2026-04-08 23:00:00
2026年4月7日，匈牙利总理维克托·欧尔班与美国副总统JD·万斯在布达佩斯举行联合记者会后握手。通常情况下，匈牙利作为人口不足1000万的内陆国家，其选举不会成为全球重大事件。但过去16年，匈牙利已不再是普通国家。欧尔班自2010年大选获胜后，迅速改革选举制度以确保长期执政，通过操控选区划分、控制媒体和司法系统，使反对派难以胜选。然而，此次选举中，反对党“蒂萨”在领导人佩特·马加尔的领导下，凭借对经济腐败问题的批评和社交媒体的高效运用，成功突破了政府的资源优势和信息控制，民调显示其领先优势达10个百分点，这被视为对欧尔班体制的严峻挑战。
此次选举不仅对匈牙利至关重要，也对美国和全球格局产生深远影响。欧尔班的右翼政权是特朗普在欧洲最可靠的盟友，其政策被视为美国右翼的蓝图，类似于伯尼·桑德斯眼中的北欧模式。若欧尔班下台，将对乌克兰战争努力形成重大助力，并打击俄罗斯的影响力。此外，欧尔班主义的失败将对全球极右翼运动造成打击，动摇其在欧洲、美国乃至世界范围内的意识形态基础。
尽管反对派目前占据优势，欧尔班仍可能通过宣布选举无效或寻求总统职位来维持权力。若其失败，匈牙利民主进程将面临重大挑战，同时欧洲右翼势力和美国MAGA运动的根基也将受到冲击。反之，若欧尔班获胜，匈牙利将继续作为俄罗斯在欧洲的代理人，削弱乌克兰获得的国际支持。因此，这场选举不仅是匈牙利内部的较量，更是全球政治格局的关键转折点。
Under normal circumstances, an election in Hungary — a landlocked Central European country of less than 10 million — would not be a major world event. But for the past 16 years, Hungary has not been a normal country.
After Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a massive victory in Hungary’s 2010 election, he almost immediately began changing the country’s system of government to ensure he would never lose again. He has rigged the electoral rules to favor his Fidesz party, consolidated control over 80 percent to 90 percent of the country’s media, and packed the courts with yes-men. By the mid-2010s, Hungarian elections were so thoroughly tilted in his favor that it became extraordinarily difficult for the opposition to win.
But this time around, they might just hit the jackpot.
Orbán’s opponents have united around a new party, Tisza, led by a charismatic defector from his regime named Péter Magyar. His message, focused on the regime’s catastrophic economic record and extreme corruption, has resonated with many Hungarians; his deft use of social media and in-person campaigning has helped him escape a severe cash disadvantage and the government’s hammerlock on the media.
Polls show Tisza leading Fidesz by a considerable margin; there is a very serious chance that Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister, though he will need a supermajority in parliament to undo some of the most damaging changes Orbán has made.
The stakes are enormous: not just for Hungarians, but for the United States and even the world.
Under Orbán’s far-right rule, Hungary has been Trump’s most reliable ally in Europe. But for many in the broader MAGA movement, it is more than that: it is a blueprint for the American future, the rough equivalent of what Nordic countries represent to Bernie Sanders.
Were Orbán to truly fall, their dreams might be shattered — which is why Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week to all-but-openly campaign for Orbán’s reelection. On Tuesday, he gave a speech at a Fidesz campaign rally, calling President Donald Trump on the phone from the stage to get his thoughts on Hungary. “Go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you,” Vance said in closing.
The Hungarian prime minister is also a close Russian ally, recently describing himself as a “mouse” helping the “lion” Putin. Hungary’s membership in the European Union and NATO has allowed Orbán to disrupt the West’s pro-Ukraine efforts from within, including by blocking aid. Were Orbán to be ousted, it would be a considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.
Hungary’s 2026 election, in short, is not just like any other vote. It is one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade.
Under Orbán, Hungary has become a paradigmatic example of a very modern kind of autocracy: one political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”
In such a system, voters are (mostly) free to cast ballots for the candidate of their choosing: Hungary isn’t like Russia under Putin. But Hungarian elections are decidedly unfair, in that the system is structured to give the incumbent government so many advantages that the opposition should be almost incapable of winning. It is a system based around plausible deniability: retaining just enough democratic features that Hungary can claim to still be a democracy, while doing its best to give the voters as little meaningful choice as possible.
The government’s advantage begins with the very structure of elections. Hungarian parliamentary elections operate under mixed electoral rules: A little over half of all parliamentarians are elected in US-style single district contests, while the remainder are determined by national proportional votes.
The single districts are gerrymandered beyond all recognition to overweight Fidesz’s rural base and steal seats from the opposition’s heavily urban constituency. Moreover, Orbán put in place rules that allow his party to transfer over excess votes from gerrymandered districts they win to the proportional contest — effectively allowing them to run up the score in an already-rigged game.
But even beyond the formal rules, the background conditions of elections are profoundly unfair. There are a million different ways this is true — ranging from the government’s hammerlock over media to an unfair campaign finance system to a two-tiered voting system for Hungarians abroad that favors government supporters over critics. There are widespread allegations of voter intimidation, like local officials threatening to cut off a poor constituent’s access to health care unless they vote for Fidesz.
Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian electoral law at Princeton University, estimates that the opposition would need to win by roughly 10 to 15 points in the national vote to overcome the structural advantages the government has given itself.
And currently, Magyar and Tisza are 10 points ahead in Politico EU’s poll of polls.
This is a remarkable accomplishment: a testament to both Magyar’s skills as a politician and to the serial failures of the Fidesz government.
