Noel King | Vox

Inside the $600 billion “sleep tourism” industry

2026-05-04T16:15:28-04:00

Vox producer Peter Balonon-Rosen with his recording equipment in his room at the Sleep Lab at Equinox Hotel in New York City. | Peter Balonon-Rosen/Vox

Sleep can feel like a precious commodity in my household.

My wife has had her fair share of insomnia. Across the hall, our one-and-a-half-year-old is…well, a one-and-a-half-year-old. The days of regular, two to three times a night wake-ups have barely faded. Plus, all it takes is one daycare sickness to take us right back. I’m a stay-up-too-late procrastinating kind of guy. In other words, we all could use a bit more sleep.

While the benefits of a full night’s sleep have been well-documented, those good Zs can be hard to come by. It’s led to parental burnout, workplace burnout, and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declaring insufficient sleep a public health epidemic. Today, the agency says about one-third of US adults and children don’t get enough sleep.

Now, a growing number of Americans are heading out on vacation with one goal: a great night of sleep. According to a recent travel trends report, “sleeping” now outranks shopping, nightlife, and seeing wildlife as US travelers’ main vacation activity.

Globally, luxury hotels are meeting their demand by offering high-end luxury sleep packages designed hand-in-hand with sleep scientists that promise a scientifically curated night of relaxation. It’s birthed a global sleep tourism industry worth around $600 billion.

Dr. Matthew Walker, a world-renowned sleep researcher and director of the Sleep Innovation Laboratories at the UT Dallas Center for BrainHealth, partnered with the luxury hotel chain Equinox Hotels to design what they call their “Sleep Lab.” It’s a nearly $2,000-per-night room entirely optimized and dedicated to getting guests to sleep.

“It’s a whole thermal and sensory ballet, all of which is designed around the biology of what your body needs,” Walker told me.

We’ve already gamified just about everything with our health, from how many steps you take in a given week to what your heart rate says about your stress levels and, of course, how well you sleep at night. This data has created new ways to try to optimize even the parts of life that are supposed to be relaxing.

So I was curious to interrogate sleep tourism and the luxury gamification of sleep. Could going on a sleep vacation unlock ways to sleep better all of the time?

I set off into Equinox Hotels’ Sleep Lab for a night with a sleep mask and reporter’s notebook in hand. I spoke with Noel King, co-host of the Today, Explained podcast, about the journey and my takeaways.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

So the people who do marketing have been marketing a solution to burnout, a sexy new solution, and the sexy new solution is: Go to sleep.

Indeed. Hotels are now offering these luxury sleep vacations: tailor-made packages designed for sleep tourists, the growing number of people who say they’re going on vacation not to go shopping or see wildlife, but just to catch a few Zs.

This makes sense to me, although I always thought of catching a few Zs as part of the vacation. You’re telling me that they’re saying this is something new?

Yes, sleeping on vacation has been around as long as vacations have been around.

But these new things are specific hotel packages designed to be all about sleep. And it’s actually birthed this new global sleep tourism industry that’s worth about $600 billion.

$600 billion is a lot of money.

Part of that is because they’re offering these luxury sleep packages designed hand-in-hand with sleep scientists. So now we’ve got sleep tourism options in Fiji, Portugal, Hawaii.

I couldn’t make it to Fiji myself, but I did go to one in New York City, where I live, at Equinox Hotels, the luxury hotel cousin of the luxury gym.

They are ready, willing, and able to sell you a package to help you sleep. As both an intrepid sleep reporter and a sleep-deprived dad, I wanted to understand the mechanics of this and to know if being a sleep tourist could unlock better ways to sleep in general. Like, could I take any of my tourism home with me?

So I approached my sleep journey in three legs. In the first leg I asked: Could I, sleep tourist, get as relaxed as humanly possible?

So I hit the Equinox spa to get what they call a sleep IV. There I was, sitting by a window, classical music floating through the air, sipping my lemon water, about to pump myself full of this bright yellow Gatorade-looking cocktail of things like magnesium, taurine, vitamin C, B, zinc. All these things, they said, supposedly prime my body for good sleep.

An hour later, hanging in the sauna, I was feeling pretty zonked. But I knew I couldn’t stop yet. I had more relaxation to do.

Which brings us to leg two of my journey. Now that I had found relaxation, could I squeeze the most out of it?

“Overall, we’re at a moment where we’re thinking about sleep a little differently than we have in the past.”

So I did this thing called the Wave Table. It’s marketed as a way to get the equivalent of three hours of sleep in just 30 minutes. You basically lie on this water bed under a weighted blanket and listen to these sounds that are supposed to help slow down your brain.

To me, it just sounded like this ambient oceanscape. And because I’m a nerd, rather than napping, I was focused on the sound design of it all, wave after wave after wave.

Peter, you will recall that the point of this was to get some sleep. Did any sleeping actually happen?

Yes, the sleeping part of the journey. I wanted to see if the tools of science could help with that. So I entered what they call their Sleep Lab.

What does that mean?

It’s a hotel room which promises a full-on scientifically tailored premium sleep experience.

It’s got a room bar. But instead of just Diet Cokes and chips, it’s full of supplements and juices and patches to help you sleep. It’s got a smart mattress that adjusts things for you overnight.

And it came equipped with all these activities and exercises that help you get good sleep. So I set out to do every single thing they recommended.

There were breathing exercises, color therapy, meditations, breathwork, bodywork yoga stretches, more breathing exercises, drinking sleepytime tea, drinking cherry juice to get extra melatonin, taking a steam shower…

Almost two hours of activities later, I was finally done. And the room goes to sleep too. The shades automatically drop, the room cools off, the mattress does too, and then darkness.

They claim that this is scientific. Scientifically, what was happening with all this?

To figure that out, I spoke with Dr. Matt Walker, who’s a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the University of Texas Dallas. Now, this man is the face of sleep in America today. He teaches the literal MasterClass on how to sleep. And he helped design this room.

To get sleep, your body needs to do a ton of dancing, it turns out. Matt tells me temperature is a huge part of that. You need to drop your brain and body temperature to fall asleep and then stay asleep. And then to wake up, your body has to do that whole dance again, but in reverse.

And the wake up…was honestly really nice.

The room came alive around me. The room and mattress had warmed.

The shades lifted. These ambient alarm clock sounds floated through the air. And there I was, soft, light, pleasant feelings all around.

So you did it. You got to sleep. Did you wake up well-rested?

I kind of wish I’d had one of those video game health [bars] floating above my head so I could tell where my levels truly were. It was a lot of work to go to sleep. But once I did wake up, I did feel pretty nice.

One thing that is striking me in this moment is that none of this sounds particularly cheap. How much did this cost you?

Well, to get one of these rooms, depending on how far you book in advance, it’ll run you about $2000 a night.

$2,000.

And that’s just for the room, not even the Gatorade-colored IV that I did.

Okay, you and I have talked about this. I am not a sound sleeper. What are the lessons for those of us who were not lucky enough to have this experience with you? Give me some tips.

Sure, sure. I think there’s things like keeping your temperature cool or taking a hot bath or shower before bed, keeping things as dark as possible. You can do that even if you’re not out on a sleep vacation. Another thing — doing all those sleep activities did keep me off my phone before bed and that’s pretty good for sleep too.

