2026-04-06 21:00:00
《美国，其实》（America, Actually）由阿斯特德·赫尔顿（Astead Herndon）主持，于4月11日首播。该节目由Vox推出，专为视频平台设计，旨在通过沉浸式报道、深入分析和人性化叙事，让观众深入了解美国政治在特朗普时代后的演变。节目将探讨一个核心问题：没有特朗普作为中心人物，美国政治会是什么样子？节目形式多样，包括与政界人士的一对一访谈、专家解读以及记者和播客主持人的小组讨论，内容将无缝适配YouTube、社交媒体视频和音频平台。
《美国，其实》延续了Vox标志性的解释性新闻报道，同时结合实地采访和鲜明的观点，为观众提供更清晰、更贴近现实的美国政治视角。该节目还与“报告美国”（Report for America）合作，致力于提升本地新闻报道质量，扩大对弱势社区的覆盖。通过这一合作，Vox将借助“报告美国”的记者网络，挖掘被忽视的声音，呈现更具代表性的报道。
赫尔顿自2025年起担任Vox的主持人和编辑总监，以其深入的实地报道和对美国选民及政治格局变化的洞察力而闻名。他曾为《纽约时报》撰写政治报道，并主持过政治播客《The Run-Up》。其作品曾获得多项荣誉，包括纽约大学颁发的杰出记者奖和美国黑人记者协会评选的年度记者称号。此外，他还为CNN担任政治分析师。
Vox成立于2014年，致力于弥合新闻报道与公众理解之间的鸿沟，推动解释性新闻的普及。而“报告美国”作为非营利组织，专注于支持美国各地新闻机构，提升本地新闻的可持续性和影响力。截至2026年7月，该组织已在全国465家新闻机构中安置了超过850名记者，并帮助这些机构筹集了超过6000万美元的本地捐款。
Today, Vox announced the launch of America, Actually, a new video-first podcast hosted by Astead W. Herndon. Designed from the ground up for video platforms, the show will bring audiences inside the forces shaping American politics for a post-Trump era through immersive reporting, sharp analysis, and deeply human storytelling. America, Actually will explore the question: What does American politics look like without Trump at the center? It’s been a one-man show for more than a decade, but now, the country is heading toward the first open presidential election since 2016. With episodes rolling out on YouTube and social platforms alongside audio, America, Actually reflects Vox’s continued emphasis on premium, multiplatform journalism that meets audiences where they are.
“A decade in politics journalism has only made me more certain that America is a more diverse country changing faster than our political system reflects, and the centrality of Donald Trump has only further flattened that nuance,” says Herndon. “My goal with America, Actually is to make a program that highlights that broad landscape of often ignored people and ideas — while remaining accessible and inviting. We will lead with the kind of rigor and curiosity that is Vox’s signature, but we will also have fun.”
The show will take a variety of platform-native formats, from one-on-one interviews with compelling elected officials (Herndon has recently interviewed New York City Mayor Zohran Mandani and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as a guest host on Vox’s flagship podcast Today, Explained), to classic Vox explainers with outside experts, to group discussions with an eclectic mix of journalists and podcasters. Each episode is built to travel seamlessly across YouTube, social video, and audio. The show expands on Vox’s signature explanatory journalism by pairing it with firsthand reporting and a strong point of view, offering a clearer, more grounded understanding of American politics.
The launch is further strengthened through a partnership with Report for America, a national program dedicated to revitalizing local journalism and expanding coverage in underserved communities. Through this partnership, Vox will deliver community-centered reporting, drawing on Report for America’s network of journalists to elevate diverse voices, surface overlooked perspectives, and help audiences understand how power and policy shape their lives.
“America, Actually represents exactly where we see the future of Vox storytelling — journalism that is rigorous, ambitious, and designed first for video,” says Swati Sharma, editor-in-chief of Vox. “Astead has a rare ability to connect deeply with people and translate complex political dynamics into stories that feel urgent and accessible. This show is not just about explaining the news; it’s about showing it, in a way that brings audiences closer to the realities shaping the country.”
Herndon joined Vox in 2025 as a host and editorial director, and is known for his deeply reported, on-the-ground coverage of American voters and the changing dynamics of the political landscape. As a national politics reporter for the New York Times, he was a central part of election coverage for seven years and previously hosted the politics podcast, The Run-Up. His reporting has taken him across the country, chronicling how identity, culture, and power intersect in modern American politics, and he is widely recognized for his ability to surface nuanced perspectives from voices often left out of the national conversation. Herndon’s profile of Vice President Kamala Harris for the New York Times Magazine was nominated for a National Magazine Award in profile writing. He has received the Distinguished Journalist Award from DePaul University and was named 2025 Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. Herndon is also a political analyst for CNN.
About Vox
When Vox was founded in 2014, it was animated by a simple observation: The media did a good job of reporting the news and commenting on it, but there was a disconnect between that work and the audience truly understanding why something happened. Vox started as — and remains — an organization dedicated to addressing that gap, which not only persists but has grown.
We are proud to have popularized explanatory journalism in many forms, across many mediums. Our work has been used to educate people everywhere, from elementary schools to college classrooms to vaccination sites in Taiwan to footnotes in congressional memos.
About Report for America
Report for America recruits, places and supports talented journalists in local newsrooms across the United States. We provide salary support, training, and newsroom sustainability coaching, enabling our partners to expand coverage on critical, often overlooked issues and strengthen trust with their audiences. By July 2026, Report for America will have placed more than 850 journalists in 465 newsrooms nationwide and will have helped newsroom partners raise more than $60 million in local donations. Report for America is an initiative of Report Local, a nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to strengthening local journalism across the US and around the world.
