2025-12-29 20:00:00
随着2025年接近尾声，Vox回顾了今年最精彩的一些报道。为了整理这份清单，我参考了同事们推荐的他们最喜欢的文章，并尽量涵盖各种话题，希望能为你的工作日或休息时间带来乐趣和启发。以下是按无特定顺序排列的精选内容：
我们找到了清洁能源的圣杯，这仅仅是开始（作者：Umair Irfan）
在四月，Umair Irfan报道了今年最令人鼓舞的清洁能源故事之一：大型电池。他指出，新型的电网级电池是利用风能和太阳能潜力的关键，也是对美国老旧电网的重要改进：“它们是可再生能源的花生酱与巧克力，使清洁能源的最佳特性更加突出，并缓解其一些缺点。”
这个岛国的大多数动物只存在于地球其他地方（作者：Benji Jones 和 Paige Vega）
今年，我的同事Benji Jones为马达加斯加这个岛国撰写了三篇精彩报道，探讨该国珊瑚礁、狐猴和变色龙面临的危机，以及如何通过解决经济需求来推动保护工作。这些报道是在马达加斯加政府被军事政变推翻之前完成的。
播客对大脑的影响（作者：Adam Clark Estes）
Adam Clark Estes今年深入探讨了科技如何重塑我们的大脑，并提出了如何对抗这一影响的方法。其中，他关于沉默重要性以及我们不断听播客时错失了什么的文章，可能是我最喜欢的。我相信它将对我2026年的播客习惯产生深远影响。
独家：RFK Jr. 和白宫埋藏了一项关于酒精与癌症的重要研究（作者：Dylan Scott）
在今年健康领域诸多事件中，我的同事Dylan Scott仍抽出时间主持Vox的Today, Explained通讯。他于九月获得了一份被RFK Jr. 的卫生与公共服务部试图掩盖的研究结论，该研究发现了酒精消费与癌症死亡之间的新证据。不过，Vox的Bryan Walsh也有好消息：2025年美国人饮酒量减少了。
最可能的AI末日（作者：Eric Levitz）
2025年对AI的风险进行了深入反思。Eric Levitz以一篇关于“完全自动化的新封建主义”的文章，生动地描绘了AI可能带来的灾难。他指出，虽然我们尚未到达那个地步，但像《圣诞奇遇记》中的Ebenezer Scrooge一样，我们还有机会阻止这一未来。
他们的民主已经消亡，他们对特朗普权力扩张有重要启示（作者：Zack Beauchamp）
我的同事Zack Beauchamp今年深入报道了特朗普政府对民主的冲击。他借鉴了自己多年报道其他国家民主倒退的经验，指出特朗普与匈牙利总理欧尔班的相似之处，并提醒美国人从中吸取教训。他的二月文章至今仍是重要的参考。
海洋边缘的魔法世界（来自Vox的Unexplainable播客）
这是Vox Unexplainable播客中的一集，由Byrd Pinkerton制作。她讲述了自己喜爱的加州潮池生态系统，以及气候变化对它们的影响，以及研究者们如何应对这些变化。这集提醒我们，即使面对看似难以解决的大问题，也要关注自己能控制的事物，并珍惜发现的美。这将是进入2026的完美一集。
我们误读了百年的美国经典小说（作者：Constance Grady）
Constance Grady在纪念《了不起的盖茨比》出版100周年之际，回顾了这部经典小说的诞生过程以及它成为不朽之作的偶然因素。这是一篇提醒我们为何喜欢这部小说的绝佳文章。
美国增长最快的郊区即将变得非常昂贵（作者：Marina Bolotnikova）
2025年，Merriam-Webster公布的年度词汇是“slop”，但“可负担性”可能成为政治领域的热门词汇。Marina Bolotnikova在七月份的文章中指出，美国宽敞、蔓延且价格合理的郊区正在接近其极限，未来将变得非常昂贵。她认为，解决这一问题可能需要借鉴Abundance的解决方案。
共和党面临纳粹问题（来自Vox的Today, Explained播客）
在11月，Vox的Today, Explained播客探讨了共和党内部爆发的“纳粹问题”——这一问题成为今年最大的新闻之一。主持人Noel King和整个Today, Explained团队深入分析了这一现象的起因、现状及其对国家的高风险影响。
特别推荐： 不要让杂乱的家阻止你做主人（作者：Allie Volpe）
除了这本通讯，我还主持Vox的The Logoff播客。这意味着我经常思考两个问题：特朗普和如何真正远离互联网，重新夺回大脑空间。Allie Volpe的这篇文章是我今年最喜欢的Logoff推荐之一：她建议我们不要让杂乱的家阻碍我们成为朋友的主人，而是多花时间陪伴朋友。我计划在2026年多这么做，也希望你如此！
本文最初发表于Today, Explained通讯。点击此处订阅！
As we wind toward the end of the year, Vox is taking a look back with some of our best stories of 2025. To build this list, I took recommendations from my colleagues for their favorites and tried to give you a range of topics to dive into. Whether you’re slogging through a day of work or taking some time off, I hope these entertain and inform you. Here they are, presented in no particular order:
In April, Umair Irfan reported on one of the most hopeful clean energy stories of the year: really big batteries. New grid-scale batteries, he writes, are a key ingredient to harnessing the potential of wind and solar energy, as well as a much-needed improvement to America’s archaic grid: “the peanut butter to the chocolate of renewable energy, making all the best traits about clean energy even better and balancing out some of its downsides.”
It’s possible that no one at Vox has had a more interesting year than my colleague Benji Jones, who reported this incredible package of three stories from the island nation of Madagascar, shortly before the country’s government was overthrown in a military coup. Benji covered the crises facing Madagascar’s coral reefs, lemurs, and chameleons — and how conservation efforts can succeed by addressing economic needs as well.
Adam Clark Estes has done so much amazing work this year about the way tech rewires our brains and how to fight back (including experimenting on himself and briefly ruining his life in the process). But this story, about the importance of silence and what we miss out on when we’re constantly listening to podcasts as we move through the world, might be my favorite. I know it’s the one that will most influence my listening — or not listening — in 2026.
With everything happening on the health beat this year, it’s a miracle my colleague Dylan Scott has had time to help co-host the Today, Explained newsletter as well. Somehow he has, though, and he also squeezed in a major scoop this September: He obtained the conclusions of a major alcohol study that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department tried to bury, which found new evidence linking alcohol consumption to cancer mortality. (Vox’s Bryan Walsh has some good news about that, though: Americans drank less in 2025.)
2025 was, unfortunately, a big year for reckoning with the dangers of AI. It’s a dreary beat, but Eric Levitz did it best with this story about one possible apocalypse: what he describes as “fully automated neofeudalism,” where AI helps secure the power of a small caste of oligarchical elites over all the rest of us. The good news, he writes, is we’re not there yet — and just like A Christmas Carol’s Ebenezer Scrooge, there’s still time to stave off that future.
My colleague Zack Beauchamp has done incredible work covering the Trump administration’s assault on democracy this year, drawing from his years of experience covering other countries’ backsliding. Almost a year into Trump 2.0, his February story about the parallels between Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán — and the lessons Americans should take from Hungary’s crisis — is still a vital roadmap.
Vox’s Unexplainable podcast is consistently fun and fascinating, but this episode from July, produced by Byrd Pinkerton, packs a sneaky emotional punch too. She tells the story of the tide pools she loves on the California coastline: how climate change is impacting their delicate ecosystem, and how the researchers who love them too are dealing with that change. The episode ends with a reminder to keep focusing on the things you can control, even when big problems like climate change feel impossibly hard to grasp, and to keep appreciating beauty as you find it. It’s the perfect episode to carry into 2026.
