Preview: Nvidia reported earnings after the bell. Here are the results.

Preview: Comcast may be proceeding with a transaction as a signal to the rest of the media industry that consolidation is necessary.

Preview: Both discounters are contending with price-conscious shoppers, but Walmart reported improving trends with discretionary merchandise.

Preview: Gautam Adani and others are charged in the New York indictment with paying Indian government officials $250 million to secure solar energy supply contracts.

Preview: In its most recent quarter, McDonald's reported earnings and revenue that topped expectations, but saw its same-store sales fall globally by 1.5%.

Preview: Delta, the most profitable U.S. airline, expects to expand capacity by no more than 4% year-over-year in 2025.

Preview: American Airlines plans to roll out the new technology to 100 airports across the country.

Preview: The average NHL team is worth $1.92 billion, and recent transactions are commanding revenue multiples that rival deals done in the MLB.

Preview: The NHL's Utah Hockey Club is solidifying Salt Lake City as the next sports hub, with the help of a fast-growing economy and tech billionaire Ryan Smith.

Preview: Target missed on earnings and revenue even as it cut prices on thousands of items, including milk, diapers and toys, to try to attract discerning shoppers.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: IT BEGINS: COMCAST TO SPIN OFF NETWORKS... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: MSNBC MAY CHANGE NAME! STREAMING KILLED THE CABLE STAR... 'We Could Be Fired Tomorrow'... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: MSNBC MAY CHANGE NAME! (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: IT BEGINS: COMCAST TO SPIN OFF NETWORKS... STREAMING KILLED THE CABLE STAR... 'We Could Be Fired Tomorrow'...

Preview: STREAMING KILLED THE CABLE STAR... (Top headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: IT BEGINS: COMCAST TO SPIN OFF NETWORKS... MSNBC MAY CHANGE NAME! 'We Could Be Fired Tomorrow'...

Preview: 'We Could Be Fired Tomorrow'... (Top headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: IT BEGINS: COMCAST TO SPIN OFF NETWORKS... MSNBC MAY CHANGE NAME! STREAMING KILLED THE CABLE STAR... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: NUCLEAR 'RED LINE' (Main headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: UKRAINE BATTLE 1,000TH DAY BIDEN APPROVES LAND MINES

Preview: UKRAINE BATTLE 1,000TH DAY (Main headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: NUCLEAR 'RED LINE' BIDEN APPROVES LAND MINES

Preview: BIDEN APPROVES LAND MINES (Main headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: NUCLEAR 'RED LINE' UKRAINE BATTLE 1,000TH DAY Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: Suicide pod creator speaks out after first customer dies with 'strangle marks'... (First column, 1st story, link)

Preview: Kissinger's final warning: Prepare now for 'superhuman' people to control Earth... (First column, 2nd story, link)

Preview: Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking US Soldiers and Spies to Nuke Vaults and Brothels in Germany... (First column, 3rd story, link) Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: 30 years after South Carolina killer mom Susan Smith was put behind bars for drowning her two toddler sons, she will appear for her first parole hearing on Wednesday morning.

Preview: A Georgia judge on Wednesday reached a verdict for Jose Ibarra, the suspect accused of murdering Augusta University student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus in February.

Preview: The FBI indicted former poll worker Nicholas Wimbish, 25, for allegedly mailing a bomb threat to a polling place.

Preview: New York City Mayor Eric Adams called on state leaders for help containing the city's mentally unwell homeless after repeat convict allegedly killed 3 people.

Preview: An illegal immigrant with suspected gang ties has been charged with breaking into a New York City prosecutor's apartment, robbing her and committing "a lewd act."

Preview: The leader of a Washington, D.C., preschool was arrested in an alleged child exploitation case being investigated by the FBI, the Justice Department says.

Preview: Florida and federal investigators detail the work that led to the arrest of three gang members for an alleged check fraud conspiracy.

Preview: Brittany Patterson, 41, is fighting against potential jail time after deputies arrested her over her 10-year-old son's unsupervised walk into town.

Preview: A pentagon official told Congress Tuesday that the agency has solved a prominent UFO mystery from 2016 which showed what appears to be an object flying at a high speed just above water.

Preview: A forensic psychiatrist revealed Jordan Neely suffered from schizophrenic delusions and abused synthetic marijuana, two factors in increased violent behavior.

Preview: NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Third Quarter Fiscal 2025  NVIDIA Blog Nvidia nearly doubles revenue on strong AI demand  CNBC Nvidia Doubles Profit as A.I. Chip Sales Soar  The New York Times Nvidia On Deck. Will Report Spark Rally? (Live Coverage)  Investor's Business Daily Morning Bid: Nvidia beats, but fails to provide spark  Yahoo Finance

Preview: Senate Democrats request Matt Gaetz case files from the FBI  The Washington Post Ethics Committee deadlocks on releasing Matt Gaetz sex, drug probe report  CNBC ‘Betrayed the process’: Rep. Susan Wild speaks out against House Ethics Chairman over Gaetz report  MSNBC Trump Transition Live Updates: Vance Takes Matt Gaetz to Meet With Senators  The New York Times Gaetz AG Confirmation Updates: Report On Sexual Misconduct Claims Stuck In Limbo As Gaetz Lobbies GOP Lawmakers  Forbes

Preview: Venezuelan Migrant Found Guilty of Killing Laken Riley in Georgia  The New York Times Laken Riley murder trial: Jose Ibarra found guilty of killing nursing student, sentenced to life in prison without parole  Yahoo! Voices Laken Riley's friends and family share statements ahead of Jose Ibarra's sentencing  Fox News Live updates: Laken Riley murder suspect Jose Ibarra found guilty on all charges  CNN Laken Riley Murder Trial: Jose Ibarra Found Guilty of Killing Georgia Nursing Student  The New York Times

Preview: Western embassies in Kyiv shut due to Russian air attack threat  NPR Analysis: US embassy’s temporary closure in Kyiv reflects a starkly escalating war in Ukraine  CNN US Embassy in Kyiv warns of 'potential significant' air attack, as Russia accuses Biden of seeking to prolong war  ABC News U.S. embassy shut as Ukraine braces for possible retaliation after firing long-range U.S. missiles into Russia  CBS News Ukraine Rejects Massive Air Strike Warning As 'Russian Psychological Operation'  Barron's

Preview: Trans congresswoman Sarah McBride responds to Capitol Hill bathroom ban  The Guardian US Mike Johnson supports barring Sarah McBride from using women's restrooms in the House  MSNBC Speaker Johnson announces new Capitol bathroom policy in response to controversy over trans House member  Fox News Speaker Johnson restricts use of Capitol bathrooms by transgender people  The Washington Post Mike Johnson institutes transgender bathroom ban for U.S. House  Axios

Preview: Trump seeks to slow roll mounting conviction dismissal ahead of inauguration  The Hill Trump lawyers demand judge 'immediately' throw out hush money case  NBC News 'Highly unlikely' Trump will face jail sentence as Manhattan DA seeks stay to 2029, says Ted Williams  Fox News 'Crazy law school hypothetical': Honig reacts to latest in Trump's hush money case  CNN Prosecutors ask judge to consider delaying sentencing in Trump’s hush money case until after he leaves office: How we got here  Yahoo! Voices

Preview: Susan Smith denied parole 30 years after killing her 2 sons  ABC News Susan Smith, who killed her 2 young children 30 years ago, denied parole  CNN Killer mom Susan Smith denied parole 30 years after drowning sons  Fox News Susan Smith, who drowned her sons in 1994, is denied parole. Here’s what to know.  The Washington Post Killer mom Susan Smith denied parole after she sobbed, begged to be let out — but still refused to accept responsibility for all her crimes  New York Post

Preview: Trump picks former acting AG Matthew Whitaker as nominee for NATO ambassador  Reuters Trump announces Matthew Whitaker as his pick to be US ambassador to NATO  CNN Trump picks Matthew Whitaker for ambassador to NATO  NPR Trump Picks Former Attorney General Whitaker as NATO Ambassador  Bloomberg Trump’s Latest Cabinet Pick Is His Crappiest Yet (Literally)  The New Republic

Preview: Russia's Updated Nuclear 'Red Line' Adds Uncertainty: Experts  Barron's ‘I would call it saber rattling’: Adm. Stavridis on Russia’s nuclear threat against the West  MSNBC Putin approves new nuclear weapons doctrine for Russia. Here's what it means.  NBC News Ukraine foreign minister: ‘The United States cannot afford to look weak’  The Hill Putin lowers the threshold for using his nuclear arsenal after Biden's arms decision for Ukraine  The Associated Press

Preview: Trump said he'd use the military for mass deportations. Here are the industries with the most immigrant workers.  Business Insider “Absolutely Insane”: Pentagon Officials on Trump’s Military Deportation Plan  The Intercept How could the U.S. military be used for Trump's mass deportation plan?  CBS News Rand Paul breaks with Trump on using military for mass deportations: ‘Huge mistake’  POLITICO Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair: Mass deportation plan will increase grocery costs  The Hill

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of celebrity doctor and failed Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) marks the latest potential shakeup of federal health agencies, and adds new uncertainty to the future of Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. If confirmed, Oz would take the helm of...

Preview: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) will be the next chair of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), the group announced on Wednesday, following an election at the RGA’s annual conference. Kemp is stepping up from his role as 2024 vice chair to take the reins, and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) will succeed him as the...

Preview: Welcome to The Hill's Sustainability newsletter {beacon} Sustainability Sustainability   The Big Story Where climate progress is possible under Trump The victory of President-elect Trump earlier this month was greeted by the climate movement writ large as a disaster — particularly since it came alongside a Republican sweep of the two houses of Congress. ©...

Preview: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-Calif.) said mass deportations could cause a spike in costs for American families, including at the grocery store. President-elect Trump has repeatedly pledged large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants, which could greatly impact the workforce. “What we also see, I think, under mass deportations, as you're going to...

Preview: A new poll from nonprofit ThinkYoung finds that teenagers under 18 are split on party identity. Roughly 24 percent of the teenage children said the Democratic Party represented their ideals well, 24 percent said the same of Republicans and 23 percent said neither party represents them well. Another 26 percent said they were not sure....

Preview: Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has unveiled a bill that would ban transgender people from bathrooms aligned with their gender identity in federal buildings. In a post on the social platform X, Mace said she had “filed a new bill to protect women and girls across the entire country on all federal property everywhere,” and attached...

