This is getting hard to ignore

Plus: Kristi Noem, "Abolish ICE," and more.

View this email in your browser    Each week, a different Vox editor curates their favorite work that Vox has published across text, audio, and video. This week's recommendations are brought to you by Miranda Kennedy, executive producer of Today, Explained and Explain It to Me. Each week, a different Vox editor curates their favorite work that Vox has published across text, audio, and video. This week's recommendations are brought to you by Miranda Kennedy, executive producer of Today, Explained and Explain It to Me. Hello, and welcome to Friday! This is one of those weeks that has felt both extremely long and super short. Many of us on the East Coast and Midwest have spent the week ice-picking and shoveling out our sidewalks while entertaining kids at home and making endless mugs of hot chocolate and saucepans of soup. Not all bad — in fact, cute in a hibernating kind of way. And people are nicer to each other in the cold. Even in the city, there's a communitarianism: shoveling one another's walks, exchanging info about slippery patches of sidewalk and which neighborhood restaurants are open.    But, overlapping with this wintery cosiness and shared de-icing, there's the sickeningly familiar rollercoaster of news: the horrific killing of another civilian observer on Saturday morning, an outpouring of grief and protest, and a politicized standing down and backing away.    One image I've been carrying with me through the week is of Minneapolis residents, gathering together in the frigid temps — not just against the cold and the snow, but against the aggression by ICE officers on their city. Wearing thick hats against the cold and thick masks against the pepper spray, they have been braving the weather and the dangers of an erratic armed force to come together in a very intense communitarian display. It's inspiring and certainly puts in perspective my complaints about my icy driveway.    —Miranda Kennedy, executive producer of Today, Explained and Explain It to Me TOP PICKS THIS WEEK 🎧 "Abolish ICE"   In the immediate aftermath of a shocking event, I don't need writers or pundits to tell me what to feel or fear; I need help parsing through exactly what happened and for someone to help give voice to some of the communal outrage and confusion that I'm feeling — and to explain, from inside a place of real curiosity and need, what could come next, both what we have a right to expect and what we should expect (in case those things are different, which in this case, they are.)    That's what this episode of Today, Explained did the Monday after Alex Pretti was killed by an ICE officer on the street in Minneapolis. It opened with the last words of Renee Good ("That's fine dude; I'm not mad at you.") and Pretti ("Are you okay?") and closed with a realpolitik look at the way lawmakers are using what leverage they have to try to express the country's shock and fury at two people getting gunned down in the street for posing no threat to speak of.    Your friends are still acting like everything is normal in America. What do you do?   This very smart advice column from Sigal Samuel helps a reader grapple with the duality we're all living in — of making hot chocolate safe in our houses while contemplating the faltering of democratic, civil order in American cities. The reader has an intuition that "we're all obligated to play some role in this. But I don't know how to convey that to them or how to articulate exactly what that role should be."    Sigal's answer is through the work of a German Jewish political scientist whose 1941 book, "The Dual State," describes life under authoritarianism: mostly uneventful, even boring, but liable to flip on a dime to be chilling and unrecognizable. She congratulates the reader for recognizing that all is not right in this version of America and then counsels them to talk to their friends about Renee Good, "a concrete illustration of the dual state dynamic."    How much trouble is Kristi Noem in?   This timely newsletter is an excerpt from an interview with Ben Terris, a political correspondent for our sister publication New York Magazine, who profiled Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem in a hilarious piece last year. The question at hand here is whether "ICE Barbie" could be ousted from her role in the administration as some Democrats have called for or whether she could even suffer a minor rebuke. Ben explains how we got to here, with a bulked-up, undertrained army of ICE officers, run by a fairly under-qualified leader "without much of an ideological backbone."    Ben points out that many of Noem's former colleagues were more than happy to spill the dirt on Noem, showing very little loyalty to her. His reporting has long shown that she is on "thin ice" with the administration. But he thinks Trump is unlikely to give in to calls to get rid of Noem now, because he hates to be seen as backing down or giving in. So, she may have won herself a bit of time, simply by default.     📹 Minnesota officials want to find out the truth about Renee Good's death. The federal government won't let them.   The morning that Alex Pretti was shot and killed in Minneapolis, we published the first episode of our new Today, Explained Saturday show, an interview with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. In our interview, conducted from a turbulent Minneapolis, Ellison made it clear that the Justice Department had declined to open an investigation into the officer responsible for Good's death. He also described the ways that the Trump administration is withholding evidence from the state in the investigation into her death. (Some of this is supposed to change, because when President Trump and Gov. Tim Walz spoke this week, Trump said they would start sharing evidence.)    Ellison also took tough questions about the role Democrats played in the "defund the police" movement, the "abolish ICE" movement, and the Somali fraud scandal that brought ICE to his state back in December. And he warned that we should take seriously Trump's threat to impose the Insurrection Act on Minnesota.    The Saturday interview show is Today, Explained's first foray into video episodes, hosted by Astead Herndon, who brings rigor, journalism, and curiosity. Check out the interview and subscribe to the Vox channel so you don't miss a single one! This email was sent to aymentanaze.news@blogger.com. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe. If you value Vox's unique explanatory journalism, support our work by becoming a Vox Member.   View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.   Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.