Vox

特朗普之后的美国政治是什么样子的？

2026-04-11T12:04:02+00:00

与唐纳德·特朗普的民调相比，政治媒体的处境更糟。我们这些记者正面临信任危机、相关性下降以及被注意力经济淹没的困境，这种经济模式可能会用Claude或网红取代我们。传统新闻报道的技能，如讲故事、街头采访，甚至“调查”一词，如今已成为现代TikToker的模板。然而，新闻业的核心流程——事实核查、等待评论、注重细微差别而非轰动效应，或以好奇心为先——正变得愈发孤独，与日益被激烈观点淹没的受众争夺注意力。我希望我的新节目《美国真相》能有所不同。随着国家迈向2026年中期选举和十年来首次开放总统初选，这感觉像是一个正在发生变化的国家的新故事的开端。新兴社区、人工智能、快速变化的工作经济以及全球冲突风险等议题，本应在上一次总统大选中占据核心位置，但现在却无法再被忽视。我们正面临“我们希望成为怎样的国家？”这一问题，而回答它需要一种更关注复杂现实而非表面现象的新闻报道方式。在过去十年的政治报道中，我走访了30多个州，关注大小选举，希望实现这一目标。作为《纽约时报》的政治记者和播客《The Run-Up》的主持人，我致力于扩大对黑人选民、中西部居民和福音派群体的报道，这些群体我认为长期被忽视。我曾担任参议员伊丽莎白·沃伦和时任副总统卡玛拉·哈里斯竞选活动的首席记者，探讨代表性的价值与局限。我还专注于报道特朗普选民的趋势，通过参加集会或社区活动（如“特朗普伍德斯托克”或“查理·基尔的转折点”活动）直接倾听他们的声音。我发现了一个比人们通常认为更政治化的国家：工人阶级无需劳工统计局的最新数据便能察觉经济放缓，选民虽无法说出“选区划分”一词，却直觉地意识到国会已变得极端化。选民普遍认为，2024年拜登与特朗普再次对决的前景，反映出政治体系已完全脱离民众意愿。所谓“极化”的叙事源于将这些观点简单归类为“红队”和“蓝队”，但这并非固有的现象。我认为，将特朗普从政治讨论的核心移除，有助于更清晰地看到这一新的故事。我一直认为，尽管特朗普是独特的独裁式人物，但他利用了一个与大多数美国人关切脱节的政治体系，使其更容易被操控。只有将关注点从政客和精英媒体转向广大选民，我们才能更清楚地看到这种脱节。《美国真相》旨在展现这个国家意见的多样性。我去年加入Vox，是为了穿透噪音，放大政治报道通常忽略的声音，并帮助观众理解当今美国政治中真正重要的议题。通过这个新节目，我们希望每周探讨推动美国后特朗普时代发展的民众和思想，并为2028年大选做准备。我计划探讨的问题包括：反对伊朗战争的共和党派系有多大？日益加剧的社会孤立如何影响政治？这是否是首个黑人选民不再决定民主党初选结果的选举？美国公众对以色列日益消极的情绪将如何体现在投票中？在首期节目中，我们现在在YouTube和各大播客平台上线，民意调查专家奈特·西格尔和文化播客主持人猎人·哈里斯讨论了节目的核心问题——没有特朗普的政治节目是否可能？以及塑造我们后特朗普时代的政治与文化因素。之后，节目将邀请专家、政界人士和地方记者进行访谈，这些访谈将通过与“报告美国”（Report for America）的合作实现，该计划将新兴记者派驻全国各地新闻机构，报道被忽视的议题。我们的目标是建立一种新的理解方式，以反映特朗普时代扭曲的国家面貌。并非因为特朗普不反映我们的现状，而是因为政治体系本身具有扁平化倾向。尽管白宫可能不考虑公众意见进行治理，但候选人无法享有这种奢侈。美国公众已重新回到政治讨论的中心。2026年中期选举和2028年总统大选将迫使我们进行一次自特朗普十年来被回避的重置。最终，一个后特朗普时代将到来，让我们共同书写它。

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The only people with worse poll numbers than President Donald Trump are the political media that cover him. We, the journalists, are in a crisis: of trust, relevance, and being swamped by an attention economy that will either replace us with Claude or an influencer. The skills of traditional reporting: storytelling, man-on-the-street interviews, even the language of “investigations,” are the template for the modern TikToker. But it’s the process of journalism — fact-checking, waiting for comment, leaning into nuance over sensationalism, or even leading with curiosity generally — that is growing to be a lonelier pursuit, competing for attention from an audience increasingly inundated by hot takes.

I”m hoping my new show, America, Actually, will be different. As the country marches toward the 2026 midterms and the first open presidential primary in a decade, it feels like the first steps of a new story for a changing nation. Emerging communities, artificial intelligence, a rapidly shifting work economy, and growing risk of global conflict — all things that should have been front and center in the last presidential election — can now no longer be ignored. The question of “who do we want to be?” is open, and answering it will require the type of journalism that prioritizes the messy over the clean.

In a decade in political journalism, I’ve gone to 30-plus states and followed elections big and small, in hopes of doing just that. As a political reporter and host of The Run-Up podcast at the New York Times, I sought to expand the Times’ coverage of Black voters, Midwesterners, and evangelicals — communities I felt confident were underrepresented. I was the lead reporter for the presidential campaigns of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and then-Vice President Kamala Harris, exploring the values and limits of representation. I found a niche doing trend stories about Trump voters, either by attending rallies or going to community events (like Trumpstock; “Woodstock for Trump fans,” or Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point events) to hear from his voters directly.

And what I found most was a country that was more politically attuned than it’s often given credit for. Working-class people who did not need the latest revised figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to know that the economy was slowing. Voters who could not name gerrymandering — but intuitively understood that Congress had grown more extreme than ever. An electorate that more or less agreed that the mere prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024 was a reflection of a political system that had become completely untethered from the desires of its citizenry. The whole narrative of “polarization” came from the process of sorting those views into Team Red and Team Blue. It was not inherent.

By removing Donald Trump from the center of the political discussion, I think it gives space to see that new story more clearly. I have always believed this president, while a uniquely authoritarian actor with unique electoral traits, has exploited a political system whose distance from the concerns of most Americans made it even more vulnerable for exploitation. And it’s only in flipping our focus, from the concerns of elected officials and the elite bubble of industry and media that follows them to the voters at large, that we political journalists see that distance most clearly.

America, Actually will seek to see the country for that diversity of opinion. I joined Vox last year because I want to cut through the noise, amplify voices that political journalism typically hasn’t amplified, and help audiences understand the issues that really matter in American politics today. With this new show, we want to create a weekly space to think about the people and ideas who are driving the country’s post-Trump future — and prepare us for the 2028 election along the way.

Some of the questions I want to explore include: How large is the wing of Republicans against the Iran war? What’s the impact of growing social isolation on politics, which has long been a community activity? Is this the first Democratic primary where the Black vote won’t be determinative? How will Americans’ souring mood on Israel manifest itself in votes? Will it?

In our first episode, out now on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, pollster Nate Silver and culture podcaster Hunter Harris discuss the show’s premise — Is a politics show without Trump even possible? — and the political and cultural factors that will shape our post-Trump future. Later, the show will feature interviews with experts, elected officials, and local journalists, who will regularly appear on the podcast through a partnership with Report for America, the national service program that places emerging journalists into local newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered issues.

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The goal is to model something different: a new way to understand a country that the Trump era has distorted. Not because this president doesn’t reflect who we are, but because the political system inherently flattens it. And while the White House may govern without public opinion in mind, candidates don’t have that luxury. The American public is back in the center of the conversation. The 2026 midterm elections, and the 2028 presidential election, will force a reset that’s been avoided since Trump came down that golden escalator more than a decade ago.

There will, eventually, be a post-Trump future. Let’s write it together.

同人小说如何走向主流

2026-04-10T21:36:07+00:00

2026年2月25日，《Heated Rivalry》一书的副本。Archive of Our Own（简称AO3）是全球最受欢迎的网站之一，拥有超过1000万注册用户。该网站的用户不仅阅读，还创作大量关于喜爱的虚构角色的故事。它为普通读者提供了一个尝试将角色置于不同情境和结局中的平台。近年来，像AO3这样的网站成为出版商寻找新作者的重要来源，他们希望从中发掘下一个畅销作品。去年夏天，华盛顿邮报记者Rachel Kurzius撰文探讨了粉丝小说如何逐渐主流化。她指出，“粉丝小说”（Fanfic）已成为诸如《Heated Rivalry》和《五十度灰》等畅销作品的基础。她预测，随着更多粉丝小说爱好者进入主流行业，这一类型将越来越多地融入主流文化。

粉丝小说起源于上个世纪，例如《星际迷航》（Star Trek）的同人志（zines）。这些作品最初局限于特定的粉丝群体，后来随着像FanFiction.net这样的平台出现，不同粉丝圈逐渐融合，开始探索不同作品中角色的互动。如今，AO3已成为这一领域的核心平台，其组织方式类似于图书馆，用户可以按粉丝圈、角色、故事类型或情节模式进行搜索，其内容库极为庞大。

《五十度灰》最初是《暮光之城》的粉丝小说，后来成为畅销书并发展为电影系列，这促使出版商重新审视粉丝小说的价值。如今，传统出版商在推广作品时，也开始使用与AO3相似的标签，如“Draco/Hermione”等，以吸引读者。此外，粉丝小说中的一些写作趋势，如第一人称现在时的叙述方式和同性恋浪漫题材，也逐渐被主流出版界采纳。

Kurzius认为，粉丝小说如今受到更多重视，部分原因在于其质量得到了认可，同时新一代编辑和文学代理人成长于粉丝文化，对粉丝小说持更开放的态度。此外，传统出版业面临困境，而粉丝小说已证明其市场潜力，因此被视为一种相对安全的投资。然而，当粉丝小说进入传统出版领域时，其原本基于“礼物经济”的特性（即非盈利性质）可能会发生变化，这对粉丝小说作为艺术形式和社区文化的意义提出了新的挑战。

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Copies of the book Heated Rivalry on February 25, 2026. | Michael Reichel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Archive of Our Own, or AO3, is one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 10 million registered users. Its users spend their time both reading and writing many, many words about their favorite fictional characters. It’s a place that allows normie readers to try out their characters in different scenarios and with different outcomes. In the last couple of years, sites like AO3 became fertile ground for publishers to find new authors who might provide them with their next big hit.

Last summer, reporter Rachel Kurzius wrote about how fan fiction is going mainstream for the Washington Post. “Fanfic,” as it’s known to its friends, is the underpinning of smash hits from Heated Rivalry to Fifty Shades of Grey. Kurzius anticipates that as more fanfic adherents grow up and get jobs in various roles in the mainstream, we’ll see more and more of this genre creeping into the mainstream.

Kurzius spoke Today, Explained host Noel King about why fan fiction is everywhere. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. For the whole interview, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is fan fiction?

This is such a fun question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here. So let’s start with the big tent philosophy, which is fan fiction is anything that is really derived from or inspired by preexisting works. But if we think about this broadly, basically everything that we know, including many of the classics are fan fiction, right? We could think recently about Percival Everett’s James, that’s Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Does that really count?

In speaking with a lot of fandom experts, one person that I spoke with told me she used to want to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it a kind of legitimacy. Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that are winning awards. And so fanfic is that too. But she came around to the idea that if you define everything that way, then that’s such a broad category that it kind of loses meaning and so a more narrow version of understanding fanfic would be these transformative works that are based on preexisting property that exist in the gift economy. And this is key. The idea that this is something that people are doing not to make money and in fact ought not make money doing this, that it’s just they’re doing it because it is fun or exciting or community building to do.

Where did this start?

Last century, there were people who were writing zines, for example, very popularly, Star Trek among them. But those were very specific as to one fandom. People were writing fan fiction about particular characters in one world, and that tradition passed forward to various websites and online newsletters that again, were balkanized into a particular fandom.

It was only later when we saw broader websites like, for example, fanfiction.net, that were bringing all of these different fandoms together and saying, if you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you might like Supernatural. Let’s see what these characters could do, or what happens if we put these beloved characters from different worlds together and have them meet with one another.

That brings us to the modern day with Archive of Our Own, which I would say is kind of the big powerhouse archival player these days. And certainly where I look for fanfic when I read it.

Explain what Archive of Our Own is.

Archive of Our Own is a website where people can post and read fan-created transformative works, and it is organized in such a way that it’s clear it was created by librarians, right? You can certainly search by fandom, by character. You could also search by the kind of story you want to hear, or a trope that you’re interested in. You would be amazed at just how extensive the archives are on Archive of Our Own.

You would say, even if you don’t know what any of this is, it is being mainstreamed. It has been mainstreamed into culture, now. You are actually consuming things that started out as fan fiction. What are they?

The big one, the Kahuna that became the juggernaut, would be 50 Shades of Grey, which was actually Twilight fan fiction. 50 Shades of Grey completely changed the game. It was a bestseller as a book. It became an absolute bestseller as a movie series. And it got publishers thinking. I spoke with romance duo Christina Lauren [the pen name for co-author duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings], who actually met writing Twilight fanfic, and they said that when they first spoke to people about going into the traditional publishing world, and this is more than a decade ago, they were told, “Don’t say a thing about fan fiction. That’s a scarlet letter.” Well, that is not true anymore.

These days, particularly last summer, you saw three works in particular that either had been Draco/Hermione fan fiction, or at least a prominent Draco/Hermione writer wrote a series that wasn’t exactly the fanfic, but certainly the fanfic roots were actually being advertised by the publisher as a selling point. One very famous one is The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which was originally a Rey/Kylo Ren fan fiction from Star Wars. And what is so kind of funny and meta about that is that that is now being adapted into a movie. And the male lead is actually married to the actress who played Rey in Star Wars.

If you look at genre fiction these days, publishing houses, when advertising those works, are using very similar tags to the ones that you would see on Archive of Our Own. So they are broadcasting those same tropes as saying, if you like that, you’ll find that in this book. Because they’ve realized, thanks to fan fiction, that’s how a lot of readers like to find what they’re going to read next.

Another thing that I found incredibly fascinating is a decade, a decade and a half ago, fan fiction writers were writing in the first-person present tense, and it created this kind of urgency and immediate connection, but you weren’t seeing that a lot in traditional publishing. Now that has been subsumed by traditional publishing. So a lot of really popular trends, even in terms of writing, began in fan fiction. You might also see joyous queer romance was a huge part of fan fiction before traditional publishing got on board.

So it seems clear to me, based on what you’re saying, that writers of fan fiction and the work itself are being taken more seriously than they were, I don’t know, 20 years ago. Why do you think that is? Is it just because, hey, some of this writing is pretty darn good, let’s take it seriously?

I think part of it is just a broader mainstreaming of fanfic, and that people are kind of waving that fanfic flag proudly in a way that they hadn’t a decade or so ago. And if we’re understanding the structures of traditional publishing, whether it is the editors who are acquiring works or literary agents, a lot of these people are people who grew up on fan fiction, right? So they might not have the same hangups or ideas about fan fiction that previous generations had. They’re interested in it, and they see it as a legitimate form of writing.

Part of it, I think, is because traditional publishing is in, some may say, dire straits, and there’s a broader hunger for IP, intellectual property, things that have already been proven successes. And if you look at some of these fanfics on Archive of Our Own, they have millions of views. I think traditional publishing looks at this and says, “This is basically as safe a deal as we are going to get in terms of thinking that that might be able to translate into book sales.”

What I find really interesting about it is, if one of our elemental definitions of fanfic is that it exists in the gift economy, what happens when fanfic becomes a legitimate path to traditional publishing? What does that mean for fanfic as an art or as a community? And I think that that’s something that a lot of fanfic writers and readers are wrestling with right now.

为什么通货膨胀率上升

2026-04-10T21:11:11+00:00

2026年4月6日，洛杉矶一家杂货店的顾客正在购买牛肉。| Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
本文出自《The Logoff》每日简报，旨在帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅此处。

欢迎来到《The Logoff》：伊朗战争对经济的影响正逐渐显现。
最新情况：本周五公布的数据显示，3月份美国通胀率达到3.3%，比2月份上涨近1个百分点，是近四年来的最快涨幅。消费者显然对此并不满意。同一天发布的密歇根大学数据也显示，4月消费者信心指数降至50以下，创历史最低水平。虽然目前这些数据仍为初步统计，但已显示出令人担忧的趋势。

伊朗为何与此有关？战争始于2月中旬，伊朗随即关闭了关键的霍尔木兹海峡，导致美国汽油价格飙升至每加仑4美元以上，并使许多商品（包括食品）价格上涨。尽管停火协议目前维持着脆弱的平衡，但美国总统特朗普本周的施压并未促使海峡重新开放。据BBC报道，自停火协议宣布以来，仅有四艘油轮和19艘船只通过海峡，远低于正常情况下每天超过100艘的水平。即便在最乐观的情境下，若海峡近期重新开放，油品供应恢复仍需数周甚至数月时间，据Vox本周早些时候引用的石油市场专家罗里·约翰斯顿的说法。

接下来会发生什么？美国与伊朗的谈判团队将在本周末于巴基斯坦会面，讨论更持久的和平协议，这可能为美国经济带来急需的缓解。然而，谈判结果仍难以预料：本周五，特朗普在Truth Social上再次发出威胁，称“伊朗人之所以还活着，就是为了谈判！”

说到这里，是时候下线了……

我总是喜欢《纽约杂志》的“Grub Street Diet”栏目，其中某位人物（可能是政界人士、名人或记者）会展示一周内颇具特色的饮食选择。最新一期由调查记者兼作家帕特里克·拉登·基夫撰写，您可点击此处阅读。

祝您周末愉快，我们周一再见！

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Customers shop for beef at a grocery store in Los Angeles, California, on April 6, 2026. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The economic impact of the Iran war is becoming clearer.

What’s happening? On Friday, we learned that inflation climbed to 3.3 percent in March, almost 1 percentage point higher than it was in February and the quickest inflation has grown in nearly four years.

Unsurprisingly, consumers aren’t thrilled. New data from the University of Michigan, also released Friday, shows consumer sentiment from April under 50, its lowest point ever. It’s not even mid-April, so for now, those numbers are preliminary — but they point in a concerning direction.

What does Iran have to do with this? Shortly after the war began in late February, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial passage for oil and natural gas. It has remained largely closed ever since, driving gas prices over $4/gallon in the US and making many more goods, including food, more expensive.

Will the ceasefire fix prices? No. The ceasefire, while fragile, is holding. But despite President Donald Trump’s demands this week, there is no sign that it has led to the Strait reopening.

According to the BBC, four tankers, and only 19 total ships, have passed the Strait since the ceasefire was announced; under normal conditions, well over 100 ships transit the Strait each day.

Even under the most optimistic scenario where the Strait does reopen in the near future, it will take weeks, if not months, for the oil supply to rebound, oil markets expert Rory Johnston told Vox earlier this week.

What’s next? American and Iranian negotiating teams will meet in Pakistan this weekend to discuss a more permanent peace deal, which could provide the US economy with a needed reprieve. How that will go is anyone’s guess: On Friday, Trump issued another threat, writing on Truth Social that “The only reason [the Iranians] are alive today is to negotiate!”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I always enjoy New York Magazine’s “Grub Street Diet,” where someone — a politician, a celebrity, a journalist — lays out a week of sometimes-eclectic culinary choices. Their latest features investigative reporter and author Patrick Radden Keefe, and you can read it here.

Have a good weekend and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

每月燃气账单持续上涨的真正原因

2026-04-10T19:50:37+00:00

根据“建筑脱碳联盟”（BDC）最新报告，2025年燃气账单上涨速度比电力账单快60%，比通货膨胀速度快四倍。这一现象背后有更深层的原因：过去，燃气账单的主要驱动因素是燃气价格本身，但如今，燃气系统基础设施成本（如管道更换）已成为主导因素。2024年，基础设施成本占客户账单的约70%，而燃气价格仅占30%。BDC报告指出，过去十年间，燃气公司用于管道和输送的支出翻了三倍，2023年达到280亿美元。自2010年起，燃气公司加快了管道更换速度，部分原因是管道寿命有限，最终会腐蚀和泄漏。2010年至2014年间，27个州实施了政策，使燃气公司能更快回收更换成本，从而提高用户费率。据美国燃气协会数据，至少42个州已通过某种形式的附加费或计划加速燃气管道更换。然而，燃气用户数量仅增长了8.5%（自2000年以来），而燃气公司支出却大幅增加，导致每户燃气用户支付的费用比30年前更高，形成“低效且昂贵”的燃气系统。BDC计算，如果燃气公司继续以2010年前的速度投资，美国用户到2023年可节省约1300亿美元，相当于每户燃气用户节省1723美元。尽管燃气行业强调使用燃气比电力更省钱，但BDC认为继续投资燃气系统并不合理。随着各州设定强制性气候目标，必须转向电气化并大幅减少化石燃料使用。报告作者凯文·卡本内尔指出，对于老旧且不安全的燃气管道，可考虑地热能网络、需求响应计划、污水热回收等替代方案。越来越多的州已开始采取行动，例如自2020年以来，13个州和华盛顿特区已启动逐步淘汰燃气供暖的程序。在明尼苏达州，一项新提案允许燃气公司建设地热能网络，以减少化石燃料使用，该提案获得州内最大燃气公司CenterPoint Energy及劳工团体的支持。与此同时，马萨诸塞州正在扩展其首个由燃气公司主导的热能社区，而马里兰州监管机构则正在评估燃气公司规划是否符合州气候目标。州政策和激励措施也在推动电气化工具（如热泵）的普及。在加州，立法者正在考虑《热泵准入法案》，以加快热泵的安装，助力该州实现2045年碳中和目标。2025年，热泵连续第四年在美国销量超过燃气炉。此外，插电式阳台太阳能系统也日益受到关注。卡本内尔表示，人们正通过升级为更高效、舒适、节能的电器而逐步脱离燃气系统。尽管特朗普政府在联邦层面削减了清洁能源激励措施，但各州在脱碳方面的进展依然显著，这进一步证明随着燃气系统成本持续上升，清洁能源解决方案正变得更具性价比。

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In 2025, gas utility bills rose 60 percent faster than electric ones and four times faster than inflation, according to a new report by the Building Decarbonization Coalition. | Lindsey Nicholson/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

From the cold snap this winter to the US war with Iran, rising energy bills are making headlines. But there’s a larger story behind spikes in gas-utility costs, one decades in the making.

