I definitely went into this pregnancy bracing for the worst. I’ve covered abortion rights for the last ~15 years and so consider myself deeply familiar with the most tragic kinds of pregnancies women can have (yes, probably too familiar) and I strongly believe people should have control over their reproductive choices. I knew from reporting how taxing pregnancy, labor and postpartum can be, and I guess I spent years thinking about all this largely and almost exclusively through the lens of bodily autonomy. Even for wanted pregnancies, the rhetoric I’d absorbed had much to do with consent to be “invaded.” Mine was a wanted pregnancy, 100%, but I still felt rather nervous when I got the news—bracing for what I felt sure would be nine months of discomfort and debilitation, coupled with low-grade anxiety about gaining weight that might be hard to later lose.

Here’s where I’ll give a brief caveat that I know every pregnancy is different, I’ve been lucky to have a good pregnancy so far, and I still have about two months left so I recognize things could take a turn for the worse at any time. (That’s not to say there’s been no unpleasant symptoms over the last 30 weeks — I’ve gained firsthand knowledge of experiences I did not know existed like ‘round ligament pain’ and the truly bizarre feeling of your ribs stretching apart and oh the lovely third-trimester ‘PUPP’ rash— but overall, most things have been brief and manageable.)

For now, though, I can say that I have found the experience of being pregnant much more special and enjoyable than I was expecting. I really went into it with a “means to an end” mentality, and so have been rather delighted to discover how cool and fascinating and joyful the whole thing can be.

Perhaps my favorite thing, and the most surprising thing, is the experience every day of just experiencing sheer awe. The kind of awe people hike up to mountain tops for. The kind of awe we associate with the most beautiful sunsets, or symphony orchestras. It’s a quiet wonder I experience alone whenever I feel a kick, and each night with my husband as we examine my growing belly and read up on what is happening inside. The amount of times I hear myself saying, “woah.” I'd read plenty over the years about the physical and psychological benefits of awe, but none of those stories ever talked about the mind-bending wonder that comes with growing a person inside of you.

I remember how I felt at 13 weeks when I started going to prenatal yoga. I had never been in a room with so many pregnant women before—let alone women in their late second and third trimesters. It was stirring. I couldn't help but sneak stares at the women who were 35, 37, 39 weeks along, bending and stretching. It was so beautiful. I wasn't showing yet, and seeing them moved something in me—a glimpse of what was coming, maybe, but I think more just the power of watching bodies do this wild thing.

As time has gone on, I admit something else I never expected was how deeply gratifying it’s been not only to experience the awe of my own changing body, but to watch as other people catch sight of me and experience a sense of wonder, too. The closest thing I can think of is when you see someone else’s cute baby, or someone’s cute puppy on the street, and their parent or owner can see you get happy and delight in their child or pet’s adorableness. But that deeply pleasurable awwww feeling is not quite the same as awe. It’s hard to explain, and it’s totally unlike anything I’ve had before, but it’s been a real gift to give that feeling to not only my husband and family but to strangers.

I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing because in America I feel very conditioned to never comment on anyone’s body, never to assume anyone is pregnant even if they might look it, since the risk of being wrong can be so offensive to someone. Overall that caution seems…the appropriate do-no-harm approach. That said, when I was in Australia last month I was stopped and approached kindly by so many people asking when I was due, how I was feeling, wishing me congratulations, all these excited things. It was surprising, especially at first, but also felt really nice and affectionate. Like the opposite of offensive, like the whole pregnancy experience was bringing me closer to everyone around me. Somewhere in my mind I thought aren’t unsolicited comments about my body supposed to be much more objectifying or intrusive, but all they really felt were humanizing and communal. And their awe and joy became part of my own.

For our honeymoon we went to Northern California. We spent two weeks traveling around San Francisco, Mendocino, Napa Valley and Yosemite National Park. Over the Christmas break I shared with him how surprising it’s been, to both experience this daily wonder and to give a bit of it to others. He looked at me and said, “you have a little Yosemite inside you.”

