2025-12-03 04:30:00
美国得克萨斯州的反选区划分抗议者在最高法院外集会。| 摄影：Evelyn Hockstein/《华盛顿邮报》/盖蒂图片社
上个月，得克萨斯州的一家联邦法院裁定，由于特朗普政府司法部的法律失误，一项旨在为共和党赢得美国众议院五席的选区划分方案必须被废除。今年8月，受特朗普推动，得克萨斯州的共和党人重新绘制了该州的国会选区地图，使其更有利于共和党。这促使民主党在蓝色州发起报复性选区划分。加州选民支持了一项公投，允许该州重新绘制选区地图以增加民主党优势，而弗吉尼亚州也可能在民主党今年冬天全面掌控该州政府后重新绘制选区地图。
这些明显旨在通过选区划分来偏袒某一政党的行为之所以被允许，主要是因为2019年共和党大法官在“Rucho v. Common Cause”一案中裁定，联邦法院不能干预党派选区划分。然而，尽管最高法院的共和党多数派通常对有偏见的立法选区划分持宽容态度，他们仍认为某些形式的选区划分是不被允许的。例如，大法官塞缪尔·阿利托在“Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP”（2024）一案中指出，如果立法机构在选区划分中将种族作为主要考虑因素，该地图将受到最严格的宪法审查。
这起案件涉及得克萨斯州共和党在重新划分选区时，是否因种族因素而非法划分选区。当时，特朗普政府的司法部曾写信威胁要起诉得克萨斯州，除非其重新划分选区以消除某些种族少数群体占多数的选区。司法部实际上要求得克萨斯州在重新划分选区时，将种族作为主要考虑因素，从而改变选区的种族构成。一些得克萨斯州官员也引用这封信作为重新划分选区的依据。
因此，联邦法院在“LULAC v. Abbott”一案中裁定得克萨斯州的选区划分方案无效。此案现已提交至最高法院，得克萨斯州请求最高法院恢复其共和党选区划分方案。考虑到最高法院目前的6-3共和党多数，得克萨斯州很可能成功。
此案出现在最高法院的“影子法庭”上，即处理紧急动议和其他案件的程序，通常由大法官在没有充分简报或口头辩论的情况下快速决定，甚至不发布解释性意见。因此，最高法院可能随时对此案作出裁决。
如果得克萨斯州胜诉，其胜诉方式将至关重要。得克萨斯州的律师提出了两个主要论点：一是有大量证据表明该州重新划分选区是为了政治利益，而非种族因素；二是最高法院应忽略司法部的信件和相关官员的言论。然而，得克萨斯州的第二个论点则极具危险性，若被最高法院接受，将赋予各州几乎无限的权力，以违反宪法的方式操纵选举。
得克萨斯州的论点基于“Purcell”原则，即法院在选举临近时应避免改变州的选举程序，以免造成选民困惑并导致投票率下降。但得克萨斯州声称，即使在距离大选一年前，法院的裁决仍会触发这一原则。他们指出，得克萨斯州的国会初选将在2026年3月3日举行，而截止日期为2025年12月8日。因此，如果最高法院不撤销下级法院的裁决，这些截止日期将被破坏。
尽管得克萨斯州的律师声称Purcell原则适用于LULAC案，但这一论点在现实中显得荒谬。因为LULAC案的裁决是在2025年11月18日作出的，距离2026年中期大选还有近一年时间，Purcell原则在此时几乎无法适用。然而，得克萨斯州的律师仍试图利用这一原则来阻止法院审查其选区划分方案。
过去，最高法院曾对类似案件做出过类似裁决。例如，在2022年的“Merrill v. Milligan”一案中，最高法院以5-4票裁定，阿拉巴马州的选区划分方案应被允许，尽管该方案在2022年中期大选前九个月就被下级法院裁定为非法。大法官布雷特·卡瓦诺在该案中写道，州和地方选举官员需要大量时间来准备选举，因此法院应在选举前九个月内避免干预选举法律。虽然卡瓦诺也表示，如果案件对原告完全有利，他可能不会支持这种九个月的禁令，但只要州方能提出一个模糊但看似合理的论点，该禁令就可能适用。
值得注意的是，最高法院最终还是考虑了阿拉巴马州选区划分的挑战，并同意下级法院的裁决，认为该方案非法。这表明，最高法院可能接受得克萨斯州提出的12个月禁令。如果这一原则被广泛接受，将严重削弱宪法对选民权利的保护，使各州能够以各种方式操纵选举。希望最高法院能保持理智，避免做出这种极端裁决。
Last month, a federal court in Texas ruled that a Republican gerrymander, expected to give the GOP five extra seats in the US House, must be struck down because of incompetent lawyering by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
In August, at Trump’s urging, Texas Republicans redrew their state’s congressional maps to make them much more friendly to the GOP. This led Democrats to push for retaliatory gerrymanders in blue states. California voters backed a ballot referendum allowing that state to redraw its maps to make them more Democratic, and Virginia may also redraw its maps once Democrats take full control of its government this winter.
These transparent attempts to rig congressional elections to benefit one party or the other are permissible largely because of the Republican justices’ decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which held that federal courts may not intervene to prevent partisan gerrymandering.
Yet, while the Court’s Republican majority is normally very tolerant of biased legislative maps — they are expected to eliminate the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering in the Court’s current term — most of the Republican justices still believe that one form of gerrymandering is not allowed. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP (2024), “if a legislature gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map is subjected” to the most skeptical level of constitutional scrutiny.
This matters because, as Texas Republicans were trying to decide whether to redraw the state’s maps earlier this year, Trump’s Justice Department wrote a letter threatening to sue the state unless it enacted an illegal racial gerrymander. The letter claimed, falsely, that it is illegal for a state to draw any map that includes a district where white people are in the minority, and two other racial groups make up the majority. DOJ told Texas that it must redraw its congressional maps to eliminate several districts that fit this description.
The Justice Department, in other words, effectively ordered Texas to give race a predominant role when it redrew its maps — changing the configuration of several districts in order to change their racial composition. Several key Texas officials, moreover, cited this letter as justification for the new maps. Governor Greg Abbott, for example, told the legislature to consider “legislation that provides a revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” in a special session.
Given this evidence that Texas impermissibly assigned voters to congressional districts because of their race, a federal court struck those maps down in League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Abbott.
This case is now before the Supreme Court, with Texas asking the justices to reinstate its Republican gerrymander. Given the Republican Party’s 6-3 majority on the Court, it is likely that Texas will succeed.
The case arises on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices often decide without full briefing or oral argument, or even without issuing an opinion explaining their decision. So the Court could rule on Texas’s request at any time.
In the likely event that Texas prevails, it still matters a great deal how it prevails in the Supreme Court. Broadly speaking, Texas’s lawyers make two arguments to the justices. One is a fairly normal argument: there is also a bunch of evidence that Texas redrew its maps for political, and not racial, reasons. And so, Texas’s lawyers argue that the justices should focus on this evidence and ignore the DOJ’s letter and any statements from Texas officials who agreed with that letter.
Texas’s other argument, however, is extraordinarily dangerous. If taken seriously by the Supreme Court, it would give states virtually limitless power to rig elections in ways that blatantly violate the Constitution.
If the Republican justices want to bail out their party without handing down a decision with broad legal implications, they can do so by focusing narrowly on the facts of the LULAC case. There is considerable evidence on both sides of the case: Texas points to various facts which suggest that it redrew its maps solely to benefit Republicans, while the plaintiffs point to the DOJ’s letter and related evidence showing that race played a central role in the state’s decision to redraw the maps.
A narrow decision in Texas’s favor would emphasize the former evidence, while downplaying the significance of the DOJ’s letter.