But I actually asked Matt about whether this could help someone like you who has bad insomnia. And he says a sleep vacation, even in his carefully designed lab, is not necessarily going to change things.

I trust him, but I will tell you that even if I had $2,000 a night to spend on this, I would not do it. I am too skeptical.

However, you said this is a $600 billion industry, which means lots of people are willing to spend the two grand a night. What do you think that is telling us about where we are at the moment?

As I was looking into all of the sleep tourism, there did seem to be more branding than substance at times. You would see a place boast about their sleep tourism option on their website, and then I’d go and look and they offer you a sleep mask and a comfy pillow, but not necessarily anything that seemed super sciencey.

Overall, we’re at a moment where we’re thinking about sleep a little differently than we have in the past. The grindset mindset is out. Pamper yourself. Take care of yourself. That’s in. Sleepmaxing is a thing that’s all over TikTok with people offering tips on how to hack your sleep.

Did you take anything away from the hotel? The stuff that they taught you, did you keep doing any of it?

That’s kind of what I went in looking for. Could I, as a tourist, take any of this home with me? Like, I don’t have a fancy bed — but I can breathe at home, or try to keep my room cool.

But all those exercises they prompted me to do in that room, it’s just not realistic to do all the time. Because life is busy, it’s messy, it’s full of friction and challenges — things that aren’t great for sleep but are part of having a full life.

What China is learning from the US war in Iran

2026-04-30T14:57:15-04:00

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier conducts US blockade operations in the Arabian Sea on April 16, 2026. | US Navy via Getty Images

Two months into the US-Iran war, the fighting has hardened into a standoff, with no end in sight. Both countries claim to have the upper hand, but there is only one clear winner so far — and it isn’t either of them.

“China’s watching this war very closely,” James Palmer, deputy editor of Foreign Policy and author of its China Brief newsletter, tells Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Palmer talked with Noel about the lessons China is drawing from America’s military performance in Iran, why Trump’s treatment of US allies could prove costly in any future conflict in the Pacific, and why — despite all of that — China is still pushing hard for a ceasefire.

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 podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What does China have to do with America’s war in Iran?

China’s watching this war very closely. China’s always been interested in how America fights, going back to the first Gulf War, which caused Beijing to really rethink its military, rethink how far ahead the US was.

One of the things they’ve noticed this time is just how fast America’s burning through its munitions. They’re also looking at where does America go in terms of allies and who will stand [with] America when America goes into a really stupid war? China wants to know how this will affect any potential conflict with the US in the Asia Pacific in the future.

What is the relationship between Iran and China? They’re communicating. Are they friendly?

Yes, they’re very friendly. If you go to China, you’ll run into Iranians a surprising amount because there are a ton of exchange programs — including, for instance, pilot training. There’s an Iranian medical school at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine for some reason.

It’s very odd because China is a communist state, and the Iranian regime has regularly murdered communists in the past. And equally, at least in theory, Iran is all about protecting Muslims. And China is the world’s greatest persecutor of Muslims: millions of Uyghurs arrested, imprisoned, put in camps, forced into labor.

But it’s a very practical relationship. They see themselves as having shared interests, both commercial and geopolitical. They see themselves as both opposed to the United States, and in particular, I think China sees Iran as a fellow victim of the current world order.

China is watching this war play out very carefully because it is trying to learn a couple of things, including what the US military can and presumably can’t do. What is it learning about our military strengths and weaknesses?

The main thing they’re looking at is really the question of production chains and the ability to replenish munitions, which seems to be even weaker than people thought. People have been warning about this for many years, but one of the American catastrophes of late has been to take these warnings and write a million think tank pieces about them and not actually do anything to fix it.

That’s in contrast with China. China had a bunch of strategic weaknesses in the 2010s, which it then went and fixed — domesticated its own supply chains, looked for new suppliers, all this kind of thing. And while we haven’t seen it stress-tested yet, it seems to be much more potentially capable of mass munitions production than the American system is. So while America has better weapons, China may have the ability to get those weapons out there more.

And you think of something like the Germans versus the Americans in World War II. The German tanks, the German planes were in many ways superior, but the Americans were putting 20 tanks on the battlefield for every German one. Industry is a force all its own. But even the quality of American weapons, I think, is coming into some doubt as a result of the Iran war because we’re seeing that the Iranians with their dug-in positions, with their preparation, even with their air defense being completely overwhelmed by American power, they’ve got surprising survivability: Much more, I think, has survived that American and the Israeli onslaught than first anticipated.

That’s partially because Iran’s a big place. It’s got a lot of places you can really dig stuff in. But it may also be that America has been overestimating its own capabilities even against a country that isn’t a peer opponent.

I hear you saying that China is paying attention to what the US can do militarily because it is thinking, what would we do? What would China do if the US attacks it in the way it attacked Iran?

I think it’s double-sided because on the one hand, China can imagine itself as being the victim of air power, the victim of this overwhelming force. And so it’s asking itself, could the Americans kill our leadership? And the answer to that is probably not, because Chinese air defense is a lot better than Iranian.

But it’s also looking at it and saying, well, what if we want to take Taiwan? What if we want to use our power and project force across the [Taiwan] Strait? Like the Iranians, the Taiwanese have had plenty of time to prepare. They dug in, they know who their opponent is, and they’re expecting it.

We’ve seen also that there’s this ability to threaten your [neighbors], even if you are being beaten by a stronger opponent. For all of America’s power, for all of America’s force, it’s not able to force the reopening of the Strait [of Hormuz]. It’s not able to keep those waters safe. And so China’s thinking, well, what will the Taiwanese be able to do in the [Taiwan] Strait? If we’re sending across a million men, how many of those ships are going to be safe? And maybe it’s less than they thought.

So China imagines itself as the US and it imagines itself as Iran. In that case, it’s thinking of Taiwan and what China might do to Taiwan. Let me ask you where the US plugs back into that, because I’ve been reading that the US has moved an aircraft carrier and expensive missile defense systems out of Asia and into the Middle East to kind of cope with Iran. Are we now at this huge disadvantage if China is to go after Taiwan?

Not really, because in any Taiwan scenario, we get tons of warning.

It requires amassing matériel, men, ships in a way that’s going to be extremely obvious. And there’s perhaps no part of the planet more closely watched than the Taiwan Strait. Aircraft carriers, mobile assets — you’re going to have probably enough warning to move them back. And we’ve got a ton of them in the Asia Pacific anyway, it is festooned with American bases.

What moving stuff out of the Asia Pacific is costing America is mostly political credibility. And the big example of this is THAAD, which is this very expensive, very technologically advanced missile defense system that we put in South Korea in the 2010s. China was really opposed to the deployment, and it punished South Korea very harshly for allowing the deployment of THAAD in South Korean territory.

Most notably, there was a complete boycott of the South Korean supermarket chain Lotte, which was trying to break into China and was basically driven out of China, as were a bunch of other South Korean businesses. South Korean pop stars were banned from entering the country for a while. They really paid a price.

Now they see the Americans treating them like shit in the way that Trump has treated all of America’s allies like shit. The US military says it hasn’t moved every part of that [system] out and that it’s just moved some components, but the damage has been done anyway. The South Korean press has widely reported it as THAAD itself being moved out and the reputational cost is already there.

