2026-04-23 06:10:00
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 Trump administration is reportedly hoping to send Afghan refugees to Congo — or back to the country they fled from.
What’s happening? According to a New York Times scoop, more than 1,100 Afghan refugees who are currently in Qatar at a former US military base and who were promised a chance to come to the US may soon be offered a choice between relocation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and returning to Afghanistan.
Neither option is desirable: Congo is currently facing a serious refugee crisis and ongoing fighting with a rebel paramilitary group, and the refugees have no ties to the country. But in Afghanistan, their lives would be in immediate danger from the country’s Taliban government.
Who are the refugees? Many of the 1,100 Afghans now stuck in limbo in Qatar aided the US over nearly two decades of war as interpreters working with US troops or served as members of the Afghan special forces. Some, the Times reports, are family members of American soldiers, and more than 400 are children.
Most have also already been screened and approved to move to the US, according to NBC.
What’s the context? The US took in nearly 200,000 Afghan refugees during and after its chaotic withdrawal from the country in August 2021, but the Trump administration ended visa processing for all Afghans last year after two National Guard members in Washington, DC, were shot by an Afghan national who was admitted to the US in 2021.
What comes next? This is not yet a done deal, only under discussion by the Trump administration and Congolese officials. But it would match a well-worn pattern of the Trump administration trying to send refugees and other immigrants anywhere they can, regardless of safety or other ethical concerns. Earlier this month, Congo agreed to receive immigrants from third countries deported by the US, and at least 15 people were sent there last week.
Hi readers, happy Earth Day! If you’re looking for some actionable ways to help the planet today, my colleagues over at Future Perfect pulled together some charity recommendations here.
If you’re just ready to log off, I hope you’re able to do it by getting outside and enjoying nature a little bit this evening. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-04-23 05:35:00
The facts underlying Hencely v. Fluor Corporation, a case the Supreme Court handed down on Wednesday, are horrible and tragic.
During a 2016 Veterans Day celebration on Bagram Airfield, a US military base in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber named Ahmad Nayeb detonated an explosion that killed five people and wounded 17 more. One of the wounded was Army Specialist Winston Hencely, who confronted the bomber and attempted to question him — causing Nayeb to set off his suicide vest shortly after Hencely approached him.
The Army believes that Hencely’s actions “likely prevent[ed] a far greater tragedy,” because the soldier stopped Nayeb from triggering the explosion in a location where it could have killed more people. Hencely is now permanently disabled from skull and brain injuries suffered during the bombing.
The legal issue in Hencely involves “preemption,” a constitutional principle dictating that, when federal law and state law are at odds with each other, the federal law prevails and will often displace the state law entirely. After the bombing, Hencely sued Fluor Corporation, a military contractor that employed Nayeb, claiming that Fluor violated South Carolina law by failing to adequately supervise Nayeb. Fluor has two subsidiaries in South Carolina.
In Hencely, six justices concluded that the wounded soldier’s lawsuit is not preempted, and thus does not need to be dismissed before any court determines if Fluor should be liable. While all three of the Court’s Democrats sided with Hencely, the case cleaved the Republican justices straight down the middle (and not in the way that the Republican justices ordinarily split when they split down the middle). Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, which was also joined by Republican Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissent, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The question of when a particular state law is preempted by federal law does not always divide the justices along familiar political lines. An expansive approach to preemption sometimes yields results that liberals will celebrate, and other times, benefits right-leaning policymakers. In Wyeth v. Levine (2009), for example, Thomas also took a narrow view of when federal laws should be read to preempt a state law, and thus ruled against a pharmaceutical company whose drug caused a woman to lose her arm. But advocates for immigrants also frequently argue that state laws targeting their clients are preempted by federal law.
So the Hencely case is significant because it reveals how each of the current justices tends to view preemption cases. Thomas has long questioned many of the Court’s previous cases, taking a broad view of preemption, and it now appears that Gorsuch and Barrett share some of his skepticism. The other three Republicans, by contrast, appear much more sympathetic to arguments that the federal government should have exclusive control over some areas of US policy.
The Constitution provides that federal law “shall be the supreme Law of the Land,” and state law must yield to it. But determining whether a specific state law is preempted by a federal law is not always a simple task.
The easiest cases involve “express” presumption, when Congress enacts a law that explicitly invalidates particular kinds of state laws. Imagine, for example, that South Carolina had a law requiring all T-shirts to be made with 100% yellow fabric. If Congress passed a law saying that “no state may regulate the color of T-shirts,” that federal law would expressly preempt South Carolina’s yellow shirt law.
Other relatively easy cases involve “impossibility” preemption, which occurs when it is impossible for someone to simultaneously comply with a state law and a different federal law. If Congress passed a law requiring all T-shirts to be made with 100% red fabric, for example, the hypothetical yellow shirt law would also be preempted because a shirt cannot be entirely red and entirely yellow at the same time.
The hardest preemption cases, meanwhile, involve state laws that may undercut a federal policy or undermine the goals of a federal law, but that do not present such a clear conflict with a federal law that it is impossible to comply with both laws. In Hines v. Davidowitz (1941), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a Pennsylvania law requiring noncitizens to register with the state, even though no federal law explicitly prohibited Pennsylvania from enacting such a registration regime.
