Jonquilyn Hill | Vox

Hope vs. optimism, explained

2026-04-10T17:14:36-04:00

On Explain It Me, we try to give you useful information to help you navigate and understand the world around you. But lately there’s been an elephant in the room: Life feels kind of…bad.

Polling suggests that Americans are unsatisfied with their lives now, and with prospects for the future. It’s understandable why: We’re on the cusp of a technological revolution, but it could come for all our jobs; the country is at war; and the global economy can feel unstable at best.

All this uncertainty and we’re still expected to do things like declutter our homes, work out, and stay on top of our reading. So how do you face all that crushing negativity? Some make the case for optimism. Jamil Zaki, psychology professor and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, makes the case for hope. “Optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well, and optimistic people tend to be pretty happy and healthy, but they can also be a bit complacent,” he told Vox.

By contract, Zaki says, hope is “the idea that the future could turn out well, but that we don’t know what the future holds. In fact, being hopeful acknowledges and embraces that things are difficult and asks, ‘Where can we go from here?’”

So how do you find hope in times of darkness? And why are some of us more predisposed to seeing the bright side of things than others? We answer those questions and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

I’ve seen the phrase “toxic optimism” used to suggest that, at times, we tell people everything is going to be okay when it’s not. Are there times when we’re trying to get people to gaslight themselves into thinking things are better than they actually are?

A lot of the time there’s actually pressure to be negative about the future because there’s the view that if you’re positive, you must be a Pollyanna, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If you think about it, yes, being a Pollyanna might encourage you to do nothing. An optimist might not feel like they have to fight for anything because everything’s going to turn out well, but a pessimist might not fight for very much either.

There’s a bunch of research that finds that people who are hopeless and cynical are less likely to vote or take part in social movements. Authoritarian regimes actually benefit a lot when people are hopeless. In fact, I think that a lot of propaganda is meant to make people hopeless because that negativity keeps people frozen in place, and that’s exactly what those authoritarian powers often want.

I think people assume there’s naivety if you’re not cynical or if you’re not pessimistic.

There’s an old quote: “Always predict the worst, and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.” I do think that there is an inherent sense that negativity and wisdom are the same thing. And you see this everywhere.

There’s evidence from psychology that bears this out. Research finds that 70 percent of people believe that cynical folks who have a negative outlook on humanity are smarter than non-cynical individuals, and 85 percent of people think that cynics are socially smarter — that they’re better able to tell who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.

That’s a stereotype in our culture, but it’s also one that’s wrong. The data actually find that cynical people are not any smarter than non-cynics, and they’re actually worse at knowing who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.

What do we know about people who are able to maintain hope in dark times? What makes them able to do that?

When I think about hopeful people, I think about activists. Was Nelson Mandela optimistic and thinking that everything was going to turn out great when he was in his jail cell? Hope is a stubborn, active sense of the world. It’s an acknowledgement that things are not what we want now, but a sense that they could improve and that we have something to do about it.

Hopeful people, as the science bears out, have the ability to envision that better future. They also have a will to pursue it. They have that grit and that passion to actually continue going for a goal, even if it’s difficult. And they have something known as waypower, which is that they’re able to map a path between where they are and where they want to be, and oftentimes that waypower requires not being alone.

Hopeful people often aren’t hopeful just as individuals. They find communities of people who want the same positive change that they do, and they work together towards creating that change.

What makes someone that way? Are we predispositioned to be hopeful or cynical?

There’s a bunch of research using twins where they look at the difference between levels of optimism and hope among identical twins versus fraternal twins. The idea is if identical twins are more similar, that’s probably due to their genetics. And that research suggests that things like optimism, pessimism, and hope have a little bit of a genetic component, but not much. Twenty-five percent of how hopeful or optimistic you are appears to be explained by your genes, which leaves the vast majority to be explained by your experience.

“I think of cultivating hope as a practice of noticing — not a practice of ignoring the bad side, but a practice of balancing that with real attention to what is beautiful.”

A lot of that experience has to do with what happens to us early in life. If you come from a nurturing, warm household, you tend to be more optimistic and hopeful, but there’s also evidence that we can make a difference for ourselves. Therapy, for instance, tends to be a practice that increases people’s sense of hope. So if you don’t feel like a very hopeful person, that’s not like a life sentence, you can do things to change the way that you perceive the world.

Every week we ask people to call in, and when we asked people how they’re cultivating optimism in their lives, I honestly thought, “Oh, no, people aren’t going to call. They won’t have anything to say. Everything is bad.” But, I was wrong!

I think it’s worth acknowledging that wrongness that you had, because that’s something I think a lot of people are wrong about. If we’re experiencing the world through our screens, it seems like first, everything is terrible, and second, everybody knows that everything is terrible.

The funny thing is that when we return to our local communities, when we actually ask people about their lives, they’re doing wonderful things and you realize how excellent the average person is on a bunch of dimensions. A great thing about human beings, in my opinion, is that we like each other more the closer we get to one another.

Research finds, for instance, that most Americans do not think that most people can be trusted. We’ve become a very cynical nation. But if you ask people, what about the folks in their neighborhood — and this is not just your friends and family, but your grocer, your bus driver, your barber — people feel so much better about the folks that they actually encounter in real life.

People also told us their hobbies bring them joy. I remember people were trying all kinds of stuff at the height of the pandemic, and it seems like it’s still the case. I called 2026 the year of the hobby. I’m just going outside and trying things. What makes that such an effective strategy?

Well, first tell me about your 2026 hobbies. Which one has brought you the most joy?

I’ve gotten back into film photography. I used to do it in high school, and I just go shoot film all around the city.

Does it bring you a sense of hope or optimism to do this?

Oh, yeah. You just look at the world a little bit differently. It’s like, oh, look at that shadow. Look at that angle. What’s the reflection off that building? But also, when you have a camera, especially a film camera, people love to stop and talk to you.

I love this idea of noticing more. A lot of the data from my lab, from lots of other labs, suggest that yes, we don’t want to gaslight people into ignoring the bad things in life, but a lot of us go around missing the good things in life.

I think of cultivating hope as a practice of noticing — not a practice of ignoring the bad side, but a practice of balancing that with real attention to what is beautiful. I think in general, hobbies are a chance for us to pay attention to things that we care about and often bring us in connection to people who turn out to be often pretty great.

Something that I feel like needs to be acknowledged is that this is not the only time in the world where life has been hard. Humanity has survived a lot, and our listeners called in and really reminded us of that. People told us about grandparents who were civil activists, grandparents who survived and met in Auschwitz. Is that an argument that resonates with you?

Absolutely. One practice that I use is to think back to what life was like for my parents or for their parents. We’ve been through so much, and I’m not saying that everything will turn out well, but generally speaking, we are a resilient species, especially when we’re able to come together.

The high price of everything, explained

2026-04-03T14:32:14-04:00

The war with Iran is choking the Strait of Hormuz, limiting the amount of oil available to the rest of the world. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

When I was growing up, my dad and I would play a game at the grocery store: As the cashier was ringing up the items on the list my mom had given us, we each would guess what we thought the total would amount to. Whoever was closest won bragging rights, and maybe if we were feeling indulgent, the candy bar of our choosing.

