2026-04-30 02:15:00
2026年4月27日，美国司法部长代理托德·布拉恩奇（Todd Blanche）在华盛顿特区的司法部召开新闻发布会。本周对特朗普政府的司法部来说意义重大，先是周一发生了一起针对特朗普的未遂刺杀事件，随后司法部将调查目标转向了前FBI局长詹姆斯·科米（James Comey），他面临第二轮被指为“极其薄弱”的联邦指控，指控他通过用贝壳写的信息威胁总统。布拉恩奇作为代理司法部长，正面临考验，他此前是特朗普的私人律师。在司法部长帕姆·邦迪（Pam Bondi）被解雇后，布拉恩奇暂时接任这一职位，现在正争取成为正式司法部长。
CNN首席法律事务记者保拉·里德（Paula Reid）在本周与《Today, Explained》主持人诺埃尔·金（Noel King）的对话中提到，布拉恩奇在担任代理司法部长期间表现稳健，尤其是在处理特朗普司法部面临的诸多争议事件后。这些争议包括处理埃普斯坦（Epstein）文件的混乱、对案件的不当处理以及试图起诉他人等。而此次针对科米的指控则被视为一次新的挑战。
布拉恩奇的背景是纽约南区联邦检察官，后转向白领犯罪辩护，并于2023年加入特朗普的法律团队，处理了由杰克·史密斯（Jack Smith）提起的两起联邦案件以及纽约的“封口费”案件。尽管他的客户特朗普在纽约被判有罪，但布拉恩奇成功避免了其入狱，并最终使特朗普未在联邦案件中接受审判。因此，在特朗普眼中，布拉恩奇是“救他免于牢狱之灾”的关键人物。
关于布拉恩奇是否适合担任司法部长，有观点认为他“不够符合MAGA（特朗普支持者）的期望”，且未能摆脱特朗普司法部处理埃普斯坦文件时的“原罪”。然而，也有内部人士表示，尽管存在争议，布拉恩奇在代理司法部长职位上表现称职，且并非所有人都反对他担任这一职务。此外，埃普斯坦文件的处理问题仍是特朗普政府的污点，但布拉恩奇在这一事件中的角色可能不会成为他被任命的障碍。
目前，布拉恩奇是否能获得正式司法部长职位仍存在不确定性。尽管有其他潜在候选人，如哥伦比亚特区联邦检察官珍妮·皮罗（Jeanine Pirro），但布拉恩奇仍有机会。不过，特朗普政府的司法部长职位历来充满挑战，且过去所有司法部长都曾被解雇、替换或辞职。因此，布拉恩奇能否长期担任这一职位，仍有待观察。
It’s been a big week for the Trump Justice Department, beginning with the arraignment of an alleged would-be presidential assassin on Monday.
Just one day after charges were brought against Cole Tomas Allen, who prosecutors say attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the DOJ pivoted to a new target: Former FBI Director James Comey, who is facing a second set of incredibly flimsy federal charges — this time, for allegedly threatening the president with a message written in seashells.
It’s a lot to keep track of, and overseeing it all is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer. Blanche, the deputy attorney general, got the top job on a temporary basis after his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, was fired earlier in the month; now, he’s auditioning for the real thing.
CNN’s chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid told Today, Explained co-host Noel King earlier this week that the job is Blanche’s to lose. She explains how he got here, how he’s doing so far, and how Trump administration insiders and the MAGA movement feel about him as a potential attorney general.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Has [Blanche] done anything that has surprised you?
Todd Blanche has actually, I think, really met the moment perfectly, especially in the larger context of my reporting on his audition for attorney general.
[The Correspondents’ Dinner shooting] is the first thing that has happened to the Blanche Justice Department as opposed to being something they’ve done or what we’ve seen throughout the Trump Justice Department, which has been a lot of self-inflicted controversies: the handling of the Epstein files, the controversial firings, decisions they’ve made around cases and trying to charge people. That’s all self-inflicted.
But when you’re the attorney general, you’re going to deal with a Boston Marathon bombing or a San Bernardino shooting. This is not quite of that level, but it is certainly a massive event that they have to respond to. That is a real test for the attorney general, and so far it’s been a textbook response from him. He did the Sunday shows. He took questions. And then we heard from him again after Monday’s arraignment.
Pam Bondi, of course, was fired earlier this month. Tell me about how Todd Blanche ended up in this job.
He started out as a federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York for a long time. Then he went into white-collar practice, and then he joined the Trump legal team around 2023 when Trump was in the middle of those four major legal cases. Todd worked on the two federal cases brought by Jack Smith, and he also represented [Trump] in New York on the hush money case.
But what really distinguished Todd Blanche is that Trump lawyers come and go. I’ve probably talked to 40 of them over the past decade, right? Todd flourished. Yes, his client was convicted in New York, but he kept him out of jail, and ultimately their legal strategy on the federal cases resulted in Trump never facing trial on either one of those. In Trump’s eyes, Todd Blanche is the guy who kept him out of jail.
What has he been up to since he ended up in the acting role?
He’s been a busy bee. In my reporting, I talked to over a dozen high-level people inside DOJ. Some people I know don’t particularly care for Todd as a person. There was a general consensus, though, this is his job to lose, but in order to keep it, he’s going to have to deliver on weaponization for the president.
That means Trump wants his political adversaries to be prosecuted, and that is something that they have not been able to do yet. Judges and grand juries have to sign off on this. They’ve largely been reluctant, and so they’re getting tripped up by the checks in the system. But he’s made it clear this is what he wants. So ultimately, in order to get this job and to keep it, he needs to bring a case against the political adversary.
Does MAGA like Todd Blanche?
The two knocks on Todd Blanche are that “he’s not MAGA enough” and that he doesn’t get the Trump DOJ away from the “original sin” of how they’ve handled the Epstein files.
I have talked to officials inside the administration, including at least one White House official who said, yeah, we feel that Todd is not MAGA enough. He doesn’t do enough for the base. But even those people who in past stories have been pretty tough on Todd said, “When it comes to being the acting attorney general, he’s done the job. We’re not opposed to him having this job.”
When it comes to the Epstein files, one administration official told me that that is the original sin of the Trump Justice Department. And by that, they mean Pam Bondi’s repeated bungling of the rollout of those files, promising there was new information — those binders that she handed out that really had just a rehash of things that were already in the public domain, her saying that she had the client list on her desk when really there’s no client list.
Eventually, they just had Todd take over the messaging. He was also the one who went down and met with Ghislaine Maxwell. He was the one who oversaw the release of the documents. He has been front and center on this. So when he becomes the acting attorney general, the concern from some administration officials is, well, putting him in charge isn’t going to get us past our biggest embarrassment, which is Epstein. But I don’t think in Trump’s eyes that’s going to be disqualifying.
Is this job his if he wants it? Are there any other serious contenders?