Magyar used to be a high-ranking member of Fidesz: His ex-wife was Orbán’s justice minister. In 2024, he resigned in protest of a child sexual abuse scandal and began attacking the regime as a corrupt “feudalistic” oligarchy. This is largely true: The Orbán system depends on abusing regulatory and fiscal powers to funnel money into a handful of friendly oligarchs, who depend on government largesse and favor to maintain their wealth.
This has made the prime minister and his friends very wealthy men, but also done real damage to Hungary’s economy: the country is currently one of the poorest in the European Union, if not the poorest. As the Fidesz-aligned rich get richer, the quality of public services degrades. Hungary is experiencing population decline thanks to its low birth rate and unusually high levels of outmigration.
These are things ordinary Hungarians can see and feel in their everyday lives. As a socially conservative former regime insider, Magyar is a credible messenger for former Fidesz supporters disenchanted by Orbán’s serial failures. He has criss-crossed the country, using in-person events to overcome the government’s financial advantage and control over information, and become a fixture in the handful of independent media outlets that remain.
This perfect storm is what it takes to give the opposition even a chance to overcome the structural advantages Fidesz has put in place to remain in power. Even then, there is a real chance Orbán tries to cheat: declaring the election null due to alleged fraud, à la Trump in 2020, or installing himself in the country’s presidency (and expanding its powers) rather than leaving.
Whether he could pull this off is a different question. And right now, observers are bullish on Tisza’s chances: betting markets put Magyar’s odds of becoming prime minister at 66 percent.
If Magyar does win, restoring democracy will not be easy. Much of the architecture of Orbánism is enshrined in the Hungarian constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in parliament to amend. A full Tisza victory, then, requires more than merely winning a rigged game — it requires doing so resoundingly.
But even if domestic reform proves hard, Sunday’s results will matter to millions beyond Hungary’s borders.
Under Orbán, Hungary has become more than just a symbol of the far-right’s rising political fortunes: It has become an active player in extending its global reach and an intellectual leader in shaping its agenda. Budapest has spent an enormous amount of money and political effort helping support sister parties across the democratic world. There is a reason why far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have all visited Budapest to campaign with Orbán during the late stages of the 2026 campaign.
The greatest success, however, has been the Hungarian capture of the American right’s imagination. Beginning around the late 2010s, Trump-aligned intellectuals and political operatives began citing Hungary as a model for what the right should aim to do in the United States. They describe it not as an impoverished authoritarian outpost, but a conservative Christian democracy that took the difficult-but-necessary steps to destroy the pathological influence of cultural leftism on a society.
Adherents to this view can be found throughout the Trump administration, with Vance himself perhaps the most prominent. In a 2024 interview with Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer who decamped to Budapest to take a job at a government-backed think tank, the future vice president praised Orbán’s crackdown on academic freedom — which included forcing an entire university out of the country — as an example for the American right.
“The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said. “I think his way has to be the model for us.”
Top conservative intellectuals share a similar view: Dreher is not the only one who moved to Hungary to work with a government-aligned outfit. Were Hungary’s regime to well and truly fall, it would represent a significant ideological defeat for this movement, one that would raise questions about its political durability in Europe, America, and elsewhere.
The contest in Hungary also has huge stakes for the still-brutal war in Ukraine.
Since the 2022 Russian invasion, Orbán has emerged as the country’s greatest opponent in the Western alliance. He has repeatedly blocked European and NATO support for Ukraine — he is currently holding up a roughly $100 million EU loan to the country — and has stoked conflict with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently reported that some European leaders no longer talk about the war in front of Orbán, as there is an expectation that anything said will get back to Putin.
This isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is longstanding suspicion of Ukraine in Hungary, owing largely to the treatment of the Hungarian ethnic minority in that country. Orbán’s central reelection argument has been that Magyar would be a pro-Ukraine puppet; he has repurposed against Zelenskyy the same conspiratorial attack lines, at times word-for-word, he once used against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros (both men are Jewish).
Perhaps for this reason, the nationalistic Magyar has been cool toward Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the campaign — adopting a more adversarial stance than any other center-right party in Europe. But at the same time, he has no love for the Kremlin, which is currently busy trying to get Orbán reelected. So while Hungary under Magyar may not be a pro-Ukrainian nation, it will certainly be far more anti-Russian than it is under Orbán.
A Magyar victory — even a simple majority — would at very least mean that Russia loses its mole in Europe. At most, it could lead to Ukraine receiving significantly greater amounts of European support.
You can thus say this for Viktor Orbán: He has made Hungary into an outsize player on the global stage, though far more for ill than for good. His fall would have shockwaves in Brussels, Washington, and Moscow — weakening the financial foundations of the European far-right, the ideological foundations of the MAGA movement, and the political foundations of Putin’s effort to split Europe from Ukraine.
But if Orbán wins, none of this will come to pass. And the fate of Hungarian democracy could be sealed.