2026-04-06 19:00:00
2025年3月，华盛顿特区举行的“为科学站出来”集会上，抗议者们呼吁重视科学。据《Grist》报道，美国农业部（USDA）下属的研究机构中，有一项“禁忌词汇”政策，禁止使用与气候相关的术语。Ethan Roberts，伊利诺伊州皮奥里亚市国家农业利用研究中心的工会主席表示，过去十年中，他见证了多个政府任期，但当前的转变尤为剧烈。2024年3月，USDA发布了一项备忘录，要求员工避免使用超过100个被禁止的词汇和短语，其中约三分之一与气候变化直接相关，如“全球变暖”、“气候科学”和“碳封存”等。
为应对这一政策，研究人员开始使用更温和的替代词，如“气温升高”、“土壤健康”和“极端天气”。这种语言调整是更广泛趋势的一部分，自特朗普政府上台以来，美国的“气候沉默”现象逐渐加剧，企业和媒体也减少了对气候变化的讨论。此外，联邦政府的运作方式也发生了变化，例如埃隆·马斯克创立的“政府效率部”（DOGE）大规模裁员，而特朗普政府还削减了与环境和公共土地相关的科研经费。
研究人员正在适应这一新环境，一些人通过调整措辞或寻找其他资金来源继续进行气候研究。例如，研究天气模式与大豆病害关系的团队，会将研究重点从气候变化转向病害本身。美国国家科学基金会（NSF）的资助数据也反映了这一趋势：2023年有889项资助项目标题或摘要中提及“气候变化”，而2024年骤降至148项，降幅达77%。部分原因是NSF工作人员在特朗普任期内减少了对气候变化相关项目的审批，但研究人员自我审查、避免使用“气候变化”一词的现象也起了作用。
一些科学家开始寻求私人资金支持，如Dana Fisher教授通过私人渠道资助研究，以改善北美对气候变化的传播方式。她还寻找海外资金，因为在共和党执政期间，美国政府对气候研究的资助较为谨慎。例如，当乔治·W·布什总统在任时，她曾获得挪威研究理事会资助，研究美国城市和州的气候行动如何影响联邦政策。
然而，某些与气候相关的术语仍被视为政治敏感。例如，“公平性”和“环境正义”在特朗普政府时期成为更危险的词汇。美国环保署（EPA）的环境正义办公室被关闭，相关工作人员也被裁员。NSF的资助分析也显示，特朗普任期内与DEI（多样性、公平性和包容性）相关的词汇几乎完全消失，而“清洁能源”和“污染治理”等术语的使用也有所减少。
美国农业部的Roberts认为，这种语言上的压力可能是一种政治审查，也可能只是资助方要求研究符合其政策。尽管如此，许多气候研究项目仍因政治敏感词汇而陷入资金困境。研究人员正努力调整研究框架，以符合白宫的优先事项，同时避免使用被禁止的术语。例如，Roberts提到，通过巧妙使用词汇和控制研究呈现范围，科学家们仍能继续工作，但目前尚未有大规模的追查行动。
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
At the Department of Agriculture’s research division, everyone knows there’s one word they should never say, according to Ethan Roberts. “The forbidden C-word” — climate.
Roberts, union president at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois, has worked for the federal government for nearly a decade. In that time, the physical science technician has weathered several political administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term. None compare to what’s happening now.
The sweeping transformation became apparent last March, after a memo from upper management at the USDA Agricultural Research Service instructed staffers to avoid submitting agreements and other contracts that used any of 100-plus newly banned words and phrases. Roughly a third directly related to climate change, including “global warming,” “climate science,” and “carbon sequestration.”
Roberts met with his union to figure out how to respond to the memo. They concluded that the best course of action was just to avoid the terms and try to get their research published by working around them. Throughout the federal agency, “climate change” was swapped for softer synonyms: “elevated temperatures,” “soil health,” and “extreme weather.”
It’s part of a bigger trend. Across federal agencies and academic institutions, scientists are avoiding words they once used without hesitation. When Trump took office last year — calling coal “clean” and “beautiful” while deriding plans to tackle climate change as a “green scam” — a so-called climate hushing took hold of the United States, as businesses, politicians, and even the news media got quieter about global warming. There’s a long list of supposedly “woke” words that agencies have been discouraged from using, many tied to climate change or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The language changes were accompanied by larger shifts in how the federal government operates. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), laid off hundreds of thousands of federal workers last year. The Trump administration also slashed spending on science, cutting tens of billions of dollars in grants for projects related to the environment and public lands. Researchers are adapting to the new landscape, with some finding creative ways to continue their climate research, from changing their wording to seeking out different sources of funding.
For federal researchers studying, say, the interplay between weather patterns and soybean diseases, the key is to reframe studies so they don’t clash with the Trump administration’s politics. “Instead of making it about the climate, you would instead just make it about the disease itself, and be like, ‘This disease does these things under these conditions,’ rather than ‘These conditions cause this disease to do this,’” Roberts added. “It’s just changing the focus.”
You can see how federally funded research has changed by looking at the grants approved by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, an agency that provides roughly a quarter of the US government’s funding to universities. Grist’s analysis found that the number of NSF grants whose titles or abstracts mentioned “climate change” fell from 889 in 2023 to 148 last year, a 77 percent plunge. Part of that’s a result of NSF staffers approving fewer grants related to climate change under Trump. But researchers self-censoring by omitting the phrase in their proposals also appears to play a role, evidenced by the corresponding rise of “extreme weather” — a synonym that gets around the politicized language.
Trent Ford, the state climatologist for Illinois, said he’s started using terms like “weather extremes” and “weather variability” in framing his proposals for grants.
“It’s sort of a weird thing, because on principle, if we’re studying climate change, to not name climate change feels dirty,” said Ford, who’s also a research scientist at the Illinois State Water Survey at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. But it’s more of a practical decision than anything else: “We’ve seen where grants that say everything but ‘climate change’ and are obviously studying the impacts of climate change get through with no problem.” He only uses the phrase in grant proposals when he thinks it’s absolutely necessary and when efforts to steer around the term would look too obvious to a reviewer.
Researchers have always had to tailor their framing to align with a funder’s priorities, in this case the federal government. Near the end of President Joe Biden’s term in late 2024, when Ford’s team applied for an NSF grant to study how climate conditions could affect Midwestern agriculture, it made sense to include a line about talking to a diverse group of farmers. But that word became a problem after Trump returned to office.
“By the time the proposal got reviewed by the program manager at NSF, that same language that was required four months ago was now actually a death sentence on it,” Ford said. The NSF liked the proposal, but wanted the researchers to remove the line about reaching a diverse set of agricultural stakeholders and confirm that they would talk to “all American farmers,” Ford said. The team sent it back in, and the NSF approved it last April.
Others weren’t so lucky. Another scientist at the Agricultural Research Service, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said DOGE eliminated major research programs at the agency and, in the process, wiped out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds for an initiative to grow plants without soil that “really didn’t have anything to do with climate change.” The scientist said it had only been labeled as climate research to “satisfy the previous Biden administration.”
“Anything, any project, that had ‘CC’ in front of it, was eliminated. Because ‘CC’ stands for climate change,” the staffer said. “So, unfortunately, that came back to bite them during this administration.”
Though not to this extreme, researchers have found themselves staying away from politically fraught terms like “climate change” before. During the first Trump administration, Austin Becker, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies how ports and maritime infrastructure can be made more resilient to hazards like storms and flooding, started avoiding the phrase, even though it’s what motivated his research. “Everything that was ‘climate’ just became ‘coastal resilience,’” he said. “And we’ve kind of just stuck with that ever since.”
Ford initially resisted pressure to stop using the phrase from colleagues he was writing grants with, but he gave in this time around for financial reasons. “Getting a grant could be the difference between a graduate student getting a paycheck and us having to let a graduate student go, or having to let a full-time employee of the university go,” he said.
Some researchers have been looking for grants in new places as federal money dries up. Dana Fisher, a professor at American University and the director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, has procured private funding to research ways to improve and expand communication about climate change in North America. She’s also looking overseas for funding, where she’s had success during past Republican administrations that were hesitant to approve grants for climate research. When George W. Bush was president, Fisher got a grant to study how climate action in US cities and states could influence federal policymaking, an effort funded by the Norwegian Research Council. That fact raised some eyebrows when she mentioned it to people she was interviewing in Congress. “They’re like, ‘Huh?’” Fisher said. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s what happens when there’s a Republican administration.’”
