2026-04-28 19:00:00
美国联邦调查局（FBI）战术小组正在准备进入与加州托伦斯市疑似白宫记者协会晚宴枪手有关的房屋。美国总统唐纳德·特朗普近年来遭遇了多次暗杀企图，一些人怀疑这些事件并非真实发生。实际上，情况并不那么耸人听闻，而是更加令人担忧且直接：美国政治暴力正在上升。尽管这一趋势存在一些例外和限制，但多个数据来源均显示这一趋势一致。仅在过去一年中，一名枪手就暗杀了保守派活动人士查理·克里克；另一名枪手在明尼苏达州射杀了一名民主党议员及其丈夫，并试图伤害其他人；还有人在宾夕法尼亚州州长乔什·沙皮罗的家中纵火。特朗普本人已成功躲过三次袭击，最近一次发生在周末的白宫记者协会晚宴上。一名加州男子携带霰弹枪、手枪和多把刀具闯入安全检查点，意图攻击特朗普政府的多名成员。白宫新闻秘书卡罗琳·利维特在周一的新闻发布会上指责民主党议员和“部分媒体”煽动了此次袭击，称“针对特朗普的仇恨和暴力言论使这种暴力行为合法化”。然而，虽然暴力言论可能在一定程度上助长了攻击行为，但实际情况远比这复杂且不具单向性。
关于政治暴力的数据：由于政治暴力的定义模糊且难以长期追踪，相关研究存在挑战。许多数据集依赖媒体报道来识别事件，而随着地方新闻报道的减少，这种方法显得不可靠。此外，样本量往往较小，难以得出广泛结论。尽管如此，现有数据仍指向同一趋势。自九年前开始收集数据以来，美国国会警察观察到针对国会议员、家属及工作人员的威胁显著增加。普林斯顿大学“弥合分歧”计划也发现，近期重大政治事件（如2024年总统选举和查理·克里克之死）后，地方层面的威胁明显上升。与此同时，美国马里兰大学全球恐怖主义数据库显示，自20世纪90年代大幅下降后，全球范围内的暗杀和未遂暗杀事件自2010年代中期开始回升。据《华尔街日报》周一报道，美国反政府暴力在2025年达到近30年来的最高水平，且左翼极端分子的攻击数量首次超过右翼极端分子。
为何会出现这一现象？无需博士学位就能推测出推动这一趋势的因素。去年，皮尤研究中心询问美国成年人为何认为政治暴力在加剧，受访者提到的许多因素与研究者一致：党派极化、暴力行为逐渐被接受以及社交媒体的影响。研究者指出，美国政治的极端分化以及这种分歧被赋予道德色彩，使许多美国人将对手视为“邪恶”的。据卡内基国际和平基金会高级研究员拉切尔·克莱因菲尔德表示，这种环境不仅限于传统的左右对立，还包括对整个政治体系不满的人群。她写道：“那些对政治感到愤怒但无法通过正常途径解决问题的人，现在可能认为暴力是一种解决方案。”此外，阴谋论和其他在线虚假信息也在其中发挥作用。与过去几十年的极端分子不同，如今许多实施暴力的人是通过社交媒体自我激进化的。目前尚不清楚上周枪击案嫌疑人科尔·托马斯·艾伦是否符合这一模式，他的动机调查仍在进行中。但据《纽约邮报》周日发表的艾伦在袭击前起草的文件显示，他认为有必要采取暴力行动以履行道德义务。
President Donald Trump has now faced so many assassination attempts that some people suspect they aren’t real.
The truth is less salacious, more alarming…and more straightforward. (If you wanted to stage a colossal false flag attack, would you do it under the noses of a thousand reporters?!)
Simply put, political violence is on the rise in the US. There are some caveats and asterisks to that claim, which we’ll get to in a minute — but generally speaking, across multiple sources, the trendline is consistent.
In the past year alone, one gunman assassinated the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; another shot and killed a Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and attempted to kill others, in Minnesota; and a man set fire to the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Trump himself has now survived three attacks, most recently at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this past weekend. A California man rushed a security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, intending to target multiple members of the Trump administration.
In a press conference on Monday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democratic lawmakers and “some in the media” for the latest attack, claiming — in a now-familiar refrain — that “hateful and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump…helped legitimize this violence.”
But while there is some truth to the broad idea that violent rhetoric can normalize attacks, the reality is far more complex (and far less one-sided) than that.
Political violence is notoriously difficult to track over time. (There’s that asterisk I promised.) The term itself is squishy, and researchers differ on which acts belong under its umbrella. Many datasets also rely on media reports to identify relevant incidents, which is a shaky method in an era of declining local news coverage. And sample sizes are sometimes so small that it’s hard to draw any broad conclusions from them.
Still, the measures we do have point in the same direction. The US Capitol Police — who track threats made against members of Congress, their families, and their staff — have observed a marked increase since they began collecting data nine years ago.
Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative also found a sharp increase in threats at the local level following recent high-profile political events, including the 2024 presidential election and the death of Charlie Kirk.
Meanwhile, the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, which includes incidents of political violence from 1970 to 2020, finds that assassinations and attempted assassinations began ticking up around the world in the mid-2010s, after a sharp decrease in the 1990s.
And new data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, shows that antigovernment violence in the US reached a more than 30-year high in 2025. For the first time in 20 years, the Journal reported, more of those attacks came from the extremists on the left than extremists on the right.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in poli sci to guess at the forces driving this trend. Last year, when the Pew Research Center asked American adults to explain, in their own words, why political violence is getting worse, respondents landed on some of the same factors that researchers do: partisan polarization, a growing acceptance of violence, and the role of social media.
In particular, researchers say, the level of political division in the US — and the degree to which that division has taken on a moral tone — has created an environment where many Americans view their opponents as fundamentally “evil.” That environment extends outside of the traditional left/right divide to include many people who are angry at the system as a whole, according to Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a leading political violence researcher.
“It seems that those who are angry about our politics, but do not see a path to resolve issues through normal means, now believe that violence might be a solution,” she wrote in a Monday post.
Conspiracy theories and other types of online disinformation also play a role. Unlike the extremists of decades past, who may have operated as part of a formal organization, many of today’s perpetrators have self-radicalized on social media.
It’s too early to say if Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in last weekend’s shooting, fits that mold. An investigation into his motives is ongoing. But a document that Allen reportedly drafted before the attack, published on Sunday by the New York Post, does say that he felt a moral imperative to resort to violence.
