2026-05-01 05:35:00
2026年4月30日，特朗普在华盛顿特区白宫发表言论，呼吁田纳西州州长努力调整国会选区地图，以“为我们赢得一个额外的席位”。此举表明，在最高法院最近关于路易斯安那州诉Callais案的6比3裁决后，共和党人正计划通过更激进的选区划分策略，在2026年中期选举中获得更多席位。该裁决推翻了《美国投票权法案》中禁止种族性选区划分的条款，进一步削弱了该法案的效力，并为共和党激进划分选区提供了支持。特朗普去年曾推动白宫施压得克萨斯州进行罕见的中期选区调整，使该州可能新增约五个共和党席位。尽管此前红州选区划分战似乎对共和党不利，但近期佛罗里达州立法机构通过新地图为共和党赢得四个席位，路易斯安那州也暂停即将开始的国会初选，以便根据裁决调整选区。若田纳西州共和党落实特朗普的提议，该州也可能为共和党增加一个席位。此外，作者提到，由于华盛顿特区今日首次在本年度出现日落时间为晚上8点，建议读者暂时放下政治新闻，享受阳光，待5月再回来。
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: After a major Supreme Court decision, President Donald Trump is pushing Republicans to redistrict even more aggressively.
What’s happening? On Thursday, Trump said in a post that Tennessee’s governor would “work hard to correct” the state’s congressional map in order to “give us one extra seat” in Congress.
It’s the latest sign that, following the new Supreme Court opinion, Republicans will try to pick up even more seats ahead of the 2026 midterms by further gerrymandering multiple different states, including Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida.
What’s the context? On Wednesday, the Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais to strike down a provision of the Voting Rights Act banning racial gerrymandering.
As my colleague Ian Millhiser explained, the upshot of the ruling isn’t just that the Court’s six conservative justices have further weakened the Voting Rights Act; the decision is a full-throated endorsement of the most aggressive gerrymandering schemes possible, and Republican politicians — including Trump — are taking note.
How did this start? Trump is also the one who kicked all of this off last year, when his White House decided to pressure Texas into a rare mid-decade redistricting scheme. Texas successfully created about five more Republican seats in the US House — probably — by redrawing its maps, but in the process, launched a wider war.
How’s the math looking? Until recently, it seemed like the redistricting wars could have backfired on Republicans, or at best ended with a stalemate. Earlier this month, Virginia voters approved a referendum to draw new maps creating four additional Democratic seats, giving the party a slight edge nationally.
Since then, however, Florida has gotten involved; earlier this week, its legislature passed new maps netting four new Republican seats. On Thursday, Louisiana also suspended its about-to-begin congressional primaries to give it time to redraw its maps in response to the Callais decision. And if Tennessee Republicans make good on Trump’s post, the party could net another seat too.
Hi readers — if you, like me, happen to live in Washington, DC, I have some fairly specific good news for you. Today, the sun will set at 8 pm here for the first time this year, and we won’t get a sunset earlier than 8 pm again until August. With that in mind, let’s go log off and enjoy some sunshine — we’ll see you back here in May (which is, somehow, tomorrow).
2026-05-01 04:20:00
2026年缅因州民主党参议员初选中，州长珍妮特·米尔斯（Janet Mills）于10月22日宣布退出竞选，使得外行牡蛎渔民格雷厄姆·普拉特纳（Graham Platner）成为该党提名的热门人选。目前该席位由共和党五届参议员苏珊·柯林斯（Susan Collins）占据，是民主党争取的重要席位。然而，这场初选暴露了民主党内部的多种矛盾与紧张关系。
米尔斯的失败是否源于年龄、拜登政府的“后遗症”或其糟糕的竞选表现？文章指出，米尔斯的竞选策略陈旧、缺乏活力，未能有效展示其个人魅力，而年龄问题（若当选将年满79岁）和对拜登政府的不满情绪加剧了选民的怀疑。尽管她作为州长表现良好，但选民更希望看到一位充满新意和活力的候选人。
普拉特纳的胜利是否因他的左翼立场，还是因其亲民形象？他与伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）派系关系密切，但其成功更多归因于接地气的竞选风格和广泛的个人联系。他通过参加社区集会、社交媒体和数字广告等手段，赢得了大量选民的支持。尽管曾因纳粹骷髅与交叉骨纹身引发争议，但他的坦诚态度反而强化了其“真实”形象，使这一问题逐渐被接受。
此外，文章探讨了普拉特纳是否代表了民主党对传统精英的反叛。尽管存在“民主党茶党”现象，但更多是选民对华盛顿政治圈的不满，而非单纯针对体制。普拉特纳的个人经历和与本地人的亲近感，使其在不同群体中都具有吸引力。
关于苏珊·柯林斯的前景，尽管面临全国反特朗普趋势的压力，她仍凭借长期在州内的深厚人脉和对联邦资金的高效争取，保持了稳固的支持基础。尽管初选中民调显示她处于劣势，但实际支持可能更为广泛。作为拨款委员会主席，她过去能确保连任，如今虽影响力减弱，但仍是关键人物。
One of the most hotly contested Democratic primaries of 2026 ended with a whimper rather than a bang Thursday, as Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) suspended her Senate campaign, making outsider oyster farmer Graham Platner the overwhelming favorite for the party’s nomination.
The seat, currently held by five-term Sen. Susan Collins (R), is one of Democrats’ top pickup opportunities. But the primary battle surfaced many fascinating tensions inside today’s Democratic Party.
What doomed Mills — anti-establishment sentiment, her age, a bad campaign, or all of the above? How did Platner survive what many expected to be a campaign-ending scandal? Were his bold left views an asset or a liability? And can we read big national trends into this outcome, or is it mainly about the particular candidates, and the quirky state, involved?
To answer these questions, I spoke with Alex Seitz-Wald, a longtime national political reporter who moved to Maine and now works as deputy editor for the Midcoast Villager, a local newspaper. Since Maine’s Senate primary captivated national attention, Seitz-Wald has been a sort of Maine politics whisperer — a Maine-splainer — to national reporters. Here’s what he had to say.
Janet Mills is the sitting governor and was Democratic leaders’ dream candidate to take out Susan Collins. It was believed by many that she alone could put the seat in play. Now she’s gone down to defeat by a little-known outsider candidate — what went wrong?
If I had to pick one thing that explains the Mills-Platner thing, she just ran a terrible campaign. I’ve seen dozens of Senate campaigns. I covered national politics for 15 years, and this is one of the most shockingly bad campaigns I’ve ever seen.
The question she never really put to bed, but that everyone had was: Did she really want to do this? She kind of dragged her feet on running, as Chuck Schumer and national Democrats were very publicly trying to encourage her to run. She ran this very lackluster campaign, not doing a lot of public events, not a lot of energy, a media strategy that felt very dated. And that was what she could control.
The stuff that she couldn’t control — her age was the biggest factor. She would have been 79 when she was sworn in. Last summer, when she got in was right off the whole Joe Biden fiasco, the loss of the presidency to [Donald] Trump.
So a lot of Democrats were very concerned about that. It was so fresh in people’s minds, so raw, and people felt like they had been lied to by the White House and the Democratic powers that be — it just made them all the more suspicious.
