Gabrielle Berbey | Vox

Mark Zuckerberg is burning billions to chase the holy grail of AI

2025-08-28T16:27:05-04:00

The Meta AI logo appears on a smartphone screen and as the background on a laptop screen in this photo illustration in Athens, Greece, on July 24, 2025. Meta states it can spend as much as $72 billion on capital expenditures this year, with a focus on AI and the data centers used to train and run the models. | Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Companies in the AI race are barreling toward a new goalpost: so-called superintelligence, or an AI model that can surpass human intelligence.

The terminology here can get a bit dizzying. Top AI companies had already been trying to build what’s long been called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), or AI that they claim will be as smart as humans. Depending on who you talk to, superintelligence might just be a flashy marketing term meant to draw even more venture capital — or it might be the obvious next step in the development of AI models that some believe are already as intelligent as humans.

Meta, in particular, has branded its AI department around the goal of superintelligence through its new “Superintelligence Labs.” Over the past few months, Mark Zuckerberg has escalated the industry’s talent war, reportedly offering pay packages of up to $1 billion dollars to recruit Silicon Valley’s top AI engineers.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram recently spoke with Riley Griffin, tech reporter at Bloomberg, about why Meta is gunning so hard for top AI talent right now and what the company hopes to build with these top technologists.

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.

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How new is Meta’s new superintelligence lab? What is it, and what are they trying to do with it?

The superintelligence lab is incredibly new, and the story of Meta’s superintelligence lab is at its core a story of competition.

So, you’ve got Mark Zuckerberg, a famously competitive CEO, and this past spring, we learned through our reporting that he’d begun to feel quite acutely that Meta was falling behind in this all-consuming race for AI. Meta had just released the latest version of its large language model – they call it Llama. This is a system meant to rival open AI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. But when the rollout landed, it fell flat. And it fell flat internally, according to our sources. It had just become clear that Meta was not leading the pack among these AI companies.

Listeners may think of Meta as the parent company of Facebook, or Instagram, or WhatsApp, these popular apps that have billions of users. But Meta is increasingly seeing itself as an AI company, too. And it wasn’t leading there. And so Zuckerberg, seeing, feeling that he was falling behind in this race, immediately sprung into action. From his homes in Tahoe and Silicon Valley, he started personally recruiting, and he was basically quietly building this new secretive team that we now know is Meta Superintelligence Labs.

What is this super secretive team going to do? I thought Meta was all about the “metaverse,” and that’s why they changed their name to Meta. It sounds like they should have changed their name to AI.

It’s a really good point. When I speak with folks on Wall Street, the metaverse is always the pain point. It is something that still bleeds cash. It’s not a big revenue driver. It hasn’t proved itself to be the dream that Mark Zuckerberg once painted.

Meta’s AI ambitions are a bit of a different beast. Back in the days where it was still called Facebook, they were in the AI game. They brought on this guy named Yann LeCun, a big, award-winning thinker on [AI]. If you were watching that at the time, you might’ve thought Meta was really well-positioned to be the AI leader.

But when OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, it blew everyone out of the water, including AI researchers at Meta who I’ve spoken with. They’d been building their own large language models, but the approach was still rather academic. It wasn’t packaged in a consumer product in the way OpenAI so successfully executed on ChatGPT. So, I think that’s when the race began, but it really kicked into gear this April with what felt to many internally at Meta as a flop with its latest release of Llama.

And what exactly has Meta done in this space so far? Nothing, it sounds like?

Right now, we’re seeing a talent war. We’re seeing Meta create a new organizational structure for its AI talent. This is a multi-billion-dollar effort, and Meta has the cash to deploy.

The perspective of company leadership is that they’re looking to make a big bet and plug that talent gap. They believe there’s only a small talent pool that can best make use of that spend, to put together these competitive models. Many are focused on reasoning, and that means they’re specialists who can help build models that think step by step, as opposed to in this probabilistic approach where they’re predicting the next word in the sentence.

A lot of chatbots right now, they look like they understand what you’re saying when you type in a question, but really they’re just predicting. They’ve taken these massive amounts of data, and they’re able to predict the next word in the sentence. And what Meta, what OpenAI, want to do is give them the capacity to think, to reason for themselves. So, if you’re going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to win the AI race, what’s a couple billion on the talent that can steer the ship? That’s the rationale coming from inside the company.

But, of course, there’s pushback. One thing I’ve heard from folks who have left Meta over the years is that if you are a PhD type who got into this really complicated question of AI reasoning and superintelligence, you weren’t necessarily inspired when Meta announced that they were creating AI chatbots that sounded like Snoop Dogg. So, there has been skepticism of Mark Zuckerberg as a leader. He’s someone who really wants to bring AI into the hands of individuals.

I think it’s too early to tell whether or not it’s working. What has been successful is Mark’s efforts to court some of the biggest names out there. They are taking away top talent from competitors. But we also know there are people who have turned down Mark Zuckerberg’s sports-team-level compensation packages.

I will say that pushback isn’t coming from Wall Street. Meta’s stock is up nearly 30 percent this year to date. Clearly, there’s excitement from the investor community.

So, it sounds like Meta is restructuring itself or creating altogether new structures, to play the long game on superintelligence. What does it look like in the rest of the industry right now?

