The New York Times Magazine - 30.08.2026.pdf

《纽约时报》杂志

2026年8月30日

时间有限？随时随地玩迷你填字游戏。

18 温和派将社会主义者视为民主党的威胁。社会主义者对此表示认同。作者：查尔斯·霍曼斯

26 他曾是 YouTube 上顶级的草坪护理 网红， 随后一切陷入混乱 作者：乔恩·朗森

30 台湾的捍卫者 摄影：张正之 文字：布鲁克·拉默

专栏

4 背景：美国人声称讨厌窥探的摄像头。但他们无法移开视线。作者：威利·斯泰利

8 语言： “lore”（传说 / 背景知识）如何将事实变为虚构——反之亦然。作者：米奇·塞里奥

10 访谈：普里亚·帕克表示，如果没有冲突，你的关系注定会失败。作者：大卫·马切塞

14 屏幕世界 一家深受喜爱的咖啡连锁店推出的古怪新饮品，揭示了注意力经济的运作方式。 作者：索菲·海尼

16 伦理学家：我的姐姐与父母断绝了联系。我必须选边站队吗？作者：夸梅·安东尼·阿皮亚 此外：法官约翰·霍奇曼

— 44, 45 多样化谜题 及答案

46 填字游戏

“反群体愤怒”背后究竟隐藏着什么？

让我们在开头就明确一点：在光天化日之下的中央公园与年轻同事亲热，尤其是如果你已婚的话，这可能既不是个聪明主意，也不是一件道德正确的事。据报道，最近一个夏日，两名顶尖律师之间就发生了这样的事情。在这样一个拥有 860 万 人口的城市里，这类事情可能时刻在发生，也可能并非如此。坦率地说，这既不关我的事，也不关你的事。我之所以知道这件事，是因为一个拥有 360 万 粉丝的抖音 (海外版) 博主杰·瓜波 (Jay Guapo) 正好路过，并决定拍摄这对情侣，责骂他们（“周围有孩子！”），在对方极度不安的反对下继续拍摄，然后将视频发布到他的动态中。该视频目前的播放量已超过 1200 万 次，并因此成为了《纽约邮报》持续调查的主题，该报发布了多篇关于此事件的报道，将这对男女称为“亲热律师”。

抖音 (海外版) 的评论区对这段视频感到兴奋。观众从两人脸上尴尬至极的神情中直觉地意识到，他们非常反感被拍摄——这种反感暗示了这次亲热行为是非公开允许的。但一些评论者似乎对杰·瓜波的决定感到更不安，他们经常争论说，没错，也许他们做了错事，但婚外亲热并不违法。那么为什么要拍摄？为什么要发布？

对某些人来说，这是对严重罪行的报应；而对另一些人来说，这仅仅是最新的提醒：智能手机摄像头与社交媒体平台共同创建了一个随机的“袋鼠法庭”（kangaroo court）——一个可以通过隐形门户被召唤，以执行迅速审判（或者至少是它自己定义的审判）的法庭。（《金融时报》在视频发布六天后报道称，该律师事务所已让其中年长的男性亲热者停职。）关于婚姻不忠的禁忌无需多言，我敢打赌，在摩西第一次登上西奈山之前，这件事就已经定论了。但在石板刻字的时代，甚至在仅仅二十年前的黑莓手机时代，“为了好玩而在公共场合拍摄陌生人并将其发布在互联网上给数百万人观看”都是不可能实现的。这种行为太新了，以至于还没有形成任何形式的文化共识。在什么时间点拍摄陌生人才算可以接受？只要你想拍就拍？如果他们违法了？谁的法律？因此，得益于录制设备的微型化，这场审判全天候地持续进行着。

现在看来可能难以置信，但在那个时代的黎明时分，有些人真的相信，将摄像头、麦克风以及其他设备普及到数百万人的手中，可以成为抵御监视的盾牌。

这种思路是由一位名叫史蒂夫·曼 (Steve Mann) 的连续发明家兼学者提出的。曼有时被称作可穿戴计算之父，他在 20 世纪 60 年代后期还是个孩子时就开始设计便携式技术，远在桌面电脑广泛使用之前。那是冷战时期，一个偏执的 era.。曼在一家电视维修店工作，与一名痴迷于窃听器和监听设备的男人共事。曼的早期发明之一是一个能够实现他所谓的“元感知”（meta-sensing）——即感知传感器的设备——随着这些传感器的激增，这件事变得愈发重要。马桶、小便池和水龙头——他指出，这些设备现在都内置了摄像头以辅助运行。虽然分辨率低，但依然存在。“所有这些东西都在监视我们，而我们却看不见它们，”他在一次 TED 演讲中解释道。

曼恩提出了一种应对措施，即“sousveillance”（下向监视）——这个词源自法语，意为“在下方”。这个想法似乎是由他那不寻常的爱好所衍生，而非指导该爱好。早期的照片显示，他背着一台计算机，右眼还连接着一个看起来像潜望镜的装置。“回到 70 年代，”他在另一场讲座中说，“人们为了避开我而过马路。”当他进入那些布满闭路电视（CCTV）摄像头但禁止拍照的地方——比如领事馆，甚至是一家杂货店——时，他的思考变得更加敏锐。曼恩认为这很虚伪：当然，这些地方允许拍照，但仅限于他们自己拍。为什么只有他们能被信任地掌握记录证据？如果记录分布在许多不同的参与方手中，难道不能存在一个更完整、更可靠的记录吗？

曼恩认为，这样一个社会——一个下向监视社会——将会减少腐败，并最终减少被监视的情况。“如果每个人都记得（记录）所有事情，”他写道，“那么监视的需求就会很少。”

这种乐观的、开源的本能，推动了本世纪初许多原生于网络的政治运动，从“匿名者”（Anonymous）到比特币（Bitcoin）。这种倾向——不信任权威，鄙视普通人（normies），但尽管如此，却极其看好强大且新颖的技术能够改善（或抵消）两者的行为——其历史记录毁誉参半。对普通人和权威的厌恶很快会演变成反动，正如我们所看到的，孕育了“匿名者”的讨论版 4chan，最终变成了我们今天所熟知的 4chan；而比特币并没有取代法定货币，反而成了一种投机工具，并催生了数百万个更多的投机工具，而到目前为止，很少有工具敢于假装具有实际用途。

在下向监视中，你可以看到一些相同的希望和缺陷。你当然可以认为，这种意识形态在 2010 年代及之后取得了一些胜利：记录警察杀人的手机视频可以说是这段时间内产生的影响最深远的媒体片段，并切实改变了警察执行任务的方式——尽管讽刺的是，这是通过创造一种新形式的监视来实现的。大多数警察在执行其他任务之前，必须先开启自己的可穿戴视频摄像头。但这似乎并没有减少警察枪击致死的总数。但在某些司法管辖区，其他警察执法过程的视频——比如一次有趣的醉驾逮捕——可以通过公共记录请求获取，然后上传到 YouTube，向数百万人展示，以获取娱乐和利润。你可以说，这又是那些普通人的行为了，但他们和我们一样使用着同一个互联网。

最近，各种政治倾向的美国人一直在利用互联网以一种截然不同的方式团结起来，对抗一种新形式的监视：自动车牌识别系统，主要是由一家总部位于亚特兰大的名为 Flock Safety 的公司生产的系统。这些由人工智能驱动的摄像头通常可以通过其太阳能电池板来识别，近年来在全国各地迅速增加。目前，除了阿拉斯加州以外的每个州都部署了超过 100,000 台。根据该公司及其执法部门客户的说法，所有这些摄像头所做的只是被动地追踪车牌，从而提供一种实时标记被盗车辆和失踪人员的方法，同时留下可以用来拼凑犯罪嫌疑人行踪的记录。

这些摄像头已被用于侦破一些严重的犯罪案件。2025年，它们通过识别汽车品牌和型号的能力，帮助罗德岛州普罗维登斯的警方追踪到了布朗大学的枪击犯，而该枪击犯此前更换了车牌。但这些设备也被滥用：已有数十起案例显示，警察被指控或被起诉利用车牌识别器追踪女友、前任，甚至是他们感兴趣的人。新技术提供的这种虚假的确定感，还导致警方犯下愚蠢的错误，逮捕或向可证明清白的人地指向武器。但这些个别滥用案例并非核心问题，真正让反对者担忧的是 Flock 摄像头所代表的意义：这是向建立高科技警察国家迈出的实质性一步。

