There are few animals humans fear more than sharks. This is understandable: Sharks are big, dramatic creatures that have been permanently lodged in our culture as underwater killers since Jaws.

They also kill about six people in a given year. Snakes, on the other hand, kill roughly 100,000. After mosquitoes, which spread diseases like malaria, and humans, who just murder each other, snakes are the deadliest animals on Earth.

The surprise isn’t just that snakes kill so many people, but that the scale of this death and suffering has only recently become clearer. In India, where roughly half of the world’s snakebite deaths happen, official reports had long recorded only about 1,000 snakebite deaths a year. But many victims die in villages, on farms, or on their way to hospitals, and until recently, India did not require snakebite cases or deaths to be systematically reported through its public health system. Researchers using household death surveys and verbal autopsies have more recently estimated that the real number is close to 60,000 a year in India alone.

That gap in data is a big part of the reason why snakebites are so deadly in the first place. Antivenoms exist, and modern antivenoms can work well when given in time. But snake venom differs from one snake species to the next. Different species carry different mixes of toxins that can attack the nervous system, muscles, or tissue in different ways. That means antivenoms often have to be matched to the various snakes found in a given region; an antivenom made for one set of snakes may do little against another. Antivenoms are also expensive to produce and buy, and hard to keep reliably stocked in the rural clinics where they’re needed most.

But medicine is only half the problem. Once a person gets bitten, they have to recognize the danger, reach a hospital or clinic in time, and that clinic has to have an appropriate antivenom in stock, often without anyone knowing exactly which snake bit them. The patient also has to be able to afford the treatment. In poor, rural communities, any of those steps can and often do fail.

And because the people most at risk are also among the least able to pay, there has never been much of a market for better snakebite treatments. In fact, in the last two decades, the market has gotten worse with some manufacturers leaving the field altogether.

But things are beginning to change. Scientists are now running human trials on snakebite treatments other than antivenom, including drugs that may not require cold storage or precise species matching. In February, the World Health Organization issued its first formal blueprint for what next-generation snakebite drugs should look like, including treatments that could be given to victims before they reach a hospital. And in 2024, after years of severe undercounting, India’s health ministry moved to make snakebite a notifiable disease, meaning every case and death has to be reported to public health authorities, and launched a national plan to bring those deaths down.

The field is “witnessing important developments (not sufficient, but important) on various fronts,” José María Gutiérrez, one of the field’s leading authorities on antivenom at the University of Costa Rica, wrote in an email. But whether any of this reaches the villages where most snakebite deaths happen is a separate question.

How the field got stuck

The basic technology behind antivenoms is more than a century old. In the 1890s, scientists figured out they could inject small amounts of snake venom into animals, usually horses and sheep, wait for their immune systems to produce antibodies, and then harvest those antibodies as treatments.

The manufacturing has gotten a lot more sophisticated since then. The basic animal-based method is still widely used, but modern antivenoms are more carefully purified, processed, and quality-controlled, making them far safer and more effective than earlier versions. But the underlying challenge is still the same. Antibodies have to be matched to specific toxins they are meant to neutralize, and making them at scale is still expensive.

This economic challenge of producing antivenom became most visible in 2014, when Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company, stopped producing Fav-Afrique, a vital antivenom for sub-Saharan Africa that neutralizes venom from 10 of the most dangerous snakes in the region, because it wasn’t profitable enough. That breakdown was a clear illustration of the underlying problem: snakebite kills at an enormous scale, but mostly among people who have little purchasing power.

But things are beginning to look up. In 2019 the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based philanthropy, announced a roughly $100 million, seven-year program to bring snakebite treatment into the 21st century. A review commissioned by Wellcome found that global funding for snakebite research totaled just $57 million from 2007 to 2018, averaging less than $5 million a year.

The new commitment was the largest infusion of funding the field had ever seen, supporting both the search for new kinds of snakebite treatment and efforts to shore up existing antivenom supply. Some of that money went to Wales-based MicroPharm to restart production of Fav-Afrique, the antivenom Sanofi had abandoned.

The big shift now is that researchers are no longer just trying to make better antivenoms. They’re also trying to develop treatments that could get around some of  antivenom’s biggest limitations. And the WHO blueprint gives that shift a more concrete shape. It calls for two kinds of next-gen treatments: drugs that could help in hospitals, alongside or instead of antivenom, and simpler drugs that could be given soon after a bite.

The most advanced new candidate is called varespladib, a drug that can be given as a pill that blocks one of the most damaging families of enzymes in snake venom. In a phase 2 trial, it appeared safe but did not clearly outperform standard care. Researchers now see it more as a field aid. 

There are also efforts to repurpose other existing drugs and test them against snakebites, such as marimastat, a cancer drug, and DMPS, a drug used to treat heavy metal poisoning. Gutiérrez says these repurposed drugs are the most promising near-term options because researchers don’t have to start from zero. They have already been tested for other diseases, which means they can move into snakebite trials much faster than brand new drugs. Clinical trials of some of these repurposed drugs are now underway in the US, India, and Kenya. Further out, researchers are also working on new antibody therapies and AI-designed proteins targeted at specific snake toxins.

