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2026-05-02 19:45:00

In a lab room, a toddler, deaf from birth, sits while a tone plays. There’s no reaction. His face does not change. 

Six weeks later, after a single injection of an experimental gene therapy, the same toddler is back in the same room. The tone plays. The toddler’s head turns toward the sound. And somewhere just off screen, the child’s grandfather says his name. The boy turns and looks. He can hear.

“When the parents realized their child had a response to sound they cried,” says Dr. Yilai Shu of the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University, who co-led the trial, in a video that showed the results. “The whole family cried.” The video cuts to another child, thirteen weeks post-treatment, dancing to music.

This is what gene therapy can do in 2026. The clip comes from the international clinical trial of an OTOF gene therapy run by Mass Eye and Ear and China’s Fudan University that provided the underlying science behind a drug the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved last week.

On April 23, the FDA granted accelerated approval to Otarmeni, a gene therapy from the pharma company Regeneron for severe-to-profound hearing loss caused by mutations in a gene called OTOF. In a pivotal trial, 80 percent of treated patients gained measurable hearing, and 42 percent reached the level needed to pick up whispers. Two and a half years after treatment, 90 percent of patients in the underlying multi-center trial were still hearing.

It’s a drug that certainly feels like a miracle to those in the trials, taking patients from silence to sound. But what can feel almost as miraculous is how far the broader field of gene therapies like Otarmeni — which deliver a working copy of a broken gene directly into a patient’s cells — have come.

In 1999, the nascent field of gene therapy all but collapsed when a teenager named Jesse Gelsinger died four days after being injected with an experimental gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, the first publicly identified death in a gene therapy clinical trial. In the years that followed, funding evaporated, careers ended, and “gene therapy” became a cautionary tale.

It took years and major changes in how gene therapies are delivered for the field to recover. And now, 27 years after Gelsinger’s tragic death, we have a gene therapy that can effectively reverse some kinds of congenital hearing loss. The next decade is no longer about whether gene therapy can deliver clinical results. It’s about whether it can deliver results to enough patients, at prices people can actually pay, for diseases that affect more than a few hundred kids a year. 

Get those answers right, and what feels like a miracle to some in 2026 could become ordinary medicine.

Back from the brink

After Gelsinger died, the FDA halted gene therapy trials in the US, the National Institutes of Health tightened oversight, and the principal investigator of the Penn study — James Wilson — was barred from clinical trials for five years and stripped of his administrative titles. In the lean years that followed, two things happened.

The first was a change in delivery. Gene therapies use engineered viruses to deliver restorative genes to a patient’s cells. The therapy used on Gelsinger was carried by an adenovirus, which are highly immunogenic, meaning the human immune system recognizes them and reacts violently. It was that immune reaction that killed Gelsinger. 

In the aftermath, the field increasingly turned to adeno-associated viruses (AAV), which are smaller, more tolerable, and capable of slipping a payload into the right cells without setting off a five-alarm immune reaction. AAV vectors are now the workhorse of in vivo gene therapy, including in Otarmeni.

The second thing that happened was CRISPR. Adapted in 2012 by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier into a precision gene-editing tool, CRISPR could do something AAV could not: find a specific spot in the patient’s own DNA and rewrite the letters there, correcting the broken gene in place. CRISPR also earned gene therapy a cultural moment it hadn’t had since before Gelsinger. Money and talent flooded back into the field — including into the AAV programs that produced Otarmeni.

Disease by disease

The clearest sign something has shifted in the field is the lengthening list of therapy approvals. In December 2017, the FDA cleared Luxturna for hereditary blindness from RPE65 mutations — the first gene therapy in the US for an inherited disease. Two years later, Zolgensma was approved for spinal muscular atrophy, a wasting disease that kills children before age two in its severe form. In 2022, Hemgenix made hemophilia B the first bleeding disorder with a one-shot fix. In 2023, Casgevy and Lyfgenia did the same for sickle cell, with Casegevy becoming the first FDA-approved CRISPR therapy.

The sickle cell approvals matter most because they are the first for a patient population that is large; 100,000 Americans suffer from it — mostly Black, and historically underserved. The gene therapies are also proof of concept that the underlying CRISPR mechanism can be redirected at multiple different targets. Verve Therapeutics is using base editing to permanently disable PCSK9, a gene that controls how much LDL cholesterol stays in the bloodstream, with the promise of one-time treatment instead of daily statins for patients at high cardiovascular risk. Early trial data showed a 53 percent average drop in LDL cholesterol. Trials are open for additional hereditary-blindness genes, Pompe disease, and a long list of single-gene conditions. 

The cost of magic

The science is working, but paying for it is another matter.

These are the list prices for the recent approvals: Luxturna at $850,000 per patient, Zolgensma at $2.13 million, Casgevy at $2.2 million, Lyfgenia at $3.1 million, Hemgenix at $3.5 million. Two-thirds of US sickle cell patients are on Medicaid, and only 16,000 are eligible for Casgevy under the current label. Regeneron has pledged to provide Otarmeni for free in the US, but that works only because the OTOF patient pool is small — an estimated 50 babies a year. That math won’t work for more common disorders.

