VoxModify

2026-04-28 05:50:00

唐纳德·特朗普于2026年4月25日在美国华盛顿特区的白宫举行记者会。这则新闻出现在《Logoff》每日通讯中，该通讯旨在让您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。订阅此处。欢迎来到《Logoff》：各位读者，周末期间，特朗普总统在白宫记者会上遭遇了第三次高调的暗杀企图，但他本人及其他与会者均安然无恙。一名特勤局特工被枪击，但因穿着防弹背心未受重伤。我们很快将了解枪手的信息，他今天已在华盛顿特区出庭。然而，白宫在枪击事件后正全力推进另外两个议题：针对吉米·基梅尔的言论和特朗普的“舞厅”项目。发生了什么？首先，基梅尔上周早些时候开了一则玩笑，称第一夫人梅拉尼娅·特朗普“散发着寡妇般的光芒”。周一，特朗普夫妇要求基梅尔辞职，梅拉尼娅称该言论是“充满仇恨和暴力的”。这并非特朗普政府首次采取此类行动。去年，基梅尔因特朗普的联邦通信委员会主席威胁其雇主ABC而短暂停播，其恢复工作令政府陷入尴尬。尽管基梅尔的玩笑与周六晚的袭击事件并无关联，但政府似乎仍试图借此机会施压。至于“舞厅”项目，该建筑尚未建成，但特朗普希望在其任期结束前完成。目前，白宫因法律禁令而无法进行地上施工。因此，袭击事件后，政府正试图以所谓国家安全为由推动该项目。周日，代理司法部长托德·布兰奇表示，针对政府的诉讼“正在阻碍总统安全设施的建设”。（需注意，白宫记者会并非政府活动，即使舞厅建成也不会在此举行。）总体来看，面对一次几乎发生的悲剧，特朗普政府正全身心投入于琐碎的政治投机行为，并试图压倒反对者。## 此外，通过这则《华尔街日报》的故事，我学到了一个新词——“thigmotactic”，即“触觉导向的”，该词由《华尔街日报》的罗伯特·麦克米伦报道，特指喜欢依偎的社交动物，如海狮。其中一只著名的 Stellar 海狮“Chonkers”如今在旧金山的 Pier 39 安家。您可点击此处阅读更多相关内容（含赠品链接）。一如既往，感谢您的阅读，祝您度过愉快的一晚，我们明天再见！

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: Hi, readers. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump was the target of a third high-profile assassination attempt at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He was unharmed, as were the other attendees. One Secret Service agent was shot but not badly injured, thanks to a bulletproof vest. 

We’re likely to learn more about the shooter, who was arraigned in DC today, in the coming days. But the White House is coming out swinging on two other priorities post-shooting: Jimmy Kimmel and Trump’s ballroom.

What’s going on? Let’s start with Kimmel, who made a joke earlier in the week describing First Lady Melania Trump as having “a glow like an expectant widow.” On Monday, both Trumps called for Kimmel to lose his job over the joke, which Melania described as “hateful and violent.” 

This is something the Trump administration has tried before. Last year, Kimmel was briefly off the air after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair threatened his employer, ABC; his reinstatement was a black eye for the administration.

There’s nothing to connect Kimmel’s joke with Saturday night’s attack, but the administration, undeterred, appears to be trying again.

And the ballroom? Said ballroom — a massive entertaining space for which the East Wing was demolished — doesn’t exist yet, but Trump badly wants it done before the end of his term. Right now, however, the White House is enjoined from proceeding with above-ground construction on the building. 

And so, following the attack, the administration is leaning hard into a supposed national security justification for the ballroom. On Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the lawsuit against the administration was “delaying the construction of a secure facility for the President to do his job.”

(The Correspondents’ Dinner is not a government event and would not be hosted at the White House even were the ballroom completed.)

What’s the big picture? Faced with a potential tragedy narrowly avoided, the Trump administration is going all-in on petty political opportunism — and trying to ride roughshod over its opponents.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I learned a new and delightful word from this Wall Street Journal story: thigmotactic, which the Journal’s Robert McMillan reports is “a scientific term for very social creatures who like to cuddle.” 

The creatures in question are sea lions, and specifically, a stellar Steller sea lion named “Chonkers,” who has made himself at home at San Francisco’s Pier 39. You can read all about him here with a gift link.

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

2026-04-28 03:30:00

2020年美国最高法院审理的Chatrie诉美国案中，首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨与宾夕法尼亚州首席副检察长迈克尔·费舍尔在智能手机上进行口头辩论。该案探讨警方在何种情况下可以利用手机数据追踪犯罪现场附近的人。在案件辩论初期，多数大法官对被告律师亚当·尤尼克沃斯基主张的宪法严格限制政府追踪权利表示怀疑，甚至可能推翻2018年具有里程碑意义的Carpenter案判决，该案要求警方在获取手机位置数据前必须获得搜查令。然而，当司法部律师埃里克·费因开始辩护后，大法官们对政府可能过度获取个人信息的担忧加剧。罗伯茨指出，若政府能通过手机追踪，可能掌握某宗教活动或政治集会所有参与者的身份信息。其他大法官也担心政府可能在未获得搜查令的情况下获取大量电子邮件、日历和照片信息。

综合大法官们的关切，最高法院可能对Chatrie案作出谨慎裁决，维持Carpenter案确立的隐私保护标准，但不会大幅扩展。该案涉及“地理围栏”搜查令，允许警方获取特定时间和地点附近人员的信息。在Chatrie案中，警方获得一项搜查令，要求谷歌提供在弗吉尼亚州米德尔敦某银行抢劫案发生前后一小时在该地点附近的人的信息。该搜查令设定了150米半径范围，包括银行和附近教堂。谷歌通过“位置历史”功能追踪部分用户位置，但数据在最初阶段是匿名的，警方仅在调查后期才获取部分人的身份信息。

尽管如此，该搜查令并未要求法官或治安官判断警方是否合理缩小了最初19名用户的范围，而是由谷歌自行决定是否提供额外信息。部分大法官对此表示不满，认为警方应向法官申请进一步缩小搜索范围。最高法院似乎在三个方向上存在分歧：支持警方扩大追踪权限的保守派（如托马斯和阿利托），担忧政府权力扩张的自由派（如戈尔斯奇和巴雷特），以及中间派（如卡瓦诺和金博尔）。最终裁决可能较为细致，不会显著改变现有法律，但可能允许警方在获得搜查令的情况下追踪特定时间地点的人员，但不会允许大规模搜索，例如政治集会的全体参与者。因此，Chatrie案的判决可能不会对现有法律造成重大影响，但会明确搜查令的适用范围，以防止政府滥用技术手段识别政治异见者等群体。

If I’d only listened to the first half of the Supreme Court’s Monday argument in Chatrie v. United States, a case asking when police can use cellphone data to determine who was present near the site of a crime, I would be convinced that the Court is about to drastically limit Americans’ right to privacy.

Most of the justices’ questions to Adam Unikowsky, the lawyer for a criminal defendant who was convicted of robbing a bank, appeared skeptical of Unikowsky’s claims that the Constitution places strict limits on the government’s ability to track people through their cellphones. Some of the justices even appeared likely to neutralize Carpenter v. United States (2018), a landmark case suggesting that police must obtain a warrant before they obtain cell phone data revealing where a person has been in the past.