2026-04-08 22:00:00
2026年4月7日，威斯康星州上诉法院法官克里斯·泰勒（Chris Taylor）在密尔沃基市的麦迪逊会议中心酒店和州长俱乐部庆祝赢得威斯康星州最高法院选举。周二的选举结果使民主党在全美最重要的州最高法院之一中获得了超级多数席位，这一胜利具有重大意义。泰勒以20个百分点的优势击败了共和党支持的法官玛丽亚·拉扎尔（Maria Lazar）。尽管威斯康星州最高法院选举名义上是非党派的，但近年来所有选举都呈现为“自由派”（民主党支持）与“保守派”（共和党支持）之间的对决。泰勒此前曾作为民主党成员在州议会任职，她将接替共和党支持的“保守派”法官丽贝卡·布拉德利（Rebecca Bradley）。泰勒的胜利意味着，除非出现法官去世等极不可能的情况，民主党将在2028年总统大选期间继续有效掌控该州司法系统。
威斯康星州最高法院的党派控制对全国具有重要影响。尽管泰勒的胜利使民主党在该州最高法院获得超级多数，但争夺该州最高法院控制权的斗争一直是全美最具争议的司法较量之一。2025年，亿万富翁埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）曾公开支持“保守派”候选人，并警告称“西方文明”面临威胁，甚至在政治集会上发放百万美元支票。然而，此次选举中，民主党更受青睐，且党派控制问题已不再悬而未决。2023年，共和党曾控制该法院，但当时民主党法官珍妮特·普罗塔谢维奇（Janet Protasiewicz）当选，使民主党获得微弱多数。普罗塔谢维奇的当选也结束了威斯康星州长达十多年没有竞争性立法选举的局面。自2010年民主党在州议会选举中表现强劲后，共和党通过大幅调整选区地图，成功掌控了州政府，并阻止民主党重新夺回立法权。例如，在2018年，民主党州议会候选人获得了54%的选票，但共和党仍凭借选区地图优势赢得了99个席位中的63个。普罗塔谢维奇在竞选时承诺废除这一选区地图，上任后她与三位民主党同事共同推翻了该地图，使2023年的选举结果更加公平。尽管2024年共和党仍掌控州议会，但因新地图的减少偏见，他们在州议会和参议院总共失去了14个席位。随着最高法院现在完全由民主党控制，威斯康星州将在11月举行另一场自由公正的立法选举，这可能为民主党提供自十多年以来首次治理该州的机会。此外，泰勒的胜利也有可能阻止共和党说服最高法院推翻2028年总统选举结果，正如特朗普在2020年试图做的那样。共和党法官安妮特·齐格尔（Annette Ziegler）计划于2027年退休，而民主党法官丽贝卡·达莱特（Rebecca Dallet）的席位将在2028年进行选举。即便共和党赢得这两场选举，2028年总统大选期间，最高法院仍将保持4比3的民主党多数。
Wisconsin voters effectively gave Democrats a supermajority on one of the most important state supreme courts in the country on Tuesday.
The result was a blowout. Justice-elect Chris Taylor defeated Judge Maria Lazar by a twenty-point margin. Although Wisconsin Supreme Court races are technically nonpartisan, every recent race has pitted a “liberal” backed by Democrats against a “conservative” supported by the Republican Party. Taylor previously served in the state legislature as a Democrat.
She will replace Justice Rebecca Bradley, a “conservative” in the euphemistic language Wisconsin uses to describe Republican justices.
Taylor’s victory also means that, barring the death of a justice or some other unlikely event, Democrats will retain effective control of the judiciary in one of the nation’s most hotly contested swing states during the 2028 presidential election.
In 2020, after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin to former President Joe Biden, Trump asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to toss out 220,000 ballots cast in Democratic areas of the state. Although Trump did not prevail in this lawsuit, three justices, including retiring Justice Bradley, concluded that at least some of these voters should have been disenfranchised.
Although Taylor’s victory gives Democrats a supermajority on Wisconsin’s highest court, the battle to control this swing state court has long been one of the most contested judicial fights in the country.
Billionaire Elon Musk ostentatiously backed the “conservative” candidate in 2025, warning the future of “Western Civilization” was at stake and even handing out million-dollar checks at a political rally. With Musk sitting things out, Democrats favored more strongly this time, and partisan control of the court no longer in question, this week’s race was less high-profile and less expensive.
Republicans controlled the court as recently as 2023, when Justice Janet Protasiewicz won her seat and gave Democrats a narrow majority. Protasiewicz’s win also ended a period of more than a decade when Wisconsin did not hold competitive elections for control of its state legislature. After a strong electoral performance in 2010, Republicans gained control of Wisconsin’s government and used that control to aggressively gerrymander the state in order to prevent Democrats from ever regaining control of the legislature.
In 2018, for example, Democratic candidates for the state assembly received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats thanks to the GOP’s gerrymander.
But Protasiewicz campaigned on abolishing this gerrymander. After she took office, she joined her three Democratic colleagues in striking down the gerrymander in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (2023). Though Republicans retained control of the state legislature in 2024, they lost a total of 14 seats in the state assembly and senate thanks to the new, less biased maps.
With the state supreme court now firmly in Democratic hands, Wisconsin will hold another free and fair election for control of the state legislature in November, potentially giving Democrats their first opportunity to govern the state in more than a decade.
Meanwhile, Taylor’s win will most likely prevent a Republican from convincing the state supreme court to overturn the result of the 2028 election in Wisconsin, as Trump asked them to do in 2020.
Justice Annette Ziegler, a Republican, plans to retire in 2027. And Democratic Justice Rebecca Dallet’s seat is up in 2028. But even if Republicans win both of these races, the state supreme court will still have a 4-3 Democratic majority during the 2028 presidential election.