任何支付费用使用 Flock 的管辖区都可以简单地检索自己的数据，但还有另一种更令人不安的选择。这些摄像头还将数据馈送到一个更大的、可搜索的网络中，该网络由许多管辖区的数据组成，且仅对那些选择与他人共享数据的管辖区开放。大多数使用 摄像头的管辖区都选择了加入。这意味着，理论上，在没有搜查令的情况下，你在美国本土大部分地区和夏威夷的行踪都可能被追踪；即便执法部门目前尚未如此滥用该网络，但在某个阴暗的未来，这绝对是有可能的。

公司则表示，这种情况是不可能发生的。数据保留的默认设置仅为 30 天，不过客户可以将其延长或缩短。（该公司最近将默认保留窗口改为七天。） 还引入了保障措施，以确保警方不会将搜索用于课外

1996 年的史蒂夫·曼（Steve Mann）当时是麻省理工学院的一名研究生，他会带着这些连接并传输到互联网的设备四处走动。

目的。（据《麻省理工科技评论》报道，这些措施很容易被规避。）

而且，没人相信这些说法。抖音 (海外版) 上充斥着对这些摄像头的愤怒和阴谋论：它们侵犯了你受第四修正案保护的免受非法搜查的权利（这一点非常不明确）；它们没有被安装在犹太社区（并非事实）；数据将被提供给 Palantir 以创建 AI 警察国家（无论如何，目前还没有）。

住在纽约，人们很容易觉得这些担忧有些过时。由于我们为了获得开进曼哈顿交通拥堵地带的特权，需要通过自动车牌识别（A.L.P.R.）支付大量过路费，因此我们对车牌识别器已经习以为常。全市到处都是测速摄像头，不断读取车牌，偶尔给我寄罚单。许多纽约司机为了逃避测速摄像头和过路费而故意损坏自己的车牌；我并不认为他们是自由战士。而且，这些摄像头在协助刑事调查的同时，并没有将纽约变成一个极权国家。（事实上，许多人注意到，这里的警察似乎花了很多时间在手机上分心。）

但现在，这些 摄像头正耸立在那些没有巴特里隧道（Battery Tunnels）且没有拥堵费的小镇上。在那些地方，去任何地方都意味着要开车，你无法融入人群，而且这些决定在几乎没有或完全没有公众讨论的情况下就做出了。相反，这些信息是通过社交媒体向公众披露的，由那些争夺注意力的创业者发布，有时他们甚至在推销据称能对抗摄像头的产品：用于干扰摄像头的激光笔，以及能让你知道附近是否有录像设备的传感器。

但更具影响力的后果是，这种反Flock狂热产生了一张名为DeFlock的众包自动车牌识别（A.L.P.R.）地图。而这似乎在助长一波针对这些摄像头的破坏行为。抖音（海外版）用户现在会拍摄自己摧毁摄像头的视频，或者提供一些含糊的指南，教人如何“不”摧毁它们。当然，其中有很多可能出错的地方：在前往或离开任务现场的途中被另一个A.L.P.R.捕捉到，或者在摧毁Flock摄像头时被该摄像头本身拍下。而且事后，你可能还会决定在互联网上分享自己犯罪的记录证据。

但这种方法与曼的方法截然不同，且似乎反映了一种广泛的、跨党派的对技术及其所服务的权势人物之未来的悲观情绪。当这种悲观情绪与对官方叙事的不信任相结合时，会引发剧烈的反弹。从这个意义上说，反Flock狂热与新兴的反对数据中心的运动更为相似，而非一场关于公民自由的斗争。

一场针对监视本身的运动必须应对监视的所有形式：不仅是A.L.P.R.，还包括我们对他人的监视——以及对我们隐私更紧迫的威胁，即我们为了每天消遣数小时而交给这些设备的海量信息。有时，这种消遣就是观看陌生人在公园长椅上亲昵。

当你盯着一个带有摄像头、麦克风、GPS、面部识别技术，且存有你的信用卡信息、浏览记录、照片、整个社交关系网以及你发送给任何人的几乎每一条消息（无论是否加密）的设备，同时观看一段关于用圆锯锯掉车牌识别器的抖音视频时，这其中有一种淡淡的荒诞感。这种偏执显得几乎滑稽地错位。因为如果国家、Palantir或任何其他机构想要违反宪法，滥用新技术来追踪我们的每一个动作，并将我们困在极权警察国家中，他们不需要你先开车经过安装在汉堡王（Burger King）外的摄像头。有一个简单得多的方法。它现在可能就在你的口袋里。

Lore（名词）：一种巧妙的语言技巧，将日常生活转化为宏大的幻想，反之亦然。

知道某些事情往往令人感到窘迫。大脑存储事实的空间有限，人们很容易担心自己存储的事实可能是错误的，或者认为有更实用、在知识分量上更重的东西应该是被妥善保存的。例如，为什么我知道Train乐队和Matchbox Twenty乐队吉他手的名字，而无论使用多少记忆法，都无法让我记住毒藤的独特外观？在20世纪60年代末，在信息时代的黎明时分，我们每天吸收且往往是不情愿地记住的无用知识最常见的名称之一变成了“trivia”（琐事 / 冷知识）。这个词带着腼腆的微笑：它知道它所定义的知识确实是琐碎的。凭借其古怪的复数形式，“trivia”邀请你将事实视为可以收集的闪亮小饰品。

近年来，“trivia”遇到了一个令人惊讶的挑战者：“lore”（传说 / 背景知识）。肯尼迪遇刺的细节在网上被描述为“J.F.K. lore”。关于Chuck E. Cheese的悲剧起源故事——他的中间名真的是Entertainment，并且在圣马里纳孤儿院长大——这就是那个机械老鼠背后的“令人不安的lore”。一名Threads用户好奇Dave Matthews Band是否有“什么好的lore”——确实有，例如，该乐队的巡演巴士曾将约800磅的人类排泄物倾倒在芝加哥河中的那次事件。

如果说“琐事”（trivia）是谦卑的，那么“传说 / 背景知识”（lore）则是史诗般的，或者至少是模拟史诗的。它赋予了微小的碎片化事实一种魔法咒语般的感觉，仿佛是从术士图书馆的禁书卷轴中读到的一样。恰恰地，“lore”是一个非常古老的词。它与“learn”（学习）拥有共同的日耳曼语根。在古英语中， 指的是知识，任何被教授或习得的东西——事实、道德、教义。早期现代英语保留了这一含义。在《失乐园》中， 除其他含义外，还代表着理性的常识之声，可惜被悲剧性地忽视了：在弥尔顿笔下的亚当和夏娃吃掉禁果后，“理智不再主宰，意志 / 也不听从她的教诲（）”。尽管如此，在现代性的门槛前，这个词开始产生一种古旧的语感。它变成了一个更适合讨论往昔岁月的词汇：“希腊传说”或“罗马传说”；以及遥远过去的“传奇故事（legendary ）”。隐约地，几乎在不经意间， 开始在硬事实与神话故事之间闪烁。

到了 20 世纪 70 年代，所有热爱剑与魔法的人都捕捉到了这种淡淡的幻想气息。《高级龙与地下城》手册的早期版本勾勒出了一个魔法世界，其中包含“奥秘知识（arcane ）之书”以及被一层“传闻、故事和其他传说（）”所包裹的传奇遗物。在接下来的几十年里， 变成了一个更宽泛的类别，不仅涵盖了幻想世界中具体的传闻和故事，还涵盖了该世界整体的构成神话和历史。作者科里·多克托罗（Cory Doctorow）在 2024 年写道：“粉丝们要求 。”也就是说，粉丝们已经习惯于要求故事中每一个元素都有背景故事和解释。而且他们会不遗余力地去寻找这些内容。