But in the second half of the argument, after Justice Department lawyer Eric Feigin took the podium, most of the justices appeared even more concerned about some of the implications of Feigin’s arguments. 

As Chief Justice John Roberts noted shortly after Feigin began his argument, if the government has too much ability to track people using their cellphones, it could potentially learn the identity of everyone who attended a particular religious service, or everyone who attended a particular political meeting. Meanwhile, several other justices appeared worried that the government lawyer’s arguments would permit police to comb through many people’s emails, or their personal calendar and photos, without first obtaining a warrant.

In light of these concerns raised by the justices, it appears likely that the Court will hand down a cautious decision in Chatrie — one that reads Carpenter to require police to always obtain a warrant before they attempt to track someone using their cellphone. That said, the police in Chatrie did, in fact, obtain a warrant. And the Court may very well rule that the warrant in this case complied with the Constitution.

Chatrie, in other words, is likely to be a fairly narrow decision. The Court appears likely to maintain existing privacy protections against police searches, but most likely will not extend them in any significant way.

“Geofence” warrants, briefly explained

The specific legal question in Chatrie involves “geofence” warrants, which are warrants permitting the government to learn who was in a particular location at a particular time. Typically, it is possible for police to discover this information because both cell phone companies and software vendors such as Google often track the location of individuals’ phones. 

In Chatrie, police obtained a warrant requiring Google to turn over information about who was present near a bank in Midlothian, Virginia, within an hour of a robbery at that bank. The warrant drew a 150-meter radius around the crime site that included both the bank and a nearby church. Google had this information about some of its users because of an optional feature known as “location history,” which can be used to pinpoint users’ location with extraordinary precision – but only for users who have opted into this service.

The warrant also laid out a three-step process that limited how much information police could obtain about each individual cell phone user who was inside this geofence. At the first stage, Google provided anonymized information on 19 individuals who were present near the bank during the relevant period. Police sought additional location information on nine of these individuals and, after reviewing that additional information, sought and received the identity of three of these people. One of the three was Chatrie.

So this warrant did place meaningful restrictions on what information could be obtained by police. The data was anonymized until the final stage of the investigation, and police only learned the identity of a small percentage of the total number of people who were present near the robbery.

At the same time, the warrant did not require a judge or magistrate to determine whether the police were justified in narrowing the original 19 individuals down to nine, or down to the three whose identities were ultimately revealed. Google was responsible for determining whether it would turn over this additional information. At least some of the justices appeared bothered by this fact on Monday, and they may rule that this warrant only would have been permissible if police had been required to go back to the judge and get permission to narrow the search.

Three ways the Court could decide Chatrie

Broadly speaking, the Court appeared to fracture into three factions in Chatrie. The most pro-police faction, which included Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, seemed eager to diminish Carpenter and make it much easier for the government to track people without first obtaining a warrant.

As Alito noted, Carpenter involved a similar search, but one that was technologically distinct from the one at issue in Chatrie. In Carpenter, police determined a suspect’s location by tracking which cell phone towers or other “cell sites” their phone was communicating with at various times. This information is less precise than the GPS-tracking data that Google possessed in Chatrie, but it is also information that, in Alito’s words, a cellphone user has “no choice but to disclose.”

Alito’s argument was that Chatrie could have turned off the feature in many of Google’s apps that allowed Google to track his location, but no cell phone user can prevent their phone from communicating with cell sites unless they turn off the phone altogether. Carpenter, under Alito’s framework, would only require a warrant if police want to obtain information that a cell phone user cannot opt out of revealing.

As a practical matter, this would mean that the government would have virtually limitless ability to track people’s movements, so long as it relied entirely on services such as Google Maps or Uber, where users can prevent the service from tracking their precise location.

Shortly after Feigin began his argument, however, several key justices signaled that they do not buy Alito’s argument. Roberts raised his concern about police learning the identities of everyone who attends a particular church. Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out that people also sometimes voluntarily share their emails, photos, and personal calendars with Google, and he expressed concern that the government’s legal arguments would allow police to access that information without a warrant as well. 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who also asked some questions that seemed sympathetic to the government’s position, seemed to recoil when she realized that the Justice Department’s argument would not only permit the police to track when someone enters a private residence, but also specifically whether someone entered that residence’s bedroom.

That said, it seems unlikely that the Court will place sweeping restrictions on the government’s ability to obtain geolocation data provided that they first obtain a warrant. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former public defender who is often sympathetic to the rights of criminal defendants, said fairly explicitly that she does not see a problem with a warrant permitting police to learn which 19 individuals were near the bank robbery — although she likely would support additional restrictions once police seek more information on some of these individuals.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, suggested that a geofence warrant is valid so long as it places “reasonable geographic and temporal” limits on the search. Police, in other words, can learn who was in a fairly narrowly defined location within a brief period of time, but the Constitution might not permit a sprawling search of, say, everyone at a political protest that encompassed many city blocks and that lasted an entire day.

All of which is a long way of saying that the Court’s decision in Chatrie is likely to be fairly nuanced, and it is unlikely to significantly disturb existing law. Police will still need to obtain a warrant before they can discover where someone was at a particular time in the past, but the Court is unlikely to place particularly strict restrictions on what that warrant should say.

Whether those restrictions are strict enough to prevent the government from identifying political dissidents and similar groups is unclear, and the question may remain open until a future case.

2026-04-28 02:05:00

2026年4月14日，莱娜·邓汉姆（Lena Dunham）出现在《德鲁·巴里摩尔秀》（The Drew Barrymore Show）上。她的新回忆录《Famesick》引发了公众对其过去争议的重新审视。一些曾批评她的媒体人如今公开道歉，认为他们过去对她的苛刻评价并不公正。例如，Rachel Simon在MS Now上写道：“我们应向莱娜·邓汉姆道歉。”她承认邓汉姆虽有缺陷，但从未应受仇恨或苛责。类似地，Sonia Soraiya在Slate上表示，自己曾误解邓汉姆，并为此道歉。这些反思表明，随着距离15年，邓汉姆的争议被重新评估，部分批评显得荒谬。

《Famesick》中，邓汉姆详细描述了成名初期对她的身心伤害，以及由此引发的阿片类药物成瘾和自我毁灭行为。她指出，2010年代的“取消文化”（cancel culture）是社会舆论的产物，其背后既有 misogyny（性别歧视），也包含对社会正义的追求。然而，这种文化有时被滥用，甚至成为攻击无辜者的工具。

文章回顾了邓汉姆的争议时间线：2012年《女孩们》（Girls）播出引发大量批评，包括对其种族和阶级问题的指责；2014年她出版回忆录《不是那种女孩》（Not That Kind of Girl），揭露性侵经历，却因被指“虚假指控”而遭保守派攻击；2016年她因在Met Gala上对奥德尔·贝克汉姆（Odell Beckham Jr.）的言论引发争议；2017年她因支持一名被指控性侵黑人女性的白人编剧而备受批评。尽管如此，邓汉姆在回忆录中并未为所有争议道歉，仅对2017年的事件表示悔意。

作者认为，邓汉姆的争议反映了“取消文化”的复杂性：它既是社会进步的推动力，也因过度攻击而显得荒谬。邓汉姆本人对这种文化既有深刻理解，也难以完全摆脱其影响。尽管她曾多次陷入舆论漩涡，但作者仍认为她并未犯下不可原谅的错误，且她的道歉值得一定宽容。最终，文章指出，公众对邓汉姆的重新审视，也折射出对“取消文化”本身的反思与批判。

Lena Dunham, the subject of a thousand 2010s think pieces about whether or not she is problematic, has re-emerged from behind the curtain with her new memoir, Famesick. But this time around, the think pieces look different. Some of them are mea culpas addressed to Dunham. 

