2026-03-31 19:00:00
在缺乏持久系统性解决方案的情况下，美国旅客只能做最典型的美国式事情：靠自己解决问题。我计划在一周后带一岁的孩子乘坐三小时的航班，这在正常情况下本就令人头疼，但最近机场的混乱局面让这件事变成了真正的噩梦。因此，当我得知许多机场的安全检查混乱正在缓解时，我感到如释重负，甚至欣喜若狂。但这种情况并未解决美国航空旅行在安全性和可靠性方面更深层次、长期存在的问题。
今天，我们将探讨两个问题：为什么美国的航空旅行如此糟糕？以及在不选择乘坐Amtrak（美国铁路）的情况下，如何改善这一状况？
本文最初发表于Today, Explained通讯
了解世界，每天获取一份解释和当天最引人注目的新闻。点击此处订阅。
美国航空公司逐渐让旅客习惯了糟糕的飞行体验：座位狭小、食物一般、各种服务都要收费。但即使按照现代航空旅行的低标准来看，目前航空业似乎正面临特别严重的危机，包括人员短缺、安检延误以及一系列令人毛骨悚然的事件，让一些旅客开始质疑航空旅行是否安全。这些问题在政府部分停摆期间进一步恶化，当时约有5万名TSA（美国运输安全管理局）特工被迫无薪工作。非计划的临时调岗和辞职导致全国安检流程受阻，旅客排队时间长达数小时。周一，TSA特工终于收到了一个月前的工资，缓解了多个机场的拥堵情况。但即使一切恢复常态，常态依然是“相当糟糕”。
我们能否将机场安检私有化？
一个备受关注的解决方案来自自由派思想库——赫里特基金会（Heritage Foundation）及其他一些保守派智库。他们提议允许美国机场雇佣私人安保承包商来承担TSA的大部分工作。这些私人承包商将负责检查证件、扫描行李、进行人身检查，而且在当前的政治环境下，他们还能在政府停摆时继续工作。这种模式已经在大约20个美国机场实施，包括堪萨斯城和旧金山。
修复“过时”的系统将需要巨额资金
支持者认为私有化可以降低成本并提高TSA的效率。但即使如此，它也无法解决导致美国机场延误和安全问题的许多其他系统性问题。根据美国联邦航空管理局（FAA）的数据，美国80%的空管基础设施都“过时”或“不可持续”。这包括612个建于上世纪80年代的雷达系统，以及一些设备老旧到FAA不得不在eBay上寻找替换零件。设备故障会导致航班延误和取消，更不用说可能引发的事故了。去年夏天，国会批准了超过120亿美元用于开始更新这些设备，例如更换老式的铜缆。但FAA表示，要彻底改造整个空管系统，还需要另外200亿美元。
另一个机场人员短缺问题
与此同时，FAA还缺少大约3000名空管人员，这显然不利于机场的安全和运行效率。就在九天前，纽约拉瓜迪亚机场仅有两名空管人员在岗时，一架加拿大航空快线的客机撞上了消防车。特朗普政府推出了一些举措来增加空管塔台等设施的人员，但同时也加剧了问题，例如在削减开支的行动中取消了FAA的支持职位。上一次政府停摆结束于11月，也导致数百名空管人员和培训人员辞职。在缺乏持久系统性解决方案的情况下，美国旅客只能做最典型的美国式事情：靠自己解决问题。许多机场仍然建议旅客提前数小时到达，一些旅客则选择改乘火车。不幸的是，美国的客运铁路系统同样处于混乱状态。至于开车，就别提了——你见过现在的油价吗？
I’m scheduled to take my 1-year-old on a three-hour flight just over a week from now. Probably a headache, under normal circumstances, but a bona fide nightmare amid the recent airport bedlam. I was thus relieved — overjoyed, really — to learn that the security line chaos is easing at many airports. But that doesn’t address the larger, longer-term safety and reliability challenges in American air travel.
Today, we’re looking at two questions: Why is US air travel so bad? And what can be done to improve it, short of taking Amtrak?
Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Sign up here.
US airlines have gradually acculturated travelers to a pretty awful flight experience: smaller seats, middling snacks, fees for everything you can imagine. But even by the low standards of modern air travel, the aviation industry seems to be in particular crisis right now, plagued by staffing shortages, security delays, and a string of terrifying incidents that have some fliers questioning whether air travel is safe at all.
Those issues only got worse during the partial government shutdown, which forced some 50,000 TSA agents to work without pay. Unscheduled callouts and resignations slowed security screenings nationwide, snarling travelers in hours-long lines.
On Monday, TSA agents received their first paycheck in over a month, easing the bottleneck at many airports. But even if things go back to normal, normal is still…pretty awful.
One buzzy option for righting the ship — or, fine, the plane — comes courtesy the libertarian minds at the Heritage Foundation (and several other conservative think tanks). They’ve proposed that the United States allow airports to hire private security contractors to do much of TSA’s work.
These private contractors would check IDs, scan luggage, conduct pat-downs and — importantly, in our current political atmosphere — continue working through government shutdowns. The model is already in place at roughly 20 US airports, including Kansas City and San Francisco.
Proponents argue that privatization would reduce costs and make TSA more efficient. But even if that’s true, it wouldn’t address many of the other systemic issues causing delays and safety scares at US airports. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, 80 percent of the country’s air traffic control infrastructure is “obsolete” or “unsustainable.”
That includes 612 radar systems that date back to the 1980s and other equipment so old that the FAA has to use eBay for replacement parts. Equipment failures can cause flight delays and cancellations, to say nothing of potential accidents. Last summer, Congress approved more than $12 billion to begin modernizing that equipment, starting with things like replacing old-school copper cables. But the FAA says it will need another $20 billion to fully retrofit the air traffic control system.
Meanwhile, the FAA is also short about 3,000 air traffic controllers, which doesn’t exactly improve airport safety or performance. Only two controllers were working at New York’s LaGuardia Airport when an Air Canada Express passenger jet collided with a fire truck nine days ago.
The Trump administration has launched a number of initiatives to staff up air control towers and other facilities, but it’s also exacerbated the problem by, for example, eliminating FAA support staff during DOGE’s cost-cutting spree. The last government shutdown, which ended in November, also prompted the resignation of hundreds of air traffic controllers and trainees.
In the absence of durable systemic solutions, American travelers are left to do that most American of things: fend for themselves. Many airports are still urging travelers to show up hours early for their flights, and some fliers are traveling by train, instead.
Unfortunately, America’s passenger rail system is also something of a train wreck. And don’t even think about driving — have you seen gas prices?!
2026-03-31 18:15:00
2023年1月，24岁的营养博主雅各布·史密斯（Jacob Smith）因对豆腐表现出过度的好奇而陷入尴尬。他原本是出于健康考虑，试图减少肉类摄入，增加植物性食物。为了展示这一改变，他带着17万Instagram粉丝一起探索植物性饮食。在第一段视频中，他展示了自己如何烹饪豆腐，虽然一些粉丝给出了有用的建议，但更多人则用“豆腐男孩”（soy boy）这个常见的嘲讽称呼他。
这一事件反映了男性在推广植物性饮食时所面临的挑战。在富裕国家，为了可持续地养活不断增长的人口，人们需要减少肉类消费，增加植物性食物。然而，这在男性中并不容易推广，因为许多人认为吃肉是男性气质的一部分。这种观念源于“人类狩猎者”（man the hunter）的理论，该理论认为在人类历史中，男性负责狩猎，女性则负责采集和养育孩子。但近年来，越来越多的研究表明，女性同样参与了狩猎活动，甚至在某些情况下表现得更为出色。
史密斯本人也意识到，这种性别与饮食的关联更多是文化建构，而非生物学必然。他开始通过“豆腐男孩系列”视频测试其他植物性蛋白来源，如素肉（seitan）和发酵豆制品（tempeh），并以幽默的方式回应批评。然而，他的视频也引发了大量负面评论，甚至有人认为他吃豆腐会变得“女性化”或“同性恋”。
史密斯的账号曾被Instagram封禁，原因是Meta认为他支持“危险”组织。尽管他并未涉及政治或暴力内容，但这一事件凸显了社交媒体对性别与饮食话题的敏感态度。与此同时，他还在TikTok继续发布“豆腐男孩系列”，但评论更加激烈。
在西方文化中，男性普遍认为吃肉是男子气概的象征。这种观念不仅体现在广告中，也渗透到流行文化中。例如，Burger King曾推出“Manthem”广告，强调“吃肉才是男人的饮食”。然而，越来越多的研究挑战了这一传统观念，指出女性在狩猎中同样扮演了重要角色，甚至在某些情况下更擅长耐力型狩猎。
研究者罗布·韦尔泽博尔（Rob Velzeboer）指出，男性对植物性饮食的态度往往受到传统性别观念的影响。他发现，男性更容易接受植物性饮食的健康益处，而女性则更关注肉类生产对动物的伤害。一些男性甚至将素食主义视为一种“男子气概”的体现，比如通过独立思考、自律和健康等传统男性特质来定义自己的生活方式。
尽管植物性饮食在十年前曾受到更多欢迎，但如今，随着“男子气概”（manosphere）的兴起，越来越多的男性将吃肉视为身份认同的一部分。因此，推动植物性饮食的普及，需要更深入地理解男性对性别和饮食的复杂态度，并找到更有效的沟通方式。
In January, a 24-year old nutrition influencer named Jacob Smith made the grave mistake of becoming a little too curious about tofu.
Smith had read a study about the health benefits of eating less meat and figured he’d try to replace a small amount of the animal products he ate with plant-based foods. So, as content creators do, Smith brought his 170,000 Instagram followers along on his plant-based exploration.
In his first plant-based video, he filmed himself cooking tofu. In the comments, some of his followers gave him helpful tips on how to make it better next time. But a lot of people called him the well-worn insult known to any guy with a platform who dares to proudly eat tofu on social media: soy boy.
Cooking tofu was a departure for Smith, as just a few years prior, he had virtually no interest in plant-based proteins. Early on in college, Smith had followed what amounted to a carnivore diet — eating loads of meat and eggs — and dabbled in other dietary trends. But he eventually went back to a more “normal diet,” he told me, and went on to earn a master’s degree in dietetics. During his graduate program, he built a large Instagram following by explaining what he describes as “evidence-based nutrition,” covering research and debunking inaccurate health information.
Although Smith has remained a meat-eater, the response to his tofu video inspired him to start a series of videos testing out other plant-based protein sources, like seitan and tempeh, cheekily leaning into the criticisms he was getting. “I started calling it the Soy Boy Chronicles,” Smith told me.
The chronicles caught fire, each video racking up hundreds of thousands of views and with them, a flood of angry comments.
For “almost the majority of haters,” he told me, “their main critique about eating plant-based is it’s going to make you have more estrogen and that’s going to make you more feminine.” Of course, men and women both naturally produce the hormone estrogen, and eating soy foods doesn’t change men’s hormonal makeup. Plus, it’s well-established that soy products are not only safe to eat but also confer a number of health benefits, especially when replacing processed and red meats. (And estrogen, it turns out, may have been critical to early humans’ hunting abilities — more on this later.)
Some commenters said his newfound interest in plant-based foods explained why he’s weak (he is, in fact, quite jacked), made his voice sound “feminine” (he sounds like your average dude), or even more absurdly, that it would lead him to grow breasts or become gay. “I don’t even know where these ideas come from,” he told me, exasperated.
