2026-01-10 20:30:00
最近发生了一件最奇怪的事情。我联系了一家客服部门，结果体验非常好。我发了一封邮件，很快就得到了回复，并成功获得了退款。这次积极的解决问题经历最特别的地方在于，我无法确定是否还有其他人类参与其中。然而，我短暂地意识到，预言终于实现了：AI终于让我的投诉变得更容易，并且能获得更好的结果。至少这是我愿意相信的。客服本来就是AI可以轻松处理的事情之一。事实上，这次良好的体验是由一家以AI为核心的企业Intercom提供的。他们有一个名为Fin的AI代理，负责处理大部分客户的咨询。但为什么不是全部呢？“我确信，现在很多通过电话或电脑进行的客服工作，这些岗位的人将会失业，而AI将做得更好。”OpenAI首席执行官Sam Altman在9月份对Tucker Carlson说。Altman并不是唯一一位推动自动化客服的硅谷高管。去年，Salesforce削减了4000个客服岗位，转而采用AI工具；Verizon则推出了基于Google Gemini的聊天机器人作为其客服的入口。还有Klarna，其CEO曾吹嘘用AI取代人类客服，但随后在5月份收回了说法，开始招聘更多的人类客服人员。这正是问题所在。事实证明，AI，尤其是生成式AI，在某些方面确实非常出色，但一旦遇到困难，就可能表现不佳。这就是为什么你仍然需要验证ChatGPT提供的所有信息，也是为什么尽管聊天机器人在诊断某些医疗状况方面表现良好，但它们还不能取代人类医生。在客服方面，AI擅长处理简单任务，比如退款，但在处理更复杂的案例，尤其是当客户情绪激动时，AI却可能表现得很糟糕。正如《Anchorman》中所说：“百分之六十的时间，它总是能奏效。”然而，人类客服人员正在大量被AI取代，过去几年里，无论是美国还是其他国家，这一趋势都十分明显。无论是为了降低成本还是为了显得高科技，很多公司都推出了AI客服聊天机器人作为客户的第一接触点，但很快他们就意识到，客户其实并不喜欢这种做法。据Gartner客户服务与支持领导者研究主管Brad Fager表示，这些公司现在正在撤回这些计划。“用AI取代员工的想法根本不可行，甚至也不可取，”Fager告诉我，他指出高管们可能认为用AI取代人类客服是降低成本的好方法。“但现实是，这根本行不通。”此外，也有证据表明客户并不喜欢与AI互动。2024年Gartner的一项调查显示，61%的客户更希望公司完全不使用AI来处理客服问题，而其中53%的客户表示，如果公司使用AI，他们可能会考虑转投竞争对手。正如Fager向我解释的那样，Gartner认为AI和自动化将改变未来的客服模式，但人类仍将在这个过程中发挥重要作用。许多AI整合工作将发生在后台，帮助人类客服人员更好地完成工作，而不是直接与客户互动。客户可能永远不知道AI是否参与其中。这让我想起了几年前MIT和斯坦福研究人员的一项研究，他们探讨了生成式AI如何提高客服人员的工作效率。结果显示，AI主要帮助了经验较少的客服人员。通过实时提供处理电话咨询的建议，这些员工每小时能解决14%更多的问题。这个工具是基于经验丰富的客服人员的数据进行训练的，甚至还能帮助新手客服人员更富有同理心地对待客户。相比之下，你可能体验过的聊天机器人更像是一个AI版的电话菜单。你向客服机器人求助，却只能看到一系列选项，让你不断缩小问题范围，最终找到可能由AI处理的正确代理人。这与令人恼火的传统电话菜单（如“按1查询账单，按2查询技术支持”）如出一辙。这些前端的AI解决方案本质上是将AI工具附加在旧客服系统上，效果却非常糟糕。波士顿大学市场营销教授Werner Kunz认为，很多公司只是为了尝试AI而这么做。“这并不奏效，”他告诉我，“与旧系统相比，AI的失败率太高了，如果公司现在只是用AI做这些事情，我认为这会破坏客户关系。”Kunz还指出，如果将AI用于后台，可以在更安全的环境中获得更好的效果。他还补充说：“谁在乎你是否使用AI呢？”这让我回想起最近一次令人意外的积极客服体验。我联系了Intercom公司，确认是他们的AI代理Fin解决了我的问题。整个过程没有电话菜单的困扰，也没有和聊天机器人“搏斗”才能找到真人客服的经历。Fin记录了我的投诉，用听起来像人类的邮件向我提供了解决方案，甚至在合适的语境中使用了表情符号，而且在我还没来得及感到烦躁之前就解决了问题。但说AI让客服终于变得好起来，这似乎并不完全准确。正如Kunz和Fager所解释的，很多公司错误地使用AI，或者将其附加在旧系统上，导致效果不佳。然而，Intercom联合创始人兼首席战略官Des Traynor表示，全心全意投入AI是为客户提供他们想要的东西——即时结果的最佳方式。“你不想等待，”Traynor说，“这就是人们在打电话之前先上网搜索的原因：人们只想立即解决问题，而AI正好能提供这一点。”他补充道：“当它起作用时，它对用户来说就是更好的。”Traynor承认，AI带来了软件时代，让人对它的效果产生怀疑，而这一问题也引导了Fin的开发。他说，他的公司投入了大量时间来构建一个AI评估引擎，并对每个版本进行“严酷测试”，以确保Fin不会产生错误信息或做出错误判断。因此，Fin每周能解决一百万个客户问题，解决率为67%，虽然还不是100%，但Traynor表示这个数字每个月都在上升1%。他承认有些互动需要人类介入，但在大多数情况下，AI都能更好地完成任务。在我自己的案例中，确实如此。对消费者来说，最大的问题在于，你无法选择任何公司如何处理其客服问题。此外，还存在一种收入差距，大公司如亚马逊可以投入更多资源，提供更好的客服，而小公司如本地公用事业部门只能尽力而为。然而，可以肯定的是，一场变革正在发生。有迹象表明，向公司投诉变得更加容易，但也有强烈证据表明，许多公司仍会设法让投诉变得困难，尽管他们希望让投诉更容易。AI的到来是为了帮助改善服务，但前提是它不能先让事情变得更糟。本文的版本也发表在User Friendly通讯中。点击此处订阅，以免错过下一篇文章！
The weirdest thing happened to me recently. I contacted a customer service department and enjoyed it. I sent an email, heard back promptly, and got a refund. What was most notable about the positive problem-solving experience was the fact that I couldn’t tell if there was a human other than me involved.
It dawned on me, however briefly, that the prophecies were finally coming true. AI was finally making it easier for me to complain to companies and get results. At least that’s what I wanted to believe.
Customer service is supposed to be one of those things that AI can just do. Indeed, that one good experience was powered by an AI-first company called Intercom. They have an AI agent called Fin that handles most of its clients’ queries. Why not all of them?
“I’m confident that a lot of current customer support that happens over a phone or computer, those people will lose their jobs, and that’ll be better done by an AI,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Tucker Carlson, of all people, in September.
Altman is hardly the only Silicon Valley executive pushing to automate customer service. Last year, Salesforce cut 4,000 customer service jobs in favor of AI tools, and Verizon launched a chatbot powered by Google Gemini as its front door for customer service. Then there’s Klarna, whose CEO bragged about replacing humans with AI before backtracking last May and launching a recruiting drive to hire more human customer service agents.
