2026-03-27 04:00:00
美国的可卡因和甲基苯丙胺（冰毒）过量使用死亡人数正在上升。尽管阿片类药物过量死亡人数有所下降，但越来越多的美国人正在使用并死于兴奋剂类药物，尤其是可卡因和甲基苯丙胺。2016年，可卡因过量死亡人数为10,375人，而2023年则上升至29,449人。甲基苯丙胺的过量死亡人数也出现了类似增长，从2017年的9,438人增加到2023年的33,283人。
在美国不同地区，主要使用的毒品也有所不同：可卡因在东北部部分地区仍占主导地位，而甲基苯丙胺则在其他地方更为常见。兴奋剂类药物使用量的激增，同时伴随着阿片类药物过量死亡率的下降，表明毒品使用并未结束，而是发生了变化。过去那种将人简单归类为仅使用海洛因或可卡因的观念已经过时，因为人们会使用多种毒品，且选择不同毒品的原因各异，这也会增加死亡风险。
目前，这些毒品的成分更加复杂，往往含有合成物质，使得使用者难以了解自己摄入的是什么。因此，针对可卡因和甲基苯丙胺成瘾的干预措施尚未像阿片类药物那样成熟。斯坦福大学精神病学与行为科学教授Keith Humphreys表示：“目前还没有针对可卡因或甲基苯丙胺的药物治疗，所有方法都已被测试过，但没有一种有效。”
现有的行为治疗仍主要集中在专科诊所，而未普及到普通医疗诊所。此外，兴奋剂过量的症状与阿片类药物不同，因此人们可能难以识别这些症状。如果想要避免下一次毒品危机重蹈阿片类药物危机的覆辙，我们需要在具体措施上付出更多努力。但我们可以借鉴过去成功降低阿片类药物死亡率的原理，例如与社区合作、建立联系、提供基于证据的治疗选择。
自2010年代中期以来，专家指出可卡因和甲基苯丙胺的使用出现了回升。同时，甲基苯丙胺的效力也因毒品贩子的介入而增强。最近的数据显示，同时使用兴奋剂和阿片类药物（尤其是芬太尼）的过量死亡人数显著上升。专家将这种同时使用分为三类：无意中混合使用、有意的娱乐性混合使用、以及为了缓解戒断症状而故意混合使用。
针对兴奋剂滥用，公共卫生系统正在尝试适应。目前最有效的治疗方法是“条件管理”（contingency management），即通过奖励机制鼓励人们远离毒品。加州在2021年批准了一项试点计划，已帮助超过1万人，效果优于以往的行为疗法。然而，由于资金有限，这种疗法在许多州通过医疗补助和私人保险获得的途径仍然受限。一些州如罗得岛和佛蒙特州则利用了阿片类药物诉讼的赔偿资金来设立相关项目。但更根本的问题是，一些政策制定者和医生反对“奖励”毒品使用者不吸毒的做法。
即使有政治支持，实施这些措施仍需要大量时间和资金。因此，我们需要进一步推动药物辅助治疗的发展。通常，治疗成功与否以患者是否完全戒断为标准，但一些专家认为这种标准并不全面。内华达大学里诺分校的行为科学家Karla Wagner指出：“目前评估药物治疗效果的唯一标准是患者在试验结束时是否持续戒断，但这些药物在减少渴求和降低风险行为等方面也有显著效果。”
此外，美国药物滥用研究所的负责人在去年的一篇博客中也支持在评估药物治疗效果时考虑除戒断之外的其他指标。美国成瘾医学学会也支持在管理可卡因和甲基苯丙胺成瘾方面使用某些药物的非官方用途。
关于兴奋剂过量使用的症状，专家指出应警惕以下情况：心跳加速、体温升高、行为异常（包括幻觉）、对光和声音敏感。如果身边有人出现这些症状，可以采取一些措施帮助他们，例如保持冷静、关闭灯光和声音、用冰袋降温等。如果这些措施无效，或怀疑出现心脏问题，应立即寻求紧急医疗救助。
阿片类药物过量死亡率下降的经验表明，公共卫生干预可以产生实质性的效果。现在正是我们借鉴这些经验，应对可卡因和甲基苯丙胺危机的时机。
We’ve been bringing the 1980s back — including, unfortunately, the cocaine.
While opioid overdose deaths are mercifully on the decline, more Americans are now using and dying from stimulants, particularly cocaine and methamphetamine. A decade ago, in 2016, there were 10,375 deaths from cocaine overdoses; in 2023, there were 29,449. Meth has seen a similar spike in fatalities, from 9,438 deaths in 2017 to 33,283 in 2023. The drug of choice varies depending on where in the US you are: Cocaine is still king in some parts of the Northeast, while methamphetamines are more commonly used elsewhere.
The surge in stimulant use at the same time the opioid overdose crisis has started to ebb is a warning that drug use doesn’t simply end — it evolves. And the image of somebody being solely a heroin user or a cocaine user is outdated: People use multiple drugs, and they choose different ones for different reasons — which can also increase their risk of death. The drugs themselves are now more complex and likely to be synthetic, adding to the risk that you could be taking something without fully understanding what’s in it.
