2026-02-05 05:50:30
2026年2月3日，米兰-科尔蒂纳冬奥会的媒体日活动在意大利科蒂纳丹佩佐的奥运村举行，奥运五环标志出现在活动现场。| Kevin Voigt/Getty Images 本届冬奥会（第25届冬季奥运会）将在伦巴第大区和意大利东北部的多个场地举行，开幕式于2月6日星期五开始，持续到2月22日。从冰球（拥有自己的文化时刻）到新兴项目如高山滑雪登山，冬奥会涵盖了冬季运动的全部项目。请关注Vox在此提供的所有关于冬奥会的新闻和解释文章。* 像奥运选手一样思考 * 冰为何如此滑的秘密 * 空中滑雪战争如何催生了越野滑雪 * 奥运花样滑冰评分机制 * 压力下失常表现的科学原理及如何避免
The XXV Winter Olympic Games are being held in sites across Lombardy and Northeast Italy, starting with the opening ceremony on Friday, February 6, and lasting until February 22. From ice hockey (having a cultural moment of its own) to newer competitions like ski mountaineering, the games span the full breadth of the Winter Olympics.
Follow along here for all of Vox’s news and explainers about the Games.
2026-02-05 03:30:00
2025年9月8日，美国司法部长帕姆·邦迪在华盛顿特区的圣经博物馆与总统唐纳德·特朗普一同祈祷。| Win McNamee/Getty Images
周二，一位代表特朗普政府的律师向联邦法官表示：“我希望你直接对政府采取藐视法庭的措施，这样我就能睡个好觉。”这位律师朱莉·李（Julie Le）被临时调派至明尼苏达州的美国检察官办公室，仅在一个月内就处理了88起联邦法院案件，这是一项极其繁重的工作量，即使是工作最努力的律师也会请求宽恕。此外，李在法庭上还回应了联邦地区法官杰里·布莱克韦尔（Jerry Blackwell）的命令，要求解释特朗普政府为何未能遵守1月27日的法院命令，即释放一名被关押的个人。布莱克韦尔还曾于1月31日下令，若政府不回应，则将其视为藐视法庭。
显然，特朗普政府无法遵守法院命令或回应法官的威胁，原因并不难理解。明尼苏达州联邦地区法院首席法官帕特里克·席尔茨（Patrick Schiltz）在1月26日的命令中指出，特朗普政府“决定派遣数千名特工前往明尼苏达州逮捕外国人，却未为由此产生的数百份保释申请和其他诉讼做好准备。”换句话说，特朗普动用数千名武装执法官在明尼阿波利斯骚扰和逮捕移民，却没有派遣足够的律师来处理由此产生的联邦法院案件。因此，当法官下令政府释放被拘留者或采取其他行动时，往往没有律师能够及时回应。更糟糕的是，即使有律师参与，特朗普政府似乎也无力或不愿遵守法院命令。据报道，李在周二的听证会上表示，要让特朗普政府遵守这些命令“就像拔牙一样困难”，“我需要发送10封电子邮件才能纠正一个释放条件，甚至要威胁要离开法庭才能让其他问题得到解决。”
与此同时，明尼苏达州的联邦法官们已采取非常规手段来打破这一僵局。例如，席尔茨在1月26日的命令中要求，除非该名移民被迅速释放，否则特朗普政府的代理局长托德·洛伊（Todd Lyons）必须亲自出庭解释政府为何无法遵守之前的命令。这一策略似乎奏效了，因为该名移民最终被释放。然而，尽管席尔茨的手段成功促使政府遵守了一项法院命令，但政府仍未能遵守其他大量命令。据席尔茨在1月28日的命令显示，ICE（美国移民与海关执法局）在74起案件中违反了96项法院命令。
换句话说，特朗普似乎已经破坏了司法部的运作。司法部缺乏足够的人员来应对ICE在明尼阿波利斯所犯的法律违规行为。而且，这种情况可能会进一步恶化。据《全国广播公司》（NBC）报道，李在法庭上承认了这一问题后，已不再担任明尼苏达州美国检察官办公室的职务，因此她的88起案件将由其他已超负荷工作的律师接手。她的同事安娜·沃斯（Ana Voss）也“已提交辞职通知”。事实上，自特朗普占领明尼阿波利斯以来，该办公室已有多名律师辞职抗议。上个月，六名律师，包括该办公室的第二位律师，因高级司法部官员要求他们对 Renee Good 的遗孀展开刑事调查而辞职。据《美联社》报道，此后又有八名律师离开或计划离开该办公室。
此外，明尼苏达州以外的司法部律师也可能被卷入明尼阿波利斯的混乱。据《彭博社》报道，全国93个美国检察官办公室最近被要求指定一名或两名律师加入“紧急支援小组”，以协助那些因特朗普政策引发的紧急或关键情况而需要帮助的司法部办公室。换句话说，司法部似乎正在将律师从刑事起诉和政府民事辩护中抽调出来，以应对特朗普政策引发的一系列危机。
特朗普政府的问题不仅在于数量，还在于其对联邦法律的误读。许多移民被非法拘留，而他们却无法挑战这种非法拘留，因为找不到律师。例如，在 Juan T. R. v. Noem 一案中，席尔茨下令要求 ICE 总监出庭，除非该名移民被释放。特朗普政府声称，根据联邦法律，必须拘留这位仅在法庭文件中被称作“Juan T. R.”的移民，因为他是“申请入境的外国人”。然而，Juan 并非申请入境者，他于1999年抵达美国。因此，该法律并不适用于他。尽管如此，特朗普政府仍错误地解读该法律，以非法方式拘留了大量移民。据11月26日的一份意见书，一位联邦法官指出，特朗普政府对这一法律的误读已在至少362起联邦地区法院案件中被挑战，而截至该判决时，挑战者在160位不同法官的裁决中赢得了350起案件。因此，法院几乎一致驳回了特朗普政府对这一法律的错误解读。但特朗普政府仍然继续非法拘留人员。
目前尚不清楚有多少移民正被非法拘留，但其中许多人尚未挑战这种非法拘留，因为他们无法找到律师。直到最近，联邦法院可能还会通过“全国性禁令”来回应这种普遍的法律违规行为，即发布一项禁止联邦政府在全国范围内实施相同法律违规的法院命令。但最高法院的共和党多数派最近在特朗普诉CASA案（2025）中限制了下级法院发布此类禁令的权力。因此，这些案件只能逐个处理，而司法部显然缺乏足够的人员来应对每起案件。
特朗普政府对司法部的破坏可能在多年后仍产生影响，即使国会通过立法禁止未来总统进行类似行动。一个可能的后果是，司法部在特朗普离开白宫后仍将难以招聘到优秀人才。经验丰富的律师正在逃离司法部，政府将因此失去他们的专业技能和机构知识。同时，许多顶尖申请者可能因担心被置于类似李的困境而犹豫是否申请司法部的工作。司法部的“DOGE”（即“特朗普政府试图解雇公务员”的象征）以及类似行为的阴影笼罩着所有联邦职位。过去，司法部因其工作稳定性和可预测的工作量而吸引精英律师，但现在这些优势已不复存在，许多曾寻求司法部职位的高能律师可能更倾向于选择私人执业。与此同时，法官们似乎对司法部律师失去信心，也不确定他们是否可以信任这些律师的法庭陈述。在新总统上任后，司法部律师是否能重新赢得这种信任，仍不清楚。
“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” a lawyer representing Donald Trump’s government told a federal judge on Tuesday. Julie Le, the lawyer, who was temporarily detailed to the US Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis, was assigned to 88 federal court cases in under a month — a crushing workload that would make even the most diligent attorney beg for mercy.
