2026-01-21 07:10:00
2026年1月16日，唐纳德·特朗普在白宫南草坪向记者发表讲话后，乘坐海军陆战队一号直升机离开。本文出自《The Logoff》——一份帮助你了解特朗普政府动态，同时避免政治新闻占据你生活的每日简报。订阅请前往此处。
欢迎来到《The Logoff》：一年前重返白宫后，特朗普变得更加不受约束，也更加不受欢迎。发生了什么？周二，特朗普花费近两个小时发表了一场冗长且不诚实的记者会，吹嘘自己过去一年的政绩，并随意谈论从汽油价格到他在皇后区的童年等话题。今晚，他将前往瑞士达沃斯，与那些世界秩序已陷入混乱的各国领导人进行交流。
为什么这重要？大约一个月前，特朗普曾发表过一场同样奇怪的晚间演讲，但语气不同（大声喊叫，而不是含糊不清）。当时，我的同事扎克·比厄姆普指出，这表明特朗普正在与政治现实对抗。这一说法至今仍然成立——特朗普的民意支持率极低，但不确定的是，他是否意识到自己正在失去公众的支持（或者是否在意）。而一个陷入幻觉的特朗普，可能比一个正在挣扎的特朗普更加危险。
背景是什么？周末时，特朗普再次向挪威首相发出关于格陵兰的威胁，称诺贝尔和平奖是其理由之一。他还威胁对反对他格陵兰行动的欧洲国家征收关税。此外，我们还了解到特朗普提议的“和平委员会”，这个机构将类似于联合国，而特朗普本人将担任主席。周二，加拿大总理马克·卡尼警告称，美国主导的世界秩序可能会出现“破裂”。
大局如何？短期内，特朗普显然认为他可以为所欲为。这在格陵兰、对委内瑞拉的攻击以及对明尼苏达居民的强硬行动中都得到了体现。但他的日益膨胀的权力主张可能会掩盖这样一个事实：特朗普无法改变很多东西，包括人们对他的看法（周二他暗示可能是他的“公关团队”出了问题）。随着中期选举临近，他似乎没有打算去解决这些问题。
好了，是时候下线了。读者们，临别之际：一年的“特朗普二世”也意味着一年的《The Logoff》。感谢你们的支持和阅读时间。希望这份简报能帮助你们更好地了解特朗普政府的重要新闻，同时保持理智。如果你希望支持Vox的新闻报道，最好的方式是成为会员。我也很乐意听听你们的想法：你们对特朗普世界有什么迫切的问题？有没有什么内容希望我们多报道？欢迎通过电子邮件[email protected]与我联系。
最后，一件好事：今天是企鹅日。你知道吗？这是麦哲伦企鹅的声音。
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: One year after returning to the White House, Donald Trump is more unconstrained — and unpopular — than ever.
What’s happening? Trump dedicated nearly two hours on Tuesday to a rambling, dishonest press conference touting his record over the past year and free-associating about everything from gas prices to his childhood in Queens. Tonight, he will depart for Davos, Switzerland, where he will speak to many of the leaders of a world order in shambles.
Why does this matter? About a month ago, Trump gave an equally strange primetime address, albeit in a different register (shouty, rather than mumbling). At the time, my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote that it revealed Trump was flailing against political gravity. That remains objectively true — Trump’s approval ratings are abysmal — but whether Trump realizes he’s losing the public (or cares) is less certain. And a delusional Trump may be even more dangerous than a flailing one.
What’s the context? Over the weekend, Trump reiterated his threats against Greenland in a message to Norway’s prime minister, citing the Nobel Peace Prize as part of his rationale. He also threatened tariffs against European nations that opposed his move on Greenland. We additionally learned more details about Trump’s proposed Board of Peace, which would resemble a quasi-UN with Trump at its head; and on Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned about a “rupture” of the US-led world order.
What’s the big picture? In the short term, Trump clearly feels that he can do what he wants. This is as true for Greenland as it is for his attack on Venezuela, or his heavy-handed use of force against Minneapolis residents.
But his increasingly total assertions of power at home and abroad can distract from the fact that there’s a lot Trump can’t change, including how the country feels about him (on Tuesday, he suggested maybe his “bad public relations people” were at fault). With the midterms approaching, it doesn’t seem like he has any plans to figure it out.
Hi readers, before we go: One year of Trump II also means one year of The Logoff. We’re so thankful for all of your support and for taking the time to read and share this newsletter. Hopefully, it’s been a helpful and sanity-preserving way to keep up with the most important news out of the Trump administration. If you want to support Vox’s journalism, the best way to do so is by becoming a member.
I’d also love to hear from you: What burning questions do you have about what’s happening in Trumpworld? Is there something you want to see us cover more often? You can shoot me an email at [email protected] to let me know how we’re doing.
Lastly, a good thing: It is Penguin Awareness Day. Did you know this is what Magellanic penguins sounds like?
2026-01-21 04:00:25
美国总统唐纳德·特朗普再次将格陵兰岛置于其外交政策的核心位置，重新推动了这一长期举措，令美国盟友感到不安。最新举措是任命路易斯安那州州长杰夫·兰德里为格陵兰岛特别大使，负责推进特朗普将该地区纳入美国控制范围的目标。特朗普称该岛对美国国家安全至关重要。丹麦和格陵兰迅速驳回了这一提议，发表联合声明强调主权和边界受国际法保护。其他欧洲领导人，包括法国总统埃马纽埃尔·马克龙，也支持丹麦和格陵兰。特朗普自上任以来就曾提出购买或兼并格陵兰岛，但其言论在第二个任期中变得更加激烈。这一重新关注的举措反映了美国政府的国家安全战略，强调美国在西半球的主导地位，并限制中国和俄罗斯在北极地区的影响力。尽管美国官员与格陵兰和丹麦已有密切的军事合作，但特朗普的做法引发了对其盟友关系的新担忧。以下内容将为您提供最新动态和分析：国会能否阻止特朗普试图占领格陵兰？特朗普对格陵兰的推动简要解释谁能阻止特朗普夺取格陵兰？特朗普的外交政策尚未跨越的一条红线特朗普再次提及格陵兰一位格陵兰居民解释格陵兰对特朗普的感受*特朗普对格陵兰的冒险举动真正的危险性
President Donald Trump has again elevated Greenland to a central place in his foreign policy, renewing a long-running push that has unsettled US allies. The latest move came with the appointment of Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland, charged with advancing Trump’s goal of bringing the territory under US control. Trump has argued the island is vital for American national security.