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American health care policy. Sign up here.
These shifts present real challenges to the public health system and public health messaging. The United States spent a generation building treatment and recovery programs to address the opioid crisis. The focus was on prescription painkillers, heroin, and later fentanyl; dependence was managed through proven medications like methadone and buprenorphine, and overdoses could be stopped with a spray of naloxone. There was a dedicated effort to get treatment into the hands of primary care doctors, first responders, and ultimately, people in need.
We have none of the same interventions for cocaine or methamphetamine addiction, or for preventing death once an overdose has started.
“There is no medication for cocaine or methamphetamine,” said Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. “Everything under the sun has been tested and nothing has worked.”
The behavioral treatments that do exist are still largely reserved for specialty clinics and aren’t available in the primary care offices that are often people’s first stop in the health care system. The signs and symptoms of a stimulant habit or overdose are not the same as they are for opioids, which means people who use these drugs and their loved ones might not be as likely to recognize them.
If we want to prevent the next drug crisis from becoming as devastating as the last, we’ve a lot of work to do on the specifics. But we can — and should — adopt the same principles that have led to our recent successes in bringing down opioid deaths.
“The technical specific treatment intervention might be different,” Dr. Brian Hurley, an addiction physician and immediate past president of American Society of Addiction Medicine, told me. “But the principles of working with the community, helping create connection, giving people access to evidence-based options are the same.”
The story of America’s relationship with hard drugs goes something like this: Heroin surged in the post-Vietnam era; cocaine and later crack cocaine became a scourge in the ’80s, provoking the harsh and unforgiving response during the Reagan era; and meth appeared on the scene in the ’90s. By the 2000s, powerful prescription painkillers had seeded the next drug crisis, while cocaine and meth use dropped off sharply. Before stimulants made their recent comeback, opioids — first prescription meds, then heroin, and finally powerful synthetic iterations like fentanyl — were the dominant concern for the better part of two decades.
“Many of the doctors who were out providing treatment in the late 2010s and early 2020s, they had only ever dealt with opioids,” said Richard Rawson, a long-time addiction researcher who is affiliated with the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Vermont. “They really had no idea what to do with this thing.”
But dating back to the mid-2010s, experts say, cocaine and meth have seen a resurgence. Meth has also gotten more potent in the past decade, after its production was taken over by drug cartels. One of the most striking trends in recent drug overdose deaths has been the more recent rise in deaths involving both a stimulant and an opioid.
The experts that I spoke to put the simultaneous use of opioids (particularly fentanyl) and stimulants including cocaine and meth into three different buckets:
Whatever the reason is, taking opioids and stimulants at the same time puts an even greater strain on your health. Your body can oscillate between different extremes — sometimes going from a sedate state with shallow breathing to being overly amped with heart palpitations — in a matter of minutes. Over the longer term, this kind of frequent drug use taxes your heart and can lead to chronic health issues aside from overdose that we should account for when thinking of the toll of the drug crisis.
The public health system is now trying to adapt to the resurgence of stimulants.
Right now, the most proven treatment for stimulant dependency is called contingency management: In essence, it’s a rewards system that offers people an incentive not to use drugs, and it has been effective in randomized trials. Participants will come to a clinic, give a urine sample, and if their urine is drug-free, they receive a gift card. California received approval in 2021 to launch a pilot program that’s treated more than 10,000 people, Rawson said, with folks staying in their treatment longer and testing negative more often than in the behavioral therapy programs of the past.
Funding has been scarce elsewhere, however: Access to contingency management through Medicaid and most private insurance benefits is limited. Some states, like Rhode Island and Vermont have tapped into their opioid lawsuit settlement money to set up their own programs. But more fundamentally, the concept has drawn opposition from some policymakers and even doctors who don’t like the idea of “rewarding” drug users for not using, Rawson said. Even with political support, it will still require serious time and financial resources to implement.
As the public health system works to scale up contingency management programs, we should be doing more to advance medication-assisted treatment. Success is typically measured by whether patients fully abstain from using drugs. But some experts told me they think that’s misguided.
“The only benchmark right now for getting a treatment approved is whether people stop using for a sustained period at the end of the trial,” said Karla Wagner, a behavioral scientist at the University of Nevada Reno. “But those medications do produce some meaningful impacts on other outcomes that are not abstinence-based.” For example, some clinical trials that involved using a prescription drug to manage cocaine or methamphetamine addiction found that a subset of people do feel fewer cravings and engage in less risky behavior, even if they didn’t always completely hold off on taking narcotics.
“All of those things can be really meaningful and impactful and improve quality of life,” Wagner said.
She took heart in a blog post last year from the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which argued for considering measures other than abstinence when evaluating medications for substance abuse. And the American Society for Addiction Medicine has endorsed the off-label use of stimulant medications that have shown some effectiveness in managing cocaine and meth dependency.
Finding a Narcan-like solution that can stop cocaine and meth overdoses once they start is a problem for medical science. But more public knowledge about the symptoms of a stimulant overdose and what to do if you’re with someone who’s experiencing them could still help avert the worst outcomes.