This is the oldest state in the country, so it’s not like people are ageist. But I talked to a lot of Democrats, including a lot of older women, who said they like Janet Mills as a governor, but they wanted a fresh face with new energy and new ideas in the Senate.
She was not a Joe Biden — like, a doddering old person who was being protected by staff. I’ve spent time with her: she is sharp, she’s physically active. But Maine Democratic voters just never really saw that, because she was just not out there, proving it to them.
Platner is associated with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. How important do you think ideology and views were in explaining his appeal — as opposed to the more generic vibes of “he seems tough and he fights.” Or are they intermingled?
Progressives gave Platner a good base of support, but I think they should be careful in overreading this as a victory of their ideology. Because there were a lot of other factors here.
There’s his Maine-ness, if you will. He just looks like a lot of people. If we went down to town, like a couple miles from where I am right now, we could find like a half dozen dudes who look just like Graham Platner. They’re guys who work with their hands who shower after work instead of before work.
I think that resonates with people who are more working class — but also especially with Democratic progressive thought leaders who are more affluent, but who recognize the need for the party to reach those people more. He can do that kind of code switching because he went to GWU, because he comes from an upper-middle-class family, because he was a bartender at [the Washington, DC, bar] the Tune Inn. He can speak to the donors and thought leaders and he can also speak to the guys at the waterfront.
Having covered a million campaigns, I’m not a huge believer in campaigns really mattering in general. I think it’s structural forces more often. But in this case, I really do think that the campaign that he ran — and the campaign that Mills did not run — were instrumental. It’s a small state, 1.3 million people. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody.
So the fact that he was just out there doing town halls that would get a couple hundred people, a thousand people, building this kind of sense of energy — no one’s ever seen anything like that here. And eventually, he reaches some kind of critical mass where he has directly met with or been in a room with a significant chunk of the Democratic voting base. That’s before you get to all the podcast interviews that he’s done, social media, digital ad campaigns, and all of that that made him omnipresent — he just connected with people personally.
People have been using the phrase “Democratic Tea Party,” and saying this is an example of it. Among Democratic voters in Maine, have you seen a white-hot rage at the establishment generally, or was this more about the specifics of the particular candidates in this race?
I would say it’s more of a simmering resentment than rage. And I think it’s existed for a long time.
Maine is definitely a state that has a chip on its shoulder. Every summer, we get wealthy people from New York and Boston and DC and everywhere who come in, and then they leave. That’s the background music of this kind of resentment of outsiders telling us what to do.
People really resented the sense that Chuck Schumer, the Washington Democrats, the people from away, were forcing Janet Mills upon them. I picked up a lot of that really early on. They just kind of anointed her as the candidate and then said, shut up and get behind her. So, more than the “establishment” or policy, it was just the sense that people who know nothing about Maine are trying to tell us what to do — and fuck you for doing that.
Then there’s Platner’s tattoo [an image of a skull and crossbones used by Nazis]. This was a gigantic story in the beginning of the campaign. Do you think he overcame this mainly because of his specific skills and appeal? Or is it because we’re in the post-woke era now and progressives are thinking differently about things like this?
We can’t check a counterfactual, but I don’t see any way that he survives at Peak Woke — or even pre-Great Awokening, when the normal rules of politics existed.
Pre-Trump.
Yeah, pre-Trump.
Before it came out, he’d had enough time to build support and get people emotionally invested in his campaign. And because it was dropped so close to the Mills campaign launch, it just immediately came with this added valence of, oh, this is a hit planted by his opponents.
I talked to a lot of people, didn’t hear any initial abandonment, and it just kept going. And then it actually sort of inoculated him going forward because he was seen as talking about it so much. He went on a lot of podcasts, he talked to anyone who wanted to ask him the question, he got asked at town halls. He was perceived as being very open and honest about it. And then it was taken as a sign of growth — of his realness — because he was willing to admit a mistake and not try to explain it away, like most politicians. So it ended up reinforcing this perception that he’s a regular guy.
I also think, if you look at his bio, he was voted Most Likely to Start a Revolution in high school, where he’s holding up signs with Free Palestine and Free Tibet. Through that, and through the Reddit posts, we have something like an unvarnished window into his raw political id. And the Nazi thing just doesn’t really pass the smell test to me.
Susan Collins is one of the last so-called moderate Republicans, who her critics say is now no longer much of a moderate at all. She’s now facing what could be her toughest environment ever. What’s your sense of how Maine voters are viewing Collins right now? Has she managed to retain some distance from Trump and her reputation for doing what’s best for Maine?
Discount or underestimate Susan Collins at your own risk, because she has proven time and again that she’s a very effective politician at winning campaigns in tough environments. That said, I do think this is probably the toughest environment that she’s faced. It’s a midterm; Trump won’t be on the ballot. The national environment, and locally here, is very much shaping up to be anti-Trump. She’s older. She’s more established, more establishment-coded.
That said, it’s really hard to gauge her support because it’s very sub rosa. She has just been around for so long. She has these personal relationships with, like, everybody in the state and seems to just be aware of everything going on. I talk to people all the time who are like, “all right, just emailed with Susan,” or “I just got off the phone with Susan.” So she’s just making these one-on-one connections. She seems to be a step ahead of everyone, knowing everything that is going on. And I think that goes a long way.
She’s the chair of the Appropriations Committee. In olden times, that was like a guaranteed lock on winning reelection. It is not as powerful as it used to be, but I do think it’s meaningful in a state like Maine that relies a lot on federal money — and she has just absolutely opened the spigots in the past year.
You can go on her website and you can see all the money and all the projects she’s funded, and there’s these little pins on the state of Maine, covering the entire map. When this money falls from the sky, it’s a huge boon.
And a word of caution on the polling. In 2020, polls all had Collins down heading into election day. She had been outspent by her Democratic opponent two to one. And then she ended up winning by 9 percentage points. So it looks very anti-Collins out there — but I think behind the scenes, she has a lot more support than is obvious.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
2026-05-01 04:00:00
当人们想到英雄医生时，往往会联想到那些在医院面对患者奇特或模糊症状时，能迅速做出正确诊断的医生。这种形象是许多医疗程序类电视剧的基础，如《豪斯医生》和《匹兹堡》。然而，随着人工智能（AI）技术的发展，人们开始思考：如果机器能同样甚至更出色地完成这一任务，我们该如何应对？这一问题正变得愈发紧迫。据《科学》杂志发表的一项重大研究显示，先进的AI程序在诊断急诊患者时，往往表现优于人类医生。AI已逐渐成为现代医学的一部分，用于整理医生笔记、筛选潜在的药物研发对象等。研究作者强调，AI在急诊室的应用潜力巨大，但必须经过严格的临床试验验证其特定用途的安全性和有效性。他们警告不要过度解读研究结果，认为AI不应取代医生，而应作为辅助工具，帮助医生在信息不全或超出经验范围的情况下做出更准确的判断。
研究团队评估了OpenAI的o1推理模型，该模型比ChatGPT等通用AI更专注于医疗诊断。他们在模拟和历史病例中测试了该模型的准确性，包括用于医学培训的案例以及来自贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心的真实急诊案例。结果显示，o1模型在急诊分诊时的诊断准确率为67%，在患者准备入院时为81%，均优于两位专家医生的50%和55%、70%和79%。然而，研究也指出，这些案例是经过筛选的，可能无法完全反映真实世界中的表现。例如，在涉及“不能错失”的诊断（如患者面临严重伤害或死亡风险）的实验中，AI模型的表现与ChatGPT和人类医生相当。此外，这些研究都是回顾性分析，AI并未在真实时间中直接参与诊断和治疗决策。
研究作者强调，AI在急诊室的使用应由医生监督，不能完全取代人类。他们建议通过临床试验进一步评估AI在真实条件下的准确性和安全性。与此同时，AI在某些特定场景下可能具有价值，例如为患者提供饮食建议或缓解背痛的拉伸方法（属于低风险的“绿色”应用），但涉及生命攸关的高风险情况（如胸痛）时，仍需专业医生介入。尽管AI在医疗领域展现出巨大潜力，但研究人员也提醒公众需谨慎对待AI的医疗决策，避免将其用于自主诊断和治疗。例如，一项发表于《自然医学》的研究发现，ChatGPT在处理医疗案例时低估了病情严重性，导致部分患者未能及时获得关键治疗。因此，AI的应用应建立在严格监管和医生指导的基础上，确保其在医疗决策中的辅助作用，而非替代角色。
When I think of heroic doctors, I think of the physician in the hospital who’s presented with a patient suffering bizarre or vague symptoms and pulls out the right diagnosis just in time. It’s the basis of almost every medical procedural TV show, from House, MD to The Pitt. It’s the mystique that has made doctors among the most revered professionals in society.