Le, moreover, was in court after federal district Judge Jerry Blackwell ordered her and her co-counsel to explain why the Trump administration had not complied with a January 27 order requiring it to release an individual from US custody. As Blackwell’s order demanding an explanation laid out, the government also did not respond to a January 31 order threatening to hold it in contempt.
It’s not a mystery why Trump’s government is unable to comply with court orders, or even respond to judges threatening contempt. As Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge in Minnesota’s federal district court, explained in a January 26 order, the Trump administration “decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.”
Trump, in other words, deployed thousands of armed law enforcement officers to harass and arrest people in Minneapolis, without sending enough lawyers to handle all of the federal court cases that would inevitably result from Trump’s occupation of Minnesota. So, when a judge issues an order commanding the government to release a detainee or to take some other action, there’s often no lawyer available to respond to that order.
Worse, Trump’s government appears either unwilling or unable to comply with court orders even when one of its lawyers does engage with a particular case. Le reportedly told Blackwell at Tuesday’s hearing that it is like “pulling teeth” to get the Trump administration to comply with these orders. “It takes 10 emails from me for a release condition to be corrected,” Le said. “It takes me threatening to walk out for something else to be corrected.”
Minnesota’s federal judges, meanwhile, have resorted to extraordinary tactics to break this logjam. In his January 26 order, for example, Schiltz ordered Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to personally appear in court and explain the government’s inability to comply with his previous order, unless the immigrant named in that order was swiftly released. This tactic appears to have worked, because the man was released.
But, while Schiltz’s tactic successfully got the Trump administration to comply with a single court order, the administration is still out of compliance with numerous others. In a January 28 order, Schiltz listed “96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases.”
Trump, in other words, appears to have broken the Department of Justice. It simply does not have the personnel it needs to respond to all of the legal violations committed by ICE in Minneapolis. And it is likely that this problem is going to get much worse.
It is likely that Le’s moment of honesty in Blackwell’s courtroom will follow her for the rest of her career. Any future potential employer who Googles her name will find an array of news articles about the time that she asked a federal judge to hold her in contempt.
This stigma will follow her, moreover, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that she was incompetent or otherwise neglected her duties. Le, who previously served in a different government role, reportedly volunteered to help the Department of Justice with the crushing weight of cases it faced due to Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis. The DOJ rewarded her with an impossible workload that made her vulnerable to judicial sanctions.
There’s a lesson here for lawyers who are considering public service: Don’t work for Trump’s Justice Department or this can happen to you.
It is likely, moreover, that working conditions in Trump’s DOJ will only get worse. NBC News reported that Le is no longer working for the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota after her courtroom confession, so now her 88 cases will need to be handled by some other already overworked lawyer. Her co-counsel, Ana Voss, is also “among those who have given their notices of resignation,” according to NBC.
Indeed, the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota has hemorrhaged lawyers since the occupation of Minneapolis began. Six lawyers, including the office’s No. 2 attorney, resigned in protest last month after senior DOJ officials pushed them to open a criminal investigation into the widow of Renee Good, who was killed by federal immigration officer Jonathan Ross. Eight more attorneys have since either left the office or plan to leave, according to the Associated Press.
Nor are Justice Department lawyers outside of Minnesota safe from being pulled into the Minneapolis debacle. Bloomberg reported that all of the nation’s 93 US Attorney’s Offices were recently ordered to designate one or two lawyers who will join “emergency jump teams” that will assist DOJ offices that require “urgent assistance due to emergent or critical situations.”
The Justice Department, in other words, appears to be pulling lawyers off criminal prosecutions and civil defense of the US government, so they can deal with an outbreak of crises created by Trump’s policies.
This is not just a problem of quantity. Another reason why DOJ lawyers are stretched so thin is that the Trump administration is detaining many immigrants without a legal basis to do so.
There’s no telling how many immigrants are illegally confined right now, but have yet to challenge that illegal detention because they haven’t been able to find a lawyer.
Consider, for example, Schiltz’s orders in Juan T.R. v. Noem, the case where he ordered ICE’s director to appear in court if an immigrant was not released. The Trump administration claimed that it must detain this immigrant, identified only as “Juan T.R.” in court documents, under a provision of federal law that calls for detention “in the case of an alien who is an applicant for admission.” But Juan is not an applicant for admission. He arrived in the United States around 1999. So this statute does not apply to him.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has misread this law to detain numerous immigrants without legal justification. In a November 26 opinion, one federal judge wrote that the Trump administration’s misreading of this federal law “has been challenged in at least 362 cases in federal district courts.” As of that decision, the challengers had prevailed “in 350 of those cases decided by over 160 different judges sitting in about fifty different courts spread across the United States.”
So the courts are nearly unanimous in rejecting the Trump administration’s misreading of this law. But Trump’s government continues to illegally detain people nonetheless. There’s no telling how many immigrants are illegally confined right now, but have yet to challenge that illegal detention because they haven’t been able to find a lawyer.
Until fairly recently, federal courts might have responded to such widespread legal violations by issuing a “nationwide injunction,” a court order that bars the federal government from committing the same legal violation anywhere in the country. But the Supreme Court’s Republican majority recently limited lower courts’ power to issue such injunctions in Trump v. CASA (2025). And so these cases are being handled piecemeal, even though the Justice Department apparently lacks the personnel to respond to each individual case.