I like to take the end of the year to reflect a bit on what I’ve written, and do a little bit of thinking about what’s to come. This marks my tenth (!) year in a row doing these rounds up, which feels a little hard to believe. (Past roundups can be found here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015)

There were definitely recurring themes of my reporting this year around care, gender, and housing, and I definitely felt drawn to solutions-oriented stories. I received one note from a reader earlier this fall that really made me feel good, because it captured so much of what I try to do professionally. They said:

“You have a knack for throwing cold water on over-hyped solutions while still offering reasons for optimism.”

It’s been an unusually big year on my end — I got married, pregnant, moved across town, pitched and now am far along into writing (!) my first book, changed my name, started a new role at Vox, published 45 articles — and when I think ahead to next year — from finishing my book to giving birth and learning how to parent and ultimately transitioning back to work after maternity leave — it’s certainly making me lean against any kind of New Years Resolution beyond “making it to 2027 in one piece, with a 9 month old in tow.” I’m looking forward to everything, but it’s also funny to think that some years my goals have been like “commit to reading for at least 30 minutes a day” and “do more back stretches.”

I’m happy to report that book leave month 1 went well. I’ve never worked on an intellectual project like this before and it’s been such a good (occasionally-wrenching-don’t-get-me-wrong) challenge and a lot of building the plane while flying kind of learning. A loved one of mine recently asked me if I have any tips for writing a book and I sent them a long-ish email a few nights ago, that I think I will repackage in some form next month when I get home for anyone who might be considering their own book project. So feel free to subscribe for that now if you might be interested. I fly home from Australia tomorrow.

(Feel free to skip ahead if you want to just get to the roundup.) The lowest point of the last month for me was being in Australia amidst the Bondi Beach Hannukah attack. My husband had not yet arrived in Perth, and though his family was lovely and supportive, it was still a really isolating and hard time, and watching the news unfold in real time while almost everyone I knew in the world, including every Jewish person I know, was fast asleep for hours, was difficult. I thought about sending a newsletter that week but ended up being too upset and overwhelmed to get my thoughts down. I ended up just spending a lot of time learning about Jewish dynamics in Australia and I actually found one small synagogue in Western Australia that had a Hanukkah memorial service for the victims/survivors which was very moving and I’m glad I was able to attend it.

For what it’s worth, I think one of the pieces of the attack that got a bit lost in translation between US media and Australian media was the way American coverage almost immediately tried to slot the shooting as similar to the antisemitic attacks we’ve seen in the US since October 7, 2023. Where you had certain high profile acts of violence like the murders of Israeli embassy employees in Washington DC, the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home during Passover, the attack on a dozen Jewish people in Boulder, Colorado followed by the assailant expressing some sort of call about Gaza/Palestinians or anti-Zionism. After the Bondi shooting there was an immediate assumption from some people in the US that this tragedy must have followed a similar pattern. (I even saw a disturbing subset of people try and justify not caring about the attack by highlighting old statements on Israel/Palestine by the murdered Rabbi.)

But there were some key differences. For one thing, the father+son shooters were apparently radicalized by ISIS. They had homemade ISIS flags in their car at the time of the attack, and actually traveled together to the South Philippines in early November, where an active ISIS affiliate is located, and reportedly received military training there. (ISIS has since called the Bondi attack “a source of pride” for them.)

We don’t hear as much about ISIS anymore since they were defeated in Syria in 2019, but they haven’t actually disappeared. My colleague Josh Keating had a good write-up about the state of ISIS in the wake of the shooting I’ll quote from here:

ISIS: Down but not out

To be sure, ISIS is not the same group it was a decade ago, when it controlled an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq and had as many as 80,000 fighters in its ranks. Now, the territorial “caliphate” has been entirely eliminated, and its numbers have probably shrunk to less than 3,000.