There’s the rub. It turns out that AI, and especially generative AI, is really good at doing some things…until it isn’t. That’s why you still have to fact-check everything ChatGPT tells you and why, even though they’re good at diagnosing certain medical conditions, chatbots can’t replace human doctors. When it comes to customer service, AI can be good at simple tasks, like issuing refunds, but terrible at handling more complicated cases, especially when customers are upset and could benefit from some human empathy. To quote Anchorman, “Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.”
Still, human customer service agents are losing their jobs to AI in large numbers, and have been for the last few years, both in the United States and abroad. Whether to cut costs or look cool, a lot of companies rolled out AI-powered chatbots as the first point of contact for customers, only to realize that customers actually hate this concept. Now, these organizations are pulling back from those plans, according to Brad Fager, chief of research for customer service and support leaders at Gartner.
“The idea that you could replace your workforce is really just not viable, and it’s not even preferable,” Fager told me, noting that executives might think replacing human agents with AI is a good way to cut costs. “The reality is it’s just not working.”
There’s also evidence that customers just don’t like interacting with AI. One 2024 Gartner survey found that 61 percent of customers would prefer companies didn’t use AI at all for customer service, and 53 percent of them would consider switching to a competitor if they did. As Fager explained to me, Gartner has broadly taken the stance that AI and automation will transform the future of customer service, but that humans will play a big role in that transformation. And to many customers’ delight, a lot of the AI integration will happen on the back end, helping human agents do their jobs better rather than leading interactions. The customers themselves may never know that AI was involved.
This approach reminded me of a study I read a couple of years ago from researchers at MIT and Stanford who looked into how generative AI improved productivity in call center workers. It did, mostly for the less experienced agents. With access to an AI tool that offered real-time suggestions on how to handle calls, the workers were able to resolve 14 percent more cases per hour. The tool had been trained on data from more experienced agents and could even help novice workers be more empathetic to customers.
Contrast this with what you’ve probably experienced with chatbots: the AI version of a phone tree. This is where you ask a customer service bot for help and are met with a menu of options prompting you to narrow down your request in order to get you to the correct, probably AI-powered agent. It’s a slightly updated version of the infuriating phone tree that asks you to say or press one for billing, two for technical support, and so forth.
These front-end solutions to identify customers and their needs are essentially AI tools bolted onto old customer service systems, and they’re awful. Werner Kunz, a professor of marketing at the University of Massachusetts Boston, argues that a lot of companies are doing this just to do something with AI.
“It doesn’t work very well,” he told me. “The failure rate is way too high in comparison to the older systems, and if this is what companies are using AI at the moment for, I think it destroys customer relationships.” Kunz added that using AI in the backend would provide better results in a safer environment, and also, “Who cares about if you use AI or not?”
Which brings me back to my recent, surprisingly positive customer service experience. I reached out to Intercom, the company that built the software, and confirmed that it was an AI agent that solved my problem. There was no phone tree analog and, in a sense, no fight with a chatbot to reach a human agent. Fin, the AI agent, registered my complaint, offered me a solution in a human-sounding email — there were even emojis used in the correct context — and closed the case before I even considered getting annoyed.
It wouldn’t quite be correct to say that customer service, thanks to AI, is finally starting to get good. As Kunz and Fager explained, lots of companies are getting it wrong by using AI for the wrong things or tacking it onto legacy systems. However, Intercom co-founder and chief strategy officer Des Traynor says that going all in on AI is the best way to give customers what they want: instant outcomes.
“You don’t want to wait,” Traynor said. “It’s the same reason why people Google before they pick up the phone: People just want instant resolution to problems and that’s what AI offers.” He added, “It’s just categorically better for users — when it works.”
Traynor admitted that AI ushered in an era of software that left people wondering if it worked, and that problem guided the development of Fin. He said his company “put a phenomenal amount of time into building an AI evaluation engine” and “torture-tests every release” to make sure Fin doesn’t hallucinate or get things wrong. As a result, Fin resolves a million customer queries a week with a 67 percent resolution rate, which is not 100 percent, but Traynor said that number is going up 1 percent every month. He conceded that some interactions needed human intervention, but in most cases, the AI can get the job done better. In my case, that was true.
The big problem here, if you’re a consumer, is that you don’t necessarily get to choose how any given company is handling its customer service. There’s also a sort of income equality gap between the haves and the have-nots, whereby bigger companies, like Amazon, can invest more and offer better customer service and small companies, like local utility boards, just do the best they can.
What’s clear, however, is that a transformation is happening. There are signals that complaining to companies is getting easier to do but also strong evidence that many companies will continue to make it difficult, even though they want to make it easier. AI is here to help make things work better, but only if it can stop making them worse first.
A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
2026-01-10 20:00:00
过去几周，埃隆·马斯克的Grok AI机器人一直在未经女性和未成年女孩同意的情况下，以惊人的速度生成色情图像。最近，彭博社的一项分析发现，Grok每小时能生成6700张此类图像，即每分钟超过一张。本周五，X平台（原推特）终于对Grok实施了一些有限的限制措施，新政策规定只有付费订阅用户才能使用Grok生成或修改图像。然而，在独立的Grok应用程序中，任何人都可以提示生成新图像，这意味着深度伪造色情内容仍在持续。
Grok一直以来都是主要AI模型中较为露骨的一个，拥有“性感”和“火辣”等可切换的模式。尽管员工曾警告称该机器人被用于生成儿童色情内容，但马斯克仍坚持认为Grok将是“最性感”的AI模型。他在X上为这一选择辩护，称这是出于商业考量，引用了1980年代VHS战胜Betamax的案例，当时色情产业支持VHS，因其存储容量更大。马斯克写道：“VHS最终胜出，部分原因在于它允许‘火辣模式’ 😉。”
马斯克的说法有一定道理。色情产业往往奖励早期采用者，而其在色情内容上的巨大利益，使其在选择两种竞争且不兼容的技术时拥有显著的影响力。然而，认为整个色情产业作为一个中立、模糊的群体决定技术战争的全貌并不准确。更准确地说，我们用来生成和分享图像的技术，通常是由那些试图迅速传播女性身体图像的人所塑造的，而这些女性往往并未真正同意。从这个角度看，Grok的能力并不算什么特别之处。
色情产业不仅帮助VHS战胜Betamax，还推动了其他技术的发展。例如，超级8胶片的普及（便于业余电影制作）、流媒体视频的兴起（私密且易于访问）、网络支付的出现（与付费流媒体内容相关）、网络分析技术的发展（对成人流媒体复杂的商业交易有帮助），以及蓝光光盘击败HD DVD。蓝光光盘的存储容量比竞争对手大，这在色情市场中尤其具有吸引力。
此外，还有一些图像分发系统是在色情产业之外发展起来的。其中许多系统都是出于人们想要迅速分享对女性身体的性化图像的动机，但这些图像的发布者往往并非自愿或知情的成年人。有时这些创新是无害的，比如谷歌图片的开发，是因为2000年很多人搜索詹妮弗·洛佩兹穿着著名低腰Versace礼服的照片，而洛佩兹本人将这一事件视为她的荣耀。在这种情况下，她穿着该礼服参加了一个高调活动，并希望被关注，因此可以合理地认为她是知情同意的。
但有时候情况就复杂得多。YouTube的诞生就源于开发者想要观看2004年珍妮特·杰克逊的“服装故障”事件，却因难以在互联网上找到相关视频而感到沮丧。杰克逊一直声称她并未打算让自己的乳房在电视上被展示，因此这属于非自愿的裸露。与此同时，马克·扎克伯格创建Facebook的灵感来自Facesmash，这是一个模仿“Hot or Not”的网站，用于将哈佛大学女生与农场动物进行比较。其初衷并非制造非自愿色情内容，而是对女性进行性化羞辱，这种行为在发布当晚就因过于受欢迎而使哈佛服务器崩溃。
因此，马斯克说那些具有“火辣模式”的技术往往表现良好，这并非完全错误。但更准确的说法是，在我们这个充满性别歧视的社会中，对未自愿女性身体的物化和羞辱具有极高的价值，以至于世界改变性技术的命运往往取决于其在促进这种行为方面的效率。AI本就注定会被用于此类目的，但只有像马斯克这样冷酷无情、愿意忽视道德底线的人，才会让事情发展到如此糟糕的地步。
For the past few weeks, Elon Musk’s Grok AI bot has been generating pornographic images of women and underage girls, without their consent, at an astounding rate. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that Grok creates 6,700 such images per hour, or more than one per minute. On Friday, X at last put some minor guardrails on the tool, with a new policy that only paying subscribers can use Grok to generate or alter images. On the standalone Grok app, however, anyone can prompt Grok to generate new images, meaning the deepfaked porn continues.