These are the signs to be alert to, according to the experts I spoke with:
If you’re with someone who experiences these symptoms, there are things you can do to help, said Pia Marcus, director of overdose prevention at OnPoint NYC. First, she said, if it’s someone you know well, try to calm them down. Turn off the lights or any sources of sound to create a more peaceful environment. She said you should also try to physically cool them, and recommended ice or ice packs to do that.
“You have to rely on soothing mechanisms to help ground this person,” Marcus said. “It’s a person that’s not necessarily rooted in space and time, and your job is to try to root them.”
It is possible to bring somebody back from danger with these interventions in a community setting, Marcus said. But if these measures don’t appear to be working, the person seems to be having a cardiac event, or if it’s not someone you know well and you don’t feel capable of soothing them, you should call for emergency medical care.
The lesson of the falling opioid death count is that public health interventions can make a real difference. Now is our moment to try to use a similar playbook to get ahead of the cocaine and meth crisis before it gets any worse.
2026-03-26 22:25:00
The Supreme Court tossed out a billion-dollar verdict against an internet service provider (ISP) on Wednesday, in a closely watched case that could have severely damaged many Americans’ access to the internet if it had gone the other way.
Wednesday’s decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment is part of a broader pattern. It is one of a handful of recent Supreme Court cases that threatened to break the internet — or, at least, to fundamentally harm its ability to function as it has for decades. In each case, the justices took a cautious and libertarian approach. And they’ve often done so by lopsided margins. All nine justices joined the result in Cox, although Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized some of the nuances of Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion.
Some members of the Court have said explicitly that this wary approach stems from a fear that they do not understand the internet well enough to oversee it. As Justice Elena Kagan said in a 2022 oral argument, “we really don’t know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet.”
Thomas’s opinion in Cox does a fine job of articulating why this case could have upended millions of Americans’ ability to get online. The plaintiffs were major music companies who, in Thomas’s words, have “struggled to protect their copyrights in the age of online music sharing.” It is very easy to pirate copyrighted music online. And the music industry has fought online piracy with mixed success since the Napster Wars of the late 1990s.
Before bringing the Cox lawsuit, the music company plaintiffs used software that allowed them to “detect when copyrighted works are illegally uploaded or downloaded and trace the infringing activity to a particular IP address,” an identification number assigned to online devices. The software informed ISPs when a user at a particular IP address was potentially violating copyright law. After the music companies decided that Cox Communications, the primary defendant in Cox, was not doing enough to cut off these users’ internet access, they sued.
Two practical problems arose from this lawsuit. One is that, as Thomas writes, “many users can share a particular IP address” — such as in a household, coffee shop, hospital, or college dorm. Thus, if Cox had cut off a customer’s internet access whenever someone using that client’s IP address downloaded something illegally, it would also wind up shutting off internet access for dozens or even thousands of innocent people.
Imagine, for example, a high-rise college dormitory where just one student illegally downloads the latest Taylor Swift album. That student might share an IP address with everyone else in that building.
The other reason the Cox case could have fundamentally changed how people get online is that the monetary penalties for violating federal copyright law are often astronomical. Again, the plaintiffs in Cox won a billion-dollar verdict in the trial court. If these plaintiffs had prevailed in front of the Supreme Court, ISPs would likely have been forced into draconian crackdowns on any customer that allowed any internet users to pirate music online — because the costs of failing to do so would be catastrophic.
But that won’t happen. After Cox, college students, hospital patients, and hotel guests across the country can rest assured that they will not lose internet access just because someone down the hall illegally downloads “The Fate of Ophelia.” Thomas’s decision does not simply reject the music industry’s suit against Cox, it nukes it from orbit.
Cox, moreover, is the most recent of at least three decisions where the Court showed similarly broad skepticism of lawsuits or statutes seeking to regulate the internet.
The most striking thing about Thomas’s majority opinion in Cox is its breadth. Cox does not simply reject this one lawsuit, it cuts off a wide swath of copyright suits against internet service providers.
Thomas argues that, in order to prevail in Cox, the music industry plaintiffs would have needed to show that Cox “intended” for its customers to use its service for copyright infringement. To overcome this hurdle, the plaintiffs would have needed to show either that internet service providers “promoted and marketed their [service] as a tool to infringe copyrights” or that the only viable use of the internet is to illegally download copyrighted music.
Thomas also adds that the mere fact that Cox may have known that some of its users were illegally pirating copyrighted material is not enough to hold them liable for that activity.
As a legal matter, this very broad holding is dubious. As Sotomayor argues in a separate opinion, Congress enacted a law in 1998 which creates a safe harbor for some ISPs that are sued for copyright infringement by their customers. Under that 1998 law, the lawsuit fails if the ISP “adopted and reasonably implemented” a system to terminate repeat offenders of federal copyright law.
The fact that this safe harbor exists suggests that Congress believed that ISPs which do not comply with its terms may be sued. But Thomas’s opinion cuts off many lawsuits against defendants who do not comply with the safe harbor provision.