As scarce as funding for anything related to the climate has become under Trump, some topics appear to be even more politically toxic. In Ford’s experience, and from what he’s heard from other researchers, “equity” and “environmental justice” are “actually dirtier words.” The Trump administration has closed the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice offices at its headquarters and in all 10 of its regional offices, and continues to lay off EPA staff who helped communities dealing with pollution. Grist’s analysis of grants reveals a similar pattern: Under Trump, mentions of DEI have vanished from NSF grants entirely. Terms like “clean energy” and “pollution” have also declined, but not as sharply as climate change.
You could view the federal government’s pressure on scientists to change their language in different ways. Is it Orwellian-style censorship, silencing dissent and policing language? Or simply the right of a funder, whose politics changes with each administration, to ask for research that reflects its concerns? Does it affect what research gets done, or will applicants simply swap in harmless synonyms to ensure the work can continue?
The answer is complicated, according to the USDA’s Roberts. Many of the climate projects at the agency’s research division that have so far avoided cancellation are stuck in funding purgatory, awaiting a fate that could hinge on a politically charged word or two. Scientists are adapting their research to better align with White House priorities, hoping to continue equipping farmers with the knowledge of how to adapt to a warming world — and scrubbing any forbidden language in the meantime.
“Clever word usage, and controlling the scope of how the research is presented, allows for scientists to keep doing the work,” Roberts said. “There’s no one going around hunting these people down, thankfully. Not yet, anyway.”
A list of words related to climate and the environment included in the leaked USDA ARS banned words memo
Climate: climate OR “climate change” OR “climate-change” OR “changing climate” OR “climate consulting” modeling” OR “climate models” OR “climate model” OR “climate accountability” OR “climate risk adaptation” OR “climate resilience” OR “climate smart agriculture” OR “climate smart forestry” O[–] “climatesmart” OR “climate science” OR “climate variability” OR “global warming” OR “global-wa[–] “carbon sequestration” OR “GHG emission” OR “GHG monitoring” OR “GHG modeling” OR “carb[–] “emissions mitigation” OR “greenhouse gas emission” OR “methane emissions” OR “environmen[–] “green infrastructure” OR “sustainable construction” OR “carbon pricing” OR “carbon markets” O[–] energy”
Clean energy: “clean energy” OR “clean power” OR “clean fuel” OR “alternative energy” OR “hyd[–] OR “geothermal” OR “solar energy” OR “solar power” OR “photovoltaic” OR “agrivoltaic” OR “wi[–] OR “wind power” OR “nuclear energy” OR “nuclear power” OR “bioenergy” OR “biofuel” OR “biogas” OR “biomethane” OR “ethanol” OR “diesel” OR “aviation fuel” OR “pyrolysis” OR “energy conversion”
Clean transportation: electric vehicle, hydrogen vehicle, fuel cell, low-emission vehicle
Pollution remediation: “runoff” OR “membrane filtration” OR “microplastics” OR “water pollution” OR “air pollution” OR “soil pollution” OR “groundwater pollution” OR “pollution remediation” OR “pollution abatement” OR “sediment remediation” OR “contaminants of environmental concern” OR “CEC” OR “PFAS” OR “PFOA” OR “PCB” OR “nonpoint source pollution”
Water infrastructure: “water collection” OR “water treatment” OR “water storage” OR “water distribution” OR “water management” OR “rural water” OR “agricultural water” OR “water conservation” OR “water efficiency” OR “water quality” OR “clean water” OR “safe drinking water” OR “field drainage” OR “tile drainage”
Note: The original leaked memo screenshot was obtained by More Perfect Union. Cut off words or phrases are marked with [–].
2026-04-06 18:00:00
特朗普政府与非洲各国政府签订了数十项双边卫生协议，将数十亿美元援助直接交给当地政府，而非依赖西方非政府组织（NGO）。这一做法源于对“NGO工业综合体”的批评，即认为美国国际开发署（USAID）的大部分资金被外国非营利组织消耗，而本地卫生工作者获得的支持有限。尽管USAID的运作存在缺陷，但其在抗击艾滋病、疟疾等疾病方面发挥了关键作用，且过去并未出现大规模腐败问题。然而，特朗普政府的激进改革导致了援助中断，引发全球范围内医疗资源短缺，甚至造成生命损失。
新政策要求非洲国家分享敏感健康数据和资源，以换取美国的援助，但此举引发了隐私和利益分配的担忧。此外，援助协议中可能附加严格的地缘政治条件，例如要求赞比亚将矿产资源交给美国企业，或排除与美国关系紧张的国家（如南非）参与谈判。尽管一些全球卫生专家认为将资金交给本地政府是长期有益的，但这一转变的迅速和缺乏过渡性也带来了风险，包括资金管理不善和对弱势群体的潜在影响。
社区卫生工作者莫加迪沙（Margaret Odera）表示，尽管援助协议陷入法律纠纷，她仍对新政策抱有希望，认为资金最终会惠及本地医疗人员。然而，专家指出，这种“一刀切”的做法可能难以持续，且未来美国政府可能仍需重新引入NGO以弥补本地体系的不足。总体而言，这一政策转变标志着全球卫生援助模式的重大变化，但其效果仍需时间检验，且可能对最贫困国家的人民造成严重影响。
A surprising quirk of the Trump administration is that every so often, it tries so hard to be anti-woke that it accidentally does something woke.
See, for example, the efforts of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who oversaw USAID’s demise — directives that have contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — and who stood at the White House beside the president of Kenya a few months ago, railing against what he called the “NGO industrial complex.”
Now, I don’t know who taught Rubio that progressive catchphrase, but I doubt that he got it from INCITE!, the radical feminist collective that popularized a variation of the term in an anthology that examined the role of nonprofits in undermining social progress. In the two decades that followed, the idea of a nonprofit or — as they’re often known in international contexts — NGO “industrial complex” grew into a snarky self-critique for much of that sector’s left-leaning young workforce. By the time Teen Vogue used the term in 2022, the phrase also hinted at an enduring related criticism of USAID’s tendency to primarily fund Western nonprofits rather than local governments and organizations in recipient countries.
In an unexpected twist, this term has found its way into the vocabulary of a very Republican secretary of state, now reflecting a preference for funding foreign governments over non-governmental organizations (NGOs). “If we’re trying to help countries, help the country,” Rubio said in his remarks in December announcing a new $1.6 billion bilateral aid deal between the US State Department and Kenya. “Don’t help the NGO to go in and find a new line of business.”
Whatever one thinks of Rubio, he has a point. As part of the “America First Global Health Strategy” announced last year, the Trump administration has embraced an approach to foreign aid that more left-leaning reformists have been talking about for years, a concept known as localization, or the idea that giving aid directly to local governments and organizations — not Western nonprofits — is the best and most cost-effective way to strengthen global aid overall and global health systems especially. In recent months, the US has negotiated dozens of deals between the State Department and African governments, which are set to collectively receive billions of dollars that they can spend as they see fit.
