Avishay Artsy | Vox

The larger stakes of Trump’s redesign of Washington, DC

2026-03-27T14:11:29-04:00

Workers add Donald Trump's name to the facade of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, on December 19, 2025. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

While President Donald Trump has been flexing America’s might overseas, he’s also working to impose his will on the nation’s capital.

Trump’s urban interventions in DC’s built environment have raised eyebrows and sparked lawsuits.

The changes to DC are already underway, from the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom, to a makeover of the White House Rose Garden, to the planned two-year closure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for renovations.

And more changes could be coming soon: a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery, a plan to paint over the exterior of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and a sculpture park near the National Mall.

Past presidents have added to or modified parts of Washington DC’s historic core. But Trump’s disregard for design review processes has irked many preservationists.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram discussed these changes with The Washington Post’s longtime architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, who wrote a column about the threat Trump poses to D.C.’s architectural splendor.

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.

Philip, you recently published a column about Donald Trump’s changes to Washington, DC in which you make a very bold argument. You say that Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architecture and design since the city was burned down by the British in the War of 1812. Tell us how you justify that argument.

That sounds like hyperbole maybe, but, in fact, he really is turning out to be an amazingly influential force in terms of the design of the city. The War of 1812, the British come through and they burn the White House and they burn the Capitol, and they have to be rebuilt.

Donald Trump has torn down the East Wing of the White House, and he’s making major changes, major additions. He’s taken out the Rose Garden at the White House. He wants to build a new giant memorial triumphal arch at Arlington Cemetery. He’s talking about a Garden of National Heroes that would really change the kind of sylvan landscape along the Potomac River.

It goes on and on. And more important even than those changes is the fact that he wants to change how Washington manages change. He really wants to kind of force this through by personal fiat rather than go through a longstanding process of design review, which has been absolutely essential to keeping Washington the city we know today.

Essential to the argument you’re making here is that DC isn’t New York. It isn’t a city that was slowly built over time, that progressed and evolved with the times. The intention behind Washington, DC sets it apart.

Yes, it begins as a planned city. Very few American cities begin with a plan.

A designer named Pierre L’Enfant created what was called the L’Enfant Plan, and that was to take a typical city grid of streets, ones that run north-south, and east-west of big boxes that were generally for the neighborhoods, for commerce, for the daily stuff of life, and then lay over them these sweeping avenues that connect important civic nodal points. Maybe there’s a statue there, maybe that’s where the Capitol or the White House is. And these create a much grander architecture.

In some ways, the vistas of these avenues stand in for the ambition of the country — a sense of being far-seeing. And Washington has done an awful lot over the years to preserve that. Among the most basic things is: We didn’t build skyscrapers. We’ve kept a very low-slung skyline. And one of Trump’s changes, which is this giant 250-foot-tall memorial arch, would actually be one of the very tallest buildings in Washington and would fundamentally change that skyline.

[The public] voted this president into office twice. His hotels in New York are tourist attractions. People around the world go to his golf courses. If he plants an arch on the edge of Virginia in front of Arlington National Cemetery behind the Lincoln Memorial, is there a chance that people end up loving it the way they ended up loving the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, even though they might not have been clear wins when they were initially built?

Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I wrestle with that all the time. One of the things that’s disturbing to me is that the impulses and the instincts that Americans had about the markers of monarchy — we used to be really allergic to that stuff. We used to really bristle at the idea of a president being in any way imperial or king-like.

Now, I think there’s less understanding of the connection between values and politics on one side and aesthetics and architecture on the other side. And so, in some ways, the story I’m writing is an attempt to introduce Americans to what is, in a sense, a hidden history and a hidden aesthetics in Washington that are very vital and very important. You may not get that just by taking a quick tour on a double decker bus of the city, but it’s there. And it was extremely important to the people who made Washington into the city that is greatly beloved today.

If he has his way, is he also suggesting to future presidents that you can have your way with this city, and its monuments, and its environs and then creating some kind of aesthetic seesaw for the nation’s capital?

Oh, I think it’s more than just suggesting. I think he’s laying out the roadmap.

I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that one of the real victims in all of this is the idea of design review. There are these groups in Washington, including one that goes back to 1910, that have the ability to come in and look over plans, and they’re usually staffed by professional architects, professional designers, professional landscape artists, and they improve things.

Trump has stacked those committees with his own people, including his 26-year-old personal assistant, who, as far as I can tell, has no expertise in any of these questions. And they’re basically just kind of rubber stamping these things. So that’s a roadmap for any future president coming in.

If you want an unfortunate example, you might think back to the days of ancient Rome when new emperors would come in, and if they really didn’t like their predecessor, they wouldn’t just necessarily raze down the triumphal arch erected by the predecessor. They might even take the statues off and replace the heads with heads of their own symbolism, a kind of constant retrofitting of the symbolic landscape of Rome to represent the current person in power. And you can say, “Well, that’s just politics,” but that makes for a landscape that doesn’t have the historical gravitas and temporal lastingness that you would want and that we’ve had in Washington for a very long time.

Does fine dining have a toxic chef problem?

2026-03-23T14:21:27-04:00

Noma chef Rene Redzepi in Copenhagen, Denmark. | Thibault Savary/AFP via Getty Images

One of the most acclaimed restaurants in the world, Noma, opened a pop-up in Los Angeles on March 11.

It was supposed to be a joyous occasion for Noma head chef and co-founder René Redzepi and the staff, who relocated from Copenhagen, Denmark, for the sold-out 16-week stint.

But Noma LA’s opening has been mired in controversy — not only because it costs $1,500 for a meal, but because of new allegations that Redzepi physically and psychologically abused staff members and interns for years.

The accusations were first posted on Instagram in February by Jason Ignacio White, a former head of Noma’s fermentation lab. Further reporting by the New York Times’s Julia Moskin included accounts by 35 former Noma staffers of Redzepi punching, jabbing, and berating employees between 2009 and 2017.

Some of these accounts have been known for years, with clips from the 2008 documentary Noma at Boiling Point circulating on social media that show Redzepi screaming and cursing at employees.

Redzepi himself acknowledged his bad behavior in a 2015 column in Lucky Peach magazine. He says that the culture at the restaurant has changed since these alleged abuses took place.

But the latest charges are prompting another round of soul-searching in the fine dining world, and raise questions of what it will take to dismantle the toxic culture that has permeated so many kitchens.

To understand what might come out of this reckoning, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Helen Rosner. She’s a staff writer and restaurant critic at the New Yorker and author of their weekly column The Food Scene.

Why do you think this story about René Redzepi is getting such a big reaction? We know that chefs like him, and even him, have been accused of very bad behavior before.

Noma is quite simply the most important restaurant in the world, which sounds like a big hyperbolic thing to say, but it is the truth. I think that there is no single restaurant on the planet that is as influential for the fine dining scene, that is as contributive to this sort of trickle-down of trend and philosophy and the way of thinking and the way of doing business.

René Redzepi is the face and avatar of this restaurant that any chef and any cook in the entire world is aware of and almost certainly is in some way modeling themselves on.

Can you just explain why it’s so important?

Noma is, to maybe oversimplify it, a restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, that was opened in the early 2000s by chef René Redzepi with Claus Meyer, who’s no longer affiliated with it. [It] took a couple years to find its footing, but when it really burst onto the international fine dining scene, what Noma was doing was a type of cooking that was really rooted in a phrase that they used that has now become kind of a cliche in the culinary world: “sense of place.” What Redzepi was doing was a lot of foraging, a lot of going out and finding ingredients, plants, animals, fungus, insects. What Noma did was actually quite revolutionary and like a lot of silly-seeming descriptions of art, when you were actually experiencing it in its execution, it was pretty extraordinary and transportive.

And this is why people would pay like $1,500 to go to this LA pop-up.

It’s the kind of thing where I think from the outside you might think of it as pretentious, but I genuinely think, and I’ve eaten at Noma twice, that I wouldn’t call it pretentious because I don’t think it was pretense. I think that Redzepi and the team that he cultivated believed quite passionately in the innovation and the creation and exploration that they were doing. They communicated it to diners with extraordinary clarity. It was, I think, by any metric of art, successful art.