ISIS’s attacks and grisly beheading videos once dominated global headlines, prompting a major US military intervention in the Middle East. Now, jihadist-motivated attacks — by ISIS or other groups — are far outnumbered by attacks by right-wing and left-wing extremists in the United States. And numbers are way down in Europe, as well.

But, the truth is that ISIS never really went away. This year began, after all, with an ISIS-inspired car attack in New Orleans that killed 15 people. Last year saw mass casualty attacks by the Afghan affiliate ISIS-K in Russia and Iran, as well as a thwarted plot targeting a Taylor Swift concert in Austria.

Most of the recent ISIS violence, however, has taken place in the countries where the group’s various affiliates are based. This includes Syria, where the number of attacks is up since Assad’s downfall and the removal of a significant number of US troops. But, the group is believed to be growing fastest in Africa, with major affiliates operating in West Africa’s Sahel region, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia.

Little is known about ISIS’s current global “caliph” — Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, who took over in 2023. According to some reports, he is based in Somalia. Even though the group is no longer a physical “state” in any sense, experts believe there’s still a high degree of centralization and coordination between its various affiliates throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Much of ISIS’s work radicalizing and recruiting new members, though, occurs online via social media. The group has taken advantage of the global anger over Israel’s war on Gaza for recruitment purposes, which is somewhat ironic given that ISIS and Hamas are longtime enemies.

Many of the recent attacks and foiled plots in Europe do, in fact, appear to be the work of “lone wolves” radicalized online, many of them teenagers. As the French terrorism analyst Wassim Nasr told me last year, would-be attackers are often given instructions and logistical support by “cyber-coaches” they meet online, a cheaper and less risky process than bringing them to another country for training.

This makes the Australia case, in which the suspects legally purchased firearms and may have traveled to an area where ISIS operates in the Philippines despite one of them having been previously investigated for links to terrorism, all the more noteworthy.

Anyway, there’s still a lot they’re investigating about what happened. It’s been a bit dizzying of course as an American to see the country rally so quick and collectively around passing stronger gun laws. (The father legally owned six guns which almost everyone in Australia thinks should not be a thing.) There are also people seeking to use this attack as an opportunity to push through more dubious policies that seem much more about squashing dissent and peaceful protest on Israel/Gaza than understanding how these Australians connected with ISIS in the first place, or why Iran was behind at least two major antisemitic attacks in Australia since 2023. I thought this Jewish Currents podcast in the immediate wake of the shooting was a good discussion. Their guest was a Melbourne lawyer active in Jewish/pro-Palestinian stuff and I think she had some good context especially on the Jewish community in Australia and how this attack has already started being weaponized in the US and Israel.

This went on a little longer than I planned but hopefully provides some useful context for anyone following along. I’m definitely personally invested in learning about this as I proceed in my third trimester cooking a baby who will grow up Jewish, American and Australian, and deeply connected to all three.

EOY roundup! I picked 15 pieces to lift up here. Not all of them were the ones that necessarily did “the best” by traditional reader metrics, but contained things I was personally proud of, maybe advanced some news or idea not previously reported anywhere before, or noticed something important hiding in plain sight, or just elevated an “old” topic from a new perspective. All of these stories except for the one non-Vox piece was edited by my terrific editor Angela Chen, who I am sad is departing for another opportunity next year. I’m grateful for her eyes and feedback on every story I did in 2025.

1. People are spending $20,000 a year on child care. Here’s what Mamdani can do about it. (December 11, 2025)

I’m very proud to share this op-ed published in the New York Times! I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s major opportunity with universal child care, and the pitfalls he and his team should be mindful of as they embark on this important challenge. I also had the chance in this piece to build on a lot of my previous reporting (you’ll find links to five of my Vox stories) and they even ran it the following week in the print paper. That’s a gift link ^

2. This didn’t start with DOGE (Feb 14, 2025)

It’s hard to believe the the short-sighted, cruel and (expensive!) attacks on the federal government from earlier this year really happened, but they did. I know people still looking for work as a result, or employees who are still working for the federal government who say their jobs are so much harder now with their colleagues and support team significantly reduced. This piece looked at how the attacks on the federal government drew from the same playbook that’s been used against K-12 teachers and public education for decades.