But Texas’s lawyers also make another argument that would allow states to evade judicial review of virtually any election law, even laws that clearly violate the Constitution or that explicitly seek to rig elections. And, given some of the justices’ past rulings in similar election cases, there is a very real risk that this Court will embrace this argument.
In Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), the Supreme Court issued a vague warning that judges should be reluctant to alter a state’s election procedures as the election draws close. Court orders changing these procedures, Purcell warned, “can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” And “as an election draws closer, that risk will increase.”
It’s hard to argue with this basic point, at least in the abstract. If a court were to change, say, where polling places are located or what documentation a voter must show to cast a ballot, and if it did so a week before an election, many voters might be disenfranchised because they were unaware of these changes and did not know what they needed to do in order to vote.
But the lower court’s order in LULAC was handed down on November 18, nearly a full year before the 2026 midterm elections. So it is hard to imagine how Purcell could play any role whatsoever in this case.
Nevertheless, Texas’s lawyers claim that a court order handed down a year before a general election triggers Purcell. Among other things, they note that Texas currently is scheduled to hold primary elections for Congress on March 3, 2026, and that the current filing deadline closes on December 8, 2025. So, unless the Supreme Court lifts the lower court order, these deadlines would be disrupted.
It is unclear why the lower court couldn’t simply move these deadlines. There’s nothing in the Constitution that requires Texas to hold its primary elections in March.
The implications of Texas’s argument — that courts cannot block unconstitutional state election laws up to one year before a general election — are breathtaking. For one thing, it is doubtful that either the plaintiffs in LULAC or the lower court could have moved faster even if they wanted to.
Abbott signed the Texas gerrymandering bill into law on August 29; the LULAC plaintiffs actually filed their motion seeking to block that law one day before Abbott signed it, on August 28. Like many redistricting cases, LULAC required the lower court to consider piles of evidence and expert testimony.
The case was heard by a three-judge panel, and the two judges in the majority produced a 160-page opinion evaluating all this evidence. In a break from the judiciary’s ordinary practice, they also issued this opinion before dissenting Judge Jerry Smith’s rival opinion was ready — most likely so the majority could get the decision out quickly in order to avoid Purcell. Smith’s later-issued dissent was 104 pages.
Both the plaintiffs and the lower court, in other words, appear to have moved as fast as they possibly could have moved. If Purcell applies to LULAC, it could mean that any election law enacted up to 15 months before a general election could not be blocked by federal courts. A state might cancel its congressional elections altogether and assign all of its seats to one party or the other. Or it might draw single-person districts consisting solely of a Republican candidate for the US House.
And then, when the next election cycle rolls around, it could enact a new law that does the same thing with slightly different wording 15 months before the election — and that law would potentially be immune from judicial review as well.
The idea that courts are forbidden from hearing challenges to a state’s election laws a year or more before an election takes place may seem so absurd that no judge would take this argument seriously. But this Supreme Court has given serious consideration to similar arguments in the past.
In Merrill v. Milligan (2022), for example, a 5-4 Supreme Court blocked a lower court order requiring Alabama to redraw its congressional maps. That lower court order was handed down in late January 2022, so about nine months before the 2022 midterms.
Although most of the five justices in the Merrill majority did not explain themselves, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurring opinion, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, which argued that the lower court’s order violated Purcell. “State and local election officials need substantial time to plan for elections,” Kavanaugh claimed. And apparently they needed so much time that they must be given a nine-month window where their election laws enjoy broad immunity from judicial review.
In fairness, Kavanaugh also wrote that he would make an exception to his nine-month moratorium on enforcing the Constitution and federal election law if the case was “entirely clearcut in favor of the plaintiff.” So even he probably would not allow a state to cancel its elections altogether and assign congressional seats to whichever party controls the state legislature. But so long as the state can raise a vaguely plausible argument for its maps, Kavanaugh’s moratorium would hold.
Notably, the Supreme Court eventually did consider this challenge to Alabama’s maps on the merits, and it agreed with the lower court that the maps were illegal.
The fact that two justices signed onto a nine-month moratorium on court orders blocking state election laws in Merrill suggests that Texas could succeed in its request for a 12-month moratorium. At least some members of the Court have already signalled that the Purcell window is big enough to swallow up almost an entire election year.
Again, it is unlikely that this Supreme Court will agree with a lower court decision that could cost the Republican Party five US House seats. But Texas’s Purcell argument risks neutralizing constitutional protections against voter disenfranchisement altogether. Hopefully, even this Supreme Court has the sense not to go there.
2025-12-03 04:30:00
2025年11月30日，特朗普在棕榈滩国际机场登机返回华盛顿特区时向媒体挥手。在感恩节当天，这个以欢迎有需要的陌生人为核心的美国节日，特朗普宣布有意“永久暂停来自所有第三世界国家的移民，以让美国体系得到充分恢复”。然而，这一广泛政策在实践中如何运作尚不明确，而且通常与实际政策存在很大差距。不过，这一政策确实有先例：2016年特朗普当选后不久，极右翼组织“另类右翼”（alt-right）的领袖理查德·斯宾塞曾在一次会议上提出，要对所有移民，尤其是非欧洲移民，实施为期50年的限制。当时斯宾塞承认自己的提议“比特朗普说的任何事情都更激进”。如今，特朗普似乎采纳了斯宾塞的政策主张。
这并非白宫首次采用2010年代白人至上主义运动的语言。白宫高级顾问斯蒂芬·米勒上周在推文中引用了“另类右翼”对移民问题的著名批评。欧洲的“另类右翼”提出的“再移民”理念，也被特朗普的国土安全部和国务院所接受。而“美国人被移民取代”的概念，原本只在夏洛特镇的火炬游行中出现，如今却成为共和党高层广泛宣传的主张。
这种转变并非完全新鲜：米勒曾是斯宾塞的大学同学，早在2015年就私下引用白人至上主义网站并主张全面禁止移民。但在特朗普的第一个任期，这类言论并不适合公开。例如，2018年，特朗普因发现演讲稿撰写人达伦·比蒂在另类右翼活动上发表讲话而将其解雇。而在第二个任期，比蒂却被任命为国务院高级职位。他从未否认自己的极端立场，但如今，另类右翼对白宫的影响已从隐秘转为公开，其影响已无所遁形。
自2000年代末以来，“另类右翼”（简称“另右”）一直试图构建一种以白人至上为核心的保守政治替代方案。其主要思想家，如斯宾塞、彼得·布里默洛和约翰·德比希尔，认为现有的保守派不愿认真对待他们关于美国应由白人多数治理的观点。他们认为，非白人移民会威胁美国的繁荣。与当时主流保守派关注移民对社会和经济的下游影响不同，另类右翼更强调移民的种族或国籍背景，认为来自贫困或“第三世界”国家的人无法适应美国社会，无论出于文化还是生物学原因，他们的到来都会使美国变得更穷、更弱、更脏。他们还嘲笑认为个体移民可以适应美国的“魔法尘土”理论。
在特朗普第一个任期，这些观点仍被视为敏感话题，甚至在2019年保守派全国会议中，主办方刻意拒绝邀请斯宾塞等知名另类右翼人物。但如今，这些观点已公开出现在政策和言论中，如特朗普的“第三世界移民禁令”和国务院提议的“再移民办公室”。例如，上周《华尔街日报》的一篇社论认为，美国不应因一名阿富汗移民在华盛顿州枪杀两名国民警卫队员而惩罚所有阿富汗移民。对此，米勒明确引用了“魔法尘土”理论，反对“美国可以大量接纳来自贫困国家移民”的说法。他写道：“当失败国家的人跨越国界时，并不会发生魔法般的转变。大规模移民及其后代会重现其原籍国的困境和恐怖。”
同样，保守派活动人士克里斯·鲁福（与白宫关系密切）最近对索马里移民展开猛烈抨击，他以明尼苏达州一起涉及索马里人的欺诈案件为例，暗示整个索马里社区都在损害美国。当有人指出不能将所有索马里移民的责任归咎于个别欺诈者时，鲁福暗示将整个索马里群体视为问题是有道理的。他写道：“索马里的国家文化与挪威不同，因此索马里人和挪威人思考、行为和组织方式也不同。明尼苏达州的挪威人表现得与挪威人一样，而明尼苏达州的索马里人则表现得与索马里人一样。”因此，他认为美国应根据种族重新设计移民政策。事实上，特朗普政府于周二宣布了一项针对明尼苏达州索马里移民的新打击行动。
尽管斯宾塞等另类右翼领袖如今已不再活跃，但像比蒂这样的另类右翼成员却已进入权力核心。这表明，另类右翼的标签已不再必要，因为这些观点已不再是主流保守派的“替代”选择，而是成为共和党的公开立场。这种转变反映了关键人物（如特克·卡森）有意识地将这些思想植入主流保守派，也反映了特朗普不断排挤温和派，将“房间里的成年人”（如米勒）边缘化。此外，2024年大选后，右翼对文化胜利的盲目自信也推动了这一趋势，他们认为普通美国人突然对极端右翼的政治观点（尤其是移民问题）变得接受。
因此，我们正生活在一个世界中，那些曾被视为有毒的移民观点，如今却在国家最高层被公开提出。
Late on Thanksgiving Day, a holiday whose central fable is about the American value of welcoming strangers in need, President Donald Trump announced an intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.”
