2026-03-25 20:30:00
2026年2月25日，在亚利桑那州斯科茨代尔的一场春季训练比赛中，一个记分牌显示了ABS系统对一个判罚的确认。对于一项已有超过150年历史的运动来说，2026年MLB赛季的开幕将出现许多前所未有的首次。官方开幕日定于3月26日，这是棒球历史上最早的开幕日。今晚，巨人队与洋基队之间的第一场比赛将作为开幕之夜（而非开幕日）举行，这将是历史上第一场在Netflix上直播的比赛。而且，这场比赛中很可能有球员在投球后挑战裁判的判罚，从而触发棒球史上首次使用自动判定好球与坏球（ABS）系统的复核程序。
这套系统非常简单。每支队伍每场比赛有两次挑战机会，如果挑战成功则保留，失败则失去。只有投手、捕手或击球员可以挑战，且只能针对好球与坏球的判罚，并且必须在投球后两秒内提出。一旦挑战被提出，安装在球场周围的12个高速摄像头会追踪投球的确切位置，随后软件会创建该球的三维轨迹模型，显示在大屏幕上，供所有观众观看。然后，系统会立即给出判决结果，而裁判只是将机器的决定传达给观众。这种改变理论上能让所有参与者都受益。当出现关键判罚失误时（例如本月世界棒球经典赛中多明尼加的致命好球判罚），球队可以提出挑战。挑战次数有限且迅速决定，不会让比赛节奏变慢。
自动系统精确度达到0.25英寸（大约一支铅笔的宽度），并且足够快，可以捕捉到103英里/小时的阿罗尔迪斯·查派曼的快速球。尽管如此，人类裁判仍然在比赛中占据主导地位。总体而言，ABS系统似乎是一个理想的选择，它保留了人类的判断，同时允许机器纠正最严重的错误。虽然该系统并非由人工智能驱动，但它展示了人类与AI未来可能有效合作的前景，即人类仍然在决策过程中发挥重要作用，但由机器提供支持。
然而，问题在于在人类与机器之间寻求平衡。一旦你承认机器是最终的权威，那么你实际上就悄悄地消除了人类存在的必要性。看起来稳定的平衡其实并不稳定。
这种对裁判权威的冲击已经在小联盟中显现。小联盟多年来一直在试验ABS系统。棒球记者杰森·斯塔克曾写道，小联盟的裁判们已经厌倦了被机器反复推翻，于是开始改变自己的判罚方式，以“像机器人一样”来判断好球与坏球。由于联盟赋予机器最终决定权，人类裁判不再保持独立，而是开始模仿机器。裁判——曾经是球场上的主宰，其判罚被视为最终决定——现在实际上成为了AI的草稿。人类的知识和经验正在被削弱。对此，一位棒球球迷可能会用更生动的语言回应：“他们本来就是一帮傻瓜。”这或许并不公平，毕竟我们碳基的裁判们也并非完美，不过，球迷们对裁判的公平性一直不太在意。
MLB估计裁判正确判罚了94%的投球，这在一方面是个好消息——我不确定自己在任何事情上都能达到94%的准确率——但另一方面意味着，平均每场比赛中，裁判仍然会犯大约17到18次错误。而且，尽管数据显示裁判的判罚能力确实在提高，但我们现在能够看到回放和精确的投球追踪数据，使得这些错误变得一目了然。有人甚至创建了一个名为“裁判记分卡”的独立项目，利用公开的Statcast投球追踪数据来评估每位裁判和每场比赛的表现。新的ABS系统只是确认了过去技术早已揭示的事实。因此，对裁判权威的科技冲击早已开始，尽管ABS系统仍有误差，但引入机器最终会让比赛的判罚更加准确。然而，人类的某些技能也将因此而逐渐消失。
最好的捕手是擅长“框球”（即通过调整姿势让投球看起来像好球）的专家，即使实际上不是。优秀的击球员也会根据裁判的个人好球区进行调整。比如，红袜传奇球员泰德·威廉姆斯曾说，存在三个好球区：他自己的、投手的和裁判的。这些技能都是建立在人类不完美的基础上的，而随着机器的引入，这些技能的价值将逐渐降低，尽管比赛因此变得更加“公平”。
要窥见棒球的未来，只需看看网球。2006年，职业网球引入了Hawk-Eye挑战系统，允许球员对部分边线判罚提出挑战。起初，球员并不喜欢这个系统（如马尔特·萨芬曾说：“是谁想出这个愚蠢的主意的？”）。但随着比赛速度的加快，这种逻辑变得不可否认。到2020年，美国公开赛已经完全取消了人工边线裁判，而温布尔登则在2025年跟进。尽管仍然雇佣了人类裁判，但他们的主要职责变成了管理比赛，比如维持观众秩序。挑战系统只是通往全面自动化的道路上的一个站点。如今，棒球也开始踏上这条道路。
ABS系统正是当一个机构意识到机器比人类更擅长某项工作，但又不愿公开承认时所采取的折中方案。这正是当前许多组织所处的境地，随着AI能力的不断提升。目前的结果往往是一种混合模式，让许多员工感到压力和无力，而未能真正享受到全面自动化的益处。但随着时间推移，自动化往往是一条单行道。问题不在于机器是否会最终判罚好球与坏球，而在于这种折中状态还能维持多久——对那些我们又爱又恨的裁判，以及对其他人而言。
For a sport that’s more than 150 years old, the opening of the 2026 Major League Baseball season is set to feature an unusual number of firsts. The official Opening Day on March 26 is the earliest in baseball history. The first official game of the season tonight between the Giants and the Yankees — which is Opening Night, not Opening Day, totally different — will be the first-ever game streamed on Netflix.
And chances are that some time during that game, a player will tap his helmet or hat after a pitch is thrown, challenging the umpire’s call and triggering baseball’s first-ever Automated Balls and Strikes (ABS) system review. The robot umpires are here.
The system is remarkably straightforward. Each team gets two challenges per game, retaining them if successful, losing them if wrong. Only the pitcher, catcher, or batter can challenge, only over balls and strikes calls, and only within two seconds of the pitch.
Once a challenge is made, a network of 12 high-speed cameras installed around the stadium tracks the pitch’s exact location, and then software creates a 3D model of the pitch’s trajectory — on the Jumbotron for everyone to see — against the batter’s individualized strike zone. The verdict is made instantly. The umpire doesn’t go to a monitor and reconsider for minutes, like in NFL or NBA replay. He is merely the conduit to announce what the machine has decided.
This change should in theory make everyone better off. Teams have an appeal in the event of a potential blown call at a crucial moment (such as the brutal game-ending strike call for the Dominican Republic in this month’s World Baseball Classic). Challenges are limited and rapidly decided, so the game doesn’t slow down. The automated system is accurate to within 0.25 inches — roughly the width of a pencil — and quick enough to catch an Aroldis Chapman 103-mph fastball. Human umpires are still largely in charge of the game.
All in all, the ABS system appears to be an ideal compromise — preserving human judgement while allowing machines to correct the worst mistakes. While the system isn’t AI-powered, it seems like an example of how humans and AI could fruitfully work together in the future, with humans firmly in the loop but aided by the machines.
Except there’s a problem with splitting the difference between human and machine. Once you’ve conceded that the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right — which is exactly what baseball has done here — you’ve quietly eliminated the case for having the human there at all. What might seem like a stable equilibrium isn’t stable at all.
You can see this breakdown already underway in the minor leagues, which has been experimenting with the ABS system for years. Baseball reporter Jayson Stark has written about umpires in the AAA minors who, having grown tired of being overturned for all to see by the machine, began to change the way they handled the game, “calling balls and strikes the way they think the robot would call them.”
Because the league has given the machine final say, the human behind the mask doesn’t stay independent — he starts mimicking the machine. The umpire — once the lord of the diamond, whose word was law — becomes in effect the rough draft for the AI. Human knowledge and expertise becomes degraded.