Grok has long been one of the more suggestive of the major AI models, with “spicy” and “sexy” settings that can be toggled on and off. While employees have warned that the bot is being used to generate child sex abuse materials, Musk has remained committed to the idea that Grok would be the sexiest AI model. On X, Musk has defended the choice on business grounds, citing the famous tale of how VHS beat Betamax in the 1980s after the porn industry put its weight behind VHS, with its larger storage capacity. “VHS won in the end,” Musk posted, “in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉.”
There is a certain amount of truth to Musk’s take. The porn industry tends to reward early adopters, and the money to be made in porn means that it has impressive leverage when it comes to choosing between two competing and incompatible forms of technology.
Yet the idea that porn as an industry, neutral and amorphous, settles tech wars doesn’t show us the whole truth. It would be more accurate to say that the technologies we use to generate and share images are, more often than not, shaped by people distributing images of women’s bodies — often with dubious consent from the women themselves. In that sense, Grok’s abilities are par for the course.
Porn didn’t only help VHS win over Betamax. The industry has also been linked to the mainstreaming of Super 8 film (easy and convenient for amateur filmmakers), the development of streaming video (private and easily accessible), the development of web payments (comes with paywalled streaming video), the development of web analytics (good for the complex business transactions of adult streaming), and the victory of Blu-ray over HD DVD. (Like VHS, Blu-rays held a lot more data than its competitors, which is especially attractive in the porn market.)
Then there were the systems of image distribution that developed outside of porn as an industry. A surprising amount of them revolved around people trying to share sexualized images of women’s bodies as quickly as possible — only in these cases, the people whose images getting distributed weren’t necessarily consenting adults who were getting paid for their trouble.
Sometimes the innovation was more or less harmless. Google Images was developed because so many people went searching for pictures of Jennifer Lopez in her famously low-cut Versace gown in 2000, a distinction Lopez has treated as a feather in her cap. In this case, Lopez wore the dress to a high-profile event and wanted to be seen and talked about, so it’s reasonable to assume consent.
Other times it got cloudier. The impetus for YouTube came when developers wanted to watch Janet Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction and were frustrated that it took so long to find video of it on the internet. Jackson has always maintained that she did not intend for her breast to be seen on national TV, so here, we’re dealing with nonconsensual nudity.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s progenitor for Facebook was Facesmash, a Hot or Not rip-off developed to compare the women of Harvard University’s student body to farm animals. The intent here was less to create nonconsensual pornography than it was to perform a sexualized humiliation of nonconsenting women — an act that turned out to be so popular that it overwhelmed Harvard’s servers the night it launched.
So Musk is not entirely wrong when he says that technologies with what he euphemistically refers to as “spicy mode” tend to do well. A more accurate phrasing, however, might be to say that in our misogynistic society, objectifying and humiliating the bodies of unconsenting women is so valuable that the fate of world-altering technologies depends on how good they are at facilitating it.
AI was always going to be used for this, one way or the other. But only someone as brutally uncaring and willing to cut corners as Elon Musk would allow it to go this wrong.
2026-01-10 19:30:00
2025年1月，唐纳德·特朗普就职总统后不久，寻求庇护者聚集在墨西哥蒂华纳的美国海关办公室外。十多年前，特朗普首次进入政坛时，就将关闭美国边境和改革移民体系作为其政策的核心。而在他第二个任期的一年里，这一议题不仅定义了他的总统任期，也改变了美国的走向。其中，特朗普政府对庇护制度的破坏可能是最具影响力的举措之一。庇护制度允许移民因害怕暴力或迫害而合法进入美国。特朗普政府采取了强硬措施，限制寻求庇护者的入境，同时迫使已在美境内的寻求庇护者离开。本期《Today, Explained》特别嘉宾米尔斯·布莱恩采访了普罗公共报道（ProPublica）的移民记者米卡·罗森伯格，探讨特朗普政府如何让寻求庇护者的生活更加艰难，拜登政府时期庇护制度的崩溃，以及美国政策变化对世界的影响。以下是他们对话的节选，已进行删减和润色。完整播客内容更丰富，欢迎在Apple Podcasts、Pandora和Spotify等平台收听。
特朗普政府在2025年对庇护制度持怎样的态度？根据美国法律，人们可以在边境请求庇护，如果他们担心返回本国会受到伤害。但这一过程会触发一个漫长的法院程序，可能需要数年才能解决。特朗普及其顾问认为，这一制度实际上是一个巨大的漏洞，他们相信大多数通过这种方式进入美国的人并非真正的寻求庇护者，而是出于经济原因。因此，特朗普政府上任后迅速推出了一系列政策，旨在关闭这一制度。这些政策包括在边境迅速将寻求庇护者遣返墨西哥，甚至将他们送往第三国，如巴拿马、哥斯达黎加，甚至一些他们从未到过的地方，剥夺他们在美国寻求庇护的机会。
这些“第三国”遣返政策对特朗普政府的整体政策有多重要？这可能是特朗普政府最具创新性和令人惊讶的举措之一。多年来，多个政府都面临一个难题：一些国家拒绝接受本国公民作为遣返对象。在第一次特朗普政府时期，他与一些中美洲国家达成协议，让这些国家接收部分遣返人员，但进展有限。这次，特朗普政府大幅加强了这一策略，与大约20个国家签署了相关协议，包括南苏丹和乌干达等遥远地区。其中，最具野心和影响的举措之一是将近230名委内瑞拉人送往萨尔瓦多的最高安全监狱。他指责这些人是“最坏的帮派分子”。然而，普罗公共报道与委内瑞拉合作伙伴的调查发现，美国政府清楚地知道这些男子在美国从未被定罪过，但他们仍被迅速拘捕并送往监狱，几个月后才通过囚犯交换被释放。这是美国历史上首次在如此大规模上实施此类遣返政策，目前正面临法律挑战。但由于这些人员大多已不在美国境内，因此很难进行有效挑战，导致许多人陷入极其危险的境地。
在特朗普之前，庇护制度是如何运作的？在拜登政府时期，大量寻求庇护者在边境向官员自首以申请庇护，这一现象显著增加。许多人被释放到美国境内，以便在移民法庭上提出庇护申请。根据法律，只有那些因种族、宗教、国籍、政治观点或属于特定社会群体而面临迫害的人才有资格获得庇护。由于这些理由很难证明（尤其是当人们因恐惧而逃离时，可能缺乏足够的证据），因此设立了法院系统，以便人们有时间收集证据并提出申请。我认为，确实有很多人真正有合法的庇护请求，他们为了生命而逃亡，面临政治迫害。但同时，也有一部分人是因为经济困难、暴力或其国家的政治和经济崩溃而来到美国。特朗普政府认为几乎所有的庇护请求都是虚假的，因此采取了极端措施，这实际上导致了合法寻求庇护者难以获得保护。
对于远离美国的国家的人来说，他们是如何得知或相信前往墨西哥、穿越边境、等待并自首能够带来更好的生活？我认为，对于不同国籍和群体的人，情况各不相同。一些人通过WhatsApp群组或TikTok网红了解到不同的入境路线。来自南美洲、印度和非洲部分地区的人开始意识到，他们可以通过边境申请庇护，并可能被释放以继续他们的申请。例如，有数十万人徒步穿越哥伦比亚和巴拿马之间的危险丛林。非洲和印度的移民甚至欠下数万美元的债务，购买商业或包机航班飞往尼加拉瓜，再穿越墨西哥前往美国。
目前还有人获得庇护吗？这一现象是否还在发生，还是特朗普彻底关闭了这一渠道？特朗普政府的目标是封锁边境，这一目标在许多方面已经实现。边境过境人数降至历史最低水平，被释放到美国境内以进行法院程序的人数也大幅减少。因此，人们很难再通过这一途径寻求庇护。这说明美国的庇护政策发生了巨大波动。这些波动似乎很大程度上是因为政策主要由行政命令决定。你认为国会是否会采取实质性的措施来改革庇护制度？我认为，目前国会不太可能采取实质性的行动。多年来，国会一直未能通过真正全面的移民改革法案。我们目前使用的是一个过时的系统，每位总统都通过行政命令和行动来制定移民政策。这些政策可以被法院挑战，也可能在新政府上台后迅速被推翻。因此，只有通过真正的、具有广泛共识的立法行动，才能对庇护制度进行实质性改革。
面对这些无法获得庇护的人，我们该如何看待他们？他们是否会转向其他国家？是否会有一个新的“灯塔之城”出现？目前，全球正经历前所未有的难民潮，人们因冲突而逃离家园。特朗普是利用人们对移民增长担忧的一波政治浪潮的一部分。欧洲甚至加拿大的一些政客也接受了特朗普政府对限制移民和减少庇护申请的立场。过去，许多国家在人权和保护寻求庇护者的问题上都倾向于跟随美国的领导。但现在，这些国家可能会跟随美国采取相反的立场。
When he first emerged on the political stage more than a decade ago, Donald Trump made closing America’s borders and remaking our immigration system a central plank of his agenda.