The logic might seem sound. But it hasn’t happened sooner because it’s also risky. It’s harder to audit a foreign government than a well-established, well-connected NGO. And millions of lives are on the line. The transition from the one approach to the other is also fraught: Dismantling USAID has disrupted access to vital medications and health services around the world, leading to mass suffering and loss of life. It is unclear if this new strategy will be able to fill those lapses in care, especially for the women and children most vulnerable to aid cuts.
But if there were ever a moment to blow up the entire old aid order, it’s arguably now, when there is very little left to lose. And it turns out some surprising figures in global health are cautiously optimistic about it.
“They’re basically making a bet that they can do it and get away with it, and if things go wrong, they’ll get a bit of a pass,” Rachel Bonnifield, director of the global health policy program at the Center for Global Development, said of the administration. “And that’s probably true, and it very well might be a good thing” for global health in the long run.
It comes at a critical juncture for global health and American foreign aid more broadly. “We all have to work hard to ensure that these disruptive moments are moments of real progress,” said Jirair Ratevosian, a senior adviser for health equity policy under the Biden administration and now a senior scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. If all goes well, the strategy could “be a huge success for this administration,” he said, “something that I think, decades from now, public health will credit this administration for.”
It’s worth noting, however, that this MAGA-fied global health strategy has also doubled as just another way for this administration to get other countries to do what they want. For example, watchdog groups have raised serious concerns about the terms of the new deals, which require African countries to share sensitive health data and even precious minerals with the United States just to keep their clinics open. Many people won’t get their HIV meds at all this year simply because Trump takes issue with the governments they live under. And the administration’s rushed timeline — which included shutting off existing aid flows overnight, instead of transitioning over time — has led to deadly lapses in services in the countries that can least afford it.
What’s clear is that this administration has enacted the most sweeping reform to global health in a generation. But so far, they’ve opted to do so in the worst way possible. The question for those that inherit this new structure is whether something good can come from it: Will this change herald a new norm of more effective giving that advocates have dreamed about for decades — or will global aid fully transform into another cudgel that this White House and the next ones brandish to pressure poorer nations into doing their bidding?
Margaret Odera is a community health worker in Kenya. In 2006, she was diagnosed with HIV and nearly died of the virus before a local health worker, funded by USAID, convinced her to seek free anti-retroviral therapies through PEPFAR.
“My life was saved through USAID,” Odera, who also credits the agency with helping her find her own calling as a health worker, told me. Despite that, she often felt that there was something amiss about how it distributed its resources.
“Most of the money, maybe 70 percent of it, was going directly into people’s pockets,” she said with a sigh, instead of “coming to the ground for community members.” She’s referring here to the notion that foreign (often North American or European) nonprofits gobbled up most of USAID’s budget, while local health workers on the ground like herself received minimal support.
It is true that almost all of the big USAID contracts went to a small group of large organizations, many of them American NGOs. As of 2024, just over 10 percent of USAID grants and contracts went to local groups in recipient countries, a statistic that Elon Musk later called out to smear the agency as fundamentally wasteful.
Despite the Trump administration’s admonitions, there is no evidence of widespread waste, fraud, or abuse at organizations funded by USAID. In fact, their work saved millions of lives each year.
Still, the US might have been able to save even more lives if local groups and governments played a more central role in distributing aid. The research group the Share Trust found that channeling funding through local groups is 32 percent more cost-effective than funding higher-salaried Western NGOs.
“I don’t think it’s as inefficient as they say it is, but it’s undeniable that there is overhead incurred in the United States,” Bonnifield said. Between the higher prices of foreign salaries and the expense of transporting workers to and from the countries in which they’re working, the costs simply “add up and get expensive.”
And that means less money for Odera and other local health workers, who in Kenya, are paid a meager government stipend worth about $35 per month — less than the country’s minimum wage. There are roughly 3 million community health workers globally — who often serve as a critical, and sometimes only, line of medical contact, especially for people in poorer countries. And the vast majority of these workers do not receive any salary at all.
Before Trump, USAID-funded NGOs did employ and pay a massive number of local health workers. But this model also led to a kind of parallel health care system, Bonnifield said, where NGOs — with their big budgets and better salaries — would inadvertently “poach from the public sector.”
The result was a bifurcated health sector. While USAID was very effective at combatting specific diseases like HIV or malaria, these programs were effectively siloed from countries’ broader primary health care systems, which often went underfunded. Many people knew where to get their HIV meds, but struggled to find a primary care doctor.
“People want to go to a health care center, and they want to get all of their support in one stop,” Ratevosian said. “They want to get tested for HIV, they want to pick up their malaria medications, they want to get checked for high blood pressure, just like anyone else wants to in any other country in the world.”
But even though USAID was never perfect, its wholesale destruction instantly put millions of people’s lives at risk, thrusting local health workers into a panic around the world.
Odera remembers the chaotic day the agency laid off its health staff — including a clinic providing HIV care and anti-retroviral therapies — in Mathare, one of Kenya’s largest slums.
“I feared for my life,” said Odera, who still relied on USAID to keep her own HIV in check. “I was asking myself, ‘What will happen five years from now, if I’m not taking drugs? I still have small kids, who I’m educating, and if I die now, what will happen to my children?’”
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world did die in the immediate aftermath, from hunger or preventable diseases, unable to access previously USAID-funded resources.
In the following months, however, elements of USAID’s work experienced a groggy rebirth, culminating in September with the release of a new “America First” global health plan, parts of which read oddly familiar to progressive reformists who favor localization.
Suddenly, it seemed, the Trump administration was ready to make a deal: As part of an untested new strategy, the US would enter into “multiyear bilateral agreements” directly with recipient countries, offering up to billions of dollars of support in exchange for the promise to progressively increase their own domestic health spending to varying degrees. Kenya’s was the first to be negotiated in December, followed by Uganda, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and others soon after. As of March, the US had negotiated bilateral deals with 27 countries across Africa and Central America.
At first glance, “of course we were excited,” said Peter Waiswa, a Ugandan health systems researcher and associate professor at the Makerere University School of Public Health. Not only was US global health aid on the rise but for the first time, local authorities would take center stage.
“From a systems perspective, there’s no alternative to government in terms of doing a public good,” Waiswa said. “And so that was exciting that maybe at last, the [Ugandan] government will have a little bit more to be able to deliver.”
But this is the Trump White House’s global health strategy after all, and the State Department has made no secret of advancing its own interests in shaping bilateral deals.
For one thing, the White House expects recipient countries to share health data and biological specimens with the US government. This is ostensibly put forth as a means of quickly identifying and quashing disease outbreaks as they arise, which might sound like a benign addendum — it is generally good when countries share health data with one another. But advocates have raised alarms over whether the data-sharing terms will abide by local privacy laws, and, moreover, whether African nations will actually benefit from any health innovations gleaned from the data, such as when African countries struggled to access Ebola treatments developed from their own citizens’ health data.
Allan Maleche, executive director of the Kenya Legal & Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS, said that the biggest concern is about who controls that data, and eventually profits off of it: “What are the consent and limitations safeguards when you share data across borders?”