Denmark and Greenland swiftly rejected the idea, issuing a joint statement underscoring that sovereignty and borders are protected by international law. Other European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, voiced support for Denmark and Greenland.
Trump has floated buying or annexing Greenland since his first term, but his rhetoric has intensified during his second. The renewed focus reflects the administration’s National Security Strategy, which emphasizes US dominance in the Western Hemisphere and limiting Chinese and Russian influence, particularly in the Arctic. While US officials already enjoy close military cooperation with Greenland and Denmark, Trump’s approach has raised fresh concerns about relations with America’s allies.
Follow along here for the latest updates and analysis.
2026-01-21 03:05:00
2019年12月2日，支持枪支管控和枪支安全措施的支持者在最高法院外举行集会，当时大法官们正在听取“State Rifle and Pistol v. City of New York”一案的口头辩论。| Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
在周二上午，最高法院的共和党多数大法官花费了大量时间试图理解如何让两个相互矛盾的原则同时成立。一方面，所有涉及第二修正案的案件都必须使用专门适用于第二修正案的法律规则进行判断；另一方面，持枪权不应与其他宪法权利受到不同的对待。2022年，在“New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen”一案中，共和党大法官推翻了一项已有百年历史的纽约法律，该法律要求任何希望在公共场所携带手枪的人都必须证明“正当理由”才能获得许可证。而在周二的“Wolford v. Lopez”一案中，法院听取了对夏威夷州一项法律的挑战，该法律似乎是故意针对Bruen案而设计的。虽然Bruen案中的法律直接禁止大多数人携带枪支上街，但夏威夷的法律则通过要求枪支拥有者在进入某场所前必须获得该场所业主或经理的明确许可，间接达到同样的目的。由于很少有企业会给予这种许可，而枪支拥有者也很少会空手进入场所，因此夏威夷的法律实际上可能在大多数公共场所有效地禁止了枪支。
然而，Bruen案还宣布了一个奇怪的法律规则，仅适用于第二修正案案件。根据这一规则，只有当政府能够证明某项枪支管制措施与美国历史上枪支管制的传统一致时，该措施才是合宪的。因此，政府律师必须将现代法律与宪法制定时期“类似”的法律进行比较，以证明其一致性。如果法院认为旧法律与新法律足够相似，那么新法律就不会违反Bruen案的裁决。然而，这一专门针对第二修正案的规则过于模糊和不明确，以至于来自不同政治立场的法官都抱怨其难以适用。
在Wolford案中，夏威夷的律师提出了一个非常有力的论点，认为他们的法律应被Bruen案所接受。他们的简报列举了大量与夏威夷法律相似的旧法律，例如1771年新泽西州的一项法律，禁止人们在非自己拥有的土地上携带枪支，除非获得土地所有者的书面许可；1763年纽约州的一项法律，规定在“封闭土地”上携带枪支必须事先获得业主或持有者的书面许可。这些只是18世纪存在的一些类似法律的例子。
但事实证明，这些历史背景并不重要，因为最高法院的六位共和党大法官——包括对案件双方律师提出严厉质疑的艾米·康妮·巴雷特大法官——都表明他们很可能推翻夏威夷的法律。这表明，共和党大法官似乎希望在涉及枪支的案件中使用双重标准。当现代枪支法律与1790年代的枪支法律不相似时，他们可以使用Bruen案的规则来推翻该法律；而当现代法律与旧法律相似时，他们又会抱怨政府律师对第二修正案的处理与其他宪法权利不同，并据此推翻法律。
另一个迹象表明夏威夷法律可能面临挑战，是几位共和党大法官试图让律师Neal Katyal难堪，因为他简报中引用的一些旧法律可能是出于不良目的而制定的。例如，Katyal引用了重建时期后由路易斯安那州颁布的一项法律，据称该法律旨在剥夺黑人在私人土地上的持枪权。当然，针对种族的法律是违宪的，但它们并不违反第二修正案。这些法律违反了第十四修正案关于平等保护的条款。
无论如何，如果路易斯安那州是唯一要求枪支拥有者在进入私人土地前获得业主许可的州，那么这一历史案例将大大削弱夏威夷的法律论点。但这一被指控具有种族主义色彩的法律只是众多历史法律中的一项，而路易斯安那州可能只颁布了一项具有种族歧视性质的枪支法律，并不能否定Katyal简报中其他相似法律的合法性。
总的来说，历史上多个州都曾颁布过与夏威夷法律相似的法律，而这些法律中绝大多数似乎都是出于正当目的。如果Bruen案的裁决被诚实地应用，这些历史法律似乎要求法院支持夏威夷的法律。但最高法院的共和党多数派似乎并不愿意在他们不喜欢结果时适用Bruen案的规则。换句话说，当Bruen案的规则不利于枪支法律时，他们可以据此推翻该法律；而当该规则支持枪支法律时，他们又认为不能适用，因为这会意味着对第二修正案的处理与其他宪法权利不同。
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority spent much of Tuesday morning trying to figure out how two mutually exclusive principles can both be true at the same time. One principle is that all Second Amendment cases must be judged using a bespoke legal rule that only applies to the Second Amendment. The other principle is that the right to bear arms must not be treated differently than other constitutional rights.
Four years ago, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the Republican justices struck down a century-old New York law that required anyone who wishes to carry a handgun in public to demonstrate “proper cause” before they could obtain a license allowing them to do so. On Tuesday, the Court heard Wolford v. Lopez, a challenge to a Hawaii state law that appears to have been designed intentionally to sabotage Bruen.
While the law at issue in Bruen directly banned most people from carrying a gun in public, Hawaii’s law tries to achieve this same goal indirectly by requiring gun owners to obtain explicit permission from a business’s owner or manager before they can bring a gun into that business. Because few businesses are likely to grant such permission — and few gun owners are likely to go into a business unarmed, ask the manager for permission, and then return with their weapon — Hawaii’s law is likely to operate as an effective ban on firearms in most public spaces.