A year into his second administration — and as this week’s events in Minneapolis underscore — the issue has defined his presidency and changed America’s trajectory.
Perhaps one of the most consequential moves on that front has been his dismantling of our system of asylum: the process by which immigrants can legally enter the country if they fear violence or persecution. Trump has moved aggressively to curtail asylum-seekers’ entrance into the US, as well as to force ones already in the country to leave.
Today, Explained guest host Miles Bryan talked to ProPublica immigration reporter Mica Rosenberg about how the Trump administration has made life harder for asylum-seekers, how the system broke under Joe Biden, and what the changes in the US might spell for the rest of the world.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What was the Trump administration’s mindset about asylum coming into 2025?
Under US law, people are allowed to show up at our border and request asylum if they fear returning to their home countries. But that actually triggers a very long court process in the US that can take years to resolve.
Trump and his advisers really view this system as kind of like a giant loophole. They believe that most people who are coming into the country this way are not legitimate asylum-seekers, and they’re maybe coming for economic reasons. They’ve really come into office with a blitz of policies to try and shut that system down.
And that includes things that they’re doing at the border, which is quickly turning people back to Mexico — and, in some cases, sending them to third countries like Panama or Costa Rica or even farther, locations that they’ve never been to, and not giving them a chance to seek asylum here.
How important are those “third country” deportations to the administration’s overall policy?
This is really one of the most novel and surprising things that the Trump administration has tried.
For years, multiple administrations have struggled with a particular issue of countries that have refused to take back their own nationals as deportees. During the first Trump administration, he forged agreements with some Central American countries to take back some deportees from different nationalities — mostly regional migrants, and they didn’t really get very far.
This time around, [the administration has] really ramped up this strategy significantly. They’ve signed these types of agreements with around 20 countries, including really far-flung ones like South Sudan and Uganda.
In one of the most audacious and consequential deportations so far of Trump’s presidency, he sent close to 230 Venezuelan nationals to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. He accused them of being the worst of the worst, gang members. Our reporting at ProPublica and with Venezuelan reporting partners found that the government knew that the vast majority of these men had never been convicted of any crimes in the United States, but they were rounded up and whisked away to this prison, where they were held for months before they were released in a prisoner exchange.
This is something that has never really been tried before at this scale. And it’s being challenged in court. But it’s very difficult to challenge because once these people are outside of the United States, they’re mostly outside of the jurisdiction of US courts. So it’s leaving a lot of people in very precarious situations.
I think it’d be helpful to kind of remind everybody, including myself, what this system and the process looked like before Trump started blowing it up. Can you paint us a picture of how this was working under the Biden administration?
During the Biden administration, this phenomenon of people arriving at the border and turning themselves in to border officials to claim asylum really exploded under the Biden administration. The people that were coming and asking for refuge were overwhelming border stations, and many ended up being released into the country to make their claims in immigration court.
What qualifies you for asylum is a really sort of narrow band of reasons. It’s granted to people specifically who fear persecution because of their race, their religion, their nationality, their political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The system’s really been set up in the past acknowledging that those things can be very difficult to prove (especially if you’re fleeing out of fear, you might not have all of the proof that you need).
That’s why the court system was set up in this way. It was supposed to give people time to gather evidence, to make their claims. I think there are a lot of people who were arriving at the border who really did have legitimate asylum claims. They’re fleeing for their lives. They’re facing political persecution. But mixed in there, I think, are people who are coming for other reasons. They’re facing serious economic hardship or violence or political and economic breakdown in their home countries.
What the Trump administration has done, by believing that almost all of the asylum claims are fraudulent or not legitimate, they’re really sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And advocates are saying that these changes have made it nearly impossible for legitimate asylum-seekers to really get protection.
How do people in countries far from the United States find out or come to believe that flying to Mexico and then trekking to the border and then waiting at the border and then maybe turning themselves in was going to lead to a better life?
I think it’s very different for every nationality and every group. There were WhatsApp groups, there were TikTok influencers who were advertising different routes for making it to the United States.
People from countries deeper in South America, in India, and parts of Africa started understanding that they could come to the border and claim asylum and potentially be released to pursue their claims. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were making a perilous trek on foot through the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama.
