2026-03-30 20:00:00
现在是时候让“Sid”走了。| Duncan1890/Getty Images 你可能通常会把陌生人的面孔当作你人生这部电影中的背景角色，但你所关心的几乎所有人都曾是陌生人。除了从出生起就在你身边的人，每段关系都有一个从陌生到熟悉的过程。陌生人可以为日常生活的点滴带来深远的意义，无论是在大场合还是小细节中。在她新书《Once Upon A Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life》中，英国苏塞克斯大学心理学与善意研究的副教授吉莉安·桑德斯特姆（Gillian Sandstrom）提出了我们应该更多地尝试与陌生人建立联系的理由。她结合了相关研究，既强调与陌生人互动的好处（交谈可以提升幸福感），也帮助缓解你的担忧（人们其实比我们想象的更愿意与我们交谈）。
在陌生人群体中，最令人紧张的场景之一就是你作为唯一的陌生人出现在一个群体中，比如新工作、合唱团或小区。你对每个人都不熟悉，但对他们来说，你却是唯一的陌生人。在这种情况下，桑德斯特姆提供了一些建议，帮助你融入群体，同时告诉你，你可能并没有想象中那么尴尬。
你是否认为在街头与陌生人交谈和加入一个新声乐团体（大家彼此认识，而你却不知道他们）之间的场景不同？在与陌生人交谈时，如果你知道可能会再次遇见他们，那么你可能会更担心他们的看法，希望他们喜欢你，这样下次见面时你才会有话题。有时候人们会担心对方并不想和他们交谈。比如，你每天在公交站都见到同一个人，你可以打招呼，但如果打招呼后你不喜欢对方，或者对方很无聊，你以后每次去公交站都要和他们说话，那就太尴尬了。因此，有时候选择不说话会更明智。当你知道可能会再次见到这些人时，确实会更紧张，你希望给对方留下好印象，这种感觉更令人焦虑。
这种与陌生人交谈的场景是否属于“闲聊”？无论你是否会在未来再次见到对方，与陌生人交谈的开场方式都是一样的。你必须思考：“我们该聊什么？”因为你并不了解对方，所以不知道哪些话题合适，哪些不合适，只能慢慢摸索共同话题。比如，你刚刚加入的合唱团就是一个很好的开场话题，因为你们有共同的兴趣。或者你们在同一家公司工作，这也可以成为交谈的切入点。
书中提到的“Sid”这个声音，是我们在脑海中不断告诉自己“不要和陌生人说话，你并不有趣，没人喜欢你”的负面声音。这种声音在你加入一个大家彼此都认识的群体时会更强烈。你有什么建议来平息这种声音吗？这种声音往往来自于我们总是将自己与那些社交能力很强的人进行比较。研究表明，我们通常认为自己在几乎所有方面都比别人优秀，但在社交方面却不是这样。我们总是将自己与那些最擅长社交的人进行比较，这导致我们觉得自己社交能力很差。其实，我们并不需要与那些社交高手比较。如果环顾四周，你会发现大多数人和你一样，都在努力寻找合适的交谈方式。作为研究人员，我非常重视数据。那么，Sid，你有什么数据来支持你的说法吗？请给我看看证据。我们很少与陌生人交谈，而且当我们缺乏足够经验时，就容易想象那些糟糕的交谈场景。我们会记住那些不愉快的经历，而忽略那些成功的对话。对于我来说，平息Sid的方法就是告诉自己：“你没有任何依据来这么说，你没有任何数据支持你的想法。”
你的一项研究指出，大多数与陌生人的交谈都进行得不错，只有极少数会非常糟糕。这说明我们对与陌生人交谈的想象往往夸大了其负面结果。实际上，与陌生人交谈并不像我们想象的那么糟糕。当我们缺乏实际经验时，更容易想象那些失败的场景，这会让我们产生焦虑。这种焦虑会进一步影响我们的行为，使情况更加尴尬。这种现象被称为“聚光灯效应”，即我们觉得自己被他人关注的程度远高于实际。这形成了一种自我实现的预言。
如果某次与陌生人交谈时你说了一件傻事，而所有人都笑了，你会怎么处理？如果是我的话，我会试着用幽默来化解尴尬。我曾多次因为某次尴尬的对话而感到不安，但偶尔提起时，却发现大家早已忘记。你可以试着说：“我还在想着上次那个糟糕的笑话。”他们一定会回答：“什么笑话？我都不记得了。”
那么，为什么值得与陌生人交谈，尤其是那些你经常遇到的陌生人？如果你在一个躲避球团队中，却不与队友交谈，那感觉就不一样了。乐趣来自于与对手开玩笑、互相调侃，以及之后一起喝杯茶。如果你没有这些互动，那就会感到空虚。很多人加入某个团体后，只和少数几个人交谈，之后每次去都只和他们说话。我努力避免这种情况，我总是尝试与更多人交流。我参加了一个业余乐团，如何将一次简单的交谈发展成更深入的关系？如果你希望建立长期关系，就需要有重复的接触。每周见到同一批人是一个好的开始，但你还需要勇敢地提出：“我们之后一起喝杯咖啡吧。”当然，如果你不想进一步发展这些关系，那也没关系。你不需要强迫自己记住他们的名字或联系方式，但如果你愿意，也可以这么做。
研究表明，与不同的人互动有助于我们学习不同的东西。你认为人们在与陌生人互动时有什么误解吗？人们通常会认为自己与陌生人没有共同点，所以为什么要和他们交谈？有什么好处吗？其中一个原因是，我们可以通过与他人建立联系，一起完成更多事情，并在群体中感到更安全。我们将在群体中茁壮成长，工作场所也会因此产生更多的成果，因为我们会更擅长团队合作，并彼此信任。但要实现这一点，需要有人率先迈出一步。正如你所说，有人必须先行动起来。这就像在学校舞会上，我们所有人都站在一边，但其实我们都有同样的愿望。这是与陌生人交谈的最大误解：我们总以为自己是唯一一个感到焦虑、不知道该怎么做、觉得别人不想和我们交谈的人。但实际上，每个人都会有这样的感觉。只要有人勇敢地迈出一步，忽略脑海中的Sid，去尝试交谈，一切就会变得不同。
You may generally disregard unfamiliar faces as background characters in the movie that is your life, but almost everyone you care about was once a stranger. Aside from the people who have been in your life since you were born, every relationship has a getting-to-know you process where you transition from unknowns to knowns.
Strangers can bring so much meaning to everyday moments, in big ways and small ones. In her new book Once Upon A Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life, Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, makes the case for why we should make more attempts to connect with unknowns. Sandstrom draws on research that both extols the virtues of interacting with strangers (talking with them improves well-being) and helps quell your fears (people enjoy talking to us more than we think).
Among the most nerve-wracking of stranger encounters are ones where you’re the unknown entity in a group: at a new job, a knitting club, or on the block. Everyone is unfamiliar to you, but to them, you’re the sole stranger. Here, Sandstrom offers some advice on how to integrate into the unit, and why you probably aren’t as embarrassing as you think.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Is there a difference between talking to a stranger on the street versus going into a new a cappella group and they all know each other and you don’t? Is the stranger scenario different for each of those contexts?
There is something different when you know that you might see the person again, because you probably worry more about their judgment. You want them to like you, so that when you see them again, you might want to talk again. Sometimes people worry [the other person doesn’t] want that. So you might think, I see the same person at the bus stop every day and I could say hi. But what if I do and then I don’t like them? Or if they’re boring and then I’m going to have to talk to them every single time I go to the bus stop? So it’s better to just not talk at all. It’s definitely scarier when you know that there’s the potential to see people again; you really want to make a good impression. It feels higher stakes.
Would this type of conversation fall under the umbrella of small talk?
The way you start a conversation works the same way whenever you’re talking to someone that you haven’t met before, regardless of what’s going to happen in the future, if you’re going to see them again or not. You have to figure out, What are we going to talk about? I don’t know you, so I don’t know which topics are good and which topics are not good, and we have to fumble our way to finding some common ground. The choir [you just joined] is a good conversation starter. You’ve chosen the same thing to do. Or you’re working for the same employer. You have something in common, which could be an easier conversation starter.
What stuck out to me in the book was what you call Sid, this insidious voice in your head who’s telling you not to talk to strangers, and that you’re not interesting and nobody likes you. That voice is even stronger in situations where everybody knows each other and you are the new person. What advice would you have to quiet that voice?
That voice in our head that’s like, “You suck, you don’t know what you’re doing, nobody likes you” — part of that comes from always comparing ourselves to others. There’s research showing that we generally think we’re better than average at almost everything, but not at social stuff. This is almost the only thing where we think we’re not better than average. Who are you comparing yourself to? We compare ourselves to highly social people, the people who are really good at this. That’s partly why we think that we’re not any good, because we’re comparing ourselves to the best of the best.
We have to be better at realizing, yes, there are some people like that, but we don’t have to compare ourselves to those people who are really good. If you look around the room, probably more people are like you desperately trying to figure it out and have a decent conversation.
I am a researcher, so I’m all about the data. Okay, Sid, what data do you have? Show me the receipts. We don’t talk to strangers very often, and when we don’t have enough data, we can’t [easily] be like, “Oh yeah, I remember that great conversation I had.” We remember the really bad stuff. If you ever had a conversation with a stranger that didn’t go well, or you tried to talk to someone and it was a bit awkward or they didn’t want to talk, that’s what you’re going to remember. For me, what helps quiet Sid is to be able to say, “No, you have no basis for what you’re telling me. You have no data.”
I was really struck by your study that showed most conversations with strangers go well; there are very few that are total trainwrecks. That speaks to the idea that we’re making this up. It’s not that bad.
When we don’t have data, we have to imagine stuff, and it’s easier to imagine those trainwrecks. That’s the stuff we remember. It’s the drama.
It also ups the stakes, especially if you’re the new person at work and thinking, “I’m going to say something stupid, and they’re going to see me every day and think I’m an idiot for the rest of the time that we work together.”
There’s this research on who we’re willing to confide in. People, in certain situations, would rather share something with someone they don’t know, because if they share it with someone they do know, every time they see that person they’re going to be reminded of the fact that they shared that thing. The same is true here. If you tell a joke that nobody laughs at, you might think that every time you see them, you’ll be reminded of that joke and it didn’t go over well. They’re probably not thinking of it. The spotlight effect is when we feel like other people are noticing all our flaws more than they actually do, and then, that changes how you act, and it makes things more awkward. There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy going on.
What if you said something stupid and everyone laughed. How do you move on?
