2026-01-10 07:25:00
2025年11月3日，格陵兰岛努克的彩绘房屋和住宅公寓楼。| Juliette Pavy/Bloomberg via Getty Images
这则新闻出现在《Logoff》日报上，帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅这里。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：各位读者，这周的新闻进展非常迅速。有一则大新闻不容忽视：在委内瑞拉之后，特朗普总统将目光转向了格陵兰岛。特朗普到底想做什么？他想以任何方式获得格陵兰岛。目前来看，他的首选方案似乎是购买该岛，但丹麦方面表示这不可能，或者可能通过支付格陵兰岛居民费用来实现独立。不过白宫本周表示，军事手段“始终是一个选项”。周五，特朗普告诉记者：“如果我们不能轻松地做到，那就只能用困难的方式。”这真的值得我担心吗？不幸的是，是的。正如我的同事乔什·凯因格所报道的，特朗普在委内瑞拉的行动表明，他愿意采取极端措施来实现其扩张主义的美国权力愿景。包括丹麦首相梅特·弗雷德里克森在内的欧洲领导人，都将此视为一个严重威胁。
特朗普到底想用格陵兰岛做什么？特朗普称获得格陵兰岛对国家安全至关重要，包括声称该岛附近有“俄罗斯和中国船只到处都是”。但将美国拥有该岛视为解决安全问题的必要条件是误导的。不仅丹麦是北约盟友，而且美丹之间还有一个单独协议，允许美国在希望的情况下大幅增加其在格陵兰岛的军事存在。这说明还有另一种解释：这可能是特朗普总统在任期最后阶段的一个大型自大项目，他自认为是一个善于谈判和房地产开发的人。正如特朗普本周对《纽约时报》所说，这是“对成功心理上的需要”。
大局如何？随着2026年的到来，特朗普似乎越来越不受约束。委内瑞拉是迄今为止最明显的例子之一，而当他表示格陵兰岛可能是下一个目标时，我们应该认真对待。
好了，是时候下线了……祝贺您成功读完周五晚上！在我们所有人周末下线之前，我的同事普拉蒂克·帕瓦尔分享了一则我最喜欢的过去一年的故事：纽约市拥堵收费政策的成功。这是一项相对较小的干预措施——在高峰时段对司机收取9美元的通行费——一年后，它已帮助减少通勤时间，提高道路安全，并惠及公共交通。我认为这值得庆祝。
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Hi readers, this has been a breakneck news week. Here’s one big story that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle: After Venezuela, President Donald Trump is turning his gaze to Greenland.
What is Trump trying to do? Acquire Greenland, any way he can. For now, it seems like Plan A is to try to buy it, which Denmark says is a nonstarter, or perhaps to pay Greenland’s residents to secede. But the White House said this week that the military is “always an option.”
On Friday, Trump told reporters that “If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”
Is this really something I need to worry about? Unfortunately, yes. As my colleague Josh Keating reports, Trump’s actions in Venezuela make it clear that he’s willing to take drastic steps to facilitate his expansionist vision of US power. European leaders, including Denmark’s own prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, are treating it as a serious threat.
What does Trump actually want Greenland for? Trump has described acquiring Greenland as necessary for national security, including claiming that there are “Russian and Chinese ships all over the place” near the island.
But it’s misleading to suggest the US would need to own the island to shore up security concerns. Not only is Denmark a NATO ally, but the US and Denmark have a separate agreement giving the US significant room to scale up its military presence in Greenland if it wishes.
That leaves another explanation: This is one big vanity project for a president in his last term in office, one who sees himself as a dealmaker and a real estate developer. As Trump put it to the New York Times this week, it’s “psychologically needed for success.”
What’s the big picture? As 2026 gets underway, Trump is acting as though he’s increasingly unchecked. Venezuela is one of the clearest examples so far — and we should take him seriously when he suggests Greenland could be next.
Congratulations on making it to Friday evening! Before we all log off for the weekend, here’s my colleague Pratik Pawar on one of my favorite stories of the past year: the success of congestion pricing in New York City. It’s a relatively small intervention — a $9 toll for drivers during peak hours — that, one year on, has helped reduce commute times, improved road safety, and benefited public transit. I think that’s worth celebrating.