But Elina Vrijsen, who researches food and communication sciences at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium, has some ideas about that. “People probably perceive him as a very normative masculine man because he eats meat” and he’s fit, she told me. “But then he breaks his boundaries of masculinity by eating vegan food, and for a lot of people, this brings a lot of tension and a lot of questions.”
Smith has a similar theory. If he became fully vegan, he suggests, the criticism might have been more tame. But “people have more desire to defend themselves against people who somewhat eat like them,” he said. He’s showing a middle ground is possible — that one doesn’t need to be vegan, nor endorse carnivorism.
One day, just a couple weeks after he had launched the Soy Boy Chronicles, he tried to log on to Instagram only to find that his account had been taken down. The reason? According to a screenshot Smith shared with Vox, Meta said it doesn’t allow its users to follow, praise, or support people or organizations it defines as dangerous.
Smith was confused. He never cursed in his videos or even talked much about politics, save for occasional nutrition news, and said he certainly hadn’t promoted violence, criminal activity, or terrorism (which would have violated Meta’s terms if he had). He described it as a “family-friendly account.”
Meta told me the company reviewed his account and stands by the ban. “We reviewed and determined the correct enforcement action was taken for violating our policies,” a spokesperson told me over email. The company declined to answer specific questions about Smith’s account and how he had violated its policies.
Smith has continued his Soy Boy Chronicles on TikTok, but he says commenters there are even nastier than on Instagram.
Putting aside the Instagram suspension and whatever caused it, the backlash Smith garnered for eating tofu is just one of the latest examples of what can happen when men, especially those who appear traditionally “masculine,” promote plant-based eating. And Smith probably won’t be the last, so long as legions of people believe that masculinity requires heavy meat consumption and perceive men who question that belief to somehow be a threat to the status quo.
From the mid-2010s to the early 2020s in the United States, there was a brief window of time in which plant-based eating was gaining more popular traction and many more people were questioning conventional gender norms. But numerous trends suggest those cultural currents have changed direction in recent years. American culture has become increasingly fixated on protein, especially from animal-based foods; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes a carnivore diet; and then there has been the further rise of the so-called manosphere, a loose network of male influencers promoting an intensified vision of masculinity that often entails high levels of meat intake.
But the belief that “real men eat meat” long preceded the latest nutritional and cultural trends, and it is so deeply ingrained that a small but rich academic field has sprung up to study it.
It’s much more than a niche intellectual pursuit, though.
Figuring out how to reduce the consumption of animal products in wealthy countries is a pressing issue, as meat and dairy production account for up to one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions and are the leading drivers of global deforestation and US water pollution. Global meat production also represents a moral atrocity, with hundreds of billions of animals reared in grueling factory farms.
Women in Western cultures have generally proven to be more open-minded to reducing their meat intake. But to bring about wide-scale change in our food system, nonprofits, academics, policymakers, food businesses, content creators, and others will have to figure out how to persuade the other half of the population that what they eat doesn’t make them more or less of a man.
The idea that “real men eat meat” is a pervasive belief across Western cultures, and research in the US, Europe, and Australia bears this out. Studies from these places have found that:
When I asked several researchers how this belief came to be so prominent, all of them pointed first to food advertising, which began to be segregated by sex in the 1950s.
That’s given us TV ads like Burger King’s 2006 “Manthem” commercial, in which a guy served what appears to be a plate of vegetables in a fancy restaurant stands up and marches out while breaking into song, declaring he’s “too hungry to settle for ‘chick food.’” He heads straight to a Burger King as other men join him in song, pledging to “wave tofu bye-bye.” Burgers in hand, they march onto the highway and together, throw a minivan off an overpass, a show of the strength that meat gives them.
The commercial ends with a blunt message: “The Texas Double Whopper: Eat like a man, man.”
WeightWatchers (For Men), Hummer, Slim Jim, and the American Meat Institute have similarly over-the-top ads, while Manwich, Campbell’s Soup, KFC, and others have sent the signal perhaps slightly more subtly. The underlying message can be found beyond the realm of advertising and throughout pop culture, too.
Even plant-based protein companies sometimes use this tactic, advertising with a “masculinized aesthetic,” Vrijsen pointed out. The companies are, according to Vrijsen, seeking to “reassure consumers that reducing meat does not mean giving up your masculine identity…even when the product changes, the general logic often stays in place.”
The answer as to why such marketing has proven so effective can be found in the field of anthropology, which for decades has posited that throughout the long trajectory of human history, a clear division of labor separated the sexes: The men went off to hunt while the women stayed behind to safely gather edible plants and raise children, a vision put forth in then-popular theories, such as in the influential 1968 book Man the Hunter.
But some scholars have been poking holes in this widely accepted theory. Two of the most prominent critics of the “man the hunter” theory today are Sarah Lacy, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware, and Cara Ocobock, an associate professor of human biology at the University of Notre Dame, who’ve published papers together on the issue.
Most hunting didn’t look like “a super strong man by himself” engaged in a “battle of will against a wooly mammoth,” Lacy told me. Rather, much of it was probably mixed-sex groups who chased animals off cliffs, ambushed them from bushes and trees, caught them in nets, and injured them with weapons, which made it easier to chase them down to the point of exhaustion.
While this work required strength, it also required endurance. And women, Lacy and Ocobock argue in a 2023 paper published in the journal American Anthropologist, are particularly well-suited for the endurance needed to effectively hunt, thanks in part to higher estrogen levels.
“During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates,” the two wrote in a piece for Scientific American. “Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity.”
There’s “this emphasis that testosterone is the only hormone that gives people an [athletic] advantage,” Lacy told me, but “estrogen absolutely conveys sports advantages,” too.
Some archaeological evidence also conflicts with the dominant “man the hunter” theory, Lacy said. This includes prehistoric women buried with hunting equipment and Neanderthal remains that suggest men and women were potentially facing off with animals at a similar rate.
Much of the “man the hunter” theory, Lacy said, also rests on research into a small number of well-studied hunter-gatherer, or forager, societies, which only tells us so much. These handful of groups represent “such a tiny snapshot of the amount of variation that would’ve been present throughout multiple millions of years of human evolution.” At the same time, more recent historical ethnographic and archaeological research, along with research into Indigenous groups, provide plenty of evidence of women hunting.
This kind of research “challenges the assumption that the link between masculinity and meat consumption has a clear historical foundation,” Vrijsen, the food and communications researcher, told me. “And instead, it suggests that this association is more cultural than biological — and shaped sometimes by ideology rather than evidence.”
Lacy and Ocobock felt this observation firsthand in the wake of their published research. While it was well received among their anthropology peers, Lacy told me, some people on the internet were incensed.
The overwhelmingly negative public response came from “predominantly men who were just so offended by the insinuation that hunting is not the special thing” that they did that drove human evolution, Lacy told me. “It was really wild.” After Lacy and Ocobock had published their piece on the topic in Scientific American, the magazine offered them counseling “because the reaction — specifically on Twitter — was so virulent,” Lacy said.
Rob Velzeboer’s first glimpse into the dicey gender politics of meat came to him when he briefly competed as a boxer in the mid-2010s. He decided to go vegetarian out of a sense of duty to help animals, and while his peers weren’t necessarily hostile to the change — these were real-life acquaintances and friends, not internet strangers — they were often “very, very suspicious,” he told me.
Velezeboer is now a researcher at the University of British Columbia, where he studies meat and masculinity, among other topics. Lately, though, he’s become less interested in why this issue is so charged and more interested in figuring out how to have more productive conversations with men about it.
He’s currently working on a meta-analysis review of numerous studies to look at how men and women react to different messages on the issue. So far, by looking through dozens of studies, he told me that women are more open to messages about harms inflicted on animals in meat production, while men are more receptive to messages about the health benefits of plant-based eating.
Meanwhile, other research by Velzeboer has found that some vegetarian and vegan men frame their lifestyle through traditional American masculine norms, like: independent thought, rationality, discipline, health, alignment between their values and behavior, or even as a rebellious act that demonstrates they don’t just go along with the crowd.
Some of those traits apply to David Meyer, an 11-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion and host of the Ageless Warrior Lab podcast.
“I’m suspicious of when culture tells us we should be this way or that way,” Meyer told me. “[Food] companies are trying to make something appeal to us in a certain way, and we need to think for ourselves.”
Meyer told me that he thinks meat can certainly be part of a healthy diet, but for him, he felt that eliminating animal products from his diet decades ago improved his own health and athletic performance. He’s also an animal lover, and said he doesn’t want to support animal cruelty if he doesn’t have to.
“It works for me, and I’m not saying it would work for anybody else, but a lot of the fighters that I work with have reduced animal products and even dairy specifically, and they feel much better,” Meyer said. But if for some men, eating meat is part of their view of themselves as being masculine, that’s fine by him.
There are plenty of other professional male athletes that have embraced a plant-based diet, too, like NBA players Kyrie Irving and Chris Paul, strongman Patrik Baboumian, tennis star Novak Djokovic, and UFC champion James Wilks, featured in The Game Changers, a documentary about elite athletes who happen to eat plant-based.
Dominick Thompson, a content creator and longtime vegan with very big muscles, views his veganism, in some ways, as an extension of his traditional masculine side.
“No matter your diet, masculinity is about protecting — being a natural protector of the most weak and the most vulnerable,” Thompson told me. “And that includes not only animals, but human animals — those that simply can’t protect themselves. To me, that’s a pillar of what masculinity really is.”
After thinking about it long and hard enough, it all can get a bit muddling. Masculinity, femininity — these are squishy, evolving terms that mean different things to different people at different times, and are hard to pin down. Vrijsen, who’s conducted focus groups with young men about masculinity, told me they themselves often have a hard time defining what it means to them.
That uncertainty might explain some of the rise of the manosphere, in which prominent male influencers have stepped into the void to define masculinity for young men — and for some, like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan, high-meat diets are part of it.
It’s a big shift from where the plant-based movement was just a decade ago, Thompson said, when people seemed much more open to it. It was also a time when more and more people were questioning conventional gender norms. “But now I do feel like a lot of people are a little bit more close-minded” to eating plant-based, Thompson said. “We have a lot of work cut out for us.”
And Smith, for his part, is still posting through it with his Soy Boy Chronicles, forging ahead in the gray — often viciously patrolled — online territory of what it means to be a man in this country who also eats tofu.