2026-04-08 20:30:00
在印度，关键专利于3月到期后，超过40家制药公司推出了Semaglutide（Ozempic、Wegovy和Rybelsus的GLP-1药物）的仿制药，价格低至每月8美元，而美国则高达349美元（无保险情况下）。这一变化使该药物在印度变得更为可及，尤其对14亿人口中的肥胖、糖尿病和心血管疾病患者而言意义重大。印度是全球糖尿病患者最多的国家之一，约有1亿人患病，3.5亿人面临肥胖问题，心血管疾病每年导致280万人死亡，且发病年龄比高收入国家早十年。这些疾病共同构成了印度的代谢危机，而Semaglutide能同时改善体重、血糖和心血管风险，成为治疗的关键药物。
世界卫生组织（WHO）已将GLP-1药物列入基本药物清单，但目前印度的Semaglutide仍主要通过私立诊所和药店提供，未纳入政府医疗体系。尽管仿制药价格大幅下降，但许多印度人仍无力承担自费费用，且政府尚未介入。此外，印度的诊断率较低，约四分之一糖尿病患者未被确诊，这也限制了药物的普及效果。
尽管如此，Semaglutide的普及可能对印度乃至全球的公共卫生产生深远影响。巴西和加拿大等国也将面临专利到期，而约150个国家从未对Semaglutide申请专利，这些国家占全球2型糖尿病患者和临床肥胖人群的69%和84%。若Semaglutide在印度取得显著成效，或将成为本世纪最重要的公共卫生突破之一。然而，其实际应用仍需克服经济负担和医疗体系覆盖不足等挑战。
By now, Ozempic needs no introduction in America. One in 8 American adults now takes a GLP-1 drug of some kind. But even as millions of people in wealthy countries have benefitted from these drugs, they have remained out of reach for most of the world.
But for a country of 1.4 billion people, this medication just got a lot more accessible.
Last month, a key patent on semaglutide — the GLP-1 sold as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus — expired in India, a country known for making affordable drugs at scale. Within days, at least a half-dozen Indian drugmakers had launched generic semaglutide, with more than 40 expected to follow. The cheapest version costs about $14 a month. The same drug goes for as much as $349 a month in the US without insurance (where patents don’t expire until 2032).
GLP-1s are often talked about as weight-loss drugs. But semaglutide’s bigger significance may be that it can treat a cluster of related metabolic diseases — especially obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular risk — all at once.
That matters a lot in India. The country has one of the largest diabetic populations in the world by sheer number — more than 100 million people are estimated to be living with some form of the disease. And 350 million people there live with obesity. Heart attacks and strokes, which are lumped together under cardiovascular disease, claim 2.8 million lives a year in India, and strike nearly a decade earlier on average than in high-income countries.
Those numbers have been climbing “linearly upwards” for decades, said R.M. Anjana, a researcher-physician at the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation in Chennai who has also co-authored India’s largest national diabetes studies. And until now, no drug or policy has made much of a dent in the national numbers.
But there are early signs that GLP-1s can make a difference at the population level. In the US, adult obesity — which had only gone up since Gallup first started measuring it in 2008 — fell by nearly 3 percent between 2022 and 2025 as GLP-1 use surged. It was the first time anything in recent memory had bent that curve at a national scale.
India’s metabolic crisis is different, and much larger — which makes the moment all that much more consequential.
Diabetes and heart disease are often bound up with obesity in some form. And in India, there are millions who don’t have obesity by standard measures but already show signs of metabolic disease, such as high blood pressure or insulin resistance, putting them at greater risk of these diseases. Researchers have found that this group — people with lower weights who still have the metabolic issues common with obesity — is the single largest metabolic category among Indian adults, roughly 43 percent in a large national study. This is exactly the profile where semaglutide’s benefits will be the most dramatic.
“Should it be given to everyone? No, definitely not,” Anjana said. “But there’s definitely a group of people who’s going to benefit from these drugs, and making it more affordable is a good step.” Even those who develop Type 2 diabetes without obesity may see improvements on semaglutide.
And how the drug is understood popularly matters, especially in the early days. In India, as in the US, much of the public excitement around it has centered on slimming down, with weight-loss clinics popping up around the country and marketing pushing the drug’s weight-loss potential ahead of its clinical use.
That framing isn’t entirely wrong. India does have a substantial obesity burden, and reducing excess weight can have real benefits in also reducing other diseases. But this focus on one usage of the drug has created a strange distortion. Some diabetes patients who might have improved health outcomes with the drug are wary of it because they think it’s primarily cosmetic. Others, as Ambrish Mithal, an endocrinologist at Max Healthcare in New Delhi, puts it, “just want to lose three kilograms for a daughter’s wedding.”
“It’s the excitement of treating disease that is driving the doctors. It’s the excitement to lose weight that’s driving the public,” he said. “They’re looking at two different things.” In terms of tackling a massive disease burden, the ends may well be worth the different paths to get there.
There are early signs that these drugs are already shaping public health writ large, not just individual health outcomes, such as the recent decline in national obesity rates in the US. And last week, the UK expanded semaglutide availability for roughly 1.2 million people to help prevent further heart attacks and strokes.
Both of these developments are signals of a drug’s broader public health utility. In India, where the burden of these diseases is far higher, and the price of the drugs that treat them is getting so much cheaper, they could have an even bigger public health impact.
That broader medical case is part of the reason why the World Health Organization added GLP-1 drugs to its essential medicines list last September, a model list of medicines it recommends countries make widely available through their health systems.
For now, though, semaglutide in India is available only through private doctors and pharmacies, not through government-funded care. In many countries, that would be a major barrier. It matters less in India, though, because most diabetes care already happens through private providers: about 80 percent of diabetes care is delivered that way, often paid out of pocket.
That also makes price especially important. Brand-name Ozempic and Wegovy previously cost more than $100 a month in India, putting them well out of reach for most people. In a country where the average monthly spending is between $44 and $75 a month per person, depending on where you live, that price was simply too high. Generics come in at a fraction of that price, which is, Anjana said, “a genuine boon.”
The entry of generics has also shaken the market. Recently, Novo Nordisk slashed the price of its branded Ozempic and Wegovy in India by up to 48 percent. With potentially more than 40 manufacturers soon to be competing in the marketplace, prices may fall further still, said Andrew Hill, a pharmacologist at the University of Liverpool who studies drug pricing. His latest estimate suggests that injectable semaglutide can be made for as little as $28 per person per year, leaving room for prices to dive even more.