在互联网上，粉丝们创建了维基和论坛，致力于编译从《星球大战》到 BTS 音乐视频等各种内容的 ，追踪关于角色背景的每一个随口提及的细节，并汇总正典事件的时间线。（你知道达斯·摩尔在《幽灵的威胁》结尾被劈成两半后竟然没死吗？或者帕尔帕廷皇帝的正典名字叫希夫？）在这些协作努力中， 最初的学术含义再次闪现：分布在各地的研究者共同协作，汇总关于一个虚构世界的所有事实。

如果说 在某种程度上是一个关于将虚构内容视为一套可发现之事实的词，那么它也是一个将现实生活中的硬事实想象成宏大故事一部分的词。这种特质使得这个词极其适合社交媒体，因为在那个领域，自我披露就是通用货币。在 X 上，一个经久不衰的提示帖写道：“分享一个关于你自己的 ”，配图是一个微笑的火柴人撑在电脑屏幕前，准备接收你的八卦。而回复内容

LO

这类帖子引发的反应与你在破冰活动中被要求分享的“趣闻”颇为相似，只不过它们倾向于更阴暗的色调——一位发帖者报告说，自己在一次求职面试中不小心把“被麻醉过”（anesthetized）说成了“被安乐死过”（euthanized）；其他人则分享了与真正的死亡和灾难擦肩而过的经历。将这些并不有趣的事实称为“lore”（传说 / 背景知识），或许钝化了原始经历带来的痛苦，在修辞上将它们置于朦胧的远古时代，并讽刺地将其吹捧为神秘的秘密——换句话说，成了八卦和揣测的素材。

这类激烈的自我披露已经产生了一些奇妙的复合词。有时它们被称为“lore drops”（传说掉落）——这个词隐约呼应了与 QAnon 阴谋论相关的“Q-drops”，而该阴谋论本身就拥有一套极其偏执且幻想色彩浓厚的“”。另一些时候，过度分享的片段被称为“ dump”（传说倾倒）——在语义上与“trauma dump”（创伤倾倒）仅有一步之遥。去年，一名 Urban Dictionary 用户写道：“‘’是一个术语，用来指代你过去中那些让你成为现在的有趣事情，比如创伤。”个人“”是经过救赎并转化为叙事的苦难。

还有什么能比这更具市场价值？“你的品牌有‘’吗？”广告周（Advertising Week）这样问道。该行业期刊关于品牌“”——即“使一个世界感觉完整，并让你在其中的位置感觉自然而然的累积故事、历史和知识”——的案例研究之一，是国王十字车站 9 $^{3 / 4}$ 站台的《哈利·波特》主题标志，那是魔法世界与我们平庸世界之间的门户。这个例子比它自己意识到的更为贴切。“”是一个枢纽词，一个门槛词。虚构通过它变成了切实的客观事实；事实通过它变成了宏大故事的一部分。它最终的把戏在于，让知识不再令人尴尬或毫无用处，而变成了一种黑魔法。

米奇·塞里奥（Mitch Therieau）是一位作家，也是西弗吉尼亚大学（West Virginia University）的英语助理教授。他经常撰写关于文学、音乐和数字文化的文章。 插画由贝内迪克特·鲁夫特（Benedikt Luft）绘制

普里亚·帕克称：没有冲突，你的关系注定失败

我不知道你们怎么想，但从个人关系到工作再到政治，在我看来，冲突显然已经多得溢出来了。但在她的新书《争吵的艺术》（The Art of Fighting）中，冲突解决引导师普里亚·帕克（Priya Parker）认为，我们需要更多的冲突，并且需要更擅长处理冲突。这本书是帕克此前作品《聚集的艺术》（The Art of Gathering）的自然延伸，在之前的作品中，她提供了工具和案例，探讨集体活动如何能在社交群体内部建立更紧密、更具凝聚力的纽带。她在《争吵的艺术》中采取了类似的方法，但这一次，她探讨的是有意识的、深思熟虑的冲突如何成为通往更深层连接的路径。她和我讨论了这个反直觉的观点，以及如何处理一些常见的职场和家庭冲突。

《聚集的艺术》关注的是健康的群体活动。而新书关注的是冲突。人们很难不怀疑，这是否暗示了世界发展轨迹中某种阴郁的趋势。那么，为什么你会觉得必须写这本书？我对人类的连接深感兴趣。作为一名冲突解决引导师，我发现在我合作的许多组织和家庭中，以及我参与或观察到的许多朋友圈子中，他们经常分崩离析，正是因为他们害怕争吵。当冲突出现时，组织和朋友圈基本上在两种状态之间摆动：一种是不健康的和平——即厌恶冲突、逃避冲突、假装一切都很好；另一种是不健康的冲突——即升级、支配或虐待。我写《争吵的艺术》是为了告诉大家：看，这是所有群体生活、所有关系中极其重要的一部分，而我们却没有被教会如何

正确地处理它。冲突并非不道德，也不是有毒的。冲突是我们认清自我，以及协商如何共同参与公共生活的方式。你使用了“不健康的和平”这个词，这听起来像个矛盾修辞法，因为和平怎么会是不健康的？你能解释一下你的意思吗？我先讲一个个人故事。我是半印度裔，半美国白人，我的父母都非常厌恶冲突。当我的父母分居随后离婚时，所有人都感到震惊，因为他们从未吵过架。因此，我从小就意识到，逃避会带来巨大的损失。实际上，我是第三代逃避冲突的人。当气氛紧张时，我们只是把头埋在沙子里，希望事情能过去。而“不健康的和平”就是这样一种想法：如果我们假装冲突不存在，如果我们把它掩盖起来，一切都会好起来。但实际上，当我们没有进行有意义的

对话时，关系可能会就此终结。在文化语境中，你经常听到“这不是我的活儿”、“这不是我的负担”、“包袱太重了”——就好像朋友之间应该只有快乐。但因为我们太厌恶冲突，我们在真正愿意参与之前就选择了退出。我们的社区和家庭正在破碎，部分原因就是我们没有被教会如何进行这些争吵的技巧。

人们最常请你帮忙解决的职场冲突是什么？人们找我解决的最常见问题之一是：“我们的团队太礼貌了。我们有一种近乎有毒的礼貌规范，这阻碍了我们就‘产品应该包含什么’或‘客户为什么讨厌我们的产品’等真正重要的问题进行对话。”因此，公司找我解决的最常见的一类问题，就是帮助他们提高处理冲突的能力。我认为，如果认为我们现在的冲突太多，这是一个巨大的误解。实际上，我们的冲突太少了。

这听起来很疯狂。虽然听起来很疯狂，但在战争与和平之间还存在某种状态，我将其称之为“健康的炽热”（healthy heat）。健康的炽热是所有有意义的关系的核心。我的工作一部分就是帮助团队在面对这种“炽热”时感到更自在。我举个例子：我们会让公司或团队举办一场“大胆观点”（hot takes）派对，基本上就是在练习亲社会冲突。他们在欢笑，在争论，他们发现自己被允许在那些其实无关紧要的事情上对彼此感到厌恶。他们开始将彼此争吵常态化，而低风险的争论实际上是对高风险争论的一种准备。

在冲突中，妥协扮演什么角色？因为回顾我的职业生涯，有些时刻我选择了妥协而非参与冲突——即便在那些我认为妥协永远不会带来更好结果的情况下。我当时只是觉得，我不想处理这件事。但你想与那个人保持关系吗？嗯，冒着丢掉工作的风险，大概想吧。[笑] 太棒了！

但我们如何管理局面，才能在减少冲突的同时，又不觉得我们只是在勉强妥协？我的意思是，妥协是生活的一部分。人类交往的很大一部分在于决定你的意图是什么，以及你希望这段关系变成什么样。我的父亲是一个来自爱荷华州滑铁卢的白人。他是保守派，是共和党人，是一名福音派基督徒。他对我至关重要，多年来我们关系中的一个重要部分就是找出哪些对话是没有帮助的，以及在存在分歧的情况下，我们在哪里、如何进行有意义、丰富且充满快乐的对话与互动？任何有意义的长久关系中都存在分歧，而能够达成妥协的部分能力在于可以说：“我不会赢得每一场战斗，但我可以接受这一点。”妥协是任何类型的人际关系或团队中非常重要的一部分。

