2026-04-21 05:49:12
美国总统唐纳德·特朗普关于关税的新闻发布会画面出现在纽约证券交易所交易大厅的电视上，时间为2026年2月20日。| Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images 本文出自《The Logoff》每日简报，帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，同时避免政治新闻占据过多生活时间。订阅此处。欢迎来到《The Logoff》：特朗普政府允许企业申请关税退款，但消费者因商品价格上涨而承担的关税成本无法获得退款。发生了什么？由于最高法院在2月驳回了特朗普多项关税政策，政府有法律义务退还这些关税带来的超过1660亿美元的收入。周一，政府启动了关税退款门户。该退款流程被赋予了“CAPE”这一便捷缩写，即“Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries”（综合行政与申报处理）。虽然并非所有英雄都披着斗篷，但关税退款的执行者们确实如此。谁可以获得退款？只有那些直接向美国政府支付关税的企业才能申请退款，这可能意味着普通消费者无法获得退款。如果您购买了进口商品或含有进口组件的产品，可能已经通过更高的价格或费用承担了特朗普关税的成本。但如果您并未直接向政府付款，则无法获得退款。抱歉！整体情况如何？尽管最高法院未明确说明退款流程应如何进行，但下级法院已下令推进该流程，目前政府正按照这一要求执行。这一局面会持续多久？特朗普似乎有意避免退还关税收入，他仍可能拖延退款或提出新的法律上诉。但退款流程的第一步已按计划顺利进行，且未引发争议。更广泛地说，特朗普并未放弃对关税的使用。法院仅推翻了部分关税，其余仍有效，他希望在其他法律授权下实施更多关税。根据耶鲁大学预算实验室的数据，目前的关税税率仍约为他上任前的五倍。## 本周将迎来英仙座流星雨的高峰，届时每小时可观察到多达20颗流星，当然前提是天气良好。更多太空资讯请查看space.com。
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is letting businesses apply for tariff refunds — but consumers who ate those costs via higher prices are out of luck.
What happened? Because the Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs back in February, the administration is legally obligated to give back more than $166 billion of revenue those tariffs brought in.
On Monday, they kicked that off by launching their tariff refund portal. They’ve given the refund process the handy acronym of CAPE. That’s short for “Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries.” Not all heroes wear capes, but the tariff refunders do.
Who gets refunds — and who doesn’t? Basically, only those who paid tariffs directly to the US government can apply for refunds.
That probably means not you personally. If you bought an imported product, or a product with imported components, you may have eaten the cost of Trump’s tariffs through higher prices or fees. But if you weren’t paying the government directly, no refund for you. Sorry!
What’s the big picture? Though the Supreme Court didn’t address how the refund process should work, a lower court ordered the process to move forward — and, for now, the administration is playing ball.
Will it last? Trump seemed inclined to try and avoid giving back his precious tariff money by any means necessary. He could still slow-walk actually returning the money, or file another legal appeal. But the first step in the refund process went ahead as planned, and without drama.
More broadly, Trump hasn’t given up on tariffs. The Court only struck down some of them; others remain in place, and he’s hoping to institute more under different legal authorities. The current tariff rate remains about 5 times higher than it was before he took office, per the Budget Lab at Yale.
This week will bring the peak of the Lyrid Meteor Shower, in which as many as 20 shooting stars per hour can be seen at night — if the weather cooperates, of course. Check out space.com for more.
2026-04-20 20:00:00
2024年底，我因被裁员而失去了杂志编辑的工作。尽管理智上知道不应将自我价值与工作挂钩，但面对失业带来的经济压力和身份认同危机，我常常感到绝望。许多美国人同样面临这种困境，据2023年皮尤研究中心的调查，约四成非自雇者将职业视为自身身份的核心部分。失业不仅影响收入，还可能让人感到羞耻和自我怀疑，尤其是当需要接受政府援助时。然而，Aja Evans（一位纽约市的财务治疗师）建议人们应允许自己一段时间来哀悼失去的工作和过去的生活方式，避免立即陷入求职压力。她强调，失业期间应关注当下能带来的积极体验，例如重新审视消费习惯，减少不必要的开支，转而投入更有意义的活动。同时，重建社交联系也很重要，比如与旧友重聚、参与志愿活动或加入兴趣小组，这些都能帮助缓解孤独感。此外，失业可能成为重新规划人生的机会，例如发展新技能或培养长期兴趣。正如Michael Young的经历所示，他通过削减开支、重新安排时间，不仅改善了财务状况，还找回了生活的乐趣。尽管失业可能带来痛苦，但许多人都在这一过程中找到了新的方向和意义。
When I was laid off from my role as an editor for a magazine in late 2024, logically, I knew what I was supposed to think: Don’t tie your self-worth to a job. After all, it’s just a job.
While I did my best to believe that optimistic mantra, most days — and especially on the ones I scooped up dirty, sweaty towels from rich people at a local gym to make ends meet — I felt hopeless. I had little money coming in for several months, and on more mornings than I’d care to admit, fewer and fewer reasons to wake up. I barely felt human.
As Aja Evans, a New York City-based financial therapist and author of Feel Good Finance, tells Vox, feeling terrible about yourself during a period of unemployment or underemployment is super common. “We really do base a lot of our identity on what we do,” she says, to the point that a career can seem like “the most important aspect of who we are and how we present ourselves.” According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, about 4 in 10 Americans who aren’t self-employed see their careers as a crucial part of their overall identity.
So when you’re out of work, your perception of yourself — and how you’re supposed to present yourself to other people — becomes skewed. There’s obviously a lot more to any human than their job status, but with social structures that value financial success over other attributes (say, how kind or adventurous you are), unemployment can feel painful and confusing.
There’s also a good chance that, as you’re navigating a new budget, you probably don’t have as much extra money to spend on pleasure — perhaps you have to decline dinner and drink invites, or put off long-anticipated trips or concerts. Making the (smart!) decision to pull back on certain expenses can feel extra isolating.
If any of this is resonating with you, know that you’re not alone: Layoffs are incredibly common across all industries, and a lot of people are struggling right now. Here are some tips from people who have gone through it (or who are there right now).
Though Domenica Davis, 47, had an inkling that layoffs were going to affect her role as a national broadcast TV meteorologist almost two years ago, that didn’t make the news any less difficult to digest. “It was shocking,” she tells Vox. “I thought, Oh my god. What am I going to do?”
Felicia Penza was 30 years old, pregnant with twins, and preparing to relocate from Scottsdale, Arizona, to Los Angeles in 2010 when she was unexpectedly let go from her job as a graphic designer. “Getting laid off is devastating,” the now-46-year-old tells Vox. “It’s like an unexpected breakup in a relationship meant to endure, to last.”
“Take a beat, feel your feelings, and potentially grieve a job that is no longer in your life.”
Aja Evans, NYC-based financial therapist
As Evans notes, it’s really important to sit with those uncomfortable emotions for a bit. Sure, it might initially feel productive to scour LinkedIn 24/7 with hopes of finding your dream role immediately, but you’re likely to get burned out fast if you do this.
“A job search, especially in this economy, often feels like screaming into the void,” Amy Wilson, a 39-year-old digital marketer who’s experienced a handful of layoffs since 2020, tells Vox. “A lot of effort for no results. And to anyone who would say, Every no gets you one closer to your yes, I’d like to say, Shut the fuck up. … It’s actually demoralizing.’”
