Joe Posner | Vox

The NCAA’s “Student-Athlete” is under fire – but misclassification is everywhere

2021-11-03T11:58:03-04:00

Kyle Allen playing for Hawai’i Pacific University, 2011. | Barry Markowitz

On September 29, the top lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Jennifer Abruzzo, issued a memo declaring that the institutions of college sports — including the NCAA, its member conferences, and universities — are misclassifying players as “student-athletes,” rather than employees entitled to basic worker protections and benefits. Abruzzo added that she would take legal action wherever the agency has jurisdiction under the National Labor Relations Act if the practice continues.

The first page of the memo cites the second episode of Vox’s new HBO series, Level Playing Field, which premiered last week, in support of their argument. The episode, “Misclassified,” focuses on the student-athlete label and how misclassification in the NCAA is part of a wider trend of employee misclassification throughout the US — and on one former college basketball player, Kyle Allen, whose personal experience illustrates exactly what’s at stake for the thousands of athletes potentially impacted.

In 2010, Kyle accepted a scholarship offer for $25,485 to play basketball for Hawai’i Pacific University (HPU). It’s the kind of letter the NCAA says represents “opportunity” for 79,000 first-generation college students a year, but accepting that opportunity would upend Kyle’s life. Two years after signing his name to the contract, Kyle found himself without a college degree, no offer to play professionally, and bleak job prospects. Soon after that, he was behind the wheel of his car, driving for Lyft and trying to figure out what, exactly, had led him there.

Kyle’s experience isn’t unique to college sports. His story is just one of the innumerable examples of American institutions skirting the rules meant to protect workers in every sector of the economy.

NCAA sports are a multibillion-dollar industry, but the vast majority of athletes won’t ever see a dime for powering it, and the path to a professional career is exceedingly narrow. Being able to profit from the value they create is one reason the NCAA insists on calling players student-athletes: a term created by a team of NCAA lawyers in 1955 to avoid having to treat players like employees.

Inevitably, the incentives of competition pull players away from the “student” aspect. “The very first practice, you realize this is no longer fun, it’s a job,” Kyle said. “Essentially seven o’clock in the morning to around seven o’clock at night, you are on company time.”

If you’ve been following the news around the NCAA’s various legal and legislative battles, you know the landscape has already begun to shift. The confluence of a handful of state laws forcing the NCAA to finally allow its college athletes some of the fruits of their labor, in the form of endorsement or licensing deals, and June’s blistering, unanimous Supreme Court ruling called attention to the NCAA’s “disturbing” dependence on unpaid labor. But the issue goes deeper than allowing players to make a few bucks signing autographs.

“These players are performing a service and they are under the control of their institutions and perhaps even conferences,” Abruzzo told Vox. “The players at academic institutions are statutory employees, and if they’re going to be misclassified, then institutions are going to have to be held to account.”

Before this year, college athletes getting a free tattoo or selling a song they wrote could lead to serious consequences, while their schools could rake in millions plastering arenas and stadiums with sponsor logos and profiting from TV deals. Now, NCAA athletes can finally earn money off their own names without risking their athletic careers. It’s not just huge, international brands getting into business with college athletes; regional and local businesses are in the thick of it as well.

But the core injustice of the NCAA remains. That athletes are allowed to earn money off the field does not make up for them being denied compensation for what happens on it. The student-athlete designation denies players all sorts of other workers’ rights, such as compensation if injured on the job or the right to collectively bargain. “I’ve learned that that term really was created to deprive players of their statutory rights, and to kind of create this false narrative that they are amateurs,” Abruzzo said. (Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, admitted to engineering this narrative, but after retirement lamented his role in creating what he described as “a neoplantation mentality.”)

Still, the arrangement has largely continued, with only minor changes adopted by the NCAA, despite decades of criticism. The NLRB memo is a significant step on a new, more equitable path for college athletes like Kyle, whose experiences after college illuminate injustices of labor misclassification in this country.

Two years into his time at HPU, after a series of disagreements with his coach, Kyle found himself off the team and without a scholarship. He started driving for Lyft and Uber to support his family, and the similarities between his days playing and his new life driving were readily apparent. Instead of a “student-athlete,” Kyle now worked as an “independent contractor,” without the benefits of an employee. “Without these drivers, you have no business,” he said. “Without these players, you have no business.”

The experience left Kyle in what he called a “vortex of poverty.” He’d been taken in by two false dreams. “You get a full-ride scholarship or you get to pick your hours,” he said. “It’s an illusion of freedom. But in reality, you are still on a plantation.”

Abruzzo also sees the connection. “It’s not only players at academic institutions,” she said, “but others that feel they’re being misclassified, as independent contractors or otherwise, that don’t have statutory protections.”