The Court reasoned that Congress had passed “a broad and comprehensive plan describing the terms and conditions upon which aliens may enter this country, how they may acquire citizenship, and the manner in which they may be deported,” and that this plan fully established the rights and obligations of noncitizens within the United States. If Pennsylvania were allowed to supplement this federal plan with additional regulation, that would stand “as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.”
Hencely involved a dispute that more closely resembles Hines than it does the more clear cut hypotheticals involving yellow T-shirts. On the one hand, Nayeb had a job at Bagram because of a US military program called “Afghan First,” which, as Thomas explains in his opinion, “sought to stimulate the local economy and stabilize the Afghan Government by requiring contractors to hire Afghans ‘to the maximum extent possible.’”
Thus, as Alito wrote in dissent, the military had apparently decided that these “long-term foreign policy and defense objectives” justified the risk that an Afghan national might find work on a US military facility, and then use their limited access to that facility in order to commit a terrorist attack.
In other words, much as the Pennsylvania immigrant registration law undercut the federal government’s broader goals of providing a certain level of civil liberties to noncitizens, Alito argued that allowing Hencely to sue a military contractor who complied with the federal government’s policy of giving jobs to Afghan nationals would undermine that policy.
Thomas, meanwhile, concluded that, while Fluor may have hired Nayeb in order to comply with a federal directive, it allegedly did not comply with all of its obligations to the federal government. Though Nayeb was allowed on the base, he was a “red-badge holder” and thus was supposed to be closely monitored and often escorted through the base by Fluor.
An Army report, Thomas writes, concluded that “Fluor’s lax supervision … allowed Nayeb to check out tools that he did not need for his job and that he used to make the bomb inside Bagram.” It also found that Fluor failed to escort Nayeb off the base at the end of his shift.
Ultimately, Thomas disagrees with Alito that a state law can be preempted merely because it undercuts the military’s Afghan First policy in some oblique way. In Thomas’s view, preemption is only justified when “the government has directed a contractor to do the very thing” that is forbidden by state law. Hencely did not sue Fluor for hiring Nayeb; he sued Fluor for failing to adequately supervise Nayeb, and the federal government did, indeed, direct Fluor to monitor and escort red-badge-holding Afghan nationals.
Thomas’s opinion in Hencely won’t surprise anyone familiar with his opinion concurring in the judgment in Wyeth, the case ruling in favor of the woman who lost her arm due to a drug’s side effect. In that case, Thomas wrote that “I have become increasingly skeptical of this Court’s ‘purposes and objectives’ pre-emption jurisprudence,” which allows courts to invalidate “state laws based on perceived conflicts with broad federal policy objectives … that are not embodied within the text of federal law.”
Justice Thomas, in other words, appears to reject cases like Hines, which hold that federal law can sometimes displace state laws even when there isn’t an unavoidable conflict between the two laws. The fact that Gorsuch and Barrett joined his opinion in Hencely suggests that these two relatively new justices, who weren’t on the Court when Wyeth was decided, may share Thomas’s views.
As a practical matter, that’s good news for consumers and for consumer rights lawyers. Cases like Wyeth, where the manufacturer of a potentially dangerous product claims that state lawsuits arising out of that product are preempted by federal law, are fairly common. Hencely suggests that at least three of the Court’s Republicans will not support these preemption claims, at least when federal law does not clearly conflict with a state law.
At the same time, immigrants and immigration advocates will likely look upon Hencely with trepidation, as it suggests that this three-justice bloc may also seek to overrule Hines, a seminal precedent establishing that states typically may not impose restrictions on immigrants that cannot be found in federal law.
Preemption is not an issue that always favors the left or the right. Sometimes a state law benefits traditionally liberal causes, and sometimes it tries to advance a more right-wing goal. But Hencely suggests that the current Court will be more cautious about preemption claims generally, regardless of who benefits from that decision.