African and Indian migrants were going into debt for tens of thousands of dollars to pay for commercial and charter flights into Nicaragua and then to make their way through Mexico.
Is anyone still getting asylum? Is this still happening at all, or has Trump just turned the tap off completely?
Well, the Trump administration’s goals of sealing off the border are really being accomplished in many ways. Border crossings have dropped to record lows, and releases of people into the country to try and go through this court process have also really dropped. There has really been a reduction in the ability for people to seek protection here.
So you’re telling us this story of huge swings in our asylum policy. It seems like a big reason that those swings are possible is because the policy is being set with executive orders. Do you think there’s any possibility that Congress is going to actually make any meaningful changes to our asylum system?
Well, everyone says that we are where we are right now because Congress for decades has never gotten around to passing any really meaningful, comprehensive immigration reform. We’re working with an outdated system. Each president that comes in basically makes immigration policy through fiat and executive actions. And those can be challenged in court. They can be quickly overturned if a different party comes into office.
This is something that would take real, meaningful, bipartisan action. There have been efforts that came really close in the past where there were groups on both sides. I think it really doesn’t look good for congressional action at this point.
How should we think about all these people who have historically sought out the United States for asylum who now cannot? Are they going to other countries? Is there going to be another nation that becomes the shining city on the hill?
All of these changes are happening at a time where there’s really an unprecedented explosion of people fleeing conflicts all over the world. Trump is part of a wave of politicians who have capitalized on concerns about rising immigration. Politicians in places like Europe or even Canada have embraced some of the views that the Trump administration has about tamping down on migration, limiting access to asylum.
Many countries in the past have really felt compelled to follow the US lead on issues of human rights and protecting asylum-seekers. But now, these countries may end up following the US lead in the opposite direction.
2026-01-10 07:25:00
2025年11月3日，格陵兰岛努克的彩绘房屋和住宅公寓楼。| Juliette Pavy/Bloomberg via Getty Images
这则新闻出现在《Logoff》日报上，帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅这里。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：各位读者，这周的新闻进展非常迅速。有一则大新闻不容忽视：在委内瑞拉之后，特朗普总统将目光转向了格陵兰岛。特朗普到底想做什么？他想以任何方式获得格陵兰岛。目前来看，他的首选方案似乎是购买该岛，但丹麦方面表示这不可能，或者可能通过支付格陵兰岛居民费用来实现独立。不过白宫本周表示，军事手段“始终是一个选项”。周五，特朗普告诉记者：“如果我们不能轻松地做到，那就只能用困难的方式。”这真的值得我担心吗？不幸的是，是的。正如我的同事乔什·凯因格所报道的，特朗普在委内瑞拉的行动表明，他愿意采取极端措施来实现其扩张主义的美国权力愿景。包括丹麦首相梅特·弗雷德里克森在内的欧洲领导人，都将此视为一个严重威胁。
特朗普到底想用格陵兰岛做什么？特朗普称获得格陵兰岛对国家安全至关重要，包括声称该岛附近有“俄罗斯和中国船只到处都是”。但将美国拥有该岛视为解决安全问题的必要条件是误导的。不仅丹麦是北约盟友，而且美丹之间还有一个单独协议，允许美国在希望的情况下大幅增加其在格陵兰岛的军事存在。这说明还有另一种解释：这可能是特朗普总统在任期最后阶段的一个大型自大项目，他自认为是一个善于谈判和房地产开发的人。正如特朗普本周对《纽约时报》所说，这是“对成功心理上的需要”。
大局如何？随着2026年的到来，特朗普似乎越来越不受约束。委内瑞拉是迄今为止最明显的例子之一，而当他表示格陵兰岛可能是下一个目标时，我们应该认真对待。
好了，是时候下线了……祝贺您成功读完周五晚上！在我们所有人周末下线之前，我的同事普拉蒂克·帕瓦尔分享了一则我最喜欢的过去一年的故事：纽约市拥堵收费政策的成功。这是一项相对较小的干预措施——在高峰时段对司机收取9美元的通行费——一年后，它已帮助减少通勤时间，提高道路安全，并惠及公共交通。我认为这值得庆祝。
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Hi readers, this has been a breakneck news week. Here’s one big story that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle: After Venezuela, President Donald Trump is turning his gaze to Greenland.
What is Trump trying to do? Acquire Greenland, any way he can. For now, it seems like Plan A is to try to buy it, which Denmark says is a nonstarter, or perhaps to pay Greenland’s residents to secede. But the White House said this week that the military is “always an option.”
On Friday, Trump told reporters that “If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”
Is this really something I need to worry about? Unfortunately, yes. As my colleague Josh Keating reports, Trump’s actions in Venezuela make it clear that he’s willing to take drastic steps to facilitate his expansionist vision of US power. European leaders, including Denmark’s own prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, are treating it as a serious threat.
What does Trump actually want Greenland for? Trump has described acquiring Greenland as necessary for national security, including claiming that there are “Russian and Chinese ships all over the place” near the island.
But it’s misleading to suggest the US would need to own the island to shore up security concerns. Not only is Denmark a NATO ally, but the US and Denmark have a separate agreement giving the US significant room to scale up its military presence in Greenland if it wishes.
That leaves another explanation: This is one big vanity project for a president in his last term in office, one who sees himself as a dealmaker and a real estate developer. As Trump put it to the New York Times this week, it’s “psychologically needed for success.”
What’s the big picture? As 2026 gets underway, Trump is acting as though he’s increasingly unchecked. Venezuela is one of the clearest examples so far — and we should take him seriously when he suggests Greenland could be next.
Congratulations on making it to Friday evening! Before we all log off for the weekend, here’s my colleague Pratik Pawar on one of my favorite stories of the past year: the success of congestion pricing in New York City. It’s a relatively small intervention — a $9 toll for drivers during peak hours — that, one year on, has helped reduce commute times, improved road safety, and benefited public transit. I think that’s worth celebrating.