But Bruen also announced a bizarre legal rule that applies only in Second Amendment cases. Under Bruen, a gun regulation is constitutional only if the government can “demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Thus, government lawyers must prove that consistency by comparing the modern-day law to “analogous regulations” from the time when the Constitution was framed. If the courts deem the old laws to be sufficiently similar to the new law, then the new law does not violate Bruen.
This bespoke rule for Second Amendment cases is so vague and ill-defined that judges from across the political spectrum have complained that it is impossible to apply. But, in Wolford, Hawaii’s lawyers made a very strong argument that their law should survive Bruen. Their brief names an array of old laws that are very similar to the Hawaii law at issue in Wolford.
A 1771 New Jersey law, for example, barred people from bringing “any gun on any Lands not his own, and for which the owner pays taxes, or is in his lawful possession, unless he has license or permission in writing from the owner.” A similar 1763 New York law made it unlawful to carry a gun on “inclosed Land” without “License in Writing first had and obtained for that Purpose from such Owner, Proprietor, or Possessor.” And these are just two examples of the kinds of laws that existed in the 1700s that resemble Hawaii’s law.
But it turns out that none of this history actually matters, as all six of the Court’s Republicans — including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who did have some tough questions for lawyers on both sides of the case — signaled Tuesday that they are likely to strike the law down.
One of the Republican justices’ primary arguments against the Hawaii law was that the law would be unconstitutional if, instead of applying Bruen’s historical test, the Court were to apply a more normal approach to constitutional interpretation.
Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, suggested that the First Amendment does not permit a state to forbid people from knocking on a private property owner’s door and asking for their vote. So why should the Second Amendment be read to allow states to bar this person from carrying a gun? As Roberts argued, one of the “motivating concerns” behind decisions like Bruen is that the right to bear arms has historically been treated as a “disfavored right.” And thus there shouldn’t be disparities between how the Court treats the First Amendment and how it treats the Second Amendment.
Similarly, Justice Samuel Alito accused Neal Katyal, the lawyer for Hawaii, of “just relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status.”
But if Roberts and Alito don’t like the fact that Second Amendment cases are treated differently than First Amendment cases, they have no one but themselves to blame. Again, Bruen announced a bespoke legal test, which fetishizes history, and which applies to no other constitutional right. So a court that fairly applies the Bruen test will sometimes reach different results than they would if they applied the legal rules that apply in First Amendment cases.
If Roberts and Alito don’t like this reality, the obvious solution is to overrule Bruen.
The Republican justices, in other words, appear to want a double standard to apply in gun cases. When a modern-day gun law is not similar to gun laws from the 1790s, the Republican justices can apply Bruen and strike down the modern-day law under Bruen’s good-for-the-Second-Amendment-only legal standard. But when a modern-day gun law is similar to gun laws from the 1790s, then they can complain that the government’s lawyers are treating the Second Amendment differently than other constitutional rights — and strike down the law.
One other sign that the Hawaii law is in trouble is that several of the Republican justices tried to embarrass Katyal, because one of the many examples of old laws cited in his brief was probably enacted for nefarious reasons. One of the old laws Katyal cites in his brief is a post-Reconstruction law, enacted by Louisiana, which allegedly was enacted in order to disarm Black people on private land.
Of course, laws that target people because of their race are unconstitutional, but not under the Second Amendment. They violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that no one may be denied the equal protection of the laws.
In any event, if Louisiana were the only state to require gun owners to obtain a property owner’s permission before bringing a gun onto their land, then that historical example would undercut Hawaii’s legal argument significantly. But this allegedly racist law is but one example of an historical law similar to Hawaii’s. And the fact that Louisiana may have enacted one racist gun law does not invalidate all of the other examples of similar laws in Katyal’s brief.
The bottom line is that several states historically enacted laws similar to Hawaii’s law, and all but one of those laws appear to have been enacted for benign reasons. If Bruen were applied honestly, this web of old laws seems to require courts to uphold Hawaii’s law.
But the Court’s Republican majority does not appear interested in applying Bruen when they do not like the outcome it produces. Again, when Bruen’s unique test cuts against a gun law, they can strike that law down under Bruen. And when Bruen’s historical test cuts in the other direction, the Republican justices appear to believe that they cannot apply Bruen, because that would mean treating the Second Amendment differently than other constitutional rights.
2026-01-20 23:25:00
2025年1月20日，唐纳德·特朗普总统在华盛顿特区的Capital One Arena举行的室内就职游行中签署了一项行政命令，并举起该命令。| Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
这则故事出自《Today, Explained》每日新闻简报，帮助你理解当天最引人注目的新闻和故事。你可以在这里订阅。
去年特朗普上任时，他将“项目2025”带入了白宫。这是由赫尔曼·凯恩基金会提出的一个全面的保守主义治国蓝图，特朗普政府迅速开始实施。美国国际开发署（USAID）被大幅削弱，环境法规被废除，大学也遭到攻击。一年后，该政府仍在推进其议程。那么，“项目2025”能告诉我们特朗普政府下一步会做什么吗？为了解答这个问题，《Today, Explained》播客主持人诺埃尔·金采访了《大西洋月刊》的撰稿人戴维·格雷厄姆，他也是《项目：项目2025如何重塑美国》一书的作者。以下是他们对话的节选，已进行删减和润色。
“项目2025”有大约922页。特朗普政府在其中实现了多少目标？网络上有一个很好的追踪器，显示完成率超过50%。虽然这个数字很有用，但你必须谨慎对待，因为有些目标很难用数字来衡量。例如，追踪器显示特朗普已经取消了USAID，这符合他们的目标。但“项目2025”原本是希望改革USAID，而不是彻底废除。因此，这些目标并不总是能一一对应。
另一个值得注意的是，他们很多计划都依赖于拥有一个权力极大的总统，即一个不受任何制约、没有制衡机制的总统。而在第一年，他们已经在这一方面取得了很大进展。我认为这将使他们未来在实现目标方面更加顺利。
特朗普政府为何能在一年内完成这么多工作？我听到人们这样谈论：总统很少有机会尝试新政策，离开四年后再重新开始。因此，很多参与其中的人都是前特朗普政府的成员，或者与之关系密切，他们了解过去的问题，并有相应的理论。同时，他们也学习了很多关于政府运作的知识。这让他们在上任第一天就非常准备充分、组织有序、充满干劲。我认为这使他们能够迅速采取行动，出其不意地影响法院，也出乎国会和公众的意料。而且，我听说他们还有很多想法和政策尚未实现。
是的，他们有很多想法和政策需要推进，这些目标的雄心壮志非常大。他们真的希望重塑社会，这是一项需要多年才能完成的工程。但我觉得他们的计划时间跨度是数年甚至数十年。
他们未能完成哪些目标？有几个领域他们进展不大。例如，家庭友好政策或社会保守政策方面。我们还没有看到很多鼓励生育率提高的措施，也没有看到支持家庭友好的劳工政策，比如JD·范斯在竞选期间提到的那些政策。此外，也没有看到将社会福利项目从政府转移到宗教组织的重大转变。
你认为明年我们会看到更多什么？也许我们还没有足够关注的领域，而他们一直在强调的呢？
我认为即使受到关注，人们仍然低估了他们对独立监管机构的接管，例如国家劳资关系委员会（NLRB）、联邦选举委员会（FEC）和联邦通信委员会（FCC）。我们预计很快会有最高法院的裁决，很可能赋予总统对这些机构的控制权，唯独联邦储备委员会除外。我认为这将改变人们与政府互动的方式。
特别是联邦通信委员会（FCC）已经引起了一些关注。我们看到FCC主席试图让迪士尼解雇吉米·金姆尔。现在，想象一下在生活的其他方面，比如劳动保护、与社会保障局的互动，以及各种其他领域，总统都可能拥有类似的控制权。我认为我们将看到总统将这些机构变成政策执行的工具。
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When Donald Trump took office last year, he brought Project 2025 to the White House with him.
