Dylan Matthews

Washington, D.C.

Senior Correspondent and Lead Writer at Vox

I write for Vox 🔸 I donate 10 percent of my income to effective charities and so can you https://t.co/3L39qEBEue

Articles

The bizarre pancreas loophole that’s undermining America’s organ donation system

4 days ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

Below is a graph showing a trend that exploded during the 2020s:What is this depicting? Compute use for AI? Crispr gene edits per year? No, this is another, much less-known example of massive growth these past several years. This is a chart of the number of pancreases (or, to use the correct plural, “pancreata”) collected each year from dead bodies in the US for research purposes:How this happened is no mystery.
AI’s coming for your job. The big, beautiful bill will make it worse.

2 weeks ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

I’m writing this on a plane back to Washington, DC, from a conference in the Bay Area, the land of tomorrow. While the conference wasn’t about AI, this is the Bay Area, and thus roughly 90 percent of conversations were about AI. It is hard to overstate the scale of the gap between the cultures of the Bay Area and DC on this topic.
The big, bad bond market could derail Trump’s big, beautiful bill

3 weeks ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

To pass a law in the United States, you need to jump through a lot of hurdles. A bill has to first clear a committee in the House or Senate. (In the case of Republicans’ tax legislation this year, its components had to clear 11 different committees.) The House Rules Committee has to agree for it to come to the floor for a vote. It has to pass that vote.
The House’s big tax bill shows how little Republicans have really changed

1 month ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

Politics, you will notice, has gotten extremely weird. To some degree, of course, this is Donald Trump’s fault. No other president has seen the first part of their term defined by a fight over whether the federal government can send people living in the US to a prison in El Salvador with no due process. No other modern president has decided to ignore decades of settled economic and political wisdom and institute the biggest tariffs since the Hoover administration.
Trump’s big bill is terrible in all the normal Republican ways

1 month ago | yahoo.com | Dylan Matthews

Politics, you will notice, has gotten extremely weird. To some degree, of course, this is Donald Trump’s fault. No other president has seen the first part of their term defined by a fight over whether the federal government can send people living in the US to a prison in El Salvador with no due process. No other modern president has decided to ignore decades of settled economic and political wisdom and institute the biggest tariffs since the Hoover administration.
This illness kills babies at their most vulnerable. We can stop it.

1 month ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

If the year 2025 has had a message for developing countries, it’s this: “You’re on your own.”Most notably, the Trump administration began with an unprecedented and ongoing assault on foreign aid, including global health programs. But there have been further ill omens. Other rich countries, including the UK and France, followed the US example by cutting their own aid programs as well.
Humans Better Than AI at Forecasting Future

1 month ago | businessandamerica.com | Dylan Matthews

Being able to predict the future seems nice. I would’ve liked to know that my S&P 500 index funds would peak in mid-February and then fall off a cliff in April. It would’ve been helpful for my reporting in the lead-up to the inauguration to know just how far the Trump administration would go to attack foreign aid. And while I’m at it, I’d like some sense of where mortgage rates are going, so I can better judge when to buy a house. Source link
Stopping the next pandemic could be as simple as switching on a light bulb

1 month ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

In January 2024, I wrote a big piece on a relatively new, and very promising, approach to fighting respiratory diseases like Covid, tuberculosis, and flus. It’s called “far-UVC,” a type of ultraviolet light, at wavelengths of roughly 200 to 235 nanometers, that can kill the vast majority of airborne pathogens it targets, without damaging human skin or eyes the way longer-wavelength UV does. The potential here is massive.
Why humans are still much better than AI at forecasting the future

1 month ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

Being able to predict the future seems nice. I would’ve liked to know that my S&P 500 index funds would peak in mid-February and then fall off a cliff in April. It would’ve been helpful for my reporting in the lead-up to the inauguration to know just how far the Trump administration would go to attack foreign aid. And while I’m at it, I’d like some sense of where mortgage rates are going, so I can better judge when to buy a house.
Will Trump’s tariffs increase American manufacturing jobs?

2 months ago | vox.com | Dylan Matthews

Putting Americans back to work in factories isn’t just hard. It’s impossible. Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.