Preview: The House Ethics Committee met Wednesday but did not release its report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), resisting significant pressure to release its findings after President-elect Trump selected the controversial Florida Republican to be his attorney general. “There is not an agreement by the committee to release the report," Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.)...

Preview: As many as 136 million adult Americans may be eligible for Ozempic, researchers estimate. According to a study published Monday in JAMA Network, among the 25,531 participants, 8,504 were eligible for semaglutide. Semaglutide, the active medicine found in the drug, has become a popular option for people looking to lose weight. Ozempic, along with Wegovy,...

Preview: Thanksgiving dinner costs dipped for a second year in a row, according to a survey published Wednesday, though they remain at elevated levels. The annual American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) Thanksgiving dinner survey found the classic holiday meal for 10 people would cost $58.08, or less than $6 per person — a 5 percent drop...

Preview: The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief fund has dwindled to less than $5 billion, lawmakers said this week, as both sides press for the swift passage of emergency aid. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell warned Wednesday that the agency’s ability to respond to new disasters “could be jeopardized” without further funding from Congress. “In...

Preview: Although the president-elect's daughter-in-law, who said she'd "absolutely consider" serving in the Senate, just announced an athleisure line.

Preview: Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss told a judge that Giuliani should be held in civil contempt.

Preview: Eagle lovers around the world were crushed when the nest of a Minnesota pair and their chick collapsed on live video last year.

Preview: Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said Tuesday that the selection "would be funny if it weren't so sad," adding, "This is the dream team? Really?”

Preview: Charlie Dent, who was once chair of the House ethics committee, was calling for the release of the ethics report on Matt Gaetz.

Preview: For three storms, including this month's Rafael, the climate change factor goosed wind speed so much that the winds increased by two storm categories.

Preview: The “Late Night” comedian took inspiration from the streaming giant’s Jake Paul–Mike Tyson coverage glitches.

Preview: Fox News personalities seem fine with athletes expressing political views, as long as they align with their own.

Preview: The "Tonight Show" host pondered life at the conservative network following Donald Trump's Cabinet picks.

Preview: Karoline Leavitt’s hot take on her boss gets put to an instant test.

Preview: Similarities abound to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls — only this time for Nvidia bulls.

Preview: Merely in-line expectations for cybersecurity company’s fiscal year drags on the stock.

Preview: Snowflake’s last three earnings reports spurred negative stock reactions, but investors seem to like the company’s upbeat guidance this time around

Preview: Another Wall Street firm is increasing its S&P 500 target for next year, with a view that stocks are poised to extend their bull-market run to at least the end of 2025

Preview: GameStop co-founder Gary Kusin sees parallels between Swifties and the videogame retailer’s intensely loyal fans.

Preview: The selection of television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could bring on budget cuts, the privatization of Medicare and reduced benefits for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, public-health and government experts say.

Preview: With bitcoin touching all-time highs again, investors are more confident that the latest bull run will be more sustainable compared to previous cycles, with subdued volatility as the crypto industry matures with increased institutional adoption.

Preview: Williams-Sonoma Inc.’s stock was up 26% on Wednesday after the home-goods retailer reported improved sales and market-share gains, as well as stronger-than-expected profit, despite a “difficult environment.”

Preview: Target’s stock is set to suffer worst day in more than two years after profit, revenue, comparable sales and outlook all came in below expectations.

Preview: U.S. government debt sold off on Wednesday, sending yields up by the most in a week, as geopolitical anxiety eased and investors awaited President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary.

Preview: Nancy Mace is making waves after introducing a resolution that would bar Sarah McBride and other transgender women who work in the Capitol from accessing women’s restrooms.

Preview: Meanwhile, McBride, the first out trans person elected to Congress, has sought to remove herself from the spectacle that her soon-to-be GOP colleagues have made about her arrival.

Preview: Trump hypocritically demanded Republicans somehow block Biden's judicial nominees ahead of the inauguration.

Preview: The House Ethics Committee announced that it has not reached a decision on whether to release its report on former Rep.

Preview: Conservative Democrats Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine have suggested ways to reform the House of Representatives in Trump 2.0.

Preview: Judge Carl Nichols’ remark about the president-elect’s pledge to grant clemency to Jan. 6 defendants shows the impact of Trump’s electoral victory on criminal cases beyond his own.

Preview: María Teresa Kumar explains the devastating reality behind Trump's mass deportation plans and how individuals can profit as millions suffer

Preview: Ari Melber explains how Robert F. Kennedy Jr's McDonald's photo op is part of Trump's pattern of embarrassing and humiliating his critics-turned-allies

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump has begun rolling out staffing decisions for his incoming administration, naming some of his top allies to prominent positions in his cabinet and beyond.

Preview: Ali Velshi breaks down Trump's China tariff plan and explains how the American consumer will end up footing the bill

Preview: "I feel like we've been on a slippery slope since I’ve bonded with Angie [Katsanevas]," Cosby told "Virtual Reali-Tea" while promoting Van Leeuwen’s new SLC Scoop flavor.

Preview: After Monday’s deadly stabbing-spree by a man “with a troubling criminal history,” City Journal’s Rafael A. Mangual asks: Why was this guy “on the street?”

Preview: Alabama hopes to bounce back after a tough road loss to the Purdue Boilermakers, while the new-look Fighting Illini team looks to improve to a hot 4-0 start.

Preview: Travis Kelce had a laugh at Mike Tyson’s bare butt before last Friday night’s Netflix bout between him and Jake Paul.

Preview: The "Flowers" songstress and the drummer have been rumored to be dating since 2021 when they were set up on a blind date.

Preview: These twins are evenly matched. Watch the hilarious moment a pair of 2-year-olds in Nice, France, get into a heated argument, despite the barbs being mostly gibberish. Their mom jokingly called it “a regular Saturday morning” in which her tots “fight about something for 20 minutes.”

Preview: Snoring is definitely not worth sacrificing beauty sleep! Kelly Ripa complained about Mark Consuelos’ snoring on the latest episode of “Live with Kelly & Mark.” Watch the full video to learn more about Kelly putting her husband on blast. Subscribe to our YouTube for the latest on all your favorite stars.

Preview: A source tells Page Six that Pitt feels the timing was "coincidental" after a judge ruled in favor of the exes' Château Miraval case moving to trial.

Preview: Former Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani can’t stop defaming two Georgia election workers he already owes a whopping $148 million, their legal team claims in a letter to a federal judge. Attorneys for the election workers who sued Giuliani are now asking that the embattled former mayor of New York City be held in contempt...

Preview: Jeff Gorton pulled off a Great Escape that is resonating now by getting out from under Lias Andersson in a 2020 draft-day deal with the Kings that yielded Will Cuylle.

Preview: Linda McMahon is known for her many years in the wrestling world. Though her education experience is more limited than previous secretaries, she has embraced both conservative and bipartisan ideas.

Preview: The heart surgeon turned TV star has championed healthy lifestyle habits. But he’s also promoted sham diet pills and ineffective Covid-19 treatments.

Preview: Back taxes, youthful pot smoking and undocumented nannies scuttled previous presidential choices. Some of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s candidates face bigger questions.

Preview: President-elect Donald J. Trump is assembling a team of aides bent on confrontation with China. But he also has advisers who do business there, including Elon Musk.

Preview: The decision is the latest in a series of moves by the U.S. and Russia that have escalated tensions between the two.

Preview: The unusual alert came a day after Ukraine used American-made ballistic missiles to strike Russian territory for the first time. At least two other Western embassies closed for the day after the warning.

Preview: Overextended Ukrainian forces lack manpower and artillery against Russian forces willing to absorb staggering casualties.

Preview: Trying to avoid antitrust suits, Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy the lawyers as often as possible.

Preview: Eric Kim roasted dozens of birds and taste-tested eight different recipes before landing on this clever approach.

Preview: The U.S. veto at the U.N. came as the Biden administration’s envoy in Lebanon reported “additional progress” on cease-fire talks in the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Preview: The proposed law could all too easily be weaponized.

Preview: I'm deceiving them.

Preview: If you’re experiencing alarming levels of déjà vu this week with the debate over Matt Gaetz’s fitness to run the DOJ, it’s not just you.

Preview: How do we still keep getting the most basic death sentence question wrong?

Preview: Early returns on whether this was a mistake are, thus far, mixed.

Preview: Obsessive focus on Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct is a mistake, both for the media and, in due course, for senatorial opponents of the nomination.

Preview: Too bad they ultimately paid the price.

Preview: Adapted from “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” (1945).

Preview: In the late 1960s, you couldn’t go to a PTA potluck without running into one of these confectionary marvels—what happened?

Preview: The beloved Syrian-Lebanese dessert (with notes from Rose Previte’s mom).

Preview: I was the fourth and final speaker, at approximately 57.35 into the video, giving a brief talk about racial classifications… The post Federalist Society Panel on Race in the Law after SFFA appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: The U.S. now ranks second to last in the time it takes to develop a new mine—roughly 29 years. Only Zambia is worse.

Preview: If confirmed, Chris Wright and Gov. Doug Burgum will have the opportunity to prioritize innovation and deregulation to the benefit of taxpayers and the environment.

Preview: Critics say the curriculum borders on outright proselytization.

Preview: The proposal brings to mind the classic "bootleggers and Baptists" theory in which both moralists and competitors oppose a substance.

Preview: The president-elect uses conditional grammar to craft self-fulfilling speculative historical fiction.

Preview: Amanda Knox falsely confessed to murder after law enforcement subjected her to "psychological torture." Now she wants to stop it from happening to others.

Preview: Donald Trump has tabbed Howard Lutnick to be the next secretary of the Department of Commerce. He should also be the last.

Preview: A Canadian Supreme Court case challenges the country's ban on benefiting financially from sex work.

Preview: Regulations have made these vehicles less safe and more expensive.