The Heritage Foundation plan lays out a sweeping conservative playbook for how to govern America, and the Trump administration quickly got to work. The US Agency for International Development was gutted, environmental regulations went up in smoke, and universities found themselves under attack.
One year later, the administration is still working through its list. So what can Project 2025 tell us about where the Trump administration is going next? To answer that question, Today, Explained podcast host Noel King talked to David Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Project 2025 was 922 or so pages. How much of what’s in there has the Trump administration accomplished?
There’s a good tracker out there online that puts the number right above 50 percent. And I think that’s useful, but you have to take it with a grain of salt, because some of these things are just hard to equate on a numerical level.
That tracker says Trump eliminated USAID, which is a goal. Project 2025 wanted to reform USAID in different ways, but not to abolish it. So, it doesn’t always fit one-to-one.
The other thing that I would say is, so much of what they want to do depends on having this really powerful president — sort of an unfettered, no checks-and-balances situation. And they’ve made so much progress on that in the first year. I think that will enable more progress towards their goals in the future.
How did they get so much done, this administration?
A way that I’ve heard people talk about it is you don’t get a lot of chances for a president to try things, leave office for four years, and then get another shot at it.
So many of the people involved were veterans of the first Trump administration or had been closely related to it, and they saw what went wrong and they had theories [as to why]. And they also learned a lot about how the government works.
And so, that meant that they could come in on the first day and be just so ready, so organized, and so energized. I think that gave them the chance to sort of conduct this blitzkrieg that took the courts by surprise. It seems to have taken Congress by surprise. And I think it took a lot of the public by surprise.
And I think I hear you telling me that there is still a lot in that big book of ideas and policies that they would like to get done.
Oh yes. You could spend years pushing a lot of these things, and the ambitions are pretty big. I mean, they really want to reshape society, and that is a project you can make some work on in a year. But I think they’re on a timeframe of years or decades.
What did they fail to get done?
There are several areas where they haven’t done much.
I think one is in this area of pro-family policy or socially conservative policy. We haven’t seen a lot of encouraging higher birthrate stuff either.
We haven’t seen the kind of labor policy that would bolster a more pro-family vision, like things that JD Vance was talking about in the campaign. And we haven’t seen a sort of major shift of social welfare programs away from the government and towards religious organizations.
What do you think we’re going to see more of in the year ahead? What maybe have we not been paying enough attention to that they’ve been banging the drum on and we should?
Something that I think is underappreciated even as it has gotten attention is the takeover of the independent regulatory agencies: the NLRB, the FEC, the FCC.
We’re expecting a Supreme Court decision soon that seems likely to give the president control over all these agencies with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve. I think that’s going to change the way everybody interacts with the government. The FCC, in particular, has gotten some attention. We saw the chair of the FCC basically try to get Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel.
Now, imagine that in so many other areas of life: the way you work through labor protections, the way you interact with the Social Security Administration, the way you interact with any number of walks of your life. I think we’re going to see the president controlling that and making it an arm of policy.