If it was me, I’d try to make a joke about it. There have been so many times where I have continued to feel bad about something, and every once in a while, I bring it up and people are like, “I don’t even remember that.” What you could do is say, “I’m still thinking about that horrible joke I told last time.” Guaranteed, they’ll be like, “What joke? I don’t even remember.”
Why is it worth talking to strangers, especially the ones that you are going to see regularly?
It does not feel the same if you’re on a dodgeball team and you’re not talking to anybody on your team. The fun comes from being able to joke around and trash talk the opponents together and have a cup of tea afterwards. What would it feel like if you didn’t have any of that? It would be empty.
A lot of people join a group, and then, they find a couple people, and then, anytime they go to the group, they talk to those few people, and that’s it. I try really hard not to do that. I try to meet lots of people. I play in an amateur orchestra. How do you turn a chat at the orchestra to something outside of the orchestra? If you did want to turn it into something lasting, you need that repeated contact. If you’re seeing the same people every week, that’s a good start. But then, you also have to be willing and brave enough to say, “Let’s grab a coffee afterwards.”
What if you don’t want to take these relationships further?
That’s fine. You shouldn’t feel like you have to get their name and their contact info and do something, but you can if you want to. There’s research on how having a diversity of interaction partners is important. You learn different things from different people.
What misconceptions do you think people have about the value of interacting with strangers?
People start by thinking, I’m not going to have anything in common with them. Why would I? What’s in it for me? One of the reasons that we connect with other people is because we can do more together, and we feel safer when we’re in a group. We’re going to thrive. The workplace is going to be able to produce more, because we’re going to be better at teamwork, and we’re going to trust each other more. But for that to happen, someone has to go first. You have to be thinking about the “we.”
I like the way you put it: Someone has to go first. It almost feels like we’re at a school dance, and we’re all standing on the sidelines, but we want the same thing.
That’s the biggest misconception in terms of talking to strangers, period: We walk around thinking we’re the only ones who are anxious and that we don’t know what to do and that they don’t want to talk to us. But everybody’s feeling that way. It takes one person to be brave, to figure out how to ignore Sid’s voice in their head and just do it anyway.
2026-03-30 18:30:00
当唐纳德·特朗普在2024年竞选期间承诺大规模驱逐移民时，很难想象这会带来什么样的后果。尽管他吹嘘要实施“历史上最大的国内驱逐行动”，但你可能会认为他指的是某种更有限的措施——比如“逐步”进行，首先针对近期抵达者、暴力犯罪者和疑似帮派成员。至少，这是许多相信他的人所想象的，包括许多移民社区的选民，他们曾以历史性的票数支持共和党，同时也担心有时混乱的难民涌入。民调机构迅速指出，尽管许多驱逐计划在普通美国人中很受欢迎，但支持程度因细节而异。针对有犯罪记录的移民或在拜登总统任期内入境的移民的ICE逮捕行动，比拆散混合身份家庭、在教堂或学校附近逮捕移民、驱逐长期居民等措施更受支持。然而，美国城市却充斥着联邦执法机构；国民警卫队被部署以平息抗议；未识别和戴面具的特工在社区中游荡，追逐嫌疑人进入商店，并在法院逮捕移民；抗议者、政客和记者被逮捕或受伤；有待审的难民被带走并驱逐到一个臭名昭著的外国监狱；两名美国公民被枪杀。本月，民主党要求在任何资金拨款中附加新的限制，导致国土安全部大部分地区停摆或停发工资。作为回应，特朗普派遣ICE前往机场——他说这是为了帮助疲于奔命的TSA特工，甚至重塑其形象，但同时也隐含着对反对党的施压。美国众议员詹姆斯·科默（R-KY）最近在福克斯商业新闻上表示：“这会让民主党感到疯狂。”一年后，可以肯定地说，美国移民与海关执法局（ICE）、边境巡逻队（Border Patrol）和其他联邦机构的联合行动，从东到西重塑了美国的生活，以戏剧性或更隐秘的方式。这些行动影响了各种族裔社区——明尼苏达州的索马里人、俄亥俄州的海地人、密歇根州的阿拉伯人，以及美国最大的近期移民群体——来自拉丁美洲的人。一种新的公民意识型活动家在经历了ICE行动激增或持续执法行动的地区兴起。当地经济因驱逐行动而遭受重创，仍在努力恢复。恐惧、怀疑，甚至在某些情况下是偏执，已经重塑了这些社区的社会结构。但与全国受影响人群的交谈中，也有一种希望——以及特朗普政府意识到其行动已经走得太远，可能正在尝试缓和或改变其移民政策的执行方式。## ICE催生了新的公民活动家——以夏洛特为例去年，有关ICE计划在北卡罗来纳州夏洛特地区增派特工的传闻开始流传，当地居民感到震惊并开始寻找行动方案。北卡罗来纳州的药店员工乔纳森·皮尔斯告诉我：“我从未真正是个活动家，但看到的那些事情让我很不喜欢。我不喜欢特朗普对移民的言论，也看到移民问题如何影响我工作和交往的朋友，他们积极参与教会活动。”幸运的是，皮尔斯有选择。关心的市民们很容易进入本地活动，而且几个月前就已准备好行动蓝图，并在全国各地的城市进行测试和更新。11月，国土安全部正式宣布“夏洛特之网”行动。很快，无标记的厢式货车和戴面具的联邦特工开始在城市及其郊区巡逻。他们最终进行了突袭，逮捕并拘留了数百人，引发了该地区主要由西班牙裔移民社区的恐惧。但当地人早已开始组织和应对。起初，这种行动是在基层层面展开的，得到了宗教领袖的支持。移民权益组织和法律援助机构早已与该地区牧师、神父和传教士联系，以找到支持移民邻居的方法。北卡罗来纳州泰勒斯维尔的第一联合卫理公会教堂的教友，包括皮尔斯在内，已经开始参加培训，学习如何应对。最初计划是教志愿者如何帮助脆弱的邻居前往教堂和学校。但随着他们在其他城市看到ICE行动变得更加激进，这些培训内容也发生了变化。他们开始学习如何缓和局势、如何用哨声沟通，以及如何记录ICE特工与被拘留者之间的互动。他们还向害怕的邻居们重新强调他们的权利，分享如何获得法律帮助，以及如何识别潜在危险。据该教堂的牧师乔尔·辛普森所说，仅在该地区ICE行动的第一周，就有超过2000人接受了培训并组织起来。在特朗普的第一个任期中，大规模抗议是抵抗的象征：从最初的妇女游行，到中期的“为我们的生活而游行”，再到最后的“黑人的命也是命”抗议。而在他的第二个任期，抵抗更多地表现为个人行动：用智能手机记录联邦特工，或鸣笛提醒街道上的居民。1月迫使ICE撤离的明尼苏达市暴动，以及最终导致DHS部长克里斯蒂·诺姆被解职的事件，确认了一种新的活动家运动的崛起：小型、灵活、本地化，并不断采用新战术来保护邻居免受骚扰、拘留或驱逐。尽管明尼苏达市是这种网络化的顶峰，但类似的活动早在洛杉矶、芝加哥和华盛顿特区就已经出现。特朗普政府则持不同看法：官员们认为这些抗议和社区组织行动阻碍了正常的执法工作，特别是驱逐罪犯，并认为参与者的行为危及了执法人员的安全。今年早些时候，特朗普威胁要援引叛乱法并动用联邦军队镇压抗议。皮尔斯的生活与一年前相比已经大不相同。他参加了11月的培训，参加了在 Raleigh 和华盛顿特区的抗议活动，现在他关心的不仅仅是移民问题。尽管他的工作时间有限（作为单亲父母，他有育儿责任），而且天气也影响了他的活动，但他仍努力保持活跃，试图说服 Hickory 的邻居们关注 ICE 和其他经济问题，为2026年的中期选举做准备：组织写信给地方和州代表的活动，并与邻居们讨论 SNAP 福利、医疗保险和价格问题。皮尔斯是北卡罗来纳州夏洛特地区变化的一个例子：该地区的政治中立或同情的邻居们被说服去实践他们所相信的。一位邻近郊区的五旬节派牧师埃里卡·雷诺索告诉我：“我认识一些在夏洛特行动中被拘留或被种族歧视的人。我当时担心自己也会被ICE盯上。虽然我在11月初就开始参加ICE监视和互助组织，但当我听说拉丁裔公民被拘留和盘问时，我退缩了。‘我去了一个监视点，幸运的是已经有白人男性在确认身份，我问他，‘你是来确认的吗？’他说，‘是的，你应立即离开。’我意识到那一刻那个社区正在发生可怕的事情，他是在保护我。’”于是，她将活动转向更安静的互助形式，教育邻居，并在教会里讲授社会正义。尽管ICE的强势存在已经消失，但这些记忆和恐惧仍然萦绕。但这些社区也因这些变化而有所改善，雷诺索说。培训已经深入人心，社区成员也有了信心，认为他们能实际做出改变。“他们知道需要什么，”她说，“所以如果边境巡逻队再次出现，我们已经准备好了。”## 本地经济仍处于被打击状态——以芝加哥为例Little Village，位于芝加哥市中心西南部的26街沿线，以塔克里亚斯（墨西哥风味餐厅）、杂货店、精品店和面包店闻名，被称为“中西部的墨西哥”。它被认为是芝加哥拉丁裔社区的经济引擎——城市官员告诉我，与市中心的“辉煌英里”一样，Little Village 是芝加哥收入最高的街区之一。而且，不只是本地人推动着这里的商业：Little Village，特别是26街走廊，是美国其他拉丁裔人士的旅游目的地。当地商会执行主任詹妮弗·阿古亚尔告诉我：“我们经常看到来自美国中西部和东海岸的游客来到这里购买他们在自己所在州找不到的东西，比如食物、15岁生日礼服或烹饪传统菜肴所需的材料。由于很多人无法前往墨西哥，这里就成了他们最好的替代选择。”然而，移民执法机构的到来让这一切戛然而止。前边境巡逻队总指挥格雷格·博维诺来到这里时，居民、领袖和商家都预感到会有麻烦。他们没想到事情会变得如此糟糕，经济打击会如此严重，恢复也需要如此长时间。当ICE和CBP到来时，商家们已经因关税而面临更高的成本，并且在上半年的城市执法行动中遭受了财务打击。店主不得不裁员或暂时停业，其他人则无法说服员工前来工作，因为他们害怕被拘留。这一切形成了一个循环：失去收入意味着购买力下降，进而导致这些小企业的销售额下降。对此，市政府和地方官员尽其所能地评估情况并追踪其影响。自10月以来，地方、州和联邦代表与商家会面，收集证词，将商家与小型补助资金联系起来，并推动“团结购物”等倡议，鼓励那些来自外部的、通常更富裕、白人或公民的人来Little Village和其他主要由墨西哥裔美国人居住的社区购物和投资。然而，这些影响仍然存在。芝加哥市秘书长安娜·瓦伦西亚表示，她的办公室启动了“团结购物”计划，以促进来自Little Village以外的居民前来投资和消费，但她说，如果没有更多的州和市政府支持，她和当地社区所能做的有限。她呼吁创建一个公私联合的救济基金，以帮助小企业恢复和投资，特别是在2026年。她还准备在4月面对更多坏消息。“当报税单提交时，你就能看到真实的数据，”她说，“但我们已经知道，仅凭听到的故事和亲眼所见，很多社区已经变成了‘鬼城’。”## 社会结构已发生改变——无处不在这些月来，全国各地的居民，尤其是移民或侨民社区，继续描述一种“生存模式”——一种超越经济痛苦的感受。这是一种警惕感，有时甚至接近偏执，认为ICE随时可能再次出现，或就在拐角处。