2026-01-10 04:00:00
2026年1月1日，伊朗哈马丹市的抗议者在交通受阻的情况下展示胜利手势。| Mobina/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
周四晚上，伊朗政府切断了全国的互联网服务和国际电话，以应对全国范围内的反政府抗议活动。社交媒体上传播的视频显示，大量人群在多个城市游行，政府大楼被点燃。最近的抗议活动似乎是对流亡的伊朗前国王之子雷扎·帕尔拉维（Reza Pahlavi）号召民众上街抗议的回应。但自12月下旬以来，抗议活动在全国范围内蔓延，主要原因是公众对经济状况的不满。起初，抗议活动始于德黑兰集市的商人关闭店铺，随后迅速蔓延至全国城市和农村地区。
人权组织称，抗议活动中已有超过40人死亡，数千人被拘留。上周，特朗普总统威胁称，如果伊朗政府伤害抗议者，美国将“准备就绪”进行干预。伊朗领导人必须认真对待这一威胁，因为今年6月美国对伊朗核设施的空袭，以及最近委内瑞拉发生的事件，都表明美国对伊朗的敌意。
最高领袖阿里·哈梅内伊周五指责抗议者“毁掉自己的街道，只为让其他国家的总统开心”，即特朗普。伊朗政权在过去曾成功镇压过多次大规模抗议活动，例如2009年的“绿色运动”和2022年因马苏马·阿米尼（Mahsa Amini）死于道德警察之手而爆发的“妇女、生命、自由”抗议。那么这次是否有所不同？
为了解这个问题，Vox采访了约翰斯·霍普金斯大学高级国际研究学院中东研究教授瓦利·纳赛尔（Vali Nasr），他是伊朗国内政治和外交政策方面的权威专家。纳赛尔曾在奥巴马政府时期担任国务院顾问，也是新书《伊朗的总体战略》的作者。以下为采访内容的精简版。
当你看到伊朗当前的局势时，你认为这些抗议活动与之前伊朗的动荡时期（如2022年的马苏马·阿米尼抗议）有何不同？
至少到周四为止，这些抗议活动的规模还不及2022年的马苏马·阿米尼抗议，但昨晚的抗议活动似乎更加广泛，蔓延到了整个伊朗，并且在夜间变得非常暴力，一些政府建筑被烧毁。我认为最重要的区别是，这次抗议发生在伊朗与以色列的战争期间。伊朗政权的不可战胜形象已经改变。在2022年马苏马·阿米尼事件发生时，尽管事件非常重要，但德黑兰仍有一种自信，认为他们可以随意使用暴力和镇压手段。现在，首先，六月份的战争显然对政权和民众都造成了毁灭性打击，而伊朗经济状况恶化也是由于这场战争。我们看到里亚尔在六个月内贬值了40%，同期通货膨胀率飙升了60%。
此外，伊朗政权认为战争从未真正结束。即使在特朗普谈判后的“12天战争”后，领导层仍预期战争会再次爆发，而且以色列并未认为自己已经达到了所有战争目标。同时，伊朗无法再依靠代理人，其核计划也已遭到严重破坏。因此，当抗议活动开始时，伊朗关键安全决策者的主要关注点不是国内稳定或通货膨胀，而是即将到来的以色列-美国对伊朗的攻击。再加上特朗普威胁称，如果伊朗对抗议者采取暴力行动，美国将“准备就绪”来营救他们。因此，伊朗的决策变得更加复杂，因为如果不镇压抗议活动，抗议规模可能扩大，抗议者可能会认为美国站在他们这边，从而推动更多行动。另一方面，如果他们镇压抗议活动，美国可能会以镇压为借口重新发动对伊朗的战争。因此，对德黑兰来说，更大的问题不是抗议本身，而是与美国和以色列的战争。
你是否对特朗普如此公开支持抗议活动感到惊讶？
民主推广并不是特朗普政府的主要目标，包括在委内瑞拉，他基本上让尼古拉斯·马杜罗政权继续掌权。我认为特朗普这样做是为了给伊朗政府施加压力。抗议者只是他手中的工具。这与以色列的情况类似，[以色列总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡]曾表示支持抗议者的“对自由、正义和解放的渴望”。但这并不是在为抗议活动赋予合法性，因为攻击伊朗的国家支持这些抗议活动。以色列并不特别关心抗议者，而是向伊朗政权传递信息：我们已经深入伊朗，我们就在街头，甚至可能是你们抗议问题的根源。
对于特朗普和以色列来说，问题并不是他们想帮助伊朗人享受民主权利，而是他们如何削弱和瓦解伊朗伊斯兰共和国。特朗普基本上是在告诉伊朗人，你们要么让抗议活动失控，要么面对与我的战争。关键问题是，特朗普到底想要什么？如果他不想要政权更迭，也不想要民主，他到底想要什么？他可能愿意接受一个伊斯兰共和国，只要它听从他的命令。但他的命令到底是什么？你认为为什么现在会发生这种情况？有没有什么触发因素？
首先，伊朗有大量民众已经对伊斯兰共和国感到不满。无论他们是年轻人、老年人、宗教人士还是世俗主义者，都有一部分人认为这是一个糟糕的政府，他们不希望它继续存在。即使是那些更支持伊斯兰共和国的人，现在也对腐败、管理不善和经济不平等感到愤怒。他们认为伊朗的国际孤立和经济制裁并不必要，而伊斯兰共和国并没有采取任何措施来解决这些问题。在某种程度上，伊朗民众已经超越了革命的叙事，不再认同伊斯兰共和国的意识形态。此外，伊斯兰共和国在黎巴嫩真主党、叙利亚政权的崩溃以及以色列对伊朗的袭击后，失去了很多威望和不可战胜的形象。
与此同时，自2018年特朗普对伊朗实施最大压力制裁以来，伊朗经济状况持续恶化。尽管政府设法应对了这些制裁，但代价巨大，更多伊朗人陷入贫困，中产阶级的购买力下降，通货膨胀和失业率上升，生活变得更加艰难。制裁还助长了腐败，导致财富集中在少数人手中，而多数人却一无所有。最后，在12月28日，里亚尔再次大幅贬值，这促使依赖进口的商人，特别是手机销售商，率先关闭店铺，因为他们认为在经济管理不善的情况下继续经营毫无意义。因此，经济问题成为了一个触发点，引发了民众走上街头，谴责政府未能解决经济问题，随后抗议活动蔓延至其他社会群体。
你如何理解雷扎·帕尔拉维在其中的角色？
我一直认为他并没有在伊朗国内拥有广泛的群众基础，但他的呼吁似乎成为最近几天抗议活动的催化剂。他确实在伊朗有一定追随者，人们对他父亲和祖父的统治怀有深深的怀念。尽管伊朗人1979年革命时的不满已经过去多年，但如今的伊朗人普遍认为那个时期是“黄金时代”，那时伊朗人可以自由旅行，国家开放，经济繁荣，不被孤立，伊朗更像今天的沙特阿拉伯、阿塞拜疆或土耳其。他代表了一种反伊斯兰共和国的象征。我认为他目前在街头抗议者中起到了引导作用，特别是那些希望推翻伊斯兰共和国的人。然而，他并不是抗议活动的发起者，事实上，他一直在追逐这些抗议活动。他本人在伊朗没有“地面行动”，他的组织无法在伊朗开展竞选活动。我认为他影响伊朗未来的能力有限，主要是因为他在国内几乎没有政治关系。
你认为这是否是真正的革命时刻？我们是否看到伊朗政权内部出现裂痕？
我认为我们可能正站在革命的边缘。对伊朗伊斯兰共和国的压力非常严重。即使在六月份战争之前，伊朗政权内部就已经对国家的未来展开激烈讨论。现在，这种压力更加明显。伊朗是否能够抵御以色列和美国的威胁？如何摆脱经济困境？他们不再拥有可以谈判的核计划，而特朗普也不感兴趣谈判。因此，伊朗显然陷入了困境，必须承认伊斯兰革命的这一阶段已经到达极限，国家需要新的方向。当然，最高领袖不会接受这些想法，但我认为伊朗政治精英阶层内部现在已有更多公开讨论。我们尚未看到类似叶利钦（Yeltsin）登上坦克、公开呼吁结束伊斯兰共和国的领导人，但伊朗正接近这种局面。这次抗议可能不是转折点，但伊朗现在正陷入一场危机漩涡，最终将迫使重大变革。
要让这些抗议成为转折点，需要什么条件？
抗议活动必须更大规模、更持久，并且能够压倒政府的安全部队。同时，他们还必须能够从官僚体系或安全部队中获得支持。我并不认为这些是不可能的，但目前还没有发生。最高领袖现在86岁了，无论抗议活动如何发展，他可能在不久的将来就不再掌权。伊朗政权是否能够应对这种权力交接？
伊朗政权可以应对，但他的去世将是一个关键的转折点，引发关于“伊朗未来将何去何从”的真正讨论。目前在幕后进行的讨论可能会公开化。任何接任的领导人不会像他那么强大，需要几年时间才能巩固权力。在这段时间里，不同派系将有机会提出不同的伊朗未来方案。我认为最高领袖现在有点像前苏联领导人勃列日涅夫或毛泽东。系统已经意识到需要改变，但无法在他任内实现。毛泽东去世后，中国才真正开始讨论改革。在苏联，有两位或三位领导人之后才迎来戈尔巴乔夫。一旦勃列日涅夫去世，苏联体制开始瓦解。因此，当最高领袖去世时，这将是伊朗的关键时刻。
On Thursday night, the Iran government cut off internet service and international calling in the country as anti-government protests broke out throughout the country. Videos that made it to social media showed large crowds marching through multiple cities and government buildings ablaze.