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

Preview: The Crossword

Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) speaks to reporters as she heads to a House Republican Caucus meeting on Capitol Hill on November 19, 2024 in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride became the first openly trans person ever elected to the House this November, marking a historic milestone for the body. Her arrival, however, is being met with a targeted — and anti-trans — attack by Republicans in Congress that rejects the existence of trans people.  On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that he is barring trans women from women’s bathrooms in the Capitol, following a proposal from South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace (R) to do just that.  “I want to make sure that no men are in women’s private spaces, and it’s not going to end here,” Mace told reporters earlier this week. “This kind of thing should be banned.” When asked if the action was in response to McBride coming to Congress, Mace was clear, noting, “Yes and absolutely and then some.” Mace’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Johnson’s office pointed to statements he’s made about his belief in treating everyone “with dignity.”  The new rule is the latest extension of ugly attacks Republicans have levied on trans people during the recent campaign cycle and in the past few years. Dozens of states have introduced anti-trans bills that restrict children’s access to gender-affirming care, that limit athletes to playing on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, and that prevent trans women from using women’s bathrooms. All of these policies are based on — and advance — a rejection of the idea that trans women are women. As Vox’s Aja Romano has explained, Republicans have used their focus on this subject to rally their base against a “common enemy,” framing trans people as threats, including to other women’s safety in bathrooms. A 2018 UCLA study on the issue found no evidence that trans people using bathrooms that match their gender identity has increased safety risks, but that data has not changed GOP rhetoric. Instead, the GOP has kept investing in anti-trans attacks and channeling more harm toward trans individuals, who are already the disproportionate subjects of violence and who already experience high rates of self-harm.  Now, House Republicans’ push highlights how central such ideas have become to the GOP agenda — and how open they are to singling out a colleague to prove a point.  Capitol Hill’s new, anti-trans bathroom policy, briefly explained Because the speaker of the House has wide-ranging jurisdiction over facilities in the House, Johnson has significant say in imposing rules like the new bathroom regulation.  In a press release he issued on Wednesday, Johnson stated that “All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” In practice, this means that trans women are not able to use women’s bathrooms.  Johnson noted that each congressmember has a bathroom in their office, and that there are also unisex bathrooms available in the Capitol that could theoretically serve as an alternative. “Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he said in a statement.  In addition to discriminating against McBride, the rule poses serious practical obstacles: The Capitol complex is a massive set of buildings, and lawmakers are often dashing from the main chamber to committee meetings to other events. By depriving McBride of access to the women’s room, the policy is effectively asking her to run back to her office, which is located in a separate building, use the men’s restroom, or find a unisex bathroom. Limiting a member’s access to bathrooms simply makes their job much harder and more inconvenient.  The Hill’s new bathroom rules are part of broader Republican anti-trans attacks McBride responded to Mace’s initial proposal in a post on X on Tuesday, calling it “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.”  “We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars,” she added. In a post on Wednesday, McBride reiterated this message and said that while she’ll abide by Johnson’s rule, she found this whole fight to be a diversion from other policy concerns. I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. pic.twitter.com/bCuv7pIZBY — Sarah McBride (@SarahEMcBride) November 20, 2024 Republicans have made anti-trans policy a focus on par with the sorts of economic concerns McBride highlighted. During the 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump invested millions in ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’s past support for funding gender-affirming care for prisoners. And it wasn’t just Trump: Republicans and their allies spent at least $215 million on anti-trans ads last cycle. Those ads appear to have resonated with some swing voters, and the GOP now seems further emboldened when it comes to going after trans people.  Ahead of the election, as Vox’s Nicole Narea and Fabiola Cineas wrote, there was an explosion of anti-trans bills in state legislatures in 2023, with at least 19 states approving such laws. As Narea and Cineas explained, those bills were fueled in part by right-wing evangelical members of the Republican base (and by lawmaker attempts to pander to that faction). But more recent actions — from the election ads to Johnson’s new rule — show an attempt to take anti-trans policy into the mainstream.  Overall, Republicans’ actions signal that they plan to double down on the anti-trans culture war in the years to come.

Preview: Delegates hold “Mass Deportations Now” campaign signs during the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, July 17, 2024. President-elect Donald Trump said he will use the military to carry out mass deportations — the centerpiece of his immigration agenda in his second term. He has not gone into detail about his plans, but legal experts have suggested he may be able to rely on a combination of federal laws to implement the deportations with the military’s help. The notion of the president deploying the military domestically may seem like a nightmare scenario, but it’s not implausible given his broad executive powers. On Monday, Trump responded to a post on his social media network Truth Social, claiming that he would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to carry out mass deportations, saying it was “TRUE!!!” It’s not immediately clear what he means by that: whether he intends for the military to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, for military funds to be redirected toward supporting mass deportations, or something else. A representative for his transition team did not respond to a request for comment. But Trump has a few avenues through which he could activate the military and its resources. Those include the Insurrection Act, which gives the president the power to deploy the military domestically; emergency powers, like redirecting funds to military construction projects; and other presidential powers like requesting national guard assistance in carrying out military missions. Immigration advocates are readying to challenge mass deportations. Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday after Trump’s announcement that his organization is preparing for litigation. However, the law does give presidents significant leeway to use the military at their discretion, and courts have historically been wary of overstepping, though they may intervene if the civil liberties of immigrants are being violated. The United States has “a very permissive legal regime regarding how the president can use the military,” said Chris Mirasola, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. Again, those powers aren’t absolute, however. “There are downstream implementation matters that I think are more susceptible to litigation,” Mirasola said. The Insurrection Act, briefly explained According to the New York Times, Trump is planning to invoke the Insurrection Act to bring in the military to carry out mass deportations. The law is a key exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military to enforce federal law without the permission of Congress or the Constitution.  Only in rare instances have presidents invoked the Insurrection Act. President George H.W. Bush was the last one to do so amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots that broke out in response to the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King. President Dwight D. Eisenhower also notably used the Insurrection Act to facilitate the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. The provision of the Insurrection Act most likely to apply in Trump’s case is one that allows the president to unilaterally activate the military domestically to enforce federal law whenever they determine that “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion… make it impracticable [to do so] by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Mirasola said Trump would have a “relatively easy time” making the case that cartels trafficking immigrants across the border constitute an “unlawful obstruction” to the enforcement of US immigration law. Trump has in some ways appeared to begin building his case for invoking the Insurrection Act through his rhetoric on the campaign trail this year by describing an “invasion of criminals” coming across the border. But Mirasola said it would be harder for Trump to argue that it is impracticable to enforce immigration laws through the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” That’s because presidents have done so for decades, and border crossings are no longer unusually high: They have sharply declined this year and are down even from certain points in the first Trump administration. However, the law gives the president “sole discretion, in most instances” to determine whether the criteria necessary to activate the military have been met, according to 2022 congressional testimony given by Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Joseph Nunn, the Center’s counsel in the national security program. Goitein and Nunn also argued that the “vague and broad criteria for invoking the Act, combined with the lack of any provision for judicial or congressional review, render it ripe for abuse.” At that point, their concern was that Trump could have used the Insurrection Act to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election results. The use case is now different, but the potential for overreach is the same. That is to say, while advocates may challenge Trump on whether the two key criteria for invoking the law have been met, the law gives presidents a wide berth — and the courts little power. “For all practical purposes, courts have been cut out of the process,” Goitein and Nunn write. The president’s emergency and other powers There are other potential authorities that Trump could invoke to surge military resources to his mass deportation plan. As Mirasola writes in Lawfare, Trump has a nonemergency power under federal law to request the assistance of state national guards in a federal military mission. Under the National Defense Authorization Act, that mission can be to assist US Customs and Border Protection in “ongoing efforts to secure the southern land border.” The law does not provide parameters limiting the kind of assistance that the military can provide, be that boots on the ground at the border or intelligence analysis support. Emergency powers could be helpful in creating the infrastructure needed for mass deportations. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s key immigration advisers, told the New York Times in November 2023 that a second Trump administration would construct “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants facing deportation. Mirasola writes that, to do so, Trump could invoke federal law allowing the secretary of defense to “undertake military construction projects … not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support” the armed forces in a national emergency.  If Trump declares a national emergency with respect to immigration, that law would essentially allow him to bypass the need for congressional approval to get the funds he needs to construct these holding facilities. He previously used the same law to try to get funding for his border wall during his first term. Whether he could do so was never settled.  Pro-immigration advocates challenged the use of that law to fund the border wall in Trump’s first term. Their years-long litigation over the border wall became moot when President Joe Biden took office, but they were not expected to win if the issue had come before the Supreme Court. Advocates could again mount a legal challenge, but they may only succeed in delaying the construction of the facilities. However, pro-immigration advocates might have a stronger case if they file lawsuits over the conditions in these yet-to-be built holding facilities and over potential violations of civil liberties for immigrants subject to mass deportations. Those might involve, for example, violations of their constitutional right to due process. That sort of challenge, over inhumane detention conditions previously seen in CBP facilities (including a lack of access to basic hygiene products and a lack of food, water, and basic medical care) was successfully made during the first Trump administration.  Immigrants might also file suits arguing their constitutional protections against unlawful searches were violated: Doris Meissner, senior fellow and director of the US Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said mass deportations of the scale Trump is imagining would likely involve “violations of people’s civil rights, profiling, all of those kinds of harms that poor policing brings about.”  That will present a key test for the courts, Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, said in a statement: “Will [the courts] use their power to enforce long-standing protections for individuals? Will they uphold the rule of law? Or will they bow to political pressure and allow the executive to expand its already ample power?”

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for the Department of Education will likely become clearer during Linda McMahon’s confirmation hearings. | Scott Olson/Getty Images While campaigning, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to dismantle the US Department of Education (DOE), on the basis that the federal education apparatus is “indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material.”  “One thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and sending all education and education work it needs back to the states,” Trump said in a 2023 video outlining his education policy goals. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.” Trump on Tuesday nominated his former Small Business Administration head (and former wrestling executive) Linda McMahon to be the education secretary. Closing the DOE wouldn’t be easy, but it isn’t impossible — and even if the department remains open, there are certainly ways Trump and McMahon could radically change education in the United States. Here’s what’s possible. Can Trump actually close the DOE? Technically, yes.  However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.”  That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox.  Without the filibuster rule, legislation would need a simple majority to pass, but senators have been hesitant to get rid of it in recent years. With the filibuster in place, Republicans would need some Democratic senators to join their efforts to kill the department. The likelihood of Democratic senators supporting such a move is almost nonexistent. That means the push to unwind the department is probably largely symbolic. And that is the best-case scenario, Jon Valant, director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, told Vox. According to Valant, dismantling it would simultaneously damage the US education system while also failing to accomplish Trump’s stated goals.  Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.” Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students. Furthermore, much of what Trump and MAGA activists claim the agency is responsible for — like teaching critical race theory and LGBTQ “ideology” — isn’t actually the purview of the DOE; things like curriculum and teacher choice are already the domain of state departments of education. And only about 10 percent of federal public education funding flows to state boards of education, according to Valant. The rest comes primarily from tax sources, so states and local school districts are already controlling much of the funding structure of their specific public education systems. “I find it a little bewildering that the US Department of Education has become such a lightning rod here, in part because I don’t know how many people have any idea what the department actually does,” Valant said. Even without literally shutting the doors to the federal agency, there could be ways a Trump administration could hollow the DOE and do significant damage, Valant and Kettl said.  The administration could require the agency to cut the roles of agency employees, particularly those who ideologically disagree with the administration. It could also appoint officials with limited (or no) education expertise, hampering the department’s day-to-day work. Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.”  Finally, Trump could use the department’s leadership role to affect policy indirectly: “There’s power that comes from just communicating to states what you would like to see” being taught in schools, Valant said. “And there are a lot of state leaders around the country who seem ready to follow that lead.” Trump’s plans for the department will likely become clearer during McMahon’s confirmation hearings. She has been an advocate for the school choice movement, and posted praise for the hands-on education gained through apprenticeships shortly before her nomination was made public. Update, November 20, 11:45 am ET: This story was originally published on November 13 and has been updated to reflect Linda McMahon’s nomination for education secretary.