While cost may not be a problem for the families that could qualify for Otarmeni, it’s not the only concern. Cochlear implants, the standard treatment for OTOF patients for decades, have been contested within Deaf culture since the 1980s, with many arguing that deafness should be seen as identity rather than deficit. Gene therapy applied to infants makes that question all the more fraught, since the children treated with gene therapy cannot consent to the change. And not everyone would make that choice.

Beyond economic and cultural questions, we lack gene therapy for Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, or any of the polygenic — meaning, caused by multiple genes — conditions that cause massive amounts of suffering. The cochlear is a good gene-therapy target because it is small and accessible, and OTOF is a single-gene disorder. The brain and Alzheimer’s are neither of those things. The platform that is working in one child’s inner ear in 2026 is not about to deliver universal cures by 2030, or well beyond.

What gene therapies will do, however, is keep filling in the list. The next time a parent gets a rare-disease diagnosis for their child, the question will increasingly be not whether someone is working on a gene therapy, but how soon it will be ready.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

2026-05-02 19:00:00

How would you grade America’s first 250 years? 

That’s the question I posed to historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson on this week’s episode of America, Actually — and a question I pose to myself.

All grades are subjective, and the rubric of whether America earns a passing grade is one of position and perspective, but the best I could come up with was a B-/C+. 

The enduring model of multiracial democracy, however fragile it currently is, deserves some credit. So does the long list of American inventions and academic institutions, and the cultural impact of American music, film, and sports. With some demerits for the permanent underclass capitalism requires, injustices here and abroad, and preferring the wrong type of football, a passing grade seemed fair enough. 

In our interview, Richardson said that she sees the country as entering a period of enormous change, particularly as President Donald Trump continues to reshape our government to serve his maximalist desires. And since we’re focused on America post-Trump, and our road to that point in these coming elections, I asked how responsive a democracy Richardson feels we truly have — and pushed on the question of the electorate’s commitment to preserving it, considering the results of the 2024 election. 

Read on for an excerpt of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show — we write a new founding document for America’s next 250 years, listing out the values that will earn the country an A+ for the next grading period — so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you’ve argued that the country has basically reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years from the founding to the Civil War to the New Deal.

I wondered how you thought about those reinventions. What forces shaped them, and are we in a reinvention period right now?

I’m not sure I’ve ever used the words reinvention, because the way I think about it is that a country has to deal with new challenges all the time, and because we had set out at our foundation a series of principles that at the time were quite limited by who they covered, but were expansive in terms of what they could cover, we have managed through our history to address new challenges — like westward expansion, like industrialization, like globalization, like the advent of nuclear weapons — and to expand American democracy to more closely adhere to those foundational documents. 

So are we in a moment like this now? Absolutely.

What forces shape these kinds of shifts in the country? If we think about those moments where we face new challenges, how do we muster up that kind of creativity and what are the seeds that we should be looking for right now?

There’s a whole lot embedded in that question. And one of the places that I want to start is that the seeds for reinvention, I think, come from the arts. They come from music, they come from art, they come from new languages and new clothing styles and sculpture, and all sorts of new ways to envision the world through our imaginations.

And we could talk about the late 19th century, for example, and how extraordinarily creative that time was, and so forth. Those ideas, I think, come from there, but that’s not enough. I think when you see reinvention, you see Americans reaching back for their stories, for their traditional history and the places that they can see other Americans having exercised their agency to make our best traditions come into law, or at least come into practice. 

It’s an especially poignant time for us to be talking about this because on April 12, Hungarian voters put a supermajority of opposition figures to Viktor Orbán into power in their parliament, and they will, of course, have a different prime minister.

And one of the things that they appear to have done is to have reached back to Hungarian history and said, listen. We might disagree with each other about immigration and about finances and so on, but we can agree that we care deeply about our country and we must start there with people who are trying to build our country rather than tear it down.

And that really hit a chord for me because that is precisely what the Republicans did when they formed in the 1850s. It’s precisely what the populists and the Democrats did in the 1890s when they organized against the robber barons and then included the progressive Republicans. It’s certainly what we saw in the 1920s and the 1930s, what we saw in the 1950s, and I think what we’re seeing in the United States again today.

I wanted to ask about today. The premise of this show is to try to take Trump out of the center and to see the country beyond the lens of him, but baked into that is a question of whether he is an aberrant piece in American politics or reflective of a system and we’re going to have to live with Trumpism for longer than even the individual person.

Trump is very clearly the outcome of at least 40 years of right-wing rhetoric that has been adopted by the Republican Party, that laid the groundwork for a man to come in and essentially get rid of the dog whistles and call to the sexists and racist who had ended up sliding into the Republican Party after 1965 and the Voting Rights Act, to basically create sort of a libertarian, small-government elite in the Republican Party that depended on the votes of those racist and sexists to stay in power. 