我刚才轻率地开了一个不想被解雇的玩笑，但其中包含一个事实，那就是冲突中存在权力失衡。这种情况在职场冲突中经常出现。那么，权力失衡给冲突解决带来了哪些限制？权力较低的人又该如何尝试管理这种失衡？权力存在于每段关系中，组织中存在等级制度。而等级制度是非常有帮助的，对吧？

有时如此。[笑] 我遇到最挑战的情况是当一个人没有意识到自己的权力时。通常在我与管理人员合作时，我们进行的一套辅导就是帮助他们理解，他们拥有不对等的权力，这与他们与兄弟或妻子争吵时的关系截然不同。他们对对方拥有制度性的权力，这是一种不同的互动，因为你可以解雇对方。因此，我们的很多工作是面向那些拥有更多权力的人，引导他们正确地使用权力。当拥有权力的人不认为自己拥有权力时，组织就会陷入很多麻烦。

你是否觉得，你关于冲突解决的理念在扩展到政治团体之间的冲突时同样有效？我们在政治中看到了许多极不健康的冲突案例，但我也看到了一些开始变得健康的例子。目前，美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）与民主党之间正发生着巨大的冲突，对吧？DSA 就像是民主党被抛弃的情人。他们在说：“我希望你能看到我们认为可能存在的世界。”这种争斗的一部分触及了冲突解决引导员塞图·奈尔（Sethu Nair）所称的“关系渴望”。在所有类型的政治冲突中，触及这种关系渴望是真正扩大包容度的一种方式。但即使在政治分歧之间，当你把人们聚集在同一个房间里，或者当他们拥有一个通常与政治无关的共同社区时——可能是他们的踢球俱乐部，或者是知识问答之夜——拥有一个能让他们凝聚在一起的第二身份，会增强他们在政治分歧中依然能彼此共处社区的能力。

但目前一个重大问题是，那些处于冲突中的团体在多大程度上还希望维持关系？我同意，我认为我们国家最深层的危险之一就是我们不再彼此相爱。当你不再有关系渴望时，你就会直接离开。我在与组织或教会合作时，告诉领导者的一件事就是去寻找并培养那种关系渴望，即那种依然想要彼此共处社区的残余欲望。家庭成员之间，尤其是那些存在政治分歧的家庭——这在美国很多家庭中都很普遍——依然对彼此保有残余的欲望。当我们不再彼此相爱时，那就处于一个危险的状态了。你知道，我对你之前描述自己是一个厌恶冲突的人很感兴趣。你自己的这种厌恶冲突在生活中是如何体现的？当我与我爱的人——我的丈夫、我的孩子、我的朋友——处于紧张局面时，我的手心会出很多汗，心跳开始加速。有时，在一次激烈的争吵中，我会感到轻微的晕眩。我逐渐意识到，所有的争吵都是生理性的。身体中实际发生的生理反应深刻影响着我们选择争吵还是离开的能力。所以，我在生理上依然厌恶冲突。作为一名引导员，以及在我的个人生活中，我有一些非常简单的练习，就是意识到这种情况正在发生，然后呼吸，不要逃避。

但对于人们如何在心理和认知上应对厌恶冲突，你有什么建议？因为不逃跑是一回事，而能够进行一次富有成效的冲突又是另一回事。那就是将冲突重新定义为对一个人的投资。我在自己的家庭中这样做。当我和丈夫开始争吵，如果孩子们恰好在房间里，我会看着他们说：“我们吵架没关系。我们争论是因为我们彼此相爱。这是一个重要的对话。”我这么说既是说给他们听，也是说给我自己听。我们倾向于将冲突视为敌对的，但冲突实际上可以是极具亲社会性的。所以，很简单，就是自问：我在意这段关系吗？反直觉的是，如果我在意，那么我就得参与进去。

当你和丈夫吵架时，他是否说过：“别对我用那些技巧”？当然过！[笑] “别对我进行引导！”我的丈夫对冲突非常坦然。我从他那里学到了很多。这有时会让人很沮丧，因为我知道有哪些工具，但我们并不总是使用它们。当我和丈夫吵架时，我是妻子。我不能成为一名引导员。

你能分享一个你目前正在努力解决的生活冲突吗？天哪，太多了。当你成为父母后，到处都是冲突。我有一个 8 岁和一个 11 岁的孩子。当我的孩子们和同龄人在一起，两个孩子之间发生了一些事情（这完全正常），那么什么时候以及如何拿起电话给对方家长打电话，或者什么时候就让事情自然消散——这是家长群体内部以及群体之间一个非常深刻的冲突。你让孩子们在多大程度上自行解决，而我们在多大程度上应该介入并赋予他们一些技巧？我对自己的孩子就这样做，将道歉常态化。当他们做了伤害或惹恼对方的事情时，我会帮助他们练习一次完整的道歉，清晰地表达出他们做了什么，而不是说“很抱歉你感到被冒犯了”。然后，在接收道歉的一方，我引导他们不要说“没关系”，而是说“谢谢”，因为承认某人影响到了你，实际上是需要相当大的勇气和坦诚的。我们如此厌恶道歉，我们没有被教会如何道歉，而且我们甚至厌恶学习如何接受他人的道歉。这是日常群体生活中的一个巨大问题。

有些人就是绝不道歉或承认错误，这真的很令人惊讶。当我们缺乏道歉的工具和技巧时，整个家庭或团队会陷入极大的僵局。如果你不愿或不能承认自己曾经犯错，这会在整个群体内部造成巨大的扭曲。让一个群体摆脱僵局最简单的方法之一，就是让人们清晰地表达出那些伤害或惹恼他们的因素，而另一方则练习倾听和接受。

早些时候我提到了关于我们如何以一种不像是单纯妥协的方式来减少冲突的想法。你举了你与父亲关系的例子，以及你如何决定对你来说最好的方式是不讨论政治分歧。这与单纯逃避冲突有什么不同？有一项研究探讨了政治身份对美国人的重要程度。在过去的 10 年里，特别是随着唐纳德·特朗普的当选，这种身份在重要性层级中大幅上升。基督教神学家乔伊斯·安·默瑟（Joyce Ann Mercer）写过一篇很棒的文章，讲述她和家人过去如何能够互相开玩笑，并进行跨政治阵营的对话。而在过去的四年里，氛围变得不对劲，越来越接近于厌恶，并且拥有截然不同的道德世界。她说，当你处于一段因为某种原因而想要维持联系的关系中，且存在一条一旦跨越就无法回头的分界线时，她鼓励采取战略性的冲突回避。在阅读那篇文章时，它帮我理解了我与父亲之间持续数十年的对话。在某种程度上，如果你已经一次又一次地进行了所有可能的对话，并意识到你无法改变这个人，但你仍然想与他们保持关系，那么这实际上并不算逃避。无论是在我与父亲的关系中，还是在我观察这个国家时，我发现的一点是：要增加你所爱之人之间的温情。一起寻找乐趣，并记住你们彼此相爱的所有不同理由。

我是 Dunkin' 的忠实粉丝。没有哪个品牌比它更能代表我的家乡波士顿了。就像芬威球场附近发光的 Citgo 标志一样，一家大众市场咖啡连锁店可能是一个城市建立身份认同的奇怪选择，但这就是波士顿。那些不讲究的杯子、袋子和 Boxes O' Joe（大桶咖啡），甚至特许经营店里糟糕的灯光和有时令人费解的装修——所有这些长期以来在我心中激起了一种疲惫的眷恋，一种令人慰藉的平凡感。

但变化早已在悄然发生。在过去的十年里，这家深受喜爱的总部位于马萨诸塞州的机构更改了名称（不再叫 Donuts），开始发力周边产品（包括一套个性化的缎面睡眠套装），并重新设计了其好得令人难以置信的奖励计划（导致一名《波士顿环球报》的专栏作家开玩笑地呼吁在全州范围内对其进行监管，就像监管公共事业一样）。而现在，Dunkin' 似乎甚至不再是一家咖啡供应商了。当然，

我并不富有，但在他们将其从菜单上删除之前，我每天都会买这款饮品。

这家深受喜爱的咖啡连锁店推出的古怪新饮品，揭示了注意力经济运作方式的诸多细节。

斟满一杯

香草粉红云朵拿铁 (Vanilla Pink Cloud Latte)

