2026-04-01 00:50:00
支持和反对跨性别权益的团体在美国最高法院外集会 | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
在Chiles诉Salazar一案中，最高法院对挑战科罗拉多州禁止持牌治疗师提供“转化治疗”（即试图将LGBTQ+患者转变为异性恋和顺性别人士的咨询）的诉讼作出裁决，结果几乎没有悬念。这个由共和党占多数的法院通常在宗教保守派与同性恋群体利益冲突时倾向于宗教保守派，即使宗教保守派提出了较为激进的法律论点。然而，在Chiles案中，原告的论点其实相当有力。原告是一位希望为患者提供转化治疗的治疗师，她表示自己不会对LGBTQ+患者进行身体虐待或开药，只是通过谈话治疗进行咨询。因此，很难看出一项规范谈话治疗的法律如何不涉及第一修正案所保障的言论自由。
尽管投票结果一边倒，但Chiles案仍引发了关于第一修正案的复杂问题。虽然言论自由通常涵盖具有冒犯性甚至有害性的言论，但历史上法律对持牌专业人士可以向患者或客户表达的内容仍有一些限制。例如，律师若告诉客户抢劫银行是合法的，可能会面临失职诉讼；医生若建议患者用砒霜治疗流感，可能会被起诉谋杀。因此，大法官尼尔·戈萨奇在多数意见中必须制定一个规则，以使科罗拉多州禁止转化治疗的法律无效，至少适用于那些不接触患者、仅进行谈话治疗的治疗师，同时确保那些伪劣医生和不合格律师不会凌驾于法律之上。
戈萨奇的意见指出，至少在某些情况下，客户或患者必须在实际遭受不良建议带来的后果后，才能起诉提供该建议的专业人士。这一规则可能在某些特殊案例中导致不幸甚至悲剧的结果。因为转化治疗被所有主要医学和心理健康组织所摒弃，因其“使个人面临重大伤害风险”，所以Chiles案之后，一些患者可能在遭受自我伤害甚至更严重后果之前，无法对伪劣治疗师采取法律行动。
然而，Chiles案可能不会将法律和医疗实践变成“荒野”。仍然存在一些防止不良治疗行为的保障措施，而医疗事故诉讼的可能性也可能阻止一些治疗师使用已被证伪的方法。
戈萨奇的意见核心在于，科罗拉多州的法律违宪，因为它涉及“观点歧视”，而这类法律几乎总是被宪法禁止。戈萨奇指出，该法律根据治疗师对客户性取向或性别表达的观点不同而区别对待他们。例如，科罗拉多州允许治疗师肯定客户的性取向，但禁止他们以任何方式帮助客户“改变”性吸引力或行为。因此，当立法机构基于观点进行歧视时，这几乎是最糟糕的做法，这也是为什么最高法院中有两位民主党大法官加入了戈萨奇的意见。
在一份单独的附议意见中，金斯伯格大法官解释了她和索托马约尔大法官为何反对科罗拉多州的法律，并强调了对观点歧视的强烈限制。金斯伯格写道，这类法律是“内容审查的一种极端形式”，部分原因是它们暗示政府在立法时有“不正当动机”，即出于自身对特定信息的“敌意”来限制言论。因此，金斯伯格认为，任何形式的观点歧视法律都是所有言论限制中最可疑的。
尽管如此，宪法历史上允许政府对表达某些观点的专业人士进行限制，例如律师建议客户谋杀其妻子，或医生建议用氰化物治疗感冒。戈萨奇在多数意见中提到，第一修正案的保护“适用于持牌专业人士，如同适用于所有人”，但他也指出，政府在某些情况下可以对专业言论进行监管。例如，政府可以要求专业人士“仅披露事实性、无争议的信息”，因此要求医生在对患者进行特定医疗程序前披露其风险的法律应保持合宪。此外，戈萨奇还指出，当政府监管“促进违禁品销售的言论”时，言论自由的权利会大大降低，因为这类言论通常与传统犯罪行为相关联。因此，法院可能在未来涉及律师建议客户抢劫银行的案件中，也援引这一例外。
戈萨奇还支持医疗事故诉讼，但前提是原告必须证明“被告违反了适用的医疗护理标准，并导致了伤害”。因此，如果患者真的采纳了医生或律师的错误建议并因此受害，他们仍可以起诉该专业人士。此外，州执照委员会也可能在医生伤害患者后吊销其执照。从事转化治疗的谈话治疗师如果对患者造成严重伤害，也应承担医疗事故责任，尽管LGBTQ+患者因转化治疗尝试自杀或出现其他心理问题时，可能难以证明其心理状况恶化是由于治疗师的建议，而非其他因素所致。
尽管Chiles案可能削弱政府主动防止专业人士可能伤害客户的行为的能力，但许多规范医疗和法律专业人士的法律仍可能保持不变。金斯伯格指出，宪法对涉及观点歧视的法律持极其怀疑态度，即使这些法律旨在解决现实中的危害。
There was never much doubt how this Supreme Court would decide Chiles v. Salazar, a lawsuit challenging a Colorado law that bars licensed therapists from providing “conversion therapy,” or counseling that seeks to convert LGBTQ+ patients into straight and cisgender people. This Court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, typically rules in favor of religious conservatives when their interests conflict with those of queer people, even when religious conservatives raise fairly aggressive legal arguments.
In Chiles, moreover, the plaintiffs’ arguments were actually pretty strong. The plaintiff in Chiles is a therapist who wishes to provide conversion therapy to patients hoping to “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] bod[ies].” She says she does not physically abuse LGBTQ+ patients or prescribe them any medication; she merely engages in talk therapy with them. And it doesn’t take a law degree to see how a law regulating talk therapy implicates the First Amendment’s free speech protections.
And so, the Court’s vote in Chiles was lopsided, with Democratic Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joining the majority opinion. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Despite this lopsided vote, Chiles did raise difficult questions under the First Amendment. While the constitutional right to free speech is broad and typically applies to speech that is offensive or even harmful, the law has historically placed some restrictions on what sort of things licensed professionals may say to their patients or clients. A lawyer who tells a client that it is legal to rob banks risks a malpractice suit or worse. A doctor who tells a patient that they can treat their flu by taking arsenic risks being tried for murder.
So, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, had to devise a rule that invalidates Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy — at least as applied to therapists who do not touch their patients or engage in anything other than talk therapy — while also ensuring that quack doctors and incompetent lawyers aren’t placed above the law.
His opinion suggests that, at least in some cases, a client or patient who receives very bad legal or medical advice must wait until they have actually suffered the consequences of taking that advice before suing the professional who gave them the bad advice for malpractice. That rule may lead to unfortunate, or even tragic, results in some unusual cases. Conversion therapy is rejected by every major medical and mental health organization, because it, in the words of the American Psychological Association, “puts individuals at a significant risk of harm.” After Chiles, some patients may not have any legal recourse against quack therapists until they engage in self-harm — or worse.
But Chiles also likely won’t turn the practice of law or medicine into the Wild West. There are still some safeguards against bad therapeutic practices. And the possibility of a malpractice suit may deter some therapists from using discredited methods.
The thrust of Gorsuch’s opinion is that Colorado’s law is unconstitutional, because it engages in “viewpoint discrimination,” and laws that do so are almost always forbidden by the Constitution.
As Gorsuch writes, the law treats therapists differently depending on which views they express about a client’s sexuality or gender. “With respect to sexual orientation,” for example,” Colorado permits a therapist to “affirm a client’s sexual orientation, but prohibits her from speaking in any way that helps a client ‘change’ his sexual attractions or behaviors.”
Discriminating based on viewpoint is just about the worst thing that a state legislature can do if it wants a law to survive a First Amendment challenge, which explains why two of the Court’s three Democrats joined Gorsuch’s opinion. In a separate concurrence, Kagan explains why she and Sotomayor voted against Colorado’s law, and her opinion leans heavily into the very strong rules against viewpoint discrimination.
Such laws, Kagan writes, are an “‘egregious form’ of content-based regulation,” in part because they suggest that the government had an “impermissible motive” when it wrote the law — “regulating speech because of its own ‘hostility’ towards the targeted messages.” For this reason, Kagan writes, laws that engage in viewpoint discrimination of any kind “are the most suspect of all speech regulations.”