Preview: Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked, a movie based on a musical based on a movie and a book. | Universal/Wicked Welcome to Know-It-All. In the age of intellectual property grabs, docudramas, and so very many sequels, it can be difficult to find a way into the complicated worlds we see on screen. In this series, Vox experts explain what you need to know to get into the latest hot release. Like a friendship between a popular blonde princess and a dour lime-skinned outcast, the story of Wicked is a bit more complicated than it looks.  Wicked is billed as the “true story” of Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West, the very famous, very what-you-see-is-what-you-get witches from The Wizard of Oz. It’s based on a well-loved, very catchy Broadway musical that’s been around for 20-plus years. It also stars pop queen Ariana Grande and powerhouse Cynthia Erivo, and the movie’s very expansive, very expensive marketing campaign seemed determined to forever alter the way we think about pink and green. Wicked is everywhere. Surely it can’t be that impenetrable!  But did you know that the Broadway musical was based on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist novels which were, in turn, inspired by L. Frank Baum’s beloved series of over a dozen books about Oz? And that a major plot in the novels involves sentient, talking animals that love sonnets and science? Or that Wicked is really a political thriller about corrupt government officials scapegoating a minority and creating an enemy of the state? Beneath the movie’s airy aesthetics and its bubblegum pop moments is a broiling, chaotic tale of power, greed, and discrimination. The more you know about Wicked, the weirder and weirder it gets.  With that in mind, I asked my colleague Constance Grady to help us navigate the world of Wicked and Oz. Grady has read Gregory Maguire’s original novel multiple times, the Baum novels as a child, seen the Broadway production, and like me, saw the movie this week. We discussed everything from anti-goat fascism, to Grande’s delicious performance, to what from the book didn’t make it into the adaptations. Here’s what you need to know about the movie musical of the moment.  Do I have this correct? Wicked is a movie musical adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway show Wicked, which is an adaptation of the novel Wicked, which is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz.  You’re right, but there’s another adaptation layer in there. All those layers.  The whole thing starts with the L. Frank Baum children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which he published in 1900. Baum’s book was so successful that it was almost immediately adapted into a Broadway musical of its own (now largely forgotten) and an entire franchise worth of sequels, 13 of which Baum wrote himself. Then in 1939 we got the most famous and, for most people, canonical version of the story: The Wizard of Oz, the Judy Garland film based on the Baum novel.  The first Wicked was Gregory Maguire’s novel, first published in 1995 as Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire’s gimmick was to take Margaret Hamilton’s cackling, green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 film — surely one of childhood’s scariest villains — and make her the beating heart of his novel. He renamed her Elphaba, a name suggested by the initials of L. Frank Baum. Wicked the musical came in 2003, with music from Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman. It was a smash hit success when it came out, and it’s still running on Broadway now, 21 years later.  The musical was such a hit that Universal, which owns the rights, has had various versions of the film in development for a very long time now. Finally and at last, in 2021, Universal put director Jon M. Chu of Crazy Rich Asians on the task. Chu split the stage musical into two halves, with Wicked Part 1 to premiere in November 2024 and Wicked Part 2 set to come in 2025. And now here we are!  Do you have a favorite?  At different times, all of the Oz stories have been my favorites. I grew up on the 1939 movie like everyone else. When Dorothy opens the black-and-white door to her Kansas home and walks out into brilliant, Technicolor Oz? That’s what cinema was made for, baby!  When I was around 8 or 9 I came upon the L. Frank Baum novels, and I was tickled to find that they contained such an expansive and playful mythology. I gobbled up those books like candy. Then at around 11 years old, I read Wicked and was entranced by it: all that moral complexity, all the political intrigue, all those slippery, winding sentences.  When the musical came along, I immediately resented it for being a glitzier, simpler story than the book was — really boiled down to the complicated friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, set against the backdrop of the Wizard’s manipulations — but when I was 17 I saw it on Broadway and was overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle of it and the gleeful drive of the songs. When Elphaba started flying at the end of act one, I burst into tears.  To be fair to 17-year-old you, there is at least one person, if not 10 to 20 people, bursting into tears at every performance when Elphaba defies gravity. It’s a spectacle. It’s monumental. It’s as important to Broadway as the chandelier coming down in Phantom of the Opera. God, it’s truly so good. For that moment, I even forgive Schwartz for writing the lyric “Nessa, Nessa, I’ve got something to confess-a.” Wicked is famously one of only six musicals I enjoy. And I feel like the movie sticks to the musical. How well do the musicals stick to the book?  The musical is very, very loosely based on Maguire’s book. What Gregory Maguire wanted to write was a really sophisticated allegorical exploration of the nature of evil itself and what might drive Elphaba to wickedness. As such, his Wicked is bleak, at times self-indulgently so. Maguire’s Elphaba is raised by missionaries in a Southern Gothic childhood right out of Flannery O’Connor. After she abandons both religion and schooling and is politically radicalized by the cause of Ozian Animal rights, she becomes a terrorist, complicit in multiple acts of violence against civilians. By the end, however much you might sympathize with Elphaba’s cause, you understand why people call her the wicked witch. Wicked: Part I (the official name of this movie) feels less like, “Wow, this lady is really wicked,” and more like, “Oh, she’s just misunderstood.” Maybe we haven’t gotten to the full terrorist part yet, but I can’t imagine Elphaba’s morality is ever going to be as ambiguous as the novel.   Absolutely. The Wicked of the stage show is a much sweeter and sillier version of the story. Schwartz and Holzman ditch as much of the religion and the politics as they possibly can to focus on the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North — or Galinda, as she originally calls herself.  Maguire imagined Glinda as Elphaba’s college roommate, and she’s key to Elphie’s college years, but he largely abandons her after Elphie drops out of school to go into politics. Schwartz and Holzman, however, make comic, superficial Glinda into the heart of the story. Perhaps in part to make room for the shift in focus, Elphaba’s misdeeds are significantly toned down, and as for Maguire’s dark, heartbreaking ending … let’s just say it gets, um, revised. The movie convinced me that Glinda is actually the splashier, better-written role. I’ve always envisioned Glinda as an SEC-coded mean girl — blonde, bubbly, a bit passive aggressive rather than aggressive aggressive. Grande gets us there, and seems to really understand what makes this character so surprisingly funny.  So buy or sell: Oscar nominee Ariana Grande? Oh, man. I buy. This movie struggles a lot with its tone. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be as silly as the stage musical or as serious as the Maguire book, and as a result, it ends up veering wildly around. The only element of this movie that never has this problem is Grande’s performance.  Grande nails it top to bottom. She makes spoiled, selfish Glinda so gleefully mean, so deliciously phony in all her virtue-signaling, that you want to laugh at her the way you would laugh at Regina George — and then she shows you Glinda’s tender, insecure heart, and you fall in love with her.  Grande has always had an uncanny knack for vocal mimicry, and here she pitches her speaking voice into something halfway between Judy Garland’s earnest Dorothy tones and the distinctive showbiz patter of Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda on Broadway. You wouldn’t think you could combine the two, but Grande does, and she makes it make sense. As for the singing — well, that kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? She’s in phenomenal voice. Whatever happens with the Oscars race this year, I’ll know that Grande is the Academy Award nominee of my heart. Tonally, the movie goes from Legally Blonde to The Fugitive. The last 10 minutes are absolutely bonkers. What in the world? Yikes, right? For me, this tonal mismatch is the big flaw of the film, and I think it’s a byproduct of this very long and winding adaptation process.  When Schwartz and Holzman adapted Maguire’s Wicked, they stripped away as much of his rather baroque mythologizing as they could while still allowing the plot to make a modicum of sense. The vibe of this musical is generally: Why go on and on about the ontological differences between humans and animals if we could be singing fun bops about being popular? It doesn’t all have to be so serious all the time. In their version of the story, the Wizard’s plans are vague, but clearly evil, and Elphaba’s resistance to his regime is likewise vague, but clearly righteous. The Wizard’s main sin in the stage musical is that he is lying to his people to stoke up their fears and marshal support to his own side, because this musical hit Broadway in 2003, when George W. Bush was just about to invade Iraq. Other than that, we don’t know that much about why he’s so bad. We don’t really care, either. It all pretty much works if you just sit back in the theater and let the songs wash over you. Chu, however, takes Wicked very seriously indeed; so much so that he’s stretched out the musical’s 90-minute first act into a lugubrious two hours and 40 minutes, mostly by keeping the pacing slow and solemn. The side effect of moving so slowly, though, is that it puts a lot of pressure on the political subplot of this musical to not only make sense, but to be emotionally impactful. Unfortunately, all of the background that could make it work got left behind in Maguire’s novel.  Are we supposed to care this much about anti-animal fascism in the movie? Or the musical? Do the people who adapted Wicked care that much? Yeah, this is one of the big plotlines where the cracks in the adaptation show. It also makes for a kind of interesting timeline of how different authors have thought about Oz. One of the inconsistencies of L. Frank Baum’s Oz is that it’s a land where animals can talk and go on quests and be guests at dinner parties, and so on — you’ll recall the Cowardly Lion — but also all the characters are constantly eating meat. It’s the kind of minor quirk in world-building that a children’s book can skate right over, but it becomes weird and confusing in an adult novel. So when Maguire wrote Wicked, he imagined an Oz that distinguished between Animals, who are talking and intelligent beings who wear clothes and hold jobs and can be invited to dinner parties, and animals in lowercase, who are non-sentient and can be killed or treated as chattel. In Maguire’s Oz, the Wizard consolidates his power in part by making the Animals into a scapegoat race.  Emphasis, quite literally, on “goat.”  Over the course of the novel, we see them go from full citizens to living under restrictions to slaves who are occasionally cooked and eaten. Elphaba is radicalized into terrorism when her favorite college professor, the Goat and Animal rights agitator Doctor Dillamond, is assassinated by the government.  When Schwartz and Holzman got their hands on the story, they were transforming it once again into a children’s tale, so they didn’t particularly have time for this piece of world-building. They ditched the distinction between Animal and animal, so that Doctor Dillamond becomes a guy in a silly goat costume who exists to nudge Elphaba into realizing that the Wizard might not have her best interests at heart. It would be a stretch to think that the stage musical really wants the audience to care about animals in general, or Doctor Dillamond in particular. Chu, characteristically, seems to want to give the animal plotline more gravitas. He makes Dillamond an eerily photorealistic CGI goat who appears in one of Elphaba’s visions shivering and cringing in a cage, in a dark foretelling of the Wizard’s eventual goals. Under Chu’s solemn and slightly heavy-handed touch, you can feel how important the animal rights plotline is to Elphaba’s character arc. But the part of Maguire’s novel that made you care about the animals, and about Elphaba’s commitment to their freedom, was jettisoned long ago. It’s an uneasy balance. This contradiction is part of why, I think, Grande’s Glinda feels so much like a breath of fresh air whenever she appears on screen. The part of this story that Schwartz and Holzman cared about was Glinda and Elphaba, so that’s the part of the story architecture that remains rock solid. No matter what happens, you can’t not root for their friendship. Are we going to get more of that in Wicked: Part II? Are people going to want to see the second half of this musical if it’s all about authoritarianism?  I am very curious to see how Chu handles Wicked: Part II, because the second act of Wicked is famously much worse than the first half. All the iconic songs are over by then (although personally, I quite like “No Good Deed”), the storytelling gets bogged down in mythology that never becomes either clear or interesting, and Glinda and Elphaba spend most of the act in separate places, effectively depriving the show of its strongest dynamic for long stretches of stage time. In the stage show, you’re generally invested enough in the characters on the strength of the first half to sit through the second half with minimal complaints, but for that act two to hold its own for a full movie? Tricky! As for the anti-animal fascism, though, we can all breathe easy. As originally staged, Wicked’s act two focuses on the animal rights plotline for exactly as long as it takes to hook Elphaba up with her iconic flying monkeys and not a single second longer. We’ll see if Chu keeps it that way.

