Caitlin Dewey | Vox

Every airline is Spirit Airlines now

2026-05-04T17:57:53-04:00

Some analysts predict that the closure of Spirit Airlines will push other airlines’ fares up. | Giorgio Vera/AFP via Getty Images

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Anyone booking on Spirit Airlines kind of knew they were taking their flight into their own hands. America’s original ultra-low-cost airline has been on death’s door since the pandemic.

First, it tried to merge with JetBlue. Then it declared bankruptcy twice in a single nine-month period. In recent weeks, Spirit had hoped to persuade the Trump administration to float it a $500 million bailout that would have given the government a majority stake, but President Donald Trump ultimately didn’t go for it.

On Saturday morning, many travelers arrived at the airport to find flights canceled and check-in kiosks vacated. “Spirit Airlines died as it lived: lots of angry customers and no one picking up the phone,” wrote Saahil Desai in The Atlantic.

What killed Spirit?

Amazingly, it wasn’t Spirit’s famously terrible product that ultimately did it in. Most people hated flying Spirit, to be sure — but they tolerated the poor service and extra fees because base fares were so inexpensive.

Spirit deployed a suite of tactics to offer such cheap fares. It cut leg room and reclining space to pack more passengers on each plane than legacy airlines did. It also eschewed the typical hub-and-spoke model — where carriers funnel passengers from small and midsize cities to big central airports — and focused on offering nonstop flights between large cities and popular vacation spots.

Importantly, the company also — in the immortal phrasing of the consulting firm McKinsey — “excelled at generating incremental revenue at relatively high margins from optional services.” That’s consultant-speak for $4.50 in-flight water and $33 carry-on bags.

Even with those upsells, however, Spirit operated on thin margins…and that math hasn’t worked since the pandemic. Rising labor costs drove up Spirit’s expenses, while economic uncertainty and tighter household budgets dampened demand among cost-conscious travelers. In recent weeks, the company had warned that it could not absorb rising fuel prices, which have almost doubled since the Iran war started.

Every airline is a budget airline now

But the Trump administration accepts no responsibility for Spirit’s abrupt closure. Administration officials are instead blaming President Joe Biden for blocking JetBlue’s attempt to buy the airline four years ago.

At the time, Biden’s Department of Justice argued there was too much overlap in the two airlines’ routes — meaning the merger would decrease competition. And if there’s anything positive to be said about Spirit, it’s that the company’s bottom-barrel fares have forced other airlines to lower their prices. One 2017 study found that fares were roughly a fifth cheaper in markets where Spirit or another low-cost airline had a presence. The airline industry even has a name for this: “the Spirit effect.”

Ultimately, however, that low-fare arms race did Spirit in. To compete with ultra-low-cost carriers, most legacy airlines have begun charging for previously free amenities and introduced a “basic economy” tier that apes Spirit’s no-frills ethic. As Vox’s Whizy Kim explained in 2024: “Fliers today are paying a slightly lower base fare for a worse flying experience.”

Because of their size and scale, those carriers can also afford to operate more flights per day to more destinations, which they can offer in conjunction with popular loyalty programs. Spirit didn’t stand a ghost of a chance.

America’s new most-hated airline

With Spirit out of the game, which airline will inherit the ignominious title of most-hated airline in America? Among large carriers, the title passes to American Eagle, a network of regional flights operated by American Airlines, according to YouGov. If you’re looking at all US airlines, then Allegiant — a low-cost carrier that mostly services vacation destinations — was already less popular than Spirit was.

Don’t underestimate the airline industry’s ability to give you new reasons to hate it, though. Some analysts predict that Spirit’s closure will push other airlines’ fares up: CBS found average fares rose roughly $60, or 23 percent, when Spirit exited a route.

That’s on top of rising fuel costs from the war in Iran, which could lead airlines to cut flights, raise fares, and impose further fees. And you’ll still pay for your carry-on. The indignity.

The numbers on US political violence

2026-04-27T17:34:25-04:00

An FBI tactical team prepares to enter a house associated with the suspected White House Correspondents' Dinner shooter in Torrance, California. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump has now faced so many assassination attempts that some people suspect they aren’t real.

The truth is less salacious, more alarming…and more straightforward. (If you wanted to stage a colossal false flag attack, would you do it under the noses of a thousand reporters?!)

Simply put, political violence is on the rise in the US. There are some caveats and asterisks to that claim, which we’ll get to in a minute — but generally speaking, across multiple sources, the trendline is consistent.

In the past year alone, one gunman assassinated the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; another shot and killed a Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and attempted to kill others, in Minnesota; and a man set fire to the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Trump himself has now survived three attacks, most recently at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this past weekend. A California man rushed a security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, intending to target multiple members of the Trump administration.

In a press conference on Monday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democratic lawmakers and “some in the media” for the latest attack, claiming — in a now-familiar refrain — that “hateful and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump…helped legitimize this violence.”