I’m shopping for just myself now, but I’m still pretty good at this game. That means I’m always paying attention to how prices change. What used to feed a family of three is now just enough to cover my own grocery bill, and those prices just keep going up. So what gives? Is this just regular-degular inflation? Or is something else driving up the price of the items we use day to day?

On the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we look into three goods and why they cost so much right now: gas, coffee, and milk.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Gas prices: The war with Iran and you

First up, a trip to the gas station. Sam Ori is the executive director of the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and he says the issue with oil right now is global. The war with Iran is choking the Strait of Hormuz, limiting the amount of oil available to the rest of the world.

“The price of gasoline that we pay at the pump is set in the global oil market,” he tells Vox. “Crude oil is like the feed stock that makes gasoline. More than half of the price that you’re paying at the pump is just directly the result of the price of crude oil in the global market.”

That price, plus federal and state taxes along with profit mean Americans are paying more to fill up their cars.

The United States is still the largest producer of oil in the world. But self-sufficiency isn’t really an option. “The United States still imports a lot of oil because the refineries that we have in this country are configured to refine a certain quality of crude oil,” Ori says. “It’s not easy to change the configuration of those refineries. The United States produces what’s called light, sweet crude oil. We still need a lot of heavier, sour crudes. So we import those and then we export the light oil.”

Coffee: A climate change story

Our next stop is your local cafe. Gone are the days of hand-wringing over millennials squandering their wealth on $5 lattes. Those lattes have easily crept up to $10.

Bloomberg reporter Ilena Peng says the price of coffee has been going up since early 2024, and we can blame that on the weather. Vietnam and Brazil are the world’s biggest coffee producers, and both have had dry weather recently. “The boogeyman is ultimately climate,” she says.

But tariffs also play a role here. Last year, President Donald Trump put a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, where most of the beans at your local coffee shop likely come from. Eventually, in November, coffee and other products were exempted from tariffs, and in February, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs.

The exemption, Peng says, “helped roasters quite a bit with being able to plan, even though a lot of them are still dealing with leftover costs. You contract inventories months ahead.” That means there’s a major lag between that cost and the cost at the consumer level, so we may be paying a lot for those lattes for a while.

Milk: Small costs add up

What about the milk that goes in that coffee? Dairy prices are high right now too: The national average for a gallon of milk is $4.03. Charles Nicholson is an economics professor at Penn State University, where he teaches about supply chain management and food supply. He says the way we go about setting dairy prices gets a little complicated.

“Farms actually get paid on the basis of what the milk is used for,” he tells Vox. “So the highest value and the highest price that you would pay a farmer for milk is for milk that’s gonna go into that carton at the grocery store.”

Unlike with gas and coffee, it’s hard to point to any specific factor driving up the cost of milk. Instead, it’s a story of small price hikes all the way through the system: Other costs include the processors who put the milk into the cartons and food retailers. Transportation is a factor (remember those rising gas prices?), along with the care and feeding of livestock.

We may also see this price change outside that carton of milk too. If you’ve ordered a pizza recently, you’ve experienced where most of the milk in the United States goes. “Close to 40 percent of the milk that we produce goes into making cheeses of various kinds,” Nicholson says. “A lot of that is mozzarella cheese that would go on a pizza. And pizza restaurants can also play around a little bit with — how much cheese am I gonna put on that pizza?” That cheddar is costing some serious cheddar.

Why some American accents have endured — while others have faded away

2026-03-30T16:32:49-04:00

A golf tournament in Memphis, Tennessee. | Matthew Maxey/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

On Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we hear a lot of stories from listeners. Recently, we asked people to tell us about their accents: what they love about them, things they’ve noticed. The response was huge; we got the most responses we’ve ever gotten.

This was not a surprise to Valerie Fridland. She’s a sociolinguist and author of the book Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. “Accents are something that we share only with those people we most love and hold dear and who we saw ourselves to be in the foundational eras of our life,” she said. “It’s close to us in ways that language more generically isn’t.”

How did the modern American accent develop? And what do accents reflect about us? We answer that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Fridland, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Where did the American accent come from in the first place?

If you went back to [the year] 1600, you would probably think, “What the hell are you all saying around me? Because I don’t understand a thing.”

We start our accent journey in America with the first British colonists that came. It seems odd, because there are other colonists that were here [already], and there were indigenous languages that were here. So that isn’t the first language story of America. But the most pivotal voices for establishing that original American accent were those early British colonists. Those set up what we call “founders effects”: these sort of cultural and linguistic areas that persist through time.

The original American accent was sort of one that had leveled the playing field of many of the salient, noticeable British accent features. For example, the Rs would’ve been there, with the exception of a few Rs that got dropped really early in words like burst and curse, which became bust and cuss. It’s the British R-dropping that came over early.

What we really would’ve noticed is [a language] that sounded sort of British but not like any [particular] British accent. And it was commented on [at the time] — this incredibly uniform American accent that actually sounded quite good compared to the British form. It didn’t matter who you were, what class you were from, what kind of job you occupied — the speech was much more similar among people in America or the New World at that time than it was back in Britain.

It’s interesting that it was uniform, because we have so many regional differences now. When did we see those pop up?

Think about the way that the Atlantic Coast was settled, right at the very top. You had people coming in a lot from East Anglia and Southern Britain, and then you had the Quakers from the north of Britain, and the Scotch Irish and the Germans in the Midland. And then, in the South, you had a lot of people from Southern Britain, a lot of the Cavaliers — those that were loyal to King Charles I. They had a lot of indentured servants and a lot of enslaved people that came from West African backgrounds.

By 1780, we see that enough generations have come through and learned the patterns of this new world that they sounded very different from Britain but also started to sound different from each other.

This was actually something that concerned the Founding Fathers after the Revolutionary War, because the agreement between the states was very fragile. There were a lot of regional rivalries, a lot of state self-interest, and they were really worried that these states that had bonded together in unity against this common enemy of Britain were actually going to fall apart. One of the things they were really concerned about, particularly Benjamin Franklin and also his pal Noah Webster, were that the lack of a uniform language — or having any kind of “regional provincialism” they called them — would cause this [new union] to decay and fray.

I want to dig into the Southern accent a little bit more. It’s so distinct. How did we get it?

That did not come around until after the Civil War. [The war] brought together people towards a common enemy and also a common cultural experience that bonded their speech in ways that we find are really conducive to new accent formation.

Also, the infrastructure of the South changed during the Reconstruction period. And anytime we see a change in infrastructure, a change in the economy, a change in the transportation networks in an area, we generally see a change in the way they sound, as well.

The New England accent, the Southern accent — both get a lot of the shine. But what are we hearing in the Midwest and out West?

The Midwest and West are quite interesting, because they were both a little later. The Midwest had a really unique blending, because it emanated from the Pennsylvania colony. So that’s really the heart of the heartland accent. Over a third of the population of the Pennsylvania colony was the Scots-Irish, and another third were Germans. When you think about the Chicago accent — “da Bears,” that kind of thing — that is actually a very German-influenced accent. There were already a lot of Scandinavian settlers in that area. The Minnesota accent was heavily Scandinavian influenced, but by the time [Americans] get to the West Coast, the vast majority were resettlers from an American dialect region.