That’s exactly why it’s important not to jump in immediately. “Take a beat, feel your feelings, and potentially grieve a job that is no longer in your life,” Evans says. What does that look like? Call a friend or your therapist, or just sit on your ass and do nothing for a couple of days — whatever feels right. There will be a time for applications and networking, but give yourself a minute.
“Let’s get out of crisis mode; let’s get out of the stress cycle so that we can move into a place of making longer-term decisions,” Evans says.
If you were lucky to receive some sort of severance package, you might be able to grieve a job loss a little longer than someone who didn’t. But at some point, even with unemployment checks (which only last, at best, about 26 weeks), you’ll probably need a steady form of income to cover basic living expenses. And earning that might look different than what you’re used to.
When one 36-year-old living in New York City (whom Vox granted anonymity to avoid professional repercussions), was let go from her director-level marketing role for a fashion brand, her ego took a major hit as she searched tirelessly for work. Though she was able to eventually secure a new job, she considered it a step down in her career. The woman told Vox via email: “I TOOK A $50K PAY CUT (screams from the mountain tops). So I feel poor AF. Going from director to a specialist — yikes!”
Penza, on the other hand, didn’t take a job that she didn’t want to, but she still felt the stigma of being out of work and needing help to make ends meet. “I applied for state assistance, including health care and food benefits,” she says. “I had never done that before, and I didn’t even fully understand what SNAP benefits were.” As a Black woman, Penza says, she was “deeply aware of the stereotypes” associated with government assistance: “I was unmarried, pregnant with twins, unemployed, and now standing in line at the grocery store using food stamps to buy milk, cereal, and fruit. That moment stayed with me. It still stays with me. It forced me to confront a lot of internalized shame and pride simultaneously.”
Whether you’re receiving unemployment or working odd jobs to stay afloat, you may feel guilt, shame, or like you’re regressing in your career. In those moments, Evans says it’s important to always stay focused on next steps and remember that you’re not going to be in this predicament forever. “Why are we doing this?” she says to ask yourself. “I want to live in this place. I am able to afford my rent. I am able to make groceries. I am supercharging my debt payoff. … Let’s ground ourselves in that.”
Penza tried to do exactly that when things felt unbearable. “I had to reframe it,” she says. “I had to remind myself that I wasn’t a failure. It was a bridge for me. I was doing what I needed to do to take care of my children.”
Plus, it never hurts to focus on the present positives, even the small ones. The woman who lost her fashion job describes the boss who laid her off as “the devil who wore Zara.” Now, she says, she works for “actual angels” who do “mission-driven work.”
When Michael Young, a worker in his 40s in the AI and industrial technology space, was laid off at the start of the year, he took a close look at his spending and realized he was paying for streaming services and apps he was barely using. “I also cut back on food delivery,” Young says. “With more time to breathe, I started cooking again and remembered how much I enjoy it.”
And as someone whose weeks had been packed with meetings, Young welcomed his new daily itinerary. “For many of us in transition, the gift is schedule control,” he says. “I was finally able to get back to the gym three times a week.”
Young also sought free or low-cost ways to have fun, and says watching your budget more carefully can help you notice things you may have previously overlooked. “I also started paying attention to what local libraries, art centers, and community organizations were offering, and was delighted by how much is out there that’s free or nearly free,” he says. “It made me realize how much I’d been spending on convenience rather than actual enjoyment.”
That last bit — being more purposeful with your spending — can be an unexpected bonus in unemployment, Evans says. “A lot of times people don’t realize that sometimes that spending was a little mindless,” she says, adding that unemployment can be a “beautiful reset” to be more intentional about what brings you joy.
Jeff R., 56, reignited some forgotten interests, like guitar, woodworking, and volunteering, after he was laid off from his automotive logistics job in 2023. “While resuming neglected hobbies, learning new skills, and volunteering have certainly helped, I took more joy from simply not having to deal with the high expectations I set for myself (and that were set for me) at work,” he tells Vox.
Yes, your job gave you something to do throughout the day, but it also provided structure and an opportunity to socialize, even if you were remote. So once that goes away, it’s important to bring some semblance of community back into your life. “Reconnect with old friends,” Katie Dow, a financial planner from Bozeman, Montana, tells Vox. “Get more involved at a nonprofit. Meet new people.”
“It could be community centers, libraries, trivia nights if that’s something you’re into, book clubs,” Evans adds. “Finding community is going to be really important.” Wilson, for example, joined a choir after one of her layoffs. “I realized I needed to do something that I enjoy that would get me out of the house to make some new friends,” she says. “The side bonus I didn’t think about is that reigniting a hobby like this would give me a tangible sense of accomplishment and progress in the midst of near constant rejection from a job search.”
Plus, you never know who knows someone who is hiring. Davis recalls that many folks in her life jumped at the chance to help her and ask around their circles for job leads once they knew about her job loss. “People actually do think of you and care,” she says.
Losing a job doesn’t have to illuminate some serendipitous silver lining — the combo of losing your income and your identity for who knows how long can be particularly cruel. In the moments when I felt like a shell of my former self, I called my mom or made lunch with my best friend, a stay-at-home mom with a similar open schedule. Unemployment is extremely isolating, but knowing that I wasn’t in it alone helped me get to the next day.
2026-04-20 19:15:00
美国福音派牧师道格·威尔逊（Pastor Doug Wilson）在播客《Today, Explained》中表示，国防部长彼得·赫格赛特（Pete Hegseth）的言论并未与他们所教导的基督教教义相矛盾，他认为赫格赛特是一位言行一致的基督徒绅士。赫格赛特常将美国在伊朗的行动描述为上帝的祝福，并在最近的记者会上引用圣经经文称战争受到上帝的祝福。他身上有“Deus vult”（拉丁语意为“上帝意旨”）的纹身，这一口号曾是中世纪十字军的战斗口号。威尔逊所在的教会——位于爱达荷州莫斯科的基督教会（Christ Church）——近年来在美国各地扩展，最近在华盛顿特区开设了分支机构，旨在吸引日益认同基督教民族主义和基督教神权理念的保守派信徒。威尔逊认为，美国应由基督徒按照基督教原则治理，而特朗普的政策在某些方面更接近圣经中的基督教立场，尽管其行为也存在争议。
威尔逊称，特朗普的领导风格如同“化疗”，虽然具有毒性，但能有效治疗美国的“疾病”（即社会问题）。他承认特朗普的一些行为令人不满，但认为其正面影响远大于负面影响。对于教皇利奥（Pope Leo）批评特朗普发动战争的说法，威尔逊认为教皇的立场带有政治偏见，未能公正看待伊朗政权对平民的大规模屠杀。他指出，特朗普将自己比作耶稣的图片虽被视作亵渎，但特朗普随后删除该图片并解释称自己误将特朗普当作医生，因此他选择相信这一说法。此外，威尔逊回应了作家蒂姆·阿尔伯塔（Tim Alberta）的批评，认为特朗普是对美国教会的考验，而非失败的象征。他强调，许多基督徒正在利用当前的混乱局势积极行动，而非盲目追随特朗普。
War is nothing new for America — but the way Pete Hegseth talks about it is. President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense often styles the US’s actions in Iran as being blessed by God. As being holy.
