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.
2026-01-20 19:00:00
一项新研究提供了证据，表明有线电视新闻使选民（进而影响政治家）更加重视社会议题。在当今美国，白人选民的收入越低，越倾向于支持唐纳德·特朗普。2024年，美国收入分布最底层10%的白人选民几乎全部转向共和党候选人。而收入最高的5%的白人选民则大多支持民主党候选人卡玛拉·哈里斯。在过去的一个多世纪中，这一模式通常是相反的：从1948年到2012年的每一次总统大选中，贫困白人选民都倾向于支持左翼候选人。但这一趋势在2016年发生了变化，八年后，白人中收入与共和党倾向之间的负相关关系变得前所未有的强烈。这一变化显然反映了特朗普对美国生活的影响，但也得益于美国政治长期的结构性转变。
20世纪中叶，没有大学学位的美国人投票倾向明显左于大学毕业生。但从20世纪60年代末开始，这一差距逐渐缩小，最终在2004年反转。因此，美国社会经济地位与政党倾向之间的关系逐渐变化，然后在特朗普重新定义共和党形象后迅速发生转变。这种重新排列有诸多原因，但一个关键因素是“文化战争”议题的政治重要性日益上升。在过去50年中，关于移民、犯罪、堕胎、宗教、种族和性别等问题的争论在美国内政中变得越来越突出。随着这些议题的凸显，选民开始更多地根据自己的文化立场而非经济立场进行选择。而由于受过高等教育的选民在大多数社会议题上倾向左翼，而受教育程度较低的选民则倾向右翼，这削弱了传统上低收入群体对民主党（以及高收入群体对共和党的传统支持）。
自由派经常对这些发展感到忧虑，而且并非没有道理。文化极化的一些后果似乎令人费解。如今许多贫困美国人一方面支持进步的医疗和福利政策，另一方面却将经济问题列为首要关注，却仍然投票支持削减他们医疗补助和食品券福利的政党。当然，民主党在工人阶级选民中的支持率下降，使得特朗普的选举成功成为可能，从而威胁着美国民主。
因此，为何“文化战争”议题变得如此重要，一直是民主党关注的问题。一些进步派认为，民主党对经济民粹主义的背离是主要原因：通过在贸易和监管问题上采取“新自由主义”立场，民主党缩小了与共和党在经济议题上的差距，从而使得他们在社会议题上的分歧更加明显。而一些温和派则认为，民主党在这些文化争论中过于左倾，反而使文化议题更加突出。其他人则认为，右翼的激进化使文化战争成为不可避免的趋势；当移民与海关执法局的人员对美国公民进行暴力对待，而总统又将所有索马里裔美国人拥有的企业妖魔化时，很难让财政政策成为关注的焦点。
然而，最近的研究指出，另一个（可能补充）解释是美国人在家中的娱乐选择变得越来越好。这导致了文化战争议题在政治中的突出。
关键要点：
有线电视如何改变电视新闻： 至少从《文化战争的商业》这篇由麻省理工学院和哈佛大学两位经济学研究生Shakked Noy和Akaash Rao撰写的新论文中，我得出这样的结论。他们的研究指出，随着电视行业竞争的加剧，新闻节目开始强调文化战争议题，从而推动了美国政治的重新排列。Noy和Rao指出，从20世纪50年代中期到80年代中期，三大电视网络（CBS、NBC和ABC）主导了美国电视市场。尽管有线电视存在，但尚未普及到美国家庭，替代频道也有限。在竞争有限的情况下，主要网络并不太担心如何提高新闻节目的娱乐性，因为它们拥有几乎被锁定的观众群体。因此，它们将新闻部门视为获取声望而非收入的工具，更倾向于强调“硬”经济议题而非“软”文化议题。
然而，随着同轴电缆将越来越多的频道带入美国家庭，电视行业开始发生变化。到1997年，有线电视新闻网络（福克斯新闻、CNN和MSNBC）开始竞争观众的注意力，不仅与彼此竞争，还与超过40个其他频道竞争。关键的是，这些有线新闻网络无法像传统电视网络那样将新闻作为“亏损产品”来对待，因为新闻就是它们的全部业务。这种竞争压力促使它们都更加关注文化议题而非经济议题。