2026-04-22 20:30:00
地球周期间，人们常常困惑该怎样利用这个假期。是开始堆肥、放弃快时尚，还是为环保事业捐款？还是说，个人行为对解决气候和生态危机毫无影响，唯有政府和企业才能承担起责任？后者观点在现代环保运动中逐渐成为主流。尽管这一观点有一定道理，但仍有少数个人行动能显著改变当前的环境趋势。其中一些最具影响力的行为可能出乎你的意料。环保组织“Project Drawdown”分析了家庭可采取的前20项减少碳足迹的措施，发现减少食物浪费和采用“植物丰富型”饮食（即减少肉类和乳制品摄入）并列排名第一，而安装太阳能板则排名第三。其他环保研究也普遍将植物丰富型饮食列为最有效的环保生活方式之一。
幸运的是，食物选择是一项低门槛、每天都可以做出的决策，相较于购买电动车或进行节能家居改造等高影响行为，更具灵活性。然而，调查显示，人们普遍低估了肉类和乳制品对环境的巨大影响，不仅包括气候变化，还涉及森林砍伐、水污染等问题。正如几年前我所写：“发电厂排放黑烟的污染显而易见，而公路旁的牛羊牧场却显得自然甚至环保。” 因此，以下八张图表将展示我们的饮食选择对环境的总体影响。
首先，肉类和乳制品的生产方式效率低下。为了产出一单位可食用的肉类、乳制品或鸡蛋，畜牧业需要消耗大量热量。《Meat》一书的作者、好食物研究所所长布鲁斯·弗里德里希将这种效率比作丢弃八盘意大利面只吃一盘。因此，肉类生产本身可被视为一种食物浪费。为了种植玉米、大豆等饲料作物以及放牧牛羊，全球大部分地区已被转化为大型畜牧业用地，占地球可居住土地的三分之一以上。这是全球森林砍伐和栖息地丧失的主要原因，对野生动物构成重大威胁。在美国大陆，这一比例甚至高达41%。
除了土地，畜牧业还消耗大量淡水资源。它不仅用水量巨大，还严重污染河流和溪流。在美国，畜牧业可能是最大的水污染来源，主要污染源包括数以百亿计的农场动物产生的粪便，以及种植饲料作物所需的肥料。
最后是气候变化。全球肉类和乳制品生产是气候变化的主要驱动因素之一，占全球温室气体排放量的14.5%至19%（包括化肥生产、粪便排放、森林砍伐以及牛的甲烷排放）。相比之下，植物性蛋白质来源（如Impossible汉堡、豆类和豆腐）的碳足迹远低于牛肉、猪肉和鸡肉。
除了数据，科学家们也提供了有力的证据。2021年一项针对200多名农业和环境科学家的调查发现，大多数人都认为减少肉类和乳制品消费是降低农业碳排放最有效的方式。如果你担心个人行为无法带来改变，可以参考以下数据：俄克拉荷马州立大学的农业经济学家杰森·卢斯和巴利·诺伍德的研究表明，当消费者减少对肉类、鸡蛋和牛奶的需求时，确实会减少这些产品的生产（更多详情请见此处）。此外，采用植物丰富型饮食不仅对健康有益，还能减少在残酷工厂农场中饲养的动物数量。
长远来看，像其他污染行业一样，政府和企业也需要推动重大变革。但目前，肉类行业已成功抵制了许多环保法规。除非更多人要求改变，否则这种趋势难以逆转。我们可以通过每一餐的选择逐步改变这一现状。为此，我们提供了相关资源，例如《Meat/Less》和Vox的实用指南，帮助你减少肉类摄入，增加植物性食物的比例。
It’s Earth Week, and these days, it’s become hard to know just what to do with this holiday. Is it a reminder to start composting, ditch fast fashion, or donate to climate causes? Or does nothing we do as individuals really matter, and it’s on governments and corporations alone to fix our climate and ecological crises?
The latter idea — that our own individual actions won’t help to heal the planet — has become almost gospel in the modern environmental movement. And it’s largely right. But there are a few actions that individuals can take that actually do make a substantial difference in turning our current environmental trajectory around. And some of the most impactful ones might not be what you’d expect.
The environmental nonprofit Project Drawdown analyzed the top 20 actions that households can take to minimize their carbon footprint. It found that reducing food waste and eating a “plant-rich” diet — one that’s lower in meat and dairy — came out tied with each other for the No. 1 spot of most impactful changes. Putting solar panels on your roof ranked third, lagging far behind. (A number of other environmental analyses have put plant-rich diets as top contenders for environmental lifestyle changes, too.)
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And fortunately, food selection is a low-overhead choice we get to make many times each day, which makes it more flexible than other high-impact actions, like buying an electric vehicle or making energy-efficient home renovations.
Yet surveys show that people greatly underestimate meat and dairy’s enormous impact on the environment — and not just its fueling of climate change, but also its massive contribution to deforestation, water pollution, and other problems.
It’s understandable why. As I wrote a few years ago, “a power plant emitting plumes of black smoke screams pollution, while a pasture of cattle, chickens, or pigs along the highway looks natural and quaint — even eco-friendly.” So here are eight charts that break down how truly massive an impact our food choices have when you add them all up.
First, meat and dairy production are really inefficient ways to produce food.
Meat companies have to feed animals a lot of calories to produce just one calorie of edible meat, dairy, or eggs. Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute and author of the book Meat, likens this efficiency to tossing eight plates of pasta into the trash for every one plate we eat (in the case of chicken — and it’s far higher for beef).
In this way, meat production itself is a form of food waste.
To grow all these crops, like corn and soy — and graze cattle and sheep — farmers and meat companies have turned much of planet Earth into one big animal farm, occupying more than one-third of habitable land. It’s the top cause of global deforestation and habitat loss, and thus a leading threat to wildlife.
It uses up even more land in the continental US: 41 percent.
To look at it another way, here’s the amount of land required to produce various diets:
But land isn’t the only essential resource that animal agriculture gobbles up. It’s also the largest user of freshwater.
Animal agriculture doesn’t just use up a lot of water; it also heavily pollutes waterways like rivers and streams. In the US, it’s arguably the biggest source of water pollution. The pollution primarily stems from two sources: manure from the world’s hundreds of billions of farmed animals, and the fertilizer used to grow their feed crops.
Finally, there’s climate change.
