2026-04-04 19:00:00
2026年1月13日，康涅狄格州民主党参议员克里斯·墨菲（Chris Murphy）在华盛顿特区美国海关与边境保护局的抗议活动中发表讲话。文章指出，特朗普政府的腐败行为非常公开，与以往白宫试图掩盖腐败不同，该政府反而高调展示其与企业、硅谷和其他政府之间的交易性关系。这种“以钱换权”的政治模式成为近期由美国经济自由项目（American Economic Liberties Project）在华盛顿举办论坛的核心议题，而墨菲自2024年大选以来一直将反腐败作为其政策主张的重点。
在与墨菲的对话中，他强调了特朗普政府腐败行为的公开性和直接性，例如通过企业捐赠换取赦免或法律豁免，如波音、丰田和Zelle等公司的案例。这种腐败形式与传统游说方式不同，其影响更加明显，甚至让一些人质疑：“这真的是腐败吗？”墨菲认为，这种公开的腐败行为正在削弱公众对民主制度的信任，可能导致美国向“贪腐寡头统治”转型。
他进一步指出，这种腐败与企业垄断（如派拉蒙）之间存在关联，因为这些企业通过与政界高层的交易获得权力和利益。墨菲认为，若不打破这种腐败体系，经济和政治的相互影响将加剧，最终导致社会对民主和经济的双重失望。他呼吁民主党在2028年大选中将“恢复民主公平”和“重建经济正义”作为核心议题，以重新赋予民众对政治和经济的控制权。
President Donald Trump’s blatant, sometimes open corruption can feel disorienting. While other White Houses have made a point to show their administration is not for sale, this one has seemingly done the opposite — making a big show of their transactional relationship with corporations, Silicon Valley, and other governments, given the right price.
This kind of pay-to-play politics was the focus of a recent forum in Washington, DC, hosted by the American Economic Liberties Project, a think tank focused on corporate consolidation, breaking up monopolies, and accountability for rogue businesses. It’s also the focus of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who has made this anti-corruption a focus of his message and policy proposals since the 2024 election.
I spoke with Murphy last week as part of the forum; in an extended conversation, I asked about the effectiveness of this message, what role the Democratic Party also plays in Washington’s current culture of open corruption, and if there’s anything the public can do to push back.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full interview on Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, and you can also watch this episode on video at YouTube.com/vox.
If you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/vox. Each month, our members get access to exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.
When I think about corruption, one thing that immediately jumps to mind for me is that when we think about the Trump administration, this isn’t happening in backroom deals. A lot of these things are happening right in front of us. Is corruption the right word to even use when it’s been broadly sanctioned by legal and governmental entities?
I think corruption is still a word that resonates. I think people understand that corruption is a bad thing, that it is something that we have broadly tried to expunge from our politics. And I do think that people generally understand corruption to be something that happens quietly behind closed doors.
Corruption is something you try to hide, and so I do think the most important piece of this moment is trying to understand what to do with the brazen public way that Trump is engaging in corruption, because simply by the very fact that he does it every day, that he does it openly, publicly and proudly, it is causing some people to question, Wait, wait, is this corruption? Because this isn’t what I learned corruption is. There’s no shame in this.
I don’t necessarily know if it means you change the word. He’s trying to change the very notion of corruption by doing it publicly. And so if you call it something different, then I think you’re playing his game.
You know, your Corporate Pardons Report documents over 160 companies that have had federal enforcement actions dropped.
As we know, corporate influence has been in Washington for a long time. How do you think this is a qualitatively different moment than the usual lobbying influence that we’ve seen?
It’s just so nakedly transactional right now. It’s an easy story to explain, whether it’s the donations that Boeing made that got them out of their trouble, whether it’s the Toyota donations, whether it’s the money that Zelle pumped into the administration,
It now doesn’t happen through slowly putting money into the political system, slowly building up connections. It’s literally just a million dollars for a corporate pardon. And that now happens within weeks or months. It’s put Eric Trump on your board, the lawsuit or the enforcement action is dropped, right? It’s so nakedly quick and transactional that it’s hard to hide.
What do you think is the impact of that kind of flagrant degradation of the process? What do you think is the consequence of its being in our face in this way?
Trump takes over at a moment when a lot of Americans were seriously contemplating giving up on democracy, right? And while that conversation may not be on the surface of kitchen table talks in our country, it’s right below the surface. People just don’t think that their voice matters any longer.
They, for a long time, have believed that the elites get whatever they want out of the system and the way in which Trump has chosen to do this so transparently, I think, is an effort to permanently shatter people’s faith in the entire enterprise and to transition the country to a kleptocratic oligarchy.
And so, yes, I think this is a particularly vulnerable moment for the country in which a lot of Americans are unfortunately ready to just say, Fuck it. This thing doesn’t work any longer. It now clearly doesn’t work, because we have an elected president who is just stealing from us. I’m just going to walk away from the whole enterprise.
And when people give up and retreat from public action, that’s the moment that the oligarchs seize power and never give it up. The reason that I have been raising the unacceptability of the corruption — that it is abnormal, that we should not normalize it — is because I think Trump’s core case here is, if he’s successful in normalizing it, it may be the death blow to people’s faith in the entire democratic enterprise.
Is there some form of a conflation between overt corruption and something like corporate consolidation? Or do you see those as one and the same when we’re talking about these monopolistic media companies [like Paramount]?
It’s all part of the same story. The only way that Paramount Skydance gets to be as big and as corrupt and as manipulative as it is is because of corruption, is because of an underlying deal that is done between the Ellison family and the Trump family.
I mean, [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth literally says it on stage: I can’t wait until my friends, the Ellisons, get control of CNN because then you’ll stop telling the truth about the war.
And again, back to how you message this: Yes, I understand that it’s a hard thing to break up that corrupt consolidation. Yes, I understand that by the time we get control of things here, the prediction markets will be even more mature, but by stating what you are going to do, you can actually bend reality by being bold in your claims about what you will do with power. People — and not just people out in the public, but members of Congress, right? — start signing up for the project the bolder it is.
The scope of Trump’s corruption can feel disempowering. The administration seems immune to public opinion at many times, undeterred by legal and institutional restraints.
It feels like we’re strapped in at the beginning of a roller coaster and you don’t know where it ends. Is that true? Are constraints coming?
It’s only coming if the Democratic Party, as we head into the 2028 election, makes the un-rigging of our democracy a tent pole for our party’s messaging.
If it’s up to me, our party’s message is unrigging democracy, unrigging the economy.