“The idea of a restaurant kitchen as a particularly toxic workplace predates Noma, and is certainly not exclusive to Noma.”

A lot of chefs, as you well know, spent their time at Noma as interns or kitchen staff. When those chefs left Noma, did they take its toxic culture with them?

That’s hard to say. I think that the idea of a restaurant kitchen as a particularly toxic workplace predates Noma, and is certainly not exclusive to Noma. We see The Bear exploring the really sort of darker, more painful side of it. We see a sort of semi-glorification of it in the work of Anthony Bourdain, where he had a very conflicted relationship to it. He reveled in the kind of pirate ship-ness of cooking, and he also, later in his career as he achieved more and more fame, looked on it with a lot of skepticism and was like, we don’t have to make being an abusive dick an essential part of our professional identities as cooks.

The model of fine dining is rooted in what’s called the brigade system, which comes out of French fine dining and is modeled on military hierarchy. You have people who are each in charge of their own stations. The chef de cuisine is the head of the kitchen; the sous chef is the assistant to that. And then you have chefs who are in charge of different stations: The garde manger is the person who’s in charge of salads and raw vegetables, the saucier is in charge of sauces, and things like that.

As a system, it’s something that is not in universal adoption across fine dining, but it is kind of the substrate on which fine dining is built. And the whole idea of everybody saying, “Yes, chef,” in unison sounds like military call-and-response because it is.

And historically — this is certainly very much less the case in the last couple of decades — but historically, restaurant work was not something you went into if you were upper-class. It wasn’t something you went into aspirationally. It was an industry that took all comers and that didn’t do background checks. If you could just walk into a room and if you could scrub a dish, you’d have a job. So discipline, compliance, not talking back, not pushing back, not making any ripples, became the way that these restaurants would function.

And they were multimodal beasts with dozens of people running around trying to execute tons of dishes all the time for a demanding clientele. That kind of rigidity in structure certainly can produce a certain kind of product, but it also creates and enforces a certain kind of mindset, both in the people who are receiving the orders and the people who are giving them.

If I’m not mistaken, there was supposed to have been a huge reckoning in the restaurant industry — some other chefs who were accused of being toxic or harassers or whatever it might’ve been. Did we learn anything from it?

I think that the restaurant industry is sort of in a perpetual state of reckoning, and is also trying to figure out what it is and if it is even a coherent industry at all or just kind of a loose consortium of individual businesses.

I think that the Me Too movement and that era of workers feeling empowered to speak out was pretty extraordinary, and if it didn’t massively, dramatically shift the way that business is done in the restaurants, it certainly moved the needle a little bit. And so what we have seen over the last few years is a much stronger, much more focused culture of workers standing up for themselves.

I think part of what makes this Noma story really interesting and really complicated is that the abuses that were outlined in this blockbuster New York Times report took place between 2009 and 2017, nearly a decade ago. And that doesn’t minimize their horror. That doesn’t minimize the nature of the abuse.

But it does, I think, tell us something that this took place in a slightly different social environment where people who were coming to Noma, who were seeking out proximity to the creativity, the innovation, the excitement, the prestige, might not have felt as confident as people now might be to push back, or to say no, or to intervene, or to leave and say something immediately in public.

The way that the landscape has shifted, I think, is also that consumers are more receptive to hearing these stories. I saw this in the comments on my own article that I wrote about this for the New Yorker are overrun with people who are defending the actions that Redzepi is accused of. Not just saying it didn’t happen, but saying that, like, that’s just the cost of being in a kitchen.

This is something I want to ask you about because my favorite episodes of The Bear are the ones where people are screaming at each other and, like, on the cusp of killing each other. And then you look at this Noma pop-up in Los Angeles, even after all this controversy, and we heard that you can’t make a reservation there because it’s fully booked at $1,500 a person. Is this something that we’re okay with to some degree?

I think it’s impossible to overestimate people’s capacity for cognitive dissonance. There are lots of people who think that this kind of accountability culture has gone too far. Honestly, I don’t actually see meaningful consequences for virtually anybody who gets in the crossfire or this sort of thing. You brought up Mario Batali. When he stepped away from his restaurants, for a lot of people, several of those restaurants remained open, even though Batali wasn’t involved in [them] anymore. For a lot of people, those restaurants became toxic. I didn’t go back to Babbo, which was his flagship, but there also is a not-insignificant portion of people who went to those restaurants even harder just to stick it to the folks who had the audacity to speak up.

I don’t think that being an asshole to your employees makes the food taste better. You don’t need to be an art monster to make art. You don’t need to be a jerk in order to be successful. You don’t need to have people fear you in order to have them follow you.

I don’t think it’s possible to come up with one universal law that tells us what’s going to make a restaurant good and what’s going to make a restaurant bad — with the exception of the fact that being an abusive workplace does not mean your food is going to be good.

The man behind the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger

2026-03-13T19:35:57-04:00

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison speaks during the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on October 9, 2025. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Hollywood has been reeling from the production exodus from California, the pandemic, the writers’ and actors’ strikes, the LA wildfires, and the AI takeover. Now comes the big consolidation.

David Ellison, head of Skydance Media and son of tech mogul Larry Ellison, has been on a shopping spree, first buying up Paramount and now beating out Netflix to acquire Warner Bros.

Ellison has a checkered record of making and producing movies. That has executives wondering what he’ll do with two legacy Hollywood studios.

The merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. is expected to bring another round of layoffs, restructured divisions, more cost-cutting, and potentially fewer movie releases — despite Ellison’s promises that the media behemoth will churn out as many as 30 theatrical releases a year.

Consolidation also means fewer outlets for writers to pitch projects to. Less competition means the studios can get away with cutting cast and crew salaries.

And with Ellison trying to gain Trump’s regulatory approval, the Warner Bros.-owned CNN might veer rightward, as Paramount Skydance-owned CBS recently has.

It’s not a done deal, with the Teamsters and others lobbying the Department of Justice to block the merger unless concerns over worker protections are addressed.

But how did David Ellison come to have so much power in Hollywood? For more of his backstory, Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Reeves Wiedeman, features writer at New York Magazine.

Lately you’ve been writing features about one individual. Is it fair to say said individual is maybe the biggest nepo baby on Earth — at the moment at least?

The only credit I’ll give David Ellison in the scheme of nepo babies is that he went into a completely different industry than his dad. He took his dad’s money, maybe more money than any nepo baby has taken — tens of billions of dollars at this point of tech money — and is now pouring it into Hollywood.

He talks about how as a kid he loved the movies, like many kids do. He went to the movies with his mom every weekend and had movie marathons. He actually went to college for business, but quickly figured out that was actually not what he wanted to do. He wanted to go to film school, went to film school at USC, and initially he was trying to do any and everything. He was interested in acting, interested in writing, maybe directing.

His first foray into Hollywood was acting in a World War I movie [Flyboys] starring James Franco. The way that David Ellison got this role was his dad’s money. Larry had contributed a lot of the money for the budget, and lo and behold, David got a role in the film.

How was his big debut in Flyboys? Was it well received?

It was not great. The movie bombed at the box office. Critics did not love it. He’s not a natural actor, he’s not a naturally charismatic person, which I think has carried over into his business life a little bit. So I think, thankfully for him, he realized pretty early on the acting thing was not exactly going to take and he was going to have to figure out some other way to make it in the business.

And so he becomes a money man.

Basically. He got this notion that many people get when they get into Hollywood, especially when they have a little bit of money behind them: “I’m going to start a production company.” He initially went around, tried to find some investors to pour some money into this company that would make various movies primarily focused on the kinds of movies David liked, which were action/adventure movies.

And the company is Skydance.