The most recent protests appeared to be in response to a call to take to the streets from Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the shah of Iran, who fled the country prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But protests have been spreading throughout the country since late December, spurred by public anger over the state of the economy. What began with merchants shuttering stores in the bazaar in Tehran, quickly spread to cities and rural areas throughout the country. Human rights groups say more than 40 people have been killed in the demonstrations and thousands detained.
Raising the stakes last week was President Donald Trump’s threat that the US was “locked and loaded” to intervene if the Iranian government killed protesters. It’s a threat Iranian leaders have to take seriously since the US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last June, not to mention the events that just transpired in Venezuela. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused protesters on Friday of “ruining their own streets to make the president of another country happy,” i.e., Trump.
The Iranian regime has managed to violently suppress rounds of mass protests before, from the “Green Movement” following the disputed election in 2009 to the “woman, life, freedom” protests that broke out after Mahsa Amini died in custody of the state’s morality police in 2022. Is there any reason to think that this time is different?
To get more clarity on that question, Vox spoke with Vali Nasr, professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a leading expert on Iran domestic politics and foreign policy. Born in Iran, Nasr served as a State Department adviser during the Obama administration and is the author of the recent book Iran’s Grand Strategy. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When you watch what’s unfolding in Iran right now, what do you think distinguishes these protests from earlier periods of unrest we’ve seen in Iran such as the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022?
At least until Thursday, the scale of the protests did not approximate the Mahsa Amini protests, but last night they seemed to be much more prolific and spread across Iran in a much larger way and also grew very violent towards the end of the night, with burning of some government buildings
But I think the main thing that is much more significant is that these protests are coming at a time of war for Iran. The aura of invincibility for the regime is different. When the Mahsa Amini issue happened, as important and as significant that it was, there was a certain confidence in Tehran that they could do whatever they wanted, using brutality and suppression.
Now, first of all, there was a war [with Israel] in June, which was obviously devastating and shocking in many ways to both the regime and the public, and in fact, the worsening of Iran’s economy between June and December is partly due to the war. That’s how we saw the rial depreciate 40 percent over six months and inflation spiked by 60 percent during the same time.
“The key issue though is what does he want from Iran? If he doesn’t want regime change, doesn’t want democracy, what does he actually want?”
In the regime’s mindset, the war never ended. Even with the precarious ceasefire that President Trump negotiated after the “12-day war,” the leadership’s anticipation is that the war will resume sooner or later, and that Israel didn’t think that it had achieved all of its war aims. Plus, Iran is no longer able to use its proxies and its nuclear program is lying in ruins.
And so when these protests started, the highest priority in the minds of the key security decision-makers in Iran was not domestic stability or inflation, it was an imminent Israeli-American attack on Iran. And then on top of it, you have President Trump actually threatening that if the protesters are harmed, if Iran reacts violently, that the United States is “locked and loaded” to come and rescue them.
So the decision-making for Iran became much more complicated, because if you don’t clamp down on them, the protests will get bigger, and the protesters will now assume that America has their back, and they could push more. And perhaps that’s the reading from yesterday’s larger scale of protests and how they grew more violent.
