studies public goods and services. “I just think there’s an interesting philosophical underpinning on all of this. What are public goods? What do we, as a society, think everybody should be entitled to? And when do we, as a society, think you’re on your own?”
2025-12-30 19:12:00
We’re used to seeing Serena Williams on our TVs, muscles flexing, smashing a tennis ball past her opponent. But in a recent 30-second commercial, Williams traded the racket for a GLP-1 drug injector pen.
Williams, whose most recent child was born in 2023, has become a spokeswoman in her post-retirement days for Ro, one of the many boutique health care firms to get in on the GLP-1 craze. “They say GLP-1s for weight loss is a shortcut — it’s not. It’s science,” she says during the spot. “After kids, it’s the medicine my body needed.”
• Patients should be eating a protein-rich, balanced diet and doing some kind of strength training when on an GLP-1 medication.
• Some patients taking GLP-1 drugs have experienced significant muscle loss and weakness.
• Experts worry that too many patients may be trying to use GLP-1 drugs as a shortcut instead of improving their diet and exercise to lose weight.
Here is one of the world’s greatest athletes, giving voice — in commercials running during primetime TV, on the Today show, and on social media — to a frustration that many people have felt. She gained weight after she had kids. And even though, in her words, she was “doing everything right” after the pregnancy, she couldn’t cut as much weight as she liked. That’s where the GLP-1 drug came in and delivered results: Williams lost 31 pounds.
But there’s just one problem with the pitch: GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are, in some ways, a shortcut.
“Americans always want the fucking pill,” Dr. Robert Lustig, a metabolic scientist at the University of California-San Francisco, told me. “I view GLP-1s like a Band-Aid. … There’s nothing wrong with a Band-Aid. But what if you didn’t clean your wound and you just put the Band-Aid on? The Band-Aid is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.”
The consequences of patients slapping on the Band-Aid — taking a GLP-1 — without treating the underlying issue with the kind of healthy eating and exercise that are still necessary even with these drugs is becoming clear. Scientists have found that some GLP-1 patients can lose significant muscle mass, as well as a loss of functional strength, due to a lack of energy. Rather than feel fitter and ready to go out in the world or onto the tennis court, these are patients who find walking up the stairs to be almost debilitating.
For this story, I sought to understand how this is playing out in American culture. In searching Reddit communities dedicated to GLP-1 drugs, I found lots of normal people whose experience backed up that research: They had long tried to lose weight but could never quite meet their goals — until they went on a GLP-1 drug.
But even as they lost weight, they didn’t feel better. Some of them felt worse, weaker. There are dozens of posts of GLP-1 patients coming to their peers, asking for advice about workouts they could do to stem the muscle loss. A few hope to find the right diet that will allow them to feel energetic and avoid muscle loss while losing the weight — but without having to commit to strength training that needs to go along with it.
While the term “strength training” may conjure images of ripped bodybuilders, doctors increasingly emphasize the importance of muscle training for all of their patients, from the 30-year-old marathon runner to the 65-year-old retiree. That’s because research has shown that more lean muscle helps you age better and protects against hazards, such as falls, that pose a greater and greater threat as you get older.
These drugs are already wildly popular, and their use is likely to keep growing. In November, the Trump administration struck deals with Lilly and Novo Nordisk to lower the cash price of their drugs in exchange for expanded Medicare coverage. Those price changes, which will begin to take effect next year, could further grow the number of Americans taking these medications, including among seniors for whom any loss of muscle mass is a serious health concern. One quarter of GLP-1 prescriptions dispensed in 2024 were for people older than 65.
Falls are already one of the most potent killers of older adults; more than 40,000 Americans over 65 died from falls in 2023, and the death rate has tripled since 1990. If more patients start taking semaglutide for its effects on cognition, for example, and fail to eat and exercise properly, they could experience malnourishment and significant muscle loss; both could put their long-term health at risk.
That doesn’t mean GLP-1 drugs are a bad deal for public health. On the population level, obesity is associated with a host of major ills, and Americans have long been desperate to lose weight. The class of drugs that includes Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and now countless others — Zepbound, compound GLP-1s, etc. — are the most impressive weight-loss tools we’ve ever seen. They work because they slow digestion and tell your brain you’re full, which makes it easier for people to eat less. While these treatments are still fairly new, observational studies have found that patients who stay on these drugs for a year or more can lose 10 percent of their body weight on average. And on the population level, obesity rates are already starting to decline.
