2026-04-11 05:15:00
2026年4月6日，洛杉矶一家杂货店的顾客正在购买牛肉。| Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
本文出自《The 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《The Logoff》：伊朗战争对经济的影响正逐渐显现。
最新情况：本周五公布的数据显示，3月份美国通胀率达到3.3%，比2月份上涨近1个百分点，是近四年来的最快涨幅。消费者显然对此并不满意。同一天发布的密歇根大学数据也显示，4月消费者信心指数降至50以下，创历史最低水平。虽然目前这些数据仍为初步统计，但已显示出令人担忧的趋势。
伊朗为何与此有关？战争始于2月中旬，伊朗随即关闭了关键的霍尔木兹海峡，导致美国汽油价格飙升至每加仑4美元以上，并使许多商品（包括食品）价格上涨。尽管停火协议目前维持着脆弱的平衡，但美国总统特朗普本周的施压并未促使海峡重新开放。据BBC报道，自停火协议宣布以来，仅有四艘油轮和19艘船只通过海峡，远低于正常情况下每天超过100艘的水平。即便在最乐观的情境下，若海峡近期重新开放，油品供应恢复仍需数周甚至数月时间，据Vox本周早些时候引用的石油市场专家罗里·约翰斯顿的说法。
接下来会发生什么？美国与伊朗的谈判团队将在本周末于巴基斯坦会面，讨论更持久的和平协议，这可能为美国经济带来急需的缓解。然而，谈判结果仍难以预料：本周五，特朗普在Truth Social上再次发出威胁，称“伊朗人之所以还活着，就是为了谈判！”
我总是喜欢《纽约杂志》的“Grub Street Diet”栏目，其中某位人物（可能是政界人士、名人或记者）会展示一周内颇具特色的饮食选择。最新一期由调查记者兼作家帕特里克·拉登·基夫撰写，您可点击此处阅读。
祝您周末愉快，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: The economic impact of the Iran war is becoming clearer.
What’s happening? On Friday, we learned that inflation climbed to 3.3 percent in March, almost 1 percentage point higher than it was in February and the quickest inflation has grown in nearly four years.
Unsurprisingly, consumers aren’t thrilled. New data from the University of Michigan, also released Friday, shows consumer sentiment from April under 50, its lowest point ever. It’s not even mid-April, so for now, those numbers are preliminary — but they point in a concerning direction.
What does Iran have to do with this? Shortly after the war began in late February, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial passage for oil and natural gas. It has remained largely closed ever since, driving gas prices over $4/gallon in the US and making many more goods, including food, more expensive.
Will the ceasefire fix prices? No. The ceasefire, while fragile, is holding. But despite President Donald Trump’s demands this week, there is no sign that it has led to the Strait reopening.
According to the BBC, four tankers, and only 19 total ships, have passed the Strait since the ceasefire was announced; under normal conditions, well over 100 ships transit the Strait each day.
Even under the most optimistic scenario where the Strait does reopen in the near future, it will take weeks, if not months, for the oil supply to rebound, oil markets expert Rory Johnston told Vox earlier this week.
What’s next? American and Iranian negotiating teams will meet in Pakistan this weekend to discuss a more permanent peace deal, which could provide the US economy with a needed reprieve. How that will go is anyone’s guess: On Friday, Trump issued another threat, writing on Truth Social that “The only reason [the Iranians] are alive today is to negotiate!”
I always enjoy New York Magazine’s “Grub Street Diet,” where someone — a politician, a celebrity, a journalist — lays out a week of sometimes-eclectic culinary choices. Their latest features investigative reporter and author Patrick Radden Keefe, and you can read it here.
Have a good weekend and we’ll see you back here on Monday!
2026-04-11 03:55:00
根据“建筑脱碳联盟”（BDC）最新报告，2025年燃气账单上涨速度比电力账单快60%，比通货膨胀速度快四倍。这一现象背后有更深层的原因：过去，燃气账单的主要驱动因素是燃气价格本身，但如今，燃气系统基础设施成本（如管道更换）已成为主导因素。2024年，基础设施成本占客户账单的约70%，而燃气价格仅占30%。BDC报告指出，过去十年间，燃气公司用于管道和输送的支出翻了三倍，2023年达到280亿美元。自2010年起，燃气公司加快了管道更换速度，部分原因是管道寿命有限，最终会腐蚀和泄漏。2010年至2014年间，27个州实施了政策，使燃气公司能更快回收更换成本，从而提高用户费率。据美国燃气协会数据，至少42个州已通过某种形式的附加费或计划加速燃气管道更换。然而，燃气用户数量仅增长了8.5%（自2000年以来），而燃气公司支出却大幅增加，导致每户燃气用户支付的费用比30年前更高，形成“低效且昂贵”的燃气系统。BDC计算，如果燃气公司继续以2010年前的速度投资，美国用户到2023年可节省约1300亿美元，相当于每户燃气用户节省1723美元。尽管燃气行业强调使用燃气比电力更省钱，但BDC认为继续投资燃气系统并不合理。随着各州设定强制性气候目标，必须转向电气化并大幅减少化石燃料使用。报告作者凯文·卡本内尔指出，对于老旧且不安全的燃气管道，可考虑地热能网络、需求响应计划、污水热回收等替代方案。越来越多的州已开始采取行动，例如自2020年以来，13个州和华盛顿特区已启动逐步淘汰燃气供暖的程序。在明尼苏达州，一项新提案允许燃气公司建设地热能网络，以减少化石燃料使用，该提案获得州内最大燃气公司CenterPoint Energy及劳工团体的支持。与此同时，马萨诸塞州正在扩展其首个由燃气公司主导的热能社区，而马里兰州监管机构则正在评估燃气公司规划是否符合州气候目标。州政策和激励措施也在推动电气化工具（如热泵）的普及。在加州，立法者正在考虑《热泵准入法案》，以加快热泵的安装，助力该州实现2045年碳中和目标。2025年，热泵连续第四年在美国销量超过燃气炉。此外，插电式阳台太阳能系统也日益受到关注。卡本内尔表示，人们正通过升级为更高效、舒适、节能的电器而逐步脱离燃气系统。尽管特朗普政府在联邦层面削减了清洁能源激励措施，但各州在脱碳方面的进展依然显著，这进一步证明随着燃气系统成本持续上升，清洁能源解决方案正变得更具性价比。
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
From the cold snap this winter to the US war with Iran, rising energy bills are making headlines. But there’s a larger story behind spikes in gas-utility costs, one decades in the making.
The main driver of these bills used to be the price of gas itself. Now it’s the gas system infrastructure, like pipeline replacements: That accounted for about 70 percent of customer bills in 2024, while gas was just 30 percent.