The consequences of the Minneapolis occupation are likely to be felt for years after Trump leaves office, even if Congress enacts legislation barring any future president from conducting a similar operation. One likely consequence is that the Justice Department will struggle to hire good people long after Trump is gone.
Experienced lawyers are fleeing the Justice Department, so the government will likely lose their skills and institutional knowledge forever. Many top applicants, meanwhile, will likely be reluctant to apply for Justice Department jobs out of fear that they will be placed in an impossible position, as Julie Le was.
The specter of DOGE, and similar Trump administration efforts to fire civil servants, looms over all federal jobs. The Justice Department typically pays much less than what its lawyers could earn in private practice, but it has historically been an attractive employer for elite attorneys because it offered job security and a predictable workload. Now that that’s no longer the case, many of the kind of high-powered lawyers who historically sought out Justice Department jobs are likely to decide that they are better off in private practice.
Meanwhile, judges appear to be losing confidence in the Justice Department’s lawyers, and in whether their statements in court can be trusted. It’s far from clear whether DOJ’s lawyers will regain that confidence once the United States has a new president.
2026-02-04 21:30:00
After decades of declining sales, whole milk consumption has been on the upswing in recent years. Its return was crowned when, last month, the Trump administration published updated federal dietary guidelines that recommend full-fat dairy, like whole milk, and passed a new law that allows public schools to serve whole milk, which had been effectively prohibited since 2012 in an effort to reduce students’ saturated fat intake.
Cue a flurry of odd social media posts from the Trump administration’s offices.
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One bore an illustration of President Donald Trump as a 1950’s-era milkman, while an AI-generated video had Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drinking whole milk in a dark nightclub. Perhaps the strangest post was made by the US Department of Agriculture, which released a video of kids posing for department-store portraits repeating “drink whole milk” as ominous electronic music pulses in the background.
Every action on the internet has an equal and opposite reaction, so many social media users are sharing their theories about the milk posting blitz. Is this a MAHA thing, considering Kennedy’s demonstrated love for saturated fat? Is this a racist dog whistle, given that white supremacists have made milk their beverage of choice (because many people of color can’t digest lactose)? Or is the Trump administration just shilling for Big Dairy?
The answer is probably some mix of all of the above. But promoting dairy milk of any sort is not exclusive to the Trump administration, nor the Republican Party.
President Bill Clinton’s health secretary appeared in a 1990s Got Milk? ad, while President Barack Obama’s agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, went on to earn a $1 million salary as a dairy industry lobbyist during Trump’s first term and then returned to the US Department of Agriculture to serve as secretary under President Joe Biden in which he, too, regularly praised the virtues of dairy on X.
“There is a reflexive deference to dairy at USDA and in federal food policy circles regardless of political affiliation,” a former USDA official, who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation, told me. “Dairy is treated as a cultural and political baseline, receiving more attention than almost all other US commodities…USDA staff feel almost a paternal sense of protection over the industry, at all costs.”
The administration “is utilizing all the tools available to ensure farmers have what they need to continue their farming operations,” a USDA spokesperson wrote to Vox, adding: “Our government is taking bold steps to strengthen school nutrition, including the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, which would bring whole milk back to school cafeterias.” The agency did not respond to the criticism that it is overly deferential to the dairy sector.
To understand just how much politicians of all stripes like to advance the interests of Big Dairy, consider this one figure: In 2015, an estimated 71 percent of US dairy farmers’ revenue was dependent on government support.
That support takes many forms, including:
But likely the most beneficial policy for milk companies comes down to school cafeterias.
In the 1940s, Congress developed the National School Lunch Program, which required schools to serve each student at participating schools a cup of whole milk. That helped the industry sell off surpluses, which beneficially raised prices for farmers.
Today, about 20 percent of public schools must serve milk to students, while the other 80 percent must at least offer it, even though kids throw away 41 percent of it. In an effort to reduce food waste, some schools have tried a different approach by, for example, suggesting children can choose water if they don’t want milk. But even such light nudges have been met with reprimands from the USDA.
All this milk in schools accounts for about 8 percent of the US dairy industry’s annual revenue.
Few sectors of the food industry seem to have so much influence over school food, or the USDA itself for that matter. How did that come to be?
While dairy can certainly be part of a healthy diet, the idea that it’s essential for both children and adults is a myth, and an outdated one at that. It stems from long-held concerns around calcium, which milk is rich in, and its role in bone health later in life.
But decades of nutritional research has reached a more nuanced conclusion — that calcium absorption is complex, and high milk consumption in adolescence and adulthood doesn’t reduce the chance of hip fractures in old age.
US dietary guidelines have long recommended three daily servings of dairy, though Harvard University’s public health school recommends zero to two. There are, of course, plenty of other sources of calcium beyond dairy, like nuts, beans, lentils, tofu, sardines, seeds, dark leafy greens, and fortified nondairy products.
And dairy is rife with ethical concerns. Undercover investigations into massive corporate-run dairy factory farms and small organic operations alike have revealed horrific cruelty. Journalists and labor groups have exposed abysmal working conditions for the industry’s largely immigrant workforce. And scientists warn we need to decrease our consumption of dairy and other animal products to lower our risk of climate catastrophe.
But exposés and advances in nutrition and climate research haven’t stopped policymakers on either side of the aisle from promoting milk. That’s likely in large part due to the fact that the top 10 dairy states include a mix of blue, red, and purple electorates.
As a result, dairy state Democrats join with Republicans to champion bill after bill to further aid the industry or attack its plant-based competition, even though the dairy industry goes against many of the Democratic Party’s stated values.
The dairy sector also spends millions annually in federal elections, lobbying, and nutrition research (at least three of the nine reviewers for the new federal dietary guidelines have financial ties to dairy groups).
There are also cultural explanations for milk’s popularity in Washington right now. It’s a symbol of wholesomeness and “simpler” times, one that has proven particularly potent for MAGA and MAHA — hence the Trump-as-1950s-milkman meme and tradwife-influencer phenomenon. Even as their numbers decline, farmers maintain a vaunted status in American society, so lawmakers are hesitant to criticize them and quick to propose favorable policies.
“The sector has a halo over it given the unshakable narrative of dairy as the engine for rural communities and American tradition,” the former USDA official said.
White supremacists have also made it a symbol for their ideology because the lactose in milk is most commonly tolerated by white people and less frequently so people of color.