That said, the Constitution has historically allowed the government to discriminate against lawyers who express the viewpoint that their client should murder their wife or against doctors who express the viewpoint that cyanide is an effective cure for the common cold. Although Gorsuch’s opinion includes a categorical statement that the First Amendment’s protections “extend to licensed professionals much as they do to everyone else,” he also does describe some circumstances when the government may regulate professional speech.
The government may require professionals to “disclose only factual, noncontroversial information,” so laws requiring doctors to disclose the risks of a particular medical procedure before performing it on a patient should remain constitutional. And Gorsuch also notes that the right to free speech is greatly reduced when the government regulates “speech promoting the sale of contraband because such speech is often bound up with traditional criminal conduct.” Perhaps the Court could also rely on this second exemption in a future case involving a lawyer who tells a client that it is legal to rob banks, because such speech would also be “bound up with traditional criminal conduct.”
Gorsuch also endorses malpractice suits, but only when a plaintiff shows “among other things, that he has suffered an injury caused by the defendant’s breach of the applicable duty of care.” So, a patient who actually takes a doctor or lawyer’s terrible advice and suffers for doing so may still sue that professional for malpractice. A state licensing board might also strip a doctor of their license after they harm a patient. Talk therapists, including those who engage in conversion therapy, should also be liable for malpractice if they cause serious harm to a patient — although, an LGBTQ+ patient who attempts suicide or otherwise suffers because of conversion therapy may find it difficult to prove that their therpist, and not some other source of mental anguish, caused the patient’s mental health to deteriorate.
After Chiles, the government likely has less power to proactively prevent professionals from doing things that may harm a client. Suppose, for example, that a state had barred doctors from telling patients to take the drug ivermectin to treat Covid-19. During the Covid pandemic, many online sources encouraged Covid patients to use this drug, despite the fact that evidence does not suggest that it is an effective treatment.
It is unclear whether such a proactive attempt to stop quack doctors from prescribing bad medicine would survive judicial review under Chiles. After all, a law engages in viewpoint discrimination if it permits doctors to express the viewpoint that ivermectin is an ineffective treatment, but does not allow them to express the opposite opinion.
Still, Chiles does leave many laws regulating health and legal professionals intact. And Kagan is correct that the Constitution casts an extremely skeptical eye on laws that engage in viewpoint discrimination, even when those laws seek to address very real harms.
2026-03-31 19:45:00
田纳西州孟菲斯举行的一场高尔夫比赛。| Matthew Maxey/Icon Sportswire 通过 Getty Images 提供
在 Vox 的每周问答播客《Explain It to Me》中，我们经常听到听众分享各种故事。最近，我们邀请大家讲述自己的口音：他们喜欢口音的哪些方面，以及他们注意到的细节。回应非常热烈，我们收到了迄今为止最多的留言。这并不令人意外，因为 Valerie Fridland 是一位社会语言学家，也是《Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents》（《我们为何说话如此奇怪：我们口音的真实故事》）一书的作者。她说：“口音是我们只与最热爱、最亲近的人分享的东西，也是我们对自己在生命早期阶段身份认同的体现。它以一种语言本身不具有的方式与我们紧密相连。”
现代美国口音是如何形成的？口音又反映了我们哪些特质？在最新的《Explain It to Me》一期中，我们回答了这些问题，并探讨了更多相关内容。以下是与 Fridland 的对话节选，已进行删减和润色。你可以通过 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或其他播客平台收听完整节目。如果你想提交问题，可以发送电子邮件至 [email protected] 或致电 1-800-618-8545。
美国的口音最初是从哪里来的？如果你回到1600年，你可能会想：“我周围的人在说什么？我完全听不懂。”我们口音的旅程始于第一批英国殖民者。虽然当时还有其他殖民者和原住民语言，但这并不是美国语言的起源故事。然而，最早一批英国殖民者的声音对确立最初的美国口音起到了关键作用。这些声音形成了所谓的“创始者效应”：一种文化与语言特征在时间中持续存在的现象。
最初的美国口音在许多英国口音的显著特征上趋于一致。例如，R音在很多词中被省略，如“burst”和“curse”变成了“bust”和“cuss”。这种英国口音中R音的省略被带到了美国。我们真正注意到的是，一种听起来像是英国口音，但又不完全像任何特定英国口音的语言。这种口音在当时被评论为非常统一，而且听起来比英国口音更好。
无论你是谁，来自哪个阶层，从事什么职业，当时美国或新世界的人们的说话方式都比英国更相似。这很有趣，因为如今我们有如此多的地区差异。这些差异是什么时候开始出现的？可以想想大西洋沿岸的定居情况。最早来到这里的是来自英格兰东部和南部的移民，接着是来自英国北部的贵格会教徒，以及来自苏格兰-爱尔兰和德国的移民。到了南部，有很多来自英格兰南部的人，以及效忠于查理一世的骑士派（Cavaliers）。他们还带来了大量契约劳工和来自西非背景的奴隶。
到1780年，我们看到足够多的世代已经适应了这个新世界，并形成了与英国不同的口音，同时他们之间也开始出现差异。这实际上引起了建国者们的担忧，因为各州之间的联盟非常脆弱。存在很多地区间的竞争和各州自身的利益，他们担心这些曾经团结一致对抗英国的州会分裂。其中，本杰明·富兰克林和他的朋友诺亚·韦伯斯特特别关注，他们担心缺乏统一的语言或“地区地方主义”会导致这个新联盟的衰败。
我想更深入地探讨一下南方口音。它非常独特，是如何形成的？这种口音直到南北战争后才出现。战争将人们团结在共同的敌人和共同的文化体验中，从而在某种程度上促进了新口音的形成。此外，重建时期南方的基础设施也发生了变化。每当一个地区经历基础设施、经济或交通网络的变化时，人们的口音通常也会随之变化。
新英格兰口音和南方口音都备受关注，但中西部和西部的口音又如何呢？中西部和西部非常有趣，因为它们的形成时间相对较晚。中西部的口音源于宾夕法尼亚殖民地，因此可以说是“心之心脏”口音的发源地。宾夕法尼亚殖民地的三分之一人口是苏格兰-爱尔兰人，另外三分之一是德国人。当你想到芝加哥口音，比如“da Bears”这样的说法，那实际上是一种深受德国影响的口音。当时该地区已经有大量斯堪的纳维亚移民。明尼苏达的口音也深受斯堪的纳维亚影响，但到西海岸时，大多数移民来自美国方言区。因此，那里的口音已经是美国化的，这也是为什么我们通常认为西部口音“没有口音”——因为它们在到达西部之前，已经经历了多次口音的“平化”过程，逐渐消除了东部口音中的一些显著特征。
那么，那些已经消失的口音呢？口音会消失吗？当口音消失时，更像是逐渐淡出，而不是突然终结。其过程是使用这种口音的人越来越少。在美国，有很多正在消失的口音。人们常想到的是跨大西洋口音，比如 Cary Grant 或 Frasier 中的口音。这可能是这种跨大西洋口音的后期形式。当然，像《Cheers》和《Frasier》这样的节目描绘的是那种令人讨厌的虚伪贵族，这正是为什么这种口音逐渐消失的原因。这种口音其实是一种“假口音”，并非任何人的母语，而是20世纪初由好莱坞打造的一种学习型口音，因为当时好莱坞正呈现这类浪漫的男主角和女主角形象。但到了1950年代，人们不再想要看到这种口音。他们希望看到的是真实的自己，希望听到的是真实美国人的声音，他们希望看到的是像他们一样生活的人。因此，好莱坞的转变从浪漫的男女主角形象转向了现实主义的描绘，这导致了跨大西洋口音的消失，它变得越来越显得傲慢和精英主义，而不是一种值得追求的口音。
为什么我们对口音如此有认同感？从根本上说，口音与身份有关——与我们所爱的人、所选择的人，以及那些让我们感到被理解的人有关。当我们听到别人说话时，即使不是同一种口音，它也会让我们产生共鸣，因为我们都知道口音对我们的身份认同和归属感有多么重要。我认为这非常有趣，因为它与我们每个人息息相关。口音是我们佩戴的一种徽章，别人可以看到。就像人们会谈论时尚的变化一样，人们也会谈论语言的变化，因为语言本质上是人类历史的叙述。
On Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we hear a lot of stories from listeners. Recently, we asked people to tell us about their accents: what they love about them, things they’ve noticed. The response was huge; we got the most responses we’ve ever gotten.