The main driver of these bills used to be the price of gas itself. Now it’s the gas system infrastructure, like pipeline replacements: That accounted for about 70 percent of customer bills in 2024, while gas was just 30 percent.

“The sleeper culprit of these continuously rising bills is, in fact, the infrastructure,” said Kristin Bagdanov, co-author of a new report by the Building Decarbonization Coalition (BDC) that was published Tuesday.

Electric bills have been on the rise too, but not nearly at the same rate as those for gas. In 2025, gas utility bills rose 60 percent faster than electric ones and four times faster than inflation, the report found. All of this comes as gas use declines, a result of more efficient gas boilers alongside a push towards electrification as states work to meet climate goals.

The spike in the cost of gas itself is the cherry on top of a system that has grown increasingly expensive over the years. In the last decade, gas utility spending on pipes and delivery tripled, reaching $28 billion in 2023, the report notes. Utilities began replacing their pipelines more rapidly in 2010 — partially because of the lifespan of pipes, which will eventually corrode and leak.

Between then and 2014, 27 states implemented policies that allowed utilities to recover these costs more quickly, raising rates for customers. In total, at least 42 states have enacted some form of rider, surcharge or program to accelerate the replacement of gas distribution pipelines, according to data from the American Gas Association, a utility trade group.

Utility spending has far outpaced growth in the gas customer base, which is up just 8.5 percent in total since 2000, the BDC report says, citing data from the US Energy Information Administration. Meanwhile, residential gas demand has remained nearly flat since the 1970s.

“That means people are paying more per pipe than they had been 30 years ago,” Bagdanov said, creating a gas system that is “underutilized and more expensive.”

If utilities had continued their pre-2010 pace of investment, BDC calculates that US customers would have saved an estimated $130 billion in total through 2023, or $1,723 per household using gas. The gas-utility industry, however, emphasizes cost savings for residents who use gas instead of electricity. The American Gas Association writes in its 2026 Playbook that “homes that use natural gas for heating, cooking and clothes drying save an average of $1,030 per year compared to homes that use electricity for those same applications.”

The BDC report argues that continued investments in the gas system don’t make sense. States with mandated climate goals will have to invest in electrification and dramatically reduce fossil fuel use. Where replacements are needed for gas pipes that are old and unsafe, there are other options, said Kevin Carbonnier, co-author of the report, like geothermal energy networks, demand-response programs to use energy more efficiently, sewer heat recovery and electrification.

“Let’s look at non-pipe alternatives to see if we can modernize our homes and our infrastructure, rather than putting in the millions of dollars to replace that pipe,” he said.

A growing number of states have taken that sentiment to heart. Since 2020, utility regulators in 13 states and Washington, DC, have opened proceedings on transitioning away from natural gas for heating. Lawmakers are considering their options, too.

In Minnesota, for example, a new proposed bill would allow gas utilities to build geothermal energy networks in the state, a move that would reduce fossil fuel use. “We know that decarbonizing heating and cooling is one of the biggest challenges that we have in the clean energy transition,” state Rep. Athena Hollins, sponsor of the bill, said at a hearing in late March. The bill has received strong support from Minnesota’s largest natural gas utility, CenterPoint Energy, along with labor groups.

Massachusetts is already expanding its first utility-led thermal energy neighborhood, while Maryland regulators are currently accepting testimony on their review of whether state gas utilities’ planning is consistent with the state’s climate goals.

State policies and incentives are also helping to make electrification tools, like heat pumps, more affordable. In California, legislators are considering the Heat Pump Access Act to make it faster, easier, and cheaper to install heat pumps for cooling and heating, part of a push to help the state reach carbon neutrality by 2045.

In 2025, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for the fourth year in a row. Plug-in balcony solar is receiving mounting interest as well. “We’re seeing a lot of electrification and people disconnecting from gas as they upgrade their homes to these modern, faster, better, more comfortable, efficient appliances,” Carbonnier said.

While the Trump administration has slashed clean energy incentives on a federal level, “what we see at the state level is actually like a lot of durable progress,” Bagdanov said. “It just reinforces the fact that as that gas system continues to get more and more expensive, these clean-heat solutions get even better and more affordable.”

特朗普政府是否威胁过教皇？

2026-04-10T18:57:26+00:00

2025年11月5日，教皇利奥十四世在梵蒂冈圣彼得广场向信徒发表演讲。然而，近期一些新闻报道引发了美国天主教徒对政府是否可能推翻首位出生在美国的教皇的猜测。这些报道恰逢罗马天主教会和右翼基督教影响者对特朗普政府在伊朗战争中的政策进行批评。

核心要点

争议事件：据《自由报》报道，美国国防部官员与梵蒂冈驻美大使克里斯托夫·皮埃尔在五角大楼举行了一次非同寻常的会面，讨论教皇利奥十四世批评美国对外使用武力的言论。会面中，一名官员暗示美国拥有无限军事权力，警告梵蒂冈需注意立场，这一言论被部分教会人士视为对梵蒂冈的隐晦威胁。
历史隐喻：“阿维尼翁”（Avignon）一词成为争议焦点。该词源于14世纪法国国王腓力四世对教皇本笃十二世的控制，迫使教皇迁居法国阿维尼翁，并引发长达数十年的教皇权力斗争。此次会面被解读为类似历史事件的隐喻，暗示美国可能试图限制梵蒂冈的批评权。
双方否认：特朗普政府和梵蒂冈均否认相关指控，称媒体报道夸大事实。但部分媒体和记者坚持自己的报道，引发美国天主教界和保守派的强烈反应。

事件背景与影响

教皇利奥十四世对美国的军事行动和外交政策持批评态度，尤其在伊朗战争期间呼吁和平，反对特朗普的强硬立场。
事件加剧了美国天主教界与政府之间的矛盾，也反映了宗教右翼内部的分裂。特朗普政府支持欧洲反移民政党，同时限制难民入境，与梵蒂冈的立场冲突。
JD Vance的角色：作为特朗普政府中最高级别的天主教官员之一，Vance曾因支持特朗普的移民政策而与教皇弗朗西斯和利奥十四世发生冲突。此次事件可能进一步影响他在2028年总统竞选中的地位。

宗教右翼的分裂

事件成为理解2026年美国宗教右翼内部矛盾的窗口。部分保守派评论员（如 Tucker Carlson、Candace Owens 等）将此视为对特朗普政策的宗教性批判，甚至将其与“反基督”联系起来。
与此同时，这些评论员因支持或容忍反犹言论而受到右翼内部批评，此次事件可能迫使利奥十四世重新审视教会与这些群体的关系。

总结
“阿维尼翁事件”不仅加剧了梵蒂冈与美国政府的紧张关系，也暴露了美国天主教界与宗教右翼之间的深刻分歧。事件背后涉及历史隐喻、政治立场冲突以及宗教意识形态的对抗，其影响可能持续发酵，甚至威胁到特朗普支持者内部的团结。

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Pope Leo XIV delivers his speech to the faithful during the Wednesday General Audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican on November 5, 2025. | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images

Most American Catholics were probably not expecting to spend the first week of Easter trying to figure out whether their government was threatening to overthrow the first American-born pope.

Yet a handful of news reports this week raised that very strange possibility. They landed just as both the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing Christian influencers have been ramping up their criticism of the Trump administration over the Iran war.

Key takeaways

A report from the Free Press this week blew up tensions on the right already escalating over the US-Israeli war on Iran.
It alleged that Pentagon officials met with a top Vatican diplomat to the US and raised the memory of a dark time in the Catholic Church’s history: when French rules exercised power over the Church and the pope.
There are now competing accounts of what actually happened in that meeting, and denials by the Trump administration and the Vatican.
These reports sparked furor among Catholics and religious conservatives — adding fuel to an ideological civil war threatening the American right, and offering another example of the rift between the Vatican and the US.

This burgeoning scandal hinges on news reports that in January, the previous ambassador of the Vatican to the United States was called into an unusual meeting with Department of Defense officials at the Pentagon and dressed down. The Pentagon officials, reportedly, wanted to complain about a speech Pope Leo XIV gave in Rome that appeared to criticize American foreign policy. During the meeting, one official issued what some in the church saw as a veiled threat to the Vatican: a warning that the US wields unlimited military power, and that the pope should be conscious of that.

If true, this episode would mark a low point in modern Vatican-American political relations — on top of being a major religious scandal for Catholics in the US.

The Trump administration denies these accounts; the Vatican is keeping mostly quiet. Meanwhile, the reporters and writers who first surfaced these allegations are standing by their stories.

Whatever the truth ends up being, this scandal points to some important fracture lines in American religious life, and offers a key to understanding the way the Iran war is cracking up the religious right. It also fits into a broader conflict that is testing MAGA Catholics’ resolve, and setting up the Catholic Church as one of the Trump administration’s most visible and relevant critics.

So what exactly is the scandal?

This whole saga began with a report from the Free Press on Wednesday, in which Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi reported on a previously unknown meeting between Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, then-top Vatican diplomat in the US Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and a handful of Pentagon officials.

The meeting, which is now confirmed to have happened, was unusual, Ferraresi and other reports noted, because of where and when it happened: at the Pentagon, instead of with diplomats of the Department of State, and after Pope Leo had delivered a speech decrying the breakdown in the post-war international order and the escalating use of force and violence abroad by nations, including the US, to achieve their aims.

“War is back in vogue and the zeal for war is spreading,” Leo had said in his speech to diplomats.

That the meeting happened isn’t in doubt; but no one seems to agree on what was actually said in the encounter. The Free Press reported that the meeting was meant to be a warning to the Vatican, a reminder that militarily, the US can do “whatever it wants…and that the Vatican, and Leo, better take its side.” And so, it devolved into a “bitter lecture.”

The Pentagon, meanwhile, said Thursday that the group “had a substantive, respectful, and professional meeting” and that “recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.” The US ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican’s political government) echoed that sentiment, and called media reports exaggerations and fabrications.

But other news outlets also began picking up on the fallout. NBC Chicago, of the pope’s hometown, quoted a Vatican source who called the Pentagon meeting “most unpleasant and confrontational.” The Financial Times reported that the meeting was supposed to deliver a “friendly message” to the pope, and to ask the Vatican to be more supportive of the Trump administration’s policies, but unraveled when Pierre said the pope would follow Catholic values in conducting Vatican foreign policy.

That’s when one specific term jumps out, which caused this whole episode to become an actual scandal. Someone in the room, according to the Free Press, the Financial Times, and independent journalist Christopher Hale, invoked the name “Avignon” — which some Vatican officials reportedly understood to be a military threat against the Vatican.

Why did this particular phrase set off alarm bells? To answer that, we have to go back 700 years.

Did a Trump official really threaten the Vatican?

Though these accounts don’t agree on who invoked Avignon, the term is a trigger for Catholics, historians, and history buffs: It references the French city that served as the home base for popes in the 14th century after a French king, Philip IV, sent an army to Italy where they attacked the sitting pope, Boniface VIII, after years of feuding over who was the preeminent political power.

Phiip IV went on to force the election of a new French pope, who moved the papacy to Avignon. For 70 years, popes held court and governed Christendom from the city’s papal palace — and when the last Avignon pope tried to move the office back to Rome, it spawned a crisis for the church and the rise of rival “antipopes” in Avignon claiming to be the real pope for nearly 40 years after.

As you might now understand, “Avignon” is a loaded term. And combined with the nature of the meeting — at the Pentagon, having to do with comments Pope Leo had made about America’s use of force — you can see how this episode could be interpreted as being a veiled warning about the church staying in its lane when it comes to criticizing the dominant military power.

Why are the US and the pope so at odds?

Regardless of who invoked Avignon or how confrontational the meeting was behind the scenes, it fits into a pattern of growing public conflict between the Church and the Trump presidency.

This applies to both style and substance: Pope Leo, and the American bishops, have become loud critics of Trump’s immigration and mass deportation policy, his foreign interventions abroad and use of force against other nations, and the breakdown of the US-European alliance. For all intents and purposes, MAGA has forced the Catholic Church to appear like the chief resistance.

But it’s the joint US-Israeli war on Iran that has caused the most visible strain and direct condemnation of Trump and the American government by the Roman pontiff. After spending weeks calling for peace talks and ceasefires, and preaching the Church’s anti-war message during Holy Week commemorations, Leo used Trump’s name for the first time last week, expressing hope that he was “looking for an off-ramp” from the war.

And after Trump warned that Iranian civilization might “die” on Tuesday, Leo condemned the statements as “truly unacceptable” and urged “the citizens of all the countries involved to contact the authorities, political leaders, congressmen, to ask them, tell them to work for peace and to reject war.”

Has Pope Leo weighed in on Avignon-gate?

The pope hasn’t said anything on this latest development, but the Vatican has weighed in — a significant move given their traditional reluctance to address these kinds of political disputes.

After the Vatican Press Office initially declined to comment earlier in the week, Vatican press secretary Matteo Bruni released a statement on Friday confirming Cardinal Pierre met with Colby “for an exchange of views on matters of mutual interest,” and that “the narrative offered by certain media outlets regarding this meeting does not correspond at all with the truth” — without clarifying which narrative that was, or where existing reporting got things wrong.

Meanwhile, the Vatican diplomat involved in the meeting, Cardinal Pierre, told one independent journalist he would “prefer not speak.”

But the Free Press report suggested that this dustup is leading the Vatican to keep the US government at arm’s length while Trump is president. The first American pope has declined invitations to come to the US during its 250th celebrations, and will instead spend that time at an island in Italy where migrants fleeing danger in Africa frequently stop off while trying to reach Europe. The Trump administration has openly supported anti-immigrant political parties and leaders in Europe, while also trying to block asylum seekers and refugees from entering America.

Where does JD Vance come into all this?

Vance, a Catholic convert who has a book coming out later this year on his faith journey, was asked about the Pentagon episode on Wednesday while traveling in Hungary. He denied knowing the Vatican diplomat in question, and said he’d rather not comment on an unconfirmed report.

Vance is the highest ranking of a significant number of Catholics serving in the Trump administration (including Secretary of State Marco Rubio), was one of the last public leaders to meet with the late Pope Francis before his death, and was famously rebuked by two popes (Francis and Leo, albeit before the latter became pope) for invoking his new faith to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

Beyond being a spectacle, Avignon-gate is also a helpful key to understanding what is happening on the religious right in 2026.

As Vance’s prior papal feuds indicate, the Free Press story also runs into some intra-Catholic tensions. Colby, the Pentagon official embroiled in the mess and a reported ally of Vance, is also Catholic. Some of the leading intellectual figures on the right in MAGA circles are traditionalist Catholics who have been critical of the current and former popes for what they see as concessions to modern liberal political values.

Within US politics, Vance also represents a wing of the GOP that is being split apart by the Iran war, partly over religious lines — and in ways that could threaten his potential aspirations for the presidency in 2028. This story could make that divide even more difficult to navigate.

How does this latest story fit into MAGA’s current civil war?

Beyond being a spectacle, Avignon-gate is also a helpful key to understanding what is happening on the religious right in 2026, and how the Iran war is affecting both the MAGA coalition and the American Catholic Church.

The report landed just as arguments over Israel and Iran were driving a wedge between the GOP’s pro-Trump evangelical base, who tend to be Christian Zionists sympathetic to Israel, and a group of prominent Catholic and non-evangelical commentators who are increasingly hostile to Trump’s foreign policy agenda and critical of Israel.

Among the latter group, which includes Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Carrie Prejean Boller, and Nick Fuentes, Avignon-gate quickly became a hot topic, with many eager to embrace the most explosive interpretation of events.

“On the pope thing, that is how you know this administration is the antichrist…these people hate Catholics,” the self-described Catholic and white supremacist Nick Fuentes said on his show Thursday. Boller took aim at Colby on X, saying, “you won’t bully or threaten the Catholic Church into your unjust war.”

Many of these more isolationist and antiwar figures have also been condemned within the right for either tolerating or openly espousing antisemitism. As they rally to the Church’s side now over the war, and justify their opposition to Trump in increasingly theological terms, this episode puts more pressure on Leo to address the church’s relationship with them as well. Ferraresi, the author of the Free Press article that kicked off this affair, challenged Pope Leo in the same piece to condemn “the growing choir of Catholic pundits injecting bigotry into the MAGA infosphere,” and not just focus the church’s fire on the pro-war right.

In short, it’s a mess. Avignon-gate is almost perfectly calibrated to raise temperatures not only between the White House and the Vatican, but within the US Catholic community, and within the MAGA movement. And the issues it raises are nowhere near being resolved.

为什么即使你没有什么可说的也要保持治疗会谈

2026-04-09T17:22:20+00:00

大多数时候，我与治疗师见面时，她会处理我生活中某个正在崩溃的方面，比如我无法理性讨论政治，或者个人财务状况。但偶尔，生活显得平淡无奇，我走进咨询室时毫无话题。我曾多次考虑取消这些看似无意义的会谈。如果我感觉良好且无话可说，为什么要花45分钟时间和30美元的共付费用呢？然而，根据两位治疗师的说法，这些看似无聊的会谈其实非常有洞察力和影响力。事实上，与治疗师随意聊聊可以加深你们之间的关系，帮助他们了解你在平静时期的表现，并发现未被处理的问题。纽约市“年轻女性心理治疗”创始人兼临床主管Claudia Giolitti-Wright告诉Vox：“当客户说‘没什么好聊的’时，这些会谈往往并不空洞。它们通常会揭示一些重要的内容。”因此，我从这两次访谈中确信，轻松随意的会谈与充满冲突的会谈同样重要。以下是原因：

治疗师经常遇到这种情况，并知道如何应对
如果你像我一样，经常在会谈开始时为“没什么可说的”道歉，那么请不要担心或感到尴尬。心理治疗师Matt Sosnowsky表示，他经常听到患者这么说，这并不值得大惊小怪。治疗师专门接受过处理这种沉默期的训练。他可能会引导患者分享最近的生活动态，或者针对特定问题进行跟进。对于其他患者，他则会采用更开放的方式，询问工作、整体情绪或人际关系，以推动对话。他强调，你不需要提前准备，也不必表现得像在表演。治疗师知道如何应对。
这些会谈为被忽视的问题提供了浮现的空间
即使你认为自己非常了解自己，或清楚为何寻求治疗，仍可能有更深层、被掩盖或完全回避的问题。当你开始交谈时，即使感觉毫无价值，这些潜在问题往往会浮出水面。有时这些问题会自然浮现，比如Giolitti-Wright所说，人们可能一开始谈论圣诞树，却“最终聊到最深层的困扰”。即使没有这种情况，治疗师也能通过细微的肢体语言、语气和态度变化察觉你可能面临的困难。Sosnowsky称这些线索为“入口”，它们可能是了解你内心负担的切入点，而治疗师会借此深入探讨。
治疗师能提前察觉你可能面临的困境
“谈论无意义话题”的另一个好处是，治疗师可能在你察觉之前发现心理健康问题的早期迹象，例如重度抑郁症或广泛性焦虑症。即使你整体状态良好或症状已缓解，累积的压力可能逐渐改变你的心理平衡。Sosnowsky指出，许多人并不意识到自己正在滑向抑郁状态，尤其是那些症状波动的人。定期会谈，包括看似无成效的会谈，有助于治疗师追踪你随时间推移的细微变化，如从压力感到绝望感，并及时察觉你可能进入困难时期。这可能促使治疗师询问你的日常习惯，例如是否锻炼、睡眠是否充足、饮食是否规律、是否有愉悦的活动等，并讨论如何防止症状恶化。他提到，这些检查有助于你“在抑郁症爆发前采取行动，因为一旦陷入全面发作，治疗会更加困难。”
强化与治疗师的关系对长期治疗至关重要
至少，这些“无话可说”的会谈会加深你与治疗师之间的关系。虽然这可能看起来不重要，但牢固的关系是治疗成功的关键。研究表明，被称为“治疗联盟”的治疗师与患者之间的关系是决定治疗效果的最重要因素。Sosnowsky表示：“可以说，这是治疗最重要的方面，不仅关乎体验质量，更决定治疗的实际效果。”你越亲近治疗师，信任、共情和合作就越强，这将帮助你更开放地交流并实现个人成长。最后，需要注意的是，并非所有会谈都必须有意义。如果你感觉每次咨询都毫无进展，可能需要寻找新的治疗师。但偶尔与治疗师轻松闲聊，比如谈论同事，也说明你正在有效利用时间。并非所有重要的工作都需要费力去做。

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Most weeks when I meet with my therapist, she triages some aspect of my life that is actively bursting at the seams — my inability to rationally talk about politics, for example, or the state of my personal finances. But, every so often, life feels uneventful, and I head into sessions with nothing to talk about. On a number of occasions, I’ve considered cancelling these appointments. Why waste 45 minutes of my time and spend $30 on a copay when I feel fine and have nothing to say?

But according to the two therapists I spoke with for this story, these seemingly boring sessions can be incredibly insightful and impactful. In fact, shooting the shit with your therapist can strengthen your bond, help them see how you function during periods of calm, and uncover unaddressed problems. As Claudia Giolitti-Wright, the founder and clinical director of Psychotherapy for Young Women in New York City, tells Vox, “Sessions where a client says, ‘I have nothing to talk about’ — they’re rarely empty. They often reveal something.” So much, in fact, that I left these two interviews convinced that the easy breezy appointments are just as important as the turbulent ones. Here’s why.