He likened the recovery of a downed Air Force member in Iran on Easter Sunday to the resurrection of Christ. He quoted a Bible verse about God blessing war at a recent press conference on Iran. Famously, he has a tattoo that says “Deus vult,” which is Latin for “God wills it,” and it was a rallying cry for Christian armies during the Crusades.
The head of Hegseth’s church, Pastor Doug Wilson, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that “I like the job he’s doing, and I like how he speaks.” Wilson said that he can hear his teachings coming through when Hegseth talks about the war.
It’s been a long road for Wilson to achieve this level of influence. The evangelical pastor founded Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, in the late 1970s. The church has since spread across the country under the umbrella of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.
Recently, it opened a branch in Washington, DC: An ideal spot to serve a conservative faithful increasingly warming to Wilson’s ideas around Christian nationalism and Christian theocracy, which hold that the US should be governed by Christians according to Christian principles.
Wilson told Vox that he’s been on the fringes for decades. Now, he’s being invited into the halls of power. He recently led a prayer service at the Pentagon, he’s been on Tucker Carlson and Ross Douthat’s podcasts, he’s spoken at Turning Point USA events and at the National Conservatism Conference. Not so fringe anymore.
In a wide-ranging conversion, Wilson and Noel discussed what his ideal Christian theocracy would look like; his desire to ban abortion, same-sex marriage, repeal the 19th Amendment; and why he thinks Trump is laying the groundwork for his Christian nation.
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.
Right now the seat of power in America is President Donald Trump. Do you like President Trump’s leadership?
Two thirds of the time, I like it a lot. A third of the time, I think: What is he doing?
A good thing to compare Trump to is: America’s got cancer and Trump is chemo. Trump is a radical chemo treatment and chemo is toxic. Chemo is a system where it kills the cancer before it kills the patient.
I like the progress that Trump has made on the cancer. And I’m aware of some of the damage that’s done to the healthy tissues by his management style, his leadership style. But politics is the art of the possible.
I hear you saying: President Trump is getting us closer to the Christian nation that I want. He also acts in ways that contradict what Christ preaches in the Bible. And he is often a bad role model, right? Do you have any reservations, being a pastor, about letting Trump off the hook?
If I did let him off the hook, then I would have reservations about that. But I really haven’t. The president needs Christ. But we live in a topsy-turvy world, because there are some of his policies that are far closer to the biblical Christian position than some sanctimonious Christians who disapprove of his mean tweets and his behavior.
In the congregation I pastor, we don’t have any Trumpkin, wild-eyed supporters where no matter what Trump does, it’s always good. When Trump misbehaves, everybody laughs. We budgeted for that. That’s bad. And we know it’s bad and we say it’s bad. But we don’t have Trump derangement syndrome.
When he does good things that thrill us, we’re thrilled. I don’t mind saying that there are a whole range of issues where Trump’s behavior has thrilled me, and others that I just heartily disapprove of. And I don’t think I’m setting a poor example for our people. When I say what I think for, of, about both of those categories.
Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, attends a Communion of Reformed Evangelical Church. And that’s why I think people mention you in the same breath.
“In the world I live in, conservative, evangelical leaders are willing to oppose Trump where they think he’s wrong and they’re willing to support him where they think he’s right.”
Correct.
The secretary of defense has had opportunities — ample opportunities of late — to speak publicly in front of the American people. Do you hear your church’s teachings when he speaks?
Yes.
How so?
Let me flip it around. I don’t hear anything from him that contradicts what we teach, and I believe that he’s a consistent Christian gentleman. I like what he’s doing. I like the job he’s doing, and I like how he speaks. I’ve not heard anything that contradicts what we would teach from the pulpit.
He has spoken of the war in Iran in religious terms. He also suggests that God is on America’s side. God is rooting for America in this war. I think the thing that people struggle with is the idea that God would be on board when you see civilian casualties like this school in Iran with the children — [more than] 150 people killed.
That happens, and then the secretary of defense says: God’s on our side. Can you help us understand why that feels right to you?
The first thing I would say is that no answer should try to pretend that war isn’t horrible, okay? In any war, horrible things will happen.
But when you look at a regime that killed, what, 35 to 40,000 of their own people in the last month or so, if you’re looking at a regime where a woman can be executed for having been raped? We have a lot of problems, a lot of moral problems. We are not a moral paragon. But if you put this, the Western civilization that we have and the Islamic Sharia state that they have in Iran, I believe that it’s not a morally ambiguous situation at all.
The war has certainly divided Christians. Pope Leo wrote, “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” What do you make of his statements?
I’d say he needs to read his Old Testament more. Psalm 144:1, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my fingers for battle.” Pope Leo, before he was the pope, was just sort of an ordinary Democratic leftist critic of Trump.
Hmm.
And in the recent spat that Trump and the pope had, it was just Trump dealing with a political opponent, which is what the pope was being. I don’t think the pope was acting in the role of a religious leader executing the scripture there. I think he was just stating his political convictions.
“God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”
That strikes you as just a political opinion, just a criticism of President Trump?
Yeah, absolutely. Because when you have people who are very selective in their indignation…when you look at the kind of violence that the Iranian regime perpetrates against their own people — like 40,000 people dead — and they did it on purpose as opposed to blowing up a school by accident, and the pope is silent on that kind of thing, and then he turns to go after Trump for conducting this war. I don’t see equal weights and measures there. I don’t think Pope Leo is being honest.
President Trump posted a meme depicting himself as Jesus Christ. He deleted it, but it struck many Christians, including many conservative Christians, as really appalling. What was your gut reaction to that? And then when you had time to think it through, where did you land on that?
My first reaction [was] — I tweeted about it, I said: Somebody needs to figure out how to put this picture onto black velvet so that it can be blasphemous and tacky. The picture was blasphemous. The president’s explanation afterward was that he thought it was a doctor figure, not Jesus.
Do you believe him?
I find that’s a stretch, but I’m willing to accept it. If he took the picture down and said that portraying himself as Jesus is not what he intended, at least we got that. That was a very good thing. But I think they’ve gotta do better when it comes to social media management. That was a blasphemous image. And blasphemy is no good, no matter who does it.
What is the penalty for blasphemy?
It would depend. It’s like first-degree murder down to manslaughter. So there are varying degrees. The worst penalty in the Old Testament for blasphemy was capital punishment.
Let me ask you one last question. There’s a writer, Tim Alberta. He comes from an evangelical background. He tweeted this the other day in response to President Trump and the image: “My conviction remains: God did not ordain Donald Trump to rescue the American church, or revive the American church, or redeem the American church. God ordained Donald Trump to test the American church. And the American church has failed.” What do you think God is trying to do with President Trump?
I agree with everything in that tweet right up to the last line. I disagree with the last line. I think that Trump is a test. This goes back to what I said earlier about chemo. I think that the tumultuous times that we’re living in really are a test. But in many ways, I’ve been greatly heartened at how many Christians have gotten to work taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the chaos of our times.
I think Tim Alberta’s tweet seemed to indicate that we failed because all the Christians fell in lockstep behind Donald Trump and, and didn’t stand up and challenge him. But in the world I live in, conservative, evangelical leaders are willing to oppose Trump where they think he’s wrong and they’re willing to support him where they think he’s right. And I wouldn’t call that failure.