2026-03-31 18:00:00
我们正处于一种对“看起来更美”的文化迷恋之中。这个由大量男性组成的在线社群声称他们通过自残和使用毒品来增强自己的外貌，比如用锤子敲打脸部以获得更明显的下颌线，或者吸食甲基苯丙胺以获得更瘦削的身材。这种行为引发了媒体的震惊报道和新闻关注。他们的动机很明确：在我们的文化中，美丽的人生活更容易，因此他们选择通过极端手段来改变自己。然而，两位作者——记者斯蒂芬妮·费亚里ington和诗人兼艺术家莫斯塔里·希拉尔——却选择反其道而行之，他们称自己为“丑陋”，并拒绝改变自己的外表。在他们的回忆录中，他们探讨了丑陋的定义：它是否是个人的不安全感所致，还是客观存在的事实？是否有可能存在一种客观的美？以及丑陋背后所隐藏的种族主义和性别歧视的历史。
他们还质疑，是否将自己称为“丑陋”是一种自我认同的表达，还是自我仇恨的表现。希拉尔在书中写道，她无法仅凭美学和诗歌来与丑陋和解；费亚里ington则认为，试图避免使用“丑陋”这个词是一种错误，因为这剥夺了她描述自己如何在世界中行走的语言。然而，这些词往往带有恶意，因此这些回忆录作者和“看起来更美”群体似乎都认同一个观点：如果一个人不像同龄人那样有吸引力，那么他就会被世界所伤害。
丑陋的指控往往来自外界。希拉尔和费亚里ington都提到，他们小时候被家人、权威人士或其他孩子称为“丑陋”，而这些评价通常与他们的“异类”特征有关。希拉尔的“丑陋”源于她的种族身份，而费亚里ington的“丑陋”则与她的性别表达有关。她的家人不断施压她，让她改变自己的外貌，以符合主流审美标准。希拉尔的姐妹们甚至为了拥有“更标准”的鼻子而接受多次鼻整形手术，而费亚里ington则担心她的女儿可能因为她的外貌而不再爱她。
在历史的长河中，种族、性别和美的观念紧密相连。19世纪的医生们曾认为，面部不对称是疯狂的标志，而意大利医生塞萨雷·龙勃罗索则提出，面部特征可以揭示一个人的犯罪倾向。这些观念至今仍然影响着我们对“丑陋”的理解。希拉尔和费亚里ington指出，这些对“丑陋”的定义往往与道德和邪恶联系在一起，而这种联系是人为制造的。
在面对“丑陋”时，希拉尔和费亚里ington都经历了内心的挣扎。希拉尔曾因被称作“马脸”而感到恐惧，甚至想要丢弃当年的学校照片。但她的母亲救下了这些照片，多年后她重新审视这些照片，发现过去的“丑陋”感已经消失。然而，当她看到一张自己最近的照片时，却感到悲伤和疲惫，仿佛那些旧日的自卑又回来了。她意识到，面对衰老和疾病带来的“丑陋”是最具挑战性的，因为这提醒我们生命的脆弱和有限。
最终，希拉尔认为，接受“丑陋”是一种更诚实、更深刻的方式。她写道：“我学会了尊重丑陋，它不仅是我镜中的自己，更是我们人类的真相。”她认为，丑陋能够见证人类生命的脆弱和我们所承受的抽象理想的压力。
相比之下，“看起来更美”的群体则试图通过极端手段来追求一种理想化的、无瑕疵的外貌，他们追求的是西方文化中那种高度男性化、干净整洁的美。这种追求往往伴随着对身体的暴力改造和对安全的忽视，仿佛他们相信自己的“美丽”永远不会衰老。而接受“丑陋”则意味着承认自己终将死亡，这是一种诚实的身体认知。也许，正是这种诚实，才让“丑陋”本身变得美丽。
We’re in a moment of cultural fascination with looksmaxxers. That too-online community, made up mostly of men who claim to do things like hit themselves in the face with hammers for a stronger jawline and snort meth for leaner bodies, has become the object of shocked trend pieces and news coverage.
Looksmaxxers are fascinating in part because their motivations are so understandable. They have observed the simple fact that in our culture, life is easier for people who are beautiful, and they have made their plans accordingly, self-mutilation and hard drugs and all. The calculus feels both horrifying and comprehensible, which is why I found it so startling and exciting to find people moving in the other direction in the form of two new memoirs by authors who both call themselves ugly and have no plans to change their appearances.
“I am an ugly woman,” begins journalist Stephanie Fairyington in Ugly, forthcoming in May. “At fourteen I learned fourteen times over that I’m ugly,” writes the poet and artist Moshtari Hilal in Ugliness, published last year.
These memoirists are essentially performing the same calculation the looksmaxxers have: Life is easier when you are beautiful, and I am not naturally a person whom others consider beautiful. But rather than reach for the hammer or the needle, both Hilal and Fairyington have chosen to explore the culture instead.
In each memoir, Fairyington and Hilal navigate what they think about ugliness: to what extent their own ugliness is a product of their own insecurities and to what extent it is objective truth; whether any sort of objective truth around human beauty is even possible; and the millennia of racism and misogyny that have defined our shared sense of ugliness. They consider whether there is value to be had in calling themselves ugly and deciding not to care what anyone else thinks about that, or whether embracing such a label would be an act of self-hatred.
“I cannot reconcile myself to ugliness through aesthetics and verse alone,” Hilal frets, after devoting pages of poetry and photographs to the nose she feels is too big for her face. “It feels too tender to admit that our beauty or lack thereof impacts, even shapes, our lives,” writes Fairyington.
As I read these books, I wasn’t always sure the authors had things figured out that much more than the looksmaxxers did. The malice in the word ugliness is hard to neutralize, to the point that an attempt at reclamation can sometimes seem like self-loathing. Indeed, I found myself feeling defensive on the part of both authors, compelled to look up an author photo and fact-check their claims about themselves. “Not ugly at all!” I declared both times, after I was presented with an image of a perfectly normal-looking woman.
Yet Fairyington, at least, makes it clear she doesn’t appreciate such compliments. She notes that any time she describes herself as ugly, people (especially women) interrupt her and assure her that she isn’t.
“Women can’t let a thought like that hang in the air without vigorously swatting it away because it’s the fate they’re chronically trained (and trying) to avoid; it’s very nearly the worst thought to think of oneself,” Fairyington writes. She thinks trying to avoid the word, however, is a mistake: it means depriving her of the words she needs to describe the way she walks through the world.
To call someone ugly feels so malicious, so aggressive. But these memoirists and the looksmaxxers appear to agree on at least one thing: people really are treated badly by the world if they are not as conventionally attractive as their peers.
To deny someone the language to name their own reality feels perverse. And yet ugly feels like such a cruel word. The provocative and never-quite-answered question of these memoirs is whether turning it on yourself can become an act of self-love.
Accusations of ugliness come from the outside first. Both Hilal and Fairyington write that they were called ugly as children, either by family members, authority figures, or other kids. Crucially, the first qualities that other people told them were ugly were the signs of their otherness. For Hilal, that is race, and for Fairyington, it is signs of queerness. Their families, in an attempt to care for them, continually pressure them to erase their otherness and make themselves normatively beautiful.
Hilal is an Afghan-born woman living in Germany (her book is nicely translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer), and it is the parts of her features that are specifically Arabic that she is taught to think of as ugly: her long nose, her dark body hair. Tending to both becomes a family affair. Her aunt tells her to start bleaching her facial hair, and her sister shows her how to manage the pain from the burn of the chemical cream. Her older sisters, who all have the same family nose, all get rhinoplasties, one after the other, much to their father’s approval.
Fairyington is a butch lesbian, and it is her refusal to present as a femme that she sees as marking her as ugly. “It looks like an active and hostile repudiation of what I, as a woman, am called upon, daily, to do,” she writes — to do the work necessary to be seen as attractive to men.
As a child, Fairyington recalls, her mother’s friends were baffled by her tomboyish energy. “That’s Chyrsi’s daughter?” one says contemptuously. “It wasn’t just my face that made me unattractive to her,” Fairington writes, “it was also the legibility of my queerness.” Fairyington felt like a boy, but on her, the trappings of little boyhood — “mismatched dirty clothes, bad haircuts, and smears of pizza grease lining the sides of their goofy smiles” — became wrong, incongruous, ugly.
The history between race, gender, and technologies and philosophies of beauty is long and intimate. Both Hilal and Fairyington take their time delving into it, and it’s this history that begins to make ugliness start to fall apart as a category in their minds. It becomes historically contingent, all its gruesome political biases showing through. If an aesthetic system tells you that people of color and queer people are inherently ugly — well, what is that system really worth living by?
One of Hilal’s long rabbit holes leads her into the history of plastic surgery — which doubles, she shows, as the history of doctors trying to make racial differences disappear. One 19th-century American surgeon developed an early nose job designed to turn the “Irish noses” on the faces of a new wave of immigrants into the more anglicized “American nose.” And in the 1930s, the German Jewish inventor of the modern rhinoplasty offered discounts to those with “Jewish noses” who wanted to be able to pass.
Hilal explores the way early researchers of mental illness and criminality became obsessed with the idea that looks and temperament were linked. In the 19th century, she writes, researchers found that all the patients in a given mental hospital had asymmetrical faces and decided it must mean that facial asymmetry is a marker of insanity. (In reality, all human faces are asymmetrical, but the researchers somehow failed to notice that.) Around the same time, the notorious Italian physician Cesare Lombroso developed a theory that criminality is written upon the face. In his view, thieves have bushy eyebrows and thin beards, while rapists have delicate features with swollen lips and eyelids.
“It’s no wonder these descriptions are familiar,” Hilal writes. “We still see them today in depictions, caricatures, and costumes of bad guys in books and film and elsewhere, all of which contribute to our notions of embodied evil. We know the criminal Lombroso invented before we ever came into contact with criminality.”
Fairyington, proving Hilal’s point, cites a recent study showing that people are more likely to believe those with “ugly faces” have acted immorally. This is the kind of study that becomes catnip to the looksmaxxers, who are always claiming that their Lombroso-like obsession with facial symmetry is grounded in real science. But Hilal and Fairyington return to some core questions: Who taught us what ugliness looks like? Who linked that to immorality and evil? And what agenda did those people have?
Jessica DeFino, a journalist and vocal critic of the beauty industry, frequently remarks that when it comes to beauty, Americans have a Disney movie’s sense of morality. We congratulate celebrities we like for “aging well” because they are “unproblematic,” while we react to images of wrinkled and racist politicians by saying that hatred makes you “age horribly.” She argues that we should see this tendency for what it really is: a continuation of the thinking of those 19th-century doctors or even going back earlier, to the ancient world. “The ancient Greeks,” she points out, “used the same word, kalos” to describe both “inner goodness and outer beauty.”
Surely those who are ugly are those who have displeased the gods, who have sinned. Surely to be beautiful is to exist correctly in the world, to be pure of heart.
Hilal writes that when she began to draw portraits as part of her artistic practice, she was drawn to faces that “resembled those of the evil stepmother, strict headmistress, frigid secretary, wicked witch or sneaky and stingy neighbor.” They were also familiar faces, she writes: “They also resembled me. I had never met anyone who both occupied these roles and looked like me, yet I felt I knew these characters better than I knew myself. I wasn’t cunning or cruel, but when I smiled in the mirror, I saw them there, all those mean women.”
For both Hilal and Fairyington, being called ugly by another person distances them from their bodies and their loved ones.
Hilal writes that being labeled ugly makes her imagine herself in another, more acceptable body. “I call this idealized person ‘the other woman,’ a woman with whom I’m cheating on myself,” she writes, “whenever I secretly promise her a better life than the one promised to the self and body I’m actually spending my time with.”
Fairyington’s view of her own appearance becomes a barrier between herself and her conventionally attractive daughter, who she fears might love her less because she’s not beautiful. She describes being overcome with fear when her daughter tickles her feet, which Fairyington has always considered her ugliest part. “The idea of you seeing them in close proximity, or worse, handling them—dry, calloused, malformed—felt too vulnerable, like it would make me less lovable to you. Ugly,” she writes.