My sources say this job is Todd’s to lose. Now, even if you get it, every Trump attorney general has been fired, replaced, or resigned. So we’ll see. But there are certainly other people nipping at Todd’s heels. But there are also some people in the wings. One is the US Attorney [for the District of Columbia] Jeanine Pirro.
It was funny — the night of the dinner and the shooting, Todd was at the White House. He did the press conference with the president, said there will be charges, there’ll be a gun charge, maybe a law enforcement-related charge. Thirty, 45 minutes later, Pirro did a press conference, and man, she was yelling the specific statutes into that microphone.
It felt a little like one-upsmanship — maybe it was just her enthusiasm, and I’m reading something into it, but her name has certainly been mentioned. We have two and a half more years. There’s probably time for everyone to be attorney general if Todd can’t or won’t stay in the job for two and a half years. It’s a tough job under any administration. But this one really brings some unique challenges.
2026-04-30 01:35:00
美国最高法院在2025年1月20日的国会就职典礼后，大法官塞缪尔·阿利托（左）和克拉伦斯·托马斯等待离开舞台。最高法院周三作出的“路易斯安那诉卡莱斯案”（Louisiana v. Callais）裁决，被认为是对联邦法律中保障少数族裔（包括黑人和拉丁裔）选民在某些州获得最低代表性的规定造成重大打击。阿利托的多数意见明确支持这一观点，但其意见还进一步强化了州立法机构有权根据党派利益划分选区的立场。
该裁决实际上消除了美国《投票权法案》（Voting Rights Act）中对种族选区划分的联邦法律限制。此前，该法案要求某些种族分裂严重的州必须设立额外的选区以确保少数族裔的投票权不被削弱。然而，阿利托在裁决中恢复了1980年“莫比尔市诉鲍尔登案”（City of Mobile v. Bolden）的标准，即要求原告必须证明州立法机构存在“种族歧视动机”。尽管国会于1982年修订了《投票权法案》，明确即使没有种族歧视意图，只要法律导致少数族裔投票权被剥夺，就可能违反联邦法律，但阿利托的裁决实际上使这一修订失效，至少在选区划分案件中如此。
此外，阿利托的裁决颠覆了1986年“桑吉尔斯案”（Thornburg v. Gingles）确立的框架。该框架要求判断州是否因种族隔离和政治极化而形成两个独立的政治群体，并据此要求设立额外选区以保障少数族裔的代表权。然而，阿利托的裁决使种族极化州获得更强的保护，允许这些州通过证明选区划分同时有利于执政党来规避诉讼。这意味着，种族极化最严重的州将最不容易受到针对种族选区划分的诉讼。
在实际操作中，这一裁决使此前受《投票权法案》约束的红州（共和党占优）得以重新划分选区，以最大化共和党的代表权。例如，2023年最高法院曾要求阿拉巴马州设立一个黑人多数选区，但如今该州可声称此举出于党派目的而非种族考虑，从而取消这一选区。未来，共和党可能通过将黑人和拉丁裔议员的选区替换为白人共和党人主导的选区，进一步削弱少数族裔的影响力。
总体而言，这一裁决是阿利托所在共和党派的重大胜利，也标志着党派选区划分在联邦层面的合法化，使得种族选区划分若能服务于党派利益，也将被允许。这将加剧美国选区划分的争议，并可能在未来几十年内进一步削弱少数族裔的选举力量。
Get yourself a man who loves you as much as Justice Samuel Alito loves partisan gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which was handed down on Wednesday, was expected to deal a mortal blow to a longstanding federal rule that guarantees Black and Latino voters a minimum level of representation in some states, and Alito’s majority opinion in Callais unquestionably deals such a blow.
But Alito, whose opinion was joined only by the Court’s Republicans, also goes much further. Callais is a cry of devotion to the idea that state lawmakers should be allowed to draw legislative maps that benefit their own political party, and that lock the opposing party out of power to the maximum extent possible.
Callais’s immediate effect is that it removes what was, until Wednesday morning, one of the few remaining federal legal checks on gerrymandering: the Voting Rights Act’s provision governing racial gerrymanders. Prior to Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act sometimes required states to draw additional legislative districts where a racial minority group is in the majority. Callais effectively neutralizes that provision. It does so in two ways.
First, Alito’s opinion effectively reinstates City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), which held that plaintiffs alleging that a state law violates the Voting Rights Act must show that the state legislature acted with “racially discriminatory motivation.” Congress repudiated Mobile in a 1982 amendment to the VRA, which clarified that a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” may violate federal law even if state lawmakers did not enact it with racist intent.
Though Alito denies that his opinion effectively repeals this 1982 law, his opinion rests on a fairly meaningless distinction. Though he claims that Callais “does not demand a finding of intentional discrimination,” he then writes that the VRA “imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” So the new rule is really the same as Mobile, albeit with the words “strong inference” tossed in.
Alito then makes an even deeper cut at anti-gerrymandering lawsuits, elevating the principle that states must be allowed to engage in partisan gerrymandering to a trump card that overcomes the VRA’s safeguards against racial gerrymanders.
Before Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act cast a particularly skeptical eye on legislative maps drawn in states where voters are racially polarized — typically meaning that white voters overwhelmingly supported Republicans while non-white voters voted for Democrats. Without the VRA, these states would tend to give racial minorities minimal representation because the white Republican majority could use race as a proxy to identify Democrats. And then it could draw maps that gave these non-white Democrats few seats in the state legislature or Congress.
But Callais demands that VRA plaintiffs “must ‘disentangle race from politics’ by proving ‘that the former drove a district’s lines.” Thus, if a state draws a map that does two things at once, minimizing both Black representation and Democratic representation, the map will almost certainly be upheld because it is exceedingly difficult to prove that the purpose of the map is to target Black voters and not Democratic voters.
As a practical matter, this means that states with racially polarized electorates will almost always be immune from racial gerrymandering suits, because they can defend against those suits merely by proving that their state’s maps were drawn to benefit the Republican Party.
Moreover, Alito handed this decision down in April, despite the fact that the Court’s most contentious cases are typically handed down in late June. That gives Republicans in red states that previously had to comply with the Voting Rights Act an additional two months to draw congressional maps that benefit their party. And even if those states do not redraw their maps for the 2026 election, many are all but certain to do so for future elections.
Callais, in other words, is a major victory for Alito’s Republican Party, and it is an even greater victory for the proposition that gerrymandering should flourish without federal regulation.
Broadly speaking, state lawmakers can draw gerrymandered maps in two ways. One way, known as “racial” gerrymandering, occurs when a state draws a map in order to maximize the power of voters of one race, and to minimize the power of voters of another race. Imagine, for example, a map that crammed all of a state’s Black voters into a single congressional district, while spreading out white voters to more efficiently elect as many white candidates as possible.
“Partisan” gerrymanders, meanwhile, occur when a state draws maps that try to maximize one party’s representation and minimize the power of the other major party.