2026-04-28 18:00:00
全球正在以供应链允许的速度快速建设太阳能发电场和电池工厂，而美国却试图追赶一个它已不再掌控的市场。煤炭曾主导全球能源超过一个世纪，从1882年托马斯·爱迪生的珍珠街电站开始，历经石油时代、核能时代、天然气热潮以及数十年的气候政策波动，始终占据重要地位。然而，自2025年起，可再生能源首次超越煤炭成为全球电力的主要来源。根据《Ember全球电力审查2026》，去年可再生能源占比达33.8%，而煤炭仅为33%。太阳能在过去21年中一直是增长最快的电力来源，并在2025年首次超过风能，预计今年将超越核能。
尽管全球仍消耗约88亿吨煤炭（2024年数据），但太阳能已单独满足全球电力需求增长的75%，与风能结合则覆盖99%。化石能源发电（煤炭、石油和天然气）在2025年首次出现下降，这是自疫情以来的首次，也是本世纪第五次未增长。清洁能源的增长速度足以吸收全球新增的电力需求，而中东等地的动态可能进一步加速这一转型。
太阳能的崛起源于成本的持续下降。过去40年，太阳能组件价格每十年下降约75%，这一规律被称为“Swanson定律”。1970年代，每瓦组件成本超过100美元，而2025年已降至约10美分。此外，电池成本在2024年和2025年分别下降20%和45%，全球电池部署量增长46%，达到250吉瓦时。太阳能发电厂配备足够电池后，其电力成本甚至低于新建天然气发电厂。
中国在这一转型中扮演关键角色，目前生产全球约80%的太阳能组件，以及大部分多晶硅、硅片和电池组件。这种主导地位源于长期的国家支持投资、规模化生产及激烈的市场竞争。清洁能源的普及也使能源成为地缘政治议题，如关税、贸易争端和供应链建设的讨论。然而，从气候角度看，低成本太阳能组件在全球范围内都能降低排放。
尽管煤炭占比从2013年的41%降至当前的33%，但其发电能力并未消失。2025年，中国批准了超过40吉瓦的新煤电产能，这些电厂正逐渐成为备用能源而非主要来源。美国因政策变化（如特朗普政府取消住宅太阳能税收抵免）面临被全球甩开的风险，但全球能源转型投资已达创纪录的2.3万亿美元，中国和印度的投入分别达8000亿和680亿美元，欧盟也在加速可再生能源投资。
2026年的能源危机（如霍尔木兹海峡关闭）凸显了清洁能源已在全球多数地区成为最经济的选择。与1970年代的石油危机不同，这次危机促使各国加快太阳能、海上风电和电网储能项目的建设，而非依赖传统能源。清洁能源的未来取决于技术成本下降的速度，而这一速度主要取决于政策选择。
For more than a century, the world has run on coal.
When Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electrical station in Lower Manhattan fired up in 1882, it ran on coal. Coal survived the oil era, the nuclear era, the dash for natural gas, and decades of back-and-forth climate policy. From the 1970s through the mid-2010s, coal supplied somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the planet’s electricity, a steady if sooty presence powering modern life.
Then last year, it lost the lead. According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, recently released in time for Earth Day, renewable sources produced 33.8 percent of the world’s electricity last year, compared to 33 percent for coal. It was the first time those two lines had crossed since 1919, when the global grid was still small enough to run mostly on hydropower.
As coal has declined — at least on a relative basis — the sun has risen. When the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, solar produced just 256 terawatt hours of electricity globally. Nuclear power plants, at the time, were pumping out about 10 times that, while wind was responsible for three times as much electricity as solar.
A decade later, solar is producing 10 times more power: 2,778 TWh, roughly what the entire European Union consumes in a year. Its production has doubled in the past three years alone. For 21 years running, solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet. In 2025 it surpassed wind for the first time, and is now on pace to pass nuclear this year.
While the world still burns a huge amount of coal — some 8.8 billion tonnes in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) — solar alone covered 75 percent of the rise in global electricity demand. Put wind and solar together, and you’ve met 99 percent of it. Fossil fuel power generation — coal, oil, and gas combined — fell 0.2 percent in 2025, the first decline since the pandemic and only the fifth year this century that fossil generation didn’t rise.
Clean sources are now growing fast enough, on their own, to absorb just about everything the world is adding to its grid. And there’s a decent chance that, thanks in part to what’s happening right now in the Middle East, that transition may speed up.
It all starts with cost.
Solar module prices have fallen roughly 75 percent every decade for more than 40 years, a pattern so durable it has its own name, Swanson’s law, the observation that the price tends to drop by 20 percent every time the total number of solar panels ever built doubles. This rule has held through supply gluts, trade wars, and pandemics. In the mid-1970s, a solar module cost more than $100 per watt. In late 2025, one panel cost about 10 cents per watt. No other major energy source in modern history has gotten that cheaper, that fast.
The oldest objection to solar — that it goes dark when the sun goes down — is becoming obsolete because we can increasingly store the daytime electricity solar units generate. Battery costs dropped 20 percent in 2024 and another 45 percent in 2025. Global battery deployment grew 46 percent last year, to 250 gigawatt-hours. Solar plants built with enough batteries to deliver power round the clock now sell electricity in the US for around $76 per megawatt hour, cheaper than building new natural gas capacity.
The world’s long-time manufacturing powerhouse — China — has made this shift possible. Chinese factories now make around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and an even larger share of the polysilicon, wafers, and cells that feed into them, a dominance built over two decades of state-backed investment, enormous scale, and ferocious price competition. The result is the cheapest energy technology in human history, produced at a pace the rest of the world has not matched.
Chinese dominance has also made clean power a geopolitical story: tariffs, trade disputes, arguments in Washington and Brussels about whether to build parallel supply chains. For the climate, though, the math is simple. Cheap panels built anywhere cut emissions everywhere.
The demand side has moved too. For most of the last two decades, the global coal story has been a Chinese story. When China’s electricity demand surged, so did coal. When it slackened, so did coal. That relationship cracked in 2025: China’s fossil generation fell 0.9 percent, its first decline since 2015, even as the country’s electricity demand rose 5 percent. India’s fossil fuel generation fell as well, by 3.3 percent, while its renewables grew 24 percent year over year. In both cases, new clean energy capacity outran new demand. Ember found that renewables in China now produce more electricity than every household and service-sector business in the country, combined.
A flat year for coal is not the same as a falling one. Power-sector emissions in 2025 were still close — within a rounding error — of 2024’s levels, which set a record high. In its report, Ember calls this moment “the era of clean growth,” which should be understood as the start of real decarbonization, rather than a final state of decarbonization.
Coal’s share is shrinking — from a peak of 41 percent of global generation in 2013 to 33 percent today — but the fleet itself isn’t going away. China approved more than 40 gigawatts of new coal capacity in just the first three quarters of 2025. Thanks to growth in renewables, these plants are increasingly becoming a backup source, rather than a primary one. But those plants exist, they burn coal when they run, and they’ll burn coal for years.
Then there is the US. The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended the residential solar tax credit in December and tightened eligibility for commercial projects. Rhodium Group, a research institute, projects the law will cut US clean-capacity additions through 2035 by more than half. America is in danger of getting left behind.
That sounds bad, and in the short run it is. But policy can slow a market; it has a harder time stopping one when the economics have already shifted. BloombergNEF reported that global energy-transition investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8 percent from 2024. China alone put roughly $800 billion into clean energy last year; India’s clean-energy spending climbed 15 percent to about $68 billion; the EU has been accelerating renewables spending ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut its pipeline gas. Even if Washington slows down, the rest of the world is building solar farms and battery plants as fast as the supply chains allow. The US is trying to run against a market it no longer controls.