For as long as there have been worker protections, there have been employers fighting to escape them. Corporations powered by gig workers, undaunted by existing minimum wage laws that purport to protect employees, skirt any obligations to their labor forces by classifying everyone as an independent contractor, thus claiming that minimum wage laws don’t apply to them. One study of delivery workers in NYC found they were making $7.87 an hour after expenses, not counting the time they spent waiting on orders. Another found ride-hail drivers in Seattle were earning an average of $9.73 an hour. And a competing study of Seattle, backed by a partnership with Uber and Lyft to use their real data, still found that around a third of workers were being paid less than Seattle’s minimum wage.

“Regardless of these algorithms and other things,” Abruzzo said, “there have been any number of cases where we’ve said, sorry, you know, you’re saying you don’t have control over them, but really you do. They’re not independent contractors. They are employees.”

Misclassification in the American labor force didn’t begin with the NCAA, and it’s not confined to the companies that live in your phone: While an estimated 1 percent of workers are working in the app-based economy, 10 percent of the total workforce are full-time independent contractors, and up to 40 percent work as part-time contractors.

Not all independent contractors are misclassified, but its use as a means to escape protections is pervasive. Somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent of all companies misclassify at least one worker. And no sector is immune from contending with these issues: Freelance relationships are still very much the norm throughout the media and entertainment industries — including at Vox Media — which can lead to difficult decisions.

When seen through the lens of employee misclassification, the debate over the term student-athlete suddenly carries significant weight for many Americans who have nothing to do with college sports: If we can change the way student-athletes are treated, who else deserves to be called an employee?

Just before Labor Day, a federal judge allowed a lawsuit to proceed claiming college athletes are employees. Abruzzo is hoping to move the needle on winning players the right to collective bargaining through litigation in the NLRB, after Northwestern University players were narrowly denied the right to unionize in 2015. She also hopes employers look at the shifting ground and act on their own, or that workers force them to: “The employer should be reconsidering it, especially if they have control. And the workers themselves should be looking at it: ‘I think I am protected by this act. I don’t care what my employer says.’”

It took Kyle another six years to get back on track. After losing his scholarship, struggling as a driver for years while fighting off the depression of losing his dream, he was finally able to earn an online college degree on the side, enabling him to seek a new job in a new field. He now works in education, helping kids in his hometown of Sacramento. It’s one of those increasingly rare opportunities: the kind with benefits, and a union.

Finding out about Abruzzo’s memo, Kyle said, “It makes me feel seen, honestly. It makes me feel seen. It gives me the strength to keep the fight going.

“I’m proud of the work we did, and the work she’s doing in making sure that student-athletes are seen and heard, and that we have a voice.”

Level Playing Field: Misclassified is streaming now on HBOMax.

Introducing Vox’s new HBO show, Level Playing Field

2021-09-14T18:37:30-04:00

We’re excited to announce our new documentary series, Level Playing Field, premiering Tuesday, September 14, at 8 pm ET on HBO Max.

Each of the four episodes tells a different story from the world of sports to reveal a broader social inequality impacting all of us. In one case, that means following the plight of an NCAA student-athlete to understand what it can tell us about American labor policy — policy that is often shaped to serve the interests of employers in all sorts of industries. In another, that means revisiting a debate over midnight basketball in the 1990s to understand how racial politics warped a debate over funding a youth sports program.

Our decision to create a show focusing on the intersection of sports and politics was motivated by the increasing overlap between these two worlds. Despite the number of people who desire to “keep politics out of sports,” the impossibility of that goal is evidenced by the long history of sports figures playing a key role in determining our country’s political future. In the United States, sports is politics.

In fact, much of today’s media tend to cover politics similar to how SportsCenter might. It has for a long, long time. It makes some sense, since politics, like sports, is full of rich stories that make the most of our inescapable tribalism but can reduce the life-and-death stakes of complicated public issues to something we can yell at our screens about.

It’s no coincidence that sports language often finds its way into political debate, whether it’s winning and losing, choosing a side and sticking to it, or getting over a hurdle to reach the finish line. Politicians and activists of all stripes use it as a metaphor for how they want the world to work: People want fair competition, so rules should be designed in a way that allows for a level playing field.

To address this, most major sports leagues organize their competition to try to reset their own starting lines in creative ways: The NFL distributes its massive television income equally despite the far larger viewership for some teams, so those finishing last have a chance to catch up. Both the NFL and NBA give the worst teams the best draft picks.

The rest of the world generally … doesn’t. Change is slow, and it’s difficult or impossible to redraw long-outdated lines to reflect our grayscale world. That’s where Level Playing Field focuses. Our stories show the overlap between sports and politics in four different topics: labor, immigration, racial justice, and elections.

By grounding our storytelling in personal journeys, viewers will see firsthand how abstract policy decisions translate to very real impacts in someone’s day-to-day life. Altogether, what they show is just how extraordinarily difficult it is to make the world reflect our idealistic desire for fairness.