Globally, meat and dairy production is one of the leading drivers of climate change, accounting for 14.5 percent to 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (including from fertilizer production, manure, deforestation, and, yes, cows’ methane-rich burps). Meanwhile, plant-based protein sources, like Impossible burgers, beans, and tofu, have much lower carbon footprints than beef, pork, and chicken.
Aside from hard data, compelling evidence on the necessity of plant-rich diets also comes from scientists themselves. In a 2021 survey of more than 200 agricultural and environmental scientists, most ranked “reducing meat and dairy consumption” as the most effective way to reduce agricultural climate emissions.
And if you’re worried that your individual actions don’t actually matter, consider this table below. It’s from leading agricultural economists Jayson Lusk and Bailey Norwood of Oklahoma State University, who crunched the numbers and determined that when consumers buy less meat, eggs, and milk, it truly does reduce production of them (more on that here).
What’s more, embracing a plant-rich diet is also much better for your health and, of course, helps to reduce the number of animals reared on cruel factory farms.
In the long run, like every other polluting industry, significant change will also have to come from governments and corporations. But so far, the meat industry has been highly effective at beating back environmental regulations. It’s hard to see how that’ll change unless more people demand it. We can start — one meal at a time — with what we eat. And we’ve got you covered with resources to get started: Check out Meat/Less, Vox’s practical guide to eating less meat and more plant-based foods.
2026-04-22 20:00:00
每年，美国联邦和州级野生动物机构都会培育数百万条鱼并将其放归自然水域，供钓鱼爱好者捕捞。这一做法的背景是许多生态系统因水坝、污染和水温上升等原因，已无法维持曾经丰富的鱼类种群。然而，问题在于这些被放生的鱼往往并非本地原生物种。例如，在本视频拍摄地康涅狄格州，能源与环境部（DEEP）会培育并放生来自西海岸的虹鳟鱼以及来自欧洲、亚洲和北非的褐鳟鱼。当然，各州并非随意投放鱼类，而是采取了多种预防措施和监控系统，以保护本地生态系统免受外来物种的威胁。但即便如此，事情仍可能出错，引入外来鱼类可能对生态系统造成严重破坏。那么，为何州级野生动物机构仍大规模进行鱼类增殖放流？在本视频中，Vox的制片人内特·克里格（Nate Krieger）与康涅狄格州DEEP的工作人员一同参与了一次鱼类放流活动，仅用不到一小时就将675条活鳟鱼放入米安斯河，以支持当地钓鱼者的娱乐需求。该视频探讨了促使各州进行这一可能对生态系统造成伤害行为的奇怪悖论，分析了美国鱼类增殖放流的复杂性，评估了其对生态系统的潜在风险与可能的保护效益。同时，视频也指出，休闲钓鱼能够鼓励人们亲近自然，从而建立与环境的联系，这对未来具有不可估量的价值。更多信息及相关资源如下：* Benji Jones关于外来鱼类增殖的文章；* 康涅狄格州DEEP发布的2026年鱼类增殖报告；* 各州狩猎与钓鱼的拨款数据，按类别和州划分；* Edwin P. Pister撰写的《荒野鱼类增殖：历史与视角》；* 关于19世纪用于鱼类增殖的“鱼类专列”（fish cars）的详细信息和精美照片。本视频由Animal Charity Evaluators支持，并获得了EarthShare的资助。
Every year, federal and state wildlife agencies in the US breed millions of fish and release them into the wild, all for fishers to catch. They do this because many ecosystems no longer support the thriving fish populations they once did, due to dams, pollution, and rising water temperatures.
But there’s a catch. In many cases, the fish that are being released aren’t native to these ecosystems. In Connecticut, where this video was filmed, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) breeds and releases rainbow trout — from the West Coast — and brown trout, from Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. Of course, states aren’t just throwing fish into the water at random. There are many preventative measures and monitoring systems in place to protect local ecosystems from the dangers of non-native species. But things can still go wrong.
Introducing non-native fish can wreak havoc on an ecosystem. So why are state wildlife agencies doing it by the million?
To see some fish stocking in action and learn more about the process, Vox producer Nate Krieger went on a fish stocking run with employees of Connecticut DEEP. In just under an hour, they released 675 live trout into the Mianus River for the recreation of local fishermen.
This video examines the strange paradox that incentivizes states to do something that, at least in some cases, hurts the very ecosystem they’re trying to conserve. It explores the complicated question of fish stocking in the US, examines the possible dangers to ecosystems, and shines a light on potential conservation benefits. Because recreational fishing encourages people to spend time outside, which builds a relationship with nature and the environment that could be invaluable for our future.
Read more about non-native fish stocking:
This video is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.