Scientists are also discovering that these drugs have amazing potential to treat a breadth of issues: from addressing substance-abuse disorders, lowering your risk for heart disease, and even potentially preventing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Recent studies have found that taking a GLP-1 like Wegovy or Ozempic is even associated with lower cancer deaths.
But to stem the risk of muscle-mass loss, you must also be willing to commit to improving your diet and adopting a serious workout regimen over the long term. GLP-1 drugs may be magical when it comes to weight loss, but they are not magic pills. Which means that along with the rise of Ozempic and other GLP-1s is a coming reckoning over America’s shortcut culture.
Plenty of athletes who are not world-famous see the same appeal in GLP-1 drugs that Serena Williams did.
One person in particular stood out to me. A self-identified weight lifter, CrossFit enthusiast, and horse rider, who I’ll call Sam, shared their experience on Reddit. They explained they had always struggled to lose weight despite strict meal preparation and eating a lot of protein.
And so, Sam started taking Wegovy. ”I’m happy with the results,” they said — before getting to a pretty big caveat for somebody who’s always had an active life.
Despite aiming to eat 100 grams of protein every day, they said they were feeling weak. “I swear I can feel my muscle being broken down. Is this a thing??” Sam asked in the online forum. “I actually feel less firm, more wobbly and flabby. I seem to have less definition,“ they said. “Is this just a necessary evil to weight loss?”
GLP-1 drugs are undeniably exciting, and they are being widely adopted. I recently found out a family member of my own had started taking them, and they’re not the kind of person who’s susceptible to diet fads either. As a reporter, that makes me nervous: Anything that sounds too good to be true probably is.
It would be wonderful if GLP-1 drugs could cure Alzheimer’s, but we probably need to think through the trade-offs. And I started to pick up from other reporting and social media feeds I follow that some people were experiencing this unexpected muscle loss. I thought it would be valuable to unpack the science to explain why this happens to some people and explain what they can do to avoid it.
The internet is filled with examples just like this. “Anyone else having a hard time working out on Wegovy?” asked one Reddit poster last year. They even felt their arms were weaker while bowling. Another person realized something was wrong when they could no longer do yard work around the house. Other people have noticed leg weakness after light walking or climbing the stairs: “I actually struggle to go up a staircase and I’m only 32,” said one GLP-1 patient.
“I know a lot of people are working out, and I do need to begin exercising on top of the wegovy, but I’m just wondering if anyone else is experiencing extreme weakness or if it’s just me and my un-toned self,” they asked.
Sam’s post in particular had a lot of comments, with one respondent even urging the patient to reconsider: You are “a strong, capable goddess. You don’t need to lose weight.” Accept who you are. In response, Sam laid out the dilemma that so many people who have sought to lose weight over the years face: “Unfortunately, some of us just do NOT lose weight with diet and exercise.”
It’s true: Weight loss is not assured from diet and exercise. Some people have a genetic disposition to becoming obese. And not everybody who is obese is unhealthy; the body mass index is an imperfect measurement, and some people who are technically obese can still be healthy if much of their weight is muscle. Still, the realization that obesity is a disease to be treated, rather than a personal failure that can only be remedied through personal growth, has been important in reducing the prejudices that overweight people have long faced.
But at the same time, it is a slippery slope from acknowledging diet and exercise may not be sufficient on their own to thinking a drug like Ozempic can make them unnecessary. Some people, like Sam, have always exercised and viewed GLP-1s as an extra push to help them reach their weight goals. But I also encountered other people who did not necessarily have healthy habits before but were able with the drugs to cut weight for the first time. One patient on Reddit acknowledged that they don’t work out and they don’t adhere to a particular diet. They have been losing weight, but they are “scared” about losing too much weight — so they ask if they can just eat more chicken or drink a protein shake and regain the muscle “without working out.”
They have reason for concern: The same clinical trials that have shown how effective GLP-1 drugs are with weight loss have also consistently reported muscle loss or weakness among patients. When one group of researchers evaluated the type of body mass that patients on semaglutide drugs were losing, they found that about 40 percent was important muscle.