Okay, you said it, not me: President Trump treats America’s allies like shit. And that raises some interesting questions here about diplomacy. President Trump has not been able to get America’s usual allies on board with the war, despite various pleas and whining and whatnot. What does it mean for China that America’s allies are like, Uh-uh guys, not this time?

America’s entire power projection in the Asia Pacific is very dependent on allies. Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait, you’re running a supply chain all the way up from Australia or from Japan. You’re dependent not only upon the big countries or relatively big countries, you are also dependent upon these little island states on the way, which have traditionally looked to America as a security patron.

All of this is dependent on goodwill and that goodwill is falling apart. As Trump has made the US increasingly a pariah state, it’s going to affect our readiness.

All right, so I think someone might be hearing us talk and thinking this war in Iran has been entirely upside for China. Is that the case?

Not really. It’s more of a lose-lose scenario. They’re getting the best they can out of it, but the closure of the Strait [of Hormuz] is still a big problem for them. And they’ve been working hard to try and get a ceasefire.

China feels the pain as much as anybody else. While they’re trying to get what they can from the war, they would still really like to see peace.

This is what it takes to become Trump’s attorney general

2026-04-29T14:10:23-04:00

Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche at a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on April 27, 2026. | Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images

It’s been a big week for the Trump Justice Department, beginning with the arraignment of an alleged would-be presidential assassin on Monday.

Just one day after charges were brought against Cole Tomas Allen, who prosecutors say attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the DOJ pivoted to a new target: Former FBI Director James Comey, who is facing a second set of incredibly flimsy federal charges — this time, for allegedly threatening the president with a message written in seashells.

It’s a lot to keep track of, and overseeing it all is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer. Blanche, the deputy attorney general, got the top job on a temporary basis after his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, was fired earlier in the month; now, he’s auditioning for the real thing.

CNN’s chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid told Today, Explained co-host Noel King earlier this week that the job is Blanche’s to lose. She explains how he got here, how he’s doing so far, and how Trump administration insiders and the MAGA movement feel about him as a potential attorney general.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Has [Blanche] done anything that has surprised you?

Todd Blanche has actually, I think, really met the moment perfectly, especially in the larger context of my reporting on his audition for attorney general.

[The Correspondents’ Dinner shooting] is the first thing that has happened to the Blanche Justice Department as opposed to being something they’ve done or what we’ve seen throughout the Trump Justice Department, which has been a lot of self-inflicted controversies: the handling of the Epstein files, the controversial firings, decisions they’ve made around cases and trying to charge people. That’s all self-inflicted.

But when you’re the attorney general, you’re going to deal with a Boston Marathon bombing or a San Bernardino shooting. This is not quite of that level, but it is certainly a massive event that they have to respond to. That is a real test for the attorney general, and so far it’s been a textbook response from him. He did the Sunday shows. He took questions. And then we heard from him again after Monday’s arraignment.

Pam Bondi, of course, was fired earlier this month. Tell me about how Todd Blanche ended up in this job.

He started out as a federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York for a long time. Then he went into white-collar practice, and then he joined the Trump legal team around 2023 when Trump was in the middle of those four major legal cases. Todd worked on the two federal cases brought by Jack Smith, and he also represented [Trump] in New York on the hush money case.

But what really distinguished Todd Blanche is that Trump lawyers come and go. I’ve probably talked to 40 of them over the past decade, right? Todd flourished. Yes, his client was convicted in New York, but he kept him out of jail, and ultimately their legal strategy on the federal cases resulted in Trump never facing trial on either one of those. In Trump’s eyes, Todd Blanche is the guy who kept him out of jail.

What has he been up to since he ended up in the acting role?

He’s been a busy bee. In my reporting, I talked to over a dozen high-level people inside DOJ. Some people I know don’t particularly care for Todd as a person. There was a general consensus, though, this is his job to lose, but in order to keep it, he’s going to have to deliver on weaponization for the president.

That means Trump wants his political adversaries to be prosecuted, and that is something that they have not been able to do yet. Judges and grand juries have to sign off on this. They’ve largely been reluctant, and so they’re getting tripped up by the checks in the system. But he’s made it clear this is what he wants. So ultimately, in order to get this job and to keep it, he needs to bring a case against the political adversary.

Does MAGA like Todd Blanche?

The two knocks on Todd Blanche are that “he’s not MAGA enough” and that he doesn’t get the Trump DOJ away from the “original sin” of how they’ve handled the Epstein files.

I have talked to officials inside the administration, including at least one White House official who said, yeah, we feel that Todd is not MAGA enough. He doesn’t do enough for the base. But even those people who in past stories have been pretty tough on Todd said, “When it comes to being the acting attorney general, he’s done the job. We’re not opposed to him having this job.”

When it comes to the Epstein files, one administration official told me that that is the original sin of the Trump Justice Department. And by that, they mean Pam Bondi’s repeated bungling of the rollout of those files, promising there was new information — those binders that she handed out that really had just a rehash of things that were already in the public domain, her saying that she had the client list on her desk when really there’s no client list.

Eventually, they just had Todd take over the messaging. He was also the one who went down and met with Ghislaine Maxwell. He was the one who oversaw the release of the documents. He has been front and center on this. So when he becomes the acting attorney general, the concern from some administration officials is, well, putting him in charge isn’t going to get us past our biggest embarrassment, which is Epstein. But I don’t think in Trump’s eyes that’s going to be disqualifying.

Is this job his if he wants it? Are there any other serious contenders?

My sources say this job is Todd’s to lose. Now, even if you get it, every Trump attorney general has been fired, replaced, or resigned. So we’ll see. But there are certainly other people nipping at Todd’s heels. But there are also some people in the wings. One is the US Attorney [for the District of Columbia] Jeanine Pirro.

It was funny — the night of the dinner and the shooting, Todd was at the White House. He did the press conference with the president, said there will be charges, there’ll be a gun charge, maybe a law enforcement-related charge. Thirty, 45 minutes later, Pirro did a press conference, and man, she was yelling the specific statutes into that microphone.

It felt a little like one-upsmanship — maybe it was just her enthusiasm, and I’m reading something into it, but her name has certainly been mentioned. We have two and a half more years. There’s probably time for everyone to be attorney general if Todd can’t or won’t stay in the job for two and a half years. It’s a tough job under any administration. But this one really brings some unique challenges.

The 1980s sex scandal that explains TMZ’s move to DC

2026-04-23T14:26:40-04:00

Colorado Sen. Gary Hart acknowledges the crowd of volunteers gathered at the official opening of "The Friends of Gary Hart" national campaign office in Denver on February 2, 1987. | Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The newest journalists running around Capitol Hill are none other than reporters from TMZ. The celebrity gossip site, famous for its aggressive and sometimes unsavory — but often effective — newsgathering tactics, opened up a Washington, DC, bureau just last week.

TMZ’s expansion into congressional news promises even more celebrity-style coverage of politicians. (For example, TMZ founder Harvey Levin recently asked the public to send pictures of lawmakers doing anything but their jobs during Congress’s spring recess.) But this brave new media landscape and its consequences date back further, to the 1980s. The clearest example is that of Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, an oft-forgotten politician once considered a frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic nomination for president, who was forced out of the race by allegations of an affair.

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Bai, who wrote a book on the Hart scandal titled All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, tells Today, Explained co-host Noel King that Hart was right about a lot of things to come in politics, including getting the leaders we “deserve.”