In December, dozens of organizations signed a letter addressed to African heads of state raising objections to the data sharing requirement. Kenya’s health deal with the US is currently on hold until a data privacy lawsuit proceeds through that country’s court system. And Zimbabwe ended talks with the US about health aid in February over similar concerns.
Another emerging risk is that the agreements could come with increasingly strict geopolitical strings attached. In Zambia, the US State Department has refused to sign over lifesaving aid unless the country agrees to fork over its vast mineral reserves to American businesses.
“It is effectively not really a health strategy, but a security and economic strategy,” Mihir Mankad, director of advocacy and global health policy at Doctors Without Borders, told me. Other countries on the president’s bad side, such as South Africa, have been excluded from the negotiations altogether, severely disrupting their responses to public health crises.
“They pick winners and losers every single day,” Ratevosian said. “They punish people who don’t subscribe to their beliefs, and that is carried over to foreign assistance — and that’s a recipe for danger.”
Odera, the community health worker, is choosing to not care about those concerns right now, because for the first time in a long time, she feels optimistic. She’s frustrated that Kenya’s agreement with the US has gotten caught up in the courts.
“Anything that improves the health security of our country is good for me,” Odera said, who is convinced that soon enough, with money going into the Kenyan government’s hands, the benefits will trickle down to local health workers like herself. All she’s asking for is a minimum wage, which in Kenya, is about $120 per month.
It will take months, maybe years, to see if that materializes. And as hopeful as Odera is, even she worries there’s a risk that, without proper oversight, the money could easily be lost to mismanagement. For what it’s worth, studies on the effects of bilateral aid on corruption have had mixed results, with some researchers finding little association between the two, and others finding a significant risk, especially when aid doesn’t come with anti-corruption requirements. Under the previous USAID model, despite the Trump administration’s claims, evidence shows that corruption was rare. Well-resourced NGOs tend to have established systems for keeping their accounting in order, for example, even in very fragile contexts like Afghanistan, where audits by USAID found that only about 0.4 percent of funds ever strayed from their intended purposes. The Trump administration fired the USAID watchdog charged with monitoring corruption back in February of last year.
And every global health expert I spoke with for this story agreed that in the long run, moving more money into local hands is a good thing. US presidents have been trying and mostly failing to do so for years. But nobody has ever dared to do it so quickly — and for good reason.
Yes, the NGO industrial complex was flawed. But it also played a crucial role in making HIV a much less deadly disease around the world and helped make it the safest time in history to be a child. It often found ways to protect those who face discrimination or live on the margins, including women and LGBTQ people, even when their governments chose not to. And we very well may miss it when it’s gone.
“If there is an advantage to the abruptness [of the Trump administration’s changes], it’s that people have to take it seriously immediately,” said Mankad of Doctors Without Borders. “But if there’s a disadvantage, it’s that the bottom could fall out right away.”
In a perfect world, there would be no need for NGOs. There would be no need for foreign aid. Odera and other local health workers like her would earn the salaries they deserve without having to rely on often capricious aid flowing from the powers that be in Washington, DC.
But we don’t live in that world. And so far, it’s entirely unclear whether the Trump administration’s blustery, bullying approach will even come close to ushering in the vision of a world without a need for foreign aid, one in which people like Odera can thrive. But for many people in the poorest nations, the road ahead could be deadly — or at least very rough. For many of these countries, the co-investment that Trump’s deals require may be far too expensive to sustain, and the logistics too complicated to organize overnight.
Even so, this structural shift is probably permanent. Future US administrations may eventually bring more NGOs back into the fold to backstop local governments and help ensure the continuation of care for those who need it — but the era of largely bypassing recipient governments is rightfully, incontrovertibly coming to an end.
“It aligns with where the momentum is elsewhere in global health, and what the demands of African countries have been for some time,” Bonnifield said. “It will be hard to come back from this.”
2026-04-05 20:30:00
我经常与许多聪明的人合作，有时他们提出的问题会让我停下脚步。这发生在我的专栏《Your Mileage May Vary》最新一期发布后，该期讨论了将孩子送入私立学校而非公立学校是否在道德上令人不安。我的编辑之一布莱恩·沃尔什提出了一个让我深有共鸣的问题，他指出，作为布鲁克林公立学校8岁孩子的家长，最让我感到困扰的并非道德层面，而是面对教育选择时的极度不确定性。作为父母，我们只有一个机会去决定孩子的教育路径，而无法通过对照实验来验证结果。这种不确定性让人焦虑，尤其是在AI正在重塑劳动力市场和社会结构的当下。
传统上，成功的公式是：好成绩、好大学、好工作。但如今这一路径正在瓦解，我们难以预知15年后哪些技能真正重要，或者小学课程是否能影响未来的职业发展。此外，人际关系网络的重要性也在变化，AI的普及可能削弱或增强其作用。尽管我作为未来学家对此感到困惑，但我也意识到，这种不确定性并非独有，许多专家也难以给出明确答案，而他们却可能以每年4万美元的学费来“假装”能解决这个问题。
我引用的西格尔的研究确实令人安心——家庭背景比学校环境更重要。但即便如此，那种深夜的焦虑感依然存在：“如果我错了怎么办？”这让我想到玛丽·奥利弗所说的“独特而珍贵的生命”，在没有明确指导手册的情况下，如何为孩子规划未来？这在最稳定的时期都很难，如今在AI变革的背景下更显艰难。
我认为，虽然培养孩子的软技能和元认知能力（如批判性思维、适应力）很重要，但更重要的是关注结构性问题。如果我们将精力集中在个人层面的技能培养上，就像试图通过更好的太阳帽来抵御气候变化一样，效果有限。相反，我们需要推动政治参与和集体行动，以应对AI带来的系统性挑战。例如，支持技术公平的组织、投票给符合自己愿景的领导人、传播对AI公司宣传的反叙事。
我曾陷入“囤积”心态，认为通过教育、工作和储蓄就能掌控未来。但当我患上慢性疾病时，这种幻觉被打破，我意识到个人努力无法解决所有问题。而我的朋友则通过紧密的社区支持，更好地应对了类似困境。她的经历让我反思，AI冲击下，或许我们应该从“囤积”转向“团结”模式，重视集体力量而非个人奋斗。
因此，我建议家长们关注结构性问题，积极参与政治和集体行动，同时培养孩子对社会问题的思考能力。这不仅能帮助他们更好地应对未来的不确定性，也能让他们在社会中拥有更多话语权和安全感。
I work with a lot of very smart people, and sometimes one of them asks me a question that stops me in my tracks. That’s what happened after I published the newest installment of my advice column, Your Mileage May Vary, which was about whether it’s morally icky to send your kid to private school instead of the local public school.