3. Why Americans are moving in with strangers half their age (Feb 24, 2025)
I wrote about the “new empty nesting” — seniors opening up their spare bedrooms to younger renters who are looking for a cheaper option. It’s an underrated but practical idea that bridges generations, boosts needed housing supply, and helps more people afford to age in place. There are laws and cultural practices that still make this kind of intergenerational home-sharing more difficult than it needs to be, and I wrote about some of the people and organizations working to change that.

4. This workplace benefit is helping parents — and boosting businesses. Could it backfire? (Feb 26, 2025)
My deep-dive into employer-sponsored child care.

5.Conservatives have a plan for cheaper day care. But is it safe? (April 17, 2025)
My deep-dive into the conservative deregulatory push in child care. I traveled to Idaho for this reporting. I think we’re seeing more bipartisan consensus that there should be some loosening of rules and restrictions over child care, but debate still remains on things like how much daycare providers should be able to earn, what “quality” should look like, what is a tolerable ratio of staff to kids. These arguments will no doubt continue in 2027 and 2028.

6. Cities are trying a new approach to clearing homeless tent encampments (May 2, 2025)
This piece had a lot of new info about how cities are responding to homelessness in our post Grants Pass world.

7. The right’s new playbook to restrict access to abortion pills (May 9, 2025)
A look at how the anti-abortion movement is trying to recalibrate under Trump 2.0 to restrict abortion medication. (For now at least abortion rates continue to rise post Roe v. Wade, largely due to expanded access to abortion medication.)

8. America might finally make childbirth free (May 30, 2025)
An encouraging and interesting story to report, though unfortunately I could not manifest it passing this year before I need it.

9. The big barrier to having children we’re not talking about (June 2nd, 2025)
A piece where I argue that our society could do a lot more to support early parenthood for those who want that, and if we're serious about reproductive choice, then we shouldn't ignore it.

10. The deceptively simple reform that could unlock more housing (May 29, 2025)
On one of the most-talked-about ideas these days in housing policy — whether apartment buildings above 3 stories should be permitted to be built with just one staircase, instead of two. Such “single-stair” buildings are pretty standard throughout the world, but North American fire safety standards developed pretty differently over the last 165 years, and as such American fire safety officials today remain very opposed to the idea of making this change. I looked at the debate, research and legislative push.

11. Confusing abortion bans hurt patients. But there’s a cost to making them clearer. (July 1, 2025)
    A story looking at a debate over whether abortion bans can be improved in ways to give doctors more legal reassurance to provide care in emergency situations, and the political stakes of doing so.
    

12. Do falling birth rates matter in an AI future? (July 18, 2025)
    A piece that asks: does AI make declining birth rates less important? Will aging societies need fewer workers, anyway? Who is actually examining these questions, and what do we know so far?
    

13. Cutting five words from this law could make houses cheaper (July 21, 2025)
    I wrote about the obscure, 50-year-old federal rule that has been stifling affordable housing in America.
    

14. What happens when a city takes women’s unpaid work seriously? (December 5, 2025)
    My piece on Bogota’s care blocks and how the transformative idea is spreading around the world.
    

15. Traditional gender roles won’t get men what they want (December 8, 2025)

    A new study on 40+ European countries found women increasingly want men to share child care and housework equally—but men's attitudes have barely budged. In countries where this gap was widest, both birth rates and female employment were lower.
    
    There's a lot of reluctance to—and frustration with—studying men and masculinity in particular. But avoiding it won't make the problems go away. I wrote about why this all matters, not just for birth rates, but for gender equality and relationships.

Thank you all so much for reading and sharing your smart thoughts and ideas with me this year. I hope you have a really nice end to 2025.

Rachel

Hi from Perth, Western Australia! (It is 13 hours ahead of the East Coast of USA here, so it’s Sunday night.)