So what you get there is already Americanized speech, but truly that’s why we think of the Western accent as being accent-less: because it had gone through so many cycles of leveling out some of the more noticeable features from the East Coast by the time they hit it West.

What about the accents that don’t exist anymore? Do accents die?

When accents die, it’s more like a slow fade and an instant death. What happens is just fewer and fewer people use them. In that case, we actually have a lot of dying accents in America. The one that people think about is that Transatlantic accent.

Like Cary Grant?

Yes. Or Frasier. That was probably the later incarnation of that Transatlantic accent. And, of course, [Cheers and Frasier were] depicting pretentious snobs that no one wants to hang out with, and that is exactly why that accent has died out.

The trick is: It was a false accent. It was no one’s native accent. It was a learned accent. It was a fabricated, cultivated accent of the early 20th century, predominantly parlayed by Hollywood, because [those were] the type of roles and iconic images that Hollywood was presenting at that time.

But, by the 1950s, we didn’t want to see that anymore. We wanted to see ourselves. Americans wanted to hear Americans, and they wanted to see Americans that lived like they did. And so the shift in Hollywood was really from these romantic leading man and leading woman kind of roles to these gritty depictions of realism in Hollywood. With that, we really lost the Transatlantic accent, and it became snobby and elitist rather than something aspirational.

Why do we feel so connected to our accents?

Fundamentally, accents are about identity — the people we love, the people we choose, the people that feel like they get us. When we hear people talk about accents, even if it’s not the same accent, it’s something that bonds us, because we all understand how important to our identities, to our feeling of belonging, that accents are. And I think it’s something that is so interesting, because it’s so relevant to all of us. It’s a badge we wear that others can see. It’s sort of like when fashions change, people talk about it. When language changes, people talk about it, because language is fundamentally the story of humanity.

How Mormons went mainstream

2026-03-23T16:35:04-04:00

Taylor Frankie Paul at The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season two premiere in 2025. | JC Olivera/Variety via Getty Images

Everything is coming up Mormon…or at least it feels that way. From reality TV drama to cookies to sodas to how we think about femininity, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is at the forefront of culture in the US. For a religion that only 2 percent of Americans follow, Mormonism is sure punching above its weight.

McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a member of the Mormon church, said mainstream acceptance was kind of the hope all along. “From the very beginning, the kind of fledgling religious movement that became known as the Mormons was subjected to a constant barrage of state sanctioned persecution,” he said. “The early Mormons actually were constantly fleeing from one state to another, trying to find a place where they could set up shop and worship, and they were always driven out of wherever they had landed. Over the course of several years in the early 19th century, they were driven from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and Missouri. Actually, the governor issued what was called an extermination order that demanded that Mormons be removed from the state or killed.”

So how did Mormonism evolve to have such cultural influence? And how is that influence shaping the faith? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

You write in this piece back in 2020 that Mormonism is kind of the most American religion. What makes Mormonism uniquely tied to the American story compared to other religious traditions?

Well, it’s one of the largest global religions that was founded in America. Also, theologically, the church has always been wrapped up in the American project. From early on, church leaders taught that America was a promised land that had been prepared to be the place where God could restore his church to the earth. Many of the ideas in Mormon theology are also drawn from the sacred American texts. Mormons actually are taught that the founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution — are divinely inspired, that America is a special place that God has set apart. There are deeper ideas in the theology, like agency and free will, that you can connect to foundational American ideas like pluralism and democracy.

I found this document that was written by Mormon pioneers who, as they were leaving the United States, wrote about themselves as almost a Noah’s arc of American ideals. They were gathering all of the best of America’s aspirational commitment to religious freedom, to democracy, to liberty. And they were going to bring it to this new civilization that they were setting up in the desert. But they always believed that at some point America would accept them back and they would play an important role in revitalizing and strengthening the country where their religious movement was founded.

When did we start to see the church try to assimilate into mainstream America?

It was around the 20th century that Latter-Day Saints started to think more deliberately about how they could be initiated into American life. And certainly by the middle of the 20th century, the church was making a pretty concerted effort to be accepted as part of mainstream American society. You saw Latter-Day Saints joining the military and intelligence agencies in very large numbers. That’s partly because a lot of them speak foreign languages from their mission service and because they live relatively clean lives that makes them attractive recruits to places like the CIA and FBI.

You also saw a lot of the church’s messaging trying to portray it as kind of an all-American church. Mormons had big families. They were traditionally arranged where the men worked, the women stayed at home, they had lots of kids. They were very active in civic organizations like the Boy Scouts of America. I don’t want to say that this was all PR. I think a lot of it was genuinely rooted in the things that they believed were important about American civic life and family life and religious life. But also there was a distinct desire to prove to America that they were worthy of being considered American. The church disavowed polygamy and discontinued the practice, and that was kind of the beginning of the mainstreaming of Mormonism. Utah became an official state, and from that point on the church was on this march of assimilation, trying to be accepted as a respectable and positive force in American religious life.

It also adopted some mainstream ideas that did not age well. Can you talk about that a little bit?

I think most notably the church’s position on race. In the early years of the church, Joseph Smith was at times an outspoken abolitionist. He actually ran for president on this long-shot protest bid on a platform that included a proposal that would buy the freedom of every enslaved person in America and abolish prisons. There were elements of early Mormonism that were actually pretty progressive and radical for their time. Joseph Smith was eventually killed by an anti-Mormon mob. He was replaced by Brigham Young, who was this kind of gruff leader who led the church into Utah and established their desert Zion out there. He took the church in a different position on racial issues.

Under Brigham Young, and for many, many years after up until 1978, Black men were not allowed to hold the priesthood. Black families were not allowed to participate in certain temple ordinances in the church. The way I’ve heard it from scholars who study this period of the church’s history, the church became really fixated on the idea of securing its place at the top of America’s racial hierarchy, rather than trying to kind of fight against the idea of a racial hierarchy.

“In that quest for assimilation, you can become sort of single-mindedly focused on performing your Americanness at the expense of what makes your belief system and your worldview distinctive.”

I should mention this is partly rooted in the fact that for a while in the 19th century, Mormons actually were treated as a different race. There are fascinating medical journal reports that were written at the time where doctors or people would go to Mormon communities and observe them and come back and write about how Mormons are clearly a distinctive race, defined by their thick, protuberant lips and sunken yellow visage. It’s kind of classic quack racial science from the 19th century. Mormons really internalized this idea that white America doesn’t see us as part of them. I think that there was a deliberate effort by some church leaders to really perform their whiteness to be accepted into white America.

Of course, the church eventually lifted the priesthood ban for Black men in the late 1970s, but that has continued to hang over the church as this shadow. Even as the church exploded in growth in West Africa, and many Black members have joined the church, there is this ongoing reckoning with the church’s racial history and it remains a really difficult chapter.