The company’s called Skydance. And what they were able to do very early on is they got a deal with Paramount. And Paramount at the time was a struggling movie studio. It’s one of the legendary movie studios in Hollywood, but at the time it was being mismanaged and not that successful and they were happy to have David come in with some money to help them finance and make some movies. And in exchange for doing that, David was allowed to participate in — as they put it in Hollywood — some of the big franchises that Paramount has. And some of those movies were great big blockbusters. A lot of them David didn’t have a ton to do with.

And then eventually, he started trying to make movies on his own. Some of them were based on original ideas that he and others had. He also had this longstanding goal of making a Terminator movie. Terminator and Terminator 2 were two of the movies he loved as a kid. And he made a version of the movie, Terminator Genisys. Also not great.

He had this mixed track record of making these big action movies. Generally the ones with Tom Cruise were pretty good. Generally the ones without Tom Cruise based on original ideas, not so good.

And then he makes a really good movie with Tom Cruise.

Inarguably one of the best, maybe the best critical and commercial film of the last few decades, Top Gun: Maverick. And David Ellison, for anyone who wants to criticize him, and there’s plenty of ways and reasons to do it, he deserves a lot of credit for it. Plenty of other people, most especially Tom Cruise, came together to make that happen. But David was one of the people who really kept up the momentum to make that movie happen. To the point of over a billion dollars and some Oscar nominations.

Does that change how Hollywood sees him? Does he become less of a nepo baby and more of a legitimate player?

I think it was really good timing because that movie came out, did incredibly well, everyone in Hollywood loved it. “Tom Cruise is here to save the movies. David Ellison is the one who’s supporting him. Maybe he’s not so bad.” And right at that moment was when David had started his pursuit of Paramount.

It became public at the end of 2023 that he was interested in buying it. The Redstone family was going to sell the company. Like many industries, Hollywood was going through this real period of disruption. Spending was down, money was down. Covid changed the movie business in particular. And so there was this feeling, at least at that moment, that if not the savior of Hollywood, that David was maybe the best possible person you could have to take over a studio like Paramount.

I think where the opinion of him started to change was in the year between 2024 into 2025, between when the deal was announced and when it actually went through. A lot of things happened during that point, and the biggest was that Donald Trump was elected president. And Paramount is not just a movie studio. Paramount owns CBS, most notably.

And people will, I’m sure, remember all of the drama that surrounded 60 Minutes and Trump’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes. And David spent a good portion of that year catering to the Trump administration’s needs and wants and desires in order to get this deal approved.

So David, who had up to that point barely been involved in politics at all, he was not someone who was even really a big donor to politicians prior to 2024, became tied to the Trump administration in ways that made people uncomfortable in all kinds of ways.

You’ve done a bunch of interviews. You’ve spoken with anonymous Hollywood executives. Are they feeling more hopeful in a moment like this where there’s been a bunch of consolidation but also a ton of money infused into the industry, or are they terrified that this is all going to implode?

I did not get any inklings of hope. I think there’s a certain realism that people have that consolidation was going to happen, which we all know the history of, that in any business, things tend to get smaller. Combined with the politics, the fact that David has catered so much to the Trump administration and whether that’s going to continue. And then thirdly, his taste and his abilities as an executive. He is now, as one Hollywood person pointed out to me, he went from being a midshipman to being the captain of the Titanic, literally, because he now owns the movie Titanic, which was a Paramount movie.

At the end of the day, everyone in this business is in it to make movies, TV shows, and to make money. And David Ellison has a lot of that, a lot of money, and he is going to be making a lot of the movies and TV shows that we get to watch.

Iran after Khamenei

2026-03-03T14:50:44-05:00

Iranians protest against attacks by the US and Israel on February 28, 2026, in Tehran, Iran. | Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

Iran has already announced new interim leadership to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed this weekend, along with several other high-ranking Iranian officials in an Israeli strike.

But who will lead the country in the long term is far from certain in the opening days of what could be a protracted war.

Key takeaways

It’s not clear who’s running Iran now, but the regime is designed so that it can’t be easily toppled by removing the people at the top.
There is not one opposition leader or group ready to take over the country, and many opposition figures lack public legitimacy.
The hardline generals who run the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are probably in the best position to take power.
The war with Iran threatens regional stability; if the regime does collapse, Iran could turn into a failed state.

President Donald Trump’s stated objective for the attack on Iran has shifted dramatically in recent days, from the alleged threat of an imminent nuclear attack, to the regime’s support of terrorist groups, to wanting to bring “freedom” to the people of Iran.

Similarly, Trump’s desired outcome has been evolving on the fly, from full-scale regime change to merely replacing the leadership at the top (as the US recently did in Venezuela) to “peace throughout the Middle East, and indeed, the world,” as he wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.

Regime change is difficult to achieve through the kind of bombing campaign the US and Israel are currently pursuing, but Trump and the Pentagon aren’t ruling out sending in ground troops, even as polls show that the Iran incursion is broadly unpopular among Americans.

And Iran’s leadership has threatened “ferocious” retaliation as it fires ballistic missiles at Israel and at US military bases, civilian targets, and energy infrastructure in Gulf states.

To learn more about what to expect next, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Nahal Toosi, senior foreign affairs correspondent and columnist for Politico.

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.

Who is in charge in Iran right now?

It’s a very good question. Technically, they’ve said that they’ve appointed an interim council to lead the country for now. It consists of the president, Masoud Pezeshkian — he’s something of a moderate in the Iranian system — and there’s a member of the Guardian Council and the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

They’re considered hardliners for the most part. But, to be honest, it’s a little bit unclear who is really running the military. There’s a very senior guy named Ali Larijani who has a lot of power, as well. It’s a little vague, especially when the bombs keep raining down.

How did this regime, which, right now, seems to be in complete disarray, survive so many years?

Everything through repression, diplomatic negotiation, balancing its anti-Americanism by appealing to other world powers such as China and Russia. It has used any number of tricks.

It has had international relations with plenty of countries, if not America, over the years, but, increasingly, it has become isolated, as well. It was getting weaker and weaker, and my sense is that the Trump administration saw a moment of unusual vulnerability and just went for it.

It went for it with the idea, presumably, that if you take out the leaders of the regime, then you get regime change. Is that what is likely to happen here?

The thing about a regime is it’s not just about the people. It’s also about the process of everything from elections to making decisions. It’s about power and how power is allocated within a system.

The Iranian system was never built around a single cult figure, that type of thing, to where you could just take one person out and everything else would change, and there’d be rainbows, and unicorns, or whatever.

This is a systematic place, and it has been designed to regenerate itself. People step in when other people leave or die. So, what’s different now is that the US and Israel — Israel in particular, because they’re really the ones carrying out the assassinations — have been going after as many figures as they can get, and even ones who aren’t really in power, apparently, like people who might be related to someone in power.

It depends on how deep they can go to where the whole thing could fall apart. But, then, you still have the armed forces. You still have the paramilitaries. There’s a certain limit. And there’s a certain limit to munitions, for that matter.

Trump said this weekend that he hopes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the police will work together with Iranian patriots — so, the protesters who’ve been protesting in the streets.

He’s essentially saying that the military and the police who massacred these protesters earlier this year should now work alongside them. Does it sound likely to you?

Strange times make for strange bedfellows. There’s been reports over the years that there are people in the military, and armed forces, [and] police forces who don’t like the regime, who would prefer to defect.

A lot of these guys are there collecting a paycheck. At the same time, a lot of these guys killed thousands of Iranian protestors just weeks ago. I’m not saying it can’t happen. Someone might emerge, but I would have a lot of questions.

What does the organized opposition in Iran look like? Is there someone inside of Iran who has the political leverage to take over?

The short answer is no. There’s no real organized opposition inside Iran. There are opposition figures. Many have been thrown in prison, many have just had to flee the country. There are some who are under house arrest, that sort of thing, and some kind of came from the system and tried to change it, and so, they might not have legitimacy in the eyes of many Iranians who really, really want complete regime change.

There’s just not a real organized group. There are different groups outside Iran who claim to be opposition leaders and organizations to a degree, but many of them have not been inside Iran for a long, long time, and they don’t really have the confidence, and they haven’t really proven themselves as having a ground game inside the country.