“We owe Lena Dunham an apology,” declared Rachel Simon in a story for MS Now. The apology came with a caveat: “Dunham is, and always has been, a flawed figure. But she never deserved our hatred, nor the expectations placed on her to get everything right.” 

“I was wrong about Lena Dunham,” proclaimed Sonia Soraiya at Slate. Soraiya argues that Dunham’s nervy, uncomfortable magnum opus Girls “activated” her own self-loathing, and that she and other critics of the era took it out on Dunham. 

“I was one of Lena Dunham’s haters. I want to say I’m sorry,” wrote Dave Schilling at The Guardian. Dunham’s memoir, in which she writes vividly about how her early fame destroyed her mental and physical health, had Schilling rethinking the way he used to write about her. “Rarely did I think about the adverse effects of society turning her into a Wicker Man-style totem for us to set on fire,” he wrote. “To a lot of us, she stopped being a person and transformed into a symbol. I can’t think of anything more unfair.” 

In Famesick, Dunham writes that the intensity of the public conversation about her when Girls premiered in 2012 exacerbated her chronic illness, which would be eventually diagnosed as endometriosis plus Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The combination of the stress of fame and the stress of chronic illness drove her into an opioid addiction and self-destructive behavior, which would further fuel the discourse about her. 

Even in the 2010s, at the height of Dunham’s fame, it was fairly evident that a number of the outcries over Dunham’s public presence were overblown. Now, with the distance of 15 years, and Girls reclaimed as a piece of important art, some of those controversies appear remarkably stupid. We should not have been so cruel to her, the consensus is developing, and we would not have been, had she arisen at any other historical moment. 

With Dunham’s redemption cycle, we’re performing a sped-up version of the discourse cycle that saw the public reexamining the misogynistic witch hunts of Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, et al. in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s become clear, with the distance of 20 years, that the gossip press of the 2000s was driven primarily by misogyny, occasionally dressed up as concern trolling. Now, the oft-unspoken villain is cancel culture, the slew of social media shaming and chiding that became such a virulent force at the same time that Dunham was coming up in the 2010s. Apologizing to Dunham becomes a way of apologizing for and repudiating cancel culture, making the case that we are no longer in the cancel culture moment.

But 2010s cancel culture was a different beast than 2000s purity culture. The tactics of social media dogpiling and calls for deplatforming were sometimes misdirected at, say, recipe writers who misspoke in an interview, but they also helped push forward the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter. Defenders of cancel culture used to say that it was less about canceling the sinful than it was about holding the powerful to account for their misdeeds — but it wasn’t always clear who was powerful enough to be worth targeting, and which misdeeds were all that bad.

Dunham, as the showrunner of a conversation-driving television show, had a fair amount of power, as well as a knack for saying the wrong things in public. The questions before us now are: Was anything she said in public bad enough to justify the treatment she received? And, by extension, just how destructive was cancel culture, really? 

Cancel culture emerged from a specific moment in history that would be difficult to replicate. First, social media democratized discourse; suddenly elites were vulnerable to criticism by regular people in the public square. It also divided people into teams and made everyone angry all the time. 

This was also the era of blogs — Gawker and its sister site Jezebel; The Awl and its sister site The Hairpin; Salon, Slate, and many more — which were so fun to read and so hard to work at. Blogs were content mills that needed to be fed. The key metric for digital newsrooms at the time was how many clicks any individual story got, which incentivized quickly written hot takes about polarizing figures who sparked audience outrage. 

Meanwhile, the educated class was rapidly shifting the norms of acceptable public behavior and belief systems toward the left. In the post-Gamergate, post-Ferguson, post-Obama culture wars, everything must be understood as expressive of the shift in these norms, to be analyzed and evaluated for its fidelity and virtue. At its best, it was a valuable refocusing that helped people reprocess the hegemonic beliefs about the world they had inherited. It could also, at its worst, be reductive. Cancel culture was a tool that held the powerful to account. It was a weapon that punished disproportionately. It was bipartisan, vicious, frightening, bewildering, exhilarating. 

Confessional-style women’s blogging was also in its heyday in those days — all the XOJane “it happened to me” stories, the Jezebel tampon posts — which were so prevalent that their gravitational pull warped any piece of fiction about the intimate lives of women, including Girls, into being understood as a confession. As such, it was evaluated religiously, praised for its radical political transparency, damned for its sins.

Of all the people who were canceled in the 2010s, Lena Dunham was surely not the most deserving. She was the young showrunner of a critically acclaimed but little-watched HBO drama, with most episodes garnering well under 1 million viewers. How much influence could she possibly have wielded? But Girls became something bigger than itself; sometimes it felt that every one of the few hundred thousand people who watched it were writing essays about it. 

Some of that criticism was straightforwardly misogynistic: People wrote angry screeds about how much they hated Dunham because she was naked on her show a lot and they thought she was ugly. Some of it was in bad faith. Dunham’s Girls alter ego, Hannah, was abrasive and entitled, and in the discourse, the distance between them collapsed. People were furious at Dunham for making them watch a character as unlikable as Hannah. 

A great deal of the criticism of Dunham was plausibly in good faith, but it was extraordinarily loud. There was the criticism that Dunham and all the young women she cast were nepo babies. Then there was the way Dunham’s real-life presence sometimes evoked the same clueless arrogance as that of the character she played. Part of that involved her saying a lot of thoughtlessly provocative things, many of which displayed a consistent obtuseness toward class and race.

To begin with, Girls was set among young people in diverse Brooklyn, and yet all the main characters were white: Why? Some argued that Dunham’s blinkered, privileged characters were exactly the type of young New Yorkers who would surround themselves with other white people, while others argued Dunham’s refusal to engage with race was a sign of racism in and of itself.

Dunham responded with a characteristic mix of reason and hamfisted trollery. “If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to,” she told NPR in 2012, after the first season aired. “I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.” 

Dunham was right that the charm of Girls lay in its specificity, and it was reasonable for her to fear that she couldn’t bring that level of sensory, bodily detail to the life of a Black character. But the following season, she followed up the controversy by casting Donald Glover as Hannah’s short-lived Black boyfriend, who was revealed to be a Republican — a strange creative choice that tokenized what was, at that point, the show’s sole Black character.  

In the meantime, outside the show, Dunham kept making unforced errors. “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had,” she said on a podcast in 2016. In 2019, she described sitting next to the NFL star Odell Beckham Jr. at the Met Gala, and feeling insecure that Beckham, who is Black, didn’t seem attracted to her. “The vibe was very much like, ‘Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a…yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cellphone,’” Dunham said. Theoretically she was talking about her own insecurities, but in practice, the quote was so specific and bizarrely sexualized (truly the Lena Dunham story) that critics argued it played into a harmful narrative about how Black men respond to white women. (Dunham later apologized.)  