Therapists see this all the time — and they know how to deal

If you, like me, often start your sessions by apologizing for “have nothing going on,” consider this permission not to worry or feel awkward. Matt Sosnowsky, a psychotherapist and the founder of Philadelphia Talk Therapy, says he hears this from patients all the time, and it’s no big deal. Therapists are specifically trained to deal with this kind of lull.

“Oftentimes, I’ll just prompt them for an update on what’s been going on,” he says. With clients who are there to work on a specific issue, he’ll follow up on the topics they’ve been working through. With other patients, he’ll keep things more open-ended, asking about work, their overall mood, or their relationships to get the conversation flowing. This is to say: Don’t sweat it if you aren’t prepared. You don’t need to show up ready to perform or impress, says Giolitti-Wright. Your therapist knows what to do and say.

Appointments where you have “nothing to talk about” create space for overlooked issues to surface

Even if you consider yourself highly self-aware and feel clear on the reasons you’re in therapy, there are almost always deeper, buried issues that you’ve overlooked, downplayed, or completely avoided. As you start talking, even if it feels like you’re saying nothing of value, these underlying issues often rise to the surface. Sometimes these issues naturally bubble up — as Giolitti-Wright says, people will start rambling about, say, how they bought a Christmas tree but then “end up talking about the deepest shit.”

Even when that doesn’t happen, your therapist is trained to pick up on subtle cues — such as shifts in body language, tone, and attitude — that signal you’re struggling with something. Sosnowsky calls these cues “ports of entry.” “Those are often inroads to learn about what you’re carrying that you may not even notice,” he says, and your therapist will likely use that to dig deeper.

For example, if you let out a big exhale while talking about work, Sosnowsky might say, “I noticed that deep sigh, what’s that about?” or ask more targeted questions about your job. Then, you’re off to the races. This creates an opportunity for you to examine something you may not have fully considered yet or have been avoiding altogether, says Sosnowsky.

After all, these simmering problems tend to influence your mood and choices on a regular basis more so than the obvious catastrophes, adds Giolitti-Wright. Tending to them early and proactively can help you and your therapist identify solutions for long-term relief and prevent them from snowballing into larger, more difficult issues.

It’s good for your therapist to get a glimpse of your full personality

Many people, myself included, tend to see therapy as a thing to do when you’re dealing with something specific or when there’s an emergency. But that’s a huge misconception, according to Giolitti-Wright. The purpose of therapy is to enhance your daily functioning, improve your quality of life, and ease symptoms like irritability or hopelessness. To do this effectively, your therapist needs to see how you function as a whole person. As Giolitti-Wright puts it, “How you are when nothing is wrong or in crisis is as important as how you are in crisis.”

If your therapist only ever sees you during moments of extreme stress, it can actually be harder for them to provide guidance that effectively addresses and resolves your problems long-term, she adds. By learning about how you move through your day when things are good — and getting a sense of your strengths, your sense of humor, etc. — your therapist can provide personalized advice and spot patterns that may be contributing to recurring challenges.

Recognizing these patterns can reveal deeper, more systemic issues affecting your life, says Sosnowsky. What initially appears to be minor frustration with your new boss, for example, may actually stem from a more general resistance to change. These revelations “often come just from getting to know what somebody’s life is when they’re not completely zeroed in on explaining to you their interpretation of a specific issue,” Sosnowsky says.

Your therapist can often see a rough patch coming before you do

One additional benefit of “talking about nothing” is that it may help your therapist pick up on early signs of mental health conditions like major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder. Even if you’ve been doing well overall or your symptoms have been in remission, mounting stressors can gradually shift that balance, says Sosnowsky. Many people don’t recognize when they’re slipping into a depressive state, especially folks whose conditions typically ebb and flow, he says.

Regular appointments, including ones that seem unproductive, allow therapists to track subtle changes over time — like a shift from feeling stressed to hopeless — and notice when someone may be entering a more difficult period. That might lead your therapist to ask about your everyday habits — Are you exercising? Sleeping well? Eating enough? Doing things for pleasure? — and discuss ways to prevent your symptoms from escalating, says Sosnowsky. As he puts it, these check-ins help you “get ahead of the depression because it’s much harder to treat when you’re in the throes of a full-blown depressive episode.” They may also prompt your therapist to conduct an assessment to determine if you may have a mental health disorder that hasn’t been diagnosed.

You’ll strengthen your relationship with your therapist — which is important long-term

At the very least, your “nothing to talk about” sessions will strengthen the bond you have with your therapist. While that may not seem all that important, having a strong relationship is absolutely critical. Research suggests this relationship, dubbed the “therapeutic alliance,” is the most powerful determinant of how effective therapy will be for you. “You could argue this is the single most important aspect of therapy, and not only in terms of the quality of the experience, but the actual efficacy of outcomes,” Sosnowsky says. The closer you feel to your therapist, the more trust, empathy, and collaboration there will be, which will ultimately help you open up more and experience personal growth.

One final thing to keep in mind: You don’t want every single appointment to be aimless. If you perpetually feel like you’re spinning your wheels or that your mental health is stagnant, it may be time to look for a new therapist, says Sosnowsky. But, if, every now and then, you feel like you spent $30 to kick back and gossip about your coworkers with your therapist, rest assured that you’re still making good use of your time. Heavy lifting doesn’t always need to feel so heavy.

奥斯汀租金的惊人下降如何解释美国的住房问题

2026-04-10T03:35:22+00:00

美国奥斯汀的住房市场：租金下降与政策改革的争议

近年来，美国许多城市的租金价格出现显著下降，其中奥斯汀的降幅尤为突出。根据Apartment List的数据，奥斯汀过去一年的租金下降了6%，是美国主要城市中降幅最大的。这一变化与该市推行的YIMBY（“我的后院也需要”）政策密切相关，包括简化建筑许可流程、取消停车配额、允许建设附属住宅（ADUs）以及增加住房供应等措施。这些政策被Pew Charitable Trusts的报告认为是推动租金下降的重要因素。

然而，部分经济学家对奥斯汀的政策效果持怀疑态度。他们指出，租金下降可能更多是市场对疫情时期价格飙升的自然反应，而非政策直接导致。例如，约翰·蒙德龙（John Mondragon）等学者认为，住房供应的限制可能并未对整体租金产生显著影响，但承认这些限制在特定社区层面确实存在。此外，像旧金山这样的高房价城市，尽管近年来租金增长放缓，但其住房供应仍严重不足，无法满足需求。

文章还提到，尽管全国范围内租金下降，但住房市场具有高度地域性，不同城市的供需情况差异显著。例如，密尔沃基（Madison）虽然在过去十年中增加了大量住房，但租金仍大幅上涨，说明住房供应不足的问题依然存在。因此，住房供应对价格的影响不容忽视。

尽管存在争议，多数住房经济学家认为，增加住房供应是解决住房负担能力问题的关键。奥斯汀的经验表明，通过政策改革扩大住房供给可以有效降低租金，这为其他城市（如纽约、波士顿、旧金山和洛杉矶）提供了借鉴。文章建议这些城市可以尝试类似政策，如允许公寓建筑无需审批即可建设，并减少停车要求，同时通过严谨的分析评估政策效果。最终，即使没有完全确凿的证据，住房市场中住房供应与价格之间的关系仍是值得深入探讨的重要议题。

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Apartments and condos in Austin. | Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

Here is one narrative violation in the usual drumbeat of doom that we’re used to hearing about housing in America: The rent, in many cities across the US, is getting cheaper.

After soaring to Covid-era highs, rents have cooled. Last month, the national median rent was down 1.7 percent from one year prior, according to research from the rental marketplace Apartment List. This made it the biggest annual decline since the company started tracking rent data in 2017.

One success story stands out among all the rest: Austin, Texas, where rents dropped by a full 6 percent over the past year, more than in any other large metro area in the US. The Austin area’s median rent, at $1,274, is back to roughly where it was right before the pandemic — which means that, in 2026 dollars, it’s significantly cheaper than it was in 2019.

For the past decade, Austin has been a standard-bearer for the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement, passing a barrage of policy changes to make it easier to build new housing, especially new apartment buildings. According to a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative, these reforms are responsible in large part for the sharp drop in rents enjoyed by Austinites over the last several years.

Housing economists overwhelmingly agree that, to bring home prices down, cities need to embrace supply-side reforms that cut away the thicket of regulation that make it oddly difficult to do something as seemingly simple as build an apartment building — an argument that I and others at Vox have echoed many times.

But housing markets are enormously complicated and shaped by many factors; it’s challenging for researchers to measure the exact effects of policies like those rolled out in Austin. Pew’s report certainly provides strong suggestive evidence that the city’s policy reforms made a real difference — but remember that, since around 2022, rents have fallen nationwide, too, and in many other cities quite substantially. So it seems likely that at least some of Austin’s rent decline would have happened anyway, even without its full suite of YIMBY reforms.

How do we isolate the impacts of reforms meant to increase housing supply, figure out which ones worked, and to what extent they worked? Those are questions housing experts are taking up right now, and they’re not merely academic ones. Getting them right is how we will claw our way out of a housing affordability crisis that almost no one doubts exists — even as some disagree over how to solve it.

Austin’s housing boom, explained

In the 2010s, a local boom fueled by tech jobs drew hundreds of thousands of new residents to Austin and its suburbs. Following a trajectory familiar to other high-demand cities during that period, Austin’s rents soared — in their case by nearly 50 percent in that period, according to data from the Census Bureau — and single-family home prices climbed even faster. So the city sought ways to rapidly expand its housing supply to meet the surge in demand.

Austin is hardly the only city that has tried to unfetter homebuilding to ease its cost of living. But it is remarkable for the sheer breadth of reforms it’s adopted, Alex Horowitz, project director for Pew’s housing policy initiative, told me — which was one of the most important takeaways from his team’s Austin research. Those reforms have included:

Updating zoning codes across parts of the city to automatically allow the construction of tall apartment buildings in some places rather than requiring each to go through a long and costly permitting process.
Reducing and later, in 2023, eliminating parking minimums for virtually all new homes. (Elsewhere in the US, parking mandates — i.e., a minimum number of off-street spaces available per unit — make housing more expensive, and sometimes physically impossible, to build.)
Making it significantly easier to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which are smaller homes that sit alongside houses on single-family lots.
Allowing up to three homes to be built on lots zoned for single-family houses and greatly cutting down the minimum lot size required to build a single-family home, encouraging builders to add small, less expensive starter homes.
Creating density bonuses that allow developers to build taller in exchange for setting aside some units as income-restricted at lower rents — an approach that, the Pew report notes, has added more market-rate and more affordable apartments.
Last year, Austin’s city council voted to legalize apartment buildings up to five stories built with a single staircase, instead of the two staircases required by default in most US building codes — a longtime YIMBY holy grail because it can drop the cost of new buildings and open up more space and unit layout flexibility.

“Not many cities have taken as many different steps as Austin has,” Horowitz said. That matters because passing any single reform — even if it’s a big one, like Minneapolis’s 2018 decision to end single-family zoning — may not spur much home construction if an insurmountable wall of other rules still makes projects infeasible.

As housing advocates have put it to me before, housing is like a door with many deadbolts on it; unlocking just one will not magically open the door for more building. You can legalize triplexes on every single-family lot in America, but if the local zoning code requires every single unit to have two off-street parking spots, the triplex will not get built because there’s just not enough room for all that parking.

Austin’s broad range of policy changes meant that, between 2015 and 2024, the city managed to add 120,000 homes, Pew found — a stunning 30 percent increase in its housing stock. From 2023 to 2024, rents fell especially fast in “Class C” buildings — older, less expensive buildings generally occupied by people of modest incomes. This was a particularly important finding because NIMBYs routinely oppose new-construction “gentrification buildings” on the grounds that they’re unaffordable to all but the affluent. But by the laws of supply and demand, building new homes in an area lowers the cost of housing across the board, including older, cheaper units, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated empirically.

Attacking the city’s housing shortage from so many different angles has also accomplished another thing, Horowitz pointed out. Austin has built an unusually diverse mix of new homes, including not just apartments in large buildings — although those still make up nearly half of the city’s new units because they’re such an efficient way to house people — but also smaller apartment buildings, single-family homes, and townhouses. These varied options give residents more choice in where to live, and also may help retain people in the city as they have families and seek more living space.

The unexpected state of the US rental market

But how does Austin’s experience — its steep rise in home prices in the 2010s and early 2020s, and subsequent decline — compare to what’s been happening in other cities?

Here is one interesting observation about Apartment List’s latest analysis — the one that found a striking drop in rents nationwide over the last year:

From 2017 to 2026, the US national median rent grew by about 3 percent per year on average — less than the overall rate of inflation during the same period. The early 2020s run-up in rents ended up being partially canceled out by a sustained (if uneven) decline that began in 2022.

That happened because many metro areas, especially in the Sunbelt, built lots of new apartments in the past few years. “We’ve been going through this big multi-family construction boom,” Chris Salviati, chief economist for Apartment List, told me. “When we started to see rent growth softening over the past couple of years, I think that was expected because we had all these units that were getting completed.” Rents have fallen sharply in cities from Denver to San Antonio to Portland, Oregon.

Looking at that chart, you might even think, “Wait, what housing crisis?” It turns out that many cities and their surrounding areas were perfectly capable of adding new housing to meet the early 2020s’ surge in demand. So were restrictive zoning codes really holding them back in the first place? Rent increases have even moderated over the last decade in notoriously unaffordable markets like San Francisco — since 2017, rents in that metro area have only grown, on average, less than 1 percent per year:

So, are US housing markets not as catastrophically dysfunctional as we’d been led to believe by the housing shortage doomsayers?

A more careful look at the evidence suggests it wouldn’t be right to go quite that far. For one thing, we have not seen as much moderation in the cost of homes for sale as we have in rentals. And housing markets are hyper-local, so nationwide rent averages obscure a lot of regional variation. Plenty of cities have seen rapid recent growth in housing prices that have far outpaced inflation — like Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, where rents have climbed by more than 7 percent per year on average between the beginning of 2017 and 2026:

Coastal superstar cities like San Francisco, meanwhile, were already at a hyper-expensive baseline pre-pandemic because their home prices had been frog-boiling toward unaffordability over the course of decades. That is part of what’s pushed many Americans to move to cities like Austin (and Madison, for that matter) in search of good jobs and greater affordability. And that rents have slowed in the Bay Area is not necessarily evidence that the region has built enough housing to meet demand.

In fact, we know it’s been underbuilding for many years: By the city’s own accounting, San Francisco added 211,000 jobs from 2009 to 2019, creating a need for 154,000 housing units, but it built only 29,500 homes in that period. It’s woefully off track to meet its homebuilding goals this decade, too. So the relatively flat rents in the city may more likely suggest that it has hit an “unaffordability ceiling,” as Salviati put it. “We just hit a point where the market can no longer sustain prices going up by five-plus percent every year,” he said. (And would-be residents of the city are simply pushed to move farther afield.)

Causation is tricky to prove in housing markets, though, and looking at short-term price changes alone can easily lead to misinterpretation. You can have an extremely high-demand metro that doesn’t build much, like San Francisco, that sees plateauing prices because it’s already so expensive that the market can’t bear much more. And you can have a city that builds a lot of new homes relative to its existing housing stock — as Madison has over the last decade — and still sees soaring rents because it didn’t build enough to accommodate all the people who want to move to the area, and still had more room to absorb rent growth. Madison, for example, added 22,472 homes — more than three-quarters of which were apartments in developments with at least 25 units — between 2015 and 2024. That is a lot relative to the city’s size: a 20 percent increase in its housing stock. But it still underproduced what it needed, a shortfall that quickly piles up in the shape of limited supply, high demand, and rising rents.

What’s not in doubt is that housing supply is crucially important in shaping costs. And post-pandemic, many US cities showed an unexpected ability to add enough supply to push down some of the prices that caused Americans so much heartburn around the pandemic years. The relevant question for judging the ramifications of Austin’s housing reforms is not just whether housing got built after they passed or even whether the city’s rents dropped, but whether those things wouldn’t have happened if not for those new laws.

Could the skeptics have a valid point?

I first became obsessed with that question when, a few months ago, I stumbled on a fascinating (to a weirdo like me) bit of economics drama. Although most experts would tell you that reforming restrictive zoning laws in hot markets like Austin will bring down home prices, a contrarian group of economists recently dared to ask: What if it doesn’t?

In a controversial working paper, those researchers argued that measured housing supply constraints — like zoning codes that ban anything but single-family homes in most US neighborhoods — may not matter much for home prices across US metro areas, actually. One author of that paper, economist John Mondragon, a research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, cast doubt on the YIMBY narrative about Austin in a LinkedIn post earlier this year.

“The Austin, TX housing supply success story is something of a shibboleth in most housing circles,” he wrote. “Often the large decline in Austin house prices or rents over the last few years is marshaled as evidence. Unfortunately, I do not find this kind of casual look at the data to be very illuminating.”

The working paper has been a lightning rod in the field, drawing formal refutations from economists Michael Wiebe and Salim Furth; the authors published their own responses to those responses, as well as a nine-page document of frequently asked questions. Fully accounting for the dispute is outside the scope of this piece (to understand it, one economist encouraged me to contact a theoretical econometrician, which is like an economist but with even more math). But suffice it to say that as a working paper, it should be taken with a hefty serving of salt.

Regarding Austin, however, Mondragon raises a valid point. The city, like so many others, saw an extreme rise in rents early in the pandemic; that tends to induce developers to build more so they can benefit from high prices. So it’s hard to untangle whether Austin’s construction boom and subsequent rent declines are the result of its new zoning policies, or simply the market’s natural response to pandemic-era price spikes.

Home construction often happens in boom-and-bust cycles like these — developers build lots of housing until the supply glut pushes prices down, which reduces the incentive to build more and often limits how much further prices can be reduced. That’s what appears to have happened in US cities in the last few years, and it’s not unreasonable to think this dynamic was at play in Austin, too. Interestingly, a 2025 post by the National Multifamily Housing Council, a trade association for the apartment industry, made a similar argument about Austin — that its rent drops had more to do with builders responding to price signals than it did with any recent regulatory reforms.

This disagreement matters not just because it’s important to understand what shapes housing affordability, but also because a growing YIMBY consensus in US politics — nationally and locally — is still a fragile one, and it needs to be able to answer challenges and counterarguments, and think carefully about causation. Local policy leaders increasingly agree that there is a relationship between housing supply and housing prices, just like the basic economic forces at play in markets for all kinds of goods. But many communities across the US are still pushed about by NIMBYs who advocate fiercely against allowing more housing construction. Mondragon and his co-authors’ paper was quickly taken up as ammunition by these development opponents.

Meanwhile, a steady drip of other reports, sometimes sloppy, uncontrolled ones authored by non-economists, still downplay the role of housing scarcity in driving high home prices. It’s “a cottage industry of producing anti-YIMBY, low-quality studies,” Ned Resnikoff, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who recently wrote a response to a few of those reports, told me.

When I raised all this to Pew’s Alex Horowitz, I got the sense that he was annoyed at the suggestion that there’s any real debate here. “The overwhelming majority of academic research papers on this topic have reached the same conclusion, which is that supply influences costs,” he said. “Periodically there is a paper that comes out in a different place, but, I would say, not using conventional economic methods.”

Economists have estimated the importance of supply constraints on housing using a range of methods: If home prices in a city far exceed the cost of building a home, for example, like they do in the most expensive US cities, then that ought to induce developers to want to build more because they stand to profit a great deal. If they don’t build much in spite of this, then that points strongly to the likelihood that supply constraints — regulation, as well as geographic limits — are getting in the way. Researchers have also directly estimated how much regulatory red tape adds to the cost of homebuilding — it’s a lot!

Although the precise forces behind Austin’s recent rent declines have not yet been thoroughly dissected in a controlled, peer-reviewed study, Horowitz said that the evidence from Pew’s case study points overwhelmingly to the effectiveness of the city’s building reforms. The researchers “very explicitly see that a lot of the new homes getting built [in Austin] weren’t previously allowed,” he said. “It just doesn’t take much of a leap to see the causality there.”

The two perspectives may not, in the end, be that hard to reconcile. Mondragon and his co-authors don’t deny that housing supply shapes prices (you’d be laughed out of the field for suggesting otherwise). However you slice it, we need a sufficient supply of housing in order for housing to be affordable. The authors are, rather, unconvinced that constraints like zoning are meaningfully holding back supply. But even that claim, which has been ferociously contested by other housing researchers, is weaker than it appears at first glance because the working paper does acknowledge that supply constraints “almost certainly” matter at the level of individual neighborhoods (the authors argue that those effects don’t show up at the level of entire metro areas).

Ultimately, we need not wait for perfect evidence to be able to speak about what is, to the best of our understanding, likely happening in the American housing market. It seems unlikely to be a mere coincidence that the cities that had the greatest recent rent declines are concentrated in the Sunbelt, which tends to have fewer constraints on building housing than coastal cities. Even within that region, Austin outperformed both in how many homes it added and in how much prices dropped: “Austin is the market that has built the most new multi-family housing per capita by a pretty wide gap,” Salviati said.

Is it possible that all those new homes and lowered rents had nothing to do with Austin’s aggressive push to make it easier to build more homes? Perhaps, and maybe peer-reviewed research will eventually find that Austin’s zoning changes weren’t as big a deal as YIMBYs thought, though my hunch is that they’ll end up mattering quite a lot. In the meantime, there is every reason for New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their suburbs to try the same experiment in housing abundance that Austin has. They can start with what Horowitz calls the “one-two punch” of policies for improving housing affordability: allow apartment buildings to be built by right in as many places as possible, and reduce parking mandates.

And like any good experiment, we’ll need exacting analysis to know how it’s working. Maybe I’ll call that theoretical econometrician after all — or at least ask my mayor to.