What he did was he sort of flipped the script. He nodded to the establishment Republicans who wanted the tax cuts, but he empowered the racist and the sexists and the America-Firsters and so on. And so he is very much a product of that.

But he is also something different because by empowering them, what he did is he turned a democracy not just to an autocracy, but to a personalist autocracy. It’s sort of, in a way, a step beyond fascism that we can talk about — the idea that wants all the power, but he also wants the power not for his party and not for even his cronies, but for himself.

Now there’s a bigger question, as I say, embedded in what you said, and that is, is the United States of America’s system so deeply flawed to begin with that we were waiting for a Trump? 

And to that, I would say no. I say that many of us dropped the ball after the 1960s and the 1970s, and the idea that we had finally managed to create a new kind of American government that was premised on reality rather than on the previous images of American life. 

By that I mean that it was a government that recognized the worth of individuals. It didn’t necessarily protect individuals the way the principles of that government suggested they should, but it recognized their worth in a way that the government before 1965 and before the Great Society under LBJ had not done. And so for a lot of people, they thought, oh, we’re on this trajectory toward a liberal democracy that is in fact going to recognize the worth of disabled Americans and elderly Americans and so on. 

And as a result, we stopped focusing on the importance of liberal democracy. But what that did is it enabled the radical right to step in and give people a sense of a national narrative that made their agency feel deeply important to them — that they were the ones protecting America in a way that people like me weren’t.

Because the immigrants are taking your job, because folks are coming in and represent a kind of imminent threat.

That’s right. And you know, one of the things that always jumps out to me is Lauren Boebert, the representative from Colorado, on the morning of January 6, 2021, [tweeting] to people, “This is 1776” — the idea that they were the ones who were truly protecting America. 

One of the things that I think Trump has done for us since his re-taking the oath of office in January 2025 was to make it clear that our democracy and the guardrails of our democracy that so many people believed couldn’t be challenged, Trump just tore ’em up. 

And with that, a lot of people who sort of assume the guardrails were there are stepping into the fray and saying, okay, I didn’t think I was going to have to get involved in politics, but clearly I do, and here I am.

That kind of engagement in protecting American democracy is the sort of thing that we’ve seen in the past — in the 1850s, 1890s, and so on — to reclaim that democracy and crucially, make it adjust to new conditions that are currently challenging it.

2026-05-02 06:05:00

2026年4月24日，唐纳德·特朗普在马里兰州安德鲁斯联合基地登上空军一号。本文出自《Logoff》每日简报，旨在帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅此处。欢迎来到《Logoff》：特朗普总统向国会宣称伊朗战争已经结束，实际情况如何？根据特朗普的说法，由于美伊停火协议的实施，伊朗战争已“终止”，且该协议目前仍有效，没有明确的结束期限。他在给国会的信中写道：“自2026年4月7日起，美国武装部队与伊朗之间已无交火记录。自2026年2月28日开始的敌对行动已终止。”然而，从现有证据来看，这一说法并不准确。尽管美伊并未爆发大规模战争，但美国仍对霍尔木兹海峡实施海军封锁（上个月，美国甚至击中了一艘涉嫌违反封锁的伊朗船只，特朗普称其为“在引擎室炸出一个洞”）。此外，美军仍驻扎在伊朗附近，冲突随时可能重新升级，而特朗普也持续威胁要恢复全面战争。特朗普的这封信显然是为了规避《战争权力决议》——该决议要求美国在通知国会冲突开始后60天内结束军事行动，除非国会批准继续行动（国会尚未批准，且特朗普政府也未寻求延长60天的期限）。不过，特朗普并非首个试图规避该决议的总统：正如《华盛顿邮报》前助理国务卿斯蒂芬·拉德默克所指出的，无论是哪个党派的总统，都曾以不同方式规避过这一规定。好了，现在是时候“下线”了。各位读者，祝您五一快乐！以下是来自Vox“Unexplainable”播客的两个谜题，供您周末娱乐。如果您想了解更多，欢迎收听播客。祝您度过愉快的周末，我们周一再见！

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: President Donald Trump told Congress the Iran war is over. Is it? 

What happened? Friday marks a legal deadline for Trump, after which he should be required to wind down US military operations around Iran. But according to Trump, he already has: The president wrote in a letter to Congress on Friday that the Iran war was “terminated” thanks to the US-Iran ceasefire, which remains in effect with no firm deadline.

“There has been no exchange of fire between the United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026,” Trump wrote in the letter. “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have been terminated.”

Is it true? Not really, from all evidence available. While the US and Iran haven’t been engaged in the kind of full-scale hostilities that marked the early weeks of the conflict, a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is still in place. (Last month, the US even fired on an Iranian-flagged ship allegedly attempting to violate the blockade — in Trump’s words, “blowing a hole in the engineroom.”)