While the criticisms of Dunham’s body and nudity were straightforward misogyny, the criticisms of her oversight around race were more reasonable. Still, few of them merited the intensity of response Dunham received in the 2010s: not just the polite and well-reasoned essays, but the vitriolic and unending Twitter posts accusing her of monstrous bigotry and evil thoughts. In some cases, it felt as though the social justice outrage around Dunham’s racism were giving cover to people who hated her because they thought she was ugly and annoying, like right-wing commenters who claim they’re criticizing white women as an act of allyship with people of color.  

In Famesick, Dunham declines to apologize for any of her missteps — save for what was probably her greatest controversy: her 2017 defense of a white Girls writer accused of raping a Black woman.

In 2017, at the height of the Me Too movement, actress Aurora Perrineau filed sexual assault charges against Girls writer Murray Miller, saying that he raped her in 2012, when she was 17 years old. In response, Dunham and her Girls co-showrunner Jenni Konner sent a statement to the Hollywood Reporter defending Miller.

“While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story,” they wrote, “our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”

“I believe in a lot of things but the first tenet of my politics is to hold up the people who have held me up, who have filled my world with love,” Dunham added on what was then Twitter.

For an outspoken feminist like Dunham to accuse a woman of lying about her sexual assault, on the grounds that the man accused was someone she knew, was a betrayal of some of her most clearly stated principles. To make matters worse, the accused man was white, and the alleged victim was a woman of color, playing directly into one of Dunham’s biggest weaknesses.

In Famesick, Dunham describes her decision to publish this statement as “the narcissism of fame in its purest form.” 

“I was so deep in my own distress — physical, emotional, existential — that I had ceased to be able to imagine anyone else’s,” she writes. She also says that the response went out the same day she returned home after a full hysterectomy, high on pain killers, under pressure from Konner, and she doesn’t remember drafting it. 

Every time I read this apology, I find myself going back and forth on it. Dunham sounds genuinely contrite — but then Dunham always does sound genuinely contrite in all her apologies, which never seem to end. 

The medical context from which she was writing her original statement sounds almost unimaginably difficult. Dunham evokes the physical and mental pain of the hysterectomy with brutal efficiency, likening her disease-ridden uterus to “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws”; one of her doctors tells her later that he doesn’t know how she was able to keep walking. I am reluctant to tar someone forever for a poor decision made so soon after the trauma and pain of major surgery. 

Yet there is also a slippery manipulative quality to the way Dunham writes about this statement, a subtle passing of blame. Konner becomes the chief agent in Dunham’s version of events, the woman of sound mind and sound health who pushes the fateful statement on a woozy, dissociating Dunham and supposedly publishes it over Dunham’s mother’s protests. Such villainous, boundary-crossing, ill-intentioned figures recur throughout this memoir at some of Dunham’s lowest moments: suddenly, we encounter people who whom Dunham tells us are cruel or unempathetic in a way she says that she is not. 

“It is in these moments that I felt unsure whether Dunham is a victim or a narcissist,” wrote the essayist Eleanor Halls in her review of Famesick; “the truth is you can be both.” And isn’t it always both with Lena Dunham?

Knowing everything we do about Dunham, it feels reasonable to decide that she has crossed the line too many times and you are done with giving her second chances. It feels reasonable to conclude that you don’t want to pay attention to her public persona but are willing to give her consistently high-quality TV work another try. And it also feels reasonable to decide that you are willing to allow her the grace of her apology, even with caveats. 

That, in the end, is where I end up. Dunham has a compelling voice, and I find that she hasn’t done anything so appalling that it interferes with my interest in seeing what she does next.  

Part of the reason so many people are invested in parsing out how bad Dunham is or was, and how much she deserved her treatment in the 2010s, is because it is a way of working out by proxy how much we collectively need to feel ashamed of cancel culture. In the midst of the vicious backlash to progressive politics that supposedly led to Trump’s reelection, there’s a growing sense among many progressives that the eager, ugly, censorious glee of cancel culture was a tactical mistake, that it alienated supporters, that it was even immoral.

Looking back at Dunham’s career, though, reveals that cancel culture never went along any particular party lines. It was misogynistic: It attacked women with a specific glee, particularly women like Dunham, who was considered ugly yet still took her clothes off on TV. It was also feminist: Dunham’s biggest wave of backlash came after she defended an accused rapist whose accuser was a Black woman. 

Cancel culture was an expression of what was new and exciting about both social media and digital media, and also what was monstrous and destabilizing about them. It was a tool used by people on both sides of the political aisle, and also people who did not identify as political at all. It devoured people like Lena Dunham, and it was also a source of attention she seemed to court, provoking and trolling and apologizing in an endless cycle of discourse. 

Dunham was in the unique position to understand both the panicky horrors and the perverse thrills of cancel culture better than nearly anyone. Like the people apologizing to her, she, too, doesn’t seem to know if it was all that bad — only that she wishes it had not been so bad to her.

2026-04-27 19:15:00

如果你未能成功购买或因价格过高而放弃2028年洛杉矶奥运会门票，你并不孤单。购买这些门票的过程就像与一位极其富有的朋友交谈，他们谈论自己热爱的运动，比如击剑、板球和羽毛球，同时也在考验你的财务责任感。作者在尝试购票时经历了诸多困扰，包括复杂的网站、不透明的库存、高价门票（最高可达5000美元）以及令人失望的购票体验。尽管组织方承诺奥运会将对本地居民经济友好，例如提供28美元的门票，但实际中许多门票价格远超预期，甚至有近50%的门票价格低于200美元，而只有5%的价格超过1000美元。

购票流程中，门票分为A至J的字母等级，但不同赛事和场馆的定价标准不一，导致同一等级的门票价格差异巨大。例如，游泳赛事的A级门票可能比羽毛球的A级门票贵数千美元。此外，部分赛事可能不提供所有等级的门票，这使得购票更加复杂。作者在早期购票窗口中发现，即使拥有优先权，也无法获得热门赛事的门票，且价格高昂，甚至愿意为一场初步比赛支付1116美元。最终，作者决定放弃购买，尽管在闭幕式门票上仍感到震惊，因为最贵的门票价格高达4961美元。

文章指出，奥运会通常超支，且对主办城市居民来说，门票价格过高可能成为负担。尽管洛杉矶2028组委会（LA28）声称将提供更多本地优惠门票，但其财务透明度和定价策略仍受到质疑。未来可能引入动态定价机制，进一步推高热门赛事的票价。此外，从明年起，门票将在Ticketmaster、Sports Illustrated Tickets和AXS/Eventim等平台上进行转售，而美国的转售市场通常价格高昂。作者虽对未来的购票机会抱有一丝希望，但仍可能需要依赖朋友或寻找更便宜的途径才能观看比赛。

Buying tickets to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is kind of like having a megawealthy friend talk to you about the hobbies that they enjoy. 

Do you fence? Do you like cricket? Badminton’s fun, right? 

Like a diabolically rich friend, the Olympics are also, at the same time, a test of financial responsibility. 

How much would you pay to watch people gracefully sword fight? Do you think you could learn to love cricket if you were spending $100? Would you like to go into mild credit card debt to see a less beautiful version of tennis?  

Ultimately, I said no to my rich friend, the Olympics. I wasn’t alone. 

As so many potential LA 2028 spectators have expressed, the entire ticket-buying process — email registration, a finicky website, specific time slots, opaque inventory — was bad. The fact that prices were exorbitant, as much as $5,000, after so many assurances from organizers and elected officials that these Games would be financially accessible, including $28 tickets available to locals, with nearly 50 percent of all tickets costing less than $200, and only 5 percent of tickets costing more than $1,000. 