Tell me about Reza Pahlavi. It seems like maybe the exiled son of the last shah of Iran might fall into that category.

Yes. He’s been outside the country for nearly 50 years, and, over the decades, he has, every now and then, emerged and tried to make some noise and say, “the US should do something. We should support the people of Iran.”

In recent years, his profile really has risen, but it’s partly because he and his aides have pursued a kind of political polarization approach. They’ve really sided with Republicans. They’ve really been pro-Trump, and they have gone out of their way, especially online, to intimidate and push aside others who are in the opposition. It’s been a pretty divisive approach.

At the same time, because he has such name recognition inside the country, and because he has managed to raise his profile, it sort of has worked for him so that more and more people, even inside Iran, chant his name.

Does that mean that he has groups on the ground in the country who can take over institutions and take the armed forces over? I have not seen any evidence of that.

He says he’s in touch with many Iranian defectors, including from the armed forces, but we really haven’t seen proof of that, and the US officials I speak to do not seem to think he’s a serious player.

What about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? If they take over, is that like a military dictatorship?

Over the years, we have heard reports that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has grown in power and stature inside the system.

Now, the IRGC is not the normal Iranian military. It reports directly to the supreme leader. It’s very religiously driven, but I’d say there’s a fair amount of interest in the economic side of things for them, because they own large parts of the Iranian economy.

They are probably in the best position to take power. Even if they put a cleric in front and as a symbol, the real power could lie with the IRGC. And this is a group that could, on the one hand, be very pragmatic, if you say, “look, let’s make money, let’s have peace.”

On the other hand, they could grow even more hardline, and anti-American, and anti-Israel and push even harder with having a nuclear Iran down the line. It’s probably, in many ways, the odds-on favor in terms of seizing the mantle of power in the country.

You well know that the United States has attempted regime change in the Middle East before, and the results were catastrophic. How concerned are you that we are looking down the barrel of another catastrophe here?

If you look at the conflagration in the Middle East right now as a result of these actions, it is deeply concerning. It’s a question of how many countries will get drawn in.

At some point, the Arab states might feel like they have to attack Iran because it’s been attacking them. This could get very ugly. It could spill across borders. It could destabilize a number of places. Most of all, it could destabilize Iran.

If you decimate the leadership but, then, nothing rises to take its place, you could have what’s called regime collapse. It could become a chaotic, failed state.

I do think, though, you have to ask yourself about the really long arc of history. Yes, Afghanistan is a different story. It’s back in the hands of the Taliban, but Iraq, for instance, continues now to hold elections. It’s gone through some very, very tough times, but it is a somewhat functioning democracy. The people there are freer than they were under Saddam Hussein.

It’s been more than 20 years now, but things do, over time, change. The question is: Is it worth it? Is it worth American lives and American treasure to make this sort of thing happen? I think keeping that nuance in everyone’s mind is really important.

How the prenup became mainstream

2026-01-30T12:21:41-05:00

A wedding cake is seen during edition number 45 of SIGEP (International Exhibition of Ice Cream, Pastry, Bakery and Coffee) Fair in Rimini, Italy, on january 24, 2023. (Photo by Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto via Getty Images) | NurPhoto via Getty Images

Prenuptial agreements, long exclusive to celebrities and the ultrarich, have trickled down to the rest of us.

A 2023 Axios/Harris poll found that half of US adults say they’re open to signing a prenup, and that younger people are driving the trend.

Forty-one percent of Gen Z and 47 percent of millennials who are engaged or have been married said they entered a prenup, according to the poll.

There might be several things driving the trend: new apps that make it easier and cheaper to draw up prenups, influencers touting the value of prenups on social media and in podcasts, and young people being more likely to be the children of divorced parents and therefore more realistic about the possibility that their marriage won’t last.

The New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Wilson did a deep dive into the world of prenups, speaking to divorce lawyers, married couples, and others to better understand why prenups are growing in popularity. She shared some of her findings with Today, Explained host Noel King.

What got you thinking and writing about prenups?

I just noticed them all over. You’ve seen prenups on TV shows like Sex and the City or reality shows like Real Housewives. And in those contexts it makes sense because we’re talking about people with a lot of money. The stereotype is that you’ve got a rich guy and he wants to figure out a way to screw his gold-digging younger partner out of her share of the assets.

But I started seeing prenups appear on shows like Love Is Blind. There was a contestant who worked in HR and she wanted her fiance to sign a prenup, and neither of them really had much money. And I expected the conversation on social media to be sort of making fun of this a little bit. Like, “Come on girl, like, we don’t have any money. We’ve blown it all on avocado toast.” But everyone’s saying, “Absolutely, this is just financial hygiene. This is just being responsible.”

All over TikTok, there were these personal finance influencers, often female. There’s one who goes by the handle Your Rich BFF, her name’s Vivian Tu, and she had a viral video that said, “What’s in my prenup and in my purse?“ It was a very cutesy conversation about prenups. And she got a lot of support from people online saying, “Yes, every woman should push for a prenup.”

And also just the numbers of people getting prenups have just risen dramatically. So there was a 2023 Axios/Harris poll that showed that 40 percent of millennials and Gen Z claimed that they had signed a prenup. That number struck a lot of the lawyers I spoke to as way too high, although they all told me that they have seen a big uptick in younger couples asking for prenups. So I just wanted to dig into this phenomenon.

You have laid out what my understanding of a prenup always was, which is, there’s a rich guy, he’s coming to the marriage with all the money, the woman has no or less money. And so the idea is basically, “I’m going to protect myself from this woman just in case,” a very gendered scenario that I just laid out but, I also think, rooted in some truth. You said it was a woman on Love Is Blind who was like, “I want a prenup,” and she didn’t have money. So what are the differences that we’re seeing here?

You’re right that there is a really big gendered shift. One of the things I researched for this piece are these apps that have just kind of proliferated across the market. Many of their founders are women. One is Hello Prenup. One is called First and that was actually launched by Sheryl Sandberg’s former chief of staff at Facebook, a woman named Libby Leffler. And she absolutely has used very much like “lean in” kind of language around prenups.

The same way that Sheryl Sandberg was telling women, “You’ve got to negotiate your salary,” now her protege is saying, “Well, you should renegotiate your marriage contract. You would never take on a new job without knowing your compensation package. Why would you enter a marriage without the same know-how?”

I think that one thing that’s really important here to understand is we’re talking about a particular generation, millennials and Gen Z, who are used to thinking about divorce and separation. Twenty-five percent of millennials are the children of divorce or separation. So they’re coming to their new relationships with a certain amount of trauma. And so there was a little bit of that, but not nearly as much as you would think. I think that this generation is just a bit more realistic, that “happily ever after” or “until death do we part” are not realistic ways to think about marriage.

When you were learning about the details of people’s prenups, what surprised you? What really raised your eyebrows or made you go, “Oh damn, they really thought of something there”?

Companies like Hello Prenup, they are offering all sorts of new clauses. So something called a social media image clause, what that does is you can, in your prenup, say for any disparaging content about your ex that you post on social media, you have to pay a financial penalty. And I think that’s because we’ve seen people’s careers be affected by information about what happened in their relationship becoming public.

So it’s not totally irrational. Millennials are also getting married later. So things like IVF have come up. Hello Prenup also has an embryo clause where you can decide how you want to, for instance, divide embryos in the event of a divorce, and even who’s going to pay for storage fees.

Even [with] classic clauses like the infidelity clause, you have to be very particular about how you define infidelity these days. I mean, we’re living in an era of ethical non-monogamy. More people are thinking differently about what infidelity is. I interviewed for the piece a divorce lawyer who said that relationships with an AI chatbot, those could conceivably violate an infidelity clause. And she actually said that she’s already telling her clients to be careful about how much, for instance, you even divulge to some of these chatbots because she said you can actually subpoena those conversations and they can come up in a divorce, but also in custody.