In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican majority held that federal courts may not hear challenges to partisan gerrymanders. But the Voting Rights Act, as it was amended in 1982, still sometimes prohibited maps that dilute racial minorities’ voting strength. Recall that the amended VRA prohibits a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” A racial gerrymander abridges the right to vote by making votes cast by voters of one race matter less than votes cast by members of a different race.
The Court laid out this pre-Callais framework in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). While the Gingles framework is complicated, it primarily turned on two questions: 1) whether a state is residentially segregated by race; and 2) whether the states’ voters are racially polarized by political party.
Gingles recognized that, when residential segregation and racial polarization coexist, they produce two separate political communities who will consistently vote for opposing candidates — for example, white voters who vote for Republicans in one part of a state, and Black voters who vote for Democrats in another part of it. In such a state, the majority community will use its control of the state legislature to draw maps that leave the minority community with little, if any, representation. And so the VRA sometimes required these states to draw additional districts where a racial minority group was in the majority, in order to ensure that group was not unfairly denied representation.
Although Alito claims that his Callais opinion “does not require abandonment of the Gingles framework,” he’s not telling the truth. Gingles was the Court’s attempt to apply the 1982 VRA amendment’s command that a law which “results” in less representation for racial minorities is suspect. But, by reviving Mobile’s racist intent requirement, Alito effectively repeals the 1982 amendment — at least as it applies to redistricting cases.
On top of that, Alito’s Callais opinion turns Gingles on its head. Again, Gingles held that, because states that are racially polarized tend to produce unfair maps, those states sometimes had special obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Callais, by contrast, holds that racially polarized states enjoy enhanced protections against being sued for racial gerrymandering.
Under Callais, a state that is accused of racial gerrymandering may defend against that suit by demonstrating that its maps also benefit the political party that controls the state legislature. So the most racially polarized states will enjoy the highest level of immunity from lawsuits challenging their maps.
The most immediate impact of this decision is that red states that previously were bound by the Voting Rights Act are now free to redraw their maps to maximize Republican representation. As recently as 2023, for example, the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to draw an additional Black majority district in order to comply with the VRA. Alabama may now eliminate this district so long as it claims that it is doing so for partisan reasons, and not racial ones.
More broadly, Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering that it is likely to eliminate any remaining concerns political parties may have that the Supreme Court might push back if states draw maps too obviously rigged in their favor. Rucho already established that partisan gerrymandering is allowed. Callais effectively rules that racial gerrymandering is also allowed, so long as it also achieves partisan ends.
A less certain question is what happens to Black representation over the course of the next several decades. Callais will allow Republican state lawmakers to eliminate many congressional seats that are currently held by Black or Latino lawmakers and replace them with white Republican districts. One upshot is that many minority voters will now need to form coalitions with white voters in order to elect their preferred candidates. It remains to be seen whether such alliances will form in the future.
Unless and until that happens, however, Callais will increase the power of white Republicans and diminish the power of Democrats and voters of color generally. The gerrymandering wars are only beginning, and the Republican Party just gained a powerful new weapon.
2026-04-30 00:30:00
4月18日，美国威斯康星州麦迪逊市外的Ridglan Farms（一家为生物医学研究繁殖狗的公司）发生了一场激烈的抗议活动，数百名动物权益活动人士与警方发生冲突。此次活动是动物权益运动中“公开救援”策略的一次大规模尝试，旨在通过媒体曝光引发公众关注，推动改变。此前，3月15日的行动中，活动人士成功救出30只被关在笼中的狗，并引发全国性关注。然而，4月18日的行动遭遇了警方的强力镇压，包括橡胶子弹、催泪瓦斯和“蜂刺弹”等非致命性武器，导致28人被捕，其中四名活动人士面临超过十年的监禁指控。
Ridglan Farms因多次违反动物福利法规而备受争议，包括对狗进行无麻醉手术等虐待行为。尽管该公司曾与威斯康星州达成协议停止销售狗，但未要求其交出剩余的狗。活动人士认为，警方的过度反应可能反而会增强公众对动物权益的关注，并推动更广泛的行动。他们希望借此事件引发社会对动物苦难的共鸣，将动物权益运动与更广泛的公民不服从传统联系起来。
文章指出，动物权益运动近年来逐渐转向更抽象和数据驱动的策略，如有效利他主义（effective altruism），但同时也面临如何平衡渐进改革与直接行动的挑战。尽管此次行动未能成功解救狗，但其引发的媒体关注和公众讨论可能为运动带来新的动力，推动更深远的变革。活动人士强调，他们的目标不仅是救出个别动物，更是通过大规模行动改变公众对动物的普遍态度，将动物权益纳入主流政治议程。
It’s exceptionally rare that the tiny, perpetually marginal, and politically outmatched animal rights movement manages to capture national attention. A lack of attention is that movement’s core problem and central organizing question. How can it convince the public to make space in their minds for something they’d really, really prefer not to: the industrialized torture of animals by the billions for food, research, and other human ends?
One coalition of grassroots activists has offered one possible answer. It has recently mounted one of the most audacious and most news-making animal rights campaigns in recent memory, and, in the process, turned an obscure breeder of beagles for biomedical experimentation into an issue of national political significance.
On March 15, dozens of activists stormed Ridglan Farms, a dog facility outside Madison, Wisconsin, that raises beagles for research labs across the country and has been accused by state regulators of hundreds of animal welfare violations. The activists entered one of the company’s buildings and extracted 30 of the dogs held in cages there (who are, under the law, Ridglan’s property). Twenty-two beagles were driven off the site and have since been placed in homes, while eight were seized from activists by police and believed to be returned to Ridglan.
That event produced an arresting set of images seen by tens of millions of Americans in the news and on social media, and it reached the agenda of political leaders all the way up to Congress and the Trump administration. So, the group, a loose assemblage known as the Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs, sought to raise the stakes even higher: They would rapidly recruit and train hundreds of new volunteers and return to Ridglan within a few weeks to remove all of the nearly 2,000 beagles believed to still be confined there.
This next rescue attempt, on April 18, unfolded much differently, when more than 1,000 activists arriving at the facility were caught off guard by a major show of force from law enforcement. The police, primarily the Dane County Sheriff with help from other law enforcement agencies, tackled activists and deployed rubber bullets; pepper spray; tear gas; and, the sheriff’s office confirmed to me, stinger grenades, which are less-lethal grenades that release rubber pellets and are often used for riot control.
One woman had her nose broken. A 67-year-old Navy veteran was pinned to the ground, covered with tear gas, and struggled to breathe as an officer pressed a knee into his back. Another man trying to go through a hole in Ridglan’s fence was knocked unconscious by police and had a tooth knocked out. Police removed a woman’s protective goggles to douse her in the face with pepper spray. Numerous people ended up in the emergency room. Reporting from the scene, I found myself, for a minute or two, also choked by the tear gas.
Police force of this magnitude may be grimly familiar to human rights movements from Black Lives Matter to the recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but it is unprecedented in US animal rights activism. The day was a devastating defeat for the activists, who couldn’t come close to breaching Ridglan’s buildings this time — and no beagles were rescued.
