It seems that we have finally reached the limits of Vox’s “explanatory journalism.” Like most of you, I imagine, I had supposed there were no limits, and that nothing was beyond the powers to explain of the smartest kids in the class, the kids who grew up to run what James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal used to call that “young-adult website.” But when it came to what Vox’s Emily Stewart called the “Bud-lash” against Anheuser-Busch, the whiz kids could do no better than this: “The Bud Light boycott, explained as much as is possible.”

“As much as is possible” for them, anyway. Ms. Stewart included several assurances that the boycott was a minor hiccup and unlikely to last or to damage Anheuser-Busch’s share price in the long term. But saying that there’s nothing much to explain isn’t quite the same thing as an explanation. What Ms. Stewart could reveal was that the boycott had something to do with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who used Bud Light to celebrate his/her “365 days of womanhood”—and the fact that this “made some people very mad.”

Decades of advertising by multiple brewers have associated beer-drinking, not entirely gratuitously, with working-class masculinity.

Beyond that, the explanatory cupboard turned out to be bare. I trust that few of my readers will require an elucidation of this mystery. Decades of advertising by multiple brewers have associated beer-drinking, not entirely gratuitously, with working-class masculinity. The new campaign surely must have