But what if a machine could make that call just as well or even better? What should we do about it here in the real world?
That question is becoming more urgent. According to a major new study published in Science, advanced artificial intelligence programs often outperform human doctors when diagnosing people seeking emergency medical care.
AI has already, for better or worse, become a part of modern medicine. Different programs are being used to do everything from collate physician notes to identify promising new candidates for drug development. The authors of the Science study portrayed their findings as strong evidence that AI could be valuable in the emergency room as well — as long as it is fully vetted in clinical trials for specific uses.
Lest the hype outpace the science, the authors made a point to say that they feared their research would be cited to justify replacing human doctors with software programs: “I get a little bit queasy about how some of these results might be used,” said co-author Dr. Adam Rodman, a general internist and medical educator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. They warned against taking such a simplistic view of their findings.
“No one should look at this and say we do not need doctors,” Rodman said in a call with reporters.
At the same time, the researchers did argue that AI had reached the point where it could be a genuine asset for doctors in certain situations — especially in the ER, where physicians are frequently dealing with imperfect information. They called for clinical trials that would properly assess the safety and efficacy of using AI for those tasks, serving as a second pair of virtual eyes that could act as a gut check for human physicians, or help them when they encounter a case that is outside their experience or expertise.
AI can clearly be a force for good in health care, they said — so long as we recognize its limitations and use it in conjunction with, rather than as a replacement for, our human doctors.
“We’re witnessing a really profound change in technology that will reshape medicine,” Arjun Manrai, who studies machine learning and statistical modeling for medical decision-making at Harvard Medical School, said.
The researchers evaluated OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, which is a more specialized AI program than, say, ChatGPT. It works more deliberately and with an emphasis on internal logic. They ran the program through several experiments, evaluating its accuracy in both simulated and historical cases that have been used in medical training to test physicians’ critical thinking as well as real-world emergency cases from the Beth Israel hospital. The study then compared how the o1 model performed against human doctors, ChatGPT, and human doctors using ChatGPT.
Assessing the training cases allowed the researchers to compare o1’s performance to a very large sample of existing data from human doctors who took the same tests. And across those different scenarios, the AI consistently outperformed those physicians and offered the correct diagnosis or a helpful plan for patient management in the vast majority of the cases studied.
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But its accuracy when evaluating raw electronic health record data from real-world ER cases was especially impressive. This is closest to the messy reality that emergency doctors must often perform in: they are dealing with a person who is in serious need of speedy treatment, and have incomplete and unfiltered information, if they have much information at all. In reviewing those cases, the o1 model identified the exact or a very close diagnosis 67 percent of the time during the patient’s initial presentation at triage (versus 50 and 55 percent respectively for two expert doctors that the AI was measured against) and 81 percent of the time once the patient was ready to be admitted to the hospital (versus 70 and 79 percent for the human doctors).
“We can definitively say…reasoning models can meet that criteria for making diagnostic reasoning at the highest levels of human performance,” Rodman told reporters.
Two experts I consulted who were unaffiliated with the study — Dr. Sanjay Basu at UC-San Francisco and Nigam Shah at Stanford — praised its rigor, but they also noted its limitations. The preexisting training cases studied have been curated specifically for evaluating physicians’ accuracy, so they may overstate how well the model would perform in the real world. In one of the case study experiments that included a set of “cannot-miss” diagnoses when the patient is at risk of serious harm or death, the AI model did not perform any better than ChatGPT or human doctors.
Even the ER findings, which come closest to assessing the o1 model’s performance under true-to-life conditions, were retrospective reviews of existing cases; the model was not actually asked to diagnose or manage patients in real time.
That is why, as even the Science study’s authors argued, the next step should not be immediately putting Open AI’s model in charge of emergency triage at hospitals across the country. Instead they called for clinical trials that could assess the model’s performance — in both accuracy and safety — under real-world conditions.
“Medicine is high stakes… and we have ways to mitigate these risks. They’re called clinical trials,” Rodman told reporters. “What these results support is a robust and ambitious research agenda.”
AI hype, especially in medicine, is high right now. While listening to the authors discuss their findings, what struck me was their own awareness that their research could be used as a justification for cutting the human medical workforce — and the risks that could end up creating for patients.
“There’s a lot of these so-called AI doctor companies out there that are trying to either cut doctors out of the loop or have minimal clinical supervision,” Rodman said. “As one of the senior authors on the study, I do not think that these results support that.”
The authors emphasized that based on their results, they would envision AI models in the ER being overseen by an actual doctor. Making a diagnosis is only part of treating a patient; it also includes figuring out a treatment plan and monitoring for developments — as well as the human element. “Humans want humans to guide them through life-or-death decisions,” Manrai said.
Basu and Shah said they supported narrowly defined uses for AI in the ER based on the collective research so far. It could offer second opinions when a patient is being handed off to another clinician or weigh in on specific high-risk situations (such as a patient presenting with sepsis infection or stroke symptoms) where time is of the essence. It could also reduce paperwork for doctors, an application featured in the most recent season of The Pitt. Shah pointed to prior authorization, documentation, and scheduling as obvious areas where AI could help.
At the same time, AI models should absolutely not be deployed to autonomously diagnose and manage treatment, Basu said.
Individuals should also be cautious about using AI to make medical decisions. Other studies of AI diagnosis have found worrying results, especially for consumer-facing models like ChatGPT. A paper published in Nature Medicine earlier this year evaluated how ChatGPT did when presented with scenarios that ranged from non-urgent to emergent and found the model underestimated the seriousness of the patient’s condition in 52 percent of cases; patients who were on the verge of diabetic shock or respiratory failure were instead referred to 24- or 48-hour monitoring. The model repeatedly failed to identify clear signs of suicidal ideation.