Most of us have experienced similar thoughts in our lives: It’s the rare and confident soul who doesn’t ever hear a little voice in their head call them ugly. The conventional advice at this point is to try to find beauty in yourself as you exist now, and to dismiss the limited beautiful/ugly binary of Greek statues. Both Fairyington and Hilal play with such possibilities, and sometimes they work. But they don’t always.
Fairyington writes that after she came out at age 19, she felt “desirable — if not attractive — for the first time ever” as she learned that the masculinity that made her ugly to her mothers’ friends made her appealing to other queer women. Studying queer theory in college opened her mind further to the possibilities of moving beyond conventional beauty ideas. “I could even cultivate ‘ugly’ like some girls cultivate ‘pretty,” she writes in excitement, “or fuse the two in some startling and unexpected way, or transcend both.” She started to wear flip flops year-round, “to intentionally expose my ugly feet.”
Yet transcendence proves difficult, as Fairyington’s optimism about the possibilities of what she calls her “radical ugliness” is always tempered with that “tenderness” — the insecurity about her looks below the surface bravado and pleasure in queer aesthetics. She shifts back and forth ambivalently over whether her ugliness is a badge of pride she is embracing or a neutral truth she must stare in the face.
In one section, she quotes Thomas J. Spiegel’s 2022 paper on “lookism,” which argues that society’s prejudice against the ugly should be disrupted like any other form of prejudice. Spiegel asserts that we should recognize ugly people as a marginalized social group, but we are unable to do so, because it feels so mean to call someone else ugly, or to let them call themselves that. “Our next-level liberation depends upon our ability to manage the fragile and fraught embarrassment in openly admitting the ways our culturally informed plainness or prettiness impact our lives,” Fairyington declares.
That “fragile and fraught embarrassment” can cut deep. When she and her partner, Sabrina, begin talking about having a baby, Fairyington overhears one of her friends say that Sabrina should be the genetic mother, because she’s the pretty one, and Fairyington doesn’t disagree: She doesn’t want to inflict her face on an innocent child. She vacillates between worrying that her pretty daughter will dislike her for her ugliness, or that her daughter is too focused on conventional expressions of beauty.
When Sabrina takes their 8-year-old to get her nails done, Fairyington protests that they’re teaching her to objectify herself too young. When she sees her daughter pine over the rhinestone-covered dresses worn by a group of drag queens, Fairyington writes knowingly, “What you don’t yet understand is that it’s not subversive when you do it; it’s submission.” The pleasures of self adornment are, for her, never about self-expression or the play of color and texture and form. They are inextricably tied to making oneself small in order to please other people — just as, in this book, her own radical ugliness is tied both to an intoxicating self-expression, a grim social disadvantage, and the intimate horror of displeasing the people she loves.
Meanwhile, Hilal describes being called “horseface” at 14, and, in horror, trying to throw out that year’s school pictures. Her mother rescues the pictures, and in the poem that opens Ugliness, Hilal looks at them again for the first time in decades, only to find the old sense of her own ugliness has vanished. She writes:
I search in vain
for an ugly horseface.
All I find is the picture of a child
flashing her teeth,
smiling for what will be the last time
in fourteen years.
Yet at the end of the book, Hilal is startled to glance at a recent photo of herself, from a day she felt happy and energetic, and find that she looks sad and tired and old. All her old teenage insecurities come rushing back — all her historiography and post-colonial analysis be damned. “Have I not learned anything?” she demands, betrayed by both her mind and her body. “How could my face fade on me like that, after I worked so hard getting to know and love it?” Aging is bringing new challenges to her project. The most difficult form of ugliness to confront, she realizes, is that of an old or sick body, which reminds us all of our own mortality and summons fear and disgust.
Hilal concludes with some shame that much of her project has been about trying to find a way “into the realm of beauty” through “ethical arguments and aesthetic drawings.” She thought, she writes, “I might convince others, and maybe even myself, that I’m beautiful too.” What she finds more productive, in the end, is the work of the writer and advocate Mia Mingus, who calls for a shift “from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence.”
Mingus’s magnificent bodies are bodies that are non-normative: “The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself.” It is this framework that pushes Hilal to want to reconcile herself to the idea of ugliness, which acknowledges the human, fleshy frailty of bodies in a way that beauty cannot.
“I learned to respect ugliness: as an enduring reflection, not just of myself in the mirror, but of our humanness,” Hilal writes. “Ugliness alone reflects a truth that transcends images and words in bearing witness to the vulnerability of human life and the organic limits of the many abstract, general ideals imposed on us.”
Part of the project of the looksmaxxers is to try to contain the messy realities and limitations of our human bodies, and instead to embody the beauty ideal at its most Western, hypermasculine, and antiseptic. They strive for inhuman symmetry, for straight Greek noses and cut-glass jaws, for physiques that allow no possibilities of androgyny or gender play, no hints of weakness or vulnerability. They push toward that ideal with such deliberate violence and disregard for safety that it is as though they believe that their new, “beautiful” bodies will never die.
Trying to embrace ugliness instead is a fraught concept, riddled with possibilities for self-loathing and self-deception. But at the very least, as Hilal shows us, a body that is reconciled to ugliness is a body that knows it will die someday. It is an honest body — and isn’t there something beautiful in that?
2026-03-31 05:49:00
2026年3月26日，旅行者在德克萨斯州休斯顿乔治·布什洲际机场的TSA安检点排队等候。| Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
本文出自《Logoff》每日通讯，帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，同时避免政治新闻占据您的生活。点击此处订阅。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：美国的航空旅行状况正在好转——至少暂时如此。
发生了什么？今天，TSA特工首次在一个月内收到工资，缓解了持续的国土安全部关门带来的压力，也减少了美国主要机场的漫长安检队伍。
资金从哪里来？国土安全部仍未获得资金，但特朗普总统于周五签署了一项行政命令，指示即使如此也要支付TSA特工工资，因为安检队伍已达到危机水平。此次支付部分覆盖了特工因关门而拖欠的工资，据称是使用了去年“大美法案”（特朗普的“Big Beautiful Bill”）为国土安全部分配的资金。据CNN报道，这种单方面调配资金的做法是否合法尚不清楚，但工资仍在发放。
背景如何？这是第二次政府长时间关门导致特朗普政府绕过国会支付联邦雇员工资。去年，一次更广泛的、创纪录的关门期间，特朗普将国防部的资金用于支付美军工资。（这次没有影响到军队工资，因为国会已为国防部提供资金。）
大局如何？周一的工资发放对数万名没有收入的TSA员工以及美国疲于奔命的航空旅行系统来说是个大好消息。但这也更像是一个临时补救措施，而非长久之计。具体而言，尽管我们不清楚特朗普政府此次支付TSA工资的确切资金来源，但这种状况不会持续太久；国会最终仍需为TSA和其他国土安全部门（包括移民与海关执法局和海关与边境保护局）提供资金，无论是否包括ICE和CBP。
还有一个更深层次的问题：这类资金短缺的情况越来越频繁。即使国会很快解决此次关门问题，我们很可能很快又会面临另一场关门。
好了，现在是时候下线了……
我的同事艾莉·沃尔佩（Allie Volpe）——可以说是“下线”的非正式守护者——是关于如何享受生活的宝贵建议的源泉。在她最近的一篇文章中，她采访了专家吉莉安·桑德斯特罗姆（Gillian Sandstrom）教授，探讨了与陌生人交谈的利与弊。您可以在这里阅读他们的对话。
祝您有一个美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！
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 US air travel situation is looking up — for now.
What’s happening? TSA agents received paychecks today for the first time in more than a month, easing the burden of the ongoing Homeland Security shutdown and alleviating long security lines at major US airports.
Where is the money coming from? DHS still doesn’t have funding, but President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday directing that TSA agents be paid anyway, as airport security lines began to reach crisis proportions.
The paychecks covered some, but not all, of the back pay owed to agents due to the shutdown and were reportedly paid out of money allocated to DHS under last year’s reconciliation package (Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”).
As CNN has reported, it’s unclear whether that kind of unilateral direction of funding is legal, but paychecks are flowing regardless.
What’s the context? This is the second time a prolonged government shutdown has resulted in the Trump administration going around Congress to pay federal employees. Last year, during a much broader, record-long shutdown, Trump redirected Defense Department money to pay US troops. (Military paychecks have not been affected this time, since DOD has been funded by Congress.)
What’s the big picture? Monday’s paychecks are a big deal for the tens of thousands of TSA employees who have been going without, as well as for America’s beleaguered air travel system. But they’re more of a Band-Aid than a permanent fix.
Specifically, while we don’t know exactly where the Trump administration is getting the money for TSA paychecks, it’s not going to last forever; at some point, Congress will still need to fund TSA and the rest of DHS, with or without ICE and CBP.
There’s also an underlying problem: These kinds of funding lapses are getting more and more frequent. Even if Congress gets this shutdown sorted out soon, we’re likely to be staring down another before we know it.
My colleague Allie Volpe — arguably the unofficial patron saint of logging off — is a font of good advice about living life. For her latest story, she spoke with an expert, Professor Gillian Sandstrom, about how, and why, you should talk with strangers. You can read their conversation here.
Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-03-30 20:00:00
现在是时候让“Sid”走了。| Duncan1890/Getty Images 你可能通常会把陌生人的面孔当作你人生这部电影中的背景角色，但你所关心的几乎所有人都曾是陌生人。除了从出生起就在你身边的人，每段关系都有一个从陌生到熟悉的过程。陌生人可以为日常生活的点滴带来深远的意义，无论是在大场合还是小细节中。在她新书《Once Upon A Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life》中，英国苏塞克斯大学心理学与善意研究的副教授吉莉安·桑德斯特姆（Gillian Sandstrom）提出了我们应该更多地尝试与陌生人建立联系的理由。她结合了相关研究，既强调与陌生人互动的好处（交谈可以提升幸福感），也帮助缓解你的担忧（人们其实比我们想象的更愿意与我们交谈）。
在陌生人群体中，最令人紧张的场景之一就是你作为唯一的陌生人出现在一个群体中，比如新工作、合唱团或小区。你对每个人都不熟悉，但对他们来说，你却是唯一的陌生人。在这种情况下，桑德斯特姆提供了一些建议，帮助你融入群体，同时告诉你，你可能并没有想象中那么尴尬。
你是否认为在街头与陌生人交谈和加入一个新声乐团体（大家彼此认识，而你却不知道他们）之间的场景不同？在与陌生人交谈时，如果你知道可能会再次遇见他们，那么你可能会更担心他们的看法，希望他们喜欢你，这样下次见面时你才会有话题。有时候人们会担心对方并不想和他们交谈。比如，你每天在公交站都见到同一个人，你可以打招呼，但如果打招呼后你不喜欢对方，或者对方很无聊，你以后每次去公交站都要和他们说话，那就太尴尬了。因此，有时候选择不说话会更明智。当你知道可能会再次见到这些人时，确实会更紧张，你希望给对方留下好印象，这种感觉更令人焦虑。
这种与陌生人交谈的场景是否属于“闲聊”？无论你是否会在未来再次见到对方，与陌生人交谈的开场方式都是一样的。你必须思考：“我们该聊什么？”因为你并不了解对方，所以不知道哪些话题合适，哪些不合适，只能慢慢摸索共同话题。比如，你刚刚加入的合唱团就是一个很好的开场话题，因为你们有共同的兴趣。或者你们在同一家公司工作，这也可以成为交谈的切入点。
书中提到的“Sid”这个声音，是我们在脑海中不断告诉自己“不要和陌生人说话，你并不有趣，没人喜欢你”的负面声音。这种声音在你加入一个大家彼此都认识的群体时会更强烈。你有什么建议来平息这种声音吗？这种声音往往来自于我们总是将自己与那些社交能力很强的人进行比较。研究表明，我们通常认为自己在几乎所有方面都比别人优秀，但在社交方面却不是这样。我们总是将自己与那些最擅长社交的人进行比较，这导致我们觉得自己社交能力很差。其实，我们并不需要与那些社交高手比较。如果环顾四周，你会发现大多数人和你一样，都在努力寻找合适的交谈方式。作为研究人员，我非常重视数据。那么，Sid，你有什么数据来支持你的说法吗？请给我看看证据。我们很少与陌生人交谈，而且当我们缺乏足够经验时，就容易想象那些糟糕的交谈场景。我们会记住那些不愉快的经历，而忽略那些成功的对话。对于我来说，平息Sid的方法就是告诉自己：“你没有任何依据来这么说，你没有任何数据支持你的想法。”
你的一项研究指出，大多数与陌生人的交谈都进行得不错，只有极少数会非常糟糕。这说明我们对与陌生人交谈的想象往往夸大了其负面结果。实际上，与陌生人交谈并不像我们想象的那么糟糕。当我们缺乏实际经验时，更容易想象那些失败的场景，这会让我们产生焦虑。这种焦虑会进一步影响我们的行为，使情况更加尴尬。这种现象被称为“聚光灯效应”，即我们觉得自己被他人关注的程度远高于实际。这形成了一种自我实现的预言。
如果某次与陌生人交谈时你说了一件傻事，而所有人都笑了，你会怎么处理？如果是我的话，我会试着用幽默来化解尴尬。我曾多次因为某次尴尬的对话而感到不安，但偶尔提起时，却发现大家早已忘记。你可以试着说：“我还在想着上次那个糟糕的笑话。”他们一定会回答：“什么笑话？我都不记得了。”
那么，为什么值得与陌生人交谈，尤其是那些你经常遇到的陌生人？如果你在一个躲避球团队中，却不与队友交谈，那感觉就不一样了。乐趣来自于与对手开玩笑、互相调侃，以及之后一起喝杯茶。如果你没有这些互动，那就会感到空虚。很多人加入某个团体后，只和少数几个人交谈，之后每次去都只和他们说话。我努力避免这种情况，我总是尝试与更多人交流。我参加了一个业余乐团，如何将一次简单的交谈发展成更深入的关系？如果你希望建立长期关系，就需要有重复的接触。每周见到同一批人是一个好的开始，但你还需要勇敢地提出：“我们之后一起喝杯咖啡吧。”当然，如果你不想进一步发展这些关系，那也没关系。你不需要强迫自己记住他们的名字或联系方式，但如果你愿意，也可以这么做。
研究表明，与不同的人互动有助于我们学习不同的东西。你认为人们在与陌生人互动时有什么误解吗？人们通常会认为自己与陌生人没有共同点，所以为什么要和他们交谈？有什么好处吗？其中一个原因是，我们可以通过与他人建立联系，一起完成更多事情，并在群体中感到更安全。我们将在群体中茁壮成长，工作场所也会因此产生更多的成果，因为我们会更擅长团队合作，并彼此信任。但要实现这一点，需要有人率先迈出一步。正如你所说，有人必须先行动起来。这就像在学校舞会上，我们所有人都站在一边，但其实我们都有同样的愿望。这是与陌生人交谈的最大误解：我们总以为自己是唯一一个感到焦虑、不知道该怎么做、觉得别人不想和我们交谈的人。但实际上，每个人都会有这样的感觉。只要有人勇敢地迈出一步，忽略脑海中的Sid，去尝试交谈，一切就会变得不同。
You may generally disregard unfamiliar faces as background characters in the movie that is your life, but almost everyone you care about was once a stranger. Aside from the people who have been in your life since you were born, every relationship has a getting-to-know you process where you transition from unknowns to knowns.
Strangers can bring so much meaning to everyday moments, in big ways and small ones. In her new book Once Upon A Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life, Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, makes the case for why we should make more attempts to connect with unknowns. Sandstrom draws on research that both extols the virtues of interacting with strangers (talking with them improves well-being) and helps quell your fears (people enjoy talking to us more than we think).
Among the most nerve-wracking of stranger encounters are ones where you’re the unknown entity in a group: at a new job, a knitting club, or on the block. Everyone is unfamiliar to you, but to them, you’re the sole stranger. Here, Sandstrom offers some advice on how to integrate into the unit, and why you probably aren’t as embarrassing as you think.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Is there a difference between talking to a stranger on the street versus going into a new a cappella group and they all know each other and you don’t? Is the stranger scenario different for each of those contexts?
There is something different when you know that you might see the person again, because you probably worry more about their judgment. You want them to like you, so that when you see them again, you might want to talk again. Sometimes people worry [the other person doesn’t] want that. So you might think, I see the same person at the bus stop every day and I could say hi. But what if I do and then I don’t like them? Or if they’re boring and then I’m going to have to talk to them every single time I go to the bus stop? So it’s better to just not talk at all. It’s definitely scarier when you know that there’s the potential to see people again; you really want to make a good impression. It feels higher stakes.
Would this type of conversation fall under the umbrella of small talk?
The way you start a conversation works the same way whenever you’re talking to someone that you haven’t met before, regardless of what’s going to happen in the future, if you’re going to see them again or not. You have to figure out, What are we going to talk about? I don’t know you, so I don’t know which topics are good and which topics are not good, and we have to fumble our way to finding some common ground. The choir [you just joined] is a good conversation starter. You’ve chosen the same thing to do. Or you’re working for the same employer. You have something in common, which could be an easier conversation starter.
What stuck out to me in the book was what you call Sid, this insidious voice in your head who’s telling you not to talk to strangers, and that you’re not interesting and nobody likes you. That voice is even stronger in situations where everybody knows each other and you are the new person. What advice would you have to quiet that voice?
That voice in our head that’s like, “You suck, you don’t know what you’re doing, nobody likes you” — part of that comes from always comparing ourselves to others. There’s research showing that we generally think we’re better than average at almost everything, but not at social stuff. This is almost the only thing where we think we’re not better than average. Who are you comparing yourself to? We compare ourselves to highly social people, the people who are really good at this. That’s partly why we think that we’re not any good, because we’re comparing ourselves to the best of the best.
We have to be better at realizing, yes, there are some people like that, but we don’t have to compare ourselves to those people who are really good. If you look around the room, probably more people are like you desperately trying to figure it out and have a decent conversation.
I am a researcher, so I’m all about the data. Okay, Sid, what data do you have? Show me the receipts. We don’t talk to strangers very often, and when we don’t have enough data, we can’t [easily] be like, “Oh yeah, I remember that great conversation I had.” We remember the really bad stuff. If you ever had a conversation with a stranger that didn’t go well, or you tried to talk to someone and it was a bit awkward or they didn’t want to talk, that’s what you’re going to remember. For me, what helps quiet Sid is to be able to say, “No, you have no basis for what you’re telling me. You have no data.”
I was really struck by your study that showed most conversations with strangers go well; there are very few that are total trainwrecks. That speaks to the idea that we’re making this up. It’s not that bad.
When we don’t have data, we have to imagine stuff, and it’s easier to imagine those trainwrecks. That’s the stuff we remember. It’s the drama.
It also ups the stakes, especially if you’re the new person at work and thinking, “I’m going to say something stupid, and they’re going to see me every day and think I’m an idiot for the rest of the time that we work together.”
There’s this research on who we’re willing to confide in. People, in certain situations, would rather share something with someone they don’t know, because if they share it with someone they do know, every time they see that person they’re going to be reminded of the fact that they shared that thing. The same is true here. If you tell a joke that nobody laughs at, you might think that every time you see them, you’ll be reminded of that joke and it didn’t go over well. They’re probably not thinking of it. The spotlight effect is when we feel like other people are noticing all our flaws more than they actually do, and then, that changes how you act, and it makes things more awkward. There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy going on.
What if you said something stupid and everyone laughed. How do you move on?
If it was me, I’d try to make a joke about it. There have been so many times where I have continued to feel bad about something, and every once in a while, I bring it up and people are like, “I don’t even remember that.” What you could do is say, “I’m still thinking about that horrible joke I told last time.” Guaranteed, they’ll be like, “What joke? I don’t even remember.”
Why is it worth talking to strangers, especially the ones that you are going to see regularly?
It does not feel the same if you’re on a dodgeball team and you’re not talking to anybody on your team. The fun comes from being able to joke around and trash talk the opponents together and have a cup of tea afterwards. What would it feel like if you didn’t have any of that? It would be empty.
A lot of people join a group, and then, they find a couple people, and then, anytime they go to the group, they talk to those few people, and that’s it. I try really hard not to do that. I try to meet lots of people. I play in an amateur orchestra. How do you turn a chat at the orchestra to something outside of the orchestra? If you did want to turn it into something lasting, you need that repeated contact. If you’re seeing the same people every week, that’s a good start. But then, you also have to be willing and brave enough to say, “Let’s grab a coffee afterwards.”
What if you don’t want to take these relationships further?
That’s fine. You shouldn’t feel like you have to get their name and their contact info and do something, but you can if you want to. There’s research on how having a diversity of interaction partners is important. You learn different things from different people.
What misconceptions do you think people have about the value of interacting with strangers?
People start by thinking, I’m not going to have anything in common with them. Why would I? What’s in it for me? One of the reasons that we connect with other people is because we can do more together, and we feel safer when we’re in a group. We’re going to thrive. The workplace is going to be able to produce more, because we’re going to be better at teamwork, and we’re going to trust each other more. But for that to happen, someone has to go first. You have to be thinking about the “we.”
I like the way you put it: Someone has to go first. It almost feels like we’re at a school dance, and we’re all standing on the sidelines, but we want the same thing.
That’s the biggest misconception in terms of talking to strangers, period: We walk around thinking we’re the only ones who are anxious and that we don’t know what to do and that they don’t want to talk to us. But everybody’s feeling that way. It takes one person to be brave, to figure out how to ignore Sid’s voice in their head and just do it anyway.