Constance Grady marked the 100th anniversary of the classic novel The Great Gatsby with this account of how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal story came to be and how it has been cemented as an all-time classic, in part through a series of accidents. It’s a perfect reminder of what makes a novel many of us likely haven’t revisited since high school so timeless.
Merriam-Webster tells us that the word of the year in 2025 was “slop” — but “affordability” might be one of the runners-up, at least in US politics (don’t tell Donald Trump). In July, Marina Bolotnikova wrote about a pressing story from the frontier of the American housing market, where America’s spacious, sprawling, affordable suburbs are about to reach their outer limit — and get very expensive. To fix it, she argues, it might be time to look to the Abundance playbook, in 2026 and beyond.
In November, Vox’s Today, Explained podcast covered a late-breaking candidate for one of the biggest stories of the year: The Republican civil war that has erupted over the party’s increasingly clear Nazi problem. Co-host Noel King and the entire Today, Explained team expertly break down what’s happening, how we got here, and the very high stakes for the country.
In addition to this newsletter, I also host Vox’s The Logoff. That means I spend a lot of time thinking about two things: Donald Trump, and the best ways to actually log off, flee the internet, and reclaim a little bit of brain space from a nonstop news cycle. This story, from Allie Volpe, was one of my favorite Logoff recs of the year: She writes that we should all stop letting a messy house keep us from hosting, and prioritize spending more time with our friends instead. I’m going to try to do more of that in 2026, and I hope you do too!
A version of this story originally appeared in the Today, Explained newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-12-29 19:30:00
在美国得克萨斯州拉布克市，一名年轻儿童在他母亲的怀抱中接种了麻疹疫苗。| 约翰·森内迈尔/Getty Images 亚利桑那州钱德勒市的全科医生安德鲁·卡罗尔博士于2000年首次来到这里，也就是美国宣布麻疹已被根除的那一年。如今，25年过去了，距离他诊所几小时的地方爆发了麻疹疫情，这仅仅是今年美国多地出现令人担忧疫情的最新一例，而疫苗接种率正在下降。
在为这篇报道采访的医生中，他们告诉我，他们感到疲惫和沮丧。许多医生描述了对医学持怀疑态度的患者，他们从各种来源获取信息，而这些信息往往是错误的。现在，公共卫生官员在肯尼迪的领导下，正在验证一些在社交媒体和YouTube上流传的荒谬观点，这使得医生更难赢得患者的信任。
Dr. Andrew Carroll, a family physician in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb outside of Phoenix, first arrived there in 2000, the same year the United States declared measles had been eradicated. Now, 25 years later, an outbreak is accelerating a couple hours away from his practice — only the latest in a number of troubling outbreaks across the United States this year as vaccination rates tumble.
In 2025, more than 1,900 cases have been diagnosed — the most in more than 30 years. More than 200 Americans, the vast majority of them young children, were hospitalized and three people have died — the first measles deaths in the US in more than a decade. A massive outbreak that began in an insular religious community in west Texas set the tone for the year: As cases grew over the spring, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. waffled on the value of vaccines while touting unproven treatments like cod liver oil. The Arizona outbreak was likewise seeded in a fundamentalist Mormon community with a history of low vaccination rates.
When I spoke with Carroll shortly before the holidays, he thought back to his training in the 1990s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. “I watched a lot of people die slowly and agonizingly,” he said. But we’ve made so much progress in both research and public health: today, people can live for decades with HIV and have safe sexual relationships with partners who were not infected.
“That’s science,” he said — the very same rigorous, empirical process that eradicated another deadly disease, measles, which before widespread vaccinations started in 1963 was killing hundreds of children every year. The same process has eliminated diseases like polio and smallpox.
“It only takes one generation to forget the progress we’ve made on certain things — and one of those is measles,” Carroll told me. “Twenty-five years ago, we were a measles-free nation. Now we’re back one generation later because we forgot how terrible it was.”
There are many reasons why measles is spreading in the US again — the decline in trust in the measles vaccination, political polarization, social media algorithms, and the Covid-19 backlash.
But in speaking with five doctors practicing in or near some of this year’s hot spots, something else stood out to me: Americans have lost their fear of measles.
And the measles virus is fearsome: It is still one of the most contagious infections known to humanity. It can put healthy children in the hospital; a small number of infected people will die from it. Even if a patient survives measles, it can cause a person’s immune system to lose its protection against a wide variety of pathogens — a phenomenon known as immunity amnesia.
That’s why the measles vaccine was such a scientific miracle. It was highly effective — preventing infections in 97 percent of cases — and, after a concerted public health campaign to educate people on the value of getting vaccinated, upward of 90 percent of Americans had received their measles shot at the turn of the 21st century and nearly every American agreed on the importance of childhood vaccinations.
“We’ve done too good of a job,” said Dr. Emily Briggs, a family physician in New Braunfels, Texas, outside San Antonio. She’s joking — mostly. But Carroll told me that the patients in his practice who are most concerned about the outbreak a few hours away are the grandparents — the only remaining generation that saw the impacts of measles up close.
Not only have Americans grown complacent about measles, but our current political landscape has contributed to a slide in vaccination rates across the board.
Fewer people are getting the annual flu shot and Covid-19 booster rates are pitifully low. Vaccination rates have been dropping not only for measles but for whooping cough, another deadly disease that is seeing a resurgence. Trust in experts and scientists is near an all-time low.
And it hasn’t helped that America’s top health official, Kennedy, has minimized how dangerous the disease really was: “When you and I were kids, everybody got measles,” he said in March on Fox News, touting the lifetime protection that infection incurred and ignoring the several hundred annual deaths that still occurred in the mid-20th century.
And so the measles virus has had an opportunity to reconquer areas where it had long been absent. Fewer than half of kids in a Mennonite community in west Texas, where that state’s outbreak began, were vaccinated. At the South Carolina charter school that is the epicenter of that state’s currently accelerating outbreak, less than 20 percent were.
Dr. Ada Stewart, a family physician in Columbia, South Carolina, told me she was bracing for another surge in cases after the holiday season. She said her patients were approaching the end of year with trepidation, too:
“I have people coming to me: ‘Can I go visit Grandma up there in Greenville? Is it safe? Should I take my baby?’” Stewart said. “People are scared.”
The doctors I spoke to for this story told me that they are exhausted and frustrated. Many of them described patients who have become more dubious of medicine, who have their own sources of information — frequently inaccurate — and now public health authorities under Kennedy are validating some of the more outlandish ideas they find on social media and YouTube. It’s harder to gain their patients’ trust.
“There’s some resistance by many people to take lessons from history. They don’t want to be encumbered by those lessons and give up their autonomy and their agency to choose for themselves what they want to do,” Dr. Jason Terk, a pediatrician in north Texas, told me. “Of course, they don’t understand that what they choose to do isn’t just for them. It’s for everybody else when it comes to public health.”
And that’s an additional burden on already overworked and underpaid doctors. America doesn’t have enough primary care physicians or pediatricians as it is. They are already among the lower-paying specialties, which has driven more and more young doctors to pursue more lucrative positions as orthopedic surgeons and to work in higher-paying metro areas.
I’ve written stories about the twilight of the family doctor and America’s doctor deserts, communities that already struggle to find primary care doctors and pediatricians who will come and practice there. Now, these doctors are tasked with combating misinformation not only from social media but from the federal government — often with even fewer resources than before.
“Our burnout is so significantly higher now because: Why is it on us to have to reiterate the exact same accurate information when that’s why we have public health officials? That’s why we have a federal government,” Briggs said. “Yet it’s falling to us as individual physicians to have to reiterate evidence-based medicine each and every visit.”
The medical consensus that had held for as long as some of these doctors have been practicing — upward of 30 years in some cases — has been shattered. “It’s been a little bit insane,” Briggs said.