即使居民们准备迎接更好的天气和更多的户外活动时间，这种心理痕迹仍然留在他们的心中，影响着他们在全国范围内的公共生活。除了夏洛特和芝加哥的故事，凤凰城地区的拉丁裔居民也向我展示了这一现实。马里科帕县的移民、混合身份家庭、公民和活动家们与移民政策、驱逐行动以及随之而来的社会结构破坏有着长期的历史。这个地区在特朗普之前就是执法的重点区域，当时关于如何处理那些在美国生活多年的人的争论最为激烈。由强硬反非法移民官员如州长简·布雷弗和马里科帕县警长乔·阿尔帕伊奥推动的州法律SB 1070，实际上授权了地方执法部门执行移民法：要求警方在怀疑某人无证时检查其移民身份。该法律将无证状态视为州犯罪，并赋予阿尔帕伊奥“美国最严厉的警长”以继续对无证移民进行强硬打击，这引发了对种族歧视和对棕色人种的心理和情感伤害的指控。该法律在多年的法律斗争后被法院广泛阻止。但这一记忆——以及该地区主要墨西哥裔美国人发起的活动和组织——仍然存在。尽管凤凰城没有像芝加哥、夏洛特或明尼苏达那样经历大规模部署，但该地区也经历了类似的安静执法、有针对性的突袭和联邦特工的传闻。“我们的社区在开门和离开家时都会多想一想，”亚利桑那州移民权益组织“Living United for Change”的组织者兼发言人塞萨尔·菲罗斯告诉我，“这就像你脑海中的一个念头：如果因为你的肤色而被拦下，或者因为你的肤色而被问及公民身份，该怎么办？”菲罗斯说，这种恐惧甚至存在于公民和拥有合法文件的人中，他们担心遇到联邦官员、被种族歧视或受到骚扰，因为社区成员感觉这种情况已经发生过。菲罗斯告诉我，他不得不与家人进行类似组织与社区成员之间的对话：随身携带REAL ID、护照或永久居留证，并制定如果家人无证被拘留的应对计划。“我妈妈是一名校车司机，她有口音，因为英语不是她的母语，她非常自豪自己是美国人。但与此同时，她也害怕被ICE或联邦特工或地方执法部门种族歧视。”菲罗斯说，因此，她现在随身携带护照，这是她以前从未做过的事情。不仅仅是菲罗斯的社区有这种恐惧，或者改变了他们的行为。我采访的每个人都有类似的故事。他们因新闻报道而感到个人安全更加脆弱，不仅无证移民被拘留或驱逐，还有合法的难民、绿卡持有者、学生和美国公民也被卷入其中。这种不安也反映在了全国民意调查中。11月，皮尤研究中心发布的一项调查分析了美国拉丁裔居民的情绪，发现他们因特朗普第二任期的执法议程而改变了行为。五分之一的西班牙裔成年人表示，出于对“证明合法身份”被要求的恐惧，他们改变了日常活动。十分之一的人现在随身携带证明公民身份或合法身份的文件，比以前更频繁。此外，还有更艰难的对话，关于如果有人被拘留，家庭将不得不采取什么措施。凤凰城郊区的56岁居民约兰达·兰德罗斯告诉我，除了随身携带REAL ID和避免长时间外出，她还与西南部和爱荷华州的家人制定了不同的计划，以防ICE敲门或拘留家庭成员——记住电话号码以通知家人或律师，知道不要开门，以及要求出示搜查令。她最担心的是住在爱荷华州的无证表弟，他患有慢性健康问题，需要透析治疗。“如果他被拘留，他可能会在那里待几天、几周甚至几个月。他不能这样，他活不下去。”兰德罗斯说。因此，他们制定了A、B、C三个计划：* 计划A：他要求立即驱逐，并签署任何要求他签署的文件。“我们有在墨西哥的家人准备接他。”她说。* 计划B：他们聘请移民律师试图与长时间拘留抗争。但律师费用高昂，且他们住在不同的州。“在亚利桑那州，我知道可以联系到提供免费法律援助的人，”她说，“但在爱荷华州，我却没人可以联系。”* 这样就只剩下计划C：安排葬礼。“但葬礼费用很高，而且我们家族已经有多人死亡。”她说。这些关于社会和家庭生活变化的故事让我想起了我的同事安娜·诺思最近称之为“ICE疫情”的现象——除了ICE行动带来的长期恐惧和经济损失外，还有社区信任的损害和人们参与社会生活的意愿下降。孩子们被留在家中或在家接受远程教育；教堂信徒跳过了弥撒或被允许因错过弥撒而获得宽恕；害怕的工人则待在家里，拒绝暴露在可能被拦截的风险中；需要医疗护理的孩子或成人则选择推迟或推迟检查，以避免被ICE接触。还有对那些为了预防被拘留而提前搬离、退休或自我驱逐的人的悲伤。阿古亚尔，芝加哥的小企业活动家，告诉我：“他们想让人们筋疲力尽，这在某些情况下已经奏效了。一些商家告诉我，他们多年的常客决定自我驱逐，因为他们觉得，‘与其被关进这些营地，不知道会被送到哪里，家人是否能找到我，不如带着我的东西回家。’”在芝加哥的Los Comales，冈萨雷斯回忆起她的儿子问她是否应该随身携带他的护照或身份证来证明他的公民身份。“我说，‘不，去他妈的。’有人需要对我进行审查？我生活在一个类似卡夫卡式纳粹政府的地方吗？”她说，“你可以通过我的指纹或通过我口述的信息来识别我，但我不应该为了走在街上而不得不向你展示我的身份证。”特朗普的移民政策在几个月来一直受到负面评价，尤其是在拉丁裔选民中，这种负面评价最为明显。3月的一项福克斯新闻民调显示，对拉丁裔受访者而言，特朗普的总体支持率仅为28%，有72%的人表示不支持。民主党也在一些曾于2024年向右倾斜的拉丁裔社区中获得了选民支持。特朗普据说已向他的核心圈子表示，他担心自己最初的“大规模驱逐”计划已经超出了选民的接受范围。目前，这些社区的居民仍处于一种等待状态。他们所有人都预计，ICE或CBP会在某个时候再次出现，特别是在明尼苏达市的行动引发的愤怒和关注逐渐消退之后。但他们也感到一些乐观，认为他们的社区和邻居未来会如何应对。在每一次交谈中，我都听到一个积极的一面：尽管现在有更多的怀疑和恐惧，但邻里之间、信仰团体之间以及拉丁裔群体内部已经建立了新的联系。“无论拉丁裔社区内部是否存在‘我们与他们’、‘有证件与无证件’、‘罪犯与非罪犯’之间的分歧，现在大家更团结了，更愿意互相帮助。”北卡罗来纳州的五旬节派牧师雷诺索告诉我。“在这些不确定的时期，我们必须彼此展现恩典和同情。”
When candidate Donald Trump promised mass deportations on the 2024 campaign trail, it was hard to imagine exactly what that might turn into.
Though he boasted about implementing the “largest domestic deportation operation” in history, you could be forgiven for believing he meant something more limited — a “sequential” approach (as JD Vance suggested), starting with recent arrivals, “violent criminals,” and suspected gang members.
That, at least, seemed to be what a lot of voters who trusted him on this topic, imagined — including many immigrant-heavy communities who voted Republican in historic numbers, and were also concerned about the sometimes chaotic flow of asylum seekers into the country.
Pollsters were quick to note that though many of these deportation proposals were quite popular with the average American, support varied dramatically depending on the details. Targeted ICE arrests of convicted felons and those who arrived in the United States during the Biden presidency polled significantly better than separating mixed-status families, carrying out arrests at or near churches and schools, and deporting longtime residents — who might be your neighbors or friends.
Instead, American cities were occupied by federal law enforcement agencies; the National Guard was deployed to quell protests; unidentified and masked agents strolled through neighborhoods, chased suspects into stores, and arrested immigrants at courthouses; protesters, politicians, and journalists were arrested or injured; people with pending asylum cases were seized and deported to a notorious foreign maximum-security prison; and two American citizens were shot and killed.
Much of the Department of Homeland Security remained shut down or operated without pay as Democrats demanded new limits attached to any funding this month. In response, Trump deployed ICE to airports — to help beleaguered TSA agents and even rehabilitate their image, he says, but also implicitly to pressure an opposition party that has come to see them as the president’s personal army and associate them with repression. “That’ll drive the Democrats crazy,” US Rep. James Comer (R-KY), said on Fox Business News recently.
A year into this deportation program, it’s safe to say that the joint work of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US Border Patrol, and other federal agencies have reshaped American life, from coast-to-coast, in both dramatic and more quiet ways. It has touched all kinds of ethnic communities — Somalis in Minnesota, Haitians in Ohio, Arabs in Michigan — and has had a particular impact on the nation’s largest cohort of recent immigrants, those from Latin America.
A new kind of civically conscious activist has risen in places that experienced ICE surges or are continuing to see enforcement actions. Local economies were devastated by deportation efforts, and are still struggling to recover. And fear, suspicion — and, in some cases, paranoia — have remade the social fabric of communities touched by ICE.
But in conversations with affected people across the country, there’s also a sense of hope — and a sense that the Trump administration is realizing how far it has gone, and may be attempting to tone down or change how it pursues its immigration goals.
When rumors began circulating last year that ICE was planning a surge of agents to the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, locals were alarmed and looking for something to do.
“I was never really an activist, but the stuff that I was seeing, I just didn’t like,” Jonathan Pierce, a drugstore employee in Hickory, North Carolina, told me. “I didn’t like how Trump talked about immigrants and I was seeing how the immigration stuff was affecting people that I work with, who are my friends, who have been active in church.”