Midnight Basketball revisits President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill to understand how a few lines of funding for a youth sports program became the touchpoint in a racialized national debate over the decision between investing in crime prevention versus punishment.

September 14, 8 pm ET

Misclassified follows the experience of a single “student-athlete” who became an Uber driver after his college hoops career came to an end. With added perspective from former Stanford tight end and current Sen. Cory Booker, we dive into the little-known history of how the term “student-athlete” was created by the NCAA and its team of lawyers. That enabled a system of exploitation that shares a lot in common with the economy the rest of us work in.

September 21, 8 pm ET

Down the Backstretch goes to the other side of the horse-racing track, where a group of mainly immigrants do the unseen, dangerous, and difficult work that powers the sport — like millions of jobs Americans simply don’t want to do.

September 28, 8 pm ET

The Assist follows the extraordinary story of how WNBA star Elizabeth Williams made a new blueprint for athlete activism by leading her team in a fight against its owner, Kelly Loeffler, on behalf of Rev. Raphael Warnock and his attempt to win her Georgia Senate seat in the 2020 election.

October 5, 8 pm ET

The series represents something new for Vox and demonstrates how our short documentaries, spanning from YouTube to Netflix to, now, HBO, will continue to evolve. So please watch, share with friends, and tell us what you think.

Watch our new show Answered on Quibi

2020-04-20T16:50:00-04:00

We’re excited to announce that today we’re launching a new show, Answered, focused entirely on the coronavirus. The show is designed to help answer common questions and provide clarity and insight in this confusing moment in time.

Each five- to six-minute episode is hosted by Vox’s Cleo Abram. You’ll recognize her from the great work she’s done with Vox’s short-form video team, and from our YouTube original series: Glad You Asked. In every episode of Answered she’ll talk to prominent experts, journalists, and professionals to help break down a specific topic and deliver a satisfying answer. And don’t worry, she’s doing it all in a safe, socially distant way from her living room.

Answered is the only show on Quibi entirely dedicated to covering the pandemic. We’re excited to bring more of Vox’s clear, concise coverage to another audience, in a brand new format. Exploring new, visual forms of storytelling has always been central to Vox’s approach to journalism, so continuing to evolve with Quibi is a natural next step.

If you haven’t already, you can download Quibi via the App Store on iOS and on the Google Play store. The app is currently free for the first 90 days, if you needed any further incentive. For the first two weeks the show will air Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but then we’ll ramp up to five days a week.

If you have questions you’d like to send in to the show team, feel free — we’re at answered@vox.com. We hope you enjoy the show, and as always, thank you for supporting Vox.

Why fighting the coronavirus depends on you

2020-08-25T15:27:25-04:00

In March 2020, the World Health Organization officially classified Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, as a pandemic. That means the disease no longer constitutes just an outbreak or even an epidemic; the coronavirus has now spread around the world, and will continue to reach into other countries and communities.

That’s in part because of how contagious the virus is. When you’re infected with the flu, it takes about two days before you start to show symptoms. But coronavirus symptoms take an average of five to six days to appear, so it’s easy to spread well before you notice that you’re feeling sick. Many people are spreading it while going about their daily lives as usual.

The risk is that once coronavirus starts to spread in a community, about 20 percent of cases are severe and may require hospitalization. As those cases multiply, hospitals can fill up quickly. And people with severe cases of Covid-19 who can’t receive proper medical attention are at a much higher risk of dying.

Ideally, we would be able to stop the virus from spreading entirely. We can’t do that right now. What we can do is slow it down, so that the severe cases get spread out over a longer period of time, and hospitals are less likely to be overwhelmed on any given day. And that’s where each one of us comes in. The best way to slow down the spread is for everyone — healthy, sick, young, old — to limit social contact as much as possible, immediately. This is called social distancing, and it only works if enough of us do it. But if we do, it could mean the difference between the life and death of someone you know.

Watch the video above to see how social distancing can work.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

Ford v Ferrari feels like a classic Oscar movie. Can it win Best Picture?

2020-01-31T10:42:47-05:00

Matt Damon and Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari. | 20th Century Fox

Every year, between five and 10 movies compete for the Oscars’ Best Picture trophy. It’s the most prestigious award that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gives out every year, announced right at the end of the ceremony. And there aren’t any set rules about what constitutes a “best” picture. It’s the movie — for better or worse, depending on the year — that Hollywood designates as its standard-bearer for the current moment.

And so, the film that wins Best Picture essentially represents the American movie industry’s view of its accomplishments in the present and its aspirations for the future.

Each year’s nomination slate roughly approximates the movies the industry thinks showcase its greatest achievements from the past 12 months. And one thing that’s definitely true about the nine Best Picture nominees from 2019 is that, in tone and theme, they’re all over the place.