彼得·赫格塞特提倡“最大杀伤力”。这一主张在伊朗意味着什么？

2026-04-09T19:53:56+00:00

2026年4月6日，国防部长彼得·赫格塞斯在白宫简报室谈论伊朗冲突。早在特朗普政府对伊朗开战之前，其政策就已经展现出更具攻击性的倾向。特朗普将国防部重新命名为“战争部”，以符合其价值观，而赫格塞斯则承诺贯彻“最大杀伤力”的理念。多年来，赫格塞斯一直主张以无保留的战士精神对抗敌人，2024年他出版了《战士之战：那些捍卫我们自由的人所遭受的背叛》一书。在取得委内瑞拉行动和去年对伊朗核设施有限打击的成功后，赫格塞斯与特朗普开始对伊朗战争充满信心，并展现出不惜代价的强硬态度。特朗普本周早些时候威胁要摧毁整个文明，虽然可能暂时促成停火，但这一策略似乎难以持久。

在今日解释节目主持人塞安·拉梅斯瓦拉姆与《新 Yorker》的本杰明·华莱士-韦尔的对话中，探讨了赫格塞斯和特朗普如何将这一理念付诸实践。华莱士-韦尔指出，赫格塞斯是特朗普团队中唯一与总统一样对战争进展持乐观态度的人，而副总统JD·万斯、国务卿马可·鲁比奥等则态度谨慎或矛盾。赫格塞斯的军事极端主义立场使其在团队中更具影响力，因为他准确把握了特朗普的意图，并成为其政策的代言人。

尽管赫格塞斯的策略可能在短期内有效，但长期来看可能并不明智。此外，赫格塞斯还把战争与宗教信仰联系起来，特别是在军事简报会上呼吁人们为美军祈祷，并将伊朗政权称为“末日般的存在”，这种做法为战争增添了宗教色彩。然而，华莱士-韦尔质疑这种“最大杀伤力”是否是一种可行的外交政策，认为特朗普威胁核战争的行为虽然震慑了部分人，但并未真正实现战略目标。目前伊朗似乎已掌控霍尔木兹海峡，美国的冒险行为也使其许多盟友感到不满。尽管特朗普通过威胁采取强硬手段暂时摆脱了困境，但整体来看，这一系列行动似乎并未带来实质性的成果，更多只是引发了愤怒、轰炸和死亡，其长远影响仍存疑。

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks about the conflict in Iran from the White House briefing room on April 6, 2026. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Even before the Trump administration went to war with Iran, it was talking differently about its approach to combat.

President Donald Trump relabeled the Department of Defense to something more in line with his values: the Department of War. His Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised to deliver on a philosophy of “maximum lethality.” For many years, Hegseth has wanted to unleash an American warrior and fight the enemy, no holds barred. (In 2024, Hegseth authored a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.)

After notching successes in Venezuela and in last year’s limited strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Hegseth and Trump began the Iran war confident and with a seemingly unbridled willingness to inflict damage. Trump’s post earlier this week threatening to wipe out a whole civilization may have resulted in a temporary ceasefire, but it seems like that strategy isn’t going anywhere.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells about how that philosophy has been realized in Hegseth and Trump’s first big war. Wallace-Wells explains Hegseth’s need to unleash that warrior ethos at every opportunity and how it might be driving the US’s next step with Iran.

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

How is [Hegseth] executing this concept of his?

I’d say a couple of things. The first is, it’s interesting to note, in all of the reporting that we’ve seen from many different outlets, that Hegseth is the only person who’s in the president’s circle who seems as optimistic as Trump does about the progress of the war and the possibilities of the war.

You see [Vice President] JD Vance distancing himself very actively from the war. You see [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio taking an ambivalent position. Gen. [Dan] Caine sees risks as well as possibilities. But Hegseth has been gung-ho the whole way.

His approach to the war, I think, has been that American lethality will deliver whatever the president wants. In the very first hours of the war, you have this massive bombing raid that kills [Iran’s Supreme Leader] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and then President Trump comes out a few days later and says, in that raid, not only was Khamenei killed, but some of the other senior figures in the Iranian regime who we had hoped might succeed Khamenei [were killed]. Within a day of the war beginning we see 175 people killed in a school in southern Iran, presumably through a targeting error, though we’re still not totally sure exactly what happened there.

In both of these cases, you see a program of unleashed lethality. And I think you can see in both those cases that it undermines the aims of the United States and the stated war aims of the president, both in eliminating some of the potential replacements in the case of the initial bombing, and then also in making it just a little harder to imagine the Iranian public getting behind the kind of uprising that President Trump has said he wants to trigger.

How much of his approach do we think is coming from his own belief in this concept of maximum lethality, and how much of it is so many in his Cabinet just wanting to please the president?

It’s interesting to think of Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as each representing one idea of the president. Vance represents the sort of nationalism of the president. Rubio represents maybe a more traditional Republican transactional approach. And Hegseth just represents the full military maximalism. And he has become more influential because he has been the one who has, I think, successfully seen what the president wants to do in Iran and made himself the spokesman and enabler of that.

I do think that there’s a pretty good chance that this doesn’t turn out so well in public opinion and the progress of the war. I’m not sure that it’s been a very savvy long-term play for Hegseth, but I think we should remember that Hegseth did not have a political base or role in the world before Trump tapped him. He had never been a senior military commander. He’d served in the military as a younger man. He was the weekend co-host of Fox and Friends.

He owes his position in the world to President Trump. He’s, according to public opinion, now deeply unpopular, as is the war. If we’re thinking just in pure personal terms, it’s not crazy for him to take a shot and try to position himself as the maximalist face of this war. But I do think that there may be real costs for the rest of us.

Another thing that feels significant to this conversation and feels like maybe a companion piece to this idea of maximum lethality is Pete Hegseth is really tying this war [together with] his approach to God.

I would say to a Christian God, even more specifically. He’s specifically asked during military press conferences for people to pray to Jesus Christ on the troops’ behalf.

Another element that matters here is, he’s referred to the Iranian regime as apocalyptic, and together with delivering prayers from the podium where he’s giving technical updates on the progress of the war, it does give an atmosphere of holy war to the whole operation.

Pete’s whole thing is maximum lethality. The president seemed to go even further with his post, the whole world was on edge, and then we got a ceasefire out of it, however tentative it may be. Does that prove something about this concept of maximum lethality as a viable foreign policy?

If you threaten nuclear war, you can spook some people. I think that that’s pretty intuitive, but I don’t know that that really proves anything in terms of foreign policy. We’re looking at a situation where Iran seems like they’re likely to have full control of the Strait of Hormuz, where the regime is still in control, where the United States has alienated a huge number of its own allies around the world with its willingness to play brinksmanship.

In the narrow sense of, Trump had managed to get himself into a real trap and then by threatening enormous lethality, to use Hegseth’s word, he was able to maneuver out — I guess it worked, but it’s really hard for me to say that in any bigger-picture sense this was effective. I have to look back at this whole month and just say, what was this all for? It feels to me like a whole lot of fury and bombs and death, and it’s really hard for me to see a lot that’s come from it.

我们不知道伊朗是否仍然能够制造炸弹。

2026-04-09T15:54:10+00:00

2026年4月9日，伊朗安全人员在德黑兰为悼念其父亲阿里·阿亚图拉·哈梅内伊被美以联合空袭击毙40天举行纪念活动时，站在其新任最高领袖穆罕默德·哈梅内伊的巨幅画像下站岗。| 马吉德·赛迪/盖蒂图片社

当前美伊战争的焦点已转向伊朗对霍尔木兹海峡的控制，以至于最初以摧毁伊朗核计划为由的战争目标似乎变得次要。美国政府是否仍将其视为优先事项尚不明确。周三，国防部长彼得·海格塞思强调伊朗核计划仍需被摧毁，而副总统JD·万斯则表示不担心伊朗放弃核浓缩权利。特朗普则称伊朗核计划已被彻底摧毁，尽管这一说法在6月空袭后也曾被提出。伊朗是否仍有制造核武器的途径？如果有的话，美国和以色列能否采取行动阻止？为厘清这些问题，我采访了中东伯明翰学院詹姆斯·马丁核不扩散研究项目的教授杰弗里·刘易斯。刘易斯是核不扩散领域的专家，也是研究伊朗和朝鲜等国核及军事能力的权威开源分析人士。

刘易斯指出，尽管美国和以色列官员坚称伊朗必须交出剩余浓缩铀并摧毁其核浓缩计划，但若伊朗不配合，仅靠武力威胁并不现实。他质疑伊朗是否将所有浓缩铀都藏在伊斯法罕的地下隧道中，以及是否存在其他储存地点。此外，伊朗仍具备制造离心机的能力，且拥有相关技术人才。即便摧毁部分设施，伊朗仍可能迅速恢复生产。他同时提到，巴基斯坦作为停火谈判的中介，拥有强大的离心机计划，这可能是伊朗核技术的来源之一。

关于特朗普称伊朗“核尘”被深埋地下且无法使用的说法，刘易斯认为缺乏证据。他指出，尽管伊朗对隧道入口进行了掩埋，但这些入口已被打开，且美国和以色列的卫星监控能力并不足以实时掌握所有动态。他强调，除非进行持续的无人机监控，否则很难确定伊朗是否在转移核材料。若伊朗开始挖掘隧道，可能会引发一场针对其设施的快速打击。

特朗普威胁“摧毁整个文明”的言论引发了广泛争议，白宫不得不否认考虑使用核武器。刘易斯认为这并非真正的核威胁，而是特朗普惯常的夸张表达，可能指打击桥梁和发电厂等设施。他指出，核武器在打击地下设施方面确实有其优势，但美国尚未使用，且使用核武器将是严重错误。他担忧若美国对伊斯法罕发动核打击，伊朗可能将铀藏入废墟中，从而增加核风险。

在评估伊朗导弹计划时，刘易斯指出五角大楼公布的被摧毁导弹和无人机数量缺乏可靠依据。由于缺乏初始数据，这些估计难以准确。伊朗可能使用了类似塞尔维亚90年代的诱饵策略，使得实际损失难以判断。除非进行地面行动，否则很难确切了解其剩余能力。

刘易斯认为，其他国家可能会从这场战争中吸取教训，即尽快完成核武器开发更为安全。他指出美国曾背叛伊拉克、利比亚和伊朗等国的去核协议，而朝鲜和巴基斯坦则相对安全。因此，他更倾向于成为朝鲜或巴基斯坦的一员，而非伊朗、伊拉克或利比亚。

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Members of the Iranian security forces stand guard under a large portrait of Iran's new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, during a memorial to mark the 40th day since his father, Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed in US-Israeli joint strikes, on April 9, 2026, in Tehran, Iran. | Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

The focus of the US-Iran war — and now the negotiations over the US-Iran ceasefire — has shifted to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, to such an extent that the main original justification for the war (destroying Iran’s nascent nuclear program) can sometimes feel like an afterthought.

It’s not clear to what extent it’s still even a priority for the US government. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth insisted that Iran’s nuclear program would still be dismantled while Vice President JD Vance, who is leading ceasefire talks in Pakistan this weekend, suggested he’s not concerned about Iran forsaking its right to nuclear enrichment. Meanwhile, President Trump has suggested at various points that this is a moot point, since Iran’s nuclear program has been irreparably destroyed anyway. (It should be noted: He made the same claim after the airstrikes on Iran in June.)

Does Iran still have a pathway to a nuclear weapon? If it does, can the US and Israel do anything about it? To help sort through the confusion, I spoke with Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Lewis is an expert on nuclear nonproliferation and a leading open source analyst studying the nuclear and military capabilities of countries like Iran and North Korea.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

On Wednesday, we heard Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and others insist that Iran must turn over its remaining uranium stockpile and dismantle its enrichment program. They also say it could still be removed by force if Iran didn’t agree. Is that remotely realistic?

It’s realistic if we occupy the country, but short of that, no. The claim we’ve heard is that half the highly enriched uranium is at [the underground tunnel complex in] Isfahan. So, where’s the other half? And if it’s not all at Isfahan, then how many other sites is it at? Is some of it still at Fordow and Natanz? Is it at some third location? What about their ability to produce centrifuges? What about centrifuges they have in storage? What about the people who know how to operate them?

You can set them back by destroying things, immobilizing things, and taking things, but there’s a large group of people who understand how to operate these things. There’s a basic capability that’s in place.

And oh, by the way, the neighbor who has been handling the ceasefire negotiations [Pakistan] happens to have a very large and capable centrifuge program that was the source of Iran’s original centrifuges. So, what’s the plan here, guys?

In his speech last week, Trump said that Iran’s “nuclear dust” — as he called it — was buried far underground and unusable. Is there anything to that claim?

There’s no evidence of that. I mean, we see the tunnels. The tunnels are intact, so it’s not buried. The only burying was the Iranians burying the entrances to protect them, but we’ve seen them open those entrances and access the tunnels. If you put something in a safe in your house, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to your money, right? You just have to open the safe.

Sure, but given the level of satellite surveillance Iran is under, and the level of US and Israeli intelligence penetration into the Iranian regime, isn’t there a case to be made that it would just be crazy for the Iranians to try to restart their nuclear program now?

The intelligence penetration was real. Is it still real? No one knows that. The surveillance is not anything like 24/7. We’re getting satellite images taken some number of times a day, and there’s some latency. But unless we are operating drones 24/7 over those sites, we’re not going to be able to know for certain unless the Iranians are really slow.

If they were to open up the tunnels, I don’t think it would take them that long to move the [stockpile]. So if we saw them opening up the tunnels, that could cause a race to hit them. But it’s also true that we saw them opening up the tunnels back in September and October, and we didn’t do anything about it.

Just as a broad statement, I’m not as confident as [the US and Israeli governments] are that they know where all the material is. I’m not as confident as they are that they could detect a movement of the material.

On Tuesday, when we saw Trump threaten to destroy a whole civilization, it got to the point that the White House actually had to deny that it was considering nuclear weapons use, and people like Tucker Carlson were calling on officials to disobey nuclear orders. I’m curious what you made of that as someone who considers nuclear risk on a regular basis.

I didn’t think that they were going to use nuclear weapons, and I didn’t interpret that as a nuclear threat. Trump likes bombast, and I took him to mean striking bridges and power plants — which is arguably illegal, and I certainly am morally uncomfortable with it.

But, you know, nuclear weapons would be useful for targeting the deep underground facilities. They would be very useful for these missions. I’m glad that the US has not used them, and I think it would be a terrible mistake to do that. But it does cross my mind that the uranium that I think is not buried in rubble could be buried in rubble if they hit Isfahan with a nuclear weapon, which I don’t want them to do.

There’s still a taboo there, but I don’t know how strong that taboo is.

When it comes to Iran’s missile program, the Pentagon has put out a lot of figures on the numbers of missiles and drones and launchers destroyed, but how much do we actually know about the capabilities Iran still has after being hit for almost 6 weeks?

The problem is, we didn’t have a good baseline for how many launchers, how many missiles, there were [at the outset].

Those kinds of estimates are always a bit of voodoo. We don’t make them on the open source side, because we don’t think we can do it reliably. When you have a factory that’s operating [making drones or missiles], unless you try to count every box that goes in and every box that comes out, it’s pretty hard to know.

It’s also hard to know what you’ve destroyed. I mean, the Iranians are almost certainly using lots of decoys, which the Serbs did in the 90s. That’s not to say that these are all decoys that are getting struck, but until you go in on the ground, it becomes really hard to know.

What lessons do you think other potential nuclear proliferators might take from this war?

That it makes sense to finish that nuclear weapon as soon as you can. I would certainly look at the three countries that disarmed — Iraq, Libya, and Iran — or at least made disarmament agreements; the US double crossed all of them. And then, I would look at North Korea, and they seem to be fine. I’d rather be North Korea or Pakistan than I would Iran, Iraq, or Libya.

向下流动的大学毕业生的神话

2026-04-08T15:54:15+00:00

“占领华尔街”示威者于2011年10月3日占据纽约华尔街附近的公园。| 法新社/Getty Images
“高技能”工人的黄金时代正在终结。随着企业不断用机器替代人力，越来越多的专业人士发现自己的高学历不再具有价值，许多人被迫从事低薪工作，而另一些人则只能通过接受更剥削性的雇佣条件来维持其高地位。

关键要点
• 近年来大学毕业生的“隐性失业”（即从事非专业工作）比例低于1990年代。
• 大学毕业生群体因人口结构变化、文化战争等因素逐渐左移。
• 知识型工作者目前状况良好，但未来可能因人工智能而发生变化。
• 随着技能阶层与普通劳动者之间的界限逐渐模糊，高技能工人开始认同无产阶级的政治立场，呼吁结构性变革，而非温和改革。

马克思的预言是否应验？
尽管马克思在1848年曾预言高技能工人将沦为无产阶级，但过去170年资本主义并未完全实现这一趋势，反而创造了更多技能、收入和地位的层次。然而，近年来一些迹象表明，高技能工人可能正在经历类似无产阶级化的现象。

为何大学毕业生左移？

人口结构变化：美国大学毕业生群体逐渐多元化，女性和少数族裔比例上升。自1980年以来，女性和非白人毕业生更倾向于支持进步政策和民主党，这推动了整体政治倾向的左移。
文化战争的影响：随着社会议题（如移民、性别平等、种族正义）在政治中的重要性上升，大学毕业生更倾向于支持民主党，而共和党则因特朗普的反智、威权和排外政策失去吸引力。
政党认同塑造经济立场：大学毕业生在转向民主党后，逐渐接受该党派的经济理念，如支持工会。数据显示，高学历群体对工会的支持率显著上升，而低学历群体则相反。
千禧一代与资本主义的矛盾：2008年金融危机和媒体、学术行业的就业困境使年轻一代对资本主义产生持续怀疑，推动他们转向左翼政治。

AI可能改变未来
尽管目前高技能工人的经济状况并未出现全面恶化，但人工智能的崛起可能改变这一趋势，使马克思的预言在未来成为现实。然而，当前的左翼政治转向更多源于文化战争和政党认同，而非经济崩溃。

总结
大学毕业生政治左移的现象并非单纯由经济困境驱动，而是人口结构变化、文化议题的极化以及政党认同转变的综合结果。尽管AI可能在未来加剧这一趋势，但目前的经济数据并未显示大规模的无产阶级化，更多是社会和政治因素的推动。

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"Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators occupy a park near Wall Street in New York, October 3, 2011. | AFP via Getty Images

The heyday of the “high-skill” worker is ending.

As corporations find new ways to replace labor with machines, more and more professionals are seeing their vaunted credentials lose their value. Many have been forced into menial jobs — while others cling to their prestigious positions only by accepting ever more exploitative terms of employment.

Key takeaways

• Recent college graduates are less likely to be underemployed than they were in the 1990s.

• College graduates have moved left due to demographic change, the culture war, and other factors.

• Knowledge workers are doing fine today, though that could change in the future due to AI.

The class distinctions that once cleaved skilled workers from common laborers are therefore eroding. And as they do, the former are starting to embrace the politics of proletarians: identifying with the masses instead of management — and demanding structural change instead of milquetoast reforms. Today, “high-skill” workers’ declining fortunes are a problem for them; tomorrow, they will be one for the oligarchic elite.

Or so Karl Marx argued in 1848.

The ensuing 17 decades weren’t kind to Marx’s prophecies. Instead of melting every strata of worker into a uniform proletariat, capitalism generated myriad new gradations of skill, pay, and prestige. And rather than immiserating professionals and proles alike, market economies drastically raised living standards for workers in general, and the highly educated in particular (or at least, they did so once leavened with a spoonful of socialism).

Nonetheless, some now suspect that Marx’s predictions may have been less wrong than premature. The steam engine might not have devalued all skilled labor, but artificial intelligence sure seems like it might. What’s more, even before the past decade’s AI breakthroughs, many college graduates were already struggling to find white-collar work, growing disillusioned, and drifting left.

In a recent New York Times essay, the (very good) labor reporter Noam Scheiber argues that the past 15 years of economic change have taken a toll on young college graduates, bequeathing them “the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.”

In his telling, recent grads feel they were sold a bill of goods. Throughout their childhoods, every authority promised that they could attain a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, so long as they secured a university diploma. But too many students took this offer. The economy started minting more knowledge workers than white-collar jobs, thereby consigning a historically large share of graduates to unemployment or low-wage service work.

As a result, in Scheiber’s telling, the politics of college graduates have been transformed. In the Reagan and Clinton eras, the highly educated tended to see themselves “as management-adjacent — as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, university graduates voted to the right of working-class Americans, while holding more conservative views on economic policy.

Now, grads are more likely to identify with rank-and-file workers than their employers. In fact, overqualified baristas, discontented coders, and precariously-employed journalists have spearheaded a boom in labor organizing.

Meanwhile, college-educated voters have become slightly more economically left-wing — and much more Democratic — than those without degrees.

Scheiber acknowledges that these political shifts have multiple causes. But his account of college graduates’ realignment is still largely materialist: The demographic was increasingly “proletarianized” — which is to say, shunted into working-class jobs — and moved left as a consequence.

There’s much truth in Scheiber’s reporting. And in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, he offers keen insights into the radicalization of the overeducated and underemployed.

But his big-picture narrative about college grads’ shifting fortunes and politics is a bit misleading. A variety of forces have been pushing highly educated voters to the left. But a broad collapse in the economic position of the well-educated is not one of them.

The (college) kids are all right

Without question, the past two generations of college graduates have faced some unique economic challenges. The cost of a university education has risen sharply since the 1990s, forcing students to shoulder larger debts. And in the cities where white-collar jobs are concentrated, housing costs have soared.

Nevertheless, there is little evidence that college-educated workers have been proletarianized, en masse. To the contrary, by some metrics, graduates are doing better today than they were in the 1990s.

In painting the opposite picture, Scheiber leans heavily on anecdotes. Much of his reporting centers on college-educated workers who are stuck in low-wage service jobs. And he suggests that the fate of these scholarly waiters and well-read retail clerks is becoming increasingly common.

To make this case, Scheiber cites Federal Reserve data on the types of jobs held by “underemployed” college graduates — meaning, graduates whose occupations don’t require a degree. He notes that, among this subset of young grads, the percentage with well-paying, non-college jobs — such as insurance agent or human resource worker — has declined over time, while the share with low-wage jobs has increased.