On the other hand, if they reacted and they clamped down, then the United States may then actually use the crackdown as a pretext for restarting the war with Iran. So I think for Tehran, the larger issue is not the protest itself, it’s war with America and Israel, right? That’s a much larger issue.
Were you surprised to see Trump align himself with the protests like this? Democracy promotion hasn’t been a big priority for his administration, including in Venezuela where he’s basically left most of the regime in place after capturing Nicolás Maduro.
I think for him it’s a way of putting pressure on the Iranian government. The protesters are a tool in his hand. It’s similar with Israel. [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed support for the protesters’ “aspirations for freedom, liberty and justice.”] That’s not really a way of giving legitimacy to the protests, if the country that attacked Iran is backing them, but Israel was not necessarily concerned about the protesters so much as it was messaging to the Iranian government that we’re deeply penetrated in your country, we’re on the streets, we may even be responsible for your headache with the protesters.
For both Trump and Israel, the issue is not that they want to help Iranians enjoy democratic rights; the main issue is how they can weaken and break the Islamic Republic. Trump basically wants to tell the Iranians that you’re caught between letting your protesters run wild or facing war with me.
The key issue though is what does he want from Iran? If he doesn’t want regime change, doesn’t want democracy, what does he actually want? He might be happy to live with an Islamic Republic, provided that it does his bidding. But what is his bidding?
Why do you think this is happening now? Is there a spark that set this movement off?
First of all, there are large segments of the Iranian population that are now alienated from the Islamic Republic. It doesn’t matter if they’re young, old, religious, or secular. There are just a lot of people who believe that it is a bad government and they don’t want it, and even those who are more sympathetic to it are now really angry at the level of corruption, mismanagement, economic inequality. They believe that Iran’s international isolation and the economic sanctions against Iran need not be there, and that the Islamic Republic is not doing anything to solve it.
In a way, the Iranian population, by and large, has moved beyond the revolution and is no longer buying into the narrative of the Islamic Republic. And then on top of it, the Islamic Republic lost a lot of its stripes with the collapse of Hezbollah, the fall of Syria, and the Israeli attack on Iran. It has less of an aura of power and invincibility.
In the meantime, the economy has been steadily getting worse since 2018 when President Trump imposed maximum pressure sanctions on Iran. It’s true that the government has weathered those sanctions, but also at a huge cost to its population. More Iranians have grown poor. More of the middle class has lost its purchasing power. Inflation has gone up, unemployment has gone up, and life has become a lot harder. Also, sanctions have encouraged corruption and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.
Finally, on December 28 when the rial again collapsed in a big way, the merchants who particularly rely on imports, and these were actually mobile phone sellers, were the first to react to say, you know, basically we’re just going to shut our businesses, because there’s no point in having businesses when you’re mismanaging the economy and things are getting worse, etc. And so they basically closed their shops. And so you had a trigger, which was purely economic, and it brought people into the streets to decry the fact that the government was not doing anything about rightsizing the economy that then began to spread into other segments of the population.
How do you understand the role of Reza Pahlavi here? My assumption was always that he didn’t have much of a constituency within Iran itself, but his call for people to come out and protest does seem to have been part of the catalyst for what we’ve seen over the past few days.
He definitely has a certain following in Iran. There’s a tremendous amount of nostalgia towards his father and grandfather’s reign in Iran. Whatever grievances Iranians had in 1979 that brought about the revolution are long forgotten and are definitely not remembered by the generation that’s alive in Iran today, by and large. They can look back at that [pre-revolutionary] period as a sort of a golden era where Iranians traveled the world, the country was open, there was affluence, they were not isolated, when Iran looked a lot more like what Saudi Arabia or Azerbaijan or Turkey does today. He represents a sort of anti-Islamic Republic. I think his role is most important right now in basically giving a sense of direction or a rallying cry to those who are in the streets, and particularly those who want the Islamic Republic gone.
However, he wasn’t responsible for the start of these protests. In fact, he’s been chasing them. He himself does not have a “ground game” in Iran. His organization is not able to run campaigns in Iran. And I think his ability to shape Iran’s future is limited, largely because he has very few political relationships in Iran.
Are there any signs this is a true revolutionary moment? Are we seeing any signs of fracture within the regime itself?
I think we could be potentially on the verge of that. The pressure on the Islamic Republic is quite severe and serious.
“The pressure on the Islamic Republic is quite severe and serious.”
Even before the June war, and even more so after, there were intense debates within the halls of power in the Islamic Republic around the future of the country. Are you going to be able to defend it against Israel and the US? How are you going to get the country out of the economic impasse that it finds itself in? You no longer have a nuclear program to negotiate over, and Trump is not interested in negotiations. So the country clearly sees itself as at an impasse.
It’s time to acknowledge that this phase of the revolution of the Islamic Republic has reached its limits, and that the country needs a different direction. Of course, the Supreme Leader is not open to these ideas, but I think there’s now much more open debate even among the political class in Iran.
Now we’re not yet seeing a Yeltsin getting on a tank, a major leader coming out and addressing the people and saying, “I’m calling for the end of the Islamic Republic,” or a redirection of the Islamic Republic, but I think Iran is very close to that sort of a scenario.
This particular protest may not be the turning point, but Iran is now caught in that sort of whirlwind where it’s going to face crisis after crisis, and ultimately that’s going to force a major shift.
What would it take for these protests to be that turning point?
The protests themselves have to become even larger than they have been, they have to be sustained, and they have to be able to overwhelm the security forces when and if they are deployed in full force. And then they also have to be able to draw defections from the bureaucracy or the security forces of the country. I’m not saying that none of that is possible. It’s quite possible, but that has not happened yet.