2026-03-30 18:30:00
当唐纳德·特朗普在2024年竞选期间承诺大规模驱逐移民时，很难想象这会带来什么样的后果。尽管他吹嘘要实施“历史上最大的国内驱逐行动”，但你可能会认为他指的是某种更有限的措施——比如“逐步”进行，首先针对近期抵达者、暴力犯罪者和疑似帮派成员。至少，这是许多相信他的人所想象的，包括许多移民社区的选民，他们曾以历史性的票数支持共和党，同时也担心有时混乱的难民涌入。民调机构迅速指出，尽管许多驱逐计划在普通美国人中很受欢迎，但支持程度因细节而异。针对有犯罪记录的移民或在拜登总统任期内入境的移民的ICE逮捕行动，比拆散混合身份家庭、在教堂或学校附近逮捕移民、驱逐长期居民等措施更受支持。然而，美国城市却充斥着联邦执法机构；国民警卫队被部署以平息抗议；未识别和戴面具的特工在社区中游荡，追逐嫌疑人进入商店，并在法院逮捕移民；抗议者、政客和记者被逮捕或受伤；有待审的难民被带走并驱逐到一个臭名昭著的外国监狱；两名美国公民被枪杀。本月，民主党要求在任何资金拨款中附加新的限制，导致国土安全部大部分地区停摆或停发工资。作为回应，特朗普派遣ICE前往机场——他说这是为了帮助疲于奔命的TSA特工，甚至重塑其形象，但同时也隐含着对反对党的施压。美国众议员詹姆斯·科默（R-KY）最近在福克斯商业新闻上表示：“这会让民主党感到疯狂。”一年后，可以肯定地说，美国移民与海关执法局（ICE）、边境巡逻队（Border Patrol）和其他联邦机构的联合行动，从东到西重塑了美国的生活，以戏剧性或更隐秘的方式。这些行动影响了各种族裔社区——明尼苏达州的索马里人、俄亥俄州的海地人、密歇根州的阿拉伯人，以及美国最大的近期移民群体——来自拉丁美洲的人。一种新的公民意识型活动家在经历了ICE行动激增或持续执法行动的地区兴起。当地经济因驱逐行动而遭受重创，仍在努力恢复。恐惧、怀疑，甚至在某些情况下是偏执，已经重塑了这些社区的社会结构。但与全国受影响人群的交谈中，也有一种希望——以及特朗普政府意识到其行动已经走得太远，可能正在尝试缓和或改变其移民政策的执行方式。## ICE催生了新的公民活动家——以夏洛特为例去年，有关ICE计划在北卡罗来纳州夏洛特地区增派特工的传闻开始流传，当地居民感到震惊并开始寻找行动方案。北卡罗来纳州的药店员工乔纳森·皮尔斯告诉我：“我从未真正是个活动家，但看到的那些事情让我很不喜欢。我不喜欢特朗普对移民的言论，也看到移民问题如何影响我工作和交往的朋友，他们积极参与教会活动。”幸运的是，皮尔斯有选择。关心的市民们很容易进入本地活动，而且几个月前就已准备好行动蓝图，并在全国各地的城市进行测试和更新。11月，国土安全部正式宣布“夏洛特之网”行动。很快，无标记的厢式货车和戴面具的联邦特工开始在城市及其郊区巡逻。他们最终进行了突袭，逮捕并拘留了数百人，引发了该地区主要由西班牙裔移民社区的恐惧。但当地人早已开始组织和应对。起初，这种行动是在基层层面展开的，得到了宗教领袖的支持。移民权益组织和法律援助机构早已与该地区牧师、神父和传教士联系，以找到支持移民邻居的方法。北卡罗来纳州泰勒斯维尔的第一联合卫理公会教堂的教友，包括皮尔斯在内，已经开始参加培训，学习如何应对。最初计划是教志愿者如何帮助脆弱的邻居前往教堂和学校。但随着他们在其他城市看到ICE行动变得更加激进，这些培训内容也发生了变化。他们开始学习如何缓和局势、如何用哨声沟通，以及如何记录ICE特工与被拘留者之间的互动。他们还向害怕的邻居们重新强调他们的权利，分享如何获得法律帮助，以及如何识别潜在危险。据该教堂的牧师乔尔·辛普森所说，仅在该地区ICE行动的第一周，就有超过2000人接受了培训并组织起来。在特朗普的第一个任期中，大规模抗议是抵抗的象征：从最初的妇女游行，到中期的“为我们的生活而游行”，再到最后的“黑人的命也是命”抗议。而在他的第二个任期，抵抗更多地表现为个人行动：用智能手机记录联邦特工，或鸣笛提醒街道上的居民。1月迫使ICE撤离的明尼苏达市暴动，以及最终导致DHS部长克里斯蒂·诺姆被解职的事件，确认了一种新的活动家运动的崛起：小型、灵活、本地化，并不断采用新战术来保护邻居免受骚扰、拘留或驱逐。尽管明尼苏达市是这种网络化的顶峰，但类似的活动早在洛杉矶、芝加哥和华盛顿特区就已经出现。特朗普政府则持不同看法：官员们认为这些抗议和社区组织行动阻碍了正常的执法工作，特别是驱逐罪犯，并认为参与者的行为危及了执法人员的安全。今年早些时候，特朗普威胁要援引叛乱法并动用联邦军队镇压抗议。皮尔斯的生活与一年前相比已经大不相同。他参加了11月的培训，参加了在 Raleigh 和华盛顿特区的抗议活动，现在他关心的不仅仅是移民问题。尽管他的工作时间有限（作为单亲父母，他有育儿责任），而且天气也影响了他的活动，但他仍努力保持活跃，试图说服 Hickory 的邻居们关注 ICE 和其他经济问题，为2026年的中期选举做准备：组织写信给地方和州代表的活动，并与邻居们讨论 SNAP 福利、医疗保险和价格问题。皮尔斯是北卡罗来纳州夏洛特地区变化的一个例子：该地区的政治中立或同情的邻居们被说服去实践他们所相信的。一位邻近郊区的五旬节派牧师埃里卡·雷诺索告诉我：“我认识一些在夏洛特行动中被拘留或被种族歧视的人。我当时担心自己也会被ICE盯上。虽然我在11月初就开始参加ICE监视和互助组织，但当我听说拉丁裔公民被拘留和盘问时，我退缩了。‘我去了一个监视点，幸运的是已经有白人男性在确认身份，我问他，‘你是来确认的吗？’他说，‘是的，你应立即离开。’我意识到那一刻那个社区正在发生可怕的事情，他是在保护我。’”于是，她将活动转向更安静的互助形式，教育邻居，并在教会里讲授社会正义。尽管ICE的强势存在已经消失，但这些记忆和恐惧仍然萦绕。但这些社区也因这些变化而有所改善，雷诺索说。培训已经深入人心，社区成员也有了信心，认为他们能实际做出改变。“他们知道需要什么，”她说，“所以如果边境巡逻队再次出现，我们已经准备好了。”## 本地经济仍处于被打击状态——以芝加哥为例Little Village，位于芝加哥市中心西南部的26街沿线，以塔克里亚斯（墨西哥风味餐厅）、杂货店、精品店和面包店闻名，被称为“中西部的墨西哥”。它被认为是芝加哥拉丁裔社区的经济引擎——城市官员告诉我，与市中心的“辉煌英里”一样，Little Village 是芝加哥收入最高的街区之一。而且，不只是本地人推动着这里的商业：Little Village，特别是26街走廊，是美国其他拉丁裔人士的旅游目的地。当地商会执行主任詹妮弗·阿古亚尔告诉我：“我们经常看到来自美国中西部和东海岸的游客来到这里购买他们在自己所在州找不到的东西，比如食物、15岁生日礼服或烹饪传统菜肴所需的材料。由于很多人无法前往墨西哥，这里就成了他们最好的替代选择。”然而，移民执法机构的到来让这一切戛然而止。前边境巡逻队总指挥格雷格·博维诺来到这里时，居民、领袖和商家都预感到会有麻烦。他们没想到事情会变得如此糟糕，经济打击会如此严重，恢复也需要如此长时间。当ICE和CBP到来时，商家们已经因关税而面临更高的成本，并且在上半年的城市执法行动中遭受了财务打击。店主不得不裁员或暂时停业，其他人则无法说服员工前来工作，因为他们害怕被拘留。这一切形成了一个循环：失去收入意味着购买力下降，进而导致这些小企业的销售额下降。对此，市政府和地方官员尽其所能地评估情况并追踪其影响。自10月以来，地方、州和联邦代表与商家会面，收集证词，将商家与小型补助资金联系起来，并推动“团结购物”等倡议，鼓励那些来自外部的、通常更富裕、白人或公民的人来Little Village和其他主要由墨西哥裔美国人居住的社区购物和投资。然而，这些影响仍然存在。芝加哥市秘书长安娜·瓦伦西亚表示，她的办公室启动了“团结购物”计划，以促进来自Little Village以外的居民前来投资和消费，但她说，如果没有更多的州和市政府支持，她和当地社区所能做的有限。她呼吁创建一个公私联合的救济基金，以帮助小企业恢复和投资，特别是在2026年。她还准备在4月面对更多坏消息。“当报税单提交时，你就能看到真实的数据，”她说，“但我们已经知道，仅凭听到的故事和亲眼所见，很多社区已经变成了‘鬼城’。”## 社会结构已发生改变——无处不在这些月来，全国各地的居民，尤其是移民或侨民社区，继续描述一种“生存模式”——一种超越经济痛苦的感受。这是一种警惕感，有时甚至接近偏执，认为ICE随时可能再次出现，或就在拐角处。即使居民们准备迎接更好的天气和更多的户外活动时间，这种心理痕迹仍然留在他们的心中，影响着他们在全国范围内的公共生活。除了夏洛特和芝加哥的故事，凤凰城地区的拉丁裔居民也向我展示了这一现实。马里科帕县的移民、混合身份家庭、公民和活动家们与移民政策、驱逐行动以及随之而来的社会结构破坏有着长期的历史。这个地区在特朗普之前就是执法的重点区域，当时关于如何处理那些在美国生活多年的人的争论最为激烈。由强硬反非法移民官员如州长简·布雷弗和马里科帕县警长乔·阿尔帕伊奥推动的州法律SB 1070，实际上授权了地方执法部门执行移民法：要求警方在怀疑某人无证时检查其移民身份。该法律将无证状态视为州犯罪，并赋予阿尔帕伊奥“美国最严厉的警长”以继续对无证移民进行强硬打击，这引发了对种族歧视和对棕色人种的心理和情感伤害的指控。该法律在多年的法律斗争后被法院广泛阻止。但这一记忆——以及该地区主要墨西哥裔美国人发起的活动和组织——仍然存在。尽管凤凰城没有像芝加哥、夏洛特或明尼苏达那样经历大规模部署，但该地区也经历了类似的安静执法、有针对性的突袭和联邦特工的传闻。“我们的社区在开门和离开家时都会多想一想，”亚利桑那州移民权益组织“Living United for Change”的组织者兼发言人塞萨尔·菲罗斯告诉我，“这就像你脑海中的一个念头：如果因为你的肤色而被拦下，或者因为你的肤色而被问及公民身份，该怎么办？”菲罗斯说，这种恐惧甚至存在于公民和拥有合法文件的人中，他们担心遇到联邦官员、被种族歧视或受到骚扰，因为社区成员感觉这种情况已经发生过。菲罗斯告诉我，他不得不与家人进行类似组织与社区成员之间的对话：随身携带REAL ID、护照或永久居留证，并制定如果家人无证被拘留的应对计划。“我妈妈是一名校车司机，她有口音，因为英语不是她的母语，她非常自豪自己是美国人。但与此同时，她也害怕被ICE或联邦特工或地方执法部门种族歧视。”菲罗斯说，因此，她现在随身携带护照，这是她以前从未做过的事情。不仅仅是菲罗斯的社区有这种恐惧，或者改变了他们的行为。我采访的每个人都有类似的故事。他们因新闻报道而感到个人安全更加脆弱，不仅无证移民被拘留或驱逐，还有合法的难民、绿卡持有者、学生和美国公民也被卷入其中。这种不安也反映在了全国民意调查中。11月，皮尤研究中心发布的一项调查分析了美国拉丁裔居民的情绪，发现他们因特朗普第二任期的执法议程而改变了行为。五分之一的西班牙裔成年人表示，出于对“证明合法身份”被要求的恐惧，他们改变了日常活动。十分之一的人现在随身携带证明公民身份或合法身份的文件，比以前更频繁。此外，还有更艰难的对话，关于如果有人被拘留，家庭将不得不采取什么措施。凤凰城郊区的56岁居民约兰达·兰德罗斯告诉我，除了随身携带REAL ID和避免长时间外出，她还与西南部和爱荷华州的家人制定了不同的计划，以防ICE敲门或拘留家庭成员——记住电话号码以通知家人或律师，知道不要开门，以及要求出示搜查令。她最担心的是住在爱荷华州的无证表弟，他患有慢性健康问题，需要透析治疗。“如果他被拘留，他可能会在那里待几天、几周甚至几个月。他不能这样，他活不下去。”兰德罗斯说。因此，他们制定了A、B、C三个计划：* 计划A：他要求立即驱逐，并签署任何要求他签署的文件。“我们有在墨西哥的家人准备接他。”她说。* 计划B：他们聘请移民律师试图与长时间拘留抗争。但律师费用高昂，且他们住在不同的州。“在亚利桑那州，我知道可以联系到提供免费法律援助的人，”她说，“但在爱荷华州，我却没人可以联系。”* 这样就只剩下计划C：安排葬礼。“但葬礼费用很高，而且我们家族已经有多人死亡。”她说。这些关于社会和家庭生活变化的故事让我想起了我的同事安娜·诺思最近称之为“ICE疫情”的现象——除了ICE行动带来的长期恐惧和经济损失外，还有社区信任的损害和人们参与社会生活的意愿下降。孩子们被留在家中或在家接受远程教育；教堂信徒跳过了弥撒或被允许因错过弥撒而获得宽恕；害怕的工人则待在家里，拒绝暴露在可能被拦截的风险中；需要医疗护理的孩子或成人则选择推迟或推迟检查，以避免被ICE接触。还有对那些为了预防被拘留而提前搬离、退休或自我驱逐的人的悲伤。阿古亚尔，芝加哥的小企业活动家，告诉我：“他们想让人们筋疲力尽，这在某些情况下已经奏效了。一些商家告诉我，他们多年的常客决定自我驱逐，因为他们觉得，‘与其被关进这些营地，不知道会被送到哪里，家人是否能找到我，不如带着我的东西回家。’”在芝加哥的Los Comales，冈萨雷斯回忆起她的儿子问她是否应该随身携带他的护照或身份证来证明他的公民身份。“我说，‘不，去他妈的。’有人需要对我进行审查？我生活在一个类似卡夫卡式纳粹政府的地方吗？”她说，“你可以通过我的指纹或通过我口述的信息来识别我，但我不应该为了走在街上而不得不向你展示我的身份证。”特朗普的移民政策在几个月来一直受到负面评价，尤其是在拉丁裔选民中，这种负面评价最为明显。3月的一项福克斯新闻民调显示，对拉丁裔受访者而言，特朗普的总体支持率仅为28%，有72%的人表示不支持。民主党也在一些曾于2024年向右倾斜的拉丁裔社区中获得了选民支持。特朗普据说已向他的核心圈子表示，他担心自己最初的“大规模驱逐”计划已经超出了选民的接受范围。目前，这些社区的居民仍处于一种等待状态。他们所有人都预计，ICE或CBP会在某个时候再次出现，特别是在明尼苏达市的行动引发的愤怒和关注逐渐消退之后。但他们也感到一些乐观，认为他们的社区和邻居未来会如何应对。在每一次交谈中，我都听到一个积极的一面：尽管现在有更多的怀疑和恐惧，但邻里之间、信仰团体之间以及拉丁裔群体内部已经建立了新的联系。“无论拉丁裔社区内部是否存在‘我们与他们’、‘有证件与无证件’、‘罪犯与非罪犯’之间的分歧，现在大家更团结了，更愿意互相帮助。”北卡罗来纳州的五旬节派牧师雷诺索告诉我。“在这些不确定的时期，我们必须彼此展现恩典和同情。”
When candidate Donald Trump promised mass deportations on the 2024 campaign trail, it was hard to imagine exactly what that might turn into.
Though he boasted about implementing the “largest domestic deportation operation” in history, you could be forgiven for believing he meant something more limited — a “sequential” approach (as JD Vance suggested), starting with recent arrivals, “violent criminals,” and suspected gang members.
That, at least, seemed to be what a lot of voters who trusted him on this topic, imagined — including many immigrant-heavy communities who voted Republican in historic numbers, and were also concerned about the sometimes chaotic flow of asylum seekers into the country.
Pollsters were quick to note that though many of these deportation proposals were quite popular with the average American, support varied dramatically depending on the details. Targeted ICE arrests of convicted felons and those who arrived in the United States during the Biden presidency polled significantly better than separating mixed-status families, carrying out arrests at or near churches and schools, and deporting longtime residents — who might be your neighbors or friends.
Instead, American cities were occupied by federal law enforcement agencies; the National Guard was deployed to quell protests; unidentified and masked agents strolled through neighborhoods, chased suspects into stores, and arrested immigrants at courthouses; protesters, politicians, and journalists were arrested or injured; people with pending asylum cases were seized and deported to a notorious foreign maximum-security prison; and two American citizens were shot and killed.