To which a baseball fan might respond, perhaps with more colorful language, “they’re all bums anyway.” Which wouldn’t be quite fair to our carbon-based umpires, not that fairness to umps has ever been a concern for baseball fans. MLB estimates that umpires call 94 percent of pitches correctly, which on one hand is good — I’m not sure I’m 94 percent accurate on anything — but on the other hand, means they’re still making mistakes on around 17 or 18 pitches a game on average.
And even though the data suggests umpires have actually been getting better, we’re now able to see replays and precise pitch-tracking data that make it crystal clear just when a call has been blown. A guy named Ethan Singer even created an independent project called Umpire Scorecards, which uses publicly available Statcast/pitch tracking data to score every umpire, every game. The new ABS system just ratifies what previous technology made obvious years ago.
So the technological assault on the umpire’s authority has been underway for some time, and while even the ABS system has its margin of error, the end result of introducing machines will be a more accurately called game. But real human skills will be lost along the way. The best catchers are experts at framing pitches to make them look like strikes, even if they aren’t. Good batters learn an umpire’s individual strike zone and adjust game to game. (The Red Sox great Ted Williams used to say there were three strike zones: his own, the pitcher’s, and the umpire’s.) All of these skills were built on human imperfection, and all of them will become less valuable even as machines make the game “fairer.”
To get a glimpse of baseball’s possible future, just look at tennis.
In 2006, pro tennis introduced the Hawk-Eye challenges, which allowed players to appeal a limited number of line calls to an automated camera system. The players were, initially, not fans. (As Marat Safin put it: “Who was the genius who came up with this stupid idea?”)
But the logic, especially as the sport got faster and faster, was undeniable. By 2020, the US Open had eliminated human line judging altogether, and Wimbledon followed suit in 2025. Human umpires are still employed, but mostly for the purposes of match management; i.e., shushing the crowd. The challenge system turned out to be just a stop on the path to near full-scale automation. And now baseball is stepping onto the same road.
The ABS system is what you get when an institution knows that the machine is better at the job but isn’t ready to say so. That’s exactly the position that a lot of organizations find themselves in right now, as AI grows ever more capable. The result, for the moment, tends to be a hybrid approach that leaves too many workers feeling stressed and disempowered, while failing to capture the benefits of more complete automation.
But over time, automation tends to prove to be a one-way street. The question isn’t whether machines will eventually call balls and strikes. It’s how much longer the halfway point can hold — for those umpires we love to hate, and for the rest of us.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-03-25 20:00:00
我们小时候都听过一个传说：胡萝卜对视力有好处，甚至有人说胡萝卜能让人在黑暗中看见东西。但这个传说到底从何而来？是否有科学依据？事实上，胡萝卜富含维生素A，而维生素A对视力是必需的。但如今大多数人通过日常饮食已经摄取了足够的维生素A，过量食用胡萝卜并不会提升视力或赋予夜视能力。事实上，通过补充剂摄入过量的维生素A反而可能对健康有害。这个普遍的传说实际上起源于第二次世界大战。在德国空军对伦敦和其他英国城市的轰炸（即“闪电战”）期间，英国政府有多个重要理由说服其公民和全世界的人相信吃胡萝卜有助于改善视力。信息部和食物部联合开展了一些极具影响力的胡萝卜主题宣传。这个传说至今仍然广为流传。Vox的制片人Nate Krieger采访了一位眼科医生和一位二战宣传史专家，以揭开胡萝卜视力传说的真相。本视频探讨了这场奇怪的宣传运动背后的动机，解释了它为何如此成功，并重新向大家介绍“胡萝卜博士”Dr. Carrot。了解更多关于胡萝卜在二战中奇特作用的内容：《说服民众》（David Welch）《Lord Woolton：喂养战时英国》《胡萝卜不能帮助你在黑暗中看见》：了解二战宣传如何使这个传说流行起来《世界胡萝卜博物馆》*《英国是你的朋友》（Rosemary Hill）。本视频由Stonyfield Organics制作。Stonyfield Organics并不参与我们的编辑决策，但他们使这类视频成为可能。
We all heard the myth while growing up: Carrots are good for your eyesight. Or maybe even: Carrots can make you see in the dark. But where did this myth come from? And is there any basis in science?
It turns out that carrots are chock-full of vitamin A, which is necessary for vision. But most people today get enough vitamin A in their normal diet, and eating an excess of the orange vegetable won’t boost your eyesight or grant you night vision. In fact, consuming more vitamin A than your body can handle (via supplements instead of natural fruits and vegetables) can be detrimental to your health.
The origins of this common myth actually lie in World War II.