But might there be a success hidden in this apparent failure? The activists now hope that the images of police repression that have turned the attempted rescue into national news can be leveraged into greater public support and momentum for their cause.
“We’ve created a new narrative that the animal rights movement has never had, which is that we’re getting the shit beat out of us by police, and we’re getting thousands of ordinary people to show up and get involved,” Abie Brauner, a lawyer and organizer in the action, told me. Scott Wagner, the Navy veteran who was tackled by police and who is still on crutches today after his leg was injured in that encounter, told me that “the PR does nothing but benefit the animal movement.”
Many casual observers will encounter Ridglan as an isolated story — one controversial facility subjecting dogs to lives of confinement and experimentation that would make dog-loving Americans recoil in horror. But it’s also part of a much grander strategy. “Ridglan is like a stand-in for all industrialized animal abuse,” Justin Marceau, a law professor at the University of Denver and head of its Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, told me.
The ultimate prize for the animal rights movement is to persuade people to connect the suffering of beagles to that of the many more animals raised for food on factory farms, whose exploitation is made possible by the same legal structure that treats animals as property with few limits on what can be done to them. It is a goal that’s always eluded the animal movement: Can the public’s empathy stretch beyond the animals we’ve chosen to love to reach cows, pigs, and chickens?
The recent actions at Ridglan represented the largest-ever iteration of a tactic developed by animal rights activists over the last decade, known as “open rescue.” Activists walk into factory farms, slaughterhouses, and other places of animal exploitation, remove animals, and then bring their stories to the media. When they face criminal charges for entering private property and taking animals, they then try to persuade juries that they were right to rescue animals from suffering. Their aim is not to liberate every exploited animal one by one, but rather to put a spotlight on the victims of factory farming, build a mass movement for animal rights, and create legal precedent in support of viewing animals as moral subjects rather than as mere property.
Open rescue, primarily associated with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), has mostly focused on animals raised for food on factory farms — newborn piglets, goats, turkeys, chickens raised for meat and eggs. It has notched jury acquittals and other courtroom victories for activists defending themselves against criminal charges. And it has given rise to a vibrant school of legal and philosophical thought on activists’ right to rescue animals — and animals’ rights to be rescued — from suffering and confinement.
Ridglan was first targeted by DxE in 2017, when a group of activists entered the facility, removed three beagles, and filmed the conditions there: dogs living beneath fluorescent lights in stacked cages above pools of their own waste, pacing from boredom. Three activists — Eva Hamer, Paul Picklesimer, and attorney and DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung — were later charged with burglary and theft and were set to face trial in 2024. But in a surprising reversal, all of the charges against them were dropped, after which the activists persuaded a judge to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Ridglan for animal cruelty — a testament to the movement’s legal sophistication. As I covered in a previous Vox story, at a 2024 evidentiary hearing for that case:
Former Ridglan employees said they’d performed crude surgeries on beagles without pain relief, including removing prolapsed eye glands and cutting out their vocal cords, a measure meant to reduce noise from the densely packed barking dogs. “It still haunts me every day,” testified Matthew Reich, who worked at Ridglan from 2006 to 2010.
Last year, Ridglan was cited by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) for 311 violations of state animal welfare regulations, including failing to handle dogs “in a humane manner that does not cause physical harm or unnecessary injury.” Between 2022 and 2025, the citations allege, Ridglan performed improper surgeries on hundreds of dogs without adequate pain relief; the company has disputed the allegations. By October 2025, Ridglan agreed to stop selling dogs by July of this year to avoid prosecution for criminal animal cruelty.
But that deal did not require Ridglan to surrender its remaining dogs. So, Hsiung, a longtime animal movement leader, incensed by the state’s refusal to seize dogs from a facility that it had probable cause to think had violated Wisconsin’s animal cruelty laws, organized last month’s open rescue at Ridglan. That also allowed him to do something else: to connect the radical spirit of direct action and open rescue to a species that Americans already love, and thereby recruit many new activists from beyond the limited group of true believers that normally turn out at animal rights events.
At the March action that followed, law enforcement’s response had been halfhearted and maladroit, all but allowing activists to drive off with vanloads of dogs. Videos of rescuers carrying vulnerable beagles out of Ridglan spread across TikTok and Instagram with a moral clarity that cast the activists not as trespassers but as liberators, helping the group recruit an unprecedented number of people ready to return and break out the rest of the dogs.
After the success of that rescue, US Rep. Mark Pocan, whose congressional district includes Ridglan, rebuffed the company’s request for assistance in countering the activists’ planned April action in a widely shared letter and urged the company to rehome its remaining beagles. “The documented treatment of beagles on your property is alarming,” he wrote. Earlier this month, Pocan also questioned US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the federal government’s funding of experiments on beagles purchased from Ridglan. That research “should not be happening,” Kennedy said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
I’ve covered the open rescue movement many times and know it intimately; I also happen to live in Madison and, by way of disclosure, I personally know some of the people in the city who have been involved in the campaign against Ridglan over the last decade, though I did not rely on those relationships to cover this story. In preparation for this piece, I conducted interviews with organizers, observed planning meetings, and had countless conversations with participants in the days before and after the attempted rescue. Over the last week and a half, I got a deep look into how this month’s action was planned and rehearsed and, ultimately, how it unraveled.
The first group of would-be beagle rescuers arrived on the morning of April 18 intending to cut through Ridglan’s fence and other barriers it had set up to thwart the activists — including a moat filled with manure. They came outfitted with boltcutters, sledgehammers, saws, Halligan bars — which are used by firefighters to pry open doors — and other tools, similar to what they had brought to the March rescue. But this time, their tools were quickly confiscated by police, who stood behind Ridglan’s chain-link perimeter repelling anyone who tried to enter, as if defending a fortress.
Activists standing outside the fence pleaded with law enforcement to put down their pepper spray and tear gas, maintained that they were nonviolent, that they were only here to help dogs. “There’s no need for weapons; none of us have weapons,” one activist entreated officers over a megaphone.
As the thousand-plus activists grew increasingly hopeless that they’d be able to save any beagles from the facility that day, they wandered around the large grassy area at the front of the property in search of anything useful to do. They helped clear noxious chemicals from each other’s eyes and tried to appeal to officers’ consciences, invoking dogs’ loyalty and guileless affection. A man thundered to a row of Wisconsin State Patrol officers dressed in riot gear: “These dogs will love you more than your best friend loves you!”
Open rescue is rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence, but the presence of scary-looking tools intended to breach Ridglan’s property might undermine those optics in the eyes of the general public. The sheriff’s office prominently highlighted the implements as “burglary tools” in a press release. “I want to be very clear: This is not a peaceful protest,” Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said in a statement while the event was unfolding. Barrett also asserted that activists had been trying to assault law enforcement. When I reached out to the sheriff’s office for evidence for that claim, public information and education officer Elise Schaffer pointed me to a folder of footage. In one of the clips, an SUV is visible hitting and driving through one of Ridglan’s gates, and in another an activist appears to grab a police baton and run off, though none of the footage involves what I’d characterize as assaulting an officer.