But while there is some truth to the broad idea that violent rhetoric can normalize attacks, the reality is far more complex (and far less one-sided) than that.

The numbers on political violence

Political violence is notoriously difficult to track over time. (There’s that asterisk I promised.) The term itself is squishy, and researchers differ on which acts belong under its umbrella. Many datasets also rely on media reports to identify relevant incidents, which is a shaky method in an era of declining local news coverage. And sample sizes are sometimes so small that it’s hard to draw any broad conclusions from them.

Still, the measures we do have point in the same direction. The US Capitol Police — who track threats made against members of Congress, their families, and their staff — have observed a marked increase since they began collecting data nine years ago.

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Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative also found a sharp increase in threats at the local level following recent high-profile political events, including the 2024 presidential election and the death of Charlie Kirk.

Meanwhile, the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, which includes incidents of political violence from 1970 to 2020, finds that assassinations and attempted assassinations began ticking up around the world in the mid-2010s, after a sharp decrease in the 1990s.

And new data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, shows that antigovernment violence in the US reached a more than 30-year high in 2025. For the first time in 20 years, the Journal reported, more of those attacks came from the extremists on the left than extremists on the right.

But why?

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in poli sci to guess at the forces driving this trend. Last year, when the Pew Research Center asked American adults to explain, in their own words, why political violence is getting worse, respondents landed on some of the same factors that researchers do: partisan polarization, a growing acceptance of violence, and the role of social media.

In particular, researchers say, the level of political division in the US — and the degree to which that division has taken on a moral tone — has created an environment where many Americans view their opponents as fundamentally “evil.” That environment extends outside of the traditional left/right divide to include many people who are angry at the system as a whole, according to Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a leading political violence researcher.

“It seems that those who are angry about our politics, but do not see a path to resolve issues through normal means, now believe that violence might be a solution,” she wrote in a Monday post.

Conspiracy theories and other types of online disinformation also play a role. Unlike the extremists of decades past, who may have operated as part of a formal organization, many of today’s perpetrators have self-radicalized on social media.

It’s too early to say if Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in last weekend’s shooting, fits that mold. An investigation into his motives is ongoing. But a document that Allen reportedly drafted before the attack, published on Sunday by the New York Post, does say that he felt a moral imperative to resort to violence.

5 of your biggest questions about the Iran war, answered

2026-04-25T14:43:43-04:00

President Donald Trump at a news conference in the White House briefing room on April 6, 2026. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

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It’s been just over eight weeks since the US and Israel started a war with Iran for contradictory and incoherent reasons. Virtually nothing about the conflict — except maybe its stakes — has gotten clearer since then, and there’s still no end in sight: US-Iran talks, set to take place in Pakistan over the weekend, fell apart on Saturday. In a social media post, President Donald Trump said of Iran that “Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none!”

I figured some of you might have questions, so Vox’s senior foreign policy correspondent, Joshua Keating, is stopping by to field a few reader-submitted questions about the Iran conflict.

Here’s what you wanted to know, and what Josh had to say:

I continue to hear people on the right defend the decision to attack Iran as a necessary measure to prevent the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Is there any truth to that?

Iran has a stockpile of around 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which in theory could provide enough material to make 10–11 nuclear weapons. Iran had denied that it wanted to build a bomb, and the last Ayatollah Ali Khamenei famously issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, but there’s no credible civilian use for the level of enrichment it carried out.

At the same time, it’s also possible that rather than building a bomb, Iran believed that staying as a “threshold” nuclear state gave it leverage in negotiations with the West and a form of deterrence. This proved to be a serious miscalculation.

As far as we know, Iran still has this material — the “nuclear dust” Trump keeps talking about — buried underground at one or more of its main enrichment sites. Whether the Iranians could actually excavate the material and make it into a usable weapon before this activity was detected and attacked by the US or Israel is an open question. But having now been bombed in the midst of nuclear negotiations twice in the past year, Iran probably has even more incentive to build a nuke than it did before.

How likely is it that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed/mostly closed indefinitely?

Depends what you mean by “closed” and by “indefinitely.” Trump’s extension of the ceasefire last week might suggest he has little interest in launching military action to open the strait, or just that he’s waiting for more military assets to arrive in the region.

Either way, both sides clearly have an economic incentive to reopen the strait — though Iran may have a greater incentive to inflict enough of a disruption on its adversaries that they won’t consider attacking again in a few months. Experts believe Iran has planned for months of economic pressure and is calculating that the US has a lower pain tolerance.

It’s equally hard to imagine a world in which other countries, particularly Iran’s neighbors across the Gulf, tolerate it continuing to charge tolls for use of an international waterway. But we’re in unprecedented territory here. It’s hard to say anything for certain.

Aren’t there any options for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz? Why can’t Saudi Arabia or someone come up with a solution?