Now that vaccine hesitancy has gone mainstream, Terk, the Texas pediatrician, told me he tries to walk through the science, the risks and benefits, and make them clear to his patients. But he also wants them to understand that while a vaccination may be a personal decision, if they choose to ignore his advice, they take responsibility for the consequences.
Those are the difficult conversations physicians find themselves having in our new era of measles. If there is any potential bright side to this year’s outbreaks, they say, it’s that new experiences with this deadly disease may convince people once again of the value of a measles shot.
“We’re going through a cycle, and there will be casualties. There will be needless deaths and illnesses,” Terk told me. “I think that the only generation that is going to learn from this will be maybe the next one.”
2025-12-29 19:15:00
与会者在凤凰城的Turning Point年度美国节（AmericaFest）会议上，跟随牧师约翰·阿曼丘库沃（John Amanchukwu）进行每日祈祷，以纪念已故的右翼政治活动家查理·克里克（Charlie Kirk）。| Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images
关键要点：
为了分析这一问题，我重新审视了一种流行理论，即Z世代可以分为两个不同的群体。一个是年长群体，通常出生于1995年至2001年之间，他们更忠于民主党，且熟悉疫情前的生活方式。另一个是年轻群体，出生于2002年之后，他们在疫情中成长，政治观点更加独特，且在2024年之前似乎更亲特朗普。现在，新的数据继续支持这一观点，即Z世代内部存在一些延续自2024年的细微差别。特别是，上周发布的《年轻男性研究项目》（Young Men’s Research Project）的一项新调查显示，至少在Z世代男性中，年轻群体比年长群体更倾向于反对特朗普。
这些发现值得注意，因为它们似乎与一些其他关于Z世代内部分歧的分析相矛盾，这些分析认为，是年轻群体而非年长群体更倾向于保守主义和共和党。《年轻男性研究项目》的作者查理·萨布吉（Charlie Sabgir）告诉我：“整体而言，年轻男性是所有选民群体中最不具意识形态倾向的一群。”虽然他们表面上看起来更保守，但就实际政策和意识形态而言，他们尚未像年轻女性那样坚定地形成一套固定的信念。萨布吉承认，一些社会态度的差异仍需进一步研究，以确定其原因。这可能是由于TikTok等平台和算法驱动的内容流？特定的网红和内容创作者的影响？还是由于前几代人中常见的向保守主义转变？他指出，这些因果关系仍不清楚，但可以确定的是，年龄差异正在加速扩大。至少在对特朗普的看法方面，他说：“年轻群体对事件发生的速度仍感到震惊，而这种震惊对最年轻的群体影响更大，因为他们之前从未经历过特朗普的总统任期。”
那么，年轻一代是否真的更保守？
其他数据来源，包括专门针对年轻选民的民调，也追踪了Z世代中最年轻一代在政治上的波动和分歧，尽管这些数据可能与《年轻男性研究项目》的意识形态分析有所不同。例如，秋季的哈佛和耶鲁青年民调都显示，年轻人对国家发展方向的不满和对特朗普的看法日益增长，同时对社会和文化问题的看法也更加不稳定。然而，耶鲁青年民调再次发现，年轻一代比年长一代更倾向于保守主义和共和党。耶鲁青年民调的创始人兼前主任米兰·辛格（Milan Singh）表示，年轻一代比年长一代更可能支持特朗普的总统任期和一些政策。他指出：“如果你查看任何涉及年龄分组的调查问题，你会发现18至22岁的年轻人比23至29岁的年轻人略微更保守。”但他强调，这并不意味着每个年轻人都是“狂热的特朗普支持者”或“右翼人士”。
这些分歧提出了一个更大的问题：这些年轻人是否因为经济问题和对特朗普的不满而更容易被说服改变投票倾向？还是这些意识形态差异是持久的，预示着未来可能有更多年轻保守主义者加入特朗普或共和党的阵营？
辛格认为，尽管18至22岁的年轻人比23至29岁的年轻人略微更保守，但这些年轻人仍然具有可塑性，他们并不一定持有坚定的意识形态信念。他认为，一些右翼人士认为年轻一代是因歧视、政治正确、多元化倡议和进步文化而转向保守主义的观点，是对当前形势的误读。他说：“你可以编织出一个相当清晰的叙事，即许多年轻人在2024年投票支持特朗普，即使他们通常支持民主党，是因为他们对生活成本感到极度不满。当然，你还需要加上脚注，说明一些年轻人可能有更保守的观点，而他们并不适合当前的民主党联盟。但如今他们发现，特朗普不仅没有兑现降低生活成本的承诺，反而通过其标志性立法使情况更糟，损害了他们的利益，因此他们开始反对特朗普。”
G. Elliott Morris，一位数据记者和民调与选举专家，告诉我，Z世代内部的这些分歧实际上表明，年轻美国人之间的分界线在于他们是否愿意彻底推翻现有政治体系。他说：“要调和这两种观点，我们可以将年轻的Z世代群体视为比年长群体更加反体制、反现任政府，并且更加悲观。”如果问这两个群体认为国家正在走向何方，这个年轻群体更可能表示“走错了方向”。如果问他们是否担心自己的经济状况，他们也更加悲观。如果他们在疫情期间毕业或就读大学时遭遇了就业机会的减少，那么他们就会更加反对民主党、反对哈里斯，并最终在2025和2026年更强烈地反对特朗普。
这些差异将在未来的美国大选和政治中产生重要影响。过去两年关于年轻美国人的讨论似乎都带有某种宿命论或决定论的色彩，认为他们无法成为可靠的民主党选民，或者他们需要更多的进步派宣传，或者他们已经成为坚定的共和党选民或“groypers”（指对特朗普支持者的一种称呼）。实际上，像其他群体一样，年轻选民——特别是年轻男性——并不是一个整体。
Over the last year, the youngest generation of American voters have scrambled a lot of our understanding of politics.
The Gen Z cohort swung hard toward Republicans last year, moving anywhere from 6 to 21 points toward President Donald Trump (depending on the data source) compared to 2020. But, they now appear to be just as aggressively swinging away. In recent polls, they prefer Democratic congressional control by 17 points in 2026 and, now, strongly disapprove of Trump — a flip from earlier this year.
This swerve back includes young men — that segment of the country that Democrats, and a lot of the media, spent the last two years fixated on understanding. After all, reports over the last few years suggested these young Americans were becoming more conservative. They were getting more religious, were more Trump-curious, and were rebelling against Democrats and popular culture for making traditional masculinity taboo — all while dealing with a mental health and loneliness crisis.
Could they have become bleeding heart liberals over the course of a few months? The answer may determine more than just the midterm elections. Different segments of Gen Z may have different reasons for feeling disillusioned with party politics and the state of the nation. And that may determine what the next generation of political leaders will have to say and propose to re-spark faith in the political system.
To analyze this question, I revisited one popular theory that I tried to articulate in the spring: There are two distinct kinds of Gen Z. One is an older cohort, generally born between 1995 and 2001 — more loyal to Democrats and familiar with a pre-pandemic way of life. The other is a younger one, born after 2002 — raised during and after the pandemic, more idiosyncratic politics, and seeming more friendly to Trump during the first half of the year and in 2024.
Now, new data continues to back up the case that there are nuances within Gen Z that carried over from 2024. And, more specifically, a new survey published last week from the Young Men’s Research Project suggests that, at least among Gen Z men, it’s the younger cohort that is turning sharply more anti-Trump than the older cohort. While it is one data set, it adds to the body of evidence that the youngest members of the electorate are going through a tumultuous period right now.
In October, the team behind the Young Men Research Project partnered with the polling group YouGov to zero in on men aged 18–29. What they found challenges some of the theory that I laid out earlier this year, namely that the younger cohort of Gen Z is more likely to identify as “conservative” and hold traditional views of politics and society, specifically gender, than the older cohort. But, it also provides evidence that the opinions and views of these two cohorts of young people are shifting around at different rates.
