Vox Quick Hits

With Democrats in charge, there is a lot of talk about big ideas for the country, including … banning menthol cigarettes? Politico’s Sarah Owermohle explains why Black lawmakers are split over whether a ban would help or hurt Black communities.

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Aarti Shahani, NPR journalist and host of WBEZ podcast Art of Power, talks with investigative journalist and author Alfredo Corchado about the US-Mexico border. Trump's actions created a new urgency for the political establishment to better understand the border, and Biden's challenges there continue to grow. Corchado, a former child farmworker and a Mexican-American with identities on both sides of the border wall, discusses the reality, politics, history, and future of the border.

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The Trace’s Jennifer Mascia explains why two gun reform bills the House recently passed are likely to fail in the Senate.

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Your 20s can feel like the best of times and also the worst. Book Critic Constance Grady offers a few reads to help navigate through the murky existential waters of starting a career or finding a new purpose.

Ask a Book Critic is an exclusive series from Vox Quick Hits. New episodes every other Wednesday and you can read the column here.

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Matt, Dara, and Vox's Jerusalem Demsas discuss the politics of progressive control proposals that rise to the fore in the wake of mass shootings, and whether or not they can be effective at curing the real ills of gun violence in America.

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On Monday, a tweet sold for $2.9 million. That followed a JPEG that went for $69 million. The Verge’s Liz Lopatto explains how internet ephemera turned to gold.

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Sixty years ago, geologists tried to drill down through the Earth’s crust to pull up a piece of the Earth’s mantle. Their mission didn’t go exactly as planned. But it sowed the seeds for a new field of science that’s helped us rewrite not only the history of the planet, but, potentially, our definitions of life itself.

The documentaries featured in this episode are "The First Deep Ocean Drilling: Mohole, Phase 1" and "Project Mohole: Report No. 1."

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As the argument for student debt forgiveness has been fleshed out in recent years, so has the case that it’s not the right way to go. Some experts, economists, and ordinary Americans are skeptical of forgiving student debt. They argue that while debt is certainly a problem for the people who have it, forgiveness isn’t a really effective way to stimulate the economy or to tackle equity goals. Beth Akers, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, lays out the case against broad-based student debt forgiveness in Tell Me More’s two-part series on student debt.

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The United States and China met in Anchorage, Alaska, on Thursday to air grievances, and the cameras were rolling. Vox’s Alex Ward explains how the meeting set the stage for one of the world’s biggest rivalries.

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There’s about to be a huge transfer of wealth from the pockets of Boomers to younger generations. Will “the great wealth transfer” magnify existing inequalities or expand the middle class? Deputy editor Meredith Haggerty discusses her story on this hard-to-talk-about topic and unpacks why inheritance is more complicated than it seems.

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