I experienced the frustration of the terrible website, a bad time slot, and the sticker shock firsthand. I eventually logged off, empty-handed, during a spiral in which I found myself seriously considering spending money to see javelin, a sport I have never once thought about.  

Here’s how the great 2028 Olympic ticket mess went down.

Trust the process (or not) of buying 2028 Olympics tickets

The road to disappointment began this winter. 

On January 14, 2026, organizers opened registration for the first ticket drop, scheduled for April. Interested Olympic spectators were invited to submit their email addresses anytime until March 18, and residents of Los Angeles and Oklahoma City (softball and canoe slalom will take place there) had the opportunity to register for a locals-only presale. You were then entered into a random draw for a chance to purchase tickets, and those lucky enough to be selected were given a specific time slot between April 9 and April 19 to purchase tickets. Entrants living in LA and OKC who were selected were assigned a slot in a window that began a week earlier, on April 2. 

The tickets are categorized using an alphabetical tier system in which Tier A accounts for the most expensive tickets, Tier B is the second-most expensive, with prices decreasing all the way down to Tier J. It quickly gets confusing, though, because there’s no standard tier pricing across events — so the Tier A tickets for swimming will cost more (possibly thousands more) than the Tier A tickets for badminton. 

Here’s the other wrinkle: Not every event will have all the lettered tiers. In other words, some venues may only go down to D, while a bigger stadium or arena may go all the way to J. But since there’s no standard pricing, an E-tier ticket in a bigger venue could theoretically end up being more pricey than a C-tier — depending on the event. 

This is all difficult to visualize, especially since consumers can’t see the inventory of tickets available or the prices until they’re logged into the buying portal during their time slot. When you do have access, it’s presented as a giant list that you have to scroll through. And while you can see what the cheapest tickets are for the event you want to go to, you still have to click through to see the tiers. (As a workaround, the very helpful people on Olympics Reddit created a crowd-sourced spreadsheet detailing all the available sporting sessions, the tiers available for each, and the respective prices.) 

People living in LA — with the earliest time slots — didn’t seem to fare as well as organizers promised. On TikTok and in interviews with traditional media outlets, Angelenos said that they didn’t find the affordable tickets that were promised, and even though they had the early bird advantage, some found that some of the premier events, like gymnastics and swimming, weren’t available. If they were in stock, only the most expensive tiers were up for purchase. 

Meanwhile, organizers confirmed that no new inventory was added after the presale and before the first general sale began on April 9. A friend of mine who got an April 10 slot concurred that the options were slim and was tempted by a $1,116.27 entry to a preliminary swimming heat:

I ended up receiving what seemed to be one of the last spots, an April 17 window. And after everything I’d seen so far, my hopes were not high. If people were having trouble during the presale, getting into the fray two days before the entire drop closed was not looking promising. 

Right when my buying window unlocked, swimming and gymnastics were already sold out, as previous buyers also reported was the case. The same was true for men’s and women’s basketball. Tennis was blocked out as well. Football (soccer) was an option, but the only tickets I had access to buy were in Nashville. Nothing against Nashville, but I was looking to go to the LA Olympics in Los Angeles. 

The best team sporting event I had access to was Women’s Volleyball. The US team is the reigning silver medalists and won gold in 2020. It would be fun to see the American women mount their medal defense. 

I was very close to purchasing these, but ultimately decided against it. 

The problem is that the only tickets available to me started at $489.92 for tier A, the highest one for the event, and they were for a preliminary round match — the round-robin games before eliminations begin. There’s no guarantee, not even for that price, that I would be able to see the US team play; you’re spending nearly $500 for one match on a specific day, between two teams that have yet to be determined. However, if there were a cheaper option available for this, I would have jumped at it. 

There were some tickets available for track and field, but none for relays and sprints. Javelin, which was bundled with the men’s 3,000-meter steeplechase final, went for $750.38.  

The most affordable option I came across was tickets to see a preliminary round of women’s cricket for $105. While this would no doubt be a lucky day for a cricket enthusiast, I didn’t bite. While the price was right, I couldn’t be sure that my excitement for cricket in two years would be high enough to justify it. 

Finally, in an act of mild humiliation, I decided to click on tickets for the closing ceremonies. They were sold out, but I wanted to see just how expensive they had been. The most you could spend on the finale celebration was a cool $4,961.20. That’s nearly $5K not to see any sports. 

Is it normal for the Olympics to be too expensive for the people living in the host city?

The thing to keep in mind about the LA Olympics is that hosting the Games is, more often than not, a huge, expensive burden that strains security resources and stresses infrastructure. But because it’s the Olympics, many cities bid to host them anyway.  

Historically, the Olympics have a tendency to run over budget. The most recent Winter Games in Milan cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than expected, and according to France’s court of auditors, French taxpayers ended up shouldering a 6 billion euro burden after hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics (though organizers dispute this number). The French government initially said the public funding would only be 1 billion euros, and measures like using existing structures for the events (i.e., not spending money creating new permanent venues) would mitigate cost. 

“These events rarely end up being a great deal for the people who live in the cities where they’re staged,” said Brett House, a professor specializing in macroeconomics and international finance at Columbia Business School. House explained that the Olympics and similar events like the World Cup tend to have cost overruns and that organizations like the IOC and FIFA often put their priorities ahead of local needs (e.g., FIFA’s dispute with New Jersey and NJ Transit). Spending money on city infrastructure to accommodate the rush of people coming to the Olympics or any massive international event is a different animal than spending money on city infrastructure to actually improve the city long-term, and problems arise when the two don’t align. 

The big question now is whether the LA Olympics will also go over budget and who will end up paying. 

LA28, a privately funded nonprofit, is in charge of organizing these Games. Ticketing programs are one of LA28’s major revenue streams (along with licensing, corporate sponsors, and significant contributions from the International Olympic Committee), and according to LA28, the entire event will cost upwards of $7.1 billion. Selling pricey tickets helps pay for that budget.

But the city of Los Angeles, the state of California, and LA28 are still finalizing a safety net deal in which the city would step in and pay for the first $270 million in losses if there is a deficit. If the losses mount, the state would then step in and cover $270 million more. (According to LAist, lawmakers passed the legislation to enable this in 2017, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has yet to sign it.) LAist reports that “city officials say if that contract isn’t airtight, it could leave L.A. with millions in unexpected costs.”

Despite press releases and assurances from organizing committees like LA28 about the positive economic impact — jobs, contracts, tourism, etc. — history, and more recently Paris, suggests that LA taxpayers may end up footing some of the bill. Shutting those same taxpayers out of the events that they might end up paying for is a boorish look, and perhaps explains why organizers and city officials like LA Mayor Karen Bass have continually emphasized the importance of accessibility for LA residents. 

“It is very hard to quantify the benefits that organizers claim will accrue to cities,” House added.  “Of course, we can put numbers on some of the elements, but the numbers almost never come out as high as the organizers and the international organizations behind them promise that they will be.”

For unlucky fans who struck out on this first drop of tickets, there are some options: entrants who did not purchase tickets or were not selected will automatically be entered for a chance to buy tickets during future drops. The Olympics organizing committee said that the next drop will include “refreshed inventory” for the premier events that sold quickly during this one, but it is unclear what specific ticket inventory will be included in each future drop. The next drop will, according to LA28, occur in August. 