Book writing update— [or skip below if you want to just get to the new stories]

I’m writing this newsletter at the end of week one of my book leave from Vox. “Book leave” in journalism essentially means a period of time your company has agreed to allow you to take off from your job, where you don’t receive a paycheck but you’re entitled to keep your health insurance and retirement, and you can return to your job afterwards. At most places it’s a discretionary opportunity granted by the employer, meaning you can request to take unpaid leave and your company can say yes or no. In our union’s contract we have the negotiated right to request an unpaid book leave for up to six months, and the company agrees to at least consider requests on a good faith, case-by-case basis. Media companies understand publishing books can help not just their employees but the company itself, so it’s not an entirely altruistic thing, but if I were say the company’s top political reporter and I requested book leave during a presidential election, the company very well could say no we’re not granting that request. I know someone who requested six months and was approved for four. TLDR, at Vox at least they aim to be reasonable but it’s not a guaranteed right.

Anyway — a month or so after my book contract was finalized I submitted a request for a 3 month book leave (December 1-Feb 28). It ran up the chain and a few weeks later it was approved, fortunately. My first draft is due April 1, 2026!

I’ve never written a book before and the plan I came up with for myself was to spend the time leading up to book leave researching, reporting, and outlining, so then when I went on book leave, I could focus exclusively on turning my outline into the book. I thought that this would be the “easiest” way to balance my full-time writing job with the demands of book writing, since I only have certain hours in a day/week where I feel I’m mentally able to write. (Other hours of the day I feel able to do research, read, organize notes, interview sources, but writing takes a certain level of brain power I find much harder to tap into in the afternoons and evenings. I can write then under stressful-breaking-news-level of pressure, but that’s not a state of being I want to be in for more than short periods of time, and that’s rarely ever “flow” state.)

But when I talked with my editor in late summer they gently but firmly suggested I rethink my plan, that I might be underestimating how long it takes to write a book, and upon hearing I was pregnant, that I also might be underestimating how I’ll be feeling near the end of my third trimester. They suggested I try to file the first six chapters before I leave for book leave.

These were all fair, good points, but it was stressful to think about recalibrating and finding the time. Being pregnant though turns out to be quite the motivating force. I know journalists/authors who assured me it’s really normal in book publishing to get extensions on your book deadlines. But I didn’t want to have to do that with a baby coming, and I do feel like having a real deadline is generally good for me. So, recalibrate I somehow did — and spent every weekend, federal holiday, etc working. It was pretty intense and tiring, but I did it. And now I’m extremely grateful/relieved to be starting my real book leave focused on writing the rest of the book and editing, where I’m not also doing a full-time job on top.

Back this summer, before I learned I was pregnant, my husband said he’d like to try to visit his family in Australia for Christmas. I thought hm, well I already by this time had been approved for book leave in December. What if I went early, stayed with his dad, and he then met us for the holiday? It was kind of a crazy plan, and if I had been earlier or further along in my pregnancy it probably wouldn’t have worked out, but the timing was sort of ideal (I will need a doctor’s note to fly home) and so now I’m here working for the month! I rented a little co-working space about 20 minute walk from my father-in-law’s, and have been benefiting from the sun, the exceptional Australian coffee, and the lack of distractions from the time difference. This is probably more than you cared to know but I have found a lot of book writing/publishing pretty opaque myself, so thought it might be interesting for anyone who is curious to learn more.

Bogota’s care blocks:

I’m really glad to share my new feature story for Vox which is on the best, most practical social policy idea I’ve had the opportunity to cover this year. Back in October, thanks to a philanthropic grant supporting child care journalism, I was able to travel to Colombia to do reporting on these things called “care blocks” which are essentially neighborhood hubs where caregivers (almost always women) can access services like handing off laundry, seeing a therapist, finishing their education, joining a fitness class or just resting, while their kids or elderly relatives are cared for nearby. Bogota’s “system of care” also includes mobile buses that bring services to caregivers in rural areas, and an at-home program that targets caregivers who support people with such severe disabilities that they can’t leave their homes.