As Shah put it to me, the Science paper represents a “ceiling” for using AI for diagnosis, while the Nature Medicine paper represents a floor. The two studies show how precise we need to be when considering AI’s use for making clinical decisions: While the more sophisticated o1 model did well in the Science study reviewing curated cases, the consumer-facing ChatGPT — developed by the very same company, Open AI — underperformed in the other paper.
“Both can be true,” Basu told me. “Both are.”
In the call with reporters, Manrai described both “green” (low-risk) scenarios where an AI might genuinely be helpful even to a lay person and “red” (high-risk) cases where you should always involve a medical professional. A green use would be, for example, asking a model about a diet that could help manage your hypertension or stretches that could alleviate a recent back injury. Think of it more as lifestyle advice than hard clinical guidance.
A red use, on the other hand, would involve serious medical situations with life-or-death consequences: chest pain, to give one of many possible examples, is cause to go straight to a doctor or the hospital, not to consult ChatGPT.
We are getting closer to unlocking the awesome potential of these powerful programs to improve medical care, to make what was once science fiction a reality. But even these researchers at the cutting edge agree that we need to move cautiously — and keep the real experts, the doctors, in the loop.
2026-05-01 03:00:00
2026年4月16日，美国“亚伯拉罕·林肯”号航母在阿拉伯海执行封锁行动。美国与伊朗的战争已持续两个月，目前陷入僵局，双方均声称占据优势，但尚未有明确胜者。中国密切关注这场战争，从中学习美国军事行动的优缺点，特别是其弹药消耗速度和盟友关系的处理方式。中国还思考，如果未来美国在亚太地区发动类似战争，其盟友是否会支持美国。此外，尽管中美存在矛盾，但中国与伊朗保持着友好关系，包括军事交流和教育合作。然而，这种关系更多基于现实利益，而非意识形态。中国认为伊朗在战争中表现出的顽强抵抗能力，可能对未来的台海冲突有借鉴意义。
美国在伊朗战争中暴露了其军事供应链和弹药补给能力的不足，而中国则在2010年代通过加强国内供应链和寻找新供应商，弥补了自身弱点。尽管美国拥有更先进的武器，但其后勤保障能力可能不如中国。此外，美国将部分军事资产从亚太调往中东，以应对伊朗局势，这可能削弱其在亚太的军事存在，影响与盟友的关系。例如，美国在韩国部署的“萨德”系统（THAAD）引发了中国的强烈反对，导致韩国在经济和文化领域遭受损失。这种行为反映了特朗普政府对盟友的不重视，进一步损害了美国的国际信誉。
中国认为，美国在台海冲突中可能难以有效应对，因为台湾有充足的时间准备，且美国的军事行动未必能完全控制局势。然而，中国也意识到伊朗战争对自身并非完全有利，尤其是霍尔木兹海峡的封锁对全球能源供应构成威胁。因此，中国积极呼吁停火，希望实现和平。总体而言，这场战争对中美双方都是不利的，中国虽从中获取了一些战略信息，但更希望看到冲突结束。
Two months into the US-Iran war, the fighting has hardened into a standoff, with no end in sight. Both countries claim to have the upper hand, but there is only one clear winner so far — and it isn’t either of them.
“China’s watching this war very closely,” James Palmer, deputy editor of Foreign Policy and author of its China Brief newsletter, tells Today, Explained co-host Noel King.
Palmer talked with Noel about the lessons China is drawing from America’s military performance in Iran, why Trump’s treatment of US allies could prove costly in any future conflict in the Pacific, and why — despite all of that — China is still pushing hard for a ceasefire.
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.
What does China have to do with America’s war in Iran?
China’s watching this war very closely. China’s always been interested in how America fights, going back to the first Gulf War, which caused Beijing to really rethink its military, rethink how far ahead the US was.
One of the things they’ve noticed this time is just how fast America’s burning through its munitions. They’re also looking at where does America go in terms of allies and who will stand [with] America when America goes into a really stupid war? China wants to know how this will affect any potential conflict with the US in the Asia Pacific in the future.
What is the relationship between Iran and China? They’re communicating. Are they friendly?
Yes, they’re very friendly. If you go to China, you’ll run into Iranians a surprising amount because there are a ton of exchange programs — including, for instance, pilot training. There’s an Iranian medical school at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine for some reason.
It’s very odd because China is a communist state, and the Iranian regime has regularly murdered communists in the past. And equally, at least in theory, Iran is all about protecting Muslims. And China is the world’s greatest persecutor of Muslims: millions of Uyghurs arrested, imprisoned, put in camps, forced into labor.
But it’s a very practical relationship. They see themselves as having shared interests, both commercial and geopolitical. They see themselves as both opposed to the United States, and in particular, I think China sees Iran as a fellow victim of the current world order.
China is watching this war play out very carefully because it is trying to learn a couple of things, including what the US military can and presumably can’t do. What is it learning about our military strengths and weaknesses?
The main thing they’re looking at is really the question of production chains and the ability to replenish munitions, which seems to be even weaker than people thought. People have been warning about this for many years, but one of the American catastrophes of late has been to take these warnings and write a million think tank pieces about them and not actually do anything to fix it.
That’s in contrast with China. China had a bunch of strategic weaknesses in the 2010s, which it then went and fixed — domesticated its own supply chains, looked for new suppliers, all this kind of thing. And while we haven’t seen it stress-tested yet, it seems to be much more potentially capable of mass munitions production than the American system is. So while America has better weapons, China may have the ability to get those weapons out there more.
And you think of something like the Germans versus the Americans in World War II. The German tanks, the German planes were in many ways superior, but the Americans were putting 20 tanks on the battlefield for every German one. Industry is a force all its own. But even the quality of American weapons, I think, is coming into some doubt as a result of the Iran war because we’re seeing that the Iranians with their dug-in positions, with their preparation, even with their air defense being completely overwhelmed by American power, they’ve got surprising survivability: Much more, I think, has survived that American and the Israeli onslaught than first anticipated.
That’s partially because Iran’s a big place. It’s got a lot of places you can really dig stuff in. But it may also be that America has been overestimating its own capabilities even against a country that isn’t a peer opponent.
I hear you saying that China is paying attention to what the US can do militarily because it is thinking, what would we do? What would China do if the US attacks it in the way it attacked Iran?
I think it’s double-sided because on the one hand, China can imagine itself as being the victim of air power, the victim of this overwhelming force. And so it’s asking itself, could the Americans kill our leadership? And the answer to that is probably not, because Chinese air defense is a lot better than Iranian.
But it’s also looking at it and saying, well, what if we want to take Taiwan? What if we want to use our power and project force across the [Taiwan] Strait? Like the Iranians, the Taiwanese have had plenty of time to prepare. They dug in, they know who their opponent is, and they’re expecting it.
We’ve seen also that there’s this ability to threaten your [neighbors], even if you are being beaten by a stronger opponent. For all of America’s power, for all of America’s force, it’s not able to force the reopening of the Strait [of Hormuz]. It’s not able to keep those waters safe. And so China’s thinking, well, what will the Taiwanese be able to do in the [Taiwan] Strait? If we’re sending across a million men, how many of those ships are going to be safe? And maybe it’s less than they thought.