This is true. But Scheiber’s presentation of the data point is misleading.

Low-wage workers do account for a rising share of underemployed college graduates. And yet, the percentage of college grads who are underemployed has declined over time. For this reason — according to Scheiber’s preferred data set — recent college graduates were less likely to hold a low-wage job in 2023 than they had been three decades earlier.

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More critically, throughout this period, the share of recent graduates in low-wage jobs was always tiny. In 2023 — the most recent year in the Fed’s data — just 4.5 percent of young college-educated workers held such positions. Among college graduates of all ages, meanwhile, that figure was 2.2 percent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s early career as a struggling bartender saddled with student loans is a key part of her political biography, but it’s not the typical experience for the diploma set. Nor has it become more common over time.

Of course, just because a job requires a college degree doesn’t mean it’s well-paid. But college grads’ wages have also trended upward over time. And the gap between the pay of workers with a degree and those who only completed high school has widened slightly since 2003.

Scheiber argues that such wage data obscures as much as it reveals. He concedes that college grads earn much more than working-class Americans “on average.” But he suggests that these averages are skewed by the knowledge economy’s inequalities: If a small minority of workers in tech and finance reap massive pay gains, then the average wage for college graduates can go up, even if most are treading water or falling behind.

And yet, the median wage data tells the same general story as the averages: Between 2000 and 2025, the median college graduate’s earnings rose both in absolute terms, and relative to the median worker with a high school diploma (albeit only modestly).

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All this said, Scheiber identifies one indisputably concerning trend in the college-educated labor market: For five years now, the unemployment rate for recent college grads has been higher than the overall jobless rate. This is highly unusual; historically, young grads have had an easier time finding jobs than the typical worker.

Still, it’s important to put this trend in context. Young college graduates remain much less likely to be unemployed than other workers of the same age. And joblessness still afflicts only a small fraction of graduates. In December 2025, the unemployment rate among recent grads was 5.6 percent; among all grads, it was only 3.1 percent.

None of this means that young college graduates have no legitimate grounds for complaint or concern. The point is merely that, in the aggregate, college-educated workers’ economic circumstances have not dramatically deteriorated, even as their political behavior has drastically changed. The “proletarianization” experienced by some college graduates therefore can’t explain more than a small fraction of the demographic’s leftward shift.

Why college graduates moved left (or “What’s the matter with Greenwich?”)

So, what can? Why have college graduates become so much more left-wing — in their economic attitudes, issue positions, and voting behavior?

There are many right answers to this question. Here, I’ll just sketch four:

1. The demographics of America’s college-educated population have changed.

“College-educated voters” are not a fixed caste of immortals, drifting through time — backing Calvin Coolidge in one era and Kamala Harris in another.

Rather, that phrase denotes a demographic category, whose internal composition is constantly changing. Over the past four decades, America’s college-educated population has grown less white and more female. In 1980, just 13.6 percent of American women over 25 had a college degree, while just 7.9 percent of Black Americans did, according to US Census data. By 2024, those figures had jumped to 40.1 percent and 29.6 percent respectively. (Rates of college attendance among white and male Americans also rose over this time period, but at a much slower rate.)

This shift surely pushed the college-educated population leftward. Since the 1980s, women have been more likely than men to espouse progressive views on the economy and vote for Democrats in elections. And the same is true of nonwhite voters relative to white ones. Thus, the feminization — and diversification — of the college-educated electorate likely accounts for much of its liberalization.

Put differently: If nothing else had changed about America’s society or economy since 1980, the changing demographics of college-educated voters would have been sufficient to move that population to the left.

2. The culture war led many socially liberal college graduates to become Democrats.

College graduates have been more socially liberal — and cosmopolitan — than less educated voters, since at least the 1950s. In the mid-20th century, however, cultural issues were less politically salient. Republicans and Democrats didn’t have uniformly divergent positions on immigration, feminism, racial justice, or the environment.

But the major parties began polarizing on those subjects in the 1970s. And such issues became increasingly central to our politics in the ensuing decades. In part for this reason, college graduates have been drifting toward Democrats — and working-class voters, toward Republicans — for half a century.

The French economist Thomas Piketty illustrated this trend in 2018. In the following chart, negative values mean that Democrats did better with working-class voters than college-educated ones in that election year; positive values mean the opposite:

In other words, the highly educated’s realignment began long before the (real and supposed) 21st-century economic trends that Scheiber describes.

To be sure, the “diploma divide” widened dramatically in recent years. Yet the inflection point for that shift was not the Great Recession, but rather, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign — which associated the GOP with an unprecedentedly anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and xenophobic brand of nationalism.

And there are other signs that it was the culture war — not economic strife — that drove college graduates toward Democrats.

For one thing, across Western countries, there is a tight correlation between how central social issues are to political conflict and how likely college-educated voters are to support left-wing parties.

For another, the college-educated voters who’ve joined the Democratic coalition in recent years are disproportionately affluent. Of the 57 counties that have consistently moved toward the Democratic Party in all three presidential elections since 2012, 18 have a median household income above $100,000.

The same pattern shows up in individual-level voting data. In 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of the income distribution voted to the right of Americans as a whole. In every presidential election since 2016, however, rich whites have been more Democratic than those in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution.

Simply put, Greenwich did not swing toward Democrats because its people were proletarianized, so much as because the GOP was Trumpified.

3. When socially liberal college graduates became Democrats, many adopted the economic orthodoxies of their new coalition.

To his credit, Scheiber acknowledges that the culture war played a big role in college graduates’ partisan realignment. But he suggests that this can’t explain the transformation of educated voters’ economic views.

Which is reasonable. Perhaps, the rising salience of immigration, feminism, and authoritarianism have made college grads more likely to vote Democratic. But why would it have rendered them more pro-labor? Surely, one may think, the latter must have more to do with changing economic circumstances than culture war allegiances.

As I’ll note in a minute, I do think that college graduates’ shifting economic views partly reflect their material challenges.

But it’s also plausible that, to a large extent, the demographic has become more economically progressive because it’s grown more Democratic.

Voters often switch parties on the basis of a few key issues — those core to their political identities — and then take dictation from their new coalition on other subjects. One can see this anecdotally in the evolution of “Never Trump” Republican pundits like Bill Kristol or Jennifer Rubin. Each broke with the GOP over Trump’s authoritarianism and foreign policy views, but subsequently embraced a variety of liberal policy positions.

This dynamic — in which partisanship can drive economic ideology — is arguably visible in some of the polling that Scheiber cites. In his essay, he notes that college graduates are much more likely to approve of labor unions today than they were in the 1990s. And he interprets this as a sign that graduates have stopped seeing themselves as “management-adjacent.”

And yet, in the Gallup survey he references, college graduates were 15 points more likely to support unions than those with a high school degree or less. Meanwhile, Americans with annual incomes above $100,000 were 6 percentage points more pro-labor than those earning less than $50,000.

Notably, this appears to be a novel development. According to American National Election Studies data, college graduates expressed warmer feelings for “big business” than for “labor unions” virtually every year between 1964 and 2012. Then, in 2016, they abruptly became more pro-union than pro-business. By 2024, America’s most educated workers were its most pro-labor.

Conversely, the least educated segment of Americans —– those without a high-school degree —– went from being the most pro-union segment of the workforce in the early 1980s to the least in 2016 (although, they still approved of labor unions by more than big business in that year).

This pattern of support is difficult to explain, if we assume that a voter’s opinion on unions is a reliable index of their (perceived or actual) adjacency to management. On the other hand, if voters’ economic opinions are shaped by both their material interests and partisanship, then the disparities make perfect sense. Labor unions are associated with the Democratic Party. So, as college graduates have grown more Democratic, they’ve looked more kindly on unions. As the “poorly educated” (in Trump’s famous phrase) became more Republican, they became less likely to approve of labor than other Americans.

If true, this would be consistent with a large body of political science data showing that partisans express more sympathy for groups that favor their political party.

4. Millennials and capitalism got off on the wrong foot.

In saying all this, I don’t mean to deny that some college-educated voters have embraced radical, pro-labor politics, in response to material difficulties.

Although recent graduates have not been proletarianized en masse, many millennials did graduate into a labor market scarred by the Great Recession. During our first, formative years as workers, we often struggled to secure well-paying jobs, as a direct consequence of Wall Street’s malfeasance.

Millennials’ earnings and net worths eventually caught up to those of prior generations. But people’s political beliefs are typically forged during late adolescence and early adulthood. The 2008 crisis therefore left many millennials persistently skeptical of capitalism, even when it didn’t render them durably underemployed. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, which crystallized these grievances for many recent graduates, were an important precursor to today’s left-wing activism.

Separately, young professionals in the media and academia have seen a genuine collapse in their economic prospects: It was much harder to earn a middle-class living at a magazine or humanities department in 2016 than it was in 1996. And it is harder still to do so in 2026.

The “ideas” industries comprise a small share of the overall economy. But they exert wildly disproportionate influence over political discourse. Thus, the declining fortunes of aspiring journalists and academics has likely colored the worldviews of other politically engaged millennials and zoomers, even if their own industries are fairly healthy.

This said, these factors probably don’t have that much to do with the movement of college-educated Romney 2012 voters toward the Democratic Party. Rather, the Great Recession — and jobs crises within journalism and academia — help explain why perennially left-of-center subsets of the college-educated electorate have gravitated toward socialism in recent years.

AI could still prove Marx right

Capitalism still hasn’t turned educated professionals into immiserated proletarians — or unified the working class in opposition to the bourgeoisie.

This may be about to change. Certainly, AI poses a greater threat to knowledge workers’ class status than any previous technological breakthrough. Indeed, many tech CEOs are explicitly promising to put millions of white-collar workers out of a job. So, reports of the college-educated’s economic dispossession — and political mutiny — may prove prescient. But such declarations remain, for the moment, ahead of their time.

关于日志的惊人真相

2026-04-09T00:16:25+00:00

美国俄勒冈州威拉米特国家森林中的北方斑 owl | Greg Vaughn/Getty Images
森林生态系统对环境至关重要，它们为美国提供清洁的水和空气，吸收温室气体，并为濒危野生动物提供栖息地。因此，环保组织强烈反对特朗普政府去年春季提出的扩大公共森林采伐的计划。该计划通过行政命令要求增加采伐，认为不充分利用森林资源会损害经济安全、破坏野生动物栖息地，并增加野火风险。随后，农业部长布鲁克·罗林斯宣布超过一半的森林进入紧急状态，允许USFS（美国森林局）在更少限制下进行采伐。环保组织认为此举是为木材行业提供便利，而特朗普的政策在历史上并未表现出对森林的真正保护意图。

然而，文章指出，采伐并不总是对环境有害。例如，选择性采伐或间伐可以改善森林健康，减少树木间的竞争，增强其抗旱和抗虫害能力，同时降低野火风险。印第安部落曾通过控制燃烧实现类似效果，而自然生态中树木也会因生长而自我调节密度。此外，某些森林（如以针叶树为主的西部森林）依赖火灾维持生态平衡，合理采伐可能模拟这一自然过程。

尽管如此，特朗普的政策面临经济挑战。目前，美国90%的木材来自私人林地，而公共林地附近缺乏足够的采伐基础设施和锯木厂。同时，环境法规（如《濒危物种法案》和《国家环境政策法案》）也限制了公共林地的采伐。此外，当前木材市场需求疲软，美国住房市场因高利率而停滞，部分国家（如中国）也因关税减少进口。若需求回升，私人林地可灵活应对，但公共林地采伐可能需依赖政府补贴，经济回报有限。

特朗普政府还试图废除“无路区规则”（Roadless Rule），该规则保护未被近期采伐的荒野和原始森林。专家认为此举可能对环境造成灾难性后果。同时，政府试图绕过《濒危物种法案》的保护措施，例如通过“上帝小组”（God Squad）推翻对濒危鲸类的保护，以促进木材生产。

尽管森林管理可通过采伐减少野火、虫害等威胁，但特朗普政府的政策已导致USFS（美国森林局）员工和科研设施大幅减少，削弱了可持续管理的能力。专家担忧，当前的环境和资源管理条件正在恶化，未来森林保护面临更大挑战。

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A northern spotted owl in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. | Greg Vaughn/Getty Images

The value of forest ecosystems is hard to overstate. Blanketing roughly a third of the US, they supply clean water and air, absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide, and provide homes for imperiled wildlife and a tranquil place for Americans to hunt and fish.

It’s for this reason that environmental advocates widely opposed a plan announced by the Trump administration last spring. In an early March executive action, he ordered his administration to ramp up logging in our public forests, including those managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Failing to “fully exploit” forests for timber, Trump said, weakens our economic security, degrades fish and wildlife habitat, and sets the stage for wildfire disasters.

A month later, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who also oversees the US Forest Service (USFS), declared an unexpected emergency across more than half of the agency’s forests, citing the risk of wildfire, disease, and other threats. The emergency declaration allows USFS to log those lands with far fewer restrictions.

These moves drew unsurprising reactions from environmental groups.

“The Trump administration is brazenly sacrificing our forests and the species that depend on them,” Robert Dewey, former VP of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit conservation group, said last spring after the Trump announcement. “There is no legitimate reason or emergency to justify rubberstamping logging projects.”

Defenders of Wildlife and other organizations called the emergency declaration a gift to the timber industry.

It is indeed hard to see a good intention for our nation’s forests through Trump’s track record. At face value, his administration’s logging push seems like multiple environmental disasters waiting to happen.

Yet there are two important points these concerns tend to overlook, starting out with this: Logging isn’t always the environmental boogeyman it’s made out to be.

Logging is often less harmful than you think

Logging is one of those things that seems universally and irrefutably awful for the environment. It brings to mind nightmarish images of giant machinery flattening pristine forests filled with helpless critters, à la movies like FernGully and Avatar. And in some parts of the world — and historically in the US — those images are not far off the mark.

But the reality today is more complicated.

The first thing to know is that many of our public forests are already not in a truly “natural” state. Decades of misguided fire suppression and a period of widespread logging in the wake of World War II produced forests today that are dense with trees of similar age, which makes them prone to intense wildfires and attacks from pests.

While it may sound counterintuitive, selective logging or thinning — i.e., removing some but not all of the trees — can actually make these forests healthier. In thinned-out forests, trees face less competition for water and sunlight, boosting their tolerance to drought and beetles, and fires aren’t as destructive, according to Mark Ashton, a professor of silviculture and forest ecology at Yale University. No one in this country knows this better than Indigenous Americans. Tribes were practicing thinning thousands of years ago using controlled burns, which prevent the buildup of fuel.

Absent a history of industrial logging and fire suppression, forests can thin themselves out on their own; when one tree grows big, for example, its canopy can shade out and kill those around it.

This raises another important point: Logging, and sometimes even clear-cutting, can mimic natural disturbances that shape forest ecosystems. Many Western forests, such as those dominated by lodgepole pine, evolved with fires that wipe out large tracts of trees. The cones of some of those trees only release seeds during a fire. In the right ecosystem, clear-cutting — followed by burning — can mimic this process, while also producing usable timber.

“It’s gotten a bad rap, but, I mean, basically you’re emulating a natural process,” Todd Morgan, a forest industry researcher at the University of Montana, said of strategic clear-cuts.

Of course, slashing trees in one area doesn’t mean a fire won’t just burn them in another. And as fossil fuels heat up the planet and rainfall patterns change, loads of forests are going up in smoke with or without logging. In the age of climate change, clear-cutting is only adding to the existing loss of wildlife habitat — amid an extinction crisis.

Still, logging, when done thoughtfully, isn’t always an environmental disaster. This is to say nothing of the valuable product it also produces: timber. Wood is a renewable material, unlike some of the alternative construction materials, like plastic, most of which still comes from oil and gas. Turning trees into lumber also keeps the planet-warming carbon they store locked up for longer than if they were burned.

The economic reality behind Trump’s timber push

Regardless of potential impacts of logging, Trump’s plan to expand timber production on public lands may run into challenges anyway. And the main reasons for that are not as much environmental as they are economic.

A big one is the lack of logging infrastructure near public forests. After World War II — when home-building was booming — the US intensively logged its national forests, the bulk of which are in the American West. Toward the end of the century, however, environmental regulations and a conservation ethic took hold, shifting most logging onto private lands that have fewer environmental protections.

That’s still the reality today: Around 90 percent of all timber currently comes from private forests, including tree plantations, which are concentrated in the southeastern US. As a result, there simply aren’t a lot of operational sawmills near public forests anymore, said Brent Sohngen, an environmental economist at Ohio State University. Many of those forests, meanwhile, are remote and hard to access. “There’s just not going to be an easy route for getting those logs out of the woods into a mill at a cheap price,” Sohngen said.

Yes, companies could always build new mills in anticipation of more logging, but such projects are expensive and only tenable if it’s clear that public lands will remain open to substantial exploitation for years to come. That’s in no way guaranteed, Sohngen said. Policies change from one administration to the next, not to mention from one month to the next in the Trump administration.

“I don’t think there’s enough certainty that [demand] will be there long-term that you will see an increase in infrastructure,” said Chris Wade, a research economist at RTI International, a research organization.

Another obstacle is environmental regulation — laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act that pushed the industry into private lands in the first place. “Whenever someone proposes a timber harvest [in public lands], it’s going to get litigated,” Sohngen says. It’s for similar reasons that opening up Alaska wilderness and ocean to oil drilling has drawn few takers.

But perhaps the largest impediment to logging public lands is due, in part, to knock-on effects from Trump administration actions themselves — and that is that there’s simply not much demand for timber right now.

One reason is that the US housing market is stagnant due to high interest rates, and that market is a key driver of lumber demand. (Those high rates are, in turn, linked to inflation, which is expected to increase more due to the Trump administration’s war on Iran and its upward pressure on oil prices.) Some countries like China are also importing fewer logs from the US, due in part to retaliatory tariffs, further chilling demand, Wade said.

What’s also worth noting is that, should timber demand rise again, private forests can easily ramp up production, Sohngen said. Logging in federal lands, meanwhile, will likely have to be subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, there seems to be little economic incentive or payoff to actually cut more trees on public lands.

The very, very big caveat

Even with these obstacles in place, public lands will likely see a bump in timber harvesting under Trump. Again, there’s a way to log that wood responsibly, but doing so requires smart, experienced people, extensive planning, and resources — things the Trump administration has been clear-cutting with impunity.

Last year, the US Forest Service lost at least 5,800 of its some 35,000 employees (as of late 2024). That includes more than 20 percent of its scientists with PhDs, according to an analysis by Science News. Late last month, meanwhile, the Trump administration announced sweeping changes at the agency — among them, moving its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Utah and closing 57 of its 77 research facilities.

Share your feedback

Do you have a story tip or feedback on our reporting? Reach out to benji.jones@vox.com.

“Here’s my worry: Where are all the foresters in the forest service?” Ashton told me last fall, before the recent reorganization. “The whole institution has been gutted. That’s ominous. If you want to manage these forests sustainably, you have to have the knowledge and technical professionalism to do it right.”

Trying to manage forests without staff and research facilities is like “trying to fly a plane without a pilot,” said Martin Dovciak, a forest ecologist at the State University of New York.

At the same time, the administration is also trying to rescind what’s known as the Roadless Rule, which protects vast stretches of wilderness and old-growth forests from logging — those that haven’t been logged in the recent past and often don’t need active management. “It would be really crazy to do timber harvesting there,” Sohngen said. “There would be places there that [logging] would be disastrous for the environment.” And it’s not clear that logging old-growth trees even makes economic sense, foresters told me.

What’s more is that the Trump administration has been attempting to skirt safeguards that ensure logging on public lands minimizes environmental harm. The administration may once again, for example, convene the so-called God Squad — a panel with the power to overrule the federal Endangered Species Act — to sidestep protections for the nation’s most threatened species, should they interfere with logging plans (as it recently did to avoid protections for very endangered whales that happen to share territory with oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico). “I think it’s on the table,” Wade, of RTI International, said of calling on the God Squad to avoid protections for species in peril.

In response to an email detailing our reporting, a spokesperson for the Forest Service reiterated that active forest management (which includes logging) helps reduce the growing threats of wildfire, insects, disease, and drought. The agency did not address claims that Trump administration policies, and the loss of expertise, would make it hard to manage forests sustainably and in a way that is economically feasible.

A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management, similarly told Vox that wildfires and other disturbances have razed vast amounts of forest in the West. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of the Interior is committed to providing opportunities for the timber industry to boost supply chain stability and support local economies, clear dead and dying timber, protect lives and property, and defend communities from the devastation of wildfire,” the spokesperson said.

The White House deferred to the Interior Department when asked for comment.

This is all to say: While logging can be conducted to minimize harm and even benefit forest ecosystems, the Trump administration has shown no sign of making the environment a priority, experts told me.

“I do not doubt that there are still going to be good people left in the agency who are going to try to do the best they can under the circumstances,” Dovciak said. “But the circumstances are getting worse. I really worry about that.”