据称是法式香草风味配草莓冷奶泡

你仍然可以买到咖啡——或者一大杯冰拿铁，或是加了三泵液体糖的冷萃咖啡——我也经常这么做。但请看看你当地 Dunkin' 店里那个带背光的菜单。展现在面前的不再是咖啡照片，而是越来越多亮粉色、电光橙色以及绝对不存在于自然界中的各种绿色饮品。

以下是今年夏天 Dunkin' 提供的一些饮品：粉红柠檬滴 Suncloud 柠檬水、西瓜青柠 Dunkin' Zero、Fluffernutter 咖啡冷饮、粉红芒果白日梦清爽饮 (the line of fruity "refreshers" seems to live somewhere between tea and soda)（这类果味“清爽饮”系列似乎介于茶和苏打水之间）、提拉米苏冰蛋白拿铁、芒果蛋白清爽饮、草莓云朵抹茶，以及配有棉花糖冷奶泡的草莓火龙果清爽饮。其中一些不含咖啡因，另一些则充满了咖啡因，但没有一种是我在传统意义上认为的咖啡。它们的名字如此古怪且前卫，以至于让星巴克那著名的南瓜香料拿铁听起来都显得古朴了。

这些饮品感觉像是为 TikTok 和 Instagram Reels 设计的。它们在味觉和视觉上都具有极强的刺激性。人们首先是通过视觉接触到它们的——简直是视觉糖果。这种追求色彩鲜艳、含咖啡因的非咖啡饮品的趋势并非 Dunkin' 所独有，尽管这家连锁店显然采用了最大胆的配色方案和最具创意的命名方式。看看各地的餐饮特许经营店：虽然星巴克是最早加入“清爽饮 (Refreshers)”以及后来加入“气泡饮 (Spritzes)”的品牌之一，但现在似乎每家咖啡店或快餐店都有“新鲜水果拿铁”、“柚子焦糖抹茶”和“桃子馅饼拿铁”。这些亮丽的色彩在你的屏幕上一个接一个地复制出现。

因此，现在连朴实无华的 Dunkin' 也在新闻稿中表示，它希望“在今年夏天提供粉红色”，仿佛“粉红色”是一种食物而非一种颜色。这很贴切，因为这些饮品出现在我们所谓的“信息流 (feeds)”中——那是永无止境的短视频滚动，却从未真正滋养过我们。我们反复看到的画面是一个年轻女性坐在车的前排，举着一杯巨大的彩色饮料。她在粉色奶泡前低语道：“这太漂亮了，我还没试过。”

此外，Dunkin' 正在直接与 TikTok 上的热门品牌和趋势进行交叉渗透。它在 11 月与电影《魔法坏女巫：为了美好 (Wicked: For Good)》合作推出了绿色和粉色的饮品；今年夏天，它与凯莉·詹娜 (Kylie Jenner) 合作推出了 King Kylie™ 系列的三款从深红到淡粉色的饮品，以及与 Z 世代服装品牌 Parke 合作的白日梦清爽饮。这些都是“限时供应”，旨在社交媒体上制造炒作。（“我不富裕，但在他们把这款饮品从菜单上撤掉之前，我每天都会买一杯，”一名 TikTok 女性告诉我们，她当时正啜饮着一杯靛紫色的、现已停售的星光柠檬水。）

Dunkin' 推销配有棉花糖奶泡的 Suncloud 柠檬水当然有其线下原因。咖啡行业的经济形势严峻，尤其是在这个通货膨胀时代。对于一个每天喝咖啡的人来说，花 \$5.49（我当地店的价格）买一杯紫色新奇饮品，可能比花 \$4.69 买一杯在家就能做的大杯冰咖啡更容易在心理上自我说服。这些新饮品——有些用绿茶提供咖啡因，有些不含咖啡因但充满了糖分——激活了业内人士所谓的“下午市场”，或者我称之为“在工作期间仍想喝点什么的古怪后咖啡时段”。像 Celsius 这样的能量饮料也很受欢迎；如今我们只是有了更多让自己兴奋起来的方式。

但 Dunkin' 菜单上的这些新增项，最重要的是证明了即使是一家简单的咖啡店，也无法再置身于注意力经济之外。它必须制造惊喜，甚至制造冲击。饮品不再仅仅是饮品——它们也是内容。

而且，这种“内容创作”改变了这个地方的特质。正是 Dunkin' 最初那种不加修饰的身份使其如此深受喜爱；这种身份曾成为《周六夜现场》（Saturday Night Live）中关于某种特定波士顿男人的小品素材，成为人们调侃的对象，也成了新英格兰地区的代名词。而现在，它不再是那种像本·艾弗列克（Ben Affleck）在电影《镇上之徒》（The Town）中饰演的角色，在波士顿沙石公司结束一天工作后会去买杯黑冰咖啡的场所。（艾弗列克的一位代表表示，艾弗列克是 Dunkin' 咖啡的忠实饮用者，有时也是该品牌的代言面孔，但此次未就这些进展发表评论。）我心中与家乡联系在一起的那个品牌已经消失了。它现在所属的区域是万维网（World Wide Web）。

这让我想起 Stanley 发生的事情，这家钢杯制造商自 1913 年起就已存在。Stanley 制造的是实用杯子，受到特定人群的喜爱，主要是对户外活动感兴趣的太平洋西北地区男性。随后在 2023 年，该公司推出了首个与乡村歌手的名人合作系列，并迅速走红；同年晚些时候推出的限量版粉色杯子引发了极端的购物狂潮。很快，Stanley 开始推出名为“香脂光芒”（Balsam Glow）和“夜幕光泽装饰”（Nightfall Gloss Deco）的杯子。在那里，新奇同样取代了平凡。而且，其审美趋势与 Dunkin' 的方向一致——趋向于闪亮、多彩且吸睛。互联网的炒作周期似乎将一切都推向视觉震撼的最高等级。于是，所有东西开始看起来都一样，最终再也没有什么能真正闪光。

索菲·海尼（Sophie Haigney）正在撰写一本关于我们对收集物品痴迷的书，涵盖从无价化石到塑料版《电力敢死队》（Power Rangers）的所有内容。

我姐姐与父母断绝了联系。我必须选边站队吗？

我是一个有四个成年姐妹的家庭中的一员。多年来，我们每个人与父母的关系都多少有些紧张，尽管程度各异。

我们的父母在物质上供养了我们，且没有虐待行为。然而回想起来，我认为可能存在一些情感上的忽视。无论这是否是根本原因，还是某种更广泛模式的一部分，我和我的姐妹们在价值观和观点上已经与父母变得截然不同。我们在政治、宗教、堕胎、LGBTQ 权利、金钱以及许多其他问题上存在分歧。我与父母保持着礼貌的关系，但我们并不特别亲近。

我的一个姐姐走得更远，决定与他们断绝所有联系。她有一个年幼的女儿，是我父母唯一的孙女。这种疏离让我的父母深感痛苦，他们经常询问可以做些什么来修复关系。与此同时，我姐姐对自己的决定非常坚定，她希望得到他人的支持，而不是被施压去和解。

我发现自己陷入了中间。我关心每一个相关的人。我同情父母的悲伤和困惑，但我也尊重姐姐设定界限以及决定与谁建立关系的权利。我不想成为调解员或传话筒，但双方似乎都在寻求我的指导。

在这种情况下，我承担什么样的义务（如果有的话）？仅仅与每一方分别维持关系是否符合伦理？或者，因为我可能是他们之间少数剩下的联系纽带之一，我对父母、姐姐或外甥女是否欠有更多的责任？我该如何在对悲痛父母的同情与对我姐姐自主权的尊重之间取得平衡？ —— 匿名

我很遗憾你处于这种境地。你所描述的这种家庭疏离在过去十年左右的时间里已变得令人遗憾地普遍。与父母切断所有联系的策略受到了某些知名治疗师的鼓励，现在 Reddit、抖音 (海外版) 和 Facebook 上充斥着支持性的“疏离成年子女”的证词和建议。治疗背景并非偶然：治疗师的专业义务主要面向客户，而非面向客户生活中的其他人。一个了解所有相关人员的家庭朋友可能会同时同情父母和孩子；无论父母有多少缺陷，对那个人来说，他们是真实存在的。