Even at $14 a month, there are millions of Indians who can’t afford to pay out of pocket, and they’ll have to rely on the public health care system. But there’s no sign yet that the government will step in to help them. And recent experience doesn’t necessarily bode well. SGLT2 inhibitors, another class of diabetes drug, went generic in India six years ago and still haven’t made it to government clinics.
And India faces another, even more basic obstacle: diagnosis. According to the most recent round of India’s largest national health survey, one in four people with diabetes had not been diagnosed. A drug, however cheap, won’t help patients who don’t know they might need it. Still, for the hundreds of millions who do, or who will, the arrival of a $14 Ozempic will be transformative.
And India will not be the last place to test that promising development. Brazil and Canada, where patents are also expiring this year, are next in line. Plus, in roughly 150 countries, semaglutide was never patented in the first place. Together, those countries account for 69 percent of the world’s type 2 diabetics and 84 percent of people with clinical obesity.
But the stakes are arguably highest in India. Semaglutide can do something very few drugs can: lower weight, improve blood sugar, and reduce cardiovascular risk all at once. Now, for the first time, it is becoming genuinely cheap in a hugely populous country where all three conditions are widespread and rising. If it makes a dent there, it could point to one of the biggest public health breakthroughs of this generation.
2026-04-08 19:00:00
Caroline Sacks，一位29岁的布鲁克林内容创作者，过去习惯与兴趣相投、充满活力的人约会，但这些关系并未持续。如今，她正与一位喜欢冥想、瑜伽和Grateful Dead乐队的“Deadhead”（该乐队粉丝）步入婚姻。她认为，尽管两人兴趣差异明显，但这些差异并非无法调和，反而可以成为探索彼此世界的契机。
现代恋爱中存在许多看似矛盾的真理：一方面，人们倾向于与相似的人建立关系（称为“同质性”），另一方面，差异也可能带来新鲜感。研究表明，人们在关系中更看重彼此的共同核心价值观和长期目标，而非具体兴趣。例如，是否喜欢同一部电影或同一项活动可能并不重要，但对家庭、政治立场或人生意义的共识才是关键。
心理学家Paul Eastwick指出，即使两人实际差异很大，只要他们认为彼此有共同点，关系更可能持久。他提到，只需找到三到四个共同点，就能构建一个令人满足的关系。而William Chopik则认为，人们通常通过共同兴趣（如运动俱乐部、工作或宗教活动）相识，但恋爱应用让筛选相似性变得容易，也可能让人错失潜在的合适伴侣。
此外，差异本身也可能成为关系的亮点。例如，Sacks和她的未婚夫虽然兴趣迥异，但通过一起尝试新事物（如听Grateful Dead音乐或参加小提琴乐队演出），他们发现了彼此的吸引力。研究还发现，当一个人表现出对伴侣兴趣的好奇时，会增进彼此的了解，甚至提升吸引力。因此，恋爱中的差异并非障碍，而是可能带来成长和新体验的契机。
Caroline Sacks wasn’t used to dating quiet guys, guys who liked meditation, yoga, and the Grateful Dead.
Sacks, a 29-year-old content creator who lives in Brooklyn, is more of a Bridgerton and Justin Bieber girl herself. In the past, she tended to date people who had the same interests and had similarly high energy. But those relationships didn’t pan out. So, rather than drop the Deadhead before their relationship really began, Sacks saw those differences as minor misalignments, something to be curious about instead of dismissing out of hand. Over the last six years, she’s been to several Dead and Company shows and she is now marrying the Deadhead. “If you met us separately, I really don’t think you would put us together in any way, shape or form,” Sacks tells Vox.
Modern romance is marked by many, often contradictory, truisms. Love is easy, but it also requires hard work, and yet feelings of frustration or annoyance are red flags. For long-term happiness, your interests and lifestyle must be consistent, yet we’re told opposites attract.
The truth is, believing you have plenty in common with your partner is more important than your actual similarities, experts say. And part of the fun of being with someone whose interests are very different from yours is finding the activities you do enjoy together. “Imagine that if you line up the 10,000 things that two people might have in common,” says Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis and author of Bonded By Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection. “All you really need to craft a relationship that feels fulfilling is the ability to build around three or four of those things.”
People do typically form relationships with those of similar ethnicity, religion, education, and lifestyle behaviors; it’s known as homophily. Research has shown that the closer you are to a person, the more alike you probably are.
We naturally self-sort based on our interests, too; if you frequent a certain bar or join a local civic organization, you’ll meet people who share at least one thing in common with you. “When you think of how two people would meet if they have zero things in common, it’s hard to come up with a lot of scenarios,” William Chopik, an associate professor of social and personality psychology at Michigan State University, tells Vox. “People often meet through their mutual interests. They’ll meet at a run club, or at work, or at church maybe.”
And dating apps make screening for these similarities easier than ever; it’s not difficult to, say, write off hikers or keep your eyes peeled for fellow art enthusiasts. Although apps broaden the dating pool to include people outside of your usual social contexts, all it takes is a swipe to weed out potential matches based on your perceived dissimilarities. But that can be ill-advised, because what we think we want in a partner isn’t necessarily what we actually want. In a study, Eastwick found that the qualities people say they find attractive aren’t necessarily present in the people they end up with.
Having similar interests doesn’t mean you’re entirely compatible either. “In general, we say that two people are compatible when they can be together without constant friction,” Alessia Marchi, a couples counselor who has studied compatibility, tells Vox in an email. That means people mesh when their core values and big-picture goals — whether they want kids, their political leanings, how they find purpose and meaning — are aligned. Liking the same movies isn’t as important.