In fact there is. The East-West pipeline, built in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War with exactly this kind of scenario in mind, runs from Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields to the port of Yanbu on its western Red Sea coast. It has quickly become arguably the most important piece of energy infrastructure on the planet and was targeted several times by Iranian missiles and drones.

The pipeline is now operating at its full capacity of 7 million barrels a day, which has been an important relief valve for the global economy, but isn’t enough to replace the 20 million barrels that normally flow through Hormuz.

Gulf countries are now considering a number of other pipeline projects, but probably not on a timeframe that will do much to help with this crisis.

Ultimately, Hormuz isn’t like other “chokepoints” in the global economy. The geography of the region’s oil fields and the Persian Gulf means there’s really not an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

I understand that the war in Iran has depleted America’s stockpiles of key ammunition. How long will it take to rebuild those stockpiles, and how much of a problem is that? (Put differently: Don’t we plan for stockpiles to be used and rebuilt?)

It’s a serious problem. The New York Times reported last week that the US has used more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles in this war, and it produces only about 100 per year. We’ve burned through about 50 percent of our THAAD missile interceptors — around 200 — and we only buy about 11 per year. This has led to diversions of these very in-demand systems from Europe and East Asia.

This would not be a great moment for the US to get into another major war, particularly with a peer adversary like China. But how serious a problem it is depends on how much longer this war lasts and how many targets the US still wants to hit. It is, certainly, a good time to be in the missile business. The Pentagon wants to invest another $30 billion into critical munitions, including interceptors.

I’m concerned about how Iran might retaliate against the US by means of cyberwarfare. Is there any evidence that their ability to do so has been affected by the US/Israel attacks?

Iran doesn’t appear able to launch the kind of major cyberattacks that would seriously disrupt Americans’ daily lives, but attacks by pro-Iranian “hacktivist” groups have been increasing, with targets including the medical device maker Stryker, the social network Bluesky, and the Los Angeles Metro. These attacks are a concern, but not on the level of the kind of damage that is feared from ongoing Chinese hacking campaigns like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon.

Democrats are winning the redistricting war — for now, anyway

2026-04-22T18:16:59-04:00

"Vote Yes" signage is seen during a Virginians For Fair Elections canvassing event in Woodbridge, Virginia. | Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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As the old-timey term suggests, gerrymandering has a long history in American politics. But it has intensified in recent years — first after the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims, and again last summer, when President Donald Trump urged Republicans in Texas to redraw their maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Texas Republicans drew up new congressional districts last summer that are expected to net their party five more US House seats in the upcoming midterm election. Californians responded by voting for an equal and opposite redistricting plan that should swing five seats for Democrats.

On Tuesday night, Dems notched another big win when voters in Virginia approved a new map that’s expected to flip four seats their way. But the Great Redistricting Wars aren’t over. In fact, they’re still spilling over to other states. So, this morning, we’re tallying each side’s score in the electoral arms race (and concluding that the real loser might be democracy).

Democrats strike back. The Virginia referendum — and a similar initiative in California — were intended to offset Texas’s new maps. Currently, Virginia’s congressional delegation is split 6-5 in Democrats’ favor. The referendum approved on Tuesday night asked voters to rejigger the map to favor Democrats in 10 districts, netting four seats and bolstering Democrats’ chances of flipping the House of Representatives.

The proposal marked a significant shift for Democrats, who have often opposed partisan gerrymandering in the past. And the victory itself was hard won. Though Virginia has tended to vote for Democrats in presidential and gubernatorial elections since 2000, the state is swingy and had a Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, until January.

Voters also complained about confusing messaging from both sides of the campaign, and many independent voters seemed uncomfortable with the notion of a partisan power grab. The electorate leaned more Republican than it did in last year’s elections, and the race was closer than expected.

Still, urban centers like Richmond, Virginia Beach, and the Washington, DC, suburbs of northern Virginia turned out enough Democratic and independent votes to carry the measure. Combined with redrawn maps in several other states — including California, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, and Utah — the Virginia vote creates the possibility that Democrats will enter the midterm elections with a one-seat edge.

Florida could be next. Primaries have already begun in several states, so time is running out for any enterprising partisans who want to gerrymander further ahead of the midterms. The big wild card is Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has wanted to redraw his state’s maps since Trump’s appeals last summer.

But the effort has been mired in GOP infighting and a lack of preparation, and it faces a state constitution that bars partisan redistricting. The state legislature is scheduled to meet for a special session to create anywhere from one to five additional Republican-leaning districts next week.

“It’s a big state, so that would give Republicans a lot of opportunity,” Barry C. Burden, an elections expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told my colleague Christian Paz. But it also creates some risk for Republicans: In spreading their voters across new districts, they’re opening themselves up to the possibility of an upset — particularly if Latino voters drift back toward Democrats.