These care blocks are built on what’s known as the “3 Rs”: recognize, redistribute, and reduce. Recognize that care work is real work that sustains society. Redistribute it — not just between women and men, but to care recipients when able, and to the state, employers, and communities. And reduce the overall burden so individual caregivers aren’t consumed by it.

My story looks at where these care blocks came from, how they’ve evolved over the last half-decade, and how they’re now spreading around the world. As one philanthropic leader said to me, 20 years ago, no mayor talked specifically about “climate.” Now every major city has a climate action plan. Care policy like this could very well be on a similar trajectory — in part because it turns out to be a pretty efficient way to deliver services cities already were looking to provide.

You can read the story here [←-unpaywalled gift link] though if you are a Vox subscriber you will also receive a Vox members-only newsletter this week with some behind-the-scenes details of my reporting trip. (Including how I got my phone stolen 😭)

I should say now is also a really good time to consider signing up for a Vox membership because it’s their annual holiday sale — so $4 a month instead of $5, or $40 for a year, instead of $60. If this is the kind of journalism you want to see more of, I can sadly report that Google ad revenue in the age of AI is not going to help us get there, and reader support really, really helps. I’ll say the ad-free podcasts have been quite nice, too!

Will cities make room for families with kids?

The “creative-class” boom worked to revitalize cities—until it didn’t. Millennials loved cities, but cities didn’t build enough infrastructure for when they’d eventually become parents. With families now leaving, Boomers retiring, and Gen Z smaller (and often working remotely), the next chapter for urban America could look very different.

I wrote about the fairly existential moment facing cities and city leaders — who have traditionally favored making politically easier, short-term decisions when it comes to building housing. (Aka not building housing.) There’s still time to change course though, and I wrote about what that might look very like.

This isn’t the first time I’ve looked at this subject. Back in 2023 I wrote a piece looking at why cities built so few apartments for families. This past spring I published a story looking at the relationship between affordable housing and fertility. A month later I published a piece on the debate around single-stair construction, which some people say would make it easier to build family-sized apartments in cities. This story is my latest attempt to explore the issues, and I think it does offer some new research, news-y developments and ideas.

You can read that story here.

Ok, that’s all for now…I hopefully have something else to share later this week, fingers crossed.🤞

Here’s a picture of me in Australia, at 25 weeks (!).

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I hope everyone is having a great fall. I have a lot of reporting to share today. I’ve been a little slower than usual with this newsletter than I’d like, but I hope you’ll forgive me. In addition to working on the first draft of my book, I’m happy to share with you that I’m 19 weeks pregnant :) We’re really excited about it—and it’s definitely forcing me to be a lot more disciplined with my limited time to research and write.

For those who’ve followed my work for a while, you know I’ve given a lot of thought to having kids. I reread my motherhood dread essay about a month ago and felt a lot of tenderness for the person who wrote it, and gratitude that I was able to capture where I was at that time of my life. I know many people are still there, and it’s been interesting to reflect on how different I feel today.

It’s a reminder to me that while some people have always known they wanted to be parents, and others have always known they want to remain child-free, millions of us fall somewhere in between. Our feelings, preferences, and desires are deeply shaped by factors like who we’re partnered with, what our jobs and care supports are like, what our friends are doing, the messages we’re consuming, where we’re living, and so on.

Getting pregnant on a timeline that felt right to me — and with the person I wanted — has made me even more grateful for the reproductive rights and birth control access I’ve had. There are still plenty of unknowns, and I’m acutely aware there’s still lots of this pregnancy to go, but I feel rather happy that, while I’m feeling all sorts of emotions these days, dread isn’t one of them.

Some new stories:

Trump and IVF
Trump’s neither abandoning IVF as some social conservatives hoped, nor taking real steps to make it more affordable for most Americans. I looked at what he [finally] proposed last week, and what he could have done if he were serious about affordability. You can read my Vox story here, and/or watch a 90-second social video on Instagram here.