There is, however, the AI wild card. The IEA estimates global data-center electricity use rose 17 percent in 2025, with AI-specific demand growing faster. In the US, gas is currently the biggest single source of new data-center supply. Artificial intelligence is the one uncontrolled variable that could swamp clean-power gains in the back half of this decade.
The last big oil shock rewrote the global energy system. After the 1973 OPEC embargo, President Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House, founded the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, and signed the country’s first appliance efficiency standards into law. Ronald Reagan undid much of that work, but the seed technologies — photovoltaic R&D, efficiency standards, CAFE rules for cars — kept developing in the background for decades.
This time, the shock is being felt by a system where clean alternatives are already the cheapest option in most places. The US-Iran war has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a quarter of seaborne oil and a fifth of global LNG normally flow. The IEA called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
The response has been exactly what cheap clean power makes possible. In March, global solar generation grew 14 percent year over year and wind grew 8 percent; solar alone saved European buyers some $3.5 billion in gas costs for the month. Countries that might have responded to an oil crisis in 2006 by drilling faster are instead moving up construction for solar farms, offshore wind, and grid-scale storage. Where the 1970s planted seeds that took 40 years to sprout, 2026’s shock is meeting an industry already at commercial scale.
The climate case for clean power has always rested on a simple bet: that the technologies would keep getting cheaper faster than the politics got worse. Today, solar is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the history of electricity, while coal looks to be on a terminal decline. Batteries are starting to make it a 24-hour fuel. What comes next is a question of speed — and speed, mostly, is a question of choice.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-04-28 18:00:00
多年来，“让美国再次健康”（MAHA）运动主要由母亲们推动。她们因担忧儿童疫苗安全和食品中的化学物质，促使唐纳德·特朗普当选总统，并让罗伯特·F·肯尼迪 Jr. 成为国家健康领域的主要影响力人物。如今，这一代人已经长大，MAHA运动的面貌也正在发生变化。
关键要点
目前，最受关注的MAHA倡导者是十几岁或二十出头的年轻女性。例如，20岁的Lexi Vrachalus在Instagram上分享无种子油、无糖的饮食和购物内容，她曾制作用枫糖浆和牛肉明胶制成的“复活节小熊”，并表示：“你可以自己掌握健康，你拥有治愈身体的力量。”像她这样的年轻影响者，如电影制作人Grace Price和健康生活专家Ava Noe，正在以更贴近年轻人的方式传播信息，例如教兄弟姐妹制作酸面团面包，而非讨论儿童疫苗问题。
MAHA的“新面孔”
传统上，MAHA运动的代表是反对疫苗强制和食品添加剂的千禧一代和X世代母亲，或是像Andrew Huberman和Joe Rogan这样的50多岁男性播客主持人。然而，随着年轻一代的崛起，MAHA的未来可能由像Lexi Vrachalus和Ava Noe这样的青少年影响者主导。Vrachalus拥有超过17万Instagram粉丝，她曾与健康与人类服务部长罗伯特·F·肯尼迪 Jr. 合作推广联邦饮食指南。她曾因厌食症被建议吃“垃圾食品”来恢复健康，但后来发现超市里的食物大多为高度加工的“垃圾食品”，因此转向食用“上帝创造的真正食物”来恢复健康。
从反种子油到反疫苗的潜在风险
年轻人可能更容易接受“自己掌控健康”的信息，因为他们对社会机构和医疗体系感到失望，尤其是在新冠疫情期间。他们更倾向于从朋友、家人或社交媒体获取健康建议，而非依赖医生。同时，他们对新闻机构提供的事实核查信息也缺乏信任。专家指出，这种反权威思维可能使年轻人更容易接受MAHA内容中的一些有害信息，例如将食品分为“真实食物”和“非真实食物”，或推广未经证实的补充剂和“天然”食品（如生牛奶）。
如何重建年轻人对科学的信任
在政治极化和传统新闻来源不被信任的背景下，反科学阴谋论尤其难以反驳。教育者认为，关键在于以年轻人当前的环境为出发点，例如在Instagram和TikTok等平台上进行互动，或以不评判的态度回答他们的健康问题。此外，教授年轻人批判性思维，帮助他们区分科学事实与误导性信息，是应对这一挑战的重要策略。例如，生物教授Melanie Trecek-King通过分析欧洲猎巫运动的历史，引导学生思考如何评估信息和证据。
专家指出，科学传播者需要改变传统观念，鼓励医生和科学家在社交媒体上发声，并在信息传播中提供补偿。同时，年轻人对一切持怀疑态度的倾向，也可能成为解决这一问题的助力。正如Generation Skeptics项目负责人Bertha Vazquez所说，MAHA影响者对自身观点充满信心，而科学家则不会如此自信。科学本身并不追求绝对确定性，因此教育者可以借此教导学生识别过度自信的言论，从而提高他们的信息辨别能力。
For years, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement was driven by moms.
Concerned about the safety of childhood vaccines and about chemicals in the food their kids were eating, they helped propel Donald Trump to the White House — and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the role of the nation’s top health influencer — with a message centered on fear for the next generation.
Now, that next generation is here.
The latest MAHA advocates to gain public attention are women in their teens or early 20s. Lexi Vrachalus, 20, posts videos of her seed-oil-free, sugar-free meals, snacks, and shopping trips. In a post around Easter, she made her own Peeps with maple syrup and beef gelatin.
Her message: “You can take back health into your own hands,” she told me. “You have the power to heal your body.”
She and other influencers, like the young filmmaker Grace Price and clean-living maven Ava Noe, are creating videos with a younger sensibility than their forebears — think baking sourdough for siblings rather than talking about kids’ vaccines. And their version of MAHA (that’s Make America Healthy Again, for the uninitiated) is breaking through to American teens.
“I get questions from my younger audience like, how can I encourage my parents to eat healthy?” Vrachalus said. “Or, how can I eat healthy when all my parents do is buy junk food?”
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with young people trying to eat healthy. But educators and misinformation experts are worried about what comes next: Among adults, MAHA influencer culture has served as a funnel for a host of beliefs and behaviors that start with skepticism, veer into suspicion of all authority, and end up with actively dangerous behavior, including a resistance to vaccines that has led to outbreaks of disease.
“There’s this focus on healthy foods and environmental concerns, but running under the surface of some of those more superficial connections is this idea that there’s this cabal,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon. “There’s this kind of conspiratorial thinking that ‘they,’ coded as liberal, are lying to you.”
So far, polling shows that young people are less likely to identify with MAHA than Americans in their 30s and 40s. But MAHA-inflected wellness videos are reaching more teens, and there’s evidence that more young people are falling for health misinformation that they see online.
In a 2024 survey by the News Literacy Project, 80 percent of teens said they saw conspiracy theories on social media platforms, and a majority of those teens said they were inclined to believe one or more of those theories. The second most common type of conspiracy theory mentioned by teens in the survey (after “aliens & UFOs”) was content around Covid-19 and public health issues.
The rise of young MAHA influencers has educators and other experts asking what they can do to help Gen Z and Gen Alpha Americans — a group already deeply distrustful of institutions and authorities — distinguish reality from toxic misinformation. If teachers, families, and policymakers hope to thread that needle, they’ll have to do more than just respond to false claims point-by-point — they’ll need to address the sources of discontent and disaffection that may be pushing young people toward MAHA in the first place.