“The sleeper culprit of these continuously rising bills is, in fact, the infrastructure,” said Kristin Bagdanov, co-author of a new report by the Building Decarbonization Coalition (BDC) that was published Tuesday.
Electric bills have been on the rise too, but not nearly at the same rate as those for gas. In 2025, gas utility bills rose 60 percent faster than electric ones and four times faster than inflation, the report found. All of this comes as gas use declines, a result of more efficient gas boilers alongside a push towards electrification as states work to meet climate goals.
The spike in the cost of gas itself is the cherry on top of a system that has grown increasingly expensive over the years. In the last decade, gas utility spending on pipes and delivery tripled, reaching $28 billion in 2023, the report notes. Utilities began replacing their pipelines more rapidly in 2010 — partially because of the lifespan of pipes, which will eventually corrode and leak.
Between then and 2014, 27 states implemented policies that allowed utilities to recover these costs more quickly, raising rates for customers. In total, at least 42 states have enacted some form of rider, surcharge or program to accelerate the replacement of gas distribution pipelines, according to data from the American Gas Association, a utility trade group.
Utility spending has far outpaced growth in the gas customer base, which is up just 8.5 percent in total since 2000, the BDC report says, citing data from the US Energy Information Administration. Meanwhile, residential gas demand has remained nearly flat since the 1970s.
“That means people are paying more per pipe than they had been 30 years ago,” Bagdanov said, creating a gas system that is “underutilized and more expensive.”
If utilities had continued their pre-2010 pace of investment, BDC calculates that US customers would have saved an estimated $130 billion in total through 2023, or $1,723 per household using gas. The gas-utility industry, however, emphasizes cost savings for residents who use gas instead of electricity. The American Gas Association writes in its 2026 Playbook that “homes that use natural gas for heating, cooking and clothes drying save an average of $1,030 per year compared to homes that use electricity for those same applications.”
The BDC report argues that continued investments in the gas system don’t make sense. States with mandated climate goals will have to invest in electrification and dramatically reduce fossil fuel use. Where replacements are needed for gas pipes that are old and unsafe, there are other options, said Kevin Carbonnier, co-author of the report, like geothermal energy networks, demand-response programs to use energy more efficiently, sewer heat recovery and electrification.
“Let’s look at non-pipe alternatives to see if we can modernize our homes and our infrastructure, rather than putting in the millions of dollars to replace that pipe,” he said.
A growing number of states have taken that sentiment to heart. Since 2020, utility regulators in 13 states and Washington, DC, have opened proceedings on transitioning away from natural gas for heating. Lawmakers are considering their options, too.
In Minnesota, for example, a new proposed bill would allow gas utilities to build geothermal energy networks in the state, a move that would reduce fossil fuel use. “We know that decarbonizing heating and cooling is one of the biggest challenges that we have in the clean energy transition,” state Rep. Athena Hollins, sponsor of the bill, said at a hearing in late March. The bill has received strong support from Minnesota’s largest natural gas utility, CenterPoint Energy, along with labor groups.
Massachusetts is already expanding its first utility-led thermal energy neighborhood, while Maryland regulators are currently accepting testimony on their review of whether state gas utilities’ planning is consistent with the state’s climate goals.
State policies and incentives are also helping to make electrification tools, like heat pumps, more affordable. In California, legislators are considering the Heat Pump Access Act to make it faster, easier, and cheaper to install heat pumps for cooling and heating, part of a push to help the state reach carbon neutrality by 2045.
In 2025, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for the fourth year in a row. Plug-in balcony solar is receiving mounting interest as well. “We’re seeing a lot of electrification and people disconnecting from gas as they upgrade their homes to these modern, faster, better, more comfortable, efficient appliances,” Carbonnier said.
While the Trump administration has slashed clean energy incentives on a federal level, “what we see at the state level is actually like a lot of durable progress,” Bagdanov said. “It just reinforces the fact that as that gas system continues to get more and more expensive, these clean-heat solutions get even better and more affordable.”
2026-04-11 03:00:00
2025年11月5日，教皇利奥十四世在梵蒂冈圣彼得广场向信徒发表演讲。然而，近期一些新闻报道引发了美国天主教徒对政府是否可能推翻首位出生在美国的教皇的猜测。这些报道恰逢罗马天主教会和右翼基督教影响者对特朗普政府在伊朗战争中的政策进行批评。
核心要点
事件背景与影响
宗教右翼的分裂
总结
“阿维尼翁事件”不仅加剧了梵蒂冈与美国政府的紧张关系，也暴露了美国天主教界与宗教右翼之间的深刻分歧。事件背后涉及历史隐喻、政治立场冲突以及宗教意识形态的对抗，其影响可能持续发酵，甚至威胁到特朗普支持者内部的团结。
Most American Catholics were probably not expecting to spend the first week of Easter trying to figure out whether their government was threatening to overthrow the first American-born pope.
Yet a handful of news reports this week raised that very strange possibility. They landed just as both the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing Christian influencers have been ramping up their criticism of the Trump administration over the Iran war.
This burgeoning scandal hinges on news reports that in January, the previous ambassador of the Vatican to the United States was called into an unusual meeting with Department of Defense officials at the Pentagon and dressed down. The Pentagon officials, reportedly, wanted to complain about a speech Pope Leo XIV gave in Rome that appeared to criticize American foreign policy. During the meeting, one official issued what some in the church saw as a veiled threat to the Vatican: a warning that the US wields unlimited military power, and that the pope should be conscious of that.
If true, this episode would mark a low point in modern Vatican-American political relations — on top of being a major religious scandal for Catholics in the US.
The Trump administration denies these accounts; the Vatican is keeping mostly quiet. Meanwhile, the reporters and writers who first surfaced these allegations are standing by their stories.
Whatever the truth ends up being, this scandal points to some important fracture lines in American religious life, and offers a key to understanding the way the Iran war is cracking up the religious right. It also fits into a broader conflict that is testing MAGA Catholics’ resolve, and setting up the Catholic Church as one of the Trump administration’s most visible and relevant critics.
This whole saga began with a report from the Free Press on Wednesday, in which Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi reported on a previously unknown meeting between Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, then-top Vatican diplomat in the US Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and a handful of Pentagon officials.
The meeting, which is now confirmed to have happened, was unusual, Ferraresi and other reports noted, because of where and when it happened: at the Pentagon, instead of with diplomats of the Department of State, and after Pope Leo had delivered a speech decrying the breakdown in the post-war international order and the escalating use of force and violence abroad by nations, including the US, to achieve their aims.