当然，有线电视强调社会争议这一观点并不新鲜（这一观点在2013年的电影《伴娘》中被精彩阐述）。但Noy和Rao通过分析过去六十年的电视新闻录像和文字记录，证明了这一点。他们发现，有线电视网络在议题报道中，大部分都集中在文化议题上，而传统广播新闻网络则更倾向于经济议题。这种编辑倾向似乎是理性的：根据智能电视数据，Noy和Rao发现，当一个频道从完全的文化内容切换到完全的经济内容时，观众数量平均下降2.2%——这大约是切换广告的点击流失惩罚的六分之一。值得注意的是，经济内容实际上更有效防止观众转投其他新闻频道。但那些在CNN和福克斯新闻之间来回切换的观众仅占电视观众的少数。而文化议题更可能吸引那些在看新闻和打篮球、看真人秀、玩电子游戏或其他娱乐活动之间做选择的观众。
在2010年代，随着家庭娱乐选择的增加，传统广播新闻开始首次强调文化议题而非经济议题，这似乎是出于对竞争压力的妥协。
有线电视新闻改变了选民的优先事项： 当然，有线电视新闻网络的编辑决定是否会影响选民行为并不显而易见。毕竟，只有少数选民会观看这些频道。而且，美国人仍然普遍表示经济问题是他们最关心的。但Noy和Rao提供了证据，表明有线电视新闻促使选民（进而影响政治家）更加重视社会议题。为了隔离有线电视新闻的影响，研究人员利用了美国人观看习惯的一个特点：在其他条件相同的情况下，我们更倾向于观看频道号较低的频道（例如15号）而不是频道号较高的频道（例如56号）。由于有线电视网络的频道号在不同市场随机分配，因此可以通过比较MSNBC和福克斯新闻在频道号较低和较高的地区的影响，来衡量其政治影响力。当Noy和Rao进行这种比较时，他们发现，在有线电视新闻曝光率较高的地区，选民更有可能告诉盖洛普，社会问题才是国家“最重要的问题”。而且，这种现象似乎导致了政治家在这些地区更加强调文化战争议题：在选民观看更多有线电视新闻的选区，竞选广告更倾向于关注社会议题。
数字媒体也可能偏向社会议题： Noy和Rao的研究主要关注有线电视新闻，但他们的发现表明，网络出版物和影响者——他们的受众随时可以点击进入各种电影、电视节目、书籍和色情内容——将有更强的动机去突出文化战争议题。在当今历史上竞争最激烈的注意力市场中，新闻媒体有强烈的动机去强调那些最能吸引随意观众的议题。Noy和Rao的研究强烈表明，身份认同、性别角色和移民问题比财政或监管政策的争论更能吸引观众。每天查看TikTok、X（推特）或Bluesky等平台，似乎也印证了这一观点。
经济问题仍然是政治的重要议题： 这一切并不意味着经济问题不再重要。事实上，Noy和Rao的研究表明，那些竞选广告聚焦于经济议题的候选人表现更好，而那些强调文化议题的候选人则效果较差。对于选民整体而言，尤其是摇摆选民，经济问题仍然是首要关注。然而，一个选民更相信民主党还是共和党能够管理经济，很大程度上取决于他们在文化战争中的立场。这解释了为何在2024年，尽管两个群体都把通货膨胀视为国家首要问题，但工人阶级白人选民却支持特朗普，而受过高等教育的白人选民则支持卡玛拉·哈里斯。
政党的决策很重要（但并非孤立发生）： 即使媒体环境的变化推动了文化战争，政党的立场也无疑起到了重要作用。民主党可以通过在社会议题上采取更温和的立场，或者更有效地代表和推动工人的经济利益，来减少这些议题的重要性。但任何试图将政治重新聚焦于经济议题的努力都将面临强大的阻力。随着影响者、视频游戏和人工智能等娱乐内容的不断增长，政治媒体将面临更强的动机去迎合那些能吸引注意力的议题——也就是文化战争议题。
In today’s America, the less money a white voter has, the more likely they are to support Donald Trump.
