Vox

Some deaf children are hearing again because of a new gene therapy

In a lab room, a toddler, deaf from birth, sits while a tone plays. There’s no reaction. His face does not change.Six weeks later, after a single injection of an experimental gene therapy, the same toddler is back in the same room. The tone plays. The toddler’s head turns toward the sound. And somewhere just off screen, the child’s grandfather says his name. The boy turns and looks. He can hear.Good NewsA weekly dose of stories chronicling progress around the world.Email (required)“When the parents realized their child had a response to sound they cried,” says Dr. Yilai Shu of the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University, who co-led the trial, in a video that showed the results. “The whole family cried.” The video cuts to another child, thirteen weeks post-treatment, dancing to music.This is what gene therapy can do in 2026. The clip comes from the international clinical trial of an OTOF gene therapy run by Mass Eye and Ear and China’s Fudan University that provided the underlying science behind a drug the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved last week.On April 23, the FDA granted accelerated approval to Otarmeni, a gene therapy from the pharma company Regeneron for

Heather Cox Richardson grades America

How would you grade America’s first 250 years?That’s the question I posed to historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson on this week’s episode of America, Actually — and a question I pose to myself.All grades are subjective, and the rubric of whether America earns a passing grade is one of position and perspective, but the best I could come up with was a B-/C+.The enduring model of multiracial democracy, however fragile it currently is, deserves some credit. So does the long list of American inventions and academic institutions, and the cultural impact of American music, film, and sports. With some demerits for the permanent underclass capitalism requires, injustices here and abroad, and preferring the wrong type of football, a passing grade seemed fair enough.In our interview, Richardson said that she sees the country as entering a period of enormous change, particularly as President Donald Trump continues to reshape our government to serve his maximalist desires. And since we’re focused on America post-Trump, and our road to that point in these coming elections, I asked how responsive a democracy Richardson feels we truly have — and pushed on the question of the electorate’s commitment to preserving it, considering the results of

The Department of Holy War

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has a longstanding fascination with the Crusades. That’s right, the Crusades: the series of late 11th to 13th century medieval wars in which Europeans fought to control the Holy Land. He has tattoos that reference the Crusades, which actually came up during his confirmation hearing in 2025. And his 2020 book is titled American Crusade. The final chapter is titled “Make the Crusade Great Again.”Hegseth paints the Crusades as a “defensive war” in which Christianity had to react or face being overrun by Islam. According to professor of medieval history Matthew Gabriele, this is an extreme oversimplification of the actual history. And viewing the past in this way could have possibly dangerous ramifications on the current war in Iran.Pete Hegseth’s obsession with the Crusades may seem like a personality quirk, like your uncle who is obsessed with World War II submarines. But when that worldview influences how a defense secretary thinks about modern conflicts, it stops just being about the past — and it starts shaping the future.Vox producer Nate Krieger took a closer look at this “Holy War” to investigate the actual history of the Crusades and to understand how Pete Hegseth’s interest in

Trump says Cuba is “next.” What does that mean?

“We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” President Donald Trump mused earlier this month during remarks about the war in Iran, one of a number of times in recent weeks that he has implied Cuba will be “next” on the administration’s regime change agenda.The administration amped up its “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba in January, shortly after the capture of Venezuelan president and key Cuban ally Nicolas Maduro, severely restricting oil imports to the island as it was already suffering from repeated nationwide blackouts. Now the Pentagon is preparing a range of military options for taking action on the island. Senate Democrats are alarmed enough by the saber-rattling that they’ve sponsored legislation to block military action against the nation.Amid the threats, talks are ongoing as well. A US State Department delegation visited Havana earlier this month, the first time a US government aircraft had touched down in Cuba since the short-lived rapprochement under the Obama administration. The American delegation brought a list of demands including economic reforms, the release of political prisoners, compensation for US residents and corporations whose properties were seized in the Cuban revolution, and allowing Starlink internet connectivity on the island.Ever since Fidel Castro