Are there any fears inside the church that assimilation may be too much in the current American culture? I was raised in church and one of the things I was raised with was, “Even if you’re in the world, you’re not supposed to be of the world.”

It’s an ongoing conversation in the church. We got the same rhetoric that we should be in the world, but not of the world. I remember one of the big defining talks given by a Latter-Day Saints prophet early in the 21st century was by Gordon B. Hinckley, who was the president of the church. He said that we are a peculiar people and that we should be a peculiar people. We should be apart from the culture in some ways, even as we try to participate in American life. And I do think that there is a question now about whether that assimilation has gone too far.

I remember five years ago when I wrote this story about the church entering its third century. And the thing that I worried about was that Mormonism would drift into radical right-wing politics like much of the religious right. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints used to be the most reliably Republican religious group in America, and in the Trump era has actually become a little bit less reliable. There’s a growing number of independents. Younger Mormon voters are rejecting the Trump-era GOP.

And so I’m not so concerned about Mormonism being radicalized. I’m actually more concerned about it becoming so obsessed with assimilation, so obsessed with approval from mainstream American society that it kind of loses sight of what it actually is because in that quest for assimilation, you can become sort of single-mindedly focused on performing your Americanness at the expense of what makes your belief system and your worldview distinctive. And there’s a part of me that wants to keep Mormonism weird. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing that the kind of pop cultural symbol of our church, which used to be the kind of dorky young kid with the white shirts and ties and black name tags, is now beautiful women on reality shows.

I think it is interesting that women are the face now.

I actually think that is really interesting and exciting, and it’s nothing against those women at all. It is just that I think there is a little bit of discomfort in some quarters of the church that Mormonism will come to be seen as all these sort of pop cultural indicators. The reality shows, the weird soda cocktails that everybody drinks, and then not actually be identified by their religious beliefs. I think some church leaders are grappling with what that means for them going forward.

Is sugar addictive?

2026-03-17T09:45:49-04:00

Sugar can be addictive. But eliminating it is not so simple. | Getty Images

I never realized how much sugar was in my life, until I gave up sweets for Lent. I go on a walk and outside the grocery store I see the Girl Scouts pushing their product. I go to a friend’s birthday party and the cake stares at me from across the room. I head to the coffee shop, but that matcha latte just doesn’t hit the same without a little simple syrup.

Sugar is the nutritional boogeyman ready to leap out from behind every corner, a ubiquitous presence at our kitchen tables: per person on average Americans eat about 120 pounds of the sweet stuff each year.

Maya Feller, a Brooklyn-based registered dietician nutritionist, said she’s seen a shift in how we talk about sugar over the years. “I would say the difference is the demonization,” she told Vox. “Currently we are in a battle of wits and morality around sugar. Back in the 1980s when I was young, people were going sugar-free. But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, you’re a bad person if you’re having sugar.’ We fully entered into the morality that’s associated with sugar.”

So how do you make the best food choices for yourself without spiraling? And if you want to reframe your relationship with sugar, how do you do that in a healthy way? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

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What do you think has caused the shift in how we view sugar?

Some of that is coming from what we refer to as wellness culture and this overall desire to be slender and able-bodied. So when you have these foods that have been demonized and then a person eats that food, then it’s like, “Oh, well, you’re not going after the gold standard. You don’t want to be slender and able-bodied. And if you’re ill, that’s your fault.”

When someone comes to you and they say they want to cut back on sugar, what are the questions you ask them?

My first question is “Why?”

Is it because you’re concerned about your cardio metabolic health? Are we talking about diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease? Or perhaps you are aware that you’ve been eating three pounds of sugar every week.

Once I know what the why is, then we can start to get to the meat of really figuring out where it’s showing up in your day and then how to address pulling it back while not getting lost in “you’ve done good/you’ve done bad.”

What are some of the biggest challenges your patients face with sugar?

It’s everywhere. When I say everywhere, it is everywhere. There’s sugar in ketchup. There’s sugar in tomato sauce. If you’re buying boxed, jarred, canned or frozen food, sometimes it’s added in. It’s not just pastries.

So that’s the biggest challenge. You really have to become that informed consumer and read the nutrition facts label. You’ve got to read the ingredient list and then understand how that food fits in the context of your day.

Do you recommend going cold turkey?

Oh no, absolutely not. Any change that you make in your overall eating pattern, you want to make sure that it’s something that’s sustainable and that you can replicate it over time. For most of us, it’s not realistic to say that we’re not going to eat any added sugar. Last night I was at dinner and dessert was brought out, and if I wasn’t eating added sugar, then I couldn’t have taken part in dessert.

“Any change that you make in your overall eating pattern, you want to make sure that it’s something that’s sustainable and that you can replicate it over time.”

I do say slowly reduce to a place that you feel like you can sustain the majority of the time. Think of it in a way where it’s not all or nothing, because sugar really is everywhere.

Some of us love sweets more than others. What’s your advice for those of us with a sweet tooth?

Here’s the thing: One of the challenges when we’re shopping is we rarely purchase one single cookie. Perhaps it’s a bag of cookies. Is there a way to change how the cookie comes into your home? Instead, is there a bakery close by? Could you bake a cookie?

Then maybe it’s just having the cookie after lunch or after dinner. I prefer to have it up against a meal just because you’ve had some protein and fiber in the meal to help slow down the absorption of the sugar into the bloodstream.

Is there a way to retrain our taste buds? A way to make the sweet tooth stop?

You absolutely can. It takes time. When I’m working with folks, I like to figure out how much sugar you have on a regular basis, and in what form you’re getting it. Is it a liquid sugar or is it a solid sugar?

The reason I ask about the liquid is because if someone’s sitting down and they’re having a two-liter bottle of a soda, we can cut it down by half a glass per day over X amount of days. But if it’s like a sleeve of cookies or a cake, then we’re going to have to know what your sugar interactions are over the course of the day. Is it possible that we could reduce it to two sugar interactions from three? Can we cut the portion size? Can we change when you’re having it? Can we change some of your behaviors around what you do after you have it? We go through that level of detail because we eat multiple times per day.

I want to make it applicable to work, relaxation, all of the things, so that when you’re doing that stepdown, it’s not like, “Oh, I’m on my sugar reduction journey now, but it doesn’t apply to other parts of my life or other scenarios.”

We’re living in really stressful times, and I think for a lot of people, a sweet treat at the end of the day is a reward for making it through. But is that a crutch? Are we ultimately doing ourselves more harm than good when we do that?

I don’t actually think so. I understand foods being comforting, and I’m not going to be the person to say, “No, you can’t have that thing after you’ve lived a whole life.” I won’t do it.

But what I will say is, what’s your current health? How can we create a space where you can really enjoy that sweet treat? Let it be a moment, and then move on from it so that it doesn’t become a four-hour activity.

I gave up sugar for Lent this year, and in a few weeks, Lent will be over and I’ll once again be staring down those cookies at my favorite bakery, trying to decide how this is going to fit into my life. What should I do when that happens?

This is forethought: Okay, I know that this is coming and I’m going to have to figure out how this fits in.