Much of the Department of Homeland Security remained shut down or operated without pay as Democrats demanded new limits attached to any funding this month. In response, Trump deployed ICE to airports — to help beleaguered TSA agents and even rehabilitate their image, he says, but also implicitly to pressure an opposition party that has come to see them as the president’s personal army and associate them with repression. “That’ll drive the Democrats crazy,” US Rep. James Comer (R-KY), said on Fox Business News recently.
A year into this deportation program, it’s safe to say that the joint work of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US Border Patrol, and other federal agencies have reshaped American life, from coast-to-coast, in both dramatic and more quiet ways. It has touched all kinds of ethnic communities — Somalis in Minnesota, Haitians in Ohio, Arabs in Michigan — and has had a particular impact on the nation’s largest cohort of recent immigrants, those from Latin America.
A new kind of civically conscious activist has risen in places that experienced ICE surges or are continuing to see enforcement actions. Local economies were devastated by deportation efforts, and are still struggling to recover. And fear, suspicion — and, in some cases, paranoia — have remade the social fabric of communities touched by ICE.
But in conversations with affected people across the country, there’s also a sense of hope — and a sense that the Trump administration is realizing how far it has gone, and may be attempting to tone down or change how it pursues its immigration goals.
When rumors began circulating last year that ICE was planning a surge of agents to the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, locals were alarmed and looking for something to do.
“I was never really an activist, but the stuff that I was seeing, I just didn’t like,” Jonathan Pierce, a drugstore employee in Hickory, North Carolina, told me. “I didn’t like how Trump talked about immigrants and I was seeing how the immigration stuff was affecting people that I work with, who are my friends, who have been active in church.”
Fortunately, for Pierce, he had options. Concerned citizens had an easy entry point into local activism and a clear blueprint for action that had been prepared months in advance and was being tested and updated in cities around the country.
In November, Homeland Security officially announced Operation “Charlotte’s Web.” Soon, unmarked vans and masked federal agents patrolled the city and its suburbs. They would end up carrying out raids, arresting and detaining hundreds, and sparking fear in the region’s primarily Hispanic immigrant communities. But locals were already organizing and responding.
It started at the grassroots level, with support from religious leaders. Immigrant rights’ groups and legal aid organizations were already in contact with pastors, priests, and preachers in the region to iron out ways they could support immigrant neighbors. Congregants at the First United Methodist church in Taylorsville, North Carolina — Pierce among them — had already begun attending trainings on how to respond.
The original plan was to teach volunteers how they could help vulnerable neighbors get to and from churches and schools, the Rev. Joel Simpson, a First United Methodist pastor, told me. As they watched ICE tactics grow more aggressive in other cities where they had launched major operations, “those trainings shifted from what we had originally planned once we realized this could get much more violent and intense.”
Working with groups like Siembra NC and the Carolina Migrant Network, churches began to host more trainings and activate neighbors to sign up to monitor ICE operations. They learned deescalation tactics, how to communicate via whistles, and how to document interactions between ICE agents and detained people. They refreshed their frightened neighbors on what their rights were, shared how to get legal assistance, and how to be aware of potential danger.
In all, more than 2,000 people were trained and organized during that first week of ICE operations in the area, Simpson told me.
The defining image of resistance during Trump’s first term was the mass protest: The Women’s March at its start, the March for Our Lives in the middle, and finally Black Lives Matter protests at the end. In his second term, it has become more about individual action: Recording federal agents with a smartphone or sounding a car horn to alert a street to their presence.
The Minneapolis uprising that forced ICE to pull out in January — and eventually led to the firing of DHS secretary Kristi Noem — confirmed the ascendance of a new type of activist movement that had already established itself around the country: Small, nimble, local, and constantly adopting new tactics to protect neighbors from harassment, detention, or deportation.
“It’s churches and neighborhoods and grassroots community organizational networks that are already existing that mobilized to help immigrant families first and foremost,” Theda Skocpol, an expert on political organizing in the US, told me in January.
While Minneapolis was the culmination of these forms of networking, elements of this activism preceded it in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC, all following similar blueprints.
TheTrump administration sees it differently: Officials have argued that these protests and community organizing tactics are impeding normal enforcement operations — particularly deporting criminals — and that participants have endangered officers with disruptive behavior. Earlier this year, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and use federal troops to quash protests.
Pierce’s life feels a lot different now than a year ago. He’s participated in those November trainings; he’s joined protests in both Raleigh and in Washington, DC, and he now cares about more than just immigration.
Though he’s been limited by his work schedule — child care responsibilities as a single parent — and weather, he’s tried to remain active, trying to convince neighbors in Hickory to care about ICE and other economic concerns ahead of the 2026 midterms: organizing letter-writing campaigns to local and state representatives, and talking with neighbors about the future of SNAP benefits, health insurance, and affordability.
Pierce is an example of what another preacher told me has changed in the Charlotte area: of politically agnostic or sympathetic neighbors being convinced to practice what they believe.
“I knew that there were people in Charlotte that cared for the immigrant community, but it wasn’t until Border Patrol was in Charlotte that I saw the action that came attached to that,” Erika Reynoso, a Pentecostal preacher in Gastonia, a neighboring suburb, told me. “It gave them a chance to take action as opposed to just having an ideology.”
“They know what it takes. So if Border Patrol shows up again, we’re ready.”
Erika Reynoso, Pentecostal preacher in North Carolina
Reynoso knew plenty of people who were detained or racially profiled during the Charlotte surge. She herself feared what might happen to her as ICE behaved more aggressively. Though she began to participate in ICE watches and mutual aid groups early in November, once she heard reports of Latino citizens being detained and questioned, she pulled back.
“I went to one of the sightings and thankfully there was already a white male verifier there, and I asked him, ‘Hey, are you here to verify?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you should leave immediately,”” she said. “I knew that in that moment there was something terrible happening in that neighborhood and he was protecting me.”