First, there’s some of the expected. As in their last survey in May, they found a generation of anxious and pessimistic young men. While most of the older cohort of Gen Z men thought the country was on the wrong track, those levels were even higher among the younger cohort.
This gap in cynicism also came up again in approval ratings of Donald Trump (though both cohorts disapprove of him, they found a 6 point gap between the older and younger cohort). And there were chasms in the difference of support for some of Trump’s policies. When it came to ICE tactics, school vaccination requirements, and firings of federal workers, younger Gen Z men disapproved of Trump’s position by much wider numbers than the older cohort.
The biggest divergence between the groups, however, came in their views of society and traditional gender norms. Older Gen Z men actually reported more conservative views than the younger cohort. They were more likely to agree that “things are generally better when men bring in money and women take care of the home and kids” or that “feminism favors women over men.” This cohort had more skeptical views toward gay and transgender people, as well.
These findings are notable because they seem to run counter to some of the other analyses of the divisions within Gen Z, which find that it’s the younger cohort, not the older one, that tends to be more open to conservatism and the GOP.
“Young men as a whole are about the least ideological generation or demographic of any voting demographic there is, in terms of their views on different policies,” Charlie Sabgir, the author of the YRMP report, told me. They might appear on paper as more conservative as whole, he explained to me, “but in terms of actual policy and ideology, they just haven’t committed themselves to any rigid set of beliefs in the same way that young women have [who are much more uniformly liberal and progressive on policy and ideology down the line.”
Sabgir acknowledged that some of the differences in social attitudes require more research to examine and connect to causes. Could it be TikTok and algorithmically powered streams of content? Specific influencers and content creators informing their perspectives? The natural aging into more conservative views that tended to happen with previous generations?
That causation is still unclear, he said. But, he was clear that there does seem to be an accelerating divide by age. At least when it comes to views of Trump, he said, “there’s still a sense of shock at the pace at which events are happening,” that is hitting the youngest cohort differently than an older, more-jaded cohort that has seen a Trump presidency before. It would then make sense that the younger cohort that swung to him would swing away more aggressively. “Odds are they were not aware of just how unstable everything felt during that first administration,” he said. “So they would feel buyer’s remorse.”
Other data sources, including other polls specifically focused on young voters, have tracked similar volatility and divisions within the youngest voting generation, even if they might diverge from the YMRP findings on ideology. The fall Harvard and Yale Youth Polls, for example, both tracked growing cynicism and disenchantment with the direction of the country, views of Trump, and volatile views on society and culture.
But the Yale Youth poll — which was one of the first to track a more conservative, GOP-friendly lean from younger Gen Z voters — again found a division in views in their most recent survey, published this month. The younger cohort was again less likely to say they were “liberal” and more likely to say they were “conservative” than the older cohort, according to Milan Singh, the founder and former director of the Yale Youth Poll.
They were more likely to approve of Trump’s presidency and more likely to support some of his policies. “If you look through any of these questions where there’s an age breakout, you can pretty much always see that the 18 to 22-year-olds are slightly more conservative than the 23- to 29-year olds,” Singh said. But, he emphasized that this isn’t to say that every young person is “hardcore MAGA Republican, right winger.”
This divide raises an even bigger question: Are these young men more likely to be persuaded to vote in a different way because of economic concerns and disenchantment with Trump? Or, are these ideological differences strong and durable, presenting a future MAGA or Republican movement with eager young conservatives who would continue to move their generation to the right?
Singh holds that, though there is still a slightly more conservative lean — one exacerbated by gender — among 18- to 22-year-olds compared to those aged 23–29, these young men are still persuadable, as they don’t necessarily hold firm ideological convictions. To buy the argument from some on the right that there’s a rising generation of fervent right-wing youth driven by discrimination, “wokeness,” diversity initiatives, and progressive culture would be to misread the moment.
“You can stitch together a pretty clean narrative that a big reason that many young people voted for Trump in 2024, even though they may have typically voted for Democrats or you would expect them to be Democrats, was that they were really fed up by the cost of living. … Of course, you have to add footnotes that some young people may have had more conservative views and were kind of out of place in the current Democratic Party coalition,” Singh said. “But they’ve seen that not only has Trump not delivered on lowering the cost of living, his signature legislation in their mind makes it worse and benefits the billionaires at their expense, and now they’re turning against it.”
Instead, what these divisions within Gen Z really suggest, G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist and polling and elections expert, told me, is that the dividing line among young Americans is the degree to which one cohort or the other is willing to just tear the whole system down.
“The way to reconcile these two things is to view the younger Gen Z cohort as significantly more anti-system, anti-incumbent and pessimistic [than the older cohort],” Morris said. “If you ask these two groups which direction they think the country is going, this group is much more likely to say ‘wrong track.’ If you ask them if they’re worried about their economic situation, they’re also much more pessimistic. If their job opportunities from graduating or being in college during Covid were suppressed, then they would be significantly more a anti-Democratic party, anti-Harris in 2024, and then they would in turn also be more anti-Trump in 2025, 2026.”
And this becomes more obvious among young men, who are among the groups most likely to say that they are dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of affordability and the economy after ranking it as their top concern ahead of 2024.
Sabgir, of the YMRP, agreed with some of this conclusion. In YMRP’s May and October surveys, a plurality of the younger Gen Z cohort were still students or not full-time workers, and they reported more of a sense of financial instability and frustration with the state of the country. Their relative inexperience with life in a more unstable world than the one older Gen Z inhabited, therefore, might be contributing to this swing.
These differences will end up being consequential to future American elections — and politics, more generally. A lot of the last two years of discourse over young Americans has seemed to be pretty fatalistic or deterministic about their ideological views or swing-voter status — that they can’t be trusted as Democratic voters; that they simply require more progressive outreach; or that they are dyed-in-the-wool Republican voters or “groypers” now. It turns out that, like other subsets, young voters — and young men specifically — aren’t a monolith.