Fortunately, for Pierce, he had options. Concerned citizens had an easy entry point into local activism and a clear blueprint for action that had been prepared months in advance and was being tested and updated in cities around the country.
In November, Homeland Security officially announced Operation “Charlotte’s Web.” Soon, unmarked vans and masked federal agents patrolled the city and its suburbs. They would end up carrying out raids, arresting and detaining hundreds, and sparking fear in the region’s primarily Hispanic immigrant communities. But locals were already organizing and responding.
It started at the grassroots level, with support from religious leaders. Immigrant rights’ groups and legal aid organizations were already in contact with pastors, priests, and preachers in the region to iron out ways they could support immigrant neighbors. Congregants at the First United Methodist church in Taylorsville, North Carolina — Pierce among them — had already begun attending trainings on how to respond.
The original plan was to teach volunteers how they could help vulnerable neighbors get to and from churches and schools, the Rev. Joel Simpson, a First United Methodist pastor, told me. As they watched ICE tactics grow more aggressive in other cities where they had launched major operations, “those trainings shifted from what we had originally planned once we realized this could get much more violent and intense.”
Working with groups like Siembra NC and the Carolina Migrant Network, churches began to host more trainings and activate neighbors to sign up to monitor ICE operations. They learned deescalation tactics, how to communicate via whistles, and how to document interactions between ICE agents and detained people. They refreshed their frightened neighbors on what their rights were, shared how to get legal assistance, and how to be aware of potential danger.
In all, more than 2,000 people were trained and organized during that first week of ICE operations in the area, Simpson told me.
The defining image of resistance during Trump’s first term was the mass protest: The Women’s March at its start, the March for Our Lives in the middle, and finally Black Lives Matter protests at the end. In his second term, it has become more about individual action: Recording federal agents with a smartphone or sounding a car horn to alert a street to their presence.
The Minneapolis uprising that forced ICE to pull out in January — and eventually led to the firing of DHS secretary Kristi Noem — confirmed the ascendance of a new type of activist movement that had already established itself around the country: Small, nimble, local, and constantly adopting new tactics to protect neighbors from harassment, detention, or deportation.
“It’s churches and neighborhoods and grassroots community organizational networks that are already existing that mobilized to help immigrant families first and foremost,” Theda Skocpol, an expert on political organizing in the US, told me in January.
While Minneapolis was the culmination of these forms of networking, elements of this activism preceded it in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC, all following similar blueprints.
TheTrump administration sees it differently: Officials have argued that these protests and community organizing tactics are impeding normal enforcement operations — particularly deporting criminals — and that participants have endangered officers with disruptive behavior. Earlier this year, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and use federal troops to quash protests.
Pierce’s life feels a lot different now than a year ago. He’s participated in those November trainings; he’s joined protests in both Raleigh and in Washington, DC, and he now cares about more than just immigration.
Though he’s been limited by his work schedule — child care responsibilities as a single parent — and weather, he’s tried to remain active, trying to convince neighbors in Hickory to care about ICE and other economic concerns ahead of the 2026 midterms: organizing letter-writing campaigns to local and state representatives, and talking with neighbors about the future of SNAP benefits, health insurance, and affordability.
Pierce is an example of what another preacher told me has changed in the Charlotte area: of politically agnostic or sympathetic neighbors being convinced to practice what they believe.
“I knew that there were people in Charlotte that cared for the immigrant community, but it wasn’t until Border Patrol was in Charlotte that I saw the action that came attached to that,” Erika Reynoso, a Pentecostal preacher in Gastonia, a neighboring suburb, told me. “It gave them a chance to take action as opposed to just having an ideology.”
“They know what it takes. So if Border Patrol shows up again, we’re ready.”
Erika Reynoso, Pentecostal preacher in North Carolina
Reynoso knew plenty of people who were detained or racially profiled during the Charlotte surge. She herself feared what might happen to her as ICE behaved more aggressively. Though she began to participate in ICE watches and mutual aid groups early in November, once she heard reports of Latino citizens being detained and questioned, she pulled back.
“I went to one of the sightings and thankfully there was already a white male verifier there, and I asked him, ‘Hey, are you here to verify?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you should leave immediately,”” she said. “I knew that in that moment there was something terrible happening in that neighborhood and he was protecting me.”
Instead, she shifted her activism toward more quiet forms of mutual aid, of educating neighbors, and preaching about social justice at her church. And though ICE’s heavy presence is gone now, those memories and that fear still linger.
But these communities have been changed for the better too, Reynoso said. The training has stuck with them, and so has the confidence that it can make a difference in practice.
“They know what it takes,” she said. “So if Border Patrol shows up again, we’re ready.”
Anchored by taquerias, grocery stores, boutique shops, and bakeries on 26th Street southwest of downtown Chicago, Little Village is known as the “Mexico of the Midwest.”
It’s renowned for being the economic engine of Chicago’s Latino community — city officials told me that along with the Magnificent Mile downtown, Little Village is among the top tax-revenue-generating stretches of Chicago.
And it’s not just the locals driving commerce: Little Village, and specifically the 26th Street corridor “is a tourist destination for other Latinos in the United States,” Jennifer Aguilar, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce, told me. “We see a lot of visitors from the Midwest and East Coast that come to buy things that they can’t find in the states that they live in, like food, quinceañera dresses or ingredients that they need to cook traditional dishes. And since a lot of them can’t go to Mexico, this is the next big best thing.”
Then the immigration authorities arrived.
When Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander-at-large, came to town, residents, leaders, and business owners knew to expect disruption. They just didn’t expect how bad things would get, how hard the economic hit would be, and how long it would take to recover.
Immediately, the midwestern Latino visitors who made the trek by car to drive under the corridor’s iconic welcome arch were too afraid to come in “because they heard that ICE was targeting Little Village,” Aguilar said.
News coverage at the time showed scenes of a ghost town in Little Village, of canceled Mexican Independence Day celebrations in downtown, of ICE targets being chased into shops and restaurants, of seemingly random traffic stops, and of protests prompting armored vehicles and federal agents to deploy tear gas — including at least three times in Little Village.
The effect was immediate. From September to late October, when ICE was most active in Chicago, business owners in Little Village were reporting 50 to 60 percent drops in sales compared to the previous year, according to the local alderperson, Michael D. Rodriguez. Some shops struggled to make a single sale in a week, while others temporarily closed their doors.
Wherever ICE and CBP officers have surged, a trail of economic devastation has often followed. Local businesses in multiple cities have complained of foot traffic shutting down, frightened employees staying home, and vendors scared off streets.
Nationally, these enforcement operations have remade the economy. The flow of immigrants into the United States — both documented and undocumented — has turned net negative for the first time in 50 years, according to a Brookings Institution report, with more people now exiting the country overall. The report estimated the change could result in a $60 billion to $110 billion drop in consumer spending between 2025 and 2026, and further worsen prices because of higher labor and production costs, particularly in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing.
While the White House has touted every migrant worker removed as a potential job opening for a native-born one, hiring has slowed nationally over the same period. The administration has also made some concessions to immigrant-heavy industries, particularly agriculture, by discouraging raids.
But these big-picture statistics can obscure the very real way these economic hits have damaged American communities. And perhaps no place is a better example of this pattern than Little Village.
When trying to describe the economic pain caused over these weeks, the Chicagoans I spoke to tended to come back to a chilling comparison: the Covid-19 pandemic.
The last time they had felt a shock like this had been during the peak of the coronavirus shutdowns. But unlike in 2020, there were no equivalent grant programs or federally backed loans, like the Paycheck Protection Program, to help keep businesses and employees afloat.
“At least people were getting paid; you had essential workers, and I never stopped working,” Christina Gonzalez, the co-owner of the Los Comales taqueria and catering group, told me. “But we were recovering from 2020 and this [with tariffs] hit us like a one-two punch.”
When ICE and CBP arrived, businesses were already struggling with higher costs as a result of tariffs, and dealing with financial hits from some enforcement actions in the city in the first half of the year. Shop owners had to furlough or lay off employees; others couldn’t convince workers to commute to the area, for fear of being detained. This all created a cycle: Lost wages meant less purchasing power, which meant lower sales for these small businesses.
In response, city and local officials have tried their best to take stock of what was happening and track the lingering fallout. Since October, local, state, and federal representatives have met with business owners, collected testimony, connected businesses with small grant funds, and promoted campaigns to convince people of means — often wealthier, white, or citizens — to visit Little Village and other primarily Mexican American neighborhoods to shop and spend.
Still, the impacts have lingered. Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia, whose office started the “Shopping in Solidarity” initiative to promote visits and investment from those outside Little Village, said there’s only so much she and local communities can do without more state and city support. She’s called for the creation of a joint public-private relief fund to help with small business recovery and investment efforts in 2026. And she’s preparing for more bad news in April across the city.
“When the tax returns are filed, you’ll be able to actually see the real numbers,” she said. “But we know that it’s already going to be devastating just by hearing the stories and seeing it with our own eyes — the ghost towns of a lot of our neighborhoods.”
All these months later, residents across the country, particularly those in immigrant or diaspora communities, continue to describe a kind of “survival mode” — a feeling that extends beyond economic pain.
It’s a sense of wariness that sometimes borders on paranoia, that ICE will return or is hanging around the corner. And it lingers even as residents prepare for better weather and more time spent together outdoors — a footprint still left on residents’ souls as they navigate public life across the country.
The stories of Latino residents in the greater Phoenix area gave me another window into this reality, in addition to stories from Charlotte and Chicago. Immigrants, mixed-status families, citizens, and activists in Maricopa County have a long history with immigration politics, deportations, and the inevitable shearing of the social fabric that comes with it.
This part of the country was the focal point of enforcement in the pre-Trump years, when the battle over immigration and what to do about those who had been living in the US for years was most acrimonious. Championed by hardline anti-illegal immigration officials like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, state law SB 1070 essentially deputized local law enforcement to enforce immigration law: requiring police to check immigration status during stops if they suspected someone might be undocumented. It made a lack of documentation a state crime, and empowered Arpaio, “America’s toughest sheriff,” to continue an aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the county that sparked accusations of racial profiling and mental and emotional distress to brown people in the region.
The law was largely blocked in court after years of long legal battles. But that memory — and the activism and organizing that sprung up in response by primarily Mexican Americans in the area — still remains.
Though Phoenix hasn’t seen the same kind of mass deployments that Chicago, Charlotte, or Minneapolis have faced, the area has experienced similar kinds of quiet enforcement, targeted raids, and rumor-mill sightings of federal agents across the area, as in those other cities.