It’s reasonable to interpret the Trump administration’s milk posts as the next front in their culture war. But its extremely online milk content is much more likely what it appears to be on its face: an advertising campaign for the dairy industry. And in spirit it’s really not that much different from what other administrations — whether Republican or Democrat — have done, and I’d wager, what the next one will do, too.
2026-02-04 21:00:00
互联网是我们不同阶段自我的档案库。如果你是Z世代或千禧一代，很可能你在网络上保存了自己几乎每一个生活阶段的内容：旧时的粉丝、旧时的朋友、旧时的观点。随之而来的，也有一种不可避免的尴尬。当你看到多年前自己发布的内容感到难堪时，你可能会想彻底删除，但记者兼《华尔街日报》撰稿人亚历山德拉·萨缪尔（Alexandra Samuel）认为，这未必是最佳选择。她告诉Vox：“我认为，你应当考虑删除你发布的内容，但这是出于‘策展’的需要。”萨缪尔说：“互联网档案馆会保存网络上的各种快照，因此当你删除某些内容时，可能只是删除了你自己所看到的部分。这并不意味着这些内容已经从互联网上彻底消失。我认为在删除内容之前，备份它们是个好主意。”
当你回顾旧帖子并感到尴尬时，还有哪些其他选择？我们该如何看待自己一生的数字档案？在Vox的每周问答播客《Explain It to Me》中，我们回答了这些问题。以下是与萨缪尔的对话摘录，已进行删减和润色。你可以通过Apple Podcasts、Spotify或其他播客平台收听完整节目。如果你想提交问题，可以发送电子邮件至[email protected]，或致电1-800-618-8545。
你有没有过因为在线上的某些行为而感到后悔或羞愧的时刻？当然有。2011年6月，温哥华队输给了波士顿队，人们情绪激动。当时街头发生了骚乱，而这次骚乱的特别之处在于，它首次被实时社交媒体记录下来。那是Twitter的鼎盛时期，人们在推特上分享照片，在YouTube上发布视频。起初，大家对这种“公民监控”的想法充满期待，认为可以“抓住那些翻车、砸商店的人”。那天晚上，我亲眼目睹了这一切的发生，并想：“这可不是个好主意。”历史告诉我们，当我们开始对他人指手画脚，扮演一种准监控角色时，事情往往会变得非常糟糕。那晚我为《哈佛商业评论》写了一篇文章，探讨通过社交媒体进行公民监控这一现象为何如此有问题。我收到了很多反对意见。有趣的是，很多人本能地反应是：“但如果我举报了呢？”我认为，愤怒作为一种主观体验，确实有其令人愉悦的一面。我们生活在一个复杂的世界里，有很多灰色地带和微妙之处。如果你在亚马逊购物，或者给车加油，就很难觉得自己是道德高尚的人。而这些在线指责他人的时刻，会让我们短暂地获得一种道德优越感。
那么，不删除旧帖子有什么好处呢？想象一下，你在Instagram或TikTok上发布了一条内容，后来意识到自己当时有点傻，甚至希望从未说过那些话。也许你在评论区还和别人有过交流，有人指出你的话不够敏感，而你也展示了一些学习和成长的迹象。如果你在没有备份的情况下删除了这些内容，将来如果它再次被翻出来，你就没有证据证明你已经有所改变。因此，最好是截图保存、归档评论区，并备份所有相关背景信息，这样即使将来它再次出现，或者你只是想回顾一下，也能有所准备。我不确定你是否读过旧日记，但我确实读过。每次读的时候，我都想：“过去的我所想的，根本不关我的事。”你这句话说得真对，我确实有过这样的经历，重新阅读旧日记。
我们需要意识到，任何快照都是对过去经历的二维呈现。无论是回顾自己过去的行为，还是别人说过的话，我都希望我们能多一些温柔和同理心，关注人们所学到的东西以及我们自身的成长，而不是只以最糟糕的时刻来评判他人。你有没有什么建议，帮助我们在未来十年或二十年后不会因为自己的社交媒体账号而感到羞愧？
试图拥有一个从不后悔的社交媒体形象，其实是一种毫无意义且愚蠢的做法。相反，我认为我们应该抵制那种“热评”（hot take）的诱惑。你需要找到一个中间地带，不要为了制造争议而刻意引发争论。当你故意去激怒他人时，你可能会说出一些并不反映你真实想法的话。但如果你的目标是拥有一个从不后悔的社交媒体形象，那么真正应该做的就是远离网络。我其实认为，现在不使用社交媒体是一个非常好的选择。如果我不是一名需要在线展示的记者，我可能早就不再使用社交媒体了。听起来，如果你在网上分享任何内容，后悔的感觉可能是不可避免的。那么，你该如何应对这种后悔呢？
首先，你需要将自己从情绪中抽离出来，以更客观的态度看待这件事。问问自己：“如果这是发生在朋友身上，我会怎么想？”不要犹豫承认自己可能错了，但也不要急于回应。你需要关掉电脑，放下手机，离开现场。然后，找一个有良好判断力的人聊聊，听听他们的看法。互联网传播迅速，但除非你是名人，每小时收到数万条回复，否则根本不需要立即回应那三条糟糕的评论。你可以等到第二天再处理。然后，你完全可以坦率地说：“我错了。”我认为，作为人类、专业人士和互联网用户，我们能做的最有力量的事情之一，就是展示自己可以犯错，甚至可以在网上犯错，但这并不会毁掉你作为一个人的价值。
The internet is an archive of so many different versions of ourselves. If you’re Gen Z or a millennial, there’s a good chance you preserved almost every stage of your life online: old fandoms, old friends, old opinions. And with that comes an inevitable cringe.
So what do you do when you see something embarrassing you posted years ago? You may be tempted to go scorched earth, but journalist and Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel says that’s not necessarily the best course of action. “I think that you need to think about deleting things you’ve posted as curation,” she told Vox.
“The Internet Archive keeps snapshots of all kinds of things on the internet, so you need to be aware that when you delete something, it might be deleted for you,” Samuel said. “That doesn’t mean it’s deleted from the internet. I think when you delete things, it’s always a good idea to back them up before you delete them.”
What other options do you have when you look back on an old post and cringe? And how should we be thinking about our life’s digital archive? We answer these questions on Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Samuel, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
Was there a moment when online regret and shame first grabbed your attention?