Whites in the bottom 10 percent of America’s income distribution broke for the GOP nominee in 2024 by landslide margins. Those in the top 5 percent largely backed Democrat Kamala Harris, according to American National Election Studies data.
For most of the past century, the opposite pattern prevailed: In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, poor whites voted to the left of rich ones.
But that changed in 2016. Eight years later, the new, negative correlation between income and Republicanism among whites became unprecedentedly strong, as Ohio State University political scientist Tom Wood has shown:
This development surely reflects Trump’s personal imprint on American life. Yet it was also made possible by long-term, structural shifts in our politics.
In the mid-20th century, Americans without college degrees voted sharply to the left of university graduates. But beginning in the late 1960s, this gap started to narrow before finally flipping in 2004. The relationship between socioeconomic status and partisanship in the United States therefore changed gradually — and then, with Trump’s populist rebrand of the GOP, all at once.
This realignment had many causes. An indispensable factor, however, was the rising salience of “culture war” issues.
Over the past 50 years, debates over immigration, crime, abortion, religion, race, and gender became increasingly prominent in American politics. As this happened, voters began sorting themselves less on the basis of their economic attitudes and more on that of their cultural ones. And since college-educated voters lean left on most social issues — while less educated voters lean right — this eroded the lower classes’ traditional attachment to the Democratic Party (and the upper classes’ historic ties to the GOP).
Liberals often lament these developments — and not without reason. Some consequences of cultural polarization seem perverse. Many poor Americans today 1) express progressive views on health care and social welfare, 2) say that economic issues are their top concern, and 3) nonetheless vote for the party hellbent on cutting their Medicaid and food stamp benefits.
And of course, Democrats’ flagging support with working-class voters has enabled Trump’s electoral success — thereby imperiling American democracy.
For these reasons, the question of why the culture war gained such political prominence has long preoccupied Democrats. Some progressives blame their party’s alleged abandonment of economic populism: By embracing “neooliberal” stances on trade and regulation, Democrats narrowed the gap between the parties on economic issues, thereby making their divisions on social matters more conspicuous.
Some moderates, meanwhile, suggest that the party made cultural controversies more salient by moving too far to the left in such debates. Others argue that the right’s radicalization has made the culture war’s primacy inevitable; it is hard to keep fiscal policy in the foreground when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement are brutalizing US citizens and the president is demonizing all Somali-American-owned businesses.
But recent research points to another (potentially complementary) explanation for the decline of materialist voting: Americans’ at-home entertainment options have gotten too good.
• In recent decades, culture war issues have become increasingly salient in American politics, triggering a realignment of the major party coalitions.
• A new study suggests that the rise of cable television fueled these trends: Facing heightened competition, news broadcasters realized that social issues were better at attracting viewers’ attention than economic ones.
• Digital media has made the attention economy even more competitive — and thus, culture war controversies even more prominent.
At least, this is my takeaway from “The Business of the Culture War,” a new paper from a pair of economics graduate students at MIT and Harvard University, Shakked Noy and Akaash Rao, respectively.
Their study’s basic story is simple: As the television business grew more competitive, news broadcasts began emphasizing culture war controversies, fueling a realignment of American politics in the process.
Noy and Rao note that, from the mid-1950s to mid-1980s, the three big networks — CBS, NBC, and ABC — dominated American television. Although cable TV existed, it had yet to fully penetrate American households and alternate channels were limited. Amid such scant competition, the major networks didn’t worry too much about maximizing the entertainment value of their news broadcasts. Each had a nearly captive audience, who could be force-fed briefings on current affairs most evenings. The networks therefore viewed their news divisions as vehicles for earning prestige as much as revenue. And this led them to favor “hard” economic coverage over “soft” cultural stories.
