Breakdancing at the Olympics and more of Vox’s best journalism

Hey readers,

Track and field starts at the Olympics today, and I am ready. I have the event schedule bookmarked. I’ve listened to my two-hour preview podcast (and that’s just for the distance running events). Really, I’ve been preparing for this week since the Tokyo Olympics ended, watching not just the World Championships but also countless minor track meets on second-rate streams. Or maybe it’s been even longer: I remember crowding around the tiny TV in my high school’s weight room with the rest of the cross country team after practice to watch the epic 2004 men’s 10,000-meter final, and I’ve been hooked ever since. 

The thing I rediscover every four years is that the magic of the Olympics comes from the events you are not anticipating. That’s why — as much as I’m excited for Jakob Ingebrigtsen vs. Josh Kerr  — the Paris Games for me are going to defined by the past week. Sure, I’ve enjoyed the old reliables, gymnastics and swimming. But how about handball? Pommel horse? Or canoe slalom? I still couldn’t explain the rules, but it doesn’t matter. There’s a different kind of excitement that comes from going all-in on an event that you previously knew nothing about. The unexpected hit for me so far this year was the men’s road cycling individual time trial. I had on Gold Zone, Peacock’s new multiview stream, and the riders racing past Paris landmarks caught my attention. I didn’t think much about it. A half hour later, I was pacing back and forth in my living room wondering if Wout van Aert’s time would stand up. (It didn’t; he got bronze.) 

The Olympics serve as my biennial reminder of the delight that comes from breaking routines and discovering something new. In that spirit, here are a few stories from Vox that I enjoyed this week. 

—Bill Carey, executive director of audience and membership 

📹 Can Paris fix its poop problem before the Olympics? One of the major plotlines in Paris this week was around the triathlon. There were delays and even talk of cutting the swimming portion and turning it into a duathlon. Why? Even after the $1.5 billion project to clean up the Seine, the E. coli levels were too high to be safe to swim in. This video explains why swimming in the Seine was banned for a century and the lengths Paris went to fix the problems before the Games. 

🎧 Breaking the Olympics: One more Olympics story — this time from Today, Explained, our excellent daily news podcast. I am always excited for whatever new sports join the Olympics, but I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with the addition of breaking (which you may know as breakdancing). Host Sean Rameswaram’s conversation with b-boy historian Alien Ness only got me more excited. 

Why two astronauts are stuck in space: Two astronauts were supposed to spend 10 days on the International Space Station. They’ve been there for nearly two months. I appreciated learning the backstory from this explainer by Ellen Ioanes, including how Boeing found itself at the center of another, uh, suboptimal news story. 

Do bigger highways actually help reduce traffic? This story does two things that Vox stories often do so well. It highlights something overlooked— in this case, the way cars shape American life — and it dissects something complicated: claims that highway expansion is, somehow, better for the climate. Read David Zipper’s smart story to understand the blind spot at the center of those claims to be environmentally friendly. 

The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies: I’ve seen headlines over the past few years about our shrinking population, but the rise of the movement to get people to have more kids — also known as pronatalism — has gained prominence over the past few weeks with resurfaced comments from Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance about “childless cat ladies” and extra votes for parents. In this story, Rachel Cohen digs into pronatalism’s roots, its darker corners, and whether government policy could actually make people more willing to procreate.

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