“I get it; the police see the dogs as property, so if they pepper spray me while I’m running at the fence with a saw, I can’t be too upset,” activist Mark Schellhase acknowledged to me a few days after the open rescue attempt. But, he said, “their violence extended far beyond people trying to get inside the facility.” Police could be seen in footage forcefully pushing people who were standing on public property, far away from Ridglan’s fence.
Brauner emphasized to me the distinction between destroying property for its own sake and damaging it for the purpose of saving the animals, comparing it to smashing a car window to free a dog overheating inside. “Our goal was not to cause property destruction. In fact, we wanted to minimize that as much as possible,” Brauner said, and “only do it to the extent that it’s necessary to save the dogs.” In past open rescues, gaining entry into factory farms has been relatively easy — activists are often able to simply walk inside. But this time, in large part because the group had openly declared its intent to take out dogs, Ridglan took extraordinary steps to lock down its facilities and create additional physical obstacles.
According to activist documentation, 28 people were arrested that day, four of whom — Hsiung, along with Aditya Aswani, Dean Wyrzykowski, and Melany Brieno — have been charged with conspiracy to commit burglary, which can carry more than a decade each in prison.
“If any break-in participants, supporters or police were injured during Saturday’s violent assault on Ridglan Farms, the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of Wayne Hsiung and other key leaders, who organized and led hundreds in the coordinated attack on a federally-licensed health research facility,” Ridglan wrote to me in a statement. Referring to the Ridglan’s deal with a special prosecutor to shut down its dog sales operation, which did not require the company to surrender its remaining dogs, the statement added: “Instead of respecting the rule of law and the results of a thorough investigation which led to a binding legal agreement between the state of Wisconsin and Ridglan Farms, Mr Hsiung and his accomplices decided to encourage lawlessness and vigilantism because they did not personally agree with the results of the legal process.”
The company didn’t directly answer a question about what will be done with the dogs that still remain in its facilities, saying instead that it “will fully comply with the October 2025 settlement with the state of Wisconsin.”
Now, activists are continuing to push a variety of angles to free Ridglan’s beagles. Many of them hope law enforcement’s repression will backfire — two Dane County supervisors have called for an investigation into the police’s use of force at the event — and escalate pressure to liberate the dogs. The coalition has urged Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul to facilitate the beagles’ release, and animal rescue groups have been negotiating with the company to buy the dogs, an opportunity that Lara Trump, the day of the attempted rescue, publicly urged Ridglan to accept.
Perhaps my favorite text ever written about animal rights is political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel’s The War Against Animals, a sweepingly ambitious book that argues the human relationship with nonhuman animals is a literal state of war, in which we are the aggressors. The foiled rescue attempt on April 18 felt like a rare in-kind, proportionally appropriate response to that war. “It looks like some sort of medieval battle,” Marceau remarked, an observation echoed by others who watched the weekend unfold. But will it be effective for animal advocates, persuasive to the human public that they must ultimately win over?
It feels like animal rights is in a new era, more intimately connected to other traditions of civil disobedience.
Here is the most positive read on that day: Overwhelming police force of the kind seen at the attempted rescue tends to be used on serious protest movements with the ability to turn out massive crowds of people. Past open rescues have been met with large police presence and certainly many arrests, but brutal suppression tactics hadn’t been used on animal rights activists before, and the action’s organizers didn’t adequately prepare to face them. In that sense, the movement may have underestimated its own growing influence and power to elicit such a response from law enforcement.
Now, it feels like animal rights is in a new era, more intimately connected to other traditions of civil disobedience — a connection that had been invited by Hsiung, whose trainings for activists leading up to the actions at Ridglan emphasized their continuity with the civil rights movement and others that have been on the receiving end of police brutality. Mansi Goel, whose 99-year-old grandfather had been jailed in the movement for Indian independence from Britain, told me that the experience tapped into “something ancestral” for her, and that she hopes the violence that she and others experienced at Ridglan will precipitate greater “solidarity across all movements seeking freedom.”
The Ridglan actions might also be interpreted as a reflection of shifting intellectual and political currents in the animal rights movement. Animal advocacy has, over the last decade or so, become increasingly abstract and numbers-driven, due in part to the influence of effective altruism, which has injected needed rigor into the movement by pushing advocates to prioritize interventions that can reduce the most suffering for the most animals. Often, that has meant incremental welfare reforms for chickens, who are raised and killed for food in greater numbers than any other land animal. But within EA, there has also been a growing sense that this calculus can miss the value of harder-to-measure work, like moral confrontation and mass organizing that can lead to more durable change in the public’s view of animals. Brauner, who himself shares an ideological kinship with EA, told me that “sometimes building towards social or political movements over a long period of time can lead to vast and transformative change, which is much more effective” than narrowly focusing on marginal welfare improvements.
Of course, nothing in animal rights advocacy has yet proven particularly effective. Even its triumphs, rare moments of breaking through to a world that is totally ignorant of the scale and severity of animal exploitation, can feel transient and ultimately curdle into disappointment. The movement has not managed to change the fundamental outlook for animals in the US and the world: We exploit, maim, and kill millions more of them with every passing year.
We can’t yet know what Ridglan will mean for animal rights’ momentum — the unprecedented scale of this rescue attempt, the ferocity of law enforcement’s response, and the seriousness of the criminal charges that movement leaders now face have been variously described to me by participants as electrifying and galvanizing for the cause, and also tragic and dangerous. It has been, if nothing else, a bold and bruising experiment in broadening the movement’s tent beyond the already converted, and carrying animal rights forward into the realm of mass politics.
2026-04-29 23:35:00
2026年4月20日，狮门影业（Lionsgate）在洛杉矶杜比剧院（Dolby Theatre）举办电影《Michael》首映式，该片聚焦被指控性侵儿童的“流行音乐之王”迈克尔·杰克逊（Michael Jackson）。尽管存在争议，该片仍创下首周末票房纪录。此前，2019年的纪录片《Leaving Neverland》曾引发广泛讨论，导致广告商停止使用杰克逊音乐，甚至《辛普森一家》（The Simpsons）也撤下相关剧集。然而，随着杰克逊遗产方通过法律手段让《Leaving Neverland》从HBO下架，电影《Michael》的上映再次引发公众对杰克逊的重新关注。
部分观众认为，杰克逊已去世，相关指控显得遥远，因此选择忽略伦理争议，欣赏其音乐才华。也有支持者坚信他无罪，认为司法系统存在偏见，尤其针对黑人男性。导演安托万·福夸（Antoine Fuqua）指出，早期版本的电影曾展现杰克逊在调查中被警方虐待的情节，但因法律问题被删除。他质疑部分指控者的动机，并承认无法确定指控是否属实。
文章进一步指出，美国司法系统对黑人存在系统性偏见，黑人男性常被错误指控性犯罪，如“斯科茨伯勒男孩”（Scottsboro Boys）和“中央公园五人案”（Central Park Five）等历史事件。同时，有色人种儿童在遭遇性侵时面临更多障碍，其证词常被忽视，母亲也常被指责。尽管杰克逊在2005年性侵指控案中被判无罪，但该案件仍反映了司法系统对黑人和儿童的双重歧视。
文章最后强调，面对杰克逊的遗产，观众更倾向于观看其音乐成就，而非直面指控背后的真相。真正的反思需要正视证据，直面司法系统的黑暗面，而非回避。
The new biopic Michael, about the tortured King of Pop, had a record-breaking opening weekend — despite the fact that the film celebrates the musical legacy of Michael Jackson, a man credibly accused of sexually abusing multiple children.