Consumers (myself included) are probably hoping that the second drop will have some more affordable tickets available. In a City Council meeting on April 14, members grilled LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover over ticket prices, the 24 percent service fee that applied to all purchases,  and financial transparency. Hoover and LA28 have promised that there will be more tickets — including more $28 tickets — available for locals in the future. But he also told LAist earlier this month that he wouldn’t be opposed to implementing dynamic pricing. 

Dynamic pricing is based on demand and timing — more interest means a more expensive ticket — and embracing it could mean prices for premier events get even higher. As an enjoyer of popular concerts and someone who uses Uber and Lyft, I don’t believe this approach has ever worked in my favor. 

That’s not all. 

Beginning next year, verified tickets will be available on three resale platforms: Ticketmaster, Sports Illustrated Tickets, and AXS/Eventim. The resale and secondary ticket market in the US can be very pricey, with tickets for popular events often going for a tremendous markup. As my colleague recently pointed out, reselling has become its own lucrative marketplace. While the 2026 Milan Cortina Games constrained the resale prices of tickets in its official app to face value (plus service fees), it’s unclear if that will be the case in LA.

If astronomical resale prices and dynamic pricing do go into effect, the Olympics will feel a lot like concerts and other sporting events in the US: extremely expensive, attended largely by people who can afford to spend $1,000 for a night out in the nosebleeds. 

But at the same time, I’m still registered for the next ticket drop (and future ones). I’m holding out the slightest hope that organizers might open up more inventory, and perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to see the next Simone Biles or Suni Lee in person, or watch Anthony Edwards and A’ja Wilson lead the US basketball teams to gold. More expensive resale is an option down the line, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ll have two years to befriend a diabolically rich person to take me along with them. 

2026-04-27 19:00:00

新泽西州州长米基·谢里尔（Mikie Sherrill）于2026年3月10日在新泽西州议会大厦的议会议厅发表讲话。| Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg via Getty Images

多年来，许多民主党人批评一些在高利润企业工作的员工（如亚马逊、沃尔玛和麦当劳）使用医疗补助（Medicaid）福利，认为这些企业应为员工提供更合理的工资和医疗保障。然而，这一观点存在根本性错误，并与左翼对社会福利的普遍愿景相悖。实际上，民主党正试图将这种模糊的“企业福利”概念转化为实际的税收政策。例如，新泽西州和科罗拉多州的立法者正推动对雇佣医疗补助受益人的公司征收罚款，以弥补该计划的资金缺口。随着共和党削减医疗补助资金，其他州也可能效仿，但这将是一个错误。

医疗补助并非“企业福利”
首先，医疗补助作为“企业福利”的说法缺乏依据。2014年《平价医疗法案》（Affordable Care Act）为各州提供新的医疗补助资金，使研究人员得以观察该计划对经济的影响。结果显示，增加医疗补助并未导致企业降低工资。此外，从理论上看，公共医疗保障反而应增强工人在劳动力市场中的议价能力，而非削弱。如果政府能保障失业者的基本需求，他们将更有能力要求更高的工资。因此，医疗补助和食品券等计划实际上是补贴工人，而非企业。

其次，这种观点实际上支持了将医疗保障与就业挂钩的模式，这与进步派主张的全民医疗保障理念相冲突。例如，伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）认为，沃尔玛雇佣医疗补助受益人相当于“从纳税人身上吸血”，但这种逻辑却与他倡导的“全民医保”（Medicare-for-All）政策相矛盾，后者旨在取代企业提供的医疗保障，由政府统一覆盖。

对雇佣医疗补助受益人的公司征税是错误的
尽管这些批评存在概念性缺陷，但它们正逐渐影响政策制定。新泽西州州长谢里尔提议，对雇佣医疗补助受益人的大型企业每年每人征收725美元罚款。科罗拉多州的部分民主党人也支持类似政策，认为不应让州民为大型企业支付医疗补助费用。然而，这种做法可能带来负面影响：一方面，企业可能歧视那些可能使用医疗补助的员工（如单亲母亲），以减少成本；另一方面，低收入工人可能因担心被解雇而放弃申请医疗补助，即使其雇主提供的保险更差。正如新泽西政策研究中心的彼得·陈（Peter Chen）所言，这会削弱医疗补助的吸引力，而该计划通常比企业保险更全面且可转移。

直接提高最低工资或更有效
民主党人抱怨亚马逊员工使用医疗补助，确实反映了现实问题：美国工人应获得更多经济收益，许多州也需填补医疗补助预算缺口。然而，医疗补助为工人提供跨岗位的全面保障，是积极因素，而非需要解决的问题。若想提高沃尔玛工人的工资，直接上调最低工资即可；若认为富人应多为社会福利做贡献，可提高个人和企业的最高税率。对雇佣医疗补助受益人的公司征税不仅无法直接提升工资，还可能引发歧视，削弱对公共医疗保障的争取，且税收收入远低于普遍增税。因此，最佳方式是直接采取行动，而非通过伤害工人的政策或激化纳税人对安全网计划的不满。

For years, many Democrats have lamented the fact that some workers at highly profitable corporations — from Amazon to Walmart to McDonald’s — receive Medicaid benefits. 

Their reasoning isn’t hard to understand: To be eligible for safety net programs, one must have a low household income. And why should anyone working at a highly profitable enterprise earn a low income? Surely, Walmart can afford to provide its cashiers with a living wage and health care benefits. By not doing so, the Walton family is “living off corporate welfare from the federal government,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders put it in 2020. 

This argument is intuitive. But it is also incorrect — and utterly antithetical to the left’s broader vision for social welfare.

Unfortunately, Democrats are on the cusp of turning their party’s incoherent conception of “corporate welfare” into actual tax policy. In New Jersey and Colorado, lawmakers are currently pushing to impose a fine on companies for every Medicaid recipient they keep on their payrolls, in order to shore up funding for that program. As Republican Medicaid cuts weigh on state budgets, others could be tempted to follow their lead. 

That would be a mistake. These proposals are likely to harm low-income workers, while reinforcing the very employer-provided health insurance model that progressives rightly oppose.

Medicaid is not “corporate welfare”

At a high level, there are two problems with the populist critique of Medicaid as “corporate welfare.”

For one, there is no real basis for the notion that the program subsidizes large companies by allowing them to pay their workers lower wages.

In fact, America just ran a vast, real-world experiment that falsified that hypothesis. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act offered states new Medicaid funding to enroll millions of workers who were previously ineligible. This gave researchers an opportunity to gauge Medicaid’s economic impacts by looking at how conditions changed when various states expanded the program. And none of the resulting case studies found that increasing Medicaid benefits led employers to cut wages. 

Further, there is no good reason to expect that public health insurance would reduce wages, even in theory. To the contrary, conventional welfare economics would actually suggest the opposite.

When workers are guaranteed health insurance and nutritional aid by the government, they enjoy more leverage over employers in the labor market, not less. If being unemployed means going hungry — or forgoing medical care — then many workers will accept the first job offer they get, no matter how poorly compensated. 

By contrast, if the state provides jobless workers with some of their basic needs, then more will be able to hold out for higher wages. 