The Supreme Court has the last word. A pending Supreme Court decision could, crucially, also kick off another round of gerrymandering just ahead of the midterm elections. It’s a scenario that my colleague Ian Millhiser called “nightmare fuel for Democrats.”

The Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 law, prohibits election practices that discriminate based on race and has historically been used to justify the creation of congressional districts where racial minorities make up a majority of the population. Should the Court strike down that provision during this term, a number of Southern states would likely redraw their electoral maps. Several still have time to do so before the midterm contests.

What would that mean in political terms? Nothing good for Democrats. Last fall, a New York Times analysis predicted the party could lose roughly a dozen districts, wiping out whatever gains it made in the California and Virginia referendums.

Partisan gerrymandering isn’t great for democracy, either. While research suggests it doesn’t significantly increase polarization — a claim some critics have made — widespread gerrymandering could dilute the power of voters in affected districts and dampen political competition. But few in power seem to care about that much anymore, as long as it’s the other side facing limits.

“We’re not engaged in political gerrymandering,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told the Times this week. “We are engaged in responding to the Republican effort to rig the midterm elections.”

Another Trump official exits in scandal

2026-04-21T17:45:43-04:00

Former Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer departs a Women's History Month event in the East Room of the White House on March 12, 2026. | Al Drago/Getty Images

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

I will remember former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer less for her tenure than for her casual deployment of the diminutive term “sauvi B” — which no person over 27 should use, especially during the workday.

Chavez-DeRemer resigned Monday amid an internal investigation into her conduct. In addition to instructing staff to buy her bottles of sauvignon blanc on work trips, Chavez-DeRemer allegedly stashed liquor in her office, encouraged young female staffers to “pay attention” to her father and husband, had an affair with a member of her security detail, and arranged work travel to visit family and friends.

It’s a pretty wild story, all told. And while the specifics are unusual, the broader pattern is not. Across both of his terms, President Donald Trump has repeatedly nominated high-level officials who have later flamed out amid controversies or clashes with the president himself. In just the past eight weeks, three Cabinet-level officials have resigned or been forced out of the administration.

Who’s in, who’s out. Trump previously ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the erstwhile face of his mass deportation campaign, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who served as one of Trump’s defense attorneys during his first impeachment trial in 2020. Noem fell out of the president’s favor over a $220 million border security ad campaign that prominently featured her (among other more consequential missteps). Bondi was fired over her handling of the Epstein files, which alienated a large segment of Trump’s core base, and her failure to prosecute his political enemies.

They’ve been playing musical chairs outside the Cabinet, as well. According to the Brookings Institute, which has analyzed White House turnover going back to the Reagan administration, roughly a third of Trump’s “A Team” — the staffers who occupy the highest positions within the Executive Office of the President — have left the White House since January last year. While eight of those people were promoted into other positions, 22 resigned or were pressured to do so.

Trump’s turnover record. That turnover rate — 20% in the Cabinet and 32% among top executive staff — actually represents a marked improvement from Trump’s first term.

Turnover on the “A team” then was a whopping 92%, according to Brookings, and 14 Cabinet members left over that same period. (Remember Rick Perry? Betsy DeVos? Rex Tillerson? To say nothing of the various former Cabinet officials who have since reinvented themselves as Trump critics and pundits.) Trump still oversees a pretty volatile staff relative to other presidents, however; on average, just 10% of executive staff turn over in a president’s first year.

Trump’s loyalty test. It’s also worth considering why stability improved in Trump’s second term. The president didn’t choose better-qualified or credentialed staff necessarily; he chose more deferential ones. As Reuters put it in a story about Trump’s early search for staff in 2024, “One quality is absolutely paramount: unquestioning loyalty.”

That emphasis on personal allegiance has apparently helped reduce policy disagreements and interpersonal squabbles in the top tiers of the administration. But it hasn’t necessarily protected even Trump’s personal friends and associates from getting the axe. Bondi had known Trump for over a decade, for instance. And another rumored departure — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — is Trump’s longtime friend. FBI Director Kash Patel, who has published several fawning children’s books about Trump, may also be on the chopping block next.

I, for one, will be pouring out a glass of sauvi B for them.

Live Nation lost in court. Here’s what it means for concerts.

2026-04-17T15:38:28-04:00

Protesters rally against the live entertainment ticket industry outside the US Capitol in 2023. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Live Nation will have to face the antitrust music, a federal jury in New York ruled this week, declaring that America’s preeminent concert middleman is an illegal monopoly. This was not news to those of us who’ve attended a concert in the past, oh, dozen years. You could score a ticket to Celine Dion’s comeback tour with all the money I’ve tithed to Live Nation in service fees and charges.

The verdict is an important recognition, however, that all is not well on America’s concert scene. So this morning, we’re taking a look at why live music got so expensive — and how this verdict could change things.