Everybody — I mean everybody — has had to respond to Mark Zuckerberg’s crazed hiring push. His efforts have set a new bar for compensation across the industry. We’ve seen other companies like OpenAI have to make offers to their own employees that are much higher.

You’re even seeing that in the language, the public posturing from CEOs. OpenAI has said that they’re going to spend trillions on the AI race. Other companies are being quite loud about the money they’re going to throw. But we’re talking about the biggest players here — we’re not talking about the upstarts that have just gotten some venture cash and have no revenue. Meta, Google, even OpenAI are in a different position because they have cash to burn.

South Park is doing what the rest of the media won’t

2025-08-21T13:48:15-04:00

Kenny, Cartman, Kyle, and Stan are characters in the hit series South Park.

South Park is back, and the show’s creators are going full force on their jabs at the Trump administration. Three episodes in, the show’s world-building centers fully around President Donald Trump and the colorful characters in his administration, with scathing parodies of figures like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Vice President JD Vance.

While Matt Stone and Trey Parker are known for directing crude jokes at Democrats and Republicans alike, South Park’s latest season is already hitting record ratings with an especially unrestrained critique of the Trump administration. Since the new season launched, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers has tried to dismiss the jabs, saying that South Park “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”

South Park’s latest season is launching in the context of interesting times for Comedy Central’s parent company, Paramount Pictures. Paramount has been under intense scrutiny from the Trump administration after settling a lawsuit with the Trump administration over their news magazine show 60 Minutes. Since then, the Trump administration oversaw Paramount’s deal with Skydance, which requires CBS to hire an ombudsman to root out “bias” at the network.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Brian Stelter, chief media analyst at CNN, about how South Park’s latest season is taking aim at the Trump administration, and how the show’s creators are navigating the context of their parent company seemingly buckling under the Trump administration’s scrutiny.

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.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a fan of South Park?

I would call myself a passive South Park fan. If I saw it on Comedy Central, I would enjoy it. But now, in the past month, I am an active fan. I’m seeking out new episodes.This show has defied the odds. It’s almost 30 years old and suddenly more relevant than ever.

How did it defy the odds?

By speaking truth to the ultimate power right now. You know, the creators of South Park have always hated bullies, and they seem to believe Trump is the biggest bully of them all. The very premise of the first episode of this new season is about Trump targeting the media.The character Eric Cartman is angry that NPR has been forced off the air. From the very first seconds of the new season, you know that this show has something to say.

You also see how South Park Elementary is being transformed due to Trump’s actions. This is a dramatic exaggeration of what’s happening in real life, but it is true. When Trump is introduced in the show, you see him fighting with the Prime Minister of Canada over tariffs. But most memorably you see him getting in bed with Satan.

I’m gonna use some words I don’t typically use on the show right now to describe that particular scene, because Trump derobes. Before you even see who he is about to get into bed with, we see that he has a micro penis. How do they follow that up?

The most ruthless jokes in the second episode were about Kristi Noem. They were about that old scandal involving her shooting a dog on her farm. You saw her over and over again in this episode shooting at dogs. This episode was really personal in the way it targeted Noem, showing her face maybe falling apart, pushing this idea that she was overusing Botox or other face fillers. Also, there’s the idea that she cares so much about photo ops and PR, she’s always out there dressing up in various outfits, posing for photos and videos. And as always, there are elements of truth to these critiques or satires.

It is true that Noem has tried really hard to be front and center, very visible, playing to the cameras, going out on tours, appearing in the field, showing that she’s doing the work, so to speak.

Noem did not take this episode in stride. She said, “It’s so lazy to make fun of women and how they look.” For Noem, this was personal, this was ugly. And she wanted to be on the record about it.

Is this the first time this show has gone after Donald Trump and his administration?

No, but it is by far the most direct, the most vicious. Back during Trump’s first term in office, there was this storyline where one of the teachers at the school, Mr. Garrison, was becoming president and over time acting more and more Trump-like. This served as a way for the creators of South Park to ridicule Trump and to speak out about some of his behaviors and conduct in the first term. But this was not nearly as direct or aggressive as what we’re seeing now.

I guess it’s not that big a surprise that South Park would go after Donald Trump when he is Donald Trumping harder than he is ever Donald Trumped before.

Yes.

But they’re not even sparing their parent company in these new episodes, right?

Matt and Trey are like a lot of creators in that they love to poke fun at the parent company when they can. The timing of this new season has been really extraordinary because Paramount was in the final days of this protracted, politically tortured merger approval process when the new season premiered.

So you literally had this anti-Trump episode, sticking it to the administration, putting the president in bed with Satan, airing on cable at the same time that the administration is having to review and approve this merger.

The second episode of the season aired on a Wednesday, and then on a Thursday the new Paramount took shape. The merged company, Paramount and Skydance, came together. There was this big formal press conference on Thursday around lunchtime in New York City and the new CEO David Ellison took questions from media reporters about his grand hopes and dreams about this new company.

I said to him, “So what about this South Park problem? You know, what are you gonna do about this problem? Do you view it as a problem?” Ellison’s response was really telling. He started out by saying he’s a huge fan of the show. He’s been a fan of South Park for his entire adult life. He’s 42, and he then went on to praise Matt and Trey as being really unique, talented creators. And he said to me, they are equal opportunity offenders, and they always have been.