2026-04-20 18:30:00
副总统JD·万斯手持一个高度先进的追踪设备，该设备可被政府用来监控他的所有行动。你可能也在口袋里携带了类似的追踪设备，警方甚至特朗普政府都可以借此追踪你的行踪。如果你使用手机，你的位置信息会持续被暴露。手机通常通过连接附近的通信塔或“基站”来接收信号，因此你的手机运营商（以及警方）可以通过追踪你连接的基站来大致了解你的位置。许多智能手机用户还会使用依赖GPS的软件来精确确定自己的位置，这就是为什么Uber能准确找到你的位置来接你。十年前，在卡彭特诉美国案（2018年）中，最高法院裁定执法部门通常需要获得搜查令才能从运营商处获取你的位置信息。本周一（4月27日），法院将审理后续案件——查特里诉美国案，该案件提出了卡彭特案未解决的多个问题。例如，当警方获得搜查令使用手机数据时，该搜查令应包含哪些内容？允许警方获取多少人的位置信息？政府何时可以获取无辜人士的位置数据？如果用户自愿使用像谷歌地图中用于追踪位置的服务，是否会影响隐私保护？互联网公司是否只需提供匿名数据，而何时需要披露用户身份？更广泛地说，现代技术使政府能够以宪法制定时难以想象的方式侵犯每个人的隐私。最高法院对此问题非常清楚，并在过去几十年里努力确保其对第四修正案的解释（限制政府在未获许可的情况下搜查个人、住宅、文件和物品）能跟上技术进步的步伐。正如法院在基洛诉美国案（2001年）中所指出的，目标是“确保在第四修正案通过时存在的隐私水平不受政府侵犯”。然而，法院对这一公民自由主义项目的承诺也显得不稳定。卡彭特案最初确立了警方在使用手机数据追踪嫌疑人时必须获得搜查令，但该案以5比4的投票结果通过，且两位多数派大法官——鲁斯·巴德·金斯伯格和斯蒂芬·布雷耶已离任（尽管布雷耶被凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊取代，后者通常持相似观点）。尼尔·戈萨奇在该案中撰写了混乱的反对意见，认为过去六十年的第四修正案相关判例大多错误。因此，戈萨奇被视为一个不确定因素，他的投票在查特里案中难以预测。
查特里案涉及“地理围栏”搜查令，即警方可以获取特定时间段内曾在某一区域的人的位置数据。在弗吉尼亚州米德洛斯汀的一起银行抢劫案调查中，警方获得了一项搜查令，要求谷歌提供在抢劫发生前一小时曾在银行或附近教堂区域的人的位置数据。谷歌拥有这些信息，是因为其“位置历史”功能会追踪并存储许多手机的位置。这些数据可用于识别使用谷歌地图等应用的用户，也可用于分析用户可能看到的广告。政府在简报中强调，只有约三分之一的谷歌账户用户启用了“位置历史”功能，而被告律师则指出，超过5亿用户已启用该功能。搜查令还规定了一个三步流程，以限制政府使用位置信息的能力：首先，谷歌提供匿名信息，涉及19名在特定区域出现的人；随后，警方请求并获取其中9人的具体位置信息；最后，警方获取这三人身份，包括查特里本人，他最终因抢劫罪被定罪。因此，查特里案并非警方完全无视宪法，也不是他们可以随意调查的案例。警方确实获得了搜查令，并且该令限定了追踪范围和获取身份的程序。问题是，这种搜查令和程序是否足够，或者宪法是否要求更严格的限制（或更宽松的权限）。
最高法院对第四修正案的现代理解始于1967年的卡兹诉美国案，该案确立了警方在监听电话对话前必须获得搜查令。然而，卡兹案确立的“合理隐私期待”原则较为模糊。正如约翰·马歇尔·哈兰大法官在附议意见中总结的，第四修正案案件通常取决于个人是否对警方的搜查有“合理的隐私期待”。在后续案件中，法院进一步解释了这一概念。例如，尽管卡兹案保护了电话对话内容，但1979年的史密斯诉马里兰州案指出，警方无需搜查令即可获取用户拨打的电话号码，因为这些号码必须通过第三方（电话公司）传递。类似地，虽然第四修正案通常要求警方在未经同意的情况下搜查住宅需获得搜查令，但如果警察在公共街道上看到某人正在犯罪，他们并未违反该修正案。在加利福尼亚诉西拉洛案（1986年）中，法院表示：“第四修正案并未要求警方在公共街道上经过住宅时必须遮住眼睛。”然而，进入21世纪后，法院开始担忧其20世纪的判例未能充分保护隐私免受过度执法的侵害。例如，在基洛案中，联邦特工使用热成像设备检测住宅内部温度，发现异常高温后申请搜查令，最终查获大麻。根据西拉洛案的判例，特工可能无需搜查令即可使用该设备，但法院认为，如果不更新对第四修正案的理解，警察技术可能会侵蚀该修正案保障的隐私权。因此，法院裁定，当警方使用“未普遍使用”的技术调查住宅时，必须获得搜查令。同样，在卡彭特案中，五位大法官裁定执法部门通常需要搜查令才能使用某些手机位置数据追踪嫌疑人。根据史密斯案，政府有理由认为这些数据不受第四修正案保护，因为用户自愿将位置信息共享给运营商。但多数意见认为，这种无限制的访问可能让政府窥探到个人最私密的生活。卡彭特案指出，位置数据不仅揭示个人的行动轨迹，还可能暴露其家庭、政治、职业、宗教和性取向等关联。因此，政府在追踪某人是否参加工会集会、面试新工作或与家人或上司不认同的人发生关系前，应获得搜查令。
然而，涉及新技术的第四修正案案件充满不确定性。查特里案中的一个关键问题是，法院是否仍普遍认为技术进步可能侵蚀第四修正案的保护。卡彭特案以5比4通过，但两位多数派大法官已离任，其中一位被更保守的艾米·康妮·巴雷特取代，另一位则由布雷特·卡瓦诺取代。查特里案是卡瓦诺首次参与此类案件，他是否支持扩大第四修正案的适用范围尚不明确。此外，戈萨奇在卡彭特案中反对意见认为，应放弃卡兹案中的“合理隐私期待”框架，转而关注手机用户是否拥有该数据的所有权。由于戈萨奇的反对意见过于注重理论而缺乏实际案例的指导，他的投票方向难以预测（尽管查特里案的律师在简报中详细讨论了财产法）。因此，查特里案的判决结果存在不确定性。我们无法准确了解几位关键大法官对第四修正案的态度，而法院最近的判例也表明，律师不能再依赖先例来预测该修正案如何适用于新技术。然而，此案的利害关系极高。如果法院允许政府过度获取位置信息，特朗普政府可能获得参加政治集会等行为的多年数据。正如卡彭特案所述，政府可以通过手机追踪你的政治、商业、宗教和性取向关系。同时，警方应能利用手机数据追踪并逮捕银行劫匪。因此，问题在于法院是否能找到一种方法，让警方使用手机数据协助执法，同时不侵犯无辜者的权利。第四修正案并未设想一个没有警方调查的世界，而是要求警方在进行某些隐私侵犯行为前获得搜查令，并限制该搜查令的授权范围。关键在于，这个不断变化的法院是否能正确平衡隐私权与执法需求。
Check your pocket. You’re probably carrying a tracking device that will allow the police — or even the Trump administration — to track every move that you make.
