It’s been four months since the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the US to stand trial. His vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, is now in charge, but the Trump administration has been largely silent on what comes next for the country.

In the meantime, Missy Ryan, a staff writer at the Atlantic, tells Vox that some polling suggests that a significant number of Venezuelans now feel that their country is better off — or at least no worse — than it was pre-US intervention.

It’s a somewhat surprising finding, given the many less optimistic predictions in the aftermath of Maduro’s removal. To explain what’s going on, Ryan spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the surprising status of the US operation and what some positive outlook from inside the country tells us about what comes next. 

Below is an excerpt of the 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.

You published a piece in the Atlantic titled “Venezuela Seems to Be Going … Well?” Why did you call the piece that?

The headline of the piece really captured the surprise that many of my colleagues and many of the Latin America experts that I spoke with for the piece felt three months on from the ouster of Maduro, which was that, contrary to a lot of expectations about the potential destabilization of Venezuela, the potential for an Iraq-style armed insurgency or fracturing of the state, things were pretty quiet in Venezuela.

And in fact, there had been a relatively positive response from the Venezuelan public. In the limited polling that’s been done since January 3, they have expressed cautious optimism or at least a willingness to let some time pass before making a judgment about the overall net analysis of ‘are things better or worse for us in Venezuela?’

And you referenced polling, so this isn’t just people in the media saying things got better in Venezuela. Venezuelans broadly feel that way.

Correct. And I think that that should be the ultimate arbiter. It doesn’t matter as much what analysts in Washington or Miami think. It’s about the Venezuelans in Venezuela and then obviously the exile community throughout the world who are deeply invested in what happens there [and] can potentially return and help grow the economy, rebuild Venezuelan society after a very traumatic period of repression and economic deterioration. 

The sense was people were willing to give Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president, some time and the interim authority some time to show if they could deliver on the kind of bread and butter issues that Venezuelans seem most focused on. There are starting to be some improvements there in terms of the economy. It hasn’t really affected prices yet, but certainly investment is starting to slowly materialize, [though] definitely far short of what President Trump had envisioned and promised when we heard from him in early January. 

But with oil prices, where they are and the lifting of sanctions, the resource-dependent Venezuelan economy stands to grow if only from a statistical rebound perspective. And hopefully that’ll really begin to trickle down into Venezuelans’ pockets. The question of political freedoms is going to be very important, but it didn’t seem like it was the primary concern of Venezuelans in the polling that has been done so far.

One of the biggest differences is obviously just that there’s someone different in charge. Is Delcy Rodríguez making Venezuela a freer country than Maduro did?

That is a complicated question. There have been a number of metrics that you can talk about. 

When the ouster happened in January, the Trump administration talked about it as a simple law enforcement operation that was executed by the military, which is incredibly unorthodox. They were talking about three phases, and this is what Rubio and the people at the State Department were describing as three phases that they saw for Venezuela: stabilization, recovery, and then transition. 

As part of that recovery stage, they have leaned on the Rodríguez interim authorities to take certain steps. They focused on the release of political prisoners [and] they backed away from the same level of arbitrary arrests that had occurred under Maduro. There have been some limited, mostly economically focused protests or demonstrations that have happened without the same kind of crackdown that you would’ve expected under Maduro. 

These have only been limited steps; there’s so much more that hasn’t actually occurred yet, and that includes the full release of political prisoners.

Remember that although Venezuelan oil exports are really starting to increase and the revenues are really starting to increase, that money goes into a US Treasury-controlled account in the United States, and Delcy Rodríguez has to submit a spending plan to the US government and in order to get that money back to Venezuela to pay salaries, to provide public services. So it is not an autonomous sovereign situation — far from it.

One of the biggest criticisms of this intervention in Venezuela, against President Trump, has been, “You didn’t even change the regime. You just put Maduro’s number two in power.” There’s no commitment to elections, at least in a concrete form. Do we have any idea now that it’s been four months, when we might see elections?

There has been no official statement either from the interim authorities in Venezuela or the US government, but what I’m told privately is that they are planning for elections to occur by the second half of 2027. 

