Dolly Li | Vox

The most interesting fruit in the world could go extinct

2026-03-11T18:03:29-04:00

Can we save the banana? | Koon Nguy for Vox

Bananas are one of the world’s most popular fruits. They’re a staple crop in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the US, the average person eats more than 25 pounds of bananas per year.

The banana found in nearly every lunch bag, smoothie, and cereal is likely a Cavendish banana — a single variety that accounts for 99 percent of global exports — despite there being over 1,000 different species of bananas. This kind of uniformity is what allows the beloved banana to be cheap, durable, and ubiquitous.

It also makes them extremely vulnerable.

A variant of Panama disease, a soil fungus that once wiped out the world’s most commercial banana, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s, is back. And this time, there’s no obvious replacement for it waiting around the corner. So, what will it take to save one of the world’s most beloved fruits?

This video explores how monocropping became both a blessing and a curse in the search for the most commercially viable banana, how this assumed ubiquity could lead to the end of the banana as we know it, and what scientists are doing to prevent the extinction of the Cavendish.

The House of Representatives is too small

2026-02-20T10:55:01-05:00

For more than a century, the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 seats; in that same period, the US population has tripled. This means that today, the average representative is responsible for more than 750,000 constituents. Scholars and politicians say this imbalance is why many Americans feel like Congress is disconnected from them.

So what if we…added more seats? That’s what Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) is proposing in a new bill, because he believes it’s closer to what the country’s founders originally envisioned. While expanding Congress could make our ratio of voters to representatives smaller, it also raises a difficult question: Can a larger, more crowded legislature actually govern, or are we just adding more voices to the gridlock? Vox dives into the math, the history, and the potential future of a “bigger” American democracy.

Learn more about expanding the House of Representatives:

Why US elections only give you two choices, a Vox video about proportional representation
The Case for Enlarging the House of Representatives, a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, co-authored by Lee Drutman, who’s featured in the video
Expanding the House of Representatives, Explained, from Protect Democracy
The text of Rep. Sean Casten’s bill
The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, US Census Bureau
US population keeps growing, but House of Representatives is same size as in Taft era, Pew Research Center

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This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

2025, in 8 minutes

2026-01-07T14:04:43-05:00

2025 was dominated by the second iteration of the Trump administration, the release of the Epstein Files, and government shake-ups that ranged from the longest federal shutdown in history to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announcing her resignation. It was also a year of historic political moments — from a ceasefire in Gaza to Gen Z-led government protests abroad, and the rise of young politicians like Zohran Mamdani.

Along the way, the world got its first American pope, Labubu became a household name, and China upended the AI conversation with the introduction of DeepSeek. Amid seemingly endless government transitions, the year closed with a growing sense of unrest as the US launched new strikes in multiple countries. Let’s take a look back at the jam-packed events that defined 2025.

You can find this video and many others on Vox’s YouTube channel.

What makes the Great Smoky Mountains smoky?

2025-12-23T13:10:59-05:00

The Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park in the United States. Located on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina and spanning more than 500,000 acres, the vast landscape is in the heart of historic Cherokee homeland.

But how did this iconic landscape get its name?

Vox traveled to the Smokies to explore how these mountains get their iconic blue, hazy effect and how the Cherokee people, whose presence in the region dates back thousands of years, are connected to one of the nation’s most impressive natural spaces.

Sources and further reading:

This video is presented by Visit North Carolina. Visit North Carolina doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this one possible.

Why we need so much lithium

2025-12-09T16:38:18-05:00

Lithium used to be almost an afterthought — found in small quantities in medicine and tempered glass, and peaking in pop culture fame in the ’90s thanks to an eponymous Nirvana song. Today, the metal is back in the spotlight with a new identity: “white gold.”

That nickname, coined over the past decade, stems from lithium’s extraordinary price spike, soaring to nearly $70,000 per metric ton in 2022 (for reference: In 1991, when Nirvana released “Lithium,” the mineral sold for about $4,200 per metric ton, roughly 6 percent of its recent peak). The boom was hard to ignore, even for billionaire Elon Musk, who suggested on X that Tesla “might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale.”

Fueled by the global rise in electric vehicles and the proliferation of lithium-ion batteries in everything from laptops to phones to solar panels, lithium consumption has skyrocketed: globally, people now use nearly 28 times more lithium per capita than in the 1990s. After China, the US is the world’s second-largest consumer of lithium, yet it mines less than one percent of the global supply. And lithium isn’t just powering our devices, it’s powering a future in clean energy.

To rectify this lack of domestic lithium, the US government approved a $2.26 billion loan in October 2025 to Lithium Americas, a Canadian company developing Thacker Pass in northern Nevada, the largest lithium deposit ever discovered in the United States. To this day, Nevada remains the only state that both mines and refines lithium domestically.

But this major investment may have come a little too late.

For one, despite the growing demand, Earth is actually in no short supply of lithium, and the price of this mineral dropped to $14,000 per metric ton just two years after the 2022 high, as new lithium resources became available worldwide. More importantly, the real bottleneck in the lithium supply chain isn’t mining — it’s refining. And China is already decades ahead in the battery-making process, refining over 70 percent of the lithium in the world.

In this video explainer, we’ll explore how lithium is fueling the “white gold rush” in Nevada and other parts of the country, whether or not the US Department of Energy’s investment in Thacker Pass will pay off, and what the history of mining ghost towns and boom and bust cycles can tell us about the future of this critical mineral.