2026-01-10 04:00:00
2026年1月1日，伊朗哈马丹市的抗议者在交通受阻的情况下展示胜利手势。| Mobina/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
周四晚上，伊朗政府切断了全国的互联网服务和国际电话，以应对全国范围内的反政府抗议活动。社交媒体上传播的视频显示，大量人群在多个城市游行，政府大楼被点燃。最近的抗议活动似乎是对流亡的伊朗前国王之子雷扎·帕尔拉维（Reza Pahlavi）号召民众上街抗议的回应。但自12月下旬以来，抗议活动在全国范围内蔓延，主要原因是公众对经济状况的不满。起初，抗议活动始于德黑兰集市的商人关闭店铺，随后迅速蔓延至全国城市和农村地区。
人权组织称，抗议活动中已有超过40人死亡，数千人被拘留。上周，特朗普总统威胁称，如果伊朗政府伤害抗议者，美国将“准备就绪”进行干预。伊朗领导人必须认真对待这一威胁，因为今年6月美国对伊朗核设施的空袭，以及最近委内瑞拉发生的事件，都表明美国对伊朗的敌意。
最高领袖阿里·哈梅内伊周五指责抗议者“毁掉自己的街道，只为让其他国家的总统开心”，即特朗普。伊朗政权在过去曾成功镇压过多次大规模抗议活动，例如2009年的“绿色运动”和2022年因马苏马·阿米尼（Mahsa Amini）死于道德警察之手而爆发的“妇女、生命、自由”抗议。那么这次是否有所不同？
为了解这个问题，Vox采访了约翰斯·霍普金斯大学高级国际研究学院中东研究教授瓦利·纳赛尔（Vali Nasr），他是伊朗国内政治和外交政策方面的权威专家。纳赛尔曾在奥巴马政府时期担任国务院顾问，也是新书《伊朗的总体战略》的作者。以下为采访内容的精简版。
当你看到伊朗当前的局势时，你认为这些抗议活动与之前伊朗的动荡时期（如2022年的马苏马·阿米尼抗议）有何不同？
至少到周四为止，这些抗议活动的规模还不及2022年的马苏马·阿米尼抗议，但昨晚的抗议活动似乎更加广泛，蔓延到了整个伊朗，并且在夜间变得非常暴力，一些政府建筑被烧毁。我认为最重要的区别是，这次抗议发生在伊朗与以色列的战争期间。伊朗政权的不可战胜形象已经改变。在2022年马苏马·阿米尼事件发生时，尽管事件非常重要，但德黑兰仍有一种自信，认为他们可以随意使用暴力和镇压手段。现在，首先，六月份的战争显然对政权和民众都造成了毁灭性打击，而伊朗经济状况恶化也是由于这场战争。我们看到里亚尔在六个月内贬值了40%，同期通货膨胀率飙升了60%。
此外，伊朗政权认为战争从未真正结束。即使在特朗普谈判后的“12天战争”后，领导层仍预期战争会再次爆发，而且以色列并未认为自己已经达到了所有战争目标。同时，伊朗无法再依靠代理人，其核计划也已遭到严重破坏。因此，当抗议活动开始时，伊朗关键安全决策者的主要关注点不是国内稳定或通货膨胀，而是即将到来的以色列-美国对伊朗的攻击。再加上特朗普威胁称，如果伊朗对抗议者采取暴力行动，美国将“准备就绪”来营救他们。因此，伊朗的决策变得更加复杂，因为如果不镇压抗议活动，抗议规模可能扩大，抗议者可能会认为美国站在他们这边，从而推动更多行动。另一方面，如果他们镇压抗议活动，美国可能会以镇压为借口重新发动对伊朗的战争。因此，对德黑兰来说，更大的问题不是抗议本身，而是与美国和以色列的战争。
你是否对特朗普如此公开支持抗议活动感到惊讶？
民主推广并不是特朗普政府的主要目标，包括在委内瑞拉，他基本上让尼古拉斯·马杜罗政权继续掌权。我认为特朗普这样做是为了给伊朗政府施加压力。抗议者只是他手中的工具。这与以色列的情况类似，[以色列总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡]曾表示支持抗议者的“对自由、正义和解放的渴望”。但这并不是在为抗议活动赋予合法性，因为攻击伊朗的国家支持这些抗议活动。以色列并不特别关心抗议者，而是向伊朗政权传递信息：我们已经深入伊朗，我们就在街头，甚至可能是你们抗议问题的根源。
对于特朗普和以色列来说，问题并不是他们想帮助伊朗人享受民主权利，而是他们如何削弱和瓦解伊朗伊斯兰共和国。特朗普基本上是在告诉伊朗人，你们要么让抗议活动失控，要么面对与我的战争。关键问题是，特朗普到底想要什么？如果他不想要政权更迭，也不想要民主，他到底想要什么？他可能愿意接受一个伊斯兰共和国，只要它听从他的命令。但他的命令到底是什么？你认为为什么现在会发生这种情况？有没有什么触发因素？
首先，伊朗有大量民众已经对伊斯兰共和国感到不满。无论他们是年轻人、老年人、宗教人士还是世俗主义者，都有一部分人认为这是一个糟糕的政府，他们不希望它继续存在。即使是那些更支持伊斯兰共和国的人，现在也对腐败、管理不善和经济不平等感到愤怒。他们认为伊朗的国际孤立和经济制裁并不必要，而伊斯兰共和国并没有采取任何措施来解决这些问题。在某种程度上，伊朗民众已经超越了革命的叙事，不再认同伊斯兰共和国的意识形态。此外，伊斯兰共和国在黎巴嫩真主党、叙利亚政权的崩溃以及以色列对伊朗的袭击后，失去了很多威望和不可战胜的形象。
与此同时，自2018年特朗普对伊朗实施最大压力制裁以来，伊朗经济状况持续恶化。尽管政府设法应对了这些制裁，但代价巨大，更多伊朗人陷入贫困，中产阶级的购买力下降，通货膨胀和失业率上升，生活变得更加艰难。制裁还助长了腐败，导致财富集中在少数人手中，而多数人却一无所有。最后，在12月28日，里亚尔再次大幅贬值，这促使依赖进口的商人，特别是手机销售商，率先关闭店铺，因为他们认为在经济管理不善的情况下继续经营毫无意义。因此，经济问题成为了一个触发点，引发了民众走上街头，谴责政府未能解决经济问题，随后抗议活动蔓延至其他社会群体。
你如何理解雷扎·帕尔拉维在其中的角色？
我一直认为他并没有在伊朗国内拥有广泛的群众基础，但他的呼吁似乎成为最近几天抗议活动的催化剂。他确实在伊朗有一定追随者，人们对他父亲和祖父的统治怀有深深的怀念。尽管伊朗人1979年革命时的不满已经过去多年，但如今的伊朗人普遍认为那个时期是“黄金时代”，那时伊朗人可以自由旅行，国家开放，经济繁荣，不被孤立，伊朗更像今天的沙特阿拉伯、阿塞拜疆或土耳其。他代表了一种反伊斯兰共和国的象征。我认为他目前在街头抗议者中起到了引导作用，特别是那些希望推翻伊斯兰共和国的人。然而，他并不是抗议活动的发起者，事实上，他一直在追逐这些抗议活动。他本人在伊朗没有“地面行动”，他的组织无法在伊朗开展竞选活动。我认为他影响伊朗未来的能力有限，主要是因为他在国内几乎没有政治关系。
你认为这是否是真正的革命时刻？我们是否看到伊朗政权内部出现裂痕？
我认为我们可能正站在革命的边缘。对伊朗伊斯兰共和国的压力非常严重。即使在六月份战争之前，伊朗政权内部就已经对国家的未来展开激烈讨论。现在，这种压力更加明显。伊朗是否能够抵御以色列和美国的威胁？如何摆脱经济困境？他们不再拥有可以谈判的核计划，而特朗普也不感兴趣谈判。因此，伊朗显然陷入了困境，必须承认伊斯兰革命的这一阶段已经到达极限，国家需要新的方向。当然，最高领袖不会接受这些想法，但我认为伊朗政治精英阶层内部现在已有更多公开讨论。我们尚未看到类似叶利钦（Yeltsin）登上坦克、公开呼吁结束伊斯兰共和国的领导人，但伊朗正接近这种局面。这次抗议可能不是转折点，但伊朗现在正陷入一场危机漩涡，最终将迫使重大变革。
要让这些抗议成为转折点，需要什么条件？
抗议活动必须更大规模、更持久，并且能够压倒政府的安全部队。同时，他们还必须能够从官僚体系或安全部队中获得支持。我并不认为这些是不可能的，但目前还没有发生。最高领袖现在86岁了，无论抗议活动如何发展，他可能在不久的将来就不再掌权。伊朗政权是否能够应对这种权力交接？
伊朗政权可以应对，但他的去世将是一个关键的转折点，引发关于“伊朗未来将何去何从”的真正讨论。目前在幕后进行的讨论可能会公开化。任何接任的领导人不会像他那么强大，需要几年时间才能巩固权力。在这段时间里，不同派系将有机会提出不同的伊朗未来方案。我认为最高领袖现在有点像前苏联领导人勃列日涅夫或毛泽东。系统已经意识到需要改变，但无法在他任内实现。毛泽东去世后，中国才真正开始讨论改革。在苏联，有两位或三位领导人之后才迎来戈尔巴乔夫。一旦勃列日涅夫去世，苏联体制开始瓦解。因此，当最高领袖去世时，这将是伊朗的关键时刻。
On Thursday night, the Iran government cut off internet service and international calling in the country as anti-government protests broke out throughout the country. Videos that made it to social media showed large crowds marching through multiple cities and government buildings ablaze.