It is not clear exactly how exactly this sweeping policy is supposed to work in practice — or if, as is often the case, the president’s posts bear little resemblance to policy reality. But it does have a clear precedent: a speech given by Richard Spencer, the leader of the once-prominent “alt-right” movement, given just after Trump’s victory in 2016.
“One fundamental policy we’re going to put forward is a break on all immigration, particularly non-European immigration, for a 50-year period,” Spencer said at a November 2016 conference.
At the time, Spencer acknowledged his proposal was “certainly out in front of anything Donald Trump said.” Now, however, the president has adopted a version of Spencer’s policy as his own.
This is hardly the only example of the White House adopting language from the 2010s-vintage white nationalist movement.
Top White House adviser Stephen Miller referenced a prominent alt-right critique of immigration in a tweet last week. A call for “remigration,” a vision of mass deportations developed by Europe’s alt-right equivalent, has been embraced by Trump’s Homeland Security and State departments. And the concept of a “great replacement” of Americans by migrants, once the province of tiki-torch marchers at Charlottesville, is now widely proclaimed by the Republican Party’s leading figures — from Trump on down.
This isn’t entirely new: Miller, a college friend of Richard Spencer’s, sent emails privately citing white nationalist websites and advocating for a full immigration ban all the way back in 2015.
But in Trump’s first term, this kind of thing was not for public consumption — and when exposed, it caused a scandal. In 2018, for example, Trump fired speechwriter Darren Beattie after he got caught giving a speech at an alt-right event.
In the second term, the Trump administration appointed Beattie to a high-level position at the State Department. He never repudiated his extremism; what changed is that the alt-right influence on the White House is now open rather than hidden.
The mask is well and truly off.
Since its origins in the late 2000s, the alt-right (short for “alternative right”) aimed to build out a parallel vision for conservative politics rooted in an explicit white nationalism. Its leading ideologues — writers like Spencer, Peter Brimelow, and John Derbyshire — believed that the existing conservative movement was unwilling to take seriously their belief that the US should be a country governed for and by its white majority. Non-white immigration, in their view, threatened everything that made the United States great.
In this respect, they went further than even the right’s mainstream immigration hawks of their time. Typically, right-wing immigration hawks focused on the downstream effects of immigration: claiming that current policy was suppressing working-class wages or causing an increase in crime. Such concerns could, in theory, be addressed by reforms to existing immigration policy; by spending more on assimilation programs or prioritizing high-skilled immigrants, for example.
Within this context, the alt-right’s defining move was to argue purely on the basis of ethnic or national origin. In their view, there are entire classes of people — those hailing from poor or “Third World” countries — who cannot under any circumstances adapt to America. Whether for reasons of culture or biology, or perhaps both, bringing such people to the United States would inherently make the country poorer, weaker, and dirtier. It is an argument for collective responsibility: for holding all migrants from a particular country responsible for problems with its government or society.
The alt-right mocked the idea that individual immigrants could adapt to America as “magic dirt” theory.
“Sure, Mexico and Central America are messed-up places, and presumably their inhabitants played some role in messing them up. If we just move thirty or forty million of those people to the USA, though, our Magic Dirt will transform them into civic-minded Jeffersonian yeomen!” Derbyshire wrote in a 2015 column for the alt-right site VDARE.
At the time, these ideas were too toxic even for the Trump wing of the GOP. At the inaugural 2019 National Conservatism conference, an effort to build a more intellectual Trumpist nationalism, the organizers made a show out of refusing admission to prominent alt-right figures like Brimelow. When I reported on a conference presenter advancing “magic dirt” arguments against non-white immigration during one of the panels, it turned into a PR disaster for the event.
Yet today, this sort of thing is proclaimed openly at the highest levels — in actual policy concepts like Trump’s “Third World” ban and the State Department’s proposed “Office of Remigration,” but also in its rhetoric and argumentation.
Last week, for example, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece argued that the US government should not punish all Afghan immigrants for the actions of the asylum seeker who shot two National Guard members in Washington, DC. In response, Stephen Miller explicitly invoked the magic dirt theory against what he called “the great lie” that America can integrate large numbers of migrants from poor countries.
“No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders,” Miller writes. “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
Similarly, leading conservative activist Chris Rufo — a figure closely aligned with the White House — has been on a tear against Somali immigrants, using a recent fraud case in Minnesota involving Somali perpetrators as evidence that the entire community was hurting America. When confronted with the argument that it’s wrong to blame all Somali immigrants for the actions of fraudsters, Rufo implied that it’s actually quite reasonable to see Somalis collectively as the problem.
“The national culture of Somalia is different from the national culture of Norway. Somalis and Norwegians therefore tend to think differently, behave differently, and organize themselves differently,” he wrote. “Norwegians in Minnesota behave similarly to Norwegians in Norway; Somalis in Minnesota behave similarly to Somalis in Somalia.”
That’s why, he argued, the US should begin explicitly redesigning its immigration policy around ethnicity. (On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced a new initiative to crack down on Somali migrants in Minnesota.)
“In the United Kingdom, mass immigration from incompatible cultures is creating a civilizational crisis. Rather than replicate the policies of our sister country, we should accept reality and adopt a more thoughtful policy, which recognizes cultural norms as a reasonable measure of capacity to assimilate and to contribute,” he writes.
Rufo is not, by the wild standards of the second Trump term, an extremist. He has repeatedly called on the right to reject Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi streamer popular with young conservatives.
Yet this merely shows how much the contours of the debate have shifted. Ideas about immigration that were once scandalous, even in the first Trump term, are now openly proclaimed without anyone being especially scandalized or surprised.
You’d think, given the alt-right’s evident influence on the current White House, its leaders would be taking a public victory lap. Yet the movement has all but dissolved as an independent entity — battered by lawsuits emanating from the 2017 Charlottesville rally violence and outflanked on the edgelord right by even more radical figures. There is no better example of the alt-right’s formal dissolution than Richard Spencer’s recent effort to reinvent himself as a Trump-critical quasi-lib.
The fact that no one really calls themselves “alt-right” anymore reflects not only this organizational failure but, ironically, also its ideological success. While individuals like Spencer are now non-factors, others (like Acting Assistant Secretary of State Darren Beattie) are now quite literally in the halls of power. The alt-right label doesn’t make sense anymore because there is no longer any need to describe these views as an “alternative” to the mainstream right. Many are now the Republican Party’s stated positions.