I’ll end here because you are right that people are feeling super discouraged and super powerless right now. We as a party have to start our analysis of what this moment needs through a diagnosis of the way that people are feeling like they have no agency. Both our economic and political messaging has to be about returning control to human beings and explaining to them, as we’ve talked about a few times, that it goes both ways: The corruption of our economy is downstream of the corruption of our democracy.
But also, the right way to end the corruption of our democracy is also downstream of the corruption of our economy. When our economy is an economy that only cares about profit and efficiency, it becomes this winner-take-all economy in which the folks who do well just grab it all. And we’ve normalized that because we’ve normalized the idea that that shared prosperity is not a value any longer in our economy.
When we normalize zero virtue in our economy, it’s really easy to say, well, maybe virtue shouldn’t matter in our politics either. And so that’s why the project is so big, right? There are cross currents between what has happened in our economy affecting our politics, what’s happened in our politics affecting our economy, which is why your willingness to confront this question of corruption in government and in our economy and recognizing how they flow back and forth is so critical.
2026-04-04 18:00:00
编辑注：2026年4月4日早上6点（东部时间）：本文最初于2018年3月30日发布，现为复活节特别更新。复活节临近，如果你和大多数美国人一样庆祝这一节日，可能会购买一些糖果，而其中最具代表性的便是Peeps。这些糖果以软糖棉花糖为基底，裹上彩色糖衣，配上可食用蜡制成的“眼睛”，通常以五只相连的形态出售。每份（五只）含140卡路里、无脂肪、34克糖分，主要成分是糖和玉米糖浆，且含明胶，因此不适合素食者。Peeps由宾夕法尼亚伯明翰的Just Born糖果公司生产，该公司成立于1910年，由俄罗斯移民Sam Born创立，还生产其他糖果如Mike & Ikes和Hot Tamales。Sam Born发明了多种糖果工艺，包括巧克力糖粒和冰激凌上凝固的巧克力酱，还设计了将棒棒糖插入的机器。1953年，Just Born收购了邻近兰开斯特的Rodda糖果公司，该公司生产软糖和手工雏鸡造型的棉花糖。Sam Born之子Bob Born改进了生产流程，将制作时间从近27小时缩短至6分钟，并去除了原本装饰在Peeps上的翅膀。
Peeps如今已超越复活节，成为全年皆可购买的糖果。它们有多种颜色（如蓝色、粉色、薰衣草）、口味（如棉花糖味、姜饼味、柠檬味、巧克力涂层、条纹味）和造型，包括兔子、心形、南瓜、Minions等，但原版黄色雏鸡（仅含糖味）仍是最受欢迎的。据WalletHub网站估计，每年复活节有超过15亿只Peeps被食用。然而，Peeps也颇具争议，有人强烈反对，如《卫报》2012年的文章《对不起，但Peeps令人作呕》，以及Facebook上的反Peeps群体。《奥克兰论坛报》的Angela Hill认为它们令人不安，而《达拉斯观察者》则形容吃Peeps如同“舔了一口糖粉覆盖在祖母皱纹上的感觉”。
Peeps的用途不仅限于食用，它们也常用于创意料理，如Peeps脆饼、Peepza（直接放在披萨上）和Peepshi（用Peeps、Nerds等糖果制作的“假寿司”）。此外，人们还尝试用它们进行艺术创作，如华盛顿邮报的“Peep Show”立体模型比赛，参赛者需用Peeps构建3D场景，曾出现Peeps版的梵高画作和《飞屋环游记》场景。这一传统可追溯至17世纪，当时欧洲宫廷糖果师会制作糖雕塑用于宴会。2016年，马里兰州国家港举办了首届“世界Peeps食用大赛”，冠军Matt Stonie在五分钟内吃掉200只Peeps，赢得3500美元奖金。
然而，Just Born公司近期陷入与工会的法律纠纷。该公司试图通过将新员工从养老金计划转为401(k)计划来规避6000万美元的联邦法律费用，引发罢工和法律诉讼。工会指控公司违规，而公司则认为罢工非法。此案结果可能影响数百万参与多雇主养老金计划的美国工人。
在复活节糖果排名中，Ranker网站将“巧克力涂层棉花糖Peeps”和“兔子造型Peeps”列为独立条目，但排除了Jordan杏仁等其他糖果。值得一提的是，争议性的《罗斯安妮复出》剧集首集曾出现主角罗斯安妮·康纳早餐吃Peeps的情节，这从营养和口腔健康角度看颇具风险。本文最初于2018年3月30日发布，现更新至2026年4月4日。
Editor’s note, April 4, 2026, 6 am ET: This story was last updated on March 30, 2018, and we’re revisiting it for this Easter.
Easter season is upon us, and if you’re like a majority of Americans who celebrate the holiday, you’ll probably purchase some candy for the occasion. And that stash will likely include the neon-sugar-coated hallmark of the season: Peeps.
But while their blobby shapes and bright colors are easily recognizable, their backstory might not be so familiar — or as straightforward as you’d think. Read on to find out more about these squishy harbingers of spring.
In their traditional form, Peeps are shaped like baby chickens and made of a soft marshmallow rolled in colored sugar, with eyes made of edible wax. They are typically sold in packs of five conjoined marshmallows. One serving of Peeps (five pieces) contains 140 calories, no fat, and 34 grams of sugar, which makes sense since their two main ingredients are sugar and corn syrup. Peeps also contain gelatin, which makes them unsuitable for vegans.
Peeps are manufactured by the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania-based Just Born candy company, which was founded in 1910 by a Russian immigrant named Sam Born and also manufactures such trick-or-treating offenses as Mike & Ikes and Hot Tamales.
According to Just Born’s company history, Born is to thank for several confectionary feats we now take for granted, including producing chocolate sprinkles and that type of chocolate sauce that hardens into a crunchy shell when it hits ice cream; he also invented a machine to put sticks into lollipops, without which our national lollipop game would be sadly deficient.
In 1953, Just Born bought the Rodda candy company, which was based in nearby Lancaster and produced jelly beans as well as a line of handmade, chick-shaped marshmallows. Born’s son Bob Born figured out how to mechanize the marshmallow creation process, which shortened the manufacturing time from nearly 27 hours to six minutes. (Bob also ditched the wings that used to be piped onto each Peep, which further streamlined the process.)
Much like that other tooth-achingly sweet seasonal treat candy corn, Peeps have expanded beyond their original limited availability to become a year-round sweet. They come in different colors (blue, pink, lavender), flavors (cotton candy, gingerbread, “lemon delight,” chocolate-covered, candy cane), and shapes — Peeps bunnies were introduced in the 1980s, and now the line includes hearts, pumpkins, Minions, and more.