So China imagines itself as the US and it imagines itself as Iran. In that case, it’s thinking of Taiwan and what China might do to Taiwan. Let me ask you where the US plugs back into that, because I’ve been reading that the US has moved an aircraft carrier and expensive missile defense systems out of Asia and into the Middle East to kind of cope with Iran. Are we now at this huge disadvantage if China is to go after Taiwan?
Not really, because in any Taiwan scenario, we get tons of warning.
It requires amassing matériel, men, ships in a way that’s going to be extremely obvious. And there’s perhaps no part of the planet more closely watched than the Taiwan Strait. Aircraft carriers, mobile assets — you’re going to have probably enough warning to move them back. And we’ve got a ton of them in the Asia Pacific anyway, it is festooned with American bases.
What moving stuff out of the Asia Pacific is costing America is mostly political credibility. And the big example of this is THAAD, which is this very expensive, very technologically advanced missile defense system that we put in South Korea in the 2010s. China was really opposed to the deployment, and it punished South Korea very harshly for allowing the deployment of THAAD in South Korean territory.
Most notably, there was a complete boycott of the South Korean supermarket chain Lotte, which was trying to break into China and was basically driven out of China, as were a bunch of other South Korean businesses. South Korean pop stars were banned from entering the country for a while. They really paid a price.
Now they see the Americans treating them like shit in the way that Trump has treated all of America’s allies like shit. The US military says it hasn’t moved every part of that [system] out and that it’s just moved some components, but the damage has been done anyway. The South Korean press has widely reported it as THAAD itself being moved out and the reputational cost is already there.
Okay, you said it, not me: President Trump treats America’s allies like shit. And that raises some interesting questions here about diplomacy. President Trump has not been able to get America’s usual allies on board with the war, despite various pleas and whining and whatnot. What does it mean for China that America’s allies are like, Uh-uh guys, not this time?
America’s entire power projection in the Asia Pacific is very dependent on allies. Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait, you’re running a supply chain all the way up from Australia or from Japan. You’re dependent not only upon the big countries or relatively big countries, you are also dependent upon these little island states on the way, which have traditionally looked to America as a security patron.
All of this is dependent on goodwill and that goodwill is falling apart. As Trump has made the US increasingly a pariah state, it’s going to affect our readiness.
All right, so I think someone might be hearing us talk and thinking this war in Iran has been entirely upside for China. Is that the case?
Not really. It’s more of a lose-lose scenario. They’re getting the best they can out of it, but the closure of the Strait [of Hormuz] is still a big problem for them. And they’ve been working hard to try and get a ceasefire.
China feels the pain as much as anybody else. While they’re trying to get what they can from the war, they would still really like to see peace.
2026-04-30 18:45:00
在美国，每当有人购买攻击性武器（如AR-15步枪），实际上都在为野生动物保护提供资金。这一现象源于一项鲜为人知的法律——联邦野生动物恢复补助法案（Pittman-Robertson Act），自1937年通过以来，该法案通过向枪支、弹药和弓箭设备征收11%（长枪和弹药）或10%（手枪）的税款，将资金注入州级野生动物机构。这些机构负责恢复栖息地、监测濒危物种以及管理狩猎和捕鱼活动。过去十年，该法案每年为州野生动物机构提供近10亿美元的资金，占其预算的约18%（2019年数据），成为其主要资金来源之一。
尽管狩猎人数近年来有所下降，但枪支销售却显著增长，尤其是用于自卫或射击场的枪支。如今，超过70%的枪支和弹药销售与狩猎无关。这一趋势使得野生动物机构的资金来源逐渐从狩猎者转向更广泛的枪支使用者。因此，这些机构开始资助或建设公共射击场和弓箭场，以维持资金流。然而，学者和环保组织对此存在道德争议，认为用暴力工具资助保护工作可能产生负面激励，甚至与暴力和伤害相关联。
尽管如此，许多专家认为，当前野生动物保护仍高度依赖这一税收。例如，美国鱼类与野生动物管理局（Fish, Wildlife, and Parks）利用该资金成功恢复了多种濒危物种，如大角羊和鹰类。此外，该法案还促进了跨政治立场的环保合作，因为枪支行业与保守派支持者共同推动了这一政策。尽管有提议通过对户外装备征税来替代枪支税收，但这些方案因成本和可及性问题遭到反对。目前，野生动物保护被视为跨党派的共同目标，但资金来源仍主要依赖枪支行业，这使得相关争议难以解决。
Here’s a weird fact: Every time someone buys an assault weapon in the US, such as an AR-15, they’re funding wildlife conservation. The same is true if they purchase a handgun, a shotgun, or any other kind of gun or ammunition.
That’s thanks to a law most people have never heard of: the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, commonly known as the Pittman-Robertson Act. Passed by Congress in 1937, the law channels revenue from a tax on firearms, ammo, and archery equipment to state wildlife agencies — government organizations that restore wildlife habitat, monitor threatened species, and oversee hunting and fishing. Levied on firearm manufacturers and importers, the tax is 11 percent for long guns and ammunition and 10 percent for handguns, and it sits on top of other common taxes.
Over the last decade, the law has channeled close to $1 billion a year into state wildlife agencies across the country, amounting to a substantial share of their budgets. One recent analysis found that Pittman-Robertson made up about 18 percent of state agency budgets, on average, in 2019. (License fees for fishing and hunting, along with a hodgepodge of other revenue streams, including a similar tax on fishing gear, make up the rest.) And revenue from Pittman-Robertson has been increasing, roughly doubling in the past two decades — in no small part because gun sales have surged.
Despite the dedicated tax revenue, wildlife agencies are still chronically underfunded. They oversee the bulk of the nation’s imperiled species — which now comprise more than one-third of all plants and animals in the US — and threats to biodiversity like climate change are only getting worse. These agencies need all the money they can get.
As a result, “wildlife agencies have a clear incentive to increase firearm use if they want to sustain themselves,” said John Casellas Connors, a researcher at Texas A&M University and one of the leading experts on the Pittman-Robertson Act. “There’s a desire to increase access to opportunities to shoot, to ensure that people keep buying guns and using guns.” Indeed, the purchase of firearms of any kind helps pay for staff, wildlife monitoring, and many of the other conservation tasks they do.
This raises an important question: Is it okay to fund conservation with tools of violence?
The link between conservation and guns is as old as the modern conservation movement itself. For a long time hunters were the movement.
In the late 1800s, elite and influential sportsmen like Theodore Roosevelt raised concerns about vanishing wildlife — deer, elk, bison, waterfowl, and other game species they liked to hunt. Ironically, rampant, unregulated hunting for profit is what threatened these animals in the first place. Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, market hunting drove now-abundant white-tailed deer populations close to extinction, and similarly eliminated all but a few hundred bison.
As much as Roosevelt and his peers recognized hunting as a problem for wildlife, however, they also saw sportsmen as conservation champions.
“In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen,” Roosevelt said. “The genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”
That sentiment gave rise to the conservation movement that we know today — and to state wildlife agencies, most of which first appeared in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Staffed with biologists and ecologists, these government divisions sought to preserve habitat and regulate fishing and hunting, a remit still reflected in many of their names (Arizona Game and Fish, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Pennsylvania Game Commission, and so on).