After the success of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, it was tempting to think that there was a permanent asterisk next to Jackson’s name. Advertisers stopped using his music, and The Simpsons pulled his episode from syndication. Now, however, Leaving Neverland has been wiped from HBO after legal finagling from Jackson’s estate, and Michael is an enormous hit. We have clear proof that audiences are ready to put that unpleasantness behind them and instead embrace Jackson’s inarguable musical genius.
Some audience members have doubtless made the calculation that with Jackson long dead, the accusations against him are distant, too, leaving them with no particular ethical reasons to deprive themselves of the pleasure of seeing a Michael Jackson concert recreation on the big screen. (“Forget what the ‘professional’ critics are saying theyve completely missed the mark on this one,” begins one audience review on Rotten Tomatoes. “If you want to experience the magic of the King of Pop, this movie delivers.”)
Other Jackson defenders have decided that Jackson was innocent. TikTok is full of videos laying out the basics of the case and asking “Guilty or innocent?”, with the majority of commenters saying “innocent.” “The world owes Michael an apology” is a sentiment that pops up a lot.
Then there’s a variation on that defense, rooted in the long, ugly history of racism in the criminal justice system in America. Some of his defenders — including Michael director Antoine Fuqua — believe that Jackson was unfairly smeared by a system looking to bring down a successful Black man, in the same way that so many other Black men have been wrongly accused and maligned before.
“When I hear things about us — Black people in particular, especially in a certain position — there’s always pause,” Fuqua told the New Yorker. He added that an early cut of Michael showed Jackson brutalized by the police over the course of their investigation, “being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster,” before it was excised from the film for legal reasons. According to the New Yorker, he doubts the intentions of some of the accusers’ parents and says he doesn’t know whether the allegations are true or not.
“This may sound like an excuse, but what many don’t understand is how hard it is for older generations to square what has so often happened in the past — the fear that society is just tearing down another good Black man — with the reality that these men could have been, or are convicted of having been, harmful,” wrote Nadira Goffe for Slate, in an article about Jackson’s loyal older Black fandom.
Talking about Michael, then, requires pitting two marginalized groups against each other: Black men and abused children, neither of whom is served by the American justice system. It makes discussing the case even sadder and harder than it already is.
To be clear, the case against Michael Jackson really is extraordinarily strong. At least 10 people have publicly accused Jackson of sexually abusing them as children, in remarkably consistent and detailed stories. Only one accusation resulted in a criminal trial, in 2005, and Jackson was found not guilty. That, however, is par for the course when it comes to child sex abuse cases, even those in which the accused adult doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend in their defense. A 2019 study shows that fewer than one in five of all child sex abuse cases lead to prosecution. Of those, about half result in a conviction.
On the rare occasion that there is a trial, it is almost always a bad experience for the child at its center. There are persistent myths about how child sexual abuse — that children will always have physical injuries, that they will immediately tell an adult, that they can be manipulated into lying about accusations — that affect how their allegations are perceived. A 2017 study of defense tactics in child sex abuse cases found that “just as women are met with doubt when they report sexual assault, the justice system remains skeptical of children’s testimony.” Their mothers are often blamed for allowing the abuse to happen. In Jackson’s 2005 trial, his defense lawyer sarcastically referred to Jackson’s child accusers as “these little lambs,” suggesting that they were involved in “the biggest con of their careers” against Jackson.
At the same time, there’s a reason that a story about the American state attempting to take down a Black man at the top of his game resonates so deeply. It’s based on the real problem of how our criminal justice system treats Black people: unjustly.
According to the ACLU, Black people in the United States are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, while one in 81 Black adults in the US is serving time in state prison. There is also a long, long history in this country of Black men being falsely accused of sex crimes. That was the stated reason for the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys and the Central Park Five, the racist murder of Emmett Till, and thousands of monstrous lynchings. You can understand why someone would look at this history and cry foul.
But boys and children of color — the alleged victim in the Jackson case that made it to trial in 2005 is Latino — face unique barriers when they are sexually assaulted. “As Black and racially minoritised children are located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping structural inequalities, their specific experiences of victimisation are still largely overlooked in the criminological literature,” writes Aisha K. Gill, a professor of criminology and co-editor of the book Child Sexual Abuse in Black and Minoritised Communities. Both racism and culture affect whether they are believed and the support they receive.
All of these numbers and statistics and sad moments in American history represent groups of people whom the justice system bludgeons with the law as though it were a weapon, who are routinely humiliated and rarely protected. To put them in opposition to each other is a dark and uncomfortable thing. It is far, far easier to watch a glorified concert film of Jackson’s greatest hits and bask in the glee of it. But an honest reckoning with Jackson’s legacy would require facing the strength of the evidence against him, darkness and all, and not looking away from it.
2026-04-29 20:30:00
2020年2月28日，纽约证券交易所的屏幕显示着红色的股价。在新冠疫情初期，当公共空间人去楼空、医院人满为患时，我曾看到2017年《时代》杂志的一张封面在社交媒体上流传，该封面标题为“警告：我们尚未准备好应对下一次大流行”。我曾撰写过这篇文章，当时也认为疫情的威胁早已显现，为何我们仍未做好准备？然而，我却未能预见疫情的到来。2020年1月至2月，尽管中国及全球多地开始实施封锁，我仍对疫情持轻视态度，认为它会像禽流感、MERS或埃博拉病毒一样自行消退。但事实证明，我错了。
类似的情况正在发生：当前市场对伊朗战争和霍尔木兹海峡封锁的危机反应迟钝。国际能源署称，这将是全球石油市场历史上最大的中断，3月份全球石油供应减少了超过1000万桶/日。相比之下，1973年石油禁运仅导致全球供应减少7%。霍尔木兹海峡的封锁使供应减少13%，且战争和封锁造成的基础设施损害需要数月甚至数年才能修复。然而，尽管各地出现柴油短缺、燃料配给、能源紧急状态等现象，标普500指数却在同期创出历史新高，市场对现实的忽视令人震惊。
为何市场对如此重大的能源危机反应迟钝？作者认为这与人类认知偏差有关，即“鸵鸟悖论”。宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院的罗伯特·迈耶和霍华德·库内尔指出，人们在面对缓慢或理论化的威胁时，往往难以察觉其真实影响。投资者倾向于短期政治解决（短视）、依赖过往经验（健忘与乐观）、跟随市场趋势（惯性与从众）以及关注财务数据而忽视实际供应链影响（简化思维）。人类大脑更擅长应对明确的突发威胁，而非渐进的、分布式的危机。
2020年2月19日，市场在疫情尚未爆发时达到峰值，但仅五周后便暴跌34%，创下历史最快跌幅。这表明市场并非突然变得聪明，而是最终无法继续忽视现实。作者预测，若霍尔木兹海峡封锁持续至6月，标普500指数将在劳动节前至少下跌10%。尽管当前市场仍未充分反应，但类似2020年疫情的“渐进-突然”模式可能再次出现。作者呼吁人们不要重蹈覆辙，及时应对下一次重大危机。
In the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, in those days when public spaces emptied and hospitals filled up, I used to see this magazine cover from 2017 being passed around social media. The story was a familiar one to me, because I was the one who had written it:
The posts were all versions of the same thing: The warning signs had been there, we knew something like this was coming, why weren’t we prepared? All of which was true, and all of which I had been trying to get across in that story, which was itself the culmination of years of reporting on emerging diseases: SARS in Hong Kong in 2003, H5N1 bird flu in Indonesia in 2007, H1N1 flu in 2009. Surely I’d seen Covid coming too.