If you had to picture the MAHA coalition, you might think about a group of millennial and Gen X moms, banding together over their opposition to vaccine mandates and food additives. Or maybe you’d call to mind someone like Andrew Huberman or Joe Rogan, male podcasters in their 50s extolling the virtues of supplements and protein to an audience of “Huberman husbands.”
And sure, that’s today’s MAHA — a recent Politico poll found that those most likely to identify with the movement were Americans in their 30s and 40s.
But tomorrow’s MAHA is coming, and the teen girls and young women emerging as MAHA influencers show us what it might look like.
Vrachalus, for example, has more than 170,000 followers on Instagram — not as many as established voices like Vani Hari with follower counts in the millions, but a respectable reach for a creator, especially one so young. Vrachalus recently made a video with Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, to promote the new federal dietary guidelines.
When she was diagnosed with anorexia at 13, a dietitian told her she’d have to eat “junk food” in order to get better, Vrachalus told me. Instead, “I started to research, and I realized that basically everything in the grocery store is ultraprocessed junk food,” she said.
Today, “I heal my body using real food that God created and designed us to eat,” she said.
Ava Noe, 18, has about 26,000 followers on her Instagram account, @cleanlivingwithava. She hopes to show young people that they “don’t have to be a certain age to take their health into their own hands,” she told me. “It’s never too early to start maximizing your health.”
For Noe, that looks like anything from searching for “clean” food at the grocery store to medically controversial practices like making her younger siblings use fluoride-free toothpaste.
Meanwhile, some older MAHA influencers feature their young children as a way to get their message out to families. Gretchen Adler, for example, a creator with over 500,000 Instagram followers, recently posted a video in which her 9-year-old daughter explains why she makes her own gummy candy from orange juice and gelatin. Storebought gummies, she says, are “pure trash.”
“I’ll always say to show this to your child,” Adler says of her daughter’s appearances on her feed. “That’s the way that we can inspire these people or these young children, is when they see another child that they can relate to.”
Young people may be an especially receptive audience for the message that they can take their health into their own hands.
Gen Z Americans “feel very disillusioned by organizations in society and institutions, including, of course, medical institutions in the wake of Covid,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute and author of The Politics of Gen Z.
They are more likely than their elders to rely on friends and family or social media for health advice, and less likely to rely on doctors. They also distrust news outlets that could give them fact-checked information about health claims.
At the same time, young people are concerned about their health, experts say. “I have seen students become more inclined towards trying to think about wellness because they need to, because they’re not doing well,” said Phillips, who has taught university students for 18 years. “College students used to be some of the most carefree people in the world, and that just isn’t what is true anymore.”
The result, some say, is a population especially primed to listen to MAHA messaging delivered by influencers their own age. “These are beautiful young people that are promoting it, and they’re thinking, old people don’t know what they’re talking about. Here’s this cute 22-year-old who’s explaining this to me,” said Bertha Vazquez, who runs Generation Skeptics, a program that trains teachers to respond to misinformation.
However, experts worry that some MAHA content could be harmful, not helpful, for young people’s health. Such content often promotes the idea that consumers need to be vigilant about their food to avoid “toxins,” or that products can be divided into “real food” and “not-real food.”
“That black-and-white thinking is very dangerous for people that have vulnerability to eating disorders,” Zoë Bisbing, a psychotherapist specializing in disordered eating, told me.
Vrachalus isn’t convinced that opposing processed food promotes disordered eating. “Our great-great-grandparents, they didn’t have Oreos, they didn’t have ice cream,” she said. “I just don’t think that our great-great-grandparents had eating disorders because they didn’t have fake food.”
But eating disorders aren’t the only concern experts have raised. Some fear that exposure to MAHA content could push young people toward harmful behaviors that Kennedy and other movement leaders have supported, from using beef tallow as sunscreen to avoiding vaccines or chemotherapy.
“When they do get a dangerous virus, or they do get cancer, or they do have a child, the big concern is that they will not get the vaccines and the standard care,” Vazquez said.
Vrachalus and Noe don’t talk as much about vaccines or avoiding modern medicine as older MAHA and MAHA-adjacent influencers do. “I’m not anti-Western medicine at all,” Vrachalus told me. “If I break my arm, I’m going to the doctor tomorrow.”
But previous generations of MAHA and wellness influencers have cast doubt on proven treatments from the measles vaccine to chemotherapy, sometimes while pushing dietary supplements that are unproven and unregulated, or foods like raw milk that can cause serious illness.
Some young people are already subscribing to this kind of thinking — 18-year-old Shelby Gwinn, who is studying to be a dietitian, recently told the New York Times that “all pills do is cover up a problem instead of getting to the root cause,” and that today she takes 30 supplements to manage her eczema. “I do think the government should step in if a food company is putting absolute trash or chemicals in their food products,” she said — “but then again, I don’t trust the government.”
There’s a long history of wellness movements shading into conspiracy theory, Phillips told me. This anti-government, anti-medicine thinking began to creep into many wellness spaces, including yoga studios, around the time of the pandemic.
“The messaging is basically this idea that you can’t trust doctors, you can’t trust the medical establishment,” Phillips explained. “They are trying to poison you.”
In a polarized political landscape in which many young people are disillusioned with traditional news sources, conspiracy theories can be especially difficult to counter. That’s doubly true since so many young people really have been failed by their doctors, their government, and their world.
“There are so many different ways that institutions have really genuinely let people down,” Phillips said. “But being able to make those kinds of critiques is different than this kind of conspiratorial attitude towards institutions.”
Teaching young people to think critically about information, whether it comes from an authority figure or a content creator their own age, may involve separating that information from politics.
Melanie Trecek-King, a biology professor at Massasoit Community College and founder of the website Thinking Is Power, likes to start with European witch trials. She helps her students evaluate the beliefs about witchcraft that led to these trials, the evidence presented against accused “witches,” and the harms — including torture and executions — that false beliefs caused.
By choosing examples from the past that aren’t personal for students today, she avoids putting them on the defensive. And once they’ve learned the process of evaluating information and evidence, “then they will make the connection in the real world,” she told me.
Not everyone can take a class like Trecek-King’s. But educators say it’s crucial for science communicators to meet young people where they are, whether that means posting on platforms like Instagram and TikTok or responding to questions about health without judgment or shaming.
“We have to be going to the places where people are,” said Jessica Knurick, a science communicator and content creator who has a PhD in nutrition science. Too often, scientific and medical experts take the attitude that “you should just listen to us because we’re us, instead of talking to people on a human level and understanding where their concerns are,” Knurick said.
Getting expert information to where teens and other young people can see it will require changing professional norms that discourage doctors and tenure-track scientists from being on social media, Knurick said. It will also require finding ways to compensate experts for their time in a social-media economy that doesn’t always reward sober fact-checking.
But more science communicators and groups that serve young people are rising to the challenge. And it’s possible that young people’s tendency to question everything can be part of the solution.
“These MAHA influencers, they’re so confident in their claims, and you’ll never see a scientist like that,” Vazquez said. “Science is never about 100 percent certainty.”