“War is back in vogue and the zeal for war is spreading,” Leo had said in his speech to diplomats.
That the meeting happened isn’t in doubt; but no one seems to agree on what was actually said in the encounter. The Free Press reported that the meeting was meant to be a warning to the Vatican, a reminder that militarily, the US can do “whatever it wants…and that the Vatican, and Leo, better take its side.” And so, it devolved into a “bitter lecture.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, said Thursday that the group “had a substantive, respectful, and professional meeting” and that “recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.” The US ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican’s political government) echoed that sentiment, and called media reports exaggerations and fabrications.
But other news outlets also began picking up on the fallout. NBC Chicago, of the pope’s hometown, quoted a Vatican source who called the Pentagon meeting “most unpleasant and confrontational.” The Financial Times reported that the meeting was supposed to deliver a “friendly message” to the pope, and to ask the Vatican to be more supportive of the Trump administration’s policies, but unraveled when Pierre said the pope would follow Catholic values in conducting Vatican foreign policy.
That’s when one specific term jumps out, which caused this whole episode to become an actual scandal. Someone in the room, according to the Free Press, the Financial Times, and independent journalist Christopher Hale, invoked the name “Avignon” — which some Vatican officials reportedly understood to be a military threat against the Vatican.
Why did this particular phrase set off alarm bells? To answer that, we have to go back 700 years.
Though these accounts don’t agree on who invoked Avignon, the term is a trigger for Catholics, historians, and history buffs: It references the French city that served as the home base for popes in the 14th century after a French king, Philip IV, sent an army to Italy where they attacked the sitting pope, Boniface VIII, after years of feuding over who was the preeminent political power.
Phiip IV went on to force the election of a new French pope, who moved the papacy to Avignon. For 70 years, popes held court and governed Christendom from the city’s papal palace — and when the last Avignon pope tried to move the office back to Rome, it spawned a crisis for the church and the rise of rival “antipopes” in Avignon claiming to be the real pope for nearly 40 years after.
As you might now understand, “Avignon” is a loaded term. And combined with the nature of the meeting — at the Pentagon, having to do with comments Pope Leo had made about America’s use of force — you can see how this episode could be interpreted as being a veiled warning about the church staying in its lane when it comes to criticizing the dominant military power.
Regardless of who invoked Avignon or how confrontational the meeting was behind the scenes, it fits into a pattern of growing public conflict between the Church and the Trump presidency.
This applies to both style and substance: Pope Leo, and the American bishops, have become loud critics of Trump’s immigration and mass deportation policy, his foreign interventions abroad and use of force against other nations, and the breakdown of the US-European alliance. For all intents and purposes, MAGA has forced the Catholic Church to appear like the chief resistance.
But it’s the joint US-Israeli war on Iran that has caused the most visible strain and direct condemnation of Trump and the American government by the Roman pontiff. After spending weeks calling for peace talks and ceasefires, and preaching the Church’s anti-war message during Holy Week commemorations, Leo used Trump’s name for the first time last week, expressing hope that he was “looking for an off-ramp” from the war.
And after Trump warned that Iranian civilization might “die” on Tuesday, Leo condemned the statements as “truly unacceptable” and urged “the citizens of all the countries involved to contact the authorities, political leaders, congressmen, to ask them, tell them to work for peace and to reject war.”
The pope hasn’t said anything on this latest development, but the Vatican has weighed in — a significant move given their traditional reluctance to address these kinds of political disputes.
After the Vatican Press Office initially declined to comment earlier in the week, Vatican press secretary Matteo Bruni released a statement on Friday confirming Cardinal Pierre met with Colby “for an exchange of views on matters of mutual interest,” and that “the narrative offered by certain media outlets regarding this meeting does not correspond at all with the truth” — without clarifying which narrative that was, or where existing reporting got things wrong.
Meanwhile, the Vatican diplomat involved in the meeting, Cardinal Pierre, told one independent journalist he would “prefer not speak.”
But the Free Press report suggested that this dustup is leading the Vatican to keep the US government at arm’s length while Trump is president. The first American pope has declined invitations to come to the US during its 250th celebrations, and will instead spend that time at an island in Italy where migrants fleeing danger in Africa frequently stop off while trying to reach Europe. The Trump administration has openly supported anti-immigrant political parties and leaders in Europe, while also trying to block asylum seekers and refugees from entering America.
Vance, a Catholic convert who has a book coming out later this year on his faith journey, was asked about the Pentagon episode on Wednesday while traveling in Hungary. He denied knowing the Vatican diplomat in question, and said he’d rather not comment on an unconfirmed report.
Vance is the highest ranking of a significant number of Catholics serving in the Trump administration (including Secretary of State Marco Rubio), was one of the last public leaders to meet with the late Pope Francis before his death, and was famously rebuked by two popes (Francis and Leo, albeit before the latter became pope) for invoking his new faith to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
Beyond being a spectacle, Avignon-gate is also a helpful key to understanding what is happening on the religious right in 2026.
As Vance’s prior papal feuds indicate, the Free Press story also runs into some intra-Catholic tensions. Colby, the Pentagon official embroiled in the mess and a reported ally of Vance, is also Catholic. Some of the leading intellectual figures on the right in MAGA circles are traditionalist Catholics who have been critical of the current and former popes for what they see as concessions to modern liberal political values.
Within US politics, Vance also represents a wing of the GOP that is being split apart by the Iran war, partly over religious lines — and in ways that could threaten his potential aspirations for the presidency in 2028. This story could make that divide even more difficult to navigate.
Beyond being a spectacle, Avignon-gate is also a helpful key to understanding what is happening on the religious right in 2026, and how the Iran war is affecting both the MAGA coalition and the American Catholic Church.
The report landed just as arguments over Israel and Iran were driving a wedge between the GOP’s pro-Trump evangelical base, who tend to be Christian Zionists sympathetic to Israel, and a group of prominent Catholic and non-evangelical commentators who are increasingly hostile to Trump’s foreign policy agenda and critical of Israel.
Among the latter group, which includes Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Carrie Prejean Boller, and Nick Fuentes, Avignon-gate quickly became a hot topic, with many eager to embrace the most explosive interpretation of events.
“On the pope thing, that is how you know this administration is the antichrist…these people hate Catholics,” the self-described Catholic and white supremacist Nick Fuentes said on his show Thursday. Boller took aim at Colby on X, saying, “you won’t bully or threaten the Catholic Church into your unjust war.”