During the Blitz (the German Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign against London and other British cities), the British government had several important reasons to persuade both its citizens and the wider world that eating carrots improved eyesight. The Ministry of Information and Ministry of Food worked together to spread some shockingly impactful carrot-based propaganda. And the myth remains prevalent to this day.
Vox producer Nate Krieger spoke to an ophthalmologist and a World War II propaganda historian to get to the bottom of the carrot vision myth. This video explores the impetus behind this strangely targeted propaganda campaign, explains why it was so successful, and reintroduces the world to Dr. Carrot.
Read more about carrots’ strange role in World War II history:
This video is presented by Stonyfield Organics. Stonyfield Organics doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this one possible.
2026-03-25 19:30:00
深夜时分，世界似乎格外孤独，但没有睡眠不足的父母是真正孤单的。我的第二个孩子小时候是个彻夜难眠的“小夜猫子”。起初他白天睡觉、晚上清醒，像吸血鬼一样，让人疲惫不堪。后来他开始每晚醒来四到五次，每次都充满活力和兴奋，仿佛迫不及待地想了解我们都在做什么。我度过了整整一年的睡眠剥夺期，常常幻想能直接往眼睛里注射咖啡因。但我知道，这很正常，只要熬过这些早期月份，孩子就会开始正常睡眠，我也能恢复精力，至少能保持一天清醒。然而，我仍在等待，我的孩子现在三岁半了，上幼儿园，正在学习写自己的名字。他仍然需要好几个小时才能入睡，经常半夜醒来，常常在凌晨5点就起床。他的睡眠问题在同龄孩子中并不少见——根据美国国家睡眠基金会的数据，2至5岁的儿童中约有30%、学龄儿童中约有15%经常难以入睡或无法整夜睡眠。这意味着数百万美国父母每天都在像僵尸一样艰难地生活，有些人甚至多年都无法获得一整夜的安稳睡眠。
尽管存在一个专门针对儿童睡眠的行业，但大多数资源都集中在婴儿身上，而我却无法将三岁的孩子绑在Snoo（一种婴儿睡眠摇篮）上。此外，我不断受到关于睡眠剥夺对健康危害的提醒，以及专家提出的改善睡眠的建议，但这些建议似乎没有考虑到我生活中那个喜欢用头撞醒我的孩子。
在某种程度上，我开始思考，为什么我的孩子和其他许多美国孩子都如此难以入睡？孩子们是否一直都是这样？在没有等待青春期的情况下，有什么办法能帮助这些父母摆脱这种困境？为了回答这些问题，我采访了多位专家，他们的观点改变了我对孩子睡眠问题的看法。我也和其他父母交流，他们让我意识到，尽管凌晨四点的世界让人感到孤独，但我并不孤单。正如作家兼母亲Wendy Wisner所说：“你需要以一种这种现象是正常且普遍存在的前提来开始。”
事实上，过去几个世纪的孩子并不比现在的孩子更容易入睡。埃默里大学教授兼《Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World》一书的作者Benjamin Reiss指出：“人类的昼夜节律会随着生命周期发生变化。”例如，婴儿需要的睡眠时间比成人多，但往往更分散。在19世纪之前，家庭通常共用一个房间睡觉，Reiss说，如果孩子半夜醒来，父母或其他家庭成员可以迅速回应，然后大家重新入睡。此外，父母也不必面对分离焦虑的问题，因为那时孩子们通常和父母同睡一室。在工业革命之前，许多家庭是多代同堂的，这样夜间有更多人可以帮忙照顾孩子。而富裕家庭则雇佣了大量帮佣，比如奶妈，她们常在夜间工作，让母亲能够休息和恢复体力。正如Jennifer Wright在《Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them》一书中所提到的，但即便如此，人们仍然感到睡眠不足。到了17世纪，人们开始将婴儿送往有奶妈的房屋中，以避免夜间换尿布或听婴儿哭闹。例如，简·奥斯汀在她生命的前几年就被送到村庄的奶妈家中。
在19世纪之前，作息时间也与现在不同，孩子的教育和父母的工作往往在家中进行，因此没有严格的时间要求。然而，随着工业革命的到来，成人，包括许多女性，被期望每天工作14小时，而不是在自己的农村土地上劳作。因此，父母需要按照固定时间安排睡眠，孩子也需要适应这种节奏。一些父母选择使用鸦片酊（Laudanum），俗称“穷孩子的保姆”，来让孩子安静入睡。虽然这种方法确实能让孩子安静，但也有致命风险，因此逐渐被淘汰。取而代之的是越来越多的育儿专家开始提供帮助孩子入睡的建议。同时，随着工业化带来的财富增长，家庭住房也变得更加宽敞，父母和孩子开始分房而睡。儿科医生建议父母不要让孩子睡在他们身边，因为这会干扰所有人的睡眠。如今，我们仍然面临这样的挑战，工作和学校都遵循严格的时间表，而父母则要努力让孩子适应这些安排。正如Wright所说：“现代父母可能感到他们正在经历婴儿睡眠问题，但事实上，他们可能比历史上任何时期的父母都更积极地应对这一问题。”
尽管如此，我们仍然必须面对这个问题。大多数父母都有工作，大多数孩子都有学校，而我们都需要休息。根据睡眠心理学家Lynelle Schneeberg的说法，成年人需要5到9小时的睡眠，而年幼的孩子则需要9到10小时。许多父母深知睡眠不足的后果，Schneeberg告诉我，睡眠剥夺曾被用作一种酷刑手段。除了记忆力和注意力下降，睡眠不足还会影响情绪，增加焦虑和抑郁的风险，使人更容易烦躁。我自己也发现，如果整夜都被孩子吵醒，白天和孩子玩耍时就没有耐心了，除非是玩捉迷藏，他让我躲进被窝里。
Wisner告诉我，她的大孩子直到10岁才开始正常入睡，常常需要超过一个小时才能入睡，而且每次都需要父母陪伴。她多年来和孩子同床或同室而眠，以减轻夜间醒来带来的困扰，但她说：“我非常疲惫，这真的很难。”睡眠不足对成年人的健康也有严重影响，可能导致高血压、痴呆等疾病。当孩子难以入睡时，父母往往失去了与伴侣交流或放松的时间。在印第安纳大学健康 Riley 医院的儿科睡眠心理学家 Sarah Honaker 告诉我：“在我的临床工作中，我见过很多父母说，睡前是他们一天中最糟糕、最紧张的时刻。”我曾以为孩子对睡眠的抗拒不会对他们的健康造成太大影响，认为睡前是一场父母与孩子之间的对抗：我想要孩子睡觉，以便我可以做家务、和丈夫聊天、看 Pluribus、自己睡觉；而孩子则想熬夜玩耍。我的学龄前孩子似乎也没有明显的睡眠问题——即使他晚上拖延到10点才睡觉，第二天早上也会自己醒来。但与睡眠专家的交谈让我开始重新思考，我的孩子是否真的适应了这种睡眠方式。
Schneeberg指出，虽然有些孩子确实需要比平均水平更少的睡眠，但大多数睡眠不足的孩子都会在白天表现出一些问题。这些后果可能包括学习困难、情绪管理问题，甚至更容易生病。Honaker还描述了一个恶性循环：孩子难以入睡，导致他们将上床与入睡之间的联系打破，从而抗拒睡觉，这又加剧了与父母的冲突和睡前的紧张感。“所有这些都会使他们更难入睡，”Honaker说。
回想与孩子共度的睡前时光，我常常感到无奈。有时他从床上跳下来，当我要求他回到床上时，他会抱怨：“我不能！”有时他会在房间里来回走动，威胁要吵醒他的哥哥。有时他绕着房间跑，有时他还会打人。我们很少能顺利度过一个睡前时刻，不威胁一些失去特权的后果。这显然对我和丈夫来说很糟糕，但对我的孩子来说也并不轻松。也许，我开始意识到，我们其实是在同一战线上。
意识到我的孩子可能也渴望更多的睡眠并不意味着我知道如何帮助他入睡。我们已经做了基本的尝试：晚餐后不使用屏幕，保持一致的睡前程序，包括阅读、黑暗的房间和白噪音。大多数我认识的父母都了解这些方法，但仍然难以改善孩子的睡眠。Honaker建议，要根据孩子的自然困倦时间安排睡前时间，即使这意味着将睡前时间稍晚一些。她还提到一种称为“睡前逐渐延后”的策略，即父母记录孩子在夜间争吵、跺脚和责备之后实际入睡的时间，然后在该时间点将孩子送入睡眠。如果孩子成功入睡，父母可以逐步将睡前时间提前。目标是向孩子展示一个平静、无压力的睡前体验。
Schneeberg则谈到“入睡关联”，即孩子依赖的入睡方式，比如某个物品、某个人或某种环境。成年人也有类似的入睡关联，比如“你可能喜欢床的一侧”。但当孩子的入睡关联是父母的陪伴时，他们每次夜间醒来都需要父母。为了解决这个问题，Schneeberg建议逐步减少对父母的依赖，用独立的入睡关联来替代，比如一本书、一个玩具或一张画板。
此外，还有更宏观的解决方案。Reiss告诉我：“我们的社会对睡眠安排有着非常狭隘的理解。”他认为这种狭隘和僵化的观念是问题所在。Reiss并不是建议我们所有人都辞职并实行家庭式教育（尽管在Instagram Reels上有很多人这样建议），但他认为，建立一些有意为之的社区可能有助于解决这一问题。这些社区可以让学校和工作更接近居住地，从而让父母之间的育儿责任更分散一些。然而，这种模式在美国尚未普及。但疫情带来的孤立和育儿疲劳，让许多美国人重新思考社区的重要性。最近，《纽约时报》的Gillian Morris写了一篇关于旧金山奥克兰一个名为Radish的住房社区的文章，那里有20个成年人和8个孩子共同生活，听起来非常理想：“一旦Phil和Kristen的孩子在晚上7点入睡，他们就可以和隔壁的18个朋友联系，把婴儿监视器交给在家的人，然后外出约会。不需要保姆，也不需要提前计划，就像孩子出生前的日子一样。”Reiss说：“任何考虑共同生活空间的人，也在考虑睡眠问题。”然而，对于大多数父母来说，与18个朋友同住并不是可行的建议。我和丈夫更可能专注于改善孩子的睡眠关联，而不是探索共同生活。不过，报道这个故事让我开始以一种不同的视角看待自己与孩子的关系，不再将自己视为孩子的敌人，而是作为这个不完美的社会的一员，努力帮助我们所有人适应。Wisner给我提供了一个思考孩子睡眠问题的框架：“知道这是正常的非常重要。”她说，“但这并不意味着你必须忍受它。”“知道这是正常的，但还有改善的方法”似乎为许多育儿难题提供了一个有用的起点。然而，很多时候，只有通过与其他人的交流，我们才能真正接受这个信息。因为当你在深夜醒来时，一切都不正常，一切似乎都无法好转。
As a baby, my second child was a terrible sleeper.