Who is Gary Hart?

Gary Hart in 1987 was the far and away leading Democratic contender for the presidential nomination [in 1988]. It all went away in one week in what was the first modern broadcast-era sex scandal in politics.

He was said to be having an affair with a woman who was not his wife, and that he spent a night with her on a boat and then had her in his townhouse. He was followed by reporters from the Miami Herald who hid in the bushes on his street and followed him. It all made for great drama and his political ambitions in that moment imploded and his political career never recovered.

What was new here was that, rather than having it be discovered either in the commission of a crime or by some kind of disclosure, reporters went out and searched for evidence of extramarital affairs on Gary Hart’s part. And the press really decided in that moment that it was both relevant and essential to know whether he had been faithful to his wife or not.

“There was a lot happening in that moment. You were right at the birth of satellite technology and what would become the 24-hour news cycle.”

Hart, who grew up in an era of very different rules, basically said that this is none of your business. And that was not considered a suitable answer then or now. He never elaborated, including to me, and I wrote an entire book about it.

The rules didn’t change because Hart was a different kind of politician or because he changed the rules. The rules changed because they were changing and Gary Hart just kind of walked into it. There was a lot happening in that moment. You were right at the birth of satellite technology and what would become the 24-hour news cycle.

Suddenly it was possible to go live from anywhere, which had a real impact on what was considered news and what wasn’t. You also had this new generation of journalists who had been inspired into the business by the example of Woodward and Bernstein 10 to 15 years earlier. That meant not just taking people down in a shallow way, not just looking for scandal, but really protecting the American voter from failures and lapses in character, which was something they thought the American media of the previous generation had failed to do.

How did [Hart] react once he was caught?

Defiantly. He felt it was no one’s business. He refused to answer questions about it. He tried to move on. Hart would tell you that he got out of the race not because he was no longer a tenable candidate, but because it was impossible to speak to voters. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Washington Post on the campaign trail. It was People Magazine and it was the brand-new A Current Affair and all these kinds of things.

He withdraws from the race after a week, and he gives a speech that I think, particularly given the moment we’re at now, is the most important forgotten speech in American political history:

We’re all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.” Some things may be interesting but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re important.

And I’ve come back very often in my writing over the years to this phrase. Because I do think in a sense, as a country, that’s what’s happened. We have created a political process that rewards shamelessness and dishonesty and exhibitionism and entertainment. And lo and behold, we have gotten a president now, twice, who is shameless and exhibitionist and attention-seeking and an entertainer at heart. And those two things are not coincidental.

Some of the scandals that have been uncovered, they’re not just cheating scandals. Some of them are serious crimes, sex crimes. Is the tabloid-ification of political journalism also a good thing?

Yes. Not all scandal coverage, not all tabloid coverage, is worthless. It’s not like we just don’t care about anything you do in private. But I do not agree with those who would say, Well, if a president’s going to have an affair, we should know about it. You have to be accountable for that, right?

There are a lot of journalists who covered Gary Hart. If they’re still around today, they will tell you he got what he deserved. My answer to that has always been, well, I guess we’re going to have to go back in history. Let’s build a time machine. We’re going to have to get rid of FDR and we’re going to have to get rid of Lyndon Johnson and we’re going to have to get rid of John Kennedy. And I guess we can just figure out another way through the Great Depression and the Second World War and the Cold War because none of these guys deserve to be president.

We are not morality police. My sympathy with Gary Hart is he was pleading in that moment not for complete innocence, not that he shouldn’t have to be accountable. He was essentially saying some things are relevant and some things are not. And no one has ever made a case with any persuasiveness whatsoever that anything Gary Hart did in that moment was relevant to the governance of the United States.

Congress takes a recess and TMZ is chasing [Sen.] Lindsey Graham around Disney World. There was this satisfied reaction: Maybe we should be paying attention to what Congress is up to. Maybe we should be a little bit more mad at them. Do you put any stock in that?

I saw a grown man having a lot of fun at Disney. And look, I think the undercurrent of the allegations of those photos was different. It was not just about a senator having fun while the Capitol was dysfunctional. It was about rumors about Senator Graham that a bubble wand seemed to reinforce in people’s minds.

Rumors about his sexuality.

“If you’re chasing a politician around Disney World…I don’t know how constructive that is.”

Of all the things I really don’t like about Donald Trump, I will give him credit for talking all the time to the media. He wants to be seen, needs to be heard. I have lived through an era where I went from riding around in cars and buses and getting to know candidates who wanted to govern the country, and having lunch with them and socializing to an extent that I understood who they were, to an era when it would be almost impossible to have that kind of proximity to leading politicians of the day. And we created that climate.

If you’re chasing a politician around Disney World because he seems to be having too good a time when the government’s not perfect, I don’t know how constructive that is.

A cautionary tale about tax cuts

2026-04-16T08:46:24-04:00

A man in Van Nuys, California, holds a sign encouraging motorist to express their anger at IRS on their final day to file 2005 income taxes on April 17, 2006. | David McNew/Getty Images

Americans are getting crankier about paying taxes.

Most people don’t enjoy paying Uncle Sam, but for much of the 2000s and 2010s, a sizable percentage of Americans thought that the amount of federal taxes they paid was “about right,” according to Gallup. But recently, the share saying their taxes were “too high” has been climbing; last year, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they pay too much.

Call it the Great American Tax Revolt, or maybe the Third American Revolution. Whatever we label this anti-tax wave, its effects are already rippling out across the country. Republicans in red states are slashing property taxes, or threatening to eliminate them entirely. Even some Democratic lawmakers are proposing massive tax cuts to be paid for with tax increases on only the very richest.

All of this reminds Isaac Martin, a professor of urban studies at University of California San Diego, of the battle over Proposition 13: a 1978 California ballot measure that capped property taxes statewide, setting off a chain of fiscal and social consequences that the state is still grappling with.

“I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free,” Martin told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

King and Martin talked about the history of property tax in America, the story of Prop 13, and what California’s experience suggests about where the rest of the country may be headed.

What was going on with taxes in the 1970s?

There was what we call now the property tax revolt, a major grassroots movement of protest against local property taxes. It was a nationwide thing. It happened in communities all around the US, but people really remember the events in California because Californians at that time, in 1978, amended their constitution to limit the property tax. And that tax limitation, which they called Proposition 13, then became national news and had all kinds of impacts in and outside of California.

I lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and I remember Proposition 13 being a big topic of conversation, but not everyone will know of its history. Why does Prop 13 matter? Why is it such a big deal?

Proposition 13 is a big deal for a few reasons. The first is that it very dramatically changed the state’s tax structure. It said local governments cannot levy any property tax in excess of 1 percent, so it capped the property tax rate at 1 percent.

“It’s a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don’t think carefully about what to do with that anger.”

The second and more important thing it did is it put an annual cap on the amount that the assessed value of your property for tax purposes could increase from year to year. Even if your home was appreciating in value very rapidly, as far as the local tax assessor was concerned, it wasn’t actually going up more than 2 percent per year in value. And that, among other things, constrained the finances of local governments in California.

It also gave property owners a tax break that grew over time, the longer they stayed in their homes. It was the beginning of a real cascade of similar changes to California law, including later initiatives in the 1980s that said that the tax break you have on your home because you got in early, you can pass that down to your children. You can pass that down to your grandchildren. That’s one reason why Peter Schrag, who was the [opinion] editor of the Sacramento Bee for many years, said in the 1990s, Listen, we now have a hereditary aristocracy of property in California.