2025-12-28 19:30:00
2019年7月，纽约埃尔蒙特的一个郊区。| John Keating/Newsday RM via Getty Images
要点总结：
请为我们解释一下“丰裕议程”是什么。
“丰裕”一词源于我和我的合著者德里克·汤普森写的一系列文章。我们一直在思考一个现实问题：在民主党执政的地区，人们真正需要的东西似乎没有被充分建设或提供，比如住房。在加州、纽约、马萨诸塞州等地方，住房供应明显不足，而红州如佛罗里达和德克萨斯则更容易实现。在拜登政府时期，我们看到对去碳化的巨大推动，但建设输电线路、电动车充电网络、太阳能板和风力涡轮机等却面临重重障碍。因此，如何让一种自由主义能够快速建设，以实现自由主义的目标，成为我思考的一个核心问题。当民主党执政时，政府应该能够实现诸如建设高速铁路或第二大道地铁等承诺，按时、按预算、迅速完成。这样人们才能看到政府能为他们做什么。那么，如何为政府创造条件，特别是民主党执政的政府，使其能够兑现承诺？
你最近写了一篇专栏文章，称“美国的住房问题在于太多钱追逐太少的房子”。你认为住房成本和住房供应问题具体体现了“丰裕议程”的核心观点？
我认为住房问题对民主党来说尤其令人痛心，因为住房是普通家庭和中产家庭预算中占比最大的部分。而在民主党执政的地区，住房成本已经失控，这与共和党执政的地区截然不同。我常说，当人们搬到奥斯汀或休斯顿时，会发现与搬到旧金山或洛杉矶时截然不同的情况。奥斯汀和休斯顿能为他们提供更多住房，而旧金山和洛杉矶则不能。这使得在红州生活更加负担得起。在我们写书的时期，可以看到大量人口从加州、纽约和伊利诺伊州迁出，因为这些地方变得越来越无法负担。对我而言，这确实是民主党对所代表人民的一种背叛。我在旧金山写了很多书的内容，那里的标语写着“没有人是非法的”和“善良是最重要的”，但住房却只允许单户住宅，房价甚至超过一百万美元。所以，虽然我们说“没有人是非法的”和“善良是最重要的”，但如果人们无法负担得起生活费用，那就说明问题非常严重。此外，住房问题也相当复杂，因为解决它非常困难。民主党确实希望解决，比如加文·纽森在上任时承诺在任期内建造350万套新住房，但他显然没有达到目标，但他一直在努力，起诉地方政府并签署了数十项住房法案。实际上，当政府已经进入一种以创造大量机会为特征的平衡状态时，要改变这种状态，为大量建设提供空间，是非常困难的。
这本书出版后，我们看到一些“丰裕”相关的民间组织开始出现，特别是在书中提到的大城市，如纽约和加州。我最近收到一封来自“包容性丰裕小组”的邮件。还有大学团体。你是否预料到这一点？这是不是你原本设想的民主党政治平台？
我们知道这些想法有很强的吸引力，因为我们在2021年开始撰写相关文章时就看到了这种能量，而德里克最初提出了“丰裕”这一概念。我当时用的术语是“供给侧进步主义”，这显然不适合书名。所以“丰裕”这个词就胜出了。我们知道一些“包容性丰裕”组织已经存在，因此我们是在为一个正在兴起的运动和趋势撰写内容。在我们把这些想法整合到“丰裕”框架之前，这些理念本身，比如“支持建设”（YIMBY）主义，或为了去碳化而加快建设，就已经存在了。因此，我们站在了过去活动家、政策制定者、思想家的肩膀上，比如新政时期，他们曾迅速完成大量工作。
我还想问你如何看待自己的角色。你认为你的工作是为了帮助民主党赢得选举吗？
我认为我的职责是创造一些基于对现实诚实评估的好想法，从而让事情变得更好。我希望在这一刻，这些想法不显得那么党派化。在其他一些国家，认为我们应该去碳化并不是一个左右之争的问题。维韦克·拉梅斯瓦里最近在《纽约时报》上发表了一篇文章，他认为如果去除了所有这些左翼的审美和理念，丰裕理念实际上对共和党也有帮助。因此，我认为并不是所有的想法都是民主党与共和党的对立。我想说的是，我认为特朗普政府对自由民主制度的破坏是独一无二的。我认为它几乎明确地试图建立某种继任或前任结构，一种以交易和隐藏的移民与海关执法局（ICE）特工为特征的体制。因此，目前我认为，对于那些不仅相信丰裕议程中的理念，还相信我们如何共同生活、如何拥有一个自由和公平的政治体系和国家的人来说，创建能够使自由民主制度有效运作并成为右翼民粹主义有力抗衡的运动，就是我所看到的工作方向。
我原本想问，你希望这本书的遗产是什么？是重新定位民主党或自由民主制度在城市中的执行力吗？
是的，但不止于此。我希望这本书的遗产是人们能够负担得起的住房，是他们可以乘坐的高速铁路，是他们可以使用的清洁能源，从而降低能源账单并为整个社会提供更多能源。
我们之前谈到重新定位民主党，最近我一直在思考一个想法，就是前威斯康星州民主党主席本·威克勒对我说过的话。他说民主党是一个让政府为你工作的政党。我记得当时想，是的，民主党应该是一个让政府为你工作的政党，它应该毫不留情地做到这一点。这不仅意味着丰裕，还意味着反对腐败。我认为现在，这可能意味着任期限制和年龄限制，意味着认真对待政府的工作，而不是现在政府运作的方式。对我而言，这为民主党带来了困难，因为它必须同时捍卫制度并对其进行现代化。这比目前的特朗普主义共和党要难得多。这让我想到像佐赫兰·马姆达尼或西雅图当选市长凯蒂·威尔逊这样的候选人。当你看到一些候选人对某些丰裕理念的民粹式拥抱时，你会认为他们是丰裕民主党人吗？还是我应该考虑那些更接近中间立场的人？
“丰裕民主党人”是指那些能够实现丰裕的民主党人。因此，我为看到许多不同派系的民主党人，甚至一些共和党人，采纳丰裕理念和论点感到高兴。但真正区分谁是真正的丰裕民主党人，谁不是的，是他们是否能够兑现承诺。因此，我对马姆达尼抱有希望，但治理纽约市众所周知非常困难，而大量建设住房比实施租金冻结要难得多。我非常希望他能做到，但我也要保持谨慎，因为过去我看到很多政客承诺了这些事情却最终失败了。正如我所说，加文·纽森经常谈论丰裕。在我看来，他过去一两年签署了一些非常重要的法案，但他在加州未能兑现住房改革的承诺。因此，丰裕最终不是关于你说什么，而是关于你实际做了什么。它主张民主党，或者说所有政府，都应该被评判是否能够创造人们需要的东西，无论是直接创造还是通过为私人市场创造条件来实现。
Do you remember where you were when you first heard about “abundance”?
In some circles, 2025 was the year that abundance became inescapable. The political framework — which essentially argues Democrats need to focus less on process and more on delivering for constituents — provided the title of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book in March. For, seemingly, the rest of the year, an endless stream of podcasts, X posts, and articles followed its publication.
The discourse has elevated Klein into something of a spiritual leader for the Democrats, a position he finds a bit uncomfortable.
“I see my job as trying to create good ideas built on an honest assessment of the world that will lead to things being better,” Klein told Today, Explained host Astead Herndon. “I would love it if that at this moment did not seem quite so partisan.”
Herndon talked to Klein about the tenets of abundance, the challenges prominent Democrats like Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom face in delivering it, and what he hopes the legacy of his book will be.
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.
Define the abundance agenda for us.
So Abundance comes out of a series of pieces that me and my coauthor Derek Thompson wrote.
We were struggling with the reality that, in places where Democrats governed, you were not seeing enough of the things people need get built or produced — in places like California and New York, Massachusetts, just not enough housing. And that’s compared, by the way, to red states like Florida or Texas, which have an easier time producing it.
Under the Biden administration, we were seeing this huge push to decarbonization, but there was a lot standing in the way of building the transmission lines, electrical vehicle charger networks, the solar panels, the wind turbines.
And so this question of how can you have a liberalism that builds fast enough to achieve liberalism’s goals became, certainly for me, a somewhat obsessing question. How do you have government, particularly when Democrats are running it — the party that believes in government — that when they say we’re going to build high-speed rail or we’re going to build the 2nd Avenue subway, they get that done on time, on budget, quickly. And so people begin to see what government can do for them.
How do you set the conditions for government, particularly Democratic governments, to follow through.
Yes.
You recently wrote a column saying, “America’s housing problem is too much money chasing too few homes.” What is it you think about this issue specifically — housing costs, housing supply — that demonstrates the core argument of the abundance agenda?
So the thing where this issue I think causes particular heartache for Democrats is that there is no bigger part of a working family’s budget or a middle-class family’s budget than housing. And in the places where Democrats govern, housing costs have gone completely out of control. And that is honestly distinct from places where Republicans govern.
So I always say that there is this huge difference between what happens when people move to Austin or Houston and what happens when they move to San Francisco or Los Angeles. Austin and Houston build more homes for them, and, to a first approximation, SF and LA don’t. And that means it is much more affordable for many people to live in these red states.
In the period where we’re writing the book, you were seeing a big exodus, migration out of California, out of New York, out of Illinois, because it has become so unaffordable. So to me that is a real, on the part of Democrats, betrayal of the people they say they’re standing for.