These drugs are not meant to replace antivenom, which remains quite effective when given in time. But they could finally move the field beyond where it has been stuck for decades.

The hard part

But the new excitement has yet to pay off. Tim Reed, who runs the Amsterdam-based NGO Health Action International, has long argued that snakebite researchers and funders have chased expensive scientific solutions while community needs go unmet. The pipeline looks promising, he said, but it has yet to bring anything to market. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have died from snakebite in recent years, and many more have been left with life-changing injuries, “with a disproportionate representation of children,” Reed said.

The new drugs may eventually arrive, but Reed worries that when they do, they may still be priced out of reach for rural patients. Even varespladib, which is cheaper to develop than antibody-based treatments, is being brought forward by a small biotech company that will eventually need to recoup its investment. Whether it will be affordable for a farmer in Bihar or western Kenya is separate from whether it works in trials, yet just as important.

Reed argues that the global snakebite world still underfunds the work that can help people now: prevention, first response, and community education. His organization has kept a small snakebite program going with its own funds, supporting school-based prevention work in Kenya and research in Rwanda. Its Women Champions of Snakebite network is still active, and it has helped launch a Snakebite Community Engagement Network run by people in the Global South. These programs are small, but they are built around the communities where snakebite actually happens.

A better snakebite response would have to do both things at once: Develop better drugs while also funding the community work that can prevent snakebites and deaths now. There’s been real progress, more so in some areas of concern than others, but, as Gutiérrez put it, “there is still a long road to go to give this problem the attention it deserves.” 

On Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to thrust another dagger into the nearly lifeless corpse of the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most successful civil rights law in American history. Before the Roberts Court began to dismantle it, the VRA included a web of provisions intended to prevent states from denying anyone the right to vote because of their race. And the law started to dismantle Jim Crow voter suppression almost immediately after it took effect. Just two years after it became law, Black voter registration rates in Mississippi grew from 6.7 percent to 60 percent.

But the Supreme Court’s Republican majority loathes this law. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a 2021 dissenting opinion, her Court “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act. As a young White House lawyer, future Chief Justice John Roberts unsuccessfully pushed then-President Ronald Reagan to veto a 1982 amendment to the VRA that the Court recently repealed in Louisiana v. Callais (2026).

After Callais, it is unclear whether the VRA has any remaining force whatsoever.

The two orders the Court handed down on Monday, meanwhile, concerned an alternative proposal to strangle the Voting Rights Act that Justice Neil Gorsuch floated in a concurring opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the same case where Kagan said that her Court has treated no law worse than the VRA. But the Monday orders neither endorsed Gorsuch’s theory nor rejected it — it merely asked two lower courts that previously considered this theory to consider it again.

The orders came in two cases, Turtle Mountain Band v. Howe, where the lower court backed Gorsuch’s attempt to further neutralize the VRA, and Board of Election Commissioners v. NAACP, where the lower court rejected Gorsuch’s attack on the law.

It’s unclear why this Supreme Court, which has been so relentlessly hostile toward the VRA, decided to punt this latest fight until some future date. It’s also unclear whether this fight still matters, as the Court has already bled the Voting Rights Act so deeply that the law may no longer actually do anything.

Still, as it appears there is still one more big legal dispute looming over this most diminished of federal laws, let’s take stock of just how much of the Voting Rights Act remains.

Does the Voting Rights Act still do anything at all?

Before the Republican justices started to dismantle the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the law used several mechanisms to ensure that voters of color were not locked out of power. As originally enacted in 1965, the law required states with a history of racist election practices to “preclear” any new election laws with officials in Washington, DC, to ensure that those laws did not target voters because of their race. This provision was effectively repealed by Shelby County.

Meanwhile, the 1982 amendment required some states to draw a minimal number of majority-Black or majority-Latino legislative districts. And it forbade a state election law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color,” even if the plaintiffs challenging that law could not prove that it was enacted with racist intent. 

This 1982 amendment was effectively repealed by Callais.

That said, Callais does say that a Voting Rights Act plaintiff may still prevail in very limited circumstances. The law, Justice Samuel Alito claimed in his Callais opinion, “imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” So a voting rights plaintiff may still win their case if they can show that a state law was motivated by racist animus.

Realistically, however, this means that the post-Callais Voting Rights Act does no independent work whatsoever. As Alito acknowledges in Callais, the Constitution already contains a voting rights provision — the 15th Amendment — that, in Alito’s words, “bars only state action ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose.’” So state laws that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race were already illegal before the VRA became law.

Indeed, even prior to the VRA’s enactment in 1965, the Supreme Court did occasionally strike down state election laws that intentionally discriminated on the basis of race, holding that they violated the 15th Amendment. The Voting Rights Act was necessary not because Jim Crow voting laws were legal, but because Jim Crow states were creative. Whenever a court did strike down a state law intended to keep Black people from voting, Southern states would typically respond by enacting a new law that achieved the same goal in a different way — thus forcing civil rights advocates to bring another lawsuit that could take years before another judge issued a new injunction against the new law.