That’s something educators can teach students, Vazquez said: “If someone’s so cocksure of themselves, then that’s a red flag.”
2026-04-28 05:50:00
唐纳德·特朗普于2026年4月25日在美国华盛顿特区的白宫举行记者会。这则新闻出现在《Logoff》每日通讯中，该通讯旨在让您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅此处。欢迎来到《Logoff》：各位读者，周末期间，特朗普总统在白宫记者会上遭遇了第三次高调的暗杀企图，但他本人及其他与会者均安然无恙。一名特勤局特工被枪击，但因穿着防弹背心未受重伤。我们很快将了解枪手的信息，他今天已在华盛顿特区出庭。然而，白宫在枪击事件后正全力推进另外两个议题：针对吉米·基梅尔的言论和特朗普的“舞厅”项目。发生了什么？首先，基梅尔上周早些时候开了一则玩笑，称第一夫人梅拉尼娅·特朗普“散发着寡妇般的光芒”。周一，特朗普夫妇要求基梅尔辞职，梅拉尼娅称该言论是“充满仇恨和暴力的”。这并非特朗普政府首次采取此类行动。去年，基梅尔因特朗普的联邦通信委员会主席威胁其雇主ABC而短暂停播，其恢复工作令政府陷入尴尬。尽管基梅尔的玩笑与周六晚的袭击事件并无关联，但政府似乎仍试图借此机会施压。至于“舞厅”项目，该建筑尚未建成，但特朗普希望在其任期结束前完成。目前，白宫因法律禁令而无法进行地上施工。因此，袭击事件后，政府正试图以所谓国家安全为由推动该项目。周日，代理司法部长托德·布兰奇表示，针对政府的诉讼“正在阻碍总统安全设施的建设”。（需注意，白宫记者会并非政府活动，即使舞厅建成也不会在此举行。）总体来看，面对一次几乎发生的悲剧，特朗普政府正全身心投入于琐碎的政治投机行为，并试图压倒反对者。## 此外，通过这则《华尔街日报》的故事，我学到了一个新词——“thigmotactic”，即“触觉导向的”，该词由《华尔街日报》的罗伯特·麦克米伦报道，特指喜欢依偎的社交动物，如海狮。其中一只著名的 Stellar 海狮“Chonkers”如今在旧金山的 Pier 39 安家。您可点击此处阅读更多相关内容（含赠品链接）。一如既往，感谢您的阅读，祝您度过愉快的一晚，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: Hi, readers. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump was the target of a third high-profile assassination attempt at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He was unharmed, as were the other attendees. One Secret Service agent was shot but not badly injured, thanks to a bulletproof vest.
We’re likely to learn more about the shooter, who was arraigned in DC today, in the coming days. But the White House is coming out swinging on two other priorities post-shooting: Jimmy Kimmel and Trump’s ballroom.
What’s going on? Let’s start with Kimmel, who made a joke earlier in the week describing First Lady Melania Trump as having “a glow like an expectant widow.” On Monday, both Trumps called for Kimmel to lose his job over the joke, which Melania described as “hateful and violent.”
This is something the Trump administration has tried before. Last year, Kimmel was briefly off the air after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair threatened his employer, ABC; his reinstatement was a black eye for the administration.
There’s nothing to connect Kimmel’s joke with Saturday night’s attack, but the administration, undeterred, appears to be trying again.
And the ballroom? Said ballroom — a massive entertaining space for which the East Wing was demolished — doesn’t exist yet, but Trump badly wants it done before the end of his term. Right now, however, the White House is enjoined from proceeding with above-ground construction on the building.
And so, following the attack, the administration is leaning hard into a supposed national security justification for the ballroom. On Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the lawsuit against the administration was “delaying the construction of a secure facility for the President to do his job.”
(The Correspondents’ Dinner is not a government event and would not be hosted at the White House even were the ballroom completed.)
What’s the big picture? Faced with a potential tragedy narrowly avoided, the Trump administration is going all-in on petty political opportunism — and trying to ride roughshod over its opponents.
I learned a new and delightful word from this Wall Street Journal story: thigmotactic, which the Journal’s Robert McMillan reports is “a scientific term for very social creatures who like to cuddle.”
The creatures in question are sea lions, and specifically, a stellar Steller sea lion named “Chonkers,” who has made himself at home at San Francisco’s Pier 39. You can read all about him here with a gift link.
As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-04-28 03:30:00
2020年美国最高法院审理的Chatrie诉美国案中，首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨与宾夕法尼亚州首席副检察长迈克尔·费舍尔在智能手机上进行口头辩论。该案探讨警方在何种情况下可以利用手机数据追踪犯罪现场附近的人。在案件辩论初期，多数大法官对被告律师亚当·尤尼克沃斯基主张的宪法严格限制政府追踪权利表示怀疑，甚至可能推翻2018年具有里程碑意义的Carpenter案判决，该案要求警方在获取手机位置数据前必须获得搜查令。然而，当司法部律师埃里克·费因开始辩护后，大法官们对政府可能过度获取个人信息的担忧加剧。罗伯茨指出，若政府能通过手机追踪，可能掌握某宗教活动或政治集会所有参与者的身份信息。其他大法官也担心政府可能在未获得搜查令的情况下获取大量电子邮件、日历和照片信息。
综合大法官们的关切，最高法院可能对Chatrie案作出谨慎裁决，维持Carpenter案确立的隐私保护标准，但不会大幅扩展。该案涉及“地理围栏”搜查令，允许警方获取特定时间和地点附近人员的信息。在Chatrie案中，警方获得一项搜查令，要求谷歌提供在弗吉尼亚州米德尔敦某银行抢劫案发生前后一小时在该地点附近的人的信息。该搜查令设定了150米半径范围，包括银行和附近教堂。谷歌通过“位置历史”功能追踪部分用户位置，但数据在最初阶段是匿名的，警方仅在调查后期才获取部分人的身份信息。
尽管如此，该搜查令并未要求法官或治安官判断警方是否合理缩小了最初19名用户的范围，而是由谷歌自行决定是否提供额外信息。部分大法官对此表示不满，认为警方应向法官申请进一步缩小搜索范围。最高法院似乎在三个方向上存在分歧：支持警方扩大追踪权限的保守派（如托马斯和阿利托），担忧政府权力扩张的自由派（如戈尔斯奇和巴雷特），以及中间派（如卡瓦诺和金博尔）。最终裁决可能较为细致，不会显著改变现有法律，但可能允许警方在获得搜查令的情况下追踪特定时间地点的人员，但不会允许大规模搜索，例如政治集会的全体参与者。因此，Chatrie案的判决可能不会对现有法律造成重大影响，但会明确搜查令的适用范围，以防止政府滥用技术手段识别政治异见者等群体。
If I’d only listened to the first half of the Supreme Court’s Monday argument in Chatrie v. United States, a case asking when police can use cellphone data to determine who was present near the site of a crime, I would be convinced that the Court is about to drastically limit Americans’ right to privacy.