I mean, I wrote a lot of the book when I was living in San Francisco and you have these yard signs where it says “No human being is illegal” and “Kindness is everything,” and everything is zoned for single-family housing and the homes cost more than a million dollars to buy. So yeah, it’s great to say no human being is illegal and kindness is everything, but if the human beings can’t afford to live there, then something’s gone really wrong.
And so the other thing that makes housing kind of interesting and complicated is that it’s actually very hard to solve. I mean, Democrats do want to solve it. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, promised to build 3.5 million new homes over his tenure when he took office. He’s nowhere near on track for that, but it’s not like he hasn’t been trying, he’s suing local cities and he’s signed dozens of housing bills.
It’s actually really, really hard, when you have ended up in a government equilibrium which is about creating a lot of opportunities to say no, to then unwind that if you need to create the space to say yes to a lot of things rapidly.
Since the book has come out, we have seen some “Abundance” civic groups pop up, particularly in big cities that were mentioned in the book, places like New York City and out in California. I saw an “inclusive Abundance group” in my inbox the other week. There’s college groups. Did you expect this? Was this the point, did you think this was a political platform for Democrats?
We knew that there was electricity around this set of ideas because we’d seen it in the pieces that I started writing in 2021, and Derek, who wrote the initial piece naming it. I had the much less good term “supply-side progressivism.”
That doesn’t fit on the side of the book!
Yeah, you can see why “Abundance” won that one.
So we knew some of this was happening, some of the inclusive abundance groups were already there. So we knew that we were writing to a movement and a tendency that was already gaining force and prior to sort of us wrapping a series of ideas into this frame of abundance, the ideas themselves, YIMBY-ism, for instance, or that we need to build fast for decarbonization. So we are standing on the shoulders of giants of activists of policy, intellectuals and also of the past, right, like the New Deal, where they did a lot of things very, very fast.
Yeah. I also wanted to ask how you see your role. Do you see your job as helping Democrats win?
I see my job as trying to create good ideas, built on an honest assessment of the world that will lead to things being better. I would love it if that at this moment did not seem quite so partisan. There are other countries where say, thinking we should decarbonize is not a right-left issue.
Vivek Rameswamy just had a piece in the New York Times saying that he thinks abundance, if you didn’t have all these left-coded aesthetics and ideas, could actually be very helpful for Republicans.
So I don’t think every single idea is Democratic versus Republican.
What I will say is that I do think the Trump administration is uniquely lethal to liberal democracy. I think it is almost explicitly trying to create some kind of successor or I might say predecessor structure to it, a regime of deal-making and transaction and masked ICE agents. And so right now, I do believe that, for people who believe in not just a set of ideals that are in Abundance, but in a broader set of ideals about how we live here together and how we have a free and fair political system and country, creating movements that allow liberal democracy to deliver and be an effective counterweight to right-wing populism is part of how I see my work.
I was going to ask what you would want the legacy of Abundance to be as a book. Is it to reposition the Democratic Party, or liberal democracy, on delivering in cities?
Yeah, but it’s more. What I want the legacy of it to be is the affordable homes people need, is the high-speed rail they can ride, is the clean energy they can use and that makes their energy bills cheaper and that gives us more energy in total as a society…
We were talking about repositioning the Democratic Party, and I’ve had something running through my mind recently, which is something Ben Wikler, the former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said to me, which is he said that the Democratic Party is a party that makes government work for you.
And I remember thinking like, yeah, the Democratic Party, the party that wants government to work for you, that should be what it is. And then it should be ruthless about making that true. And that doesn’t just mean abundance. It means [opposing] corruption, right? I think at this point it probably means term limits and age limits, right? It means taking government working seriously, right? Not the way government works now. And this, to me, is a difficult space for the Democratic Party, which has to simultaneously be defending institutions and modernizing them. It’s a much harder position than the sort of Trumpist Republican Party right now.
That leads me to candidates like Zohran Mamdani or Katie Wilson, the mayor-elect in Seattle. When you see the kind of populist embrace of some abundance lanes, do you look at those candidates and think those are abundance Democrats? Or should I be thinking more folks a little closer to the center?
The Abundance Democrats are the Democrats who deliver abundance. So I am thrilled by the way I’ve seen Democrats of many different stripes and even a couple Republicans pick up some of the ideas and arguments of abundance. But the thing that is going to separate who’s real in this and who is not is whether they deliver.
So I am hopeful about Mamdani, but governing New York City is famously very, very difficult and building a lot more housing is going to be harder to do than implementing a rent freeze. I’m very hopeful he can do it. But I want to be very cautious myself, having watched a lot of politicians promise on this and fail, right?
As I said, Gavin Newsom talks about abundance a lot. He’s actually signed some incredible bills in my perspective in the last year or two, but he was not able to deliver the housing change he promised in California.
And abundance is in the end, not about what you say, it is about what you deliver. It is an argument that the Democratic Party should, that all government should, be judged by whether or not it is able to create — either directly or through creating the conditions for the private market to create it — the things people need.
2025-12-27 21:30:00
2025年12月22日，墨尔本一条巷子里，一名男子经过一幅壁画，这幅壁画描绘了Ahmed al Ahmed在邦迪海滩大规模枪击事件中英勇制服一名袭击者的场景。Ahmed al Ahmed来自叙利亚，于2006年移居澳大利亚。12月14日，当枪手在“海边光明节”活动上开火时，他没有选择逃跑，而是躲在一辆停着的汽车后，冲向枪手，夺下武器，并在不还击的情况下将袭击者控制住。他随后被枪击，接受了复杂的手术治疗神经损伤，并计划进行另一场手术。新南威尔士州州长Chris Minns称他为“真正的英雄”，表示许多人之所以能够活下来，是因为Ahmed的勇敢行为。Ahmed从医院病床上简单地表示：“我出于内心做出了行动。”
7月初，德克萨斯州中部发生严重洪水，Scott Ruskan作为海岸警卫队的救援游泳员首次执行任务，协助从Camp Mystic撤离了165人。Ruskan表示，由于恶劣天气，原本一小时的飞行延长到了七到八小时。在地面，他发现他是现场唯一的救援人员，面对大约200名惊恐的儿童和工作人员。他负责现场分类和组织直升机撤离。Ruskan淡化了“英雄”这一称号，表示：“我只是恰好在值班的队伍里。”他称“真正的英雄”是那些在地面的人。
7月，一架小型飞机撞上树后起火，Giovanna Hanley和邻居们冲向现场。Hanley告诉ABC新闻：“有人带来了斧头……甚至有人带来了灭火器。”在其他邻居使用水管灭火时，她的公公用斧头砸碎窗户，以便为营救人员开辟通道。四名乘客被成功救出并送医治疗。后来，当地市长称邻居们的行动“无异于英雄行为”。
7月，巴黎北部一栋高层公寓因有毒烟雾而被困，Fousseynou Cissé从窗户爬出，站在连接两栋公寓的狭窄窗台上，约65英尺高，帮助撤离儿童和婴儿。媒体报道称，母亲们将孩子递出窗户，Cissé将他们传递到相邻公寓的安全区域，然后帮助母亲们过窗台。他的解释非常朴实：“这不是经过计算的，而是出于本能：‘我们必须离开。’”巴黎警察局长Laurent Nuñez表示，他将授予Cissé勋章，以表彰他的勇气和奉献精神，并称这是“共和精神的勇气”体现。
8月20日，纽约皇后区的Queensboro Plaza站，地铁局工作人员Ray McKie听到尖叫，看到令人不寒而栗的一幕：“一列火车驶来，一个人……躺在铁轨上。”在大雨导致站台湿滑的情况下，他冲上前去示意火车停下，然后跳下站台，救起昏迷的14岁少年，该少年头部撞伤。他还帮助另一名乘客离开轨道，并一直陪伴受伤少年直到急救人员到来。少年最终康复。McKie后来描述说，这一切发生得太快，他只是凭本能行动。
此故事最初发表于Good News通讯。点击此处订阅！
One of my favorite books is Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. The book is, in part, a study of people who take altruism so seriously it starts to look almost alien to the rest of us — the kind of people who donate to others the money they “should” be saving for themselves, who give the time they “should” be spending, who risk the personal safety they “should” be prioritizing. The book’s implicit question hangs in the air: Why do some of us treat helping as a side hobby at best, while others treat it as a life’s work — even when it could cost them their own lives?