The most-nominated film overall is also one of the year’s most successful commercially, and one of its most controversial. A beloved social thriller from Korea has reached the milestone of becoming that country’s first Best Picture and Best International Feature nominee. There are three historical dramas: one set during World War I, one that centers on a 1966 car race, and one that co-stars an imaginary Hitler. There’s a quietly funny drama about love and divorce and a revisionist history of Hollywood in the summer of 1969. The world’s arguably most influential living auteur made a gangster epic with eternity on its mind. And a critically acclaimed adaptation of a celebrated novel rounds out the group.

In the runup to the Oscars on February 9, the Vox staff is looking at each of the nine Best Picture nominees in turn. What makes this film appealing to Academy voters? What makes it emblematic of the year? And should it win?

Below, Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff, Vox video creative director Joe Posner, and film critic Alissa Wilkinson talk about Ford v Ferrari, the real-life story of two men racing against both their biggest competitor and their own demons.

Alissa: It took me a while to get around to seeing Ford v Ferrari, not because I didn’t have faith in it — after Logan, I’m genuinely interested in everything director James Mangold comes up with — but because it was sold to me as a “dad movie,” and I didn’t put it at the top of my priority list. (Look, I love dads, but there are a lot of movies.)

But when I finally got to watch it, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a really well-crafted movie with some excellent performances (one in particular we’ll get to in a bit) and a lot going on under the, uh, hood. I hate the “they don’t make movies like this anymore” cliché, because of course they do, but there’s something very old-fashioned about Ford v Ferrari that I loved.

One of you is a dad and one of you is not, though that’s not why I wanted to talk about the movie with you. It’s because I know you’re both attentive to matters of craft and how they advance storytelling beyond mere plot — and this movie, as you both know, is very dependent on things like sound design and images to give the audience an almost visceral experience. So before we get to the story of Ford v Ferrari, can we talk about how the story is told? What stood out to you?

Joe: I’ll get this out of the way: Yes, I am the dad in here. And I did enjoy this movie. (Only about half as much as the Academy-spurned Hustlers and Uncut Gems, though.) But Mangold and company made this fun — from little things like constantly referring to Henry Ford II (played by Tracy Letts) as “the Deuce” to bigger things like putting the Deuce through some truly jaw-dropping driving, and then letting us just watch him cry for what felt like a full minute afterward.

In terms of technical craft, honestly, the first thing that stuck out to me was just how loud this movie was. A baby sleeping downstairs means I’m going out to the theater less, but even at home the loud “VROOMs” triggered my deep fear of waking the baby. Yet I couldn’t turn down the volume — the characters’ voices have been carefully calibrated to be so quiet that the car noises were guaranteed tear through your body like a little puddle. Kind of a rude move for an actual new parent, but clearly a fun approach. And hey, the sound mixers and editors might even win Oscars. It’s nominated for both, perhaps making up for its lack of onscreen diversity with “VROOM” diversity?

But what was up with the voiceover? This film wants me to believe that if I’m driving a car at more than 7,000 RPMs, everything else will disappear, and I’ll just be a “body, moving in space.” Does either of you understand why a genuinely fun movie like this one would have this kind of cheesy-ass VO? It was like somebody was trying to write a Bruce Springsteen song for the movie but only went like 33 percent of the way there.

Emily: My partner and I have a semi-regular movie night with some friends, and the one man in our little quartet kept insisting that we needed to watch this movie for one of those get-togethers. He’d seen it in theaters and thought we would enjoy it. So, dutifully, we loaded it up — and we had a fuckin’ blast. (Yes, there’s no G at the end of that word!)

Maybe the chief reason to watch this movie is the race sequences, which blaze by with a muted intensity that feels strangely classicist at this point in cinematic history. It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine, say, Tony Scott or Ron Howard having made this in the mid-’90s and winning a bunch of Oscars for it, because the film’s high-speed races would have felt so groundbreaking at the time. Now, it’s weirdly quaint, a great reminder of what a dad movie has become in an era when a lot of dads are Gen Xers.

But the other selling point of Ford v Ferrari, as far as I’m concerned, is Christian Bale. He’s just magnificent as Ken Miles, a man who approaches the planet as a thing he could get to spin at more revolutions per minute in order to transcend himself and … something something something something. (You’re right, Joe, that this movie sort of assumes that what you most want to do in life is drive a car really fast. Maybe that’s true.) He anchors the movie in such a way that when this film takes a full turn toward “he was taken too soon” in its last 15 minutes, Ken’s (historical) death in a crash kind of robs the movie of its momentum in a way it never really earns. But still!

Also, yes, Tracy Letts, our most wonderful movie dad. How he didn’t get more notice for a movie in which he plays out that long series of emotions after he’s dragged into a car that goes extremely fast is beyond me, and in a movie full of schematic villains (like the Italians in this movie are basically out of a Mario game), he offers a nuanced look at a man with a lot of power who just wants to play with his toys.