Before we get into the issues in the case, let’s tackle the marquee question: No, this verdict won’t (immediately, or even necessarily) lower ticket prices. The court hasn’t assessed penalties yet. And Live Nation has already signaled it will likely appeal. But the case could still, over time, chip away at Live Nation’s dominance in the live music market.

How much of the industry does Live Nation control, anyway?

A lot of it. Too much of it, according to this verdict. Since 2010, when Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged, the combined company has dominated not just ticketing, but venue management, artist management, and event promotion in the US.

This lawsuit alleged that Live Nation controlled, as of 2024, about 60 percent of the market for concert promotion and 70 percent for ticketing. It also operated almost 80 percent of the country’s top arenas and managed more than 400 artists, locking both performers and venues into exclusive contracts that made it hard for alternatives to compete.

How does Live Nation’s monopoly hurt consumers?

As Emily Stewart wrote for Vox in 2023, companies with this much market power don’t really need to compete on price or quality. Just look at the sorry state of concert tickets.

Live Nation has taken particular heat over the service fees it tacks onto ticket prices, which vary by venue and event but always seem a little too high to be fair. The federal jury in New York found that the company had overcharged customers $1.72 per ticket, on average.

Ticketmaster’s glitchy software has also drawn scrutiny — most visibly, and controversially, before the start of Taylor Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour. Widespread site outages prevented many US fans from securing concert tickets, and, well…if there’s one fan base you don’t want to cross, it’s probably Swift’s.

Swift is just one of many, many touring artists who’ve complained about Live Nation and Ticketmaster over the years, typically accusing the company of making their tours inaccessible to fans. In 2022, the country singer Zach Bryan even dropped an album titled All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster. (Despite that, only one artist testified during the trial: Ben Lovett, of Mumford & Sons, who is also a venue operator.)

What will this verdict do about it all?

That remains to be seen. This lawsuit began under the Biden administration, which argued it was “time to break [Live Nation] up.” The Trump administration has taken a different approach, withdrawing from the suit and inking a tentative settlement deal in early March. But more than 30 states continued the case, without the Department of Justice, hence Wednesday’s verdict.

Judge Arun Subramanian can now impose financial penalties or mandate changes to Live Nation’s business. The company could be required to reimburse some consumers, for instance, or to divest some venues. In an “ideal scenario,” one antitrust policy analyst told my colleague Alex Abad-Santos in 2022, a judge would unwind the merger that created Live Nation 16 years ago. But no major American company has been broken up as a result of antitrust litigation since AT&T in 1984.

What would breaking up Live Nation accomplish?

Live Nation would presumably argue that splitting it up achieves nothing at all. In a statement to Rolling Stone earlier this week, the company said that “there is no evidence in the record that Live Nation or Ticketmaster drives higher ticket prices or that breaking up the company would lower them.” One common justification for vertical mergers, like the Live Nation/Ticketmaster behemoth, is that they create efficiencies that benefit consumers.

Antitrust experts are skeptical, however, saying those benefits rarely pan out. They argue that breaking up Live Nation would disrupt its web of exclusive contracts, restore competition, and give smaller venues and ticketing companies a chance — potentially lowering ticket prices and raising wages for workers at both venues and ticketing services.

A split wouldn’t solve everything, though. On their own, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are still big enough to exert considerable influence over ticket prices and availability. (In fact, both were subject to complaints on those scores before they merged into one company.)

Live Nation’s dominance also isn’t the only reason that concerts have gotten so expensive. As Whizy Kim wrote for Vox in 2024, the demand for top concert tickets far outstrips supply, driving up the cost of tickets on both the primary market and the (booming, often predatory) secondary market. By one calculation, the average ticket price for a top-100 music tour skyrocketed from $40.74 in 2000 to $122.84 in 2023, well outpacing inflation.

Is there any other way to bring ticket prices down?

Kim proffered one counterintuitive solution: Make tickets even more expensive at their initial point of sale. Raising their face value undercuts scalpers, who jack up prices even higher on resale.

Other solutions might include releasing more tickets to general fans instead of holding reserves for presales or VIPs and restricting or regulating the secondary market. Some states have attempted to legislate these issues, while a bipartisan bill that overwhelmingly passed the House last year would mandate more transparency around added charges. Last March, President Donald Trump also signed an executive order directing the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on ticket resellers.

Alas, none of that will help you if you’re trying to catch some live music this weekend. But take solace in the fact that concertgoers just scored — in the words of many gloating state attorneys general — a “historic” win over the rogue forces of monopolization.

Trump’s bungled Iran negotiations didn’t have to go this way

2026-04-16T14:22:26-04:00

Wendy Sherman speaks during a meeting in Wellington, New Zealand in August 2022. | Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

American and Iranian negotiators are reportedly getting closer to a deal that would end the weeks-long war between the nations, following the collapse of in-person talks in Islamabad last weekend. In his announcement Sunday, Vice President JD Vance initially sounded pretty hopeless about the whole thing, as you might expect of a man whose dreams had just been smashed. But now there are reports of backchannel phone calls, Pakistani delegations, frameworks of frameworks…it’s all very The Diplomat.