Absolutely. In June 2011, Vancouver lost the Stanley Cup to Boston, and people went nuts. There was this riot in the streets, and what made that riot notable is that for the first time, it was captured in real time on social media. It was the heyday of Twitter. People were tweeting photos. People were making videos and posting them on YouTube. There was initially a lot of excitement about the idea that like, “We’re going to be able to catch the people who are flipping cars and breaking into store windows.”
I saw this unfolding literally that evening, online. And I thought, “This is not a good plan.” History teaches us that when we start narcing on our fellow citizens and stepping into that quasi-surveillance role, it tends to go very, very badly. I wrote a piece that evening for the Harvard Business Review about why this phenomenon of citizen surveillance through social media was so problematic. And I got a lot of pushback.
It’s interesting that so many people’s gut reactions were like, “Okay, but what if I snitched?”
I think there’s something really delightful about outrage as a subjective experience. We live in a really complicated world. There’s a lot of gray. There’s a lot of nuance. It’s really hard to feel like a morally upright person if you shop on Amazon and put gas in your car. And these moments where we’re shaming people online give us a little moment of moral superiority.
What’s the argument for not deleting old posts?
Imagine a scenario where you’ve posted something on Instagram or TikTok. You realize afterwards that you were kind of an idiot, and you wish you hadn’t said what you said. Maybe you even had a back-and-forth in the comment thread where someone pointed out why what you said was insensitive and you showed some capacity for learning. If you delete it without archiving it [and] it comes back to haunt you, you don’t have that evidence of you learning. It’s much better to take the screenshots, archive the thread, and back up all that context so that if it does still come back to haunt you or even if you just want to reflect on it, [you can].
I don’t know if you’ve ever gone back and read old journals, but I have. And every time I think, “What old me thought is none of my business.”
It’s funny you said that. I’ve literally had that exact experience of rereading old journals. We just all need to realize that by definition, anything that is a snapshot is a two-dimensional image of something that we experienced. Whether you’re looking at your own history of something that you did, or if you’re looking at something someone else said, I just wish we could have a little more tenderness and empathy and focus on what people learn and how we grow rather than judging everyone by their most awful moment.
Do you have any advice for best practices when it comes to having a social media presence you won’t be ashamed of in 10 or 20 years?
Trying to have a social media presence where you never regret anything is a recipe for having a completely meaningless and stupid social media presence. Conversely, I think it’s important to resist the lure of the hot take. What you need to do is try and chart that middle ground where you don’t court controversy for its own sake. When you’re deliberately pushing people’s buttons, that’s when you end up saying things that don’t reflect what you truly believe. But if your goal is to have a social media presence where you never regret anything, then truly don’t be online. I actually think it’s a really, really good option now. If I were not a journalist for whom part of the job is showing up online, I do not know if I would use social media anymore.
It sounds like if you’re going to share anything online, that feeling of regret may be inevitable. How do you survive it?
The first thing to do is take yourself out of it, depersonalize it, and think, “If this were happening to a friend, what would I think here?” Don’t hesitate to admit if you think you were wrong, but don’t rush to respond either. You need to close the computer, put the phone down, walk away. Talk to somebody with good judgment and ask what they think. The internet moves quickly, but unless you are a celebrity and you’re getting a hundred thousand responses an hour, there’s actually no reason that three crappy comments can’t wait to be addressed the next day.
And then you absolutely can say you’re wrong. I actually think one of the most powerful things that we can do as humans, as professionals, and as internet users: Show that you can be wrong and you can even be wrong on the internet, and it doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t destroy your value as a human.
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2025年10月18日，示威者在亚特兰大市民中心到佐治亚州议会大厦的游行中举着抗议标语。| Julia Beverly/Getty Images 这篇文章发表于《Today, Explained》——一份帮助你理解当天最引人注目的新闻和故事的每日简报。点击此处订阅。
每当有人提起杰弗里·爱泼斯坦（Jeffrey Epstein）案，我都会感到一丝不安。一开始很难确定他们到底在谈论什么：是爱泼斯坦被证实的罪行，还是围绕这些罪行的阴谋论。有时，这两者之间的界限并不清晰。尤其是在最近大规模、混乱的文件发布之后，这种不确定性更加明显。
爱泼斯坦的罪行已经得到证实，令人震惊。他在数年内性侵并贩卖数十名女孩和妇女。而他同时与许多高权势人物保持密切私人关系，包括政界人士、企业高管和知名记者。一些人直接被牵涉其中，而其他人则因未能及时揭露爱泼斯坦的罪行而受到质疑。
然而，围绕这些事实，还形成了一个更加脆弱的阴谋论和谣言网络。在美国右翼，有一种普遍的阴谋论认为，爱泼斯坦及其罪行证明了存在一个邪恶的、以恋童癖为主的秘密集团，这与“Qanon”阴谋运动所谴责的类似。对于许多“MAGA”阵营的人来说，爱泼斯坦代表了“沿海精英阶层的逍遥法外文化”，正如布朗大学政治学教授阿舒托什·瓦尔辛尼（Ashutosh Varshney）所说。
也许正是因为爱泼斯坦也与右翼政治人物有关联，或者是因为对沿海精英的不信任并非仅限于右翼，所以这位臭名昭著的金融家也引起了左翼的注意和猜测。例如，周末我看到一些社交媒体帖子声称，爱泼斯坦案的新文件严重牵涉到唐纳德·特朗普总统。但事实并非如此。虽然特朗普在文件中被提及超过1000次，但社交媒体上流传的（极其露骨）指控来自一个未经核实的举报列表，提交给了公共的FBI举报热线。
围绕爱泼斯坦案的阴谋论和谣言使得人们很容易将整个事件视为党派煽动或八卦新闻。但这是个错误，有两个原因。首先，这里确实发生了真实的犯罪行为，有真实的受害者。这些女性的律师目前正在要求政府删除最近发布的爱泼斯坦文件，因为这些文件在数千次出现中未对她们的姓名和照片进行遮蔽。其次，这些阴谋论本身反映了美国社会和政治氛围的重要变化，尤其是在整个政治光谱中这些阴谋论逐渐获得支持的情况下。
正如七个月前法国报纸《世界报》（Le Monde）的政治理论家朱利安·吉里（Julien Giry）所指出的：“阴谋论揭示了我们社会的状况。”他写道：“在美国，自至少独立战争以来，阴谋论就得到了广泛的社会接受，这些理论反映了人们对政治、媒体和司法精英的普遍不信任。”
当然，这种不信任并非始于爱泼斯坦案。但爱泼斯坦案的复杂性和未解之处，使其成为这种不信任的完美载体和持续推动者。事实上，与爱泼斯坦案相关的更多文件的发布，反而可能让怀疑者更加质疑司法部和其他“精英”机构的可信度。
例如，周五，司法部发布了它声称是爱泼斯坦案件最终的350万份文件，民主党随即指责特朗普政府隐瞒了数百万页的额外证据。而周一，比尔和希拉里·克林顿同意在众议院委员会调查爱泼斯坦案时作证，这在数月的与共和党主席的僵持后达成。
换句话说，爱泼斯坦的故事继续做着一件罕见的事情：在美国左右两派之间建立起共同的敌人——一群他们怀疑仍在逍遥法外的权势人物。
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
I feel a bit of trepidation when anyone brings up the Jeffrey Epstein case. It’s hard to know, at first blush, which they’re talking about: the documented crimes of which Epstein was convicted or the surrounding fog of conspiracy. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
That’s especially true in the wake of a massive, chaotic document release, like the one that we got over the weekend.