US forces also remain in place near Iran, and there’s the ever-present possibility that the conflict could resume at full force — something Trump has continued to threaten as a deal to end the conflict permanently eludes him. 

What’s the context? Trump’s letter is a fairly transparent attempt to skate around the War Powers Resolution, which requires the US to end its involvement in military conflicts within 60 days of notifying Congress of their start, unless Congress votes to authorize the conflict. (It hasn’t. There’s also the possibility of a 30-day extension on that 60-day deadline, which the Trump administration has likewise not yet pursued.)

He’s not the first president to do this, however: As Stephen Rademaker, a former assistant secretary of state, points out in the Washington Post, there’s a pattern of presidents from both parties evading the War Powers Resolution in various circumstances. 

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy May Day! Here are two mysteries to keep you entertained over the weekend, from my colleagues at Vox’s Unexplainable podcast. I’ll keep them mysterious here — if you want to learn more, the podcast is a great listen. Have a good weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday! 

2026-05-02 04:00:00

美国国防部长彼得·赫格赛特对十字军东征有着长期的兴趣。十字军东征指的是11至13世纪欧洲为争夺圣地而发动的一系列中世纪战争。他在2025年确认听证会上曾因十字军东征相关的纹身引发关注，其2020年出版的书籍名为《美国十字军东征》，最后一章标题为“让十字军东征复兴”。赫格赛特将十字军东征描绘为基督教为抵御伊斯兰扩张而进行的“防御性战争”。然而，中世纪历史教授马修·加布里埃尔认为，这种观点是对历史的极端简化。以这种视角看待过去，可能会对当前伊朗战争产生潜在危险的影响。赫格赛特对十字军东征的痴迷看似只是个人兴趣，如同你叔叔痴迷二战潜艇，但当这种世界观影响国防部长对现代冲突的看法时，它就不再只是对过去的关注，而是开始塑造未来。Vox的制作人内特·克里格对这场“圣战”进行了深入探讨，以研究十字军东征的真实历史，并分析赫格赛特对中世纪历史的兴趣如何可能影响美国的外交政策及伊朗战争的未来走向。进一步阅读推荐：* Vox记者乔舒亚·凯因关于赫格赛特在特朗普外交团队中角色的文章；* 马修·加布里埃尔与大卫·M·佩里的著作《光明时代：中世纪欧洲的新历史》；* 科德·J·惠特克的《黑色隐喻：现代种族主义如何源自中世纪的种族观念》；* 反诽谤联盟（ADL）关于被指定为仇恨象征的符号百科全书，其中许多与中世纪历史或十字军东征有关。

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has a longstanding fascination with the Crusades. That’s right, the Crusades: the series of late 11th to 13th century medieval wars in which Europeans fought to control the Holy Land. He has tattoos that reference the Crusades, which actually came up during his confirmation hearing in 2025. And his 2020 book is titled American Crusade. The final chapter is titled “Make the Crusade Great Again.” 

Hegseth paints the Crusades as a “defensive war” in which Christianity had to react or face being overrun by Islam. According to professor of medieval history Matthew Gabriele, this is an extreme oversimplification of the actual history. And viewing the past in this way could have possibly dangerous ramifications on the current war in Iran. 

Pete Hegseth’s obsession with the Crusades may seem like a personality quirk, like your uncle who is obsessed with World War II submarines. But when that worldview influences how a defense secretary thinks about modern conflicts, it stops just being about the past — and it starts shaping the future. 

Vox producer Nate Krieger took a closer look at this “Holy War” to investigate the actual history of the Crusades and to understand how Pete Hegseth’s interest in medieval history might actually affect US foreign policy and the future of the war in Iran. 

Further reading: 

• Vox correspondent Joshua Keating’s article on Hegseth’s role in Trump’s foreign policy team
• The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry 
• Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged From Medieval Race-Thinking by Cord J. Whitaker
• The Anti-Defamation League’s encyclopedia of symbols that have been designated as hate symbols, many of which are related to medieval history or the Crusades

2026-05-01 19:30:00

《穿普拉达的女王2》依然以千禧一代的乐观主义为基调，但其对新恶势力的批判力度有所减弱。这部电影被描述为一部关于千禧一代的童话，讲述主角安迪通过一年的努力在时尚界获得成功的故事。然而，随着现实生活的变迁，这种故事如今显得有些压抑，正如许多童话在深入观察后也并非那么美好。千禧一代始终相信，可以在不牺牲太多或伤害他人的情况下，拥有充实的工作和人际关系。即便他们不得不出卖灵魂和关系，那也是为了获得世界上最时尚的工作，以及通往更伟大事业的跳板。

《穿普拉达的女王2》中，安迪成为《Runway》的特约编辑，发现时尚杂志同样面临行业困境。电影中的反派角色杰伊（由BJ Novak饰演）和本吉（由Justin Theroux饰演）代表了资本和科技巨头的贪婪。杰伊试图通过削减开支来优化杂志，而本吉则因追求消费主义而与《Runway》产生关联。电影呈现了媒体行业在资本驱动下的生存困境：要么成为无灵魂的消费工具，要么被不择手段的亿万富翁收购。