The story of Proposition 13 in California matters for at least a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is that it’s a real cautionary tale that you can really lose something very valuable if you allow your anger at taxes to take over and you don’t think carefully about what to do with that anger. As I understand it, it’s a story of the simplest, worst solution to a real crisis.

Where did [Prop 13] come from?

First off, property taxes have always been a mess in America. Property taxation is the oldest tax we have in the United States. It predates the republic. And until the middle decades of the 20th century, the property tax was still being administered as if we were in the horse-and-buggy era.

The people who were in charge of figuring out how much your house or your business was worth for the purpose of taxing it were political animals, and they didn’t tend to have much expertise in actually appraising property. Instead, what they would do is just kind of write down from year to year, Oh, we wrote down this number for your home last year. Let’s write it down again this year.

They were giving away these kinds of informal tax breaks to people in a way that was often also very political. They might trade a low assessment for bribes. They very commonly traded low assessments for votes. And in the 1960s, led by California, many states then began to reform how they administered the property tax. They brought in computers, they professionalized assessment, and suddenly for the first time, many, many property owners, especially homeowners in the United States, started to get taxed on the actual values of their homes for the first time. And it turned out they didn’t like that.

It was a cause of an incredible freak-out — people petitioning to abolish the property tax. One of the most colorful figures in the movement was a real crank named Howard Jarvis, who was a Los Angeles entrepreneur, a kind of serial entrepreneur, who first in the late 1960s campaigned to abolish the property tax and got nowhere with it, but did get enough traction that he decided it was worth continuing to try.

He teamed up with a used car salesman named Paul Gann, and took inspiration actually from the Los Angeles property assessor, who was also arguing for property tax reforms, a guy named Phil Watson, and wrote a limitation — a state constitutional amendment to limit taxes — that became Proposition 13. They collected more signatures than any ballot initiative in the history of California. And in June 1978, a majority of the voters went for it.

Why did a majority of voters go for it? Was it hard to convince people?

Jarvis wrote later in his memoir that the best argument was simply to go up to people and say, Sign this, it will lower your property taxes.

All right, so the upshot is what exactly? What happens after voters say, Yeah, this is what we want.

Quality of services in many cases declined. It’s clear, for example, that there was a shift in fire protection away from professional fire departments and toward volunteer fire departments in some parts of the state.

It hurt the schools. School finance has continued to, of course, increase in California as it has elsewhere in the US, but California used to be at the top in terms of quality of education in primary and secondary education and in terms of school spending. And now it’s definitely not.

“The lesson here is that we really value, and should value, a lot of the public services and public goods that our governments provide.”

It has hurt the quality of infrastructure — potholes in the roads, response times of first responders. It has shifted the state tax structure onto income taxes, which means that the tax system in California is really swingy — in a boom, a lot of money might flow into the state’s coffers, and in a recession, the state budget really suffers. During the financial crisis, this meant that local governments that could no longer rely on a lot of property tax revenue were especially vulnerable to bankruptcy.

It has also created all kinds of unfairness — new unfairness, rather unlike the old system. Now you might actually pay a lot more tax than somebody else in your neighborhood who has an identical home worth the same amount of money, just because they bought their home earlier than you did. And they might agree that that’s unfair, but they might not vote to change it because it’s an unfairness that allows them to stay in their home.

You’re aware that Americans are growing irritable about paying taxes, and I wonder whether you think it’s fair to look at California and see a warning about where the rest of the country might be headed?

I do. I mean, I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free. The lesson here is that we really value, and should value, a lot of the public services and public goods that our governments provide. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t operate efficiently, but it does mean that when you think about how much you’re willing to pay for them, you also have to pay attention to what you’re willing to give up.

Obama’s top Iran negotiator on Trump’s screwups

2026-04-14T15:54:49-04:00

“It’s hard to believe that someone”s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations,“ former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said on Vox’s Today, Explained. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump, in between blockading the Strait of Hormuz and posting blasphemous AI images of himself as Jesus, claims he still wants to strike a deal with Iran’s government to end the current conflict, reopen the Strait, and curtail the country’s nuclear program.

So far, he’s been unsuccessful — and during his first term in office, he tore up the US’s previous nuclear agreement with Iran, negotiated under Barack Obama in 2015.

To find out how the US and Iran got to yes last time — and why they haven’t under Trump — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the Obama administration team that got a nuclear deal with Iran.

What do you think it would take for the US to get a new deal with Iran right now?

It depends on what the objectives are for the president and for Iran. Right now, President Trump wants to make sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz, he wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen, because he thinks they create a risk for Israel, who is our ally and all of the countries in the Gulf region.

Iran, on the other hand, has control of the Strait of Hormuz, so they’re looking to maintain that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region. They want to ensure that they maintain a right to enrichment and they want to be able to continue to have relationships with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis.

There’s a big gap and it’s curious, because the negotiation team on our side is quite small. The negotiation team on their side includes people like Abbas Araghchi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations. He’s now the foreign minister and he knows every single detail of that deal.

Back when you were negotiating with Iran, were there moments looking back when you thought, This is just not going to happen?

Absolutely. There were many points along the way where I said to my counterparts, “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

We thought we were very close to a set of parameters and the supreme leader at the time gave a speech and set out a whole new set of parameters that I think surprised even his foreign minister.

We had to figure out how we could get from where we were, which we thought was on our way to a deal, to now consider what the supreme leader had publicly said.

We know, in part because President Trump articulated this early and often, that there were some Americans who thought we could have gotten a better deal with Iran. What do you hear as the main complaint and what do you say to those critics?

“All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks.”

The critics say that the strongest part of the deal only lasted for 15 years. They wanted it to last forever. We argued that it gave us what is called a one-year breakout timeline so that we would have a year — if somehow we discovered Iran was cheating, which we thought was highly unlikely — to do something about it.

I think some critics wanted to go to war. They thought they could create a regime change. 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, it could mean the lives of our military and an enormous cost to our economy and to American citizens.

Are the right people at the negotiation table?

I find it difficult to believe that Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner can be successful in two weeks. I fully suspect that the negotiations will continue beyond two weeks if they get any traction at all.

I think part of the reason the vice president is there is because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who has no formal role in the government, don’t have credibility with Iran because twice before when they were negotiating with Iran, we attacked.

It’s hard to believe that someone’s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations.

Is there a risk this time around that the US comes out weaker and Iran comes out stronger?

I think it’s very hard to be that reductive. There are parts of Iran that are weaker. They don’t have the navy they once had. They don’t have the missile programs they once had. They don’t have the nuclear programs they once had.

They can rebuild all of that and if they get millions of dollars in tolls and sanctions relief from the United States, they will be able to rebuild all that capacity faster. But at the moment they have been set back.

The United States, in my view, has been set back. 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. We have put Russia and China in stronger positions. We have removed oil sanctions from Russia and oil sanctions from Iran, already putting money in their coffers, giving Russia more money so they can prosecute their horrible and illegal war against Ukraine.

All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks. The regime in place in Iran now is more hard line than the one before, if you can believe it, and may decide it must have a nuclear weapon in order to deter future attacks.