All of which is to say, programs like Medicaid and food stamps subsidize workers, not their employers. Suggesting otherwise is both inaccurate and politically hazardous: If you tell people that Medicaid functions as a subsidy to Walmart, they’re liable to think that cutting the program isn’t such a bad idea.

Second, the populist argument validates the notion that workers should get health insurance from their employers, rather than the government — a concept that’s contrary to progressives’ own vision for universal health care. 

In Sanders’s framing, when Walmart employs a Medicaid recipient, it is effectively leeching off taxpayers. This implies that a more upstanding company would assume responsibility for its employees’ health insurance, thereby relieving taxpayers of that burden. 

And yet, in other contexts, progressives rightly argue that we should break the link between health care and employment.

Sanders is the nation’s most famous proponent of Medicare-for-All — a policy that would replace all employer-provided health insurance with government coverage. This would be a tall order politically. But the substantive case for shifting our system in this direction is unimpeachable: The employer-based health care model is both inefficient (since it generates higher administrative costs than a more centralized system) and inegalitarian (since it leaves Americans’ access to health care contingent on their labor market success). 

Decrying Walmart workers’ use of Medicaid as evidence of scandalous “corporate welfare” — rather than a model of what the entire health insurance system should look like — is contrary to reformers’ own objectives. 

Fining companies for employing Medicaid recipients is a bad idea

Alas, despite its conceptual flaws, populist complaints about workers at big companies using Medicaid are getting more influential. What was once just a rhetorical cudgel against low-paying employers is now on the brink of generating actual policies. 

In New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill has proposed a fine on all large employers with Medicaid recipients on their payrolls. Under her plan, such firms would have to pay the state $725 annually for each Medicaid enrollee they employ. 

Meanwhile, some Democrats in Colorado’s state legislature are pushing a similar proposal, on the grounds that “Colorado taxpayers should not subsidize the nation’s largest corporations by way of our state providing Medicaid for their employees.” 

These plans are responding to a genuine policy challenge: Thanks to President Donald Trump’s cuts to federal Medicaid funding, many states need to find new revenues to maintain benefits. 

But fining companies that employ Medicaid recipients is not a sound solution. Indeed, such a policy would likely hurt the very workers it purports to help, for at least two reasons.

First, Sherill’s proposal incentivizes employers to discriminate against workers who seem likely to use Medicaid benefits. 

Eligibility for Medicaid isn’t determined by a worker’s personal income, but by their household income and family size. For this reason, single mothers are especially likely to qualify for the program. Thus, under Sherrill’s plan, employers looking to fill low-wage positions could save money by disfavoring applicants who appear to have children and/or lack a partner. Likewise, companies that already employ Medicaid recipients would have a greater incentive to fire such workers.

Second, and relatedly, the proposal could deter low-wage workers from enrolling in Medicaid, even when their employers’ health plan offers worse benefits, for fear of making themselves a target for layoffs. 

“This could discourage workers from enrolling in Medicaid because doing so would make them less employable,” Peter Chen, a senior policy analyst at the think-tank New Jersey Policy Perspectives, told me. “And yet, Medicaid is often a preferable insurance product for them because it’s portable and often provides better coverage for children than employer-based plans.”

If you want to raise the minimum wage, just do that

When Democrats grouse about Amazon employees using Medicaid, they gesture at real problems. American workers deserve a larger cut of our economy’s proceeds. And many states need to plug holes in their Medicaid budgets.

But the fact that lots of workers have access to public health insurance — which follows them from job to job and offers comprehensive benefits — is a good thing, not a problem to be solved.

If you want to get Walmart workers a raise, you can hike the minimum wage. If you think the wealthy should contribute more to sustaining social programs, you can raise top tax rates on all individuals and corporations.

But fining companies that hire Medicaid users does not directly raise anyone’s pay. And such measures generate much less revenue than broad-based tax hikes, even as they encourage discrimination and undermine the broader fight for public health insurance.

In other words, the best way to hike the working poor’s wages — or the rich’s taxes — is to simply do those things. There’s no need to hurt workers with bad policy or stoke taxpayers’ resentment of safety net programs in the process.

2026-04-27 18:30:00

美国城市步行安全状况堪忧，其步行死亡率远高于加拿大、英国、澳大利亚和挪威等国家。尽管2025年上半年美国行人死亡人数较前一年减少了约11%（共3024人），但这一下降只是短暂的，因为疫情前的几年中，行人死亡率曾因道路空旷、车速加快而迅速上升。2019年行人死亡人数达到6272人，是近30年来最高水平，而这一数字可能因未计入停车场和车道等非主干道区域的死亡案例而被低估。

美国行人死亡率的上升与SUV和皮卡的流行密切相关，这些车辆因体积大、高度高，增加了对行人的伤害风险。此外，贫困人群向郊区迁移也导致更多人不得不在缺乏安全设施的道路上步行。尽管美国部分城市已引入“零愿景”（Vision Zero）计划，旨在通过道路设计减少交通事故，但因公众对改变现有交通模式的抵触，实施效果有限。交通监控摄像头等技术手段在其他国家有效，但在美国文化中却备受争议。

未来，美国若想改善步行安全，不仅需要技术革新（如自动紧急制动系统和自动驾驶汽车），更需从哲学层面重新审视交通规划，将行人安全置于优先位置。加拿大和澳大利亚等国虽有类似美国的汽车依赖型城市结构，但行人死亡率却显著更低，这表明改变并非遥不可及。只有将步行视为城市生活的重要组成部分，而非次要选择，美国才能真正实现更安全、更宜居的交通环境。

There are many ways you could measure the health of a city — its air quality index, its population growth, the number of jobs it added last year. My favorite is one not often high on the priority lists of city governments in the US: How safe is it to walk? 

The US has the grievous distinction among peer countries as being one of the most dangerous places in the developed world for walking down the street. American pedestrians are killed by cars at three times the rate of Canadians, four times the rate of Brits and Australians, and more than 13 times the rate of Norwegians. 

Last month, we finally got a bit of good news about pedestrian safety in America: About 11 percent fewer pedestrians were killed in the first half of 2025 — an estimated 3,024 people total — compared to the same period the previous year, according to a preliminary report published by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). That striking drop tracks a broader decline in total US car crash deaths last year. 

Any number of lives saved is worth celebrating, of course, but this is a case where a positive data point occludes a grimmer story. Road fatalities are likely only falling so steeply because just a few years ago, the US saw a rapid, pandemic-era rise in the number of people killed by cars. In 2021, 7,470 pedestrians were killed in crashes, up from 6,565 in 2020 and 6,272 in 2019. We’re now climbing down from that unusually deadly period, but pedestrian deaths in the first half of 2025, GHSA reports, are still higher than they were in similar periods pre-Covid.

The ubiquitous killing of pedestrians on American streets preoccupies me like almost nothing else, but “pedestrian” strikes me as a uniquely terrible term (unless I’m using it to insult someone). Adam Snider, director of communications for GHSA, who talks about pedestrian deaths among other road safety issues for a living, hates the word, too. “We are all pedestrians,” he recently wrote. “The moment you step out of your car, off the bus, or out your front door — you’re one too” (inclusive, of course, of people who get around in wheelchairs, children in strollers, and others). Our ability and need to walk is one of our deepest human inheritances, Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. It is, she wrote, “the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart.” And getting killed in that most vulnerable, most human state is “visceral, it’s sudden, it’s violent,” Snider told me. “It’s an awful way to die.”