2026-01-20 20:30:00
2025年10月25日，维多利亚港出现了一个充气的Labubu玩偶。 | 侯宇/中国新闻社/视觉中国/盖蒂图片社
如果说中国在2025年取得了巨大成功，那还远远不够。根据特朗普的竞选议程和他第二个任期的初期政策，美国对中国采取了强硬态度，包括加征关税、限制芯片出口，并试图在各方面占据主导地位。然而，一年后，这些政策的痕迹几乎难以找到。相反，中国通过在经济上对美国施加影响，以及运用其新获得的软实力，实现了繁荣发展。
如果你没有看过中国大片《哪吒2》或游戏《黑神话：悟空》，那你可能听说过Labubu。但为什么这些文化产品现在才开始走出中国？它们又将如何影响中国对美国日益增强的软实力？为此，Today, Explained的高级制作人兼记者Miles Bryan采访了《经济学人》驻上海的中国商业与金融编辑Don Weinland。以下是他们对话的节选，内容经过删减和润色。
你如何定义中国的软实力？
首先，中国在文化输出方面表现得相当保守。作为世界第二大经济体和制造业强国，中国在文化产品方面却并不突出。但这种情况正在发生变化。多年来，人们很少知道中国生产的电影、游戏或玩具，尤其是它们的名字。然而，2025年，中国的文化输出比以往任何一年都更加成功。
我们不妨从Labubu说起。老实说，我并没有Labubu，但我经常看到它们。在研究这个故事时，我惊讶地发现它们起源于中国。你对Labubu感兴趣吗？
我不算特别喜欢Labubu，但我对制作它们的公司Pop Mart非常感兴趣。该公司在2024年引起广泛关注，2025年更是爆红。这些Labubu通常被称为“丑萌”，它们以盲盒形式出售，你不知道会得到哪一个，它们也成了收藏品，有点像棒球卡。你可能得到一张稀有的卡片。
你提到电影，比如《哪吒2》。它在2025年初大获成功，成为票房最高的动画电影。这是一部讲述中国传统神话故事的动画电影，本身就很了不起。虽然大部分票房来自国内市场，但我知道也有美国人看过。通常，中国电影在美国不太受关注，但这部电影似乎打破了这一局面。高级领导人还公开提及这部电影，这在以往很少见。他们显然是在强调中国在文化方面的成功，这说明这部电影的重要性。
你提到的游戏《黑神话：悟空》也十分受欢迎，不仅在中国，也在海外。这是一款基于中国传统神话的游戏，非常受欢迎。它的流行甚至带动了中国相关地区的游客数量增加。这种文化产品不仅能带来直接的经济收益，还能促进旅游业的发展。
这些文化产品为何能在过去一年中成功走出中国？你认为发生了什么变化？
我认为有两个重要因素。首先，这些产品的创作者大多在30到40岁之间，他们是在中国教育体系改革期间接受大学教育的。当时有更多的学生接受高等教育，互联网也相对自由，他们更容易接触到国外文化。因此，他们吸收了大量外来文化元素。
其次，这些文化产品如今获得的资金支持比以往更多。中国共产党将重点放在制造业、电动汽车、电池、太阳能等产业上，对文化产品和软实力的关注较少。但近年来，这种趋势正在改变，尤其是在动画电影和游戏领域。如今，这些公司更容易获得资金支持，这意味着它们不仅能在国内传播，还能走向国际市场。
还有一个因素阻碍了中国文化的输出，那就是国内严格的法规。这些法规使得制作带有色情、性感或暴力内容的娱乐产品变得非常困难，甚至在情景喜剧中提到离婚都可能受到限制。在中国，超自然题材如鬼屋也受到限制，因为共产党不鼓励迷信。
你认为2026年会有什么新的中国文化产品出现吗？比如Labubu 2.0？
我不认为Labubu会消失。Pop Mart将继续推出这些奇怪又可爱的玩偶。但我认为，2026年美国消费者可能会看到更多高质量的中国产品。我们一直在谈论娱乐，但产品对软实力的影响同样重要。如果你开始购买高质量的中国产品，可能会改变你对中国的态度。
中国在儿童娱乐产品方面似乎取得了进展。我认为这为文化输出提供了一个安全的空间。儿童内容不需要暴力和色情，这使得更多针对年轻人的文化产品更容易传播到国外。
To say that China had a successful 2025 would be an understatement.
According to President Donald Trump’s campaign agenda and early months of his second administration, the United States was going to be tough on China. Trump went heavy on tariffs, limited chip exports, and tried to assert dominance over the country.
A year later, you’d have trouble finding evidence of it.
Instead, China has prospered by exercising hard economic power over the US — by wielding its newfound soft power. If you didn’t catch the blockbuster Chinese movie Nhe Zha 2 or play Black Myth: Wukong, you likely caught wind of a Labubu.
But why did these cultural exports finally leave China now? And how might it impact China’s growing hard power over the US?
To find out, Today, Explained senior producer and reporter Miles Bryan spoke with Don Weinland, a China business and finance editor for The Economist based in Shanghai.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How would you define [China’s] soft power?
The first thing to say is that China massively underpunches on its cultural exports. This is the world’s second biggest economy, an incredible manufacturing power unparalleled elsewhere. And yet on cultural exports, it is really not doing very well on that front.
This is something that’s actually changing. For many years, I don’t think you would’ve known most of the movies or video games or toys that are being made in China, especially not by name. But China did much better on cultural exports in 2025 than it has in previous years.
I feel like we should start with Labubu. I don’t have any Labubus, to be honest, but I do see them everywhere, and I was surprised to learn in researching for this story that they originated in China. Are you a Labubu guy?
I’m not really a Labubu guy per se, but I am very interested in Pop Mart, the company that makes Labubus. It really started getting a lot of attention in 2024, and then in ’25, it just blew up. If you haven’t seen one, they’re often described as being “ugly cute.” And they come in these things called blind boxes. You don’t know what Labubu you’re going to get. They’re collectors’ items. It’s kind of like baseball cards in a way. You don’t know what baseball cards you’re getting, and you might get a rare card.
So what else? You mentioned movies.
Nhe Zha 2 really blew up at the beginning of 2025. It’s an animated film. It tells a traditional Chinese myth story. It’s the highest grossing animated film ever. That’s quite amazing in itself. And most of that happened domestically, but I know people in the US that have seen it as well.
Chinese films don’t get a lot of screen time in the US traditionally, but this one seems like it did break through in some places. You would hear senior leaders citing Nhe Zha 2, which is very odd to hear them referencing this animated film. And really, they were pointing to what they see as a cultural success. So that tells you something about how important this movie was.
You also mentioned video games. I was looking into one game that looks like it broke through: Black Myth: Wukong. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Incredibly popular within China, but also overseas. I think it’s one of the most popular video games of this style ever. It’s also based on a traditional Chinese myth. It was so popular that the areas in China that it takes place in started getting a bunch of tourists visiting them. This type of cultural product can generate economic growth, not just in the selling of the product itself, but also in areas like tourism.
What do these products have in common that contributed to their breaking out of China as cultural exports in the past year? What do you think is happening here that’s different?
I’ve kind of narrowed it down to two really important things. One is that a lot of the creators behind these things are in their late 30s or early 40s, and they are people that went to university in China just as the education system was changing. A lot more students were going to school at the time. It’s a time when the internet was relatively free. It was quite easy to get online and look at foreign websites. I think they absorbed a lot of foreign culture.
Another thing is that these types of products are being funded quite a bit better than in the past. The Communist Party has its priorities. It wants to be strong in manufacturing; it wants to be strong in areas like electric vehicles and batteries, solar power. It hasn’t really focused that much on its cultural products and its soft power, and we can kind of see that changing in areas like animated film or video games. It’s a lot easier for these types of companies to get funding now, and that just means that it’s going to reach a lot more people in China, but also overseas.