I am a huge believer that if you want to have a cookie, it can be a once-in-a-while activity. Once it becomes a staple, then it’s a different story. You can go to the bakery, get that cookie that you love, and savor it when you have it. So don’t eat it walking down the street, but find a special place. If it’s a park bench, if it’s your home, if it’s with a friend or whatever, savor that cookie and then it becomes special.

There was a time when we used to go out for ice cream, and that was a special thing. We’ve lost the specialness of special moments. A treat is supposed to be special.

How to get rid of all of your extra stuff

2026-03-11T14:36:40-04:00

It often feels like people fall into one of two categories: those who throw things away easily, and those who hold onto everything. For those of us who fall into the latter category, tasks like spring cleaning and downsizing can be a challenge, especially when you take into account the amount of stuff we as Americans tend to accumulate.

In fact, 71 percent of Americans say they buy things they already have because they can’t find the original in all of their clutter. And as baby boomers age, they and their children are trying to get a handle on all the things that have accumulated between them.

So what’s the difference between someone who might have a few too many things and someone who could be considered having a hoarding problem?

Mary Dozier is a clinical psychologist and professor at Mississippi State University. She studies hoarding disorder and specializes in intervention to help older adults with hoarding problems, and she says that at the end of the day, it’s subjective.

“The level of clutter that one person finds to be completely functional, another person might find that they can’t use their home the way they want to anymore,” she told Vox. “That’s how I always think about it: is the level of clutter keeping you from using the home how you would like to use it?”

How can we learn to get rid of the clutter in our lives? And when should we hold onto things? Dozier answers these questions and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

You work with people who hold on to too much stuff in a way that really limits them and impacts their lives in a negative way. But I think a lot of us struggle to manage our things. Why do we hold on? What’s going on with us?

I think of the items we have as an external manifestation of ourselves. We tend to hold onto things from either our past or family members’ past because it gives us this sense of where we’ve come from. But we also often hold onto things because of the promise of who we could be.

The silly example I have from my life is a pasta maker. It’s embarrassing, but a whole decade ago, I took a pasta-making class with my husband, and in the class, it was really easy, and so we were like, “We’re definitely going to go home and make pasta.” We tried it once. It was not easy. And I think some of those dreams are easier to let go of than others.

How often is throwing everything out the answer? Like, should we just throw that pasta maker in the garbage?

I felt my heart rate go up when you said that. Truthfully, one of the things we know is that when people have really, really severe hoarding problems, it’s not safe for them to be in their home.

Sometimes what has to happen is this massive cleanout, but it’s an incredibly traumatic thing that it’s the same kind of a PTSD response as if you lost your home in a tornado, because in essence, you did. A tornado swept through your home and took everything away.

I know that there’s a broad spectrum of minimalism to maximalism, but I think I’m a fan of keeping the things around us that help us feel like who we are. It’s that external way that we present the world, whether it’s through our clothing or our accessories or the clutter that we have in our handbags. The things that we choose to keep on ourselves or to keep in our home signal to the world of who we think that we are.

I’m curious if things like the Marie Kondo method or any of those other kinds of minimalist decluttering hacks work for the people that you help. Is it that simple or is there a little more there?

I think there’s more to it, and especially to the idea of sparking joy. If you put a puppy in front of me, I’m going to say this puppy is sparking some joy right now. There’s a difference between happiness and fulfillment.

I always encourage people to go through your clutter and think about what you want to keep and what you want to let go of. Starting before you even do that, ask yourself what are your values? What do you care about in the world? What’s important for you in a broader sense? And then as you’re going through these items, thinking through if that item is consistent with those values.

You don’t have to hold onto something out of guilt. If somebody gives you a present and you don’t want it, that’s okay. It doesn’t say anything about you or your friendship with that person to not keep that item. That guilt shouldn’t be part of why you’re holding onto things.

In your opinion, what are some of the good reasons not to get rid of stuff?

Come back to that sense of what this item is doing for you. Is it that this is the one thing that seeing it gives you that connection to your grandfather? I think sometimes people get lost in, “I’m going to hold onto everything that reminds me of my grandfather. I’m going to hold onto everything that’s about this dream I could be.” Try to think through why you keep things and how many of those things you need to keep.

Are there ways that we can reframe clutter to better serve us?

I think it can be helpful to take that step back and think, “If there wasn’t anything in this home, what would I want to be in here?” Everything that you keep, you’re making a decision to keep, and sometimes people default to that decision because it’s hard to think through.

But you’re still making that choice. That inaction in itself is still an action, which I think is probably one of those broader truths about life. Are you staying in a relationship because you’re choosing to be in that relationship every day, or are you staying in the relationship just because it’s what you’ve been doing? You can kind of think about our relationships with our items.

I think, as boomers age and younger generations start to get more of their stuff, it can be like, “What do you do with it?” Do you have any advice for that?

There’s something called Swedish Death Cleaning. I don’t know if you’ve come across it, but it’s basically putting the responsibility on the baby boomers: They’re the ones that should be going through their things before we’re inheriting it. It’s this idea of cleaning out your things before you die.

It’s something that I deal with a lot of my patients that I’ve treated. These older adults who will say things like, “I could get rid of these things, but I want to make sure it goes somewhere where it’s going to be appreciated. I want my daughter to inherit my wedding china but I know that right now she doesn’t want it.” And so they’re holding onto it as this responsibility for it. Our responsibility is to people, but not necessarily to things.

Is it possible to be a happy maximalist?

Absolutely. It comes back to if it’s dysfunctional or not. If your home is filled to the brim, but you’re living a healthy, happy life in that environment, that’s absolutely okay.

It’s all about the subjectivity of it. Just because there might be a current cultural norm for minimalism or — I know cottagecore was in for a while — these trends come and go, but think about what’s your truth of how you like your space to be.

Are you someone who likes a completely blank wall, or do you want it to be gallery style? I think whatever somebody’s truth may be is good if you’re healthy, if you’re happy, if it’s not hurting anyone.

Are more people getting ADHD — or are we just catching more cases?

2026-03-06T15:04:26-05:00

For many of us who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — better known as ADHD — seemed like a condition for kids.

But that perception is changing: Of the more than 15 million adults in America diagnosed with ADHD, about half of them got that diagnosis in adulthood. Laura Knouse, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at University of Richmond, says that the condition can be a challenge to diagnose, leading to delays.

“If we think about the core features of ADHD, it’s characterized by age-inappropriate and impairing inattention and it can occur by itself or with hyperactivity impulsivity,” she said. “What we know about these kinds of symptoms is that they can be because of ADHD, but they could be the result of so many other mental health conditions or other kinds of lifestyle factors.”

How did we get to our current understanding of ADHD? And why has there been an uptick in diagnoses? Knouse answers these and other questions in the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Historically, when did we first hear about ADHD?

The traits we associate with ADHD probably have existed in humans as long as they have been humans. But in terms of the medical literature, we can rewind the clock all the way back to 1775. A German physician named Melchior Adam Weikard is now the first documented clinical case description.

It was also independently discovered in different places through the 1800s.