If you use a cellphone, you are unavoidably revealing your location all the time. Cellphones typically receive service by connecting to a nearby communications tower or other “cell site,” so your cellular provider (and, potentially, the police) can get a decent sense of where you are located by tracking which cell site your phone is currently connected with. Many smartphone users also use apps that rely on GPS to precisely determine their location. That’s why Uber knows where to pick you up when you summon a car.
Nearly a decade ago, in Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court determined that law enforcement typically must secure a warrant before they can obtain data revealing where you’ve been from your cellular provider. On Monday, April 27, the Court will hear a follow-up case, known as Chatrie v. United States, which raises several questions that were not answered by Carpenter.
For starters, when police do obtain a warrant allowing them to use cellphone data, what should the warrant say — and just how much location information should the warrant permit the police to learn about how many people? When may the government obtain location data about innocent people who are not suspected of a crime? Does it matter if a cellphone user voluntarily opts into a service, such as the service Google uses to track their location when they ask for directions on Google Maps, that can reveal an extraordinary amount of information about where they’ve been? Should internet-based companies turn over only anonymized data, and when should the identity of a particular cellphone user be revealed?
More broadly, modern technology enables the government to invade everyone’s privacy in ways that would have been unimaginable when the Constitution was framed. The Supreme Court is well aware of this problem, and it has spent the past several decades trying to make sure that its interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which constrains when the government may search our “persons, houses, papers, and effects” for evidence of a crime, keeps up with technological progress.
As the Court indicated in Kyllo v. United States (2001), the goal is to ensure the “preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” More advanced surveillance technology demands more robust constitutional safeguards.
But the Court’s commitment to this civil libertarian project is also precarious. Carpenter, the case that initially established that police must obtain a warrant before using your cell phone data to figure out where you’ve been, was a 5-4 decision. And two members of the majority in Carpenter, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are no longer on the Court (although Breyer was replaced by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who generally shares his approach to constitutional privacy cases). Justice Neil Gorsuch also wrote a chaotic dissent in Carpenter, suggesting that most of the past six decades’ worth of Supreme Court cases interpreting the Fourth Amendment are wrong. So it’s fair to say that Gorsuch is a wild card whose vote in Chatrie is difficult to predict.
It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the Supreme Court is still committed to preserving Americans’ privacy even as technology advances — and whether there are still five votes for the civil libertarian approach taken in Carpenter.
Chatrie concerns “geofence” warrants, court orders that permit police to obtain locational data from many people who were in a certain area at a certain time.
During their investigation of a bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, police obtained a warrant calling for Google to turn over location data on anyone who was present near the bank within an hour of the robbery. The warrant drew a circle with a 150-meter radius that included both the bank and a nearby church.
Google had this information because of an optional feature called “Location History,” which tracks and stores where many cellphones are located. This data can then be used to pinpoint users who use apps like Google Maps to help them navigate, and also to collect data that Google can use to determine which ads are shown to which customers.
The government emphasizes in its brief that “only about one-third of active Google account holders actually opted into the Location History service,” while lawyers for the defendant, Okello Chatrie, point out that “over 500 million Google users have Location History enabled.”
The warrant also laid out a three-step process imposing some limits on the government’s ability to use the location information it obtained. At the first stage, Google provided anonymized information on 19 individuals who were present within the circle during the relevant period. Police then requested and received more location data on nine of these individuals, essentially showing law enforcement where these nine people were shortly before and shortly after the original one-hour period. Police then sought and received the identity of three of these individuals, including Chatrie, who was eventually convicted of the robbery.
Chatrie, in other words, is not a case where police simply ignored the Constitution, or where they were given free rein to conduct whatever investigation they wanted. Law enforcement did, in fact, obtain a warrant before it used geolocation data to track down Chatrie. And that warrant did, in fact, lay out a process that limited law enforcement’s ability to track too many people or to learn the identities of the people who were tracked.
The question is whether this particular warrant and this particular process were good enough, or whether the Constitution requires more (or, for that matter, less). And, as it turns out, the Supreme Court’s previous case law is not very helpful if you want to predict how the Court will resolve Fourth Amendment cases concerning new technologies.
The Court’s modern understanding of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” begins with Katz v. United States (1967), which held that police must obtain a warrant before they can listen to someone’s phone conversations. The broader rule that emerged from Katz, however, is quite vague. As Justice John Marshall Harlan summarized it in a concurring opinion, Fourth Amendment cases often turn on whether a person searched by police had a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
The Court fleshed out what this phrase means in later cases. Though Katz held that the actual contents of a phone conversation are protected by the Fourth Amendment, for example, the Court held in Smith v. Maryland (1979) that police may learn which numbers a phone user dialed without obtaining a warrant. The Court reasoned that, while people reasonably expect that no one will listen in on their phone conversations, no one can reasonably think that the numbers they dial are private because these numbers must be conveyed to a third party — the phone company — before that company can connect their call.
Similarly, while the Fourth Amendment typically requires police to obtain a warrant before searching someone’s home without their consent, if a police officer witnesses someone committing a crime through the window of their home while the officer is standing on a public street, the officer has not violated the Fourth Amendment. As the Court put it in California v. Ciraolo (1986), “the Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares.”
As the sun rose on the 21st century, however, the Court began to worry that the fine distinctions it drew in its 20th-century cases no longer gave adequate protection against overzealous police.
In Kyllo, for example, a federal agent used a thermal-imaging device on a criminal suspect’s home, which allowed the agent to detect if parts of the home were unusually hot. After discovering that parts of the home were, in fact, “substantially warmer than neighboring homes,” the agent used that evidence to obtain a warrant to search the home for marijuana — the heat came from high-powered lights used to grow cannabis.
Under cases like Ciraolo, this agent had a strong argument that he could use this device without first obtaining a warrant. If law enforcement officers may gather evidence of a crime by peering into someone’s windows from a nearby street, why couldn’t they also measure the temperature of a house from that same street? But a majority of the justices worried in Kyllo that, if they do not update their understanding of the Fourth Amendment to account for new inventions, they will “permit police technology to erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.”
Devices existed in 2001, when Kyllo was decided, that would allow police to invade people’s privacy in ways that were unimaginable when the Fourth Amendment was ratified. So, unless the Court was willing to see that amendment eroded into nothingness, they needed to read it more expansively. And so the Court concluded that, when police use technology that is “not in general public use” to investigate someone’s home, they need to obtain a warrant first.
Similarly, in Carpenter, five justices concluded that law enforcement typically must obtain a warrant before they can use certain cellphone location data to track potential suspects.
Under Smith, the government had a strong argument that this data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Much like the numbers that we dial on our phones, cellphone users voluntarily share their location data with the cellphone company. And so Smith indicates that cellphone users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding that data.
But a majority of the Court rejected this argument, because they were concerned that giving police unfettered access to our location data would give the government an intolerable window into our most private lives. Location data, Carpenter explained, reveals not only an individual’s “particular movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’” Before the government can track whether someone has attended a union meeting, interviewed for a new job, or had sex with someone their family or boss may disapprove of, it should obtain a warrant.