并不是说大多数治疗师鼓励在家庭关系中采取全有或全无的方式。远非如此。但概括地说，治疗文化倾向于扩大——有时是鲁莽地扩大——关于什么构成虐待或伤害的定义。在早些年 (era)，完全切断家庭关系似乎只有在极端情况下才具有正当性，例如身体或性虐待、严重的成瘾等。如今，选择断联的成年子女可能会谈到感觉没有被“看见”，或者父母在“情感上不在场”、未能“尊重界限”或具有“控制欲”。有时，这些理由——如“自恋性虐待”或某种泛指的“毒性”——听起来触目惊心，但由于过于模糊，既无法反驳也无法验证。所有这些抱怨可能源于真正具有破坏性的关系，但也可能是在描述普通的父母缺陷。

需要明确的是，没有人被要求仅仅因为虐待者是父母就必须留在一段严重的虐待关系中。但我们应该对以下前提停下来思考一下：

额外 建议 来自法官 约翰· 霍奇曼

希娜写道：我的未婚夫和我当时正从北卡罗来纳州开车前往蒙特利尔，途中我们在佛蒙特州的 Ben & Jerry's 冰淇淋店停靠。停车场已经满了，除了四个电动汽车 (E.V.) 充电车位。我把车停在其中一个车位里，尽管我们没有电动车。我的未婚夫说停在那里是不对的。但我看到至少有一辆电动车停在普通车位上。谁是对的？

在背后抱怨她或密谋将她踢出局；而是与她沟通。简而言之，把她当作你处于同样境地时希望被对待的方式来对待。

可以推测，她和你们所有人一样，是为了陪伴而不仅仅是为了游戏才参与其中。你们可以商定一个每回合的时间限制，并达成共识，即她有时可能不得不放弃该局剩余的轮次。其他折中方案也可能随之出现：有些夜晚可以允许较慢的节奏；一张桌子上的玩家可以同意减少游戏局数；她自己可能也会对进一步的调整提出想法。不过，任何可行的安排都始于就现状与她坦诚沟通。而且在未来的某一天，你可能会庆幸当时没有人太快地伸手去拿那个篮子。

北特鲁罗（粉色云朵），2026年，24 x 38 英寸，布面油画。

米切尔·约翰逊：在特鲁罗的二十一年

特鲁罗城堡山艺术中心，鳕鱼角

2026年9月8日至20日

9月6日和7日可预约私人预览

派对破坏者：温和派将社会主义者视为民主党的威胁。社会主义者对此表示认同。作者：查尔斯·霍曼斯

作者：查尔斯·霍曼斯 照片插图：丽莎·希汉

那是民主党的“社会主义之夏”——共和党全国委员会在当天早晨的一封电子邮件中如此快意地称之。而美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）的共同主席阿希克·西迪克（Ashik Siddique）正站在一家酒吧外的椅子上，号召着同志们。

“佐兰的竞选是一个巨大的概念验证，”西迪克对聚集在人群中说道。当时正值7月的最后一天，人们聚集在芝加哥参加一场DSA的组织峰会。在他周围聚集的一百多名成员中，许多人曾为佐兰·马姆达尼（Zohran Mamdani）的竞选提供志愿服务，马姆达尼是新当选的纽约市市长，也是DSA的坚实支持者。“在接下来的一年半里，我们可以将这种模式推广到全国，”西迪克说。

DSA通常不是一个由强势个性主导的组织；其领导者往往散发出一种谦逊且略显呆萌的热情。当38岁的前纽约环境组织者西迪克在酒吧露台上集结队伍时，他看起来像是一个极其热心的周日下午公园清理活动的首席志愿者，正指引人们去拿备用的耙子和垃圾袋，而不是一个领导着美国社会主义历史上可以说最辉煌季节的组织领袖。

就在2011年，社会主义在美国还是如此禁忌，以至于 PolitiFact 可以毫无争议地观察到，“‘S-词’（社会主义）在美国政治中被压倒性地认为是一个有毒的标签。”但自从参议员伯尼·桑德斯在2016年竞选总统，尤其是去年马姆达尼赢得市长选举以来，这种情况发生了显著变化。

今年7月，CNN的一项民调发现，在民主党及倾向民主党的成年人中，足足有三分之一的人认同自己是民主社会主义者。而且他们的投票行为也证明了这一点。

自6月以来，DSA支持的候选人在纽约、费城、底特律和丹佛的五个民主党稳操胜券的国会初选中获胜——其中两次是击败了任职已久的现任议员。一名DSA成员有望成为华盛顿的下一任市长。另一名则在洛杉矶市长的决选中竞争。

本月，在获得当地DSA分会背书的情况下，参加威斯康星州民主党州长初选的民主社会主义候选人弗朗西斯卡·洪（Francesca Hong）以微弱差距落败，这让左翼的许多人感到失望。但这同时也释放了一个关于新社会主义政治潜力的信号：即使没有DSA全国领导层和政治人物的支持，她的竞选活动距离击败一名受到该州民主党州长热烈支持的对手仅差几千票。

2015年，作为美国最大的社会主义组织（尽管不是政党），DSA声称的成员不足7,000人，且其中大多数处于非活跃状态。西迪克宣布，到7月初，该组织的人数已达到120,000人，使其成为美国历史上规模最大的有组织社会主义运动——甚至超过了20世纪初美国社会党（Socialist Party of America）的鼎盛时期。

“我尽量不做一个迷信的人，不去寻找预兆或信号，”西迪克继续说道，“但我们成员达到120,000人、超越历史上的社会党的那一天，恰好是7月4日（美国独立日）。”

“美国！美国！美国！”有人喊道。同志们跟着齐声高喊了几拍，然后渐渐变成了略显尴尬的笑声。

距离桑德斯2016年总统竞选的支持者们掸掉DSA的灰尘——这个来自美国左翼早已逝去时代的次要遗产——并将其重新打造为挑战他们眼中自满且妥协的民主党建制派的工具，已经过去了将近十年。从那时起，建制派一直以警惕的好奇心观察着DSA，就像一名油轮船长正透过双筒望远镜，凝视着一群从远处开着一艘缓慢且看起来摇摇欲坠的渔船逼近的海盗。

“没错，你们有过 A.O.C. 的胜利”——指亚历山德里娅·奥卡西奥-科尔特斯在 2018 年纽约国会选举中的爆冷获胜——“还有一些‘小分队’（Squad）的其他动作，但美国民主社会主义者组织（D.S.A.）其实并不是，你知道的，一个主要参与者，”中间派民主党智库“第三条道路”（Third Way）主席乔纳森·考恩告诉我。但该组织从马姆达尼开始的连胜势头，已让民主党警觉起来。来自长岛的民主党众议员汤姆·苏佐基告诉我，那些反对 D.S.A. 的人“一直在鸡尾酒会上焦虑地搓手。没有人组织起来。而我们必须组织起来。”

一些著名的自由派民主党人主张欢迎民主社会主义者，并追求“加法而非减法”，正如加利福尼亚州州长加文·纽森在 7 月告诉一名播客主持人那样。但温和派坚持认为，对于一个在国家纲领中要求废除监狱和美国参议院，且坦率地将民主党视为达成目的的手段而非联盟伙伴的运动，是不可能妥协的。

考恩将 D.S.A. 比作特朗普的 MAGA 运动：一场共和党起初不屑一顾，随后予以接纳，最终被其吞噬的叛乱。“在我看来，他们对民主党构成了致命威胁，”他告诉我。

“第三条道路”在 2016 和 2020 年曾投入巨资反对桑德斯的竞选活动，该机构在 8 月宣布将投资 1500万美元 启动一个项目，以应对 D.S.A. 的崛起。考恩担心，否则像奥卡西奥-科尔特斯这样与 D.S.A. 结盟的候选人可能会在 2028 年对民主党总统提名发起可靠的挑战：“这将是伯尼 2016, 2020, 的重演，但这次会成功。”