The whole point of preclearance was to prevent racist laws from ever taking effect, and thus prevent Jim Crow lawmakers from outrunning slow-moving courts that were struggling to enforce the 15th Amendment.

Meanwhile, while Jim Crow lawmakers were often quite explicit about their white supremacist goals, by the 1980s most lawmakers who still harbored racist beliefs were shrewd enough not to say such things out loud. The 1982 amendment, which targets state election laws that have negative racial impacts — even if the plaintiffs cannot prove racist intent — was designed to ensure that the VRA would still function even in a world where plaintiffs could not produce direct evidence that a state law was enacted for racist reasons.

The combined effect of Shelby County, Brnovich, Callais, and similar cases, in other words, is to return (or, perhaps, retvrn) US voting rights law to 1964. While some shell of the Voting Rights Act remains on the books, it does not appear to do any independent work that isn’t already done by the 15th Amendment.

And that brings us back to Gorsuch’s proposal in Brnovich, which, if taken to the extreme, could potentially leave voting rights plaintiffs even worse off than they were prior to the Voting Rights Act’s enactment.

Gorsuch wants to make it impossible to sue for violations of the Voting Rights Act

Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in Brnovich suggests that the Voting Rights Act does not include an “implied cause of action.” This means that, if Gorsuch’s view were to prevail in the Supreme Court, no private plaintiff would ever be able to bring a lawsuit alleging a violation of the VRA ever again (although the federal government would still be able to do so, assuming it was controlled by a president who supports voting rights). 

Some federal laws state explicitly that certain individuals or institutions may sue in order to enforce them. When a federal law does not contain such explicit language, however, the Supreme Court has developed a set of rules governing when private parties may sue to enforce the law.

Until last year, these cases were governed by the rule the Court most recently laid out in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023), which held that a federal law may be enforced by private lawsuits if it is “‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited’ and contains ‘rights-creating,’ individual-centric language with an ‘unmistakable focus on the benefited class.’”

Thus, for example, if a federal law says that “no state may prevent an athletic person from riding a bicycle,” this law would be enforceable by private lawsuits because the law’s text focuses on the people who benefit from it (athletic people). A similar statute saying that “states shall not impede access to bicycles” would be unenforceable by private lawsuits, because that hypothetical law lacks the “individual-centric language” demanded by Talevski.

Two years after Talevski, however, the Court appeared to abandon its framework. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), the Court considered whether a statute that permits “any individual eligible for medical assistance” under Medicaid to choose their own health provider could sue after a state denied Medicaid benefits to patients who choose Planned Parenthood as their health provider. 

Although this statute clearly permits Medicaid patients to file lawsuits, at least under the Talevski rule, the Court’s Republicans issued a confusing majority opinion disallowing the suit. It is unclear whether Medina was intended to overrule Talevski, or if it was merely a one-off decision that the Republican justices reached because they did not want to rule in favor of an abortion provider.

That said, Medina does include several pages suggesting that federal laws that use the word “right” in their text may be enforced through private lawsuits.

So, with these two competing frameworks in mind, consider the language of the Voting Rights Act:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color…

Under Talevski, the VRA may be enforced via private lawsuits because the statute is phrased in terms of the people who benefit from it (“any citizen of the United States”). Similarly, while the Medina decision is difficult to parse, it does suggest that statutes that use the word “right” may be enforced by private lawsuits. And that word is front and center in the Voting Rights Act.

Gorsuch’s Brnovich opinion is only a paragraph long, so it does not explain how Gorsuch reached the odd conclusion that the VRA does not authorize private lawsuits. Gorsuch doesn’t even specify whether he thinks that Talevski’s framework, Medina’s framework, or some secret third thing should govern VRA lawsuits.

But he did write that opinion, and it was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. So it appears that there are at least two votes on the Supreme Court to cut off private lawsuits under the VRA altogether.

One uncertain question is whether these two justices would still permit private plaintiffs to sue under the 15th Amendment. Like the Voting Rights Act, the 15th Amendment’s language (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”) should permit suits under either Talevski or Medina. But, if Thomas and Gorsuch are willing to shut down VRA suits in the absence of any law or precedent justifying such an outcome, why wouldn’t they also shut down 15th Amendment suits?

We don’t know. But on Monday, the Court decided to delay resolving this question — the question of whether any private plaintiffs may sue under the VRA — until some future date. So we will have to wait until then to find out if Thomas, Gorsuch, or any other justice wants to make federal law even less favorable to voting rights plaintiffs than it was under Jim Crow.

The Trump administration has a surprising new agenda item: It’s all-in on legalizing a psychedelic drug called ibogaine. 

Ibogaine is classified as a Schedule I drug, which means it’s illegal on the federal level. But some studies show it may be able to treat opioid addiction, and researchers are also hopeful that it can help with PTSD. 