Preview: An oil pump jack on the Great Plains, southeastern Wyoming. | Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump had a pointed tagline for his energy policy: “Drill, baby, drill.” That statement is emblematic of where Trump is poised to focus his efforts in a second term: He’s pledged US “energy dominance” and everything from “new pipelines” to “new refiners” that amp up fossil fuel production.  This approach marks a stark shift from the Biden administration’s and puts the US’s emphasis more heavily on producing oil and gas than on attempting a transition to clean energy sources. In addition to touting the need to boost fossil fuels, Trump has disparaged subsidies for clean energy investments and called for “terminat[ing]” the funds that were allocated for those subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. His stance ignores the role that burning fossil fuels has played in climate change and could cause considerable harm to US efforts to address the issue.  Several of his nominations are indicative of these goals. He’s chosen oil industry executive Chris Wright — a fracking evangelist — to head up the Department of Energy. He’s named North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — who connected Trump to oil executive donors during the campaign — as the lead for the Interior Department and as an “energy czar.” He’s also tapped former Rep. Lee Zeldin — who’s emphasized his commitment to deregulation — as his chief of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  There’s only so much the administration can control, however. Although Trump can take notable steps to try to increase fossil fuel production, actual upticks in oil and gas extraction will depend heavily on the private sector and the economics of the industry.  Still, while Trump faces some constraints, he has significant policy levers he can pull to encourage production of fossil fuels. Wright, Burgum, and Zeldin have also signaled they’re prepared to execute on the president-elect’s vision, including changes to drilling on public lands and speedier permitting for oil and gas projects.  “President Trump and his energy team — Mr. Burgum, Mr. Wright, Mr. Zeldin — can go to considerable lengths to make expanded production attractive and relatively easy,” Barry Rabe, a University of Michigan environmental policy professor, told Vox.  How Trump could increase fossil fuel production Trump has two key avenues he can utilize to boost fossil fuel production. One, he can open up more public lands and waters for exploration, development, and extraction. Two, he can ease the regulatory processes that govern fossil fuel work. Trump could offer more oil and gas leases on public lands As president, Trump will oversee the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of Land Management as well as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, both of which manage a substantial fraction of the country’s public lands and waters. He’ll also oversee the Agriculture Department, which contains the Forest Service, another body that has oversight of some public lands.  The Bureaus of Land Management and Ocean Energy Management, as well as the Forest Service, are the three main entities that issue oil and gas leases on public spaces. These leases effectively allow fossil fuel companies to rent parcels of public land from the federal government so they can extract resources from these areas. Once land is designated as available for lease, leases are typically auctioned off to the highest bidder. Those bureaus, and the Forest Service, have major discretion to determine if more leases can be issued and where. But the president can issue an executive order instructing them to prioritize the subject: Trump could call on agencies to make identifying suitable public lands a top agenda item, for example.  “If you have an administration that says we want everything that could be leased to be leased, there’s a lot of discretion to be able to do that,” says Stan Meiburg, the executive director of the Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University.  Trump’s first term, during which he also made moves to expand the acreage of public lands available for oil and gas drilling, is likely a sign of what’s to come. Per a study from Science, he mounted one of the largest reductions in protected public lands in history, rolling back the acreage of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to allow for additional oil and gas exploration in these places. Data from the Bureau of Land Management shows that there was an increase in total acres offered for oil and gas leases during Trump’s first term compared to President Barack Obama’s second term and Joe Biden’s current term.  Though Trump could again expand the number of leases available, it’s important to note that won’t necessarily translate to more production. Leases are subject to environmental rules — that means new leases could well be challenged in court for potential violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, or other federal laws.  Another factor could limit production too: corporate interest. Companies may not be interested in these new leases since many of the parcels might not be home to fossil fuels. And businesses could also lease the land but fail to utilize it.  The White House could make expanding production easier for the private sector The second avenue Trump could pursue is rolling back regulations to make fossil fuel production easier and faster for the private sector. Much of this will involve undoing policies the Biden administration put in place — like the pause on permits for liquefied natural gas exports — and expediting federal approvals for oil- and gas-related projects.  Trump could use the executive branch’s authority to rescind certain proposals. For other rules, the White House could need Congress’s help. By utilizing what’s known as the Congressional Review Act, Congress has the ability to roll back rules that agencies have recently put in place. In other cases, it might need to pass new legislation: The EPA has just begun imposing a methane fee on oil and gas companies, and because that fee was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, it would need an act of Congress to undo. Under it, these businesses must curb their methane emissions or suffer a financial penalty.  Repealing policies like the methane fee and the natural gas export permit pause would curb the restrictions oil and gas companies currently face, creating more opportunities to export products abroad and making fossil fuel production less costly.  Another area where both the administration and Congress have power to ease regulation is on the issue of permitting reform. Currently, any oil and gas project — such as building a new pipeline — must go through many layers of approval by federal agencies like the EPA. (Many clean energy infrastructure projects also need to go through this process.) For these projects, companies have to obtain a hefty number of permits, slowing their ability to execute on these plans.  The Biden administration managed to outstrip the pace at which the Trump administration issued permits for drilling on public lands. Under Trump, federal agencies could try to further streamline such approvals, says Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado-Boulder Law School professor and former staffer at the Interior Department. “We certainly could see some efforts to pull back on environmental standards, to make it easier to permit different kinds of facilities,” Squillace told Vox.  Trump could also take executive action to direct agencies to cut as many unnecessary steps as possible and to simplify their processes. More expansive permitting reforms, like policies that put firm limits on the time needed for legal challenges and federal approvals of a project, would need the backing of Congress, however, and have had bipartisan support in the past. The combination of loosening restrictions currently placed on oil and gas companies and making new projects easier to pursue all tie back to Trump’s pledge to “slash the red tape” on the industry.  As is the case with expanding access to public lands, it’s not clear that these policy changes will result in more fossil fuel production since much of that will depend on how private companies respond. Trump can make production a little easier, but the market for fossil fuels is also a factor During the Biden administration, the US produced more oil and gas than any country in the world. Companies’ incentives to increase production will depend on whether they think it’s financially sound for them. As more countries — including the US — have invested in clean energy sources, there is more competition in the market, which could factor in to whether businesses see it as a smart move to dial up their fossil fuel output if given the chance. “As we watch a movement toward more solar and wind development, there is less demand for the oil and gas products that we’ve been producing,” Squillace says.  Though the administration has stressed that it’s all-in on fossil fuels, it’s not evident that it can turn away from clean energy investments to the degree that Trump has urged. Defunding the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, would prompt legal challenges, short of an actual repeal by Congress.  The administration could well take some contradictory stances, too. Although Trump has long denigrated energy sources like offshore wind and subsidies for electric vehicles, his allies include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who’s the head of an EV company. Musk is among the tech leaders who’ve attained notable influence in the administration and who also has deep ties with the government due to his role leading SpaceX.  All of this means that, ultimately, even though Trump will have the power to try making good on this campaign pledge, it may not work out the way he promised.