Many of these more isolationist and antiwar figures have also been condemned within the right for either tolerating or openly espousing antisemitism. As they rally to the Church’s side now over the war, and justify their opposition to Trump in increasingly theological terms, this episode puts more pressure on Leo to address the church’s relationship with them as well. Ferraresi, the author of the Free Press article that kicked off this affair, challenged Pope Leo in the same piece to condemn “the growing choir of Catholic pundits injecting bigotry into the MAGA infosphere,” and not just focus the church’s fire on the pro-war right.
In short, it’s a mess. Avignon-gate is almost perfectly calibrated to raise temperatures not only between the White House and the Vatican, but within the US Catholic community, and within the MAGA movement. And the issues it raises are nowhere near being resolved.
2026-04-10 18:30:00
大多数时候，我与治疗师见面时，她会处理我生活中某个正在崩溃的方面，比如我无法理性讨论政治，或者个人财务状况。但偶尔，生活显得平淡无奇，我走进咨询室时毫无话题。我曾多次考虑取消这些看似无意义的会谈。如果我感觉良好且无话可说，为什么要花45分钟时间和30美元的共付费用呢？然而，根据两位治疗师的说法，这些看似无聊的会谈其实非常有洞察力和影响力。事实上，与治疗师随意聊聊可以加深你们之间的关系，帮助他们了解你在平静时期的表现，并发现未被处理的问题。纽约市“年轻女性心理治疗”创始人兼临床主管Claudia Giolitti-Wright告诉Vox：“当客户说‘没什么好聊的’时，这些会谈往往并不空洞。它们通常会揭示一些重要的内容。”因此，我从这两次访谈中确信，轻松随意的会谈与充满冲突的会谈同样重要。以下是原因：
治疗师经常遇到这种情况，并知道如何应对
如果你像我一样，经常在会谈开始时为“没什么可说的”道歉，那么请不要担心或感到尴尬。心理治疗师Matt Sosnowsky表示，他经常听到患者这么说，这并不值得大惊小怪。治疗师专门接受过处理这种沉默期的训练。他可能会引导患者分享最近的生活动态，或者针对特定问题进行跟进。对于其他患者，他则会采用更开放的方式，询问工作、整体情绪或人际关系，以推动对话。他强调，你不需要提前准备，也不必表现得像在表演。治疗师知道如何应对。
这些会谈为被忽视的问题提供了浮现的空间
即使你认为自己非常了解自己，或清楚为何寻求治疗，仍可能有更深层、被掩盖或完全回避的问题。当你开始交谈时，即使感觉毫无价值，这些潜在问题往往会浮出水面。有时这些问题会自然浮现，比如Giolitti-Wright所说，人们可能一开始谈论圣诞树，却“最终聊到最深层的困扰”。即使没有这种情况，治疗师也能通过细微的肢体语言、语气和态度变化察觉你可能面临的困难。Sosnowsky称这些线索为“入口”，它们可能是了解你内心负担的切入点，而治疗师会借此深入探讨。
治疗师能提前察觉你可能面临的困境
“谈论无意义话题”的另一个好处是，治疗师可能在你察觉之前发现心理健康问题的早期迹象，例如重度抑郁症或广泛性焦虑症。即使你整体状态良好或症状已缓解，累积的压力可能逐渐改变你的心理平衡。Sosnowsky指出，许多人并不意识到自己正在滑向抑郁状态，尤其是那些症状波动的人。定期会谈，包括看似无成效的会谈，有助于治疗师追踪你随时间推移的细微变化，如从压力感到绝望感，并及时察觉你可能进入困难时期。这可能促使治疗师询问你的日常习惯，例如是否锻炼、睡眠是否充足、饮食是否规律、是否有愉悦的活动等，并讨论如何防止症状恶化。他提到，这些检查有助于你“在抑郁症爆发前采取行动，因为一旦陷入全面发作，治疗会更加困难。”
强化与治疗师的关系对长期治疗至关重要
至少，这些“无话可说”的会谈会加深你与治疗师之间的关系。虽然这可能看起来不重要，但牢固的关系是治疗成功的关键。研究表明，被称为“治疗联盟”的治疗师与患者之间的关系是决定治疗效果的最重要因素。Sosnowsky表示：“可以说，这是治疗最重要的方面，不仅关乎体验质量，更决定治疗的实际效果。”你越亲近治疗师，信任、共情和合作就越强，这将帮助你更开放地交流并实现个人成长。最后，需要注意的是，并非所有会谈都必须有意义。如果你感觉每次咨询都毫无进展，可能需要寻找新的治疗师。但偶尔与治疗师轻松闲聊，比如谈论同事，也说明你正在有效利用时间。并非所有重要的工作都需要费力去做。
Most weeks when I meet with my therapist, she triages some aspect of my life that is actively bursting at the seams — my inability to rationally talk about politics, for example, or the state of my personal finances. But, every so often, life feels uneventful, and I head into sessions with nothing to talk about. On a number of occasions, I’ve considered cancelling these appointments. Why waste 45 minutes of my time and spend $30 on a copay when I feel fine and have nothing to say?
But according to the two therapists I spoke with for this story, these seemingly boring sessions can be incredibly insightful and impactful. In fact, shooting the shit with your therapist can strengthen your bond, help them see how you function during periods of calm, and uncover unaddressed problems. As Claudia Giolitti-Wright, the founder and clinical director of Psychotherapy for Young Women in New York City, tells Vox, “Sessions where a client says, ‘I have nothing to talk about’ — they’re rarely empty. They often reveal something.” So much, in fact, that I left these two interviews convinced that the easy breezy appointments are just as important as the turbulent ones. Here’s why.
If you, like me, often start your sessions by apologizing for “have nothing going on,” consider this permission not to worry or feel awkward. Matt Sosnowsky, a psychotherapist and the founder of Philadelphia Talk Therapy, says he hears this from patients all the time, and it’s no big deal. Therapists are specifically trained to deal with this kind of lull.
“Oftentimes, I’ll just prompt them for an update on what’s been going on,” he says. With clients who are there to work on a specific issue, he’ll follow up on the topics they’ve been working through. With other patients, he’ll keep things more open-ended, asking about work, their overall mood, or their relationships to get the conversation flowing. This is to say: Don’t sweat it if you aren’t prepared. You don’t need to show up ready to perform or impress, says Giolitti-Wright. Your therapist knows what to do and say.
Even if you consider yourself highly self-aware and feel clear on the reasons you’re in therapy, there are almost always deeper, buried issues that you’ve overlooked, downplayed, or completely avoided. As you start talking, even if it feels like you’re saying nothing of value, these underlying issues often rise to the surface. Sometimes these issues naturally bubble up — as Giolitti-Wright says, people will start rambling about, say, how they bought a Christmas tree but then “end up talking about the deepest shit.”