The daily news cycle, with its bias toward negativity, seems to have its own implicit question: How bad can people be? It’s an easy story to tell, because outrage quickly spreads across the social media landscape. But, if you pay attention — really pay attention — another story keeps surfacing, stubbornly, in the margins: the stories of people who run toward danger. They don’t workshop it. They don’t calculate odds. They don’t ask if they’re the “right person” to do something. They just move, on instinct, because someone else’s life is suddenly in front of them.
These stories deserve at least as much of our attention as the darker ones — not because they’re sentimental, or because they cancel out evil, but because they tell the other half of the truth about what it means to be human.
So, I thought the best way to close out 2025 for Good News would be to highlight just a handful of the many extreme altruists who put their lives on the line to save others. Most of them are ordinary people, no different than you or I, who suddenly found themselves thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
It’s impossible to read their stories without wondering, “Would I do the same thing in the same moment?” There’s no way to know, but each of us can make the decision, every day, to do what we can to make the lives of those around us a little better. That’s one intention I’ll take into the new year.
When gunmen opened fire at the “Chanukah by the Sea” event at Bondi Beach on December 14, Ahmed al Ahmed didn’t look for escape; video shows him duck behind a parked car, then sprint at a shooter, wrestle the gun away, and hold the attacker at gunpoint without firing. He was shot and has been recovering in the hospital after a complex operation involving nerve damage, with another lengthy surgery scheduled. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns called him “a genuine hero,” saying he had “no doubt” many people were alive because of Ahmed’s bravery. From his hospital bed, Ahmed — who came to Australia from Syria in 2006 — put it simply: He acted “from the heart.”
Scott Ruskan, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer on his first official mission, helped coordinate the evacuation of 165 people at Camp Mystic during catastrophic flooding in central Texas in early July. Ruskan said the flight that normally takes about an hour stretched to seven or eight because of severe weather — “some of the worst flying we’ve ever dealt with.” On the ground, he realized he was the only first responder on scene, facing roughly 200 terrified kids and staff. It was up to him to triage and organize helicopter evacuations. Ruskan downplayed the hero label, saying, “I just happened to be on the duty crew,” and “the real heroes…were the kids on the ground.”
After a small plane crashed into a tree in a Pembroke Pines neighborhood in July, the wreckage erupted in flames. Giovanna Hanley and neighbors ran toward it. Hanley told ABC News, “One [person] brought over an ax. … Someone even brought over a fire extinguisher.” While other neighbors used hoses, her father-in-law used the ax to break the window as they worked to clear a path to pull people out. All four passengers were rescued and hospitalized. The mayor later called the neighbors’ actions “nothing short of heroic.”
When toxic smoke trapped families in a top-floor apartment in northern Paris in July, Fousseynou Cissé climbed out a window and balanced on a narrow ledge connecting two apartments — about 65 feet above the drop — to help evacuate children and babies. The media reported that mothers handed children through a window, and Cissé passed them along to safety in the adjacent apartment before helping the mothers cross. His explanation was refreshingly uncinematic: “It wasn’t calculated; it was instinct: ‘We’ve got to go.’” Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez said he would award Cissé a medal “in recognition of his courage and dedication,” calling it an example of “republican courage.”
On August 20, Metropolitan Transit Authority conductor Ray McKie heard screams at Queensboro Plaza in New York and saw what no one wants to see: “a train coming in,” as he said later, and “a person…lying on the tracks.” In heavy rain that made the platform slippery, he ran to signal the train to stop, then jumped down and picked up the unconscious 14-year-old who had fainted and hit his head. He helped another passenger off the track and then stayed with the injured teen until emergency responders arrived. The teen recovered. McKie later described it as pure reflex: “It all happened very fast, and I just went on instinct.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-12-26 20:00:00
似乎越来越多的年轻美国女性想要离开美国。11月的一项盖洛普民意调查发现，15至44岁的美国女性中有40%表示，如果有机会，她们会永久移居国外。这一比例自2014年以来上升了10倍，而且与其他美国人群体或其它发达国家的年轻女性不同。这些女性想要离开美国，部分原因可能与唐纳德·特朗普有关。盖洛普发现，这一趋势始于2016年夏天，即特朗普成为共和党总统候选人之后。在拜登总统任内，这一趋势继续上升，但支持国家领导的女性与不支持的女性之间，对离开美国的渴望存在25个百分点的差距。这表明，摆脱特朗普的影响在某种程度上是这些女性想要移居国外的诱因之一。
然而，想要离开美国的冲动有时也表现为看似与政治无关的形式。最近一篇BBC文章提到，一位31岁的女性在2021年从洛杉矶搬到里斯本。她说：“美国的工作与生活平衡并不强，我想要一个节奏不同、文化不同的地方，学习一门新语言。”在葡萄牙，她感觉“又找回了完整的自己”。的确，谁不想拥有比美国更好的工作与生活平衡？谁不想拥有比美国更完善的福利保障？在美国，人们普遍认为一切都要靠自己努力获得，包括育儿和医疗保障，而在其他国家，这些被视为政府应保障的基本人权。如今，育儿成本高昂，常常让至少一位家长的收入被消耗殆尽，这导致许多女性不得不退出职场。而产假政策很少被强制规定，白宫发言人卡罗琳·利维特甚至大肆宣扬她生完孩子三天后就重返工作岗位。美国的孕产妇死亡率是所有高收入国家中最高的，而且这种情况已经持续很久了。此外，随着堕胎权被推翻，女性在怀孕后若不想继续妊娠，却难以在安全合法的环境下做出选择。
因此，人们不禁会想：为什么不干脆离开？去一个不需要在工作和育儿之间做出选择的地方，一个可以摆脱资本主义压力和家庭生活负担的地方，一个既能生孩子又能有时间陪伴孩子的地方？
我们经常将逃离美国及其薄弱的社会保障体系视为一种解放和进步的行为，仿佛离开美国就能像詹姆斯·鲍德温那样在巴黎找到自由。然而，逃离工作与生活失衡的幻想在当代美国流行文化中却有着更黑暗的回响。从这个角度来看，逃离美国的幻想与传统妻子（trad wife）的幻想惊人地相似。
传统妻子的网络影响者已成为社交媒体上最热门的讨论对象之一，他们的内容既美观又具有政治争议性。传统妻子们分享她们作为全职妻子和母亲的生活，大多数受欢迎的创作者身材苗条、外表传统漂亮，她们会拍摄自己亲手为孩子制作最爱的麦片，甚至在阳光明媚的厨房里浓妆艳抹。更有争议的是，许多自称传统妻子的创作者提倡按照他们所谓的圣经原则生活，顺从丈夫，并思考女性不参与职场生活会有多好。
传统妻子的幻想与逃离美国的幻想一样，自2016年开始流行，当时传统妻子的原型人物Alena Kate Pettitt出版了她的第一本书《Ladies Like Us》。2020年，这些影响者的受欢迎程度从小众走向主流，因为居家的人群开始寻找方式美化并向往家庭生活的琐碎。
虽然传统妻子的幻想中包含对男性作为家庭唯一决策者的反对，但大多数女性却被她们所呈现的“平静、放松的生活方式”所吸引——一种早晨有足够时间亲手做麦片的美好生活。这种幻想的一部分是，女性可以在照顾孩子的同时，同时追求高薪职业。最成功的传统妻子影响者甚至能赚到足以购买昂贵电器的钱。这意味着，传统妻子的幻想与逃离美国的幻想一样，都是女性试图摆脱美国资本主义对她们的束缚。但两者之间有一个关键区别：对传统妻子来说，家庭和工作其实是同一件事。她的家庭就是她的工作，她的艺术，她的审美劳动。
在反女性主义的背景下，女性逃离美国的幻想和传统妻子的幻想都是一种逃避现实的方式。它们都试图解决美国资本主义对女性的双重束缚，即既要工作又要照顾家庭，而这两者往往相互冲突。这些幻想如今成为女性最普遍和强烈的幻想之一。圣诞电影产业显然意识到了这一点，因此在这一类型的电影中，对不满的城市职业女性来说，可能的两个幸福结局是：回到家乡，或成为某个宁静欧洲小国的王室成员。
自2016年“Access Hollywood”录音带发布后，美国经历了九年的动荡。特朗普当选总统后，女性在“Me Too”运动中爆发了强烈的抗议，七年后的今天，这种愤怒仍在持续。三年前，特朗普任命的最高法院大法官推翻了“罗伊诉韦德案”，剥夺了女性的联邦堕胎权。两年后，特朗普因性侵E. Jean Carroll被定罪，但一年后，他还是赢得了连任。
美国女性多年来积极参与了激烈的女权主义活动，她们起诉州政府和联邦政府，揭露雇主的不当行为并起诉他们，分享自己最私密的骚扰、虐待和歧视经历，甚至因此失去了工作。然而，这些努力似乎并未带来明显的成果。如今，在“Me Too”运动的反扑持续进行中，女性所探索的幻想更多地体现了一种疲惫的妥协——一种选择退出的幻想。
为什么不去想象离开职场？为什么不去想象离开家乡？如果现状无法改变，我们又何必继续战斗？如果这场斗争毫无意义，为什么不干脆退出战场？
Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies.