Then in the early 1900s, we start to see more mental disorders in general. ADHD didn’t become part of the diagnostic system that’s used in the United States until 1968, and the name of it has changed a number of times. It was first referred to as the hyperkinetic reaction of childhood. Then moving into the ’70s and ’80s, it evolved to not just focus on the behavior, but also the cognitive processes. That’s where we get a name change to attention deficit disorder.

It wasn’t really until the ’90s that, even in clinical spaces, the idea that ADHD persists into adulthood became a prominent thing. We know that about 50 percent of ADHD cases persist into adulthood. But for a long time it was like, well, this kid’s just going to outgrow this so we don’t have to worry about it in adulthood. But now we know that is not the case.

Do we know what causes ADHD?

What we find when we’re talking about the core ADHD symptoms, the extent to which this varies between people is about 80 percent heritable — about as heritable as differences in human height. The place where the environment becomes exceedingly important is in the extent to which somebody with these ADHD traits experiences impairment.

One of the well-established ways to treat ADHD is with medications. Certain stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin are pretty widely used. But they don’t work for everyone. What are some of the other ways ADHD is treated? Are they just as effective?

There are non-stimulant classes of medications: atomoxetine, various other non-stimulant medications. From the research overall, they don’t tend to be as effective as the stimulants.

The other thing is everybody’s brain is a little bit different. It would be so nice if we could just say, “Well, everyone is going to respond to this drug in this way,” but if someone doesn’t like how a stimulant makes them feel, that’s totally fine. They should talk to their doctor about trying some of these alternatives.

Anyone can benefit from general supportive counseling, but where we really see the larger effects for adult ADHD is cognitive behavioral therapy for adult ADHD, where you’re working with a mental health professional on skills that address the inattentive and impulsive symptoms.

In the biological therapy space, there is some exciting stuff going on with something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. It’s a way of stimulating the brain in certain ways that is showing signs of being able to relieve symptoms, at least for limited periods of time.

And finally, with this disorder, there have been a ton of unproven or disproven treatments out there. So I encourage buyer beware. I sit on the professional advisory board for an organization called Children and Adults with ADHD, and I would just encourage listeners to go to CHADD’s website in the National Resource Center for ADHD if they have a question about what’s the evidence for this kind of treatment.

Are you seeing an increase in people who have ADHD?

That’s such a great question, and I think to answer it, you have to draw a distinction between an increase in the number of people getting diagnosed with ADHD versus if there is a true increase in what an epidemiologist would call the prevalence of ADHD in the population.

I still can’t find solid evidence that the prevalence of the well-defined, neurobiologically related traits of ADHD are increasing. However, the thing I get concerned about as a clinician is there’s clear evidence that for certain populations, ADHD is still vastly underdiagnosed and undertreated. These populations may be the ones that are least visible to us on social media and even in advocacy spaces sometimes. These are the people that probably also have the least access to care. I want to highlight that it can simultaneously be over and underdiagnosed — depending on who you’re talking about.

I think we’ve seen a real rise in people talking about ADHD on social media, and there are even ADHD influencers. How accurate is what we’re seeing online?

I had a lot of fun looking up the very recent research studies on this that are fascinating. A couple of studies have taken the top videos on TikTok, and then had experts rate the quality of the information that is in these videos. There are only a couple studies, but they all land around that basically 50 percent of what’s on #ADHD TikTok videos is not accurate. There’s a lot of what I would call misinformation: not that people are necessarily trying to spread misinformation, but I think a lot of the content tends to communicate personal experiences. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I do think there is a risk of possibly overpathologizing experiences that are just part of normal human experience.

On the other hand, it’s a tremendous opportunity for awareness for advocacy. I really think we so-called experts are really dropping the ball here. In one of the studies, almost none of these top videos were put out by people like me who study this for a living. We have got to change that.

How Americans learned to love the credit card

2026-02-23T10:47:46-05:00

Americans are in serious debt. Together, we owe nearly $1.3 trillion in credit card debt alone; our average balance is around $6,500 each. Owing that much can be scary, not to mention overwhelming. And all of that debt has created some seriously strange political bedfellows: President Donald Trump has proposed capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent for one year, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), is into the idea too. (Banks, unsurprisingly, are not.)

Key takeaways

Department stores started extending credit to customers around the beginning of the 20th century.
Banks got in on the credit game as a way to keep customers and make money during the white flight of the 1960s.
The Supreme Court eventually ruled that interest rates were determined by where the company extending credit was based, and not where customers lived. This sent banks to states with fewer regulations, and interest rates went higher.

But how did credit card interest rates get so high — upward of 24 percent — in the first place? That’s a question for Sean Vanatta, a professor at the University of Glasgow and author of the book Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control, which tells the history of the credit card industry in the United States.

Vanatta says the story starts at department stores around the turn of the 20th century: “These are huge palaces of consumption. They’re in part marketing themselves on the availability of credit. You initially get something called a credit token. They eventually are cards that have your name, your account number, and your address embossed on them. This connects to a mechanical billing system that then creates carbon paper slips that are then billed to your house.”

So how did we go from these paper slips to the credit industry we have today? Vanatta answers that question and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversations, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

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How did credit go from department stores to the banking industry?

The department stores after World War II begin to expand outside of the central cities and compete with small local merchants. What begins to happen in the 1950s, and then to a much bigger extent in the 1960s, is that banks get into the credit card market. The banks go around to the small stores and say, “Listen, we can pull you all together into a centralized credit plan, and then you’ll be able to offer credit that competes with department stores.”

At the same time, there’s the development of what are called travel and entertainment cards. You have business executives who need to wine and dine clients and who are traveling all the time. For them, it’s cards like Diners Club and American Express, which are really built on enabling you to more easily manage your expense account, to entertain clients, to impress people that you have a gold American Express card.

In the 1950s and 1960s, banks are increasingly looking to consumers as a new source of loans: home mortgages or auto loans. But if you’re the biggest bank in Chicago and all of the affluent customers are moving out to the suburbs, you have a problem. Banks under state laws in some states couldn’t build more than one branch, so all the biggest banks are built in the city center where the businesses are. Banks like Continental Illinois, like the First National Bank of Chicago, all begin to see credit cards as a way to attract these affluent customers, to get them to continue to do their banking with central city banks. It’s really about suburbanization, it’s about white flight out of cities, and that is part of what’s driving banks into the credit card market in the 1960s.

What did these early cards feel like? You know, if I’m out to dinner with my friends, you throw that heavy gold card on the table, but I imagine the cards did not feel like that.

You start to get the plastic cards in the late 1950s, and this is real innovation. There’s an inventor who essentially invents the equipment to emboss plastic cards. He goes and sells this idea to Bank of America and eventually to American Express. If you look at an old American Express credit card, it has this little thing at the bottom that says “member since” and then a two-digit date. The reason that exists is because this inventor wanted to demonstrate that his machine could emboss more numbers than other competitors, and this was a way to market that embossing technology.

“There’s all sorts of things like credit card points, which help the most affluent people get further rewards for spending money they were already going to spend.”

Oh, that’s so wild. I just thought it was just so you can flex how long you’ve had that card!

But that’s part of it, right? It’s like credit is a kind of status. And so the American Express card in particular has always tried to build itself up as this status symbol.

