A few weeks ago, I was zoning out, scrolling through Instagram stories. Among the usual photos of dinner recipes, museum pictures, and selfies, I saw a post that stopped me cold in my tracks. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion said that her then-boyfriend, basketball player Klay Thompson, cheated on her. 

The group chats activated immediately. My friends and I were stunned. We’d watch this couple work out together, celebrate the holidays, and even purchase a home through our tiny screens. Eventually, the shock turned to rage. The thing is: We don’t actually know these people. 

This is not the first time I’ve gotten worked up about a stranger’s cheating scandal. Ariana Madix and Tom Sandoval. Halle Berry and Eric Benét. Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Even a random couple at a Coldplay concert raised the blood pressure of outside observers. 

Americans are divided about a lot, but when it comes to cheating, we’re in agreement: Don’t do it. And changes in technology mean that, for some, the definition of infidelity is widening. Writer Zoe Yu detailed this shift in a recent article she penned for The Atlantic about something called “microcheating.” 

“Just like regular cheating, microcheating is sort of nebulous and really hard to pin down because what goes for cheating in one relationship might not actually count as cheating in another one,” she wrote. “One person might think that flirting with someone over text is cheating, another person might not. This varies, I think, a lot from relationship to relationship.”

What other actions follow under the umbrella of microcheating? And how is technology shaping the way we think about our romantic relationships? We discuss that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.  

Is microcheating a purely digital thing?

It’s not purely digital, but I think because of how tech-driven a lot of our relationships now are, a lot of these small behaviors that might constitute a breach in the exclusivity of a relationship are very much digital. 

This can mean having an online dating account or subscribing to someone’s OnlyFans. Then there are these emerging little behaviors, like hitting like on someone’s Instagram post or sliding up on someone’s story.

Sliding up on a story?

Sliding up on someone’s story. As someone who’s firmly in the Gen Z cohort, I was explaining to one of my older millennial friends just how much meaning is suffused into something as tiny as a story.

A lot of Gen Zers will sit around and be like, “Oh my gosh, what does it mean that he liked my story? What does it mean that he slid up and responded with so-and-so emoji?” I think it’s because a lot of the time, the first ways that we were socialized with each other — at least in the Gen Z demographic — were actually through tech.

It’s interesting because on one hand, I think it’s very easy to sort of roll your eyes. But I’m not above seeing someone cute and going back to a post from a year ago, hitting “like,” and seeing what happens. I think we’ve all received the little looking sideways emoji on a picture of ourselves we posted. But it also seems like a lot to track. Does this mean people are tracking their partners’ likes and other online activity?

Yeah. I think one defining feature of microcheating is how one-sided it is; people are very much in an investigative mindset. 

What’s really interesting about cheating is that people are attempting to assign meaning to something that is actually a lot more complex. I don’t deny there is information that you can glean from someone’s online behavior and the way that they present themselves publicly on a profile, but also the human reality is much more complicated and much more hairy. 

I think one aspect of microcheating is that it boils down all of the human contradictions and irregularities and things that you might not understand about a person into these very reductive data points. What’s interesting is that the entire premise of microcheating is couched on the assumption that if you snoop and you find something, this is uncorrupted evidence.

How much of this is actually less about the relationship itself and more about embarrassment? Everything is very public-facing. I think of conversations with my friends where it’s just like, “I really like this guy. I hope he doesn’t embarrass me.”

That’s like the whole Sabrina Carpenter song, right?

Yes!

You might not actually object to your boyfriend liking some girl’s post. What you actually might be concerned about is the message that it’s sending to this person, given the social meaning that we’ve now assigned collectively to likes and comments and follows. 

You might not actually think, “Oh, my boyfriend might be attracted to this person because he’s following her on Instagram.” It might actually be the fear of “How is this going to reflect on me? How is this going to embarrass me and how is it going to affect the way that other people see my relationship and whether or not my significant other is sufficiently loyal?”

Is it possible to have a full life online without microcheating? Is it reasonable to expect people not to post or share memes or do whatever it is we do online if we also want to be in a relationship?

I think the bar for exclusivity has gotten inordinately high, to the point where people are demanding an exclusivity of emotion, of attraction, and you can’t actually share a laugh or share a private moment with anyone outside of this romantic relationship that is supposed to be at the center of your life. 

I think this is actually super damaging because it closes off all of these really, really great relationships, friendships that are outside of a romantic concept, but you can’t really reach for if you think that every kind of small behavior might be potentially suspect.

The Trump administration has a surprising new agenda item: It’s all-in on legalizing a psychedelic drug called ibogaine. 

