Vox Sentences - The last good day on the internet

Hello!

Here’s what might be, quite literally, my hottest take: I love summer. I love seasonal fruit at the farmer’s market, floating lazily in pools, eating ice cream and Popsicles, and having picnics. The highlight of every summer is the week I spend on an Atlantic beach with nearly a dozen of my friends, accumulating memories and photos and sand that I find in surprising corners of my home for the next 11 months.

What I don’t love about summer is the traffic I face on the way to that beach vacation. In honor of going places — or avoiding the traffic and staying home — here are three favorites from this week about cars, car culture, and whether there’s a better way, plus two other things we published that I loved.

—Libby Nelson, editorial director for politics and policy

One change that would make cars safer for everyone

I’ve lived in Washington, DC, since 2009, and I’ve grown used to questions about crime from concerned relatives in the rural and suburban Midwest. They’re always surprised when I answer honestly: I worry a lot more about cars, especially in the past few years. Drivers who speed through red lights and barge into crosswalks feel like the most serious threat that urban living poses to my personal safety. In this piece, senior correspondent Marin Cogan asks a question that should be obvious: Why do cars’ “safety ratings” ignore the danger a car poses to everyone else on the road?

🎧 Cities know how to improve traffic. They keep making the same colossal mistake.

Of course, when you are behind a wheel, the most annoying thing is that seemingly everyone else is too. One of the best ways to improve congestion in crowded city centers is congestion pricing: making drivers pay to enter crowded urban streets, giving cities a new revenue stream while easing traffic as some would-be drivers opt to walk or take public transit instead. Vox correspondent Abdallah Fayyad weighs in on New York’s imperiled plan for congestion pricing, arguing that the case against it is weak and that it’s still the best hope for addressing the eternal problem of too much traffic. 

📹 Why China is winning the EV war

By now, you’re probably thinking I’m a car hater, so here’s the twist: If anything, I’m at risk of making my new car my entire personality. I just traded in my ancient, beloved Honda Fit for a plug-in hybrid, and I can’t get over how cool and futuristic it is to have a car that can silently cruise through city streets, using no gas whatsoever. This is still a pretty niche experience in the US, where fully electric vehicles are wildly expensive, but China has lapped the US on EV development and consumer uptake. This video explains why. 

 🎧 The last good day on the internet

Here’s a fun fact I trot out that will sound like gibberish to my children, and possibly already does to anyone under the age of 24: Can you believe that The Llamas and The Dress happened on the same day? Arguably the peak of collective internet fun for desk-job workers; inarguably the last time the internet could be united by two moments with so little larger meaning. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about: Some llamas escaped. People couldn’t agree if a dress was white and gold or blue and black. You kinda had to be there?) So I loved this episode of Today, Explained, which found all kinds of meaning in this silly moment that may never happen again. (That is, unless it does. I saw The Dress making the rounds on TikTok recently, with no acknowledgment whatsoever that we all did this nine years ago.)

How Trump gets away with being nearly as old as Biden

Finally, a politics chaser: Did you know the former (and possibly future) president of the United States, Donald Trump, turns 78 today — putting him squarely in a cohort known, medically speaking, as the “old old”? (That’s older than the young old but not as old as the oldest old.) Both the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, and Trump, his rival in November, are, to put it mildly, getting up there in years. But you’ve likely heard a lot more about Biden’s age than Trump’s — far more than a difference of three years might suggest. Vox senior politics reporter Christian Paz unpacks three theories for why that might be the case. 

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