If Iran decides it wants a nuclear weapon, I can assure you many other countries, even some of our closest friends around the world, will think they need a nuclear weapon as well.

How fan fiction went mainstream

2026-04-10T17:36:07-04:00

Copies of the book Heated Rivalry on February 25, 2026. | Michael Reichel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Archive of Our Own, or AO3, is one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 10 million registered users. Its users spend their time both reading and writing many, many words about their favorite fictional characters. It’s a place that allows normie readers to try out their characters in different scenarios and with different outcomes. In the last couple of years, sites like AO3 became fertile ground for publishers to find new authors who might provide them with their next big hit.

Last summer, reporter Rachel Kurzius wrote about how fan fiction is going mainstream for the Washington Post. “Fanfic,” as it’s known to its friends, is the underpinning of smash hits from Heated Rivalry to Fifty Shades of Grey. Kurzius anticipates that as more fanfic adherents grow up and get jobs in various roles in the mainstream, we’ll see more and more of this genre creeping into the mainstream.

Kurzius spoke Today, Explained host Noel King about why fan fiction is everywhere. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. For the whole interview, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is fan fiction?

This is such a fun question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here. So let’s start with the big tent philosophy, which is fan fiction is anything that is really derived from or inspired by preexisting works. But if we think about this broadly, basically everything that we know, including many of the classics are fan fiction, right? We could think recently about Percival Everett’s James, that’s Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Does that really count?

In speaking with a lot of fandom experts, one person that I spoke with told me she used to want to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it a kind of legitimacy. Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that are winning awards. And so fanfic is that too. But she came around to the idea that if you define everything that way, then that’s such a broad category that it kind of loses meaning and so a more narrow version of understanding fanfic would be these transformative works that are based on preexisting property that exist in the gift economy. And this is key. The idea that this is something that people are doing not to make money and in fact ought not make money doing this, that it’s just they’re doing it because it is fun or exciting or community building to do.

Where did this start?

Last century, there were people who were writing zines, for example, very popularly, Star Trek among them. But those were very specific as to one fandom. People were writing fan fiction about particular characters in one world, and that tradition passed forward to various websites and online newsletters that again, were balkanized into a particular fandom.

It was only later when we saw broader websites like, for example, fanfiction.net, that were bringing all of these different fandoms together and saying, if you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you might like Supernatural. Let’s see what these characters could do, or what happens if we put these beloved characters from different worlds together and have them meet with one another.

That brings us to the modern day with Archive of Our Own, which I would say is kind of the big powerhouse archival player these days. And certainly where I look for fanfic when I read it.

Explain what Archive of Our Own is.

Archive of Our Own is a website where people can post and read fan-created transformative works, and it is organized in such a way that it’s clear it was created by librarians, right? You can certainly search by fandom, by character. You could also search by the kind of story you want to hear, or a trope that you’re interested in. You would be amazed at just how extensive the archives are on Archive of Our Own.

You would say, even if you don’t know what any of this is, it is being mainstreamed. It has been mainstreamed into culture, now. You are actually consuming things that started out as fan fiction. What are they?

The big one, the Kahuna that became the juggernaut, would be 50 Shades of Grey, which was actually Twilight fan fiction. 50 Shades of Grey completely changed the game. It was a bestseller as a book. It became an absolute bestseller as a movie series. And it got publishers thinking. I spoke with romance duo Christina Lauren [the pen name for co-author duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings], who actually met writing Twilight fanfic, and they said that when they first spoke to people about going into the traditional publishing world, and this is more than a decade ago, they were told, “Don’t say a thing about fan fiction. That’s a scarlet letter.” Well, that is not true anymore.

These days, particularly last summer, you saw three works in particular that either had been Draco/Hermione fan fiction, or at least a prominent Draco/Hermione writer wrote a series that wasn’t exactly the fanfic, but certainly the fanfic roots were actually being advertised by the publisher as a selling point. One very famous one is The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which was originally a Rey/Kylo Ren fan fiction from Star Wars. And what is so kind of funny and meta about that is that that is now being adapted into a movie. And the male lead is actually married to the actress who played Rey in Star Wars.

If you look at genre fiction these days, publishing houses, when advertising those works, are using very similar tags to the ones that you would see on Archive of Our Own. So they are broadcasting those same tropes as saying, if you like that, you’ll find that in this book. Because they’ve realized, thanks to fan fiction, that’s how a lot of readers like to find what they’re going to read next.

Another thing that I found incredibly fascinating is a decade, a decade and a half ago, fan fiction writers were writing in the first-person present tense, and it created this kind of urgency and immediate connection, but you weren’t seeing that a lot in traditional publishing. Now that has been subsumed by traditional publishing. So a lot of really popular trends, even in terms of writing, began in fan fiction. You might also see joyous queer romance was a huge part of fan fiction before traditional publishing got on board.

So it seems clear to me, based on what you’re saying, that writers of fan fiction and the work itself are being taken more seriously than they were, I don’t know, 20 years ago. Why do you think that is? Is it just because, hey, some of this writing is pretty darn good, let’s take it seriously?

I think part of it is just a broader mainstreaming of fanfic, and that people are kind of waving that fanfic flag proudly in a way that they hadn’t a decade or so ago. And if we’re understanding the structures of traditional publishing, whether it is the editors who are acquiring works or literary agents, a lot of these people are people who grew up on fan fiction, right? So they might not have the same hangups or ideas about fan fiction that previous generations had. They’re interested in it, and they see it as a legitimate form of writing.

Part of it, I think, is because traditional publishing is in, some may say, dire straits, and there’s a broader hunger for IP, intellectual property, things that have already been proven successes. And if you look at some of these fanfics on Archive of Our Own, they have millions of views. I think traditional publishing looks at this and says, “This is basically as safe a deal as we are going to get in terms of thinking that that might be able to translate into book sales.”

What I find really interesting about it is, if one of our elemental definitions of fanfic is that it exists in the gift economy, what happens when fanfic becomes a legitimate path to traditional publishing? What does that mean for fanfic as an art or as a community? And I think that that’s something that a lot of fanfic writers and readers are wrestling with right now.

Is the Iran war turning into Trump’s Iraq?

2026-04-07T14:14:40-04:00

Iranian flags are seen amongst debris at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, which was hit by US-Israeli strikes on April 7, 2026. | Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

How closely does President Donald Trump’s war in Iran compare with America’s last conflict in the Middle East?

Both the Iran war and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq have paired conventional American military dominance with shifting, ambiguous objectives. And both feature an American president desperate to declare the mission accomplished.

“I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu,” Dexter Filkins, a staff writer at the New Yorker who was the former Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Filkins talked to King about America’s quick conquest of Iraq in 2003, the chaos that followed, what the Iraq War did to the American psyche, and where the similarities between that war and Trump’s war in Iran end.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

President Bush claimed to have won the conflict [in Iraq]; about six weeks in, he gets on an aircraft carrier, he’s got this banner behind him that says “mission accomplished.” What was the moment for you that it became clear that the mission had not been accomplished?

It was clear the moment that the US military entered Baghdad, and it’s April 9, 2003. The chaos and the looting and the bloodshed began immediately. By the end of the day, after the US military marches triumphantly into the capital; by nighttime, the capital is on fire. And there’s total anarchy.