This was not a surprise to Valerie Fridland. She’s a sociolinguist and author of the book Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. “Accents are something that we share only with those people we most love and hold dear and who we saw ourselves to be in the foundational eras of our life,” she said. “It’s close to us in ways that language more generically isn’t.”
How did the modern American accent develop? And what do accents reflect about us? We answer that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Fridland, edited for length and clarity. 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.
Where did the American accent come from in the first place?
If you went back to [the year] 1600, you would probably think, “What the hell are you all saying around me? Because I don’t understand a thing.”
We start our accent journey in America with the first British colonists that came. It seems odd, because there are other colonists that were here [already], and there were indigenous languages that were here. So that isn’t the first language story of America. But the most pivotal voices for establishing that original American accent were those early British colonists. Those set up what we call “founders effects”: these sort of cultural and linguistic areas that persist through time.
The original American accent was sort of one that had leveled the playing field of many of the salient, noticeable British accent features. For example, the Rs would’ve been there, with the exception of a few Rs that got dropped really early in words like burst and curse, which became bust and cuss. It’s the British R-dropping that came over early.
What we really would’ve noticed is [a language] that sounded sort of British but not like any [particular] British accent. And it was commented on [at the time] — this incredibly uniform American accent that actually sounded quite good compared to the British form. It didn’t matter who you were, what class you were from, what kind of job you occupied — the speech was much more similar among people in America or the New World at that time than it was back in Britain.
It’s interesting that it was uniform, because we have so many regional differences now. When did we see those pop up?
Think about the way that the Atlantic Coast was settled, right at the very top. You had people coming in a lot from East Anglia and Southern Britain, and then you had the Quakers from the north of Britain, and the Scotch Irish and the Germans in the Midland. And then, in the South, you had a lot of people from Southern Britain, a lot of the Cavaliers — those that were loyal to King Charles I. They had a lot of indentured servants and a lot of enslaved people that came from West African backgrounds.
By 1780, we see that enough generations have come through and learned the patterns of this new world that they sounded very different from Britain but also started to sound different from each other.
This was actually something that concerned the Founding Fathers after the Revolutionary War, because the agreement between the states was very fragile. There were a lot of regional rivalries, a lot of state self-interest, and they were really worried that these states that had bonded together in unity against this common enemy of Britain were actually going to fall apart. One of the things they were really concerned about, particularly Benjamin Franklin and also his pal Noah Webster, were that the lack of a uniform language — or having any kind of “regional provincialism” they called them — would cause this [new union] to decay and fray.
I want to dig into the Southern accent a little bit more. It’s so distinct. How did we get it?
That did not come around until after the Civil War. [The war] brought together people towards a common enemy and also a common cultural experience that bonded their speech in ways that we find are really conducive to new accent formation.
Also, the infrastructure of the South changed during the Reconstruction period. And anytime we see a change in infrastructure, a change in the economy, a change in the transportation networks in an area, we generally see a change in the way they sound, as well.
The New England accent, the Southern accent — both get a lot of the shine. But what are we hearing in the Midwest and out West?
The Midwest and West are quite interesting, because they were both a little later. The Midwest had a really unique blending, because it emanated from the Pennsylvania colony. So that’s really the heart of the heartland accent. Over a third of the population of the Pennsylvania colony was the Scots-Irish, and another third were Germans. When you think about the Chicago accent — “da Bears,” that kind of thing — that is actually a very German-influenced accent. There were already a lot of Scandinavian settlers in that area. The Minnesota accent was heavily Scandinavian influenced, but by the time [Americans] get to the West Coast, the vast majority were resettlers from an American dialect region.
So what you get there is already Americanized speech, but truly that’s why we think of the Western accent as being accent-less: because it had gone through so many cycles of leveling out some of the more noticeable features from the East Coast by the time they hit it West.
What about the accents that don’t exist anymore? Do accents die?
When accents die, it’s more like a slow fade and an instant death. What happens is just fewer and fewer people use them. In that case, we actually have a lot of dying accents in America. The one that people think about is that Transatlantic accent.
Like Cary Grant?
Yes. Or Frasier. That was probably the later incarnation of that Transatlantic accent. And, of course, [Cheers and Frasier were] depicting pretentious snobs that no one wants to hang out with, and that is exactly why that accent has died out.
The trick is: It was a false accent. It was no one’s native accent. It was a learned accent. It was a fabricated, cultivated accent of the early 20th century, predominantly parlayed by Hollywood, because [those were] the type of roles and iconic images that Hollywood was presenting at that time.
But, by the 1950s, we didn’t want to see that anymore. We wanted to see ourselves. Americans wanted to hear Americans, and they wanted to see Americans that lived like they did. And so the shift in Hollywood was really from these romantic leading man and leading woman kind of roles to these gritty depictions of realism in Hollywood. With that, we really lost the Transatlantic accent, and it became snobby and elitist rather than something aspirational.
Why do we feel so connected to our accents?
Fundamentally, accents are about identity — the people we love, the people we choose, the people that feel like they get us. When we hear people talk about accents, even if it’s not the same accent, it’s something that bonds us, because we all understand how important to our identities, to our feeling of belonging, that accents are. And I think it’s something that is so interesting, because it’s so relevant to all of us. It’s a badge we wear that others can see. It’s sort of like when fashions change, people talk about it. When language changes, people talk about it, because language is fundamentally the story of humanity.
2026-03-31 19:00:00
在缺乏持久系统性解决方案的情况下，美国旅客只能做最典型的美国式事情：靠自己解决问题。我计划在一周后带一岁的孩子乘坐三小时的航班，这在正常情况下本就令人头疼，但最近机场的混乱局面让这件事变成了真正的噩梦。因此，当我得知许多机场的安全检查混乱正在缓解时，我感到如释重负，甚至欣喜若狂。但这种情况并未解决美国航空旅行在安全性和可靠性方面更深层次、长期存在的问题。
今天，我们将探讨两个问题：为什么美国的航空旅行如此糟糕？以及在不选择乘坐Amtrak（美国铁路）的情况下，如何改善这一状况？
本文最初发表于Today, Explained通讯
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美国航空公司逐渐让旅客习惯了糟糕的飞行体验：座位狭小、食物一般、各种服务都要收费。但即使按照现代航空旅行的低标准来看，目前航空业似乎正面临特别严重的危机，包括人员短缺、安检延误以及一系列令人毛骨悚然的事件，让一些旅客开始质疑航空旅行是否安全。这些问题在政府部分停摆期间进一步恶化，当时约有5万名TSA（美国运输安全管理局）特工被迫无薪工作。非计划的临时调岗和辞职导致全国安检流程受阻，旅客排队时间长达数小时。周一，TSA特工终于收到了一个月前的工资，缓解了多个机场的拥堵情况。但即使一切恢复常态，常态依然是“相当糟糕”。
我们能否将机场安检私有化？
一个备受关注的解决方案来自自由派思想库——赫里特基金会（Heritage Foundation）及其他一些保守派智库。他们提议允许美国机场雇佣私人安保承包商来承担TSA的大部分工作。这些私人承包商将负责检查证件、扫描行李、进行人身检查，而且在当前的政治环境下，他们还能在政府停摆时继续工作。这种模式已经在大约20个美国机场实施，包括堪萨斯城和旧金山。
修复“过时”的系统将需要巨额资金
支持者认为私有化可以降低成本并提高TSA的效率。但即使如此，它也无法解决导致美国机场延误和安全问题的许多其他系统性问题。根据美国联邦航空管理局（FAA）的数据，美国80%的空管基础设施都“过时”或“不可持续”。这包括612个建于上世纪80年代的雷达系统，以及一些设备老旧到FAA不得不在eBay上寻找替换零件。设备故障会导致航班延误和取消，更不用说可能引发的事故了。去年夏天，国会批准了超过120亿美元用于开始更新这些设备，例如更换老式的铜缆。但FAA表示，要彻底改造整个空管系统，还需要另外200亿美元。
另一个机场人员短缺问题
与此同时，FAA还缺少大约3000名空管人员，这显然不利于机场的安全和运行效率。就在九天前，纽约拉瓜迪亚机场仅有两名空管人员在岗时，一架加拿大航空快线的客机撞上了消防车。特朗普政府推出了一些举措来增加空管塔台等设施的人员，但同时也加剧了问题，例如在削减开支的行动中取消了FAA的支持职位。上一次政府停摆结束于11月，也导致数百名空管人员和培训人员辞职。在缺乏持久系统性解决方案的情况下，美国旅客只能做最典型的美国式事情：靠自己解决问题。许多机场仍然建议旅客提前数小时到达，一些旅客则选择改乘火车。不幸的是，美国的客运铁路系统同样处于混乱状态。至于开车，就别提了——你见过现在的油价吗？
I’m scheduled to take my 1-year-old on a three-hour flight just over a week from now. Probably a headache, under normal circumstances, but a bona fide nightmare amid the recent airport bedlam. I was thus relieved — overjoyed, really — to learn that the security line chaos is easing at many airports. But that doesn’t address the larger, longer-term safety and reliability challenges in American air travel.