But they needed money.
That’s where Pittman-Robertson came in. The idea behind the law — named for its two Congressional sponsors, hunters Key Pittman and Absalom Willis Robertson — redirected an existing excise tax on certain firearms (and later, through amendments, all firearms) to state wildlife agencies. The law also prohibited states from redirecting revenue from selling hunting licenses away from those agencies.
The law put into practice what’s known as a “user-pay” model of conservation, the idea being that hunters rely on wildlife, so they should pay to preserve it — in this case through revenue from their hunting licenses and weapons. It also fueled the now-pervasive idea, perpetuated by hunters, that they pay for conservation.
That was largely true for a time, but over the last few decades the number of hunters in the US has slowly declined — from more than 14 million hunters who are 16 years and older in 1991 to fewer than 11.5 million in 2016. The share of people in that age range who hunt has fallen even more, from 7.4 percent to 4.5 percent over that same period.
This trend has been worrying for wildlife agencies precisely because they have relied so much on hunters for funding.
But here’s the thing: While hunters have declined, gun sales in the US have increased — dramatically so. Estimates from the Trace, a newsroom that reports on gun violence, indicates that gun sales have roughly doubled since 2000. That means people are buying more guns but for purposes unrelated to hunting, such as handguns and AR-style weapons for self defense or for use at shooting ranges. Indeed, more than 70 percent of firearm and ammo sales these days are intended for purposes other than hunting, according to a 2021 report from the market research firm Southwick Associates.
This has funneled more money overall to state wildlife agencies — just not from hunters. “The money that is going toward this largely is being borne by people who may never, ever step into the field, may never go into a duck blind, may never go out to a hunting stand,” said Mark Oliva, managing director of public affairs at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for the firearms industry. And that, in turn, has prompted wildlife agencies to cater to this growing population of firearm users.
State wildlife agencies generally have two main goals: to manage hunting and fishing programs and to conserve native species and their habitats. That often entails things like removing invasive species, reintroducing animals back into the environment, and studying the spread of zoonotic diseases. Bringing wolves back to Colorado, for example, was a project led by the state’s wildlife agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
But because of Pittman-Robertson and the ever-present crunch for funding, these organizations have become incentivized to encourage more gun and ammo purchases. Along with a handful of more recent amendments to the law — which make it easier to spend Pittman-Robertson funds on shooting activities — that incentive has led wildlife agencies to increasingly fund or build their own public shooting and archery ranges. Pittman-Robertson funding has supported more than 120 new ranges since 2019.
By promoting firearm use (and related ammo purchases), target ranges do indirectly support wildlife conservation. But they are of course not wildlife conservation, said Christopher Rea, a sociologist at Brown University, who’s studied Pittman-Robertson. This is an important point, considering the speed at which ecosystems and animal species are declining across the US — and considering that agencies are supposed to use their resources to stem such losses.
“Pittman-Robertson has drifted from preserving the biotic community and moved instead towards preserving firearms use,” Rea and Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, wrote in a 2022 paper.
Some environmental groups have argued that, by using their limited resources to support sport shooting, wildlife agencies are pulling back on their responsibility to safeguard native species. “During a global extinction crisis requiring an all-hands-on-deck effort to conserve and protect declining species, state agencies are instead abusing the nation’s largest pot of restoration funding to promote recreational gun use and other ‘shooting sports,’” the advocacy group Wildlife for All said in a post on its website.
Wildlife for All estimates that about a quarter of Pittman-Robertson funding for state agencies goes towards shooting and archery ranges, hunter education, and promoting shooting sports. But still, the group found, most of that money is spent on wildlife restoration and projects to safeguard animals and their habitats. And barring a resurgence in hunting, promoting other uses of firearms is a way for wildlife agencies to maintain as much funding as possible for increasingly essential conservation projects.
There is, however, a deeper concern about funding conservation with firearms, though it has more to do with the human animal. Casellas Connors, Rea, and many other researchers point out that guns and gun ownership rates are linked to a higher risk of homicides and suicide. That means conservation is also tied to violence and harm.
“As a matter of my own personal politics and moral preferences, I don’t think we should be funding conservation by selling [what are] essentially tools of violence,” Rea, of Brown, told me. “That’s really problematic.”
Oliva, with the firearms trade group, strongly disagrees with the idea that more firearms means more violence. National crime rates have fallen substantially, he said, relative to the late 1900s. The number of gun deaths has declined in the last few years, too, even though there are more guns in the US than ever. (One major caveat here is that gun deaths are still well above pre-pandemic levels, and suicide-related gun deaths have continued to increase.)
Gun laws are, of course, among the most contentious topics in US politics, and it’s unlikely that questions about funding wildlife agencies will change opinions on either side. But even if you think promoting or benefiting from the purchase of guns is morally wrong, it’s hard to argue that — under the existing budgetary circumstances — losing nearly a fifth of funding wouldn’t decimate wildlife agencies’ work. There’s no getting around the fact that any laws that have the effect of meaningfully reducing firearms sales would also likely eat into critical funding for conservation.
Proposals to repeal Pittman-Robertson have been floated before, most recently in 2022. That would be a disaster for wildlife, said Mark Duda, executive director of the outdoor market research firm Responsive Management and a former state biologist in Florida. Money made available by the law has helped bring back all kinds of once-rare species across the country, he said, from elk and turkeys to peregrine falcons and bald eagles. In Montana, for example, the state agency — Fish, Wildlife, and Parks — used funding from Pittman-Robertson to study and later bring back bighorn sheep.
Other people I spoke to agreed. “Wildlife agencies probably wouldn’t have been able to do almost any of the work they’ve done without Pittman-Robertson funds,” said Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, who’s currently working on a book about the law. Even with that funding, they often don’t have enough staff or resources they need to adequately monitor and restore declining wildlife populations, he said.
Jonah Evans, who oversees non-game and rare species at Texas Parks and Wildlife, the state’s wildlife agency, said that money from gun taxes funds staff salaries and research on a range of imperiled native species, such as the tricolored bat and the loggerhead shrike, a songbird. “Pittman Robertson is like the backbone of wildlife management at our agency,” Evans said. In Texas alone, there are more than 1,000 animal species in decline that need help. Trying to conserve them all with the limited resources that Parks and Wildlife has, Evans said, “is an overwhelming project.”
Disentangling the firearm industry from conservation could also have other, less obvious consequences. Beyond funding state agencies, Pittman-Robertson has also helped build a diverse political coalition of support for conservation, Rea says. The firearm industry — which tends to be much more conservative than the broader environmental movement — strongly supports Pittman-Robertson, in part because it helps sustain the animals that hunters want to shoot. And, by extension, the law gives the industry’s right-oriented constituency a stake in conservation. Even sport shooters and gun owners who don’t hunt support the excise tax, Duda told me, citing survey data.
“At a time when environmentalism is evermore polarized and left-coded, Pittman-Robertson helps continually reinject pro-conservation rhetoric into a right-leaning political sphere, via its links to hunting and guns,” Rea told me. “I strongly believe it’s one mechanism that helps maintain that long history of bipartisan support for conservation.”