These women seem to want to leave at least in part because of Donald Trump. Gallup found that this trend began in summer 2016, shortly after Trump became the Republican nominee for president. It continued to climb during the Biden presidency, but there’s a 25-point gap in the desire to leave between those who approve of the country’s leadership and those who don’t. That suggests that getting away from Trump plays at least some role in the appeal of the fantasy of expatriating.
But the desire to leave America can also express itself in ways that sound, at first glance, apolitical.
A recent BBC article about the trend spoke to a 31-year-old who decided to move from LA to Lisbon in 2021. “There’s not a strong work-life balance in the US,” she said. “I wanted to live somewhere with a different pace, different cultures, and learn a new language.” In Portugal, she says, she feels “more like a whole person again.”
Well, sure: Who hasn’t wanted a better work-life balance than the one the US offers? Who hasn’t wanted more than a minimal social safety net; a capitalist hustle culture; and a guiding belief that everything must be earned, including things like child care and health insurance, which in other countries are considered human rights that the government will take care of for you?
It’s the child care, it seems, that is increasingly the last straw for women — the way it’s becoming both more compulsory and more difficult to do.
In the same article, the BBC quoted a 34-year-old who moved from the US to Uruguay after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. “I have children, and I don’t plan on having more, but the increasing governance of women’s bodies terrified me,” she said. She added, “People don’t realise how far behind the US is on maternal care, parental leave, and healthcare, until they leave the country.”
America is a hostile country if you’re having children. Child care is so expensive that it can eat up the salary of at least one parent, which frequently leads to women leaving the workforce to take care of their children. Parental leave is rarely mandated: Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has made much of her decision to go back to work three days after giving birth. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country, and we have for a long time. And if, for all these reasons and many others, you get pregnant and you find that you’d prefer not to be, it’s become increasingly difficult to act on that choice in a safe and legal way.
So a person might wonder: Why not simply leave? Go somewhere that doesn’t make you choose between work and children, somewhere you can leave behind both the stresses of capitalism and the pressures of family life. Somewhere you can have kids and also afford to spend time with them.
We often talk about the idea of fleeing America and its feeble social safety net as a liberating, progressive act, as though by leaving the US a person has the chance to become James Baldwin in Paris. But the idea of escaping the work-life balance trap has darker echoes in contemporary American pop culture. When I think of the fantasy of the ex-pat through this lens, it comes to look strikingly similar to the fantasy of the trad wife.
Trad wife influencers have become some of the most discussed figures on social media, hitting the viral sweet spot of content that is both aesthetically soothing and politically inflammatory.
Trad wives post online about their lives as stay-at-home wives and mothers. Most of the popular ones are thin and conventionally pretty, and they post videos of themselves making their children’s favorite cereal from scratch, wearing full makeup in sun-drenched kitchens. More controversially, many creators who identify as trad wives promote the idea of living according to what they call Biblical principles, submitting to their husbands, and musing over how much better life is when women are out of the workplace.
Trad wife influencers, like the ex-pat fantasy, started trending up in 2016, when the prototype, Alena Kate Pettitt, published her first book, Ladies Like Us. In 2020, the popularity of these influencers crossed from niche to mainstream, as a population confined to their homes looked for ways to start romanticizing domestic drudgery.
The political stuff attracts attention, but it’s the aesthetic of the domestic work made beautiful and aspirational that maintains an audience. A 2025 study from King’s College London found that while only 7 percent of female viewers of trad wife videos approved of the idea of men as sole household decision makers, 79 percent were attracted to the “calm, relaxed lifestyle” trad wives appear to maintain — a life where you have enough time in the morning to whip up a scratch-made batch of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.
Part of the trad wife fantasy is the idea that while you get to spend unlimited time with your children, you are simultaneously pursuing a lucrative career. The most successful of the trad wife influencers can make astonishing amounts of money, enough to pay for those expensive Aga stoves. This means that the trad wife of fantasy is a woman who has escaped the trap of trying to have both family and work in the US, just like the ex-pat of fantasy. But there’s a key difference: For the trad wife, family and work are the same thing. Her family is her work, her art, her aesthetic labor.
Much has been written already about the escapism of the romantasy trend, and why it’s grown as a way to deal with the horrors uncovered by Me Too and its long, vicious backlash. Romantasy, as Daniel Yadin wrote for the Drift, allows its presumed-female readers the fantasy of opting out of unpredictable and potentially violent human men and going for fairies or gentle blue aliens instead.
I have begun to read the fantasy of fleeing the US and the fantasy of the trad wife as versions of the same escapism, translated to motherhood. Both fantasies thwart the trap American capitalism lays for all its women. They are about finding a way to have a job and have a family, and not let either one ruin your life.
They are also among the most potent and widespread of the fantasies with which women are presented right now. The Christmas movie industrial complex must realize this, which is why the two happy endings possible for the discontented city career girls of the genre are to either move back to their hometowns or to become royalty in small but idyllic European countries.
It has been nine years now since the publication of the infamous Access Hollywood tape was followed swiftly by the election of Donald Trump. It has been seven years since the outrage over Trump’s election powered the ferocious rage of Me Too. It has been three years since Trump’s Supreme Court appointees led the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, taking away women’s federally mandated legal right to an abortion. It has been two years since Trump was found criminally liable for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, and one year since America went ahead and elected him for a second term anyway.
American women spent years in furious feminist activity. Women sued state governments and federal governments; they exposed their employers and sued them, too; they told their most private stories of harassment and abuse and discrimination, risking their careers and sometimes outright losing them.
All this they did — to, in the end, little apparent result. Now, as the backlash to Me Too continues to play out, the fantasies women are exploring are all about a kind of exhausted resignation — an opting out.
Why not imagine leaving the workforce? Why not imagine leaving home? There’s no way to win, a woman might think, if we stay as we are. So if the fight is pointless, why not simply walk off the battlefield?