So I think Ellison was saying: They’re not just targeting Trump because they’re a bunch of lefties who wanna attack the Republicans. They have always called out people on the left and on the right. They’re equal opportunity offenders. I think he was trying to differentiate South Park from late night shows like The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which was recently canceled. I think he was trying to say, these two creators are special. They are one of a kind, and they’re gonna be protected by Paramount.

Obviously the other context here is the new owners of Paramount had just struck a five-year deal to exclusively stream South Park on the Paramount Plus streaming service. This five-year deal is worth well over a billion dollars. For the creators of South Park and for their production company, this is a huge vote of confidence in South Park as a tent pole of the future of Paramount. The whole idea makes a lot of sense when you think about it. South Park has a library of 325 episodes going back to the 1990s. This is a really valuable library in the streaming era, because people like to go back and watch episodes from 10 or 20 years ago. These episodes have a really long shelf life. That’s why Paramount was willing to fork over so much cash.

I think this might be where some people get confused, because you’ve got everyone from Brown University to Meta to CBS and Paramount settling with the president, making donations to the president’s inaugural committee. And then you’ve got Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who work for CBS or do business with Paramount Plus, not only going for the president, not only making fun of his administration, his own manhood, but making literally a billion dollars while doing it. How are they able to get away with something that seemingly no one else is right now?

This might be a case of business actually trumping politics. For the Paramount Plus streaming service, loud franchises like South Park are crucial. They’re more important now than they were 10 years ago, and they might even be more important 10 years from now.

They are the foundation of the house that David Ellison’s trying to build. and he can’t compromise. The difference here between South Park and Stephen Colbert is that The Late Show was losing money. So, yeah, Stephen Colbert is a staunch critic of President Trump, one of the loudest Trump critics on TV. He’s been canceled. A lot of his fans worry it’s for political reasons. CBS says it’s purely for financial reasons, and in a way, South Park actually affirms the CBS claim.

Paramount keeps putting out press releases touting how well South Park is doing. The show is beating some of its very old records on cable. But more importantly, if you add up the cable audience and the streaming audience, you’re seeing 5, 6, 7 million viewers tuning in for these new episodes. Those are the kinds of numbers that almost any creator would kill for, certainly creators of animated comedies.

Trump killed affirmative action. His base might not like what comes next.

2025-08-14T11:35:18-04:00

Proponents for affirmative action in higher education rally in front of the US Supreme Court on October 31, 2022, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s administration is scrutinizing higher education. Last week, the White House issued a memorandum requiring all universities receiving federal funds to submit admissions data on all applicants to the Department of Education. The goal is to enforce the 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action.

Days before the memo was released, Columbia and Brown agreed to share their admissions data with the administration, broken down by race, grade point average, and standardized test scores. The administration suspects that universities are using “racial proxies” to get around the ban on race-based admissions. The Department of Education is expected to build a database of the admissions data and make it available to parents and students.

Amid this increased federal scrutiny, an alternative idea from Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project for the Progressive Policy Institute, is gaining attention. Kahlenberg, who testified in the Supreme Court cases against Harvard and UNC, advocates for class-based affirmative action instead of race-based admissions. He argues that this approach will yield more economically and racially equitable results.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Kahlenberg about how he contends with the consequences of helping gut race-based affirmative action, why he believes class-based affirmative action is the path forward, and if his own argument may come in the crosshairs of a Trump administration eager to stamp out all forms of affirmative action.

You’re the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. I would take it to mean that you are a progressive.

It’s complicated these days. I’m left of center. I think of myself more as liberal than progressive.

I ask because you testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. This is the case that essentially gutted race-based affirmative action. It doesn’t sound like a progressive, or even a left-of-center, position. What was going on? Explain what you were thinking.

I’ve long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges. I think that’s enormously important, but I’ve been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated, but economically segregated.

I think there’s a better way of creating racial diversity — a more liberal way, if you will — which is to give low-income and economically disadvantaged students of all races a leg up in the admissions process in order to create both racial and economic diversity.

What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that? Were primarily wealthy Black and Hispanic students benefiting from affirmative action?

There’d been a number of studies over the years that had come to that conclusion, including from supporters of race-based affirmative action. Then, in the litigation, further evidence came out. At Harvard, 71 percent of the Black and Hispanic students came from the most socioeconomically privileged 20 percent of the Black and Hispanic population nationally.

Now, to be clear, the white and Asian students were even richer. But for the most part, this was not a program that was benefiting working-class and low-income students.

Alright, so the Supreme Court in 2023 hands down this decision that says, essentially, we’re done with race-based affirmative action. Was there a difference in how progressives and conservatives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling?

Most mainstream conservatives have always said they were opposed to racial preferences, but of course, they were for economic affirmative action. But now we have some on the extreme, including the Trump administration, saying that economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity.

What do you make of that? That was your team once upon a time, right?

Well, I think it’s troubling when people shift the goalposts. In a number of the Supreme Court concurring opinions in the case, conservatives said that economic affirmative action made a lot of sense. Justice [Neil] Gorsuch, for example, said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and instead gave economic affirmative action, that would be perfectly legal. And now some extremists are shifting their position and saying they’re opposed to any kind of affirmative action.

Are you surprised by that shift?