So you heard all of the arguments for prenups, and I imagine, you found some of them very convincing. What are the arguments against prenups?

I think on one level, it feels like people are giving up on a broader kind of social repair to the way that divorce happens now. It’s a privatized solution.

I also think these are really complicated legal documents, and I don’t think that everyone knows what they’re doing when they press these buttons on an app. For instance, I interviewed a woman who is a theater actress. She does not make a lot of money. She picks up shifts as a cater waiter and at Lululemon, and she married a finance bro, and she insisted on a prenup. She wanted whoever paid the down payment on an apartment or house and covered most of the financials that they would get that property in the event of a divorce. And I thought, what? Why would you do that if you’re the lesser-earning partner? And she said, well, what if I book a show? What if I get a movie?

I also think that there’s a lot of manifesting that can happen in these prenups. I spoke to a researcher who studied something called the optimism bias, and she said that prenup signers suffer from this. So what does that mean? It means that when someone says, you and your partner, do you think you’ll ever get divorced? You’re going to say no. And that actually can impact what you get in a prenup, what you think that you want in a prenup, because you might agree to less favorable terms. You might even ask for less favorable terms because you want to show your partner that you’re not in it for the money.

I do wonder sometimes what it means to go into the messiness of marriage, thinking so much about “what’s mine, what’s yours?” I do wonder how that works on a day-to-day basis when you’re living complicated lives and things go awry. And life is so unpredictable and I felt really often that the people I was interviewing knew that and they were almost using the prenup to create some certainty.

Is heterosexuality cringe?

2026-01-07T13:46:44-05:00

In recent months, freelance writer Chanté Joseph noticed a surprising trend on her social media feeds: Women had stopped posting pictures of their boyfriends.

For a long time, boyfriend pics were good social media fodder. Whether on vacation or chilling at home, these images sent a message of heterosexual bliss, of contented couplehood. A world, as Joseph wrote, “where women’s online identities centered around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed.”

But then the boyfriends disappeared. You might see a hand, or a shadow, or the back of a head. But the faces of these men were cropped out or blurred out, “as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.”

Women were living their lives, and their guys no longer served their personal brands.

Joseph puzzled this out in an article for Vogue called “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” The piece went viral, sparking a wave of TikTok discourse and prompting a follow-up story a couple of weeks later.

Today, Explained host Astead Herndon called Joseph up to talk about her piece, the reaction it received, and the state of heterosexual dating now.

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You wrote what I would think is one of the most memorable pieces of the year, a piece for Vogue that went viral in 2025, specifically about a question that you put into the zeitgeist. Can you tell me about the piece?

The piece was essentially asking this question if having a boyfriend has lost the social standing it once provided women. And I was analyzing this through the lens of social media.

I was looking at the way that women are very private about posting their romantic partners online. A lot of people were sticking emojis over their boyfriend’s heads. We’ve all seen this and I think it started to ramp up, and then it became a little bit of a parody where people would just edit out their boyfriend’s heads completely.

But then I noticed that people would post their wedding videos or they would post their engagement videos and photos. They were edited in a way that you never knew what the husband looked like. And I was like, “Okay, this is feeling a bit extreme.”

You’re noticing something that has really become clear on the timeline. I remember boyfriend reveals or things like that, but it’s gone to outright hiding. So what did your piece find and what did you even mean by “embarrassing”?

So I found basically three things.

The first was, people said they didn’t want to do this simply for privacy reasons. And I questioned, “Well, why is it only this area of your life?” And then they would go on to say, “Well, if I posted my boyfriend and he cheated on me next week and I had to go back and delete the pictures…I’d have to deal with the shame of that.”

But then there were women who just outright thought the idea of having a boyfriend was inherently embarrassing because it didn’t align with the brand. A lot of people felt like, “If I post my boyfriend on Instagram or on social media, I’m indicating something about me to the world that I don’t want people to know.”

“It was absolutely fascinating to get into the perception of straightness, straight people, and straight culture.”

In the piece, one of the comments that I quote is this idea of someone saying, “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” I think it’s the way that the heterosexual romantic relationship has almost been co-opted a little bit by the right. It feels traditionally very conservative. I feel like I’m aligning to this idea of the world that doesn’t really feel natural to me.

I was going to ask specifically about how we should think about this alongside rising trends like “tradwives” and others. Are these things that are happening at the same time? Are these just different communities?

I think they are happening at the same time. I think about the reaction to my piece — whether it’s from the men who were just really angry that I could ever talk disparagingly about men or the women who were very proud of their relationships — feeling as if [it] was an attack on them.

I think the way we talk about relationships online has changed so much. I was talking about the ReesaTeesa “Who the fuck did I marry?” [series] or the “Danish Deception,” these women coming online making these 60-part TikTok videos, detailing all of the horrible things that have happened to them.

West Elm Caleb. I remember that one.

All of these things. So there is no illusion around the fantasy anymore. And so I think that has gripped a lot of people.

You did a callout on your Instagram, and the responses from followers said that there was “an overwhelming sense…that regardless of the relationship, being with a man was almost a guilty thing to do.” So are we talking here just about, like, shame of heterosexuality partnerships? It seems like straightness is at the core of this.

Oh yeah, 100 percent. And I think this is what really upset people as well. We don’t talk about heterosexuality in this way. We very much see it as a norm. This is just the way to be in society. And so we should never really question what’s going on here.

But actually, I was like, “No, it’s deeper than that.” So one of the inspirations behind this piece was a book by professor Jane Ward. Her book is called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, and in the book, she has a chapter that is dedicated to the things that queer people say behind their straight friends’ backs.

And it was absolutely fascinating to get into the perception of straightness, straight people, and straight culture. And I think the idea of embarrassment definitely came from reading that and really realizing the ways that, yeah, straight culture is very embarrassing.

What do you think we’ve learned about straight relationships from this episode?

I think what I’ve learned is that people are still trying to claim the privilege that being in a relationship, particularly a straight relationship, gives them. And I think for some people, their anger to this piece was about them realizing that they might lose this privilege, and they might not have many other privileges. And so losing this feels like a big deal.

Do you feel like you’ve come through this thinking boyfriends are more or less embarrassing?

Do you know what? I think I’ve come away thinking that they’re more embarrassing. I can’t lie because the men are being embarrassing, and the women with boyfriends upset about this piece are even more embarrassing. So I’m like, damn, I might have to double down.

What does Trump’s AI czar want?

2025-12-19T13:58:24-05:00

David Sacks speaks to press outside of the White House on March 7, 2025 in Washington, DC. | Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

This summer, as President Donald Trump signed a new industry-friendly “Genius Act” for cryptocurrency, he deferred to White House “AI and cryptocurrency czar” David Sacks to explain why crypto companies need a hands-off regulatory framework.

When Trump introduced an executive order this month that limits states’ ability to regulate artificial intelligence, Sacks was at his side again, insisting that government needs to get out of Silicon Valley’s way if the US hopes to beat China in the race for superintelligence.

Sacks has had a meteoric rise to become Trump’s point person on all things tech.

Sacks was an early friend of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The two met at Stanford, bonded over their conservative leanings, and co-wrote The Diversity Myth, a polemic against political correctness and campus liberalism. He then became part of Thiel and Elon Musk’s “PayPal mafia,” started a company that sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion, and founded a venture capital firm with big stakes in SpaceX and xAI.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Nitasha Tiku, tech culture reporter for the Washington Post, about how Sacks went from Silicon Valley investor to DC heavyweight.

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How do most people know about David Sacks?

David Sacks has a very popular tech podcast, All-In, that he co-hosts with three of his “besties.” They’re all investors, and one of the other co-hosts was also part of the war room as Elon [was] taking over. And they cheered a lot of his ideas: fire your trust and safety department, get rid of DEI, fight for free speech. The idea is that you’re getting an unfiltered, candid look from people who are in the game, “in the arena,” as they like to say on the podcast.

But increasingly they started talking about politics and David started out as the conservative foil. His co-hosts were much more like centrist Democrats. And the evolution of their worldview, of their political stances, is pretty close to what we see from the tech supporters of Trump’s second term.