Incidentally, my colleagues at the Today, Explained podcast just scored a fascinating interview with an actual diplomat: Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state and President Barack Obama’s top negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. So this morning, we’re turning to Sherman to (try to) understand the Trump administration’s screwups in Iran in 2026.

In her new interview with Vox’s Noel King, Sherman cautioned against being too “reductive” in discussing the outcomes of the war or the talks. (Iran has absolutely been weakened, she said.) But she outlined five areas where the Trump administration’s approach has, so far, failed.

Problem No. 1: They sent the B team to negotiate

Nearly 300 Americans descended on Islamabad for the most recent round of US-Iranian negotiations, including national security advisers, regional specialists, and Vice President JD Vance, who led the US delegation. But earlier rounds of negotiations were helmed by guys like Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff (Trump’s personal friend). Whatever their merits, neither man holds any particular expertise on Iran (or a real government position).

To further complicate matters, the US attacked Iran twice during previous rounds of ceasefire negotiations that Kushner and Witkoff hosted. So they don’t exactly radiate credibility, Sherman said.

Problem No. 2: They pursued a strategy that benefited Russia

Whatever the outcome of these peace talks, no one makes out better than Russian President Vladimir Putin. While the war in Iran is costing the US something like $2 billion a day, it could generate as much as $151 billion in additional revenue this year for the Russian government.

Russia benefits both from rising oil prices and from the relaxation of long-standing US sanctions, which Trump partially lifted in March. That windfall has already eased a domestic economic crisis in Russia and allowed Putin to continue his Ukraine war.

But that’s not the only way that Russia — and other US adversaries, including China — benefit from the war in Iran. The US will also emerge from the conflict weaker than it began, Sherman said: “We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances.”

Problem No. 3: They badly damaged the world economy

At this point, I probably don’t need to list the myriad and diverse ways that the war — and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz — has destabilized the global economy. Just this Tuesday, Britain’s finance minister slammed Trump for what she called a costly “mistake” and “folly.”

Whatever you make of that “folly” bit, however, the cost was predictable, Sherman said. In fact, it came up repeatedly during the 2015 nuclear negotiations.

“We constantly said to the United States Congress, ‘if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz; it could increase the gas prices; it could take down the international economy,’” she added.

Problem No. 4: They did not, in fact, have the Iranians’ “backs”

President Trump initially urged Iranians to rise up against the regime, promising that the US would support them. Now, regime change is no longer a focus of either the US military campaign or negotiations to end it. That’s a major blow to many pro-democracy activists in Iran and throughout the Iranian diaspora, as the writer and advocate Roya Rastegar wrote for Vox last month.

“Iranian citizens who do want freedom…have been completely forgotten in this process,” Sherman said. “The regime in place in Iran now is more hardline than the one before, if you can believe it.”

Problem No. 5: They actually made the nuclear problem worse

As my colleague Joshua Keating has written, Trump’s quest to stop Iran from getting a nuke could actually encourage the regime to seek out a bomb. Why? Because in the present world (dis)order, that actually looks like the best or only way to protect against US intervention.

Meanwhile, if Iran gets a bomb, other countries will want one too — including close US allies, Sherman said. So the world may ultimately become more likely to see a nuclear attack because of Trump’s war.

The bottom line? “The United States, in my view, has been set back.”

Listen to the full interview with Wendy Sherman here.

So what’s behind the Iran ceasefire?

2026-04-07T20:04:57-04:00

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth conduct a news conference in the White House briefing room on Monday, April 6, 2026. | Tom Williams/Getty Images

Editor’s note, April 7, 7:30 pm ET: President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday evening that the US and Iran had agreed to a two-week ceasefire to negotiate a more comprehensive agreement to end the war. This news came before Trump’s deadline of 8 pm ET for Iran to reach a deal or, he said, a “whole civilization will die tonight.” The article below was originally published earlier Tuesday and explains how we reached this point.

We’re now more than five weeks into President Donald Trump’s unpopular and apparently unprovoked war with Iran, and any decisive “victory” still seems far off. The US and Israel have dominated the battlefield from the start. But Iran successfully brought an economic crisis to a gunfight: By closing the Strait of Hormuz, a major chokepoint in the global energy trade, it spiked the price of oil, fertilizer, and other goods and triggered rationing and curfews in dozens of countries. A gallon of gas now tops $4, on average, in the United States.

Trump has veered from one approach to another as he struggles to resolve this thorny situation. First he tried suggesting that the closure of the Strait was not actually a problem at all. When that failed, he said other countries would handle it. On Sunday morning, he took a very, er, different tack: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he posted on Truth Social, where he threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges.