Today, we’re looking at two questions: Why is US air travel so bad? And what can be done to improve it, short of taking Amtrak?
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US airlines have gradually acculturated travelers to a pretty awful flight experience: smaller seats, middling snacks, fees for everything you can imagine. But even by the low standards of modern air travel, the aviation industry seems to be in particular crisis right now, plagued by staffing shortages, security delays, and a string of terrifying incidents that have some fliers questioning whether air travel is safe at all.
Those issues only got worse during the partial government shutdown, which forced some 50,000 TSA agents to work without pay. Unscheduled callouts and resignations slowed security screenings nationwide, snarling travelers in hours-long lines.
On Monday, TSA agents received their first paycheck in over a month, easing the bottleneck at many airports. But even if things go back to normal, normal is still…pretty awful.
One buzzy option for righting the ship — or, fine, the plane — comes courtesy the libertarian minds at the Heritage Foundation (and several other conservative think tanks). They’ve proposed that the United States allow airports to hire private security contractors to do much of TSA’s work.
These private contractors would check IDs, scan luggage, conduct pat-downs and — importantly, in our current political atmosphere — continue working through government shutdowns. The model is already in place at roughly 20 US airports, including Kansas City and San Francisco.
Proponents argue that privatization would reduce costs and make TSA more efficient. But even if that’s true, it wouldn’t address many of the other systemic issues causing delays and safety scares at US airports. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, 80 percent of the country’s air traffic control infrastructure is “obsolete” or “unsustainable.”
That includes 612 radar systems that date back to the 1980s and other equipment so old that the FAA has to use eBay for replacement parts. Equipment failures can cause flight delays and cancellations, to say nothing of potential accidents. Last summer, Congress approved more than $12 billion to begin modernizing that equipment, starting with things like replacing old-school copper cables. But the FAA says it will need another $20 billion to fully retrofit the air traffic control system.
Meanwhile, the FAA is also short about 3,000 air traffic controllers, which doesn’t exactly improve airport safety or performance. Only two controllers were working at New York’s LaGuardia Airport when an Air Canada Express passenger jet collided with a fire truck nine days ago.
The Trump administration has launched a number of initiatives to staff up air control towers and other facilities, but it’s also exacerbated the problem by, for example, eliminating FAA support staff during DOGE’s cost-cutting spree. The last government shutdown, which ended in November, also prompted the resignation of hundreds of air traffic controllers and trainees.
In the absence of durable systemic solutions, American travelers are left to do that most American of things: fend for themselves. Many airports are still urging travelers to show up hours early for their flights, and some fliers are traveling by train, instead.
Unfortunately, America’s passenger rail system is also something of a train wreck. And don’t even think about driving — have you seen gas prices?!
2026-03-31 18:15:00
2023年1月，24岁的营养博主雅各布·史密斯（Jacob Smith）因对豆腐表现出过度的好奇而陷入尴尬。他原本是出于健康考虑，试图减少肉类摄入，增加植物性食物。为了展示这一改变，他带着17万Instagram粉丝一起探索植物性饮食。在第一段视频中，他展示了自己如何烹饪豆腐，虽然一些粉丝给出了有用的建议，但更多人则用“豆腐男孩”（soy boy）这个常见的嘲讽称呼他。
这一事件反映了男性在推广植物性饮食时所面临的挑战。在富裕国家，为了可持续地养活不断增长的人口，人们需要减少肉类消费，增加植物性食物。然而，这在男性中并不容易推广，因为许多人认为吃肉是男性气质的一部分。这种观念源于“人类狩猎者”（man the hunter）的理论，该理论认为在人类历史中，男性负责狩猎，女性则负责采集和养育孩子。但近年来，越来越多的研究表明，女性同样参与了狩猎活动，甚至在某些情况下表现得更为出色。
史密斯本人也意识到，这种性别与饮食的关联更多是文化建构，而非生物学必然。他开始通过“豆腐男孩系列”视频测试其他植物性蛋白来源，如素肉（seitan）和发酵豆制品（tempeh），并以幽默的方式回应批评。然而，他的视频也引发了大量负面评论，甚至有人认为他吃豆腐会变得“女性化”或“同性恋”。
史密斯的账号曾被Instagram封禁，原因是Meta认为他支持“危险”组织。尽管他并未涉及政治或暴力内容，但这一事件凸显了社交媒体对性别与饮食话题的敏感态度。与此同时，他还在TikTok继续发布“豆腐男孩系列”，但评论更加激烈。
在西方文化中，男性普遍认为吃肉是男子气概的象征。这种观念不仅体现在广告中，也渗透到流行文化中。例如，Burger King曾推出“Manthem”广告，强调“吃肉才是男人的饮食”。然而，越来越多的研究挑战了这一传统观念，指出女性在狩猎中同样扮演了重要角色，甚至在某些情况下更擅长耐力型狩猎。
研究者罗布·韦尔泽博尔（Rob Velzeboer）指出，男性对植物性饮食的态度往往受到传统性别观念的影响。他发现，男性更容易接受植物性饮食的健康益处，而女性则更关注肉类生产对动物的伤害。一些男性甚至将素食主义视为一种“男子气概”的体现，比如通过独立思考、自律和健康等传统男性特质来定义自己的生活方式。
尽管植物性饮食在十年前曾受到更多欢迎，但如今，随着“男子气概”（manosphere）的兴起，越来越多的男性将吃肉视为身份认同的一部分。因此，推动植物性饮食的普及，需要更深入地理解男性对性别和饮食的复杂态度，并找到更有效的沟通方式。
In January, a 24-year old nutrition influencer named Jacob Smith made the grave mistake of becoming a little too curious about tofu.
Smith had read a study about the health benefits of eating less meat and figured he’d try to replace a small amount of the animal products he ate with plant-based foods. So, as content creators do, Smith brought his 170,000 Instagram followers along on his plant-based exploration.
In his first plant-based video, he filmed himself cooking tofu. In the comments, some of his followers gave him helpful tips on how to make it better next time. But a lot of people called him the well-worn insult known to any guy with a platform who dares to proudly eat tofu on social media: soy boy.
Cooking tofu was a departure for Smith, as just a few years prior, he had virtually no interest in plant-based proteins. Early on in college, Smith had followed what amounted to a carnivore diet — eating loads of meat and eggs — and dabbled in other dietary trends. But he eventually went back to a more “normal diet,” he told me, and went on to earn a master’s degree in dietetics. During his graduate program, he built a large Instagram following by explaining what he describes as “evidence-based nutrition,” covering research and debunking inaccurate health information.
Although Smith has remained a meat-eater, the response to his tofu video inspired him to start a series of videos testing out other plant-based protein sources, like seitan and tempeh, cheekily leaning into the criticisms he was getting. “I started calling it the Soy Boy Chronicles,” Smith told me.