2026-04-22 20:00:00
《昨日》是Caro Claire Burke的首部小说，其设定极具吸引力：主人公Natalie是一位哈佛大学辍学的“传统家庭主妇”网红，20岁时嫁入豪门，却突然穿越到1855年。在那里，她失去了现代生活中的精致家电、奢华毛衣、保姆和农场工人，取而代之的是简陋的茅厕、染色的粗布衣服，以及用自制碱皂洗一整批衣服的繁重劳动。面对这个艰苦的旧世界，Natalie经历了大量哭泣，甚至试图逃跑却陷入熊陷阱，腿部受伤后还得忍受19世纪的草药治疗。她形容这种痛苦“仿佛大脑接收到无数神经信号尖叫着‘紧急’，身体却耗尽了整整一个月的能量”。
读者在目睹Natalie的困境时，难免产生一种满足感，忍不住想质问：“你那些传统价值观现在还管用吗？”并带着一丝嘲讽。这正是《昨日》的核心主题：对“传统家庭主妇”（tradwife）形象的愤怒与批判。小说的这一设定吸引了大量关注，甚至引发了Anne Hathaway参与制作和主演电影的激烈竞争。然而，当小说试图进一步探讨传统家庭主妇与女权主义者同样对自身生活不满时，其说服力开始减弱。
Natalie深知自己的内容充满愤怒情绪，她称粉丝为“愤怒的女性”，认为这些“自诩进步的女性”对像她这样的人充满憎恨。在一次去Target的途中，她遇到高中好友Vanessa，后者已放弃宗教信仰，Natalie则对Vanessa的叛逆感到既嫉妒又蔑视。她甚至幻想让Vanessa因思考自己而头痛。Natalie认为，传统家庭主妇的追随者既被她田园生活的美好吸引，又对她传播的性别观念感到愤怒。她将这种吸引力比作腐烂却令人上瘾的黑松露，认为人们一旦发现“腐烂的东西”可以食用，就会沉迷其中。
小说中，Natalie的“腐烂”被描绘为她农场生活的虚假幸福，以及她对自身处境的矛盾心理。然而，作者Burke所批判的“腐烂”实际上更多是传统家庭主妇的虚伪。Natalie的“有机农场”实则使用农药，她的荷兰炖锅产品来自台湾，且通过代购销售。她对丈夫Caleb的不满、对现代女性的敌意，以及她对自身生活的虚伪满足，都揭示了她作为网红的双重性。
Burke的结论略显轻浮：她暗示传统家庭主妇若诚实面对自己，会认同女权主义对自身生活的批判。但作者认为，这种结论并未真正触及传统家庭主妇的内心，反而将她们简化为一个缺乏实质的虚构形象。Natalie的自我惩罚和对现代女性的憎恨，本质上是一种幻想——她既想通过惩罚传统家庭主妇来满足读者的愤怒，又不愿承认她们可能真诚地相信自己的生活方式。这种设定让《昨日》在吸引读者的同时，也暴露出其对复杂社会议题的简化处理。
小说的叙事节奏紧凑，如同悬疑小说，但其核心问题在于：它是否真的能让人信服？作者指出，将传统家庭主妇塑造成一个虚构的“敌人”，并让她们在穿越中接受惩罚，本质上是一种不诚实的幻想。这种幻想与田园牧歌式的虚假生活并无二致，最终让《昨日》未能完全满足读者的期待。
Yesteryear, the buzzy new debut novel by Caro Claire Burke, has the kind of premise it’s hard to look away from: a tradwife influencer named Natalie — a Harvard dropout who married rich at 20 — wakes up in 1855. Gone are her tastefully discrete appliances, her prized collection of luxury sweaters, her team of nannies and farm workers. In their place: an outhouse, stained homespun prairie dresses, and hours of back-breaking labor spent washing a single load of laundry with homemade lye soap.
Natalie, confronted with this brave old world, does a lot of crying. Things get especially rough for her after she tries to escape, stumbles into a bear trap, badly injures her leg, and then has to cope with 19th-century pioneer medicine. The medicinal ointment “smells like bacon grease,” and there’s no anesthetic for the stitches, so that, Natalie tells us, “it feels like my body has depleted a month’s worth of energy from the mere translation of so many nerve signals screaming EMERGENCY to my brain.”
There’s a sort of satisfaction to witnessing Natalie’s distress. You find yourself wanting to say, “How’s all that trad working for you now?” and then maybe sneer a little.
At long last, one of those perniciously appealing traditional housewife influencers — the type who’s always posting videos of herself baking bread in a sun-drenched kitchen while her adorable children romp next to her — has been forced to put her money where her mouth is. Surely now, you think, she’ll have to admit that the modern era has some things going for it.
Yesteryear is a book animated by this kind of rage, by a palpable fury at the archetype of the tradwife. That’s what makes the premise so irresistible — irresistible enough to have garnered breathless review coverage, for Anne Hathaway to sign on to produce and star in the movie after a vicious four-studio bidding war. I myself read Yesteryear in one long rush, unable to put it down.
But where the book begins to falter is when it tries to suggest that tradwives are just as angry with themselves as feminists are.
In Yesteryear, Natalie knows her content is rage bait. She refers to her followers as “the Angry Women,” noting smugly that “self-proclaimed progressive women” are “chemically addicted to hating women like me.” When, on a trip to Target, she encounters Vanessa, a high school friend who has since renounced her devout upbringing, Natalie lingers with almost erotic pleasure on how much the person must envy and despise her. “Go ahead,” she thinks gleefully. “Give yourself a migraine thinking about me.”