The thing about Trump’s threats is that he often doesn’t follow through on them. Online commentators have even coined an acronym for this: TACO, or “Trump always chickens out.” Should Trump not chicken out, however, then the US could be bombing 93 million civilians “back to the Stone Ages” in a matter of hours.

But let’s back up. Why is the US in Iran to begin with?

The US and Israel launched surprise airstrikes against Iran on February 28. Trump has variably claimed those strikes were intended to eliminate an “imminent threat,” to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and/or to oust the repressive, theocratic regime that has ruled the country for generations.

You might generously assume that, in pursuing multiple and occasionally conflicting objectives, Trump is taking something of a many-birds-with-one-stone approach. But as NPR’s Mara Liasson put it Monday, it certainly looks like he’s making the strategy up “as he goes.”

The Iranians, on the other hand, have been very strategic. Using a vast supply of small, cheap drones, the regime has brought the (asymmetric) fight to the US and Israel, forcing both countries to drain their supply of expensive interceptor missiles.

They also weaponized the country’s geography by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that many — dare I say most? — Americans could not name or place before last month. Reopening the Strait is now a central objective of the military action, and the Trump administration seems to understand that the war will be perceived as a loss for the US unless/until it reopens.

What will persuade Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz?

That’s the $200 billion question. At times, Trump has seemed determined to make the problem go away by insisting it doesn’t exist. Just last week, he claimed that the Strait would “open up naturally” after the conflict ended and said other countries that rely on Gulf oil should take on the task of getting tankers through again.

At other times, Trump has taken a starkly different approach — threatening to dramatically and aggressively escalate strikes if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait. On each occasion, however, he’s given the Iranian regime a deadline…and then delayed. And delayed.

On March 21, he threatened to “obliterate” Iranian power plants if the Strait was not opened within 48 hours. He then extended that timeline until March 26 to allow for negotiations.

On March 26, Trump again extended the deadline, this time until the evening of April 6. On April 5, he bumped it to 8 pm Eastern today, April 7. He also threw in a couple of well-placed profanities to signal he meant business. (Update: He agreed to a two-week cease-fire before the deadline.)

How serious are Trump’s threats?

If you mean “serious” as in “sincere” or “likely,” we have no earthly clue. And reasonable people can probably disagree on whether swearing makes you sound like a more or less serious person.

But in terms of how significant or worrying these threats are, the answer is: incredibly. International law permits military strikes on power plants and similar infrastructure only if they contribute to military operations. Widespread strikes on civilian targets are likely “illegal and unacceptable,” as one high-ranking European Union official put it.

US and Israeli strikes have already killed 1,500 civilians and badly damaged infrastructure in Iran, including highway bridges, energy and industrial sites, residential neighborhoods, and school campuses. These new threats would go considerably further, potentially disrupting electricity, health care, clean water, and other critical services for millions of Iranians.

Both the US and Iran have rejected ceasefire proposals that would have paused fighting for 45 days and established a path for reopening the Strait. In the absence of that kind of negotiated off-ramp, we have a surreal, uncertain countdown…and Trump’s Truth Social feed.

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America is going back to the moon

2026-03-31T17:26:40-04:00

NASA's Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft rest at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

I have yet to see Project Hail Mary, the buzzy space blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling. But who needs science fiction when you have…science reality?

At 6:24 pm Eastern, NASA is scheduled to launch four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon. The launch is part of the Artemis program, which hopes to return humans to the moon by the end of the decade and establish a bona fide base on the lunar surface.

This launch is part of a bigger, global push to return to the moon. So, this morning, we’re looking at what’s driving the new space race — and where it’ll blast off in the future.

The space race is back on

It’s been many moons since a human last set foot on the lunar surface. But over the past five years, unmanned missions and lunar flybys like Artemis II have become markedly more frequent.

Since 2023, government space agencies, nonprofits, and private companies from Russia, India, China, and Japan have all attempted lunar landings to mixed (but generally successful) results. South Korea launched its first lunar orbiter, Danuri, in 2022. Israel also attempted an unmanned moon landing in 2019, though its craft suffered an engine failure.

America’s last lunar venture went down in February 2024, when the US landed an unmanned lunar spacecraft called Odysseus near the moon’s south pole; its first in 50 years. Odysseus carried six NASA experiments and six commercial items, including a Jeff Koons sculpture.

If all goes to plan, Artemis II will mark the first time humans have travelled into deep space since the Apollo program. (The astronauts are orbiting — but won’t land on — the moon.) They could also set a new record for distance travelled from earth.

“It is a fact: We’re in a space race,” former NASA administrator Bill Nelson told Politico.

Why everyone’s heading back to the moon

The first space race was driven by geopolitical competition between nations — and there’s still an element of that, as Nelson’s full comments to Politico suggest. (He went on to warn that the Chinese could try to claim territory on the moon, though a 1967 treaty prohibits that.)