But the original yellow chicks (whose flavor is simply “sugar”) are still the most popular, and the candy is still most commonly associated with Easter. The website WalletHub estimates that more than 1.5 billion Peeps are eaten every Easter.
Still, Peeps are rather divisive. While they have their die-hard fans, many others devote an astonishing amount of energy to railing against them. Take, for instance, the 2012 Guardian article “Sorry, but Peeps are disgusting,” or the Facebook groups dedicated to Peep hate. Angela Hill of the Oakland Tribune finds them unsettling:
I dislike them intensely. And they know it, which merely bolsters their resolve. I can see it in their beady little food-colored eyes — their defiance, their sheer pluck. You can’t get just one Peep, you know, and that’s no accident. They come in packs. One might even say, battalions.
And then there’s this vivid description of consuming a Peep, courtesy of the Dallas Observer: “It’s like eating a tablespoon of sugar lovingly dusted atop a mouthful of your gramma’s cellulite.”
Peeps are as versatile as their flavor is one-note. If you’re a Peep purist, you can just eat them straight from the package — either fresh or stale and slightly crunchy, as some people prefer. (Matthew Pye, Just Born’s VP of trade relations and corporate affairs, told HuffPost that 70 to 75 percent of people prefer “fresh” Peeps, which still leaves a sizable portion of Peep eaters who opt to consume them on the crunchier side of the sell-by date.) If you’re of legal drinking age, you could pair them with wine or beer.
If you want to get creative, Peeps-centric recipes abound, from the relatively innocuous (Peeps Krispies treats) to the elaborate (a Peeps sunflower cake) to the straight-up revolting (“Peepza” — literally just Peeps on a pizza — and “Peepshi,” a Willy Wonka fever dream wherein faux sushi is constructed from Peeps, Nerds, Fruit by the Foot, etc.). Momofuku Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi suggests skewering them to roast over a fire or flattening them and drying them in the oven to make “Peep chips.”
But if you’d rather not eat them at all, you can still experiment with Peeps in the name of science. One time-honored tradition is to put them in the microwave to see what happens. (Spoiler alert: They get big. Like, really big.) This practice has also led to the exotic sport known as Peep jousting:
In 1999, Emory University researchers Gary Falcon and James Zimring performed perhaps the most exhaustive Peeps testing in human history, exploring the candies’ durability in the face of a variety of substances. According to the Emory Report:
To test Peep solubility, they began with simple tap water, then moved on to boiling water, then to acetone, sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide, but were left dumbfounded by Peeps’ apparent invulnerability to each.
Then they tried Phenol, a protein-dissolving solvent lethal to humans in amounts as small as a single gram. Peeps proved mortal to such a substance — well, almost. One hour after plunging an unfortunate Peep into its grisly demise, all that remained in the beaker was a pair of brown carnauba wax eyes floating in a purple Phenol soup.
If you’re more of a right-brained soul, you might consider using the confections to create an artistic masterpiece. In 2006, the Washington Post launched an annual “Peep Show” diorama contest, asking entrants to create a 3D scene in which all the characters are Peeps. The contest sometimes drew several hundred participants, whose submissions ranged from a Peep van Gogh to a Peepified scene from the movie Up. (You can see past winners of the diorama contest here.) The competition was such a cult favorite that when in 2017 the Post decided to discontinue it, the fine folks at Washington City Paper took it upon themselves to keep the tradition going. (You can see the winners of 2018’s contest online, including an ode to the year’s Best Picture winner titled “The Shape of Sugar.”)
But the Post wasn’t even the first newspaper to hold a Peeps contest — that honor goes to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, whose staff writer Richard Chin dreamed up the competition in 2004. And the New Yorker argues that the tradition of sugar-based dioramas goes back much further, to the 17th century:
By the early Renaissance, inventive European court confectioners were crafting elaborate sculptures for special meals, often designed to echo or compliment the themes of the musical or theatrical entertainments that would accompany a banquet. These could also be allegorical in nature, depicting religious scenes or commemorating military victories. At the wedding of Maria de Medici to Henri IV, in Florence, in 1600, the groom was not in attendance, but he was represented by an impressive sugar sculpture depicting him on horseback.
In a less, uh, artful contest, in 2016 Maryland’s National Harbor hosted the first World Peeps Eating Championship. The winner, Matt Stonie of San Jose, took home $3,500 for consuming an impressive (or disturbing) 200 Peeps in five minutes.
Things have soured a bit for the sugary candy lately. In recent years, Peep-maker Just Born has been mired in a sticky legal battle with its union workforce over the company’s longtime pension plan. This fascinating Washington Post article goes into it in depth (and is worth reading in full if you’ve made it this far into an article about Peeps), but I’ll explain it briefly here.
Just Born has what’s called a multiemployer pension program, which allows employees enrolled in the program to move among participating companies and carry their benefits with them. In 2016, citing rising labor costs, Just Born tried to bar all new employees from joining the pension plan, funneling them to the 401(k) program instead while sidestepping a $60 million fee required by federal law to make the move. The union workers went on strike (adopting the utterly perfect chant “No justice, no Peeps!”); the strike came to a messy end four weeks later after several workers crossed the picket line and the rest eventually went back to work for fear of losing their jobs.
Then the tangled legal bit began. Per the Post:
The pension, which is administered by a group of labor officials and corporate executives from the 200 participating companies, has sued the company, alleging it improperly tried to stop enrolling new employees in the pension without paying the withdrawal fee. The company has sued the union, demanding “monetary damages” and alleging the strike was illegal.
The outcome of the case could have big ramifications for companies with multiemployer pension programs and the nearly 10 million American workers those programs cover. If Just Born manages to get out of that $60 million fee, other companies could follow in its footsteps, putting the benefits payouts for millions of American works in doubt.
Again, the Post article is worth reading in full — but rest assured that despite the company’s legal troubles, you don’t need to start stockpiling Peeps just yet.
The website Ranker maintains a fluctuating list of the top Easter candies, which confusingly includes both “chocolate-covered marshmallow Peeps” and “bunny Peeps” as separate items. However, that list also considers the unholy monstrosities known as Jordan almonds and thus must be discounted entirely.
But only one Easter candy has the distinction of featuring in the premiere of the controversial Roseanne revival, whose first episode sees main character (and noted Trump supporter) Roseanne Conner chowing down on some Peeps for breakfast. Which, regardless of your politics, seems like a risky move from a nutritional and dental health perspective.
Update, April 4, 2026, 6 am ET: This article was originally published on March 30, 2018, and updated to reflect updated information where available.