As coaxial cables brought an ever-expanding array of channels into American homes, however, the TV business started to change. By 1997, three 24-hour cable news networks were competing for viewers’ attention — against not merely each other, but upward of 40 other stations. Critically, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC couldn’t afford to treat their news broadcasts as “loss leaders” like the networks had; news was their entire business. And these competitive pressures led all three to emphasize cultural issues over economic ones.
Of course, the notion that cable news spotlights social controversies is hardly new (one can find that thesis eloquently elaborated in the 2013 cinematic masterpiece, Anchorman 2). But Noy and Rao prove it empirically.
Analyzing recordings and transcripts from the past six decades of TV news, they show that cable networks dedicate a large majority of their issue-based coverage to cultural issues, even as broadcast news networks had historically favored economic topics.
This editorial tendency appears to have been rational. Drawing on smart TV data that records when households change channels or turn off their televisions, Noy and Rao show that cultural topics are better at retaining viewers: When a network switches from an entirely cultural segment to a fully economic one, viewership falls by an average of 2.2 percent — about one-sixth of the click-away penalty associated with cutting to a commercial.
Notably, economic coverage was actually more effective at preventing a viewer from switching to a different news network. But households that ping-pong between CNN and Fox News comprise a small minority of the TV audience. And cultural topics are much more likely to retain the attention of viewers deciding between watching the news and flipping on a basketball game, reality show, video game console, or any other diversion.
In the 2010s, as such at-home entertainment options proliferated, broadcast news began emphasizing cultural topics over economic ones for the first time, in an apparent concession to competitive pressures.
Of course, it isn’t self-evident that cable news networks’ editorial decisions drive voter behavior. After all, only a small minority of the electorate watches such channels. And Americans still overwhelmingly say the economic issues are their top concern.
But Noy and Rao present evidence that cable news causes voters — and thus, politicians — to put a greater premium on social issues.
To isolate the impact of cable news channels, the researchers exploit a quirk in Americans’ viewing habits: All else equal, we tend to watch channels with low numbers (e.g., channel 15) more than those with high numbers (e.g., channel 56). And since the channel number assigned to cable networks varies randomly across markets, one can gauge the broadcasters’ political influence by comparing areas where MSNBC and Fox News are assigned low numbers to those where they’re assigned high ones.
When Noy and Rao do this, they find that — controlling for a jurisdiction’s demographics and partisanship — voters are more likely to tell Gallup that a social issue is the nation’s “most important problem” if they live in places with high levels of cable-news exposure.
And this appears to cause politicians in such areas to emphasize culture war issues: In constituencies where voters watch more cable news, the study finds that campaign ads are more likely to focus on social issues.
Noy and Rao’s paper is concerned with cable news, not digital media. But their findings suggest that online publications and influencers — whose audiences are perpetually a couple clicks away from virtually every movie, television show, book, and genre of pornography in existence — would have even stronger incentives to foreground culture war controversies.
In today’s historically competitive market for human attention, news purveyors face strong incentives to emphasize whichever issues are most captivating for casual viewers. Noy and Rao’s study strongly indicate that questions of identity, gender roles, and immigration tend to fit the bill better than debates over fiscal or regulatory policy. And most days, a perusal of TikTok, X, or Bluesky would seem to reinforce that impression.
None of this means that economic issues no longer matter. To the contrary, Noy and Rao’s study actually indicates that candidates whose ads focus on bread-and-butter issues perform better than those whose ads center cultural topics. For voters in general — and swing voters in particular — material concerns remain paramount.
Yet whether a given voter has more faith in Democrats or Republicans to manage the economy depends, to a historically great degree, on their culture war allegiances. This helps explain why working-class white voters favored Trump — while college-educated ones backed Kamala Harris — even as both blocs deemed inflation the nation’s top problem in 2024.