What’s fascinating about Ford is how it’s composed of maybe 15 different two-handers nested within it. (A two-hander is a movie about two characters who have a typically non-romantic relationship that drives both of them forward, usually with those two characters cast with well-known actors.) Yes, of course, this is a movie about the relationship between Bale’s and Matt Damon’s characters, but both men’s relationships with Henry Ford II could be at the center of this film, too. So could the actual rivalry between Ford and Ferrari, if you wanted.

It’s that willingness to feint toward the complexities of all of these characters that makes Ford v Ferrari such a blast to watch. Is it the best movie of the year? No. But it’s absolutely the one movie among the nominees that’s most likely to become a cable TV staple in the years to come. And that is its own kind of win.

Alissa: So from what I hear, the stunts (a.k.a. all that driving) are mostly real in this movie, rather than CGI’d (though there are plenty of special effects, too). Which brings up a question for me: Why don’t we have an Oscar for stunts? And do you think this one would win it this year, if we did?

Emily: This would be a totally wonderful winner of a theoretical Oscar for best stunts. And what do you know? Ford v Ferrari received a SAG nomination for its stunt ensemble, the closest thing we have to an Oscar for them. So I think you’re onto something here, Alissa.

That the movie uses mostly real stunt drivers is terrific, because it ties into what Ford v Ferrari is about at its core, which is this idea of old-fashioned craftsmanship. That’s obviously something that appeals to Mangold, a director who never met a concept he couldn’t shoehorn into a Western, but it’s also often a core idea of the dad movie. The theory goes that, at one time, men were men and craftsmanship was king. Now, everything’s falling apart. People don’t even do their own stunts anymore! It’s all created by a computer! What happened to America?

The key to the dad movie often is that it’s not really a movie about the dad watching it but about his dad. So, for instance, the idea is that you, Joe, might watch this movie and think about your own dad, and how if he really put his mind to it, he could build a race car that would take out Ferrari at Le Mans. That’s why a truly great dad movie appeals to people of all genders, and regardless of parenthood status: We can remember our own dads or some other dependably masculine figure who impacted our lives in a memorable way (like when they convinced Henry Ford II to give Ken Miles another chance by taking him on a wild ride around an airport runway).

What Mangold complicates about the dad movie in this film is that he doesn’t really give us easy heroes and villains. Though the movie is titled Ford v Ferrari, the Ferrari company and its standard-bearers sort of cease to be a major concern about two-thirds of the way through the film. Instead, we end up with a story about Ford versus Ford, as Carroll Shelby (Damon) and his team take on the more directly Ford-sponsored teams, then get bamboozled into giving up Ken Miles’s big win.

I was vaguely gutted by this bamboozlement, too. I really was invested in Ken Miles winning, and when he slowed down to let his teammates cross the finish line before him, I felt like he’d also won the victory over himself. Instead, he’d been tricked by his corporate overlords. It’s very Mangold to make a movie about how an iconoclast is still in the service of the Man, and this might be his ultimate statement of intent in that regard.

But I also loved all the little ways this movie immersed us in the details of Le Mans, like the diagram Miles shares with his son of the course, or the footrace to get to the cars that opens the big race. And there’s something so punishing about imagining keeping a car on the road for 24 hours, endlessly staving off disaster, in a way that Carroll knows all too well.

This isn’t just a movie about guys being guys, though. It’s also about exactly one woman who gets to have multiple lines of dialogue, which is Ken’s wife, Mollie, played by Caitriona Balfe. If this film has been consistently criticized for anything, it’s the way Mollie is basically a throwback to a “supportive wife” character from one of those aforementioned ’90s movies. Joe, did you find Mollie a compelling character? And how did you feel about the movie’s weird and mournful ending?

Joe: I guess Mollie is not entirely hewing to type — she never seems too worried about Ken’s high-risk avocation — but yes, the character was pretty shallow. Caitriona Balfe’s performance is knowing enough to make the most of it; watching her pull up a lawn chair to “not watch” the boys fight feels inconceivable outside the movies, for example. But the way she looks over her sunglasses, it’s as if she knows too. Maybe Mollie is pining for the crafted, larger-than-life stereotypes of Hollywood yore and has cast herself within that frame? Or maybe the male writer just … didn’t care.

As for the ending, it clearly wasn’t something this movie wanted to dwell on. The wide shot of the crash leaves you wondering what exactly happened. The voiceover returns, suggesting that maybe attaining high speed is worth dying for. We hear a vague echo telling us that “sometimes they just don’t get out of the car,” but the movie never directly grapples with the specifics of what happened with the same detail afforded to the painstakingly recreated race scenes.

Well, outside the movies we have Google, and some cursory research suggests the real Ken Miles did get out of the car — because he was violently thrown out of it as the car tumbled end over end, killing him. There’s no specific evidence the crash was due to driver error, leaving the possibility that Ford or Shelby could share responsibility.