It’s that second use that has caught the White House’s ear. Veterans and veterans’ groups have been lobbying hard for ibogaine as a way to treat PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. Last month, they made some headway on that project when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to fast-track the Food and Drug Administration review process.

Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist writing about drug policy and other topics, told Today, Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill that, naturally, podcaster Joe Rogan was also involved. Busby spoke with Hill about what ibogaine does, how the right got into psychedelics, and whether the FDA could soon approve some of them for use.

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.

When did Trump become interested in psychedelics?

Well, he’s famously never smoked a cigarette, had a drink, certainly not had a trip. So in the Oval Office the other week, he’s kind of joking about taking ibogaine. There’s a lot of bravado there, but ibogaine is an incredibly potent psychedelic. It famously gives people sort of recalls of every traumatic moment in their life. 

It’s an extracted molecule from a West African — Gabonese, specifically — root bark from a shrub, and basically became known as being able to rid opioid addicts, heroin addicts, of withdrawal symptoms in one trip. 

Ibogaine and psychedelics have now entered the mainstream conversation with the Trump administration talking about legalizing certain psychedelics. How did we get here?

Psychedelics have obviously long belonged to the cultural left, the counterculture, but it seems now there’s almost like a counter-counterculture with these right-wing, mostly Christian former special forces fighters, soldiers in the US Army, that are suffering from really debilitating conditions — from PTSD and [traumatic brain injuries] — and they’ve basically figured out that ibogaine and other psychedelics provide them the relief that conventional medicines don’t.

How is Joe Rogan involved in the policymaking here?

He’s had figures talking about psychedelics on his podcast since it began. The original sort of bro-cast dude, Aubrey Marcus, he’s had the former Texas governor and Trump’s first energy secretary, Rick Perry, on his podcast twice, along with a Kentucky lawyer and ibogaine advocate named Bryan Hubbard, who sounds like a Christian Southern revivalist and always quotes his favorite passage out of Isaiah.

Joe Rogan had this unlikely duo — who have both done ibogaine and are waxing lyrical about the benefits — on his podcast like three weeks before the executive order and they basically said, “Look, Joe, we need to make this happen.” So Joe texts Donald Trump, and apparently Donald Trump responds almost instantaneously saying, “Sounds good. Do you want FDA approval?”

This culminates with Joe Rogan actually going to the White House to attend the signing of an executive order about psychedelics. What’s in that executive order?

The thing about the executive order is it is sort of shouting into the wind a bit, but there is this money to go into the research side. 

It has five or six prongs. One of the main ones is that now under [the Right to Try Act] that Trump [signed] in his first term to allow end-of-life patients to try experimental drugs. That will be extended to psychedelics, so long as the DEA doesn’t try and obstruct that process. 

There’s $50 million for psychedelic research, most of which it seems is going to support state-led initiatives to investigate ibogaine and allow a US-first human trial. It’s also accelerating the path to a potential approval for psychedelic drugs. Three candidates that just submitted their data got fast-tracked for potential approval, so their applications will be considered more quickly. This would open the floodgates more widely to research.

Do you expect the FDA to say, “This is great, go ahead, use psychedelic drugs, they will help you.”

It’s quite likely really, within this presidency, to see several psychedelic drugs approved now. There was talk about [Joe Biden] setting up a federal task force and helping stuff along, and he didn’t seem to put any political will behind it. Trump has really seized the mantle here and he’s surfing the zeitgeist, as he weirdly seems to be able to on certain topics, all the while outraging and provoking us along the way.

There does seem to be some dissonance here, though. The GOP traditionally was all about the war on drugs.

There’s a lot of dissonance. I think that broadly, we’re seeing the war on drugs coming to an end little by little, despite the rhetoric, and I think this is a significant threshold moment. 

Trump’s always been kind of outside the Republican Party establishment compared to some previous presidents. It is not like it’s been some sort of topsy-turvy issue. The Democrats, when they’ve come in, there have been piecemeal changes. Joe Biden himself introduced the law when he was a senator to make the punishments for crack cocaine, which is more likely used by people of color, is like 30 times more stringent than for powder cocaine, which is used more often by white people. I think that there’s been a bipartisan war on drugs.

Do we know who’s using psychedelics? 

I think the interesting thing with psychedelics now, as opposed to maybe 10 or 15 years ago, is that they’ve crossed the political divide. A lot of people from unexpected segments of society are getting turned on because they are seeing, broadly, the benefits, even while there are serious risks, especially with ibogaine.

There was only one drug named in that executive order: ibogaine. Why? 

The veterans. These stories from veterans about the transformative effects of ibogaine have been really difficult to refute politically. Twenty-two veterans, on average, are committing suicide in the US every day. And Trump in the Oval Office, when he signed the order, said that “Since 9/11, we’ve we’ve lost over 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield.”