战争暂停。但经济仍然面临危险。

2026-04-08T21:07:11+00:00

2026年3月8日，伊朗德黑兰的沙赫兰石油仓库因美国和以色列的袭击发生火灾，导致该地区大量油罐车和车辆无法使用。数月来，美国与伊朗的冲突逐渐压垮全球经济。3月，伊朗关闭霍尔木兹海峡——连接波斯湾石油储备与全球市场的关键航道，引发能源价格上涨，股市和增长预期下滑。分析师警告称，若海峡不尽快重新开放，全球经济可能陷入严重衰退。然而，周二晚间，美伊达成停火协议，表面上暂停美国对伊朗的攻击，以换取海峡航运恢复。此举迅速促使油价下跌约20%，道琼斯指数上涨逾1000点。但一些人担心，华尔街的乐观情绪可能超前于实际的地缘政治局势。周三，以色列继续攻击黎巴嫩的伊朗代理人，而伊朗则指责美国违反协议，并称与美国的谈判“不合理”。为了解这一局势，我于周三采访了石油市场专家罗里·约翰斯顿。他指出，尽管停火协议是积极的一步，但许多问题仍未解决。目前，霍尔木兹海峡的航运尚未恢复，且停火期间仍有多次袭击和爆炸事件。他推测，特朗普可能因市场压力而最终单方面缓和局势，但伊朗仍可能保持对海峡的控制。伊朗强调仅允许每天10至15艘船只通过，并由革命卫队掌控航道。若停火谈判未能达成持久协议，海峡可能继续关闭，导致全球油价飙升，甚至出现每桶200美元的极端情况，进而引发全球范围内的经济衰退和能源短缺。尽管美国作为能源出口国可能在一定程度上受益，但其国内消费者仍将面临价格压力，尤其是沿海地区。此外，美国的能源安全地位可能缓解部分影响，但全球能源市场整体下滑仍会对美国产生连锁反应，最终导致民众负担加重，经济出现严重衰退。

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Fire breaks out at the Shahran oil depot after US and Israeli attacks, leaving numerous fuel tankers and vehicles in the area unusable in Tehran, Iran, on March 8, 2026. | Hassan Ghaedi/Anadolu via Getty Images

For months, America’s war with Iran has been slowly suffocating the global economy.

In March, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway that links the Persian Gulf’s oil reserves to global markets. As a result, energy prices steadily rose while stock markets and growth forecasts fell. Analysts started warning that, if the Strait did not reopen soon, the global economy could slide into a deep recession.

And then, Tuesday night, these storm clouds scattered: The US and Iran reached an agreement on a ceasefire, one that would ostensibly pause American attacks on the Islamic Republic, in exchange for a resumption of transit in the Strait.

Oil prices swiftly fell by as much as 20 percent, while the Dow jumped more than 1,000 points.

And yet, some fear that Wall Street’s mood has brightened faster than geopolitical reality. Israel continued attacking Iranian proxies in Lebanon on Wednesday, in alleged defiance of the ceasefire agreement. Iran, meanwhile, kept the Strait shuttered, accused the US of violating the terms of their understanding, and declared negotiations with America “unreasonable.”

To get a clearer picture of what all this means, I spoke with the oil market expert Rory Johnston on Wednesday. Author of the popular newsletter, Commodity Context, Johnston has long argued that investors are underpricing the risks of the US-Iran conflict.

We spoke about why time may be on Iran’s side in a war of attrition, what a postwar global economy could look like, and how US consumers will fare in the most optimistic — and pessimistic — scenarios. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

Now that there has been a ceasefire — sort of — what do you think is the most likely scenario for this war, the Strait of Hormuz, and oil markets going forward?

I think we’ve taken a step in the right direction. But there are many unresolved questions. As of Wednesday afternoon, it does not appear that there has been any resumption of flow through the Strait. And in fact, we’ve seen many, many, many explosions and attacks continue during the ceasefire.

My core assumption about this crisis was always that [President Donald] Trump was the actor most likely to cave — he is the one most sensitive to external market pressures. Given that, the most likely course of the war was that Trump would, eventually, unilaterally de-escalate. And Iran would retain quasi-control of the Strait of Hormuz.

And that seems to be the situation that we are trending toward, which — while problematic — is much better than the doomsday scenario.

But Iran has stressed that it is only allowing a limited number of ships through the Strait and that the waterway will remain under control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. We had accounts last night that Iran would only be allowing 10 to 15 ships through a day. If true, then that wouldn’t be much of a change from the status quo.

But would that be temporary? If the ceasefire leads to an actual peace agreement — which allows Iran to collect tolls on ships in the Strait — wouldn’t Tehran want a lot of traffic to move through that waterway?

Yeah. If the US Navy withdrew — and the bombing stopped and Iran felt safe and secure — then it would have an interest in resuming a moderate level of flow.

The issue is: Trump has been saying, “Let’s negotiate. And while you’re negotiating, just do us a favor and reopen the Strait, so that the global economy doesn’t crash while we’re talking.” But that’s basically asking Iran to forfeit its main source of leverage. Iran has its foot on the aorta of the global hydrocarbon market. It’s probably not going to step off before securing a more durable agreement.

So, the question is: Can the negotiations that begin Friday lead to such an agreement? And I think that’s the trillion-dollar question right now.

Let’s say we do get a peace deal, in relatively short order. In the most realistic version of that scenario, what can Americans expect to experience economically? What happens to the prices of gasoline, travel, and other energy-related commodities?

If this holds up, then we’re going to avoid the scenario where America’s average gallon of gas costs $6. But even if everything goes perfect from here, the world will still be operating with about half a billion fewer barrels of oil than it would have had, were it not for this war.

And that’s because the Gulf states had to ramp down oil production — since, without the Strait, they had no way to transport or store all of that crude.

Right. And even if flow through the Strait resumes today, it’s going to take weeks to months for them to get that production back to pre-war levels.

What would that mean for products that are downstream from fossil fuels — jet fuel, plastics, semiconductors, etc.? Would it take longer for the prices of those things to normalize?

Yeah. For one thing, there haven’t been many confirmed attacks against oil fields or oil processing facilities in the Gulf. But there have been attacks on refining assets and petrochemical facilities. So productive capacity is down.

At the beginning of the year, a barrel of diesel was $30 more than a barrel of crude oil. As of right now, it’s nearly $70 more. But that’s down from a high watermark in late March of about $90 a barrel. So, the prices of both crude and products have come down. But markets for the latter remain very tight. And they will likely remain tighter relative to crude going forward.

Let’s talk about the more pessimistic scenario. At this point, what’s the most plausible, worst-case outcome? What are you worried about?

The most obvious answer is that we get to Friday, no one can agree, and then we’re back in the same place as we were before the ceasefire.

Of course, we now know that there’s some appetite from the White House for an agreement. We can see that they’re responsive to market pressure. But Iran can see that too.

From Tehran’s strategic point of view, they have an interest in dragging this out.

So, let’s say that Iran decides that time is on their side and feels no rush to back off its most audacious demands. If the Strait remains effectively closed for another two months, what would that mean for US consumers?

By that stage, I think we will see things like $200-a-barrel crude. And that’s assuming that there is no escalation in tit-for-tat attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure.

But if we just get pre-ceasefire conditions continuing until June, we’ll be in a situation where prices will need to rise until they force demand destruction.

In other words, prices will need to be so high that consumers have no choice but to use less energy.

Right. Let’s say we have a 10-million-barrel-a-day deficit in the market. There’s no way that supply can react fast enough to fill that hole. So, to stop the global oil market from basically cannibalizing itself — and drawing inventories down to zero — you’ll need to ramp up prices until people just stop consuming.

In Western countries, that will manifest as extremely high prices. But people will manage. In the developing world and the Global South, that will manifest as outright shortages. Ultimately, you would need a large drop in consumption. If that doesn’t happen in the West, then it will happen in poor countries.

And the same will happen with diesel and jet fuel.

How much would America’s status as an energy exporter protect us in that scenario? After all, high oil prices are good for oil producers. So America’s terms of trade would improve: The stuff we export would become more valuable, relative to the stuff we import. And oil-rich regions of the country would presumably reap some benefit.

Separately, we’re less reliant on the Gulf’s energy supplies than Europe or Asia. So, might those factors save us, if this ceasefire falls apart?

The United States — and North America, more broadly — remains the most energy secure area in the world. We likely won’t see shortages here, although we will feel the price pressure.

So yes, that will benefit America’s terms of trade in a way. But the distributional effects will be extreme. You could see a boom in Texas and New Mexico, for example. But it will hit consumers across the entire United States. And it will hit them much harder on the coasts because you have more trade exposure there than mid-continent.

More fundamentally, at the end of the day, if prices continue to spiral upwards, and we do have shortages throughout the Global South, that is a world of deep, deep recession. Much of the planet would probably be in an economic depression.

No matter how energy-secure the United States is, it is still part of a global economy. And it will ultimately feel the economic ramifications of that economy downshifting in all sorts of ways. This would not be good for the median voter, by any means. It would feel like a massive tax increase. Markets would tumble. The world would simply be forced to consume less than it did before this war began.

停火已经摇摇欲坠

2026-04-08T21:11:45+00:00

2026年4月6日，特朗普在白宫南草坪与记者会面。这则新闻出现在《Logoff》每日简报中，旨在帮助读者了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据生活。欢迎阅读《Logoff》：读者们，昨日简报发布后不久，美国与伊朗达成了一项临时停火协议，避免了特朗普此前威胁的“文明毁灭”。虽然我们可能错过了昨日的突发新闻，但今天仍有诸多值得关注的内容。以下是关键信息：最新进展：截至周三下午，美伊停火协议似乎已生效，但局势仍不稳定。伊朗已指责美国违反协议中的多项条款，且双方对协议内容的理解尚不一致。特别是以色列对黎巴嫩的军事行动仍在继续，周三有超过250人死于以色列的空袭。伊朗和巴基斯坦（近期美伊谈判的调解方）均表示黎巴嫩应受昨日停火协议的保护。然而，谈判似乎仍在推进：副总统JD·范斯及另外两名美国谈判代表史蒂夫·维特科夫和贾里德·库什纳计划于周六在巴基斯坦与伊朗官员会面。特朗普对此有何表态？周二晚间，特朗普在推文中表示，他已同意“暂停对伊朗的轰炸和攻击两周”，因为美国“已接近达成一项关于与伊朗实现长期和平以及中东和平的最终协议”。周三早些时候，他补充称：“美国将协助缓解霍尔木兹海峡的交通拥堵，将采取大量积极行动，创造巨大经济利益。”然而，截至目前，霍尔木兹海峡仍未完全恢复通航：据彭博社报道，周三仅有三艘船（数百艘中）通过该海峡。至此，今日简报结束。我想要正式为这篇来自《华盛顿邮报》的近期文章提供《Logoff》的推荐（我们是否有官方推荐？我得问问编辑）：《5种方法为你的日常增添一点不便，从而提升大脑功能》（一如既往，这是一个赠阅链接）。文章指出，虽然听起来有些反直觉，但适度增加生活中的摩擦（比如自己做饭而非点外卖，或尝试挑战大脑的新事物）实际上对大脑有益。如果您有类似建议，欢迎分享。祝您有一个美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！

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President Donald Trump talks with reporters on the South Lawn during the White House Easter Egg Roll on April 6, 2026. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Hi readers, big news broke just after yesterday’s newsletter went out: The US and Iran reached a temporary ceasefire agreement, averting President Donald Trump’s threats of civilization destruction.

While we may have missed the breaking news yesterday, there’s still plenty to catch up on today. Here’s what you need to know:

What’s the latest? As of Wednesday afternoon, a US-Iran ceasefire appears to be in place, but shaky. Iran has already accused the US of violating several points of the agreement, and it’s not clear whether the sides are even on the same page about what has been agreed to.

In particular, Israel’s offensive into Lebanon is still ongoing; on Wednesday, more than 250 people were killed by Israeli strikes. Both Iran and Pakistan, which has served as a mediator for recent US-Iran talks, have said Lebanon is supposed to be covered by yesterday’s ceasefire.

Nonetheless, talks appear to be moving forward: Vice President JD Vance and two other US negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are set to meet with Iranian officials in Pakistan on Saturday.

What has Trump said about this? On Tuesday evening, Trump wrote in a post that he had agreed “to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks” because the US was “very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.”

Early Wednesday morning, he added that “[the] United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made.”

So far, however, it doesn’t seem like the strait has reopened: According to Bloomberg, as few as three ships — out of hundreds — may have passed through on Wednesday.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I’d like to extend an official Logoff endorsement (do we have those? I’ll have to ask my editor) to this recent article from the Washington Post: 5 ways to add a little inconvenience to your day — and improve your brain (as always, it’s a gift link).

It might sound counterintuitive, but as the piece explains, adding a little bit of friction — whether that means cooking a meal instead of ordering one, or trying something new that challenges your brain to work in a different way — is ultimately beneficial. If you have any other suggestions in the same vein, I’d love to hear them. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

罢免总统应该更容易得多。

2026-04-08T20:01:29+00:00

2026年4月6日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在白宫简报室的新闻发布会上模仿开枪动作，谈及伊朗战争。这一事件引发了对美国宪法第25修正案的讨论。根据NBC新闻的统计，超过70名民主党议员呼吁特朗普内阁援引该修正案，暂时阻止特朗普行使总统职权，因为他在威胁要“摧毁整个伊朗文明”。值得注意的是，一些极右翼人士，包括前美国众议员马乔丽·泰勒·格林、电台主持人亚历克斯·琼斯以及MAGA影响者坎德斯·欧文斯，也支持这一方案。然而，第25修正案的实际操作极为复杂，需要内阁多数成员同意副总统宣布总统无法履职，并且国会需以三分之二多数通过。即便总统本人声明自己无碍，国会仍需在21天内决定是否恢复其职权，否则总统将自动恢复权力。因此，通过该修正案罢免特朗普几乎不可能，因为这需要内阁和国会的广泛共识，而特朗普目前仍掌握多数支持。

相比之下，议会制民主国家（如加拿大、英国、德国、印度和日本）的领导人更容易被罢免，通常只需议会简单多数通过不信任投票即可。美国的总统制体系将行政与立法权力分开，导致总统即使失去国会和民众支持，仍可完成任期。这种制度也容易引发权力僵局，使总统难以被有效罢免。尽管2021年国会曾讨论过通过第25修正案罢免特朗普，但当时他已是“跛脚鸭”总统，任期仅剩两周，理论上可能在21天内被罢免。然而，如今特朗普任期尚未结束，且国会两院难以达成两党共识，因此他很可能继续执政至2029年。即便民主党在中期选举中夺回国会两院，也难以在参议院获得三分之二多数席位。除非出现几乎全党一致要求罢免的极端情况，否则特朗普不会轻易下台。

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President Donald Trump mimics firing a gun during a news conference in the White House briefing room about the war in Iran on April 6, 2026. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

The 25th Amendment is having a moment.

According to a tally by NBC News, over 70 Democratic lawmakers called for President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to invoke an obscure constitutional provision that would allow them to temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president, after Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran. (Trump has backed away from that threat, at least for now.)

Notably, their call for a 25th Amendment solution was echoed by some voices on the far right, including former US Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, radio host Alex Jones, and MAGA influencer Candace Owens.

It’s not the first time the amendment has come up. There’s been a regular background hum of Trump critics demanding its invocation throughout both his terms in office, which peaked in the days after January 6, 2021, with real conversations in his Cabinet and in congressional leadership about the process.

As a practical matter, Trump is not going anywhere, even if he didn’t command the near-universal loyalty within his party that he currently does. By international standards, it is extremely difficult to remove the president of the United States, and much harder than it is to remove the leaders of many of our peer democracies. And the 25th Amendment is not a viable shortcut around this problem, which is rooted in the fundamental structure of America’s government.

How the 25th Amendment actually works

Let’s cut to the chase: Trump is about as likely to be removed via the 25th Amendment as he is to be deposed by an army of unicorn-riding elves.

While it is theoretically possible to remove Trump from office (or, at least, to strip him of his powers permanently) using the amendment, the removal process is too cumbersome, has too many failure points, and requires too much of a bipartisan consensus to be an effective method of removing a president who is merely bad at being president, rather than one who is literally incapable of performing their duties.

The 25th Amendment was enacted shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and was intended to solve a different problem than the one the United States faces today — what if the president of the United States was still alive, but was physically or mentally incapacitated in a way that prevented him from exercising the powers of office?

Before the 25th Amendment was ratified, the Constitution provided that the vice president shall assume the powers of the presidency should the president show “Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office.” But the original Constitution did not lay out a process to determine when the president was unable to exercise their duties. That created a risk that the president may be unfit for duty, but no one could be sure how to formally transfer power to the vice president.

The process laid out in the 25th Amendment is, to put it mildly, complicated. It allows the vice president to declare the president unfit for duty, provided that a majority of the president’s Cabinet officers consent. Once the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet inform Congress that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

But such a declaration is unlikely to amount to much if the president is still capable of clinging to power. The 25th Amendment also provides that the president may regain their authority merely by transmitting his own “written declaration that no inability exists” to congressional leaders. If that happens, the vice president and the Cabinet may force a congressional vote on whether the president should retain power, but if two-thirds of both houses of Congress do not agree that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” then the president remains president. And they can’t stall the vote for too long: if Congress does nothing in 21 days, the president regains his executive powers.

To even begin the process of removing Trump, in other words, a majority of Trump’s hand-picked Cabinet officials (plus Vice President JD Vance) would need to agree that he was unfit. Then, when Trump inevitably told Congress that he was resuming his duties, a supermajority of both the US House and the Senate — both of which are controlled by Trump’s Republican Party — would have to vote to install Vance as acting president.

There really was some limited bipartisan chatter in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol about removing Trump via the 25th Amendment. But Trump was a lame duck with only two weeks left in office then, meaning a Cabinet vote to strip him of his powers, combined with the 21-day time limit in Congress, could actually run out the clock on his presidency.

That wouldn’t be a possibility this time. Indeed, because the 25th Amendment requires a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress to remove Trump against his will, it is even more cumbersome than the impeachment process, which only requires a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In 2021, the Senate couldn’t even secure a two-thirds majority to disqualify Trump from office while he was on trial for stirring up a violent attack against the Senate itself.

Other democracies make it much easier to remove an incompetent, unfit, or unpopular leader

The United States is unusual in that it elects its chief executive separately from its legislature. The US often elects a Congress that is controlled by a different party than the one that controls the White House. And the Congress has only limited power to remove a president — a power it has never successfully used in all of US history.

Compare this system to parliamentary democracies such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Japan. In these systems, the people elect the members of the legislature, but the legislature chooses the official who will run the government. That official also can often be removed by a no-confidence vote in the legislature, frequently by a simple majority.

The founders saw this as a key feature: The executive branch and legislative branch were expected to each jockey for control in order to keep either from consolidating power. But as the late political scientist Juan Linz observed in 1990, presidential democracies such as the United States have proven inherently unstable, because the president and the legislature may deadlock on some crucial issue and both can simultaneously claim to have a popular mandate if such a deadlock occurs. The US system also locks in place a president who may have lost the confidence of both the Congress and the people, but who is nonetheless entitled to serve out their entire term.

One additional advantage of parliamentary democracy is that it allows a political party to remove an unfit or unpopular leader without triggering a political crisis. In 1990, for example, British Conservatives replaced unpopular Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with John Major, and then retained power for seven more years under new leadership. A similar drama recently played out in Canada, where the governing Liberal Party replaced former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with current PM Mark Carney — allowing Carney to lead the Liberals to another electoral victory in 2025.

In parliamentary systems, in other words, removal of a head of government isn’t an unheard-of event that humiliates the outgoing leader and places them in a class of one. It is a normal political tactic that allows the outgoing prime minister to leave office gracefully. That sort of system gives political parties an incentive to remove bad leaders.

Meanwhile, the United States is almost certainly stuck with Trump until his term expires in 2029 — even if Democrats win back both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, there is no plausible outcome where they win two-thirds of the seats in the Senate. Some new controversy would have to generate near-universal bipartisan demand for his removal, and it’s frankly not very pleasant to imagine what the world looks like in that scenario.

关于特朗普的新理论：'软TACO'

2026-04-08T21:20:03+00:00

2026年4月6日，特朗普在白宫简报室举行新闻发布会，谈及伊朗战争问题。文章指出，特朗普周二决定接受伊朗停火协议，而非兑现其威胁对伊朗平民实施大规模破坏性攻击的承诺，这一行为再次引发了“TACO”（特朗普总是退缩）的讨论。该理论源于特朗普经常发出极端威胁却未能兑现，被用来反驳自由派认为他是个狂躁独裁者的观点。然而，这一理论在伊朗事件中并不完全适用，因为特朗普此前已发动持续一个月以上的战争，导致伊朗多名领导人及数百名平民死亡，并引发中东局势紧张和全球经济受损。因此，文章提出“软TACO”理论，认为特朗普虽会撤回部分极端威胁或逐渐缓和危机，但并非完全退缩，且其政治和经济承受力有时较高。例如，在任期内，他一度放任马斯克在联邦机构中肆意行事，但随后在舆论压力下限制其权力；又如，他宣布“解放日”关税后，虽暂停部分措施，但整体税率仍高于此前水平；再如，他在明尼阿波利斯加强移民执法，但因引发公众强烈抗议而最终撤回。尽管特朗普在某些事件中表现出退缩，但其行为仍可能引发新的危机。此次伊朗战争是其“软TACO”策略的最大考验，因为对手具备实际反击能力，且可能具有不同的承受底线。目前停火协议可能难以维持，且与伊朗达成永久协议的难度较大。若谈判失败，特朗普可能再次采取行动。此外，伊朗的袭击已对全球经济造成严重损害，而特朗普的“软TACO”策略或许能缓解部分影响，但无法彻底修复所有问题。

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President Donald Trump conducts a news conference in the White House briefing room about the war in Iran on April 6, 2026. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty

President Donald Trump’s decision Tuesday to accept a ceasefire in Iran — rather than following through on his threats to escalate the war further with massively destructive attacks harming Iranian civilians — is being greeted with what’s become a familiar refrain: TACO.

Issuing extreme threats has been central to Trump’s governance strategy. But, as many have noticed, he often doesn’t follow through on these threats. This led to the famous acronym TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out,” coined by the Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong about Trump’s tariff threats last year.

TACO became a shorthand, especially among investors, to rebut the conventional wisdom among liberals that Trump was an unhinged madman. “It’s an antidote to the wrong-headed view that Trump is a monster of authoritarian ideology,” Armstrong wrote in December, “rather than a gifted reality TV star without any political commitments worthy of the name.”

So TACO is a reading of Trump’s psychology. “I meant it to signify the plain fact that the president has a low tolerance for political or economic pain,” Armstrong wrote. In other words, don’t worry too much about the president’s extreme words or impulses — because a bad market reaction, or a whiff of unpopularity in the base, will spur him to back down quickly.