I’m not surprised. I’m confident, however, that a majority of the US Supreme Court won’t go that far. The Supreme Court, to some degree, looks to public opinion. Racial preferences were always unpopular. But economic affirmative action is broadly supported by the public.

The Supreme Court has had two cases come before it, subsequent to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision. One involved a challenge to class-based affirmative action at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia, and the other involved an attack on a similar class-based affirmative action program at the Boston exam schools, like Boston Latin. In both cases, the Supreme Court said we’re not gonna hear those cases over the vehement dissent of a couple of extremely conservative justices. So I’m fairly confident that the Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic-based preferences.

What do you make of this move by the Trump administration to ask colleges for data?

I’m of two minds about it. I do think transparency is good in higher education. These institutions are receiving lots of taxpayer money. We want to make sure they’re following the Supreme Court ruling, which said you can’t use race.

Having said that, I’m quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data, because if a college discloses the average SAT scores and grades by race of applicants, of those admitted, and then those enrolled, one of two things can be going on. One is that the university’s cheating and they’re using racial preferences, and that would be a violation of the law.

The other possibility is that they did shift to economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal.

And because Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately low income and working class, they will disproportionately benefit from a class-based affirmative action program. And so the average SAT score is going to look somewhat lower. I’m worried that the Trump administration will go after both race-based and class-based affirmative action.

Because class-based affirmative action still might mean a college is admitting more Black and Hispanic students. And what the Trump administration seems to have the issue with is that fact.

Yes. Increasingly, that’s what it looks like. As long as the Trump administration was focused on counting race and deciding who gets ahead, they had the American public on their side. But Americans also support the idea of racially integrated student bodies, they just don’t like racial preferences as the means for getting there. So, if Trump says, no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I’m just opposed to racial diversity, he’ll have lost the public. And I don’t think he will be consistent with the legal framework under Students for Fair Admissions, either.

Do you think he cares?

Well, I think he ought to care if he cares about the future of his political party. Because under class-based affirmative action, it is true that Black and Hispanic students will disproportionately benefit, but it will also benefit white working-class students. And those are the students who are coming from families that form the base of the Republican Party. So I think it would be a big mistake if the Trump administration were to really push hard on that angle.

How Trump is making America hungrier

2025-07-22T14:25:34-04:00

The Congressional Budget Office estimates more than 3 million people in the United States will likely be dropped from the accessing SNAP benefits. | Scott Heins/Getty Images

One of the most far-reaching cuts to federal programs in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a provision that will largely shift the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to the states. Until now, the federal government has covered the full cost of SNAP benefits and half of the administrative costs. The reconciliation bill is expected to cut $186 billion in federal spending for SNAP over the next 10 years, leaving states scrambling to determine how to feed the estimated 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates over 3 million Americans will likely be dropped from the program and lose their benefits.

Over the next few years, states will have to decide how much of the SNAP costs to absorb, which totaled over $100 billion in 2024. The CBOe predicts that some states will scale back or drop SNAP benefits altogether. Food banks throughout the country are already raising the alarm that they won’t be able to meet the food demands created by cuts to the program.

In addition to shifting the cost to states, the legislation will change the enrollment requirements for SNAP, such as raising the working age to 64, and requiring able-bodied parents with children over 14 to work in order to receive benefits.

Some critics of the bill argue the provision prevents SNAP from serving its purpose of feeding low-income Americans.

On the Today, Explained podcast, co-host Sean Rameswaram dove into the history of SNAP, the program’s controversies since its inception, and how the legislative bill will prevent the program from being able to deliver on its original goals with Tracy Roof, an associate professor of political science the University of Richmond who focuses on domestic policy who is writing a book about the history of food assistance in the United States.

What’s the history of food assistance in the United States of SNAP? Whose idea was this and why did we want to do it?

In the 1950s, you got more attention to certain pockets of poverty in the United States. One of the areas that got the most attention was Appalachia with coal miners who were losing their jobs. You were starting to see more mechanization of coal mines, as well as competition from things like oil. And all of these coal miners were losing their jobs in the middle of areas that didn’t have other economic opportunities. And because you had able-bodied workers in the household, a lot of these families didn’t qualify for cash assistance.

John F. Kennedy, when he was running for president in 1960, toured some of these areas and saw how widespread the problem of starvation was.

At the same time, members of Congress made the argument that we were spending all of this money to store surplus grain, and we could not find enough places to sell that grain. So we started sending some of it abroad to starving people in other countries, but we had starving people in the United States who were not getting access to that food. And so the idea came about of trying to get some of these surplus commodities to people.

When Kennedy came into office, his very first executive order was to create a pilot program.

People were given coupons that looked like Monopoly money that they could take into grocery stores and use to buy any food within the grocery store. You couldn’t get alcohol, you couldn’t get cigarettes, but pretty much any consumable food you were able to purchase with it.

Then during the mid- to late 1960s, you started to see more and more attention to the plight of tenant farmers in the South. A documentary from CBS called Hunger in America came out, and it showed starving children.

When Nixon came in, there was a very famous speech where he pledged to end hunger.

That ultimately led to the creation of a permanent program in 1964 that was expanded over the course of the late 1960s, and ultimately every jurisdiction was required to have it by 1974. It was set up such that the federal government would cover all the cost of the benefits, and the states would still be responsible for administering it, but a lot of the cost would be borne by the federal government. So that’s the origins of the program.