Still, while lawyers can quibble about whether Thomas or Sotomayor have the best reading of federal law, Thomas’s opinion was joined by a total of seven justices. And it is consistent with the Court’s previous decisions seeking to protect the internet from lawsuits and statutes that could undermine its ability to function.
In Twitter v. Taamneh (2023), a unanimous Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit seeking to hold social media companies liable for overseas terrorist activity. Twitter arose out of a federal law permitting suits against anyone “who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance” to certain acts of “international terrorism.” The plaintiffs in Twitter claimed that social media companies were liable for an ISIS attack that killed 39 people in Istanbul, because ISIS used those companies’ platforms to post recruitment videos and other content.
Thomas also wrote the majority opinion in Twitter, and his opinion in that case mirrors the Cox decision’s view that internet companies generally should not be held responsible for bad actors who use their products. “Ordinary merchants,” Thomas wrote in Twitter, typically should not “become liable for any misuse of their goods and services, no matter how attenuated their relationship with the wrongdoer.”
Indeed, several key justices are so protective of the internet — or, at least, so cautious about interfering with it — that they’ve taken a libertarian approach to internet companies even when their own political party wants to control online discourse.
In Moody v. Netchoice (2024) the Court considered two state laws, one from Texas and one from Florida, that sought to force social media companies to publish conservative and Republican voices that those companies had allegedly banned or otherwise suppressed. As Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said of his state’s law, it was enacted to stop a supposedly “dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas.”
Both laws were blatantly unconstitutional. The First Amendment does not permit the government to force Twitter or Facebook to unban someone for the same reason the government cannot force a newspaper to publish op-eds disagreeing with its regular columnists. As the Court held in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo (1974), media outlets have an absolute right to determine “the choice of material” that they publish.
After Moody reached the Supreme Court, however, the justices uncovered a procedural flaw in the plaintiffs’ case that should have required them to send the case back down to the lower courts without weighing in on whether the two state laws are constitutional. Yet, while the Court did send the case back down, it did so with a very pointed warning that the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which had backed Texas’s law, “was wrong.”
Six justices, including three Republicans, joined a majority opinion leaving no doubt that the Texas and Florida laws violate the First Amendment. They protected the sanctity of the internet, even when it was procedurally improper for them to do so.
One reason why the Court’s hands-off-the-internet approach in Cox, Twitter, and Moody is so remarkable is that the Supreme Court’s current majority rarely shows such restraint in other cases, at least when those cases have high partisan or ideological stakes.
In two recent decisions — Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025) and Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026) — for example, the Court’s Republican majority imposed onerous new burdens on public schools, which appear to be designed to prevent those schools from teaching a pro-LGBTQ viewpoint to students whose parents find gay or trans people objectionable. I’ve previously explained why public schools will struggle to comply with Mahmoud and Mirabelli, and why many might find compliance impossible. Neither opinion showed even a hint of the caution that the Court displayed in Cox and similar cases.
Similarly, in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), the Court handed down a decision that is likely to render much of federal Medicaid law unenforceable. If taken seriously, Medina overrules decades of Supreme Court decisions shaping the rights of about 76 million Medicaid patients, including a decision the Court handed down as recently as 2023 — though it remains to be seen if the Court’s Republican majority will apply Medina’s new rule in a case that doesn’t involve an abortion provider.
The Court’s Republican majority, in other words, is rarely cautious. And it is often willing to throw important American institutions such as the public school system or the US health care system into turmoil, especially in highly ideological cases.
But this Court does appear to hold the internet in the same high regard that it holds religious conservatives and opponents of abortion. And that means that the internet is one institution that these justices will protect.
2026-03-26 20:00:00
Most of us would like to believe we’re good listeners — but the truth is, we all struggle to really pay attention when someone else is talking.
“Most of the time when you ask people, ‘How well do you think you’re doing at listening to people?,’ they’re going to say, ‘Really well,’” Graham Bodie, a media and communication professor at the University of Mississippi, tells Vox. “But then when you ask about other people, they tend to say, ‘People are bad.’”
One study found that we recall more of what we said to someone compared to what was said to us. At best, people remembered 44 percent of any one conversation; other research has shown listeners’ minds wander nearly a quarter of the time while conversing. Amid the cacophony of devices dinging, children interrupting, and to-do lists haunting, your friend’s story about their vacation can quickly become background noise. Or you end up focusing more on what you’re going to say once they’re finished than on really hearing them.
Many times, it’s those closest to us whom we hear the least. As your mom complains about her neighbor again and your mind wanders to your to-do list, you might subconsciously signal listening behaviors — a nod, smiles, a few “mhm”s — effectively fooling her into thinking you’re paying attention. But this is the worst sin of all, according to Christian van Nieuwerburgh, professor of coaching and positive psychology at Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and co-author of Radical Listening: The Art of True Connection. “This half-listening is actually really detrimental to relationships because it damages expectations,” he tells Vox. “It can be hurtful to people when they’re expecting us to listen and suddenly we don’t.”