What do we learn from All-In about David Sacks’s politics?

We learn that he is conservative. He has also been politically involved in previous election cycles, giving to different candidates. He’s given to Hillary Clinton.

He mostly gives to Republicans. He spoke out against the January 6 insurrection. He was actually backing Ron DeSantis. He asked his buddy Elon to host Twitter Spaces with DeSantis back when they were still calling it Twitter, if you remember. It was an audio disaster. And he hosted a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy.

Not only that, but they had all of the Republican candidates, and Dean Phillips, on the All-In podcast. And we saw him become increasingly closer to the MAGA right.

How did Trump and Sacks end up getting involved?

Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Trump in June of 2024 at his home in San Francisco. And it seems like that dinner really cemented the deal. There were a lot of crypto entrepreneurs, and Trump just loved it. Sacks has a very nice home on Billionaire’s Row in San Francisco. When Trump came on the All-In podcast afterward, he was like, “I love David’s house.” Sacks is very deferential towards him.

They talked about what was happening to the crypto industry in a way that really resonated with Trump. They were talking about being persecuted by SEC chairman Gary Gensler, how hard it was for crypto entrepreneurs to bank, and what the Trump administration could do for them and for this empowering technology. And keep in mind that Trump has previously called crypto a scam.

We’ve seen this very quick evolution on that since the inauguration. There’s another quote in that episode where Trump talks about how Sacks introduced him to all the tech geniuses. That ends up being the start of this faction of the tech industry that helps bring Trump into the White House for a second term.

David Sacks goes from outside of the Washington, DC, establishment into a role in the Trump White House. What is he doing for Trump now and how serious is this job?

We weren’t sure how serious it was going to be. His title is the White House AI and crypto czar. Trump and Sacks have a very close and mutually respectful relationship, and he has ended up playing a extremely pivotal role in these two technologies that he has been put in charge of.

We’ve all witnessed the power of the AI industry through this post-ChatGPT boom. So it ends up having a lot of geopolitical significance in terms of how we think about national security in China. All of that is tied in with GPUs and chips that are needed by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, chips that are built by Nvidia, a trillion-dollar company. So his profile is just so much higher than it used to be.

States want to regulate AI. Governors want laws on the books protecting people from artificial intelligence. The Trump administration says, “No, you can’t do that.” Where do you think David Sacks fits into the executive order that says: States, you don’t get to make laws around AI?

He played a very instrumental role in this executive order, doing a lot of work behind the scenes, talking to the populist wing of the Republican Party, trying to get them on board, emphasizing that this would not affect those laws that would keep their constituents safe. They tried to make it clear: We’re not trying to stop you from protecting teens in your district or what have you. We just want laws that are not onerous, that won’t slow down the development of the AI industry.

And that very much matches what you are hearing from the VC crowd that worked in the Trump administration, that was aligned with the tech right when they came into office. It was like: We want rules of the road for crypto, and we want no hindrance for AI. This executive order definitely reflects their interest in making sure that there’s not a patchwork of laws that a startup has to abide by.

So the stakes here are very high. David Sacks is a rich man who is powerfully connected in the White House, and he does not want there to be AI regulation. On the other hand, you have Americans who are concerned about AI. So which side of this do you think is going to end up winning?

Just in the last couple months, we’ve seen this particular question really gear up for a fight because you have increasing concerns from parents who are reading these stories about chatbots encouraging teenagers to die by suicide or manipulating them in ways that look extremely uncomfortable when you start reading the chats. And at the same time, you have people pushing back in an organized way against having more data centers in their neighborhood, and the idea that we’re going to literally change the landscape of the country and other countries in order to power this technology that CEOs say is going to put everybody out of work.

Maybe before some of the chatbot pushback, you would’ve had the industry get its way. And I think that the industry will still be able to win. And I think that [there’s some] ability to do little carve-outs for child safety, for issues that are kitchen-table issues or things that just sound terribly bad, like encouraging a child to commit suicide, you might be able to get some restrictions on that. But the thing that will really shape how the tech industry has to behave is any checks on its ability to grow.

I am not saying that it’s futile. I think drawing attention to these issues could hopefully, potentially, change the outcome towards what voters want, what people want. But I think that we should watch for that distinction between some of these little safeguards that nominally seem like they’re going to protect people or carve out a safe space for them and some of the bigger, more existential factors.

Why Republicans in Congress are turning against Trump

2025-12-10T17:48:33-05:00

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) arrives for a press conference on Capitol Hill on November 18, 2025. Johnson is dealing with a fractious Republican caucus. | Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

For most of this year, Republican members of the House of Representatives seemed to move in lockstep with President Donald Trump, not hesitating to back him on controversial measures on immigration and the economy.

But now they seem to be breaking ranks.

Some Republican members of Congress have stood up to Trump on the release of the Epstein Files, tariffs, health care subsidies, boat strikes in the Caribbean, and other issues.

They’ve voiced frustration with House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has let Trump set the agenda for Congress even as the president’s approval rating continues to decline.

Some GOP members of the House, fed up with partisan gridlock, stalled legislation, and threats of political violence, are just calling it quits altogether. They’re either retiring or resigning to seek other offices.

The GOP could potentially lose its razor-thin margin even before the midterms. Once Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene officially resigns in January, Republicans will only have a one-seat advantage.

Today, Explained’s Astead Herndon talked to Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent for Puck News, about what’s causing the House GOP exodus and what it could mean for the party in power.

In the last few weeks we’ve heard quite a few Congress people say they’re going to retire, even resign. What is the scope of this angst in Congress? What’s the source of it?

The scope could be pretty big. I’m hearing from Republican sources, lawmakers, aides, and people close to these people who are expecting a lot more retirement announcements in the coming weeks.

There are so many reasons for it, but the most immediate is the political environment. It’s been a really tough fall for Republicans. They had completely underperformed in those November elections. There was a special election in Tennessee in a very red district that Trump won by 22 points. The Republican who won only won by nine points.

It’s just another data point of the political environment and the mood of the country around Republicans right now. People are looking at that and seeing the writing on the wall and believing that the House Republicans are not going to be in the majority after the midterms, that they’ll lose the majority. And it’s not a very fun place to be.

The thing about serving in the House is you get to reevaluate your life every two years, and we’re in that season where people, Republicans especially, are deciding if it’s worth it. And I’m told that many more Republicans are going to say that it’s not.

Does your reporting give you any sense of numbers and how we can compare that possible number to ones we’ve seen previously?

An estimate that one source told me was that close to 20 more Republicans are set to retire.

That’s a seismic number.

It is. We’re already at 23 Republicans who have announced. So it also talks about the mood of the Congress. People are just not happy right now.

Are Democrats retiring in these types of numbers? And when they are quitting, is it for the same reasons?

Democrats are retiring too. It happens every year. But the numbers are lower for Democrats and the reasons are different. For the Democrats, most of them are in their late seventies or eighties, or they have served for decades. Nancy Pelosi is one of the Democrats who is retiring.

Jerry Nadler in New York.

It’s different on the Republican side. Troy Nehls was elected in 2020. Morgan Luttrell of Texas just started serving in 2023. He’s young. A lot of members who are younger, who haven’t been here that long, are deciding to call it quits. And that is really what’s different.

Republicans have had tough moments before. Donald Trump has been unpopular before. What is it about this year, in this time, or the next midterm that might’ve been different than just general other bouts of Trump controversy?

This term, Donald Trump has so much control over this Congress. They govern in fear. They do what he says because they’re afraid. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on 60 Minutes: “I think they’re terrified to step out of line and get a nasty Truth Social post on them.”

Threats of political violence have only increased, and everyone knows that if your name is in a Truth Social and negatively, there will be an uptick for that person. These members have been dealing with that for a long time, and that has led to retirements in the past. The ability to be an independent member of Congress has really, really diminished, and people are feeling that. They are frustrated with Speaker Johnson. They think that he is playing into the demands of the president rather than what the members want and need. They were frustrated that they were out of town for seven weeks during the government shutdown.