The chronicles caught fire, each video racking up hundreds of thousands of views and with them, a flood of angry comments.
For “almost the majority of haters,” he told me, “their main critique about eating plant-based is it’s going to make you have more estrogen and that’s going to make you more feminine.” Of course, men and women both naturally produce the hormone estrogen, and eating soy foods doesn’t change men’s hormonal makeup. Plus, it’s well-established that soy products are not only safe to eat but also confer a number of health benefits, especially when replacing processed and red meats. (And estrogen, it turns out, may have been critical to early humans’ hunting abilities — more on this later.)
Some commenters said his newfound interest in plant-based foods explained why he’s weak (he is, in fact, quite jacked), made his voice sound “feminine” (he sounds like your average dude), or even more absurdly, that it would lead him to grow breasts or become gay. “I don’t even know where these ideas come from,” he told me, exasperated.
But Elina Vrijsen, who researches food and communication sciences at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium, has some ideas about that. “People probably perceive him as a very normative masculine man because he eats meat” and he’s fit, she told me. “But then he breaks his boundaries of masculinity by eating vegan food, and for a lot of people, this brings a lot of tension and a lot of questions.”
Smith has a similar theory. If he became fully vegan, he suggests, the criticism might have been more tame. But “people have more desire to defend themselves against people who somewhat eat like them,” he said. He’s showing a middle ground is possible — that one doesn’t need to be vegan, nor endorse carnivorism.
One day, just a couple weeks after he had launched the Soy Boy Chronicles, he tried to log on to Instagram only to find that his account had been taken down. The reason? According to a screenshot Smith shared with Vox, Meta said it doesn’t allow its users to follow, praise, or support people or organizations it defines as dangerous.
Smith was confused. He never cursed in his videos or even talked much about politics, save for occasional nutrition news, and said he certainly hadn’t promoted violence, criminal activity, or terrorism (which would have violated Meta’s terms if he had). He described it as a “family-friendly account.”
Meta told me the company reviewed his account and stands by the ban. “We reviewed and determined the correct enforcement action was taken for violating our policies,” a spokesperson told me over email. The company declined to answer specific questions about Smith’s account and how he had violated its policies.
Smith has continued his Soy Boy Chronicles on TikTok, but he says commenters there are even nastier than on Instagram.
Putting aside the Instagram suspension and whatever caused it, the backlash Smith garnered for eating tofu is just one of the latest examples of what can happen when men, especially those who appear traditionally “masculine,” promote plant-based eating. And Smith probably won’t be the last, so long as legions of people believe that masculinity requires heavy meat consumption and perceive men who question that belief to somehow be a threat to the status quo.
From the mid-2010s to the early 2020s in the United States, there was a brief window of time in which plant-based eating was gaining more popular traction and many more people were questioning conventional gender norms. But numerous trends suggest those cultural currents have changed direction in recent years. American culture has become increasingly fixated on protein, especially from animal-based foods; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes a carnivore diet; and then there has been the further rise of the so-called manosphere, a loose network of male influencers promoting an intensified vision of masculinity that often entails high levels of meat intake.
But the belief that “real men eat meat” long preceded the latest nutritional and cultural trends, and it is so deeply ingrained that a small but rich academic field has sprung up to study it.
It’s much more than a niche intellectual pursuit, though.
Figuring out how to reduce the consumption of animal products in wealthy countries is a pressing issue, as meat and dairy production account for up to one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions and are the leading drivers of global deforestation and US water pollution. Global meat production also represents a moral atrocity, with hundreds of billions of animals reared in grueling factory farms.
Women in Western cultures have generally proven to be more open-minded to reducing their meat intake. But to bring about wide-scale change in our food system, nonprofits, academics, policymakers, food businesses, content creators, and others will have to figure out how to persuade the other half of the population that what they eat doesn’t make them more or less of a man.
The idea that “real men eat meat” is a pervasive belief across Western cultures, and research in the US, Europe, and Australia bears this out. Studies from these places have found that:
When I asked several researchers how this belief came to be so prominent, all of them pointed first to food advertising, which began to be segregated by sex in the 1950s.
That’s given us TV ads like Burger King’s 2006 “Manthem” commercial, in which a guy served what appears to be a plate of vegetables in a fancy restaurant stands up and marches out while breaking into song, declaring he’s “too hungry to settle for ‘chick food.’” He heads straight to a Burger King as other men join him in song, pledging to “wave tofu bye-bye.” Burgers in hand, they march onto the highway and together, throw a minivan off an overpass, a show of the strength that meat gives them.
The commercial ends with a blunt message: “The Texas Double Whopper: Eat like a man, man.”
WeightWatchers (For Men), Hummer, Slim Jim, and the American Meat Institute have similarly over-the-top ads, while Manwich, Campbell’s Soup, KFC, and others have sent the signal perhaps slightly more subtly. The underlying message can be found beyond the realm of advertising and throughout pop culture, too.
Even plant-based protein companies sometimes use this tactic, advertising with a “masculinized aesthetic,” Vrijsen pointed out. The companies are, according to Vrijsen, seeking to “reassure consumers that reducing meat does not mean giving up your masculine identity…even when the product changes, the general logic often stays in place.”
The answer as to why such marketing has proven so effective can be found in the field of anthropology, which for decades has posited that throughout the long trajectory of human history, a clear division of labor separated the sexes: The men went off to hunt while the women stayed behind to safely gather edible plants and raise children, a vision put forth in then-popular theories, such as in the influential 1968 book Man the Hunter.
But some scholars have been poking holes in this widely accepted theory. Two of the most prominent critics of the “man the hunter” theory today are Sarah Lacy, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware, and Cara Ocobock, an associate professor of human biology at the University of Notre Dame, who’ve published papers together on the issue.
Most hunting didn’t look like “a super strong man by himself” engaged in a “battle of will against a wooly mammoth,” Lacy told me. Rather, much of it was probably mixed-sex groups who chased animals off cliffs, ambushed them from bushes and trees, caught them in nets, and injured them with weapons, which made it easier to chase them down to the point of exhaustion.
While this work required strength, it also required endurance. And women, Lacy and Ocobock argue in a 2023 paper published in the journal American Anthropologist, are particularly well-suited for the endurance needed to effectively hunt, thanks in part to higher estrogen levels.
“During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates,” the two wrote in a piece for Scientific American. “Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity.”
There’s “this emphasis that testosterone is the only hormone that gives people an [athletic] advantage,” Lacy told me, but “estrogen absolutely conveys sports advantages,” too.
Some archaeological evidence also conflicts with the dominant “man the hunter” theory, Lacy said. This includes prehistoric women buried with hunting equipment and Neanderthal remains that suggest men and women were potentially facing off with animals at a similar rate.
Much of the “man the hunter” theory, Lacy said, also rests on research into a small number of well-studied hunter-gatherer, or forager, societies, which only tells us so much. These handful of groups represent “such a tiny snapshot of the amount of variation that would’ve been present throughout multiple millions of years of human evolution.” At the same time, more recent historical ethnographic and archaeological research, along with research into Indigenous groups, provide plenty of evidence of women hunting.
This kind of research “challenges the assumption that the link between masculinity and meat consumption has a clear historical foundation,” Vrijsen, the food and communications researcher, told me. “And instead, it suggests that this association is more cultural than biological — and shaped sometimes by ideology rather than evidence.”
Lacy and Ocobock felt this observation firsthand in the wake of their published research. While it was well received among their anthropology peers, Lacy told me, some people on the internet were incensed.
The overwhelmingly negative public response came from “predominantly men who were just so offended by the insinuation that hunting is not the special thing” that they did that drove human evolution, Lacy told me. “It was really wild.” After Lacy and Ocobock had published their piece on the topic in Scientific American, the magazine offered them counseling “because the reaction — specifically on Twitter — was so virulent,” Lacy said.
Rob Velzeboer’s first glimpse into the dicey gender politics of meat came to him when he briefly competed as a boxer in the mid-2010s. He decided to go vegetarian out of a sense of duty to help animals, and while his peers weren’t necessarily hostile to the change — these were real-life acquaintances and friends, not internet strangers — they were often “very, very suspicious,” he told me.