Rent debt

Millions of Americans have back rent debt, but it’s received significantly less policy attention than other forms of debt, even as it continues to grow. Data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in January showed that 14 percent of active renters still carried late fees from the past year. Earlier this month, activists launched a novel rent debt strike against one of the largest corporate landlords in the country. I reported on the tenants’ strategy and national goals — and how they hope to spark a movement similar to what the “Corinthian 15” did in 2015 with student debt.
Read my my Vox story here.

Black two-parent families

Even though roughly half of Black children in the US grow up in two-parent households, social scientists have largely ignored these families for decades. I talked with Christina Cross, a Harvard sociologist and author of Inherited Inequality, about her research and what it means for debates about marriage, kids, and inequality. I learned a lot from her book and am really looking forward to seeing more people engage with it. You can read my Vox Q&A here, and a video excerpt of our interview here.

Tarrifs and housing

Trump has rolled out several rounds of tariffs this year — and they can be hard to keep track: what’s being taxed, when it’s taking effect, and how it all adds up. A new round of tariffs went into effect this month, and I looked at how these (along with earlier ones) are making housing more expensive. It’s very maddening. The president keeps talking about making America “affordable again,” but his trade and immigration policies are taking an axe to homebuilding in the middle of a housing shortage. Read the Vox story here.

The YIGBY movement

I wrote a story late last month about where the Yes-in-God’s-Backyard (YIGBY) movement goes next — a follow-up to a piece I did in 2024. It traces what happened in state legislatures over the past year, how California’s statewide YIGBY law is working two years in, and new developments on the federal level, including a bill to preempt (!) local zoning rules. I am proud of the reporting we’re doing in this area. Read the Vox story here and/or watch a ~2 minute social video on Instagram here.

Vacant homes

One of the more common responses I hear about homelessness is that we’ve got millions of vacant houses in America. It’s unfortunately not a very helpful point, though there are some things we could with those structures. I looked into what cities get right and wrong about tackling empty homes. You can read the Vox story here and/or watch a ~2 minute social video on Instagram here.

On experimenting with video
As you can probably tell, I’m trying to make short videos to accompany most of my stories. I’d give myself a B- grade so far, but I’m getting better! My editors and I are also experimenting with stories that might work only as videos — when something’s interesting but doesn’t necessarily justify the investment of a full written piece.

Earlier this month, for example, we did a video on new Pew data about Americans’ views on pronatalism — you can watch that here. This whole period feels like an experiment: testing what bolsters our reporting, what works better as video than text, and how video can reach different audiences. I’d probably be making more if I weren’t balancing book writing and pregnancy, but I’m going to keep at it — and Vox has a very good team that’s eager to support us as we expand this work. I’m just trying to get the hang of it without wasting too much time on platforms that openly try to addict us.

That’s it for now — I should have a few more stories out in the next week. If I don’t manage to get out another newsletter, you can find everything on Vox’s website and my other social channels. Thank you for reading!

Hi all, happy almost end of summer / back-to-school! I love this time of year, and the weather is starting to be much more tolerable in DC. (Though the federal government terrorizing vulnerable people in the city so the president can look tough on TV has been quite intolerable.)

I’m a little behind on sending some of my new reporting (which you can always find immediately at my author page, or on social media within a day of publication) but working on my book (!) has been a top priority this summer. I’m really excited about it, and planning to go on a three month book leave starting December 1. So doing everything I can beforehand to be able make the most of that time.

Here are some things I’ve been working on over the last month.

A Five-Word Fix for Housing

I wrote about an obscure, 50-year-old federal rule that has been stifling affordable housing in America. This rule required manufactured housing to be built on a “permanent chassis”— essentially a fixed structural base, usually anchored to the ground. This was driving me crazy because housing experts and politicians from both sides of the aisle have agreed it’s hobbled the production and cultural acceptance of manufactured housing for decades, for no real good reason.