However, there is a lot that needs to happen before then, and we haven’t seen any public steps to advance those steps, which would include reform of the National Electoral Commission, an update to the registry of Venezuelans who have all been displaced all throughout Venezuela, and then of course, the question of millions of Venezuelans who are now outside the country who would need to [take] part in any sort of credible election. 

The lack of a plan that has been made public raises questions about the level of commitment that the US administration has to the democracy piece of this. Their argument has been, ‘Look, if we jumped right into elections that really would have intensified the potential for civil conflict.’  And so their bet is on slow incremental change. 

The fact that elections might be one, two years away only lends more credibility to this argument that this wasn’t about freedom for the Venezuelan people, this was about oil. Now that we’re months out, does it feel like this was just about oil? Is that a fair criticism to lob at the Trump administration?

It definitely was about oil, primarily for President Trump. He mentioned oil 19 times in the press conference that he gave the morning after the Maduro raid. There have been some more modest deals that have occurred, but the kind of big production deals in the oil sector have not yet materialized. And there’s a lot of structural obstacles that need to be overcome. 

Primary among them is the overall trajectory of Venezuela and skepticism among oil investors to jump back in when they don’t know who’s going to be ruling the country in a year. Is it going to go back to a socialist model where they’re going to appropriate things? 

Again, as Exxon famously said, they had their assets taken not once, but twice, and [Venezuela] was uninvestible. But also, what is this country going to look like in two years, five years, 10 years?

This spring, videos of teenagers gathering in massive crowds in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Jacksonville, and other cities have gone viral. In most of the videos, you’ll see hundreds, sometimes thousands, of young people gathered in open spaces or in the parking lots of restaurants and malls. Oftentimes, it can look chaotic. These gatherings have been dubbed “takeovers.”

Teens say they occupy these spaces because there aren’t enough places for them to be with their peers on the weekends and in the evenings. 

“Young people get together like this because you got the clubs 21 and up, man,” Tyrone Crest, a 19-year-old DC-based content creator, told the Washington Post in audio shared with Vox. “The adults could go out and have fun on the weekends and enjoy themselves, right? So what we do is we basically try to get everybody to come together, enjoy themselves, you know what I’m saying? Have a little fun, get outside.”

Some teens also say the takeovers are a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ky’onna Hinton, 18, told the Post that “I feel as though we couldn’t really have as much fun as we do now. Because for me, Covid was in eighth grade, so my eighth-grade year, I was inside, and my ninth-grade year, I was inside. All the stuff that people used to do — having fun outside and parties — that got taken away from us. So we trying to live it up now.” 

Some of these takeovers, though, have gotten violent. In Washington and other cities, teens have engaged in fights, robberies, and vandalism, and some young people have been arrested for gun possession. This has resulted in city leaders using curfews and police in an attempt to rein in these gatherings. 

Jenny Gathright, who covers the DC government and city politics for the Washington Post, has been reporting on the takeovers in the region. She spoke with Today Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the trend and what’s being done to address “takeovers” ahead of the summer, when teenagers may have more free time with no school. 

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.

For people who don’t live in DC or a city where this stuff is happening, tell us: What is a teen takeover?

According to some of the teens I spoke with, a takeover — they call them “DMV takeovers” because it’s the DC, Maryland, Virginia region — is really just a massive gathering of young people in some kind of open space in the city. Sometimes these can be pretty rowdy, which is why they have led to a lot of concern and hand-wringing from local officials.

Why are they called takeovers?

Well, one of the young people said, “It’s because we’re taking over. We’re taking over a public space, and occupying it.” And it can sometimes feel to people who are in those spaces that it has suddenly become a teen space, because there are so many young people around. 

This isn’t limited to Washington, DC. Is this happening elsewhere in the country?

Yes, it is. I’ve seen reports out of Chicago and LA where young people there have also been gathering in groups of hundreds in popular neighborhoods.

Who attends these takeovers? How are they planned? Is it like some schools get together and they share a day and location? Is it all social media?

They’re planned on social media, mostly. Instagram is what I’m told, and we see flyers on Instagram.

Flyers?! 

Yeah, they’re flyers on Instagram. Sometimes there’ll be like, join this group chat for the location or location will be posted later. Large Instagram DM chains. That’s a lot of how this is organized. And you know, there are some young people in the area who kind of fashion themselves as up-and-coming promoters because of the way they’re able to attract large crowds to their gatherings.