For all those reasons, although all car crash deaths are preventable tragedies, the US transportation system’s endangerment of pedestrians strikes me as uniquely obscene. Pedestrian fatalities may not be at the top of the list of causes of death in the US, but they punch above their weight in significance because they are an indicator of deeper problems in American quality of life that set us apart from peer countries that are far less wealthy.

Our weird hostility to walking is an assault on human dignity. Americans would all be better off if our built environment made it safe, convenient, and dignified to walk as a major mode of transportation in both cities and suburbs. We would be healthier, our air and climate would be less polluted, and our cities would be more pleasant, socially connected places to live. And making the changes required to kill fewer pedestrians would make car occupants safer, too, and help put a real dent in America’s ridiculously high rate of death by cars. 

Why did US pedestrian deaths get so high?

Over the long haul, the US, like other rich countries, has made a lot of progress on traffic safety, thanks to safer car engineering, the widespread adoption of seatbelts, and people simply driving around drunk less often. US traffic fatalities generally trended significantly downward over the last half-century, up until the pandemic. Which isn’t to say that our record is particularly good now — even at today’s fatality rates, at one of the safest times it’s ever been to ride in a car, Americans face a 1 percent lifetime risk of dying in a car crash.

And even as drivers and other people inside cars themselves have become safer, pedestrian safety began to diverge sharply from that of car occupants in the 2010s. In 2009, federal statistics recorded 4,109 pedestrians were killed by cars; by 2019, it shot up 53 percent to 6,272, a number that hadn’t been seen for nearly 30 years. (The true number of deaths is even higher than this because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doesn’t count people killed by cars in places like driveways and parking lots. The National Safety Council estimates the total number of pedestrian deaths are likely about 24 percent higher than NHTSA numbers show.) As a result, these deaths have made up an increasingly large share of total car fatalities over the last few decades, from 11 percent in the early 2000s to about 18 percent in 2025. None of this has happened in other wealthy countries, nearly all of which brought down their pedestrian fatality rates in the 2010s rather than raise them. 

Why did it suddenly become so much more dangerous to be a pedestrian in America? There’s almost certainly no single reason, but most experts I’ve spoken to over the years have pointed to the growing popularity of SUVs and pickup trucks, which have soared in popularity and now make up an overwhelming share of car purchases in the US. These vehicles often make it harder for drivers to see pedestrians, and they’re more likely to seriously injure or kill people on foot because of their added weight and height. 

“You can take the same speed crash and break some legs, or you can take the same crash speed and crush some ribs and destroy someone’s organs,” said Stephen Mattingly, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, describing the difference between being hit by a stout sedan and a tall SUV. 

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, University of New Mexico engineering professor Nick Ferenchak, one of the country’s leading researchers on pedestrian and bicyclist safety, pointed to another, intriguing theory: Maybe there are just more pedestrians now. Not because Americans have suddenly discovered a love of long walks, but because an increasing number of people living outside pedestrian-friendly city centers can’t afford to get around any other way.

“There is a lot of evidence pointing to suburbanization of poverty being an important factor,” he said, with a growing share of low-income people who may not be able to afford cars living in suburbs where everyone is expected to get around by car. It is often especially dangerous to walk along the wide, high-speed roads ubiquitous in American suburbs, which are not designed to safely accommodate pedestrians and where drivers don’t expect to encounter people on foot. 

But whether or not pedestrian volumes have increased enough to explain much of the sudden rise in deaths is hard to know. The US closely tracks the total number of miles driven by all cars in the country every year — a statistic known as vehicle miles traveled (VMT) — but we don’t have an equivalent “total miles walked” denominator for pedestrians. 

Can the US ever change?

One reason cars kill so many people in the US is because we drive so much. Large steel boxes traveling at 50 miles per hour are inherently dangerous, and when we build a transportation system that prioritizes the rapid movement of cars and marginalizes other forms of getting around, we should not be surprised when the results are very deadly. But during the pandemic, something unexpected happened: total driving across the country dipped, but we saw a spike in crash deaths. Overall car fatalities increased by 7 percent in 2020 and another 11 percent in 2021, and pedestrian deaths similarly shot up.

The most widely accepted theory for why this happened is that in normal periods, routine traffic congestion slows cars down. But without road congestion during Covid, it suddenly became possible for drivers to go really fast and cause more fatal crashes — a shift that was enabled by the very design of roads in the US. That emptier roads so easily turned into deadlier ones displayed some of the fundamental flaws in the American approach to transportation: The same fatality spikes generally didn’t happen in peer countries, which had been prioritizing road safety in the decades prior, particularly the safety of people outside cars, and took steps to slow traffic on their roads because speed is the central variable that makes crashes deadly. They lowered speed limits and, to ensure the new speed limits were actually followed, embraced traffic calming measures like narrower roads to make speeding physically infeasible. 

In the 2010s, many US cities took up Vision Zero, a campaign to eliminate traffic deaths that was originally conceived in Europe in the 1990s. It rejects the premise that deaths by car cannot be avoided, and emphasizes designing transportation systems where people don’t encounter conditions in which someone’s split-second mistake can easily turn fatal. But Vision Zero’s implementation has largely been regarded as a failure in America, in part because it is so hard to get the public to accept changes to road design that inconvenience cars. Traffic enforcement cameras also make a significant difference in deterring speeding in countries where they’re widely implemented, but in the US, they’re culturally anathema and in some places are even banned at the state level. 

Mattingly, the civil engineering professor, at times sounds despairing when he talks about the prospect of making it safer to walk in the US: “The public generally don’t consider pedestrians valuable because they’re just getting in the way of them being able to drive fast to where they want to go,” he said. “And that is an incredibly bitter pill to try to swallow.”

It would be hard to deny that car fatalities generally, and pedestrian safety especially, lacks salience in the US. More than twice as many pedestrians may die here each year than the number killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but these deaths occur scattershot and just infrequently enough that they can feel to many like an inevitable cost of modern transportation, rather than a policy choice. As long as that’s the case, it will be hard to change the car-dominated, 20th-century planning paradigm that prevails in the US, even as most urban planners now agree it was a mistake.

But the US need not become Amsterdam to save many people’s lives — remember that Canada and Australia, with post-war, car-dependent built environments similar to those found in the US, manage to kill many fewer pedestrians than the US does. On the margins, there are certainly technological fixes that could make a dent in the problem without fundamentally altering the American urban form or sacrificing the convenience of drivers. Automatic emergency braking that detects pedestrians, which is now being widely adopted in new cars in the US, can reduce deadly collisions considerably, though it’s still far from perfect. Judging from Waymo’s record, self-driving cars, too, are likely to be a lot safer for pedestrians than human-driven ones — although many experts, including Mattingly, worry that widespread adoption of driverless vehicles could further entrench the marginalization of pedestrians, if we don’t make the active choice to prioritize non-motorists.   

In the long run, America ought to have bigger aspirations for the future of walking. That calls not just for technological shifts, though we surely need those, but for a philosophical one as well. Countries that have minimized pedestrian deaths have embraced walking as a wondrous, efficient transportation technology that for the last century has been wrongly sidelined by the automobile. Walking is, as Solnit wrote, “a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.” The transportation system of the future, if we want it, will allow it to flourish again.