Velezeboer is now a researcher at the University of British Columbia, where he studies meat and masculinity, among other topics. Lately, though, he’s become less interested in why this issue is so charged and more interested in figuring out how to have more productive conversations with men about it.
He’s currently working on a meta-analysis review of numerous studies to look at how men and women react to different messages on the issue. So far, by looking through dozens of studies, he told me that women are more open to messages about harms inflicted on animals in meat production, while men are more receptive to messages about the health benefits of plant-based eating.
Meanwhile, other research by Velzeboer has found that some vegetarian and vegan men frame their lifestyle through traditional American masculine norms, like: independent thought, rationality, discipline, health, alignment between their values and behavior, or even as a rebellious act that demonstrates they don’t just go along with the crowd.
Some of those traits apply to David Meyer, an 11-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion and host of the Ageless Warrior Lab podcast.
“I’m suspicious of when culture tells us we should be this way or that way,” Meyer told me. “[Food] companies are trying to make something appeal to us in a certain way, and we need to think for ourselves.”
Meyer told me that he thinks meat can certainly be part of a healthy diet, but for him, he felt that eliminating animal products from his diet decades ago improved his own health and athletic performance. He’s also an animal lover, and said he doesn’t want to support animal cruelty if he doesn’t have to.
“It works for me, and I’m not saying it would work for anybody else, but a lot of the fighters that I work with have reduced animal products and even dairy specifically, and they feel much better,” Meyer said. But if for some men, eating meat is part of their view of themselves as being masculine, that’s fine by him.
There are plenty of other professional male athletes that have embraced a plant-based diet, too, like NBA players Kyrie Irving and Chris Paul, strongman Patrik Baboumian, tennis star Novak Djokovic, and UFC champion James Wilks, featured in The Game Changers, a documentary about elite athletes who happen to eat plant-based.
Dominick Thompson, a content creator and longtime vegan with very big muscles, views his veganism, in some ways, as an extension of his traditional masculine side.
“No matter your diet, masculinity is about protecting — being a natural protector of the most weak and the most vulnerable,” Thompson told me. “And that includes not only animals, but human animals — those that simply can’t protect themselves. To me, that’s a pillar of what masculinity really is.”
After thinking about it long and hard enough, it all can get a bit muddling. Masculinity, femininity — these are squishy, evolving terms that mean different things to different people at different times, and are hard to pin down. Vrijsen, who’s conducted focus groups with young men about masculinity, told me they themselves often have a hard time defining what it means to them.
That uncertainty might explain some of the rise of the manosphere, in which prominent male influencers have stepped into the void to define masculinity for young men — and for some, like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan, high-meat diets are part of it.
It’s a big shift from where the plant-based movement was just a decade ago, Thompson said, when people seemed much more open to it. It was also a time when more and more people were questioning conventional gender norms. “But now I do feel like a lot of people are a little bit more close-minded” to eating plant-based, Thompson said. “We have a lot of work cut out for us.”
And Smith, for his part, is still posting through it with his Soy Boy Chronicles, forging ahead in the gray — often viciously patrolled — online territory of what it means to be a man in this country who also eats tofu.
2026-03-31 18:00:00
我们正处于一种对“看起来更美”的文化迷恋之中。这个由大量男性组成的在线社群声称他们通过自残和使用毒品来增强自己的外貌，比如用锤子敲打脸部以获得更明显的下颌线，或者吸食甲基苯丙胺以获得更瘦削的身材。这种行为引发了媒体的震惊报道和新闻关注。他们的动机很明确：在我们的文化中，美丽的人生活更容易，因此他们选择通过极端手段来改变自己。然而，两位作者——记者斯蒂芬妮·费亚里ington和诗人兼艺术家莫斯塔里·希拉尔——却选择反其道而行之，他们称自己为“丑陋”，并拒绝改变自己的外表。在他们的回忆录中，他们探讨了丑陋的定义：它是否是个人的不安全感所致，还是客观存在的事实？是否有可能存在一种客观的美？以及丑陋背后所隐藏的种族主义和性别歧视的历史。
他们还质疑，是否将自己称为“丑陋”是一种自我认同的表达，还是自我仇恨的表现。希拉尔在书中写道，她无法仅凭美学和诗歌来与丑陋和解；费亚里ington则认为，试图避免使用“丑陋”这个词是一种错误，因为这剥夺了她描述自己如何在世界中行走的语言。然而，这些词往往带有恶意，因此这些回忆录作者和“看起来更美”群体似乎都认同一个观点：如果一个人不像同龄人那样有吸引力，那么他就会被世界所伤害。
丑陋的指控往往来自外界。希拉尔和费亚里ington都提到，他们小时候被家人、权威人士或其他孩子称为“丑陋”，而这些评价通常与他们的“异类”特征有关。希拉尔的“丑陋”源于她的种族身份，而费亚里ington的“丑陋”则与她的性别表达有关。她的家人不断施压她，让她改变自己的外貌，以符合主流审美标准。希拉尔的姐妹们甚至为了拥有“更标准”的鼻子而接受多次鼻整形手术，而费亚里ington则担心她的女儿可能因为她的外貌而不再爱她。
在历史的长河中，种族、性别和美的观念紧密相连。19世纪的医生们曾认为，面部不对称是疯狂的标志，而意大利医生塞萨雷·龙勃罗索则提出，面部特征可以揭示一个人的犯罪倾向。这些观念至今仍然影响着我们对“丑陋”的理解。希拉尔和费亚里ington指出，这些对“丑陋”的定义往往与道德和邪恶联系在一起，而这种联系是人为制造的。
在面对“丑陋”时，希拉尔和费亚里ington都经历了内心的挣扎。希拉尔曾因被称作“马脸”而感到恐惧，甚至想要丢弃当年的学校照片。但她的母亲救下了这些照片，多年后她重新审视这些照片，发现过去的“丑陋”感已经消失。然而，当她看到一张自己最近的照片时，却感到悲伤和疲惫，仿佛那些旧日的自卑又回来了。她意识到，面对衰老和疾病带来的“丑陋”是最具挑战性的，因为这提醒我们生命的脆弱和有限。
最终，希拉尔认为，接受“丑陋”是一种更诚实、更深刻的方式。她写道：“我学会了尊重丑陋，它不仅是我镜中的自己，更是我们人类的真相。”她认为，丑陋能够见证人类生命的脆弱和我们所承受的抽象理想的压力。
相比之下，“看起来更美”的群体则试图通过极端手段来追求一种理想化的、无瑕疵的外貌，他们追求的是西方文化中那种高度男性化、干净整洁的美。这种追求往往伴随着对身体的暴力改造和对安全的忽视，仿佛他们相信自己的“美丽”永远不会衰老。而接受“丑陋”则意味着承认自己终将死亡，这是一种诚实的身体认知。也许，正是这种诚实，才让“丑陋”本身变得美丽。
We’re in a moment of cultural fascination with looksmaxxers. That too-online community, made up mostly of men who claim to do things like hit themselves in the face with hammers for a stronger jawline and snort meth for leaner bodies, has become the object of shocked trend pieces and news coverage.
Looksmaxxers are fascinating in part because their motivations are so understandable. They have observed the simple fact that in our culture, life is easier for people who are beautiful, and they have made their plans accordingly, self-mutilation and hard drugs and all. The calculus feels both horrifying and comprehensible, which is why I found it so startling and exciting to find people moving in the other direction in the form of two new memoirs by authors who both call themselves ugly and have no plans to change their appearances.
“I am an ugly woman,” begins journalist Stephanie Fairyington in Ugly, forthcoming in May. “At fourteen I learned fourteen times over that I’m ugly,” writes the poet and artist Moshtari Hilal in Ugliness, published last year.
These memoirists are essentially performing the same calculation the looksmaxxers have: Life is easier when you are beautiful, and I am not naturally a person whom others consider beautiful. But rather than reach for the hammer or the needle, both Hilal and Fairyington have chosen to explore the culture instead.
In each memoir, Fairyington and Hilal navigate what they think about ugliness: to what extent their own ugliness is a product of their own insecurities and to what extent it is objective truth; whether any sort of objective truth around human beauty is even possible; and the millennia of racism and misogyny that have defined our shared sense of ugliness. They consider whether there is value to be had in calling themselves ugly and deciding not to care what anyone else thinks about that, or whether embracing such a label would be an act of self-hatred.