When President Bush flew on the aircraft carrier and said, “mission accomplished,” it was absurd then. But then of course it became a cruel joke because the anarchy that we witnessed in the capital that day just spread far and wide across the country and engulfed the country and stayed that way for a very long time.

What allowed it to keep going? The anarchy starts in Baghdad and then it spreads. And there’s a world in which the US is there. We’ve got good troops, we’ve got good weapons, and so we just win. But that’s not what happened.

The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.

The US military is really good at what they do, and what they do is destroy their enemies. But that is not enough necessarily to make a just and lasting peace that will endure and that will, say, allow the United States to leave.

“The important thing to consider is that it’s not enough. It’s never enough. And you could say that about the Iran war.”

The United States had plenty of firepower, but it wasn’t enough to hold the country together. This was a very traumatized country that had been torn apart in many different ways, including by its own government, for many, many years. And so all these things kind of spilled out in front of us.

The overwhelming fact was that the United States military, after it destroyed the government, was unable to keep order. And until you can have order, you can’t build anything that will last. And it took many, many years for the United States to figure out a way to make that happen.

By the time we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, how had the region changed? What did that war do to the Middle East?

The Iraq War was like a magnet for every lunatic — and I mean it, every lunatic — not just in the Middle East, but across the world. It was drawing people, particularly from across the Islamic world, into the country to fight the Americans. And so it became this kind of self-sustaining firestorm.

You could hear, you could see the propaganda, you could hear it on loudspeakers: Come to the fight, come and fight the Americans. And so we got ourselves into this kind of terrible situation where we saw ourselves as the saviors. But many people across the region saw us as invaders and as occupiers.

I wonder if you can reflect on what you think the Iraq War did to Americans. Because I remember the torture memos, I remember Abu Ghraib…I just remember — and again, I was young, but I remember these things where it was like, Oh shit, this is who we are now.

I would say it’s a bit of a sad ledger because I think when the Americans went in and couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, didn’t find any nuclear weapons, people felt like they’d been lied to, that the government wanted this war, that they wanted to go to war no matter what and they made up this intelligence to go in.

Whether that’s true or not, I think there was a huge sense that people felt betrayed. We kind of lost our bearings, lost our way. I think, correctly, there was a feeling like, Oh my God, we embarked on this gigantic ambitious, bloody, expensive venture, and what did we get out of this? And I think the first and foremost, for a lot of people, it was a lot of pain that we got out of it.

As you’ve told the story of the war in Iraq, I am definitely hearing parallels to the war in Iran. What do you make of the comparisons? What is appropriate and what is going too far at this moment?

I’d say any war is horrible and terrible things inevitably happen. For instance, in the Iran war, it’s pretty clear that the United States bombed a school for children and killed 150 kids or so. That kind of thing happens, and it’s not to excuse it in any way — those things are kind of terrible across the board.

But I would say there’s a sense that I have, having lived through, and seen up close, the Iraq War — that the government once again is having a hard time speaking clearly about its goals and its justifications for being there.

That’s disturbing because we live in a democracy and the government should only be able to do what it is sanctioned to do by its people. President Trump has given out so many different justifications as to why we’re there. And so in that sense, I do have this kind of really empty, terrible feeling, kind of déjà vu.

One of the takeaways we hear is that America never learns its lesson. America is going back into the Middle East. America’s going to fight another stupid, forever war.

You clearly have a more nuanced perspective on this, and you were in the region, and that counts for a lot. What is the big lesson here for you after the last 25 years of US interference in the Middle East?

I think maybe that there isn’t a big lesson, but in the case of Iran, in the Iran war, I’ll tell you how I feel about it. I don’t like the way the war started. I’m very disturbed by it, but we’re in it and it’s too late to turn back now.

I think the best that we can hope for and that we should hope for is that we can get to a satisfactory resolution. At a minimum, I think that means for the Strait to be open so that the world economy doesn’t tumble into recession. My main hope is that we can somehow extricate ourselves from this war in a way that doesn’t leave the region in even greater chaos than what we have now.

Why Trump betrayed MAGA, according to Tucker Carlson

2026-04-02T14:52:09-04:00

Tucker Carlson attends a meeting in the East Room of the White House on January 9, 2026. | Al Drago/Getty Images

After five weeks of muddled messaging, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation on Wednesday night to make the case for his war on Iran. That message was…still muddled. He did not articulate a clear exit plan from the conflict, fobbed the Strait of Hormuz problem off on other countries, and denied that regime change was the point.

Among those making a clear case against the war is longtime Trump ally and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now hosts a mega-popular podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show.

In an interview with Today, Explained, Carlson told Vox’s Noel King that the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way. And let me just say that if it does in some way serve the interests of the United States, I’d love to hear it.”

Carlson told Noel that he brought his argument directly to Trump, to no avail. “I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person, and made the case,” he said. “And in the end it had no effect. So I tried. But I haven’t been in touch with the president since then.”

In addition to the war, Carlson and Noel discussed the conservative moment’s Nazi problem — and how much blame he bears for it. Plus, whether he’s considering a presidential run, and why MAGA voters support the war.

You don’t think that the US should be at war with Iran. Why not?

I haven’t heard a consistent case from anyone, and I would say it’s not just the Trump administration. My strong sense, having watched it closely, is that there was not a groundswell of support for this war from within the Trump administration. The president made the decision to do it, but he wasn’t surrounded by advisers who were urging him to do it. Just the opposite. I don’t think there was any enthusiasm for it.

So why are we in this war?

He did it, as the secretary of state explained, because we were pushed into it by the Netanyahu government, by Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, to be totally clear, that’s not a way of exculpating the president. He’s the commander in chief of the US military. Trump made the decision; it was the wrong decision.

But if you’re asking why did he make that decision, it’s because he was pushed into it by Benjamin Netanyahu, which raises the second obvious question: Where did Netanyahu get the power as the prime minister of a country of 9 million to force the president of a country of 350 million to do his bidding?

I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you what happened because the secretary of state said it and the speaker of the House said it, and I watched it. And what happened was the Israelis went to the White House and said, We are going to do this. We’re going to move against Iran.

At that point, the US had really only two choices. One is to follow and the other is to tell Israel no and force them not to do it, because as Marco Rubio explained on camera, if you allowed Israel to go alone, you were certain that American forces and citizens and interests in the Gulf would be destroyed.

But either way, Benjamin Netanyahu made the decision on the timing of this. That’s another way of saying he was in charge. And I’m just here to say I think it’s wrong, and I think the majority of Americans think it’s wrong.

President Trump has been talking about Iran since the late 1980s. A Guardian interview recently resurfaced from 1988, and he’s asked, “If you were a politician, what would your platform be?” He says, “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.”

This sounds a lot like the way he’s talking [now] about doing a number on Kharg Island. You’re aware of that. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Can’t this war just be what he wants?

I’m not denying him agency. I stated his agency, which is a matter of fact, not opinion. He’s the commander in chief. He gives the orders. Donald Trump made the decision.

It is also true that Israel forced that decision. That’s what happened. It’s not a question of did Donald Trump hate Iran or love Iran and now hates Iran? He’s been consistent on that.

The question is whether a regime change war against a country of almost 100 million people on the Persian Gulf was a) achievable, h) a good idea for the United States, and c) a good idea for the world. And Trump has said consistently, No, it’s a terrible idea. He’s been really specific about it: Regime change war in Iran is a bad idea. So this is the change. It’s not that he woke up one morning and was mad at Iran. What do you do about it is the question.

