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Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 10 days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, has once again brought American exceptionalism on gun violence into stark relief. No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, more ...

Boeing’s Starliner took off for the International Space Station on May 19. Joel Kowsky/NASA Starliner, a space capsule designed by Boeing, landed safely in the New Mexico desert early Wednesday evening. The vehicle’s return to Earth came after a nearly weeklong trip to the International Space Station. This journey m...

Farmers harvest wheat on the outskirts of Jammu, India, on April 30. A recent heat wave has affected the yield of India’s wheat crops. Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images Two weeks ago, India, the world’s second-largest producer of wheat by volume, announced export restrictions on the commodity. India’s wheat farmer...

Ricky Gervais performs in Netflix’s 2018 special Humanity. The comedian’s latest Netflix special has come under fire for transphobia. Ray Burmiston/Netflix Who knows exactly what response Netflix expected for SuperNature, Ricky Gervais’s transphobic new standup special, but pardon us while we refrain from clapping. ...

Adam Neumann, co-founder of WeWork and the crypto company Flowcarbon, speaks at an event in Shanghai in 2018. Jackal Pan/Visual China Group via Getty Images Adam Neumann is back. The co-founder and former CEO of WeWork and subsequent subject of the podcast-turned-TV-series WeCrashed now says he wants to fix climate ...

Part of the May 2022 issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. Andrew Bentley paused at the base of a hemlock tree during a recent hike in Red River Gorge, an hour east of Lexington, Kentucky, in Daniel Boone National Forest. He ran his fingers over a spongy mat of pale deermoss ...

Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky, on July 22, 2021. Jon Cherry/Bloomberg via Getty Images In the wake of yet another unspeakable tragedy, in which 19 children and two teachers were murdered by a gunman in a Texas elementary school, one reason for the US’s steady stream of mass shootings seems obvious. Ri...

Supporters of gun control and firearm safety measures protest outside the US Supreme Court in December 2019. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images The satirical newspaper the Onion famously repeats the same headline whenever a high-profile mass shooting occurs in the United States: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nati...

An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and at least two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday morning, just 10 days after another mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that claimed the lives of 10 people. It’s the deadliest US school shooting in years: In 2018, 17 were killed...

Marnie Beale of Arlington, Virginia, holds a sign at the US Capitol calling for background checks on gun purchases on May 25, a day after the country’s latest mass shooting, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 children and two teachers. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Nineteen child...

Roughly a year ago, the government began dispatching payments of hundreds of dollars a month, no strings attached, to a broad swath of American parents. A response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the expanded child tax credit had an immediate and striking effect on the economic security of millions of children, briefly li...

The Cannes Film Festival 2022 poster paying tribute to The Truman Show is displayed at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes. John Phillips/Getty Images For its design display every year, the Cannes Film Festival creates an original commemorative poster, which gets splashed across the buildings and billboards of the se...

It should be noted that none of these dogs are guilty of plagiarism. Getty Images The internet is full of terrible corners, but none are as skin-crawling as what you see when you open a new account on TikTok. The app’s freakishly personalized algorithm gets better at knowing what you like the more you use it, so as ...

Part of the May 2022 issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. The butterfly’s wings are splayed at an unnatural angle, orange-and-black markings visible to full effect. A metal pin skewers it to the wall. Through thick display glass, I read the tiny, hand-drawn label affixed to ...

The mouth of a sea lamprey. T. Lawrence/Great Lakes Fishery Commission They have the body of an eel, the mouth of a sarlacc, and the diet of a vampire. Sea lampreys are fish native to the Atlantic Ocean and the rivers that flow into it. But more than a century ago, they found their way into the Great Lakes, where th...

The inside of an IBM System One quantum computer. Bryan Walsh/Vox A few weeks ago, I woke up unusually early in the morning in Brooklyn, got in my car, and headed up the Hudson River to the small Westchester County community of Yorktown Heights. There, amid the rolling hills and old farmhouses, sits the Thomas J. Wa...

The US Supreme Court at dusk in October 2021. J. Scott Applewhite/AP In 1995, Barry Jones was convicted of murdering Rachel Gray, his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, and sentenced to die. Since then, the case against him has shattered. Gray died of a laceration of her small intestine, an extremely painful injury t...

President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, Japan, on May 23. Evan Vucci/AP President Joe Biden had sought to make his first Asia tour about forging a new economic framework for the region, deepening relations with the heads of state of J...

Shell has pledged to reduce its climate emissions to net zero by 2050, yet continues to expand its oil and gas drilling. Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images Caroline Dennett was in her 11th year as an operational safety consultant working with the oil giant Shell when she saw a news clip of a climate protest outs...

Gov. Brian Kemp greets attendees at a campaign event on May 17 in Alpharetta, Georgia. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp hopes to become the next prominent Republican to show that GOP candidates don’t necessarily need former President Donald Trump’s help to win their primaries. Some Trump-backed ...

All across the country, consumers are feeling the burden of high gas prices and are desperate for relief. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images As the average consumer bears the brunt of rising gas prices, big oil and gas companies have continued to rake in historic profits. Lawmakers alarmed at the stark contrast between th...

Pennsylvania Democratic congressional candidate, state Rep. Summer Lee, talks to the press in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nate Smallwood/Bloomberg via Getty Images This year’s Democratic primaries are being largely framed as an ideological struggle between the national party’s moderate and progressive wings. But votin...

Getty Images My refrigerator — that appliance humming in the background that I rarely think about — consumes about 450 kilowatt-hours of energy (kWh) every year. A highly efficient air conditioner uses 483 kWh per year, and even more if the system is older or less efficient. Chances are, though, kilowatt-hours don’t...

This story is part of a Recode series about Big Tech and antitrust. Over the last several weeks, we’ve covered what’s happening with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google. There’s a new Big Tech antitrust bill in town, and this one is especially painful for Google. A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-U...