“I cannot reconcile myself to ugliness through aesthetics and verse alone,” Hilal frets, after devoting pages of poetry and photographs to the nose she feels is too big for her face. “It feels too tender to admit that our beauty or lack thereof impacts, even shapes, our lives,” writes Fairyington.
As I read these books, I wasn’t always sure the authors had things figured out that much more than the looksmaxxers did. The malice in the word ugliness is hard to neutralize, to the point that an attempt at reclamation can sometimes seem like self-loathing. Indeed, I found myself feeling defensive on the part of both authors, compelled to look up an author photo and fact-check their claims about themselves. “Not ugly at all!” I declared both times, after I was presented with an image of a perfectly normal-looking woman.
Yet Fairyington, at least, makes it clear she doesn’t appreciate such compliments. She notes that any time she describes herself as ugly, people (especially women) interrupt her and assure her that she isn’t.
“Women can’t let a thought like that hang in the air without vigorously swatting it away because it’s the fate they’re chronically trained (and trying) to avoid; it’s very nearly the worst thought to think of oneself,” Fairyington writes. She thinks trying to avoid the word, however, is a mistake: it means depriving her of the words she needs to describe the way she walks through the world.
To call someone ugly feels so malicious, so aggressive. But these memoirists and the looksmaxxers appear to agree on at least one thing: people really are treated badly by the world if they are not as conventionally attractive as their peers.
To deny someone the language to name their own reality feels perverse. And yet ugly feels like such a cruel word. The provocative and never-quite-answered question of these memoirs is whether turning it on yourself can become an act of self-love.
Accusations of ugliness come from the outside first. Both Hilal and Fairyington write that they were called ugly as children, either by family members, authority figures, or other kids. Crucially, the first qualities that other people told them were ugly were the signs of their otherness. For Hilal, that is race, and for Fairyington, it is signs of queerness. Their families, in an attempt to care for them, continually pressure them to erase their otherness and make themselves normatively beautiful.
Hilal is an Afghan-born woman living in Germany (her book is nicely translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer), and it is the parts of her features that are specifically Arabic that she is taught to think of as ugly: her long nose, her dark body hair. Tending to both becomes a family affair. Her aunt tells her to start bleaching her facial hair, and her sister shows her how to manage the pain from the burn of the chemical cream. Her older sisters, who all have the same family nose, all get rhinoplasties, one after the other, much to their father’s approval.
Fairyington is a butch lesbian, and it is her refusal to present as a femme that she sees as marking her as ugly. “It looks like an active and hostile repudiation of what I, as a woman, am called upon, daily, to do,” she writes — to do the work necessary to be seen as attractive to men.
As a child, Fairyington recalls, her mother’s friends were baffled by her tomboyish energy. “That’s Chyrsi’s daughter?” one says contemptuously. “It wasn’t just my face that made me unattractive to her,” Fairington writes, “it was also the legibility of my queerness.” Fairyington felt like a boy, but on her, the trappings of little boyhood — “mismatched dirty clothes, bad haircuts, and smears of pizza grease lining the sides of their goofy smiles” — became wrong, incongruous, ugly.
The history between race, gender, and technologies and philosophies of beauty is long and intimate. Both Hilal and Fairyington take their time delving into it, and it’s this history that begins to make ugliness start to fall apart as a category in their minds. It becomes historically contingent, all its gruesome political biases showing through. If an aesthetic system tells you that people of color and queer people are inherently ugly — well, what is that system really worth living by?
One of Hilal’s long rabbit holes leads her into the history of plastic surgery — which doubles, she shows, as the history of doctors trying to make racial differences disappear. One 19th-century American surgeon developed an early nose job designed to turn the “Irish noses” on the faces of a new wave of immigrants into the more anglicized “American nose.” And in the 1930s, the German Jewish inventor of the modern rhinoplasty offered discounts to those with “Jewish noses” who wanted to be able to pass.
Hilal explores the way early researchers of mental illness and criminality became obsessed with the idea that looks and temperament were linked. In the 19th century, she writes, researchers found that all the patients in a given mental hospital had asymmetrical faces and decided it must mean that facial asymmetry is a marker of insanity. (In reality, all human faces are asymmetrical, but the researchers somehow failed to notice that.) Around the same time, the notorious Italian physician Cesare Lombroso developed a theory that criminality is written upon the face. In his view, thieves have bushy eyebrows and thin beards, while rapists have delicate features with swollen lips and eyelids.
“It’s no wonder these descriptions are familiar,” Hilal writes. “We still see them today in depictions, caricatures, and costumes of bad guys in books and film and elsewhere, all of which contribute to our notions of embodied evil. We know the criminal Lombroso invented before we ever came into contact with criminality.”
Fairyington, proving Hilal’s point, cites a recent study showing that people are more likely to believe those with “ugly faces” have acted immorally. This is the kind of study that becomes catnip to the looksmaxxers, who are always claiming that their Lombroso-like obsession with facial symmetry is grounded in real science. But Hilal and Fairyington return to some core questions: Who taught us what ugliness looks like? Who linked that to immorality and evil? And what agenda did those people have?
Jessica DeFino, a journalist and vocal critic of the beauty industry, frequently remarks that when it comes to beauty, Americans have a Disney movie’s sense of morality. We congratulate celebrities we like for “aging well” because they are “unproblematic,” while we react to images of wrinkled and racist politicians by saying that hatred makes you “age horribly.” She argues that we should see this tendency for what it really is: a continuation of the thinking of those 19th-century doctors or even going back earlier, to the ancient world. “The ancient Greeks,” she points out, “used the same word, kalos” to describe both “inner goodness and outer beauty.”
Surely those who are ugly are those who have displeased the gods, who have sinned. Surely to be beautiful is to exist correctly in the world, to be pure of heart.
Hilal writes that when she began to draw portraits as part of her artistic practice, she was drawn to faces that “resembled those of the evil stepmother, strict headmistress, frigid secretary, wicked witch or sneaky and stingy neighbor.” They were also familiar faces, she writes: “They also resembled me. I had never met anyone who both occupied these roles and looked like me, yet I felt I knew these characters better than I knew myself. I wasn’t cunning or cruel, but when I smiled in the mirror, I saw them there, all those mean women.”
For both Hilal and Fairyington, being called ugly by another person distances them from their bodies and their loved ones.
Hilal writes that being labeled ugly makes her imagine herself in another, more acceptable body. “I call this idealized person ‘the other woman,’ a woman with whom I’m cheating on myself,” she writes, “whenever I secretly promise her a better life than the one promised to the self and body I’m actually spending my time with.”
Fairyington’s view of her own appearance becomes a barrier between herself and her conventionally attractive daughter, who she fears might love her less because she’s not beautiful. She describes being overcome with fear when her daughter tickles her feet, which Fairyington has always considered her ugliest part. “The idea of you seeing them in close proximity, or worse, handling them—dry, calloused, malformed—felt too vulnerable, like it would make me less lovable to you. Ugly,” she writes.
Most of us have experienced similar thoughts in our lives: It’s the rare and confident soul who doesn’t ever hear a little voice in their head call them ugly. The conventional advice at this point is to try to find beauty in yourself as you exist now, and to dismiss the limited beautiful/ugly binary of Greek statues. Both Fairyington and Hilal play with such possibilities, and sometimes they work. But they don’t always.
Fairyington writes that after she came out at age 19, she felt “desirable — if not attractive — for the first time ever” as she learned that the masculinity that made her ugly to her mothers’ friends made her appealing to other queer women. Studying queer theory in college opened her mind further to the possibilities of moving beyond conventional beauty ideas. “I could even cultivate ‘ugly’ like some girls cultivate ‘pretty,” she writes in excitement, “or fuse the two in some startling and unexpected way, or transcend both.” She started to wear flip flops year-round, “to intentionally expose my ugly feet.”