“In some cases, these differences can enrich the relationship, allowing partners to learn from each other and adding variety and value to their shared experience,” Marchi says.
Insisting that your soul mate possesses all your same interests means possibly missing out on a would-be good partner because they like camping and you don’t. “Maybe you overlook someone who’s 85 percent similar,” Chopik says. “You tried to get someone who’s 90 percent similar, but maybe the 85-percent person was perfectly fine or nicer or had other characteristics that they didn’t put in their Tinder profile.”
Two people can be vastly different, but so long as they believe they have a lot in common, they have a higher likelihood of staying together, research has found. When you like someone, you might be more motivated to find common ground — something as simple as that you both enjoyed rock climbing that one time, or that you both like cooking stews in the winter. “If you are dramatically different than your partner, it might not matter if you don’t think that,” Chopik says. “If you have a crush or you seek out similarities, odds are you’ll find them.”
Actively focusing on your similarities instead of your differences could improve your relationship, too. In an as-yet-unpublished study, researchers found that after people considered their similarities with their partner, they thought about the person more positively. “Just reflecting and asking yourself, ‘What did we agree on? What did we have in common today?’” says one of the study’s authors, Annika From, a postdoctoral associate at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The specific areas of overlap aren’t of importance — what matters is that you find them. Rather than insisting on a partner who likes salsa dancing as much as you do, finding new hobbies together should be an “active construction process” that you build into your identity as a couple, Eastwick says. Salsa dancing might not be what you end up seriously bonding over anyway. Why limit yourself?
And you may discover similarities as you partake in new experiences together. Romantic relationships can help open doors to novel insights and events, which help expand your sense of self and identity. “If you think you don’t have things in common, maybe you do,” Chopik says. “You both went to this horrible art showing and you bonded over how much you hated the pretentious people.”
You don’t need to convince your partner of the joys of arcade games just because you like them; it’s perfectly healthy for each partner to have unique interests they partake in solo or with friends. And if it is important to you that your significant other shares your love of cooking, for instance, consider less obvious ways of including them, like tasking them to pick a recipe or a dessert pairing. Sacks, the content creator from Brooklyn, has gotten her fiance, who she described as a relatively unskilled chef, involved in the kitchen, and they whip up curries and protein bowls together.
Knowing someone finds you fascinating despite not sharing any of your interests can even be a turn-on. One study found that when participants perceive someone with different hobbies as being interested in them, that person becomes more attractive. When they express curiosity about your hobbies, you invite them into your world, exposing them to potentially fresh perspectives, knowledge, and skillsets. “It’s so exciting to have this chance to see the world through somebody else’s eyes, through somebody else’s vantage point,” Eastwick says.
For Sacks, that means listening to the Grateful Dead on road trips because it’s what her fiance loves and dragging him to violin cover band concerts when no one else will go with her. “You wouldn’t say that we would be a natural brand fit,” she says, “but I think it’s just a curiosity and excitement for one another that it doesn’t matter.”
2026-04-08 09:10:00
特朗普对伊朗政策的迅速转变——从“整个文明今晚都将灭亡”到寻求和解——让世界感到困惑。他可能在试图通过激化言论和威胁来迫使对手退让，类似于俄罗斯所谓的“升级以降级”核战略（尽管俄方否认这一策略存在）。这种策略的核心是利用战术核武器震慑更强的对手，使其在常规冲突中退缩。特朗普的言论虽然未涉及实际核武器使用，但考虑到其强硬措辞和美国强大的军事力量，这种比较并不牵强。在特朗普威胁摧毁“整个文明”后，外界猜测他可能采取更激进行动，白宫不得不否认计划使用核武器。一些支持者甚至指责他威胁“种族灭绝”。然而，这种策略是否奏效仍不清楚，因为伊朗是否真正退让尚无明确证据。
根据特朗普在Truth Social上发布的声明，他同意与伊朗达成两周停火协议，是受到巴基斯坦政府的敦促，而巴基斯坦在双方之间扮演了调解角色。特朗普称伊朗提出的10项提案足以作为谈判基础，但该提案是在他最激烈的威胁之前收到的。伊朗政府也表示同意停火。据《纽约时报》报道，伊朗的提案包括保证不再遭到攻击、停止以色列对黎巴嫩真主党的空袭，以及解除制裁以换取伊朗重新开放霍尔木兹海峡。但该提案并未包含伊朗交出剩余浓缩铀或停止未来铀浓缩活动，这曾是美国的核心诉求。伊朗外长表示，只要国际船只与伊朗军队协调，伊朗将在两周内允许其通过霍尔木兹海峡。伊朗方面将特朗普的声明视为全面胜利，称其完全接受了伊朗的条件，但专家认为美国不可能同意让伊朗自由发展核武器的条款。
尽管伊朗目前在战略上占据优势，但其防御力量已严重削弱，高级官员也因针对性打击而大量损失，使其比以往更易受到内外挑战。以色列的专家和官员一直怀疑战争会持续到特朗普允许其结束，目前他们可能对已对伊朗导弹和经济造成的破坏感到满意。此次事件可能并非美国的明确胜利或彻底缓和，而是中东近期历史中另一种熟悉的策略——“修剪草皮”，即通过持续施压使冲突保持在可控范围内，避免全面战争。
President Donald Trump’s fast pivot on Iran — from “a whole civilization will die tonight” to a benign return to negotiations — has a whipsawed world scratching their heads. What was he up to?
One possibility: Many Western analysts believe that Russian nuclear doctrine includes a concept called “escalate to de-escalate,” in which Moscow would use a tactical nuclear weapon early in a conflict to shock a stronger adversary into backing down from a conventional conflict. (The Russians deny this strategy exists.)
