Vox Sentences - Everyzyng you wanted to know about Zyn

Hi, everyone! I’m Elbert Ventura, the new executive editor here at Vox, where I run the text side of Vox’s newsroom — a role I’m grateful to have, not least because it’s the best seat in the house from which to view how our team’s coverage comes together every day.  

There are few more humbling experiences as a journalist than having a roomful of your colleagues talk excitedly about something you hadn’t heard of until right that moment. 

So it was this week when the Vox Slack lit up with an animated discussion about Zyn, a brand of nicotine pouch that’s been around for a while but has, in recent weeks, become a new front in our inexhaustible culture war. 

As Whizy Kim and Keren Landman tell it, the kerfuffle began when Chuck Schumer made some noise about Zyn and how social media (or “Zynfluencers,” an amazing word to hear coming out of a senator’s mouth) might be getting our kids hooked on it. That kicked off a predictable outrage cycle from the right and (for some of us at least) opened the curtain on a subculture of Zyn users who seem to gravitate toward the young conservative manosphere. Tuesday’s Today Explained podcast, hosted by Sean Rameswaram, dove into this with Semafor political reporter Dave Weigel. 

Whizy, Keren, and Sean also delved into how Zyn works, its health effects, and the policy discourse around its regulation. Their pieces are delightful examples of the explanatory work we take pride in, not to mention a good excuse for gratuitous wordplay. (While we’re here, another Keren shoutout: You should read her fantastic explainer on nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and the shifting landscape of health care providers.) 

There are many, many other things I learned about this past week, thanks to our indefatigable writers and editors. Here are a few. 

—Elbert Ventura, executive editor

America no longer has a monopoly on deadly drones

Last Sunday, three US service members were killed and more than 40 were wounded in a drone strike on a US base in Jordan. According to Joshua Keating, it appears to be the first time US service members were killed by an enemy drone — a fact that underscores the growing democratization of drone warfare.

🎧 Let’s fix retirement together

In an election year that will likely be light on substantive policy dialogue, Jonquilyn Hill’s conversation with economist Kathryn Anne Edwards on America’s broken retirement system and how we can fix it  feels like a badly needed tonic. It’s a lively discussion that offers a prismatic look at the problem — basically, too many Americans don’t have enough to retire on — and the possibilities for a better future. 

You’re probably eating way too much protein

Oh, am I? Okay, fine, I probably am. Kenny Torrella gets into the nitty-gritty of Americans’ diets, how obsessed we seem to be with protein, and why that’s a problem for animals and the planet. The best thing about Kenny’s piece is that it gives us constructive guidance on how we can adjust our diets if we want to rebalance them. (Spoiler alert: It involves fiber.)

What we’re getting wrong about 2024’s “moderate” voters

Our elections always seem to revolve around winning over the moderate voters, but do we know who those people really are? Christian Paz explains that our image of moderates might not match the reality, and offers a framework for understanding a demographic that looms so large in our politics.

Narendra Modi is celebrating his scary vision for India’s future

It’s a big year for democracy, and one of the places where its future may be charted is India. The world’s largest democracy will have elections in a couple of months; at stake is whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s illiberal vision of a Hindu nationalist India carries the day. That vision was on full display a couple weeks ago when a new Hindu temple, built on the site of an ancient mosque previously torn down by Hindu mobs in 1992, was unveiled and celebrated by millions of Indians. Zack Beauchamp explained the larger stakes behind the occasion.

📹 The tragic story of this famous meteorite

One of the signature exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History is an enormous iron meteorite that explorer Robert Perry brought back from Greenland in 1897. But it wasn’t all he brought back. On the ship back to New York were six members of the Inughuit, an indigenous tribe from Greenland. This Vox video tells the tragic story of those Inughuit, a piece of hidden history that you’d never know about from the museum’s exhibit. 

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