There’s another factor that has really held back cultural exports in China, and that’s just rules and regulations here that make it very, very difficult to make raunchy, sexy entertainment, the type of stuff that we’re used to in the US. Sometimes even broaching the topic of divorce is difficult in sitcoms. You can’t even really have haunted houses in Chinese entertainment, because the Communist Party doesn’t like superstition.
What’s your bet on the next big Chinese cultural export? Think we’re getting a Labubu 2.0 in 2026?
I don’t think Labubu is going away anytime soon. Pop Mart is going to keep cranking out these strange, ugly, cute dolls. But I would say one area that American consumers might see in 2026 is they might see more Chinese products, well-made products, popping up in America. We’ve been talking about entertainment, but products have a big impact on soft power as well. If you start buying well-made Chinese products, it could change your mind about China.
It does seem like China’s making progress on entertainment and cultural products that are more geared towards children. I think that’s kind of a safe space for Chinese cultural exports. You don’t need things like violence and sex and the raunchier bits of entertainment in this space. That might make it easier for more of these types of youth-focused things to reach people outside of China.
2026-01-20 19:45:00
由Alicia Pederson使用Courtyard Composer生成的公寓庭院街区渲染图。| © Courtyard Urbanist, Treasury Spatial Data
美国住房可负担性危机的根本原因并不复杂：我们需要建造更多的住房（大约400万套）。更多的城市扩张并没有解决问题，我们的依赖正是导致住房危机的根源之一。我们离摆脱这一困境还很远。关税显然没有帮助，而美国城市和郊区居民中的一小部分人反对在他们附近建造公寓、双拼房或任何比独立住宅更密集的建筑，使问题更加复杂。
美国人早已不再在城市中建造像纽约的宏伟褐石楼、芝加哥的迷人六层公寓楼或洛杉矶的西班牙瓷砖庭院公寓那样的建筑。但为什么？很难确定答案：这可能有经济原因，也可能有文化原因（简而言之，现代主义艺术和建筑理念对我们产生了深远影响）。以汽车为中心的社会组织方式也带来了许多问题，包括审美上的。然而，对于那些试图改变现状的人来说，最重要的解释可能是监管因素。现代生活中几乎所有建筑的建设——包括住宅、商店、办公室和其他商业建筑——都受到比我们曾经建造漂亮建筑时更为严格的监管。在过去一个世纪，尤其是二战后，复杂的区划和建筑法规体系使整个国家的步行街区和吸引人的建筑变得非法。这不仅使整体住房建设变得困难，还使任何建筑的建设成本变得极高，更不用说那些有精心设计的建筑了。
对于城市规划者来说，过于怀念过去是很容易的，但本文中的任何内容都不应被误解为呼吁回归过去。按照今天的标准，许多战前的住房缺乏基本的宜居条件，如供水、冲水马桶和防火安全。而且可能存在幸存者偏差——主要是高质量的老房子才得以保留至今。然而，建筑环境中的审美对人们来说确实很重要，而美国在这方面提供的却太少。我们对建筑优雅的渴望今天并没有转化为新的美丽建筑风格的繁荣，而是体现在像历史保护法这样的功能失调的法规中，这些法规虽然可能保护了人们喜爱的社区，但代价是加剧住房短缺和高房价。这些政策反映了人们“对美丽事物的有限存量有一种强烈的感受，每次失去一个，就仿佛失去了不可替代的东西”的想法，正如《Works in Progress》杂志的编辑Samuel Hughes最近所说。
城市政府和建筑商如何利用这些因素，实际建造更多人们喜欢的住房？Elmendorf和他的合著者讨论了一些政策改革，例如使“渐进式”增加住房密度变得更容易，即建造与周围环境比例不大的住宅。例如，可以在独立住宅旁边建造双拼房或小型公寓楼，而不是大型建筑。另一个建议是通过政策允许整个街区或社区的整体改造，这样可以在美学上保持一致性，同时激励开发商优先考虑好的设计。这一想法与我见过的最鼓舞人心的住房充足愿景相契合：庭院街区，一种占据整个城市街区的住房形式，外围是中高层建筑，内部有绿地空间。这些在欧洲已经很普遍，而Pederson致力于倡导将庭院街区适应到美国的环境中，因为它们可以同时解决我们许多住房问题。它们可以提供大量密集的新住房，但它们特别适合家庭，因为它们有内置的半私人绿地空间，类似于后院。它们的结构允许住宅获得充足的自然光，并且可以容纳三至四卧室的公寓，正如Vox的Rachel Cohen Booth所写的那样，这些公寓在美国城市中是急需的，因为它们是城市保留有孩子的家庭的希望。Pederson在她去年的Substack文章中写道：“它们提供了‘带院子的大房子’的功能等价物，同时保留了步行友好、经济实惠的城市社区所需的密度和混合用途特征。”
要容纳像这样的美丽新住房形式，城市需要废除不必要的繁重法规。例如，普遍要求公寓楼必须有多个楼梯的规则，使建造小型多单元建筑变得更加困难，同时显著增加了建筑成本。此外，还需要将放松监管与激励措施相结合，鼓励人们想要居住的建筑形式。例如，城市可以向开发商提供密度奖励，以换取增加绿化等特征，或者创建预先批准的设计模板（Elmendorf和他的合著者提到了后者）。城市可以重新合法化传统的建筑形式，并创建一套建筑蓝图目录（例如，波士顿地区到处都有老式三层公寓楼，但如今却难以在城市中新建）。目标不应是用一个更难的挑战来取代另一个挑战——YIMBY（支持住房建设的人）确实应该讨厌设计审查的地狱——而是通过一个可预测、真诚的过程来简化建筑流程。Pederson对美国当前的建筑方式并不满意，因此当我问她是否对解决这一问题充满希望时，她写道：“我非常乐观！这将是一个新技术、新愿景和‘氛围’以及监管改革的完美结合。准备好迎接美国城市规划史上的精彩篇章吧！”
The root of America’s housing affordability crisis isn’t complicated in the abstract: We need to build more homes (4 million more, to be more or less precise). More sprawl isn’t working — our dependence on it is part of what’s gotten us into a housing crisis in the first place.
We’re nowhere close to climbing out of this hole. Tariffs certainly aren’t helping, and making things more challenging is, as ever, the vocal minority of residents across American cities and suburbs who oppose new apartments, duplexes, or anything denser than a detached single-family home being built near them.