Not long after the US took Nicolás Maduro into custody in Venezuela, you did a monologue and you said that the US, an empire, needs serious men to run it, people who are wise and understand stakes, not flighty, silly, emotionally incontinent people.

In light of the way that this war was launched, given the lack of coherent messaging as you’ve described it, the apparent lack of a plan to get out of Iran, do you think we have serious men making wise decisions in the White House?

We’re not seeing wise decisions, obviously.

I think Venezuela, I think the war in Ukraine, I think all of these build on each other, but I think that the Venezuela operation set us up for what happened in Iran. It sent the message that you can achieve regime change at almost no cost. And as we’re learning five weeks in, that’s not possible in Iran, and the consequences are potentially catastrophic.

I don’t think anyone who’s paying close attention has slept well for the last month. I would love to be able to say, Okay, we made our point and we killed their religious leader. And somehow that’s virtuous, I guess. And this is victory and we’re leaving.

As an American, I would like to see that because I want to get out of this with as little damage as possible, but I don’t see how you can do that without leaving Iran stronger than it was in real terms. They have no navy, they have no air force — okay, but they control 20 percent of the world’s energy. How does that not make them stronger than they were in February?

Who are the serious men?

You find out in moments like this. Who can think clearly, who can accept unhappy truths, digest them and make wise decisions on the basis of them or who retreats into fantasy?

Who are you seeing do that? The former. In the White House. In the administration.

I don’t know. I went to see the president three times in the month before this in person and made the case — not too different from the case I’ve just made to you. And in the end it had no effect.

I haven’t been in touch with the president since then, and so I don’t know. But I do think that there are people, I know that there are people in the White House who may disagree with me on all kinds of issues, but they want to do the best for the country. They’re not crazy. And I’m sure that they’re giving, I hope they’re giving good advice. But the question at this point is how do you get out of this?

It’s not easy. This just happened in 2003. I was there, both in Washington and in Iraq in the aftermath. And it shocks me that we are doing this thing again, particularly under a president who understood exactly what happened in 2003, campaigned all three elections against doing an Iraq War again, because it was stupid. He was the only Republican to campaign against the Iraq War. It’s why he won the nomination, in my opinion, in 2016.

It’s amazing to me that the president who knew, and said he knew again and again and again that this was wrong, that he just did the same thing.

Why people are having such strong reactions to Lindy West’s new memoir

2026-03-27T18:14:16-04:00

West performs onstage at the Larkin Comedy Club on June 4, 2017, in San Francisco, California. | FilmMagic/FilmMagic

You might remember feminist writer Lindy West from her days on X (né Twitter) yelling at sexist, anti-fat trolls. Or from her book Shrill. Now, West is back with Adult Braces, a memoir detailing her journey, a literal road trip, to accepting her husband’s request to open up their marriage. Except it wasn’t really a request, as West tells it. And this time, people across social media had very strong opinions about it.

Slate senior writer Scaachi Koul joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to talk through the internet’s reaction to West’s new book, and all that came after.

Below is an excerpt of Koul’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about Adult Braces.

It’s a very digestible book. Adult Braces is Lindy’s memoir. This is her fourth book. She’s written a lot of political polemics, social polemics, a lot of personal writing, but this is some of her most personal. It’s a memoir about her taking a cross-country road trip, but also about her reformatting her marriage and turning towards polyamory with her husband.

Why do you think [the polyamory] has got people so upset here?

I think there’s a few trains of controversy here, and some is legitimate and some is really not. So the illegitimate complaints are kind of about this narrative having to do often with Lindy’s weight. She’s fat. She writes a lot about being fat. Or some people are saying that it has a lot to do with gender. Her partner, Aham, who is her husband — Aham goes by he/him and they/them — is nonbinary. So there’s been a lot of needless jabs at this particular facet of the story.

The other side of it is that the story that Lindy tells in this memoir — and all we really have to go on is what she tells us — is pretty brutal to her. Their entry into polyamory is not necessarily honest. A lot of people have been using the word “coercive polyamory.” It’s not a term I’ve ever heard before, but the idea that you kind of tell your partner, “it’s this or nothing.”

She’s clearly a reluctant participant for the first spell of their jaunt into polyamory. They meet someone, he falls in love with her first, and then she also falls in love with this person, Roya. And now the three of them are together.

When we frame this as it was coercive, as she was talked into it. There’s an opposite side of this that says: No, Aham, her husband, was honest with her right from the beginning, and she sort of hoped that it would never come to pass.

It’s clear that he told her, A condition of our marriage will be polyamory.

I think she understood some of the risks. She’s an adult. Lindy does not want to be infantilized. She said that several times — that she had and has autonomy, and these are her decisions. I believe that they are her decisions.

I want to bring the third into this, as the marriage did: Roya. Tell me about where Lindy starts with Roya, where Lindy ends with Roya, and why you think the ending has also made people uncomfortable.

When Roya is brought into the picture, it is true that Aham had more than one other girlfriend in addition to his wife. And so Lindy is a little…I would say she was reticent to kind of learn anything about this person and was sort of like, go do what you must. Aham starts to travel to Portland once a month to spend a weekend with Roya.

He has a big medical issue come up while she’s touring, and Roya is there to help. That starts to change the nature of their dynamic. Lindy talks a lot about — Wow, is this what it’s like to get a wife? Somebody who’s so organized, who takes care of the medical details and listens to me?

Over time, they start to develop a friendship, and then their relationship turns, and it becomes romantic. It fundamentally reshapes the entire nature of their polyamory and of their marriage and of their family. And then after that, Roya, she moves into the woods with them, and that’s where she is now.

You went out to the place where the family lives now. You wrote a profile of Lindy West. When you were there, did you push her at all on the question of coercion?

She preempts that question. I think it’s something that people have already said to her. She says that that’s just not true, and I kind of understand what she’s saying, which is, How can I prove it to you other than living in this life?

But if you try to write anything to convince other people, especially when it comes to memoir, it will feel dissatisfying. And I know that intimately. There’s only so much I can do. What I can offer is a perspective and a version of events. But as soon as I cross a threshold into feeling like I’m evangelizing for something, if you don’t believe me about my own experience, then it doesn’t mean anything.

I think people look at Lindy as a one-way mirror in a lot of ways. They see themselves in her. And when she makes decisions — when anybody in that position, [whether] a celebrity, influencer, writer, [or] creative, makes decisions that their audience doesn’t like, [that audience] takes it really personally.

Lindy is someone who I think a lot of people, especially her fan base, have viewed as bombastic and confident and bawdy and fun. And [then] compare that with the version that we read in Adult Braces — who is anxious and insecure, and being harmed by this person in her life.

As the audience, your proxy is her. You feel defensive of her.

What do you think about this argument that Lindy West’s memoir about coming to polyamory is like the death of millennial feminism?

We can have feelings about anybody’s relationship as it is displayed to us. We are entitled to that, especially when we’re being offered a commodity like a book which you purchase. But one person’s personal story, discomfort, misery, contentment, fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment does not speak to the end of a social movement that was knit together over several decades, and has more to do with Lindy West’s corner of the internet.

Social movements flex. They change. I don’t think it’s the death of anything. It is just where that version of it maybe ended up.