Even if shifting media dynamics have helped fuel the culture war, party positioning has surely also contributed. Democrats can plausibly reduce the salience of social issues by embracing more moderate stances on them — or by more effectively representing and advancing working people’s material interests — or both.
But any effort to repolarize politics around economic issues will face strong headwinds. As influencers, video games, and AI slop proliferates, political media will face ever-stronger incentives to lean into attention-maximizing topics — and thus, culture war controversies.
2026-01-19 20:30:00
2025年11月24日，哈德森·威廉姆斯和康纳·斯托里在多伦多TIFF Lightbox影院出席电视剧《Heated Rivalry》（《炽热情仇》）首映礼。| Harold Feng/Getty Images
《Heated Rivalry》是一部基于畅销爱情小说作家瑞秋·里德作品改编的加拿大剧集，正在HBO Max上播出。这部剧引发了广泛讨论，不仅占据了社交媒体和算法推荐，也深深吸引了观众。剧情围绕一群隐藏性取向的专业冰球运动员展开，讲述他们在爱情中经历的挣扎与激情，同时也包含大量亲密场景。尽管有人将其称为“同性恋冰球情色剧”，但该剧的核心其实非常温暖感人。
艾玛·格拉斯曼-哈格斯是Popsugar的撰稿人、记者和编辑，她认为《Heated Rivalry》并非特例。她表示，该剧之所以成功，是因为它触及了人类普遍的情感体验——渴望。她在Vox的访谈中提到：“我认为人们现在都在渴望，无论是哪种形式。在更传统的意义上，我们已经看到《Heated Rivalry》和《夏日我心醉》的成功，这两部剧都是对真正心动的强烈渴望的完美体现。”
在Vox的每周播客《Explain It to Me》最新一期中，我们与格拉斯曼-哈格斯探讨了流行文化中“渴望”的现象，以及它对我们社会的意义。以下是访谈内容的节选，已进行删减和润色。完整版可在Apple Podcasts、Spotify或其他播客平台收听。如果你想提交问题，可通过电子邮件发送至[email protected]，或致电1-800-618-8545。
你是否在其他地方也看到这种渴望？比如在政治领域，像Mamdani在纽约的竞选活动，就充满了能量和热情，以及对更好未来的渴望。此外，TikTok上也出现了新年决心趋势，人们计划在2026年经历1000次拒绝，这代表了他们愿意尝试、展现脆弱并面对失败的决心。这种“渴望”能量非常强烈。在这一千次拒绝的过程中，你也会遇到一些肯定，无论是爱情、工作还是社区组织等目标。
我认为，将渴望仅限于浪漫层面是不全面的。如今，世界充满令人沮丧的新闻事件，渴望或许是一种逃避，但我觉得它更像是一种扎根的力量。渴望是一种深刻的身体体验，是对无法得到所渴望之物的绝望，以及在接近却无法触及时所承受的痛苦。我们都很熟悉“极致痛苦”的概念，而渴望也能带来一种自虐式的快乐，这种快乐在当下尤为重要。
心动是有趣的，但有时也让人痛苦。然而，它又是一种很棒的情感体验。很难描述这种既痛苦又愉快的感觉。当我想到渴望时，脑海中浮现的词是“吞噬一切”。回到浪漫主题，我目前处于一段长期关系中，所以很久没有真正心动过，但我其实非常怀念那种感觉。这种对某个人的强烈依恋有一种怀旧的色彩，仿佛回到了一个更简单、纯粹的年代，那时你只想着那个人，其他事情都不重要。
现在，如果我打开手机，很可能看到几条关于《Heated Rivalry》的短信。这部剧无处不在，也成为了Popsugar团队热议的话题。我本人是酷儿女性，我的许多酷儿女性朋友都非常喜欢这部剧，并且被剧中对男性脆弱面的描绘所吸引。这种描绘在现实中并不常见。
我想谈谈谁在渴望。《Heated Rivalry》之所以特别，是因为它聚焦于酷儿男性。我在文章中提出，女性常常是渴望的对象，但现实中我们很少看到女性渴望的描绘。我认为，我们看到的很多女性形象只是被动地希望或期待某些事物，但这并不是真正的渴望。自从Popsugar在Instagram上发布了我的文章后，我一直在思考这个问题。有位网友的评论让我印象深刻，他说我们总是看到那些渴望却得不到的女性形象，这让我深思。
我认为，被动的希望和真正的内心渴望是有区别的。我希望今年能看到更多来自女性和酷儿群体的内心渴望，而不仅仅是怀旧或感伤的情绪。我想要看到的是那种如风暴般强烈、如玻璃破碎般激烈的渴望。
Heated Rivalry, the Canadian series streaming on HBO Max based on the bestselling romance novels by Rachel Reid, has taken over group chats, algorithms, and brains. For those who have not watched, it follows queer, closeted professional ice hockey players as they navigate falling in love and all the angst that comes with it. There’s also a lot of sex. So. Much. Sex.