The Supreme Leader is 86 years old now. Whatever happens with the protests, he probably won’t be in power for more than a few more years. Is this a regime that can weather that kind of transition?
Well, it can weather it, but his passing would be the opening that would bring a real debate about, “Where does Iran go from here?” The kinds of discussions happening now behind closed doors could come out in the open.
Any leader that comes in his place will not be as powerful as he is, it will take a number of years for any leader to consolidate power, and in that time period, there’s going to be a lot more intense fighting and a lot more ability by different factions to basically put on the table very different scenarios for the future of Iran.
I would say that Iran’s Supreme Leader is now a bit like [Former Soviet Leader Leonid] Brezhnev or Mao. The system already knows that it needs to change, but it can’t under him. When Mao passed, that’s when the debate in China really burst into the open, right? It took a number of years between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, right? In [the Soviet Union], there were two or three leaders until we arrived at Gorbachev. But once Brezhnev was gone, I think the system was beginning to unwind. So when [the Supreme leader] passes, that is going to be the critical, pivotal moment for Iran.
2026-01-10 02:05:00
How much alcohol should you drink? The US government now vaguely, in effect, says just don’t drink too much. And what qualifies as too much? Well, that’s up to you.
As part of the new federal dietary guidelines released this week, the Trump administration eliminated the previous specific recommended limits on alcohol consumption — two drinks or less per day for men and one drink for women. Now, the new guidelines say “consume less alcohol for better health. (It maintained the prior guidance discouraging a few certain groups — pregnant women and people who have a history of alcohol abuse — from drinking at all.) It’s a major change that defies a growing public health consensus that people should drink as little alcohol as possible, because no amount of drinking is actually safe.
To justify the change, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees the Medicare and Medicaid programs, argued that there was no scientific evidence to justify specific limits on drinking alcohol. “So there is alcohol in these dietary guidelines, but the implication is, don’t have it for breakfast,” he said during the announcement of the new guidelines.
“The general move away from two glasses for men, one glass for women — there was never really good data to support that quantity of alcohol consumption,” he added.
That’s not true.
There is such data — evidence commissioned by the federal government that the Trump administration itself tried to bury ahead of the dietary guidelines’ release, as Vox reported a few months ago. But instead, Oz and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have handed the alcohol industry a long-sought win in its battle against public health critics.
For the whole sordid saga, you can check out our feature story from September. But here is a brief recap: In early 2022, the Biden administration launched the Alcohol Intake & Health Study, a new report on alcohol and its health effects to inform the next dietary guidelines due in 2025, a response to the increasing evidence that no amount of alcohol is safe. The World Health Organization had made such a declaration in 2023; in the US, more than 170,000 people die every year from alcohol-related causes.
Almost as soon as that project began, the alcohol industry started pushing back and soliciting Congress in its efforts.
In response to this pressure, Congress approved in fall 2023 an alternate study to be overseen by the National Academies of Science and Medicine. Congressional hearings held by the lawmakers, who represented states where alcohol is a major industry, and letters they sent to the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden on behalf of their constituents framed the original report as a witch hunt against alcohol.
Nonetheless, both studies were undertaken, and their respective authors got to work. In December 2024, the National Academies report came out and stated that, with some very important limitations, the health effects of alcohol were marginal. But a draft version of the Alcohol Intake & Health Study was posted in January 2025, shortly before the end of the Biden administration, and it came to very different conclusions, as I wrote recently:
They broke out their findings by different drinking levels — from one drink per day to three — and focused on health outcomes that have been proven to be associated with alcohol use.
Their big-picture conclusion: Among the US population, the negative health effects of drinking alcohol start at low levels of consumption and begin to increase sharply the more a person drinks.
A man drinking one drink per day has roughly a one in 1,000 chance of dying from any alcohol-related cause, whether an alcohol-associated cancer or liver disease or a drunk driving accident. Increase that to two drinks per day, and the odds increase to one in 25.
That is precisely the kind of evidence that would suggest a specific limit on alcohol consumption would be appropriate — the kind of evidence that Oz claimed does not exist.
The final version of the Alcohol Intake & Health Study was shelved — and still has not been published by the Trump administration. They decided to squash its public release, as I reported last fall, even as they claimed it would be taken into consideration for the forthcoming dietary guidelines.
There was such a furor over that decision that even the authors of the National Academies report later published a commentary in the journal JAMA to make clear that their study should not be over-interpreted to justify more drinking or eliminating limits on drinking alcohol.
Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened in the new dietary guidelines — a policy victory cheered by beer, wine, and liquor manufacturers. The limits are…whatever you want them to be.
“Dr. Oz must have thrown back a few cocktails for breakfast before making that comment,” Mike Marshall, president and CEO of the US Alcohol Policy Alliance, told me. “The federal government’s own report, the Alcohol Intake & Health study, made it clear that there is overwhelming evidence that reducing consumption to less than 2 drinks per day dramatically reduces the chance of dying due to alcohol. Just because the industry, via Congress, said ‘don’t read it’ doesn’t mean the report never existed.”
2026-01-09 23:20:00
The Associated Press this week reported a stunning fact: Of the 13,000 homes destroyed a year ago in the extraordinary wildfires in and around Los Angeles, fewer than a dozen have been rebuilt.
The massive, fast-moving wildfires that tore through Los Angeles County last January directly killed at least 31 people and sickened many more, torching more than 16,000 structures in total. With an economic toll estimated as high as $275 billion, the 2025 Los Angeles fires may be the costliest disaster in US history.