The moral debate aside, most people agree that wildlife agencies need more money than they have now, even with Pittman-Robertson in place. And, over the years, lawmakers have proposed additional sources.
In 2022, the US House passed a non-partisan bill called Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would send $1.3 billion a year to agencies specifically to help them safeguard vulnerable species. But the bill never passed the Senate, because lawmakers couldn’t agree on how to pay for it. (For scale, the war against Iran has so far cost the US about $25 billion.)
Another idea that’s circulated for decades now is to place an excise tax on outdoor gear like backpacks and hiking boots that would, like Pittman-Robertson, go towards state agencies. The logic of a so-called backpack tax follows a similar “user-pay” model: Hikers, rock climbers, and birdwatchers are also using the outdoors, so they should pay in some way to protect it. And while hunting is declining, these outdoor activities are booming.
Nonetheless, the outdoor gear industry has successfully fought against putting such a law into practice, Rea said. “That’s really disappointing,” he told Vox. “That’s a way we could solve this problem.”
I asked the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, about this. Kent Ebersole, OIA’s president, told me that the group opposes a backpack tax, because it would make gear more expensive and, thus, make outdoor recreation less accessible. “You’re harming people by increasing the price of an already expensive product,” he said, adding that outdoor companies are already facing steep costs of production from tariffs. ‘We do care about conservation,” Ebersole said. There are other ways to fund conservation besides burdening the industry with another tax, he said. (Ebersole highlighted a law in Georgia that directs a large portion of existing sales tax on outdoor gear to state wildlife conservation.)
Wildlife conservation is one of the rare causes that people seem to value across the political spectrum. “I’ve done 1,200 studies on how people relate to wildlife, and that is the common denominator,” Duda said. “People care deeply.” And yet, somehow, it’s hard to get anyone but the gun industry to pay for it.
2026-04-30 18:00:00
多年来，互联网让我们相信，连接不必局限于本地也能有意义。人们可以与远在Discord服务器、跨地域的朋友群聊或TikTok评论区的人建立联系，地理因素变得不再重要。然而，如今越来越多的人开始重视身边的人：楼下的邻居、公园里的家长、以及网络列表中显示的WiFi用户。这种趋势不仅仅是渴望连接，更是寻求支持。育儿成本高昂、房租和食品价格居高不下、气候危机频发，对许多美国人而言，生活稳定与否往往取决于身边是否有可以提供帮助的人。这种现象被称为“邻里主义”（neighborism），即把地理位置视为一种资源。随着数字工具的普及，人们并未用它们取代本地关系，而是借助这些工具激活了邻里间的互动。例如，向同楼层的人打招呼、建立小区群聊、共享育儿资源、帮邻居照看植物等。这种连接也可以是政治性的，如明尼苏达州的社区在面对移民执法时，将日常关怀与组织抗争结合，形成了非正式但高效的互助网络。这种现象并非个例，而是更大范围社会趋势的体现。
邻里主义的兴起并非新事物，但其可见性却在增强。过去几十年，人们因工作和生活节奏加快而逐渐疏远邻里，转向线上社交。然而，随着对线上连接的依赖感减弱，人们重新认识到，社区在人们彼此关心时才能发挥最佳作用。社会学家埃里克·克林伯格（Eric Klinenberg）指出，60年前美国人更倾向于与邻居互动，而现在由于工作时间延长、互联网的普及，人们更倾向于通过线上平台维持联系。但这种模式逐渐显露出其局限性，即缺乏实际支持。因此，邻里主义正在成为一种更实际的连接方式。
邻里主义不仅关乎情感，更填补了制度无法覆盖的空白。例如，费城的Facebook群组“Good Looking Out”帮助居民互助，从洪水到走失宠物，提供紧急支持。社区组织者贾西娅·尼安多罗（Aisha Nyandoro）认为，邻里主义是“一种基于邻近的日常关怀实践”，人们相信身边的邻居不仅是陌生人，更是共同构建安全与幸福的伙伴。哈佛大学社会学家罗伯特·萨姆森（Robert Sampson）则指出，即使是最微小的互动，如邻里照看孩子或互相帮忙买菜，也能增强社区凝聚力。这种信任和责任感是社区运作的基础，而非依赖于高强度的亲密关系。最终，邻里主义的核心在于功能性的支持，而非单纯的情感寄托。在过度依赖线上社交的背景下，人们重新发现，当身边有人知道你的名字和日常动向时，生活会更加美好。即使他们不是最亲密的朋友，也会在关键时刻出现，有时笨拙，有时不完美，但始终在场。
For years, the internet sold us the idea that connection doesn’t have to be local to be meaningful. Your people could live anywhere: in a Discord server, a group chat of far-flung friends, or a TikTok comment section. Geography was optional.
Now, more people are turning toward the ones physically closest to them: the neighbor down the block, the parent from the playground, the person whose wifi shows up in your network list. It’s not just about wanting connection; folks are looking for support. Childcare is expensive. Rent and groceries are high. Climate emergencies are more frequent. For many Americans, the difference between stability and crisis comes down to whether someone nearby can help.
Call it neighborism: the growing practice of treating proximity as a resource. Increasingly, digital tools aren’t replacing local relationships — they’re helping activate them.
Sometimes it looks small: introducing yourself to the people on your floor, starting a group chat for your building or block, sharing babysitters, watering a neighbor’s plants. But it can also look overtly political.
In Minneapolis, community responses to ICE activity blurred the line between everyday care and organized resistance. As federal immigration enforcement ramped up this winter, residents organized patrols, filmed arrests, shared alerts, and trained one another to document potential abuses. What emerged was something bigger than “borrow a cup of sugar” friendliness. It was infrastructure: informal, fast-moving, and built on trust. And what happened there isn’t an outlier; it’s a large-scale example of a broader shift already underway.
Getting to know your neighbors isn’t new, but its visibility is. After decades of isolation and a slow drift toward digital, long-distance connection, people are embracing an old-fashioned idea: Communities function best when people feel responsible for one another.
According to Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University and author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Americans were more likely to socialize with neighbors 60 years ago than they are today. Some of this was due to the fact that it was far more difficult to keep in touch with people who lived in other areas. “Long distance phone calls were expensive! Email did not exist,” Klinenberg tells Vox by email. Most people’s lives revolved around their home base. And at the time, “women were less likely to be in the paid labor force, which meant they spent more time in and around the neighborhood, where they anchored the family’s social life,” he added.
“Today, Americans work longer hours than they did sixty years ago, and often in more than one job. Temp work, gig work, and full time jobs all demand a lot,” Klinenberg writes — as do the familial demands facing the “sandwich generation.” “One consequence is that Americans socialize at work more than they used to; another is that they have less energy to socialize when they get back home,” he continues. “Finally, of course, there is the extraordinary rise of the internet, social media, dating apps, and the like, all of which make it far easier to socialize online, or to stay close to people who live far away, or to be anti-social, but deeply entertained, while the algorithms do their work.” Platforms made it possible to find your people anywhere, leading many of us to build relationships around shared interests and history rather than shared space. As more of our social lives moved online, the everyday, in-person interactions that once structured daily life began to fall away.