尽管影片对消费主义和资本的批判依然存在，但其商业本质也显而易见。例如，电影与多个知名品牌合作，如可口可乐、星巴克、L'Oréal等，甚至推出印有电影标志的零食包装。这些营销手段让观众难以忽视影片背后的商业利益。此外，本吉与新未婚妻的形象与贝佐斯夫妇惊人相似，而《Vogue》对贝佐斯婚礼的报道也因美化其商业帝国而引发争议。

虽然第一部电影也涉及资本主义现实，但第二部的讽刺意味更明显。影片揭示了资本与艺术之间的矛盾：尽管安迪和米拉达（Miranda Priestly）相信艺术的价值，但她们也深知金钱对艺术生存的必要性。然而，当观众在观看电影时，手中拿着印有电影标志的爆米花桶，而其母公司正是消费主义的象征时，这种“艺术终将胜利”的叙事显得更加讽刺。实际上，这部电影本身已成为资本运作的产物，其结局暗示了资本对艺术的胜利，而非真正的救赎。这或许才是第一部电影未写完的真正结局：一个关于时尚、艺术和新闻业的电影，最终不过是资本利益的延伸，而那些推动其诞生的高管，正是电影所警告的“软裤子”式人物。他们早已获胜，而如果这部电影能带来足够的收益，那便是他们的“幸福结局”。

The Devil Wears Prada is one of the great millennial fairy tales.  

Released in 2006, the year before the financial crisis and Great Recession would come for us all, the movie (based on a novel inspired by writer Lauren Weisberger’s experience working for Anna Wintour at Condé Nast) posits a subversive fantasy: Our heroine Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) believes that if she can figure out how to work for Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) for just one year, she can have any job in the industry that she wants. In the end, she learns that if you work hard and stay true to your values, you can have a good, well-paying job in New York City that doesn’t require selling your soul or betraying your friends. 

Given the way life has shaken out for many millennials, that story is now a bit depressing — not unlike the way most fairy tales, upon greater inspection, are. But this generation has always wanted to believe that one can have a fulfilling job and fulfilling personal relationships, without having to suffer too much or inflict suffering on the world. And if we did sell our souls and our relationships, it’d actually be for the chicest job on the planet, and a launchpad to something greater. 

Now, some 20 years later, The Devil Wears Prada has returned for a sequel. Like the original, it runs on millennial optimism. But in this installment, its critiques — about money, society, art, commerce, and beauty — have a little less bite. By the time you get to the fairy tale ending, it’s impossible to ignore the creative and economic circumstances that brought this movie into existence, and the fact that when it comes to media and entertainment, a billionaire is lurking in every corner. 

This time, the devil wears Vuori

The pleasure of the original is how sneakily it convinces you of Miranda Priestly’s importance and innocence. As Andy and the audience come to learn, Miranda isn’t a shallow, unreasonable monster; she is both the guiding force behind every single item in our closets and the product of an unforgiving system that not only diminishes women but also undervalues art and beauty, even when it’s incredibly lucrative. Her toughness is the reason she’s survived this long in an industry that simultaneously lauds her but also despises her for being cutthroat and harsh. As the movie posits over and over again, if a man acted the way Miranda does (and they do), they’d be lauded for it. (This type of justification ultimately unleashed a strange kind of over-correction in the real world that we would eventually deem girlbossery.)

The second movie has more explicit targets. 

In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the media landscape resembles our real one. People no longer care about reading stories, and certainly no one wants to pay for them. Accordingly, newspapers, magazines, and digital outlets have had their budgets cut, and journalists, including Andy, are being laid off in swaths. 

A flimsy first act brings Andy to Runway as a features editor, where she finds out that the fashion tome isn’t immune to the ills of the industry. She immediately finds out that Jay Ravitz (BJ Novak), the nepo baby in charge of Runway’s parent company, Elias-Clarke, wants to “optimize” Runway. (In non-corporate media jargon, he wants the magazine to make the most amount of money while running at the cheapest mode possible.) 

Even if the movie were on mute, the villains would be easy to spot. Novak’s Jay is draped head to toe in monochromatic polyester blends, all in various forms of fancy athleisure. He only wears soft pants — the implication being that his life has been so frictionless that his pants must follow suit, and that, despite being one of the most important people in the company, he’s allowed to show up to work in his gym clothes. It turns out, some of the most evil people in the world wear the softest pants. 

Jay hires a squad of consultants, dressed in drab grays and blues, to slash Runway’s spending. Of course, these people don’t know beauty. They work for McKinsey. 

The other loathsome creature of this film is Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux). Benji, according to Runway gossip, is a tech founder who went soul-searching after a divorce from his beautiful wife, Sasha (Lucy Liu). After discovering Botox, hair transplants, and steroids, he found a new fiancé in Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Andy’s across-the-office frenemy from the first movie. 