2026-04-03 19:00:00
美国中部亚利桑那州的中央亚利桑那项目（Central Arizona Project）部分管道穿过格利菲斯市（Gilbert, Arizona）的一个住宅区。该地区正面临由气候变化引发的“三重气候冲击”——冬季降雪量创历史新低、早春高温以及干旱，导致水资源危机迫近。为应对这一问题，美国西部多个地区已开始实施严格的用水限制，例如丹佛市要求居民每周仅限两天浇灌草坪，餐厅除非顾客要求否则不得提供瓶装水。此外，超过一半的美国西部滑雪场因干旱关闭或提前停业，部分滑雪场甚至出现融雪导致的意外情况。专家指出，由于降雪减少，春季植被干燥，火灾风险显著上升，尤其是入侵性植被如毒草和红 cedar 的存在加剧了火势蔓延的危险。
与此同时，美国西部各州正就科罗拉多河的水资源分配展开紧张谈判。尽管早期冬季风暴缓解了部分降水短缺，但降雪对长期水资源保障更为关键。研究显示，气候变化正在加剧雪量减少现象，而2021至2023年全球范围内的干旱程度达到近百年来最严重。美国垦务局（Bureau of Reclamation）近期发布草案，计划从2027年起削减科罗拉多河的用水量，并给予各州至10月的时间进行调整。若谈判无果，内华达州和加利福尼亚州等可能采取法律手段。农业和能源行业尤其受此影响，例如亚利桑那州尤马市的农民担忧无法获得足够的灌溉配额，而科罗拉多州部分农民已转向种植耐旱作物。
专家强调，西部必须适应更频繁的干旱和水资源短缺。博伊西州立大学的地质科学家阿列霍·弗洛雷斯（Alejandro N. Flores）指出，创纪录的低降雪量可能是未来更温暖气候的预兆，今年的干旱为西部敲响了警钟。
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Officials were already sounding the alarm bells in early March across the Western United States after a winter with historically low snowpacks, which supplies water for communities as it slowly melts throughout the spring and summer.
Then came the heat wave.
As I reported last week, a high-pressure system brought early-season heat to the region, breaking temperature records in many states with help from climate change. Much of the little snow left in parts of the region melted, sparking fears for water supplies because it may evaporate or run off too early in the season, experts say.
Compounding the problem, more than half of the Western US is now experiencing drought conditions, according to the federal drought monitoring system.
So how is the West trying to prevent a looming water crisis spurred by this triple weather whammy? Some areas are cracking down on community water usage earlier than they’ve ever had to, disrupting many parts of daily life—from gardening habits to dining out. And bigger concerns loom as states squabble over shared resources from the Colorado River, a critical and increasingly strapped watershed in the region.
Many places around the world face similar dilemmas as climate change drives an “intensifying global pattern of more widespread and severe drought,” a new study finds.
The Denver Board of Water Commissioners announced last week a series of water limits with a goal to cut area usage by 20 percent. Restaurant owners have been asked to only serve water if a diner requests it. Customers of Denver Water — a public water utility in the city — must limit lawn watering to no more than two days per week, and there are more cuts on the horizon, depending on forecasts.
“The situation is quite serious,” Todd Hartman, a spokesperson for the utility, told NBC News. He added that although Denver Water’s reservoirs are roughly 80 percent full, the city can’t rely on snowpack like it typically does to refill them as levels drop. “We’re in such a dire situation that we could be coming back to the public in two or three months and saying you’re limited to one day a week.”
In the northern Colorado city of Erie, residents and businesses were told earlier in March to halt all irrigation until early April, with a target to reduce usage by more than 45 percent. Officials threatened to shut off the tap altogether for violators.
Recreation has also been hard: More than half of the 120 ski resorts in the US West either closed, will close early, or never opened this year, according to a Reuters analysis. In Wyoming, one of the locations that did stay open experienced a slushy surprise last week as snow melted beneath skiers on the slopes.
“It was a swimming pool. We should have been checking for floaties and not lift passes, it was pretty warm,” Dalan Adams, general manager of White Pine ski resort, told Wyoming Public Media.
Many areas in the region are also contending with fire restrictions as hot, dry conditions increase the risk of blazes. Experts say spring rains could help mitigate fire risk, but climatologist John Abatzoglou told CBC that everything is “lining up for a potentially nasty fire season across the west.”
My colleague Michael Kodas, who is based in Boulder, Colorado, and has long reported on wildfires and climate change, has seen these threats firsthand in past parched years. I asked him how water restrictions, drought, and lower snowpack could influence wildfire behavior in the coming months. Here’s his inside scoop:
Most wildfires this time of year are fueled by grasses, which firefighters call “one-hour fuels” because they can dry to the point of burning in 60 minutes, so they don’t need a winter-long drought to get them ready to carry flames. As one fire behavior analyst pointed out to me from his truck outside of Denver last week, most grasses this time of year are dead, with or without a drought, and they can’t get much drier, or more flammable, than that.
But if grasses that would normally still be covered by snow are exposed to sun, wind and dry air earlier in the season, they’ll be able to burn that much earlier in the season too. And in some cases where no substantial snow has fallen on tall grasses, the stalks haven’t been matted down by the weight of snow but are instead still standing upright like match sticks and that much easier to ignite. And out on the plains, where vast, fast grassfires during droughts threaten livestock and croplands, highly flammable invasive species like cheatgrass and red cedar are making drought-primed fires much more volatile.
The bigger problem is that the snow drought has likely left many heavier, woodier fuels like trees drier than they would normally be in the spring, so they’re ready to burn much earlier in the year. Soils desiccated by drought are unlikely to recover, even with soaking spring rains, so the vegetation growing on them may not have enough moisture available to green up and resist flames.
And fire weather conditions are making wildland blazes more likely to burn big in much of the West, regardless of the fuel conditions. Warm temperatures through much of the winter and early spring, including the recent heat wave, along with low relative humidity and unusually strong and frequent wind storms, have led to an unusual number of “red flag” fire weather days right through the winter in much of the Rocky Mountains. Those fire weather conditions led utilities to cut power where I live in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies several times since December to prevent power lines from starting wildfires.
Though early winter storms helped maintain relatively average precipitation levels in much of the West, rain does not help support long-term water security for the region as much as snow.
“A gallon of winter rain that immediately runs off downstream is not nearly as helpful come July as a gallon of snowpack that melts in April or May,” Casey Olson, a climate scientist with the Utah Climate Center, told ABC News. “They are not equivalent gallons of precipitation in terms of our ability to use them when we need them the most.”