Epic.

Yeah. This isn’t the first time that people have wanted to cut or curtail or prevent certain people from accessing this program. That’s been a long-established history as well.

Pretty much from the beginning, there’ve been critics of the program. I mean, there were people in Congress that just didn’t think it was necessary, or they thought that it should be treated as a welfare program and not as a nutrition or agricultural program because it was always put into the Farm Bill. But as inflation grew in the 1970s, enrollment really started to take off. And you saw people like Ronald Reagan in his run for the presidency become very critical of people becoming overly dependent on it.

The argument was very similar to what we’ve just heard, that we needed to protect the program for the truly needy and get people that can fend for themselves off of it.

Is this most recent cut to SNAP the most drastic cut we’ve ever seen?

Yes, it’s likely to be the biggest cut we’ve seen.

But it isn’t an elimination. It’s saying, “States, you gotta figure this out, your move.”

Exactly.

Is it going to affect Democrats, Republicans, white people, Black people, Asian people, poor people, tall people?

A lot of that is gonna be up to the states. So rather than Congress coming in and saying, “We’re going to eliminate eligibility for these categories of people,” it’s telling the states, “You’re going to have to bear a larger share of the benefits. And if you can’t cover that, you’re going to have to figure out how you reduce enrollment in the program or come up with ways to cover the additional cost.”

You know, some of the bluer states are probably going to try to make up those differences and maintain assistance to people. Some of the poorer states are probably going to cut back. People will be hungry.

Why let people go hungry? We’re the richest country on Earth. Why do people want to cut food aid for the poor?

You always have a number of people that could be getting something like SNAP, but they don’t apply, either because of the stigma associated with it, or because they don’t want to go through all the paperwork, or for whatever reason they don’t know they’re eligible. Back in the 1990s in the midst of welfare reform, the participation rate fell such that only 57 percent of eligible participants participated in SNAP. And then over the course of the George W. Bush administration, that number came up into the 70s.

As they tried to make the program more accessible — and that took off during the Great Recession — what you saw was a steep increase in the percentage of people that were on SNAP. It went up to 15 percent of the population at the peak in 2013. But it remained pretty high, even as the economy started to recover.

That was largely because it took a long time for the economic recovery to hit low-income workers, and partly because of the decline in stigma. And so that criticism became really loud in Congress once Republicans took control of Congress during the Obama years, and it carried over into the Trump administration. This isn’t the first time that the Trump administration has tried to cut benefits. They tried to do it in the wake of the 2016 election as well, they just weren’t successful.

How much of a shakeup do you think this is of food aid in the United States ultimately?

Most states have to have balanced budgets either because of their constitutions or because of state laws. They can’t just sell more Treasury bonds the way the federal government does. That means that when we slip into a recession, states face really tough choices because they need to fund education, they need to fund Medicaid, and they need to fund all the other services that states provide. They’re going to face some really tough choices about where they allocate their resources.

That’s when a lot more people will be looking to apply for SNAP to be able to meet their basic needs — and it’s going to be very, very difficult for the states to meet those needs.

How Trump’s tariffs could help China

2025-04-04T14:13:46-04:00

A man walks past a screen showing stock movements at a securities office in Beijing on April 3, 2025. | Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s new tariff chart, which he unveiled Wednesday at the Rose Garden, had a mixture of surprising and predictable countries on the list. A high tariff on China? Not so surprising. But among the top 10 countries on his chart, eight are in Asia.

Many close US allies like South Korea and Japan were stunned by the steep rate increases applied to their exports.

Since the announcement, markets in Asia have tumbled. Japan’s chief cabinet secretary has called the tariffs “extremely regrettable.” South Korea’s acting president called an emergency meeting to strategize a response.

As stunned as these US allies were at the steep increase in tariffs levied against them, they weren’t caught totally offguard. Just a few days before Trump’s tariff announcement, Japan, China, and South Korea’s trade ministers met in Seoul for the first time in five years to discuss coordinating a response.

Mike Bird, Wall Street editor at The Economist and a former correspondent based in Asia, talked with Today, Explained’s Noel King how US allies in Asia are responding to the tariffs and how China may be poised to lead new alliances on the continent. Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity.

We’ve got China, Taiwan, Japan, India, South Korea, Thailand. What are we hearing today from leaders of those countries? Anything notable?

There’s a big range of reactions, and I think that reflects the difference in both relationships with the US and some different strategies going on.

So the Chinese government reaction, to note that the tariffs are deeply unreasonable, that it’s a sort of attack on the rest of the world, is probably the least surprising. I think it’s more interesting to break down the countries that are much closer diplomatically to the US. So Taiwan called the Trump tariffs “deeply unreasonable” and “highly regrettable.” South Korea said that they were studying what was happening. The Japanese trade minister called the move “extremely regrettable.“

But a lot of these countries are a little bit more circumspect and a little bit quieter, precisely because they have these very tight security relationships with the US and they’re very, very keen not to upset DC.

So when Trump held up his chart, it showed that Vietnam, for example, levies a 90 percent tariff on goods coming from the US. South Korea, 50 percent tariff. Donald Trump is saying these countries put tariffs on American goods and I’m going to fix it. Is he right? And if so, why was this going on?