When credit cards came out, were there any rules around the types of interest that could be charged?

One of the reasons why banks found credit cards attractive is because it was a new technology, and it wasn’t regulated. Banks were charging very high rates on credit cards. Consumers would tend to pay between one and a half and two percent a month. People are not very good at math, so that seemed cheap.

Then in 1968, Congress enacted something called the Truth in Lending Act, which says you have to present interest rates as a simple annual rate. So all of a sudden, people are seeing, “Oh, I’m being charged 18 percent or 24 percent.” And that is a huge shock. So what happens is the states tend to limit rates to between 15 and 18 percent. The rules in each state are different and kind of complicated and as banks are developing their sort of credit card networks, they begin to mail cards across state lines.

There’s a big fight centered around a bank called the First National Bank of Omaha, which begins mailing cards into Iowa and Minnesota. The interest rates in Nebraska are not especially high but they’re a little bit higher than what’s allowed in Iowa and Minnesota. From a consumer’s perspective, if you live in Iowa and you only ever use your card in Iowa, why would you expect that Nebraska interest rates are what would apply to you?

So then the state attorney generals and individual consumers begin to sue the First National Bank of Omaha saying that they’re charging too much. This creates a whole slew of legal cases that end up in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court says, “Well, the law is pretty clear. The bank is in Nebraska, so the transactions are in Nebraska, and so Nebraska law applies.”

So the Supreme Court rules that it’s where a bank is based that all of this is factored on, not where the customer is?

That’s right. You have these nationwide networks, which become known as Visa and Mastercard. A bank can then locate itself in whichever state has the most favorable regulations and solicit cardholders across the country. In the 1970s, Citibank is one of the largest banks in the country, but it can’t build branches outside of New York. It’s a huge global bank. They have offices all across the world. Its bankers are some of the most sophisticated in terms of figuring out what the rules are and figuring out how to circumvent them.

Citi is borrowing money and the rates at which it borrows money begin to skyrocket in the late 1970s as there’s a massive wave of inflation. The Federal Reserve really ratchets up rates to try to combat inflation. The problem that Citibank has is New York has really strict interest rate restrictions at the time. So all of a sudden Citibank is paying more for the money that it’s borrowing from investors than it can charge cardholders. And so every time someone uses a Citibank card, Citibank is losing money. Citibank needs some kind of fix, and they find it in South Dakota, which didn’t have any restrictions on credit card interest rates.

Citibank comes to them and says, “Listen, we’d love to put hundreds of jobs in your state. If you’ll just invite us to open a branch or open a bank there, we’ll move our credit card division there.” And that’s what happens. Citibank relocates to South Dakota and then is able to charge whatever interest rate they want. Delaware enacts a law that enables the same thing. So most big banks actually move their credit card operations to Delaware. And that in turn leads to things that we recognize, where it’s really hard to get a card with a decent interest rate and banks have the freedom to change those rates as they will.

When I don’t pay my credit card in full and I have to pay that interest, where does that interest go?

It goes to the banks. Credit card lending is consistently one of the highest profit areas for banks. And you see that banks that specialize in credit cards make much more money than banks that don’t. Part of it is profits to stockholders. Then there’s all sorts of things like credit card points, which help the most affluent people get further rewards for spending money they were already going to spend. A lot of it goes to advertising. There’s this kind of circuity to it where you are paying for advertising to encourage you to do the thing that you probably don’t want to do. But the banks would say, If we’re going to grant people with lower credit scores credit, they’re riskier. And for most people to have access to credit, we need to charge them higher rates.

What you see if you look at US history over the last 70 to 80 years is the economy runs on household borrowing. Mortgages, car loans, credit cards. Now it’s “buy now, pay later.” You see that household debt goes up and up and up and up. You add student loans into that mix. And people feel that precarity. They feel that risk. They feel the weight of all of that debt. But it’s the most affluent, the people who have access to the airport lounges, who have the high points cards, who get all the benefits and the rest of us pay all the costs.

How communities rally when the government fails them

2026-02-17T12:42:34-05:00

People prepare food packages for immigrants at the Dios Habla Hoy church, in Minneapolis in January 2026. | Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

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We spend a lot of time talking to strangers online these days. But how are our neighbors down the street doing? Is there something they could use a little help with? A way they need to be supported? That’s the focus of mutual aid.

This kind of hyper-local assistance covers a wide range of actions: collecting food and funds for those in need, organizing free item exchanges, or walking a child to and from school because of immigration raid fears.

Humans have been helping each other out as long as we’ve been around. But Fordham University associate professor Tyesha Maddox says we can trace the tradition in the US back to early immigrant communities. She details this history in her book A Home Away From Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity. We look at the history in the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Where did the term “mutual aid” even come from in the first place?

That’s kind of controversial only because this idea of mutual aid is one that’s not new. Many communities, particularly immigrant communities of color, have always followed mutual aid ideology. In my book, I talk about Caribbean societies following a mutual aid ideology that they inherited from groups in West Africa. However, the terminology for mutual aid comes from the 1800s with Peter Kropotkin, who was an activist and anarchist who coined the term “mutual aid.”

How did Kropotkin define the term?

He was thinking of mutual aid as an egalitarian, self-directed project. It’s a form of political change or participation in which people take responsibility for themselves. This is particularly common when government institutions are not involved in helping out with everyday needs of the people, so the people have to take it upon themselves to take care of their daily needs.

Who were the earliest communities to practice mutual aid in America?

In African American communities, particularly those in Antebellum society, we have examples of mutual aid. In the North, there were free Black societies that participated in mutual aid, particularly around schools for free people or the formerly enslaved. In places like Philadelphia and New York, in the late 19th century, we see immigrant groups such as Chinese and Jewish communities. In all of these groups, we see examples of things like providing insurance for each other, particularly workers’ comp, when workers’ comp was not a thing. And so if you got sick on the job and you couldn’t go to work, they provided a portion of your wages to you.

For many people who come as immigrants, they usually come by themselves. And so mutual aid provided connection for immigrants who are in a new city, in a new country. Another really important function of these mutual aids that we see across many of the groups, particularly in the US, in the Chinese, Caribbean, and Jewish groups, are collective funds which members paid into. In the Caribbean communities, they were called “susu,” and what they were were rotating credit practices. Everyone put in a certain amount of money and then you had a chance to take out that money to use for small loans in order to pay household expenses and mortgages or their rent or just to survive. These associations were really important for financial as well as moral support for immigrant groups.

How do we see mutual aid ebb and flow throughout history?

We see a rise particularly in the period that I study. I follow 1890 to 1940, and we see mutual aid expand exponentially in this period, particularly before World War II. Then we see a weaning-back of mutual aid once we have more government institutions that are being implemented. I think that takes away the need for some of the groups, but not all of them, and so many of them persist. There are Caribbean immigrant mutual aids that I follow that are still in existence today — and have been in existence since the 1920s.