Housing advocates and social scientists alike have long attributed NIMBYism to, at best, personal financial stakes (like property value) or logistic concerns (like traffic), at worst deeply rooted racism or classism. And all of those explanations are, to varying degrees, surely an important part of the picture.
But there might also be something more foundational at play here. People like neighborhoods with consistency and, it turns out, style.
Which may come as a surprise, given that for most of the last century, the US has been mostly building places that are ugly and a bit soul-deadening. You know the ones: sprawling subdivisions, giant strip malls and parking lots, 10-lane highways. It’s a strange feature of our age that although we now have spectacular wealth and greater technological means to create anything we can imagine than at any point in human history, “all of our buildings look like boring squares and rectangles,” as journalist Derek Thompson said on a recent episode of his podcast.
Alicia Pederson, a Chicago-based researcher, writer, and advocate for beautiful, livable cities who founded the organization Courtyard Urbanist, put it even more bluntly: The way we build today has gone fundamentally wrong and swung out of alignment with human needs, she told me in an email. “That disorder expresses itself in buildings that are widely experienced as grotesque and alienating.” Her words surface something that pervades American life yet is rarely confronted so directly: Is this really how we want to live?
All of this points to a tantalizing possibility: If modern sprawl shoulders a lot of the blame for both our housing crisis and our epidemic of ugliness, then perhaps we could start to repair both at the same time, with the same tools. Maybe housing abundance should be not just about building more of what we already have, but also about transforming and beautifying the way we build for the future.
It might feel a bit frivolous to fixate on aesthetics at a time when we face an acute housing crisis and urgently need to build lots of housing in the high-opportunity places where people want to live. But beauty matters, even if it’s harder to translate into wonk language than is something like floor area ratio. Our built environment is the physical container for our lives, shaping our entire daily existence and our interactions with our families and communities. A beautiful, humane habitat can be emotionally uplifting, inspire awe and lower the ambient stress of daily life; a bad one does the opposite. And NIMBYs are not wrong to feel that even if we are not the ones living in a new building, if it’s in our neighborhood or broader daily environment, we still live with it.
There is empirical evidence that beauty matters for making housing abundance work, too. A recent working paper contributes to a growing body of research finding that aesthetic concerns play a meaningful role in driving public opposition to new housing. People seem to oppose buildings that break the mold of what’s surrounding them, and they are less likely — a lot less likely — to support building new homes if they think they’ll be visually distasteful.
Traditionally, as University of California Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf put it to me, social scientists have theorized that people oppose new housing construction out of economic self-interest (their property values rise when housing is scarce) or NIMBYism — a broad desire to avoid change in their neighborhoods because of whatever negative externalities that might come with it (like increased traffic congestion or demand for local schools). But there are limits to those explanations — for one thing, it’s not obvious that making it legal to replace single-family houses with, say, small condo buildings lowers property values. A property in a desirable area can sell for more money if it’s possible to redevelop it into multiple homes.
It might seem obvious that aesthetic tastes have something to do with attitudes toward new housing — “neighborhood character” is a watchword of NIMBYs everywhere, something I can witness every day in my local neighborhood Facebook group in Madison, Wisconsin. But it’s hard to rigorously show whether these aesthetic preferences are, as Elmendorf put it, “real or just covering up for some other concern that people are reluctant to state directly.” Those might be racist or classist attitudes or antipathy toward renters, who are usually presumed to be the residents of multifamily homes.
Aesthetics is, of course, a complex concept that may not be fully disentangle-able from other things. It is in large part born out of one’s cultural milieu and upbringing. And to some degree, people’s aesthetic preferences are going to remain subjective, irreconcilable, and incomprehensible to one another. There are people in this country who will mourn the replacement of an empty parking lot with a set of what I think are pretty attractive new homes. There are even people who love brutalist architecture, and that’s fine — we’re a big, diverse polity that can accommodate many tastes.
In the new study (which hasn’t yet been through peer review), Elmendorf, along with co-authors David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla, a political scientist at Yale, set out to understand how aesthetic tastes might be shaping public views on housing development.
To get at the heart of the aesthetics question scientifically, the researchers ran large-scale survey experiments (with 5,999 participants broadly representative of the US population, including people across the political spectrum as well as homeowners and renters) where they manipulated the design of buildings and neighborhood context. The findings, they argue, suggest that aesthetic preferences are sincerely held, rather than mere pretexts, and that support for new apartments is strongly predicted by aesthetic factors in a number of different ways. “Aesthetic tastes are typically far more predictive of support for developing new apartment buildings than measures of other beliefs, attitudes, and preferences, such as beliefs about the relationship between development and prices or racial attitudes,” the authors write.
Respondents were far more likely to support allowing the construction of five-story apartment buildings when they’re located near buildings of a similar scale rather than near single-family houses. (Sometimes derisively called “gentrification buildings,” the wide, five-story buildings known as five-over-ones have become one of the most common building types for new apartments in the US.) That particular objection appears to be less about what apartment buildings look like than the fact people simply don’t think apartments look harmonious next to houses. And in a country where the vast majority of residential land is zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes, the possibility that people don’t like the look of apartments buildings near those houses seems like a big problem for addressing our housing crisis that calls for further investigation.
That finding was also true for people who live in the high-density areas that would be near the new apartments — in other words, mere NIMBYism doesn’t seem to be what’s going on here. Participants even judged the same photo of an apartment building as less attractive if it was to be located near a single-family home rather than another apartment building — a piece of evidence that helped convince Elmendorf that the aesthetic preferences are real, not just pretextual.
Respondents were also no less opposed to office buildings of similar size to the apartment buildings than they were to apartment buildings themselves, suggesting that these views had something to do with their opinions on larger buildings and their placement generally — and not just about the renters who would presumably live in those apartments.
The aesthetic qualities of individual buildings, regardless of their surroundings, also mattered a lot. Whether a building would be designed by an architect recognized for excellent design or an architect who received an “Aesthetic Atrocity Award” for bad design showed very large effects on participants’ willingness to support it, as did showing the respondents photos of apartment buildings of varying aesthetic quality.
You might still suspect that something more complicated is going on than pure aesthetics. The researchers tested for some of the most obvious potential confounders: Respondents who indicated more negative racial attitudes (as measured by a commonly used metric in social science research) showed no preference for office buildings over apartments. Meanwhile, aesthetic distaste for apartments — holding the belief that “new apartments are ugly” or that cities look better without them — was more strongly predictive of opposition to new buildings than were racial attitudes.