On the other hand, when people feel heard, they report feeling more positively about their relationships, safer with their conversation partners, and more open to compromise, which could encourage them to open up more. Listening to someone is one way to make them feel loved, according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, the author of How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, the book she co-wrote with social psychologist Harry Reis. “When was the last time someone was really curious about you, just couldn’t wait for you to finish your story? It’s very compelling,” she tells Vox.
If you want to forge stronger connections with those around you, especially the people you intimately know and love, it’s worth bolstering your listening skills. Deep listening requires curiosity, comprehension, and reflection, experts say. And sometimes, it means admitting when you’re distracted.
“Good relationships are founded on good conversations,” Hanne Collins, assistant professor of management and organizations at UCLA, tells Vox. “And good conversations are really founded on good listening.”
Much of our understanding of listening originates from the concept of active listening, coined by psychologist Carl Rogers in the 1950s. To do it, you are supposed to give your full attention to the speaker, ask follow-up questions, suspend judgment, and keep the conversation on topic. Other research has identified similar components of high-quality listening: attention, understanding, and positive intentions. You can probably intuit what this looks like in practice; closing your laptop when in active conversation (attention), saying something like “It sounds like you have a lot going on right now” (understanding), and biting your tongue when you feel the urge to judge (positive intentions).
The problem with these frameworks, according to Bodie, is they turn listening into a checklist. “If that’s your idea of good listening, it’s a misconception because then you go about laying down that template in every situation you find yourself in, and you become this robotic ChatGPT listener, as opposed to a human who can navigate and adapt to the varying situations that they find themselves in,” Bodie says.
Life presents a multitude of conversation types — a business meeting, an argument, a gossip session — and we need to adapt our approach to listening for each one. A friend going through a hard time might simply need an empathetic ear; you may ask more follow-up questions when getting pet-sitting instructions from a neighbor.
It’s important to regularly reflect on how you show up in conversations. “Are my listening habits helping me or hindering me in this context, in this situation, with this person, in this meeting, and so forth?” Bodie says. Think about some recent interactions you had. What do you tend to listen for (and often miss)? How do you respond? What does your face and body language convey? Do your follow-up questions come across as warm and curious or critical? Do you even ask follow-up questions at all?
The function of listening isn’t just to formulate a response — it’s to understand your conversation partner. Lyubomirsky and Reis describe it in their book as “listening to learn.” Growing up, kids are generally taught to pay attention in order to respond to teachers in class, parents at home. “It’s such a habit for us to constantly respond,” Lyubomirsky says. “So when you’re talking, I’m listening with half an ear, but the other half, I’m really trying to rehearse my answer to you.”
When you’re listening to learn, your only objective is to take in another’s point of view. Lyubomirsky likened the experience to watching a movie. “When you’re watching a film, unless you’re a filmmaker or you’re writing a paper on the film, you’re just taking it in, right?” she says. “You’re not formulating a response, you’re not thinking, What am I saying next?”
Perhaps the most visible ways of signalling your understanding to the listener are to paraphrase and ask follow-up questions. What I think I’m hearing you say is…; Tell me more about…; How did they react when you told them that?; This sounds like that other time you…. The key is to let the other person lead, according to Taylor West, a postdoctoral research fellow in the positive emotions and psychophysiology lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “People will tell you what they want to talk about, but you have to let them,” she says.
Continually pulling the conversational thread requires curiosity. Without it, there can’t be connection. This is especially important to be aware of in long-term relationships. “We often stop being curious about the people that we know the best, that we’ve known for longest, because we think that we know everything about them, and yet, there’s always something new to learn,” Lyubomirsky says.
Of course, you won’t be endlessly interested in everything your partner or best friend or kid has to say. Maybe your spouse has recently gotten into gardening and their talk of bolting and hardening off makes your eyes glaze over. But you can — and should — find ways to manufacture interest, Lyubomirsky says, because it’s crucial for showing the other person that you’re still engaged. Maybe you read up on plants native to your area so you have some basis from which to ask questions, or just ask them what they are most excited to grow next year. There’s always something to learn.
We all zone out occasionally, or get too tired to engage properly; experts say it’s best to simply own up to these limitations. Telling a coworker “Let me just finish this email and you’ll have my full attention” is better than half-listening while you type. Asking a friend if you can revisit a conversation when you aren’t so fried may prevent you from saying something less than helpful or that you’ll later regret.
It might be awkward or even embarrassing, but we need to normalize admitting when we’re not totally present, says Bodie, the communication professor: “I’m so sorry, I got distracted by those sirens. What were you saying?” In meetings at work, you might say “I apologize, I was thinking about what you said earlier and wasn’t fully listening. Could you repeat that?” if you feel comfortable.
You should also take a critical look at your workspace, home, schedule, and general habits to figure out how to minimize distractions. “Is the way in which my office is structured, is the way in which my day is structured, is the way in which people expect me to multitask, are those things incentivizing distraction?” Bodie says. You could dedicate phone-free hours at home or seek out a calm, quiet environment when you’re hanging out with friends.