Benji has more money than he knows what to do with. So he buys art — Klimts and Monets — and designer clothes and watches, all the stuff with the biggest price tags. It’s only a matter of time before Runway catches Benji’s eye, not because he has an appreciation for fashion or beauty, but because he must ravenously, messily consume it, like a toddler razing their first ice cream cone. 

Between Benji and Jay, Runway faces an existential crisis: become a soulless husk that exists to drive consumerism and shareholder value, or sell itself to a tacky billionaire who will, when he moves onto the next shiny thing, sell it or, even worse, feed it into an AI engine. That’s a relatable, if bleak, reality for many media outlets right now. 

Andy, Miranda, and Nigel (Stanley Tucci) come up with a solution that can only be described as a miracle, one that would never work outside of the slightly lobotomized, fairy-tale world of Runway. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s a better finale than the original, one that feels more spiritually in line with the idea that millennials can hard work their way into salvation.  

How critical can The Devil Wears Prada 2 really be?   

Maybe some moviegoers will more readily accept the movie’s fantasy for what it is. After all, the performances are charming and the costuming sparkles. The social commentary criticizing tech billionaires and nepo kids feels current. But one would be forgiven for not fully buying into the razzle-dazzle, given the marketing campaign and circumstances surrounding the movie’s existence.  Because as much as the film positions mindless consumerism and our capitalist overlords as art’s enemy, it very well might not exist without either. 

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, after all, another sequel brought to the surface from Disney’s bottomless and extremely valuable IP mines. Thanks to an acquisition, those troves are filled with 20th Century Fox’s original material, which includes The Devil Wears Prada. The sequel is the exact kind of movie that entertainment giants and Hollywood executives have enjoyed releasing in the last decade. Those executives, like the movie’s villains, are also probably being advised by beautyless gray ghosts and nepo babies in soft pants too, the kind that excitedly think about AI and how to “streamline” operations (i.e., cutting jobs).  

Studios today aren’t as enthusiastic about taking gambles on films as they once were, especially not mid-budget movies about fashion aimed at young women. They want the financial insurance of existing IP — a toy perhaps. Sequels of beloved films with ardent fanbases are seen as minimal risk. This may explain why this movie contains an unfathomable number of callbacks and Easter eggs to its predecessor while lacking any distinguishing “cerulean” moment. 

What is distinguishable is the marketing and brand tie-ins. Diet Coke (of course, it’s Diet Coke) released specialty cans featuring the movie’s signature red heel logo, and you can apparently order Miranda Priestly’s favorite drink off the Starbucks “secret” menu. The film also, according to CNN, officially partnered with L’Oréal Paris, Smartwater, Samsung Galaxy, Lancôme, TRESemmé, Havaianas, Grey Goose, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tiffany & Co., Dior, and Valentino fragrance.

This business is tough to watch. 

There’s also the matter of Benji and his new fiancé bearing an uncanny resemblance to Jeff and Lauren Bezos, this year’s extremely controversial Met Gala “honorary chairs.” According to the New York Times, the couple were initially just expected to be the lead sponsors of both the event and the exhibition, but this secondary role, which “comes with a place in the receiving line and a position at the top of the Met steps,” was later announced. The film does not legitimize them; there’s an understanding that if they got their hands on Runway, it would be the end. Yet, Anna Wintour, the real-life Priestly, seems to be softer than her fictional counterpart: In addition to the Met Gala, Vogue covered the Bezos wedding extensively and drew backlash for glamorizing a billionaire whose company is known for numerous on-site employee deaths and aggressive union-busting, among other problems. 

It’s not as if the first movie was immune to the realities of capitalism. Miranda’s (and perhaps Anna Wintour’s too) eternal conundrum is that she believes in art and, at the same time, understands the necessity of money to protect it. Capital allows beauty to exist, and its existence within our current system is, according to Miranda, better than it going away entirely. 

But there’s something askew this time around. It’s more difficult to believe the sequel’s “art will triumph in the end” narrative when you’re eating popcorn from a Devil Wears Prada 2 handbag popcorn bucket ($39.95) and when its parent company is the apex predator of hollow mass consumerism. 

Perhaps that’s the real, more depressing, more millennial ending that the first one left unwritten: A movie about fashion, the sanctity of art and creativity, and the importance of journalism is actually the embodiment of millions of dollars in brand deals, an exercise in unoriginality, and was greenlit by soft pant-wearing executives, just like the ones the film warns us about. They’ve already won. And if this charming but bleak sequel makes enough money to make their investment worth it, that’s their happily ever after.