The flames driven by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds ignited on top of a severe housing crisis in the region.
“Los Angeles residents faced a tight rental housing market even before these unprecedented wildfires forced thousands from their homes and compounded the problem,” Tomiquia Moss, California Business, Consumer Services, and Housing Agency secretary, said in a press release.
According to the housing research firm Up for Growth, California is short of nearly 840,000 homes, with the LA region in particular at a deficit of nearly 340,000 residences. What’s worse, the Palisades and Eaton fires displaced about 100,000 people as their flames engulfed entire neighborhoods within hours.
The disaster has created immense political pressure to rebuild as fast as possible and, indeed, California state officials say that things are moving much faster than in past disasters. But even faster than ever still isn’t fast enough.
The state government and local officials signed orders to speed up permitting and waive environmental reviews to try to accelerate the reconstruction effort. A year after the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California burned down a comparable number of homes, just 385 rebuilding permits had been issued. The state reports that of the 6,191 rebuilding permit applications received in areas afflicted by last year’s fires, 2,617 have been approved.
But even with the ramped-up effort, only about 900 homes are under construction, and less than a city block’s worth have been rebuilt to date.
Even with strong political backing, tens of thousands of lives, and billions of dollars at stake, LA’s slow restoration is a grim warning of what’s to come in a state facing growing wildfire risks as more people encroach on regions primed to burn and as the planet continues to warm. It’s not just houses and neighborhoods that have to adapt to higher levels of risk; fire-prone regions need more effective public policy.
“The system structurally is not built for rebuilding and recovery,” said Minjee Kim, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles. “You just need a whole different animal to enable comprehensive reconstruction.”
Reemerging from the ashes of a wildfire is always a long process.
The Los Angeles Times reported in September that of the 22,500 homes lost in the most destructive fires between 2017 and 2020, only 38 percent have been rebuilt to date.
The Palisades and Eaton fires together burned close to 40,000 acres across all tiers of wealth, from multimillion-dollar coastal mansions to inner-city apartment complexes. According to Realtor.com, the communities that experienced the brunt of the blazes — Altadena and Pacific Palisades — lost $8.3 billion in home values. Residents are also struggling to pay for reconstruction as insurance payouts have been slow to process. Many wildfire victims didn’t have insurance coverage at all.
Faced with rising risks, falling property values, tight budgets, and mounting reconstruction costs, only a small fraction of Angelenos afflicted by fires say they plan to rebuild. At least 600 homeowners have already decided to sell what’s left of their land.
But for those looking to stay, it’s going to take a while to move back in.
There are several key reasons why. One is that building a home in the Los Angeles area, even in ideal conditions, takes longer than the national average, anywhere between 10 to 18 months.
Of course, the aftermath of a wildfire is anything but ideal. The flames leave behind toxic debris that can contaminate the air, the water, and the soil. Simply cleaning up the ashes of an inferno can take months, and many homes in the area still face chemical hazards.
Almost every step of the rebuilding process requires permits — clearing debris, construction, connecting power and water lines — and each permit takes time to process. The city of Los Angeles reports it has received more than 3,000 permit applications for more than 1,400 addresses — still already a small fraction of what was lost. Even so, the city issued just under half of these permits.
Los Angeles County, which includes unincorporated areas, notes that it takes on average 95 business days to issue new residential construction permits. Of the 2,905 rebuilding applications received, only seven homes have been completed.
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And all these hurdles stand in your way if you want to rebuild close to exactly as you were. Most of the efforts to accelerate the permitting process apply to “like-for-like” construction, meaning the rebuilt structure doesn’t exceed 110 percent of the original building’s height and area.
If you’re an Angeleno who wants to build bigger, with greater density, or modify your home significantly to better withstand future fires, you’ll have to jump through another set of hoops.
The fact that so many people are trying to rebuild their homes at the same time has also caused shortages of labor and construction materials, further hobbling the pace of recovery. The Trump administration’s tariffs are further driving up costs on vital building supplies like lumber. Federal immigration raids have made it harder to recruit construction workers in the Los Angeles area, many of whom are undocumented.
All of this is dashing the hopes that the 2025 Los Angeles fires would at least be an opportunity to rethink and rebuild communities better.
Some experts thought that the wake of the disaster would encourage communities to work together on coherent fire mitigation strategies, harden houses against ignition, pull back from the riskiest areas, and spur work to conserve water, reduce natural fuels, and mitigate climate change. In other fire-prone regions like around Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, communities have found some success in being proactive about reducing fire risks and saving money on their insurance rates.
But once a fire has already occurred, especially in one of the most housing-starved regions in the country, the focus remains on getting homes built as fast as possible. Broader efforts to adapt to a hotter, more fiery world take a back seat.
“Our faith is up to individual decisions made by the homeowners,” Kim said. “I don’t think there is a higher-level neighborhood-scale rethinking of fire resiliency that is happening at this point.”
2026-01-09 21:30:00
What happens when you merge the world’s most toxic social media cesspool with the world’s most unhinged, uninhibited, and intentionally “spicy” AI chatbot?
It looks a lot like what we’re seeing play out on X right now. Users have been feeding images into xAI’s Grok chatbot, which boasts a powerful and largely uncensored image and video generator, to create explicit content, including of ordinary people. The proliferation of deepfake porn on the platform has gotten so extreme that today, xAI’s Grok chatbot spits out an estimated one nonconsensual sexual image every single minute. Over the past several weeks, thousands of users have hopped on the grotesque trend of using Grok to undress mostly women and children — yes, children — without their consent through a rather obvious workaround.