Most of the justices’ questions to Adam Unikowsky, the lawyer for a criminal defendant who was convicted of robbing a bank, appeared skeptical of Unikowsky’s claims that the Constitution places strict limits on the government’s ability to track people through their cellphones. Some of the justices even appeared likely to neutralize Carpenter v. United States (2018), a landmark case suggesting that police must obtain a warrant before they obtain cell phone data revealing where a person has been in the past.
But in the second half of the argument, after Justice Department lawyer Eric Feigin took the podium, most of the justices appeared even more concerned about some of the implications of Feigin’s arguments.
As Chief Justice John Roberts noted shortly after Feigin began his argument, if the government has too much ability to track people using their cellphones, it could potentially learn the identity of everyone who attended a particular religious service, or everyone who attended a particular political meeting. Meanwhile, several other justices appeared worried that the government lawyer’s arguments would permit police to comb through many people’s emails, or their personal calendar and photos, without first obtaining a warrant.
In light of these concerns raised by the justices, it appears likely that the Court will hand down a cautious decision in Chatrie — one that reads Carpenter to require police to always obtain a warrant before they attempt to track someone using their cellphone. That said, the police in Chatrie did, in fact, obtain a warrant. And the Court may very well rule that the warrant in this case complied with the Constitution.
Chatrie, in other words, is likely to be a fairly narrow decision. The Court appears likely to maintain existing privacy protections against police searches, but most likely will not extend them in any significant way.
The specific legal question in Chatrie involves “geofence” warrants, which are warrants permitting the government to learn who was in a particular location at a particular time. Typically, it is possible for police to discover this information because both cell phone companies and software vendors such as Google often track the location of individuals’ phones.
In Chatrie, police obtained a warrant requiring Google to turn over information about who was present near a bank in Midlothian, Virginia, within an hour of a robbery at that bank. The warrant drew a 150-meter radius around the crime site that included both the bank and a nearby church. Google had this information about some of its users because of an optional feature known as “location history,” which can be used to pinpoint users’ location with extraordinary precision – but only for users who have opted into this service.
The Court’s decision in Chatrie is likely to be fairly nuanced, and it is unlikely to significantly disturb existing law.
The warrant also laid out a three-step process that limited how much information police could obtain about each individual cell phone user who was inside this geofence. At the first stage, Google provided anonymized information on 19 individuals who were present near the bank during the relevant period. Police sought additional location information on nine of these individuals and, after reviewing that additional information, sought and received the identity of three of these people. One of the three was Chatrie.
So this warrant did place meaningful restrictions on what information could be obtained by police. The data was anonymized until the final stage of the investigation, and police only learned the identity of a small percentage of the total number of people who were present near the robbery.
At the same time, the warrant did not require a judge or magistrate to determine whether the police were justified in narrowing the original 19 individuals down to nine, or down to the three whose identities were ultimately revealed. Google was responsible for determining whether it would turn over this additional information. At least some of the justices appeared bothered by this fact on Monday, and they may rule that this warrant only would have been permissible if police had been required to go back to the judge and get permission to narrow the search.
Broadly speaking, the Court appeared to fracture into three factions in Chatrie. The most pro-police faction, which included Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, seemed eager to diminish Carpenter and make it much easier for the government to track people without first obtaining a warrant.
As Alito noted, Carpenter involved a similar search, but one that was technologically distinct from the one at issue in Chatrie. In Carpenter, police determined a suspect’s location by tracking which cell phone towers or other “cell sites” their phone was communicating with at various times. This information is less precise than the GPS-tracking data that Google possessed in Chatrie, but it is also information that, in Alito’s words, a cellphone user has “no choice but to disclose.”
Alito’s argument was that Chatrie could have turned off the feature in many of Google’s apps that allowed Google to track his location, but no cell phone user can prevent their phone from communicating with cell sites unless they turn off the phone altogether. Carpenter, under Alito’s framework, would only require a warrant if police want to obtain information that a cell phone user cannot opt out of revealing.
As a practical matter, this would mean that the government would have virtually limitless ability to track people’s movements, so long as it relied entirely on services such as Google Maps or Uber, where users can prevent the service from tracking their precise location.
Shortly after Feigin began his argument, however, several key justices signaled that they do not buy Alito’s argument. Roberts raised his concern about police learning the identities of everyone who attends a particular church. Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out that people also sometimes voluntarily share their emails, photos, and personal calendars with Google, and he expressed concern that the government’s legal arguments would allow police to access that information without a warrant as well.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who also asked some questions that seemed sympathetic to the government’s position, seemed to recoil when she realized that the Justice Department’s argument would not only permit the police to track when someone enters a private residence, but also specifically whether someone entered that residence’s bedroom.
That said, it seems unlikely that the Court will place sweeping restrictions on the government’s ability to obtain geolocation data provided that they first obtain a warrant. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former public defender who is often sympathetic to the rights of criminal defendants, said fairly explicitly that she does not see a problem with a warrant permitting police to learn which 19 individuals were near the bank robbery — although she likely would support additional restrictions once police seek more information on some of these individuals.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, suggested that a geofence warrant is valid so long as it places “reasonable geographic and temporal” limits on the search. Police, in other words, can learn who was in a fairly narrowly defined location within a brief period of time, but the Constitution might not permit a sprawling search of, say, everyone at a political protest that encompassed many city blocks and that lasted an entire day.
All of which is a long way of saying that the Court’s decision in Chatrie is likely to be fairly nuanced, and it is unlikely to significantly disturb existing law. Police will still need to obtain a warrant before they can discover where someone was at a particular time in the past, but the Court is unlikely to place particularly strict restrictions on what that warrant should say.
Whether those restrictions are strict enough to prevent the government from identifying political dissidents and similar groups is unclear, and the question may remain open until a future case.
2026-04-28 02:05:00
2026年4月14日，莱娜·邓汉姆（Lena Dunham）出现在《德鲁·巴里摩尔秀》（The Drew Barrymore Show）上。她的新回忆录《Famesick》引发了公众对其过去争议的重新审视。一些曾批评她的媒体人如今公开道歉，认为他们过去对她的苛刻评价并不公正。例如，Rachel Simon在MS Now上写道：“我们应向莱娜·邓汉姆道歉。”她承认邓汉姆虽有缺陷，但从未应受仇恨或苛责。类似地，Sonia Soraiya在Slate上表示，自己曾误解邓汉姆，并为此道歉。这些反思表明，随着距离15年，邓汉姆的争议被重新评估，部分批评显得荒谬。
《Famesick》中，邓汉姆详细描述了成名初期对她的身心伤害，以及由此引发的阿片类药物成瘾和自我毁灭行为。她指出，2010年代的“取消文化”（cancel culture）是社会舆论的产物，其背后既有 misogyny（性别歧视），也包含对社会正义的追求。然而，这种文化有时被滥用，甚至成为攻击无辜者的工具。
文章回顾了邓汉姆的争议时间线：2012年《女孩们》（Girls）播出引发大量批评，包括对其种族和阶级问题的指责；2014年她出版回忆录《不是那种女孩》（Not That Kind of Girl），揭露性侵经历，却因被指“虚假指控”而遭保守派攻击；2016年她因在Met Gala上对奥德尔·贝克汉姆（Odell Beckham Jr.）的言论引发争议；2017年她因支持一名被指控性侵黑人女性的白人编剧而备受批评。尽管如此，邓汉姆在回忆录中并未为所有争议道歉，仅对2017年的事件表示悔意。
作者认为，邓汉姆的争议反映了“取消文化”的复杂性：它既是社会进步的推动力，也因过度攻击而显得荒谬。邓汉姆本人对这种文化既有深刻理解，也难以完全摆脱其影响。尽管她曾多次陷入舆论漩涡，但作者仍认为她并未犯下不可原谅的错误，且她的道歉值得一定宽容。最终，文章指出，公众对邓汉姆的重新审视，也折射出对“取消文化”本身的反思与批判。
Lena Dunham, the subject of a thousand 2010s think pieces about whether or not she is problematic, has re-emerged from behind the curtain with her new memoir, Famesick. But this time around, the think pieces look different. Some of them are mea culpas addressed to Dunham.