2026-05-01 18:30:00

2026年4月28日，哈瓦那街头，一辆摩托车上的行人注视着一辆被拖车拖走的受损汽车，背景是描绘美国对古巴实施经济制裁的壁画。文章指出，特朗普近期多次暗示古巴可能是美国政府“政权更迭”计划的下一个目标。自2026年初以来，美国对古巴的“最大压力”政策显著升级，包括限制石油进口，并威胁对向古巴供应石油的国家征收关税，导致墨西哥等国暂停输油。此举使古巴面临类似1962年导弹危机的封锁局面，加剧了其经济困境，如食品价格上涨、垃圾堆积、医疗系统濒临崩溃等。

尽管特朗普认为古巴政权可能因经济压力而自行瓦解，但专家指出，古巴政权具有极强的生存意志，且与委内瑞拉不同，其领导层更加意识形态化和团结，不太可能因压力而轻易妥协。此外，美国国务院正与古巴前领导人卡斯特罗的孙子“拉乌尔”（Raulito）进行接触，但此人更多被视为谈判中介而非潜在新领导人。若与古巴达成协议，仍需满足《赫尔姆斯-伯顿法案》的条件，即必须解除对古巴政权的制裁，这在当前情况下难以实现。

关于古巴民众是否支持美国干预，文章提到古巴反对派对特朗普的政策抱有希望，认为其可能改变现状，但专家强调，古巴民众更关注的是政权是否能改善其生活状况，而非单纯替换领导人。此外，特朗普的政策可能更多受到其幕僚，尤其是国务卿马尔科·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）的影响。鲁比奥虽在伊朗问题上低调，但长期主张推翻古巴政权，并被视为推动美国对古巴更加强硬立场的关键人物。然而，若古巴政府不愿做出重大让步，鲁比奥的“交易”可能难以实现。同时，随着伊朗危机持续未解，特朗普政府是否优先处理古巴问题仍存疑。

“We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” President Donald Trump mused earlier this month during remarks about the war in Iran, one of a number of times in recent weeks that he has implied Cuba will be “next” on the administration’s regime change agenda. 

The administration amped up its “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba in January, shortly after the capture of Venezuelan president and key Cuban ally Nicolas Maduro, severely restricting oil imports to the island as it was already suffering from repeated nationwide blackouts. Now the Pentagon is preparing a range of military options for taking action on the island. Senate Democrats are alarmed enough by the saber-rattling that they’ve sponsored legislation to block military action against the nation. 

Amid the threats, talks are ongoing as well. A US State Department delegation visited Havana earlier this month, the first time a US government aircraft had touched down in Cuba since the short-lived rapprochement under the Obama administration. The American delegation brought a list of demands including economic reforms, the release of political prisoners, compensation for US residents and corporations whose properties were seized in the Cuban revolution, and allowing Starlink internet connectivity on the island. 

Ever since Fidel Castro took power in 1959, every US president has struggled with the question of what to do about the regime Castro founded 90 miles off the US coast. Fresh off decapitation operations in Venezuela and Iran, Trump seems confident that he’s the one who can solve the problem. 

“All my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba: When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll be the honor, having the honor of taking Cuba.” he has said.

But what does “taking” Cuba actually mean? The dream for opponents of the regime in both Cuba and the United States is the removal of the communist regime followed by the lifting of the US embargo. But it’s probably more likely to be something short of that. 

This administration seems to have a capacious understanding of the concept of “regime change” that does not appear to imply regime removal. The US has left Maduro’s former Vice President Delcy Rodriguez in power in Venezuela under implied threat of further military action if she steps out of line. After the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and scores of other top officials in Iran, Trump has said the country’s new government is “less radical and much more reasonable,” though unlike Rodriguez, they seem far less amenable to his demands.    

So how might Trump actually “change” the Cuban government, and what would that mean for the Cuban people? 

Will the Venezuela model work in Cuba? 

Cuba has been under a US embargo since the early 1960s, but in Trump’s second term, the pressure campaign against the island has significantly escalated. In early January, after Maduro’s ouster, the US cut off supplies of oil to Cuba from Venezuela, which had previously been its main supplier. Later that month, Trump threatened tariffs against any country supplying oil to the island, prompting countries like Mexico to halt shipments. This is the closest thing to an outright “blockade” of the island since the 1962 missile crisis — exacerbating the nation’s already dire economic situation. Food prices have been rising, trash has been piling up on the streets, and even Cuba’s once vaunted health system is on the verge of collapse, with hospitals canceling surgeries and struggling to keep ventilators running because of power cuts. 

“This is a different level of desperation,” said Chris Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House. But the Cuban regime has weathered economic crises before, notably the “special period” in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its longtime patron. Despite Trump’s suggestions that the Cuban regime might simply collapse on its own, there’s little evidence that economic pressure alone would cause that to happen.

“What’s not different is the Cuban regime’s almost genetic need to survive and defend itself, and its resistance to anything that could potentially weaken its all-consuming power,” Sabatini added. “They’ve always been willing to just let their people suffer as long as they remain in power.”

There are in fact some signs that the Trump administration is easing up on the oil restrictions. The US allowed a Russian tanker carrying 100,000 tons of crude to reach Cuba at the end of March. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has also indicated her country may restart shipments.