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Except I hadn’t. Through January and into February 2020, as lockdowns and cases of what would soon be called Covid-19 accumulated in China and then elsewhere, I remained surprisingly nonchalant. I assume it would burn out, much like bird flu itself or MERS or Ebola or any number of scary viruses that didn’t quite have the legs to cause global catastrophes. If you’d asked me for predictions, I probably would have said a (hopefully) more sophisticated version of what President Donald Trump said on February 25, a day before the first suspected community transmission in the United States: Covid was “going to go away.”
I was wrong, obviously. I couldn’t make myself see it — or maybe, I couldn’t make myself believe it, believe that we were about to experience sudden, transformative change. And I wasn’t alone. On February 19, 2020, just before Italy reported its first cluster of Covid cases, the S&P Index hit an all-time high, which is not the behavior of markets anticipating what actually happened next: an unprecedented global economic shutdown.
I now believe a similar economic blindness is at work today, with a different crisis.
That crisis is the war with Iran, and specifically the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The numbers are not subtle. The International Energy Agency calls it the largest disruption in the history of global oil markets, with global supply down by more than 10 million barrels a day in March. The Atlantic Council notes that the 1973 oil embargo — the shock that defined a decade of American economic anxiety — pulled 7 percent of global supply off the market. Hormuz has cut that same supply by 13 percent, and the infrastructure damage from the war and the shutdown will take months or years to repair.
The downstream effects are everywhere if you look. In Como, Mississippi, a 73-year-old corn farmer told NPR he is buying diesel “hand to mouth”; fertilizer is up 60 percent, an increase so steep that he may not fertilize his corn this spring at all. In Dhaka, vehicles are lining up around blocks for propane refills. The Philippines declared a state of national energy emergency. South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam are rationing fuel. Lufthansa has already canceled 20,000 summer flights.
And yet in the same week the New York Times put all of this on its front page, the S&P 500 hit another new all-time high. The disconnect is dizzying. As one analyst quoted by David Dayen in the American Prospect put it, “The market priced peace. The oil system didn’t.”
So why the gap? Why are markets, and many of us, treating the largest energy disruption in history as just another potentially bad thing that probably won’t actually happen?
The answer, I think, speaks to the same factors that kept me from believing a pandemic was coming in February 2020. Human beings are systematically bad at recognizing the moment when a slow-moving or theoretical threat becomes a clear and present one.
Wharton economists Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther call this the ostrich paradox, and they identify six biases that drive it: myopia, amnesia, optimism, inertia, simplification, and herding. Investors are betting on near-term political resolution (myopia), drawing on the pattern that Trump has often reversed market-damaging policies like tariffs (amnesia and optimism), defaulting to buy-the-dip behavior (inertia and herding), and tracking earnings while ignoring the effects of physical supply chain disruptions (simplification).
The deeper problem is that human cognition is built for sudden threats with a specific source — the punch you can see coming — and badly miscalibrated for diffuse, distributed ones. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has argued that gradual threats fail to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us “soundly asleep in a burning bed.” A 2025 paper in Science by UCLA’s Rachit Dubey and colleagues showed this formally: When information arrives in continuous form — fertilizer up 60 percent in Mississippi, propane queues in Dhaka, another flight canceled in Frankfurt — people fail to perceive a shift even when the shift is real. A binary headline (“the strait closed”) would register more sharply. But the closure of Hormuz, like the early spread of Covid, hasn’t been a headline. It’s been a process.
But you can only ignore reality for so long, and when transformative events happen, change comes fast.
Five weeks after the market hit that all-time high on February 19, 2020, it was down 34 percent — the fastest correction from a peak in market history, as Covid was finally priced in. The information that produced the crash had mostly been available weeks earlier. What changed was not the data but the integration of the data: the moment when the abstract became concrete, when Wuhan and then Italy and then Seattle made what had been a story about Over There into a story about Right Here. Markets didn’t suddenly become smart. They just became unable to stay dumb.
While I can’t see the Iran crisis causing anywhere near the economic disruption of Covid, I do think we are weeks from a similar shift. In the spirit of Future Perfect forecasting, I’ll express that thinking as a falsifiable prediction: If the Strait of Hormuz remains materially restricted through June, the S&P 500 will be at least 10 percent off its April 22 high by Labor Day.
You shouldn’t take financial advice from me, but I’m no more alone in my pessimism today than I was in my careless optimism as the pandemic was spreading. Princeton Policy Advisors has forecast a US recession beginning in May; the IMF, which projected 3.3 percent global growth in January, has now cut its baseline to 3.1 percent and added an adverse scenario at 2.5 — the latter approaching territory the world hasn’t seen outside the 2008 crisis and the pandemic. Mark Dowding, the chief investment officer at RBC BlueBay, told Bloomberg last week that the current market reminds him of February 2020: “Only when it truly disrupted our lives did the market see bigger shocks.”
