clock menu more-arrow no yes
  We’re aiming to add 2,500 contributions in the next 30 days, to help keep Vox free. Will you help us hit our goal?

Explainers

We live in a world of too much information and too little context. Too much noise and too little insight. That's where Vox's explainers come in.

Featured stories

20 years, $6 trillion, 900,000 lives

The enormous costs and elusive benefits of the war on terror.

By Dylan Matthews

John Mulaney was performing a role all along

Parasocial relationships aren’t to blame for the John Mulaney/Olivia Munn pregnancy discourse.

By Aja Romano

How bad will climate change get?

By Umair Irfan

The US was a world leader in vaccination. What went wrong?

By Dylan Scott

How 9/11 convinced Americans to buy, buy, buy

By Emily Stewart

What we’ve learned about Britney Spears’s conservatorship case changes everything

By Constance Grady

Medicare’s benefits are full of holes — and patients keep falling through

By Dylan Scott

America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate

By German Lopez

The “g-word” of urban policy

By Jerusalem Demsas

We’ve been radically underestimating the true cost of our carbon footprint

By Sigal Samuel

Donda: The hype, the controversy, the music, the Kanye of it all, explained

By Aja Romano

The evidence for violence interrupters doesn’t support the hype

By German Lopez

What’s causing California’s unprecedented wildfires

By Umair Irfan

What banning abortion at 6 weeks really means

By Anna North

The Amazon rainforest’s most dogged defenders are in peril

By Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Why America can’t fix its Covid-19 testing problems

By Dylan Scott

How safe is it for kids to go to school during delta?

By Anna North

The Jeopardy hosting saga has become a cautionary morality tale

By Aja Romano

The Ted Lasso backlash was inevitable

By Emily VanDerWerff

NATO allies are preparing for a future without America’s “forever wars”

By Jen Kirby

Why Hurricane Ida has been so devastating to the Gulf Coast

By Umair Irfan and Benji Jones

Why false claims about Covid-19 vaccines and infertility are so powerful

By Anna North

Should vaccinated people worry about long Covid?

By German Lopez

Pandemic unemployment insurance is ending at maybe the worst possible time

By Emily Stewart

ISIS-K, explained by an expert

By Jen Kirby

The lab leak hypothesis — true or not — should teach us a lesson

By Umair Irfan

How a cheap antidepressant emerged as a promising Covid-19 treatment

By Kelsey Piper

One policy that could challenge a century of fossil fuel dominance

By Rebecca Leber

Women’s rights have an uncertain future in Afghanistan

By Jen Kirby

Congress’s Democrat-on-Democrat hostage standoff, explained

By Andrew Prokop

What full FDA approval for Covid-19 vaccines really means

By Umair Irfan

How California’s bizarre recall system could elect a Republican governor

By Andrew Prokop

The Pentagon is calling on US airlines to help with Afghanistan evacuations

By Cameron Peters

The history of US intervention in Afghanistan, from the Cold War to 9/11

By Emily Stewart

What we actually know about the vaccines and the delta variant

By Dylan Scott

Why Biden was so set on withdrawing from Afghanistan

By Andrew Prokop

Who are the Taliban now?

By Jen Kirby

Pesticides can amplify each other. Bees have become the victims.

By Benji Jones

Are your houseplants actually good for the planet?

By Audrey Carleton

Federal approval of a Covid-19 booster shot offers help for some Americans

By Natasha Ishak

Climate change worsens extreme weather. A revolution in science proved it.

By Umair Irfan

The big drop in American poverty during the pandemic, explained

By Dylan Matthews