Giving someone your full attention and genuinely hearing what they have to say is one of the greatest gifts you can give. It doesn’t always come easy, but with a little effort, you can be the kind of listener everyone wants to confide in. “Conversation is a skill,” says Collins, the UCLA professor. “It’s something that we can practice and get better at.”
2026-03-26 19:15:00
Since the war with Iran began, the White House has been posting videos featuring the US military bombing targets in Iran, interspersed with clips from video games, sports highlights, and Hollywood movies. The White House says the videos are meant to highlight the success of the US military.
Some of the captions read like this: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” Others list goals for “Operation Epic Fury,” including: “Destroy Iran’s missile arsenal,” “Destroy their navy,” and “Ensure they NEVER get a nuclear weapon.” And ending with the words, “Locked in.”
Propaganda has always been a part of war. But it hasn’t always been this unserious.
To better understand how propaganda has been used in the past — and how the White House is using it now — we spoke with Nick Cull, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who specializes in the history of propaganda.
Below is an excerpt from Cull’s conversation with Today, Explained co-host Noel King, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full episode wherever you get podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
In a time of war, what’s the objective of propaganda?
The first is to rally your own population. The second is to persuade allies that you’re doing the right thing: to make friends friendlier, to make allies more supportive, and maybe even create a few new allies. And the third is to demoralize your enemy.
Some people would call that psychological warfare: to break your enemy’s will to resist, to protect images of your strength that are so overwhelming that the enemy hastens to surrender or to compromise. And that’s also a very old element in communication in wartime.
What are some past examples of wartime propaganda in the United States?
President Wilson in the First World War spoke about a war to end all wars, a war to make the world safe for democracy. He had his 14 points for how the diplomatic scene was going to be reformed. On the eve of World War II, President Roosevelt spoke about the four freedoms and set out a whole vision for a new international order. President H.W. Bush talked about a war to protect a new order on the eve of the war with Iraq.
There’s always been a chaotic, violent kind of message around American war, and sometimes this occurs in popular culture. One example would be the song “Barbara Ann,” which was made famous by the Beach Boys. It was recorded in a parody version by a group called Vince Vance & the Valiants in 1980 and they did a version called Bomb Iran. It had lines like…
“Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, Tell the Ayatollah, “Gonna put you in a box.”
President Trump brought the song back last year and used it as the soundtrack in a White House video celebrating the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites.
Is the propaganda different this time?
What we’re seeing from the Trump White House are videos that integrate footage from video games with clips from Hollywood movies and with great declarations of kaboom. There’s even one with SpongeBob.
And all of this plays into an idea that war can be communicated through memes and clips from games. It’s a meme-ification of war, a gamification of war, an appeal to war-like images that are bizarrely taken out of context.
Who are these videos for and why would the White House not aim at the broadest part of the population?
I see these videos as having been created by young men, for young men. They’re full of references to the culture of young men, including game culture, including war-oriented video games and references that other people just wouldn’t get.
They’re articulating a visual and cultural language specific to a generation. It has a propaganda purpose, but it’s not a purpose that is focused on a wider section of the American public. And I think that the president has no interest in people who weren’t planning to vote for him.
Who benefits the most from these videos?
China, because it makes the Chinese look like the adults in the diplomatic room just by doing nothing. China will have tremendous appeal to the countries of the Global South, even to former partners of the United States in Europe who are appalled by this kind of unpredictable messaging and unpredictable behavior that goes along with it.
2026-03-26 18:00:00
2026年3月20日，特朗普总统在离开白宫前往佛罗里达州迈阿密之前向媒体发表讲话。| Celal Gunes/Anadolu 通过 Getty 图片社提供
无论如何，特朗普总统希望你相信伊朗战争即将结束。以下是关键要点：
One way or another, President Donald Trump would like you to believe the war in Iran is wrapping up soon.
Trump said this week that he is “very intent on making a deal” and that his team has had good talks with unnamed Iranian leaders, who also “want to make a deal badly.” He has insisted that the war has already been won and that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.” Wall Street, rattled by the war’s disruptions, seems to love the new happy talk about negotiations.
The White House has presented a proposal for a peace deal and is hopeful for talks via a new diplomatic track possibly led by Vice President JD Vance, with the government of Pakistan acting as intermediary. The 15-point plan to end the war that the US has presented to Iran, which includes Iran turning over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and accepting limits on its missile program, is probably a non-starter for the Iranian government. Iran has rejected the plan and presented a five-point proposal of its own, including the payment of war reparations. But warring parties tend to present maximalist demands at the beginning of ceasefire negotiations. It’s at least possible this is the beginning of a deal.
But a better question than whether the US and Iran can reach a deal may be why it’s even necessary. Why couldn’t Trump simply order a halt to airstrikes as he did at the conclusion of the “12-day war” last June? If he’s really done with the war, shouldn’t it be as simple as stopping the war?
The difference between this war and Trump’s previous military engagements with Iran as well as Venezuela and Syria, is that this time Iran has fought back to a much greater extent.