The GLP-1 market is only going to grow as the drugs prove useful for a wide array of treatments. People, including those who are not overweight, may take them preventively to stave off cardiovascular disease or dementia. For them, people who are already at a healthy weight, muscle loss is an even more serious concern. If GLP-1 drugs do prove to be promising for treating age-related cognitive decline, for example, then appropriate diet and exercise will be even more paramount for that patient population. The last thing we want is more seniors suffering catastrophic injuries during a fall because of lost muscle mass.
But understanding what exactly is causing the muscle loss is important. Scientists are still figuring that out, but early indications are that the cause is not the drugs themselves but some of the lifestyle changes the drugs can lead to.
One study from researchers at the University of Utah suggests the loss of strength is largely the result of not eating enough calories. In their research on mice, they found less muscle mass loss than expected. Instead, after taking a GLP-1, mice were losing their functional strength — how much they could lift or move around — even when muscle size stayed the same. In other words, the mice appeared weaker even though their muscle mass hadn’t changed.
“Strength is not just a factor of how much muscle you have, but whether you can move that muscle effectively. There’s an energetic component to it,” lead author Katsu Funai told me. The animals on a GLP-1 drug may have had less energy because they were eating less — and therefore they wouldn’t be able to exert as much force with their muscles. It’s not the GLP-1s per se; it’s what the GLP-1s lead to without intervention.
The findings could inform how we prescribe Ozempic, Funai said: Smaller doses might help to mitigate the loss of functional strength. Otherwise, losing weight too quickly is going to mean losing energy quickly — and therefore feeling weaker. In the excitement over Ozempic, and the potential to lose a lot of weight and fast, people seem to have forgotten a fundamental truth about weight loss: “More is not necessarily better,” Funai said.
Before GLP-1 drugs existed at all, dieticians urged their patients to pace weight loss — no more than 1-2 pounds per week — for exactly this reason: You don’t want to end up malnourished and weakened. With a conventional diet, that can often lead to you eating more, which in turn eliminates the weight loss. But when your appetite is suppressed by GLP-1s, the weight loss can continue, and with it, strength and energy loss.
“With these GLP-1s, that conversation [about diet and exercise] has been sidelined,” Funai said. “There are nuances to these things that I think are being missed not just from the public, but also from scientists,”
Ironically, the very problem that GLP-1s were meant to overcome — that many Americans simply struggle to eat right and exercise enough — remains just as central even with the drugs.
And many of the people taking GLP-1s are starting at a disadvantage: Only 49 percent of Americans say they are extremely or very confident that they know what a healthy diet looks like, and about twice as many say they should get more exercise.
If your sole goal is to lose weight, a GLP-1 alone could get you there — but not in the healthiest way. Unless you change what you eat, you’re still putting the same junk in your body — albeit less of it — with the same or more negative effects on your energy and stamina.
“If you don’t change your behavior, if you don’t change your habits, you may be looking good, you may be losing weight, but metabolically, your body is in turmoil,” said Nayan Patel, a pharmacist who works with patients taking the drugs. “We’ve got to use these drugs in the right manner.”
So what should people on GLP-1s aim to eat? A high-protein diet delivering a lot of amino acids is important, Patel said: Eggs, nuts, lentils, poultry, and fish are all good sources. You can cut down on the carbs and sugars; your body won’t need them to produce energy because you’ll be cutting fat. Eating protein and strength training allows your body to be more effective at trimming the fat, without compromising your core strength.
Like anything hard but worth doing, there’s a lot to overcome. Many Americans have become intimidated by gym culture, so they might prefer to work out in privacy, at home — but they don’t know how. One person I encountered posted online to crowdsource advice on home equipment and routines. They said they didn’t want to go to a gym, but “I know I’m out of shape,” the poster confessed to their fellow Redditors.
The thread flooded with advice from simple workout routines to try to role models they could follow on social media. The advice included some very approachable strategies — something as simple as sitting in a chair with your legs outstretched and using your abdominal muscles to lift them from side to side over a water bottle. Some commenters recommended incorporating a resistance band and a workout ball. Health care providers have developed general recommendations for patients taking a GLP-1 drug: Mass General, for example, advises a mixture of 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise — activities like walking or riding a bike — or about 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise like jogging or swimming laps in addition to two days of weight training and a steady dose of stretching and flexibility workouts.
While I found plenty of people concerned with unexpected muscle loss, there were also examples of patients proudly showing off their lean and muscular new physiques. It can be done.
But in this vision, GLP-1s are a jumpstart, not a shortcut. “Losing weight is everybody’s goal. Using a drug to jumpstart is an excellent way to do the process,” Patel said. “But if you’re not taking the first two steps, you’ll stumble until you fall flat on your face.”