Preview: Donald Trump visits the Economic Club of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, last month. Some business leaders worry his economic plans will fuel inflation. | Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images Long before he officially pursued the presidency, Donald Trump railed against US trade deals. In interviews dating back to the 1980s, he told journalists that deals that benefited Asian and Middle Eastern trading partners consistently “ripped off” the US.  Over decades, that charge may have turned into a winning election strategy. As a first-term president and in his 2024 campaign, Trump argued that a lopsided global trading system is not only responsible for a deficit between the US and China, but also behind a decline in American manufacturing and jobs.  Now, Trump has made a second-term promise to raise tariffs — the taxes on imported goods that must be paid when they enter the US — even higher on China and other countries, while resurrecting those jobs.  This story was first featured in the Today, Explained newsletter Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Sign up here. But footwear, apparel, and auto-part companies say they expect to pass the cost of such tariffs on to American consumers. Yale University’s Budget Lab projects that Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost the average American household up to $7,600 a year with initial price hikes as high as 5 percent. Those higher costs could potentially backfire on the president-elect’s campaign promise to make inflation “vanish completely.” Trump’s trade strategy is one that Greg Ip, chief economics commentator at the Wall Street Journal, says is a major departure from almost 80 years of US policy. In a conversation with Noel King, co-host of the Today, Explained podcast, Ip described how it might play out and have massive implications for the global economy.  Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pandora. Noel King Trade is a reality of economic life these days. What is Trump’s theory on it and how does it differ from his predecessors?  Greg Ip In the United States, since the 1940s at least, there’s been a bipartisan consensus that more trade is good. And this came from a bipartisan view that this made our workers more productive, because they had bigger markets to sell into. It benefited our consumers because they got cheaper goods and a greater variety of goods. And it was also good for the US geopolitically because it helped us increase our economic bonds to countries that thought the same way we did, politically.  Trump comes along and he argues: This entire regime has been much more to the advantage of other countries than it has been to the United States. Countries like Japan and then Germany and now China have taken advantage of the United States’s fixation on free trade to increase their trade surplus with the US, sell us lots of manufactured goods, and not buy very much from the United States. So his entire mission, from his first term, and now into this one, is to reverse that relationship and, he hopes, force those countries to buy more from the US, and Americans to buy more from each other instead of from importers. That’s the theory, anyway.  Noel King Donald Trump had a chance to do all of this from 2016 to 2020 when he was in office. What did he do?  Greg Ip He did raise tariffs, for example, in a series of rounds of tariff increases. He imposed tariffs on a wide range of products from China. And this was pursuant to a long-running case that complained that China was just systematically unfair to the United States, stealing our technology and putting up barriers to US exports to China. Then he imposed a variety of more bespoke tariffs on particular products. Noel King So at the end of that first term … had Donald Trump gotten what he wanted? Had his plan worked?  Greg Ip If the test of Donald Trump’s trade policy was a smaller trade deficit, then no, he didn’t really achieve what he wanted. The trade deficit when he left office was larger in dollar terms than when he entered office.  Did some manufacturing jobs come back? Possibly. But there also appear to have been some costs. There were industries that had to pay more for their inputs because of tariffs, and they lost sales and possibly jobs. And some of our trading partners retaliated.  Our trade deficit with China did begin to shrink. At the same time, though, you saw our trade deficit with Mexico and Vietnam grow. And what that told us is that some businesses responded to Trump’s tariffs not necessarily by bringing production back to the United States, but by moving it to another country — out of China, into Vietnam, into Mexico — that were not quite as affected by the tariffs.  Noel King What are Donald Trump’s plans for a second term?  Greg Ip He wants to, number one, come down even harder on China. Instead of just putting tariffs on about half of China’s imports, he’s talked about a tariff on all Chinese imports of as much as 60 percent. And instead of sparing traditional US allies, he wants to impose an across-the-board tariff on everybody, of say, 10 to 20 percent.  But there’s a very big caveat to this, which is that we don’t really know if Trump will end up doing exactly what he’s talked about.  We know that Trump likes tariffs, but we also know that Trump likes to make deals. So, as in his first term, we might see that the threat of tariffs is primarily a leverage instrument — you know, a negotiating chip — in which he goes to countries that he thinks treat the United States unfairly and says, “Here are some things we want you to do differently. And if you do as we ask, then we won’t hit you with the tariffs that I’ve talked about.” Noel King How close can Donald Trump come to really and truly changing the way the world does trade? Greg Ip It’s possible that Trump presses ahead with exactly what he said, raises tariffs on everybody, and then all those countries retaliate. They export less to us, we export less to them, trade shrinks, and everybody is worse off. There’s another possibility here, which is that a lot of folks in the United States and in other countries say, “You know, he’s right. The trading system was fundamentally good, but it went off the rails at some point. We need to get together. We need to remake that thing.” So I think another possibility is that we end up a few years from now with a different trading system, and perhaps a more realistic view of how China, above all — but some other countries, [too] — have not been playing by the rules. But I think, as we learned from his first term, one thing with Donald Trump — you can be sure of this — is that you should expect the unexpected.

Preview: Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth speaks at a news conference in February in support of IVF access. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Democratic lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates have maintained a clear strategy: Win a more progressive Democratic trifecta in 2024, eliminate the Senate filibuster, and pass comprehensive federal protections. When reporters asked about contingency plans — particularly given polls suggesting full Democratic control was unlikely — such questions were dismissed, cast as premature or defeatist.  Now, with Donald Trump’s return to power and Republicans set to control Congress, that strategy is drawing fresh questions. The GOP has signaled some openness to compromise: While campaigning, Trump said he supported abortion exceptions in cases of “rape, incest, and protecting the life of the mother,” and he promised to mandate insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Several Republican lawmakers have backed their own fertility treatment bills. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) backed a Democratic-led IVF measure and speaks openly about his family’s consideration of the procedure. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) has pushed legislation to expand over-the-counter contraception. But reproductive rights organizations are doubtful. “We are not willing to compromise when it comes to our ability to make decisions about our bodies, lives and future,” Gretchen Borchelt, of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), said on a press call the day after the election. “What is the compromise that would provide relief for Amber Nicole Thurman’s family who’s grieving her every single day?” added NWLC’s president Fatima Goss Graves, referring to a patient who died from sepsis after being denied care. Vox asked six major advocacy groups if they would consider pushing for new federal protections under a Republican-led Congress, be it for IVF, birth control or abortion. Most avoided giving a direct answer, instead directing the conversation to Republican accountability and the harm caused by abortion bans. The stance reflects a deeper calculation: that accepting anything less than people deserve — meaning access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care for any reason — would legitimize restrictions and undermine the broader fight for bodily autonomy. When asked about pursuing partial protections versus holding out for more Democrats, groups choose waiting.  “We are really looking at this from a defensive position,” said Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All, the group formerly known as NARAL. “We read Project 2025, we are very familiar with the folks in leadership on the Republican side … and are preparing for them to levy attacks on reproductive freedom at all levels of government on the administrative side.”  Polling suggests there may be political opportunities Despite the Biden era’s surprising bipartisan deals on thorny issues from gun control to climate change, there were never similar attempts to forge bipartisan compromise on reproductive rights. When a small group of Republican and Democratic senators introduced legislation in 2022 to codify elements of Roe, abortion rights groups quickly rejected the idea, arguing in part that it did not go far enough. Even on issues like IVF and birth control, where Republican support seemed possible and anti-abortion groups held less sway, there were no serious efforts to find common ground.  To be sure, while many Republicans have sought to reassure voters that they support IVF, their voting record thus far tells a different story. Many of those same lawmakers co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which could severely restrict fertility treatments by granting legal personhood from the moment of conception. Republicans have largely voted against Democratic IVF legislation, while claiming they’d support narrower fertility treatment bills and criticizing Democrats for not being open to working on amendments. Still, polling suggests potential political opportunities. About 80 percent of voters say protecting contraception access is “deeply important” to them, and 72 percent of Republican voters had a favorable view of birth control. IVF is even more popular: 86 percent of Americans think it should be legal, including 78 percent of self-identified “pro-life advocates” and 83 percent of evangelical Christians. Americans’ support for abortion rights has intensified since the fall of Roe, and this reality shaped some Republicans’ rhetoric on the campaign trail. Newly elected Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Dave McCormick ran on a platform of fighting restrictions on fertility treatments and proposing a $15,000 tax credit for IVF. Some policy strategists have suggested that, regardless of Republican sincerity, Democrats and abortion rights groups might benefit from pushing votes on new IVF and birth control bills, even if they offer limited protections or codify certain provisions that advocates oppose. Such moves could either win new concrete protections or expose Republican resistance. But Democratic leadership and abortion rights groups for now seem uninterested in this approach, preferring to maintain pressure for comprehensively restoring rights.  “We haven’t seen a genuine effort from Republicans that they engage in this conversation,” Stitzlein said. “We’ve seen them propose bills to try to save face in response to Dobbs and the Alabama IVF ruling.” Should Democrats keep their red line on abortion exceptions? The political math around abortion exceptions would seem straightforward. Trump ostensibly supports them. Most Americans, including many Republicans, believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the parent’s life. And women are being demonstrably harmed by the lack of workable exceptions in state bans today. One recent study estimated that more than 3 million women in the US will experience a pregnancy from rape in their lifetime. Yet when asked whether they would consider seeking federal protections for abortion exceptions during Republican control as a harm reduction measure, established advocacy groups showed no interest, pointing to patients like Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski who almost lost their lives or fertility despite state bans with exceptions. “As we are seeing across the country, exceptions often don’t work in practice, so people should not take comfort in those or rely on them,” Rachana Desai Martin, chief government and external relations officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Vox. This position stems from a core belief: that any engagement with exceptions would validate the broader framework of restrictions. Some doctors on the ground in states with restrictive bans have bemoaned the lack of support they’ve received for carving out exceptions. “I worry that reproductive rights advocates may be digging into untenable positions and failing to listen to those affected most by the current reality,” wrote one maternal-fetal medicine physician in Tennessee.  On the question of codifying emergency medical protections, Planned Parenthood Action Fund stressed in an email that, “narrow health exceptions or those that focus only on emergencies are a disservice to patients and their health care providers because every pregnancy is unique.”  The position is particularly notable given these same groups’ strong defense of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) at the Supreme Court this year. The groups argued that EMTALA — which requires hospitals to provide “stabilizing treatment,” including emergency abortion care — represents a crucial federal protection for women in medical crises. Yet when asked about codifying the Biden administration’s interpretation of EMTALA or similar protections through legislation, the groups demurred. Internationally, exceptions have served as imperfect stepping stones to broader rights. Colombia’s journey from total ban to full decriminalization began with three abortion exceptions in 2006 — for health risks, fatal fetal conditions, and rape. Over 16 years, advocates used these flawed measures to help build public support and legal precedent for expanding access, ultimately leading to decriminalizing the procedure up to 24 weeks in 2022. India and Spain followed similar trajectories. India’s 1971 Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act initially permitted abortion only for specific circumstances like health risks and rape. Advocates used this limited framework to gradually build broader rights — first emphasizing public health arguments around unsafe abortions, then expanding to gender equality concerns. This incremental approach led to significant expansions in 2021 and 2022, including extended gestational limits and broader access for unmarried women. Spain’s path from its restrictive 1985 law to its 2010 legalization up to 14 weeks followed a similar pattern, with advocates particularly leveraging Spain’s mental health exception to create de facto broad access. These tensions — between principle and pragmatism, between long-term strategy and immediate needs — have taken on new urgency as patients in the US encounter the limitations of state-level abortion exceptions. In Louisiana, which has exceptions for protecting life, health, and fatal fetal conditions, almost no legal abortions have been reported since its ban took effect. Doctors say ambiguous laws and criminal penalties make them unwilling to test the rules.  But rather than pursue clearer federal standards around exceptions, advocacy groups are betting on abortion rights becoming more prominent as restrictions continue.  “Americans will continue waking up to stories of women who died preventable deaths because they were denied access to essential health care and voters will continue to see these bans wreak havoc on their families and communities,” declared a post-election strategy memo from Emily’s List, National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and Reproductive Freedom for All. “With anti-abortion politicians in power, abortion rights will only grow in salience for voters in elections to come.” Working with Republicans on even limited protections could also undercut the narrative of GOP extremism — a message advocacy groups see as crucial for winning in 2026 and 2028. A high-stakes political bet Despite abortion rights proving less galvanizing in the most recent election than Democrats had hoped, reproductive rights groups are betting that voter attitudes will shift as restrictions continue. Currently, 28 million women, plus more trans and nonbinary people of reproductive age, live in states with abortion bans. “We have no interest in shrinking our vision,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, said, “but the politicians who will soon govern a majority pro-abortion country would do well to expand theirs.” In an interview with Vox, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota said she will work with anyone in Congress who wants to collaborate in good-faith to protect abortion rights, but stressed that as Democrats move into the minority, “the onus will be on Republicans” to come to the table and negotiate with them in a serious way. Asked about potential deal-breakers, Smith declined to discuss specific provisions in the abstract, saying she would wait to see complete proposals. Smith’s view captured the movement’s current predicament: “We have been saying for several years after Dobbs that the way to protect people’s access to abortion is to win elections for people who are willing to protect those rights. And that didn’t happen, so there is no magic solution here.”