There are so many [representatives] and senators who are veterans themselves. There was a study from Stanford a couple of years ago that looked at 30 ex-special forces [soldiers] and found that a dose of ibogaine reduced all of their traumatic brain injury significantly. 

But we shouldn’t be under any illusions. This is a seriously potent and dangerous psychedelic when used improperly, and there’s been a whole spate of deaths. Indeed, the deaths are probably underreported because the drug disrupts the QT interval in the heart and can lead in some cases to fatal cardiac arrest.

In an age where it feels like we should all know less about each other, there’s at least one place on the internet where you just want to know more: It’s called r/GirlDinnerDiaries. 

As its name suggests, the subreddit consists of women posting a photo of their meal accompanied by a brief story about what’s happening in their lives. 

That could look like a gripping saga about a raccoon that has chosen terrorism and theft. Or a woman insisting on riding on a motorcycle with the poster’s boyfriend. A large number of the posts are relationship-oriented: the various stages of dating (not, are, breaking up); sex and desire; problems and triumphs in marriages. And sometimes it’s just about eating chocolate cake for supper — okay, maybe it’s never just about chocolate cake.  

The confessions are met with commiseration, helpful suggestions (turn that thieving raccoon into a friend by investing in a puzzle feeder!), supportive advice, or just compliments on the meal. The commentariat is generally as open as the OPs (original posters), speaking frankly about their own experiences. They chime in to offer perspective on the realities of long-term relationships, the very normal reaction of feeling insecure about someone’s extremely beautiful ex, the warning signs of abuse, how expensive it is to raise children, and the difference between setting a boundary and punishing a partner. 

What makes GDD thrilling is that it is (or at least feels like) real secrets from real women. 

The posts aren’t the kind of life updates you’d see on Instagram, nor are they long, multipart “storytime” videos that people post hoping to get hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok. And perhaps that partly explains why the forum now gets more than 2 million visitors per week, according to one of its moderators (who ultimately declined to participate in this story). 

While our collective social media fatigue is high, people are still naturally curious about other people’s lives. And while GDD fulfills that desire, it’s also just a robust and thriving community in its own right — one that can teach us something about the power of a good story, our own curiosities, and the connections we allow ourselves to make. 

What are Girl Dinner Diaries?

GDD was created in January 2026, a spinoff from the original Girl Dinner subreddit. The idea behind a girl dinner is that it’s not a “real,” composed meal, but something messier (e.g., a chaotic assortment of pretzel sticks, crackers, and pickles versus a filet mignon with a side of asparagus and potatoes). 

r/GirlDinner is more food-focused, and centers the untamed spirit of women foraging in their fridges. r/GirlDinnerDiaries is about the girl who’s eating the dinner. (The sub’s description is, “For the feral plates and the feral thoughts. Post your unhinged meals, your relationship spirals, your late-night thoughts, your soft moments, your messy moments.”)

There are three crucial things needed for Girl Dinner Diaries: a girl, a diary entry, and a picture of food. (After publishing, a moderator for Girl Dinner Diaries reached out to Vox to emphasize that being AFAB is not a requirement to participate.) Separately, they can be interesting. But something magical happens when one girl tells one story with a picture of the supper she’s currently eating. It feels like bliss — a secret you’re not supposed to know, and an opportunity for a little moment of connection with a stranger that you didn’t know you needed. 

Alexandra Solomon, a clinical psychologist who specializes in relationships and is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, told Vox that an integral component of human relationships is having witnesses to our lives. Social media seems like an obvious extension of this urge. But with apps feeling increasingly transactional and focused on getting views and likes, these platforms may not be satisfying the emotional connections we’re seeking when we share stories on them. 

We’ve all had the urge to text that friend about the annoying day we had at work, or to call someone to vent about the rude person we just encountered while running errands. The experience you’re discussing could be mundane, salacious, or anything in between, but the important thing is the connection. 

Solomon said that, in general, women are more inclined to do this than men because society encourages women to talk about their feelings, verbally express themselves, tell stories, and have the kind of conversation that “meanders from the ordinary to the profound, back to the ordinary.”

And the anonymity of a subreddit allows for more candid storytelling. While the desire to have people bear witness to our experiences is very human, people aren’t always comfortable telling their loved ones everything. On GDD, those barriers are gone, which allows participants to share and respond more openly.

“I think about my own friends, dear friends that I love, but I wouldn’t tell them I fucked up the laundry,” Solomon said. “Another characteristic of this community, though, is that when you say you fucked up the laundry, you’re going to get affirmation.”

Girl Dinner Diaries is community gossip 

GDD is also a look into how we can create online relationships and spaces that people actively participate in. 

“They’ve done a really nice job of creating community,” Melanie Green, a social psychologist at the University at Buffalo, told me. “They’ve sort of set this social norm of people being kind to each other and supportive of each other.” 