But for all the talk of gay hockey smut, the show at its core is very sweet.
Emma Glassman-Hughes is a writer, reporter, and editor at Popsugar, and she doesn’t think Heated Rivalry is an anomaly. She says the show is successful because it taps into a universal experience: yearning. “I think the people are yearning every which way,” she told Vox. “In a more classic sense, we’ve seen the success of Heated Rivalry and The Summer I Turned Pretty. Both those have blown up and really are good examples of how everyone is just excited right now about the burn of a true crush.”
On the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we spoke with Glassman-Hughes about pining in pop culture and what it says about us.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
Are you seeing this yearning anywhere else, even beyond TV and movies?
Yeah, I think of yearning in a pretty broad sense around the Mamdani campaign in New York. My feeds were full of energy and enthusiasm and true yearning and aching for a better future for some new options. I’ve also seen this New Year’s resolution trend on TikTok, where people are aiming to receive 1,000 rejections in 2026. That means putting yourself out there at least a thousand times and proving to yourself that you’re willing to try and be vulnerable and face the prospect of failure. That’s big yearner energy. Along the way in between the thousand rejections, you’re bound to get some yeses, whether that’s romantic partners or jobs or community organizing or whatever it is that you’re chasing.
I think that’s so interesting, to think of yearning beyond just the romantic.
If we look around, it’s really hard to exist in the world right now, and we’re being inundated with distressing news event after news event. I think yearning could be seen as a distraction from that, but I actually think it’s a grounding force.
Yearning is this deeply bodily human experience to despair over not having what you want and to feel the pain of being so close yet so far. We’re all familiar with the concept of exquisite pain, and I think yearning can provide this sort of masochistic joy too — and we all need more joy in our lives right now.
Crushes are fun, but they can be excruciating. At the same time, they’re kind of great. It’s hard to describe how it’s both painful and enjoyable.
When I think of yearning, the phrase that comes up is all-consuming. Going back to the romance factor, I’m in a long-term relationship right now, so it’s been a long time since I’ve had a true crush, but I actually really miss that feeling. There’s a nostalgic quality to some person sort of taking over your entire world for however long. It’s [reminiscent] of a simpler time, when you’re 13 and that’s all you can think about, and nothing really matters beyond that.
If I open up my phone right now, I’ll probably see several text messages about Heated Rivalry. It’s everywhere.
It’s definitely a huge topic of conversation on the Popsugar team. I’m queer, and all of my queer female friends are very taken with this show and very drawn to these more vulnerable depictions of masculinity that we don’t really get to see very much of.
I want to talk about who yearns. Heated Rivalry is special because it’s about queer men.
I argue in my essay that women are frequently the objects of yearning, but we see fewer depictions of female yearning out there. I think we see a lot of depictions of women passively wishing or hoping for something, but to me, that’s not true yearning.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since Popsugar posted about the essay on our Instagram. Someone actually commented something that has stuck with me: They were saying that we’re always seeing depictions of women who want and never receive, and that really made me think. I think there is a difference between the passive wishing and the real gut-level yearning, and the latter is what I want to see more of from women and queer people this year. Not just wistful stuff, but the tornadoes and the storms and the shattered glass of it all.