If Cuba’s current leaders won’t accede to Trump’s demands, no matter how much economic pressure is applied, could they be replaced by new ones? Trump may be hoping for a repeat of the Venezuela scenario in which an anti-American leader was replaced by a more pliant one, but that may not be an option in this case. Even if current President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who became communist Cuba’s first non-Castro president in 2021, could be forced into exile, it’s not clear if there’s a more cooperative alternative waiting in the wings. 

“The Venezuelan government was a very different beast,” said Michael Bustamante, a professor of Cuban-American studies at the University of Miami. Whereas the Venezuelan government was splintered into fiefdoms and camps, some of which had long pushed for better relations with the US, the Cuban leadership is much more ideological and unified. “There’s no one who has a consistent track record of having stood for economic liberalization, even in a modest way.”

The State Department has reportedly been negotiating with former Cuban leader Raul Castro’s 41-year-old grandson, also named Raul. “El Cangrejo,” or “the crab,” is seen as relatively business-friendly as well as a conduit to his 94-year-old grandfather, who is officially retired but still widely seen as influential. But “Raulito” is generally seen by experts as a useful go-between rather than a potential new leader. 

In any event, cutting a deal with Cuba that leaves a member of the Castro family in power would violate the spirit if not the letter of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which prohibits the lifting of the embargo on Cuba as long as a government that includes either Fidel or Raul is still in place. 

Do Cubans want American intervention?

Even as the administration’s plans for Cuba have remained somewhat unclear, Trump’s attention to the island has raised hopes among opponents of the Castro regime. Graffitied messages reading “Viva Trump” and “Make Cuba Great Again” have been appearing more often, Boris González Arenas, a prominent journalist and human rights activist in Havana, told Vox.

González Arenas cautioned against trying to analyze Cuban politics on a traditional right-left spectrum. The support for Trump, he said, is because “people perceive that pressure from the president of the United States could change the government in Cuba, and they know that the government is the cause of their situation — of the famine, the lack of medicine. They don’t have access to elections.”

He believes the talks would produce change in the Cuban regime only if they are accompanied by the credible threat of military force. “If Castroist leaders don’t feel that their fate, properties, and even lives, are in real danger, they are going to engage in negotiations without any compromises and real transformations.”

González Arenas said he would support military intervention “only to give sovereignty back to the Cuban people” rather than simply to replace a Castroist dictatorship with a pro-American one. “Cuba is not a country incapable of self-governance; Cuba is a nation kidnapped by a criminal group,” he added. 

In Marco we trust?

In some ways, Cuba seems like a strange target for Trump. Unlike Venezuela, it does not sit atop the world’s largest oil reserves. Unlike Iran, it does not have a nuclear weapons program. While it has long supported other left-wing governments and paramilitary groups in Latin America, it’s hard to argue that it poses an imminent national security threat to the US today. And democracy promotion has never been a major priority for this administration, even in the countries where it has sought to topple regimes. 

Trump may be enticed by the notion of solving a problem that has bedeviled his 12 predecessors in office, but if there’s a driving force behind the current US pressure campaign, it’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Though Rubio has played a conspicuously low-profile role in managing the crisis in Iran, the secretary of state — whose parents were born in Cuba — has long prioritized US efforts to topple the Cuban government, was a leading critic of Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with the Castro regime, and has been the face of this administration’s more assertive posture toward Latin America. 

“The only person in office today, in the whole political landscape in the United States, who would care enough to make Cuba a priority for the United States is Marco Rubio,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the US-based Cuba Study Group. “This makes him both the chief threat, but also the chief opportunity that Cuba is facing.”

He’s an “opportunity” for Cuban leaders because he may be the only person in the United States capable of getting the more than 60-year-old embargo lifted. Rubio has left open the possibility of lifting the embargo in a situation where there were “new people in charge” and major economic reform. But he’s also said Cuba “doesn’t have to change all at once…everyone is mature and realistic here,” suggesting that something short of a complete toppling of the communist government would be acceptable in the near term. 

Depending on what it means in practice, that would be a tough pill to swallow for opponents of the regime on the island, Cuban American exiles, and members of Congress who would have to lift the embargo. It might also be tough to square with the Helms-Burton Act, which sets the holding of free elections and the dismantlement of Cuba’s state security department as conditions for lifting the embargo. 

But in a “Nixon-to-China”-like situation, Rubio’s Cuba hawk bona fides may give him unique credibility for selling a deal both on Capitol Hill and in Miami.  

“It would be a hard sell, but I also think the Cuban American community doesn’t really have any other options,” said the University of Miami’s Bustamante. “‘In Marco we trust’ is sort of the vibe.”

But there won’t be any deal for Rubio to sell if the Cuban government is unwilling to make major compromises. And as the Iran crisis drags on without a resolution in sight, it’s also not clear how much Rubio’s boss will actually prioritize yet another regime change project.