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.
2025-12-30 03:30:00
If one elected official had a breakout year in 2025, it’s New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. The 34-year-old former state assembly member came out of nowhere to win a Democratic primary that included established names such as incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Then, Mamdani won the election his way, lapping opponents with a modern campaign that effectively used social media, brought in new voters, and embraced his history of pro-Palestinian activism and longtime affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America.
But since his win in November, Mamdani has had to confront the challenges of governance. Sweeping campaign promises like fast and free buses, universal child care, and a citywide rent freeze for government-subsidized apartments will require, at minimum, continued public pressure to make them reality.
He has angered some progressives by retaining NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and refusing to support a primary challenger against Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. Even more, Republicans (and some moderate Democrats) have sought to turn Mamdani into an avatar of incompetence, a boogeyman for left-wing politics ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Against that backdrop, Mamdani recently sat down with Today, Explained at his campaign headquarters in Manhattan to discuss his administration’s priorities, his plans for keeping his coalition together, and how he’s prepared himself for City Hall.
Throughout the discussion, Mamdani stressed that he believes he will ultimately be judged by one thing — his ability to deliver on his affordability agenda. Everything else, he said, comes second.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a special reported section in our episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. Early access to the full video interview is available right now on Vox’s Patreon.
We’re glad to talk to you at this point because we want to focus on the transition. We know that mayoral transitions can sometimes be the high-water mark for elected officials. I recently saw that you were +15 in your own favorability. How do you reverse what has been a historic trend? How do you make sure that this moment that you’re taking office is not the end of something but the beginning?
I think I am aided by the fact that I have not given much weight to polls and favorability in the past, which is part of the reason why I’m sitting in front of you, because I didn’t even have enough recognition to have favorability done at the beginning of this race.
So I think it comes back to the fact that we ran a race on an affordability agenda. It spoke to New Yorkers living in the most expensive city in the United States. We have to now deliver on that agenda. I think the premise of your point is that this is the moment of hope, and then the question of what comes next.
And even beyond the transition as a high-water mark, oftentimes in campaigns, there’s already a temptation of nostalgia for what the campaign was. We have to ensure the campaign is not the story we look back on. It’s the path to the story that we’ve yet to start. And I think that comes back to delivery. That comes back to freezing the rent, making buses fast and free, delivering universal child care. You have to transform people’s lives in a way that they can actually touch and feel and hold onto so that they’re not just grasping at the memories of what the struggle was like.
I feel like the first clues of how you all planned to do that came in the transition. You all had some unique moments putting out these explanatory videos about semi-mundane process things — like, the baseball cards for staff appointments. We were at the event that you all held last week at the Museum of the Moving Image. Why do that stuff?
I think there’s a temptation when you win — we’ve seen it in the past — to say, “Now trust me, you can go home.” The point of me winning is we keep fighting for the same agenda together. And that means you bring people along with you, and you also demystify what it is that you’re doing. I mean, this transition period is probably the most opaque period, typically because it’s between a campaign and governance, and most New Yorkers are never brought into it.
Sounds like the demystifying efforts are connected to what has been described as an inside-out strategy — that to achieve the goal of delivering, you feel as if you have to keep the public engaged. You have to keep that public pressure going.
You do. And I think there’s often a description as if the campaign ends and governance begins with the implication that you leave people behind. And in many ways, you have to keep going in the same kind of manner.
How does that get harder once you’re in office? To your point about the ways that campaigns and transitions kind of create a sense of unity, once the inauguration happens, everything becomes Mayor Mamdani’s problem. How do you reverse the trend of the public disengaging at that moment?
I think you have to do the work to create actual opportunities for engagement as opposed to vague invitations.
For 12 hours, I sat at the Museum of the Moving Image, and I listened to New Yorkers — more than 140 New Yorkers came to share their stories with me. And the point of that is not just to say I listened, it’s to actually take what they’re saying and then act upon it. And some of the concerns were large.
They were the concerns of undocumented New Yorkers sharing with me the immense fear that they live with on a day-to-day basis. And I think this idea that in fact governing could be informed by the people you’re governing for, as opposed to treating New Yorkers as if they’re just subjects.