But rather than allowing Mollie, Ken’s son Peter, or Shelby to ask that question, the filmmakers quietly speed by it.

I wish they hadn’t. I enjoyed the fun of the movie, and deeply enjoyed every moment of Tracy Letts’s portrayal of Henry Ford II’s insecurities. But the filmmakers looked away when it mattered. “He died doing what he loved,” the film wants us to say to ourselves, hoping, as Emily says, that we’ll think wistfully about our dads in the process. But Ken was only 47, and I shudder to think how my life would be different if my dad had passed away that young. Wouldn’t you want to know if your father died as a result of the Deuce’s pissing contest?

Alissa: My dad actually did pass away at 47 (from leukemia, though, not exactly a pissing contest), and I thought quite a lot about him, and the gap his passing left, while I was watching the movie. Other movies this season (like The Irishman), combined with the fact that I am slowly, slowly approaching the age he was then, have made me think about how I’ll never know him as an old man. And there’s a sense in which Ford v Ferrari expertly explores middle age, the way The Irishman is a searing insight into old age.

Last question: What other movies have given you the same feeling of adrenaline and emotion that watching Ford v Ferrari does? Another way of asking this — if someone loved Ford v Ferrari, what else would you suggest to them? Neither of these is an obvious choice, but I’d recommend Mangold’s last film, Logan, which takes the X-Men’s Wolverine character and makes him the star of a Western, and last year’s great documentary Apollo 11, which in some ways is about people trying to pull off a feat just as zany as the one in this movie.

Joe: Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry for your loss, Alissa.

To answer your question, I was surprised to be reminded of Pixar’s Ratatouille while watching Ford v Ferrari. No, not Cars, which correctly didn’t make it anywhere close to the top of Vox’s Pixar rankings. Stick with me here: I understand the technical specifics of how to make a car go faster about as clearly as how a rat could control a human via his hair. But the films share a rambunctious search for perfection, the inevitability of compromise, and some complicated parenting.

And this is even further afield, but if you’re looking for another film featuring some absolutely fantastic performances, a deeply impressive commitment to a craft, some admittedly shallow characters, and a happy ending instead of a historically mandated sad one: Singin’ in the Rain. I lived 35 years without seeing that movie. Dearest reader, avoid my mistake if you can.

But I’m so excited to hear Emily’s suggestions — take it away!

Emily: I lost my biological father (whom I never met) when he was 48, and even though I had never spoken to him, the loss was gutting all the same. I didn’t expect him to suddenly be my “dad,” but it was nice to know he was out there in the world, being somebody’s dad, probably. (Turned out this suspicion was right. His two kids have become a wonderful part of my life since I met them.)

So good dad movies often have a touch of the melancholy to them. And because our old pal James Mangold and the father who actually raised me both love Westerns, allow me to recommend a few of those. Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s paean for a long-gone genre and a long-gone way of life, is a must-watch for sure. But also how about The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, a movie that is a lot of fun yet soaked through with pathos? Or even The Searchers, which 2020 eyes will note has plenty of racist stereotypes but is at least using them in service of poking at old Hollywood’s racist assumptions, and is definitely melancholic.

Or maybe we just want a “cars go fast” movie, in which case, Ron Howard’s 2013 movie Rush is a good time. (Heck, Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13 has big Ford v Ferrari energy as well.) Yet that’s the thing about dad movies: They end up being ultra-personal choices, because they’ll always remind you, on some level, of all the fatherly folks in your own life, both known and unknown. Ford v Ferrari made me feel those ghosts acutely, but it also let me see some cars go really fast. What more do you really want from a movie?

Read the Vox staff’s thoughts on all nine of the 2020 Best Picture nominees:

Vox’s newest show Glad You Asked launches on YouTube October 8

2019-09-23T17:36:04-04:00

We’re so excited to share the first look at our newest series, Glad You Asked, coming to our channel October 8 with YouTube Originals.

Our team of four Vox producer-hosts — Joss Fong, Alex Clark, Christophe Haubursin, and Cleo Abram — look into some of YouTube’s most-searched and most-interesting questions. In typical Vox fashion, we explore human curiosity questions like Why do we cry? What happens when we die? and Will we survive Mars? Their intersecting journeys reveal unexpected answers and provide a whole new kind of show from Vox. And we can’t wait for you to see it.

Episodes 1-5 will debut weekly on the Vox YouTube channel and on YouTube.com/Learning beginning October 8, 2019, and episodes 6-10 will debut weekly beginning January 8, 2020. YouTube Premium subscribers can watch all five of the first batch of episodes on October 8, 2019, and the next batch of five on January 8, 2020.

We’ll have much more to share soon, but until then, enjoy the trailer!