Ibogaine is classified as a Schedule I drug, which means it’s illegal on the federal level. But some studies show it may be able to treat opioid addiction, and researchers are also hopeful that it can help with PTSD. 

It’s that second use that has caught the White House’s ear. Veterans and veterans’ groups have been lobbying hard for ibogaine as a way to treat PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. Last month, they made some headway on that project when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to fast-track the Food and Drug Administration review process.

Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist writing about drug policy and other topics, told Today, Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill that, naturally, podcaster Joe Rogan was also involved. Busby spoke with Hill about what ibogaine does, how the right got into psychedelics, and whether the FDA could soon approve some of them for use.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

When did Trump become interested in psychedelics?

Well, he’s famously never smoked a cigarette, had a drink, certainly not had a trip. So in the Oval Office the other week, he’s kind of joking about taking ibogaine. There’s a lot of bravado there, but ibogaine is an incredibly potent psychedelic. It famously gives people sort of recalls of every traumatic moment in their life. 

It’s an extracted molecule from a West African — Gabonese, specifically — root bark from a shrub, and basically became known as being able to rid opioid addicts, heroin addicts, of withdrawal symptoms in one trip. 

Ibogaine and psychedelics have now entered the mainstream conversation with the Trump administration talking about legalizing certain psychedelics. How did we get here?

Psychedelics have obviously long belonged to the cultural left, the counterculture, but it seems now there’s almost like a counter-counterculture with these right-wing, mostly Christian former special forces fighters, soldiers in the US Army, that are suffering from really debilitating conditions — from PTSD and [traumatic brain injuries] — and they’ve basically figured out that ibogaine and other psychedelics provide them the relief that conventional medicines don’t.

How is Joe Rogan involved in the policymaking here?

He’s had figures talking about psychedelics on his podcast since it began. The original sort of bro-cast dude, Aubrey Marcus, he’s had the former Texas governor and Trump’s first energy secretary, Rick Perry, on his podcast twice, along with a Kentucky lawyer and ibogaine advocate named Bryan Hubbard, who sounds like a Christian Southern revivalist and always quotes his favorite passage out of Isaiah.

Joe Rogan had this unlikely duo — who have both done ibogaine and are waxing lyrical about the benefits — on his podcast like three weeks before the executive order and they basically said, “Look, Joe, we need to make this happen.” So Joe texts Donald Trump, and apparently Donald Trump responds almost instantaneously saying, “Sounds good. Do you want FDA approval?”

This culminates with Joe Rogan actually going to the White House to attend the signing of an executive order about psychedelics. What’s in that executive order?

The thing about the executive order is it is sort of shouting into the wind a bit, but there is this money to go into the research side. 

It has five or six prongs. One of the main ones is that now under [the Right to Try Act] that Trump [signed] in his first term to allow end-of-life patients to try experimental drugs. That will be extended to psychedelics, so long as the DEA doesn’t try and obstruct that process. 

There’s $50 million for psychedelic research, most of which it seems is going to support state-led initiatives to investigate ibogaine and allow a US-first human trial. It’s also accelerating the path to a potential approval for psychedelic drugs. Three candidates that just submitted their data got fast-tracked for potential approval, so their applications will be considered more quickly. This would open the floodgates more widely to research.

Do you expect the FDA to say, “This is great, go ahead, use psychedelic drugs, they will help you.”

It’s quite likely really, within this presidency, to see several psychedelic drugs approved now. There was talk about [Joe Biden] setting up a federal task force and helping stuff along, and he didn’t seem to put any political will behind it. Trump has really seized the mantle here and he’s surfing the zeitgeist, as he weirdly seems to be able to on certain topics, all the while outraging and provoking us along the way.

There does seem to be some dissonance here, though. The GOP traditionally was all about the war on drugs.

There’s a lot of dissonance. I think that broadly, we’re seeing the war on drugs coming to an end little by little, despite the rhetoric, and I think this is a significant threshold moment. 

Trump’s always been kind of outside the Republican Party establishment compared to some previous presidents. It is not like it’s been some sort of topsy-turvy issue. The Democrats, when they’ve come in, there have been piecemeal changes. Joe Biden himself introduced the law when he was a senator to make the punishments for crack cocaine, which is more likely used by people of color, is like 30 times more stringent than for powder cocaine, which is used more often by white people. I think that there’s been a bipartisan war on drugs.

Do we know who’s using psychedelics? 

I think the interesting thing with psychedelics now, as opposed to maybe 10 or 15 years ago, is that they’ve crossed the political divide. A lot of people from unexpected segments of society are getting turned on because they are seeing, broadly, the benefits, even while there are serious risks, especially with ibogaine.

There was only one drug named in that executive order: ibogaine. Why? 