I would say we see the ideology of mutual aid being applied in many of the social movements in the 1950s and the 1960s in particular. I think one of the most popular examples would be that of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers were not a mutual aid group, but they definitely practiced many of the ideals of mutual aid. There was a free ambulance program, they had free clothing and shoes. They had legal aid education. They provided a free breakfast program in schools for children in various cities. I think many of the more modern social justice movements have all had an aspect of mutual aid as part of them.

Are there any other differences in the way mutual aid functions now versus the way it’s functioned in the past?

I would say the major difference is the way in which the groups are connected. So as opposed to being based on where you’re from, the groups that have formed in more recent years tend to be based on current communities or neighborhoods. They don’t have as long of a history, but I think the ideals are the same: in looking within the group and helping members out for things that they need in order to keep going.

What do you think draws people to mutual aid in this particular moment that we’re in now?

I think there is this sense that no one is going to save us but ourselves, and we have to be responsible for our communities — particularly when we don’t see the government stepping in to fill these needs of the group. So for instance, there was a reduction in FEMA assistance, so these impacted communities take it upon themselves to help their neighbors. I think this reliance on ourselves has increased, particularly in 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when the government didn’t have a plan for people and how we were going to care for each other, but we saw many of our neighbors in need.

If someone wants to start participating in mutual aid, where do they begin?

I would start with trying to see if there are mutual aid groups that are in your neighborhood or in your community, because in many cases, there actually are. And so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You look to the older groups who are already there and join those. And if there aren’t, then you take it upon yourself to try to start those groups, get together with a few of your neighbors, pool some resources and see what are the needs of your community, and then start by trying to fill those needs in the ways that you can.

The mysterious symptom popping up in some GLP-1 users

2026-02-17T16:03:46-05:00

If you watched the Super Bowl, you might have noticed that a lot of the ads were for weight-loss drugs. Even Serena Williams was selling them. That’s because demand for GLP-1s has skyrocketed over the last year, with users more than doubling from 2024.

GLP-1s are relatively new and the industry is rapidly expanding, so we’re still learning more about their long-term effects. Users report fatigue and nausea as being quite common during use. But with more people using the drug, more side effects are popping up.

Dr. Sera Lavelle is a clinical psychologist who noticed several of her patients reporting a strange GLP-1 side effect: extreme apathy. She told Today, Explained co-host Jonquilyn Hill that it isn’t quite depression, but more of a “missing spark,” making people lose interest in things they previously loved.

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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When did you first start noticing people having a psychological reaction to GLP-1s?

I first started looking into this about a year ago. It was kind of the same conversation with three different patients in the same week, and I started noticing they all had this flat affect. None of them were depressed, but each was saying things like, “Well, what’s the point?” “Maybe I don’t even care about that job promotion.” “I don’t know what it is, but I’m not even excited to go out with my friends.” And these three in particular had been on GLP-1s. And of course, you can’t make an inference based on three people, but it is what motivated me to start looking into more of the psychological effects, particularly around what we do and do not know about how GLP-1s affect dopamine and motivation-seeking behavior.

The other thing is that there’s a big difference between a person being depressed [versus the GLP-1 side effects], which they have started looking into. Does it affect suicidality and depression? You have to think about depression like, yes, it can be that kind of apathy feeling. However, depression really implies a negative affect: Like, I’m no good, I don’t feel like existing, right? That’s very different than a flatness.

It sounds like it’s not even sadness, it’s just nothing.

The same excitement you might get from, ‘Ooh, I’m going to eat this pizza later,’ or ‘Ooh, I’m going to see my friend later,’ you’re dampening this anticipatory response. So one of the theories in the literature is that it’s not just changing your appetite and metabolism, because, think about it, if it’s also helping gambling and shopping addictions, that can’t be just about metabolism.

So how are we making sense of this? That it is helping people not eat as much, they’re not getting that food noise, but they’re also not gambling and shopping. And of course we look at all three of those as negative, but what kind of positives might it be dulling? Because again, it doesn’t seem like it’s leading to something clinically diagnosable, like depression, that there’s more of these personal reports coming out of people saying, “I feel flat.”

I wonder how you think of GLP-1s. Is this a net negative? A net positive?

I have to think of it [as] very nuanced. I really hate that people are in the pro or negative GLP-1 camp. I see positives in terms of mental health for some people. I’ve worked with so many people with a history of binge eating disorder that might be a hundred pounds overweight, and it’s not just about them losing weight, looking good or being healthier, but those people have lost all psychological hope that it could ever change. If you are a hundred pounds overweight and you’re extremely upset about it and you’ve given up all hope, I think GLP-1s can be not just this physical lifesaver, but this light at the end of a tunnel for you.

But then we can’t talk about that person the same as the person who struggles with anorexia, who is abusing it because it’s their dream drug. It makes them not think about food. People with anorexia traditionally hate even thinking about food. They hate feeling hungry. It scares them. So if you’re already a hundred pounds, you hear that, oh, now I can take a pill that’s going to make me not think about food or feel hungry at all. To me, that’s a huge problem. So net positive, net negative within society? Probably equal. Whereas I think there’d be a net positive in some populations and a very net negative in others.

There are lots of physiological things we’re still learning about weight gain and weight loss, but the psychological impacts seem just as complex and difficult to manage.

They’re really complicated. Do we as a society think of obesity as strictly metabolic, or do we think of it as strictly psychological, like a binge eating disorder? But what you’re finding even with GLP-1s is that if there is a psychological component to it, that it’s more emotional eating, stress, as opposed to in response to the sight or taste of food, it’s not going to be as effective, and you’re more likely to go back to the same behaviors after going off of them.

If you have a client that’s taking GLP-1s, what’s something you want them to look out for?

I have very mixed feelings about it. There are patients I would recommend going on them for psychological reasons. Sometimes people do need a break from that food noise. It is so overwhelming. However, you want to do a lot of prep work if they’re ever planning on going off of them, because especially a person who’s kind of frantic at the idea of that food noise, of those cravings, thinking something’s wrong with them, if they get them when you go off, that’s going to be, I dunno, two to four times more intense than prior to even going on them. What you’ll find is then if they go off of them, they don’t remember what they were like before and they go, “Oh, see, I was always like this.” And it can then reinforce this idea that there’s something wrong with them. So I think a lot of preparation about going off of them and what it’s going to be like for you when your cravings return, and what are you going to do if those actually feel quite intense, and normalizing the fact that it’s going to be intense so that they know to prepare for that.

Do you ever worry that we’re going to live in a society where, like, 80% of people have that flat sort of nothing feeling?

Could it get so normalized within society that it creates this large impact? I am not willing to be fearful of that. I think it would find its place the way that we had a lot of fear that Prozac would do that to everybody, and maybe it was over-prescribed at a certain point, but it kind of found its place within society.

I do have concerns about the health impact. Doctors are saying, “Okay, well, take your GLP-1s and this is going to make you less motivated for food, but we somehow expect you to have more motivation to change your diet and to exercise.” If it’s gonna dampen your desire to kind of eat, isn’t it also going to dampen your desire, like that high you get from working out, or that [thought], “Hey, I wanna be healthier, maybe I should go for a salad.” If you think the only reason to eat better is to lose weight and something else is making you lose weight, that might actually give you inherently less motivation to eat better.