The mind, explained in five 20-minute Netflix episodes

2019-09-12T09:58:28-04:00

After nearly a year of labor behind the scenes, we have an announcement for you: Explained is finally back! And during this year, we’ve turned our attention to a crucial question: Why can’t we remember what is in the fridge?

Or more importantly, why can’t we remember most of the details of our own lives? Why do an estimated one in three people suffer from an anxiety disorder at some point? And why, when we go to bed at night, are we overcome with strange visions? Do our dreams actually mean anything, or serve any purpose?

This is what we get into in our new five-episode limited series, The Mind, Explained.

Our minds often feel like a black box. And the stakes of these questions go far beyond the fridge – to our fundamental sense of reality, and what it means to be human. How can we help ourselves, and each other, when our minds betray us? What can we do to take back some control?

Scientists have figured out so much more than you might realize – and we’re diving deep, with five brand new episodes narrated by Emma Stone taking you on an adventure through the mind, available today.

The first episode is also available now on Vox’s YouTube channel, too.

Our weekly episodes return, as well, on September 26th. They’ll be right here – where Season 1 also awaits any of you who haven’t seen it yet.

Thanks so much to all of you who watch, support, and even teach the series. If you’re a teacher wondering if you can use the series: yes you can. Here’s Netflix’s policy. And for more ideas of things we should cover in Explained’s future, send us a note at explained@vox.com.

An open letter to YouTube’s CEO

2019-06-07T13:31:40-04:00

Dear Susan Wojcicki,

YouTube’s social media profiles have been updated with a rainbow-themed version of your logo to celebrate Pride Month. But to truly celebrate your LGBTQ creators and users, there’s another more meaningful update you need to make this month.

Your platform has made it easier than ever for people making abusive content to reach a massive scale. As Vox video producer Carlos Maza documented in a Twitter thread, he’s been the subject of repeated personal attacks by the popular YouTube commentator Steven Crowder. During a series of videos attempting to rebut Carlos’s arguments, he calls Carlos “the lispy queer from Vox,” along with many other homophobic and racist slurs. These repeated attacks on Carlos’s sexual orientation and ethnicity have led to vicious onslaughts, including doxxing and dogpiling, from many of Crowder’s millions of fans.

To Carlos, us, and many of your creators and users, this behavior is in clear violation of your company’s community guidelines. YouTube’s harassment policy states that “content that makes hurtful and negative personal comments/videos about another person” will be removed from the platform. Your hate speech policy states, “We remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on” race, sexual orientation, and many other protected attributes.

To YouTube, however, Crowder’s behavior — while worthy of demonetization — is not in violation of these policies, as long as the offending language is not “the primary purpose” of a video. If the repeated harassment in these videos doesn’t cross the line by YouTube’s standards, then your line needs to be moved. Without a serious change to YouTube’s interpretation of its standards, Crowder is free to continue to make videos where he hurls slurs at journalists and creators, who will then keep getting hit with the same sort of harassment, invective, and dangerous leaking of personal information that Carlos has continued to experience from Crowder’s fans.

The suggestion implicit in YouTube’s inaction is that this harassment is simply the cost of doing business for a gay person of color on your platform. That is unacceptable to us. It should be unacceptable to you too.

Vox is proud to be among the many creators who have built big, loyal followings on YouTube — the platform is often a powerful tool to build community, give voice to underrepresented groups, spur creativity, and circulate interesting and educational information to millions. We’re sure you know there’s no meaningful alternative to YouTube, and leaving the platform would mean that those who are harassing creators have won. We’re committed to continuing to publish our signature Vox videos on the platform, but the current climate is untenable.

We are strong supporters of lively political debate and free speech and believe that turning a blind eye to abuse does nothing to advance either. Our efforts to protect Carlos and others from historically marginalized groups from being silenced or driven from the platform by incessant harassment are in line with these values. We appreciate YouTube’s efforts to work to improve your hate speech policy and your recent commitment to seriously review your harassment policy, and understand that making the internet a safer place while protecting political speech is a complicated, difficult task.

But right now those policies make everyone less safe. The dangerous backlash against creators who dare to speak out against abuse is all the more explosive when your rules are confusing and applied inconsistently and without transparency.

This Pride Month, change more than your logo. Clarify and enforce your harassment policy.

Signed,

Lauren Williams, Editor-in-Chief
Joe Posner, Head of Video

How to make more Vox Video happen

2019-01-11T11:24:51-05:00

You know that feeling you get when you learn something that blows your mind, something new, something that perhaps you didn’t even think to ask about? That’s our goal with every Vox video: We want to help you understand the world in a visually clear, creative, and hopefully beautiful way.

If that sounds like a mission you support, and you love our videos, then we ask that you consider joining the Vox Video Lab, our brand-new membership program on YouTube that will help us give you even more ambitious explainer videos and series.

Why are we doing this? The core reason is pretty simple: Our videos take a ton of work.