It’s also one of the least productive Congresses in modern history. The last Congress was really unproductive, and this one is way more unproductive. In the last Congress, over two years, 274 bills were signed into law. We’re one year into this Congress. Only 47 bills have been signed into law, and that’s big legislation and small resolutions. They are just not doing anything and legislators get frustrated. Many of them actually come to legislate and when they’re not able to deliver for their district, when they’re not able to take home wins and projects and money, people are asking themselves, what is the point?

What is Speaker Johnson doing about this? It would seem that if these retirements continue, he would have a little bit of a crisis on his hands. And even when we think about things like redistricting efforts and others, he has really chosen to be on the side of Donald Trump 120 percent. How has that blowback impacted his own caucus? And when they’re upset with him, what exactly is the reason why?

They obviously don’t want to see a lot of retirements because it just looks bad. It’s an indictment of Congress, of the job. It’s also an indictment on Speaker Johnson if he’s unable to keep these members happy, unable to make them feel that they are productive members of society, productive legislators, and that’s just not happening right now. People are really down.

The speakership seems like such a difficult job, because it’s eaten up the last several Republican GOP speakers. If we think about that role as one that holds together many different parts of the Republican party, is it always just destined to be this fraught? Or is that a consequence of our current Congress and polarization? What is the universe that Mike Johnson makes it out on the other side here with a united GOP?

I think every day that becomes a harder and harder task for him, especially when you look at polling. Trump’s approval ratings continue to fall. They’re divided on a message. They’re divided on how to deal with health care and the affordability issue. And so Speaker Johnson coming out on the other side with a united GOP? Maybe, but it’s going to be wounded and exhausted and tired and really cranky. And so the question is, if they don’t win the majority, what does Speaker Johnson do? There are definitely going to be leadership changes. And so there could be a huge shakeup among House Republicans after the midterms.

After all that talk about Democrats and their kind of fractured state, there are certainly some cracks that seem to be appearing on the Republican side too.

Absolutely. And Republicans are really worried about how the party is dealing with these trying times right now for them.

MAHA’s war on antidepressants

2025-11-21T16:47:09-05:00

Drugs like Lexapro and Prozac have become increasingly political. | Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Antidepressant use has skyrocketed among young people in recent years, and that’s drawn the attention of the public health establishment.

SSRI drugs, a type of antidepressant, were originally intended for adults. But in the three decades since Elizabeth Wurtzel’s landmark memoir Prozac Nation hit shelves, prescriptions have become far more common.

One study found that antidepressant prescriptions for young adults and teens increased by nearly 64 percent after the coronavirus pandemic. Teen girls saw the biggest increase, while prescriptions actually dropped for boys.

Some attribute the rise to social media, which has increased awareness around mental health, but has also led young people to diagnose themselves with disorders they might not have.

Antidepressants can be lifesaving for people who need them. For others, they can create new problems, triggering feelings of lethargy, emotional numbness, and reduced sexual desire. And they don’t work for about half of the patients who take them.

Going off antidepressants can also have unwanted side effects, including milder symptoms such as dizziness, headache, nausea, insomnia, and irritability, and more extreme symptoms such as violent behavior and suicidal ideation. Depression relapse is also common.

Critics argue that we lack long-term data on the effects of these drugs on brain development. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health and human services secretary, is a long-time critic of antidepressants and has called for more research into their efficacy. He’s also made false claims linking their use to mass shootings.

Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Sarah Todd, a health reporter at Stat News, about how antidepressants got political.

Sarah, whether to take antidepressants is a personal decision. But in 2025, what we’ve seen is this increasingly politicized language around them.

Is using SSRIs as a kind of political football something new?

I don’t remember the introduction of Prozac on the scene. But my impression is that they have had periods in which they’ve been more political. At that time, when Elizabeth Wurtzel was writing Prozac Nation, there was a concern that they were going to be the opiate of the masses, and people were just going to numb themselves. That faded away for a while, and now it seems to be very much back in the conversation with the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement.

MAHA has really focused on antidepressants, among other things, and the main voice of MAHA would be HHS Secretary RFK Jr. What has he said about antidepressants exactly?

So there have been a couple of different claims. He said at his confirmation hearings that getting off antidepressants was harder than getting off of heroin and that antidepressants were addictive.

That’s pretty pointed language there. What do we know about the facts? Are SSRIs addictive? Are they hard to come off?

They are not addictive. They don’t produce the spikes in dopamine that you would get with alcohol or drugs like cocaine or heroin, which are so pleasurable that they have you seeking out your next hit as soon as you come off of them.

Instead, [SSRIs] work by targeting serotonin in the brain, which is a whole different part of your system. So it’ll make you feel more stable, but not the kind of high that you might get off of a drug. They do, however, have the potential to cause withdrawal symptoms. So that part is a genuine concern.

About 15 percent of Americans experience withdrawal symptoms. And that can be a really wide range: some at the not-so-severe scale, like a headache, and some more concerning, everything from insomnia to very serious suicidal ideation. That would be less common, but it can happen.

I imagine if you’re a person who’s come off of SSRIs and you’ve had those real difficulties, it might feel like, I was addicted, even though they don’t meet the dictionary definition of addiction.

What else has RFK Jr. said about SSRIs?

Another comment that he’s made is suggesting that they’re linked in some way to mass shootings, and that’s one where the evidence is very clear that this isn’t true. I found one paper that said that over the past 30 years, they looked at all the mass shootings in the US, and just 4 percent of the perpetrators had been on antidepressants at any point in their lives. There’s really no evidence that they’re linked to violence.

This summer, the FDA raised questions about taking SSRIs during pregnancy. The FDA’s parent agency, of course, is Health and Human Services. What are the concerns there?

So the concern there is really about the potential effects on the babies from taking antidepressants, and this is a complicated issue. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that SSRIs are safe during pregnancy, and they say the risks of depression going untreated is much higher than the risk for the parent and the child of taking the SSRI.

There is a fair amount of research that’s been done on SSRIs. There are some studies showing that babies might initially be fussier when they’re first born, and that will go away with time as they adjust to not receiving the medication. And there really aren’t any clear, serious risks that have been associated with SSRI use during pregnancy.

As SSRIs go mainstream, are too many people taking them? Are they being overprescribed? What has your reporting told you about that question?

When it comes to antidepressants being overprescribed, especially for children and young people — which is what the MAHA movement has frequently focused on — it’s a good topic to dive into. Reported rates from young people of feelings of sadness and hopelessness have gone up, especially for certain demographics like teen girls and teens who are part of the LGBTQ community.

So it seems like it’s true that antidepressant prescription rates have gone up. It’s also true that the rates of the symptoms that antidepressants are meant to treat have gone up as well. The big takeaway to me is that mental health for young people is a very real issue in the U.S. and something that we should be doing a lot about.

As someone who covers health, you’re aware that the MAHA movement asks a lot of questions about many different things: fluoride, Tylenol, vaccines, seed oils.

We’ve covered some of these things, and we always ask our experts what happens when you start asking questions like, “Do antidepressants cause mass shootings? Are antidepressants linked to problems for babies?” What’s the knock-on effect of all this?

I think the effects of “just asking questions” will depend on what the questions are. For something like SSRIs and mass shootings, where there’s no evidence to suggest that that is a reality in any way, I think asking questions about that could wind up perpetuating stigma against taking antidepressants, which could be really harmful for the people who could otherwise benefit from them. That’s certainly a concern.

When it comes to asking questions about something like, “Are antidepressants overprescribed for young people?”, I don’t think that that’s necessarily a harmful path to go down. We should be thinking about antidepressants as part of a suite of potential mental health treatments that could be used in combination with everything from talk therapy to helping people feel less lonely. It’s a complicated issue. I don’t think that it’s always bad to ask questions, but I do think it’s good to think about what the potential implications are of suggesting bad effects when there’s no evidence to suggest that that would be the case.

Why are there so many billionaires nowadays?

