Vox Sentences: The Department of Homeland Security is set to shut down Friday. No one's panicking.

1. Countdown to shutdown

US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Gil Kerlikowske, Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

• The Department of Homeland Security will shut down on Friday unless Congress acts.

  [NYT / Ashley Parker]

• Its funding is expiring before the rest of the government as part of the "CRomnibus" compromise agreed to in December.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• House Republicans passed a funding bill that also blocks President Obama's plan to offer deportation relief to some undocumented immigrants.

  [The Hill / Rebecca Shabad and Cristina Marcos]

• The bill would block not just Obama's latest plan, but his 2012 executive action, which has offered relief to immigrants who came to the US as children.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Senate Democrats have been filibustering the Republican funding bill, so far successfully.

  [Politico / John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett]

• The consequences of a shutdown aren't particularly dramatic; employees will see their pay furloughed, but 85 percent of them will work as normal.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Ironically, the only part of immigration enforcement that would shut down if the government closes is E-Verify, a system employers use for checking the immigration status of potential hires.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The standoff has mobilized conservative opposition to the filibuster; Charles Krauthammer, for example, has called for its abolition in response to Democrats' obstructionism.

  [Washington Post / Charles Krauthammer]

• Conservative advocacy groups are calling for Republicans to hold out for a bill that blocks Obama's immigration policy.

  [National Journal / Lauren Fox]

• But some members of the Republican Senate caucus — like Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Bob Corker (R-TN) — have signalled support for a clean funding bill to avoid a shutdown.

  [Cleveland Plain-Dealer / Ray Jablonski]

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested Monday that he'd be open to a clean bill, paired with a separate vote to block Obama's immigration actions.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Maybe the real problem is that the Department of Homeland Security is a deeply dysfunctional agency that ought to be abolished.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

2. An unenriching decade

Mohammad-Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign affairs minister and top nuclear negotiator. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)

• Iran and the US are considering a deal that would restrict Iranian uranium enrichment for 10 years.

  [NYT / Michael Gordon]

• That said, there are still significant details to be ironed out, and both sides are emphasizing that a final agreement is not imminent.

  [Washington Post / Carol Morello]

• Iran's current 10,000 centrifuges could theoretically produce enough material for one bomb; the final number allowed by the deal hasn't been determined yet, but 6,500 looks like a plausible compromise figure.

  [AP]

• The question, then, is what happens once restrictions on enrichment ease. Iran might just ramp back up in 2025.

• The talks are aiming for a deal by March 31.

  [BBC]

• Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to express opposition to the negotiations.

  [NPR / Peter Kenyon]

• But the talks come at a low point in the US-Israel relationship; Netanyahu has allegedly authorized his government to leak information from the negotiations to the Israeli press, and the US in turn restricted Israeli access to intelligence.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

3. It's a bird! It's a man!

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, winner of Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, for Birdman. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

• The Oscars were last night! Here are all the winners, listed.

  [Vox / Kelsey McKinney]

• Birdman won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography; its closest rival, Boyhood, won Best Supporting Actress (Patricia Arquette).

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• The outcomes were unsurprising, for the most part: 19 out of the 24 awards were accurately predicted by the prediction markets (such as European betting sites).

  [NYT / David Leonhardt]

• But the acceptance speeches were surprisingly political; John Legend, upon winning the Best Song award with Common for "Glory" from Selma, noted "there are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850" (which is true, if a bit misleading given how much the black population in the US has grown since).

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Arquette gave a passionate speech calling for equal pay for women.

  [Vox / Kelsey McKinney]

• She followed that up with a backstage comment that provoked some backlash for implying that LGBT and black people need to do more to back women's equality.

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• Here's the best case for, and against, Birdman winning.

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos and Todd VanDerWerff]

• Dan Kois: Boyhood not winning Best Picture is the worst mistake the Oscars made in two decades.

  [Slate / Dan Kois]

• Personally I didn't think Boyhood really worked, but given its 100 score on Metacritic it seems I'm in the distinct minority.

  [Metacritic]

4. Misc.

• Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga, is facing six lawsuits for rape or assault.

  [NYT / Jack Healy]

• This is a very compelling case that The Simpsons' Springfield is located in the southern hemisphere.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

• Teens are abandoning Facebook — and increasingly declining to sign up in the first place.

  [The Daily Dot / Nico Lang]

• If you hold these mock Hungarian euros up to UV light, you can see the skeletons of the animals depicted on the bills.

  [Jason Kottke]

• A new study suggests that talking about geoengineering could help win over climate change skeptics.

  [Washington Post / Dan Kahan]

5. Verbatim

• "His Tinder profile said, 'I make money. I’ll buy you a couch.' We asked him why and he said, 'Girls love couches.'"

  [Aziz Ansari on Harris Wittels]

• "[Keegan-Michael] Key—to steal a phrase from Nabokov—is 'ideally bald.'"

  [New Yorker / Zadie Smith]

• "Without state enforcement, the secret drug markets of Tor hidden services are coming to resemble an anarchic state of nature in which self-help dominates."

  [Aeon / Henry Farrell]

• "The most profound and pervasive fear — among adults, among parents of affected kids, and among those kids themselves — is that antidepressants will somehow alter the patient’s essential identity."

  [The Walrus / Emily Landau]

• "ISIS's blunders look less like miscalculations and more like inevitable results of its animating ideology."

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

Correction: This post originally failed to mention that the Hungarian bank notes in "Misc." are artist's renderings, not actually in circulation./p>

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via