Trump’s next redistricting targets

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: After a major Supreme Court decision, President Donald Trump is pushing Republicans to redistrict even more aggressively.What’s happening? On Thursday, Trump said in a post that Tennessee’s governor would “work hard to correct” the state’s congressional map in order to “give us one extra seat” in Congress.It’s the latest sign that, following the new Supreme Court opinion, Republicans will try to pick up even more seats ahead of the 2026 midterms by further gerrymandering multiple different states, including Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida.What’s the context? On Wednesday, the Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais to strike down a provision of the Voting Rights Act banning racial gerrymandering.As my colleague Ian Millhiser explained, the upshot of the ruling isn’t just that the Court’s six conservative justices have further weakened the Voting Rights Act; the decision is a full-throated endorsement of the most aggressive gerrymandering schemes possible, and Republican politicians — including Trump — are taking note.How did this start? Trump is also the one who kicked all of this off

Graham Platner’s triumph, explained by a Maine reporter

One of the most hotly contested Democratic primaries of 2026 ended with a whimper rather than a bang Thursday, as Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) suspended her Senate campaign, making outsider oyster farmer Graham Platner the overwhelming favorite for the party’s nomination.The seat, currently held by five-term Sen. Susan Collins (R), is one of Democrats’ top pickup opportunities. But the primary battle surfaced many fascinating tensions inside today’s Democratic Party.What doomed Mills — anti-establishment sentiment, her age, a bad campaign, or all of the above? How did Platner survive what many expected to be a campaign-ending scandal? Were his bold left views an asset or a liability? And can we read big national trends into this outcome, or is it mainly about the particular candidates, and the quirky state, involved?To answer these questions, I spoke with Alex Seitz-Wald, a longtime national political reporter who moved to Maine and now works as deputy editor for the Midcoast Villager, a local newspaper. Since Maine’s Senate primary captivated national attention, Seitz-Wald has been a sort of Maine politics whisperer — a Maine-splainer — to national reporters. Here’s what he had to say.Did Janet Mills’s age — and the Biden hangover — doom her?Janet

A major new study found AI outperformed doctors in ER diagnosis — but there’s a catch

When I think of heroic doctors, I think of the physician in the hospital who’s presented with a patient suffering bizarre or vague symptoms and pulls out the right diagnosis just in time. It’s the basis of almost every medical procedural TV show, from House, MD to The Pitt. It’s the mystique that has made doctors among the most revered professionals in society.But what if a machine could make that call just as well or even better? What should we do about it here in the real world?That question is becoming more urgent. According to a major new study published in Science, advanced artificial intelligence programs often outperform human doctors when diagnosing people seeking emergency medical care.AI has already, for better or worse, become a part of modern medicine. Different programs are being used to do everything from collate physician notes to identify promising new candidates for drug development. The authors of the Science study portrayed their findings as strong evidence that AI could be valuable in the emergency room as well — as long as it is fully vetted in clinical trials for specific uses.Lest the hype outpace the science, the authors made a point to say that they

How 2,000 beagles set the animal rights movement on fire

Editor’s note, April 30, 4:00 pm: This piece was first published April 29 at 12:30 pm, before news emerged that two animal rescue organizations had reached a deal with Ridglan Farms to purchase 1,500 of the company’s beagles, give them medical care, and adopt them out to homes. The fate of Ridglan’s remaining dogs not covered by the agreement remains unclear. The story, which examines and contextualizes the long campaign against Ridglan and the broader animal rights strategy behind recent activist “open rescue” attempts, appears below in its original form.It’s exceptionally rare that the tiny, perpetually marginal, and politically outmatched animal rights movement manages to capture national attention. A lack of attention is that movement’s core problem and central organizing question. How can it convince the public to make space in their minds for something they’d really, really prefer not to: the industrialized torture of animals by the billions for food, research, and other human ends?One coalition of grassroots activists has offered one possible answer. It has recently mounted one of the most audacious and most news-making animal rights campaigns in recent memory, and, in the process, turned an obscure breeder of beagles for biomedical experimentation into an issue of