As much as 75 percent of water supplies during certain years come from melting snow in some states, including Colorado and Utah. A growing body of research finds that climate change is triggering more frequent snow droughts.
Traditional droughts are also worsening due to global warming: A study published this week found that the period from 2021 through 2023 has seen some of the most widespread and severe drought conditions in over a century across the globe.
These events contribute to shrinking the Colorado River, which around 40 million people depend on. Representatives from the seven Western states in the basin have met several times over the past two years to determine how to divvy up the dwindling resources, but intense debates over who gets what have stalled the process despite the federal government stepping in, as my Inside Climate News colleagues Jake Bolster and Wyatt Myskow reported in February.
In January, the US Bureau of Reclamation released a draft environmental impact statement that outlined proposed cuts to Colorado River water usage starting in 2027.
The agency gave states until October before it will impose more aggressive cuts. The outcome of these negotiations could have profound implications for water users (so…everyone in the Southwest), but are especially impactful for the agriculture and energy industries. The Bureau of Reclamation recently estimated that water managers in the basin must conserve an additional 1.7 million acre-feet of water to keep Lake Powell’s levels from falling so low they can’t spin the hydropower turbines at Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona.
Meanwhile, farmers in Yuma, Arizona — who supply much of the country’s winter vegetables — are concerned that they won’t get enough water allocations to support their crops, the news station ABC15 reports. Some farmers in Colorado are already adjusting their operations to grow more drought-tolerant crops.
But industries don’t know what to expect as representatives remain at a stalemate on negotiations — and several states, including Nevada and California, have pledged to sue if they don’t get their way.
No matter how it plays out, experts say the Western US must learn to adapt to more parched conditions in the face of climate change.
“The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region,” Alejandro N. Flores, a geoscientist at Boise State University, wrote in The Conversation. “This year’s snow drought presents a timely, albeit high-stakes, stress test for the West. Everyone will be watching.”
2026-04-03 18:00:00
2017年，凯瑟琳·保罗（Catherine Paul）曾大量制作粉色“猫咪耳”帽子，作为对特朗普言论的抗议，这些帽子成为当时妇女游行的象征。然而，随着时间推移，这些帽子逐渐被视为排他性且尴尬的“老套”符号，尤其在2024年被批评为无效的抗议形式。但随着特朗普第二届任期的开始，针对ICE（美国移民与海关执法局）的抗议再次兴起，工艺行动主义（craftivism）重新受到关注。如今，从编织帽子到刺绣布料，各种手工艺品被用于表达对移民政策的不满，例如“融化ICE”（Melt the ICE）帽子、反ICE刺绣作品以及带有政治信息的日常用品。这些作品不仅跨越了年龄和种族，还强调了社区团结的重要性。
尽管早期的“猫咪耳”帽子因缺乏包容性而引发争议，但如今的反ICE艺术更注重具体政策的抗议，并通过手工艺传递愤怒、恐惧和关怀。历史上的工艺政治形式，如美国革命时期的纺纱活动和黑人社区的故事布料，早已存在。如今，工艺行动主义被重新赋予意义，成为一种更接地气的抗议方式。然而，仍有人批评这种形式只是“表演性善举”。文章最后指出，尽管妇女游行提出了关于女性运动是否真正包容的问题，但这些问题仍未得到解答，而当前的工艺行动主义则以更小规模、更贴近社区的方式持续发挥作用。
“Back in 2017, I made a ton of pussyhats,” Catherine Paul told me. “I just knitted pink hats like there was no tomorrow.”
At the time, Paul appreciated “the way that craft could be part of a demonstration of affiliation and belief,” the artist, writer, and longtime knitter told me.
Soon the pussyhat became a symbol of something else: a brand of feminism attuned to the concerns of a subset of middle-class, mostly white American women, and nobody else. By 2024, the hats, and the 2017 Women’s March at which many demonstrators wore them, were being held up as examples of ineffective protest. More than that, the hats came to be seen as cringe — not just exclusionary, but also kind of embarrassing.
Then came Trump 2.0. In the face of an administration whose agents have kidnapped and deported children and shot more than a dozen people in the span of a few months, craftivism is back in the spotlight, with knitters, quilters, nail artists, and more getting renewed public attention for their political designs.
Paul, for example, has been knitting red “Melt the ICE” hats, from a pattern sold by Minneapolis yarn shop Needle & Skein. Friends and acquaintances are begging her for the headwear, just as they did nearly 10 years ago.
Before I started reporting this story, I thought the rise of knitted and quilted protest under Trump 2.0 might be a sign of the left reembracing cringe — of a softening toward forms of political action once deemed uncool and annoying (and, not coincidentally, feminine). But in talking to artists and scholars about craftivism right now, I’ve come to think the explanation for its popularity is both more complicated and simpler.
“The news is so ugly all the time, you can’t really find peace,” Needle & Skein owner Gilah Mashaal told me. “So what do you do? You find people and you do things with those people. And since we’re crafters, that’s what we’re doing.”
As thousands of ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis earlier this year, “my regular knitters were all feeling kind of desperate and unsure of what we could do,” Mashaal said. Employee Paul Neary had the idea to create a pattern inspired by Norwegian anti-Nazi hats called “nisselue.”
Neary posted the pattern for the “Melt the ICE” hat on knitting website Ravelry in January, charging $5 per download, with all proceeds going to immigrant aid agencies. As Mashaal recalls, the Needle & Skein team thought, “maybe we’ll raise a couple thousand dollars.”
But the pattern quickly rocketed to the top of Ravelry’s most-popular list, where it’s stayed ever since. People from 44 countries have purchased it, generating at least $720,000 for immigrant aid groups, Mashaal told me.
Meanwhile, at this year’s QuiltCon, billed as the largest modern quilting event in the world, anti-ICE quilts grabbed attention, bearing messages like, “Our government abducted hundreds of people based on race while I made this.” Anti-ICE quilts are also blowing up on Reddit, where one user recently shared a quilt reading, “Japanese American families remember: We were taken from our communities too.”
Even Maine senate candidate Graham Platner recently sat for a Pod Save America interview wearing an Anti-Fascist Knitting Club T-shirt, though his recent social media activity doesn’t make him a particularly good ambassador for the cause.
Beyond the needle and thread, nail artists are showing off “FUCK ICE” manicures. And anti-ICE artwork is cropping up on shirts, stickers, and other accoutrements of daily life. When Nadia Brown’s students at Georgetown University open up their textbooks, she sees anti-ICE bookmarks inside, the government professor told me.