The most recent protests appeared to be in response to a call to take to the streets from Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the shah of Iran, who fled the country prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But protests have been spreading throughout the country since late December, spurred by public anger over the state of the economy. What began with merchants shuttering stores in the bazaar in Tehran, quickly spread to cities and rural areas throughout the country. Human rights groups say more than 40 people have been killed in the demonstrations and thousands detained.
Raising the stakes last week was President Donald Trump’s threat that the US was “locked and loaded” to intervene if the Iranian government killed protesters. It’s a threat Iranian leaders have to take seriously since the US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last June, not to mention the events that just transpired in Venezuela. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused protesters on Friday of “ruining their own streets to make the president of another country happy,” i.e., Trump.
The Iranian regime has managed to violently suppress rounds of mass protests before, from the “Green Movement” following the disputed election in 2009 to the “woman, life, freedom” protests that broke out after Mahsa Amini died in custody of the state’s morality police in 2022. Is there any reason to think that this time is different?
To get more clarity on that question, Vox spoke with Vali Nasr, professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a leading expert on Iran domestic politics and foreign policy. Born in Iran, Nasr served as a State Department adviser during the Obama administration and is the author of the recent book Iran’s Grand Strategy. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When you watch what’s unfolding in Iran right now, what do you think distinguishes these protests from earlier periods of unrest we’ve seen in Iran such as the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022?
At least until Thursday, the scale of the protests did not approximate the Mahsa Amini protests, but last night they seemed to be much more prolific and spread across Iran in a much larger way and also grew very violent towards the end of the night, with burning of some government buildings
But I think the main thing that is much more significant is that these protests are coming at a time of war for Iran. The aura of invincibility for the regime is different. When the Mahsa Amini issue happened, as important and as significant that it was, there was a certain confidence in Tehran that they could do whatever they wanted, using brutality and suppression.
Now, first of all, there was a war [with Israel] in June, which was obviously devastating and shocking in many ways to both the regime and the public, and in fact, the worsening of Iran’s economy between June and December is partly due to the war. That’s how we saw the rial depreciate 40 percent over six months and inflation spiked by 60 percent during the same time.
“The key issue though is what does he want from Iran? If he doesn’t want regime change, doesn’t want democracy, what does he actually want?”
In the regime’s mindset, the war never ended. Even with the precarious ceasefire that President Trump negotiated after the “12-day war,” the leadership’s anticipation is that the war will resume sooner or later, and that Israel didn’t think that it had achieved all of its war aims. Plus, Iran is no longer able to use its proxies and its nuclear program is lying in ruins.
And so when these protests started, the highest priority in the minds of the key security decision-makers in Iran was not domestic stability or inflation, it was an imminent Israeli-American attack on Iran. And then on top of it, you have President Trump actually threatening that if the protesters are harmed, if Iran reacts violently, that the United States is “locked and loaded” to come and rescue them.
So the decision-making for Iran became much more complicated, because if you don’t clamp down on them, the protests will get bigger, and the protesters will now assume that America has their back, and they could push more. And perhaps that’s the reading from yesterday’s larger scale of protests and how they grew more violent.
On the other hand, if they reacted and they clamped down, then the United States may then actually use the crackdown as a pretext for restarting the war with Iran. So I think for Tehran, the larger issue is not the protest itself, it’s war with America and Israel, right? That’s a much larger issue.
Were you surprised to see Trump align himself with the protests like this? Democracy promotion hasn’t been a big priority for his administration, including in Venezuela where he’s basically left most of the regime in place after capturing Nicolás Maduro.
I think for him it’s a way of putting pressure on the Iranian government. The protesters are a tool in his hand. It’s similar with Israel. [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed support for the protesters’ “aspirations for freedom, liberty and justice.”] That’s not really a way of giving legitimacy to the protests, if the country that attacked Iran is backing them, but Israel was not necessarily concerned about the protesters so much as it was messaging to the Iranian government that we’re deeply penetrated in your country, we’re on the streets, we may even be responsible for your headache with the protesters.
For both Trump and Israel, the issue is not that they want to help Iranians enjoy democratic rights; the main issue is how they can weaken and break the Islamic Republic. Trump basically wants to tell the Iranians that you’re caught between letting your protesters run wild or facing war with me.
The key issue though is what does he want from Iran? If he doesn’t want regime change, doesn’t want democracy, what does he actually want? He might be happy to live with an Islamic Republic, provided that it does his bidding. But what is his bidding?
Why do you think this is happening now? Is there a spark that set this movement off?
First of all, there are large segments of the Iranian population that are now alienated from the Islamic Republic. It doesn’t matter if they’re young, old, religious, or secular. There are just a lot of people who believe that it is a bad government and they don’t want it, and even those who are more sympathetic to it are now really angry at the level of corruption, mismanagement, economic inequality. They believe that Iran’s international isolation and the economic sanctions against Iran need not be there, and that the Islamic Republic is not doing anything to solve it.
In a way, the Iranian population, by and large, has moved beyond the revolution and is no longer buying into the narrative of the Islamic Republic. And then on top of it, the Islamic Republic lost a lot of its stripes with the collapse of Hezbollah, the fall of Syria, and the Israeli attack on Iran. It has less of an aura of power and invincibility.
In the meantime, the economy has been steadily getting worse since 2018 when President Trump imposed maximum pressure sanctions on Iran. It’s true that the government has weathered those sanctions, but also at a huge cost to its population. More Iranians have grown poor. More of the middle class has lost its purchasing power. Inflation has gone up, unemployment has gone up, and life has become a lot harder. Also, sanctions have encouraged corruption and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.
Finally, on December 28 when the rial again collapsed in a big way, the merchants who particularly rely on imports, and these were actually mobile phone sellers, were the first to react to say, you know, basically we’re just going to shut our businesses, because there’s no point in having businesses when you’re mismanaging the economy and things are getting worse, etc. And so they basically closed their shops. And so you had a trigger, which was purely economic, and it brought people into the streets to decry the fact that the government was not doing anything about rightsizing the economy that then began to spread into other segments of the population.
How do you understand the role of Reza Pahlavi here? My assumption was always that he didn’t have much of a constituency within Iran itself, but his call for people to come out and protest does seem to have been part of the catalyst for what we’ve seen over the past few days.