And I think that’s the approach we’ve tried to take over the course of the transition. And also the understanding that, in order for people to act upon something, they have to know about something. We even take that approach to rights in this moment when so many New Yorkers are fearful of ICE agents and the potential of immigration enforcement, as we’ve seen it take place across the city. We thought it was important to remind every New Yorker of their own rights and so that — the only way they can exercise them is if they know about them.
Is there any argument, though, that this is a little glitz and glamor? I mean, these were largely supporters of yours. Did you hear criticism? Did you hear any critiques of your campaign from some of those New Yorkers?
Any gathering of New Yorkers has to have some critique; otherwise it’s not a gathering of New Yorkers. And I think there’s critique in a fear of, are you going to be able to deliver on these things? Because there’s a fear of “Should I have believed in this?” And my job, and our job, in building a team is to showcase the seriousness with which we took those commitments and how we actually deliver them.
You know, one New Yorker spoke to me about how their number one concern was about casinos. And I shared with them that I’m skeptical of the economic development promises that come with casinos, and I also know that there’s a referendum that was passed by voters that creates the citation of three casinos within New York City. And I can’t actually change that myself. And the frustration of knowing that this is something that person does not want, and you cannot help them.
I know that you previously had said that you wanted a team that did not have policy litmus tests, that you wanted folks with differing opinions on that transition team. Has the staff you put in place lived up to that?
Absolutely. I think you’ll see that appointments are not simply a reflection of myself, and I think there’s a tendency sometimes to just look to reproduce yourself, your ideas, your preferences in each and every person you hire. What you do, if you’re to do that, is create the conditions where everyone in the room is measured by the quickness with which they can say yes to you and yes to any one of your ideas. You need to build a team where people can also say no to you, where people can push you, where you are able to have the debate inside the room as opposed to waiting to have the debate outside the room. And I think that, in the appointments we’ve made thus far, it’s not demanding alignment on each and every issue. It’s asking, do you believe in the agenda at hand, and do you have a vision for this specific position that shows you can fulfill that?
You know, at the same time, there’s folks who have been frustrated with that, have thought that some of this coalition-building has maybe betrayed the movement that got you here. I’m thinking about the appointment of Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. I’m thinking about a vocal rejection of a Democratic challenger to Hakeem Jeffries in Brooklyn. My question is, have you had to embrace a different side of yourself? Do you hear any of the critiques that we’re seeing of “insider Mamdani” these days?
I think you have to, first and foremost, take these critiques in good faith. As you win an election, you can start to tell yourself stories that any critique is critique you have to keep far away from you. People don’t understand. That is how you become removed from the reason you did this in the first place.
When you engage with it, you separate the good faith from the bad faith. And I think taking this in good faith, I understand the criticism that those have shared. I also think that it is important that it’s not just a reproduction of self in every single appointment and that we understand that, for example, with the NYPD, my decision in retaining Commissioner Tisch is a decision on the basis of looking at her record of coming into an NYPD that the Adams administration had stacked the upper echelons of with corruption and incompetence and starting to root that out while lowering crime across the five boroughs.
Making this decision not only in recognition of that, but also to fulfill the larger public safety vision that we had laid out over the course of the campaign, which focused on the creation of a department of community safety that will tackle the mental health crisis, the homelessness crisis. With the commitments I’ve made specific to the NYPD, like the disbanding of the strategic response group—
Those things still happen.
That still happens, and I think that’s what’s important to make clear to New Yorkers is that the things that we campaigned on, these are still things that we will fulfill. We will do so with the teams that we’re building around us.
One question I have is: there’s so much national and international focus on both the campaign and your administration going forward, but it’s such a hyperlocal job. How do you balance what will be the intense attention with the reality of who you’re serving?
You have to remember not just that reality, but the point of this is to serve this city, right? It’s not like a reality check. It’s the reason why I did this. It’s the reason why it was possible to weather difficult moments because it’s all in service of a city that I love. There’s some days where it’s hard to believe that my job is traveling around New York City and meeting New Yorkers and listening to their concerns and having the opportunity to act upon them. And I also think the greatest thing you can do is the power of example, of what you can do, what you can succeed, what you can deliver.
Because what we’re talking about right now, the growing sense among New Yorkers that politics is irrelevant to their day-to-day struggles, the inability for our political system to deliver on crises large and small, these are not uniquely New York issues. These are issues that people feel outside of the city, outside of this country, and we have an opportunity to show that by serving New Yorkers, we can also showcase a politics that can serve working people wherever they may be.