Green studies online friendships, as well as trust and identity on the internet. She explained how GDD’s rules — like “start with decency and restraint,” “engage in good faith,” and “tough love must be loving” — set a standard for how people behave on the site. (Also, if you were wondering, men are allowed to join but are encouraged to only react and comment with emoji and GIFs.) The moderators are also active in making sure the posts and replies follow the rules. Because these guidelines are implemented consistently, it creates a space where people are willing to share with more honesty. 

“Having those norms of supportiveness and positivity and things like that, I think they’ve sort of created a bit of a baseline of trust. It seems like people feel comfortable disclosing,” Green said. 

According to Green, people are naturally curious about other people’s lives, and storytelling creates trust and leads to bonding. “One of the things that stories can do is they help us feel a sense of belongingness. You feel that connection,” Green said. “It makes us feel like, oh, we’re all in here together, experiencing this thing, connecting with someone else who’s having this human experience, and maybe you’ve had a similar experience, and so you kind of resonate with that.” She also pointed to research that food, specifically comfort food — and one could argue these dinners, no matter what they are or what form they take, bring comfort — creates a sense of community. 

The overall effect is something that feels, for those who remember, like the old internet, specifically the comment sections of mid-2000s women’s websites like The Hairpin and Jezebel. The humor and thoughtfulness in the replies are just as valuable and tantalizing as the original posts. Everyone seems to be on the same wavelength and understand the vibe. It also helps that while conversations on GDD can get into darker topics, it’s still relatively (compared to the seriousness of current events) light. 

“Maybe in a world where things are polarized, intense, high-stakes, and urgent, we are craving spaces that are low-stakes, mundane, and ordinary,” Solomon, the psychologist, said. “You’re not going to feel activated or triggered or angry or scared. You’re going to just feel curious and supportive and supported, and you’re probably going to feel maybe a little more regulated when you leave.”

Update, May 19, 4:30 pm ET: This story has been updated with other information on requirements to participate in the subreddit Girl Dinner Diaries.

It lives in a glass castle deep under the sea. 

It’s not a character from The Little Mermaid but a very real, very mysterious marine worm. Known as Dalhousiella yabukii, the worm resides inside a glass sea sponge — a simple marine animal that forms a glass-like skeleton — in the cold, dark waters off the coast of Japan. And it’s just one of a massive trove of marine animal species that scientists say they recently discovered. 

This week, the Ocean Census — a project that has set out to accelerate the discovery of sea life — announced that it has found 1,121 previously unknown ocean species since last April. That marks a massive jump in the number of newly discovered marine species in a single year, according to Oliver Steeds, director of the Ocean Census, a joint mission of the UK-based nonprofit Nekton and Japan’s largest philanthropic organization, the Nippon Foundation. Some of the other newly found creatures include fish, rays, sponges, and soft corals (you can see more of them below). 

Though it may seem that Earth is already largely explored, the vast majority of animal species on Earth — perhaps as many as 90 percent of them — remain undescribed. “This is really a planetary blindspot,” said Steeds, who’s also the founder and chief executive of Nekton.

The Ocean Census, which launched three years ago, is trying to close the gap in the marine realm by exploring remote ocean regions with the help of high-tech submersibles and taxonomists. And to that end, this large batch of species is an important step forward — with one major caveat.

Meet some of the weird creatures they found 

While the search for life beyond Earth has been a magnet for public attention, missions like the Ocean Census reveal that there is a lot we still don’t know about life on our home planet — much of which looks pretty darn alien. 

Most critters that the expeditions revealed are pretty small, like this striking ribbon worm. Found in the waters near Timor-Leste in Southeast Asia, the worm’s bright colors may be a signal to predators that it produces defensive toxins, according to a press release announcing the new findings. Such toxins may be useful in drug development; scientists have previously investigated chemicals produced by similar worms to treat cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Remarkably, the discovery effort also uncovered larger animals, which have likely managed to evade detection because they live at such great depths and in less-explored regions. 

The most charismatic among them is, perhaps, this new species of “ghost shark” that scientists found off the coast of Australia. Though distantly related to sharks and rays, ghost sharks are not actually sharks at all but chimaeras, a deep-sea fish with a skeleton made of cartilage instead of bone.

In the same region, scientists also found an unknown species of ray… 

…and an unfamiliar example of what’s known as a catshark. They’re bottom dwellers with slender bodies, and some of them apparently have a feline appearance (I’m not seeing it in this particular fish, which was found deep underwater in Australia.)  

Then there are animals that don’t look like animals at all. Like this unfamiliar sea sponge found in the South Atlantic, not far from Antarctica. Belonging to a group of animals known as the ping-pong ball sponges (for obvious reasons), this animal is carnivorous and uses those balls — which are covered in tiny Velcro-like hooks — to entrap unsuspecting prey drifting by, such as small crustaceans. 

Also in the South Atlantic, scientists found an unknown variety of “sea pen,” a kind of soft coral, more than 2,600 feet below the surface. It’s not one individual animal but a colony of thousands of genetically identical polyps, soft-bodied creatures with tentacles. 

(You can see more of the alien-like species found through the Ocean Census here.) 

Are these species actually new? 