“Our community is thinking twice when they open their doors, when they leave their homes,” César Fierros, an organizer and spokesperson for the immigrant rights group Living United for Change in Arizona, told me. “It’s this thing in the back of your head: What if you get stopped because of the color of your skin? or they inquire about your citizenship because of the color of your skin.“ It’s a fear, Fierros said, “even among citizens and people that have the proper documentation to be in the country,” of having to encounter a federal officer, of being racially profiled, of being harassed — because community members feel like it’s happened before.
Fierros told me that he’s had to have conversations with his family similar to the ones his organization is having with community members: of carrying a REAL ID, a passport, or permanent residency card at all times and making plans if a family member without documentation is detained.
“My mom’s a school bus driver. She has an accent because English is not her primary language and she’s very proud of being an American. But at the same time, she’s fearful of potentially being racially profiled by ICE or by a federal agent or by law enforcement,” Fierros told me. So his mother carries her passport with her, something that she has never done before.
It’s not just Fierros’s community that has this fear, or has changed their behavior like this. I heard similar stories from each of the people I spoke to for this story. Driven by news reports that not only undocumented immigrants have been detained or targeted for deportation, but also people in legal asylum proceedings, refugees, green card holders, students, and US citizens, their personal safety has never felt more precarious.
This uneasiness has registered in national polling as well. A Pew Research Center survey published in November analyzing the mood and feeling of Latinos living in the US found a consistent shift in how they are changing their behavior as a result of Trump’s second-term enforcement agenda. Some one in five Hispanic adults told pollsters they changed their daily activities out of fear they’ll be asked to “prove their legal status.” One in 10 say they carry a document to prove citizenship or legal status now, more often than they used to do.
And then there are more difficult conversations, about what a family will have to do in the case that someone is detained.
Yolanda Landeros, a 56-year-old resident of Buckeye, a Phoenix suburb, told me that in addition to carrying a REAL ID and avoiding spending too much time outdoors, she’s had to develop different plans with her extended family in the Southwest and Iowa about what to do if ICE comes knocking or detains a member — memorizing phone numbers to alert family or attorneys, knowing not to open doors, and asking for warrants.
She’s most worried about an undocumented cousin living in Iowa, who deals with chronic health issues and requires dialysis treatment.
“If he gets detained, he could be there for days, weeks, or months. He can’t do that. He won’t survive,” Landeros told me.
So they developed a Plan A, B, and C:
The stories of changed social and family life around the country reminded me of what my colleague Anna North recently dubbed the “ICE pandemic” — the sense that even beyond the lasting fear and economic damage that ICE surges created, there is also lingering damage to community trust and willingness to participate in social life. Kids have been kept home from school or educated remotely; churchgoers skipped services or were issued dispensations to forgive a missed Mass; scared workers stayed home and refused to expose themselves to potential stops; sick kids or adults in need of medical care opted to delay or postpone checkups for fear of ICE exposure.
And there’s the sadness that comes with knowing people who have opted to uproot their lives preemptively, retire early, or self-deport.
“They want to wear people down, and it has worked in some instances,” Aguilar, the Chicago small business activist, told me. “Some business owners have shared with me stories of regular clients that they’ve had for years that decided to self-deport because they’re like, Well, I’d rather take my stuff with me. I’d rather go home in a dignified way than end up in one of these camps and God knows where I’ll end up and if my family’s going to be able to reach me.”
Gonzales, of Los Comales in Chicago, recalled how her son asked her if he should be carrying his passport or ID around with him in order to prove his citizenship.
“I said, ‘No, fuck ’em.’ Somebody needs to vet me? I’m not living in a Kafka-esque Nazi government,” she said. “You can find me with my fingerprints or you can figure out who I am based on the information I give you from my mouth. But I should not have to show you my goddamn ID to walk down the street.”
Ratings of Trump’s immigration policy have been solidly negative for months now among voters, shifting most dramatically among Latinos, Latino Republicans, and Trump 2024 voters. A Fox News poll in March found his overall approval at 28 percent with Hispanic respondents, with 72 percent disapproving. Democrats have also made gains in elections with Hispanic communities that swung right in 2024. Trump has reportedly told his inner circle that he fears his early plans for “mass deportation” have gone too far for voters.
For now, residents in these communities remain in a bit of a holding pattern. They all expect that ICE or CBP will return at some point, particularly after the outrage and attention that the Minneapolis operations sparked dies down. But they also feel some optimism about how their communities and neighbors will respond in the future. In each of my conversations, a silver lining was repeated: that even though there is more suspicion and fear now, there are new bonds that have been forged among neighbors, in faith communities, and among Latinos themselves, specifically.
“Whatever divisions there may have been across the Latino community with the us versus them, the documented versus the undocumented, the criminals versus the noncriminals…there’s a greater sense of unity now and a willingness to help,” Reynoso, the Pentecostal pastor in North Carolina, told me. “We must exercise grace and compassion with each other in these uncertain times.”
2026-03-30 18:01:00
在美国，以创作作为抗议有着悠久的历史，可以追溯到美国革命之前，当时殖民者抵制英国纺织品，选择自己纺纱。250多年后，这种形式依然存在且蓬勃发展：例如，一款名为“Melt the ICE”的帽子编织图案，在美国移民援助组织因移民与海关执法局（ICE）占领明尼苏达州明尼阿波利斯市后，已为这些组织筹集超过70万美元。本月的封面故事由安娜·诺斯（Anna North）撰写，探讨了抵抗性手工艺的复兴，手工艺者如何思考他们的艺术，以及它与特朗普第一任期相比有何不同。本期其他内容还包括：公立还是私立学校？美国吸烟率的下降。以及独处时间的真正价值。 * * * ## 现代历史上最成功的健康宣传活动 作者：布莱恩·沃尔什 * * * ## 把孩子送私立学校是否错误？ 作者：西加尔·萨缪尔 * * * ## 当我们抹去丑陋时会失去什么？ 作者：康斯坦斯·格雷迪 3月31日出版 * * * ## 争取带薪育儿假的斗争比你想象的更容易取胜 作者：拉切尔·科恩·布思 4月1日出版 * * * ## 如何充分利用独处时间 作者：艾莉·沃尔普 4月2日出版 * * * ## 想要对抗法西斯主义？加入一个编织圈。 作者：安娜·诺斯 4月3日出版
Crafting as protest has a long history in America, dating back to before the American Revolution when colonists would boycott British textiles, choosing to spin their own instead. More than 250 years later, the medium is alive and well: A knitting pattern for a “Melt the ICE” hat, for example, has raised more than $700,000 for immigration aid groups following ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Anna North reports on the resurgence of resistance crafting, how crafters are thinking about their art, and how it looks different from the first Trump term. Also in this issue: public or private school? The decline of smoking in the US. And alone time that’s actually restorative.
By Bryan Walsh
By Sigal Samuel
By Constance Grady
Coming March 31
By Rachel Cohen Booth
Coming April 1
By Allie Volpe
Coming April 2
By Anna North
Coming April 3
2026-03-30 18:00:00
我今年47岁，虽然不算年迈，但有时却感觉像是来自另一个时代。我足够年长，记得曾经飞机座椅扶手上有烟灰缸，记得餐馆里有专门的吸烟区，这些区域几乎没有任何隔离措施。我足够年长，记得在1997年我高中毕业时，超过三分之一的高中生吸烟。而如今，根据《新英格兰医学杂志》（NEJM Evidence）本月发表的一篇论文分析的国家健康调查数据，美国成年人吸烟率已降至9.9%，这是该调查历史上首次低于10%。在公共卫生领域，这标志着吸烟在美国已成为“罕见”现象。
从1965年的42.4%下降到如今的9.9%，这一变化经历了大约60年，是现代公共卫生领域的一大成就。这一成果并非源于某一项突破性技术或奇迹药物，而是科学、政策、法律诉讼以及集体意志六十年如一日地努力对抗地球上最强大的行业之一的结果。如果要寻找大规模、长期进步的证据，吸烟的减少无疑是一个绝佳的例子。
然而，我们仍需努力彻底消除烟草。首先，9.9%是平均值，但平均值会掩盖现实。例如，拥有GED（相当于高中毕业文凭）的人群中，吸烟率仍高达42.8%，几乎与1964年的全国吸烟率相当。低收入美国人（24.4%）、农村居民（27%）、残疾人（21.5%）以及从事建筑和采矿工作的工人（约29%）的吸烟率依然很高。随着整体吸烟率下降，吸烟问题越来越成为贫困和弱势群体的健康问题。那些仍然吸烟的人往往缺乏足够的资源来戒烟。
其次，尽管传统香烟的使用在减少，但尼古丁的使用并未消失。目前，成人中7%使用电子烟，而18至24岁人群中，近15%使用尼古丁雾化产品。虽然电子烟的长期影响尚不明确，但它们比传统香烟的危害要小得多，而且有助于人们戒烟。
第三，值得注意的是，这一政府行动的里程碑并非由美国政府正式宣布，尽管数据来源于政府。联邦政府削减了资金，导致美国疾病控制与预防中心（CDC）的烟草与健康办公室被严重削弱，而这项分析是由独立研究人员通过NEJM Evidence的“公共卫生警报”计划发布的，该计划专门填补被削弱的CDC留下的空白。这让人担忧，当前的联邦公共卫生体系可能难以持续推动烟草控制的进展。
此外，在全球范围内，我们还有更多工作要做。约80%的13亿烟草使用者生活在低收入和中等收入国家。目前，烟草每年导致全球700万人死亡，预计到2030年将上升至1000万人。20世纪烟草导致了约1亿人死亡，主要发生在发达国家，而21世纪的死亡人数可能高达10亿，主要发生在发展中国家。在中东地中海和非洲世界卫生组织地区，香烟消费量在1980年至2016年间分别增长了65%和52%。
但通过观察美国的情况，我们知道这些趋势是可以改变的。从42.6%到9.9%，60年间的巨大变化，挽救了约800万人的生命。这种进步是如此缓慢，以至于我们几乎察觉不到，但当我们看到这些数字时，却感到震惊。如今，飞机座椅上的烟灰缸早已消失，餐馆里的吸烟区也不复存在，天花板上的黄色污渍也被重新粉刷。大多数30岁以下的美国人可能从未见过有人在室内点烟。他们所生活的世界，因为几十年前做出的决策而变得更加安全。这就是进步的真正模样。
How old am I? Old enough to have flown on planes that had ashtrays in the armrests. Old enough to remember restaurants with smoking sections separated from the nonsmoking section by, essentially, nothing. Old enough to remember when “smoking or non” was a question the restaurant host actually asked you. Old enough that in the year I graduated high school — 1997 — more than a third of high schoolers smoked.