“We owe Lena Dunham an apology,” declared Rachel Simon in a story for MS Now. The apology came with a caveat: “Dunham is, and always has been, a flawed figure. But she never deserved our hatred, nor the expectations placed on her to get everything right.”
“I was wrong about Lena Dunham,” proclaimed Sonia Soraiya at Slate. Soraiya argues that Dunham’s nervy, uncomfortable magnum opus Girls “activated” her own self-loathing, and that she and other critics of the era took it out on Dunham.
“I was one of Lena Dunham’s haters. I want to say I’m sorry,” wrote Dave Schilling at The Guardian. Dunham’s memoir, in which she writes vividly about how her early fame destroyed her mental and physical health, had Schilling rethinking the way he used to write about her. “Rarely did I think about the adverse effects of society turning her into a Wicker Man-style totem for us to set on fire,” he wrote. “To a lot of us, she stopped being a person and transformed into a symbol. I can’t think of anything more unfair.”
In Famesick, Dunham writes that the intensity of the public conversation about her when Girls premiered in 2012 exacerbated her chronic illness, which would be eventually diagnosed as endometriosis plus Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The combination of the stress of fame and the stress of chronic illness drove her into an opioid addiction and self-destructive behavior, which would further fuel the discourse about her.
Even in the 2010s, at the height of Dunham’s fame, it was fairly evident that a number of the outcries over Dunham’s public presence were overblown. Now, with the distance of 15 years, and Girls reclaimed as a piece of important art, some of those controversies appear remarkably stupid. We should not have been so cruel to her, the consensus is developing, and we would not have been, had she arisen at any other historical moment.
With Dunham’s redemption cycle, we’re performing a sped-up version of the discourse cycle that saw the public reexamining the misogynistic witch hunts of Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, et al. in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s become clear, with the distance of 20 years, that the gossip press of the 2000s was driven primarily by misogyny, occasionally dressed up as concern trolling. Now, the oft-unspoken villain is cancel culture, the slew of social media shaming and chiding that became such a virulent force at the same time that Dunham was coming up in the 2010s. Apologizing to Dunham becomes a way of apologizing for and repudiating cancel culture, making the case that we are no longer in the cancel culture moment.
But 2010s cancel culture was a different beast than 2000s purity culture. The tactics of social media dogpiling and calls for deplatforming were sometimes misdirected at, say, recipe writers who misspoke in an interview, but they also helped push forward the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter. Defenders of cancel culture used to say that it was less about canceling the sinful than it was about holding the powerful to account for their misdeeds — but it wasn’t always clear who was powerful enough to be worth targeting, and which misdeeds were all that bad.
Dunham, as the showrunner of a conversation-driving television show, had a fair amount of power, as well as a knack for saying the wrong things in public. The questions before us now are: Was anything she said in public bad enough to justify the treatment she received? And, by extension, just how destructive was cancel culture, really?
Cancel culture emerged from a specific moment in history that would be difficult to replicate. First, social media democratized discourse; suddenly elites were vulnerable to criticism by regular people in the public square. It also divided people into teams and made everyone angry all the time.
This was also the era of blogs — Gawker and its sister site Jezebel; The Awl and its sister site The Hairpin; Salon, Slate, and many more — which were so fun to read and so hard to work at. Blogs were content mills that needed to be fed. The key metric for digital newsrooms at the time was how many clicks any individual story got, which incentivized quickly written hot takes about polarizing figures who sparked audience outrage.
Meanwhile, the educated class was rapidly shifting the norms of acceptable public behavior and belief systems toward the left. In the post-Gamergate, post-Ferguson, post-Obama culture wars, everything must be understood as expressive of the shift in these norms, to be analyzed and evaluated for its fidelity and virtue. At its best, it was a valuable refocusing that helped people reprocess the hegemonic beliefs about the world they had inherited. It could also, at its worst, be reductive. Cancel culture was a tool that held the powerful to account. It was a weapon that punished disproportionately. It was bipartisan, vicious, frightening, bewildering, exhilarating.
Confessional-style women’s blogging was also in its heyday in those days — all the XOJane “it happened to me” stories, the Jezebel tampon posts — which were so prevalent that their gravitational pull warped any piece of fiction about the intimate lives of women, including Girls, into being understood as a confession. As such, it was evaluated religiously, praised for its radical political transparency, damned for its sins.
The Girls hot takes. In April 2012, Girls premieres on HBO, and the think pieces begin to roll in. Are Dunham and her cast nepo babies avant la lettre? Is the show too white? Is she too unlikable? Is she too naked?
Not that kind of pseudonym. In December 2014, Dunham publishes a memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, in which she describes her sexual assault. She gives her attacker a name and changes details of his identity, but the resulting character turns out to match an actual person whom Breitbart and the National Review both track down. They lambast Dunham for her “false” accusation ruining the man’s reputation.
Not that kind of scandal. Also in Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham describes examining her younger sibling’s genitals as a child. Conservative outlets accuse her of sexual assault.
That’s one way of putting it. Throughout 2015, Dunham’s fondness for hyperbolic comparisons gets her in trouble. Explaining why she doesn’t read Gawker at the height of its negative coverage of her, she says, “It’s literally if I read it, it’s like going back to a husband who beat me in the face. It just doesn’t make any sense.” Discussing Judd Apatow’s fascination with the Bill Cosby sexual assault case, she says, “It’s sort of like saying someone’s obsessed with the Holocaust.” In both cases, backlash ensues.
Met Gala cold shoulder. In 2016, Dunham accuses of Odell Beckham Jr. of ignoring her at the Met Gala in a screed that has downright odd racial overtones.
That’s one way of putting it, part 2. On her podcast Women of the Hour in 2016, Dunham declares, “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.” Backlash once again ensues.
And her little dog, too. Dunham rehomes her dog Lamby in 2017 amid mounting speculation that she is a bad pet owner.
The really bad one. In 2017, a Girls writer is accused of rape. Dunham releases a statement saying his alleged victim is a liar.
Of all the people who were canceled in the 2010s, Lena Dunham was surely not the most deserving. She was the young showrunner of a critically acclaimed but little-watched HBO drama, with most episodes garnering well under 1 million viewers. How much influence could she possibly have wielded? But Girls became something bigger than itself; sometimes it felt that every one of the few hundred thousand people who watched it were writing essays about it.