One of the most uncertain questions in Chatrie is whether the Kyllo and Carpenter Court’s concern that advancing technology can swallow the Fourth Amendment is still shared by a majority of the Court. Again, Carpenter was a 5-4 decision, and two members of the majority have since left the Court. One of those justices, Ginsburg, was replaced by the much more conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in Carpenter, was also replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Chatrie is Kavanaugh’s first opportunity, since he joined the Court in 2018, to weigh in on whether he believes that advancing technology demands a more expansive Fourth Amendment.
And then there’s Gorsuch, who wrote a dissent in Carpenter arguing that Katz’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” framework should be abandoned, and that the right question to ask in a case about cellphone data is whether the phone user owns that data. After a long windup about Fourth Amendment theory, Gorsuch’s dissent concludes with an unsatisfying four paragraphs saying that he can’t decide who owned the cellphone data at issue in Carpenter because the defendant’s lawyers “did not invoke the law of property or any analogies to the common law.”
Because Gorsuch’s opinion focuses so heavily on high-level theory and so little on how that theory should be applied to an actual case, it’s hard to predict where he will land in Chatrie. (Though it’s worth noting that Chatrie’s lawyers do spend a good deal of time discussing property law in their brief.)
All of which is a long way of saying that the outcome in Chatrie is uncertain. We don’t know very much about how several key justices approach the Fourth Amendment. And the Court’s most recent Fourth Amendment cases suggest that lawyers can no longer rely on precedent to predict how the amendment applies to new technology.
But the stakes in this case are extraordinarily high. If the Court gives the government too much access to this information, the Trump administration could potentially gain access to years’ worth of location data on anyone who has ever attended a political protest. As the Court said in Carpenter, the government can use your cellphone to track all of your political, business, religious, and sexual relations.
At the same time, the police should be able to track down and arrest bank robbers. So, if there is a way to use cellphone data to assist law enforcement without intruding upon the rights of innocents, then the courts should allow it. The Fourth Amendment does not imagine a world without police investigations. It calls for police to obtain a warrant, while also placing limits on what that warrant can authorize, before they commit certain breaches of individual privacy.
The question is whether this Court, with its shifting membership and uncertain commitment to keeping up with new surveillance technology, can strike the appropriate balance.
2026-04-20 18:00:00
美国参议员伯尼·桑德斯（I-VT）周三提出了一项决议，阻止向以色列出售军事装备，该决议获得了47名民主党参议员中的40名支持。这一事件标志着民主党内部对以色列的支持出现显著转变，坚定支持以色列的民主党人正变得越来越少。此前，民主党选民对以色列的负面看法仅占53%，但自2023年10月7日哈马斯袭击事件后，以色列在加沙的军事行动导致其国际声誉受损，加上特朗普政府与以色列联手对伊朗发动战争，使得民主党选民对以色列的负面看法升至80%。这一变化促使政界人士调整立场，不仅限于传统支持以色列的蓝州或进步派地区，甚至包括一些摇摆州的议员，如亚利桑那州的马克·凯利和鲁本·加莱戈、佐治亚州的乔恩·奥斯索夫以及密歇根州的埃莉莎·斯洛金。
然而，民主党内部的分歧依然存在。一方面，左翼活动人士呼吁对以色列施加更严厉的压力，例如切断对“防御性武器”的资助（如“铁穹”导弹防御系统），或彻底停止对以色列的直接军事援助；另一方面，部分温和派仍希望维持与以色列的盟友关系。J Street主席杰里米·本·阿米表示，虽然需要重新评估美以关系，但并不意味着要放弃对以色列的支持。而左翼活动人士则更倾向于推动美以关系的疏远。
这种分歧在新泽西州第11选区的特别选举中有所体现。尽管以色列支持团体AIPAC投入巨资试图击败温和派候选人汤姆·马林斯基，但左翼候选人安娜莉亚·梅亚仍以强硬反以色列立场赢得选举。这反映出民主党内部对以色列态度的分裂。此外，部分左翼团体还呼吁将以色列在加沙的战争定性为“种族灭绝”，并借鉴南非种族隔离制度的制裁模式。
尽管民主党内部对施压以色列达成共识，但如何实施仍存在争议。一些人认为，随着以色列经济实力增强，美国援助已不再必要，而另一些人则担心若民主党在2028年重新掌权，需面对如何调整对以色列政策的难题。目前，民主党高层及关键组织（如DNC、国会和参议院领导）的态度仍较为保守，但随着选民立场的转变，未来可能面临更严峻的挑战。
The politics of Israel have shifted inside the Democratic Party — and staunch defenders of the Jewish nation are growing scarcer and scarcer.
On Wednesday, 40 out of 47 Democratic senators voted to block a military sale to Israel — far higher opposition than had been previously seen on any similar measure. It was the most dramatic sign yet of the party’s rapid turn toward a more confrontational approach, and one that Democratic supporters and critics of Israel alike believe is nowhere near finished.
The tally left pro-Israel Democrats “shocked and disillusioned,” Marc Rod of the publication Jewish Insider reported. These divides were on display on Thursday, when voters in New Jersey’s 11th District elected Analilia Mejia, who ran as a fierce left-wing critic of Israel in a special House election. While she won handily, historic Jewish towns like Livingston and Milburn swung against her by massive double-digit margins compared to their presidential vote, a rarity in an otherwise strongly Democratic year.
“It’s disturbing for supporters of Israel who’ve long needed and counted on bipartisan support — and had it,” a Democratic operative who has long been involved in Jewish causes told me. “It’s growing, and it’s hard to tell where it’s going to end up, but it’s not good.”
But while the old pro-Israel consensus of bipartisan unconditional aid is clearly dead, reaching a new one will be harder. Operatives in different camps across the Democratic spectrum are unsure how far the current trend will go, and whether Israel faces a mere correction in its relationship or risks fully falling out of the US orbit in a future administration.
The reason for the change, however, is straightforward: Democrats’ voters have shifted.
Back in 2022, a slight majority of Democratic voters — 53 percent — viewed Israel unfavorably. Since then, the devastation Israel brought about in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks gravely damaged the country’s reputation — as has the new Iran war President Donald Trump launched alongside Israel this year.
Now, a whopping 80 percent of Democrats or adults who lean toward Democrats view Israel unfavorably, per Pew Research polling conducted last month.
As a result, politicians are responding — and not just those in safe blue states or progressive jurisdictions. The 40 senators who voted to block the military sale Wednesday included several who are from swing states and are rumored to have presidential ambitions: Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego from Arizona, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.
The shift has been slower among leaders of the party and its key organizations: the DNC, House and Senate leadership, and party fundraising committees. These officials, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who voted to approve the arms sales to Israel Wednesday, have condemned the Iran war and criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, while trying to make clear they still support the country as an ally.
But this may not be tenable, given how their party has moved underneath them. The issue will likely play a significant role in the 2028 primaries. The stakes are enormous — and activists critical of Israel feel encouraged by their success so far, and emboldened to push further.
The collapse in Democratic support for Israel played out in three main phases.