对此，许多社会主义者表示赞同。“佐兰的竞选向我们展示了我们拥有的力量——以及人们来到这里想要夺取的力量，”来自皇后区、身为 D.S.A. 成员的州议员戴安娜·莫雷诺在芝加哥的一家酒吧告诉我，一群 D.S.A. 成员聚集在那里讨论如何为奥卡西奥-科尔特斯的总统竞选进行组织工作。“现在，感觉就像我们要冲向月球了，宝贝！”

在某种程度上，D.S.A. 在美国政治这个充满“断头台好奇心”的时刻所产生的吸引力是显而易见的。《国家》杂志执行主编、曾与桑德斯合著书籍的约翰·尼科尔斯告诉我：“民调显示，人们真的很不喜欢唐纳德·特朗普，而且他们也很不喜欢民主党。这时 D.S.A. 出现了并说道：‘我们不同。我们不喜欢特朗普，而且我们对民主党也不太满意。’”

D.S.A. 的成员数量不到注册民主党人的 0.3%，即使在今年，其获胜规模也远不及 MAGA 和茶党等近期的右翼剧变。但就像那些运动一样，D.S.A. 像是一盏黑光灯，照出了它所寄生的那个政党的失败。

在民主党领导人及其政党的支持率惨淡至极之时，它培养出了像奥卡西奥-科尔特斯和马姆达尼这样的人才。其政治人物在数据中心建设和加沙战争等议题上赢得了选民，而更主流的民主党人在这些问题上要么迟迟未能把握选民的主要转变，要么被党内捐款阶层和利益集团的承诺所瘫痪。其基层志愿者帮助该组织的候选人击败了资金充足得多的对手，有时还会推动像密歇根州参议院竞选中的阿卜杜勒·埃尔-赛义德这样志同道合（即便不是社会主义者）的进步派人士。

但美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）也是一个尚未证明自己有能力扩大民主党多数席位的运动，而要实施其纲领中哪怕是最温和的部分，它都需要这种多数席位。根据去年8月的一项盖洛普（Gallup）民调，在这个国家，57%的人仍然对社会主义持负面看法。在DSA对民主社会主义那宽泛的定义——“一个让普通人在工作场所、社区和社会中拥有真实话语权的系统”——之下，聚集的内部派系从略偏左的进步派到彻头彻尾的共产主义者不等，而且他们在关于在民主党政治框架内运作是否是一个理想策略，或者是否是对其运动完整革命承诺的背叛这一问题上，存在深刻分歧。

其领导层在看待一名受欢迎的DSA政治人物竞选总统时，既感到兴奋，又感到不安。“有些人觉得这会引发一场危机，并可能导致我们的组织被摧毁，”西迪克（Siddique）告诉我，“因为我们无法处理其中的矛盾。”

7月初的一个夜晚，数百名纽约社会主义者聚集在克朗海茨（Crown Heights）的一家酒吧里。这是布鲁克林的一个社区，位于布鲁克林和皇后区交界的边缘，被称为“共产主义走廊”（Commie Corridor），DSA在2010年代后期在这里获得了其在民主党政治中的首批重要据点之一。在酒吧里，葡萄酒是橙色的，啤酒是纳拉甘塞特（Narragansett），而阿拉克酒（arak）则是巴勒斯坦的。

“切尔西！”有人喊道。我转过身，看到刚到场的切尔西·曼宁（Chelsea Manning）正与其他宾客拥抱。这位前陆军情报分析师曾因向朱利安·阿桑奇（Julian Assange）泄露机密军事和外交文件而被判处七年监禁。曼宁最近成了纽约DSA分会派对的常客，她偶尔还会担任DJ。

美国民主社会主义者组织共同主席阿希克·西迪克（Ashik Siddique），出席今年夏天在芝加哥举行的该组织组织峰会。

那晚的派对是一场筹款活动，由具有影响力的社会主义播客主丹尼尔·登维尔（Daniel Denvir）以及多位纽约DSA的知名活动人士和政治人物共同主办，旨在为罗德岛州普罗维登斯的社会主义市长候选人大卫·莫拉莱斯（David Morales）筹款。

DSA的“风土”因城市而异。由纽约市DSA（目前该组织规模最大的分会）主办的活动，感觉像是某个时尚的新文学杂志派对，充斥着带着简易刺青、将常春藤盟校文凭塞在布什威克（Bushwick）衣橱里的作家类型人物。一些规模较大的中西部分会则更像是由酒吧服务员和自行车修理工组成的圈子；而在其他地方，则带有浓厚的2020年（DSA招募的爆发年）那种激进左翼自由派的网络狂热色彩——这体现在那些至今仍在Bluesky上大喊要求人们佩戴口罩的社会工作者和图书管理员身上。（为了参加芝加哥峰会，我多年来第一次被要求提交新冠检测阴性证明。）

所有这些亚文化都与DSA在2021年进行的最后一次成员调查结果一致，受访者自称绝大多数为白人、受过大学教育且居住在城市。这并不是DSA声称要捍卫的工人阶级的画像——尽管许多指出这一点的批评者往往误解了DSA的计划。该组织与其说是在寻求争取通常在美国政治中被理解的工人阶级，不如说是在试图重新定义它。

它的梦想是一个这样的国家：薪资令人羡慕的工会汽车工人、就业不稳定的移民Uber司机、社会地位下降的研究生，甚至包括那些财富状况比父母辈更不稳定的舒适中产专业人士，他们被共同的愿望（医疗保健、经济适用房）、对阻碍他们的人的共同看法（亿万富翁、房东、帝国主义者），以及至少在“车贴级别”上达成的一致行动方案（向富人征税。废除移民与海关执法局。解放巴勒斯坦）所团结在一起。

然而，近距离观察会发现，美国民主社会主义者组织（D.S.A.）给人的感觉与其说是阶级的表达，不如说是文化的表达。围绕共同兴趣建立的线下社区——那种曾经在保龄球馆、全年龄段朋克摇滚场馆、教堂地下室或激进书店中可见的社区——如今已十分罕见，而 D.S.A. 的分会填补了这一空白。它们提供的不仅是一种不同的政治主张，而且是一种关于“参与政治意味着什么”的不同模式。分会的运作带有浓厚的 D.I.Y.（自行其是）色彩，这为其胜利增添了一种令人眩晕的超现实感，仿佛一群大学好友在宿舍里创办了一家唱片公司，结果不知怎么地，竟然用它罢免了一位连任八届的国会议员。“这成了一件你为了见朋友——以及结交朋友而去做的事情，”密尔沃基分会的一位 36 岁组织者舒亚·桑切斯（Shua Sanchez）告诉我。

即便是对该组织在党内影响力日益增强持谨慎态度的民主党战略家们也承认，他们掌握了一些目前党内主流难以有机产生的东西。“他们实现了真正的公民参与，”亚当·詹特尔森（Adam Jentleson）说道。他曾任哈里·里德（Harry Reid）和约翰·费特曼（John Fetterman）的工作人员，现任 Searchlight 研究所所长，这是一个试图将民主党从 2020 era. 时期的文化政治中拉出来的民主党新智库。“我们不再有麋鹿会（Elks Clubs）了。我们实际上也不再有工会大厅了。但我们现在有 50 个人在房间里讨论《罗伯特议事规则》。我们不应该让他们决定党的方向，但我们也不应该把他们赶出帐篷。”

在左翼自由主义政治中，近期有类似的先例——而且不仅仅是 2016 年的桑德斯竞选活动。

不止一位 D.S.A. 成员向我透露，他们对基层政治的启蒙经历是 2008 年巴拉克·奥巴马那次传统的自由主义竞选。通过“支持奥巴马”（Obama for America）组织起来的 200 万名志愿者，将他的竞选活动从渺茫的希望推向了白宫。许多奥巴马的志愿者认为他们正在建立一支比总统任期更强大的进步力量，而当奥巴马的顾问将这些志愿者转移到民主国家委员会（DNC），将其变成一个高度管理化的、为政府助威的宣传机器时，他们感到很失望。

“我曾为奥巴马挨家挨户敲门！”密尔沃基 D.S.A. 组织者桑切斯告诉我，“在那之后，他们再也没有要求我做过任何事情。” D.S.A. 的另一位全国共同主席梅根·罗默（Megan Romer）曾在 2008 年为奥巴马进行电话拉票，她说对于 D.S.A. 来说，那次经历具有“启发性”：“比如，那种力量是如何被瓦解的？是如何被收编的？因为当时确实存在有机的能量。”