The confirmed details of Epstein’s crimes are terrible enough. Over a period of several years, the financier sexually abused and trafficked dozens of girls and women.
He did so while maintaining close personal friendships with an extraordinary range of high-powered people, including politicians, business executives, and prominent journalists. Some of those people have been directly implicated in Epstein’s abuse. Others have rightfully faced questions about how much they knew and why Epstein was not prosecuted sooner.
But around those truths, an even more rickety scaffolding of speculation and rumor has formed. On the right, such conspiracy theories have broadly held that Epstein and his crimes prove the existence of a pervasive, evil, pedophilic cabal like the one decried by the Qanon conspiracy movement. To many in the MAGA camp, Epstein and his ilk perfectly embody “the culture of impunity of coastal elites,” argued Ashutosh Varshney, a professor of political science at Brown University.
But perhaps because Epstein was also associated with right-wing political figures — or perhaps because distrust of coastal elites is not exclusively a right-wing issue — the disgraced financier has become an object of interest and speculation on the left, too.
Over the weekend, for instance, I saw a number of social media posts that claimed the latest release of files from the Epstein investigation seriously implicated President Donald Trump. That isn’t true. While Trump is named in the files more than 1000 times, the (extremely lurid) allegations circulating on social media came from a list of unvetted accusations submitted to a public FBI tip line.
The fog of conspiracy and rumor around the Epstein case makes it easy to dismiss the entire story as partisan hysteria or tabloid fodder. But that’s a mistake, for two reasons.
First, there was a real crime here — with real victims. Lawyers for those women are currently petitioning the government to take down its most recent tranche of Epstein files, which failed to redact their names and images in thousands of instances.
Second, the conspiratorial ecosystem itself tells us something important about the cultural and political mood in the United States, especially as those conspiracies gain hold across the political spectrum. Writing about the Epstein case for the French paper Le Monde seven months ago, the political scientist Julien Giry noted that “conspiracy theories reveal…the state of our societies.”
“In the United States, where conspiracism has enjoyed broad social acceptance since at least the Revolution, these theories reflect a pervasive distrust of political, media and judicial elites,” wrote Giry.
That distrust didn’t begin with Epstein, of course. But the Epstein case, in all its sprawl and unresolvedness, makes both an ideal vehicle and perpetuating force. In fact, the release of more documents related to the case, far from resolving skeptics’ questions, has arguably given them more reason to doubt the Department of Justice and other “elite” institutions.
Case in point: On Friday, after the DOJ published what it described as its final batch of 3.5 million files related to Epstein’s criminal investigation, Democrats accused the Trump administration of withholding millions of pages of additional evidence.
And on Monday, Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to testify before a House committee that’s investigating Epstein, following a months-long standoff with the committee’s Republican chair.
In other words, the Epstein story continues to do that rarest of things: unite the American right and left against a common enemy — a class of powerful people that, they suspect, continue to act with impunity.
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美国的城市规划在过去一个多世纪里，几乎一直在通过各种方式几乎禁止建造公寓楼。如今，随着美国试图摆脱这种反密度政策，以解决住房可负担性危机，政策制定者发现许多隐藏的障碍。这些障碍不仅存在于土地使用规划中，还体现在复杂的建筑规范、消防要求、公用事业规则，甚至税收政策上。这些规范往往将小型多户住宅与单户住宅区别对待，使公寓楼的建设成本大幅上升。
例如，美国的建筑规范中，对于小型多户住宅（如三户或四户的公寓）通常采用商业建筑的标准，这导致了高昂的建设成本。此外，消防喷淋系统的要求也对小型公寓建设构成了巨大障碍。虽然喷淋系统在高层建筑中是必要的，但对小型公寓来说，其成本和维护费用可能过高，使得项目难以实施。
另一个问题是楼梯数量的规定。在美国，超过三层的公寓楼通常需要至少两个楼梯，这不仅增加了建设成本，还减少了可居住面积。相比之下，欧洲和纽约、西雅图等城市已经证明，单楼梯建筑同样安全，且更灵活。
此外，美国在电梯建设方面也存在严重问题。美国的电梯比欧洲的电梯更昂贵，且尺寸更大，这主要是由于建筑规范和劳工法规的影响。这些规定限制了电梯建设的效率和成本效益，使得公寓楼建设更加困难。
总体来看，住房危机的教训是经济学中的基本原理：如果持续提高建设成本，那么相关建筑就不会被建造。美国的建筑规范问题不仅在于过多的限制，还在于政府能力的不足。目前，美国的建筑规范制定权实际上掌握在一家私人非营利组织——国际建筑规范委员会（ICC）手中，这使得规范制定过程受到私人利益的影响。
尽管如此，一些改革措施正在逐步推进，例如各州推动允许更多单楼梯建筑和灵活的消防规范。然而，这种渐进式的改革速度较慢。一些倡导者希望联邦政府能建立一个更透明、更具公共问责性的建筑规范体系，以更好地满足人们的住房需求。
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that, for more than a century, American urban planning has been devoted to layering on ways to all but ban apartment buildings. And so, as the US now tries to shift out of the anti-density gear that’s driving our housing affordability crisis, policymakers are finding that there are obstacles hiding in a lot of places. Like, a lot.
States and cities are already working, little by little, to roll back the foundational problem often blamed for the current housing shortage: our rigid system of zoning, which dictates what kinds of buildings can be built where. Exclusionary zoning is the reason that it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home on most residential land in the US, making homes scarce, spread out, and unaffordable.