Natalie isn’t wrong that a lot of the attention tradwives receive ranges from critical to furious. “Is tradwife content dangerous, or just stupid?” asked a viral Cut essay in 2023. Another essay in 2020 described the sexism at its core as “the gateway to white supremacy.” In a 2024 profile of Hannah Neeleman, the influencer known as “Ballerina Farm,” who is the most prominent of the tradwives, the New York Times summarized the discourse: “Is she, as her fans would have it, a woman who has made the commendable decision to stay home, raise the kids and support the family farm? Or is she, as her detractors would argue, someone who uses social media to push for a return to traditional gender roles while glossing over the privileges that allowed her to have such a lifestyle in the first place?”
To people who consider themselves progressive, who are by and large the presumed audience for Yesteryear, tradwives aren’t women who “choose their choice”; they threaten the gains of 20th-century feminism. They try to sell women on the lie that they would be happier without birth control or educations or careers, tending endless beautiful children in a spotless, beautiful kitchen. And it’s true that a large swath of their followers are there both for the pleasure of their gorgeous pastoral lives and to be furious at them for their political propaganda.
Natalie describes the appeal of her content by analogizing it to the rancid, craveable flavor of black truffles. “People aren’t so different from pigs, apparently,” she says. “Once they learn a rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it, and they will become addicted to it.” She believes there is a “rot” of unhappiness on her farm that comes through in her content — her own exhaustion at the drudgery of her chores, the palpable fakery of her artificial paradise — “and everyone rushed towards me with their forks.”
For most critics of tradwife content, the “rot” Natalie is describing here is the anti-feminist proselytizing, the romanticization of a bleak way of life that left many women trapped. The rot Burke is portraying in Yesteryear, however, is just straightforward influencer hypocrisy.
Influencing at its most basic form is sales, and like any overworked saleswoman, Natalie lies about her product: herself, and her allegedly pure lifestyle. She secretly douses the family’s “organic” farm in pesticides, because she knows they’ll never turn a profit otherwise. Her pastoral-chic line of Dutch ovens is made in Taiwan and drop-shipped. She has nothing but contempt for Vanessa, whom she greets warmly while internally calling her a “pick me” and a “cunt” for having named her daughter Zoe.
But Natalie’s hypocrisy goes deeper than that. We learn that she despises her dimwitted husband Caleb, whom she felt pressured to marry young and begin having kids with as soon as the wedding was over, thanks to the culture of her unnamed evangelical sect; he cannot achieve a full erection during sex, leaving her to impregnate herself with a sauce baster. Being alone with her children triggers panic attacks. Early followers tell her that her smile looks too strained, so now she compulsively practices fake smiling at all times, and has trouble dropping it when the occasion calls for solemnity.
Still, she tells herself that all the wives and mothers she knows are happier than the career women she sees bemoaning their inability to have it all. Once she has her first child and finds herself bored and miserable, she decides the stay-at-home moms she knows must be lying about their happiness. With no work history or job prospects and an ever-mounting brood of children to provide for, she can find no outlet for her intellect and creativity outside of the project of turning her life into online content.
Natalie has an intimate understanding of why her followers love to resent her, because she loves to resent modern women. She tracks her liberal college roommate Reena on social media for the sheer pleasure of hating her and her life choices, an act that mirrors career women hate-following tradwives. “She looked like a stereotype of a modern woman,” Natalie gloats over a video of Reena announcing she’s been laid off from her consulting gig, “poreless and lip-lined and shrill.”
Throughout the novel, characters create an imaginary woman out of scraps of social media content, just so that they can get mad at her. Natalie does it with Reena, and Natalie’s followers do it to her. In Burke’s telling, we do this because we are all unhappy with our own lives and want to lash out. Which is a little strange, because what is the novel Yesteryear if not the process of creating an imaginary woman out of scraps of social media content, just so that we can get mad at her?
Yesteryear has a gripping, thriller-like pacing, which it owes mostly to the delicious mystery of what exactly happened to Natalie to send her to 1855.
Did she time-travel, à la Outlander? Is she on some sort of hidden camera reality TV show? Is she being tested by God (Natalie’s favorite option)? At one point, she finds a secret cabin in the past with a sign out front that says “The Manosphere,” and I got giddy with delight over the idea that Burke was positing a world where all those podcasters decided to start building virtual realities to send uppity women for reprogramming, like an updated Stepford Wives.
Along the way, Natalie is punished by the world of 1855. There’s the bear trap, of course, and the fact that one of the first things Caleb does when we meet him in the past is slap his wife across the face so hard she blacks out. Also, the food “looks, frankly, like shit,” made with such sparse, stingy ingredients that even Natalie’s famous sourdough loaves don’t turn out right. (“The worst possible thing to happen,” she fumes.)
The real reason for Natalie’s time travel, when it comes, is deflating. Without spoiling too much, Burke’s conclusion suggests that the sadistic anger that pulses through Yesteryear — the desire to see Natalie brought down a peg, humiliated, forced to admit that what she says she wants is not what anyone who had the choice would actually want — is a feeling that Natalie shares. She wants to see herself punished as much as the reader does. She punishes herself enough to furnish the whole plot of the book.