Preview: If the popular song is to be believed, there’s no place like home for the holidays.  But getting there is going to cost you. Americans plan to spend an average of $2,330 on holiday travel this year, according to NerdWallet’s 2024 Holiday Spending Report. Factor in another $900 on gifts, per the report, and hundreds more on all the usual living expenses and you’ve got a hefty credit card bill come January 1. You would think that it’d be easy to opt out of unnecessary and pricey holiday travel, but sometimes external pressures and expectations can make it hard to say no. Parents may look forward to spending uninterrupted time with their adult children and grandchildren during this time of year. If you’re coupled, that doubles the coordination: Pairs might weigh whose hometown to visit.  “We, as a culture, put so much emphasis on the holidays being the most important time — even though I don’t believe that’s true — that families get together,” says licensed marriage and family therapist Nicolle Osequeda. “[People] feel really obligated to meet the needs of their family … and moreover, not to disappoint them.” As much as you’d like to make the grandparents happy and get out of town for the holidays, sometimes your budget just won’t allow it. If you’re nervous about how to approach negotiations with your partner or break the news to your family, therapists offer some guidance on what to say and how to compromise.  Set your holiday priorities Beyond just setting a budget, Osequeda suggests first getting clarity on what an ideal holiday looks like for you. During a time of year when people are often making decisions out of obligation, ask yourself what’s actually important to you this holiday season. Maybe it’s paying down debt or saving for a major purchase. Everyone’s reasons will be a little different.  By focusing on what’s important to you, you can determine what you can afford. It’s not worth going into debt because you want to do it all this holiday season. “If there’s a reality that there’s three things you want to do and you can only afford to do two … just closing your eyes and putting things on credit cards is going to create bigger problems down the line,” says Matt Lundquist, founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy. “Those conversations go better when everybody is willing to put their cards on the table and say, ‘This is what I want, this is why it’s important to me.’” Getting clear on what you want helps you advocate for yourself when making plans with your partner, too. You may choose to prioritize some form of travel, but aren’t able to accommodate visiting both you and your partner’s families. Again, discuss your holiday goals and let your significant other know how your proposed plans align with that goal. If it’s been years since your partner’s been home, you might decide to visit them for Thanksgiving and then invite your family over for a New Year’s Eve party. “Those conversations go better when everybody is willing to put their cards on the table and say, ‘This is what I want, this is why it’s important to me,’” Lundquist says, “rather than the situation where we’re guessing what the other person wants and having to navigate reading between the lines.”  Break the news as soon as possible — and be direct Many people have a tendency to delay sharing news that might be potentially upsetting, Lundquist says. But don’t string your family along. As soon as you’ve determined you can’t make it, let your loved ones know so they can deal with their disappointment or offer a compromise, Lundquist says. Then, tell your family in a “kind but clear way,” Osequeda says, why you can’t make it — but avoid overexplaining. You owe your loved ones an explanation, but you don’t need to justify your choices, she says. The more justification you proffer, the more “people start to poke holes in your argument,” Osequeda says, and may try to convince you to spend beyond your budget.  If you’re unsure of how to tell your family, Osequeda suggests: “This is hard for me, but I’ve decided not to come home for the holidays this year because of the expenses involved. I understand if you’re disappointed. However, right now I really need to focus on [staying on top of my bills/not being stressed out over finances/not putting more money on my credit card/getting gifts for the kids]. Are there ways that we can still connect during the holidays that don’t include me traveling?” You might get some blowback from family members offering unsolicited criticism on what you choose to spend money on. (Which is none of their business anyway.) Remember that you’re making this choice based on your budget and financial needs, Lundquist says, and sometimes you’re going to make decisions that upset others. “I can’t get myself into debt to avoid you being upset,” he says, “and I also don’t want to organize our relationship in a way where those are the terms.” But be open to compromise Of course, your family might be entirely understanding and want to find a way to see you. It’s worth trying to find a happy medium, Osequeda says. If you have young kids and schlepping the whole family across the country is out of the question, you could ask your parents to travel to you if they’re able. Some families may offer to split the cost of travel with you.  Get as creative as you want: meeting somewhere in the middle, making a plan to visit during a cheaper time of year, promising to save up so you can come next year. Maybe these bigger asks are out of the question. You could make a smaller compromise and suggest FaceTiming the family during dinner or when the kids open presents. If you’ve determined that your holiday wouldn’t be complete if you weren’t at home, there are also other ways to make it work. For the cheapest flights, you might consider departing on the holiday itself and returning home during the week after the holidays. Try to carry on your luggage instead of checking a bag to save on fees. Driving will generally be cheaper than flying for shorter trips, but be sure to factor in extra travel time for holiday traffic. But if you’re traveling across the country, your time and money is better spent on flying. Other ways to lower the cost of holiday travel, according to NerdWallet, are to use miles or points for flights and hotels and to book rideshares to and from the airport in advance. Regardless of where you spend the holidays, you should still find time to get together with people you care about, whether it’s a local Friendsgiving or neighborhood potluck.  “If you are unable to make it to your family because of financial reasons,” Osequeda says, “it doesn’t mean that you have to sit home alone miserably.”