This alt-right triumph reflects deliberate efforts by key actors — like Tucker Carlson — to seed these ideas in the mainstream right. It also reflects Trump’s repeated efforts to drive more moderate voices out of the party, to sideline the “adults in the room” who reined in him and Miller during the first term. And it also reflects the hubristic sense of total cultural victory on the right after the 2024 election: a belief that there had been a “vibe shift” in which normal Americans had suddenly become receptive to a whole range of extreme right political views, most notably on immigration.
For all these reasons, we are living in a world where ideas that were toxically controversial less than a decade ago are now officially proclaimed from the highest offices in the country.
2025-12-02 21:00:00
周一，Vox宣布启动一项为期多年的重要编辑项目，探讨美国如何恢复其建设能力，包括新能源解决方案、升级交通系统以及大幅增加住房供应。该项目源于一个明确的诊断：美国迫切需要快速建设并实现增长。通过具有雄心且以解决方案为导向的新闻报道，Vox将审视影响美国建设21世纪所需基础设施和系统的政策、政治和实际挑战。报道将深入探讨可能推动进展的创新理念，例如扩大电力供应、现代化电网、加快交通项目进展以及增加住房供应以应对长期短缺。
Vox获得了Arnold Ventures基金会的资助以支持该项目，但Vox对项目中所有内容拥有完全的编辑控制权。Vox执行编辑Elbert Ventura表示：“Vox的解释性与解决方案导向的新闻报道在过去十年中引领了许多关键的政策讨论。这笔慷慨的资助将使我们深入探讨政策中最具紧迫性的问题，挖掘被忽视的想法，并在我们政治发展的重要时刻为全国对话提供信息。”
该项目包括两个主要的编辑专题、播客系列、现场活动以及即将推出的新闻通讯产品。报道和分析将由Vox的新闻团队完成，并结合来自多样化的自由撰稿人的贡献。该项目旨在为立法者、政府官员、政策制定者、学者、记者及其他参与美国建设能力讨论的人士提供资源，同时也希望将具有前瞻性的政策思路和较少被探讨的想法带给更广泛的公众。
第一个编辑专题《增长的必要性》今天已上线，未来一个月还将陆续发布更多文章。该系列将探讨为何美国偏离了增长导向的思维模式，以及为何重新回归增长——在能源解决方案、生产率、技术以及最终经济方面——是摆脱零和政治、使国家摆脱瘫痪的唯一出路。
第二个专题《他们是如何建成的》将在2026年推出。该系列将通过案例研究，分析美国可以从哪些国家学习到更快速、更清洁、更经济的基础设施建设经验，并探讨如何在国内应用这些经验。
此外，该项目还将包括《今日解释》播客的迷你系列、《灰色地带》上的访谈系列、2026年推出的专注于基础设施和建设政策的新新闻通讯，以及2026和2027年期间举办的沙龙式现场活动，探讨相关议题。
On Monday, Vox announced the launch of a major, multi-year editorial project exploring what it will take for the United States to restore its capacity to build — from new energy solutions, to upgrading transportation systems, to dramatically expanding the nation’s housing supply.
The project stems from a clear diagnosis: America urgently needs to build — fast — and it needs to grow. Through ambitious, solutions-focused journalism, Vox will examine the policy, political, and practical challenges that shape the country’s ability to construct the infrastructure and systems required for the 21st century. Coverage will delve into ideas and innovations that could unlock progress, including expanding electricity supply and modernizing the grid, improving and accelerating transportation projects, and growing housing availability to combat a decades-long shortage.
Vox received a grant from Arnold Ventures to support this project, though Vox retains full editorial control over all content produced as part of the project.
“Vox’s explanatory and solutions-focused journalism has been at the forefront of some of the most consequential policy discussions of the last decade,” said executive editor Elbert Ventura. “This generous grant from Arnold Ventures will allow us to dig into some of the most pressing questions in policy, surface undercovered ideas, and inform the national conversation in this crucial moment in our politics.”
The initiative spans two major editorial packages, podcast series, live events, and a forthcoming newsletter product. Reporting and analysis will come from Vox’s newsroom, as well as contributions from a diverse roster of freelance writers. The project aims to serve as a resource for lawmakers, government officials, policy thinkers, scholars, journalists, and others shaping the national conversation around America’s capacity to build. But it also seeks to bring smart policy thinking and under-examined ideas to the wider public.
The first editorial package, The Case for Growth, is live today, with additional stories rolling out over the next month. This series will explore why the US turned away from a growth-oriented mindset and why doubling back down on growth — in energy solutions; in productivity; in technology; and ultimately, in the economy — is the only way out of a zero-sum politics that has paralyzed the country.
The second package, How They Built It, will debut in 2026. This case-study series will examine what the United States can learn from countries that have successfully built infrastructure faster, cleaner, and more affordably — and what it would take to apply those lessons at home.
The project will also include a Today, Explained podcast miniseries; an interview series on The Gray Area; a new newsletter focused on infrastructure and building policy launching in 2026; and a series of salon-style live events exploring these topics, taking place in 2026 and 2027.
2025-12-02 20:15:00
每次获得麦克肯齐·斯科特的资助时，受助者总会流露出同样的羞涩、敬畏和喜悦。他们的眼睛会发光，脸颊泛红，偶尔还会轻声笑一下。迈克尔·洛马克（United Negro College Fund，简称UNCF的负责人）说：“从你接到她团队电话的那一刻起，这种感觉就让人感到难以置信。”斯科特在2019年与亚马逊创始人杰夫·贝索斯离婚后迅速成为亿万富翁，她的赠款通常伴随着一封感谢信，接着是简短的电话沟通，最后才揭晓一笔数额巨大的慷慨赠款，这种赠款似乎过于随意，难以置信。
令人惊讶的是，斯科特不仅是一位小说家，她与已故著名作家托尼·莫里森之间的关系也颇具传奇色彩。一旦你开始将斯科特视为莫里森的弟子，而不是贝索斯的前妻，这种印象就难以抹去。作为罕见的从写作转为亿万富翁的人，斯科特的赠款方式更像艺术家，而非那些通常在她这一阶层中出现的科技企业家或传统富豪。洛马克在与Yield Giving（斯科特的慈善机构）通话后曾想：“也许这并不是真的，也许这是幻觉。”但最终他还是在邮件中找到了确认的赠款信息，那是一笔7亿美元的赠款。
自2020年以来，斯科特已向超过2400家非营利组织捐赠了超过190亿美元，这些组织致力于种族正义、教育和经济流动性等事业。仅在2023年，她就向12所历史悠久的黑人大学捐赠了超过7亿美元，这些学校通常很少获得其他亿万富翁的资助。在慈善捐赠领域，这无疑属于顶级水平。但斯科特的独特之处不仅在于捐赠的规模，更在于她的策略。
最近，斯科特经常思考鸟类，尤其是星群，它们以平等的方式飞行，形状不断变化，却不知最终会落在何处。她希望我们也能像星群一样，以一种流动的方式进行捐赠。如果大多数亿万富翁慈善家显得专制，规定资金的使用方式，那么斯科特则更倾向于把自己看作一群相互连接的鸟，致力于摆脱“由需要变革的系统所赋予的财富”。
斯科特认为，我们对慈善的过度思考是不必要的。如果人们能够彼此信任，直接将钱交给需要的人，就能更快地帮助更多人。她曾写道：“如果我们可以信任彼此，直接把钱交出去，而不必担心是否有效，那么我们就能更快地帮助更多人。”她还提到，由于亿万富翁们常常囤积财富，加上繁琐的捐赠流程，许多因饥饿或可预防的健康问题而死亡的人本可以得到帮助。
斯科特的慈善方式被称为“基于氛围的慈善”，即让捐赠者放下对捐赠效果的过度担忧，直接给予支持。她认为，这种信任驱动的慈善方式能够帮助非营利组织摆脱繁琐的报告和审计流程，专注于自己的使命。例如，Gaby Pacheco在曼哈顿一家音乐商店演奏小提琴时，突然接到斯科特的电话，得知她将获得一笔1000万美元的捐赠，用于支持无证移民学生的奖学金。她说：“这就像多年努力后突然发现自己怀孕，那种喜悦无法抑制。”
斯科特的捐赠方式也引发了争议。一些批评者认为，突然获得大量资金可能会让一些非营利组织难以管理。例如，费城的Benefits Data Trust在获得斯科特2000万美元捐赠后仅两年就关闭了运营。一位前员工表示：“这些大额捐赠其实都有有效期。”尽管如此，大多数受助组织还是能够有效利用这笔资金。
对于普通人来说，斯科特的慈善方式提供了启示。她鼓励人们不要过度纠结于捐赠的细节，而是要相信那些真正需要帮助的组织。洛马克认为，斯科特的捐赠方式让人重新感受到人性的冲动，即单纯地帮助他人。这种冲动在当今社会尤为重要，因为美国三分之一的非营利组织在特朗普政府时期失去了联邦资助，许多组织不得不削减服务并裁员。
斯科特的捐赠方式虽然不完全依赖数据，但她强调了信任和直接支持的重要性。她建议人们在捐赠时，首先认识到世界上有很多值得支持的组织，然后根据自己的感受和信任选择捐赠对象。即使没有自己的团队，也可以参考她的网站，了解她捐赠的慈善机构。最重要的是，如果条件允许，要慷慨地给予，因为即使是相对较小的捐赠，对某些本地非营利组织来说也可能具有重大意义。
Every time a MacKenzie Scott grantee talks about receiving one of her multimillion-dollar gifts, there is always a hint of the same bashfulness, the same reverence, and the same glee.