First he had day-night confusion, a common but exhausting condition in which the baby sleeps during daylight hours and is alert and hungry all night, like a vampire. Then he settled into a schedule of waking up four or five times per night, always happy and excited, as though eager to find out what the rest of us were doing without him.
I spent his first year in a heavy haze of sleep deprivation, frequently fantasizing about injecting caffeine directly into my eyeballs. But this, I knew, was normal — I just had to wait out those early months, and then the baby would start sleeping and I would recover, if not my full faculties, then at least the ability to keep my eyes open for the duration of a day.
I am still waiting.
My little kid is three-and-a-half now. He goes to preschool. He is learning to write his name. He still takes hours to fall asleep, frequently wakes up in the middle of the night, and is often up for good at 5 am.
His difficulties are relatively common — up to 30 percent of children between 2 and 5, and 15 percent of school-aged kids, regularly have difficulty falling asleep or sleeping through the night, according to data from the National Sleep Foundation. That means that millions of American parents are lurching through our days like zombies, some of us going years without an uninterrupted night of rest.
There is a whole cottage industry devoted to children’s sleep, but much of it is focused on babies — I cannot, sadly, strap my three-year-old into a Snoo. Moreover, I am constantly bombarded by reminders of the devastating health effects of sleep deprivation, and by expert advice for better sleep that fails to account for the person in my life who likes to wake me up with headbutts.
To the extent that I can formulate coherent thoughts in my sleep-deprived state, I’ve begun to wonder why my child, and so many other children in America, are like this. Have children always been such terrible sleepers? And what, short of waiting for adolescence, can save the millions of parents who are fighting to stay awake right now?
In my effort to answer these questions, I talked to experts who changed my perspective on my kid’s sleep troubles. And I talked to other parents who reminded me that, as lonely as the world can feel at 4 in the morning, I’m not really alone.
As Wendy Wisner, a writer and mom of two, put it, “you need to start with the premise that this happens and it’s normal.”
As it turns out, children of past centuries were not magically great sleepers. “The default circadian rhythms of the human species change over the course of a life cycle,” said Benjamin Reiss, a professor at Emory University and the author of the book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Babies, for example, need more sleep than adults, but it tends to be more fragmented.
Before the 19th century, families often slept all together in a single room, Reiss said. If a child woke up at night, a parent or other family member could respond relatively quickly, and then everyone could get back to sleep. Parents also didn’t have to deal with the added hurdle of separation anxiety, which can complicate efforts to get children to sleep in their own rooms. (We were once advised to put our older child to bed with a family photograph to ease anxiety. This did not work.)
Working-class people in pre-industrial times often lived in multigenerational households with many family members who could help out at night, said Jennifer Wright, author of Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them, and other history books. Wealthier people had hired help — lots of it.
Wet nurses often worked at night, allowing well-to-do mothers to sleep and recover from childbirth, Wright told me in an email: “But look, that wasn’t enough. By the 1700s people sent their children off for their infancy to live in houses with wet nurses so they could avoid doing diapers or listening to the baby cry. Jane Austen, for instance, was sent off to live in the village with the wet nurse for the first few years of her life.”
Schedules were also different before the 19th century, with much of children’s education and parents’ work taking place in or around the home, Reiss said. There was no need for everyone to be up and out of the house by a particular hour.
That changed with the Industrial Revolution, when adults, including many women, “were expected to work 14-hour days at a factory rather than laboring on their own rural land,” Wright said. Now parents needed to sleep on a schedule, and they needed their kids to get on one too. The solution, for some, was laudanum, a tincture of opium sometimes called “the poor child’s nurse.”
Giving your children opium does keep them quiet, but it can also be fatal, and the practice understandably fell out of favor. In its place came a raft of childrearing experts with advice on helping children sleep, Reiss said. At the same time, the increased wealth that came with industrialization meant larger homes, and the advent of separate bedrooms for parents and kids. Pediatricians began advising parents not to allow children to sleep in the parents’ bed, “because that will disrupt everybody’s sleep,” Reiss said.
This is, more or less, where we are today, with work and school running on strict schedules and parents stuck with the difficult task of getting children to comply.
As Wright put it, “something that may come as a surprise to modern parents who feel they are dealing with infant sleep terribly is that they’re probably dealing with it more actively than any other parents in history.”
And yet, deal with it we must. Most parents have work, most kids have school, and we all need rest; 5–9 hours for adults and 9–10 hours for young children, according to Lynelle Schneeberg, a sleep psychologist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Many parents know well the consequences of sleep deprivation, which, Schneeberg told me, has been used as a method of torture. In addition to problems with memory and concentration, lack of sleep can also affect mood, increasing the risk of anxiety and depression and making us more irritable. I, for one, find that I have less patience for playing with my child in the daytime when I’ve been up with him all night — except when the game is hide-and-seek and he lets me hide in bed.
Wisner, the writer and mom, told me that her older child struggled to sleep until she was at least 10. She often took more than an hour to fall asleep, and needed a parent to lie in bed with her. Wisner slept either in the same bed or the same room with her children for many years to make night wakings easier, but still, “I was very exhausted,” she said. “It was really hard.”
Sleep deprivation in adults also increases the risk of a whole host of ailments, from high blood pressure to dementia. And when a child struggles to fall asleep, parents often lose the small amount of time they have to connect with each other or relax after a day of work and child care. “I’ve definitely seen parents in my clinical work who will say that bedtime is the worst and most stressful part of their day,” Sarah Honaker, a pediatric sleep psychologist at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health, told me.
I’d long assumed that kids were relatively unscathed by their refusal to sleep. I considered bedtime a fundamentally adversarial situation: I wanted my kid to sleep so that I could do dishes/talk to my husband/watch Pluribus/go to bed myself, and my kid wanted to stay up all night and play. Nor did my preschooler show any obvious ill effects from his chaotic nocturnal schedule — after a night of fighting bedtime until 10 pm, he’d often wake up on his own before 6.
But talking to sleep experts made me rethink whether my child was really fine with his no-sleep lifestyle. Some children do need less sleep than average, but large deviations from the mean are rare, Schneeberg said. “Most kids who are sleep-deprived have some kind of daytime consequence.”
Those consequences can include difficulty learning and managing emotions, and even getting sick more frequently, Honaker said. She also described a vicious cycle: Children who have a hard time falling asleep lose the association between getting into bed and falling asleep, leading them to resist bedtime, which causes more conflict with parents and more stress around going to bed. “All of this makes it thus even harder for them to fall asleep,” Honaker said.
Hearing this, I thought about bedtimes with my kid. Sometimes he jumps out of his bed, and when I ask him to get back in, he moans, “I can’t!” Sometimes he stomps around the bedroom, threatening to wake up his older sibling. Sometimes he runs in circles. Sometimes he hits. We rarely get through a bedtime without threatening some kind of loss of privileges. This obviously sucks for me and my husband, but it’s clearly not fun for my kid either.
Maybe, I’ve started to think, we’re on the same team after all.
Realizing that maybe my kid also wants more sleep doesn’t mean I know how to help him get it. We’re already doing the basics: no screens after dinner, consistent bedtime routine with reading, dark room, white noise. Most parents I know are already familiar with these tips, and yet many still struggle.
Honaker recommends being strategic about a child’s bedtime to coincide with their natural sleepiness — even if it means pushing bedtime a bit later. She also mentioned a strategy called “bedtime fading,” in which parents note the time when their child actually falls asleep after the nightly period of arguing, stomping, and recriminations, and then put the child to bed at that time. If the kid falls asleep successfully, parents can then start inching bedtime earlier again. The goal is to show the child what a smooth, stress-free bedtime can look like.