Even when that doesn’t happen, your therapist is trained to pick up on subtle cues — such as shifts in body language, tone, and attitude — that signal you’re struggling with something. Sosnowsky calls these cues “ports of entry.” “Those are often inroads to learn about what you’re carrying that you may not even notice,” he says, and your therapist will likely use that to dig deeper.
For example, if you let out a big exhale while talking about work, Sosnowsky might say, “I noticed that deep sigh, what’s that about?” or ask more targeted questions about your job. Then, you’re off to the races. This creates an opportunity for you to examine something you may not have fully considered yet or have been avoiding altogether, says Sosnowsky.
After all, these simmering problems tend to influence your mood and choices on a regular basis more so than the obvious catastrophes, adds Giolitti-Wright. Tending to them early and proactively can help you and your therapist identify solutions for long-term relief and prevent them from snowballing into larger, more difficult issues.
Many people, myself included, tend to see therapy as a thing to do when you’re dealing with something specific or when there’s an emergency. But that’s a huge misconception, according to Giolitti-Wright. The purpose of therapy is to enhance your daily functioning, improve your quality of life, and ease symptoms like irritability or hopelessness. To do this effectively, your therapist needs to see how you function as a whole person. As Giolitti-Wright puts it, “How you are when nothing is wrong or in crisis is as important as how you are in crisis.”
If your therapist only ever sees you during moments of extreme stress, it can actually be harder for them to provide guidance that effectively addresses and resolves your problems long-term, she adds. By learning about how you move through your day when things are good — and getting a sense of your strengths, your sense of humor, etc. — your therapist can provide personalized advice and spot patterns that may be contributing to recurring challenges.
Recognizing these patterns can reveal deeper, more systemic issues affecting your life, says Sosnowsky. What initially appears to be minor frustration with your new boss, for example, may actually stem from a more general resistance to change. These revelations “often come just from getting to know what somebody’s life is when they’re not completely zeroed in on explaining to you their interpretation of a specific issue,” Sosnowsky says.
One additional benefit of “talking about nothing” is that it may help your therapist pick up on early signs of mental health conditions like major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder. Even if you’ve been doing well overall or your symptoms have been in remission, mounting stressors can gradually shift that balance, says Sosnowsky. Many people don’t recognize when they’re slipping into a depressive state, especially folks whose conditions typically ebb and flow, he says.
Regular appointments, including ones that seem unproductive, allow therapists to track subtle changes over time — like a shift from feeling stressed to hopeless — and notice when someone may be entering a more difficult period. That might lead your therapist to ask about your everyday habits — Are you exercising? Sleeping well? Eating enough? Doing things for pleasure? — and discuss ways to prevent your symptoms from escalating, says Sosnowsky. As he puts it, these check-ins help you “get ahead of the depression because it’s much harder to treat when you’re in the throes of a full-blown depressive episode.” They may also prompt your therapist to conduct an assessment to determine if you may have a mental health disorder that hasn’t been diagnosed.
At the very least, your “nothing to talk about” sessions will strengthen the bond you have with your therapist. While that may not seem all that important, having a strong relationship is absolutely critical. Research suggests this relationship, dubbed the “therapeutic alliance,” is the most powerful determinant of how effective therapy will be for you. “You could argue this is the single most important aspect of therapy, and not only in terms of the quality of the experience, but the actual efficacy of outcomes,” Sosnowsky says. The closer you feel to your therapist, the more trust, empathy, and collaboration there will be, which will ultimately help you open up more and experience personal growth.
One final thing to keep in mind: You don’t want every single appointment to be aimless. If you perpetually feel like you’re spinning your wheels or that your mental health is stagnant, it may be time to look for a new therapist, says Sosnowsky. But, if, every now and then, you feel like you spent $30 to kick back and gossip about your coworkers with your therapist, rest assured that you’re still making good use of your time. Heavy lifting doesn’t always need to feel so heavy.
2026-04-10 18:00:00
美国奥斯汀的住房市场：租金下降与政策改革的争议
近年来，美国许多城市的租金价格出现显著下降，其中奥斯汀的降幅尤为突出。根据Apartment List的数据，奥斯汀过去一年的租金下降了6%，是美国主要城市中降幅最大的。这一变化与该市推行的YIMBY（“我的后院也需要”）政策密切相关，包括简化建筑许可流程、取消停车配额、允许建设附属住宅（ADUs）以及增加住房供应等措施。这些政策被Pew Charitable Trusts的报告认为是推动租金下降的重要因素。
然而，部分经济学家对奥斯汀的政策效果持怀疑态度。他们指出，租金下降可能更多是市场对疫情时期价格飙升的自然反应，而非政策直接导致。例如，约翰·蒙德龙（John Mondragon）等学者认为，住房供应的限制可能并未对整体租金产生显著影响，但承认这些限制在特定社区层面确实存在。此外，像旧金山这样的高房价城市，尽管近年来租金增长放缓，但其住房供应仍严重不足，无法满足需求。
文章还提到，尽管全国范围内租金下降，但住房市场具有高度地域性，不同城市的供需情况差异显著。例如，密尔沃基（Madison）虽然在过去十年中增加了大量住房，但租金仍大幅上涨，说明住房供应不足的问题依然存在。因此，住房供应对价格的影响不容忽视。
尽管存在争议，多数住房经济学家认为，增加住房供应是解决住房负担能力问题的关键。奥斯汀的经验表明，通过政策改革扩大住房供给可以有效降低租金，这为其他城市（如纽约、波士顿、旧金山和洛杉矶）提供了借鉴。文章建议这些城市可以尝试类似政策，如允许公寓建筑无需审批即可建设，并减少停车要求，同时通过严谨的分析评估政策效果。最终，即使没有完全确凿的证据，住房市场中住房供应与价格之间的关系仍是值得深入探讨的重要议题。
Here is one narrative violation in the usual drumbeat of doom that we’re used to hearing about housing in America: The rent, in many cities across the US, is getting cheaper.
After soaring to Covid-era highs, rents have cooled. Last month, the national median rent was down 1.7 percent from one year prior, according to research from the rental marketplace Apartment List. This made it the biggest annual decline since the company started tracking rent data in 2017.
One success story stands out among all the rest: Austin, Texas, where rents dropped by a full 6 percent over the past year, more than in any other large metro area in the US. The Austin area’s median rent, at $1,274, is back to roughly where it was right before the pandemic — which means that, in 2026 dollars, it’s significantly cheaper than it was in 2019.
For the past decade, Austin has been a standard-bearer for the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement, passing a barrage of policy changes to make it easier to build new housing, especially new apartment buildings. According to a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative, these reforms are responsible in large part for the sharp drop in rents enjoyed by Austinites over the last several years.
