Vox Sentences - The endless quest to replace alcohol

Hi there,

I’m Katherine Wells, and I’m an editor on our podcast team. Here in Texas, where I live, spring is in the air and we’re in peak wildflower season (though, to be honest, some ominous days already feel like summer). Fittingly, I’ve been thinking about change — personal, political, social. Many of the Vox pieces I’ve been drawn to this week touch on that theme, from a provocative argument to change norms around organ donation to a deep dive into whether we live in a particularly revolutionary moment.

Part of why Vox is such an essential resource is that our text, video, and audio journalists provide thoughtful, grounding analysis in a world in constant flux. With that in mind, check out this selection of pieces from our newsroom this week. 

—Katherine Wells, Vox Audio editor at large

Would you donate a kidney for $50,000?

Writer Dylan Matthews has long been interested in the subject of kidney donation — in fact, he gave away one of his own kidneys. In his latest piece on the subject, he argues for normalizing an idea that many consider taboo: paying kidney donors. The US doesn't have nearly enough kidneys for the people who need them, leaving tens of thousands of people to rely on draining, expensive dialysis. The End Kidney Deaths Act is a bill that would encourage more kidney donation by giving every nondirected donor a tax credit for $10,000 a year for the first five years after they donate. Matthews outlines the moral case for this important policy change.

🎧 America at war, now in theaters

In this recent episode of our daily news podcast Today, Explained, host Noel King examines the new film Civil War and asks whether releasing a film about political polarization and mass violence in 2024 is reckless. She talks with the LA Times’s Mark Olsen about the ambiguity of the film, in which the politics of the characters don’t line up neatly with our current left-right divide. And then, Northeastern University’s Nathan Blake walks through a history of American anxiety on film, from early fears about electricity and industrialization to our modern preoccupation with violence from within.

🎧 Fareed Zakaria on our revolutionary moment

In this episode of The Gray Area, host Sean Illing talks with Fareed Zakaria to try to answer the question "Do we live in revolutionary times?" Zakaria has a new book out about modern revolutions, in which he argues that the current moment is one of the most revolutionary, in part because the pace of change keeps accelerating. Tune in for a sweeping and thought-provoking conversation about the history and nature of revolutions.

Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made.

Speaking of the pace of change, this recent piece from Constance Grady is about how the ebook market is now saturated with spammy knockoff listings, many generated with the help of AI. A customer trying to search for Kara Swisher’s recent Burn Book, for instance, might have to sift through low-quality copycats like Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley’s Bulldog and Kara Swisher Biography: Unraveling the Life and Legacy to find the actual thing. Grady unveils how those spam ebooks are generated through schemes involving AI, ghostwriters, and the gaming of various algorithms. Her story is a fascinating look at how tech platforms create incentives to flood the zone with degraded work — and clever online entrepreneurs fill the void, leaving us with “grift and garbage all the way down.”

The endless quest to replace alcohol

Finally, as you head into the weekend, check out Rebecca Jennings’s story on the quest of a certain demographic (millennials and Gen X-ers) to change up their recreational substance of choice. The problems with alcohol are well known: It’s poison and, as Jennings says, causes “hangovers, poor sleep, embarrassing texts, unexplainable bruises, and a nagging sense that you’ve done something you regret.” So, many are increasingly turning to alternatives, including weed, kava, kratom, shrooms, and, of course, sobriety. How can we stop drinking alcohol while still fulfilling our human need to, as one expert puts it, perform “excessive behavior in a ritualized fashion”? Whatever your drug of choice, I hope you have a safe and healthy weekend with just the right amount of ritualized excessive behavior.

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