Schneeberg, meanwhile, talked about “sleep onset associations”: the objects, people, or circumstances that kids learn to rely on to fall asleep. Adults have these associations too — “you probably like one side of the bed,” she said. But when a child’s sleep association is a parent sitting with them, they’ll need that parent every time they wake up in the middle of the night.
To fix the problem, Schneeberg recommends “gradually tapering away from needing your parent” for sleep, and replacing parental presence with an independent sleep association, like a book, a toy, or a drawing pad.
Then there are larger-scale solutions. “Our society has promoted a very narrow conception of how we ought to arrange ourselves during sleep,” Reiss told me. “It’s that narrowness and inflexibility that I think is the problem.”
Reiss isn’t advocating that we all quit our jobs and homeschool our children (although plenty of people are advocating for just that on Instagram Reels, a platform perfectly calibrated for making parents feel bad about themselves in the middle of the night). However, he does believe there could be a role for intentional communities where school and work might take place closer to where people live, and where “some of the responsibilities of parenting can be distributed a little bit more broadly.”
Such communities haven’t entered the mainstream in the United States. But pandemic-era isolation and parental burnout have led to a renewed interest in community among many Americans. Gillian Morris recently wrote for the New York Times about an Oakland housing complex known as the Radish, where 20 adults and eight kids live in what sounds like a pretty enviable setup: “Once Phil and Kristen’s kids are asleep at 7 p.m., they can text one of their 18 friends next door, pass the baby monitor to whoever is home and head out. No babysitter, no preplanning — just an impromptu date night, like in the pre-baby days.”
“Any group that’s trying to think about communal living spaces is also thinking about sleep,” Reiss said.
Moving in with 18 friends isn’t actionable advice for most parents right now. My husband and I are more likely to work on our kid’s sleep associations than we are to explore communal living arrangements. Still, reporting this story did make me see myself less as my child’s enemy, trying to get him to do something boring and annoying every single night of his life, and more as a fellow resident of an imperfect society, trying to help us all adapt.
Wisner gave me a useful framework for thinking about kids’ sleep problems: “Knowing that it’s normal is very important,” she said. “That doesn’t mean like, it’s normal, so you have to put up with it.”
“It’s normal, but there are ways to make it better” feels like a helpful starting point for a lot of parenting struggles. But often the only way to internalize this message is to hear it from other people. Because when you’re up in the middle of the night, nothing feels normal, and nothing feels like it will ever get better.
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参议员马克韦恩·穆林（R-OK）于2026年3月23日抵达国会大厦。| Heather Diehl/Getty Images 前总统唐纳德·特朗普为前参议员马克韦恩·穆林提供了第二次机会，让他担任国土安全部长一职。特朗普最初提名的候选人克里斯蒂·诺姆因领导和管理能力受到越来越多批评而被撤换。穆林曾是一名水管工，后来成为MMA拳击手，再成为一位激进的政客，他在周一被确认担任新职位。如今，他将接管一个正陷入一系列丑闻的机构，包括因资金停摆导致美国机场混乱，以及一项激进且经常暴力的集体驱逐行动。穆林是否能清理这些混乱？只有时间能给出答案。但他的过往记录（真实有趣、常常出人意料）中有一些线索。今天，我们将关注这位新任负责美国边境安全、移民执法和应急响应的官员，他在一个相当困难的时刻接任这一职位。
正如他连在一起的名字所暗示的，马克韦恩·穆林是一个多面手。这位48岁的共和党人曾担任过美国参议员和水管工。他是一位坚定的“MAGA”保守派，同时也是切罗基族的注册成员。他既是一个象征性的斗士，也是一个实际的斗士，曾公开挑战一位工会领袖进行拳击对决，之后还成为了这位领袖的亲密朋友。然而，对于我们的目的来说，最重要的是了解穆林在周一确认任命之前，是一位以直言不讳的风格和与特朗普的密切关系而闻名的初选参议员。他虽然在政治上与两党都有朋友，但没有执法经验。
穆林曾在俄克拉荷马州经营家族的水管生意，2012年首次竞选国会议员。据报道，他因不满《平价医疗法案》（ACA）要求他为员工提供医疗保险而感到沮丧，并将反对该法案作为其竞选纲领的重要部分。他以“不是政客，而是商人”为竞选口号，并以超过57%的得票率当选。在国会任职十年后，他于2022年竞选以填补即将退休的参议员吉姆·因霍夫的席位。在参议院，他是唯一一位没有获得学士学位的现任参议员，也是唯一的原住民参议员。穆林对特朗普极其忠诚，特朗普曾特别关注穆林因脑部受伤而住院的青少年儿子。此外，他还卷入了一系列（有时令人震惊）的争议事件。
穆林是美国最富有的参议员之一，据2024年估算，他的资产价值在2900万美元到9700万美元之间。由于披露规则允许议员以较宽泛的范围报告资产，因此这些数字存在差距。穆林在从政之前就已经很富有，但自进入政坛以来，他的财富大幅增长。他频繁的股票交易行为引起了记者和监管组织的特别关注，他们认为他可能利用非公开信息获利，并且有时未能披露其投资。此外，穆林也因一些更引人注目的事件而登上新闻头条。2021年，他多次试图在美军从阿富汗撤军期间进行未经授权的救援行动。还有一次是在2023年参议院委员会听证会上，他公开挑战美国卡车司机工会主席肖恩·奥布莱恩进行一场打斗，参议员伯尼·桑德斯不得不介入。
当然，没有人能预知未来。但穆林在参议院确认听证会上表现得较为温和。他承诺要求移民与海关执法局（ICE）特工在大多数情况下进入私人住宅前必须获得司法授权，并与“庇护城市”合作。在被提名担任国土安全部长之前，穆林还曾与一位在众议院的朋友合作，试图达成一项跨党派协议，以结束一些ICE更具争议的新策略，包括在医院、学校和教堂等敏感场所的执法行动。（尽管穆林的投票记录偏党派，但他以拥有亲密的共和党和民主党朋友而闻名，其中一些人是在国会健身房认识的，他领导着一个跨党派的健身小组。）
考虑到穆林对特朗普的忠诚及其议程，你可能不会在穆林领导下的国土安全部看到重大转变。据政治记者Reese Gorman在与我的同事Sean Rameswaram的对话中表示，穆林本质上是特朗普的忠实支持者：“我认为你不会看到在言论或驱逐政策上出现很多变化。” 但穆林领导下的驱逐政策可能会有所不同。参议员马丁·海因里希是两位支持穆林确认的民主党人之一，他表示相信这位俄克拉荷马州议员不会被白宫“欺负”。在听证会上，穆林也多次承诺与民主党合作。他说：“我的目标是在六个月后，我们不再每天成为新闻头条。我的目标是让人们知道我们就在那里，我们在保护他们，也在与他们合作。”
President Donald Trump got a mulligan in former Sen. Markwayne Mullin — a second shot at filling the top job at the Department of Homeland Security. Trump fired his first pick, Kristi Noem, amid mounting criticism of her leadership and management of the agency.
Mullin, a plumber-turned-MMA fighter-turned-firebrand politician, was confirmed to his new post on Monday. Now, he takes over an agency muddling through a series of ugly messes, from a funding shutdown that’s causing chaos at US airports to an aggressive, and often violent, mass deportation campaign.
Is Mullin the guy to clean all this up? Only time will tell. But there are some clues in his (genuinely entertaining, often surprising) record. Today, we take a look at the man newly charged with overseeing US border security, immigration enforcement and emergency response… at a moment when that’s a pretty difficult job.
As his concatenated first name might suggest, Markwayne Mullin contains multitudes. The 48-year-old Republican has worked as both a US senator and a plumber. He’s a hardcore MAGA conservative and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He’s a figurative and literal fighter who once publicly challenged a union leader to a fistfight… and then went on to become his close personal friend.