Instead, she shifted her activism toward more quiet forms of mutual aid, of educating neighbors, and preaching about social justice at her church. And though ICE’s heavy presence is gone now, those memories and that fear still linger.
But these communities have been changed for the better too, Reynoso said. The training has stuck with them, and so has the confidence that it can make a difference in practice.
“They know what it takes,” she said. “So if Border Patrol shows up again, we’re ready.”
Anchored by taquerias, grocery stores, boutique shops, and bakeries on 26th Street southwest of downtown Chicago, Little Village is known as the “Mexico of the Midwest.”
It’s renowned for being the economic engine of Chicago’s Latino community — city officials told me that along with the Magnificent Mile downtown, Little Village is among the top tax-revenue-generating stretches of Chicago.
And it’s not just the locals driving commerce: Little Village, and specifically the 26th Street corridor “is a tourist destination for other Latinos in the United States,” Jennifer Aguilar, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce, told me. “We see a lot of visitors from the Midwest and East Coast that come to buy things that they can’t find in the states that they live in, like food, quinceañera dresses or ingredients that they need to cook traditional dishes. And since a lot of them can’t go to Mexico, this is the next big best thing.”
Then the immigration authorities arrived.
When Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander-at-large, came to town, residents, leaders, and business owners knew to expect disruption. They just didn’t expect how bad things would get, how hard the economic hit would be, and how long it would take to recover.
Immediately, the midwestern Latino visitors who made the trek by car to drive under the corridor’s iconic welcome arch were too afraid to come in “because they heard that ICE was targeting Little Village,” Aguilar said.
News coverage at the time showed scenes of a ghost town in Little Village, of canceled Mexican Independence Day celebrations in downtown, of ICE targets being chased into shops and restaurants, of seemingly random traffic stops, and of protests prompting armored vehicles and federal agents to deploy tear gas — including at least three times in Little Village.
The effect was immediate. From September to late October, when ICE was most active in Chicago, business owners in Little Village were reporting 50 to 60 percent drops in sales compared to the previous year, according to the local alderperson, Michael D. Rodriguez. Some shops struggled to make a single sale in a week, while others temporarily closed their doors.
Wherever ICE and CBP officers have surged, a trail of economic devastation has often followed. Local businesses in multiple cities have complained of foot traffic shutting down, frightened employees staying home, and vendors scared off streets.
Nationally, these enforcement operations have remade the economy. The flow of immigrants into the United States — both documented and undocumented — has turned net negative for the first time in 50 years, according to a Brookings Institution report, with more people now exiting the country overall. The report estimated the change could result in a $60 billion to $110 billion drop in consumer spending between 2025 and 2026, and further worsen prices because of higher labor and production costs, particularly in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing.
While the White House has touted every migrant worker removed as a potential job opening for a native-born one, hiring has slowed nationally over the same period. The administration has also made some concessions to immigrant-heavy industries, particularly agriculture, by discouraging raids.
But these big-picture statistics can obscure the very real way these economic hits have damaged American communities. And perhaps no place is a better example of this pattern than Little Village.
When trying to describe the economic pain caused over these weeks, the Chicagoans I spoke to tended to come back to a chilling comparison: the Covid-19 pandemic.
The last time they had felt a shock like this had been during the peak of the coronavirus shutdowns. But unlike in 2020, there were no equivalent grant programs or federally backed loans, like the Paycheck Protection Program, to help keep businesses and employees afloat.
“At least people were getting paid; you had essential workers, and I never stopped working,” Christina Gonzalez, the co-owner of the Los Comales taqueria and catering group, told me. “But we were recovering from 2020 and this [with tariffs] hit us like a one-two punch.”
When ICE and CBP arrived, businesses were already struggling with higher costs as a result of tariffs, and dealing with financial hits from some enforcement actions in the city in the first half of the year. Shop owners had to furlough or lay off employees; others couldn’t convince workers to commute to the area, for fear of being detained. This all created a cycle: Lost wages meant less purchasing power, which meant lower sales for these small businesses.
In response, city and local officials have tried their best to take stock of what was happening and track the lingering fallout. Since October, local, state, and federal representatives have met with business owners, collected testimony, connected businesses with small grant funds, and promoted campaigns to convince people of means — often wealthier, white, or citizens — to visit Little Village and other primarily Mexican American neighborhoods to shop and spend.
Still, the impacts have lingered. Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia, whose office started the “Shopping in Solidarity” initiative to promote visits and investment from those outside Little Village, said there’s only so much she and local communities can do without more state and city support. She’s called for the creation of a joint public-private relief fund to help with small business recovery and investment efforts in 2026. And she’s preparing for more bad news in April across the city.
“When the tax returns are filed, you’ll be able to actually see the real numbers,” she said. “But we know that it’s already going to be devastating just by hearing the stories and seeing it with our own eyes — the ghost towns of a lot of our neighborhoods.”
All these months later, residents across the country, particularly those in immigrant or diaspora communities, continue to describe a kind of “survival mode” — a feeling that extends beyond economic pain.
It’s a sense of wariness that sometimes borders on paranoia, that ICE will return or is hanging around the corner. And it lingers even as residents prepare for better weather and more time spent together outdoors — a footprint still left on residents’ souls as they navigate public life across the country.
The stories of Latino residents in the greater Phoenix area gave me another window into this reality, in addition to stories from Charlotte and Chicago. Immigrants, mixed-status families, citizens, and activists in Maricopa County have a long history with immigration politics, deportations, and the inevitable shearing of the social fabric that comes with it.
This part of the country was the focal point of enforcement in the pre-Trump years, when the battle over immigration and what to do about those who had been living in the US for years was most acrimonious. Championed by hardline anti-illegal immigration officials like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, state law SB 1070 essentially deputized local law enforcement to enforce immigration law: requiring police to check immigration status during stops if they suspected someone might be undocumented. It made a lack of documentation a state crime, and empowered Arpaio, “America’s toughest sheriff,” to continue an aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the county that sparked accusations of racial profiling and mental and emotional distress to brown people in the region.
The law was largely blocked in court after years of long legal battles. But that memory — and the activism and organizing that sprung up in response by primarily Mexican Americans in the area — still remains.
Though Phoenix hasn’t seen the same kind of mass deployments that Chicago, Charlotte, or Minneapolis have faced, the area has experienced similar kinds of quiet enforcement, targeted raids, and rumor-mill sightings of federal agents across the area, as in those other cities.
“Our community is thinking twice when they open their doors, when they leave their homes,” César Fierros, an organizer and spokesperson for the immigrant rights group Living United for Change in Arizona, told me. “It’s this thing in the back of your head: What if you get stopped because of the color of your skin? or they inquire about your citizenship because of the color of your skin.“ It’s a fear, Fierros said, “even among citizens and people that have the proper documentation to be in the country,” of having to encounter a federal officer, of being racially profiled, of being harassed — because community members feel like it’s happened before.
Fierros told me that he’s had to have conversations with his family similar to the ones his organization is having with community members: of carrying a REAL ID, a passport, or permanent residency card at all times and making plans if a family member without documentation is detained.
“My mom’s a school bus driver. She has an accent because English is not her primary language and she’s very proud of being an American. But at the same time, she’s fearful of potentially being racially profiled by ICE or by a federal agent or by law enforcement,” Fierros told me. So his mother carries her passport with her, something that she has never done before.
It’s not just Fierros’s community that has this fear, or has changed their behavior like this. I heard similar stories from each of the people I spoke to for this story. Driven by news reports that not only undocumented immigrants have been detained or targeted for deportation, but also people in legal asylum proceedings, refugees, green card holders, students, and US citizens, their personal safety has never felt more precarious.
This uneasiness has registered in national polling as well. A Pew Research Center survey published in November analyzing the mood and feeling of Latinos living in the US found a consistent shift in how they are changing their behavior as a result of Trump’s second-term enforcement agenda. Some one in five Hispanic adults told pollsters they changed their daily activities out of fear they’ll be asked to “prove their legal status.” One in 10 say they carry a document to prove citizenship or legal status now, more often than they used to do.
And then there are more difficult conversations, about what a family will have to do in the case that someone is detained.
Yolanda Landeros, a 56-year-old resident of Buckeye, a Phoenix suburb, told me that in addition to carrying a REAL ID and avoiding spending too much time outdoors, she’s had to develop different plans with her extended family in the Southwest and Iowa about what to do if ICE comes knocking or detains a member — memorizing phone numbers to alert family or attorneys, knowing not to open doors, and asking for warrants.
She’s most worried about an undocumented cousin living in Iowa, who deals with chronic health issues and requires dialysis treatment.
“If he gets detained, he could be there for days, weeks, or months. He can’t do that. He won’t survive,” Landeros told me.
So they developed a Plan A, B, and C:
The stories of changed social and family life around the country reminded me of what my colleague Anna North recently dubbed the “ICE pandemic” — the sense that even beyond the lasting fear and economic damage that ICE surges created, there is also lingering damage to community trust and willingness to participate in social life. Kids have been kept home from school or educated remotely; churchgoers skipped services or were issued dispensations to forgive a missed Mass; scared workers stayed home and refused to expose themselves to potential stops; sick kids or adults in need of medical care opted to delay or postpone checkups for fear of ICE exposure.
And there’s the sadness that comes with knowing people who have opted to uproot their lives preemptively, retire early, or self-deport.
“They want to wear people down, and it has worked in some instances,” Aguilar, the Chicago small business activist, told me. “Some business owners have shared with me stories of regular clients that they’ve had for years that decided to self-deport because they’re like, Well, I’d rather take my stuff with me. I’d rather go home in a dignified way than end up in one of these camps and God knows where I’ll end up and if my family’s going to be able to reach me.”
Gonzales, of Los Comales in Chicago, recalled how her son asked her if he should be carrying his passport or ID around with him in order to prove his citizenship.
“I said, ‘No, fuck ’em.’ Somebody needs to vet me? I’m not living in a Kafka-esque Nazi government,” she said. “You can find me with my fingerprints or you can figure out who I am based on the information I give you from my mouth. But I should not have to show you my goddamn ID to walk down the street.”
Ratings of Trump’s immigration policy have been solidly negative for months now among voters, shifting most dramatically among Latinos, Latino Republicans, and Trump 2024 voters. A Fox News poll in March found his overall approval at 28 percent with Hispanic respondents, with 72 percent disapproving. Democrats have also made gains in elections with Hispanic communities that swung right in 2024. Trump has reportedly told his inner circle that he fears his early plans for “mass deportation” have gone too far for voters.
For now, residents in these communities remain in a bit of a holding pattern. They all expect that ICE or CBP will return at some point, particularly after the outrage and attention that the Minneapolis operations sparked dies down. But they also feel some optimism about how their communities and neighbors will respond in the future. In each of my conversations, a silver lining was repeated: that even though there is more suspicion and fear now, there are new bonds that have been forged among neighbors, in faith communities, and among Latinos themselves, specifically.
“Whatever divisions there may have been across the Latino community with the us versus them, the documented versus the undocumented, the criminals versus the noncriminals…there’s a greater sense of unity now and a willingness to help,” Reynoso, the Pentecostal pastor in North Carolina, told me. “We must exercise grace and compassion with each other in these uncertain times.”