Alright. I’m pulling up one of these ads right now. First and foremost, it looks like it was made using AI.

The one I’m looking at says “Link up at U Street.” There’s cartoony fire in the top left and right corners, and then an image of U Street, but also cartoony. “5:00 PM till whenever. Pull up and be hype, 100 emoji. Find yo’ age, link with the crew and get turned up, music emoji. Dance vibe, and shake some ass. Good energy. Only if you ain’t coming to turn up, stay home.”

Okay. This doesn’t necessarily sound chaotic or illegal. What happens at these takeovers that’s troubling cities like DC so much?

What’s brought the trouble for local officials like the mayor, the police chief, the DC Council, is that in some cases the takeovers have ended in some kind of violence. 

There are robberies: Either young people robbing other young people who are around or stealing from cars. There was one case in March where one of the so-called takeovers ended in gunfire. No one was hit, but a teenager was arrested for firing shots. And so that is really what has brought up a lot of the concern for the officials who are responsible for public safety in the city.

So you went to one. Did you get the sense that people were coming to wreak havoc, or did you get the sense that when you put this many teenagers together in one place, there’s bound to be some shenanigans?

It’s hard to say, because teens are not a monolith. I spoke to some young people who were older teens, 18 or 19, who had come to the so-called takeover and who had been to several, and they said they were not there for drama. They were not there to try to cause violence. They were genuinely there to try to meet other people their age and have a good time out in public space because they felt like they didn’t have very many places to do that. 

They described some of the violence as unacceptable, but in some cases, maybe inevitable when you have such a large group of people — maybe there will be a few who will act up, or some people who come with some kind of intent to cause trouble. 

Which makes it a complex issue to deal with from the city’s standpoint, right? Because kids want to get together on the weekend since the dawn of time. But if you put a lot of kids together on the weekends, something might happen. How’s the city responding?

The city has responded in a few ways. 

One of the major and most publicized responses has been this curfew policy. The city, at the urging of Mayor [Muriel] Bowser and a couple of council members, has put in place a policy where young people under the age of 18 are forbidden from gathering in groups of more than eight in certain designated places that the police chief can choose and set a temporary, more intense curfew zone in advance of what they see as a planned takeover. 

So if the police chief sees one of these flyers and gets the sense that young people are slated to gather in [the DC neighborhood of] Navy Yard, they will often declare a special curfew zone in Navy Yard that forbids teens from gathering in groups and gives police the ability to disperse them if the clock hits 8 pm and there are more than eight young people in that space.

Does the curfew actually work? Because when I speak to teenagers in my neighborhood about this curfew, most of them say they’re just going to violate it. 

It’s been really challenging to measure. The mayor and the police chief insists that it’s been a useful tool and say that these gatherings would get more out of hand if they weren’t able to disperse them earlier in the night or break them up. But there are some curfew detractors who argue that it has created this tense space in Navy Yard around the curfew where young people repeatedly return.

There’s also something else going on here, right? It isn’t just curfew and more law enforcement and stricter policies. It’s also, “Let’s give them something else to do.”

One thing that DC’s government has done is the Department of Parks and Recreation has been throwing, and they’ve been doing this for a little while — I mean, they did a lot of this last summer — its series called Late Night Hype, where they kept the public pools open later and allowed teens to hang out there.

Were there fliers?

They did make fliers for Late Night Hype. It actually was called Late Night Drip at the Pools. That’s what it was called. 

Late Night Drip. [chuckles]

I think it was a smart name. And then they had Teen Spring Jams on the weekends. That bookended spring break, where at rec centers, they hosted events with music, dancing, games, sports. They actually said that across two weekends, 6,000 teens attended the events. 

A lot of people gave them a lot of praise for those events. There were definitely some issues surrounding them, but there was a lot of positive feedback from the teens who attended the events, and also from a lot of youth advocates who’d been really critical of the city’s curfew, but who pointed to the events as something good the city was doing to create the space that teens had been asking for — basically a later-night option where they could be around a lot of other people their age and also feel safe.