I missed the Covid pandemic, even with a magazine cover predicting it sitting on my desk. The market missed it too, right up to the day it didn’t. I hope we don’t miss the next big disruption. There is still time, but probably not much.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-04-29 20:00:00
妮可·基德曼正在接受临终关怀师（死亡陪伴者）的培训。这位女演员凭借在《九个完美陌生人》和《Babygirl》等热门影视作品中的表现，每年赚取数千万美元。然而，她现在选择了一项更为低调且不那么赚钱的新职业——临终关怀师。这类专业人士为临终者及其家属提供非医疗支持，包括协助安排葬礼、陪伴临终者度过最后时光等。随着美国医疗体系碎片化和文化日益个人主义化，这一角色变得愈发重要。基德曼表示，当她的母亲临终时，家人无法给予足够的陪伴，这让她意识到社会需要这样的关怀者。
类似地，导演赵婷（Chloé Zhao）也曾在今年表示自己接受过临终关怀师培训，以应对对死亡的恐惧。电视剧《The Pitt》中也曾出现临终关怀师的角色。与临终者共事的人认为，名人对这一领域的兴趣并不令人意外，因为越来越多的人开始接受并重视死亡这一人类必然的经历。
临终关怀师的工作内容包括协助处理临终者的事务、提供基本的物理护理（如用清水擦拭临终者口腔以增加舒适感），以及在允许医疗协助死亡的州帮助患者完成相关流程。他们还能代表临终者与医生沟通，并在患者去世后协助准备遗体、进行宗教仪式及支持家属哀悼。尽管部分临终关怀师提供志愿服务，但服务费用通常在每小时25至100美元之间，且通常不被保险覆盖。
近年来，人们对死亡的态度逐渐转变。美国文化长期对衰老和身体衰败存在抗拒，但疫情让人们更直接地面对死亡，同时社交媒体的普及也促进了情感表达的开放。基德曼和赵婷等名人对临终关怀师工作的关注，反映了这一趋势。正如临终关怀师培训组织创始人Alua Arthur所说，这种对死亡的接纳并非新潮，而是自古以来就存在的实践，未来仍将持续。她指出，无论贫富，死亡都是每个人必须面对的现实，而临终关怀师的存在让这一过程更加人性化和有意义。
Nicole Kidman is getting a new job.
The actress already dominates TV and film, pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year for roles in hits like Nine Perfect Strangers and Babygirl. Her new gig is less glamorous, way less lucrative, and maybe more necessary: She’s training to be a death doula.
Death doulas, also called death companions, provide nonmedical care to dying people and their families, helping with everything from funeral arrangements to sitting with people at the end of their lives. It’s an increasingly necessary role, many who work in the industry say, in a time when a fragmented healthcare system and an increasingly individualistic culture leave people without support at the end of their lives.
“As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” Kidman said in an appearance earlier this month. “Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world anymore, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.'”
Death doulas are those people, and Kidman isn’t alone in her interest in becoming one of them. Chloé Zhao, the acclaimed director of Hamnet and other films, told the New York Times earlier this year that she had trained as a death doula to cope with her fear of mortality. A character serving as a death doula also appeared in a recent storyline on The Pitt.
People who work with the dying say it’s no surprise that celebrities want to learn more about guiding others through their final days. It’s part of a larger push by people of all walks of life to get more comfortable with death, an inevitable fact of human existence that contemporary American culture too often pushes us to ignore.
“It’s something that we all grapple with,” said Alua Arthur, founder of Going With Grace, a death doula training organization. “We’ve been quiet about it a little too long.”
Humans have always needed help dealing with grief and loss, as well as with the practical challenges of caring for a dying loved one. Historically, those challenges have often been handled by extended family members or by designated people within a religious or cultural tradition. “There may be a bereavement community in your church, and that bereavement community is what comes in to provide care leading up to, during, and after a death,” thanatologist Cole Imperi told me.
In addition to supporting people who are dying or losing a loved one, death doulas also work with people around other losses that can leave a lasting impact, like divorce, infertility, or leaving a religious community. Thanatologist Cole Imperi calls these shadowlosses.
But today, many Americans live far away from their families, and more than a quarter aren’t affiliated with any religion. Dying people and their loved ones also face logistical hurdles: The healthcare system is set up to care for sick patients, and funeral homes are designed to receive dead bodies, but there’s very little in between, Imperi, who also founded the School of American Thanatology, said.
Enter the death doula. These professionals can help dying people in myriad ways, Imperi said. They can help get the person’s affairs in order by labeling items set aside for loved ones. They aren’t doctors, but they can provide basic physical care, like swabbing a dying person’s mouth with water to make them feel more comfortable. In states that allow medical aid in dying, some doulas specialize in guiding people through the process of obtaining and taking life-ending medication.
Death doulas can also advocate for a dying person with doctors and other medical staff. “A lot of times, people just will believe doctors as the expert in a situation when there’s actually a lot of room for negotiation, questions, space, time,” said Madison Barras, who trained as a death doula and now helps people think about their own mortality.
After someone dies, a doula can help prepare the body for transport to a morgue or funeral home, assist with religious rituals, and support grieving family members. While some death doulas operate on a volunteer basis, the service can cost families anywhere between $25 and $100 per hour, and is typically not covered by insurance.
Death doulas occupy a unique space in a culture that still shies away from the reality of bodily decay. The United States has a “cultural resistance to aging and falling apart or weakness,” Arthur said. “We shove it away.”
Some of the country’s wealthiest and most prominent people have bought into that resistance — Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson have gone to extreme lengths in a quest to reverse aging.
But in recent years, more people are moving in the opposite direction: toward a greater embrace of mortality. The pandemic, in particular, forced the whole country into a new intimacy with death and dying, Barras said. “It sort of bubbled to the surface that, Oh, this is happening to everybody, all of the time.”
That’s been coupled with a rise in emotional openness, fueled by social media confessionals, Barras said. “It’s more acceptable and encouraged to share the human aspect of being alive,” Barras said.
“This is not a trend or fad. It’s ancient and will continue long in the future, long after I and Nicole Kidman are dead.”
Alua Arthur, founder of Going With Grace, a death doula training group
As more people grow comfortable with the idea of death — and search for ways to make the process more meaningful and less isolating — interest in death doula training has risen.
When Arthur founded Going With Grace in 2015, “nobody knew what I was talking about,” she said. “Now I hear people that say, Oh, my neighbor is a death doula.”
Many people become interested in death doula work after a personal loss — Barras, for example, started training after caring for her dying grandmother.
After being with a dying person, “you are often left with a really beautiful feeling of curiosity,” Imperi said. “Once you experience that, it ends up being something that you want to find more space for in your life.”
Others turn to death doula training to get their heads around the idea of their own mortality. “I have been terrified of death my whole life,” Zhao told the New York Times. “Because I’m so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it, or the second half of life would be too hard.”
She’s not alone. About a quarter of students who pursue certification at the School of American Thanatology do so at least in part because of a fear of death, Imperi said.
Learning about death is just “another way that we learn about our bodies,” Imperi said. “We’re built to be born, we’re built to die, and it’s a part of us.”
That’s as true for ordinary working people as it is for multimillionaire actors. “You can’t buy your way out of people dying or of yourself dying,” Arthur said. “For all time, nobody’s been able to get out of it.”
People who support the dying say they’re glad that celebrities are bringing attention to their work. “I’m grateful that somebody of status is bringing awareness to this very, very human work that affects everybody, regardless of how much money or power you have,” Arthur said.
But, she emphasized, that work has always existed, just under different names. “This is not a trend or fad,” she said. “It’s ancient and will continue long in the future, long after I and Nicole Kidman are dead.”