Housing economists overwhelmingly agree that, to bring home prices down, cities need to embrace supply-side reforms that cut away the thicket of regulation that make it oddly difficult to do something as seemingly simple as build an apartment building — an argument that I and others at Vox have echoed many times.
But housing markets are enormously complicated and shaped by many factors; it’s challenging for researchers to measure the exact effects of policies like those rolled out in Austin. Pew’s report certainly provides strong suggestive evidence that the city’s policy reforms made a real difference — but remember that, since around 2022, rents have fallen nationwide, too, and in many other cities quite substantially. So it seems likely that at least some of Austin’s rent decline would have happened anyway, even without its full suite of YIMBY reforms.
How do we isolate the impacts of reforms meant to increase housing supply, figure out which ones worked, and to what extent they worked? Those are questions housing experts are taking up right now, and they’re not merely academic ones. Getting them right is how we will claw our way out of a housing affordability crisis that almost no one doubts exists — even as some disagree over how to solve it.
In the 2010s, a local boom fueled by tech jobs drew hundreds of thousands of new residents to Austin and its suburbs. Following a trajectory familiar to other high-demand cities during that period, Austin’s rents soared — in their case by nearly 50 percent in that period, according to data from the Census Bureau — and single-family home prices climbed even faster. So the city sought ways to rapidly expand its housing supply to meet the surge in demand.
Austin is hardly the only city that has tried to unfetter homebuilding to ease its cost of living. But it is remarkable for the sheer breadth of reforms it’s adopted, Alex Horowitz, project director for Pew’s housing policy initiative, told me — which was one of the most important takeaways from his team’s Austin research. Those reforms have included:
“Not many cities have taken as many different steps as Austin has,” Horowitz said. That matters because passing any single reform — even if it’s a big one, like Minneapolis’s 2018 decision to end single-family zoning — may not spur much home construction if an insurmountable wall of other rules still makes projects infeasible.
As housing advocates have put it to me before, housing is like a door with many deadbolts on it; unlocking just one will not magically open the door for more building. You can legalize triplexes on every single-family lot in America, but if the local zoning code requires every single unit to have two off-street parking spots, the triplex will not get built because there’s just not enough room for all that parking.
Austin’s broad range of policy changes meant that, between 2015 and 2024, the city managed to add 120,000 homes, Pew found — a stunning 30 percent increase in its housing stock. From 2023 to 2024, rents fell especially fast in “Class C” buildings — older, less expensive buildings generally occupied by people of modest incomes. This was a particularly important finding because NIMBYs routinely oppose new-construction “gentrification buildings” on the grounds that they’re unaffordable to all but the affluent. But by the laws of supply and demand, building new homes in an area lowers the cost of housing across the board, including older, cheaper units, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated empirically.
Attacking the city’s housing shortage from so many different angles has also accomplished another thing, Horowitz pointed out. Austin has built an unusually diverse mix of new homes, including not just apartments in large buildings — although those still make up nearly half of the city’s new units because they’re such an efficient way to house people — but also smaller apartment buildings, single-family homes, and townhouses. These varied options give residents more choice in where to live, and also may help retain people in the city as they have families and seek more living space.
But how does Austin’s experience — its steep rise in home prices in the 2010s and early 2020s, and subsequent decline — compare to what’s been happening in other cities?
Here is one interesting observation about Apartment List’s latest analysis — the one that found a striking drop in rents nationwide over the last year:
From 2017 to 2026, the US national median rent grew by about 3 percent per year on average — less than the overall rate of inflation during the same period. The early 2020s run-up in rents ended up being partially canceled out by a sustained (if uneven) decline that began in 2022.
That happened because many metro areas, especially in the Sunbelt, built lots of new apartments in the past few years. “We’ve been going through this big multi-family construction boom,” Chris Salviati, chief economist for Apartment List, told me. “When we started to see rent growth softening over the past couple of years, I think that was expected because we had all these units that were getting completed.” Rents have fallen sharply in cities from Denver to San Antonio to Portland, Oregon.
Looking at that chart, you might even think, “Wait, what housing crisis?” It turns out that many cities and their surrounding areas were perfectly capable of adding new housing to meet the early 2020s’ surge in demand. So were restrictive zoning codes really holding them back in the first place? Rent increases have even moderated over the last decade in notoriously unaffordable markets like San Francisco — since 2017, rents in that metro area have only grown, on average, less than 1 percent per year:
So, are US housing markets not as catastrophically dysfunctional as we’d been led to believe by the housing shortage doomsayers?
A more careful look at the evidence suggests it wouldn’t be right to go quite that far. For one thing, we have not seen as much moderation in the cost of homes for sale as we have in rentals. And housing markets are hyper-local, so nationwide rent averages obscure a lot of regional variation. Plenty of cities have seen rapid recent growth in housing prices that have far outpaced inflation — like Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, where rents have climbed by more than 7 percent per year on average between the beginning of 2017 and 2026:
Coastal superstar cities like San Francisco, meanwhile, were already at a hyper-expensive baseline pre-pandemic because their home prices had been frog-boiling toward unaffordability over the course of decades. That is part of what’s pushed many Americans to move to cities like Austin (and Madison, for that matter) in search of good jobs and greater affordability. And that rents have slowed in the Bay Area is not necessarily evidence that the region has built enough housing to meet demand.
In fact, we know it’s been underbuilding for many years: By the city’s own accounting, San Francisco added 211,000 jobs from 2009 to 2019, creating a need for 154,000 housing units, but it built only 29,500 homes in that period. It’s woefully off track to meet its homebuilding goals this decade, too. So the relatively flat rents in the city may more likely suggest that it has hit an “unaffordability ceiling,” as Salviati put it. “We just hit a point where the market can no longer sustain prices going up by five-plus percent every year,” he said. (And would-be residents of the city are simply pushed to move farther afield.)
Causation is tricky to prove in housing markets, though, and looking at short-term price changes alone can easily lead to misinterpretation. You can have an extremely high-demand metro that doesn’t build much, like San Francisco, that sees plateauing prices because it’s already so expensive that the market can’t bear much more. And you can have a city that builds a lot of new homes relative to its existing housing stock — as Madison has over the last decade — and still sees soaring rents because it didn’t build enough to accommodate all the people who want to move to the area, and still had more room to absorb rent growth. Madison, for example, added 22,472 homes — more than three-quarters of which were apartments in developments with at least 25 units — between 2015 and 2024. That is a lot relative to the city’s size: a 20 percent increase in its housing stock. But it still underproduced what it needed, a shortfall that quickly piles up in the shape of limited supply, high demand, and rising rents.