While this was widely anticipated by experts and commentators before the war started, Iran’s attacks on Gulf Arab countries and the disruptions to the global energy industry seem to have come as a genuine surprise to the president. Whether it was the killing of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020 or the bombing of the Houthis in 2024, Trump’s enemies have generally found it worth it to deescalate in hopes that he would simply go away. Even the recent raid on Venezuela that captured dictator Nicolas Maduro — which seems to have given Trump confidence that the Iran operation would go more smoothly than it has — appears to have been less an example of “regime change” in the President George W. Bush sense, and more a backroom deal cut with members of the regime who wanted to preserve their hold on power.
This time things are different: Iran’s leadership worries they will face an existential threat moving forward if they don’t prove Trump’s decision to strike was a disastrous mistake. And they may take Trump’s sudden skittishness about the war as a sign their counterattacks are working as intended.
“You don’t put your opponent in a corner where their only way out is through you. That’s what he’s finally done to the Iranians,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Pentagon Middle East adviser now with the advocacy group J Street. “He’s so boxed them in and so threatened their feeling of regime survival, that they’ve basically taken off the gloves and just gone nuts.”
One Iranian response in particular may account for much of why Trump can’t simply declare victory and move on this time: its disruption of global trade, especially oil, through the Strait of Hormuz.
“The simplest reason is Hormuz,” said Gregory Brew, an Iran and energy analyst at Eurasia Group. Even with the damage the Iranian regime has sustained, it has demonstrated an ability to strike at the heart of the global economy and inflict just the sort of pain — in the form of high oil prices — to which a US president heading into a midterm election year is most susceptible. “I think the White House is sufficiently aware that if Trump does just deescalate now it will look very much like an Iranian victory, despite the costs that have been imposed on Iran,” Brew added.
In the short term, Iran’s leaders are also publicly skeptical of whether the US entreaties are genuine — and not just a feint while they move thousands of troops to the region, possibly ahead of a ground invasion to take over Kharg Island, Iran’s main offshore oil terminal, or to control the coast along the strait. It doesn’t help that Iran has been bombed by Israel and the United States twice in the past year while in the middle of nuclear negotiations.
A further question now is whether Iran would restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz even if the US and Israel were to deescalate. Some analysts suggest the Iranians might keep the strait partially closed in order to impose costs significant enough that the US and Israel won’t simply do this all again in six months. Iran is reportedly now developing a selective vetting system for which countries will be allowed to use the strait.
Given that the economic impact of rising energy and fertilizer costs are being felt globally — and far more severely in Africa and Asia than in the United States — Iran would likely come under enormous diplomatic pressure to restore normal traffic through the strait, including from its most important trading partner, China. But Iran has still demonstrated the ability to shut down more than 90 percent of trade through the strait and to do it with a relatively small number of tanker strikes rather than the extensive mining campaign that many expected. That raises the political stakes for both sides moving forward.
Trump, depending on the day, may hope to wind down the war soon, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely happy for it to continue.
From an Israeli perspective, every day that the US and Israel continue destroying Iranian missile launchers and killing senior officials is “pure profit” in the tactical sense. The strikes are making it harder for the regime to rebuild its military capabilities and they’re giving Israel more time to take on Iran’s allied “axis of resistance” groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Plus, there’s always the off chance that the leadership is weakened to the point that it becomes vulnerable to mass protests again.
Netanyahu is also probably not the only foreign leader with Trump’s ear right now. Despite Saudi Arabia’s public opposition to the strikes on Iran, de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has reportedly been privately urging Trump to continue the war, viewing it as a historic chance to reset the balance of power in the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reports that the leaders of Arab Gulf states are “pressing Trump in regular phone conversations to finish the job and destroy Iran’s military capabilities before moving on.”
While the Gulf states may have been reluctant about getting involved in the war at the outset, for the now-apparent reason that it would expose their cities and oil infrastructure to Iranian reprisals, the ferocity of the Iranian response may have shifted their thinking. Just as Iran has proven it can make the world pay a heavy price by choking off oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, its regional rivals are hoping to prove to Iran that it can’t hold their economies hostage without paying an even bigger one in order to prevent this from becoming a regular occurrence.
The US is still the dominant player in this war and could resist demands from allies to escalate things further. As Trump demonstrated in June when he effectively called off the 12-day war on social media with Israeli jets still in the air, this is ultimately the president’s call to make. But having some of Trump’s closest friends in the region insisting the war isn’t done could give him pause.
It’s worth noting that we’re roughly three and a half weeks into what Trump had predicted would be a four- to five-week war or longer. Perhaps Trump simply doesn’t feel much sense of urgency about ending the war.
“What we’ve seen is he is very willing to just sort of pull the escape cord when he thinks he needs to,” said Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “So obviously he does not, or has not yet, felt that he needs to.”
Wars of attrition tend to continue as long as both sides think they are winning. Iran’s leaders’ calculation, from the beginning, has been that their tolerance for pain is higher than Trump’s and that with relatively little effort they can continue to impose intolerable costs on the United States.
But is Trump really feeling the pain? One would think the president would be alarmed by the spiking energy costs — and the way that diplomatic announcements appear to be timed to the opening and closing of the New York stock exchange suggests he at least has one eye on the markets, as well as his own poll numbers.