Viewed through one lens, Trump’s ceasefire in Iran is just the latest in a series of TACO examples. He threatened to end an entire civilization… but, knowing a full-scale war would be massively unpopular and disruptive, he backtracked and resumed negotiations.

And yet — the TACO theory also doesn’t quite fit what happened in Iran. Trump launched a war that lasted over a month, killed many of the country’s leaders and hundreds of civilians, set the Middle East aflame, and did great damage to the global economy. It’s hard to characterize a mere two-week ceasefire as proof that Trump “always chickens out” when he had gone so far already, and done so much harm.

Indeed, it points to a risk of TACO thinking: The theory can become a kind of coping mechanism, lulling people (and perhaps markets) into a complacent denial of the damage Trump can do.

It might be more helpful, then, to look beyond what we might call — with apologies — the “hard TACO” theory, in which Trump always chickens out, and craft a more limited “soft TACO” theory instead.

The “soft TACO” theory of Trump is that, yes, he will often back away from the most extreme threat he’s made, or try eventually to wind down a crisis he caused. But contrary to Armstrong’s assertion that Trump has a “low tolerance for political or economic pain,” his tolerance can sometimes be quite high — even if it isn’t unlimited. And it’s important to pay attention to the very real damage he can do before he decides it’s time to climb down.

The soft TACO in action

Trump’s second term has been chock-full of aggressive action from his administration, pushing the boundaries of presidential power in controversial and disruptive ways.

But a pattern has developed in which, sometimes, his actions cause a level of blowback — either political or economic — that he concludes is too intense. So he tries to roll things back at least somewhat. Examples include:

1. DOGE: Trump let Elon Musk run rampant through the federal bureaucracy for roughly the first six weeks of this term, firing civil servants and cutting contracts as he saw fit — at one point, he even urged Musk to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.”

But after Musk-induced chaos kept dominating the headlines — and after Trump’s own Cabinet officials pushed back against Musk’s power — Trump leashed DOGE in early March, saying future cuts should be done with Cabinet secretaries’ approval and with “the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”

The change stuck and Musk headed for the exits. But other Trump officials, like Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, have continued to try and remake the federal bureaucracy — albeit in less dramatically headline-grabbing ways.

The scale of the damage will also be difficult for a future president to reverse: Entire agencies were effectively shut down and the federal workforce shrank by 10 percent in Trump’s first year, with nearly 350,000 people fired, quitting, or retiring. And there’s no remedy for people in the world’s poorest countries who already suffered and died waiting for lifesaving aid from programs that were eliminated in Musk’s purge.

2. Liberation Day: Trump stunned the world on April 2, 2025, by announcing “Liberation Day” tariffs on dozens of countries, set at levels that seemed to many to be arbitrary and downright bizarre.

After a week of deepening market turmoil, though, he blinked — announcing a 90-day “pause” on many of those exorbitant tariffs, to allow for negotiations with the targeted countries. This gave rise to the “TACO” concept.

But this wasn’t a complete climbdown. The Budget Lab at Yale calculates that the daily effective tariff rate was 2.3 percent when Trump took office — and it’s at 11.05 percent now. That’s down from the peak of 21 percent after Liberation Day, but it’s still quite a lot higher than pre-Trump levels, and it sat between 14 and 16 percent for much of the last year before the Supreme Court ruled some Trump tariffs illegal. He’s still seeking to institute new tariffs under different legal authority.

3. Minneapolis: Beginning around June 2025, the Trump administration escalated its mass deportation agenda by pursuing highly visible, militarized, and aggressive immigration enforcement in specific cities — provoking and apparently welcoming tense confrontations with protesters in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

But in Minneapolis this January, two Americans — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — were shot dead by immigration officials; videos of the killings provoked viral outrage. Pretti’s killing proved a particular flashpoint, particularly when DHS officials falsely portrayed him as an aggressor.

At that point, Trump decided he’d had enough. He removed top DHS officials from their posts (including, eventually, Secretary Kristi Noem). He empowered less hard-line officials to end the enforcement surge in Minneapolis. More broadly, he appears to have abandoned the idea that immigration enforcement should be carried out via street battles in blue cities.

Trump’s climbdown here shows he was not entirely captured by hardline advisers or ideology — and that he did not feel so insulated from political consequences that he could ignore such intense backlash. But it took months — and two deaths — to get him to back down. And he hasn’t backed away from mass deportation; he’s just doing it more quietly.

Trump’s dangerous lesson

Whenever Trump backs down from one crisis of his own making, he provokes another soon afterward.

Minneapolis was barely out of the headlines when Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 11 to hear his pitch on attacking Iran. And he’d just pulled another TACO on Greenland only weeks earlier, once again reluctantly backing down only when the markets began taking his threats seriously.

According to a new report by the New York Times’ Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Tucker Carlson urged Trump not to go through with the Iran attack — but Trump told him “it’s going to be OK,” adding, “because it always is.”

Trump appears to have internalized the lesson that he can act to provoke crises — and always, eventually, rein things in if they get too out of control. That is: that he can do a soft TACO, and it will be okay.

But the Iran war is proving the biggest test of that idea to date, in large part because there’s another player involved this time that can veto a TACO with missiles, drones, and mines if they want, and may have different pain thresholds. That’s a different dynamic than his other self-provoked crises and, regardless of how the war ends, it’s an important demonstration of how one rash, binary decision can spiral out of control despite Trump’s intentions.

It’s unclear if the ceasefire will even hold — some attacks continued in the region Wednesday morning. It will also be quite challenging to strike a permanent deal with Iran that satisfies Trump’s demands on nuclear material, the Strait of Hormuz, and other issues. And if such a deal remains elusive, might he be tempted to strike again?

Finally, the attacks and retaliation from Iran have done a great deal of damage to the global economy that will be felt for months or years. Trump’s soft TACO may be able to reverse some of that — but it can’t fix everything that’s been broken.

MAGA最喜爱的强人可能濒临失败

2026-04-07T21:37:59+00:00

2026年4月7日，匈牙利总理维克托·欧尔班与美国副总统JD·万斯在布达佩斯举行联合记者会后握手。通常情况下，匈牙利作为人口不足1000万的内陆国家，其选举不会成为全球重大事件。但过去16年，匈牙利已不再是普通国家。欧尔班自2010年大选获胜后，迅速改革选举制度以确保长期执政，通过操控选区划分、控制媒体和司法系统，使反对派难以胜选。然而，此次选举中，反对党“蒂萨”在领导人佩特·马加尔的领导下，凭借对经济腐败问题的批评和社交媒体的高效运用，成功突破了政府的资源优势和信息控制，民调显示其领先优势达10个百分点，这被视为对欧尔班体制的严峻挑战。

此次选举不仅对匈牙利至关重要，也对美国和全球格局产生深远影响。欧尔班的右翼政权是特朗普在欧洲最可靠的盟友，其政策被视为美国右翼的蓝图，类似于伯尼·桑德斯眼中的北欧模式。若欧尔班下台，将对乌克兰战争努力形成重大助力，并打击俄罗斯的影响力。此外，欧尔班主义的失败将对全球极右翼运动造成打击，动摇其在欧洲、美国乃至世界范围内的意识形态基础。

尽管反对派目前占据优势，欧尔班仍可能通过宣布选举无效或寻求总统职位来维持权力。若其失败，匈牙利民主进程将面临重大挑战，同时欧洲右翼势力和美国MAGA运动的根基也将受到冲击。反之，若欧尔班获胜，匈牙利将继续作为俄罗斯在欧洲的代理人，削弱乌克兰获得的国际支持。因此，这场选举不仅是匈牙利内部的较量，更是全球政治格局的关键转折点。

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Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (right) and US Vice President JD Vance shake hands after a joint press conference in Budapest, Hungary, April 7, 2026. | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images

Under normal circumstances, an election in Hungary — a landlocked Central European country of less than 10 million — would not be a major world event. But for the past 16 years, Hungary has not been a normal country.

After Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a massive victory in Hungary’s 2010 election, he almost immediately began changing the country’s system of government to ensure he would never lose again. He has rigged the electoral rules to favor his Fidesz party, consolidated control over 80 percent to 90 percent of the country’s media, and packed the courts with yes-men. By the mid-2010s, Hungarian elections were so thoroughly tilted in his favor that it became extraordinarily difficult for the opposition to win.

But this time around, they might just hit the jackpot.

Orbán’s opponents have united around a new party, Tisza, led by a charismatic defector from his regime named Péter Magyar. His message, focused on the regime’s catastrophic economic record and extreme corruption, has resonated with many Hungarians; his deft use of social media and in-person campaigning has helped him escape a severe cash disadvantage and the government’s hammerlock on the media.

Polls show Tisza leading Fidesz by a considerable margin; there is a very serious chance that Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister, though he will need a supermajority in parliament to undo some of the most damaging changes Orbán has made.

The stakes are enormous: not just for Hungarians, but for the United States and even the world.

Under Orbán’s far-right rule, Hungary has been Trump’s most reliable ally in Europe. But for many in the broader MAGA movement, it is more than that: it is a blueprint for the American future, the rough equivalent of what Nordic countries represent to Bernie Sanders.

Were Orbán to truly fall, their dreams might be shattered — which is why Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week to all-but-openly campaign for Orbán’s reelection. On Tuesday, he gave a speech at a Fidesz campaign rally, calling President Donald Trump on the phone from the stage to get his thoughts on Hungary. “Go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you,” Vance said in closing.

The Hungarian prime minister is also a close Russian ally, recently describing himself as a “mouse” helping the “lion” Putin. Hungary’s membership in the European Union and NATO has allowed Orbán to disrupt the West’s pro-Ukraine efforts from within, including by blocking aid. Were Orbán to be ousted, it would be a considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.

Hungary’s 2026 election, in short, is not just like any other vote. It is one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade.

How Orbán could actually lose

Under Orbán, Hungary has become a paradigmatic example of a very modern kind of autocracy: one political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

In such a system, voters are (mostly) free to cast ballots for the candidate of their choosing: Hungary isn’t like Russia under Putin. But Hungarian elections are decidedly unfair, in that the system is structured to give the incumbent government so many advantages that the opposition should be almost incapable of winning. It is a system based around plausible deniability: retaining just enough democratic features that Hungary can claim to still be a democracy, while doing its best to give the voters as little meaningful choice as possible.

The government’s advantage begins with the very structure of elections. Hungarian parliamentary elections operate under mixed electoral rules: A little over half of all parliamentarians are elected in US-style single district contests, while the remainder are determined by national proportional votes.

The single districts are gerrymandered beyond all recognition to overweight Fidesz’s rural base and steal seats from the opposition’s heavily urban constituency. Moreover, Orbán put in place rules that allow his party to transfer over excess votes from gerrymandered districts they win to the proportional contest — effectively allowing them to run up the score in an already-rigged game.

But even beyond the formal rules, the background conditions of elections are profoundly unfair. There are a million different ways this is true — ranging from the government’s hammerlock over media to an unfair campaign finance system to a two-tiered voting system for Hungarians abroad that favors government supporters over critics. There are widespread allegations of voter intimidation, like local officials threatening to cut off a poor constituent’s access to health care unless they vote for Fidesz.

Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian electoral law at Princeton University, estimates that the opposition would need to win by roughly 10 to 15 points in the national vote to overcome the structural advantages the government has given itself.

And currently, Magyar and Tisza are 10 points ahead in Politico EU’s poll of polls.

This is a remarkable accomplishment: a testament to both Magyar’s skills as a politician and to the serial failures of the Fidesz government.

Magyar used to be a high-ranking member of Fidesz: His ex-wife was Orbán’s justice minister. In 2024, he resigned in protest of a child sexual abuse scandal and began attacking the regime as a corrupt “feudalistic” oligarchy. This is largely true: The Orbán system depends on abusing regulatory and fiscal powers to funnel money into a handful of friendly oligarchs, who depend on government largesse and favor to maintain their wealth.

This has made the prime minister and his friends very wealthy men, but also done real damage to Hungary’s economy: the country is currently one of the poorest in the European Union, if not the poorest. As the Fidesz-aligned rich get richer, the quality of public services degrades. Hungary is experiencing population decline thanks to its low birth rate and unusually high levels of outmigration.

These are things ordinary Hungarians can see and feel in their everyday lives. As a socially conservative former regime insider, Magyar is a credible messenger for former Fidesz supporters disenchanted by Orbán’s serial failures. He has criss-crossed the country, using in-person events to overcome the government’s financial advantage and control over information, and become a fixture in the handful of independent media outlets that remain.

This perfect storm is what it takes to give the opposition even a chance to overcome the structural advantages Fidesz has put in place to remain in power. Even then, there is a real chance Orbán tries to cheat: declaring the election null due to alleged fraud, à la Trump in 2020, or installing himself in the country’s presidency (and expanding its powers) rather than leaving.

Whether he could pull this off is a different question. And right now, observers are bullish on Tisza’s chances: betting markets put Magyar’s odds of becoming prime minister at 66 percent.

What Orbánism’s defeat would mean for the global authoritarian right

If Magyar does win, restoring democracy will not be easy. Much of the architecture of Orbánism is enshrined in the Hungarian constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in parliament to amend. A full Tisza victory, then, requires more than merely winning a rigged game — it requires doing so resoundingly.

But even if domestic reform proves hard, Sunday’s results will matter to millions beyond Hungary’s borders.

Under Orbán, Hungary has become more than just a symbol of the far-right’s rising political fortunes: It has become an active player in extending its global reach and an intellectual leader in shaping its agenda. Budapest has spent an enormous amount of money and political effort helping support sister parties across the democratic world. There is a reason why far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have all visited Budapest to campaign with Orbán during the late stages of the 2026 campaign.

The greatest success, however, has been the Hungarian capture of the American right’s imagination. Beginning around the late 2010s, Trump-aligned intellectuals and political operatives began citing Hungary as a model for what the right should aim to do in the United States. They describe it not as an impoverished authoritarian outpost, but a conservative Christian democracy that took the difficult-but-necessary steps to destroy the pathological influence of cultural leftism on a society.

Adherents to this view can be found throughout the Trump administration, with Vance himself perhaps the most prominent. In a 2024 interview with Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer who decamped to Budapest to take a job at a government-backed think tank, the future vice president praised Orbán’s crackdown on academic freedom — which included forcing an entire university out of the country — as an example for the American right.

“The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said. “I think his way has to be the model for us.”

Top conservative intellectuals share a similar view: Dreher is not the only one who moved to Hungary to work with a government-aligned outfit. Were Hungary’s regime to well and truly fall, it would represent a significant ideological defeat for this movement, one that would raise questions about its political durability in Europe, America, and elsewhere.

A defeat for Orbán is a defeat for Putin

The contest in Hungary also has huge stakes for the still-brutal war in Ukraine.

Since the 2022 Russian invasion, Orbán has emerged as the country’s greatest opponent in the Western alliance. He has repeatedly blocked European and NATO support for Ukraine — he is currently holding up a roughly $100 million EU loan to the country — and has stoked conflict with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently reported that some European leaders no longer talk about the war in front of Orbán, as there is an expectation that anything said will get back to Putin.

This isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is longstanding suspicion of Ukraine in Hungary, owing largely to the treatment of the Hungarian ethnic minority in that country. Orbán’s central reelection argument has been that Magyar would be a pro-Ukraine puppet; he has repurposed against Zelenskyy the same conspiratorial attack lines, at times word-for-word, he once used against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros (both men are Jewish).

Perhaps for this reason, the nationalistic Magyar has been cool toward Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the campaign — adopting a more adversarial stance than any other center-right party in Europe. But at the same time, he has no love for the Kremlin, which is currently busy trying to get Orbán reelected. So while Hungary under Magyar may not be a pro-Ukrainian nation, it will certainly be far more anti-Russian than it is under Orbán.

A Magyar victory — even a simple majority — would at very least mean that Russia loses its mole in Europe. At most, it could lead to Ukraine receiving significantly greater amounts of European support.

You can thus say this for Viktor Orbán: He has made Hungary into an outsize player on the global stage, though far more for ill than for good. His fall would have shockwaves in Brussels, Washington, and Moscow — weakening the financial foundations of the European far-right, the ideological foundations of the MAGA movement, and the political foundations of Putin’s effort to split Europe from Ukraine.

But if Orbán wins, none of this will come to pass. And the fate of Hungarian democracy could be sealed.

民主党刚刚掌控了美国最重要的法院之一。

2026-04-08T13:51:31+00:00

2026年4月7日，威斯康星州上诉法院法官克里斯·泰勒（Chris Taylor）在密尔沃基市的麦迪逊会议中心酒店和州长俱乐部庆祝赢得威斯康星州最高法院选举。周二的选举结果使民主党在全美最重要的州最高法院之一中获得了超级多数席位，这一胜利具有重大意义。泰勒以20个百分点的优势击败了共和党支持的法官玛丽亚·拉扎尔（Maria Lazar）。尽管威斯康星州最高法院选举名义上是非党派的，但近年来所有选举都呈现为“自由派”（民主党支持）与“保守派”（共和党支持）之间的对决。泰勒此前曾作为民主党成员在州议会任职，她将接替共和党支持的“保守派”法官丽贝卡·布拉德利（Rebecca Bradley）。泰勒的胜利意味着，除非出现法官去世等极不可能的情况，民主党将在2028年总统大选期间继续有效掌控该州司法系统。

威斯康星州最高法院的党派控制对全国具有重要影响。尽管泰勒的胜利使民主党在该州最高法院获得超级多数，但争夺该州最高法院控制权的斗争一直是全美最具争议的司法较量之一。2025年，亿万富翁埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）曾公开支持“保守派”候选人，并警告称“西方文明”面临威胁，甚至在政治集会上发放百万美元支票。然而，此次选举中，民主党更受青睐，且党派控制问题已不再悬而未决。2023年，共和党曾控制该法院，但当时民主党法官珍妮特·普罗塔谢维奇（Janet Protasiewicz）当选，使民主党获得微弱多数。普罗塔谢维奇的当选也结束了威斯康星州长达十多年没有竞争性立法选举的局面。自2010年民主党在州议会选举中表现强劲后，共和党通过大幅调整选区地图，成功掌控了州政府，并阻止民主党重新夺回立法权。例如，在2018年，民主党州议会候选人获得了54%的选票，但共和党仍凭借选区地图优势赢得了99个席位中的63个。普罗塔谢维奇在竞选时承诺废除这一选区地图，上任后她与三位民主党同事共同推翻了该地图，使2023年的选举结果更加公平。尽管2024年共和党仍掌控州议会，但因新地图的减少偏见，他们在州议会和参议院总共失去了14个席位。随着最高法院现在完全由民主党控制，威斯康星州将在11月举行另一场自由公正的立法选举，这可能为民主党提供自十多年以来首次治理该州的机会。此外，泰勒的胜利也有可能阻止共和党说服最高法院推翻2028年总统选举结果，正如特朗普在2020年试图做的那样。共和党法官安妮特·齐格尔（Annette Ziegler）计划于2027年退休，而民主党法官丽贝卡·达莱特（Rebecca Dallet）的席位将在2028年进行选举。即便共和党赢得这两场选举，2028年总统大选期间，最高法院仍将保持4比3的民主党多数。

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Wisconsin Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor celebrates winning the Wisconsin Supreme Court election at the the Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor's Club on April 7, 2026 in Madison, | Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch via Getty Images

Wisconsin voters effectively gave Democrats a supermajority on one of the most important state supreme courts in the country on Tuesday.

The result was a blowout. Justice-elect Chris Taylor defeated Judge Maria Lazar by a twenty-point margin. Although Wisconsin Supreme Court races are technically nonpartisan, every recent race has pitted a “liberal” backed by Democrats against a “conservative” supported by the Republican Party. Taylor previously served in the state legislature as a Democrat.

She will replace Justice Rebecca Bradley, a “conservative” in the euphemistic language Wisconsin uses to describe Republican justices.

Taylor’s victory also means that, barring the death of a justice or some other unlikely event, Democrats will retain effective control of the judiciary in one of the nation’s most hotly contested swing states during the 2028 presidential election.

In 2020, after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin to former President Joe Biden, Trump asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to toss out 220,000 ballots cast in Democratic areas of the state. Although Trump did not prevail in this lawsuit, three justices, including retiring Justice Bradley, concluded that at least some of these voters should have been disenfranchised.

Partisan control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court has national implications

Although Taylor’s victory gives Democrats a supermajority on Wisconsin’s highest court, the battle to control this swing state court has long been one of the most contested judicial fights in the country.

Billionaire Elon Musk ostentatiously backed the “conservative” candidate in 2025, warning the future of “Western Civilization” was at stake and even handing out million-dollar checks at a political rally. With Musk sitting things out, Democrats favored more strongly this time, and partisan control of the court no longer in question, this week’s race was less high-profile and less expensive.

Republicans controlled the court as recently as 2023, when Justice Janet Protasiewicz won her seat and gave Democrats a narrow majority. Protasiewicz’s win also ended a period of more than a decade when Wisconsin did not hold competitive elections for control of its state legislature. After a strong electoral performance in 2010, Republicans gained control of Wisconsin’s government and used that control to aggressively gerrymander the state in order to prevent Democrats from ever regaining control of the legislature.

In 2018, for example, Democratic candidates for the state assembly received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats thanks to the GOP’s gerrymander.

But Protasiewicz campaigned on abolishing this gerrymander. After she took office, she joined her three Democratic colleagues in striking down the gerrymander in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (2023). Though Republicans retained control of the state legislature in 2024, they lost a total of 14 seats in the state assembly and senate thanks to the new, less biased maps.

With the state supreme court now firmly in Democratic hands, Wisconsin will hold another free and fair election for control of the state legislature in November, potentially giving Democrats their first opportunity to govern the state in more than a decade.

Meanwhile, Taylor’s win will most likely prevent a Republican from convincing the state supreme court to overturn the result of the 2028 election in Wisconsin, as Trump asked them to do in 2020.