What’s not in doubt is that housing supply is crucially important in shaping costs. And post-pandemic, many US cities showed an unexpected ability to add enough supply to push down some of the prices that caused Americans so much heartburn around the pandemic years. The relevant question for judging the ramifications of Austin’s housing reforms is not just whether housing got built after they passed or even whether the city’s rents dropped, but whether those things wouldn’t have happened if not for those new laws.
I first became obsessed with that question when, a few months ago, I stumbled on a fascinating (to a weirdo like me) bit of economics drama. Although most experts would tell you that reforming restrictive zoning laws in hot markets like Austin will bring down home prices, a contrarian group of economists recently dared to ask: What if it doesn’t?
In a controversial working paper, those researchers argued that measured housing supply constraints — like zoning codes that ban anything but single-family homes in most US neighborhoods — may not matter much for home prices across US metro areas, actually. One author of that paper, economist John Mondragon, a research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, cast doubt on the YIMBY narrative about Austin in a LinkedIn post earlier this year.
“The Austin, TX housing supply success story is something of a shibboleth in most housing circles,” he wrote. “Often the large decline in Austin house prices or rents over the last few years is marshaled as evidence. Unfortunately, I do not find this kind of casual look at the data to be very illuminating.”
The working paper has been a lightning rod in the field, drawing formal refutations from economists Michael Wiebe and Salim Furth; the authors published their own responses to those responses, as well as a nine-page document of frequently asked questions. Fully accounting for the dispute is outside the scope of this piece (to understand it, one economist encouraged me to contact a theoretical econometrician, which is like an economist but with even more math). But suffice it to say that as a working paper, it should be taken with a hefty serving of salt.
Regarding Austin, however, Mondragon raises a valid point. The city, like so many others, saw an extreme rise in rents early in the pandemic; that tends to induce developers to build more so they can benefit from high prices. So it’s hard to untangle whether Austin’s construction boom and subsequent rent declines are the result of its new zoning policies, or simply the market’s natural response to pandemic-era price spikes.
Home construction often happens in boom-and-bust cycles like these — developers build lots of housing until the supply glut pushes prices down, which reduces the incentive to build more and often limits how much further prices can be reduced. That’s what appears to have happened in US cities in the last few years, and it’s not unreasonable to think this dynamic was at play in Austin, too. Interestingly, a 2025 post by the National Multifamily Housing Council, a trade association for the apartment industry, made a similar argument about Austin — that its rent drops had more to do with builders responding to price signals than it did with any recent regulatory reforms.
This disagreement matters not just because it’s important to understand what shapes housing affordability, but also because a growing YIMBY consensus in US politics — nationally and locally — is still a fragile one, and it needs to be able to answer challenges and counterarguments, and think carefully about causation. Local policy leaders increasingly agree that there is a relationship between housing supply and housing prices, just like the basic economic forces at play in markets for all kinds of goods. But many communities across the US are still pushed about by NIMBYs who advocate fiercely against allowing more housing construction. Mondragon and his co-authors’ paper was quickly taken up as ammunition by these development opponents.
Meanwhile, a steady drip of other reports, sometimes sloppy, uncontrolled ones authored by non-economists, still downplay the role of housing scarcity in driving high home prices. It’s “a cottage industry of producing anti-YIMBY, low-quality studies,” Ned Resnikoff, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who recently wrote a response to a few of those reports, told me.
When I raised all this to Pew’s Alex Horowitz, I got the sense that he was annoyed at the suggestion that there’s any real debate here. “The overwhelming majority of academic research papers on this topic have reached the same conclusion, which is that supply influences costs,” he said. “Periodically there is a paper that comes out in a different place, but, I would say, not using conventional economic methods.”
Economists have estimated the importance of supply constraints on housing using a range of methods: If home prices in a city far exceed the cost of building a home, for example, like they do in the most expensive US cities, then that ought to induce developers to want to build more because they stand to profit a great deal. If they don’t build much in spite of this, then that points strongly to the likelihood that supply constraints — regulation, as well as geographic limits — are getting in the way. Researchers have also directly estimated how much regulatory red tape adds to the cost of homebuilding — it’s a lot!
Although the precise forces behind Austin’s recent rent declines have not yet been thoroughly dissected in a controlled, peer-reviewed study, Horowitz said that the evidence from Pew’s case study points overwhelmingly to the effectiveness of the city’s building reforms. The researchers “very explicitly see that a lot of the new homes getting built [in Austin] weren’t previously allowed,” he said. “It just doesn’t take much of a leap to see the causality there.”
The two perspectives may not, in the end, be that hard to reconcile. Mondragon and his co-authors don’t deny that housing supply shapes prices (you’d be laughed out of the field for suggesting otherwise). However you slice it, we need a sufficient supply of housing in order for housing to be affordable. The authors are, rather, unconvinced that constraints like zoning are meaningfully holding back supply. But even that claim, which has been ferociously contested by other housing researchers, is weaker than it appears at first glance because the working paper does acknowledge that supply constraints “almost certainly” matter at the level of individual neighborhoods (the authors argue that those effects don’t show up at the level of entire metro areas).
Ultimately, we need not wait for perfect evidence to be able to speak about what is, to the best of our understanding, likely happening in the American housing market. It seems unlikely to be a mere coincidence that the cities that had the greatest recent rent declines are concentrated in the Sunbelt, which tends to have fewer constraints on building housing than coastal cities. Even within that region, Austin outperformed both in how many homes it added and in how much prices dropped: “Austin is the market that has built the most new multi-family housing per capita by a pretty wide gap,” Salviati said.
Is it possible that all those new homes and lowered rents had nothing to do with Austin’s aggressive push to make it easier to build more homes? Perhaps, and maybe peer-reviewed research will eventually find that Austin’s zoning changes weren’t as big a deal as YIMBYs thought, though my hunch is that they’ll end up mattering quite a lot. In the meantime, there is every reason for New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their suburbs to try the same experiment in housing abundance that Austin has. They can start with what Horowitz calls the “one-two punch” of policies for improving housing affordability: allow apartment buildings to be built by right in as many places as possible, and reduce parking mandates.
And like any good experiment, we’ll need exacting analysis to know how it’s working. Maybe I’ll call that theoretical econometrician after all — or at least ask my mayor to.