I want to look ahead. How would you define the priorities for your agenda? What would you define as success or failure for the Mamdani administration?
It comes back to affordability. The priorities have to be the fulfillment.
Are those the three? Are we talking about buses, child care — What am I missing?
Hit ’em. Come on.
Buses, child care, rent freeze, boom. But what about things like the publicly subsidized grocery stores? Is that a priority too?
Yes.
Well? So it’s all of the above.
I would say that the first order of priorities — like ranking best friends — the first order of priority are the three that we built the campaign around.
Okay.
There are obviously other commitments we made in addition to that. Five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough.
The fulfillment of these things are not just critically important because you’re fulfilling what animated so many to engage with the campaign, to support the campaign, but also because of the impact it can have on New Yorkers’ lives. There’s a lot of politics where it feels like it’s a contest around narrative, that when you win something, it’s just for the story that you can tell of what you won, but so many working people can’t feel that victory in their lives.
The point of a rent freeze is you feel it every first of the month. The point of a fast and free bus is you feel it every day when you’re waiting for a bus that sometimes never comes. The point of universal child care is so that you don’t have to pay $22,500 a year for a single toddler. These are not things I have to explain the worth of to you or an intellectual victory. It is a material one. And so to me, when we talk about the struggles of our democracy, when we talk about a withering faith in it as a political system, we have to understand that the withering of that faith is intensely connected to the inability of that system to deliver on the needs of the people of it.
So success is the big three promises.
Success is the big three.
What about political goals? I mean, I was on cable news today, and they’re talking about the “Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party,” and they’re talking about all challengers facing incumbents and the goal of spreading progressivism, I think specifically socialism, across the country. Is that a goal you share? Do you look out at those challengers and say, that is the Mamdani wing?
I think that anyone fighting for working people and fighting for a politics that doesn’t just think of working people, but puts them at the heart of what it is that we’re doing, is critically important anywhere in this country. I think that for me, this is a moment in time where we have to reckon with why people feel this way about politics, and there is oftentimes an inability to reckon with the failures that have come before us because they implicate a lot of what we’re doing right now.
But the implication is that part of your political project is to spread across the country and to Congress. Is that?
I mean, part of my political project is to spread the fight for working people everywhere, and I think that can mean new candidates. It can also mean a renewed belief amongst those who are already there to fight.
One of the things I also wanted to ask is, it feels like core to the kind of Democratic Party’s questions of moving forward has been what to take from your campaign. I have heard people say everything from, it’s all about social media to kind of separate from the substance. I actually want to read you a quote and have you respond.
Hit me. Is this mean tweets or good tweets?
No, no, no. Not tweets at all. Pete Buttigieg just said, “But I think if my party wants to learn lessons from Mamdani’s success that are portable to a place like Michigan where I live, it’s less about the ideology and more about the message discipline of focusing on what people care about and the tactical wisdom of getting out there and talking to everybody.”
I wanted to know, do you think this is true when we get outside of New York, are we thinking that it’s less about the substance of campaign than tactics? Or can we separate those things?
I don’t think you can fully separate the medium and the message. I think that that person is correct, that you have to have a politics that relates to working people’s lives and their struggles. It can’t be one that needs to be translated. I would also say that yes, there are far more New Yorkers who do not ask me about how I describe my politics and more they ask me, do I fit in that politics?
I also think, however, that if all we did was make videos without a vision and affirmative vision of how working-class New Yorkers could afford this city, then I wouldn’t be seated across from you right now.
There are aspects of this campaign that are very much focused on New York City, right? I don’t know if there’s a rent guidelines board anywhere else in this country that can freeze the rent for more than 2 million tenants. We do have the slowest buses in the country. We do have child care at costs that are astronomical, but the struggle for working people to afford day-to-day life, to afford dignity in the city they call home, that’s not New York City-specific.
And what I would say is wherever anyone is, to ask the people around them, what is the example of that struggle in your life, and what are the tools? And then for you as the candidate to think about what are the tools that government has to intervene in that to actually provide relief to that? Because so often politics feels like an exercise in language and ideas that you need to have been at the last meeting to understand this meeting. And you actually need to meet people wherever they are and not explain to them why they should listen to you, but to actually have a vision that is intuitive for the struggles that they’re living through.