On Tuesday, Trump may have carried out a kind of Truth Social version of “escalate to de-escalate,” cranking up the rhetoric and threats to a fever pitch in order to get himself out of a war where the United States enjoyed an overwhelming military advantage, but found itself at a strategic disadvantage.
Nuclear use was never actually in play, but given Trump’s rhetoric — and the immensity of American military power — the comparison does not feel far-fetched. After Trump’s threats to destroy “a whole civilization” on Tuesday morning, speculation about how far he’d go reached the point that the White House had to deny reports it was planning to use nuclear weapons. Some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters accused him of threatening “genocide.”
Did the ploy actually work? The Russian version is supposedly intended to get a stronger enemy to back down. In this case, it’s unclear to what extent the adversary has actually surrendered.
Subsequent tick-tock reporting may later reveal just how far Trump was contemplating going, and just how close he got to carrying out his threat. But for the moment, what we can say is that the dramatic escalation in rhetoric — and some very real attacks by the US and Israel on Iran’s railways and oil infrastructure — served as a framing device, allowing Trump to take an exit ramp that was likely already available to him, and portray it as a response to his threats.
According to Trump’s Truth Social statement, posted about an hour and a half before his declared deadline, his decision to agree to a two-week ceasefire with Iran came at the urging of the government of Pakistan, which has been acting as an intermediary to the two sides. Trump said that a 10-point proposal received from the Iranian side was enough to serve as the basis for negotiations. That proposal was received yesterday, before Trump’s most dramatic threats. Iran’s government has also said it agrees to the ceasefire.
As reported by the New York Times, the Iranian proposal includes a guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again, an end to Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the lifting of sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. It does not include Iran surrendering its remaining uranium stockpile or halting future enrichment, which had been core US demands at various points in this conflict.
Iran’s foreign minister said Iran would allow safe passage through the Strait for two weeks for international ships, so long as they coordinate with the Iranian military. Tehran, for its part, is portraying Trump’s announcement as a complete victory, saying Trump agreed to its terms in full, though it’s basically impossible to imagine the US actually agreeing to terms that would effectively give Iran carte blanche to build a nuclear bomb.
It’s also hard to imagine that an outcome in which the Iranian regime remains in place, and Iran retains its stockpile, would have been considered a victory for the US in the early days of this war, when Iran’s air defenses proved utterly unable to stop the US and Israel from devastating its infrastructure and killing its leaders. Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz changed the strategic balance in the conflict, effectively weaponizing the global economy and giving Tehran a new and potent source of leverage even as it continued absorbing blows. Even if it reopens the Strait now, it will retain the threat to close it again, potentially a more flexible and effective deterrent than its missiles and proxies.
But Iran is in a precarious position as well; its defenses are badly depleted, its senior ranks decimated by targeted strikes, and more vulnerable than ever to challenges from abroad and within. Experts and officials in Israel always suspected the war would continue only as long as Trump allowed it to, and are probably satisfied for now with the damage they’ve inflicted on Iran’s missiles and economy.
Rather than the clear win some would like, or a definitive de-escalation, this may turn out to be another episode of another, more familiar strategy in the recent history of the Middle East: “mowing the grass.”
2026-04-08 04:15:00
2026年4月4日，NASA宇航员兼阿尔忒弥斯II号任务专家克里斯蒂娜·科赫透过奥瑞恩飞船的主舱窗户向外眺望。这次阿尔忒弥斯II号任务创造了多项历史：人类首次远距离太空旅行、首次有黑人、女性和加拿大宇航员绕月飞行，以及首次将真正的厕所带上太空。尽管太空探索中有很多重大问题，但“在太空中如何如厕”这一问题尤为重要，因为这关系到未来更长时间的太空任务和月球基地建设。
在任务初期，宇航员报告称厕所出现故障，但很快被修复。然而，随着飞船接近月球，厕所问题再次出现。科学美国人撰稿人K. R. Callaway指出，解决太空如厕问题对于长期探索至关重要。她与主持人Sean Rameswaram讨论了太空厕所的发展历程。从上世纪60年代和70年代的阿波罗任务开始，宇航员只能使用粘贴在身上的袋子收集排泄物，缺乏隐私且容易泄漏。例如，阿波罗10号任务中曾出现排泄物漂浮在舱内的情况，而阿波罗8号任务中则有宇航员因生病导致呕吐物和粪便在舱内漂浮。
在阿波罗16号任务中，宇航员肯·马蒂格利曾表示，如果能去月球，他就不想再去火星了，因为太空厕所的问题实在令人困扰。如今，NASA的“通用废物管理系统”（即太空厕所）已升级为真空系统，利用气流收集尿液，而非依赖宇航员手动密封袋子。该系统还包括独立的座位和尿液收集装置，但仍在低重力环境下存在挑战，如噪音大、需要固定装置等。
尽管任务中出现了厕所故障，但NASA仍认为这一技术是未来探索的关键。尿液会被收集并释放到太空，而粪便会储存在飞船内，待返回地球时在再入大气层时烧毁。目前，工程师怀疑尿液收集系统的问题可能由冰堵导致，同时宇航员也报告了异味问题，这些问题仍在持续改进中。
太空厕所看似平凡，却是实现长期太空探索和建立宜居太空环境的重要一环。正如Callaway所说，如果无法解决如厕问题，就无法真正实现对火星的探索。
The Artemis II space mission is making history.
Farthest humans have ever traveled in space? Check.
First Black, woman, and Canadian astronauts to make it around the moon? Also check.
First time a toilet has made this journey? Big, important check.