So to be clear, we should start by saying there are trade restrictions that other countries put on the US. In some cases, they’re steeper than the ones going in the other direction. That is a reasonable thing for US policymakers to be upset about.

But what became very clear in the immediate aftermath of the announcement is that the figures being used weren’t drawn from any meaningful measure of, for example, the rates that Vietnam tariffs US goods. There was no relationship with that data. What seems to have happened is there’s been a reverse engineering of a figure via the trade deficits and surpluses that individual countries have with the US.

Basically, they’ve taken the trade surplus that Vietnam has with the US and they’ve divided it by the figure for Vietnamese exports to the US. It’s a sort of Excel spreadsheet job. And it bears almost no relationship to how these countries actually limit US trade. It’s a very strange measure to have used to decide which countries have been hit hardest.

Trump put big tariffs on Japan and South Korea. Do you think that this move forces them to rethink how they deal with the United States?

I think it will change the attitude quite a bit. One thing that the US government has tried to do a lot in the past few years is get cooperation from the Japanese and Korean governments in particular on things like export controls of semiconductors to China. That’s going to be a lot more difficult to execute if you are putting really, really steep tariffs on them.

I was reading over the weekend that Japan, South Korea, and China met for the first time in about five years to talk about trade. Do we know what goes on in a meeting like that? Does a meeting like that make America nervous?

This question of closer trilateral cooperation between China, Korea, and Japan has been going on for a long time, and it’s always been frustrated to some degree by the fact that these are three countries where usually, at any given time, someone’s upset with someone else. Whether that’s Japan and South Korea — they have a very fractious relationship — or whether it’s South Korea and China, whether it’s Japan and China, there’s usually someone that’s upset about something, and it’s limited the trilateral cooperation.

There’s always been discussion of a potential Japan, South Korea, China free trade area, and it’s never really come to fruition. Now, if you wanted to make it come to fruition, what you would want is an external threat that was common to all of those countries.

Huh.

I’m not sure there’ll be a trade agreement of that nature, but if I wanted to force one through, these are exactly the circumstances which I’d create to try and do that.

If China becomes a more trusted trade partner to American allies than America is right now, what? What are the long-term implications of this for China?

One thing the Chinese government has really struggled with in the past, and for good reason, is that they don’t really have a lot of natural allies or friends, even in Asia. I think the US seriously damaging its own relationships in the region does make things easier on that front.

If you listen to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they will tell you, and they have done for decades, that the US is a country that bullies smaller countries — it talks a high and mighty game about these lofty ideals of freedom and democracy and human rights, but in reality it’s just looking out for itself. I think these tariffs make that argument a lot easier to make in large parts of Asia. It’s a huge opportunity for them. You couldn’t have drafted these conditions better if you were a Chinese diplomat.

How not to text, explained

2025-04-02T10:16:20-04:00

Texting etiquette can be very, very, very important. | Getty Images

It’s been a big week for the group chat.

On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a story revealing that national security adviser Michael Waltz accidentally added him to a Signal thread where top Trump cabinet members were discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen.

First, the Trump administration denied that top Trump officials shared “war plans” in the chat. Then, on Wednesday, the Atlantic published more screenshots of the conversation – titled “Houthi PC small group” – in which US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth detailed the precise timing and coordination of American fighter jet take-offs for the strike.

Now, a federal watchdog group is suing members of the administration in the group chat for violating the Federal Records Act. Messier still, the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit is already a Trump administration enemy, thanks to his ruling that they must stop deporting some Venezuelan migrants. The whole security breach has thrown the White House into a state of simultaneous denial and disarray.

As the fallout from the now-infamous Signal chat continues to unfold, Sean Rameswaram sought a different type of lesson from this week’s news: a lesson on texting. For Today, Explained, co-host Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post internet culture reporter Tatum Hunter about the do’s and don’ts of texting in the modern age, and the messaging etiquette lessons we could all learn from the Signal group chat fiasco.

Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity.

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Tatum, you are brave enough to tell people how to text?

Well, I think that our lives play out increasingly online.

Today when you say something like “internet culture,” that’s just culture a lot of the time, right? You talk about texting etiquette — like, yeah, that’s just how we communicate. The internet trickles down into our lives and changes our relationships, and this is contentious for people.

Should we start with the do’s or should we start with the don’ts?

Let’s start with the don’ts because I think that’s spicier.

Okay, great. For the haters, we’ll start with the don’ts.

Three big don’ts. One don’t is: Don’t use group texts for something that they weren’t created for.

Everybody has that group text from a bachelorette party in like, 2018 that people will still pop into to share photos of their kids. Those have to die once you’re done with the reason that you created them.

If you have a group chat with your parents because you’re related, that can keep going forever, because you’ll always be related. But if you have a group chat to plan a project or a trip or do introductions, that needs to be laid to rest once that planning is over.

Another don’t is: Don’t get all offended when people have a different texting style than you.

Oh…

I see this come up all the time. I write for an audience that’s a little bit older and people get really ruffled when others don’t use, for example, proper capitalization, punctuation.

And then you can flip the script and you’ll see younger folks getting frustrated and making fun of the way their bosses or relatives text — when they’re spelling things out, using ridiculous acronyms, using the Gen X ellipsis, where you’re… like… not sure if they’re mad at you… because they’re putting ellipses into text messages where they don’t belong.

