Vox Sentences - Speed limits are too darn high

When I read a news story, I want to be surprised. I want the unexpected. I’ve become more cynical and skeptical than I used to be after two decades in journalism and 11 years in DC, but I can still feel that rush whenever I open an article that promises to challenge me. In the news ecosystem, it can be tempting to retreat to safety. Someone, somewhere, is writing a take that will leave you nodding, affirmed in your prior beliefs. 

But where’s the fun in that? 

I’m lucky these days to be editing on the Future Perfect team, which means every day, I am introduced to new ideas that push me to think beyond my own preconceived notions. Marina Bolotnikova and Chistine Mi’s illustrated essay on the virtues of veganism has stayed with me since it was published. I myself edited a recent piece that introduced a counterintuitive notion supported by empirical evidence: Americans are actually getting more compassionate. Just this week, Dylan Matthews flipped the narrative on the Biden administration’s tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles: If we’re serious about fighting climate change, why are we stopping Americans from buying the cheapest EVs available?

As I read the stories produced this week by my colleagues across the newsroom, I felt the same sensation. 

—Senior correspondent and editor Dylan Scott

Psychedelics could treat some of the worst chronic pain in the world

We’re in the midst of a psychedelic revolution. Psychedelic drugs are being decriminalized across the country, and their potential for improving people’s mental health, amid a national mental health crisis, is exciting. Yet, we may still be underselling their possible applications. Oshan Jarow wrote this week on another enormous public health problem — chronic pain — for which psychedelics may hold surprising promise. Ever since the opioid crisis set in, we have been desperate for a better way of treating people’s very real pain. Maybe we have found it.

Make “free speech” a progressive rallying cry again

I am a journalist and so inevitably the First Amendment is my favorite construct within the US legal system. But Eric Levitz pokes at an important point here: Progressives have been too eager at times to police speech, to attempt to drive ideas they don’t like from the realm of tolerable public debate, and they may now be paying the penalty for that as the establishment turns against the ongoing campus protests over Gaza. Better, Eric suggests, to cultivate an open marketplace of ideas, even those we find unsavory. Taking the language of freedom that is so pervasive on the right and commandeering it for free speech could be a powerful tool for advancing progressive ideas over the long term.

Speed limits are too darn high

When I was taking driving lessons at age 16, one instructor told me that I had a lead foot. Whatever the speed limit was, I would cross it — and keep going, until I caught myself. What I’m trying to say is I am part of the problem and Marin Cogan has the solution: The speed limits are too damn high. They are certainly contributing to the crisis of pedestrian deaths in the US. But things are starting to change. From New York City to Oakland, local governments are reducing speed limits, particularly in more congested areas. A small change can make a big difference: According to one study, a person who is hit by a car moving 30 mph is 70 percent more likely to die than a person hit by a car moving 25 mph. It’s a small sacrifice for speed freaks like me that could save a lot of lives.

The child care cliff that wasn’t

I’m a dad with three kids in daycare, so I don’t need much convincing that child care is way too expensive and also way too difficult to keep well-staffed. Tell me there’s a crisis and I’m inclined to believe you. But Rachel Cohen unpacks a surprising outcome after months of dire warnings from lawmakers and advocates about the coming child care cliff with the expirations of special funding put into place during the pandemic: The cliff never came. More moms are working than ever and employment in child care is also up. The US does need to have tough conversations about how we fund child care. But those discussions are never helped by apocalyptic rhetoric that fails to materialize.

🎧  Who’s the father? For these baby animals, one doesn’t exist.

How does a female stingray who lives with two sharks end up pregnant? Scientists have been investigating these “virgin” births and found a miracle of nature, as the Unexplainable podcast team covered in their latest episode. (You can read a text version if you prefer!) Evolution gives every species no more important than perpetuating the ancestral line — and so, if that can’t be achieved the old-fashioned way, nature gets creative. Scientists call it parthenogenesis, when a female animal without access to sperm instead merges an egg and egg-like cell and produces an embryo. If we can better understand it, it could become an important tool for conservation as more and more species are threatened with extinction.

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