Less appreciated but perhaps just as culpable are the labyrinthine rules governing how new homes must be built — the materials, safety features, and other requirements that make up the entrails of American buildings.
Increasingly, housing abundance advocates, home builders, and policymakers are discovering that fixing zoning is merely the entry point into a gauntlet of other constraints. Especially in the quest to build more “missing middle” housing — duplexes, triplexes, and small and mid-size apartment buildings. “Simply allowing a fourplex on paper does not guarantee that one will be built,” John Zeanah, the chief of development and infrastructure for Memphis, wrote in a recent report on non-zoning barriers to housing for the Center for Building in North America, a nonprofit that advocates for reforming US and Canadian building codes to align them with other affluent countries.
Why? Even as cities re-legalize the traditional housing forms that once supported economic mobility and urban vitality in America, extremely strict, sometimes ill-considered building codes and other requirements can quickly make them financially infeasible to build.
Many of our building codes are rooted in important safety needs — they’re the reason why residential fire deaths have been greatly diminished and why we can enjoy convenient electricity without getting shocked all the time.
But in the US, a morass of construction codes, fire safety requirements, utility rules, and even tax policies, treat even small multifamily buildings fundamentally differently from the way they treat single-family homes. Anything larger than a duplex is regulated under building codes as a commercial building rather than a residential one, even though apartments are, obviously, residences. That saddles multifamily homes with costly construction requirements that housing advocates argue are not evidence-based and can balloon the cost of building to crippling levels.
As a result, it costs significantly more per square foot to build multifamily homes in the US (and in Canada, which has similar codes) compared to single-family homes, a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America found last year. This is not the case in peer countries, because of the economies of scale that often otherwise come with building multifamilies.
If the words “building codes” make you want to crawl into bed and take a nap — I get it. But consider that all of this converges on a more profound point about American culture. At seemingly every level of policy, we penalize and stigmatize apartments as though they’re a second-class form of housing. The last century-plus of urban planning has shaped the deeply rooted American reverence for single-family home ownership, adding up over time to thousands of little rules that stack the deck against denser, more affordable homes.
Building codes are “supposed to be this technocratic process focused on safety, when in reality there are all sorts of values and biases embedded within them,” Jesse Zwick, a Santa Monica city council member and author of a recent report on American building codes, said on the UCLA Housing Voice podcast last year.
Here are just a handful of ways that seemingly obscure rules can thwart building missing middle housing in America.
Building codes revolve, to a great extent, around fire safety — quite understandably and importantly, given our country’s traumatic history with deadly fires. But the process by which the codes are written in the US, and their appropriateness for small- and medium-scale multifamily homes, is under growing scrutiny.
In the US, building codes are drawn from models developed by a private organization, the International Code Council (despite the name, though, its codes are primarily just used in the US). They’re then adopted as law at the state and local levels. Single-family homes, townhomes, and duplexes fall under the ICC’s residential code, while anything with three or more housing units — triplexes and up — are regulated under a code “designed for everything from apartments and offices to airports and stadiums,” the Center for Building report notes.
That code, known as the International Building Code, is not one-size-fits-all — it does have different rules for different kinds of buildings. Still, it is often “over-scaled” for small multifamily homes, Zeanah writes. “The leap in complexity from duplex to triplex is dramatic” in terms of requirements. Most new multifamily buildings must have extensive sprinkler systems, along with other commercial-grade fire safety equipment.
Who, you might be asking, could be against sprinklers? They’re very effective at putting out fires, and in many contexts, they may make perfect sense, like in apartment buildings with dozens or hundreds of units.
But everything comes at a cost — and the problem is that sprinklers cost so much to install and create such high ongoing maintenance expenses that they “can be a make-or-break factor” for small multifamily home construction, Zeanah writes.
Since small apartment buildings aren’t radically different in scale from single-family homes and duplexes — triplexes can have the same square footage as a large single-family home — Zeanah’s report argues that cities and states should consider amending their codes to allow flexibility in that requirement that would permit developers to take advantage of other fire safety options.
A bit of historical context can help shed light on the predicament we now find ourselves in. Over a century ago, the Progressive-era reformer Lawrence Veiller, who helped shape the foundation of America’s exclusionary zoning laws, essentially called for using fire codes to regulate multifamily housing out of existence by making it too expensive to build.
“The easiest and quickest way to penalize the apartment house is not through requiring larger open spaces, because I think that would be unconstitutional, but through the fireproofing requirements,” he said. “In our laws let most of our fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with almost no fire protection whatever.”
To be fair to Veiller, he was writing during a time of horrific tenement fires, and he probably couldn’t have imagined a future like ours, where apartments are even safer than single-family homes.
Zeanah recounts an example of a small developer in Memphis, Andre Jones, who struggled to build fourplexes because sprinkler systems would have been financially unworkable. So Jones and Zeanah worked together to find a solution, which eventually helped lead to a Tennessee law allowing many small buildings up to four units to forgo sprinklers if they have two-hour fire-resistant separation between walls, floors, and ceilings.
There’s precedent for such exceptions. The code that governs single-family homes and duplexes has required sprinklers in new builds since 2009, but nearly every US state has passed a law exempting single-family houses from that rule.
The residential code itself, Zeanah told me in an interview, was created as an exception from the International Code Council’s default building code, and it’s not clear why the council chose to carve out just one- and two-family structures rather than make the cutoff at triplexes, fourplexes, or elsewhere.
Meanwhile, modern buildings are already much safer than old ones, and codes that are designed for safety but end up making new homes so expensive to build that people remain in old ones may have net negative effects on safety. Many critics of US building codes have pointed out that the ICC creates these rules without meaningful cost-benefit analysis to determine whether a requirement is worth its costs to housing supply, affordability, and safety.
Gabe Maser, senior vice president for innovation and growth for ICC, told me in an interview that there’s little evidence that home construction costs significantly contribute to housing prices. “No peer-reviewed study has found that building codes have any appreciable implications for housing affordability,” he said. And there is, to be sure, a great deal of uncertainty and complexity here — more research is needed on the subject. Some research suggests that building costs don’t have much to do with home prices, especially in the most expensive cities, where prices are bid up more by sheer scarcity than by the direct cost of building. But that evidence comes largely from single-family homes.