Using handicrafts to send a message is far from new. Leading up to the American Revolution, women in the American colonies boycotted British textiles and staged spinning bees “in which they spun wool and flax yarn to make cloth called homespun,” Shirley Wajda, a curator and historian of material culture, told me in an email.
Story quilts — visual narratives sewn in fabric — have been popular in Black communities for generations. “During slavery, when African Americans were not allowed to learn how to read and write, it was an easy way to tell stories,” Carolyn Mazloomi, an artist and curator, told me.
Such art forms never left the American landscape — artists like Faith Ringgold have brought story quilts, often with political and social themes, to the walls of museums and the pages of beloved children’s books.
“Yes, knitting a hat is performative. But it’s also a way to show your anger, fear, frustration, rage, care.”
Gilah Mashaal, owner of Needle & Skein
But political crafting gained a new level of media attention — and notoriety — in the wake of Trump’s first election. Photos of the 2017 Women’s March were a sea of pink, as demonstrators donned headwear knitted in response to Donald Trump’s comments about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But the march soon became controversial — though the Washington, DC, event boasted high-profile speakers who were women of color, most attendees were white. Many women of color felt pushed out of the march and the larger movement that — kind of — grew up around it.
Organizer ShiShi Rose, for example, worked on the first march and wrote a widely read Facebook post calling on white would-be marchers to pay attention to the experiences of Americans of color. In return, she got death threats, from which she said the Women’s March organization did little to shield her.
The pink hats became, for some, a symbol of this exclusion, even their color and shape appearing to represent white, cis women’s anatomy (knitters have since said the hats were supposed to look like cat ears, not vulvas).
When Trump was elected a second time, even some who marched enthusiastically in 2017 began to wonder if their efforts had been for nought. Meanwhile, concerns that started with women of color were appropriated first by liberal white men and then by conservatives, until questions about a movement’s racial inclusivity became a kind of all-purpose derision. As my colleague Constance Grady has written, “who wanted to be like those awful women with the pink hats? Everyone knew they were cringey and unfashionable, complaining over nothing.”
Given all this, it’s been a surprise to see the return of knitted headwear. But for Brown, today’s anti-ICE art- and craftworks aren’t cringe in the same way. Unlike 10 years ago, “there’s a very specific outrage around what’s happening now with ICE, and there are direct calls for policies that would make immigration more functional,” she said. The Women’s March was far less specific and targeted.
What’s more, anti-ICE art spans demographics. When it comes to stickers and other paraphernalia, “I see older people wearing them,” Brown said. “My college students are wearing them of every ethnicity, of every race. People are just outraged.”
In trying to represent the anger of all women nationwide, the Women’s March was doomed, on a certain level, to fail. The resistance against ICE in 2026, however, is famously hyperlocal, and craftivism is no exception.
Pussyhats were about “fighting against and showing our distaste for the man that the country elected,” Mashaal said. With Melt the ICE hats, “we’re raising money to help our friends and neighbors.”
Neighborliness is emerging as a key value in the resistance to ICE. “What authoritarian regimes want to do is make people suspicious of their neighbors,” Brown said. Crafting, by contrast, brings neighbors together over a shared activity that helps them get past their fears and suspicions: “Building community in a way that gets you out of your head and working with your hands is an effective tool.”
No protest is immune to criticism, and some have argued that the Melt the ICE hats are little more than performative virtue-signaling, especially if people knit them without paying for the pattern.
“Yes, knitting a hat is performative,” Mashaal said. “But it’s also a way to show your anger, fear, frustration, rage, care.”
I started this story thinking it was about the state of feminized forms of activism in 2026. I’m ending it thinking that a lot of the questions opened up by the Women’s March — whether it’s even possible to have a truly inclusive “women’s movement” in America, for example — haven’t been answered yet. Maybe now is not the time to answer them. Maybe now is the time for something smaller-scale — the size, say, of a pair of knitting needles or a sewing machine.
In addition to her Melt the ICE hats, Paul recently completed a quilt that reads, “Fuck it we ball.” “I wanted that persistence, a reminder of the way that craft can help us persist,” she told me.
Wajda, the historian and author, is thinking about the coming spring. “Pussyhats and Melt the ICE hats have one thing in common: They are winter wear,” she told me. “Now I’m thinking about what would a craftivist create for warm weather protests!”
Mazloomi, the artist and curator, has been working for the last several years on a series of quilts about African American history, with a concentration on the civil rights era. “The stories have disappeared from the news, disappeared from museums and art centers, and I don’t want to see that happen,” she said.
Quilts remind people of “home and grandma,” Mazloomi said. “It’s a soft cushion for difficult stories.”
2026-04-03 04:00:00
特朗普宣布即将离任的司法部长帕姆·邦迪将转投私营部门。早在特朗普首次执政期间，法律记者本杰明·威特斯就曾形容其治国风格为“恶意与无能的结合”。邦迪在任期间，多次试图利用司法部对特朗普的政敌采取报复行动，但因法律处理不当而屡屡受挫。例如，她在2025年2月接受福克斯新闻采访时表示，杰弗里·爱泼斯坦的性侵者名单“正摆在我桌面上”，但司法部后来承认该名单并不存在。此外，特朗普政府试图起诉前FBI局长詹姆斯·科米和纽约州检察长丽蒂西亚·詹姆斯，但因任命的检察官琳赛·霍利甘未合法就职而被法院驳回。在明尼苏达州的大规模移民逮捕行动中，司法部因人员不足和准备不充分，被迫释放大量被拘人员。联邦法官批评司法部的无能，指出其未为可能引发的数百起法律诉讼做好准备。此外，邦迪在德州选区划分案中的干预也因法律文件错误而引发争议，尽管最高法院最终恢复了该划分，但下级法院的裁决已基于对种族动机法律的质疑。尽管邦迪的离职可能让特朗普有机会任命更称职的忠诚支持者，但目前尚不清楚其继任者人选。特朗普拥有多位能力出众的共和党律师，如前司法部长威廉·巴尔，他们可能更有效地执行政策，这对特朗普的政敌构成潜在威胁。
Early in the first Trump administration, the legal journalist Benjamin Wittes coined one of the best descriptions of how President Donald Trump governs: “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” Trump, as Wittes originally wrote, often issued executive orders that were not vetted by lawyers or policy experts — and thus were vulnerable to lawsuits and often achieved very little. And this penchant for taking seemingly bold actions that fall apart once they are exposed to the real world pervades both of Trump’s administrations.