For our purposes, however, it’s probably most important to understand that Mullin was, until his confirmation on Monday, a first-term senator known both for his outspoken style and his close relationship with Trump. He has friends on both sides of the political aisle, but no experience in law enforcement.
Mullin was running his family’s plumbing business in Oklahoma when he first ran for Congress in 2012. Mullin was reportedly frustrated that the Affordable Care Act would force him to provide health insurance to his employees, and made opposition to the ACA a major part of his platform. He campaigned under the slogan “not a politician, a businessman” — and won with more than 57 percent of the vote.
Mullin served in the House for 10 years before running to fill retiring Sen. Jim Inhofe’s seat in 2022. In the Senate, he was the only sitting senator without a bachelor’s degree and the only Native American.
Mullin is fiercely loyal to Trump, who took a special interest in Mullin’s teenage son after the boy suffered a brain injury. The lawmaker has also been involved in a series of (sometimes outlandish) controversies.
Mullin is one of the country’s wealthiest senators, with assets valued somewhere between $29 million and $97 million in 2024. (Disclosure rules allow lawmakers to report their assets within broad ranges — hence the gap in those numbers.) Mullin was a rich man when he entered politics, but his wealth has ballooned since then. His prolific stock-trading has drawn particular scrutiny from both journalists and watchdog groups, who suggest he may have profited from non-public knowledge and say he’s sometimes failed to disclose investments.
Mullin has made headlines for flashier reasons, too. In 2021, he repeatedly tried to embark on a rogue rescue mission to Afghanistan as US forces withdrew. Then there’s the time he infamously challenged Teamsters Union President Sean O’Brien to a fight during a 2023 Senate committee hearing. Sen. Bernie Sanders had to intervene.
No one has a crystal ball, of course. But Mullin struck a conciliatory tone during his Senate confirmation hearings. Among other things, Mullin said he would require ICE agents to obtain judicial warrants before entering private homes in most cases and work cooperatively with “sanctuary cities.”
Before his nomination to the DHS job, Mullin was also reportedly working with a friend in the House to broker a bipartisan compromise to end some of ICE’s more controversial new tactics, including enforcement actions at sensitive places like hospitals, schools, and churches. (Mullin is, despite his partisan voting record, known for having close Republican and Democratic friends — some of whom he met in the congressional gym, where he leads a bipartisan workout group.)
Given Mullin’s commitment to Trump and his agenda, you probably shouldn’t expect to see a big about-face at DHS under his leadership. Mullin is fundamentally a Trump loyalist, said Reese Gorman, a political reporter at NOTUS, in conversation with my colleague Sean Rameswaram: “I think that you won’t necessarily see a lot of change in the rhetoric or the mission of deporting people.”
But that mission might look and feel a bit different under Mullin. Sen. Martin Heinrich, one of two Democrats to support Mullin’s confirmation, said that he trusted the Oklahoma lawmaker could not “be bullied” by the White House. During his hearing, Mullin also repeatedly promised to work with Democrats.
“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said. “My goal is for people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them.”
2026-03-25 18:30:00
2026年2月11日，伊朗的“沙赫德-136”无人机在伊朗德黑兰西部的一场集会上展出。| 图片由Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto提供，经Getty Images授权使用
在伊朗与美国持续超过三周的战争中，美国已经摧毁了伊朗多个军事设施，包括弹道导弹发射基地和大部分海军力量。然而，伊朗仍保有其优势——“沙赫德-136”无人机。这种一次性使用的攻击无人机体积小、成本低且精度高，已被伊朗用于攻击美国的防空雷达、政府建筑和中东国家的能源设施，对美国的拦截弹药储备也构成了巨大压力。
迈克尔·C·霍洛维茨（Michael C. Horowitz）是美国外交关系委员会的技术与创新高级研究员，同时也是宾夕法尼亚大学教授。他指出，这些无人机正在改变现代战争的格局：“我认为这就像第一次世界大战中大规模引入机枪一样，”他在《Today, Explained》节目中对主持人诺埃尔·金（Noel King）说道。霍洛维茨与诺埃尔讨论了无人机的作战能力、美国如何应对它们，以及它们对未来战争的影响。以下是他们对话的节选（已进行删减和润色）。
美国虽然对伊朗的导弹基地和军事设施造成了破坏，但伊朗仍然拥有大量低成本、易于组装的无人机，这些无人机在战场上对美国构成了真正的威胁。霍洛维茨表示，这些无人机被用作巡航导弹的替代品，用于攻击美国的防空雷达、政府建筑和中东国家的能源设施。他担心的是，尽管美国航母有强大的防御能力，但大量无人机同时攻击仍可能造成严重威胁。例如，如果同时向航母发射500架无人机，即使美国能击落450架，仍有50架突破防线，这将带来巨大风险。
伊朗的无人机数量虽然不确定，但已知的是他们拥有数千架。此外，俄罗斯也能每周生产数千架类似的无人机。美国和以色列正在打击伊朗的制造能力，但伊朗的地下制造能力使得其能够利用商业手段几乎在任何地方生产这些无人机。因此，霍洛维茨认为美国需要加大对低成本武器系统的投资。他特别提到，美国首次使用“卢卡斯”（LUCAS）无人机进行精确打击，是值得欢迎的进展。
美国的军事装备一直以高质量、高成本、难以大规模生产为特点。然而，如今这种策略已不再足够。面对像俄罗斯和中国这样的强大对手，美国需要发展“高低混合”的作战力量，即同时拥有高端武器系统（如战斧导弹和F-35战斗机）和低成本、可快速部署的武器系统。
霍洛维茨认为，未来战争的形态将不断变化。正如第一次世界大战中机枪的出现改变了战争方式，二战中坦克的普及也带来了新的战争形态。如今，无人机正在成为现代战争的重要组成部分。如果一个国家没有这些无人机，也无法有效防御，那么它将处于不利地位。
After more than three weeks of war in Iran, the US has destroyed major components of Iran’s military, including ballistic missile sites and much of the country’s navy.
One advantage Iran retains, though, is the Shahed-136. The Shahed, a one-way, single-use attack drone, is small, inexpensive, and highly accurate. Iranian drone attacks have led to the death of six US service members, damaged oil and natural gas facilities in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, and are quickly depleting America’s interceptor stockpiles.
Michael C. Horowitz is a senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He says these drones have ushered in a new era of warfare: “The way that I would think about this is just like the introduction of the machine gun at scale in World War I,” he told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.
Noel talks with Horowitz about what the drones can do, how the US can counter them, and what they mean for the future of warfare.
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.
The US has done damage to Iran’s missile sites and military bases. But Iran still has cheap, easy-to-assemble drones that pose a real threat on the battlefield. Michael Horowitz, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tell us about them drones!
These one-way attack drones, like the Shahed-136, are used essentially as a substitute for a cruise missile. Iran is using them to do things like target American air defense radars, which are necessary to find other drones and shoot them down. Iran is using them to target government buildings like embassies. Iran is using them to target critical infrastructure that countries in the Middle East use for oil and gas.
The thing that somebody like me worries about is that American aircraft carriers in general are extremely well protected. A drone in and of itself would never take out an American aircraft carrier. They’re just too small. But a lot of them could. And the real risk here is that suppose you fired not one, not a hundred, but 500 at an American aircraft carrier at once. Even if the US could shoot down 450 of them, that’s still a lot that are getting through it.
The scale of these one-way attack drones that you can launch generates the potential ability to not just target the kinds of infrastructure and things that we’re seeing Iran doing, but really important military targets as well, including our ships.
Iran presumably does not have an infinite number of these drones. How many do they actually have on hand?
We don’t actually know exactly how many Iran has on hand, but we know that they have thousands. We also know, for example, that Russia has the ability to produce a thousand or more every couple of weeks of their knockoff of the Shahed-136.