I’m 47 — not ancient, even if I sometimes feel that way — and yet the America I grew up in the 1980s was still so saturated with cigarette smoke that these memories feel like dispatches from another civilization. In 1980, roughly a third of American adults still smoked. The smoking mascot Joe Camel, whom critics would later accuse of being designed to appeal to children, debuted the year I turned 10.
Now here’s a number from 2024: 9.9 percent. That’s the share of American adults who smoke cigarettes, according to data from the National Health Interview Survey analyzed in a paper published this month in NEJM Evidence. It’s the first time the rate has fallen below 10 percent in the history of the survey. In the language of public health, smoking in America is now officially “rare.”
This decline — from 42.4 percent in 1965 to 9.9 percent, over about 60 years — is one of the great public health achievements of the modern era. It didn’t happen because of a single breakthrough or a miracle drug. It happened because science, policy, litigation, and sheer collective will chipped away at the problem for six decades against the fierce resistance of one of the most powerful industries on earth. If you’re looking for evidence that large-scale, long-term progress is possible — even when the odds seem impossible — there are few better examples than the story of smoking.
The scale of the change is hard to appreciate now. At the peak, Americans consumed more than 4,000 cigarettes per person per year, or more than half a pack a day. Roughly half of all physicians smoked. Cigarette companies spent billions on marketing and lobbied ferociously against any regulation while actively suppressing evidence of harm.
The toll was staggering. Since 1964, more than 20 million Americans have died from smoking-related causes. Smoking still kills approximately 480,000 Americans per year, contributing to about one in five deaths. Globally, tobacco killed roughly 100 million people in the 20th century — more than the total number of people killed in WWII. It is, by a wide margin, the leading cause of preventable death in the modern world.
The turning point came on January 11, 1964, when Surgeon General Luther Terry convened a press conference at the State Department to announce what his advisory committee had found after reviewing more than 7,000 scientific articles: Cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and probably causes heart disease. He deliberately chose to announce the findings on a Saturday — both to minimize stock market fallout and maximize Sunday newspaper coverage. It worked. The report, as Terry later recalled, “hit the country like a bombshell.”
But the tobacco industry didn’t go quietly. Internal documents showed that cigarette companies knew smoking caused cancer as early as the late 1950s and worked tirelessly to conceal it. A famous R.J. Reynolds internal memo distilled the strategy: “Doubt is our product.”
For decades, the industry funded sham research organizations, lobbied Congress with enormous budgets, and targeted children with advertising. In 1994, the CEOs of the seven largest tobacco companies testified before Congress that they did not believe nicotine was addictive. Internal documents proved they knew otherwise.
The industry had, at that point, never lost a lawsuit — in more than 800 cases. But that would change. In 1998, 46 state attorneys general reached the Master Settlement Agreement with the tobacco companies — a $246 billion settlement, the largest redistribution of corporate wrongdoing costs in American legal history. In 2006, a federal judge went so far as to rule that the tobacco companies had violated the RICO Act — the racketeering statute typically reserved for organized crime.
No single policy killed the cigarette. It was a combination of interventions deployed over decades: warning labels on packages (1965), a ban on broadcast advertising (1970), smoke-free workplace laws (spreading from Minnesota in 1975 to most of the country by now), growing awareness of the risks of secondhand smoke (1986), progressive tax increases (a 10 percent price hike reduces consumption about 4 percent), FDA regulatory authority (2009), and cessation programs from nicotine patches to the CDC’s Tips From Former Smokers campaign. Maybe most importantly, smoking went from being something almost everyone did to something that was banned in most public spaces — which changed social norms as much as any law.
The result: an estimated 8 million lives saved between 1964 and 2014 alone, representing 157 million years of life — an average of about 20 extra years for each person who didn’t die prematurely from smoking. A 40-year-old American man in 2014 could expect to live nearly eight years longer than his 1964 counterpart, and roughly a third of that improvement comes from tobacco control alone.
But we still have a ways to go in the effort to permanently stub out tobacco.
For one thing, 9.9 percent is an average, and averages lie. Smoking rates among people with a GED — meaning they didn’t graduate high school — are still 42.8 percent, barely less than the national rate in 1964. Rates remain high among low-income Americans (24.4 percent), rural residents (27 percent), people with disabilities (21.5 percent), and workers in construction and extraction jobs (around 29 percent). As overall consumption rates have declined, smoking has increasingly become a disease of poverty and disadvantage. The people who still smoke are disproportionately the people with the fewest resources to help them quit.
Second, even as cigarette smoking goes away, nicotine hasn’t. E-cigarette use holds steady at 7 percent among adults, and while cigarettes are almost extinct among 18- to 24-year-olds, nearly 15 percent vape nicotine.
But vaping is still better for you than smoking is. E-cigarettes have helped people quit tobacco and are generally less harmful than lighting dried leaves on fire and inhaling the smoke, even if their full long-term effects won’t be known for years.
Third, notably, this milestone of government action was not actually announced by the US government, even though that’s where the data comes from. Federal cuts have decimated the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, the very office that has tracked and driven this progress for decades. Instead, the analysis was published by an independent researcher through NEJM Evidence’s “Public Health Alerts” initiative — a new collaboration created specifically to fill gaps left by the gutted CDC. There’s every reason to worry that the federal health infrastructure as it stands now will struggle to keep the momentum going against tobacco.
And in the rest of the world, we have a lot more work to do. About 80 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion tobacco users live in low- and middle-income countries. Tobacco kills over 7 million people a year worldwide, a number is projected to rise to 10 million by 2030 on current trends. While the 20th century saw roughly 100 million tobacco deaths, mostly in rich countries, some estimates project up to 1 billion in the 21st century, mostly in developing nations. Cigarette consumption in the Eastern Mediterranean and African WHO regions actually increased by 65 and 52 percent, respectively, between 1980 and 2016.
But looking at what’s happened in the US, we know those trends can change. From 42.6 percent to 9.9 percent, in 60 years. Eight million lives saved. This is the kind of progress that’s so gradual you barely notice it happening. And then you look at the numbers, and they’re astonishing.
The ashtrays are gone from the armrests now. The smoking sections are gone from the restaurants. The yellowish ceilings have been repainted. Most Americans under 30 have probably never seen anyone light a cigarette indoors. And the world they live in is measurably, dramatically safer because of decisions that were made — over decades, against long odds — before most of them were born. That’s what progress looks like.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-03-30 18:00:00
《你的里程可能不同》是一档建议专栏，为读者提供一个独特的思考道德困境的框架。它基于“价值多元主义”的理念，即每个人都有多种价值，这些价值同样有效，但常常彼此冲突。如果你想提问，可以填写这个匿名表格。以下是本周读者的问题（已简化并编辑以提高清晰度）：我正在考虑是否将我的小学孩子留在本地公立学校，还是转到更优质的私立学校。我们的公立学校虽然还可以，但我和我的伴侣觉得孩子可能在私立学校获得更多的挑战，从而更受益。不过，我也意识到美国越来越多的家庭选择离开公立学校，这对留在公立学校的孩子产生了影响。例如，公立学校的学生越多，获得的资金就越多，因此每个离开的家庭实际上都带走了部分资金。我担心，如果我带走孩子，就会加剧这个问题，但我也不想让孩子承受我的政治立场的个人负担。
亲爱的公立学校家长，你提出的问题听起来像是将孩子留在公立学校意味着给他带来负担。如果真是这样——也就是说，如果这真的意味着牺牲孩子的福祉——我知道我该说什么。我会告诉你，不要被功利主义哲学家所左右。他们主张我们应平等考虑所有人的福祉，不偏袒自己的孩子，因此可能会认为，让自己的孩子接受优质教育而让其他孩子去资源较少的学校是不道德的。但20世纪的英国哲学家伯纳德·威廉姆斯批评这种完全的无私要求是荒谬的。他认为，道德行为总是源于特定的人，而每个人都有自己独特的、个人的核心承诺。威廉姆斯称之为“基础项目”，这些承诺赋予生活意义和连续性。父母对孩子的福祉的承诺，超越了他们对所有孩子都应幸福的一般愿望。威廉姆斯认为，任何要求你忽视这些个人承诺的道德理论，都会切断你与真正构成你生活本质的东西之间的联系。因此，如果留在公立学校真的会伤害你的孩子，我不会建议你这样做。但你说本地学校还不错，听起来并不糟糕，也不危险。因此，我没有理由认为它实际上在伤害你的孩子。事实上，它可能在你没有完全意识到的情况下帮助他成长。
如果你有想让我回答的问题，欢迎填写这个匿名表格！订阅者将优先收到我的专栏，并且他们的问题会优先考虑用于未来的栏目。教育很复杂。如果我要深入讨论学校选择、教育券、特许学校和磁力学校等细节，我得写一本完整的书。所以，我只关注与你困境相关的主要观点，首先是：有一种流行的观点认为私立学校比公立学校更好，但证据并不支持这一点——尤其是当我们广泛地理解“更好”意味着什么时。虽然研究表明私立学校的学生在考试中表现优于公立学校学生，但这些优势在控制了家庭背景后大多或完全消失。弗吉尼亚大学的罗伯特·皮亚塔和阿利亚·安萨里领导的纵向研究追踪了全国10个地点超过1000名儿童从出生到15岁的发展。在控制了家庭收入、父母教育水平、社区社会经济状况等变量后，私立学校的优越性……消失了。皮亚塔说：“如果你想预测孩子高中时的表现——比如考试成绩，这是我们社会关注的重点——那么最好的预测因素就是家庭收入，无论他们上哪所高中。”
皮亚塔的研究规模相对较小，方法上也存在一些限制。但另一项对两个大型、具有全国代表性的数据集的分析也发现，当考虑到人口统计差异后，公立学校的孩子在数学方面的表现与私立学校孩子相当，甚至更好。数学被视为衡量学校整体质量的有力指标，因为它主要在学校学习，而不是在家里。研究人员认为，这可能是因为公立学校的教师需要通过更严格的认证，并且必须经常参加专业发展培训，因此他们更有可能掌握最新的教学方法，如国家数学教师协会开发的方法。
当然，一些非常高端的私立学校确实能提供一些特殊优势。网络效应是真实的。也许你希望孩子与未来的参议员为伍。也许如果你把孩子送到像安多弗或埃克塞特这样的顶级私立学校，他将来申请精英私立大学时会更有优势。但这些并不等同于确保孩子真正茁壮成长。你当然也关心孩子的心理健康。在这方面，一些关于精英、高竞争学校的研究令人担忧。心理学家苏尼亚·卢塔及其同事多年的研究发现，就读于高成就学校的学生更容易出现焦虑、抑郁和物质滥用等问题。（这些通常是私立学校，但竞争激烈的公立学校也可能陷入这种陷阱。）事实上，美国国家科学院现在将这些学生列为心理健康问题的“高危群体”，与生活在贫困、寄养或有被监禁父母的孩子并列。
除了可能提供更轻松的环境，公立学校还能带来其他重要的优势。例如，本地公立学校可以帮助你和孩子融入社区，这对孩子的社会发展和对抗孤独非常重要。同时，一个更加多样化（在种族、民族或阶级方面）的环境可以教会孩子如何与不同的人共处，培养同理心。正如美国哲学家约翰·杜威指出的，这些是培养一个繁荣的成年人和一个繁荣的民主社会所必需的技能和能力。民主是一种与不同的人共处的方式，这种生活方式需要培养，而公立学校是学习如何在共享世界中生存的绝佳场所。
此外，公共教育是免费的！（当然，“免费”——你已经通过税收支付了这笔费用，无论孩子是否使用。）因此，你可以节省下原本用于私立学校的所有费用，转而用于拓展孩子视野的丰富机会。我个人会带孩子去意大利，教他了解古罗马角斗士、文艺复兴艺术和各种口味的冰淇淋！或者，你和孩子可以一起决定将这笔钱捐赠给其他地区的孩子，以资助他们的教育资源。
总体而言，由于证据表明，一个在良好公立学校就读、有积极参与的父母的孩子，从转入精英私立学校并不会获得实质性的优势，反而可能在高度竞争的环境中面临真实的心理风险，因此我不认为有充分的理由做出这样的决定。如果你有足够的资源甚至考虑私立学校，那么你的家庭生活将很可能在很大程度上决定孩子的学业发展，无论他每天坐在哪所学校里。