Yet transcendence proves difficult, as Fairyington’s optimism about the possibilities of what she calls her “radical ugliness” is always tempered with that “tenderness” — the insecurity about her looks below the surface bravado and pleasure in queer aesthetics. She shifts back and forth ambivalently over whether her ugliness is a badge of pride she is embracing or a neutral truth she must stare in the face.
In one section, she quotes Thomas J. Spiegel’s 2022 paper on “lookism,” which argues that society’s prejudice against the ugly should be disrupted like any other form of prejudice. Spiegel asserts that we should recognize ugly people as a marginalized social group, but we are unable to do so, because it feels so mean to call someone else ugly, or to let them call themselves that. “Our next-level liberation depends upon our ability to manage the fragile and fraught embarrassment in openly admitting the ways our culturally informed plainness or prettiness impact our lives,” Fairyington declares.
That “fragile and fraught embarrassment” can cut deep. When she and her partner, Sabrina, begin talking about having a baby, Fairyington overhears one of her friends say that Sabrina should be the genetic mother, because she’s the pretty one, and Fairyington doesn’t disagree: She doesn’t want to inflict her face on an innocent child. She vacillates between worrying that her pretty daughter will dislike her for her ugliness, or that her daughter is too focused on conventional expressions of beauty.
When Sabrina takes their 8-year-old to get her nails done, Fairyington protests that they’re teaching her to objectify herself too young. When she sees her daughter pine over the rhinestone-covered dresses worn by a group of drag queens, Fairyington writes knowingly, “What you don’t yet understand is that it’s not subversive when you do it; it’s submission.” The pleasures of self adornment are, for her, never about self-expression or the play of color and texture and form. They are inextricably tied to making oneself small in order to please other people — just as, in this book, her own radical ugliness is tied both to an intoxicating self-expression, a grim social disadvantage, and the intimate horror of displeasing the people she loves.
Meanwhile, Hilal describes being called “horseface” at 14, and, in horror, trying to throw out that year’s school pictures. Her mother rescues the pictures, and in the poem that opens Ugliness, Hilal looks at them again for the first time in decades, only to find the old sense of her own ugliness has vanished. She writes:
I search in vain
for an ugly horseface.
All I find is the picture of a child
flashing her teeth,
smiling for what will be the last time
in fourteen years.
Yet at the end of the book, Hilal is startled to glance at a recent photo of herself, from a day she felt happy and energetic, and find that she looks sad and tired and old. All her old teenage insecurities come rushing back — all her historiography and post-colonial analysis be damned. “Have I not learned anything?” she demands, betrayed by both her mind and her body. “How could my face fade on me like that, after I worked so hard getting to know and love it?” Aging is bringing new challenges to her project. The most difficult form of ugliness to confront, she realizes, is that of an old or sick body, which reminds us all of our own mortality and summons fear and disgust.
Hilal concludes with some shame that much of her project has been about trying to find a way “into the realm of beauty” through “ethical arguments and aesthetic drawings.” She thought, she writes, “I might convince others, and maybe even myself, that I’m beautiful too.” What she finds more productive, in the end, is the work of the writer and advocate Mia Mingus, who calls for a shift “from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence.”
Mingus’s magnificent bodies are bodies that are non-normative: “The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself.” It is this framework that pushes Hilal to want to reconcile herself to the idea of ugliness, which acknowledges the human, fleshy frailty of bodies in a way that beauty cannot.
“I learned to respect ugliness: as an enduring reflection, not just of myself in the mirror, but of our humanness,” Hilal writes. “Ugliness alone reflects a truth that transcends images and words in bearing witness to the vulnerability of human life and the organic limits of the many abstract, general ideals imposed on us.”
Part of the project of the looksmaxxers is to try to contain the messy realities and limitations of our human bodies, and instead to embody the beauty ideal at its most Western, hypermasculine, and antiseptic. They strive for inhuman symmetry, for straight Greek noses and cut-glass jaws, for physiques that allow no possibilities of androgyny or gender play, no hints of weakness or vulnerability. They push toward that ideal with such deliberate violence and disregard for safety that it is as though they believe that their new, “beautiful” bodies will never die.
Trying to embrace ugliness instead is a fraught concept, riddled with possibilities for self-loathing and self-deception. But at the very least, as Hilal shows us, a body that is reconciled to ugliness is a body that knows it will die someday. It is an honest body — and isn’t there something beautiful in that?
2026-03-31 05:49:00
2026年3月26日，旅行者在德克萨斯州休斯顿乔治·布什洲际机场的TSA安检点排队等候。| Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
本文出自《Logoff》每日通讯，帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，同时避免政治新闻占据您的生活。点击此处订阅。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：美国的航空旅行状况正在好转——至少暂时如此。
发生了什么？今天，TSA特工首次在一个月内收到工资，缓解了持续的国土安全部关门带来的压力，也减少了美国主要机场的漫长安检队伍。
资金从哪里来？国土安全部仍未获得资金，但特朗普总统于周五签署了一项行政命令，指示即使如此也要支付TSA特工工资，因为安检队伍已达到危机水平。此次支付部分覆盖了特工因关门而拖欠的工资，据称是使用了去年“大美法案”（特朗普的“Big Beautiful Bill”）为国土安全部分配的资金。据CNN报道，这种单方面调配资金的做法是否合法尚不清楚，但工资仍在发放。
背景如何？这是第二次政府长时间关门导致特朗普政府绕过国会支付联邦雇员工资。去年，一次更广泛的、创纪录的关门期间，特朗普将国防部的资金用于支付美军工资。（这次没有影响到军队工资，因为国会已为国防部提供资金。）
大局如何？周一的工资发放对数万名没有收入的TSA员工以及美国疲于奔命的航空旅行系统来说是个大好消息。但这也更像是一个临时补救措施，而非长久之计。具体而言，尽管我们不清楚特朗普政府此次支付TSA工资的确切资金来源，但这种状况不会持续太久；国会最终仍需为TSA和其他国土安全部门（包括移民与海关执法局和海关与边境保护局）提供资金，无论是否包括ICE和CBP。
还有一个更深层次的问题：这类资金短缺的情况越来越频繁。即使国会很快解决此次关门问题，我们很可能很快又会面临另一场关门。
好了，现在是时候下线了……
我的同事艾莉·沃尔佩（Allie Volpe）——可以说是“下线”的非正式守护者——是关于如何享受生活的宝贵建议的源泉。在她最近的一篇文章中，她采访了专家吉莉安·桑德斯特罗姆（Gillian Sandstrom）教授，探讨了与陌生人交谈的利与弊。您可以在这里阅读他们的对话。
祝您有一个美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The US air travel situation is looking up — for now.
What’s happening? TSA agents received paychecks today for the first time in more than a month, easing the burden of the ongoing Homeland Security shutdown and alleviating long security lines at major US airports.
Where is the money coming from? DHS still doesn’t have funding, but President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday directing that TSA agents be paid anyway, as airport security lines began to reach crisis proportions.
The paychecks covered some, but not all, of the back pay owed to agents due to the shutdown and were reportedly paid out of money allocated to DHS under last year’s reconciliation package (Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”).
As CNN has reported, it’s unclear whether that kind of unilateral direction of funding is legal, but paychecks are flowing regardless.
What’s the context? This is the second time a prolonged government shutdown has resulted in the Trump administration going around Congress to pay federal employees. Last year, during a much broader, record-long shutdown, Trump redirected Defense Department money to pay US troops. (Military paychecks have not been affected this time, since DOD has been funded by Congress.)
What’s the big picture? Monday’s paychecks are a big deal for the tens of thousands of TSA employees who have been going without, as well as for America’s beleaguered air travel system. But they’re more of a Band-Aid than a permanent fix.
Specifically, while we don’t know exactly where the Trump administration is getting the money for TSA paychecks, it’s not going to last forever; at some point, Congress will still need to fund TSA and the rest of DHS, with or without ICE and CBP.
There’s also an underlying problem: These kinds of funding lapses are getting more and more frequent. Even if Congress gets this shutdown sorted out soon, we’re likely to be staring down another before we know it.
My colleague Allie Volpe — arguably the unofficial patron saint of logging off — is a font of good advice about living life. For her latest story, she spoke with an expert, Professor Gillian Sandstrom, about how, and why, you should talk with strangers. You can read their conversation here.
Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