Iran likely has the ability to do something in that range as well. The US and Israel are obviously targeting their manufacturing capabilities, but Iran has a lot of manufacturing that’s more underground, and because you can use commercial manufacturing to build these systems, you can do that almost anywhere.
That’s one of the reasons why I have been very vocal that the United States needs to invest more in these capabilities. And why I was thrilled, frankly, in the context of this conflict, regardless of what one thinks of the conflict itself, to see the US use its first precise mass system, the LUCAS drone, against Iran.
The American military arsenal is based on quality over quantity. It’s based on having small numbers of exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce systems that are the best in the world, but they were designed to be essentially bespoke products. They were not designed for mass production. The issue is that that’s not enough anymore.
In a world that required having those expensive, exquisite systems to do things like accurately fire weapons at your adversaries, then that was a unique advantage for the United States military. But because everybody — both smaller states and militant groups — can launch more accurate precision strikes at lots of different targets, it means that just having those kinds of systems is not enough for the United States.
If Iran is firing a $35,000 Shahed-136 at the United States, and the United States is shooting it down with a weapon that costs anywhere between $1 million per shot and $4 million per shot, you do not need to be a defense planner to understand that that cost curve is in the wrong direction.
How did Iran get so well-armed?
Necessity is the mother of invention. A country like Iran has felt intense security threats in the region. In part that’s because of Iran’s own ideology: If you’re going to roll around chanting “death to America,” then you need to be prepared for the United States and the region to have some questions.
Iran fought a war against Iraq in the 1980s. Iran has been in continual tussles with various neighbors over the years. And so Iran built up a pretty extensive military arsenal. Not anywhere near as good as the United States or Israel, but Iran, in some ways because they had to, was a pioneer in developing these low-cost, long-range precise mass weapons that they then shared with Russia. And Russia’s used hundreds of thousands against the Ukrainians.
Is there a way for the US to defend against these Iranian drones without spending so much money?
The US has options. It’s just going to take some time to get there.
Another country where necessity has been the mother of invention has been Ukraine, facing down the Russian invaders now for four years. And because Ukraine is the victim of dozens to hundreds of launches of these Shaheds almost every day, Ukraine has pioneered lower-cost air defense systems using even less expensive drones, for example, to take out those $35,000 drones, or even in some cases using old World War II-style anti-aircraft guns.
If a fairly cheap unmanned drone can overwhelm a billion-dollar aircraft carrier, does the US need to start rethinking the way it fights wars?
One hundred percent. The plan to rely only on these exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce weapons is no longer going to be enough for the United States. That would especially be true in a war against the most sophisticated potential adversaries the United States could face like China or Russia.
What the United States needs to pursue is what’s called a high/low mix of forces. Some of those high-end systems like Tomahawk missiles and F-35s, things that the United States has worked on for a generation, but then also a new wave of these lower-cost systems that need to be treated not as the kind of thing you might hold onto for 50 years, but as cheaper, more disposable, and upgraded on a regular basis.
What do you think war looks like a generation from now?
The character of warfare is always in flux. The way that I would think about this is just like the introduction of the machine gun at scale in World War I. It fundamentally changed the character of warfare.
The machine gun then just became a ubiquitous weapon. Everybody had machine guns. And then in World War II it was the tank. And everywhere since then, there have been tanks.
What we are now seeing between the Russia-Ukraine War and this war with Iran is these one-way attack drones. It’s not that they’re the only things that militaries need, but these are now going to be part of the arsenal moving forward. And if you don’t have them, and if you can’t defend against them, you’re going to be in trouble.
2026-03-25 18:00:00
2007年5月2日，一名反战示威者戴着美国总统乔治·W·布什的面具，上面还带有恶魔角，在华盛顿特区白宫前的抗议活动中跳舞。| 法新社/Getty Images
当唐纳德·特朗普赢得2016年共和党初选时，他不仅击败了众多对手，还终结了一个持续近三十年的家族统治——布什家族及其追随者在红州（保守派地区）的主导地位。这一政权的共和主义风格反映了国家俱乐部保守派的特殊利益和执念：减税、自由贸易和大规模移民以降低企业成本，以及通过政权更迭战争来巩固美国的全球霸权（以及以色列的利益）。然而，美国被遗忘的普通民众对这一全球主义议程几乎没有投资。他们希望通过关税保护本国就业，通过对富人的征税来资助自己的福利保障，希望封闭边境以保护自身文化，并希望采取孤立主义的外交政策以防止孩子死于无休止的战争。而特朗普正是承诺要实现这些目标的。因此，许多右翼民粹主义者曾深信不疑。
然而，特朗普的政策并非源自某种连贯的治国理念（更不用说亲劳工的理念），这一观点早已被证伪。尽管如此，一些亲特朗普的民粹主义者仍然坚持信仰，直到伊朗战争爆发。近一个月来，特朗普一直将推翻中东政府（甚至可能将其征服）置于美国经济健康之上，并以防止该国获得大规模杀伤性武器和“解放”其人民为由，这与共和党当年发动2003年伊拉克战争时的说辞如出一辙。对乔·罗根、塔克·卡尔森以及各种民粹主义知识分子而言，这一切都令人痛苦地熟悉。克莱蒙特研究所的克里斯托弗·卡莱尔曾表示，伊朗战争标志着“特朗普主义的终结”。而民粹主义右翼的同路人迈克尔·林德则走得更远，认为特朗普不过是“更具个性的乔治·W·布什”。
右翼民粹主义者感到失望和似曾相识是合理的，但林德的论点却过于夸张。特朗普并非只是布什的更花哨版本。即使我们忽略两人在移民政策上的明显分歧，仅从各自的外交政策来看，两者之间也存在显著差异。特朗普对地缘政治采取了更为直接的民族主义、机会主义和新殖民主义策略。在他看来，美国对其他国家的投入并未促进自身利益，反而损害了这些国家的利益。美国曾浪费资源在对外援助和国家建设上，而让盟友通过糟糕的贸易协议变得富有。这种对其他国家（包括美国盟友）利益的敌视态度是显而易见的。特朗普显然认为，没有必要宣扬仁慈或普世的意图，即使只是作为幌子。他将关税描述为从外国夺回就业机会的手段，并将许多军事行动描绘为对被征服国家资源的掠夺。与此同时，他彻底削减了美国对外援助和全球公共卫生的支出，这与他一贯忽视美国“软实力”的态度一致。
然而，特朗普也表现出冲动和易受影响的一面。他的外交政策不仅受其好战和零和思维的影响，还受到媒体赞誉、顾问和外国官员意见以及反腐败动机的驱动。在为军事行动辩护时，他有时采取“大杂烩”的方式：在解释对委内瑞拉的攻击时，他既提到了该国政权的专制性质，也提到了对委内瑞拉石油的觊觎以及阻止其所谓“毒品恐怖主义”的意图。同样，特朗普有时将对伊朗的战争描述为解放其人民的行动，同时也将其视为一项有限的行动，旨在延缓其核武器计划并削弱其海军力量。在这些情况下，他迅速放弃了对民主推广的承诺。在委内瑞拉，他满足于扶植该国更顺从的独裁者；在伊朗，他反复表示有兴趣支持该国伊斯兰政权中的务实派，只要能找到一些（他尚未杀死的）人。
这些差异并非表面的。布什对伊拉克和阿富汗的民主化承诺导致了长达数年的反恐战争，造成数百万死亡和8万亿美元的开支。而特朗普的军事行动则远没有那么血腥或昂贵。如果布什愿意用一位愿意与美国石油公司达成协议的次要巴沙尔党官员取代萨达姆·侯赛因，过去二十年的世界历史可能大不相同。同时，布什在对外援助上的投入，特别是对艾滋病治疗的资助，被认为拯救了多达2500万人的生命。相比之下，特朗普对美国援助项目的削减已经导致哈佛大学T·H·陈公共卫生学院估计的数以十万计的因传染病和营养不良而死亡的人。此外，特朗普对美国盟友的漠视导致这些国家寻求与中国建立更紧密的关系。美国全球形象的下降将带来多种长期后果，尽管这些后果难以预测。
因此，右翼民粹主义者确实成功地将“布什主义”从共和党中驱逐出去。然而，取而代之的是一种并非旨在避免一切不必要的战争，也并非以理性方式优先考虑美国利益的外交策略。相反，这是一种随形势变化而摇摆的政策，其核心是一种“黑帮式”的思维——通过赤裸裸的强制手段，以其他国家为代价追求所谓的国家利益。特朗普主义或许并未真正将美国置于首位，但却将全球贫困人群置于最后。
When Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primary, he didn’t just defeat a field of rivals; he toppled a dynasty.