Every generation has its quirks with the way that it is typing out messages. And I think we’re past the point where we’re going to argue about, “Should we be spelling everything right? Should this be formal? Should this be informal?” You have to let everyone live.

Number three? You said you had three big ones.

Oh my gosh, I have so many don’ts. I have more don’ts than I have do’s. I guess that’s what etiquette is. If we all did everything right, we wouldn’t need it.

But: Don’t be a wet blanket.

Obviously, texting is going to be shorter, drier than sending a voice note, than having a phone call. But you want to be matching people’s energy, especially if you use texting to stay in touch. Don’t be that guy who’s sending “okay,” or “thumbs up.”

Can I tell you about one of my pet peeves when it comes to this particular don’t?

Yes!

When you send someone you love something great you saw online — an article, a meme, a joke, a photo, and they go: seen it.

I’m like, if you saw it, then why didn’t you send it to me? Or if you saw it, just gimme the reaction you had when you saw it. “Seen it” is not useful to me. I don’t care that you planted your flag on this meme before I did.

Also, the goal was a discussion. Imagine if you were with somebody and you were like, “Hey, I just saw a news story about these high-level government people leaking their Signal chat” and someone was like, “Heard it.” Like, “No, I get that, it’s news. I wanna talk about it.” Memes are kind of the same.

Yes and, yes and.

Okay, I have one more don’t: No scary mysteries. Don’t send a text, like, “Hey, can we talk?”

Oh, I hate that too. My parents do that. “ Call me as soon as you can.” And I call and it’s like, “Hey, so do you want to eat tacos or…”

Where the urgency is just not matched to the content. You should say why you’re reaching out.

Okay, we’ve done a lot of don’t. Let’s do a little do.

One really nice thing to do when you’re texting is to tell people what you want from them. Maybe one person wants to be in touch a lot and the other doesn’t. Maybe one person wants to talk about more serious, heavy emotional stuff over text, and the other person’s really uncomfortable with that. But exactly like your in-person relationships, people can’t read your mind. You have to tell them what you want.

You know, what you’re reminding me of is the voice memos, or as I call them sometimes, “voice memoirs.” They can be really short and punchy and hilarious… But sometimes they’re like eight minutes long. And you’re just like, this is like work now. You just sent me a whole podcast I have to add to my queue. Maybe we should establish at some point in the texting whether we want those or not, maybe?

Absolutely. And again, just like any other thing in your friendships and relationships, it might require some compromise. So maybe for the person who’s less texty, that means you’re shooting an emoji, a thumbs up, a one-sentence thing saying, saw it, care about you, I’ll get back to this. Right? That’s a nice compromise. Or maybe if you’re the person who you know tends to get offended by this, you draw some boundary, like, “Hey, if you can’t respond to me on time, maybe we should stick to phone calls.” Right? It’s not embarrassing, I think, to talk about your texting life as if it matters, because it does!

I like that. Be bold. Okay, any more do’s that you really want to share with the people out there?

Do stay grounded in reality. Remember the world we live in, and remember that if you’re in, you know, an encrypted Signal chat — or if you’re in your private iMessage group with your best friends — that doesn’t mean that you have carte blanche to say stuff that you would never want the world to see.

Mm.

We’ve seen again and again and again how screenshots of messages — it’s not sacred. It can get out.

There was some analysis and chattering after those screenshots leaked from the Signal chat about, you know, how Vance had signaled that he might have a different opinion than Trump on a matter of foreign policy. Now he has to show up to work and be like, “Hi Donald.”

So it’s important to remember that nothing is private, nothing is sacred once you have written it in a text.

We’re going to see where the blowback for this group chat getting out ends up, with someone losing their job, with a federal inquiry, who knows. What’s clear is it won’t soon be forgotten. Do you think it’s for the best that we all had a moment to just reflect on the group chat?

There’s an optimist inside of me who likes to believe that this will be good for society, that we’re all reflecting on the group chat. However, now I’ve lived too long, right?

So, Bezos’s text leak — we’re like, oh man, we’ll never forget this. Biden leaves his Venmo public. Vance leaves his blog public. Venmo transactions from Matt Gaetz. Most recently we saw that Mike Waltz of Signal Chat fame left his Venmo friends list public. People find it and they analyze it. And it happens again and again and again to politicians, to celebrities, to CEOs. So now I’m starting to lose faith. How many high-profile embarrassing instances of our digital footprints getting out of our own control will it take before everybody pumps the brakes? Because it’s a hard-learned lesson to just kind of remember that digital stuff is forever, even in the safest of places.

I have to say in light of this week’s news, Tatum, we are skipping a huge don’t, which is: Don’t add people to a group chat against their will.

[Laughs.] I need to add another bullet point to this guide and say, don’t add the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

The silencing of Voice of America

2025-03-18T18:52:46-04:00

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to eliminate the US Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Voice of America, and put VOA employees on administrative leave. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Trump administration has shuttered a number of federal agencies, and ordered another tranche closed last Friday.

Among them was Voice of America — a news outlet founded to help the Allies fight the Nazis that still publishes and broadcasts today. Or did, until Saturday, when its employees found themselves unable to go to work.

The media remarked on the loss of Voice of America, but it didn’t quite cause the stir that firings at USAID or the Department of Education did, and that’s perhaps because it does not broadcast inside the US. Americans can visit its website for news, but can’t hear it on the radio or see it on television.