No one embodied Trump’s brand of incompetent malice more than outgoing Attorney General Pam Bondi, who, as Trump announced Thursday, “will be transitioning” to a “new job in the private sector.” In her 15 months as the country’s top legal official, Bondi flouted norms, stretching back to the end of the Nixon administration, which sought to insulate federal prosecutors from political control by the White House. But her actual attempts to use the Department of Justice to seek revenge against Trump’s perceived enemies frequently floundered on the shores of bad lawyering.
Bondi may be best known for saying, in a February 2025 interview with Fox News, that a list of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s clients was “sitting on my desk right now” — months before the DOJ later claimed that this list doesn’t exist. After she was asked about her mishandling of the Epstein files in a congressional hearing, she told lawmakers that they shouldn’t even be talking about Epstein because “the Dow is over 50,000 right now.” (As of this writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average sits at 46,371.57.)
Consider, as well, the Trump DOJ’s attempts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two officials who Trump loathes because they investigated allegedly illegal activity by the president. Both prosecutions were dismissed by a federal court, however, after a judge determined that Lindsey Halligan, the former insurance lawyer that this administration tried to install as a top federal prosecutor in Virginia, was never lawfully appointed.
Similarly, when the Trump administration ordered thousands of federal law enforcement officers to occupy the city of Minneapolis and to arrest many immigrants in that city, a competent attorney general would have recognized that these mass arrests would trigger an array of legal proceedings, and would have preemptively detailed additional lawyers to Minnesota to handle the increased caseload. Instead, the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota was almost comically understaffed, and completely unprepared for an array of court orders, requiring the administration to release many of the immigrants it had just arrested.
Federal judges criticized the Justice Department’s incompetence in their opinions — the chief judge of the local federal district court wrote that the Trump administration “decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.” One DOJ lawyer, who was assigned an impossible workload of 88 cases in a single month, told a judge that she sometimes wished she’d be held in contempt of court so that she could sleep in jail.
At times, the ineptitude of Bondi’s Justice Department even endangered the Republican Party’s ability to hold onto political power. Last November, a federal court in Texas struck down a Republican gerrymander that is expected to gain the GOP five more US House seats after the 2026 midterms. The court’s opinion, authored by a Trump-appointed judge, relied on a letter from one of Bondi’s top lieutenants, which effectively ordered the state of Texas to redraw its maps for racial reasons that are forbidden by the Constitution.
Though the Supreme Court eventually reinstated the gerrymander, the lower court’s decision was well-rooted in Supreme Court precedents questioning racially motivated laws. All of this drama would have been avoided if Bondi’s DOJ had never sent its letter, which the judge said was “challenging to unpack” because “it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” Texas’s Republican gerrymander would have never been in any danger.
This list is just the beginning. Not every Republican attorney general loyal to Trump would have made such basic errors in carrying out his agenda. And there’s no guarantee that Bondi’s successor will share her ineptitude. So Trump’s opponents may want to wait and see what comes next before they celebrate Bondi’s humiliation.
Bondi’s bumbling management of the Justice Department would have mattered more if Republicans didn’t have a firm grip on the federal judiciary. For the moment, at least, lawsuits challenging many illegal detentions in Minnesota are on hold thanks to a decision by two Republican appellate judges holding that these detentions are, in fact, legally mandated. The Texas court’s decision against that state’s gerrymander was blocked by a Republican Supreme Court.
Still, Bondi’s incompetence is likely to plague the DOJ for a long time, even though she no longer leads it. Federal judges have historically treated Justice Department lawyers with a degree of deference, because for decades the DOJ held a well-deserved reputation for being candid with judges and for hiring highly skilled lawyers. But now many judges are openly questioning the Justice Department in their opinions. That means that rank-and-file Justice Department lawyers will have to spend countless hours shoring up claims that federal judges would have simply believed in the past.
Meanwhile, the worst-case scenario for Trump’s political enemies, and for anyone else who the Justice Department decides to target for political reasons, is that Bondi could be replaced by a capable advocate. (The full list of possible candidates to replace Bondi is not yet known, but some early news reports indicate that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is under consideration).
A competent attorney general would have made sure that a lawfully appointed prosecutor brought charges against Comey and James. A competent attorney general might have selectively leaked Epstein documents that mention Democrats, rather than inspiring an act of Congress requiring all of the documents to be released. And a competent attorney general would treat DOJ lawyers’ time as precious, because every minute a prosecutor spends on unnecessary work is time they can’t spend advancing Trump’s agenda.
It remains to be seen who Trump will pick to replace the maladroit Bondi. But there’s hardly a shortage of highly partisan Republican lawyers who are actually good at their jobs. Trump could find someone like his first-term Attorney General Bill Barr, who was an extraordinarily capable advocate for MAGA’s agenda. And, if that happens, anyone unfortunate to wind up on Trump’s enemies list will miss Pam Bondi.
2026-04-03 04:00:00
这篇文章探讨了如何通过培养思维而非单纯进行“脑力训练”来维护大脑健康。尽管许多人希望通过锻炼或训练大脑来提升认知能力，但研究表明，这种训练对长期智力提升的效果有限。相反，保持健康的生活方式（如均衡饮食、规律运动、减少压力和保证睡眠）对大脑健康至关重要。此外，通过“适度困难”的学习方式（如间隔学习和混合学习）可以更有效地掌握新技能，而好奇心的培养，尤其是与社交互动结合，对延缓认知衰退有积极作用。文章还提到“繁荣”（flourishing）这一概念，强调意识、连接、洞察和目标感对大脑健康的重要性。作者认为，随着年龄增长，参与新活动并建立社交联系，不仅能激发好奇心，还能增强心理满足感和目标感，从而促进长期的认知健康。最后，作者以自己学习下棋的经历为例，指出加入兴趣社群可能比单独学习更能带来益处。
A lot of people are looking for ways to improve, preserve, and prolong their brain’s health. Just look at the seemingly endless amount of self-help books, podcasts, phone apps, TikToks, and Instagram Reels dedicated to the subject.
And, frankly, it makes sense. Alzheimer’s disease and dementia — conditions that fundamentally involve the loss of one’s sense of identity and sense of time and place — are distinctly terrifying compared to physical ailments. They rob a person and their loved ones of what should be a special period of their lives. After all, Americans are living longer than ever. It’s only natural that we want to be as present as we can be to enjoy it.
But despite the many promises you may hear about how to “exercise” or “train” your brain to improve your cognition long-term, there’s still a lot we don’t know. In fact, when I reached out to experts about how to exercise your brain, I received a fair amount of skepticism. Multiple studies that have used tailored tasks or games to test whether they can improve a person’s longer-term general intelligence have found negligible benefits; here’s one from 2019 and another with markedly similar results in 2025.
