Over the past couple of weeks, one story has overshadowed every other, no matter how important they might be: Jeffrey Epstein.

Unless you’ve been taking your summer vacation on Mars, you probably know the contours of the story. (And if you don’t, my Vox colleague Andrew Prokop wrote a useful summary this week.) But what matters here isn’t so much the details as it is the sheer, unrelenting attention it has commanded.

Between July 6, before the story really began to blow up, and July 13, online searches on the topic increased by 1,900 percent, according to a Newsweek analysis. A CNN analyst noted that over roughly the same time scale, Epstein was Googled 2.5 times more than Grok — this during the AI model’s, uh, newsworthy launch — and 1.4 times more than tariffs.

The furor over the case has led to Congress essentially shutting down early for the summer, a Republican effort to evade Democrats’ sudden and politically convenient demands for transparency. It’s not too much to say that the business of America has all but halted because of a years-old criminal case.

I’m not saying the Epstein case is totally without importance. The crime was horrific, the investigation details murky, and the political ramifications if the case shakes the president’s connection to his political base are obviously meaningful. (And if you want to read about any of that, well, good news — you have no shortage of sources.) But there is virtually no way we’ll look back in 20 years and think that the relitigation of the Epstein case was clearly the most important thing happening in the world in July 2025.

Attention is a finite resource, and you are where your attention is. A story like Epstein is analogous to a mindless, out-of-control fire consuming all the oxygen in a burning house. So I thought I’d put together a list of four stories happening right now that matter far more for the country and the world than the contents of the Epstein Files. And fair warning — they’re not all good news stories, but they absolutely are worth your attention.

1) America’s dangerous debt spiral

Through the first nine months of the 2025 fiscal year, which goes up to this June, the United States spent $749 billion on........

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