Bryan Walsh, one of my editors, hit me with the question below. I felt so many people would relate to it that I wanted to publish it along with my own response to it. In the future, I hope to share more of these smart questions from within our newsroom. For now, consider this one about making decisions under radical uncertainty. Here’s Bryan’s question:
Sigal’s column is characteristically smart, and I’d encourage anyone wrestling with the decision about how to educate their child to read it. But as a parent of an 8-year-old in a Brooklyn public school, what strikes me most about the private-vs.-public debate isn’t the ethical dimension — it’s the sheer vertigo of not knowing.
Something I realized fairly soon as a parent is that we get exactly one shot at it. There is no control group. You can’t run your kid through public school, rewind, try private, and then compare outcomes at age 30. You’re forced to make what could be a massive, consequential decision with radically incomplete information.
That uncertainty gnaws at me. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the basic formula for life success was still legible: get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job. That pathway still exists, but it’s fraying in ways that make school choice, like so much else today, feel even more like a shot in the dark. What skills will actually matter in 15 years? Will the curriculum your kid learns in third grade have any bearing on a labor market being reshaped by AI? Will the network your child builds matter less — or even more?
I’m supposed to be a futurist, and I have no idea. I suppose it’s some comfort that neither does anyone else, though plenty of people will charge you $40,000 a year in tuition to pretend they do.
The research Sigal cites is genuinely reassuring — family background matters more than which building your kid sits in. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t silence the 3 am voice that whispers: What if you’re getting this wrong?
This is such Relatable Content! How are you supposed to set up your child’s “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver put it, when life offers you no clear instruction manual and you only get one try?
This is hard in the most stable of times. And it feels even harder now, when so many parents are wondering how they can possibly educate their kids in a way that’ll prepare them for AI’s disruptions to the labor market and society overall.
You’re right about two things. First, the old formula for life success — good grades at a good school will get you a good job — can be counted on less and less. And second, parents now have to make decisions about their kids’ education with radically incomplete information.
Uncertainty is a very hard thing to hold, especially at 3 am.
So at this point, I could try to reassure you by telling you the concrete things you can do to benefit your individual child. I could reiterate what many AI executives and early adopters have told their own kids: Cultivate soft skills (like listening, empathy, and accountability) and metacognitive skills (like critical thinking, experimentation, and flexibility).
I could also reiterate something I’ve said before: A good education is about much more than ensuring job security. As Aristotle argued back in Ancient Greece, it’s about cultivating all the character virtues that make for a flourishing life — honesty, courage, justice, and especially phronesis or good judgment (learning to discern the morally salient features of a given situation so you can make a judgment call that’s well-attuned to that unique situation). The advent of AI makes a virtue like phronesis more relevant than ever, because your kid will need to be able to wisely discern how to make use of emerging technologies — and how not to.
But the thing about the virtues is, you build them up through practice. If your kid doesn’t have the opportunity to encounter friction that forces them to practice reasoning and deliberating, they’ll have a very hard time developing good judgment.
And AI tends to remove friction. It makes things fast and easy, which can be handy in the short term, but can lead to intellectual — and moral — deskilling in the long term. As AI use pervades society more and more, I think the most unusual kind of person will be one who has become neither brain-dulled nor virtue-dulled by deferring to AI models without using their own cognitive muscles first.
So if your goal is to make your kid stand out in a way that just might give them a leg-up when they’re grown, I’d say: Make sure that they build those muscles while they’re young, and for the love of god, keep exercising them. Even if this doesn’t give them full security in the labor market, it’ll help them live a more flourishing life writ large.
The nice thing about this advice for you, as a parent struggling to know what to do for your kid, is that it means you don’t have to do anything wildly different from what’s been done in the past! The benefits of a classic humanities or liberal-arts education are still among the very best you can give your child.
But.
While I think all the advice I’ve mentioned so far is reasonable on the individual level, I’d argue the very best advice would be to question the entire premise that focusing on that individual level will be an effective way to ensure much of anything for your child’s future.
On the current trajectory, it seems all too likely that we’re heading toward a future of “gradual disempowerment,” as some AI researchers put it. The basic idea is that as AI becomes a cheaper alternative to human labor in most jobs, the economic pressure to sideline humans will become incredibly hard to resist. Historically, citizens in democratic states have enjoyed a bunch of rights and protections because states needed us — we provide the labor that makes everything run, from the economy to the military.
But when AI provides the labor and the state becomes less dependent on us, it doesn’t have to pay so much attention to our demands. Worse, any state that does continue taking care of human workers might find itself at a competitive disadvantage against others that don’t. And so the forces that have traditionally kept governments accountable to their citizens gradually erode, and we end up deeply disempowered.
Under these conditions, focusing on the object-level question of “what skills should I teach my individual child?” is a bit like trying to protect your kid from climate change by buying them a better sunhat.
Instead, it makes more sense to focus on the structural problem, which demands political engagement and collective organizing. If you want your kid to have a job as an adult, then teaching them to be an effective citizen and advocate — and doing that work yourself right now — probably matters more than any particular school subject they will study. This can take many concrete forms: organizing with your labor union, supporting advocacy groups that push the government to make tech equitable and accountable, voting for politicians who share your vision, and spreading compelling counter-narratives to the fanciful stories that AI companies are selling the public.
I know that accepting the limits of what we can guarantee by focusing on the personal level is a tough pill to swallow. We live in a culture that conditions us to think in terms of the atomized individual and valorizes being self-sufficient and self-directed (see Silicon Valley’s current obsession with being “high agency.”) But my own life has taught me how fragile that model is.
I grew up in a family on welfare, so financial and professional security feels very salient to me. I tend to gravitate towards a “hoarding” mentality. That is, faced with my own 3 am anxieties, I spent years trying to maintain a sense of control by telling myself that if I burnish my educational credentials, work hard at my job, and save enough money, I’ll be okay.
But for me, that illusion of control came crashing down a decade ago when I developed a chronic illness. For a while, it was so intense that I could barely walk. And I was shattered to discover that nothing I’d hoarded — my education, my job, my savings — could help me. Even worse than the physical pain was the emotional pain of feeling alone: My doctors shunted me from specialist to specialist, and my friends and family didn’t realize that I needed more support. I was so used to the idea that I was self-sufficient, in my castle buttressed by the achievements I’d hoarded, that I didn’t think to ask.
Recently, a friend of mine also developed a chronic illness. But unlike me, she’d spent many years cultivating a community of extremely tight-knit friends. They’re the sort of group that talks a lot about solidarity and mutual aid. And they walk the talk. I’ve watched how my friend, buoyed by all the meals and parties and other ministrations they lavish on her, has been able to manage her physical challenges with so much less fear and so much more security than me. My castle isolated me. Her refusal to build one gave her true safety.
As AI disrupts the labor market, I’m trying to move myself from the hoarding model to the solidarity model.
And I wonder if it might serve you and your family well, too. The problem we’re all about to face together is structural, not individual. So the benefits you can offer your child on the individual level are, it pains me to say, fairly limited. But if you focus on political engagement and collective organizing that could actually make some difference to the structural dynamic — and teach your child to ask structural questions and be civically engaged as well — you might be able to sleep a little better at night.
