Four stories that are more important than the Epstein Files

Over the past couple of weeks, one story has overshadowed every other, no matter how important they might be: Jeffrey Epstein.

Unless you’ve been taking your summer vacation on Mars, you probably know the contours of the story. (And if you don’t, my Vox colleague Andrew Prokop wrote a useful summary this week.) But what matters here isn’t so much the details as it is the sheer, unrelenting attention it has commanded.

Between July 6, before the story really began to blow up, and July 13, online searches on the topic increased by 1,900 percent, according to a Newsweek analysis. A CNN analyst noted that over roughly the same time scale, Epstein was Googled 2.5 times more than Grok — this during the AI model’s, uh, newsworthy launch — and 1.4 times more than tariffs.

The furor over the case has led to Congress essentially shutting down early for the summer, a Republican effort to evade Democrats’ sudden and politically convenient demands for transparency. It’s not too much to say that the business of America has all but halted because of a years-old criminal case.

I’m not saying the Epstein case is totally without importance. The crime was horrific, the investigation details murky, and the political ramifications if the case shakes the president’s connection to his political base are obviously meaningful. (And if you want to read about any of that, well, good news — you have no shortage of sources.) But there is virtually no way we’ll look back in 20 years and think that the relitigation of the Epstein case was clearly the most important thing happening in the world in July 2025.

Attention is a finite resource, and you are where your attention is. A story like Epstein is analogous to a mindless, out-of-control fire consuming all the oxygen in a burning house. So I thought I’d put together a list of four stories happening right now that matter far more for the country and the world than the contents of the Epstein Files. And fair warning — they’re not all good news stories, but they absolutely are worth your attention.

Through the first nine months of the 2025 fiscal year, which goes up to this June, the United States spent $749 billion on interest on the national debt, more than it spent on anything other than Social Security. Not the debt itself — just the interest. And our debt problem is accelerating: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), President Donald Trump’s recently passed budget bill will add $3.4 trillion to the national balance sheet over the next decade.

You might say: So what? Budget scolds have been warning about the debt since at least the 1980s, and the most dire predictions have yet to come true. But as the economist Herbert Simon once warned, referring specifically to unsustainable economic policies: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” While “there’s no magic number at which the debt load becomes a full-on crisis,” as my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote last year, just about everything that is happening now — including persistently high interest rates, which make debt that much more painful, as anyone with a recent mortgage knows — indicates that crisis point is on its way.

And what will happen then? The CBO warns that unless budget patterns shift dramatically, the country will face an unpalatable mix of massive tax hikes, severe cuts to essential services, even default. And our debt problem intersects catastrophically with some of America’s other generational challenges, like the fertility and aging crisis (see No. 3) and the country’s ability to defend itself (No. 4).

I’ve written before about the long-term improvements in child mortality and extreme poverty. Those trends are real, and they represent some of the best reasons to feel optimistic about the world.

But positive long-term trends can mask periods of setback. When it comes to childhood hunger, the world is in danger of falling back. A new UNICEF report shows that after more than two decades of consistent progress, child stunting — early-life malnutrition that can lead to less growth and lifelong health problems — appears to be rising again. And while the humanitarian catastrophe that is Gaza at least has the world’s attention, if not enough of its help, hunger is spreading in other countries that remain under the radar.

In Africa’s largest country of Nigeria, nearly 31 million people face acute food insecurity — almost equivalent to the population of Texas. Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Yemen have all seen alarming reversals in childhood nutritional health. Add in surges in food prices driven by extreme weather, and the devastating effects of cuts in US food aid, and you have a recipe for a problem that is getting worse at the very moment when the willingness to help is eroding.

When it comes to long-term, world-changing trends, climate change gets most of the attention (if not necessarily the action). But there’s another challenge unfolding in nearly every country in the world that will be just as transformative — and for which we may be even less prepared.

That’s the population slowdown. In 2024, the US fertility rate hit an all-time low of less than 1.6 births per woman, far below the 2.1 required to maintain the current population level. While other countries like Japan or Italy will get there sooner, the US is absolutely on a path to an aging, shrinking future. As early as 2033, annual deaths are predicted to outpace annual births, while by 2050, one in every five Americans will be over the age of 65.

Given that a generation ago, we were worrying about global overpopulation, many people seem to think a smaller population would largely be a good thing. Certainly that’s what my emails suggest every time I write about the issue. Well, let me tell you this: It will not. (Even for climate change, apparently.)

An aging and eventually shrinking population will put more stress on everything from health care to pension systems to economic productivity, in ways that — absent some kind of technological miracle — will make us poorer, and will change life in ways we can only begin to imagine. And no one really has any idea how to fix it, or if it’s even fixable at all.

The Cold War ended nearly 35 years ago. For all of that time, the US has enjoyed a historically unprecedented position of global military supremacy. Americans have lived with the background assumption that the US would never really face a war with a true geopolitical rival — and certainly wouldn’t lose one. Of all our national privileges, that might be the most foundational one. But that foundation is in danger of crumbling.

Geopolitical tensions — especially with China — are escalating, yet America’s military readiness is quietly degrading. The US Navy’s current annual budget is over a quarter-trillion dollars, but the service still maintains about the same number of ships as in 2003. While the US builds about five commercial ships a year, China builds more than 1,000, and its naval fleet is already larger.

At the same time, America’s munitions reserves are dangerously low. In supporting Israel during its recent conflict with Iran, nearly 14 percent of the US’s vital THAAD missile interceptor inventory was expended — just replenishing those stores may take up to eight years. Meanwhile, Pentagon authorities temporarily paused shipments of Patriot missiles and other critical air-defense systems to Ukraine amid global stockpile pressures. US air defenses now reportedly have only a quarter of the interceptors needed for all the Pentagon’s military plans. Should a major conflict pop up in, oh I don’t know, Taiwan, essential munitions could be depleted far faster than production could replace them. That’s how you lose wars.

None of these stories are scandals, and none of them generate great social media content. They’re hard, long-term, wonky, even boring. But they are important. And they deserve our attention.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!