To be clear, you can’t ask Grok — or most mainstream AIs, for that matter — for nudes. But you can ask Grok to “undress” an image someone posted on X, or if that doesn’t work, ask it to put them in a tiny, invisible bikini. The US has laws against this kind of abuse, and yet the team at xAI has been almost…blasé about it. Inquiries from several journalists to the company about the matter received automated “Legacy media lies” messages in response. xAI CEO Elon Musk, who just successfully raised $20 billion in funding for the company, was sharing deepfake bikini photos of (content warning) himself until recently.
While Musk on January 4 warned that users will “suffer consequences” if they use Grok to make “illegal images,” xAI has given no indication that it will remove or address the core features allowing users to create such content, though some of the most incriminating posts have been removed. xAI has not responded to Vox’s request for comment as of Friday morning.
No one should be surprised here. It was only a matter of time before the toxic sludge that’s become of the website formerly known as Twitter combined with xAI’s Grok — which has been explicitly marketed for its NSFW capabilities — to create a new form of sexual violence. Musk’s company has essentially created a deepfake porn machine that makes the creation of realistic and offensive images of anyone as simple as writing a reply in X. Worse, those images are feeding into a social network of hundreds of millions of people, which not only spreads them further but can implicitly reward posters with more followers and more attention.
You might be wondering, as I think we all find ourselves doing several times a day now: How is any of this legal? To be clear, it’s not. But advocates and legal experts say that current laws still fall far short of the protections that victims need, and the sheer volume of deepfakes being created on platforms like X make the protections that do exist very difficult to enforce.
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“The prompts that are allowed or not allowed” using a chatbot like Grok “are the result of deliberate and intentional choices by the tech companies who are deploying the models,” said Sandi Johnson, senior legislative policy counsel at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.
“In any other context, when somebody turns a blind eye to harm that they are actively contributing to, they’re held responsible,” she said. “Tech companies should not be held to any different standard.”
First, let’s talk about how we got here.
“Perpetrators using technology for sexual abuse is not anything new,” Johnson said. “They’ve been doing that forever.”
But AI cemented a new kind of sexual violence through the rise of deepfakes.
Deepfake porn of female celebrities — created in their likeness, but without their consent, using more primitive AI tools — has been circulating on the internet for years, long before ChatGPT became a household name.
But more recently, so-called nudify apps and websites have made it extremely easy for users, some of them teenagers, to turn innocuous photos of friends, classmates, and teachers into deepfake explicit content without the subject’s consent.
The situation has become so dire that last year, advocates like Johnson convinced Congress to pass the Take It Down Act, which criminalizes nonconsensual deepfake porn and mandates that companies remove such materials from their platforms within 48 hours of it being flagged or potentially face fines and injunctions. The provision goes into effect this May.
For many victims, even if companies like X do begin to crack down on enforcement by then, it will come too late for victims who shouldn’t have to wait for months — or days — to have such posts taken down.
“For these tech companies, it was always like ‘break things, and fix it later,’” said Johnson. “You have to keep in mind that as soon as a single [deepfake] image is generated, this is irreparable harm.”
Most social media and major AI platforms have complied as much as possible with emerging state and federal regulations around deepfake porn and in particular, child sexual abuse material.
Not only because such materials are “flagrantly, radioactively illegal,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, “but also because it’s gross and most companies have no desire to have any association of their brand being a one-stop shop for it.”
But Musk’s xAI seems to be the exception.
Since the company debuted its “spicy mode” video generation capabilities on X last year, observers have been raising the alarm about what’s essentially become a “vertically integrated” deepfake porn tool, said Pfefferkorn.
Most “nudify” apps require users to first download a photo, maybe from Instagram or Facebook, and then upload it to whichever platform they’re using. If they want to share the deepfake, then they need to download it from the app and send it through another messaging platform, like Snapchat.
These multiple points of friction gave regulators some crucial openings for intercepting nonconsensual content, with a kind of Swiss cheese-style defense system. Maybe they couldn’t stop everything, but they could get some “nudify” apps banned from app stores. They’ve been able to get Meta to crack down on advertisements hawking the apps to teenagers.
But on X, creating nonconsensual deepfakes using Grok has become almost entirely frictionless, allowing users to source photos, prompt deepfakes, and share them all in one go.
“That would matter less if it were a social media community for nuns, but it is a social media community for Nazis,” said Pfefferkorn, referring to X’s far-right pivot in recent years. The result is a nonconsensual deepfake crisis that appears to be ballooning out of control.
In recent days, users have created 84 times more sexualized deepfakes on X per hour than on the other top five deepfake sites combined, according to independent deepfake and social media researcher Genevieve Oh. And those images can get shared far more quickly and widely than anywhere else. “The emotional and reputational injury to the person depicted is now exponentially greater” than it has been for other deepfake sites, said Wayne Unger, an assistant professor of law specializing in emerging technology at Quinnipiac University, “because X has hundreds of millions of users who can all see the image.”
It would be virtually impossible for X to individually moderate every one of those nonconsensual images or videos, even if it wanted to — or even if the company hadn’t fired most of its moderators when Musk took over in 2022.
If the same kind of criminal imagery appeared in a magazine or an online publication, then the company could be held liable for it, subject to hefty fines and possible criminal charges.
Social media platforms like X don’t face the same consequences because Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects internet platforms from liability for much of what users do or say on their platforms — albeit with some notable exceptions, including child pornography. The clause has been a pillar for free speech on the internet — a world where platforms were held liable for everything on them would be far more constrained — but Johnson says the clause has also become a “financial shield” for companies unwilling to moderate their platforms.
With the rise of AI, however, that shield might finally be starting to crack, said Unger. He believes that companies like xAI should not be covered by Section 230 because they are no longer mere hosts to hateful or illegal content, but, through their own chatbots, essentially creators of it.