2026-04-05 19:00:00
伊朗战争导致霍尔木兹海峡受阻，限制了全球石油供应，进而推高了油价。在最新一期的《Explain It to Me》播客中，Vox探讨了当前汽油、咖啡和牛奶价格上涨的原因。汽油价格上涨主要归因于全球石油市场供需变化，美国虽然仍是全球最大石油生产国，但其炼油厂配置只能处理特定类型的原油，因此仍需进口较重的原油。咖啡价格上涨则与气候变化有关，越南和巴西等主要产区近期遭遇干旱，同时特朗普政府曾对巴西实施50%的关税，尽管后来被取消，但成本传递存在滞后，导致消费者仍需支付较高价格。牛奶价格上涨则源于整个供应链中的小幅度成本累积，包括加工、运输和畜牧业成本。由于牛奶主要用于生产奶酪（尤其是披萨用的马苏里拉奶酪），因此牛奶价格的上涨也会影响披萨等食品的价格。
When I was growing up, my dad and I would play a game at the grocery store: As the cashier was ringing up the items on the list my mom had given us, we each would guess what we thought the total would amount to. Whoever was closest won bragging rights, and maybe if we were feeling indulgent, the candy bar of our choosing.
I’m shopping for just myself now, but I’m still pretty good at this game. That means I’m always paying attention to how prices change. What used to feed a family of three is now just enough to cover my own grocery bill, and those prices just keep going up. So what gives? Is this just regular-degular inflation? Or is something else driving up the price of the items we use day to day?
On the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we look into three goods and why they cost so much right now: gas, coffee, and milk.
You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
First up, a trip to the gas station. Sam Ori is the executive director of the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and he says the issue with oil right now is global. The war with Iran is choking the Strait of Hormuz, limiting the amount of oil available to the rest of the world.
“The price of gasoline that we pay at the pump is set in the global oil market,” he tells Vox. “Crude oil is like the feed stock that makes gasoline. More than half of the price that you’re paying at the pump is just directly the result of the price of crude oil in the global market.”
That price, plus federal and state taxes along with profit mean Americans are paying more to fill up their cars.
The United States is still the largest producer of oil in the world. But self-sufficiency isn’t really an option. “The United States still imports a lot of oil because the refineries that we have in this country are configured to refine a certain quality of crude oil,” Ori says. “It’s not easy to change the configuration of those refineries. The United States produces what’s called light, sweet crude oil. We still need a lot of heavier, sour crudes. So we import those and then we export the light oil.”
Our next stop is your local cafe. Gone are the days of hand-wringing over millennials squandering their wealth on $5 lattes. Those lattes have easily crept up to $10.
Bloomberg reporter Ilena Peng says the price of coffee has been going up since early 2024, and we can blame that on the weather. Vietnam and Brazil are the world’s biggest coffee producers, and both have had dry weather recently. “The boogeyman is ultimately climate,” she says.
But tariffs also play a role here. Last year, President Donald Trump put a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, where most of the beans at your local coffee shop likely come from. Eventually, in November, coffee and other products were exempted from tariffs, and in February, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs.
The exemption, Peng says, “helped roasters quite a bit with being able to plan, even though a lot of them are still dealing with leftover costs. You contract inventories months ahead.” That means there’s a major lag between that cost and the cost at the consumer level, so we may be paying a lot for those lattes for a while.
What about the milk that goes in that coffee? Dairy prices are high right now too: The national average for a gallon of milk is $4.03. Charles Nicholson is an economics professor at Penn State University, where he teaches about supply chain management and food supply. He says the way we go about setting dairy prices gets a little complicated.
“Farms actually get paid on the basis of what the milk is used for,” he tells Vox. “So the highest value and the highest price that you would pay a farmer for milk is for milk that’s gonna go into that carton at the grocery store.”
Unlike with gas and coffee, it’s hard to point to any specific factor driving up the cost of milk. Instead, it’s a story of small price hikes all the way through the system: Other costs include the processors who put the milk into the cartons and food retailers. Transportation is a factor (remember those rising gas prices?), along with the care and feeding of livestock.
We may also see this price change outside that carton of milk too. If you’ve ordered a pizza recently, you’ve experienced where most of the milk in the United States goes. “Close to 40 percent of the milk that we produce goes into making cheeses of various kinds,” Nicholson says. “A lot of that is mozzarella cheese that would go on a pizza. And pizza restaurants can also play around a little bit with — how much cheese am I gonna put on that pizza?” That cheddar is costing some serious cheddar.
2026-04-05 18:00:00
编辑注：2026年4月6日早上6点（东部时间）：本文最初于2018年3月29日发表，现为复活节特别回顾。对于许多基督徒而言，复活节是最重要的节日，纪念耶稣基督受难后的复活。然而，在北美和欧洲，复活节的文化影响力已不如圣诞节。美国天主教神父兼作家詹姆斯·马丁曾调侃道：“今年寄出数百张复活节贺卡？参加太多复活节聚会？电视上的复活节主题节目让人厌倦？我可没这么觉得。”为何复活节没有像圣诞节那样被广泛世俗化？这一现象揭示了美国宗教与社会历史的深层原因。它表明，我们如今所理解的节日传统是相对较近且具有政治色彩的发明。
在基督教历史上，圣诞节和复活节曾具有相似的文化地位。但清教徒（包括英国和美国的清教徒）反对所有节日，认为它们是愚昧、酗酒和狂欢的象征。他们尤其批评圣诞节和复活节，认为这些节日与异教习俗有关。例如，苏格兰长老会牧师亚历山大·希斯洛普在1853年出版的小册子《两座巴比伦》中声称，复活节名称源自异教女神埃斯特（Eostre）和巴比伦女神伊什塔尔（Ishtar），并指责复活节的斋戒习俗是异教的堕落表现。他甚至认为复活节的鸡蛋和食物等习俗也带有恶魔色彩。
然而，圣诞节在19世纪经历了文化重塑。历史学家斯蒂芬·尼森鲍姆指出，圣诞节被重新塑造为一个中产阶级、家庭友好的节日，与维多利亚时代和新教价值观紧密相连。通过华盛顿·欧文、克里门特·克拉克·穆尔和查尔斯·狄更斯等人的作品，圣诞节逐渐成为世俗化的节日，与家庭和童年紧密相关。相比之下，复活节并未经历类似的世俗化过程，其宗教意义始终未被削弱。尽管复活节也有家庭友好的元素（如复活节彩蛋），但缺乏圣诞节那样的文化推广。
圣诞节之所以更容易被世俗化，是因为其主题（耶稣的诞生）更易于转化为温馨的家庭故事，而复活节的核心信息（耶稣受难与复活）则涉及死亡与救赎，难以简化。正如《天主教费城》网站的马修·甘比诺所言：“正是这种矛盾让我更爱复活节。这个可变的春季节日庆祝的不是神人生命的开始，而是他战胜苦难与死亡的胜利。”圣诞节如今与家庭观念和维多利亚时代的新教价值观紧密相连，而复活节的神秘性与深刻性则使其在世俗文化中显得更加独特。尽管关于圣诞节意义的争论仍在持续，但至少有一个节日的意义是明确的。
Editor’s note, April 6, 2026, 6 am ET: This story was originally published on March 29, 2018, and we’re revisiting it for this Easter.
