This week offered some lessons on, among other things, how to text responsibly 👊🇺🇸🔥 This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Further reading: Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal, Texting do's and don'ts for 2024. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz holds up a posterboard showing emojis used by President Trump's national security officials in the Houthi group text chat. Image courtesy of the office of Jared Moskowitz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the 'Huge week for the group chat' about?
It's been a huge week for the group chat. Not one of yours, certainly not one of mine. I'm talking about the Houthi PC small group chat, of course.
But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone? I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious. How's the number on your phone?
Well, if you have somebody else's contact, and then somehow it gets sucked in. Oh, someone sent you that contact. It gets sucked in. Nobody's texting war plants. As a matter of fact, they even changed the Title II attack plans.
Now it turns out Judge Boasberg has actually been assigned to another high-profile case, this one surrounding the fallout from the signal messages in the Atlantic article, which we've been talking about all day, right?
Never before has the group chat been subject to this kind of scrutiny, and it's been a great reminder that we have lost our way. On Today Explained, we're going to talk about texting and how we kind of forgot how to do it right. Or maybe we never knew how to do it right in the first place.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue?
Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
This is Today Explained. And this is Sean Ramos for him. Here with Max Reed of The Reed, Max Substack. Max has been thinking about group chats for years. In fact, he wrote a piece for New York Magazine way back in 2019 called Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again.
And since a certain group chat made the internet fun this week for at least some, we thought we'd ask Max, did we this week, at least in the United States, hit peak group chat?
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Chapter 2: Who is Max Reid and what is his perspective on group chats?
Also, the goal was a discussion. Imagine if you were with somebody and you were like, hey, I just saw a news story about these high-level government people leaking their signal chat and someone was like, heard it. You're like, no, I get that. It's news. I want to talk about it. I feel like memes are kind of the same.
Yes, and. Yes, and. We've done our rants. Should we talk about some do's or do you have some more don'ts you really want to get off your chest?
Oh, man. Oh, man. Okay. I have one more don't. I actually need to hate more than I thought I did, which is no scary mysteries. Don't send a text like, hey, can we talk? Oh, I hate that too. My parents do that. Oh, don't send a text. My mom does. Call me.
Call me as soon as you can. I call her. It's like, hey, so do you want to eat tacos or?
Literally my same where the urgency is just not matched to the to the content. Yeah. No scary mysteries allowed. You should say why you're reaching out.
Okay, we've done a lot of don't.
Let's do a little do. Yes. Okay, one really nice thing to do when you're texting is to tell people what you want from them. Maybe one person wants to be in touch a lot and the other doesn't. Maybe one person wants to talk about more serious, heavy emotional stuff over the text and the other person is really uncomfortable with that.
But exactly like your in-person relationships, people can't read your mind and you have to tell them what you want. So maybe that looks something like, I want to be in touch every day. I want to hear how your day was. Or, hey, on weekdays, this is exhausting for me. Can we just like have a big old phone call on Saturdays? Whatever.
You know what you're reminding me of is like the voice memos or as I call them sometimes when I get them from Noelle King, my co-host, voice memoirs.
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