Generally speaking, however, today’s wave of lunar exploration is driven less by Cold War-style rivalry than by commercial interests. Private equity firms have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into private space companies over the past 10 years, seizing on lucrative government contracts and aiming to capture a share of a fast-growing market.

The unmanned lunar spacecraft that landed on the moon in February 2024, for instance, was produced by Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based engineering firm. For the Artemis missions, the US has relied heavily on technology developed by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.

These companies hope to supply the infrastructure for future space exploration, transportation and logistics, which will — according to plans NASA announced last week — include a $20 billion US base on the moon. Longer-term, the lunar surface could also theoretically be mined for valuable resources or used as a refueling station for longer, deep-space missions.

Next stop: Mars?

That is, after all, the ultimate ambition of the Artemis project: to put astronauts back on the moon, yes — but as a stepping stone to one day getting them to Mars. Manned lunar missions help scientists better understand how extended space travel affects the human body, as well as test life-support, communication, and navigation systems. Researchers have also hypothesized that the large ice deposits at the moon’s south pole — first discovered in 2008 — could be transformed into breathable air, drinkable water, or fuel for longer trips.

But those sorts of ambitions are still years away, at best. Artemis II is the second of five planned missions in the Artemis program, each intended to build on the one before it. Humans aren’t expected to return to the lunar surface until Artemis IV, currently slated for 2028. And it won’t be until Artemis V that NASA lays the planned groundwork for that permanent lunar base.

This is all the more reason to seize your chance to watch the launch tonight. Whatever the plans, we don’t know for sure when American (and Canadian!) astronauts will head towards the moon again. You can stream it on NASA’s YouTube channel or via C-SPAN.

The crisis in American air travel

2026-03-30T17:49:46-04:00

In the absence of durable systemic solutions, American travelers are left to do that most American of things: fend for themselves. | Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images

I’m scheduled to take my 1-year-old on a three-hour flight just over a week from now. Probably a headache, under normal circumstances, but a bona fide nightmare amid the recent airport bedlam. I was thus relieved — overjoyed, really — to learn that the security line chaos is easing at many airports. But that doesn’t address the larger, longer-term safety and reliability challenges in American air travel.

Today, we’re looking at two questions: Why is US air travel so bad? And what can be done to improve it, short of taking Amtrak?

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US airlines have gradually acculturated travelers to a pretty awful flight experience: smaller seats, middling snacks, fees for everything you can imagine. But even by the low standards of modern air travel, the aviation industry seems to be in particular crisis right now, plagued by staffing shortages, security delays, and a string of terrifying incidents that have some fliers questioning whether air travel is safe at all.

Those issues only got worse during the partial government shutdown, which forced some 50,000 TSA agents to work without pay. Unscheduled callouts and resignations slowed security screenings nationwide, snarling travelers in hours-long lines.

On Monday, TSA agents received their first paycheck in over a month, easing the bottleneck at many airports. But even if things go back to normal, normal is still…pretty awful.

Could we privatize airport security?

One buzzy option for righting the ship — or, fine, the plane — comes courtesy the libertarian minds at the Heritage Foundation (and several other conservative think tanks). They’ve proposed that the United States allow airports to hire private security contractors to do much of TSA’s work.

These private contractors would check IDs, scan luggage, conduct pat-downs and — importantly, in our current political atmosphere — continue working through government shutdowns. The model is already in place at roughly 20 US airports, including Kansas City and San Francisco.

Fixing an “obsolete” system will be expensive

Proponents argue that privatization would reduce costs and make TSA more efficient. But even if that’s true, it wouldn’t address many of the other systemic issues causing delays and safety scares at US airports. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, 80 percent of the country’s air traffic control infrastructure is “obsolete” or “unsustainable.”

That includes 612 radar systems that date back to the 1980s and other equipment so old that the FAA has to use eBay for replacement parts. Equipment failures can cause flight delays and cancellations, to say nothing of potential accidents. Last summer, Congress approved more than $12 billion to begin modernizing that equipment, starting with things like replacing old-school copper cables. But the FAA says it will need another $20 billion to fully retrofit the air traffic control system.

The other airport staffing shortage

Meanwhile, the FAA is also short about 3,000 air traffic controllers, which doesn’t exactly improve airport safety or performance. Only two controllers were working at New York’s LaGuardia Airport when an Air Canada Express passenger jet collided with a fire truck nine days ago.

The Trump administration has launched a number of initiatives to staff up air control towers and other facilities, but it’s also exacerbated the problem by, for example, eliminating FAA support staff during DOGE’s cost-cutting spree. The last government shutdown, which ended in November, also prompted the resignation of hundreds of air traffic controllers and trainees.

In the absence of durable systemic solutions, American travelers are left to do that most American of things: fend for themselves. Many airports are still urging travelers to show up hours early for their flights, and some fliers are traveling by train, instead.

Unfortunately, America’s passenger rail system is also something of a train wreck. And don’t even think about driving — have you seen gas prices?!