Their eyes light up. They blush a little. There’s a giggle here and there.
“It’s disarming,” said Michael Lomax, head of the United Negro College Fund, or UNCF, from the moment you get the call from her team. It starts with a message of gratitude from Scott, who became a multi-billionaire overnight after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019. Then, the call pivots to a few logistics, and finally, the reveal of a large, generous gift that seems far too spontaneous to be true.
I knew that MacKenzie Scott was a novelist, but I had no idea how far her lore went with her former mentor, the famed author Toni Morrison.
Once you begin to see Scott as Morrison’s mentee — rather than as a certain Amazon founder’s ex-wife — you can’t unsee it. As the rare writer-turned-billionaire, she gives more like an artist would, one source told me, than like the tech founders or old money heirs more commonly found in her class.
“Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe this is a hallucination,” Lomax thought when he hung up the phone with Yield Giving, Scott’s philanthropic arm a few months back.
But sure enough, when he finally found the follow-up email that, for days, got lost in cyber-purgatory, there it was. A gift from Scott, grantees say, is like getting a warm, fuzzy hug — only to find that when you pull away, someone’s slipped $100 in your pocket.
Or, in Lomax’s case, $70 million.
Since 2020, Scott has given away over $19 billion to more than 2,400 nonprofits that support causes like racial justice, education, and economic mobility. This year alone, she has donated more than $700 million to over a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, institutions that rarely receive major funding from other billionaire philanthropists and foundations.
As philanthropic grants go, this is major league. But what makes Scott unique in an age of impact reports and optimized metrics is not just the size of her gifts; it’s her strategy.
Lately, MacKenzie Scott has been thinking a lot about birds. In her most recent essay, she asks readers to consider starlings, who fly in egalitarian tandem, taking shape as they may, unsure exactly where they will land.
Scott wants us to be more like starlings: to give with the flow. If most billionaire philanthropists come across as paternalistic, dictating where their donations should go and how they should be used, then Scott prefers to humble herself as one in a flock of interconnected birds, committed to ridding herself of “a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” as she wrote in 2021.
Scott, it seems, believes that we are all fundamentally overthinking charity. If we could trust in one another enough to just hand over the damn money already, we could help a lot more people a lot more quickly. We will never know how many millions may have died from hunger or highly preventable health conditions, because solutions were slowed down by months, if not years, of billionaire wealth hoarding and bureaucratic red tape around giving.
“What if acts of service that we can feel but can’t always measure expand our capacity for connection and trust?” Scott wrote last month.
To be clear, Scott does not actually hand out multimillion-dollar donations on a whim. At Bridgespan, she’s got a whole nonprofit vetting team, which offers consulting services for philanthropists and nonprofits hoping to maximize their impact, on call. But it’s notable that she appears to want people to think she does. She constantly reminds us to romanticize the uncertainty that comes with handing out large sums of cash to the people and places you believe in, no strings attached.
“This is a very loving kind of giving,” said Lomax, one that reflects “the love we have for other human beings.”
And maybe, just maybe, this very atypical billionaire can teach us all something about how to be a bit more fearless in the way we give and in using our gut as our guide without expecting anything in return.
Scott’s blasé, hands-off approach to philanthropy has naturally made her a kind of fairy godmother in the collective nonprofit psyche. The notoriously private Scott, who has not given an interview to the press since she was promoting her second novel in 2013, could not be reached for comment.
In the early years, some grantees didn’t even know who she was before they got the congratulatory phone call: “MacKenzie Scott thanks you for your work. Here’s $10 million. Do with it what you will.”
Just about everyone knows MacKenzie Scott’s name now.
“What holds a lot of major donors back is this fear of making a mistake or being inefficient, or giving away money and not having an impact,” said Priya Shanker, head of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. The rich are often too anxiously attached to their cash to give as generously as they probably should.
But Scott has shown “that there are enough worthy causes and enough worthy institutions that can put this money to good use” without overthinking it too much, Shanker said. “You just have to do it,” she added.
Scott often connects her giving to her own early experiences being on the receiving end of generosity. She grew up wealthy, attending a fancy prep school before her father’s business took a turn for the worse as a teen. The generosity of friends and strangers — the dentist who gave her free care or the classmate who lent her $1,000 for tuition — helped shepherd her through Princeton, where she found a lifelong mentor in the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.
It was Morrison whose recommendation helped Scott clinch her the job as an associate at a hedge fund after graduation in 1992. She got the gig to bankroll her real vocation: her writing career.
But instead, she fell in love with the senior executive next door. Scott and Bezos wed six months later, and when he decided to move to the West Coast in 1994 and open an online bookstore, she went with him. Though she was a key contributor early on, as the bookstore ballooned into an e-commerce giant, Scott receded away from her corporate role and into her writing and motherhood, publishing two novels — one of which Morrison praised as a “rarity” that “breaks and swells the heart” — and raising four children.
By the time she and Bezos split in 2019, Amazon was valued at over $900 billion, and her 4 percent stake in the company — worth almost $36 billion at the time of their settlement — instantly made her one of the wealthiest women in the world.
One month later, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, which commits signatories to give away half their wealth in their lifetime or in their will. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book,” she quoted the author Annie Dillard in a letter vowing to give away most of her wealth. She then turned the advice on her philanthropy: “It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”
The crazy thing is, she’s actually doing it. Almost 13 percent of her fellow billionaires have signed the Giving Pledge. But, so far, almost none of them have given at a comparable rate despite seeing their fortunes swell over the past decade.
MacKenzie Scott’s ex-husband, her passenger prince on their road trip from New York to the Bellevue garage where Amazon was born, has not signed the Giving Pledge at all. He is much wealthier than she is, but he gives away far less each year. And when he does give, he gives like the rest of the billionaires do — with a whole lot of strings attached.
To understand what makes Scott special, you need to understand how other billionaires give.
If a nonprofit wants money out of Bill Gates, for example, they typically need to go through his foundation and apply for a grant, outlining a specific project proposal and budget. Then, they wait. If they’re chosen, more reporting requirements kick in. Getting your hands on even a small gift is often a total slog, an onerous months-long process involving tons of paperwork.
