Vox

How close is America to civil conflict? | The Gray Area - October 13, 2025 - Vox
Is America at a tipping point?
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Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about how democracies unravel from within, and a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
Walter talks to Sean about the warning signs she’s seeing in the US, why polarization and party identity become combustible, and what lessons we can draw from other countries. They also discuss what an American civil war might look like in the 21st century, the social and informational dynamics that accelerate breakdown, and whether America still has a path away from the brink.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Barbara Walter, professor at UC San Diego and author of How Civil Wars Start
00:00 Intro
01:23 Our political leaders are reacting differently to violence
11:05 Violence is no longer one-sided
17:54 Law enforcement leaders aren't what they used to be
22:12 Where are we on the violence continuum
33:03 The effect of violent rhetoric
38:35 Violence without ideology?
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How Your Memory Can Remake the Past | The Gray Area - October 6, 2025 - Vox
We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true or not — are what we end up calling our life, and sometimes, our collective history.
Sean’s guest today is Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called Why We Remember. The two discuss the strange alchemy of remembering and how the stories our minds create end up creating us.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Charan Ranganath, neuroscientist and author of Why We Remember
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Why Nevada has so many ghost towns - September 30, 2025 - Vox
Nevada is home to over 600 ghost towns, many of which are the remnants of the gold rush era of the 1800s and 1900s. Some of these ghost towns are well-known, like Rhyolite, but others are just coordinates on a map — hidden like secrets to the true history of Nevada.
Vox video producer Dolly Li road tripped through northern Nevada to try and find some of these hidden ghost towns and learn about the real history behind the boom and bust cycles of mining in the state. Along the way, she stops by a town that many call a ghost town, but is still partially occupied by a dozen residents.
Through visiting a few abandoned mining towns and speaking to historians about the technology and infrastructure that made mining a key industry of the state, we piece together a rich and fascinating story of Nevada’s development.
We had a chance to speak to a lot of great experts and historians for this video. Here are some links to their work:
Tami Force’s website, Nevada Ghost Towns & Beyond, where she’s documented hundreds of ghost towns in the state:
https://nvtami.com/
The archives of the W.M. Keck Earth Science and Mineral Engineering Museum (The Keck Museum), curated by Garrett J. Barmore, where we also conducted one of our interviews:
https://www.unr.edu/keck-museum
The Friends of Midas, a nonprofit organization currently run by Dana Bennett, that has a great collection of photos and history about the town of Midas:
https://friendsofmidas.com/
#ghosttowns #nevada #travel #roadtrip
This video is presented by Travel Nevada. Travel Nevada doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos (and adventures!) like this one possible.
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Who really controls TikTok? | The Gray Area - September 29, 2025 - Vox
This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and what happens when human editors inside the company can override the algorithm.
A few days after they spoke, TikTok was in the headlines again. So they jumped on a follow-up call to unpack the latest twists in the saga of who will ultimately control the app's US-operations.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Emily Baker-White, reporter and author of Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok
The Gray Area has been nominated for a Signal Listener’s Choice Award. Vote for The Gray Area here: https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2025/shows/genre/thought-leadership
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How the climate fight will be won | The Gray Area - September 22, 2025 - Vox
The sun will save us
Bill McKibben has spent four decades warning us about climate change. Much of what he predicted has come true. And yet, his new book Here Comes the Sun is more hopeful than you might expect. That’s because, for the first time, we have a genuine alternative: Solar and wind energy are now the cheapest, fastest-growing sources of power on Earth. The revolution has already begun.
This week, Sean is joined by McKibben to talk about the peril and promise of this moment. They explore how close we are to catastrophe, why each fraction of a degree of warming matters, and how the fossil fuel industry is fighting a desperate last stand. They also discuss the politics of energy in the age of Trump, why Texas and Utah may hold surprising lessons, and how cheap, abundant power could transform not just the climate fight but democracy itself.
This episode was made in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect team.
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com.
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