However, as Gabrielle Berbey — who, along with her colleagues at Today, Explained reported on the death of Voice of America — explains, the outlet’s shuttering provides a helpful way to understand the Trump administration’s approach to governance. I spoke with Gabrielle about this, and more — our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

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What is Voice of America? Why is it important?

Voice of America is the largest and oldest US international broadcaster; it was established in 1942 to fight Nazi propaganda via shortwave radio. By the time World War II ended, Voice of America — or VOA — had 3,200 programs around the world in 40 languages.

It’s operated since then, with a mission to continue combating authoritarian propaganda and to spread US values throughout the world. Today, it’s a part of United States Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which also includes other US media you may be familiar with, like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Martí. And though most USAGM outlets started on the radio, today they broadcast on television and publish online as well.

USAGM has offices and journalists all around the world, reporting from and for places that otherwise might not have access to media beyond state-sponsored media, or that may not have much media infrastructure at all, places like China, Iran, and Afghanistan. And in many places, USAGM outlets are the main — and sometimes only — voice combating the state-sponsored media narrative.

Interestingly, VOA does not actually broadcast in the US, which is why I think many people, especially people who are younger, don’t know what VOA is. But it’s played an important role for the past 80 years and this is the first time it’s gone radio silent.

Why did it go radio silent?

On Friday, the Trump administration issued an executive order that essentially put the employees of several agencies on administrative leave. As a result of that order, everyone who works at VOA and Radio Martí were put on administrative leave, and outlets like Radio Free Europe lost funding. And that effectively shut those outlets down.

Why did Trump do that?

The Trump administration was very critical of USAGM and a Voice of America even in its first term.

This term, Trump selected Kari Lake — who was the former, failed GOP gubernatorial and Senate candidate for Arizona, a fierce Trump loyalist, and former media professional herself — to run Voice of America and serve as a special adviser to USGM.

She went in reportedly really wanting to lead VOA, and to enact sweeping reforms to the organization. That wasn’t necessarily seen as a bad thing. Some sources I spoke to for this story — even some former VOA journalists — said there’s valid criticism that the VOA produces US propaganda, and some questioned whether essentially combating propaganda with propaganda, was the right use of US soft power. So there was some openness to changes.

But there were also concerns. A VOA journalist — Steve Herman, who was the White House bureau chief — was put on leave, and another involuntarily reassigned. So the reforms seemed like they might be drastic, but I don’t know if people expected a complete shutdown.

For a time, it seemed like there might be a divide in the Trump administration. On one side, Trump adviser Elon Musk and special UN envoy Richard Grenell were tweeting how we don’t need Voice of America anymore, and how it should be shut down. And on the other side was Lake, who responded to these tweets by defending USAGM and arguing that there was a place for Voice of America.

In the end, Lake backed the decision to shutter the outlets — the termination notices of some of the grants had her signature — even if she previously said that she was interested in saving it.

There’s probably a mix of reasons why USAGM and VOA were targeted. One, the Trump administration is trying to make sweeping cuts through federal agencies, and we’ve seen agencies like the Department of Education and USAID targeted that don’t align, or supposedly don’t align, with the administration’s worldview. And you could put USAGM in that category — it has been criticized by Trump-aligned figures as putting out “fake news.” There could also be a foreign policy element to it as well; we’ve seen Trump try to make some big resets on that front.

Some of the US’s adversaries have cheered the demise of USAGM, right? Has that changed the Trump administration’s stance at all?

I don’t know that we’ve seen many minds being changed in the Trump administration, but yes, we have seen the Kremlin and Russian propaganda rejoicing that Trump had gutted Radio Free Asia, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America. Chinese state media called Voice of America a “dirty rag” that the Trump administration was getting rid of.

That response reflects the fact that USAGM outlets really were a way for the United States to insert its narrative into those countries, often in a way that was critical, or designed to make people question, the state-sponsored narrative.

Without these outlets, the US has lost a way to combat disinformation. And some people are losing access to news.

I talked to one former VOA journalist during my reporting who remembered listening to VOA from Poland in the 1960s when he was a kid. He said that he would get American music and American news on VOA and that it would be his only source of information from the outside world. And that’s still the case for some people, even today — USAGM reached some consumers in poorer and more rural areas that lack media infrastructure altogether; this was their source of news.

Broadly, what can we learn about the Trump administration from these cuts?

The Trump administration is really looking for ways to make long-held far-right beliefs policy.

With VOA and USAGM, there’s a cultural element, where there’s this culture war against the so-called “mainstream media.” USAGM’s outlets are a part of that media, and while the Trump administration can only do so much to independent outlets it doesn’t like — like restricting White House access — it can shut down VOA.

But that’s just one piece of a larger puzzle. There’s the push for government efficiency and cutting waste that we talked about a little before — and it’s easy to see things you don’t like (aka “fake news”) as waste to cut.

And there’s also a big foreign policy realignment happening. There’s this idea of America First — that we need to pull back on the world stage and focus on the homefront, that taxpayer money shouldn’t go to other countries, it should only be used domestically. We saw that with shutting down USAID, and we see that here.

So this is really emblematic of the larger vision for the realignment of the government the Trump administration seems to have.

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.