There’s an easy smugness to this conclusion that, in retrospect, makes the project of Yesteryear less satisfying than it at first promised to be. It relies on the seductive but unlikely idea that if tradwives were really honest with themselves, they’d admit that they agree with feminists on what the problems with their lives are. It posits that Natalie, too, wants to ask, “How’s all that trad working out for you now?”
I don’t think we have to pretend that being Ballerina Farm really is as idyllic as it looks on Instagram in order for us to grant tradwives the courtesy of taking them at their word about their fundamental beliefs. Their lives might not be all that happy, but it strikes me as unlikely that tradwives secretly believe that this is because the message they are preaching is false and will make other people’s lives worse. Nor do I believe tradwives really think that they are doing something wrong, something rotten, by making the content that they do.
Even Natalie, for all her silent rage, never imagines that the liberal women she hates don’t genuinely believe in equality. It’s as though the strongest comeuppance Burke can imagine for this woman who makes us so angry is to deny that she believes the things she appears, through all her words and actions, to sincerely believe. Yesteryear punishes the tradwife by making her into someone less than substantial — and so in the end, this bingeable, buzzy novel fails to entirely satisfy.
There is something fundamentally dishonest in building an imaginary woman in order to hate her, and not even letting her hold her own principles. I suppose it’s fun to imagine a world in which a tradwife turns out to secretly love cursing and pills, where social media is not just exaggerated but an out-and-out lie, and where she punishes herself to save all the rest of us the trouble. But that’s no less of a fantasy than a bucolic farm where the bread is always perfect and the children never cry.
2026-04-22 19:30:00
2026年4月10日，有人在笔记本电脑屏幕上查看了Anthropic的“Project Glasswing”网站。| Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images
AI的能力有多强？强大到足以让这家领先的AI公司Anthropic在本月早些时候宣布，其最新AI模型Claude Mythos Preview仅限于向少数企业发布，以应对安全风险——至少目前如此。Anthropic表示，Mythos Preview是为通用用途设计的，但在测试过程中，他们发现该模型在识别各类软件系统中的安全漏洞方面非常高效，这可能带来巨大的安全隐患。因此，Anthropic目前通过名为“Project Glasswing”的项目，仅向少数几家大型科技公司和银行分享该模型，目的是让他们有机会修补现有系统中的安全漏洞，并提前防范可能的网络攻击。
为了更好地了解Claude Mythos Preview的特性及其对网络安全的潜在威胁，Today, Explained的主持人Sean Rameswaram近日采访了The Verge的高级AI记者Hayden Field。以下是他们对话的节选（已进行删减和润色）：
“Claude Mythos是什么？Mythos是Anthropic最新开发的通用型AI模型。但在开发过程中，他们发现这个模型具备一些意想不到的特殊能力，尤其是在网络安全领域。它能够发现几乎所有操作系统中的高风险漏洞，这对黑客来说是非常危险的。如果有人拥有这个模型，他们就能获得所有关键系统中存在的漏洞和安全隐患的详细蓝图，从而找到破坏系统或窃取数据的方法。因此，Anthropic决定不向公众发布该模型，而是选择了一些负责关键基础设施的组织，以便这些组织可以利用该模型修补自身系统中的漏洞。”
目前，许多使用Claude Mythos的公司已经广为人知，包括Nvidia、JP Morgan Chase、Google等，可能还有数十家其他负责关键软件基础设施的公司。
“这个模型是如何运作的？”Hayden Field解释道：“由于它是一个通用型模型，使用方式可能与其他AI模型类似。你只需提示它查找系统中的漏洞，例如，如果你是Google Chrome，你可能会提示它检查浏览器中某些特定部分是否存在漏洞。模型会列出所有高风险的漏洞，然后你自行修补。黑客也会以同样的方式使用它，如果落入坏人之手，他们可能会利用这些信息进行恶意活动。因此，关键在于谁在使用这个模型以及他们的动机。”
“我们是否知道像Google和Nvidia这样的公司真的在使用这项技术？”他回答：“是的。Anthropic之所以发布这个模型，部分原因是为了让这些公司反馈其工作原理以及如何修补漏洞。这是一种信息共享的方式，他们希望这些公司能够测试该模型的效果，并向Anthropic报告结果。”
“Anthropic是如何选择与哪些组织分享这项技术的？”Hayden Field问道：“他们主要寻找的是网络安全防御者，即那些许多人都依赖的公司，如果这些公司遭到攻击，后果将非常严重。例如，JP Morgan Chase就是一个典型例子。此外，Anthropic还向政府提供了这项技术。”
“Anthropic的竞争对手是否也有类似工具？他们是否在开发类似技术？”Hayden Field继续提问：“据称，OpenAI也在开发类似工具。Anthropic自己也表示，他们并不认为自己会长期在这一领域领先。他们认为，全球各地的实验室可能在未来三到六个月甚至一年内发布类似技术。因此，他们现在发布Mythos，是为了让企业和银行提前做好准备，以应对未来可能由类似技术引发的网络攻击。”
“如果这种技术如此危险，存在这么多潜在风险，是否有人在讨论是否应该完全不发布这类工具，而是将其内部化？”Hayden Field问：“这是一个非常好的问题。我很高兴你提出了，因为很少有人会问，是否应该将某些AI系统发布或用于特定用途。目前，我们看到的是‘一刀切’式的AI应用，但很多时候AI并不是解决问题的正确方法。然而，对于Mythos这样的工具，人们普遍认为它现在是必要的。因为AI已经在帮助网络攻击者提升攻击能力，而且这种趋势在过去一年中愈发明显。专家们似乎都同意，我们需要用AI来对抗AI驱动的网络攻击。这就像中世纪的城堡，当战争来临，人们会加固城墙，提高防御。这些专家也告诉我，他们知道这种技术即将出现，因此建议企业现在就加强防御，以做好充分准备。”
How powerful is AI? Enough that Anthropic, a leading AI company, announced earlier this month that its latest AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, would be available only to a limited number of businesses due to security concerns — at least for now.