2025-11-16T17:59:09-05:00

Thousands march during the "Make Billionaires Pay" rally in New York City on September 20, 2025. | Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Key takeaways

There are more billionaires than ever, both in the US and globally, and they’re much richer than they were even a decade ago.
The proliferation of billionaires is, in many ways, a policy choice. Changes to the tax code have made it easier than ever to make and keep a fortune, even as little has changed for the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
A growing wealth gap has resulted in growing anti-billionaire sentiments in US politics, most recently showcased in Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race.

It feels like everyone’s mad at billionaires right now.

Maybe it’s the disconnect between Americans struggling with grocery prices and health care premiums and the ultrarich sailing on their super yachts and flying on their private jets.

Maybe it’s that Elon Musk is on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Maybe it’s that billionaires poured money into trying to defeat Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race.

Maybe it’s that members of the three comma club are paying a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

Either way, new survey data shows that 67 percent of Americans say billionaires are making society less fair, up eight points from a year ago.

The anti-billionaire sentiment is high. To understand why, Today, Explained co-host Noel King called up Evan Osnos, a staff writer at the New Yorker. He’s spent a lot of time with the very wealthy and published a decade’s worth of essays about them in his book The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.

Evan, what are the best and worst parts of hanging out with billionaires?

Unfortunately, the best part is that it is awfully tempting. You begin to realize just how delicious the fresh-squeezed juice really is. The worst part is that you also begin to wonder about some big questions about the small-D democratic health of the country. So, it sends you back into history in ways that can be both funny and thrilling — and also quite disconcerting at times.

If you say billionaire to me, I think Oprah. That is where my mind goes. But Oprah would not be a typical billionaire, demographically. She’s an older Black woman. Is there a typical person who represents what a billionaire is?

The median billionaire would look a lot like Elon Musk, which is to say he is a man in his mid-50s who made his money on a combination of technology, inheritance, and the sheer accumulation of giant numbers.

What’s really noticeable about today is that it’s never been easier for your small billionaire fortune to become a giant billionaire fortune. For the very first time in the history of the species, we have now centibillionaires. Ten years ago, nobody in the world had $100 billion, but today, there are more than a dozen. Elon Musk, for instance. Ten years ago, he didn’t have more than $20 billion, and today, he has around $400 billion. So, the numbers have gone through the roof.

Right now, worldwide, there are more than 3,000 billionaires, and you see the growth most sharply in the United States. In 1990, there were about 66 billionaires in this country. Today, there are close to a thousand.

Even more astonishing than that simple number is that the share of wealth that’s controlled by billionaires has also soared. It used to be that 0.1 percent of Americans controlled about 7 percent of all the wealth in the country, but today, it’s gone up to 18 percent.

And why? The answer has a lot of factors, but the key one is that we’ve changed the rules over the last century to make it much easier for big fortunes to grow, mostly by reducing the taxes that would chip away at them over time. By one measure, the average tax rate for the top 400 richest Americans is now about half of what it was 50 years ago, while the tax rates for the bottom 90 percent of Americans have really not budged much at all.

So, you make the money or you inherit the money, and then the tax code benefits you in a lot of ways. And so you keep the money. How do you spend the money? What are billionaires buying?

It used to be that there was an expression among the very wealthiest advisors to the rich, which was that, “The whale that never surfaces doesn’t get harpooned.” In other words, if you keep yourself out of sight, then you stand less chance of attracting public outrage or attracting the tax man. But these days, the style has changed. You see the wedding that Jeff Bezos is having in Venice, which is visible for the whole world to see. Or take, for example, the world of superyachts. These are machines that are, in a sense, the most expensive objects that humans have ever figured out how to own, that cost about a half a billion dollars in some cases.

There are also ways that people are figuring out how to spend their money that simply were not possible a generation ago. It used to be, if you had a huge amount of money, and you wanted to see your favorite artist, you might buy a front-row ticket or maybe a skybox. Now, people have so much money, as one musician put it to me, that “people can afford to have the Foo Fighters come to their backyard on a Thursday.” Pop stars are now available for hire.

One thing that’s very clear now is that the numbers have gotten so big that people are actually struggling to figure out how to spend it. I spoke to a consultant who caters to what he calls the “bored billionaires,” and he said, “Look, I can come up with ways of people spending their money that they didn’t know were possible.”

He’ll build a restaurant, for instance, on a sandbar in the Maldives, and it’ll be [3D-printed], and they’ll have dinner together, and then it’ll be washed away. And nobody will ever be able to eat in that particular place in that way again. That, he said, is the kind of thing that you eventually end up spending your money on once you’ve bought everything else.

Recently, we have all been starting to hear about a sentiment that there shouldn’t be billionaires. Talk to me about where this “abolish billionaires” push comes from and where it began.

As a general idea, this has been around since the Russian Revolution in 1917. But in recent years, it’s become much more explicit. Bernie Sanders was running for president, and he was talking about the idea that, as he said at the time, billionaires shouldn’t exist. And then you had Elizabeth Warren talking about a policy platform that would involve a wealth tax.

The idea that every billionaire is a policy failure has become much more broadly felt in progressive policy circles. And Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was, in a sense, the most dramatic example of that, because it was unfolding right there in the financial capital of the United States: New York City.

Not long ago, the singer Billie Eilish got an award from The Wall Street Journal, and she said, “Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. And, if you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.” It made me wonder whether we’re seeing more of this kind of conversation in 2025 or whether this is a continuation of the last five, ten years.

It’s becoming much more a part of everyday conversation. The example you gave of Billie Eilish talking about this coming from a pop culture perspective is really noticeable for a few reasons.

One, I think we’re living through a time now where the fusion of economic power and political power has never been as obvious. We all saw that scene on January 20, the inauguration of the second Trump presidency, in which the crowd was full of billionaires. Many of his biggest political supporters were the richest people in the country, and the richest people in the world. So many were on that stage beside him that there wasn’t even room for the leaders of Congress, who were relegated to the audience. Trump went on to then staff his administration with at least a dozen billionaires.

We’ve never had a moment in which the actual levers of government have been handed over to some of the richest people in the world. This is not an abstraction; it’s just a fact. And you see that reflected across the decisions that the government makes.

For instance, the big fiscal bill that passed earlier in the year, known as the “one big beautiful bill,” was calculated to be the single largest transfer of wealth in American history, simply by the way that it closed off avenues for subsidies and support for poorer Americans by creating opportunities for the wealthiest Americans to hold onto more of their money. It’s just no longer an abstraction in the background; it’s right there, front and center on stage.

In the years after the financial crisis, I remember everyone said that, at some point, there is going to be a class war in the United States. People are fed up, and they’re frustrated, and it’s right in our faces. The thing that strikes me is that, a decade later, it is so much more in our faces. I wonder where you think American attitudes on this go?

For a long time, I think that Americans tolerated and, in some cases, celebrated inequality, or these giant fortunes at the top, because they felt like they were the emblems of opportunity. They substantiated the myth that really is important to the American idea that you can go from the bottom to the top, the kind of thing that you still do hear from cab drivers on the other side of the world when they hear that you’re an American.

But the numbers here at home are very different than that myth suggests. The simple fact is, if you’re a person who was born in 1940 in this country, you stood a 90 percent chance of out-earning your parents. But you fast forward to today, and a child who’s coming of age today stands less than half that chance of out-earning their parents. And, as a result, there is a feeling of hollowness and of frustration about that mythology. The history on this suggests that, at a certain point, people do get frustrated to the point where they don’t accept it anymore.

There’s a great historian named Ramsay MacMullen who studied the fall of Rome. What he said was that the fall of Rome took 500 years, but you could condense that history into a very concise explanation: “Fewer had more.” In a way, I think that recognition that we’re beginning to monkey around with the very foundation of America’s democratic sustainability has bled out into the broader population to such an extent tha”t that willingness to celebrate giant fortunes as emblems of opportunity rather than as signs of distress is changing. That pendulum feels as if it is beginning to swing in the other direction.