There are real benefits to this more cautious approach, like ensuring that the money gets where it’s intended to go and maximizes impact once it’s there. The Gates Foundation has used this method to dramatically expand access to vaccines and health care in poor countries, contributing to major reductions in child mortality and infectious diseases.
But, there are also some unintended drawbacks. Smaller nonprofits often struggle to make it through the slog at all, and even well-resourced groups say that these grant bureaucracies eat up an ungodly amount of staff time.
But, on the surface at least, Scott gives more like, dare I say, a normal person. She sees it. She likes it. She donates. It’s one-click philanthropy.
“Not only are nonprofits chronically underfunded, they are also chronically diverted from their work by fundraising, and by burdensome reporting requirements,” she wrote in 2020, adding that, because her advisory team’s preliminary “research is data-driven and rigorous, our giving process can be human and soft.”
Earlier this year, Gaby Pacheco was playing viola in a music shop in Manhattan when she got the Scott call. Her organization, TheDream.us, which offers scholarships to undocumented students, will use their gift to strengthen their work at a time when other donors have been pulling back.
It was like finding out you’re pregnant after trying for years, and “you want to run to somebody to enjoy that moment,” said Pacheco. “It is just a joy that you cannot contain for yourself.”
For hours, Pacheco wrote and rewrote her email telling students and alumni about the gift, trying to perfect it into an embrace amid “all the terrible things in the world right now, the fear, the anxiety, all the madness around immigration,” she said.
“I wanted them to know that that’s not how everyone feels,” said Pacheco. “That somebody’s looking out for them and seeing that they’re valuable, they’re worthy, they belong.”
What Pacheco experienced was trust-based philanthropy, an approach that aims to flip the normal top-down script of giving on its head by asking donors to cede some of the power they wield over grantees. It’s an approach that Scott has embraced wholeheartedly.
“It’s about trying to seat ourselves in the experience of the people who are feeling the most challenged by the system,” said Pia Infante, who helped coin the phrase over a decade ago and co-leads the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project.
In practice, that means removing burdensome requirements like lengthy financial audits and strict restrictions on where grant money can be used. It also means respecting the expertise of those closest to the issues they’re trying to address, like a person who has experienced hunger who now leads a food bank.
The pressure to impress donors sometimes warps into a race to become the most performative charity possible, which doesn’t always make them the most effective one, says Infante. Smaller charities, including highly impactful ones, frequently don’t have the time or expertise to compete for funds.
Pacheco and her staff often spend half of their time filling out impact reports for donors. Sometimes, they’ll spend months applying for a grant that never pans out.
“I believe in measurements and evaluation,” she said, but “when you are chasing dollars, you start losing focus on your mission, because you have to conform yourself to whatever that foundation cares about” instead of what’s best for your community.
This is not, by any means, an admonishment of data-driven philanthropy. As we often write about here at Future Perfect, meticulously measuring charity has done a lot of good in the world. It is a great way to seed super effective interventions like Taimaka’s fight against child malnutrition and anti-malarial, insecticide-treated nets.
In fact, some of Scott’s own grantees have reams of data to back up their work. The Malaria Consortium, named one of GiveWell’s most impactful charities last year, received $10 million from Scott in 2023. She’s donated $20 million to Evidence Action, which researches low-cost health interventions, and $4 million to Food4Education, a pioneer in cost-effective school meals.
And GiveDirectly, a darling of the effective altruism movement for its use of no-strings-attached cash transfers to fight poverty, has gotten well over $120 million from Scott since 2020.
That’s not surprising, really, given that Scott, too, prefers to give directly to her grantees, without the pomp and circumstance that most billionaires require.
“We assume that because someone’s acquired wealth or power, that they have a lot of knowledge about many things,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, vice president of research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy. “What this kind of giving does is it privileges the knowledge of people living in communities.”
In a three-year survey of over 800 of Scott’s grantees, Smith Arrillaga found, as you’d expect, that almost every organization was better off financially a few years after receiving their gift and their self-reported impact grew significantly.
Still, while it might seem hard to imagine, there can be drawbacks to being suddenly showered with cash. Scott’s skeptics point out that some charities may not be equipped to deftly manage a huge infusion of cash. And while most have in fact been able to absorb their gift strategically, there are a handful of exceptions.
Last year, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Benefits Data Trust suddenly shuttered operations just two years after receiving a $20 million grant from Scott. “It was not a secret that these multimillion-dollar grants had expiration dates,” one former staff member told me for a piece I wrote for The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
But leaders squandered the gift, investing heavily in a couple of costly AI chatbots to nowhere and straying so far from their original mission that, prior to the closure, one senior philanthropy manager resigned after they could no longer “account for where the money was going.”
“I don’t think you get responsible giving without some element of due diligence,” said Joanne Florino, a fellow at Philanthropy Roundtable, who’s been critical of trust-based philanthropy for rhetoric that she sometimes characterizes as “really extreme” for telling donors “don’t ask any questions; just give us the money and then go away.”
But, most experts say this misses what donors like Scott actually do with their cash. She’s not writing blank checks to random organizations. She’s just doing her homework differently and lightening the load for nonprofits on the other end.
And though there is still plenty of research on the backend, her process has clearly succeeded at moving a lot of money at a much faster rate than most of her peers. It comes at a moment of intense need, and with an urgency that few other donors of her class seem to grasp.
“There is this misconception that trust-based philanthropy is not strategic,” said Shanker, the head of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. “What trust based means is that it does away with these additional layers of administrative and bureaucratic burden that foundations and donors were putting on nonprofits,” she said, but “you can still be strategic.”
So, what does this mean for the rest of us who don’t have billions to give away?
Lomax, the head of UNCF, has never met MacKenzie Scott. He’d love to one day, if only to say thank you. But he did know her mentor, Toni Morrison, and he thinks that connection matters.
Just as reading a novel asks you to empathize with “someone on the outside, someone who has been marginalized,” Lomax sees Scott’s form of giving as one which “calls upon the giver to enter the life of the person they’re touching” and to connect to their own personal experience.
“We’ve been going through this period of impact philanthropy, where I’ve got to run the numbers before I decide what I give,” said Lomax, a former literature professor who’s had to learn to crunch numbers on the job.
“I’m not questioning it. I’ve learned to live in that world,” he said. But, at the same time, with Scott’s gifts, “it’s so beautiful to see a return to a very human impulse to just help somebody,” he added.
And nurturing that human impulse, he says, has rarely been this important.
A full one-third of US nonprofits have lost funding from the federal government under the Trump administration, and many have had to cut services and lay off staff. Organizations working abroad have, in some cases, faced even steeper cuts.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by it all. As Infante put it, “When everything’s on fire, how do I know where to point my hose?”
What would MacKenzie Scott do? Well, she would probably call up her vetting team. But, if you don’t have one of your own, you can mooch off of their work by perusing her website, where she lists every charity she’s donated to since 2020.
But, better yet, do the research yourself. The key here is to start off by recognizing that there is a surplus of organizations doing good for the world that are deserving of your generosity. Let yourself be moved by the charities and causes that resonate with you the most, whose leadership you trust, and whose work you think you can connect to for the long haul.
Do some vetting, of course, but don’t get so dragged down by that process that you spend more time on amateur sleuthing for the “best possible charity” than you do on actually giving back.
And, finally, if you can afford it, give big. One of Scott’s trademarks is giving large gifts that represent a huge swath of a grantee’s budget. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars for a group like UNCF.
But, most local nonprofits are actually extremely tiny, with budgets of under $500,000. For them, even a relatively small donation may be just as transformative as Scott’s blockbuster gifts.
Many of us could probably afford to spread our generosity further than we do now. Instead of only impulse buying sweater vests on Depop and tiny carrot scissors to stick on the fridge, I am actively trying to impulse hit that donation button more often this winter.