“It seems to be the case that no one has discovered a way to do cognitive training that transfers from the training task to anything general or interesting,” said Michael Cole, an associate professor in the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University and author of Brain Flows: How Network Dynamics Compose the Human Mind.
Still, the science of brain health has come a long way in the past 20 years, and we have better, evidence-based strategies for staying sharp as you age. There are no simple answers, but by combining frameworks from leading experts on learning, flourishing, and cognitive aging, there is a playbook. Making a point to do these things can make life right now more fulfilling — and it could also pay off as you get older.
First things first: If you want to have a healthy brain, you should take good care of your overall health in the boring-but-effective ways you’ve heard a million times by now: Eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly, do your best to reduce stress, and try to get enough sleep.
High blood pressure is associated with a higher risk of dementia. Chronic inflammation, another modern fixation, could also play a role in cognitive decline. On the flip side, exercise does seem to be associated with cognitive benefits: One major meta-analysis of the relevant research concluded that “exercise, even light intensity, benefits general cognition, memory and executive function across all populations.”
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American health care policy. Sign up here.
Scientists have also repeatedly found that exercise seems to protect against the risk of Alzheimer’s or dementia. One study published last year found that the adults who are active in the middle and later periods of their lives had a more than 40 percent lower risk of all-cause dementia.
So, a heart-healthy diet and exercise are the first steps toward taking care of your mind’s hardware.
But what about exercising your brain itself?
If you do want to know how best to learn anything, you should get familiar with the concept of “desirable difficulty.” Advanced by Nate Kornell, a psychologist focused on memory and learning at Williams College in Massachusetts, the basic idea is this: If something comes too easily, it won’t stick. You need some friction when learning new skills. To do that, you should space out learning and mix it up; Kornell proposes the notions of “spacing” (taking a break from new material and returning to it) and “interleaving” (mixing new material with old material) as effective strategies for learning.
These frameworks are about not improving your cognitive health, per se, but they could make it easier for you to learn something new when that is what you want to do.
“As a larger point in terms of cognitive health, it’s really not changing how your mind processes things,” Kornell told me. “It’s just putting yourself in situations that are more advantageous.”
But even if narrowly defined brain “training” may not have any established long-term benefits, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to challenge ourselves mentally or intellectually. We should just have realistic expectations about what those exercises can do. At the same time, developing new interests is still part of a healthy aging mindset, because it helps nurture some of the good habits that are solidly linked with less cognitive decline, like social connections and curiosity.
Learning a new skill demonstrates curiosity — and research continues to show that curiosity has benefits for the aging mind. Take one paper from last year, co-authored by Alan Castel, a professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA and author of Better With Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.
The researchers uncovered a nuanced relationship between aging and curiosity. They did find that what scientists call “trait” curiosity — your innate interest in seeking out new things to discover — does tend to drop with age. But at the same time, your “state” curiosity — your interest when presented with new or unexpected information — tends to start increasing in your fifth and sixth decades compared to middle age.
“We think that has some implications for cognitive health and brain health,” Castel told me, “that those individuals who are stimulating their brain, who are focusing on hobbies, or interested in lifelong learning, continued engagement with life and learning new things, are less likely to get dementia.”
These findings could lead to more productive forms of “brain training” than a random computer game supposedly designed to improve your intelligence. Instead, based on their findings, an older person may find their curiosity more piqued by something that is relevant to their own self-interest or something they already know about. For example, a person who’s gardened in the past might be stimulated by reading a book or magazine about gardening, joining a gardening club, and learning some new gardening skill — and the research suggests they’ll reap cognitive benefits from that curiosity.
“If you’re interested in gardening and you’re out and doing it and you’re trying to cultivate a new plant or determine how much rainfall there’ll be in the next week, this is all very stimulating, and you’re interpreting it at almost a different level than the novice person,” Castel said. “We think that this sort of engagement is really important as we get older to stimulate knowledge structures that are in place.”
So don’t get stuck in your ways as you age. Castel writes in his book that even changing up your old habits — hiking a familiar trail in the opposite direction, taking your dog for a morning walk, or even shopping at a different market — can benefit your brain.
Despite experts’ initial skepticism, I would still encourage you to learn a new game or pick up a hobby — but think of it less as “training” your brain in a way that will lead to a perceptible increase in your intelligence. It’s more about trying to form connections with other people and feel a sense of purpose as you age.
Experts at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds have characterized this mindset as “flourishing” — and it could also have the long-term benefits to our cognition that so many of us are seeking.
“Cultivating these positive qualities of the mind changes the brain in ways that are very clearly conducive to increased brain health,” Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, told me. “We know, for example, that objective metrics of brain aging are changed by these practices.”
Davidson and his colleague Cortland Dahl recently wrote a book called Born to Flourish: New Science Reveals the Four Practices of Thriving. In it, they say flourishing has four main components:
Each of these qualities can have benefits for your long-term cognitive health, Davidson said, but purpose is a particular area of interest. As Davidson and Dahl write in their book, based on research from their group, “a strong sense of purpose supports healthy aging, particularly in brain regions tied to learning and memory that are susceptible to stress.” People who feel they have a purpose generally experience less severe cognitive decline and better longevity overall. “Having a strong sense of purpose is probably the most important psychological predictor of longevity,” Davidson said.
And as I think about these different strategies for nurturing your mind, both right now and for the long term, I see the ways that learning new skills and taking on new hobbies is good for a healthy mind as you age because it will stoke your curiosity and relieve stress. And if it’s something you can do in conjunction with other people, it may help you feel that sense of connection and purpose that is associated with better cognitive well-being over the course of your life. The synthesis across these neuroscientists was striking at times: Davidson spoke of the value of purpose, while Cole has outlined how pursuing goals that align with your values can lead to more effective learning. Castel, in our conversation, emphasized that stimulating your curiosity is even better when done with a dose of human connection, another pillar of the program Davidson and Dahl laid out. So don’t just dive deeper into birdwatching on your own, but consider joining a nature walking club.
Think of this work less as taking your brain to a mental gym and more as cultivating the strange and wondrous garden that is your mind. You’re training your brain not to be “smarter,” but to be more present, more connected to other people, and more attuned to what gives you an all-important sense of purpose.
I’ve been playing chess lately, for the first time in my life. I do find it prods my brain to think differently. But after reporting for this story, I’m thinking of finding a local chess club. The game itself may not be a prophylactic for my brain, but finding the community of like-minded people, a sense of connection, and a sense of purpose that stokes my curiosity, just might.