He definitely has a certain following in Iran. There’s a tremendous amount of nostalgia towards his father and grandfather’s reign in Iran. Whatever grievances Iranians had in 1979 that brought about the revolution are long forgotten and are definitely not remembered by the generation that’s alive in Iran today, by and large. They can look back at that [pre-revolutionary] period as a sort of a golden era where Iranians traveled the world, the country was open, there was affluence, they were not isolated, when Iran looked a lot more like what Saudi Arabia or Azerbaijan or Turkey does today. He represents a sort of anti-Islamic Republic. I think his role is most important right now in basically giving a sense of direction or a rallying cry to those who are in the streets, and particularly those who want the Islamic Republic gone.
However, he wasn’t responsible for the start of these protests. In fact, he’s been chasing them. He himself does not have a “ground game” in Iran. His organization is not able to run campaigns in Iran. And I think his ability to shape Iran’s future is limited, largely because he has very few political relationships in Iran.
Are there any signs this is a true revolutionary moment? Are we seeing any signs of fracture within the regime itself?
I think we could be potentially on the verge of that. The pressure on the Islamic Republic is quite severe and serious.
“The pressure on the Islamic Republic is quite severe and serious.”
Even before the June war, and even more so after, there were intense debates within the halls of power in the Islamic Republic around the future of the country. Are you going to be able to defend it against Israel and the US? How are you going to get the country out of the economic impasse that it finds itself in? You no longer have a nuclear program to negotiate over, and Trump is not interested in negotiations. So the country clearly sees itself as at an impasse.
It’s time to acknowledge that this phase of the revolution of the Islamic Republic has reached its limits, and that the country needs a different direction. Of course, the Supreme Leader is not open to these ideas, but I think there’s now much more open debate even among the political class in Iran.
Now we’re not yet seeing a Yeltsin getting on a tank, a major leader coming out and addressing the people and saying, “I’m calling for the end of the Islamic Republic,” or a redirection of the Islamic Republic, but I think Iran is very close to that sort of a scenario.
This particular protest may not be the turning point, but Iran is now caught in that sort of whirlwind where it’s going to face crisis after crisis, and ultimately that’s going to force a major shift.
What would it take for these protests to be that turning point?
The protests themselves have to become even larger than they have been, they have to be sustained, and they have to be able to overwhelm the security forces when and if they are deployed in full force. And then they also have to be able to draw defections from the bureaucracy or the security forces of the country. I’m not saying that none of that is possible. It’s quite possible, but that has not happened yet.
The Supreme Leader is 86 years old now. Whatever happens with the protests, he probably won’t be in power for more than a few more years. Is this a regime that can weather that kind of transition?
Well, it can weather it, but his passing would be the opening that would bring a real debate about, “Where does Iran go from here?” The kinds of discussions happening now behind closed doors could come out in the open.
Any leader that comes in his place will not be as powerful as he is, it will take a number of years for any leader to consolidate power, and in that time period, there’s going to be a lot more intense fighting and a lot more ability by different factions to basically put on the table very different scenarios for the future of Iran.
I would say that Iran’s Supreme Leader is now a bit like [Former Soviet Leader Leonid] Brezhnev or Mao. The system already knows that it needs to change, but it can’t under him. When Mao passed, that’s when the debate in China really burst into the open, right? It took a number of years between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, right? In [the Soviet Union], there were two or three leaders until we arrived at Gorbachev. But once Brezhnev was gone, I think the system was beginning to unwind. So when [the Supreme leader] passes, that is going to be the critical, pivotal moment for Iran.
2026-01-10 02:05:00
How much alcohol should you drink? The US government now vaguely, in effect, says just don’t drink too much. And what qualifies as too much? Well, that’s up to you.
As part of the new federal dietary guidelines released this week, the Trump administration eliminated the previous specific recommended limits on alcohol consumption — two drinks or less per day for men and one drink for women. Now, the new guidelines say “consume less alcohol for better health. (It maintained the prior guidance discouraging a few certain groups — pregnant women and people who have a history of alcohol abuse — from drinking at all.) It’s a major change that defies a growing public health consensus that people should drink as little alcohol as possible, because no amount of drinking is actually safe.
To justify the change, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees the Medicare and Medicaid programs, argued that there was no scientific evidence to justify specific limits on drinking alcohol. “So there is alcohol in these dietary guidelines, but the implication is, don’t have it for breakfast,” he said during the announcement of the new guidelines.
“The general move away from two glasses for men, one glass for women — there was never really good data to support that quantity of alcohol consumption,” he added.
That’s not true.
There is such data — evidence commissioned by the federal government that the Trump administration itself tried to bury ahead of the dietary guidelines’ release, as Vox reported a few months ago. But instead, Oz and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have handed the alcohol industry a long-sought win in its battle against public health critics.
For the whole sordid saga, you can check out our feature story from September. But here is a brief recap: In early 2022, the Biden administration launched the Alcohol Intake & Health Study, a new report on alcohol and its health effects to inform the next dietary guidelines due in 2025, a response to the increasing evidence that no amount of alcohol is safe. The World Health Organization had made such a declaration in 2023; in the US, more than 170,000 people die every year from alcohol-related causes.
Almost as soon as that project began, the alcohol industry started pushing back and soliciting Congress in its efforts.
In response to this pressure, Congress approved in fall 2023 an alternate study to be overseen by the National Academies of Science and Medicine. Congressional hearings held by the lawmakers, who represented states where alcohol is a major industry, and letters they sent to the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden on behalf of their constituents framed the original report as a witch hunt against alcohol.
Nonetheless, both studies were undertaken, and their respective authors got to work. In December 2024, the National Academies report came out and stated that, with some very important limitations, the health effects of alcohol were marginal. But a draft version of the Alcohol Intake & Health Study was posted in January 2025, shortly before the end of the Biden administration, and it came to very different conclusions, as I wrote recently:
They broke out their findings by different drinking levels — from one drink per day to three — and focused on health outcomes that have been proven to be associated with alcohol use.
Their big-picture conclusion: Among the US population, the negative health effects of drinking alcohol start at low levels of consumption and begin to increase sharply the more a person drinks.
A man drinking one drink per day has roughly a one in 1,000 chance of dying from any alcohol-related cause, whether an alcohol-associated cancer or liver disease or a drunk driving accident. Increase that to two drinks per day, and the odds increase to one in 25.
That is precisely the kind of evidence that would suggest a specific limit on alcohol consumption would be appropriate — the kind of evidence that Oz claimed does not exist.
The final version of the Alcohol Intake & Health Study was shelved — and still has not been published by the Trump administration. They decided to squash its public release, as I reported last fall, even as they claimed it would be taken into consideration for the forthcoming dietary guidelines.
There was such a furor over that decision that even the authors of the National Academies report later published a commentary in the journal JAMA to make clear that their study should not be over-interpreted to justify more drinking or eliminating limits on drinking alcohol.
Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened in the new dietary guidelines — a policy victory cheered by beer, wine, and liquor manufacturers. The limits are…whatever you want them to be.
“Dr. Oz must have thrown back a few cocktails for breakfast before making that comment,” Mike Marshall, president and CEO of the US Alcohol Policy Alliance, told me. “The federal government’s own report, the Alcohol Intake & Health study, made it clear that there is overwhelming evidence that reducing consumption to less than 2 drinks per day dramatically reduces the chance of dying due to alcohol. Just because the industry, via Congress, said ‘don’t read it’ doesn’t mean the report never existed.”