Claude Mythos Preview was designed for general use, Anthropic says, but during testing, the company found it extremely effective at identifying vulnerabilities in the security systems of all types of software, creating potentially massive security concerns.
So far, Anthropic is sharing the Mythos Preview model with a handful of major tech companies and banks through a program called Project Glasswing, intended to give them an opportunity to shore up any existing security vulnerabilities and get ahead of potential hacking attempts that the model could identify.
To get a better sense of what Claude Mythos Preview represents and the potential threat it brings to online security, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full episode wherever you get podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is Claude Mythos?
Mythos is [Anthropic’s] newest AI model that they designed to be a general-purpose AI model like any other. But what they realized when they were working on it was that it had these special skills that they didn’t really anticipate. It was really good at cybersecurity. It found high-stakes vulnerabilities in virtually every operating system.
That’s pretty bad if you are using that as a hacker. And to have a blueprint for a list of every big gap and insecurity and vulnerability on all these really, really high-profile systems, you’re going to be having a list of everything you could do to take those systems down or exploit data.
They realized that they better not release this to the general public because it could fall into the wrong hands. And they instead handpicked a select few organizations that are responsible for critical infrastructure to release it to so they could plug those gaps in their systems instead.
You’ve heard of many of the companies that currently have and are using Claude Mythos: Nvidia, JP Morgan Chase, Google, apparently a few dozen more that build or maintain critical software infrastructure. How does it actually work?
Since they built it as a general-purpose model, it probably works like any other model in that you’re using it and prompting it to flag all the vulnerabilities in your system.
Maybe you’re Google Chrome, and you’re looking for specific, niche parts of the browser that you think may have some vulnerabilities. You’re basically prompting the model to flag all these really high-profile gaps to you and your security, and then you’re taking that and plugging it up on your own.
A hacker would actually use it in the same way. If it fell into the wrong hands, they’d be like, “Yeah, tell me all the vulnerabilities here.” And then they’re going to take it off the platform and use that for something nefarious. So it’s basically about who is prompting the system and what their motives are.
It’s as easy as saying, “Hey, Claude, tell me how this banking system might be vulnerable.” And then Claude thinks about it for a minute, and it spits out a bunch of answers.
Essentially, yes.
And do we know that the Googles and Nvidias of the world are actually using this technology?
Yes. Part of the reason that Anthropic released this is they wanted these organizations to report back on exactly how Mythos worked and what it did to plug up the vulnerabilities and the gaps in their system. It’s an information-sharing thing.
They’re letting these companies use it to test out how well it does to plug up all these high-profile gaps, and then they have to report back to Anthropic about how it worked.
How is Anthropic choosing who to share this technology with?
I actually asked them that. They’re essentially looking for cyber defenders or companies that a lot of people depend on, and that downstream it would be a huge issue if they got hacked in any way, shape, or form.
JP Morgan Chase is a great example. Anthropic has also offered this technology to the government.
Do Anthropic’s competitors have similar tools? Are they presumably working on similar tools?
OpenAI is apparently working on a similar tool. Anthropic itself has said this isn’t something that they deem they’ll be in the lead on for too long. They think labs anywhere in the world may release this technology in the next three months, six months, 12 months.
It seems like, sometime in the next 12 months, this is going to be out there. And so that’s why they wanted to release Mythos now, so that companies and banks could get ahead of all the hacks that may be coming down the line, when similar types of technology are released to the general public, maybe months from now.
If this is so dangerous and there’s so many potential risks, is anyone having a conversation about just not releasing tools like this and just sort of shutting it down, keeping it internal?
That is a really great question. I’m so glad you asked, because not enough people ask whether an AI system should actually be released or used for certain things. Right now, we’re seeing a lot of one-size-fits-all, throw-it-at-everything type of integration. And a lot of times AI is not the answer for things.
With this, though, people tend to agree that it is something that’s needed right now. AI is already out there helping cyberattackers really step up their attacks. And we’ve been seeing that intensify over the past year. People seem to agree that you need AI to fight AI cyberattacks, essentially.
It’s kind of like medieval fortresses, where you’re adding extra stones and building up the walls at the fortress higher because a war is coming. That’s the sense I get when I talk to these experts about this. They know it’s coming. It’s just, ‘Try to shore up your defenses now so that you’re best prepared.’