The announcement from the Ocean Census says that scientists “discovered” more than 1,100 “new” species in a single year. Those words must be taken with a grain of salt. 

Proving that a species is new to science is difficult. It typically requires that taxonomists comb through existing museum collections and academic literature to demonstrate that, based on anatomical, genetic, or other traits, what they have has not been documented before. They can then submit their evidence for peer review and publication — the typical process through which a species is formally described and officially named, thus becoming a new species.

Many of the discoveries announced by the Ocean Census, however, have not yet gone through that level of due diligence and have not been formally described, according to Greg Rouse, a marine taxonomist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. That means it’s not clear that all of those species are, in fact, new to science. 

As the Ocean Census points out in its announcement, the time between collecting a species and formally describing it as new takes about 13 years on average. That means some animals could go extinct before they’re even described in the scientific literature, the group says. “But that 13 years is there for a reason,” said Rouse, who isn’t involved in the Ocean Census project.

Formally describing and naming a species not only confirms that it’s new, but it also makes the species easier to study and conserve, such as through laws that protect named endangered species. 

“The formal description process carries out the actual work to confirm novelty and provides the ‘passport’ for that new species — its official record,” said Tammy Horton, a research scientist at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre. “Without this, the formally recognized name, the species effectively does not exist for science, and therefore also for policy — unnamed species cannot be protected.”

Karen Osborn, a taxonomist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, similarly expressed skepticism about the announcement. Discovery alone is not enough, said Osborn, who’s not directly involved in the Ocean Census. “I don’t feel like saying, ‘Oh, look, we discovered something new’ should be given the status of something being described — until you’ve actually done the work to show that it’s something unique,” Osborn said. But, she said, “it’s a step in the right direction.”

A significant number of species uncovered by the Ocean Census and its partners are, in fact, already described in the scientific literature, Steeds, of Ocean Census, told me. He didn’t know how many. “It is not for us to do that,” he said of formally describing the species. (In many cases, taxonomists involved in the discoveries will later put in the time to formally describe them.) “Our job is discovery and to accelerate discovery,” Steeds said, which is the first step toward the formal new species description. 

Horton, who’s also not directly affiliated with the Ocean Census, emphasized this point, too: “It is important to recognise that the identification or ‘discovery’ process is a fundamental part of the pipeline towards the ultimate goal of description of a species as new to science,” she told Vox. “You cannot have one without the other.”

Might some of these species not, in fact, be new? “It is something that we all need to be aware of,” Steeds told me. “Species discovery, species description are always a hypothesis — that’s the nature of it. And things do change.” (Horton suspects it’s not very common for taxonomists to believe something is new to science and later find out that it’s an individual of an already described species.)

If there’s one thing that the Ocean Census’s findings are helping reveal with absolute certainty, it’s that so much of the planet’s biodiversity remains a mystery. That’s exciting and hopeful. 

“I would love people to know how much we don’t know about how much is out there,” Osborn said. “We’ve barely scratched the surface on understanding our world.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Last week, we wrote about President Donald Trump’s plan to create a nearly $2 billion slush fund using taxpayer money. Today, he made it happen. 

What’s the latest? On Monday, the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” as part of a settlement with Trump, who previously sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. 

The fund is intended to compensate “victims of lawfare and weaponization,” a group that could include people prosecuted in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot.

According to the DOJ, “the Fund will consist of five members appointed by” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is also Trump’s former personal lawyer. Trump will be able to dismiss any of those five members at will.

What else did the government agree to? The DOJ said in a press release that, in addition to ending his IRS suit, Trump would drop two administrative claims demanding $230 million from the government over the 2016 investigation into his presidential campaign and the later FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago property. 

What else Trump gets out of the agreement is unclear, but there’s almost certainly more — the DOJ website stresses that the new “Fund” is only “a part of the settlement agreement.” 

What’s the context? Trump and his allies have already profited massively off his second term, but his administration’s corruption is reaching new heights. Another example from this week: his very active interest in stock trading. 

What’s the big picture? As Tad DeHaven wrote for Vox earlier this year, Trump has long pushed “to create discretionary pools of money and leverage points of control that can be used to reward, punish, and command, all while trying to dodge legal and constitutional constraints.”

This fund is an expression of that impulse: a vast trove of taxpayer money he can dole out to allies as he sees fit, overseen by an (acting) attorney general personally loyal to him.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

One of the goals of this newsletter is to be respectful of your time and brain space when it feels like there’s too much news to keep track of. Hopefully we’re succeeding at that — but if you still feel like there aren’t enough hours in a day, you can turn to my colleague Bryan Walsh, who wrote about how to excavate free time you might not even realize you had. (As always, it’s a gift link.) 

Have a good evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s once thriving tech bromance, which has — for now — reached a legal end.

On Monday, a jury ruled against Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, which contended that Altman and other executives “stole a charity” (as one of Musk’s lawyers put it) by turning much of what was once a nonprofit research lab into a corporate behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) For three weeks, lawyers on both sides deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence in an attempt to discredit both men and prove they’re untrustworthy and power-hungry. 