2026-04-10 03:55:00
2026年4月6日，国防部长彼得·赫格塞斯在白宫简报室谈论伊朗冲突。早在特朗普政府对伊朗开战之前，其政策就已经展现出更具攻击性的倾向。特朗普将国防部重新命名为“战争部”，以符合其价值观，而赫格塞斯则承诺贯彻“最大杀伤力”的理念。多年来，赫格塞斯一直主张以无保留的战士精神对抗敌人，2024年他出版了《战士之战：那些捍卫我们自由的人所遭受的背叛》一书。在取得委内瑞拉行动和去年对伊朗核设施有限打击的成功后，赫格塞斯与特朗普开始对伊朗战争充满信心，并展现出不惜代价的强硬态度。特朗普本周早些时候威胁要摧毁整个文明，虽然可能暂时促成停火，但这一策略似乎难以持久。
在今日解释节目主持人塞安·拉梅斯瓦拉姆与《新 Yorker》的本杰明·华莱士-韦尔的对话中，探讨了赫格塞斯和特朗普如何将这一理念付诸实践。华莱士-韦尔指出，赫格塞斯是特朗普团队中唯一与总统一样对战争进展持乐观态度的人，而副总统JD·万斯、国务卿马可·鲁比奥等则态度谨慎或矛盾。赫格塞斯的军事极端主义立场使其在团队中更具影响力，因为他准确把握了特朗普的意图，并成为其政策的代言人。
尽管赫格塞斯的策略可能在短期内有效，但长期来看可能并不明智。此外，赫格塞斯还把战争与宗教信仰联系起来，特别是在军事简报会上呼吁人们为美军祈祷，并将伊朗政权称为“末日般的存在”，这种做法为战争增添了宗教色彩。然而，华莱士-韦尔质疑这种“最大杀伤力”是否是一种可行的外交政策，认为特朗普威胁核战争的行为虽然震慑了部分人，但并未真正实现战略目标。目前伊朗似乎已掌控霍尔木兹海峡，美国的冒险行为也使其许多盟友感到不满。尽管特朗普通过威胁采取强硬手段暂时摆脱了困境，但整体来看，这一系列行动似乎并未带来实质性的成果，更多只是引发了愤怒、轰炸和死亡，其长远影响仍存疑。
Even before the Trump administration went to war with Iran, it was talking differently about its approach to combat.
President Donald Trump relabeled the Department of Defense to something more in line with his values: the Department of War. His Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised to deliver on a philosophy of “maximum lethality.” For many years, Hegseth has wanted to unleash an American warrior and fight the enemy, no holds barred. (In 2024, Hegseth authored a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.)
After notching successes in Venezuela and in last year’s limited strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Hegseth and Trump began the Iran war confident and with a seemingly unbridled willingness to inflict damage. Trump’s post earlier this week threatening to wipe out a whole civilization may have resulted in a temporary ceasefire, but it seems like that strategy isn’t going anywhere.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells about how that philosophy has been realized in Hegseth and Trump’s first big war. Wallace-Wells explains Hegseth’s need to unleash that warrior ethos at every opportunity and how it might be driving the US’s next step with Iran.
Below is an excerpt of the 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.
How is [Hegseth] executing this concept of his?
I’d say a couple of things. The first is, it’s interesting to note, in all of the reporting that we’ve seen from many different outlets, that Hegseth is the only person who’s in the president’s circle who seems as optimistic as Trump does about the progress of the war and the possibilities of the war.
You see [Vice President] JD Vance distancing himself very actively from the war. You see [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio taking an ambivalent position. Gen. [Dan] Caine sees risks as well as possibilities. But Hegseth has been gung-ho the whole way.
His approach to the war, I think, has been that American lethality will deliver whatever the president wants. In the very first hours of the war, you have this massive bombing raid that kills [Iran’s Supreme Leader] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and then President Trump comes out a few days later and says, in that raid, not only was Khamenei killed, but some of the other senior figures in the Iranian regime who we had hoped might succeed Khamenei [were killed]. Within a day of the war beginning we see 175 people killed in a school in southern Iran, presumably through a targeting error, though we’re still not totally sure exactly what happened there.
In both of these cases, you see a program of unleashed lethality. And I think you can see in both those cases that it undermines the aims of the United States and the stated war aims of the president, both in eliminating some of the potential replacements in the case of the initial bombing, and then also in making it just a little harder to imagine the Iranian public getting behind the kind of uprising that President Trump has said he wants to trigger.
How much of his approach do we think is coming from his own belief in this concept of maximum lethality, and how much of it is so many in his Cabinet just wanting to please the president?
It’s interesting to think of Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as each representing one idea of the president. Vance represents the sort of nationalism of the president. Rubio represents maybe a more traditional Republican transactional approach. And Hegseth just represents the full military maximalism. And he has become more influential because he has been the one who has, I think, successfully seen what the president wants to do in Iran and made himself the spokesman and enabler of that.
I do think that there’s a pretty good chance that this doesn’t turn out so well in public opinion and the progress of the war. I’m not sure that it’s been a very savvy long-term play for Hegseth, but I think we should remember that Hegseth did not have a political base or role in the world before Trump tapped him. He had never been a senior military commander. He’d served in the military as a younger man. He was the weekend co-host of Fox and Friends.
He owes his position in the world to President Trump. He’s, according to public opinion, now deeply unpopular, as is the war. If we’re thinking just in pure personal terms, it’s not crazy for him to take a shot and try to position himself as the maximalist face of this war. But I do think that there may be real costs for the rest of us.
Another thing that feels significant to this conversation and feels like maybe a companion piece to this idea of maximum lethality is Pete Hegseth is really tying this war [together with] his approach to God.
I would say to a Christian God, even more specifically. He’s specifically asked during military press conferences for people to pray to Jesus Christ on the troops’ behalf.
Another element that matters here is, he’s referred to the Iranian regime as apocalyptic, and together with delivering prayers from the podium where he’s giving technical updates on the progress of the war, it does give an atmosphere of holy war to the whole operation.
Pete’s whole thing is maximum lethality. The president seemed to go even further with his post, the whole world was on edge, and then we got a ceasefire out of it, however tentative it may be. Does that prove something about this concept of maximum lethality as a viable foreign policy?
If you threaten nuclear war, you can spook some people. I think that that’s pretty intuitive, but I don’t know that that really proves anything in terms of foreign policy. We’re looking at a situation where Iran seems like they’re likely to have full control of the Strait of Hormuz, where the regime is still in control, where the United States has alienated a huge number of its own allies around the world with its willingness to play brinksmanship.
In the narrow sense of, Trump had managed to get himself into a real trap and then by threatening enormous lethality, to use Hegseth’s word, he was able to maneuver out — I guess it worked, but it’s really hard for me to say that in any bigger-picture sense this was effective. I have to look back at this whole month and just say, what was this all for? It feels to me like a whole lot of fury and bombs and death, and it’s really hard for me to see a lot that’s come from it.