2026-01-19 19:45:00
如今，没有一场美国悲剧是完整的，没有GoFundMe（众筹平台）的身影。仅仅不到一周时间，就有超过150万美元被筹集到，用于资助此前在明尼阿波利斯被移民与海关执法局（ICE）特工射杀的女子Renee Nicole Good的家属。与此同时，为她的凶手设立的另一项众筹也筹集了数万美元。去年，GoFundMe还曾被用于帮助洛杉矶野火后重建房屋的人们、德克萨斯州Camp Mystic洪水幸存者接受心理治疗、以及受食品券（SNAP）停摆影响的困难家庭等。然而，尽管有五分之一的美国人通过众筹平台直接向有需要的人捐款，但许多人对这类平台的兴起感到不安。根据美联社（AP）和NORC公共事务研究中心最近的一项调查，自2010年以来，GoFundMe已筹集了超过400亿美元。该调查对1146名全国成年人进行了采访，测量了美国人参与众筹的程度，以及他们如何看待这些活动。调查显示，不到10%的美国人——包括捐款者和未捐款者——对众筹活动的有效性感到非常有信心，许多人对这些活动是否真正有益持严重怀疑态度。超过一半的受访者表示，他们对GoFundMe等众筹网站收取的合理服务费缺乏信心。而几乎同样多的人则怀疑，众筹发起人是否真正负责任地使用他们筹集的资金，甚至是否能筹集到足够的金额来实现目标。正如我之前在10月份报道的那样，一些证据表明，这些担忧是有道理的。首先，就是这些平台的服务费问题。尽管GoFundMe作为营利性平台，技术上只收取小额处理费，但其默认设置会将捐赠者的一部分资金（至少17.5%）作为“小费”转给公司。对于像Good家属这样金额庞大的众筹活动，这些小费加起来可能相当可观。如果Good家属的150万美元众筹活动中的所有捐赠者都支付了17.5%的小费，GoFundMe将从中获得超过26万美元的收入。另一个令人质疑的点是，许多发起众筹的人其实并不需要这些钱，或者即使需要，也可能不会合理使用。关于这类欺诈行为的数据难以获取，虽然GoFundMe声称其影响仅占平台活动的千分之一，但众筹的分散性使得很难核实大多数活动是否真正用于其最初的目的。此外，美国人普遍认为，很少有众筹活动能实现其最初的目标，这一看法也得到了数据的支持。一些研究表明，按此标准，只有十分之一的众筹活动能成功。尽管每一美元都很重要，但真正需要帮助的人却常常难以启动他们的众筹活动。多项研究显示，医疗类众筹活动的成功率往往与发起人所在社区的财富和种族有关，这意味着许多真正需要帮助的人被忽视了。就在Good被枪杀前一周，另一名美国公民、洛杉矶的非裔父亲Keith Porter Jr.在圣诞节前夕被一名离岗的ICE特工射杀。Porter刚刚用AR-15式步枪向空中开了一枪庆祝新年，随后被特工拦住并射杀，而该特工就住在同一个公寓楼里。然而，几天来，Porter家属的众筹活动却难以获得与Good家属相同的关注和支持。尽管有人对这种差异表示不满，但Porter女儿们的GoFundMe众筹活动最终还是筹集了接近26万美元，目标是30万美元。尽管众筹可能是一种不完美的援助方式，但在危机时刻，它仍然是我们直接帮助有需要的个人的一种重要途径。根据AP-NORC调查，人们最常捐款的众筹类型是医疗费用和医疗服务，其次是纪念和丧葬费用。很多时候，这些众筹活动成为那些陷入极度困境、别无选择的人的救命稻草。对于受益人来说，即使只是稍微成功一点的众筹活动，也可能带来巨大的改变。当然，或许还有更高效、更公平的方式来处理医疗破产和丧葬费用问题，但直到这些解决方案出现之前，互相帮助——尽管不完美——可能是我们目前最好的选择。
Today, no American tragedy is complete without a GoFundMe.
