The federal government shutdown, now in its third week, is a big deal. Federal workers aren’t getting paid, and crucial public services are closed. Despite that, in media coverage and on Capitol Hill, it hasn’t exactly felt like a crisis. Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown who studies Congress, and author of the Five Points newsletter, has previously written about that dynamic; I spoke with him for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained, about what’s making this shutdown so weird and what we know about how it could end.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.

You recently described this as “the weirdest shutdown I’ve observed.” What makes it so weird?

The stakes both seem really high, but also really low. The root cause of the shutdown, in some sense, is Democrats are scared that they’re going to cut a bargain and the president is just going to rescind it. Of course, that’s not a particularly sexy topic for voters, and there’s not a specific policy demand that makes sense to the audience, so instead, the Democrats have sort of gotten themselves to talk about health care.

Health care is their best issue, and so it’s natural for them to want to talk about it, but it also seems like small change, because for the first time, we have a shutdown where the demand is gettable. Previous shutdowns have been over impossible-to-achieve objectives — Obama was not going to........

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