Preview: Vox reader Jen Hawse asks: Why do hotels pump in very strongly smelling perfume into their lobbies and sometimes their guest rooms? What we think of as a “nice” hotel often comes down to a certain je ne sais quoi. Sure, it has all the amenities — a luxe restaurant and bar on the premises, hotel room beds with soft Egyptian cotton sheets, perhaps a decadent spa — but beyond all that, it should have an ineffable ambience that’s both welcoming and sensual, cozy and yet exotic. Scent can be what helps clinch this vibe. You might have noticed an alluring aroma wafting through the air as you enter a hotel lobby, or even a hotel room; this is likely a custom fragrance that hotels diffuse into the air. While some use mass-market scents available to consumers, many use their own signature scent developed by a master perfumer. Scent marketing, as the practice is called, isn’t just limited to the hospitality scene, but pervades the retail sector. Just think of the thick miasma of cologne that used to radiate from every Abercrombie & Fitch store. It’s (usually) a more subtle marketing tool than a giant light-up billboard, calling back to happy memories and altering your mood so you feel more satisfied in a space — which, in turn, can nudge you to stay there longer, spend more money, book a room again, and recommend the experience to someone else. Some companies are even spritzing smells in the office to make the return-to-office more pleasant. In so many of the places we spend time in, an appeal is being made to your nose. What’s the psychology behind scent marketing? Scent marketing has been around for decades, with Las Vegas casinos being some of the earliest pioneers to use it. In the 1990s and early 2000s, though, its purpose wasn’t just to invite a pleasant aroma to an otherwise neutral space — it was to counteract a lingering, distasteful odor. “There was a while there where most resorts were drawn to environmental scenting because they wanted to do something about the cigarette smoke,” Jim Reding, CEO of the environmental scenting company Aroma Retail, says.  Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. A growing number of companies outside hospitality are developing ambient scents for their retail spaces, says Caroline Fabrigas, CEO of Scent Marketing Inc. Recently, Fabrigas’s firm helped create a custom scent for Wayfair’s new Chicago store that smells like linen and fresh-cut grass.  In food and drink establishments, focusing on smell makes immediate sense: You smell pizza, you think of pizza, you crave pizza. Starbucks works hard to keep its coffee aroma from being sullied by food and other smells in its stores — employees aren’t even allowed to wear fragrances. For other spaces, the basic theory is that a distinctive smell becomes something customers immediately associate with a brand — our sense of smell is connected to the part of the brain related to memory, like a certain laundry detergent taking you straight back to being wrapped up in blankets when you were home sick from school. Using an ambient scent can cement brand recognition, and improve how well customers remember aspects of a product or service. A nice smell also puts you in a good mood. A 2021 study by researchers from the Barcelona School of Tourism, Hospitality, and Gastronomy conducted a trial in a four-star hotel by comparing guest experiences in rooms scented with lavender and rooms without any scent; guests who stayed in scented rooms appeared to show higher happiness levels when in the room than those in the neutral room. Studies have also shown that a scented environment can make customers stay longer in a restaurant (while underestimating the length of their visit), thus spending more money — time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. An experiment an automaker conducted in the early ’90s even tried to determine if spraying certain scents on salespeople would make them more likely to be perceived as trustworthy, though it’s unclear what the outcome of this trial was.  How do hotels decide on a “signature scent”? Hotels and resorts spend a lot of time matching up their brand image to a signature scent, especially today. (Although it might be very similar to a popular fragrance.) One of the trends in hotel design right now is to play up how distinct a space feels. “Everything has become hyper-local now,” says Lori Mukoyama, a global leader of hospitality practice at the architecture and design firm Gensler. “Gone are the days where we’re stamping out the same brand, exactly the same, in 50 different cities across the world.” Having a tailor-made scent is key to building the feel of a personalized hotel lobby, according to Mukoyama. “I totally feel like it’s a logo in the air,” says Fabrigas, whose company develops ambient scents for businesses. “It’s a backdrop against which all else plays.”  For some brands, having one signature scent isn’t enough. The now-closed Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, for example, used two separate fragrances for two separate spaces. In the lobby, it used a buttery coconut vanilla scent, Reding says, to evoke a tropical theme that matched the giant aquarium behind the front desk. “It gives us a feeling of warmth and safety,” he says. But then the casino used something more energizing — a “tropical cocoa mango” — to give it a party-feel that might encourage exciting risk-taking rather than relaxation. One reason why environmental scenting is so commonplace in hotels is that it’s a place where the perception of cleanliness is sacrosanct. Reding says hotels often tell him they want something that smells fresh and clean, but tend to eschew anything that might remind people of cleaning products. It goes back to how we associate smells with certain contexts — a whiff of lemony Pine Sol is going to make you think of a bathroom, or a mop, rather than the luxurious, crisp cleanliness that hotels strive for. For some, hotel fragrances are an olfactory delight they want to recreate in their own homes. Several online retailers sell hotel and resort scents for consumers — or at least, an approximation of their bespoke scent — and Reding says this is the bulk of his business today. But not everyone is a fan of scent marketing. What’s a good or bad smell is highly subjective, and people with sensitive noses in particular might bemoan not being able to escape a headache-inducing fragrance. “That’s what really makes it tricky — that you’re diffusing in public spaces without the public’s consent,” Reding says. This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Preview: Did you donate to charity in the past, but no longer do so?  If the answer is yes, you’re not alone. For the second year in a row, the philanthropy research foundation Giving USA reported that fewer Americans are donating to nonprofits than they used to, and the total amount of giving is declining once inflation is taken into account. Some in the philanthropy world are calling it a “generosity crisis” — fewer than half of American households now give cash to charity. Twenty million fewer households donated in 2016 than in 2000. And the money that is being given is increasingly coming from a small number of super-wealthy people. The only surprising thing about these findings, to me, though, is that anyone would be surprised. Why aren’t people donating to nonprofits? One big, and rather intuitive, reason why fewer people are donating money to registered nonprofits these days is the general state of the economy. The number of donors started sharply declining right around the tail end of the Great Recession in 2010. Of households that stopped donating money to nonprofits between 2000 and 2016, most earned less than $50,000 per year. Young people are also less likely to donate to registered charities than older people. The relationship between age and willingness to give away money makes sense — the younger you are, the fewer years you’ve had to earn money.  The Vox guide to giving The holiday season is giving season. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income, to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to explaining what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. You can find all of our giving guide stories here. But the age gap has grown over the past few years. In part, this can be explained by high costs of living, student loan debt, and inflation. “Younger donors simply don’t have money right now,” said Rasheeda Childress, a senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. But we can’t blame the economy for everything. The decline in organized religion might be the biggest factor in the decline in charitable giving.  Religious institutions are major hubs of philanthropy — highly religious adults volunteer nearly twice as much as other adults in the US, and roughly half of them volunteer through a religious organization. A report by the Do Good Institute, which conducts philanthropy research at the University of Maryland, found that people who belong to community groups, religious or otherwise, are more likely than others to volunteer and donate money.  It’s not that religion necessarily makes people more charitable. Community does — specifically, community where charitable giving is centered and expected. But as participation in organized religion declines, so does giving. Beyond religion, people seem to be losing faith in institutions — the government, the media, and nongovernmental organizations like nonprofits.  Nonprofits are one of the most trusted institutions in the US, but only about half of Americans have faith in them. Political polarization may be partially to blame — organizations that are colored by partisan values, like religious organizations and civil rights groups, are less trusted than nonprofits focused on more bipartisan issues like wildlife conservation.  For Nonprofit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge speculated that, as the gap between rich and poor gets wider, people are more likely to view nonprofits as “compliant handmaidens to an unjust system.” It’s not that people are less generous, it’s because they don’t trust organizations that cater to the rich donors they depend on, McCambridge added. At the same time, a survey of over 2,100 adults in the US found that, of those who stopped giving to charity over the past five years, 47 percent said that they chose to stop donating because they believed wealthier households should be pulling more weight. Historically, reaching out to small-dollar donors has not been an effective use of time for nonprofits, even though many nonprofits — particularly those in less affluent communities — depend on recurring small donations to stay afloat. Why pour energy into persuading 10,000 people to donate $10 each, when you could get all $100,000 from one wealthy donor? “It’s almost becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Childress said. By catering to the wealthy, nonprofits are “going after where the money is right now, but they’re not growing where the money is going to be.” The charitable tax deduction system was literally designed to benefit the rich. If you don’t earn a lot of money, claiming charitable donations doesn’t make much sense, especially after former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 reduced the need to itemize deductions. A totally reasonable reaction might be, “Who cares? Rich people have money to spare. Let them pay for everything!” But if we let rich people dominate philanthropy, we give them the power to shape how nonprofits operate. “You don’t want to be beholden to anyone,” said Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and author of Giving Done Right. If an organization that ought to be grounded in generosity and community is visibly propped up by a handful of billionaires and corporations, it’s not a great look.  If donors are not immersed in the community an organization is trying to serve, they’re less likely to understand what that community really needs. And centering the wealthy certainly doesn’t convince already-suspicious young middle-class adults to get involved. How can we measure generosity if the IRS doesn’t know about it? The Generosity Commission, a nonpartisan team led by the Giving Institute and Giving USA Foundation, has spent years trying to figure out where all the non-wealthy donors have gone. “There’s certainly a monetary giving crisis,” Childress said. But “if you look at the data, people are being generous” — just not in ways we’re familiar with. In other words, the apparent “generosity crisis” may not be a crisis of generosity at all.  Measuring generosity is a bit like measuring “happiness” or “loneliness” — weird. Trying to nail down a feeling with statistics requires quantifying something that can’t really be quantified. Inevitably, the final score will be an imperfect reflection of the feeling, heavily skewed by what’s possible to measure. Today, measuring cash donations to registered charities is relatively simple. These gifts are reported to the IRS, leaving behind a paper trail that can be tracked by organizations like Giving USA. A 2020 study conducted by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society found that people in the US give in ways that extend far beyond tax-exempt donations to nonprofits. These forms of giving are harder to trace, though. When I gift a guitar to my neighbor who wants to teach his kid to play, for example, there’s no official record of that transaction — just a couple Facebook comments and a face-to-face conversation. The IRS can’t trace it, so in the eyes of Giving USA, it never happened. Mutual aid — or the reciprocal exchange of resources within a community — has existed worldwide for thousands of years. But it entered the spotlight in the US during the pandemic through community fridges, child care collectives, and health care funds.  For a population that increasingly distrusts political institutions and craves human connection, mutual aid can feel more impactful than donating to a nonprofit — whether it really is or not. A survey conducted by GivingTuesday, the organization behind the post-Thanksgiving global day of giving, found that 76 percent of respondents between 18 and 34 prefer to give directly to individuals in need, and not nonprofits — only 46 percent of those over 50 agreed. Donations raised through crowdfunding also grew 33.7 percent in 2022, with 6,455,080 crowdfunding campaigns launched across the world that year. The crowdfunding market is projected to grow to as much as $300 billion by 2030. But while a GoFundMe donation counts as “generous” in my book, Giving USA can’t track it — so, we have a “generosity crisis.” But we know that humans, for the most part, are generous. In 2022, the Charities Aid Foundation found that 4.2 billion people — 72 percent of the world’s adult population — gave money, time, or service to someone they didn’t know that year. Over the past several years, the Generosity Commission has been working to “tell the full story” of generosity, so nonprofits can better understand how people want to make their communities better. In a report published in September, the Generosity Commission identified several possible explanations for declines in volunteering and donations, including the Great Recession, declining religiosity, and delays in traditional adult milestones like marriage, home ownership, and parenthood — but they note that further research is necessary. So, what should we do?  To be clear: Nonprofits do a lot of good, both in the US and abroad. Especially in smaller, less affluent communities, they absolutely depend on normal, not-super-rich donors like me — and we’re not pulling our weight. One could argue that, because I am, temporarily, a member of the richest 1 percent of the world’s population, I am morally obligated to donate a portion of my income to charity. At least in theory, if I schedule recurring donations to highly effective charities, I could save a number of lives in nations where my money will stretch much farther than it can in the US.  But such effective philanthropy has always been the exception — in fact, giving to international causes actually declined by 1.6 percent after inflation in 2023. The vast majority of charitable giving in the US is domestic. Most donors aren’t paying for malaria-preventing bednets overseas — they’re mainly donating to Ivy League schools and religious organizations. In July, Michael Bloomberg donated $1 billion to Johns Hopkins University to pay for med students’ tuition.  If I were in med school, I’d be thrilled — student debt sucks. But med students, especially from prestigious schools like the No. 2 ranked Johns Hopkins, generally go on to make loads of money. Helping them out is less effective than, say, sending $1 billion to directly help flood survivors in Kenya.  Personally, I don’t currently donate a portion of my income to registered nonprofits, highly effective or otherwise. I’m still earning back the savings I drained as a freelance journalist (after spending six years on a grad student stipend). Bloomberg didn’t pay for my Ivy League education, and with tens of thousands of dollars in undergraduate student loan debt hanging over my head, I laugh every time I receive, and promptly delete, a fundraising text from my alma mater. But I do give. I regularly support Kickstarter campaigns, gift household items to my neighbors, and donate to a mutual aid fund supporting sex workers in my community. That makes me like other “zillennials” in my cohort, who tend to direct their money toward more informal charities than traditional nonprofits. That may not necessarily count in the IRS’s statistics, but I don’t think it’s fair to call us ungenerous. Given the current state of democracy, it makes perfect sense to me that so many of us value direct, tangible impact over indirect measurements of “effectiveness.” Informal community-centered giving can feel more impactful, even if it doesn’t score as high on a utilitarian scale. And what giving within your community can do — whether in the form of cash, time, or stuff — is build connection at a moment when we need it more than ever. Middle-class people aren’t unwilling to give. They just seem to be giving differently, and philanthropic organizations are still figuring out how to measure charitable giving beyond tax-deductible donations to 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Whether channeled through money or not, people perform acts of kindness all the time. Hopefully, the philanthropy sector will start to see them. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! Update, November 20: This story was originally published on July 10 and has been updated to include details about the Generosity Commission’s September 2024 report.

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