Vox Sentences - How to change your personality

Hi readers!  

Whenever one of my mostly coastal colleagues hears that I live in Wisconsin, more often than not they’ll make a joke about the weather. And it’s true: It gets pretty cold in this part of the country, although in my five years here, I’ve come to firmly identify with the adage that there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing. But after so many weeks of single-digit and subzero temperatures, it’s such a relief to feel spring finally around the corner. Wherever you live, I hope you’re finding ways to spend more time outside and away from the firehose of daily news. 

Otherwise, for the last month and a half, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how Donald Trump won a second term because voters were so angry about the cost of living, and now he is, as many observers have put it, pressing a giant “raise prices” button, pushing the stock market into correction territory, and unleashing all sorts of other crises that people didn’t know they were voting for. The president’s approval ratings have rapidly begun to sink into net-negative territory, as my colleague Christian Paz explained this week. It’s a difficult time to be an American, but many of us at Vox feel a renewed sense of purpose in bringing you carefully curated and deliberated coverage of this administration, focused only on the most important stuff. Whether you’re after political news or some lighter fare, here are my highlights from our site this week. 

—Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor, Future Perfect

The harrowing lives of animal researchers

I’m biased because I edited it, but: If you read only one thing today, let it be this magnificent feature (currently Vox member-exclusive, but available to everyone in a few weeks) by Vox fellow Celia Ford. Celia, a former monkey researcher herself, writes about the mental health toll of experimenting on animals.

What was childhood like before vaccines?

Last week, an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles. We’re only a few generations removed from a time when deaths by disease like this one were routine in children, leaving parents with unimaginable grief. Anna North, Vox’s correspondent on the American family, makes the case for bearing witness to that history in the public health choices we make today. 

🎧 How to change your personality 

Every story by the Atlantic’s Olga Khazan is incredibly (to use an official media industry term) cliiick. So I was delighted when she showed up in my podcast feed as a guest on this week’s episode of The Gray Area, where she offers funny, charming, vulnerable advice on something many of us might be embarrassed to talk about openly: upgrading our personalities. 

Trump doesn’t seem to know why he launched a giant trade war

Senior correspondent Eric Levitz is brilliant at political and policy analysis, and it shows in this piece taking apart President Trump’s varying, contradictory explanations for his tariffs and why they make no sense.  

📹 Why the US has birthright citizenship  

This explainer is a masterclass in what Vox’s video team does better than anyone else: visually breaking down what could be an arcane, overly complicated subject into a story so beautifully and simply presented you would think the history is naturally this digestible (it isn’t!). 

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