“X has made a design decision to allow Grok to generate sexually explicit imagery of adults and children,” he said. “The user may have prompted Grok to generate it,” but the company “made a decision to release a product that can produce it in the first place.”
Unger does not expect that xAI — or industry groups like NetChoice — are going to back down without a legal fight against any attempts to further legislate content moderation or regulate easy-to-abuse tools like Grok. “Maybe they’ll concede the minor part of it,” since laws governing [child pornography] are so strong, he said, but “at the very least they’re gonna argue that Grok should be able to do it for adults.”
In any case, the public outrage in response to the deepfake porn Grokpocalypse may finally force a reckoning around an issue that’s long been in the shadows. Around the world, countries like India, France, and Malaysia have begun probes into the sexualized imagery flooding X. Eventually, Musk did post on X that those generating illegal content will face consequences, but this goes deeper than just the users themselves.
“This isn’t a computer doing this,” Johnson said. “These are deliberate decisions that are being made by people running these companies, and they need to be held accountable.”
2026-01-09 20:00:00
As President Donald Trump settles into his last term, his approval ratings sinking ever lower, an urgent new question has begun to coalesce at the center of MAGA: Would the movement survive without Trump’s force of personality? What kind of person has the juice to lead it besides Trump?
While the question remains unanswered, a new archetype has abruptly acquired stature among the MAGA faithful, an archetype that is in some ways a photographic negative of crass, mud-slinging, macho Trump. As Erika Kirk strives to take over her husband’s legacy at Turning Point USA, and Marjorie Taylor Greene remakes her image amid her retirement from the House of Representatives, both are building their image around the idea of a Christian woman who is notable for her godliness, grace, and mercy.
Erika Kirk rocketed to political stardom at the September memorial service for her late husband, Charlie Kirk, when she publicly forgave his assassin.
“I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
Trump, speaking immediately after Kirk, made a point of saying in response that he hated his enemies and would never forgive them.
The reaction from the mainstream media was polite and respectful. While Trump has profited from his alliance with the Christian right, he’s never embodied any of the movement’s traditional virtues. Kirk, outlets declared, showed what Christian forgiveness really could look like.
“The most admirable aspects of religion — mercy, charity, grace and contemplation — were found in Mrs. Kirk’s words, not Mr. Trump’s,” wrote Zaid Jilani for the New York Times. “I can only pray that today’s Christian right finds more inspiration in her than him.”
On the right, the response went beyond polite respect. Kirk was suddenly in the conversation as a major leader on the MAGA right, like a funhouse mirror image of Barack Obama after his keynote speech at the 2004 DNC.
“With her powers of communication, moving story, and personal connection, Erika Kirk could end up the next Billy Graham. She could lead a generation to Christianity. She could be the first woman president,” wrote Matthew Continetti at the Free Press. A post on the r/Christianity subreddit described Kirk as “a new archetype of the conservative Christian woman: graceful, media-savvy, intellectually aligned, and unapologetically committed to a vision of biblical womanhood that is both traditional and powerfully public.” The question, the poster added, wasn’t “if she will become a major leader, but how quickly.”
Among Kirk’s new fans was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Speaking to the New York Times in December, Greene cited the contrast between Kirk and Trump at Charlie Kirk’s memorial as the reason for her recent turn on Trump. “It just shows where his heart is,” Greene said. “And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”
Inspired, Greene reportedly texted a friend, “I wanted to be more like Christ.” She has since publicly apologized for “taking part in the toxic politics,” while remaining vague about what parts of her behavior she actually feels the need to apologize for.
As religious studies scholar Katherine Kelaidis has written for Vox, the forgiving Christian woman is a familiar archetype within faith narratives, going back to the medieval concept of the forgiving queen who intercedes with a vengeful king. “It is a model that allows the language of Christian mercy to coexist with the harsh realities of authoritarian rule, which is exactly what MAGA is aiming for,” Kelaidis explains. “It was also a model that allowed for women to have a significant public role while not transgressing normative ideas of femininity. Say, for example, Erika Kirk becoming the CEO of Turning Point USA.”
What gives the archetype its juice in this particular moment is that it is an inverse to everything Trump embodies: principled where Trump is vindictive, peaceful where he is violent, religiously motivated where he is plainly secular. In theory, the archetype of the forgiving Christian woman allows MAGA to make a show of installing women in highly visible roles that can appeal to young women, without necessarily threatening the power of the men at the center. Yet the fact that both Kirk and Greene have made a point of adopting this image during moments of transition in their image suggests — without making any claims as to the sincerity of their faith — that they have both made the calculation that MAGA wants a change from Trump as the movement develops beyond his presidency.
That their threat to Trump’s power is real can perhaps be seen through the backlash both Greene and Kirk have faced as they make their moves. As Erika Kirk spends ever more time in public, a narrative has begun to brew that she is using her husband’s death opportunistically to climb the political ladder. She’s become the center of a derisive meme. “Everyone grieves differently,” someone will post, or “Normal widows: ‘I miss my husband.’” And then, “Erika Kirk:” above an image of a woman dancing and setting off fireworks.
Trump, meanwhile, has dubbed Greene “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene.“ She has never cultivated many congressional allies outside the MAGA faithful, and now she’s isolated even from them. “I’m, like, radioactive” on both sides of the political aisle, Greene told the New York Times, adding that she plans to retire from politics for good.
The central question about MAGA since its emergence as a force in American politics has been: Is the movement simply a cult of personality built around Donald Trump and his whims? Or is it a genuine political coalition with real principles and a coherent ideology? If the movement embraces and elevates a figure whose image is built in opposition to Trump’s, we may finally have an answer to that question.