But the president is also reportedly consuming the war in the form of two-minute highlight reels of “stuff blowing up” compiled by military commanders. It’s far from clear that the strategic costs of this war, despite the operational successes, are getting through to the commander-in-chief. It’s possible he’s concluded he can juice the markets as needed with a phone call or press conference downplaying a long operation while still preparing for more extensive maneuvers behind the scenes.
Critics have coined the term “TACO” — Trump always chickens out — to describe Trump’s habit of backing off confrontations when he faces pushback. A more generous interpretation is that throughout his career, Trump has shown a remarkable ability to declare victory and move on rather than getting bogged down in crises. If that instinct isn’t kicking in this time, it may be because he doesn’t yet believe it’s a crisis.
2026-03-26 05:40:00
2026年3月23日，唐纳德·特朗普在棕榈滩国际机场登机前向媒体发表讲话。| 萨尔·洛埃布/法新社/Getty Images
本文出自《Logoff》每日新闻简报，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。点击此处订阅。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：国土安全部（DHS）停摆导致机场混乱，但特朗普有自己的优先事项。发生了什么？本周，立法者正在就一项可能为国土安全部（但不包括移民与海关执法局ICE）提供资金的措施进行谈判，以避免即将到来的复活节假期。持续的DHS停摆意味着TSA工作人员未获得工资，一些人因此辞职或假装生病，导致机场安检队伍越来越长。这些谈判本身也面临困难——缅因州独立党参议员安格斯·金今天称共和党提出的DHS资金方案是“虚幻的”。然而，特朗普却进一步搅局，要求立法者在提供DHS资金的同时通过一项名为《拯救美国法案》（SAVE America Act）的法案。特朗普周二表示：“我认为他们达成的任何协议我都不会满意。”
《拯救美国法案》会带来什么变化？该法案的核心内容是引入严格的选民身份验证要求，包括在注册投票时要求提供公民身份证明，并限制邮寄投票。最近，特朗普还试图将一些不相关的新增要求附加到该法案上；周日他发布了一条推文：“全部使用纸质选票，禁止男子参加女子体育赛事，禁止跨性别者对我们的孩子进行‘残害’……把所有内容合并为一项，然后投票！！！”
这会成为现实吗？不会。尽管特朗普坚持要求，但《拯救美国法案》在参议院几乎没有明确的通过路径，无论是否将其附加在DHS资金法案上（该法案版本已于上个月在众议院通过）。然而，在特朗普的压力下，共和党参议员仍在继续推进该法案的程序。
这对机场的安检队伍意味着什么？目前，尚无达成一致的计划来重启DHS，但随着参议员们面临错过复活节假期的可能，这种情况可能会出现。如果出现这种情况，下一个问题是特朗普是否会让他对《拯救美国法案》的执着影响到DHS的重启。
好了，现在是时候下线了。这里有一则来自Vox《难以解释》播客的令人惊叹的故事，讲述环保活动人士凯西·哈雷尔的经历。2020年被诊断出患有肌萎缩侧索硬化症（ALS）后，哈雷尔逐渐失去了说话的能力。如今，植入大脑的微电极帮助他重新开口说话。祝您有一个美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The DHS shutdown is causing chaos at airports, but Donald Trump has his own set of priorities.
What’s happening? Lawmakers are negotiating this week over a possible measure to fund much of the Department of Homeland Security — but not ICE — before a scheduled Easter recess starting on Saturday. The ongoing DHS shutdown has meant that TSA workers are not getting paid, and some are either quitting or calling out sick, resulting in increasingly long security lines at airports.
Those talks are facing their own difficulties — Sen. Angus King (I-ME) called a GOP DHS proposal today “illusory” — but President Donald Trump is throwing extra sand in the works with his demand that lawmakers pass a bill called the SAVE America Act along with DHS funding.
“I think any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it,” Trump said on Tuesday about negotiations.
What would the SAVE America Act do? At its core, the bill would introduce stringent new voter ID requirements, including requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote and cracking down on mail-in voting.
More recently, Trump has also tried to graft unrelated new requirements onto the bill; on Sunday, he posted, “All Paper Ballots, No Men In Women’s Sports, and No Transgender MUTILIZATION of our precious children … lump everything together as one, and VOTE!!!”
Is this going to happen? It is not. Despite Trump’s demands, the SAVE America Act has no clear path to passage in the Senate, whether or not it’s tagged onto a DHS funding measure (a version of the bill already passed the House last month).
Under pressure from Trump, however, Republican senators have still been going through the motions of trying to advance the bill.
What does this mean for airport lines? For now, there’s no agreed-upon plan to reopen DHS, though one could materialize as senators stare down the prospect of missing Easter recess. If that happens, the next question will be whether Trump lets his SAVE America fixation get in the way.
Here’s a remarkable story from Vox’s Unexplainable podcast about environmental activist Casey Harrell. After being diagnosed with ALS in 2020, Harrell eventually lost the ability to speak. Now, microelectrodes implanted in his brain are helping him talk once more.
Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!