The paper is part of a broader turn in research on the politics of housing that explains attitudes toward development in terms of gut-level preferences and identities — whether a person sees themselves as someone who likes cities and density, whether they think a proposed development looks nice — rather than intellectual factors like “how will this impact my property value?” The general public has “very weak intuitions,” Elmendorf said, about how new home construction will impact housing price levels (and they are often wrong about it), but beauty and ugliness are visceral.
Of course, it’s one thing to call for right-scale, beautiful housing in just the right places. It’s quite another to make it happen.
Americans have long ago stopped gracing our cities with anything like the majestic brownstones of New York City, the charming six-flats of Chicago, or the Spanish-tiled courtyard apartments of Los Angeles. But why?
It’s hard to answer with certainty: There may be economic explanations, as well as cultural ones (put simply, modernist ideas in art and architecture have done a number on us). Organizing our society around cars has also created a lot of problems, aesthetic not least among them.
Perhaps the most important explanation for those trying to change things, however, is regulatory. The construction of pretty much everything in modern life — homes, as well as shops, offices, and other businesses — is subject to a degree of regulation far more extreme than in the days when we were actually building beautiful things. Over the last century and especially post-World War II, the complex bureaucratic regimes of zoning and building codes have made it illegal to build walkable districts and appealing buildings across much of the country.
That has had the effect not just of making it too hard to build enough housing overall, but also of making it extremely expensive to build anything, let alone anything with particularly thoughtful design. “It just costs SO MUCH more to build today that it really is not economically rational to invest in great materials and style,” Pederson wrote.
In a conversation last summer, M. Nolan Gray, an urban planner and senior director of legislation and research at the nonprofit California YIMBY, told me that the labyrinthine permitting procedures that govern housing in our cities in suburbs have squeezed out competition among homebuilders and rewarded developers for their ability to navigate red tape rather than for building the highest-quality, most visually pleasing homes.
“We’ve created a world where it’s really large national and international companies that are heavily capitalized that can fight these fights to get their permits and deal with the crazy design reviews,” he said. “I want to live in a world where we have lots of people competing, and they’re competing on the margin of building more beautiful buildings. And I think we get there by allowing for more flexibility.”
It can be much too easy for urbanists to wax nostalgic about the past, but nothing in this piece should be mistaken for a call to return to it. By today’s standards, much of the prewar housing stock lacked the rudiments of habitability, like plumbing, flush toilets, and fire safety. And there may be a survivorship bias at work — it’s primarily the highest-quality old homes that have survived into the present.
But aesthetics in the built environment matter to people — and there’s far too little of it on offer in America. Our longing for elegance in our buildings finds expression today not in a flowering of lovely new building styles, but in dysfunctional regulation like historic preservation laws, which may safeguard beloved neighborhoods, but at the cost of worsening housing scarcity and unaffordability. These policies reflect a “strong feeling that we have a finite stock of beautiful things, and that every time we lose one, we’re just losing something that is completely irreplaceable,” Samuel Hughes, an editor for Works in Progress magazine, recently said.
How might city governments and builders leverage all this to actually build more housing that the public will like? Among the policy ideas discussed by Elmendorf and his co-authors are reforms to make it easy to “incrementally” densify neighborhoods with homes that are not radically out of proportion from their surroundings. That could mean, for example, building duplexes or small apartment buildings rather than big buildings next to single-family homes. Another is passing policies to allow the redevelopment of entire blocks or neighborhoods at once, so they can be densified in an aesthetically cohesive manner and developers have an incentive to prioritize good design.
That idea harmonizes with what is maybe the most inspiring vision I’ve seen for housing abundance: courtyard blocks, a housing form that occupies an entire city block, with a perimeter of mid-rise buildings on the outside and interior green space. These are already widespread in Europe, and Pederson devotes herself to advocating for adapting courtyard blocks for an American context because they could solve so many of our housing problems at once. They can supply lots of dense new housing, but they are also, she points out, especially ideal for families because they have built-in semiprivate green space that functions like a backyard.
Their structure allows the residences to draw abundant natural light, and they can accommodate three- and four-bedroom apartments that, as Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth has written, are badly needed in American cities if they are to have any hope of retaining families with children. They “offer the functional equivalent of a ‘big house with a yard’ while preserving the density and mixed-use character essential for walkable, affordable urban neighborhoods,” Pederson wrote on her Substack last year. And they are made up of relatively smaller individual buildings rather than very large ones that read to some people as bland and overbearing.
And they don’t just have to be Copenhagen cosplay — they can be built with any architectural style. Here is one I generated inspired by the red-brick architecture of Boston (using an AI-powered visualization tool created by a collaboration between Courtyard Urbanist and the design technology company Treasury):
Accommodating beautiful new housing forms like these would require cities to scrap needlessly burdensome regulations. Widespread rules that often require apartment buildings to have multiple staircases, for example, make it more difficult to build small, multi-unit buildings while adding significantly to construction costs.
It also calls for pairing deregulation with carrots that encourage the kinds of buildings people want to live in and around — cities can, for instance, offer developers density bonuses in exchange for adding features like greenery, or create pre-approved design templates (Elmendorf and his co-authors point to the latter idea). Cities could re-legalize traditional architectural forms and create a catalog of blueprints for building them (old triple-deckers, for example, exist all over the Boston area, yet are strangely difficult to build new in the city today). The goal ought not to be to swap one gauntlet for another — YIMBYs are right to hate design-review purgatory — but rather to make building easier with a predictable, good-faith process.
Pederson is no fan of how we build in America today, so I was taken aback by what she said when I asked if she’s hopeful about our ability to fix it. “I am SO optimistic!” she wrote to me. “It’s going to be a perfect convergence of great new tech, great new visions and ‘vibes,’ and regulatory reform. Prepare yourself for a fantastic chapter in American urbanism.”
I’m under no illusions that even the prettiest designs can overcome the formidable forces of NIMBYism in America overnight. Still, the moment seems right for a paradigm shift, away from the charmless, unaffordable status quo. Our housing crisis is a nightmare for millions of Americans, but it is also, perhaps, a rare invitation to rebuild the way we live.