“So many technological promises that were supposed to…make our lives better, make us feel more connected to each other,” says Garrett Bucks, founder of the Barnraisers Project, which has trained nearly 1,000 participants to organize majority-white communities for racial and social justice. “But the problem with that model is that most of us live where we are and we miss out on interpersonal human companionship face to face.”
Increasingly, that version of connection is starting to feel thin — wide-reaching, but not particularly reliable when you actually need help. As neighborism grows, social media isn’t disappearing, but its role is changing. Instead of replacing local relationships, apps are becoming a tool to facilitate them: a way to stay in touch with parents at the playground or pool, organize a bulk grocery run, or find out who lives down the block.
In that sense, this generation has something earlier ones didn’t: connective infrastructure at their fingertips. The same platforms that once promised limitless, frictionless, global belonging can now be repurposed for something smaller, slower, and more grounded, helping translate online awareness into offline care. As Bucks puts it, “We’ve tried everything else. Maybe we should try each other.”
For many people, not knowing your neighbors doesn’t seem unusual — it just feels like how life works now. You occasionally pass each other, maybe exchange a quick hello, and keep moving. The distance becomes routine. Until, eventually, it doesn’t.
“There was a certain point where I just realized how few of my neighbors I actually knew,” says Alec Patton, 45, who started a WhatsApp group in December 2024 for his neighborhood in South Park in San Diego. “It was kind of horrifying. I think I imagined that other people knew their neighbors better than I did, or maybe all my neighbors knew each other and…they just weren’t hanging out with me. But I just think the extent to which neighbors don’t know each other is pretty staggering. And so I was really feeling like I knew I wanted to do something to change that.” Patton says he read a Substack post about how to start a neighborhood group chat and thought, That seems worth trying.
Patton built his neighborhood group chat the old-fashioned way: He printed 50 fliers and dropped them in mailboxes on streets radiating out from his home. The effort paid off — today, the group has about 50 members and continues to grow organically. “I often drink coffee and read a book on the stoop in front of my house and sometimes, when I’m feeling unusually bold, I ask passersby if they’re on the chat,” Patton says. “I’ve got a QR code for the group set on a lock screen on my phone so people can scan it easily.” He also puts up a sign with the QR code at neighborhood gatherings. Others have started spreading the word too, turning it into a shared community effort.
The chat has already proven its value in both small and significant ways. In one instance, Patton realized he had lent the car seat he keeps in his car to a friend, and his wife had driven away with the other one. “I needed to take the kids to school in half an hour so I posted an urgent message on the chat — a neighbor responded in five minutes and saved the day!” he says. In a more serious moment, the group became a real-time information hub during an ICE raid at a nearby restaurant, helping neighbors understand what was happening and coordinate support. While Patton initially envisioned the chat as apolitical, he came to see moments like this not as politics, but as neighbors showing up for one another in times of need.
That kind of care, however, doesn’t emerge passively — it requires time, repetition, and a willingness to do the unglamorous work of showing up. There’s no app or shortcut that can replace the slow accumulation of trust. “Dude, I really do have to invite my neighbors over for a potluck — shoot,” Bucks, the community organizer, says. “I really do have to go to that annoying meeting that I don’t want to go to at 7 pm — shoot. I have to keep going back and forth with folks in the Signal group even if they’re getting on my nerves because it’s worth it.”
When that effort is missing, the absence is palpable — shaping not just how neighbors support one another, but how they perceive even the smallest everyday annoyances. “If you don’t know your neighbors, then all they can do is annoy you,” Patton says. “It’s just a sort of a sad and unpleasant situation.” He says he’s had instances where a neighbor was being loud and getting on his nerves, and finally had a moment where he realized that if he knew someone and had a relationship outside of the thing they do that bothers him, he’d be less irritated. “First of all, I could actually talk to them and say, ‘Hey, could you not do that?’” Patton says. “But also, I’d be less annoyed because I know who they are. It’s one thing if your anonymous neighbor is just being really noisy, and it’s another thing if you know that Mike is having a barbecue.”
Robert J. Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard University known for his work on collective efficacy, which is the process of taking social ties among neighborhood residents and activating them to achieve collective goals, says that getting to know your neighbors isn’t necessarily about building super-tight friendships. In his research, he’s found that neighborhoods function best when residents are loosely connected but willing to step in for one another, whether that’s maintaining a sense of order or simply helping out in small ways.” Any mechanisms that can bring people together, particularly in public spaces, I think, can create a certain kind of public good,” Sampson tells Vox. That level of cohesion doesn’t require intense intimacy or even liking everyone you encounter; it requires regular interaction and a shared sense of responsibility to the people around you.
Good Looking Out, a Facebook group started in 2014, connects West Philadelphia residents who use it to ask for help, share information, and flag urgent issues — everything from flooded basements to lost pets. At its core, it’s about neighbors taking care of each other.
For co-founder Gabriel Nyantakyi, 43, the group grew out of discussions about law enforcement and a desire to build something more community-led. “It emerged from conversations being had about police and policing and wanting to provide some support through community to fill some of those needs,” he tells Vox. “Just establishing some independence from the state.”
Since then, both the network and the broader culture around it have expanded. “Mutual aid culture has grown as a whole,” Nyantakyi says, pointing to the rise of community fridges and food giveaways across West Philly. The shift accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when digital tools became essential and institutional gaps became harder to ignore. “It was all a clear case of the government being inadequate in addressing people’s needs,” Nyantakyi says. “People in the community stepped up.”
Aisha Nyandoro, the founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit organization that helps support residents of federally subsidized housing, tells Vox that in the communities she works with, neighborism is not new or optional. It’s how people survive. It’s “a practice of radical, everyday care rooted in proximity,” she says. “It’s the belief that the people who live closest to you are not just strangers who share a wall or a street, but co-creators in your safety, your joy, and your ability to thrive. It is about reciprocity — not in a transactional sense, but rather a mutually helpful way.”
Nyandoro says that, in practice, it looks like “a neighbor watching a child when a parent’s shift runs long” or “moms texting each other to see if someone needs a ride to the grocery store.” Sampson, the Harvard sociology professor, notes that these kinds of interactions — even small ones — build the trust that allows communities to function.
Klinenberg sees neighborism as part of a broader shift back toward what he calls social infrastructure: the physical places that make connection possible. “If you live in a neighborhood with a great playground…a great library…sports facilities, green space,” he says, you’re “much more likely to have strong local ties.” Without those spaces, connection becomes “a lot harder and less likely.”
The emotional pull of neighborism is real, too. Juli Fraga, a psychologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, says that proximity-based relationships are easier to maintain and access in real time. Low-stakes interactions do wonders for our well-being. “Just being around other people can help us feel less isolated,” she tells Vox. Patton says that’s been the case for him — knowing his neighbors has improved his quality of life. Meanwhile, doing small favors for others, even strangers, cultivates positive emotions. Plus, these situations give people a chance to connect and know that others are experiencing similar struggles, which helps them feel less alone.
Ultimately, though, neighborism may be less about sentiment and more about function. After years of too-online hyper-optimized isolation, people are rediscovering that life is better when somebody nearby knows your name and your general comings and goings. They might not be your closest friend, but they show up anyway — sometimes awkwardly, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes just to stand there and witness.
As Bucks sees it, none of this is entirely new. “We’re not learning to do something that human beings haven’t done previously,” he says.