2025-12-29 20:00:00
As we wind toward the end of the year, Vox is taking a look back with some of our best stories of 2025. To build this list, I took recommendations from my colleagues for their favorites and tried to give you a range of topics to dive into. Whether you’re slogging through a day of work or taking some time off, I hope these entertain and inform you. Here they are, presented in no particular order:
In April, Umair Irfan reported on one of the most hopeful clean energy stories of the year: really big batteries. New grid-scale batteries, he writes, are a key ingredient to harnessing the potential of wind and solar energy, as well as a much-needed improvement to America’s archaic grid: “the peanut butter to the chocolate of renewable energy, making all the best traits about clean energy even better and balancing out some of its downsides.”
It’s possible that no one at Vox has had a more interesting year than my colleague Benji Jones, who reported this incredible package of three stories from the island nation of Madagascar, shortly before the country’s government was overthrown in a military coup. Benji covered the crises facing Madagascar’s coral reefs, lemurs, and chameleons — and how conservation efforts can succeed by addressing economic needs as well.
Adam Clark Estes has done so much amazing work this year about the way tech rewires our brains and how to fight back (including experimenting on himself and briefly ruining his life in the process). But this story, about the importance of silence and what we miss out on when we’re constantly listening to podcasts as we move through the world, might be my favorite. I know it’s the one that will most influence my listening — or not listening — in 2026.
With everything happening on the health beat this year, it’s a miracle my colleague Dylan Scott has had time to help co-host the Today, Explained newsletter as well. Somehow he has, though, and he also squeezed in a major scoop this September: He obtained the conclusions of a major alcohol study that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department tried to bury, which found new evidence linking alcohol consumption to cancer mortality. (Vox’s Bryan Walsh has some good news about that, though: Americans drank less in 2025.)
2025 was, unfortunately, a big year for reckoning with the dangers of AI. It’s a dreary beat, but Eric Levitz did it best with this story about one possible apocalypse: what he describes as “fully automated neofeudalism,” where AI helps secure the power of a small caste of oligarchical elites over all the rest of us. The good news, he writes, is we’re not there yet — and just like A Christmas Carol’s Ebenezer Scrooge, there’s still time to stave off that future.
My colleague Zack Beauchamp has done incredible work covering the Trump administration’s assault on democracy this year, drawing from his years of experience covering other countries’ backsliding. Almost a year into Trump 2.0, his February story about the parallels between Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán — and the lessons Americans should take from Hungary’s crisis — is still a vital roadmap.
Vox’s Unexplainable podcast is consistently fun and fascinating, but this episode from July, produced by Byrd Pinkerton, packs a sneaky emotional punch too. She tells the story of the tide pools she loves on the California coastline: how climate change is impacting their delicate ecosystem, and how the researchers who love them too are dealing with that change. The episode ends with a reminder to keep focusing on the things you can control, even when big problems like climate change feel impossibly hard to grasp, and to keep appreciating beauty as you find it. It’s the perfect episode to carry into 2026.
Constance Grady marked the 100th anniversary of the classic novel The Great Gatsby with this account of how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal story came to be and how it has been cemented as an all-time classic, in part through a series of accidents. It’s a perfect reminder of what makes a novel many of us likely haven’t revisited since high school so timeless.
Merriam-Webster tells us that the word of the year in 2025 was “slop” — but “affordability” might be one of the runners-up, at least in US politics (don’t tell Donald Trump). In July, Marina Bolotnikova wrote about a pressing story from the frontier of the American housing market, where America’s spacious, sprawling, affordable suburbs are about to reach their outer limit — and get very expensive. To fix it, she argues, it might be time to look to the Abundance playbook, in 2026 and beyond.
In November, Vox’s Today, Explained podcast covered a late-breaking candidate for one of the biggest stories of the year: The Republican civil war that has erupted over the party’s increasingly clear Nazi problem. Co-host Noel King and the entire Today, Explained team expertly break down what’s happening, how we got here, and the very high stakes for the country.
In addition to this newsletter, I also host Vox’s The Logoff. That means I spend a lot of time thinking about two things: Donald Trump, and the best ways to actually log off, flee the internet, and reclaim a little bit of brain space from a nonstop news cycle. This story, from Allie Volpe, was one of my favorite Logoff recs of the year: She writes that we should all stop letting a messy house keep us from hosting, and prioritize spending more time with our friends instead. I’m going to try to do more of that in 2026, and I hope you do too!
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