Back during Barack Obama’s presidency, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party increasingly soured on Israel, as Netanyahu clashed with the Obama administration over Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank and, most notably, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Indeed, Netanyahu came to Congress to give a speech condemning the Iran deal, seeming to align himself with Republicans and infuriating many Democrats. Still, outside of the activist world and plugged-in elites, Israel was rarely front-of-mind for Democratic voters in Trump’s first term or the first few years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
That changed with the Gaza war, which made Israel a constant topic on news and social media for years. An initial surge of sympathy for Israel after the October 7 attacks gave way to increasing horror over the civilian toll of its reprisals in Gaza — and Biden seemed either unwilling or unable to stop it. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders continued to disparage any talk of an eventual Palestinian state, which had long been the centerpiece of Democratic hopes for a durable peace in the region.
“This was a genocide that played out in real time and that had an impact. Kids were watching it,” James Zogby, a Democratic pollster who has advocated for the Palestinian cause inside the party since the 1970s, argued. Still, there was an age divide, with older Democrats much more likely to view Israel favorably.
Now, the events of Trump’s second term — in which the US has twice attacked Iran alongside Israel — has shaken that up, too.
“Once Trump won, we started to see really massive polling changes among older Democrats who had supported Israel,” Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told me. “Part of that is the partisan-ization of Israel, seeing Netanyahu as a Trump ally.”
Now, it’s increasingly a consensus inside the Democratic Party that tougher pressure tactics against Israel are called for — but there’s still disagreement over how far to go, with those on the left of the party pushing further.
With increasing opposition inside the party to financing “offensive” weapons for Israel, the left flank is now pushing to go further.
One idea is to cut off US financing for “defensive weaponry,” such as the interceptors used in the Iron Dome missile defense system that defends Israel from rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah (and which the US has spent billions to help finance). Some House progressives have recently backed this idea — though some of them stress that Israel should still be allowed to purchase defensive weaponry from the US with its own money.
Another is to end all direct US funding for Israel’s military, which the progressive Jewish group J Street called for this week. Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) recently voiced support for that idea. Many observers believe US policy is headed here, in part because Israel is now a very wealthy nation that doesn’t really need US aid.
“There’s a growing understanding that aid money is fungible and that any amount of aid that the US is giving frees up [Israel’s] own money to spend on things we don’t like,” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told me. (Duss has reportedly been briefing Ocasio-Cortez, a potential 2028 presidential contender, on foreign policy this year.)
Asked what the next Democratic president should do upon taking office, Duss said he or she should immediately “halt all arms sales — not just to Israel, but generally to governments that have been engaged in human rights abuses.”
Some left activist groups have other priorities, such as urging Democrats to call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Bendaas said his polling shows increased support for using sanctions on Israel similar to those used against apartheid South Africa.
“I do think that’s probably where the conversation is headed by 2028,” Bendaas said. “But the realms of possibility are moving so fast, it’s kind of hard to pin down sometimes.”
The agreement among progressives that Israel needs to be pressured more masks a deeper disagreement over: to what end?
Several advocates I interviewed pointed to a divide between the progressives hoping to salvage the US-Israel relationship, versus the leftists who are willing or even eager to outright end it.
What if the pressure tactics fail to change Israel’s security calculus, as they have so many times before?
Often these debates touch on fundamental differences in opinion about the legitimacy of the state — between “liberal Zionist” critics of Israel who also see a democratic Jewish nation as an important refuge for a historically oppressed minority and under dire threat from its neighbors, and “anti-Zionist” critics who are gaining ground in left-wing activism and see Israel as an inherently repressive entity built on ethnic supremacy and colonialism.
On the progressive side, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami told me that while there’s a need to reassess the terms of the US-Israel relationship, he was not seeking to reassess “the friendship” or “the notion that the United States is going to have Israel’s back.”
But on the left, said Bendaas, “There’s a set of folks who are more interested in: how do we actually separate and make the US and Israel less enmeshed in the future.”
The primary in New Jersey’s recent special election was emblematic of this split. The pro-Israel group AIPAC’s campaign arm spent millions to defeat not Mejia, but Tom Malinowski, a more moderate Democrat who was critical of Netanyahu and open to putting conditions on aid. Malinowski described himself as a “pro-Israel” voice seeking to correct a wayward ally; Mejia, the winning candidate, was harsher in her rhetoric and accused Israel of “genocide.”
Progressives hoping to salvage the relationship are optimistic that Israel’s elections this year will depose Netanyahu for good, allowing for a reset with a fresh face. However, the more dovish Israeli left has long been in decline and polls show many of Netanyahu’s policies on Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran retain strong support among the Israeli people — making a sharp change in approach seem unlikely.
So what then? What if the pressure tactics fail to change Israel’s security calculus, as they have so many times before?
If the Democrats retake power in 2028, they’ll have to try and answer that question.
2026-04-19 20:00:00
关于在养育孩子前必须攒够一定金额金钱的想法非常普遍，甚至像一种道德准则。但其实并非如此。最近有位读者问我，她是否太穷而无法生育孩子，我指出我们并不需要为孩子提供特定的物质财富。随后，我的编辑Katie Courage提出，作为父母，她同样面临“时间贫困”的困扰。她认为，虽然我们不必保证孩子拥有特定的金钱，但是否应该确保他们拥有足够的高质量陪伴时间呢？
Katie提到，尽管她安排了丰富的亲子活动和周末露营，但真正希望为孩子创造的是自由玩耍、阅读和自然漫步等无拘无束的时光。然而，为了实现这一目标，她常常不得不牺牲自己的休息和娱乐时间，这让她感到内疚和压力。她质疑，为何我们总是觉得时间不够，而实际上现代父母与孩子相处的时间比过去更多。
作者指出，这一现象与“足够”（enough）的概念有关。过去，父母的目标是让孩子成为经济上的助力，因此时间投入相对简单。但随着儿童劳动法的实施，孩子不再被视为经济资产，而是被情感化为“珍贵的宝贝”。这种转变导致现代父母将大量时间投入到各种“儿童活动”中，却忽视了日常琐事中的高质量互动。
作者认为，真正的关键在于“注意力的质量”而非时间的长短。例如，与孩子一起做晚饭、散步或处理日常事务时，若能全神贯注地给予关爱和陪伴，这些平凡时刻同样能培养孩子的同理心、合作精神和情绪管理能力。相反，“时间碎片化”（即“时间彩纸”）现象让父母的注意力被割裂，即使花了很多时间，也难以真正投入。
作者强调，我们不必追求“更多时间”，而是应专注于如何在现有时间中提供更有意义的关注。这需要父母训练自己的注意力，例如通过冥想、阅读、观察自然或减少科技干扰。尽管社会压力巨大，但父母无法控制所有结果，也不必在每个时刻都完美表现。最重要的是，尽可能在与孩子相处的每一刻投入专注的爱。
总结来说，作者主张父母应重新审视“时间贫困”的概念，将注意力从数量转向质量，通过日常互动传递爱与关怀，而非依赖高强度的活动安排。这不仅是对孩子的成长有益，也能让父母自身获得更充实的体验。
The idea that you need to save up a certain amount of money before having kids is so common it can feel almost like a moral law.
But it isn’t, and I said as much recently when a reader wrote in to my advice column asking if she’s too poor to have a baby. I argued that we don’t owe our kids a certain level of material wealth.
And then I got a question from another parent: my editor, Katie Courage. She pointed out that what also plagues her as a parent is time poverty. Maybe we don’t have to guarantee kids a certain amount of money, but what about a certain amount of time?
Here’s Katie’s question, and my response below.