不过，我并不是在说父母永远不应该选择私立学校。在某种程度上，这取决于你孩子的独特需求和你家庭的特殊情况。也许你的孩子非常热爱音乐，而附近有一所拥有出色音乐项目的私立学校。也许他现在在学校被欺负，但有几个好朋友在私立学校。或者，也许你非常重视宗教教育，因此私立教会学校是合适的选择。如果你决定将孩子送到私立学校，你将不得不面对你提到的集体行动问题：任何单个家庭离开公立学校的影响微乎其微，但当所有有选择的家庭都做出类似决定时，对学校资金和留在学校的孩子们的影响可能是毁灭性的。在这方面，美国政治哲学家伊丽莎白·玛丽恩·杨可以提供帮助。她指出，我们通常的责任模式——“责任归因模型”，即当发生坏事时，应将责任归咎于特定个人——在处理结构性不公时是不够的。在这些情况下，是整个系统导致了可预测的不利模式。看看造成教育不平等的复杂网络：历史上的住房隔离使贫困集中在某些社区。贫困社区产生的房产税较少，意味着当地学校资金不足。各州可能试图弥补这一差距，但贫困地区的学校仍然往往资源匮乏。有选择的家庭离开去更好的学校，导致本地公立学校入学人数减少，资金进一步流失。留在学校的孩子得不到应有的资源——从教材到辅导员——这些资源本可以帮助他们走向成功。这是一个明显的向下螺旋，但没有人或决定是罪魁祸首。
因此，杨认为，在结构性不公的情况下，我们应该采用“社会联系责任模型”。在这种模型下，如果你将孩子送到私立学校，你并不需要为此承担责任，因为系统性问题不应由一个家庭来承担。杨并不认为你需要通过个人生活方式选择来履行义务，但这并不意味着你不需要做任何事情。你仍然有政治责任：努力改变导致不公的结构。作为塑造美国教育体系的政治参与者，你有力量采取行动。你可以投票、组织和倡导。你可以施加压力，支持改革运动。你拥有的权力越大，当前体系给予你的特权越多，你的责任就越重。努力履行这一责任吧。让你的孩子看到你在行动。更棒的是，让他们参与其中。孩子们会从观察父母的行为中学习：让他们看到你致力于践行你的价值观，你就在为他们提供终身的教育。
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
I’m trying to decide whether to keep my elementary school-age kid in the neighborhood public school or move him to a more exclusive private school. Our public school is okay, but my partner and I feel that he might be more challenged and ultimately better off moving to a private school.
But I’m very aware of the increasing flow of students around the US out of public schools, and the effect that is having on the children who remain there. For one thing, since public schools get more funding the more students they have, every family that leaves effectively takes money with them. I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to that problem, but I also don’t want my child to bear the personal burden of my politics.
Dear Public School Parent,
The way you’ve framed the question makes it sound like keeping your kid in public school means imposing a burden on him. And if that were the case — if we really were talking about sacrificing your child’s well-being — I know exactly what I’d tell you.
I’d tell you not to be bullied by utilitarian philosophers. They argue we have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for our own kids, so they’d probably say it’s wrong to give your child a fancy education while consigning other children to a school with fewer resources. But the 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams argues that this sort of total impartiality is an absurd demand — and I agree.
Williams points out that moral agency — the capacity to act on values and commitments — always comes from a specific person. And as specific people, we have our own specific, individual, core commitments. These “ground projects,” as Williams calls them, are the commitments that give a life its meaning and continuity. A parent has a commitment to ensuring their kid’s well-being, over and above their general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Williams would say any moral theory that requires you to ignore such personal commitments severs you from the very things that make your life recognizably yours.
So if keeping your kid in public school really meant hurting him, I wouldn’t say you have to do it.
But you said your neighborhood school is okay. It sounds like it’s not bad and not unsafe. So I don’t have reason to think that it is actually hurting him. In fact, it might be helping him in ways you’re not fully accounting for.
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Education is complicated. If I were to get into all the details about school choice and vouchers and charter schools and magnet schools, I’d have to write a whole book. So let me just stick to the main points relevant to your dilemma, starting with this: There’s a popular narrative that says private schools are better than public schools, but the evidence does not support that — especially if we take a broad look at what we mean by “better.”
Although studies do show private school students outperforming their public school counterparts on tests, the studies also show that private school advantages disappear mostly or entirely once you control for family background.
Longitudinal research led by Robert Pianta and Arya Ansari at the University of Virginia tracked more than 1,000 children from birth to age 15 in 10 locations nationwide. After controlling for family income, parental education, neighborhood socioeconomic makeup, and other background variables, the private school advantage…vanished.
“If you want to predict children’s outcomes — achievement test scores, the things we care about socially — in high school, the best thing you can use to predict that is going to be family income — regardless of what high school you go to,” Pianta said.
Pianta’s was a modest-sized study with some methodological limitations. But another analysis of two large, nationally representative datasets also found that public school kids did just as well in math as private school kids — or even outpaced them — after accounting for demographic differences. (Math is considered a particularly robust indicator of school quality writ large because, unlike reading, it’s a subject learned mostly at school and not at home.) The researchers suggested that might be because public school teachers have to do stricter certification and can be required to do more frequent professional development, so they may be more reliably up-to-date on the latest pedagogical approaches, like those developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Admittedly, the very fanciest of private schools do offer some special advantages. Network effects are real. Maybe you want your kid rubbing elbows with a future senator. And maybe if you send your kid to ultra-elite Andover or Exeter, he’ll have a leg up if he applies to a fancy private college.
But that is not the same as ensuring your child actually thrives. I’m sure you also care about your child’s psychological well-being. And here, some of the evidence about exclusive, high-achieving schools is worrying.
The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.
The unrelenting pressure to compete and achieve can be brutal in those schools. When students constantly compare themselves to others and peg their self-worth to achievement, the results are alarming. Studies conducted over decades by psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues found that students attending high-achieving schools are at significantly higher risk for anxiety, depression, and substance use. (These are often private schools, though hyper-competitive public schools can also fall into this trap.) In fact, the National Academies of Sciences now names these students an “at-risk” group for mental health problems, alongside kids who live in poverty or in foster care or who have incarcerated parents.
In addition to potentially providing a less stressful environment, public schools can confer other important advantages. For one thing, your local public school can help you and your child be part of the neighborhood community, which is incredibly valuable for social development and countering loneliness. And being in an environment that’s more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, or class can teach your kid to empathize and get along with a wide variety of people.
As the American philosopher John Dewey pointed out, these are essential skills and capacities for a flourishing adult life and for a flourishing democracy. Democracy is a way of being in community with people unlike yourself; that’s a mode of life that has to be cultivated, and public schools are great grounds for learning to navigate a shared world.
Plus, public education is free! (Well, “free” — you’ve already paid for it with your taxes, whether or not your kid uses it.) So you could save all the money you’d spend on private school and instead use it on enriching opportunities to expand your child’s horizons. Personally, I’d take my kid to Italy and teach them about Ancient Roman gladiators and Renaissance art and the many flavors of gelato! Or you could collaborate with your child to decide where to donate some of that money to fund education resources for kids elsewhere.
On balance, since the evidence suggests that a child at a decent public school, with involved parents, probably won’t gain meaningful advantages from switching to an exclusive private school — and may face real psychological risks in a hyper-competitive environment — I don’t see a compelling reason to make the move. If you’ve got the resources to even consider private school, then your home life will probably play the biggest role in your kid’s academic trajectory, regardless of which building he sits in during the day. The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.
That said, I’m not arguing that parents should never pick private school. To some extent, this depends on the unique needs of your kid and your family. Maybe your kid is absolutely in love with music and the private school nearby has an amazing music program. Maybe your kid is being bullied at his current school but has a couple great friends who attend the private school. Or maybe a religious education is very important to you, so a private parochial school makes sense.
If you do make the choice to send your kid to private school, you’ll have to grapple with the collective action problem you hinted at: Any single family’s departure from a public school barely registers, but when every family with options reasons the same way, the cumulative effect on the school’s funding — and on the kids who remain — can be devastating.
Here, the American political philosopher Iris Marion Young can help you. She points out that our usual model of responsibility — the “liability model,” which says that when something bad happens we should assign blame to a particular individual — is inadequate when we’re dealing with situations of structural injustice. In these situations, it’s a whole system that’s producing predictable patterns of disadvantage.
Just look at the complex web that breeds educational inequality: Historical housing segregation has concentrated poverty in certain neighborhoods. Poorer neighborhoods generate less property tax revenue, which means less money for local schools. States can try to offset that, but schools in poorer areas still tend to end up with fewer resources. Families with options leave for better-resourced schools, enrollment drops at the local public school, and the school loses even more funding. The kids who remain get less of the materials — from textbooks to counselors — that would have set them on the path to success. There’s a clear downward spiral, but no one person or decision is the villain.