Christians from a variety of traditions will celebrate Easter this Sunday. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. For many Christians, including those from Eastern Orthodox traditions (who generally celebrate Easter later than Western Christians, as they use a different calendar), Easter is the most important Christian holiday of all.
But in North America and Europe, Easter has a diminished cultural force as a time for secular celebration — its wider cultural cachet hardly approaches that of Christmas. As Jesuit priest and writer James Martin wryly wrote for Slate, “Sending out hundreds of Easter cards this year? Attending way too many Easter parties? … Getting tired of those endless Easter-themed specials on television? I didn’t think so.”
So why don’t we celebrate Easter the way we do Christmas? The answer tells us as much about the religious and social history of America as it does about either holiday. It reveals the way America’s holiday “traditions” as we conceive of them now are a much more recent and politically loaded invention than one might expect.
Christmas and Easter were roughly equal in cultural importance for much of Christian history. But the Puritans who made up the preponderance of America’s early settlers objected to holidays altogether. Echoing an attitude shared by the English Puritans, who had come to short-lived political power in the 17th century under Oliver Cromwell, they decried Christmas and Easter alike as times of foolishness, drunkenness, and revelry.
Easter has maintained its status as a religious holiday and — the Easter Bunny and eggs aside — largely avoided any wider cultural proliferation.
Cotton Mather, among the most notable New England preachers, lamented how “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty … by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!” As historian Stephen Nissenbaum wrote in The Battle for Christmas, “Christmas was a season of ‘misrule’ a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity.”
Like other feasting days (such as the pre-Lent holiday we now call Mardi Gras), Christmas was a dangerous time in which social codes could be violated and social hierarchies upended. (Among the practices Puritans objected to was the popularity of the “Lord of Misrule,” a commoner allowed to preside as “king” over the festivities in noble houses for the day.)
The very nature of having a holiday, furthermore, was seen as problematic. Rather, the Puritans argued, singling out any day for a “holiday” implied that celebrants thought of other days as less holy.
Easter, too, was singled out as a dangerous time. A Scottish Presbyterian minister, Alexander Hislop, wrote a whole book about it: the 1853 pamphlet The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. Using questionable and vague sources, Hislop argued that the name of Easter derived from the pagan worship of the Germanic goddess Eostre, and through her the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. (This claim has persisted into the present day, and is often cited by those who want us to make Easter more fun and secular. Still, the evidence for the existence of Eostre in any mythological system — a single paragraph in the work of an English monk writing centuries later — let alone actual religious links between Eostre and Easter is scant at best.)
Hislop decried Easter as a pagan invention, writing: “That Christians should ever think of introducing the Pagan abstinence of Lent was a sign of evil; it showed how low they had sunk, and it was also a cause of evil; it inevitably led to deeper degradation.” Even seemingly harmless rituals — food, eggs — were signs of demonic evil: “The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now,” he wrote. Bad history it may have been, but it made good propaganda.
What did the English Puritans, their American counterparts, and this Scottish Presbyterian have in common? As the title of Hislop’s pamphlet makes clear, they were all influenced by anti-Catholicism: a suspicion of rituals, rites, and liturgy they decried as worryingly pagan. The celebration of religious holidays was associated, for many of these preachers, with two suspicious groups of people: the poor (i.e., anyone whose holiday celebrations might be deemed dangerously licentious or uncontrolled) and “papists.” (Of course, in England and America alike, those two groups of people often overlapped.)
So what changed? In the 19th century, Christmas, the secularized, domestic “family” holiday as we know it today, was reinvented. In his book, Nissenbaum goes into detail about the cultural creation of Christmas as a bourgeois, “civilized,” “traditional” holiday in the English-speaking world. Christmas, Nissenbaum argues, came to be identified with the preservation (and celebration) of childhood. Childhood itself was, of course, a relatively new concept, one linked to the rise of a growing, prosperous middle class in an increasingly industrialized society, in which child labor was (at least for the bourgeois) no longer a necessity.
Popular writers helped create a new, tamer, model of Christmas: Washington Irving’s 1822 Bracebridge Hall stories, which referenced “ancient” Christmas traditions that were, in fact, Irving’s own invention; Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “The Night Before Christmas”; and, of course, Charles Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol. Nearly everything we think we know about Christmas, from the modern image of Santa Claus to the Christmas tree, derives from the 19th century, specifically, Protestant sources, who redeemed Christmas by rendering it an appropriate, bourgeois family holiday.
But no such redemption happened for Easter. While it, too, received a minor family-friendly makeover — Easter eggs, traditionally an act of charity for the poor, became a treat for children — it didn’t have the literary PR machine behind it that Christmas did.
Instead, its theological significance intact, Easter has maintained its status as a religious holiday and — the Easter Bunny and eggs aside — largely avoided any wider cultural proliferation. A study by historian Mark Connelly found that at the dawn of the 19th century, English books referred to the two more or less equally. By the 1860s, references to Easter were half that of Christmas, a trend that only continued. By 2000, Christmas was referenced almost four times as often as Easter. Today, Christmas is a federal holiday in the US, as is the nearest weekday after, should Christmas fall on a weekend. But “Easter Monday” gets no such treatment.
The reason that Christmas, rather than Easter, became the “cultural Christian” holiday may well be prosaic. Religion News Service’s Tobin Grant suggests that the need for something frivolous to break up the monotony and cold weather rendered the Christmas season, rather than early spring, the ideal time for a period of celebration.
Or it may be theological. Christmas, with its celebration of the birth of a child, is a natural fit for a secularized celebration. Dogmatic Christians and casual semibelievers alike can agree that Jesus Christ, whether divine or not, was probably a person whose birth was worth celebrating. Plus, the subject matter makes it ideal for a child-centered holiday. The centrality of family in Christmas imagery — the Nativity scene, portraits of the madonna and child — allows it to “translate” easily into a holiday centered around children and childhood.
But the message of Easter, that of an adult man who was horribly killed, only to rise from the dead, is much harder to secularize. Celebrating Easter demands celebrating something so miraculous that it cannot be reduced, as Christmas can, to a heartwarming story about motherhood; its supernatural elements are on display front and center. It’s a story about death and resurrection.
But the same qualities that make Easter so difficult to secularize are also what make it so profound. As Matthew Gambino writes at CatholicPhilly.com,“That [paradox] is why I love Easter far more than Christmas. That moveable springtime feast celebrates not the beginning of the God-man’s life but the conquering of his suffering and ours. Easter marks the transcendence of death, the road leading beyond this life into eternity with the Father.”
Christmas as we know it today in the English-speaking world is, for better or worse, tied up in wider cultural ideas about family and a specifically Victorian, Protestant iteration of “middle-class values.” But the mystery of Easter remains strange, profound, and — for some — off-putting. But as the debate over the “meaning of Christmas” rages on, it’s nice to have one holiday, at least, where the meaning is clear.