This feels like something that really gets at people’s core philosophies about criminal justice, about adolescents. 

I’ve seen people sharing videos of these teen takeovers in Navy Yard in DC and saying stuff like: “Wow, such an impossible issue to deal with. What’s the city going to do?” And then someone will respond: “Throw every one of these kids in jail.”

It ends up feeling much bigger than DC. It feels like a sort of philosophical question about what to do about kids wilding out.

It cuts across a lot of different issues that get at people’s emotions. It gets at issues of public space, issues of race, issues of class, issues of who has the right to occupy space in a city. And also issues about policing, the role of police in a city, and the role of police with young people. And then also public safety and fear. 

A lot of what’s motivating the mayor here is that she’s worried that something really bad might happen at one of these. And of course, if something bad happened at one of these, people would be looking at her like, “Should you have done more?”

Another thing that occurs to me is that all the teen takeovers that have been happening in DC were happening in the spring, but we’re like a month away from all these kids having nothing to do all day.

The mayor would push back strongly against having nothing to do all day. Her Department of Parks and Recreation has been advertising its slate of events and all that they’re doing with programming. 

But yes, we are headed toward summer, which is part of what’s animating the debate and the tension around this — some of the calls for more coordination and actual conversation about what should be done next and how people can all kind of get on the same page about what’s the right approach here.

And no clear answers yet?

No clear answers yet.

Higher education is in crisis. Last week, Hampshire College — a private liberal arts school in Amherst, Massachusetts — announced it will shut down after the fall 2026 semester.

Founded in 1965 to “reimagine liberal arts education,” Hampshire counts documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and actors Lupita Nyong’o and Liev Schreiber among its most notable alumni.

But Hampshire is just the latest casualty in a broader trend. There are roughly 4,000 colleges in the United States. According to Jon Marcus, senior higher education reporter at the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit publication covering education, around 100 have closed since the Covid-19 pandemic, and many more are at risk over the next decade. 

For now, large public universities and well-endowed private schools like Harvard and Yale remain relatively stable. But smaller regional colleges are increasingly at risk. That shift could leave students with fewer options for higher education, and,, for some, close the door on higher education entirely. 

To understand why colleges are closing and what it means for the future of higher education in the United States, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Marcus, who explained the story of Hampshire College and some of the financial, demographic, and cultural elements afflicting colleges.

Below is an excerpt of the 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. 

Last week it was announced that the private liberal arts college Hampshire College would close after its fall semester. Tell us the story of what happened to Hampshire.

Like a lot of small colleges, Hampshire had a lot of problems hidden just below the surface. In Hampshire’s case, they weren’t that well-hidden. It had been having problems for more than six years, since before the pandemic, but was being kept afloat by its very loyal alumni, who include some people that have been extremely successful, largely in the arts.

Its endowment was very small. Its enrollment continued to decline. It had fewer than 800 students left at the end. It had $21 million in debt. 

Debt is a really important and largely misunderstood component of this. When people think of debt and college, they think of student loan debt, but there’s also institutional debt, and it is really piling up. Colleges and universities have borrowed significant amounts of money and, so, servicing that debt becomes a big drain on their operating budgets. To attract students, colleges do something else that isn’t widely known: They discount the tuition. Almost no one pays the list price you see on the website.

At Hampshire, specifically, or everywhere?

At colleges in general. The discount rate at colleges and universities is more than 50 percent. So, if you were a private business, and you gave back 50 percent of your revenue, you’d be out of business. And that’s what’s happening to a lot of these small colleges. 

At Hampshire, they were giving back more than 75 percent of their revenue in the form of discounts just to continue to get people to come there and fill seats.

It sounds like this is happening far more often than we know — that four-year colleges and universities are going out of business.

About a hundred colleges have closed since the pandemic. Many of them only made it this far because they got federal aid during the pandemic to keep them open. Had they not, they would’ve probably closed sooner. And there’s a new estimate that shows that 442 private nonprofit colleges and universities — that’s one quarter of the total — are at risk. About 120 of them are at severe risk of closing.

What are the other causes for college closures? 

We are running out of students. The number of 18-year-olds is way down. People stop having children during financial downturns. And if you do the math, the great recession was in 2008. So, in 2026 is when that hits us. 