Some of that criticism was straightforwardly misogynistic: People wrote angry screeds about how much they hated Dunham because she was naked on her show a lot and they thought she was ugly. Some of it was in bad faith. Dunham’s Girls alter ego, Hannah, was abrasive and entitled, and in the discourse, the distance between them collapsed. People were furious at Dunham for making them watch a character as unlikable as Hannah.
A great deal of the criticism of Dunham was plausibly in good faith, but it was extraordinarily loud. There was the criticism that Dunham and all the young women she cast were nepo babies. Then there was the way Dunham’s real-life presence sometimes evoked the same clueless arrogance as that of the character she played. Part of that involved her saying a lot of thoughtlessly provocative things, many of which displayed a consistent obtuseness toward class and race.
To begin with, Girls was set among young people in diverse Brooklyn, and yet all the main characters were white: Why? Some argued that Dunham’s blinkered, privileged characters were exactly the type of young New Yorkers who would surround themselves with other white people, while others argued Dunham’s refusal to engage with race was a sign of racism in and of itself.
Dunham responded with a characteristic mix of reason and hamfisted trollery. “If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to,” she told NPR in 2012, after the first season aired. “I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.”
Dunham was right that the charm of Girls lay in its specificity, and it was reasonable for her to fear that she couldn’t bring that level of sensory, bodily detail to the life of a Black character. But the following season, she followed up the controversy by casting Donald Glover as Hannah’s short-lived Black boyfriend, who was revealed to be a Republican — a strange creative choice that tokenized what was, at that point, the show’s sole Black character.
In the meantime, outside the show, Dunham kept making unforced errors. “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had,” she said on a podcast in 2016. In 2019, she described sitting next to the NFL star Odell Beckham Jr. at the Met Gala, and feeling insecure that Beckham, who is Black, didn’t seem attracted to her. “The vibe was very much like, ‘Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a…yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cellphone,’” Dunham said. Theoretically she was talking about her own insecurities, but in practice, the quote was so specific and bizarrely sexualized (truly the Lena Dunham story) that critics argued it played into a harmful narrative about how Black men respond to white women. (Dunham later apologized.)
While the criticisms of Dunham’s body and nudity were straightforward misogyny, the criticisms of her oversight around race were more reasonable. Still, few of them merited the intensity of response Dunham received in the 2010s: not just the polite and well-reasoned essays, but the vitriolic and unending Twitter posts accusing her of monstrous bigotry and evil thoughts. In some cases, it felt as though the social justice outrage around Dunham’s racism were giving cover to people who hated her because they thought she was ugly and annoying, like right-wing commenters who claim they’re criticizing white women as an act of allyship with people of color.
In Famesick, Dunham declines to apologize for any of her missteps — save for what was probably her greatest controversy: her 2017 defense of a white Girls writer accused of raping a Black woman.
In 2017, at the height of the Me Too movement, actress Aurora Perrineau filed sexual assault charges against Girls writer Murray Miller, saying that he raped her in 2012, when she was 17 years old. In response, Dunham and her Girls co-showrunner Jenni Konner sent a statement to the Hollywood Reporter defending Miller.
“While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story,” they wrote, “our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”
“I believe in a lot of things but the first tenet of my politics is to hold up the people who have held me up, who have filled my world with love,” Dunham added on what was then Twitter.
For an outspoken feminist like Dunham to accuse a woman of lying about her sexual assault, on the grounds that the man accused was someone she knew, was a betrayal of some of her most clearly stated principles. To make matters worse, the accused man was white, and the alleged victim was a woman of color, playing directly into one of Dunham’s biggest weaknesses.
In Famesick, Dunham describes her decision to publish this statement as “the narcissism of fame in its purest form.”
“I was so deep in my own distress — physical, emotional, existential — that I had ceased to be able to imagine anyone else’s,” she writes. She also says that the response went out the same day she returned home after a full hysterectomy, high on pain killers, under pressure from Konner, and she doesn’t remember drafting it.
Every time I read this apology, I find myself going back and forth on it. Dunham sounds genuinely contrite — but then Dunham always does sound genuinely contrite in all her apologies, which never seem to end.
The medical context from which she was writing her original statement sounds almost unimaginably difficult. Dunham evokes the physical and mental pain of the hysterectomy with brutal efficiency, likening her disease-ridden uterus to “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws”; one of her doctors tells her later that he doesn’t know how she was able to keep walking. I am reluctant to tar someone forever for a poor decision made so soon after the trauma and pain of major surgery.
Yet there is also a slippery manipulative quality to the way Dunham writes about this statement, a subtle passing of blame. Konner becomes the chief agent in Dunham’s version of events, the woman of sound mind and sound health who pushes the fateful statement on a woozy, dissociating Dunham and supposedly publishes it over Dunham’s mother’s protests. Such villainous, boundary-crossing, ill-intentioned figures recur throughout this memoir at some of Dunham’s lowest moments: suddenly, we encounter people who whom Dunham tells us are cruel or unempathetic in a way she says that she is not.
“It is in these moments that I felt unsure whether Dunham is a victim or a narcissist,” wrote the essayist Eleanor Halls in her review of Famesick; “the truth is you can be both.” And isn’t it always both with Lena Dunham?
Knowing everything we do about Dunham, it feels reasonable to decide that she has crossed the line too many times and you are done with giving her second chances. It feels reasonable to conclude that you don’t want to pay attention to her public persona but are willing to give her consistently high-quality TV work another try. And it also feels reasonable to decide that you are willing to allow her the grace of her apology, even with caveats.
That, in the end, is where I end up. Dunham has a compelling voice, and I find that she hasn’t done anything so appalling that it interferes with my interest in seeing what she does next.
Part of the reason so many people are invested in parsing out how bad Dunham is or was, and how much she deserved her treatment in the 2010s, is because it is a way of working out by proxy how much we collectively need to feel ashamed of cancel culture. In the midst of the vicious backlash to progressive politics that supposedly led to Trump’s reelection, there’s a growing sense among many progressives that the eager, ugly, censorious glee of cancel culture was a tactical mistake, that it alienated supporters, that it was even immoral.
Looking back at Dunham’s career, though, reveals that cancel culture never went along any particular party lines. It was misogynistic: It attacked women with a specific glee, particularly women like Dunham, who was considered ugly yet still took her clothes off on TV. It was also feminist: Dunham’s biggest wave of backlash came after she defended an accused rapist whose accuser was a Black woman.
Cancel culture was an expression of what was new and exciting about both social media and digital media, and also what was monstrous and destabilizing about them. It was a tool used by people on both sides of the political aisle, and also people who did not identify as political at all. It devoured people like Lena Dunham, and it was also a source of attention she seemed to court, provoking and trolling and apologizing in an endless cycle of discourse.
Dunham was in the unique position to understand both the panicky horrors and the perverse thrills of cancel culture better than nearly anyone. Like the people apologizing to her, she, too, doesn’t seem to know if it was all that bad — only that she wishes it had not been so bad to her.