Justice Annette Ziegler, a Republican, plans to retire in 2027. And Democratic Justice Rebecca Dallet’s seat is up in 2028. But even if Republicans win both of these races, the state supreme court will still have a 4-3 Democratic majority during the 2028 presidential election.

Ozempic刚刚便宜到足以改变世界

2026-04-07T22:30:58+00:00

在印度，关键专利于3月到期后，超过40家制药公司推出了Semaglutide（Ozempic、Wegovy和Rybelsus的GLP-1药物）的仿制药，价格低至每月8美元，而美国则高达349美元（无保险情况下）。这一变化使该药物在印度变得更为可及，尤其对14亿人口中的肥胖、糖尿病和心血管疾病患者而言意义重大。印度是全球糖尿病患者最多的国家之一，约有1亿人患病，3.5亿人面临肥胖问题，心血管疾病每年导致280万人死亡，且发病年龄比高收入国家早十年。这些疾病共同构成了印度的代谢危机，而Semaglutide能同时改善体重、血糖和心血管风险，成为治疗的关键药物。

世界卫生组织（WHO）已将GLP-1药物列入基本药物清单，但目前印度的Semaglutide仍主要通过私立诊所和药店提供，未纳入政府医疗体系。尽管仿制药价格大幅下降，但许多印度人仍无力承担自费费用，且政府尚未介入。此外，印度的诊断率较低，约四分之一糖尿病患者未被确诊，这也限制了药物的普及效果。

尽管如此，Semaglutide的普及可能对印度乃至全球的公共卫生产生深远影响。巴西和加拿大等国也将面临专利到期，而约150个国家从未对Semaglutide申请专利，这些国家占全球2型糖尿病患者和临床肥胖人群的69%和84%。若Semaglutide在印度取得显著成效，或将成为本世纪最重要的公共卫生突破之一。然而，其实际应用仍需克服经济负担和医疗体系覆盖不足等挑战。

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Semaglutide injection pens on display at a news conference in Mumbai. After a key patent expired in March, more than 40 Indian manufacturers launched generic versions of the drug, now available for as little as $8 a month, compared to $349 in the US. | Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By now, Ozempic needs no introduction in America. One in 8 American adults now takes a GLP-1 drug of some kind. But even as millions of people in wealthy countries have benefitted from these drugs, they have remained out of reach for most of the world.

But for a country of 1.4 billion people, this medication just got a lot more accessible.

Last month, a key patent on semaglutide — the GLP-1 sold as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus — expired in India, a country known for making affordable drugs at scale. Within days, at least a half-dozen Indian drugmakers had launched generic semaglutide, with more than 40 expected to follow. The cheapest version costs about $14 a month. The same drug goes for as much as $349 a month in the US without insurance (where patents don’t expire until 2032).

Key takeaways

A key patent on semaglutide – the GLP-1 sold as Ozempic and Wegovy – just expired in India, and drugmakers there are already selling their own versions for as little as $14 a month. The same drug can cost up to $349 a month in the US.
These drugs are often talked about as a weight-loss drug, but their bigger promise is in treating obesity, diabetes, and heart disease risk all at once, a cluster of conditions that kills millions of Indians every year.
India is unusually well-positioned to benefit. Most diabetes care there runs through private doctors, so cheap generics can reach patients without waiting on the government.
And the stakes are huge. There are early signs that GLP-1s can improve the health of whole populations, not just individuals. If they do the same in India, it could be one of the biggest public health wins in a generation.

GLP-1s are often talked about as weight-loss drugs. But semaglutide’s bigger significance may be that it can treat a cluster of related metabolic diseases — especially obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular risk — all at once.

That matters a lot in India. The country has one of the largest diabetic populations in the world by sheer number — more than 100 million people are estimated to be living with some form of the disease. And 350 million people there live with obesity. Heart attacks and strokes, which are lumped together under cardiovascular disease, claim 2.8 million lives a year in India, and strike nearly a decade earlier on average than in high-income countries.

Those numbers have been climbing “linearly upwards” for decades, said R.M. Anjana, a researcher-physician at the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation in Chennai who has also co-authored India’s largest national diabetes studies. And until now, no drug or policy has made much of a dent in the national numbers.

But there are early signs that GLP-1s can make a difference at the population level. In the US, adult obesity — which had only gone up since Gallup first started measuring it in 2008 — fell by nearly 3 percent between 2022 and 2025 as GLP-1 use surged. It was the first time anything in recent memory had bent that curve at a national scale.

India’s metabolic crisis is different, and much larger — which makes the moment all that much more consequential.

Two ways of seeing Ozempic

Diabetes and heart disease are often bound up with obesity in some form. And in India, there are millions who don’t have obesity by standard measures but already show signs of metabolic disease, such as high blood pressure or insulin resistance, putting them at greater risk of these diseases. Researchers have found that this group — people with lower weights who still have the metabolic issues common with obesity — is the single largest metabolic category among Indian adults, roughly 43 percent in a large national study. This is exactly the profile where semaglutide’s benefits will be the most dramatic.

“Should it be given to everyone? No, definitely not,” Anjana said. “But there’s definitely a group of people who’s going to benefit from these drugs, and making it more affordable is a good step.” Even those who develop Type 2 diabetes without obesity may see improvements on semaglutide.

And how the drug is understood popularly matters, especially in the early days. In India, as in the US, much of the public excitement around it has centered on slimming down, with weight-loss clinics popping up around the country and marketing pushing the drug’s weight-loss potential ahead of its clinical use.

That framing isn’t entirely wrong. India does have a substantial obesity burden, and reducing excess weight can have real benefits in also reducing other diseases. But this focus on one usage of the drug has created a strange distortion. Some diabetes patients who might have improved health outcomes with the drug are wary of it because they think it’s primarily cosmetic. Others, as Ambrish Mithal, an endocrinologist at Max Healthcare in New Delhi, puts it, “just want to lose three kilograms for a daughter’s wedding.”

“It’s the excitement of treating disease that is driving the doctors. It’s the excitement to lose weight that’s driving the public,” he said. “They’re looking at two different things.” In terms of tackling a massive disease burden, the ends may well be worth the different paths to get there.

In the real world

There are early signs that these drugs are already shaping public health writ large, not just individual health outcomes, such as the recent decline in national obesity rates in the US. And last week, the UK expanded semaglutide availability for roughly 1.2 million people to help prevent further heart attacks and strokes.

Both of these developments are signals of a drug’s broader public health utility. In India, where the burden of these diseases is far higher, and the price of the drugs that treat them is getting so much cheaper, they could have an even bigger public health impact.

That broader medical case is part of the reason why the World Health Organization added GLP-1 drugs to its essential medicines list last September, a model list of medicines it recommends countries make widely available through their health systems.

For now, though, semaglutide in India is available only through private doctors and pharmacies, not through government-funded care. In many countries, that would be a major barrier. It matters less in India, though, because most diabetes care already happens through private providers: about 80 percent of diabetes care is delivered that way, often paid out of pocket.

That also makes price especially important. Brand-name Ozempic and Wegovy previously cost more than $100 a month in India, putting them well out of reach for most people. In a country where the average monthly spending is between $44 and $75 a month per person, depending on where you live, that price was simply too high. Generics come in at a fraction of that price, which is, Anjana said, “a genuine boon.”

The entry of generics has also shaken the market. Recently, Novo Nordisk slashed the price of its branded Ozempic and Wegovy in India by up to 48 percent. With potentially more than 40 manufacturers soon to be competing in the marketplace, prices may fall further still, said Andrew Hill, a pharmacologist at the University of Liverpool who studies drug pricing. His latest estimate suggests that injectable semaglutide can be made for as little as $28 per person per year, leaving room for prices to dive even more.

Now for the hard part

Even at $14 a month, there are millions of Indians who can’t afford to pay out of pocket, and they’ll have to rely on the public health care system. But there’s no sign yet that the government will step in to help them. And recent experience doesn’t necessarily bode well. SGLT2 inhibitors, another class of diabetes drug, went generic in India six years ago and still haven’t made it to government clinics.

And India faces another, even more basic obstacle: diagnosis. According to the most recent round of India’s largest national health survey, one in four people with diabetes had not been diagnosed. A drug, however cheap, won’t help patients who don’t know they might need it. Still, for the hundreds of millions who do, or who will, the arrival of a $14 Ozempic will be transformative.

And India will not be the last place to test that promising development. Brazil and Canada, where patents are also expiring this year, are next in line. Plus, in roughly 150 countries, semaglutide was never patented in the first place. Together, those countries account for 69 percent of the world’s type 2 diabetics and 84 percent of people with clinical obesity.

But the stakes are arguably highest in India. Semaglutide can do something very few drugs can: lower weight, improve blood sugar, and reduce cardiovascular risk all at once. Now, for the first time, it is becoming genuinely cheap in a hugely populous country where all three conditions are widespread and rising. If it makes a dent there, it could point to one of the biggest public health breakthroughs of this generation.

我应该和我的伴侣有多少共同点？

2026-04-07T18:53:23+00:00

Caroline Sacks，一位29岁的布鲁克林内容创作者，过去习惯与兴趣相投、充满活力的人约会，但这些关系并未持续。如今，她正与一位喜欢冥想、瑜伽和Grateful Dead乐队的“Deadhead”（该乐队粉丝）步入婚姻。她认为，尽管两人兴趣差异明显，但这些差异并非无法调和，反而可以成为探索彼此世界的契机。

现代恋爱中存在许多看似矛盾的真理：一方面，人们倾向于与相似的人建立关系（称为“同质性”），另一方面，差异也可能带来新鲜感。研究表明，人们在关系中更看重彼此的共同核心价值观和长期目标，而非具体兴趣。例如，是否喜欢同一部电影或同一项活动可能并不重要，但对家庭、政治立场或人生意义的共识才是关键。

心理学家Paul Eastwick指出，即使两人实际差异很大，只要他们认为彼此有共同点，关系更可能持久。他提到，只需找到三到四个共同点，就能构建一个令人满足的关系。而William Chopik则认为，人们通常通过共同兴趣（如运动俱乐部、工作或宗教活动）相识，但恋爱应用让筛选相似性变得容易，也可能让人错失潜在的合适伴侣。

此外，差异本身也可能成为关系的亮点。例如，Sacks和她的未婚夫虽然兴趣迥异，但通过一起尝试新事物（如听Grateful Dead音乐或参加小提琴乐队演出），他们发现了彼此的吸引力。研究还发现，当一个人表现出对伴侣兴趣的好奇时，会增进彼此的了解，甚至提升吸引力。因此，恋爱中的差异并非障碍，而是可能带来成长和新体验的契机。

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Caroline Sacks wasn’t used to dating quiet guys, guys who liked meditation, yoga, and the Grateful Dead.

Sacks, a 29-year-old content creator who lives in Brooklyn, is more of a Bridgerton and Justin Bieber girl herself. In the past, she tended to date people who had the same interests and had similarly high energy. But those relationships didn’t pan out. So, rather than drop the Deadhead before their relationship really began, Sacks saw those differences as minor misalignments, something to be curious about instead of dismissing out of hand. Over the last six years, she’s been to several Dead and Company shows and she is now marrying the Deadhead. “If you met us separately, I really don’t think you would put us together in any way, shape or form,” Sacks tells Vox.

Modern romance is marked by many, often contradictory, truisms. Love is easy, but it also requires hard work, and yet feelings of frustration or annoyance are red flags. For long-term happiness, your interests and lifestyle must be consistent, yet we’re told opposites attract.

The truth is, believing you have plenty in common with your partner is more important than your actual similarities, experts say. And part of the fun of being with someone whose interests are very different from yours is finding the activities you do enjoy together. “Imagine that if you line up the 10,000 things that two people might have in common,” says Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis and author of Bonded By Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection. “All you really need to craft a relationship that feels fulfilling is the ability to build around three or four of those things.”

Why we date similar people

People do typically form relationships with those of similar ethnicity, religion, education, and lifestyle behaviors; it’s known as homophily. Research has shown that the closer you are to a person, the more alike you probably are.

We naturally self-sort based on our interests, too; if you frequent a certain bar or join a local civic organization, you’ll meet people who share at least one thing in common with you. “When you think of how two people would meet if they have zero things in common, it’s hard to come up with a lot of scenarios,” William Chopik, an associate professor of social and personality psychology at Michigan State University, tells Vox. “People often meet through their mutual interests. They’ll meet at a run club, or at work, or at church maybe.”

And dating apps make screening for these similarities easier than ever; it’s not difficult to, say, write off hikers or keep your eyes peeled for fellow art enthusiasts. Although apps broaden the dating pool to include people outside of your usual social contexts, all it takes is a swipe to weed out potential matches based on your perceived dissimilarities. But that can be ill-advised, because what we think we want in a partner isn’t necessarily what we actually want. In a study, Eastwick found that the qualities people say they find attractive aren’t necessarily present in the people they end up with.

Having similar interests doesn’t mean you’re entirely compatible either. “In general, we say that two people are compatible when they can be together without constant friction,” Alessia Marchi, a couples counselor who has studied compatibility, tells Vox in an email. That means people mesh when their core values and big-picture goals — whether they want kids, their political leanings, how they find purpose and meaning — are aligned. Liking the same movies isn’t as important.

“In some cases, these differences can enrich the relationship, allowing partners to learn from each other and adding variety and value to their shared experience,” Marchi says.

Insisting that your soul mate possesses all your same interests means possibly missing out on a would-be good partner because they like camping and you don’t. “Maybe you overlook someone who’s 85 percent similar,” Chopik says. “You tried to get someone who’s 90 percent similar, but maybe the 85-percent person was perfectly fine or nicer or had other characteristics that they didn’t put in their Tinder profile.”

Perceived common ground matters more than actual similarity

Two people can be vastly different, but so long as they believe they have a lot in common, they have a higher likelihood of staying together, research has found. When you like someone, you might be more motivated to find common ground — something as simple as that you both enjoyed rock climbing that one time, or that you both like cooking stews in the winter. “If you are dramatically different than your partner, it might not matter if you don’t think that,” Chopik says. “If you have a crush or you seek out similarities, odds are you’ll find them.”

Actively focusing on your similarities instead of your differences could improve your relationship, too. In an as-yet-unpublished study, researchers found that after people considered their similarities with their partner, they thought about the person more positively. “Just reflecting and asking yourself, ‘What did we agree on? What did we have in common today?’” says one of the study’s authors, Annika From, a postdoctoral associate at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The specific areas of overlap aren’t of importance — what matters is that you find them. Rather than insisting on a partner who likes salsa dancing as much as you do, finding new hobbies together should be an “active construction process” that you build into your identity as a couple, Eastwick says. Salsa dancing might not be what you end up seriously bonding over anyway. Why limit yourself?

And you may discover similarities as you partake in new experiences together. Romantic relationships can help open doors to novel insights and events, which help expand your sense of self and identity. “If you think you don’t have things in common, maybe you do,” Chopik says. “You both went to this horrible art showing and you bonded over how much you hated the pretentious people.”

When differences add excitement

You don’t need to convince your partner of the joys of arcade games just because you like them; it’s perfectly healthy for each partner to have unique interests they partake in solo or with friends. And if it is important to you that your significant other shares your love of cooking, for instance, consider less obvious ways of including them, like tasking them to pick a recipe or a dessert pairing. Sacks, the content creator from Brooklyn, has gotten her fiance, who she described as a relatively unskilled chef, involved in the kitchen, and they whip up curries and protein bowls together.

Knowing someone finds you fascinating despite not sharing any of your interests can even be a turn-on. One study found that when participants perceive someone with different hobbies as being interested in them, that person becomes more attractive. When they express curiosity about your hobbies, you invite them into your world, exposing them to potentially fresh perspectives, knowledge, and skillsets. “It’s so exciting to have this chance to see the world through somebody else’s eyes, through somebody else’s vantage point,” Eastwick says.

For Sacks, that means listening to the Grateful Dead on road trips because it’s what her fiance loves and dragging him to violin cover band concerts when no one else will go with her. “You wouldn’t say that we would be a natural brand fit,” she says, “but I think it’s just a curiosity and excitement for one another that it doesn’t matter.”

从威胁文明到停火：从伊朗战争中惊心动魄的一天我们学到了什么

2026-04-08T01:33:30+00:00

特朗普对伊朗政策的迅速转变——从“整个文明今晚都将灭亡”到寻求和解——让世界感到困惑。他可能在试图通过激化言论和威胁来迫使对手退让，类似于俄罗斯所谓的“升级以降级”核战略（尽管俄方否认这一策略存在）。这种策略的核心是利用战术核武器震慑更强的对手，使其在常规冲突中退缩。特朗普的言论虽然未涉及实际核武器使用，但考虑到其强硬措辞和美国强大的军事力量，这种比较并不牵强。在特朗普威胁摧毁“整个文明”后，外界猜测他可能采取更激进行动，白宫不得不否认计划使用核武器。一些支持者甚至指责他威胁“种族灭绝”。然而，这种策略是否奏效仍不清楚，因为伊朗是否真正退让尚无明确证据。

根据特朗普在Truth Social上发布的声明，他同意与伊朗达成两周停火协议，是受到巴基斯坦政府的敦促，而巴基斯坦在双方之间扮演了调解角色。特朗普称伊朗提出的10项提案足以作为谈判基础，但该提案是在他最激烈的威胁之前收到的。伊朗政府也表示同意停火。据《纽约时报》报道，伊朗的提案包括保证不再遭到攻击、停止以色列对黎巴嫩真主党的空袭，以及解除制裁以换取伊朗重新开放霍尔木兹海峡。但该提案并未包含伊朗交出剩余浓缩铀或停止未来铀浓缩活动，这曾是美国的核心诉求。伊朗外长表示，只要国际船只与伊朗军队协调，伊朗将在两周内允许其通过霍尔木兹海峡。伊朗方面将特朗普的声明视为全面胜利，称其完全接受了伊朗的条件，但专家认为美国不可能同意让伊朗自由发展核武器的条款。

尽管伊朗目前在战略上占据优势，但其防御力量已严重削弱，高级官员也因针对性打击而大量损失，使其比以往更易受到内外挑战。以色列的专家和官员一直怀疑战争会持续到特朗普允许其结束，目前他们可能对已对伊朗导弹和经济造成的破坏感到满意。此次事件可能并非美国的明确胜利或彻底缓和，而是中东近期历史中另一种熟悉的策略——“修剪草皮”，即通过持续施压使冲突保持在可控范围内，避免全面战争。

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President Donald Trump’s fast pivot on Iran — from “a whole civilization will die tonight” to a benign return to negotiations — has a whipsawed world scratching their heads. What was he up to?

One possibility: Many Western analysts believe that Russian nuclear doctrine includes a concept called “escalate to de-escalate,” in which Moscow would use a tactical nuclear weapon early in a conflict to shock a stronger adversary into backing down from a conventional conflict. (The Russians deny this strategy exists.)

On Tuesday, Trump may have carried out a kind of Truth Social version of “escalate to de-escalate,” cranking up the rhetoric and threats to a fever pitch in order to get himself out of a war where the United States enjoyed an overwhelming military advantage, but found itself at a strategic disadvantage.

Nuclear use was never actually in play, but given Trump’s rhetoric — and the immensity of American military power — the comparison does not feel far-fetched. After Trump’s threats to destroy “a whole civilization” on Tuesday morning, speculation about how far he’d go reached the point that the White House had to deny reports it was planning to use nuclear weapons. Some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters accused him of threatening “genocide.”

Did the ploy actually work? The Russian version is supposedly intended to get a stronger enemy to back down. In this case, it’s unclear to what extent the adversary has actually surrendered.

Subsequent tick-tock reporting may later reveal just how far Trump was contemplating going, and just how close he got to carrying out his threat. But for the moment, what we can say is that the dramatic escalation in rhetoric — and some very real attacks by the US and Israel on Iran’s railways and oil infrastructure — served as a framing device, allowing Trump to take an exit ramp that was likely already available to him, and portray it as a response to his threats.

According to Trump’s Truth Social statement, posted about an hour and a half before his declared deadline, his decision to agree to a two-week ceasefire with Iran came at the urging of the government of Pakistan, which has been acting as an intermediary to the two sides. Trump said that a 10-point proposal received from the Iranian side was enough to serve as the basis for negotiations. That proposal was received yesterday, before Trump’s most dramatic threats. Iran’s government has also said it agrees to the ceasefire.

As reported by the New York Times, the Iranian proposal includes a guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again, an end to Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the lifting of sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. It does not include Iran surrendering its remaining uranium stockpile or halting future enrichment, which had been core US demands at various points in this conflict.

Iran’s foreign minister said Iran would allow safe passage through the Strait for two weeks for international ships, so long as they coordinate with the Iranian military. Tehran, for its part, is portraying Trump’s announcement as a complete victory, saying Trump agreed to its terms in full, though it’s basically impossible to imagine the US actually agreeing to terms that would effectively give Iran carte blanche to build a nuclear bomb.

It’s also hard to imagine that an outcome in which the Iranian regime remains in place, and Iran retains its stockpile, would have been considered a victory for the US in the early days of this war, when Iran’s air defenses proved utterly unable to stop the US and Israel from devastating its infrastructure and killing its leaders. Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz changed the strategic balance in the conflict, effectively weaponizing the global economy and giving Tehran a new and potent source of leverage even as it continued absorbing blows. Even if it reopens the Strait now, it will retain the threat to close it again, potentially a more flexible and effective deterrent than its missiles and proxies.

But Iran is in a precarious position as well; its defenses are badly depleted, its senior ranks decimated by targeted strikes, and more vulnerable than ever to challenges from abroad and within. Experts and officials in Israel always suspected the war would continue only as long as Trump allowed it to, and are probably satisfied for now with the damage they’ve inflicted on Iran’s missiles and economy.

Rather than the clear win some would like, or a definitive de-escalation, this may turn out to be another episode of another, more familiar strategy in the recent history of the Middle East: “mowing the grass.”