Vox Sentences - What makes a good cat? 🐱

Hi, my name is Lavanya Ramanathan, and I’m a senior editor on Vox’s culture and features team. What makes my job so fun is that the work can include everything from bringing to life existential examinations of rappers to thinking about why young women have come to dread the idea of motherhood, and why countries around the world are trying everything to change that — except giving mothers the things they actually need to thrive.  

I’m a former newspaper reporter, so I tend to gravitate to the written word, and this past week was a delightful one to be reading Vox, as gorgeous features by Vox writers sliced through the tensions of the ongoing war and the revving up of the 2024 election cycle to offer a little levity, beauty, insight, and hope. 

—Lavanya Ramanathan, editor 

What makes a good cat?

Emily Stewart is a whiz at making sense of the economy, but for this piece, she set her sights on America’s second-most popular pet, attending one of the nation’s biggest cat shows to attempt to understand our bizarre love for creatures that, honestly, barely tolerate us. This wry  “investigation” is laugh-out-loud funny and also full of fascinating details and insights, few better than this one: “The main expectation you can have of a cat is that you can’t have a lot of expectations.”

Welcome to the extinction capital of the world

If you haven’t read Benji Jones’s incredibly in-depth and evocative stories on the disappearing natural world, you ought to start with this piece, which took him to the Hawaiian islands, where scores of native species are being driven into extinction, mostly by our own hand. (And then, oh my god, you’ve got to read him on the monkeys that have invaded Florida and the not-so-brilliant plan to save the pandas). Benji has an immense talent for making readers care about the creepy, crawly, slimy creatures whose delicate existence seems practically divine because it is so intertwined with our own. As one expert told him in Hawaii, “If we lose snails, we’re probably screwed.”

We’re all addicted to cheap stuff — and Temu knows it

Whizy Kim delivered the explainer we probably didn’t know we needed: a piece on Temu, the Chinese retail darling that is barely a year old and already making a splash with consumers in a cutthroat online shopping environment. Why would a company choose to go head-to-head with Shein and Amazon? Here’s Temu’s trick: It isn’t. It’s going after bargain hunters and Dollar Store shoppers by offering steep discounts and flashy gambits; about 40 percent of US sales in its first year came from households making less than $40,000 a year. 

Resilience is invaluable in tough times. Here’s how to build it.

Between two ongoing wars, lingering high inflation, job uncertainty, and whatever the Republican presidential debates were, it’s been a year. So it’s nice to have this reminder that we can work to prepare ourselves to adapt to hard scenarios, and even develop and hone our ability to cope with stress. Elise Craig writes that resilience is defined as “successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility.” Couldn’t we all use lessons on how to do that? 

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