Since manufactured housing is mostly assembled in a factory rather than built on site, it tends to be significantly cheaper to produce and purchase compared to traditional homes. Striking the permanent chassis rule would cost the government no money—all it requires is deleting five words from an old law.

I became pretty fascinated by how and why this hasn’t happened, despite the obvious benefits and zero budgetary impact. I was struck by how many times federal lawmakers, housing experts, and even a four-year National Commission convened by Congress in the 1990s had recommended the change. The permanent chassis rule and its history offer a window into how smart ideas that could solve real problems can still languish for decades in the fog of federal process.

But—and this is a big but—it also shows what it takes to move even obvious reforms from inertia to action. My story looks at why this never got done, but also why it’s finally likely to happen now. A week after my story was published, the Senate Banking Committee approved the biggest housing supply package it’s considered in a decade, and one of the bills in that package would finally eliminate this frustrating rule.

Can read it here: Cutting five words from this law could make houses cheaper.


The Cash Debate

There’s been a renewed debate lately over whether unrestricted cash transfers—also known as guaranteed income or universal basic income—help the poor and whether it was overhyped as an economic solution. I’ve been following the debate and new research closely, and did reporting to learn more about where the cash movement goes next and how to make sense of the new studies generating headlines. I also included some of my own opinions in this one.

Can read it here: The evolving fight over giving people cash, explained.

Men in Child Care

I was really glad to report this story on the dearth of men working in child care, exploring the reasons why and looking at what would help to change that. I also had the opportunity to spend time with some talented men who have chosen this career path despite the stigma and bias they sometimes face. The piece also features wonderful original photos by Alyssa Schukar who came with me.

You can read that here: A solution to the child care shortage is hiding in plain sight

State Child Care Investments

This one is a bit more niche, but if you follow child care policy, you’ve probably heard about significant new investments made by states like New Mexico, Vermont, Washington DC, and most recently Connecticut. I wrote about these state child care trust funds and other dedicated funding streams for early childhood —funded sometimes by things like online gambling revenue, taxes on weed, oil and gas, and tobacco settlements—examining both the opportunities these victories present and their real challenges.

You can read that here: The “mission accomplished” problem haunting child care activists

Gig Worker Benefits

Finally, I returned to a topic I’ve covered a lot over the last decade: labor rights for independent contractors and gig workers. Congress might soon pass what DoorDash and Uber have wanted for their drivers all along.

Ten years ago, some Democrats had more visionary ideas for “portable benefits” for gig workers, but they largely stopped talking about those, and I look at why. Now Republicans hope to tout how they’re bolstering retirement and health care for the nation’s tens of millions of independent contractors.

But some of their ideas, like “Association Health Plans,” offer far less regulated protection and may be far riskier for workers while undermining the Affordable Care Act to boot. The biggest win for workers might be making it easier for companies to contribute to contractors’ retirement savings accounts. Unions have generally opposed these kinds of reforms, fearing they would accelerate misclassification or general outsourcing to contracting.

Can read it here: A decade-long fight over worker power may be coming to an end

Thank you for reading and keeping up with this newsletter. ❤️

I do hope to write and experiment a bit more with it once I finish my book manuscript. Substack seems much more vibrant than when I first joined in 2018 (and sometimes overwhelming). My dear friend Jerusalem Demsas just launched her own magazine on this platform earlier this month, The Argument. I’m very excited to see it out in the world, and I know so many other writers now really make this their home base. While I try to stay up on newsletters in my inbox, I wouldn’t say I hang out here much. But I’m aware there’s a lot of generative connection happening and what can I say—I have a bit of FOMO. I think it’s possible Vox starts doing more on Substack in the next year, too. (I also like that if I ever want to leave Substack and go to another newsletter hosting site, I can do that with you all relatively easily.)

That’s it for now! As always, let me know if you have any thoughts (or criticisms) and if there are things you think I should be keeping on my radar