Your latest column, responding to the reader who asked if she was too poor to bring another kid into the world, was refreshingly hope-inducing! Money questions around raising kids feel so ubiquitous no matter what circumstance your family is in, so this was really worth reading for a totally flipped framework on the issue.
The resource-scarcity concern that is perpetually circling in my mind, alongside the financial one, is time. As a working parent, I constantly feel time-poor, especially when it comes to quality time with my kids.
So much of the time I get to have with them is consumed with the simple logistics of life. Evenings really only have room for dinner and bedtimes. Mornings are a blur of breakfasts, navigating clothing choices, work meetings, and school dropoffs. And a good portion of weekends go to simply fighting entropy (that is, laundry, cleaning, yardwork). We do pack in plenty of kid activities, time with friends, and weekend camping trips. But it seems like it would be so much better for my kids if I could materialize more undirected hours of puzzle-doing, book-reading, and rambling nature walks by the creek together.
I was raised in the early days of intensive parenting (with so many amazing creek walks!), and I had my first child around the culmination of Instagram parenting influencers pushing this sort of style. If you’ve watched more than two episodes of Bluey, you’ve seen how this era calibrated expectations for parents to be almost constantly available for child-focused, child-directed activities. But if I let dishes pile up in order to play all weekend (as I read as an actual suggestion in a 2010s parenting book) or if I skip out on exercise to pick the kids up early, I know I won’t be showing up for the time together as energized and as minimally stressed as I can be.
So I find myself in a constant inner battle, and the only winner is seemingly constant indistinct guilt. Is there a way of looking at this that feels less zero-sum?
I really sympathize with this feeling of time poverty — and I bet almost every working parent does, too. But I want to share some research that might make you feel better.
First, you’re actually spending a lot of time with your kids, relative to middle-class parents of the not-too-distant past. Moms now spend more time with their kids than they did in 1965, even though the majority of moms weren’t in the paid workforce then. Dads are also doing more than they did back then.
So why does everyone I know still feel like they’re not hanging out with their kids enough?
The problem has to do with that word “enough.” To know what constitutes enough of something, you have to know what goal you’re aiming for. Historically, this was pretty simple: Your goal was to raise kids who could work — typically on your farm, or maybe in a factory, mill, or mine. Sure, you also felt love for your kids, but at the end of the day children were an economic asset. You needed to feed and shelter them so they could produce income for the family.
But in the 1930s, the United States banned oppressive child labor, and kids stopped being wage earners. Now that they were economically worthless, we had to ask ourselves: What role do they play in our lives? Our collective answer was to sentimentalize them more than ever before — to treat them as precious, not financially, but emotionally.
As author Jennifer Senior has documented, our collective script about parenting flipped upside down in the decades between then and now. Kids no longer work for their parents; instead, parents work for their kids. And what’s the ultimate goal of the modern parent? Buttonhole one of them in the street and they’ll tell you: “I just want my kids to be happy!!” (potentially with some soul-rattling desperation in their voice).
Trouble is, happiness is a very elusive goal. Even a single ingredient of it, professional success, is elusive — and getting more so by the day. And so we end up with the intensive parenting culture you described, where parents expect themselves to spend endless hours on stuff that they hope will enrich their kids, boosting their self-esteem, their skills, and ultimately, their success. Music lessons, soccer games, karate, chess, elaborate craft projects, and the long et cetera of child-focused activities.
But pursuing happiness is an unbounded search process. You could spend every waking hour doing child-focused activities with your kid and it still might not be “enough” to make them a happy adult (in fact, it very well may backfire).
An outcome is impossible to guarantee. But a capacity? That’s something you can much more reliably cultivate.
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So, what if you don’t see it as your goal to guarantee your kids’ happiness? What if instead the goal is to show them love and build their capacity to love others?
In that case, quantity of hours will matter much less than — you guessed it — quality. And we all know what “quality time” means. Right?
Honestly, I don’t think we do. Many American parents tend to assume that “quality time” means time explicitly dedicated to Activities For Kids. But as books like Hunt, Gather, Parent and The Importance of Being Little show, there’s reason to believe that much more mundane stuff works wonders, too.
Young children can learn a whole lot from being woven into whatever their parents happen to be doing — cooking, yardwork, errands. They can learn practical life skills, yes, but also things like perseverance, cooperation, and emotional regulation. And they can benefit immensely from exactly the kind of low-key interaction that parents dismiss as “not counting.” I’m talking about all the stuff you called “the simple logistics of life” — dinnertimes, bedtimes, school drop-offs. That’s because any of that stuff can be the site of loving, playful interaction.
I was raised by my dad and grandmother, and the moments that stand out in my mind now aren’t the ones that happened on special outings. They’re banal in the extreme. My very first memory is of my dad tucking me in at bedtime and telling me a story, and me feeling so happy that I said, “I love being 4 — I get all of the fun and none of the responsibilities!” I also remember helping my grandmother make dinner, and how she laughed with extreme delight when I picked up a cucumber and began talking into it like it was a phone. And I remember her walking me to school and how we checked out the neighbors’ amazing gardens on the way, making a game out of noticing the best one and giving it an imaginary award.
Nothing “special” was happening during these moments. There was no “activity.” There was no set-apart “quality time” bucket, or even an explicit goal of hanging out together. We were just life-ing.
But in these brief moments, there was a loving attunement to what I was doing and feeling. There was a wholeness of attention.
Contrast that with “time confetti” — a term, coined by author Brigid Schulte, to describe how our time now often gets fragmented into tiny little pieces that end up feeling unproductive and unfulfilling. We may think we’re “multitasking.” But when you’re trying to do bathtime with your kid while simultaneously attending to intermittent pings on your work Slack or worrying about the half-dozen emails you need to send and the three playdates you need to schedule and all the group texts you need to respond to…well. It’s not just your time but also your attention that gets carved up into little splinters.
If you recognize yourself in this description, it’s not your fault. Both our work culture and our technological culture conspire to shred our time like this.
What I find helpful about the idea of time confetti is that it explains why, even though the objective amount of time that we spend with our kids is actually greater now than it was a few decades ago, the subjective feeling of time poverty is going up, not down. Feeling time-poor is not just about the brute quantity of time we’ve got, but about the kind of attention we can bring to it.
A short moment of bathtime where a parent is truly present is small but whole. And that tends to feel more fulfilling for both adults and children. (Not to brag, but little kids love me, and I’m convinced it’s because the style of loving attention my caregivers gave me really modeled for me how to lovingly attend to others in turn.)
What all this indicates to me is not that we need to spend more time with our kids, or that we need to spend more time doing Activities for Kids, but that we can do a whole lot of good by focusing on the quality of attention we offer while we do literally whatever we happen to be doing when our kids are around.
And this is actually good news, because, while it’s hard to manufacture more time in the day, we can train our attention. My personal favorite ways of doing that are through meditation, birding, reading longform fiction, and observing a tech-free Sabbath, but there are plenty of other ways.
Do I think it’s fair for the burden to fall on the individual to counter the massive societal pressures that push us all toward fractured attention? No, absolutely not. And because this is a structural issue, we’ll all inevitably have moments when we don’t manage to be mentally present. That’s okay.
You can’t control every outcome for your child, and you can’t fully control how you show up for every moment you’re with them, either. The most you can do is try, as much as possible, to infuse focused loving attention into the moments you’ve got.