Because while there are many significant questions about space — Is life out there? Could we settle Mars? How far does the universe stretch, really? — one question holds plenty of gravity: What happens when nature calls in space?
This mission hopes to return with answers.
After years of research, the Orion spacecraft used in the Artemis II mission has departed Earth with an actual toilet, door and all.
In the initial hours after the Orion capsule launched, some of the first reports from the astronauts were about their toilet malfunctioning. They quickly fixed it. But, as they approached the moon, potty problems reigned again.
“If you’re going to do longer missions and eventually potentially even have a base on the moon or go even further onto Mars, you first need to figure out: what are you going to be doing for food, for water, and also for peeing and pooping on the spacecraft and on the surface?” K.R. Callaway, a writer with Scientific American, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram.
So the simple presence of a toilet on this mission?
“Definitely history-making,” she said.
To understand the significance, Sean sat down with Callaway to discuss the history and future of space toiletry. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Tell us about the history of using the facilities in space.
So back in the ’60s and ’70s, [the] Apollo [program] used these bags. They had different ones for peeing, different ones for pooping, but it was still essentially a bag that you would tape onto your body and just go. It obviously didn’t provide a lot of privacy. We aren’t talking like going into a room with a door and doing this; this was just done in the cabin, and it was not super user-friendly either.
They had a lot of issues with leaks. You know, it’s just an adhesive. It can become unstuck and in low gravity, that can be a big problem for particles escaping.
I had a lot of fun going through the Apollo mission transcripts and just looking at all of the ways that astronauts were describing this after use. They were pretty upset about it. During the Apollo 10 mission, they said, There’s a turd floating through the air.
Wow.
So they had to wrangle that themselves. And even before that, they were having issues. During Apollo 8, there was another pretty notable mission where a crew member was ill. And so the other crew members were chasing down these blobs of both vomit and feces that were just floating wildly through the cabin.
And one of the astronauts you quote in your piece was Ken Mattingly, whose name people might be familiar with from the Apollo 13 mission and of course the Apollo 13 movie.
This was actually one of my favorite quotes that I came across while I was going through the mission transcripts. This is something that Ken Mattingly said on Apollo 16, which is that, “I used to want to be the first man to Mars. This has convinced me that if we got to go on Apollo, I ain’t interested.”
As in, this whole toilet situation is so insufferable, I maybe don’t really want to spend too much time in space anymore.
Exactly.
So NASA, I imagine, after all the Apollo missions, realizes it needs to advance this technology. How does it do so?
I spoke to Melissa McKinley over at NASA. She is the head of the Toilet Project — the Universal Waste Management System is their technical name, though I’ve been assured that just “toilet” is okay to say. And she mentioned that everything that’s happened from the ’60s and ’70s to now has really been a feat of engineering and design.
They’ve been able to implement a vacuum system that uses airflow to pull particles down instead of just having them float through space and relying on you to seal the bag yourself and keep everything in.
Help me picture what it looks like, because I’m guessing it does not look like any toilet in one of our homes.
More like an airplane toilet is how I would describe it.
The toilet has a seat and it has a funnel on the side for collecting urine and everyone gets their own separate piece to attach for the part that actually would touch your skin, luckily.
Oh!
For the toilet itself, it’s pretty loud in there.
Astronauts have to wear hearing protection and they also have handles to hold on to because you’re working in no gravity or low gravity and you need a little bit of help to stay in the right position.
So these aren’t plastic bags anymore. Where’s this stuff going? Are we just shooting it out into space?
We are partially shooting it out into space. For urine, it is collected and then it’s going to be vented a couple of times. It’s going to be a controlled process, so it will be just a lot of liquid at once, but yeah, that is where the urine is going.
For poop, they are storing that on board and then it will be kept in an area of the spacecraft that will actually burn up upon reentry. It’s not coming back to Earth with them, but it is going to stay with them for a while.
And yet, all this testing, all this hype about this new toilet, and one of the first stories we get once the astronauts are up in Earth’s orbit is that something has gone wrong with the toilet! What happened?
Already the toilet has had a few issues. It’s kind of the equivalent of a plumbing issue, but for space.
When they were trying to use it on one of the early days of the mission, they found that there was an error. The issue ended up being with the fan that helps to get the airflow to help with the urine collection — kind of a big problem. And luckily with ground control support, [astronaut] Christina Koch was actually able to fix this almost immediately after it had happened.
The latest I heard over the weekend is that they had toilet trouble again, so maybe not the best plan to have your astronauts also be your plumbers. What’s the latest on this very expensive, very important toilet?
It did seem to break again over the weekend. From what the NASA people were saying, it seems like it’s the same problem again with the urine collection system. The engineers have looked into it a little bit more deeply and they think that it might be ice blocking the tube that would help fully collect the urine.
Astronauts have reported issues with that system collection and then also a smell coming from the toilet area. Definitely a problem that they say they’re going to just keep working on.
This whole toilet thing can feel inconsequential considering what we’re really doing up there in space: exploration, making history, trying to get to Mars one day, all the rest. Why is the toilet important?
One of NASA’s goals with this particular toilet is that it’s a modular design, which means that they can put it not just in the Artemis II capsule, but they can also put it in a lot of different space vehicles.
They could potentially even adapt it to be on a Mars mission and longer-term missions. They can adapt it so that they can do what the ISS does in terms of liquid recycling and make longer-term, more sustainable missions possible.
Even though it seems very mundane to us as something that you use every day, for being in space, it’s actually one of the key things that stands in the way of making space more homelike and more able to be a place where we can do longer-term science.
If you can’t figure out the facilities, you’re never gonna figure out Mars.
Exactly.