Not only for the causes that I care about, but for myself. Data-driven or not, charity was never meant to be purely transactional.
2025-12-02 20:00:00
捐款不仅仅是帮助他人的唯一方式，你也可以献血。虽然大约62%的美国人有资格献血，但每年只有3%的人实际献血。然而，美国每几秒钟就有人需要输血。虽然平均一次红细胞输血大约需要三单位血液，但一名车祸伤者可能需要多达100单位的血液。
这篇故事最初发表于《Today, Explained》通讯。通过每日简明解释和当天最引人注目的新闻故事，了解世界。点击此处订阅。
然而，随着气温下降和节日季的临近，献血人数会大幅减少。纽约血液中心企业（NYBCe）是一家社区血液中心，尽管名字如此，它服务着超过17个州和多达7500万人口。该中心通常在年底几周内看到献血量下降近50%。美国血液中心政府事务副总裁迪恩·卡尔穆斯（Diane Calmus）告诉我：“我们知道每个人的时间都很紧张，但人们仍然会生孩子，可能会出现大出血；车祸仍然会发生；癌症患者仍然需要治疗。” 所有这些情况都需要持续的血液供应。
当你想到献血时，可能首先想到的是全血。全血是最灵活的献血类型，对捐献者来说时间投入最少。血液由四个部分组成：血浆、白细胞、红细胞和血小板。你可以单独捐献这些成分，但大多数情况下捐献的是全血，直接从静脉中采集。全血可以迅速输给失血的病人，也可以被分离成红细胞、血浆和血小板，帮助最多三个人。
虽然有48种公认的血型，但对输血而言，最重要的几种你可能已经很熟悉：A+、A-、B+、B-、AB+、AB-、O+、O-。几乎任何人都可能拥有O+血型，除了欧洲和亚洲的一些国家。O+是全球最常见的血型。美国约有38%的人拥有O+血型，包括我自己。非裔美国人和拉丁裔美国人比白人和亚裔美国人更可能拥有O+血型。
血型是遗传的，有些人拥有极其罕见的血型。拥有这些罕见血型的人只能接受同型血液，这在捐献者稀缺的情况下会带来问题，因为如果接受不兼容的血液，可能会导致严重的医疗并发症，甚至死亡。
让人们献血并不容易。当你很忙时，去献血点可能很困难。因此，让志愿者献血更加方便至关重要。我自己大部分时间都是通过学校或工作场所的献血活动进行献血的。即使如此，献血也需要一定的时间。在登记之后，捐献者会接受健康检查。你还会被问及健康状况和旅行史，如果最近去过有疟疾等血液传播疾病高发地区，可能会被暂时拒绝捐献。大多数拒绝是暂时的，但很多人在被拒绝后就不会再回来。
有些人害怕针头，但献血无法避免针头（尽管我可以证明，这个过程其实并不像想象中那样疼，针头是安全的、一次性使用的，而且并不大，也很干净）。血液中心一直在寻找新的捐献者，虽然在美国他们不会为输血支付报酬，但这并不意味着没有礼物激励。也许你已经收到过一些信息，要求你在某个日期前献血以获得电子礼品卡、一件衣服或赢取假期套餐的机会。
人们给出各种不献血的理由，很多是基于对献血过程的误解。但布里格姆妇女医院的创伤外科医生兼Blood D. E. S. E. R. T联盟主席纳库尔·雷卡（Nakul Raykar）表示：“人们不献血的首要原因是他们没有被邀请。” 所以，这是一次邀请。
想了解更多关于献血未来的知识？点击此处查看完整文章：
Donating money isn’t the only way you can help people. You can also give your blood.
Although approximately 62 percent of Americans are eligible to donate blood, only 3 percent do so each year. But someone needs blood every few seconds in the US. While the average red blood cell transfusion is about three units, a single car accident victim can need up to 100 units of blood.
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However, as temperatures dip and the holiday season approaches, blood donations drop off dramatically. New York Blood Center Enterprises (NYBCe) — a community-based blood center which, despite the name, serves over 17 states and upward of 75 million people — regularly sees a nearly 50 percent drop in donations in the last few weeks of the year.
“We know everybody’s schedules get really busy,” Diane Calmus, the vice president of government affairs at America’s Blood Centers, told me. But people “continue to have babies and can hemorrhage. Car accidents continue to happen. Cancer patients continue to need treatment.” All of these situations require a continuous blood supply.
When you picture a blood donation, you’re probably thinking of whole blood. It’s the most flexible donation type and requires the least time commitment.
Blood is made up of four parts — plasma, white and red blood cells, and your platelets. You can donate these individually, but most donations are of whole blood, which comes directly from your veins. It can be transfused as-is to a single person rapidly losing blood, or separated out into red blood cells, plasma, and platelets to help up to three people.
While there are 48 recognized blood groups, the most important for transfusion are the ones you’re probably already familiar with: A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+, O-. There’s a very good chance that anyone reading this is likely O+. Outside of some countries in Europe and Asia, it’s the most common blood type in the world. About 38 percent of Americans, myself included, have O+ blood. Black and Latino Americans are more likely to be O+ than white and Asian Americans.
Your blood type is genetic, and some people have extremely rare blood types. People with these rare blood types can only receive blood from others with the same type, which is a problem because there are so few donors, and you can suffer severe medical complications and even die from receiving incompatible blood.
Getting people to donate isn’t easy. It’s hard when you’re busy to go out of your way to a donation site. And so making donation more convenient for volunteer donors is crucial. I, for one, have mostly donated through school- or workplace-based drives.
Even then, giving your blood takes time. After registration, donors undergo a health screening. You’ll also be asked questions about your health and travel history, and you may be deferred if you’ve recently traveled to a place where bloodborne infections like malaria are common. Most deferrals are not permanent, but many people do not return after being turned away.
Some people are afraid of needles, and there’s no way to get around that for a blood draw (although I can attest that it doesn’t really feel like more than a brief pinch, and the needles are safe, single-use, not that big, and clean).
Blood centers always seek new donors, and while they don’t pay people for blood used for transfusions in the US, that doesn’t mean there are no gift incentives. Maybe you’ve gotten messages asking you to donate blood before a certain date to receive an e-gift card, clothing item, or chance to win a vacation package.
People give all sorts of reasons why they don’t donate, often based on misconceptions about the process, but “the number one reason people don’t donate is because they weren’t asked,” said Nakul Raykar, a trauma surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the chair of the Blood D.E.S.E.R.T Coalition.
So consider this an ask.