The veterans. These stories from veterans about the transformative effects of ibogaine have been really difficult to refute politically. Twenty-two veterans, on average, are committing suicide in the US every day. And Trump in the Oval Office, when he signed the order, said that “Since 9/11, we’ve we’ve lost over 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield.”

There are so many [representatives] and senators who are veterans themselves. There was a study from Stanford a couple of years ago that looked at 30 ex-special forces [soldiers] and found that a dose of ibogaine reduced all of their traumatic brain injury significantly. 

But we shouldn’t be under any illusions. This is a seriously potent and dangerous psychedelic when used improperly, and there’s been a whole spate of deaths. Indeed, the deaths are probably underreported because the drug disrupts the QT interval in the heart and can lead in some cases to fatal cardiac arrest.

The internet is full of ambitious people, particularly when it comes to home improvement. You will find people installing an entire kitchen themselves, buying and renovating an abandoned house, or even digging a series of tunnels under their home. And even renters are getting in on the DIY game.

Take Imani Keal: The Washington, DC-based influencer has transformed just about every corner of her apartment almost entirely by herself. “I have painted every room — I installed new peel and stick floor tiles in the kitchen; I did most of the light fixtures,” she told Vox. “For most of the things in here, if it is required to be built, I built it. I do everything.”

Some of those changes happened by necessity — like her kitchen cabinets. As she says, “There was a colony of mice living in the wall behind my kitchen. And because there was a little teeny tiny hole, they were able to come through there and play hopscotch in my kitchen and I wasn’t having that anymore.” She ended up renovating her entire kitchen.

For all of that work, though, Keal is still only renting her apartment. So how do you decide how much to invest in your living space? And when should you leave a home improvement project to the experts? We discuss that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Keal, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

How is your landlord cool with this?

Let me be very clear. They weren’t, but if there is a significant mice problem and you are not addressing it, we have to go forward. It became a situation where they said, “We’ll give you a credit to fix the problem and then you can fix it yourself.” And I said, fine. They rebuilt the floors and rebuilt the wall. Then I came in and purchased the cabinetry, painted it, purchased the fridge, put everything back on the wall, and made it look how it looks today.

You’ve invested a good amount of your own money into your apartment. How much?

Over three years — and a lot of this is stuff that I will take with me — maybe $30,000 or $35,000.

Some people are going to hear that and be shocked. What do you say to them about why you’re pouring so much investment into a thing you don’t own?

Number one, I live here and I think that I deserve to have a beautiful space to live in. I’m not going to sit in something that’s ugly just because other people would be upset about how I spend my money. 

Number two, I was able to turn this into a career. I have made significantly more money by doing all of these things than I have spent on the apartment. 

And number three, some people have hobbies where they will go out and tinker with a car. Some people want to go to a run club. Some people want to play pickleball. I want to learn how to use a circular saw and build furniture in my apartment. This is my hobby.

What’s the hardest task you’ve done?

Plumbing. To me, the potential for damage that can come from water is a lot greater than other things.Years ago, when I was doing a DIY project at my mother’s house, I accidentally turned the stop valve and the water just was shooting out. It was dripping down the chandelier in her living room and she had to replace all the hardwood floor.

How skilled were you when you first started doing DIY projects? Was this just something you always had in your skill bank?

No. In fact, it’s so funny. My sister was really known as the kid that would come and put an Ikea thing together. Then as I got older, I wanted a certain look and I could not find it. When the pandemic happened I was working at two different restaurants and I had a full-time job. I got laid off from my two restaurant jobs and then hours got cut for the main job that I was working. 

I went from being out a lot to being in the house, and there were so many things that I wanted that I couldn’t afford, that I couldn’t just go to the store to buy because nobody was open. Ace Hardware was an essential business, so I would spend a lot of time going to Ace Hardware because that was the only place you could go. 

You poured all this time and money into an apartment, but on the way out, you’re going to have to undo so much of it. How do you think about that? How does that feel?

It feels fine, because we all know people who get so excited about buying a house, then they buy the house and the house is hideous. They keep the same teeny tiny Ikea couch. They never get a bigger rug. They never move in. Even after spending all of this money, you are still not living in your home to the fullest so that you can make sure that your home will be nice for the person that you might sell it to in 25 years.

I have every intention of living the life that I was granted to the fullest. I’m going to do everything that I want, everything that is within my means and is possible for me to have a good life. And if that means that I have to spend a couple of days after five years of enjoying the same apartment, taking the wallpaper down, okay, sure. Whatever. 

A lot of things that I put up here can very easily be taken apart. I built this entertainment system, but I built it in five pieces that can easily be taken apart and walked out of this apartment and then moved into wherever I moved next.