The process that makes our polished, pretty little pieces of internet often takes more than a month from greenlight to publish — including the research, interviews, field shoots, transcribing, writing, editing, animating, fact-checking, and copy editing that goes into each one. As a video moves through this process, it usually goes through six rounds of review.

This is not the cheapest way to make video journalism. But it’s all that work that’s led to success we couldn’t have imagined when we got started less than five years ago: 5 million subscribers on YouTube, the first digital-only interview of a sitting president, Netflix’s first weekly current events show, and the chance to make a second season.

The foundation of all we’ve done is our free, ad-supported short-form video program. But few of the highest-quality free videos are supported by advertising alone. We all adore the free segments of Last Week Tonight on YouTube — and they probably will stay free as long as people keep paying for HBO. Dozens of our favorite independent creators give their fans the chance to support their work through Patreon.

So, today, we’re asking fans of Vox video to help us continue to expand our ambitions by joining the Vox Video Lab on YouTube. It starts at $4.99 a month for membership, and gets you a whole bunch of perks as thanks for your support.

We’ll share all sorts of behind-the-scenes videos and extras from our work, sort of like DVD extras (remember those?). We’ll do regular Q&As and live streams. We’ll make a monthly list of recommendations of what we think are the best videos on the internet (we spend a lot of time watching videos on the internet), along with why we think they’re so good. And we’ll be doing some new experiments, too.

For those of you who want even more and want to support our mission twice as much, we’ve got an upper tier that costs $9.99, which gets you in the Vox Video Lab and onto our new member advisory board. We’ll be starting with a monthly live stream, and will give you the chance to participate in our editorial process and give feedback.

We think you’ll love the perks, but the most important thing is this: Signing up for either level of this membership will help us tell more stories we know you’ll love. So please do consider signing up — or maybe if you know a Vox Video fan in your life, signing them up as a gift. We’re thrilled to say YouTube is supporting this effort too, through a Google News Initiative grant announced Monday.

All this will help us do more work, enable us to do better work, and it will make us more accountable to you. We can’t wait. So if you like our videos, we’d love your support. Join here.

Vox’s Netflix show “Explained,” explained

2019-09-03T10:27:30-04:00

On Wednesday, Vox is launching Explained, a new show on Netflix. Every episode is a roughly 15-minute dive into a topic that drives our lives or our world. The first three, which cover DNA editing, monogamy, and the racial wealth gap, are available now. You can watch the show — or add it to your Netflix queue for later — here. I hope you will.

From now through the rest of the season, we will launch a new episode every Wednesday. This is also Vox’s first truly global product: Each episode will be in 191 countries, dubbed into four languages and subtitled in 23 more.

Explained is a project we’ve been working toward for a long time. When we launched Vox a bit over four years ago, we did so with a few beliefs. One was that important, slow-changing topics were often neglected in favor of fast-breaking stories. As the old journalism adage goes, the first three letters of “news” spell “new.” But we believed there was a need for more deep reporting on the questions, forces, and ideas that rarely find themselves in the bright light of the daily news cycle.

Another was that digital media had become persistent in a way that print and radio and television weren’t. You would throw out a newspaper and then it was gone. You would watch a television show and then it was over. But digital media made the work we did accessible, searchable, and even changeable indefinitely. How could our editorial process take that persistence seriously — how could we do stories that would be as relevant two years from now as today?

We were also seeing an explosion in new formats. We were so used to the 800-word column, the 30-minute episode. All of those lengths had their roots in the constraints of the mediums in which they evolved. But now things could be as long or as short as they needed to be, and, even better, they could vary — from piece to piece, from episode to episode.

Finally, we emphasized visual journalism from the outset because, at long last, we could. For most of the history of journalism, visual journalism — color printing, computer graphics, moving images — was either impossible or cost-prohibitive. By 2014, though, the combination of computer graphics, computer screens, and broadband adoption had opened up whole new vistas in storytelling. There is so much more information you can convey, so many more ideas you can make clear and interesting, when you can show as well as tell. And so we published video stories before we published text stories, and today, YouTube is the platform with our biggest subscriber base — more than 4 million.

All this is the background for Explained. We began dreaming of this project in 2015. What if we did a show for a streaming platform, where the editorial process would be thinking about persistence from the outset, where we would take only as much of the viewer’s time as we needed and not a second more, where we could bring all our visual and reportorial tools to bear on the questions that obsessed us, where we could focus on the big topics that would help us make sense of a world that seems to go by faster and faster?

Last year, we pitched the idea to Netflix, and to our great excitement, they agreed. The result is Explained. We’re thrilled to finally be able to show it to you. And we’d love to hear the topics you’re interested in for future episodes — email us at explained@vox.com.

And on a personal note, thank you. When we launched Vox four years ago, we had no idea if there would be an audience for what we hoped to do. Thank you for showing there is one, and for giving us the opportunity to do work we love.