Eighteen years later, we’re running out of 18-year-olds, and that will begin to have an impact on college enrollment in the fall. The last big class was the one that enrolled in this most recent fall. The next fall is when the demographic cliff begins to hit.

And it’s just math. We have too many colleges, and we have too few traditional-age college students. Of the ones we still have, a smaller proportion of graduates from high school are choosing to go to college. 

We hit a peak in 2016 of 70 percent of high school graduates going to college. That’s now down to just a little bit better than 60 percent. That is a big, big drop in a very short time. And that has to do with the cost of higher education and the growing skepticism about the return on the investment. So, that’s really taking a toll.

There is the demographic cliff and cost. There’s also a culture war around our colleges and universities currently being waged by [the Trump] administration. Does that have something to do with it?

That is not helping. Under this current presidential administration, we are seeing a lot of other impacts on higher ed[ucation] obscuring the reality of what’s going on. The sustainability of higher education has been the focus that we’ve all understandably had on this firehose of funding cuts and lawsuits and attacks on DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion].

In the end, though, the kinds of colleges that we’re talking about that are at risk of closing, this doesn’t affect them, because they don’t do federally funded research. The one policy under this administration that is hurting some of these small colleges is the crackdown on international students. 

Some of these small colleges have recruited international students, because they’re profitable. They pay the full tuition. And so, we’ve seen now a 36 percent decline last year in the number of visas issued for new international students. That’s a giant hit. 

Essentially, it’s just a perfect storm of all of these things happening at the same time to colleges that are already overextended, overly indebted, and don’t have enough students.

What happens to a student who goes to one of these schools when they find out their school is closing?

Nothing good happens to those students. There is research that shows that half of those students transfer, half of them don’t. Half of them end their pursuit of a degree. Of the half that transfer, half of them never graduate. 

The reasons for that include the cost and the fact that the successor college often doesn’t take all of their credits or won’t accept their transfer credits toward the major. And, in many cases, students have left these small colleges that have closed; gone to another college; and then, it closed.

This is becoming a cycle. And one really fascinating thing that I started hearing a few years ago from a student tour guide at a small college was that parents were beginning to ask a question he never heard. And it wasn’t, “How’s the food?” It was, “Will this college still be here in four years?” So, people are beginning to pay attention.

To some degree, you’re speaking about market forces. There’s not enough students, the costs are too high, so the market’s correcting and these schools are closing. But what do we lose when we lose these smaller regional liberal arts colleges?

The first and most important thing is: Not everyone needs to go to college, but somebody needs to go to college. And college-going in the United States is down. In economic rival countries globally, college-going is way up. So, we’re losing the competitive edge that we’ve always had by having a well-educated, innovative, and entrepreneurial population. That’s the big picture. 

The small picture is more immediate. As you might assume, a college that closes is a problem for its community, because you lose jobs. Housing values go down when you lose a major employer. 

But here’s the one that surprised me that I never really thought about: A lot of these colleges are in remote, isolated places, often rural, and they draw young people to these communities. After they graduate, they stay, and they create businesses, or they work in jobs. And a lot of the colleges that have closed, they’re in places where the population is aging. All of these colleges that have closed are another kind of ending of the pipeline that was bringing in young people to a place where they were needed to diversify the economy.

For someone out there who’s like, “Hampshire College, never heard of her, doesn’t affect me,” what they might be missing is that if enough of these schools close, you’re going to see a bit of a death spiral, a doom loop, in smaller American cities.

Yes; I would say more small towns than cities. But even in some cities where colleges close, again, it’s a lot of payroll. There’s a lot of employees. There’s the add-on spending of the students who buy pizza or rent apartments. But ,to your point, the immediate reaction I’ve noticed on social media and elsewhere is, “Good, let ’em close.”

There’s a real antipathy toward colleges among some people in the public who feel that they are elitist, that they are woke, that they’re overly liberal, that they’re indoctrinating young people. 

Whether that’s true or not, that’s the public perception, and I don’t think colleges have done a very good job at counteracting that narrative. But they’re also really important. We need them. We need them in some form to continue to educate young people for jobs that require those skills.