Evidence for apartments, which have different underlying economics than single-family homes and are regulated by stricter building codes, has found that construction costs do drive housing prices. A recent working paper by Michael Eriksen, a Purdue University economist, and co-authors Deniz Besiktepe and Claudio Martani modeled how recent building code changes impact the rents that landlords need to charge to break even, finding an increase of about $169 to $279 in monthly rent on a theoretical two-bedroom apartment in a new-construction three-story building.
Many small-scale homebuilders also say that code requirements make missing middle projects infeasible. “When a project is no longer financially viable, it simply doesn’t get built, which means its impact won’t show up in observed [housing] price data,” Eriksen told me in an email.
Almost every new apartment building more than three stories tall in the US is required to have at least two staircases, to provide a second fire escape route (and sometimes even smaller buildings have to have two as well). That adds hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of construction and cuts down liveable square footage.
To accommodate two staircases, architects typically design buildings with a long hallway running down the center, called a “double-loaded corridor,” with apartments on either side. This tends to also push toward bigger buildings. Single-staircase buildings, on the other hand, can arrange apartments with a smaller number of units opening onto a single central staircase, opening up more space for larger apartments, including more units that can stretch across multiple sides of a building for more natural light, without it needing to be bisected by a central corridor. They can also have more flexible layouts that are more amenable to family-sized apartments with three or more bedrooms.
Countries in Europe and elsewhere in the world, plus Seattle and New York City, already safely build single-stair structures, and research has found that they do not have a worse safety record. Modern US multifamily homes are already significantly safer than single-family homes, likely thanks to all of their other fire safety features, according to research from Pew.
But I won’t dwell more on this debate here, because Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth already covered it in a fantastic story last year.
Homes that fall under the residential code can be built according to a pre-prescribed recipe book that ensures the safety of various structural elements, like their ability to withstand wind. But want to build a residential building with more than two homes in it? In many places, that means you’ll need to hire a dedicated architect or engineer to draw up and sign off on custom plans, Zeanah writes in the Center for Building report.
This might be perfectly reasonable for a 100-unit building. But it means that small developers looking to build a triplex or fourplex, for example, face higher upfront costs before they’re approved to build what is ultimately similar in scale to a single-family home, Zeanah points out. He recommends that governments consider allowing modest multifamily buildings to use pre-designed standards that are already allowed for single-families and duplexes.
Elevators are a marvel of modern life, making apartment living far more viable and accessible to people with a range of physical abilities. But “the United States and Canada have the most expensive elevators in the world,” sometimes costing upward of three times what European elevators do, Stephen Smith, executive director of the Center for Building, writes in a comprehensive report on elevator policy.
Regulatory factors explain most of that gap. Newly installed American elevators must typically be twice as big as their European counterparts, big enough to fit a seven-foot stretcher lying flat and a wheelchair’s turning radius. In Europe, whose elevators are essentially the global standard, typical elevators are big enough to accommodate a wheelchair and a person standing behind it, but not a wheelchair radius; the buttons in European elevators are placed on the side, so that wheelchair users can access them regardless of whether they’re facing forward or backward.
The stretcher size requirement, meanwhile, appears to provide particularly clear evidence of a lack of rigor in US building codes: It was increased to seven feet about 20 years ago with perfunctory research, and the cost impact was stated as “none,” Smith’s report found. Prior to that, the requirement had been for elevators to fit a stretcher up to 6 feet, 4 inches long. US paramedics are already trained to navigate smaller spaces by, for example, tilting stretchers.
Today, the International Code Council requires proponents of new rules to add more documentation to justify cost impact claims, and Maser told me these claims are closely scrutinized when deciding whether to adopt a rule.
Besides code requirements, US labor union rules effectively bar some of the most productive methods for building elevators, like factory preassembly, Smith writes. And the US, along with Canada, uses technical standards for elevator construction that are incompatible with the rest of the world, effectively “walling us off from the global market” for elevator parts. If you’ve ever had to live with a broken elevator that took ages to repair, that might be why!
Rather than making American homes safer and more accessible, these policies more likely mean, as Smith suggests, that fewer elevators are built, fewer apartment buildings are built, and more of our housing stock is comprised of low-density, inaccessible homes.
The lesson of our housing crisis is straight out of Econ 101: If you perpetually raise the cost of building something, it will not be built at all. The barriers go beyond building codes, too, to things like property taxes: Tennessee, for example, treats apartment buildings as commercial property and taxes them at a higher rate than single-family homes — a prime example of how we subsidize homeownership at renters’ expense.
When you don’t build something, there will be little constituency to advocate for it — and in this case, for right-sizing codes to accommodate it. For all the energy spent on the housing debate, the costs of mandating perfect construction have escaped meaningful public deliberation.
That brings us to the deeper lesson about building codes. Zoning, right now, is a problem of too many state-prescribed rules. But with building codes, the problem could be interpreted as the opposite — a lack of government capacity. The US has effectively handed off building code rulemaking to a private nonprofit that is enmeshed with private interests, including homebuilders and materials manufacturers. “I think we’ve really outsourced this decision to, honestly, a group of lobbyists, building manufacturers, labor unions,” Eriksen, the economist, said.
While only people in government roles have a final vote on changes to the ICC’s codes, critics have argued that the organization’s processes are not well set up for these public servants to make well-informed decisions. They vote on a huge volume of changes that they aren’t always equipped to understand, and the ICC’s committees, comprised of industry and nonprofit employees as well as public servants, are very influential in whether a proposed change succeeds.
Maser, of the ICC, though, stressed that proposed code changes are evaluated with a “high level of scrutiny.” They’re “thoroughly reviewed by a wide swath of experts,” he said, and “housing affordability is thoroughly vetted through the process.” Any member of the public can submit a proposed change if they’re unhappy with the current code, and code updates happen frequently enough (every three years) that a good idea can be implemented relatively quickly. Right now, a proposal to allow more single-stair buildings is working its way through the code change process.
In the near term, housing advocates are organizing to modify building codes state-by-state, such as legalizing more single-stair buildings and allowing greater flexibility for meeting fire safety standards in small multifamily buildings.
That approach is making real progress, though its piecemeal nature makes it inherently slow. In an ideal world, some advocates hope that the federal government can create a new, more transparent, and publicly accountable system for regulating the buildings in which we spend so much of our lives. Many European systems, for example, emphasize “performance-based” standards that mandate certain safety outcomes, rather than strictly dictating the tools (like sprinklers) that must be used to get there.
That may be a vision worth aspiring to, as we slowly feel our way out of the decades-old planning mistakes that have turned as basic a human need as housing into a luxury good.