For nearly three decades, the Bush family and its vassals lorded over red America. This regime’s style of Republicanism reflected the peculiar interests and obsessions of country-club conservatives: tax cuts, free trade, and mass immigration to lower corporations’ costs and regime-change wars to fortify America’s global hegemony (and/or Israel’s interests).
But America’s forgotten men and women had little investment in this globalist agenda. They wanted tariffs to protect their jobs, taxes on the rich to fund their entitlement benefits, sealed borders to secure their culture, and an isolationist foreign policy to prevent their kids from dying in a forever war — and this was precisely what Trump would deliver.
Or, so many right-wing populists once believed.
Alas, the idea that Trump’s policies all emanate from a coherent governing philosophy of any kind (much less a pro-labor one) was falsified long ago. Yet, some pro-Trump populists managed to keep the faith — until the Iran War.
For nearly a month now, Trump has been prioritizing the subjugation (if not overthrow) of a Middle-eastern government over the health of America’s economy, and he has done so in the name of preventing that state from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and liberating its people — the same rationales that Republicans used to sell the 2003 Iraq War.
For Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and various populist intellectuals, all of this is painfully familiar. The Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell has declared the Iran War “The end of Trumpism.” Micael Lind, a fellow-traveler of the populist right, goes further, arguing that Trump has proven to be George W. Bush with a more “colorful personality.”
Right-wing populists aren’t wrong to feel a sense of disappointment and déjà vu, but Lind overstates his case. Trump is not Bush in more garish packaging.
Even if we ignore the obvious divergence between the two presidents’ immigration agendas and focus exclusively on their respective foreign policies, clear differences emerge. Trump has taken a novel approach to geopolitics; it just isn’t quite the one that right-wing populists were hoping for.
Before examining the distinctions between Trump and Bush’s foreign policies, it’s worth reviewing the many areas of continuity between them. Like his Republican predecessor, Trump has:
• Launched preemptive wars of choice in defiance of international law against governments who had perpetrated no attack on the United States.
• Tried to topple the anti-American regime of a Middle Eastern country.
• Overseen large increases in defense spending.
• Maintained virtually all of America’s globe-spanning military deployments.
• Championed America’s global dominance, even when it upset allies. (Bush invaded Iraq without key NATO allies’ backing. Trump threatened to invade a NATO ally.)
• Authorized the commission of war crimes. (Bush did this tacitly but at epic scale, while Trump explicitly endorsed torture and targeting innocents on the campaign trail and removed military safeguards for civilians in his second term.)
Nevertheless, each president’s militarism was rooted in a distinct conception of geopolitics.
Bush subscribed to a radical version of liberal internationalism, often described as “neoconservatism.” Deeply shaped by the Cold War, this ideology held that America needed to both maintain global military dominance and facilitate the spread of democratic capitalism in order to safeguard its security and interests.
The basic idea was to remake hostile autocracies in America’s image and then integrate them into our traditional network of alliances and trade.
As Bush articulated the doctrine, “the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder.” At times, Bush’s evangelism for democracy was quite literal, such as when he said in July 2007 that he felt compelled to export America’s political model because “there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom.”
Of course, the Bush administration was less than faithful to such lofty goals. When the imperatives of democracy promotion and crasser national (or special) interests came into conflict, the latter often took precedence. Bush wasn’t going to blow up the US-Saudi alliance over Riyadh’s penchant for executing apostates, nor would it temper its support for Israel in light of that nation’s subjugation of the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza.
Nonetheless, the Bush administration directed considerable resources to the promotion of democracy and economic development in many parts of the globe. Beyond the trillions it spent on overseeing democratic transitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush more than doubled US spending on foreign aid — including a $15 billion investment in HIV treatment abroad.
Further, even when hollow, Bush’s rhetoric bespoke a concern for legitimizing American global leadership. The president did not ask foreign peoples to kneel before the United States’s awesome power, but, rather, to believe that its aims were fundamentally beneficent — that America sought to foster freedom and prosperity worldwide, not merely within its own borders.
Trump’s approach to foreign policy is far more unabashedly nationalist, opportunistic, and neocolonial.
In his view, America’s investments in the wellbeing of other nations have not advanced our interests but undermined them. The US squandered resources on foreign aid and nation-building while allowing its allies to grow rich at our expense through bad trade deals.
Critically, this antagonism towards the interests of other nations — including US allies — is explicit. Trump evidently sees little value in broadcasting beneficent or universalistic intentions, even as a pretense. He frames his tariffs as an attempt to confiscate jobs from foreign countries and casts many of his military adventures as bids to expropriate the resources of conquered lands.
In a total repudiation of concerns for American “soft power,” meanwhile, Trump gutted US spending on foreign aid and global public health.
All this said, the president is also impulsive and impressionable. His foreign policy decisions aren’t shaped merely by his belligerent and zero-sum worldview, but also by a desire for flattering media coverage, input from advisers and foreign officials, and the pursuit of corruption.
When justifying his martial adventures, meanwhile, Trump sometimes takes a “kitchen sink” approach: In explaining his assault on Venezuela, the president did invoke the autocratic nature of its regime but, also, a desire to seize its oil and thwart its supposed “narco-terrorism.” Likewise, Trump has at times framed his war with Iran as a bid to liberate its people but, also, as a limited operation meant to set back its nuclear weapons program and degrade its navy.
In both cases, the president swiftly abandoned his avowed interest in democracy promotion. With Venezuela, Trump was content to elevate a more pliant member of that nation’s authoritarian government. With Iran, the president has repeatedly expressed interest in backing pragmatists within its Islamist regime, if only he could find some (that he hadn’t already killed).
The distinctions between Bush’s hypocritical universalism and Trump’s haphazard nationalism aren’t merely cosmetic.
Bush’s commitment to transforming Iraq and Afghanistan into democratic societies led to years-long counter-insurgency wars in both countries, which yielded death on a gargantuan scale. By some estimates, Bush’s War on Terror claimed nearly 1 million lives and $8 trillion. To date, none of Trump’s military adventures have been remotely as bloody or exorbitant. Had Bush been content to replace Saddam Hussein with some subordinate Ba’ath Party official willing to cut some deals with US oil companies, the past two decades of world history might look very different.
At the same time, Bush’s investments in foreign aid in general — and HIV treatment, in particular — are credited with saving upwards of 25 million lives. Conversely, Trump’s evisceration of America’s aid programs has already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious disease and malnutrition, according to one estimate from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Finally, Trump’s singular contempt for the interests of US allies has led them to seek closer ties with China. The long-term consequences of America’s declining global image are likely to be myriad, even as they are difficult to anticipate.
Thus, right-wing populists did succeed in driving Bushism out of the Republican Party. The geopolitical strategy that replaced it, however, is not one that seeks to avoid unnecessary wars at all costs or prioritizes a rational conception of American interests.
Rather, it is a foreign policy that oscillates with events but centers on a kind of gangsterism — a belief in the pursuit of national advantage (dubiously conceived) through naked coercion and at other countries’ expense. Trumpism may not have put America first, but it has placed the global poor last.