Want to know more about the future of blood donation? Check out the full version of this piece here:
2025-12-02 19:30:00
“捐赠星期二”（Giving Tuesday）是感恩节之后的第一个星期二，也是全球公认的慈善捐赠日。今年，它落在12月2日。黑五（Black Friday）作为感恩节后的第一天，一直是假日购物季的开端，也是年度最大的购物日之一。营销专家注意到黑五的受欢迎程度，随后推出了网络购物促销日“网络星期一”（Cyber Monday），以及鼓励支持小型企业的“小型企业星期六”（Small Business Saturday），使得感恩节之后的购物促销活动变得非常火爆。一些人注意到，这种过度消费的氛围可能会让很多人想要远离购物，转而做一些更有意义的事情。2012年，纽约的92nd Street Y和联合国基金会共同发起了“捐赠星期二”，希望在连续几天的购物热潮之后，人们能重新关注慈善事业。斯坦福大学政治学与哲学教授、研究慈善事业的罗布·里希（Rob Reich）告诉我：“我记得92nd Street Y的亨利·蒂姆斯（Henry Timms）说，‘一周七天都会被占用，我们应该抓住星期二’。”他们确实成功了。#GivingTuesday几乎立刻就火遍全球，如今13年过去，它依然势头不减。在最初推出时，#GivingTuesday只是一个想法、一些宣传、一个社交媒体标签，以及一套供任何希望参与的组织使用的品牌建议和资源。92nd Street Y开发了这个标签、营销建议和相关资源，并将其开放给所有非营利组织使用。里希告诉我：“我们有意识地没有申请知识产权，网站上有标志，但并未受版权保护。任何人都可以使用这个标签，做任何他们想做的事情。每个人都可以用自己的内容来参与，希望它能传播开来。”自2012年启动以来，美国各地的非营利组织，以及后来全球各地的组织，都举办了各种筹款活动和事件，使用与该运动相关的品牌和标签。（2019年，“捐赠星期二”正式从92nd Street Y独立出来，成为一家独立组织。）在第一年，据估计，通过在线“捐赠星期二”活动，慈善机构筹集了约1亿美元。第二年，这一数字增长到2.8亿美元，此后势头一直不减。2022年，捐赠额创下历史新高，而2023年则保持平稳。据“捐赠星期二”报告，2024年美国人在该日的捐赠总额达到36亿美元，约有3400万人参与。尽管这些捐赠只占美国总慈善捐赠额的一小部分（2024年美国人向慈善机构捐赠了5925亿美元），但它们仍然具有重要意义。实际上，拯救一条生命或做同等好事的成本可能只有几千美元。此外，“捐赠星期二”还具有另一层意义：它不仅仅是一个筹款日，更是一个人们讨论和思考如何回馈社会的日子。据“捐赠星期二”首席执行官阿莎·库兰（Asha Curran）所说：“捐赠钱是‘捐赠星期二’团队记录的最常见的行为，但仅捐钱是最不常见的行为。”大多数人通过多种方式参与让世界变得更美好：捐款、志愿服务、分享优秀组织的信息，以及直接参与重要工作。在我们这个年支出超过4000亿美元的经济领域，有成千上万的组织在从事不同的项目，关于如何更好地为世界做贡献的讨论显然还不够充分。也许，我们更需要多谈一谈如何做出改善世界的选择。更新：2025年12月2日早上6:30，本文最初于2020年发表，此后已根据2025年情况进行更新。
Giving Tuesday — the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving and the internationally recognized day to contribute to charity — is upon us. This year, it falls on December 2.
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has always been the kickoff event of the holiday shopping season and one of the biggest shopping days of the year. Marketing experts recognized how popular it was and followed it up with Cyber Monday, a second day of mega-sales focused on online shopping, and then Small Business Saturday — making the period after Thanksgiving famous for its blitz of deals.
Some people noticed that would likely leave a lot of people looking to step away from shopping and do something a little more meaningful.
In 2012, the 92nd Street Y in New York and the United Nations Foundation introduced Giving Tuesday with the hope that after several days of big sales and rampant consumption, there’d be interest in giving back.
“I remember [92nd Street Y director] Henry Timms saying, ‘All the days of the week are going to be taken, we should grab Tuesday,’” Rob Reich, a professor of political science and philosophy at Stanford who studies philanthropy and who participated in the development of Giving Tuesday, told me.
They were right. #GivingTuesday went viral almost immediately, and now 13 years later, it’s stronger than ever.
At launch, #GivingTuesday was just an idea, some publicity, a social media hashtag, and a package of advice and branding for organizations anywhere that wanted to participate. The 92nd Street Y developed the hashtag, marketing advice, and resources, and released them all for any nonprofit to use.
“It was a deliberate choice not to have intellectual property,” Reich told me. “We had a website with a logo but it was not copyrighted. You could use the hashtag, you could do whatever you wanted with it. Everyone could put their own content into it, with the hope it could spread.”
Since Giving Tuesday’s launch in 2012, nonprofits all over the US — and, eventually, all over the world — have hosted fundraisers and events, using the branding and hashtag associated with the movement. (Giving Tuesday formally broke off from the 92nd Street Y in 2019 to become an independent organization.)
In its first year, it’s estimated that about $10 million was donated to charity through online Giving Tuesday fundraisers. The following year, it was $28 million — and the momentum hasn’t really slowed.
Donations hit a record high in 2022 but stayed flat in 2023: Giving Tuesday reported that total giving in the US reached $3.1 billion and some 34 million people participated.
The rapid growth in donors and awareness underscores the fact that Giving Tuesday has become a phenomenon in its own right — an outlet for a backlash against the consumerism of the holiday shopping season.
Shoppers eagerly participate in the sales events of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The holiday season is giving season. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income, to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to explaining what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. You can find all of our giving guide stories here.
But… well, many people also hate the post-Thanksgiving shopping crush, and question what it says about us as a society. Vox has covered its grueling effects on the retail workers who make it happen. The website Black Friday Death Count documents instances of violence in retail stores during Black Friday sales.
So the idea of a day, after the sales, to step away from buying and focus on giving struck a chord. (Besides, some researchers have posited a link between generosity and gratitude, which makes after Thanksgiving a good time to get people to think about giving.)
Giving Tuesday has been picking up steam since its first year. In 2013, its second year, it received coverage in Charity Navigator and the Chronicle of Philanthropy and a headline donation from Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz to the top global poverty charity GiveDirectly. It also went international.
“We’ve grown to 80 countries, [and] recently welcomed South Sudan and Peru and Nepal and Greece,” Giving Tuesday CEO Asha Curran told me. “Giving Tuesday exists in countries where Black Friday and Cyber Monday don’t exist, and that reminds us that there’s this value that unites us.”
All of this activity is still a relatively small share of total charitable giving. In 2024, Americans gave $592.5 billion to charity.
Compared to that, the $3.6 billion that people in the US contributed in 2024 on Giving Tuesday is just a drop in the bucket. Even if Giving Tuesday continues its exceptionally fast growth for another decade, it wouldn’t be the main source of funding for most charities.
That’s probably a good thing. The best thing for charities is to get regular donations, ideally monthly recurring ones. While a day like Giving Tuesday can be a great occasion to put giving in the news and start a conversation about our ability to do good in the world, it wouldn’t be good for it to become a make-or-break fundraising event for nonprofits.
But the fact that Giving Tuesday contributions are still a small share of all charitable donations doesn’t mean they don’t matter. It doesn’t take millions of dollars to save a life — it is estimated you can save a life, or do a comparable amount of good, for only a few thousand.
And there’s another way Giving Tuesday matters: It’s “not just a fundraising day,” Curran said. It’s a day when people talk and think about giving back.
“Donating money is the most common behavior” that the Giving Tuesday team documents, “but only donating money is the least common behavior,” Rosenbaum told me. Most people participate in making the world a better place in multiple ways: through donations, through volunteering, through sharing information about great organizations, and through directly doing important work.
For a sector of our economy where we spent over $400 billion last year, with tens of thousands of organizations working on different projects, the question of how to do good in the world is not discussed enough. It’s probably a good thing for us to talk a little more about how we make the decisions that improve our world.
Giving Tuesday’s organizers won’t tell people where to give or volunteer. Making the most of the occasion, though, requires thoughtfulness about the impact of your contributions, whatever form they take. It’s a great occasion to dive into the conversation about how to do good in the world. One of the reasons we need a day focused on giving is that most people care deeply about their communities, their causes, and the world — but don’t necessarily know how to get the most results with their money, time, or career.
My colleague Dylan Matthews has written about some strategies to make your money go further — from checking with charity evaluators to targeting the poorest people to funding basic research and the development of new solutions to our problems. Effective altruist groups have developed resources for ensuring that the causes and charities they’re excited about can make the most out of the day, including donation matching events.
Ultimately, making the world a better place requires generosity and a dedication to measuring impact, talking about what we want to achieve, and gaining a better understanding of the problems we’re trying to solve.
Update, December 2, 2025, 6:30 am: This story was originally published in 2020 and has been updated throughout for 2025.