So instead of blaming any one individual for their personal lifestyle choices, Young says that in cases of structural injustice, we should adopt the “social connection model” of responsibility. Under this model, you don’t bear blame if you send your kid to private school, because systemic problems shouldn’t rest on one family’s shoulders. Young doesn’t think you need to discharge your obligations through personal lifestyle choices.
But that doesn’t mean you owe nothing.
You do still have a political obligation: to work toward changing the structure that produces injustice. As a participant in the political system that shapes education in this country, you have some power to act on it. You can vote and organize and advocate. You can pressure decision-makers and support reform movements. The more power you’ve got, and the more privileged you are by the current system, the greater your obligation to take action.
Make the effort to act on that obligation. Let your child watch as you do. Better yet, involve them in the process. Kids learn from seeing what their parents do: Show them that you’re bent on enacting your values, and you’ll be giving them an education for life.
2026-03-29 19:15:00
2025年12月19日，工人将唐纳德·特朗普的名字添加到华盛顿特区肯尼迪中心的外墙上。| 阿尔·德拉戈/彭博社 通过盖蒂图片社提供。尽管特朗普总统在海外展示美国实力，但他也在试图改变美国首都的面貌。特朗普对华盛顿特区城市景观的改造引发了关注和法律诉讼。目前，华盛顿特区的改造工作已经展开，包括拆除白宫东翼以建造舞厅、翻新白宫玫瑰花园，以及计划对约翰·F·肯尼迪表演艺术中心进行为期两年的翻修关闭。未来还可能有更多变化：在阿灵顿国家公墓附近建造一座250英尺高的拱门，计划在艾森豪威尔总统办公室大楼外粉刷覆盖，以及在国家广场附近建立一座雕塑公园。以往的总统也曾对华盛顿特区的历史核心进行过增建或修改，但特朗普对设计审查程序的无视令许多保护主义者感到不满。今天，Explained节目的主持人肖恩·拉梅斯瓦拉姆与《华盛顿邮报》的资深建筑评论家菲利普·肯尼克特讨论了这些变化。肯尼克特曾发表了一篇关于特朗普对华盛顿特区建筑构成威胁的文章。以下是他们对话的节选，已进行删减和润色。你最近发表了一篇文章，认为特朗普是自1812年战争英国烧毁白宫和国会大厦以来，对华盛顿特区建筑和设计构成最大威胁的人。你为什么这么说？这听起来像是夸张的说法，但事实上，特朗普确实在改变这座城市的面貌。1812年战争中，英国烧毁了白宫和国会大厦，之后不得不重建。而特朗普则拆除了白宫东翼，并计划进行重大改动和新增建筑。他甚至打算在白宫外移除玫瑰花园，建造一座巨大的纪念性凯旋门，这将改变波托马克河沿岸的自然景观。更重要的是，他希望改变华盛顿如何处理城市变迁的方式。他想通过个人意志强行推进，而不是遵循长期的设计审查程序，而这种程序对于保持如今我们所熟知的华盛顿至关重要。你所强调的一个关键点是，华盛顿特区不同于纽约。它不是一座随着时间慢慢发展起来的城市，而是有明确规划的。华盛顿的规划理念使其与众不同。华盛顿特区最初是一个规划城市，很少有美国城市是这样开始的。一位名叫皮埃尔·勒内夫的设计师制定了所谓的“勒内夫计划”，该计划将传统的街道网格（南北走向和东西走向的大块区域，通常用于社区和商业）覆盖上宏伟的街道，连接重要的公共节点，如纪念碑或政府建筑。这些街道的景观体现了国家的雄心壮志——一种远见卓识的象征。多年来，华盛顿一直努力维护这种景观。其中最基本的一点是：我们没有建造摩天大楼，保持了非常低矮的城市天际线。而特朗普计划建造的这座250英尺高的纪念性拱门，将成为华盛顿最高的建筑之一，从根本上改变城市的天际线。特朗普两次当选总统，他的纽约酒店是旅游胜地，世界各地的人们也前往他的高尔夫球场。如果他在弗吉尼亚州靠近阿灵顿国家公墓的地方建造一座凯旋门，位于林肯纪念堂后面，是否有可能像人们喜爱自由女神像和埃菲尔铁塔那样，最终被人们所接受，即使这些建筑最初并不那么受欢迎？这确实是一个很有趣的问题。我一直都在思考这个问题。令我担忧的是，美国人对象征君主制的标志物曾经非常敏感，我们曾经对总统表现出任何帝王般的特质都感到不满。但现在，人们似乎对价值观与政治、美学与建筑之间的联系理解越来越少。因此，我写这篇文章的目的是试图向美国人介绍华盛顿隐藏的历史和美学，这些对华盛顿的形成至关重要。你可能不会在一次双层巴士的快速游览中发现这些，但它们确实存在。这些景观对于使华盛顿成为今天深受喜爱的城市起到了重要作用。如果特朗普如愿以偿，他是否也在暗示未来的总统可以随意改变这座城市的建筑、纪念碑和周边环境，从而为首都创造一种不断变化的美学？我认为这不仅仅是暗示。我认为他是在为未来的总统铺路。在我们谈话的开始，我提到，所有这些变化中，真正受到伤害的是设计审查的理念。华盛顿有一些这样的组织，包括一个成立于1910年的机构，他们有权审查建筑计划，通常由专业建筑师、设计师和景观艺术家组成，他们能够提升城市景观。然而，特朗普却将这些委员会成员替换成了自己的人，包括他的26岁私人助理，据我所知，他对此类问题毫无专业知识。这些委员会基本上只是对计划进行形式上的批准。因此，这为未来的总统提供了一条道路。如果需要一个不愉快的例子，可以回想起古罗马时期，每当新皇帝上台，如果他们不喜欢前任，他们不仅不会拆除前任建造的凯旋门，甚至可能移除雕像并替换为象征自己权力的雕像，不断对罗马的象征性景观进行改造。人们可能会说，“这不过是政治”，但这样的做法会让城市景观失去历史的庄重感和持久性，而这些正是华盛顿长期以来所拥有的。
While President Donald Trump has been flexing America’s might overseas, he’s also working to impose his will on the nation’s capital.
Trump’s urban interventions in DC’s built environment have raised eyebrows and sparked lawsuits.
The changes to DC are already underway, from the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom, to a makeover of the White House Rose Garden, to the planned two-year closure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for renovations.
And more changes could be coming soon: a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery, a plan to paint over the exterior of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and a sculpture park near the National Mall.
Past presidents have added to or modified parts of Washington DC’s historic core. But Trump’s disregard for design review processes has irked many preservationists.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram discussed these changes with The Washington Post’s longtime architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, who wrote a column about the threat Trump poses to D.C.’s architectural splendor.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Philip, you recently published a column about Donald Trump’s changes to Washington, DC in which you make a very bold argument. You say that Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architecture and design since the city was burned down by the British in the War of 1812. Tell us how you justify that argument.
That sounds like hyperbole maybe, but, in fact, he really is turning out to be an amazingly influential force in terms of the design of the city. The War of 1812, the British come through and they burn the White House and they burn the Capitol, and they have to be rebuilt.
Donald Trump has torn down the East Wing of the White House, and he’s making major changes, major additions. He’s taken out the Rose Garden at the White House. He wants to build a new giant memorial triumphal arch at Arlington Cemetery. He’s talking about a Garden of National Heroes that would really change the kind of sylvan landscape along the Potomac River.
It goes on and on. And more important even than those changes is the fact that he wants to change how Washington manages change. He really wants to kind of force this through by personal fiat rather than go through a longstanding process of design review, which has been absolutely essential to keeping Washington the city we know today.
Essential to the argument you’re making here is that DC isn’t New York. It isn’t a city that was slowly built over time, that progressed and evolved with the times. The intention behind Washington, DC sets it apart.
Yes, it begins as a planned city. Very few American cities begin with a plan.
A designer named Pierre L’Enfant created what was called the L’Enfant Plan, and that was to take a typical city grid of streets, ones that run north-south, and east-west of big boxes that were generally for the neighborhoods, for commerce, for the daily stuff of life, and then lay over them these sweeping avenues that connect important civic nodal points. Maybe there’s a statue there, maybe that’s where the Capitol or the White House is. And these create a much grander architecture.
In some ways, the vistas of these avenues stand in for the ambition of the country — a sense of being far-seeing. And Washington has done an awful lot over the years to preserve that. Among the most basic things is: We didn’t build skyscrapers. We’ve kept a very low-slung skyline. And one of Trump’s changes, which is this giant 250-foot-tall memorial arch, would actually be one of the very tallest buildings in Washington and would fundamentally change that skyline.
[The public] voted this president into office twice. His hotels in New York are tourist attractions. People around the world go to his golf courses. If he plants an arch on the edge of Virginia in front of Arlington National Cemetery behind the Lincoln Memorial, is there a chance that people end up loving it the way they ended up loving the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, even though they might not have been clear wins when they were initially built?
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I wrestle with that all the time. One of the things that’s disturbing to me is that the impulses and the instincts that Americans had about the markers of monarchy — we used to be really allergic to that stuff. We used to really bristle at the idea of a president being in any way imperial or king-like.
Now, I think there’s less understanding of the connection between values and politics on one side and aesthetics and architecture on the other side. And so, in some ways, the story I’m writing is an attempt to introduce Americans to what is, in a sense, a hidden history and a hidden aesthetics in Washington that are very vital and very important. You may not get that just by taking a quick tour on a double decker bus of the city, but it’s there. And it was extremely important to the people who made Washington into the city that is greatly beloved today.
If he has his way, is he also suggesting to future presidents that you can have your way with this city, and its monuments, and its environs and then creating some kind of aesthetic seesaw for the nation’s capital?
Oh, I think it’s more than just suggesting. I think he’s laying out the roadmap.
I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that one of the real victims in all of this is the idea of design review. There are these groups in Washington, including one that goes back to 1910, that have the ability to come in and look over plans, and they’re usually staffed by professional architects, professional designers, professional landscape artists, and they improve things.
Trump has stacked those committees with his own people, including his 26-year-old personal assistant, who, as far as I can tell, has no expertise in any of these questions. And they’re basically just kind of rubber stamping these things. So that’s a roadmap for any future president coming in.
If you want an unfortunate example, you might think back to the days of ancient Rome when new emperors would come in, and if they really didn’t like their predecessor, they wouldn’t just necessarily raze down the triumphal arch erected by the predecessor. They might even take the statues off and replace the heads with heads of their own symbolism, a kind of constant retrofitting of the symbolic landscape of Rome to represent the current person in power. And you can say, “Well, that’s just politics,” but that makes for a landscape that doesn’t have the historical gravitas and temporal lastingness that you would want and that we’ve had in Washington for a very long time.