Musk claimed he was duped into donating roughly $38 million to OpenAI under false pretenses, and was suing for $150 billion in financial restitution alongside major changes to OpenAI’s leadership and governance structure. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s decision that Musk failed to bring his lawsuit within the three-year statute of limitations, given that OpenAI first added its for-profit arm in 2018. However, it’s possible that the evidence put forth at trial will still be enough to convince state regulators to revisit the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit enterprise to begin with.

Lawyers tell me that Musk will likely choose to appeal the ruling, meaning the catfight might not be over yet. But even beyond the outcome, the trial shone an often uncomfortable spotlight on the inner workings of Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Here are five major revelations from the trial.

OpenAI’s board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty

Musk’s legal team sought to paint Altman as a deeply untrustworthy person, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees, and board members if it meant advancing his interests.

Multiple former OpenAI employees and board members testified as much in the courtroom. Altman’s “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” led directly to his temporary ouster as CEO in 2023, said Helen Toner, a former board member, in a video deposition. He had a tendency of “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, testified. In one instance, she said, Altman explicitly lied to her about the safety review required to vet a new AI model.

Greg Brockman kept a diary — and he probably wishes he hadn’t

Some of the more salacious evidence entered into trial came from a personal diary kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether it would be “morally bankrupt” to pivot OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise.

“Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” he wrote in one 2017 entry. “It’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him,” meaning Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its start-up funding. “He’s really not an idiot,” Brockman later wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end.”

Brockman was also candid about his personal ambitions; “It would be nice to be making the billions,” he wrote. He later received a stake in OpenAI now estimated to be worth about $30 billion.

Surprise, surprise: Elon Musk is difficult to collaborate with 

OpenAI built a bot in 2017 that was so advanced, it could beat top professional players at strategic multiplayer battle game Dota 2, a major milestone for the budding lab. “Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,” Musk emailed Brockman. 

Musk gave Brockman and cofounder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3 cars, presumably to “butter us up,” Brockman testified. The Tesla CEO then summoned them to his self-described “haunted mansion” for discussions of a possible OpenAI for-profit arm, where whiskey was served by Musk’s then-girlfriend Amber Heard. 

At one point, Musk became so irate at his guests’ insistence that they share control of OpenAI — rather than cede absolute control to Musk — that “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,” Brockman testified. In the following months, Musk repeatedly pitched having Tesla absorb OpenAI, Altman testified. And, in one “particularly hair-raising moment,” he mused that OpenAI should pass on to his children. 

Musk ultimately left OpenAI in 2018 to begin building his own competitor. During an all-hands meeting, Musk got into another tense verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence. “He snapped and called me a jackass,” Achiam testified. For Achiam’s valor, two OpenAI employees — including Dario Amodei, who later departed to form Anthropic — awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s rear end, inscribed with the message, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”

Microsoft cozied up to OpenAI to avoid being left behind in the AI race

Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him at his own birthday party for preferring humans over computers. Microsoft — which is named in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission — later became OpenAI’s first major corporate investor in 2019, because it, too, wanted to compete with Google as the AI race heated up. 

“I don’t want to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company’s decline in the personal computing race, according to emails revealed at trial. “It was becoming even more core and important that we had real agency at every layer of the stack,” Nadella testified.

That meant ingratiating itself in every corner of OpenAI’s world. Microsoft played a crucial role in bringing Altman back to power after the failed board coup in 2023, which Nadella referred to as “amateur city, as far as I was concerned.” In a text thread revealed at trial, Altman asked Microsoft executives to vet various members of OpenAI’s reconstituted board of directors, who now control both the for-profit company and the original nonprofit. 

By this summer, Microsoft will have invested over $100 billion in OpenAI, one of the company’s executives testified. The company was awarded a 27 percent stake in OpenAI last fall. 

Everybody wants to rule the world (of artificial general intelligence)

Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone who testified at trial pointed fingers at a different boogeyman whose motives were too impure and whose character was too corruptible, to be trusted with control of what all agreed would be an extremely consequential technology. By contrast, their own introspection mostly took a back seat to ambition.

“We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” Musk testified, to apparent eyerolls from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who tried and sometimes failed to steer the trial away from discussions of AI’s existential risks. “If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI,” Musk said, “I think that’s a very big danger for the whole world.”

Over a decade ago, Musk came together with OpenAI’s cofounders to build a charity equipped to take on a different threat then poised to lead the AI race: Google, which had recently acquired Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who testified that they resisted Musk’s dictatorial attempts to secure absolute control of artificial general intelligence, Musk portrayed himself as someone selfless and transparent enough to be put in charge. 

“It is ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,” Gonzalez Rogers at one point told Musk’s lawyer, in reference to xAI, which has come under fire this year for facilitating the mass creation of nonconsensual deepfakes. “I suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn’t like to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”

Update, May 18, 2026, 2 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect the conclusion of the trial.