It took less than a week to raise over $1.5 million for the family of Renee Nicole Good, the woman fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis earlier this month. At the same time, a parallel fundraiser for her killer raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. And last year saw GoFundMe campaigns for people rebuilding their homes after the Los Angeles wildfires, therapy for the Camp Mystic flood survivors in Texas, struggling families affected by the SNAP shutdown, and far more.
But even as one in five Americans donate directly to those in need through crowdfunding, many feel uneasy about the rise of platforms like GoFundMe, which has raised over $40 billion since 2010, according to a recent survey by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll of 1,146 adults nationwide measured the extent to which Americans now participate in crowdfunding, the details of what that participation now looks like, and the nature of how they perceive crowdfunding campaigns.
The survey found that less than 10 percent of Americans — including both donors and non-donors — felt very confident in the effectiveness of crowdfunding campaigns, and many harbored serious doubts about who really stands to profit from them. More than half of those surveyed said they had very little confidence that crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe charge reasonable service fees. And nearly as many doubted that crowdfunders themselves use the money they raise responsibly or raise enough to meet their goals at all.
As I previously reported in October, the evidence shows that some of their fears are justified.
Start with those service fees, which the highest share of survey participants had qualms about. While the for-profit GoFundMe, the biggest name in the game, technically only charges a nominal processing fee like any other fundraiser, the platform defaults donors into “tipping” some 17.5 percent (on my browser, at least) of their donation to benefit the company’s bottom line.
And for a fundraiser as big as the one for Good’s widow, those tips can really add up. If all donors tipped the full 17.5 percent on the $1.5 million campaign, GoFundMe would rake in over $260,000.
Another point of doubt was the idea that many who crowdfund don’t actually need the money and, even if they do, might not use it responsibly. The data on such fraud is difficult to come by, and while GoFundMe claims it affects only about one in 1,000 campaigns on its platform, the disperse nature of crowdfunding makes it virtually impossible to verify whether most fundraisers ultimately use their funds “wisely” or even for their intended purpose at all.
What’s more, Americans’ hunch that few crowdfunds ultimately reach their initial goals is also right on target. Some studies show that as few as one in ten crowdfunding campaigns succeed by that metric. And while every dollar counts, the people who need the most help often struggle to get their fundraiser off the ground at all.
More often than not, the wealthier and whiter the fundraiser’s neighborhood and network is, the more successful their campaign is likely to be, according to several studies measuring the success rate of medical crowdfunds, meaning that many people who need help get left behind.
A week before Good’s shooting, another American citizen, Keith Porter Jr. — a Black father from Los Angeles — was fatally shot by an off-duty ICE officer on New Year’s Eve. Porter had just fired a celebratory shot in the air from an AR-15-style rifle when he was confronted and killed by the agent, who lived in the same apartment complex. Yet, for days, a fundraiser for his family struggled to gain the same traction as the one for Good, who is white. Amid some outcry over the disparity, a GoFundMe for Porter’s daughters has managed to raise nearly $260,000 out of a goal of $300,000.
Still, even though crowdfunding can be a flawed way to give, it’s one of the only venues we have for directly helping individual people in need quickly during times of crisis. According to the AP-NORC survey, medical expenses and health care causes are the most common kind of crowdfunds people donate to, followed by memorials and funeral expenses. Oftentimes, these fundraisers act as a lifeline for people in intense distress who have no other options. For beneficiaries, even a mildly successful campaign can be transformative.
Sure, there are probably more efficient, more equitable ways to handle medical bankruptcies and funeral costs than an endless string of crowdfunds. But until those solutions materialize, giving to one another — however imperfectly — might be the best we’ve got.