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Each week, a different Vox editor curates their favorite work that Vox has published across text, audio, and video. This week’s recommendations are brought to you by Miranda Kennedy, Today, Explained's executive producer.
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| Each week, a different Vox editor curates their favorite work that Vox has published across text, audio, and video. This week’s recommendations are brought to you by Miranda Kennedy, Today, Explained's executive producer. |
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Welcome to the last weekend before Labor Day, when we all spend far too much time noticing and commenting on the approach of fall, rather than enjoying the end of summer. These seasonal changes are helpful for small talk, though; an easy way in to human-to-human discussion. In an era of growing human-to-chatbot conversations where we have fewer and fewer points of commonality with our fellow humans, the topic of the weather is delightfully benign.
I’ve definitely noticed myself talking about the weather more. Not only every time I talk to my dad (but he lives in Ireland, so it's really a requirement), but also to coworkers, fellow parents, and the guy next to me waiting for the bus. It's unlikely someone will throw a sandwich at you for saying, “Isn’t it a relief that the humidity’s finally gone down!” I promise this whole newsletter is not vapid commentary on seasonal changes. Instead, here’s some great reading and listening on Vox this week on the themes of commonality, community, and what still unites us.
—Miranda Kennedy, Today, Explained's executive producer
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Taylor and Travis are engaged. Congrats, America.
Yup. There is one thing that still unites us, and it is indeed Taylor Swift. So even if you think you’ve read all you can read about the pending nuptials of your English teacher and your gym teacher, this lovely piece of cultural commentary from Vox’s Aja Romano helps us understand why we care so much about Taylor’s well-charted love life: because she and Travis Kelce “don't just shape what’s left of the monoculture — they are the only remaining monoculture,” as Aja puts it. Taylor Swift is large enough to contain the multitudes of all the different Americas we contain: from the political to the not, from the feminist to the old-fashioned romantic.
🎧 The exhausting summer of nothing 2025
One sad result of our divided time: no big seasonal trends to yammer mindlessly about with your dad and the guy at the bus stop. This piece looks at why this summer had no big fun trends (other than Labubus and Coldplay guy), including no song of the summer — continuing the trend from last year, when we at Today, Explained bemoaned our collective inability to pick a unifying bop to co-celebrate as a nation. In the summer of 2025, Alex Abad-Santos says, the only real shared theme was “our unstoppable apathy.”
🎧 AI took your job
Ahead of running this story we asked Today, Explained listeners to call in if they were having trouble finding entry-level jobs. Dozens of them sent in their tales of woe, things like, “After graduation I applied to at least 80 to 100 different jobs” and “At a certain point, am I just writing something for one AI to talk to another AI?” It turns out that not only are employers holding off on making as many hires, but also, AI is making it harder to apply for jobs in the first place. As one job seeker told us, “Everything's done with computers now. No one wants to talk to each other.”
Trump isn’t just remodeling the White House. He’s rebranding America.
Surely the clearest sign of our divided times is President Donald Trump, who has now successfully made his brand the center of American culture. This piece gets at an interesting dialectic: Trump is both extremely alienating and also absolutely omnipresent. He has made himself America. This is perhaps less true of Trump’s political beliefs, which have changed over time, than it is of the Trump aesthetic — ostentatious gold, the musical Cats — and perhaps speaks to an American norm. Abdallah Fayyad argues that the rebranding of the White House describes today’s America: no longer a nation of ideas, but rather, simply a nation of Trump — at least, if you ask Trump. So if you do decide to bring up Trump with the guy at the bus stop, I suggest talking about the gilding on the White House walls.
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