选举律师、前进步派民主党人勒妮·帕拉迪斯（Renée Paradis）也在 2008 年参与了奥巴马的竞选，并在 2017 年特朗普就职后立即加入了 D.S.A. “我想，这种精英主义的变革理论在面对这个问题时完全不够格，”她在布鲁克林的聚会上告诉我。

帕拉迪斯参与了奥卡西奥-科尔特斯（Ocasio-Cortez） 2018 年的竞选，这次竞选比其他任何活动都更让政治和媒体阶层认识了 D.S.A.。然而，该组织的组织者通常认为去年秋天马姆达尼（Mamdani）的当选更具意义。“佐兰（Zohran）的不同之处在于，”播客主持人登维尔（Denvir）告诉我，“佐兰是纽约市 D.S.A. 的干部成员。”与在开始竞选国会议员前后才加入该组织的奥卡西奥-科尔特斯不同，马姆达尼在自己参选之前，花费了数年时间为其他 D.S.A. 候选人做志愿者并管理竞选活动。

D.S.A. 组织峰会开幕之夜的派对后聚会。

马姆达尼在抵达格雷西府（Gracie Mansion）后，通过在纽约国会选举中提供支持证明了他的承诺。他支持了两名获得美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）认可的候选人——达里亚利扎·阿维拉·切瓦利尔（Darializa Avila Chevalier）和克莱尔·瓦尔德斯（Claire Valdez），两人均赢得了初选，且几乎肯定将在11月赢得席位。这展现了一个组织的愿景：它不仅是认可政治人物，而且是从自身的基层中有机地培养政治人物，从而产生那些将自己视为该组织持续项目一部分的候选人。

“如果我们仅仅为了选举社会主义者而选举，那这将是一个真正愚蠢、可笑且虚荣的项目，”DSA州参议员朱莉娅·萨拉扎（Julia Salazar）在布鲁克林的群众面前说道，“我们选举社会主义者是为了建设这场运动，为了共同建立权力。”

“感觉这是一个充满巨大可能性的时刻，”选举律师帕拉迪斯（Paradis）告诉我。然而，在这一点上，DSA并非完全统一。在我们交谈时，她正在查看手机。在社交媒体上，罗德岛州的DSA成员正对纽约人参加莫拉莱斯（Morales）的筹款活动感到愤怒，因为该州分会拒绝认可莫拉莱斯。尽管莫拉莱斯是一名社会主义者，但该分会由强硬派领导，三年前因他投票支持连任民主党州议会议长而撤销了对他的认可。

这类冲突在DSA中并不罕见。该组织的决策权主要集中在经常产生分歧的地方分会层面。而像纽约这样较为温和的分会，反过来有时会发现自己与国家组织产生分歧，而在国家组织中，更激进的派系通常拥有很大的话语权。

例如，尽管奥卡西奥-科尔特斯（Ocasio-Cortez）得到了纽约分会的认可，但国家DSA最近却扣留了对其的认可，理由是它认为她在DSA纲领的几个方面承诺不足。两位国家共同主席在她未来的定位上存在明显分歧。西迪克（Siddique）参与了游说她参加2028年总统竞选的努力，但罗默（Romer）告诉我，她对“A.O.C.对DSA的忠诚程度持有一点怀疑”。

这些分歧部分源于结构，部分源于历史。DSA是一个成员大多在政治危机的高潮中加入，随后不得不弄清楚他们究竟在共同做些什么的组织。

DSA由迈克尔·哈灵顿（Michael Harrington）于1982年创立。哈灵顿是20世纪中期一位有影响力的公共知识分子和活动家，他曾与马丁·路德·金（Martin Luther King Jr.）博士共同组织活动，并撰写了《另一个美国》（The Other America）一书，该书启发了约翰逊政府的“反贫困战争”。哈灵顿于1989年去世，他也是美国有组织社会主义遗产的继承者——尽管在他继承之时，这份遗产已所剩无几。

成立于1901年的美国社会党在20世纪初是一股重要力量，它将反对镀金时代不平等与腐败的农业民粹主义，与劳工运动的激进元素以及来自欧洲的新马克思主义思想融合在一起。其成员包括杰克·伦敦（Jack London）、海伦·凯勒（Helen Keller）和W.E.B. 杜波依斯（W.E.B. Du Bois）等人物。在1900年代和1910年代的不同时期，社会主义者在州议会中拥有席位，并管理着从纽约到北达科他州再到加利福尼亚州的30多个城镇和城市。

当尤金·V·德布斯（Eugene V. Debs）在1912年作为社会主义候选人竞选总统时，他获得了6%的选票。社会主义者将他的竞选视为上升的开始。事实上，那已经是顶峰。该党反对美国参与第一次世界大战，导致其部分领导人在《间谍法》和《煽动法》通过后被伍德罗·威尔逊（Woodrow Wilson）政府起诉。当德布斯在1920年再次竞选总统时，他是在监狱中参选的。

但社会党也成为了更为平庸、且往往是自食其果的不幸的牺牲品。在繁荣时期当选的政治家中，很少有人能任职超过一届。该党陷入了激烈的派系斗争——这在当时和现在都是左翼的一种慢性习惯——并且在 20 世纪 20 年代，它将大量成员失去了，这些人加入了新成立的美国共产党，后者不仅更加激进，而且组织得更好。

与此同时，社会主义者最受欢迎的观点被进步派政治家所吸收，其中最具决定性的是富兰克林·D·罗斯福，他的“新政”将民主社会主义者在其他国家推进的经济议程包装成了民主党的政策。在新政之后，民主党成为了美国政治中的霸权力量。而社会党则变成了一个脚注。

到 1968 年哈灵顿就任主席时，社会党仅在名义上是一个政党，其政治承诺在 21 世纪的社会主义者看来会显得格格不入。他们支持民权和劳工，但由于在苏联采取的威权方向上与昔日同志发生了激烈分歧，他们也坚决反共，并且在冷战外交政策中经常表现出强硬立场。（其中一些人很快会完全脱离左翼，成为第一代新保守主义者。）由于无法在选举中获胜，该党已转向通过工会领导人和同情他们的政治人物，在民主党内部培养影响力。

但当民主党联盟在 20 世纪 60 年代末和 70 年代分崩离析时，哈灵顿不知怎么地，竟踩到了由此产生的所有碎片。他几乎立即与新左翼闹翻。当时是“民主社会学生组织”成员的政治历史学家迈克尔·卡津回忆道：“我们认为他太偏右了。他不喜欢革命。”他也不喜欢吉米·卡特，认为后者保守得令人无法接受，并在 1980 年的初选中支持参议员泰德·肯尼迪失败的挑战。两年后，在被民主党建制派排挤且被“里根革命”震惊之后，哈灵顿将两个早期左翼组织的残余力量整合为一个新团体——美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）。

“在 80 年代初，DSA 基本上毫无意义，”大约在那个时候加入的卡津说。该组织吸引了一小批年长的哈灵顿追随者以及像卡津这样来自新左翼的难民，后者在 1968 年后运动在政治暴力和意识形态玄学中崩溃后受到了教训，现在愿意考虑哈灵顿所谓的“可能的左翼”。但在 80 年代，所谓“可能”的事情并不多。

DSA 更具前景的“第二幕”最初迹象出现在奥巴马总统任期内。虽然奥巴马不是左翼人士，但他激发了一种能量，这种能量在另一个时代极有可能流向更左翼的事业，吸引了那些将他视为反战抗议候选人，或者仅仅是被选出美国首位黑人总统的前景所吸引的志愿者。在严重的金融危机中，他凭借执政的三方权力（政府、众议院、参议院）就职，似乎代表了数十年来实施雄心勃勃的进步政策议程的首次机会。

佐兰·马姆达尼和亚历山德里娅·奥卡西奥-科尔特斯：民主社会主义运动的两颗之星。

但随着新政希望在 2009 年和 2010 年消退，左翼对奥巴马感到失望。2011 年底，不满情绪的第一次重大表达是“占领华尔街”。该抗议运动在曼哈顿祖科蒂公园的营地恰好距离 DSA 总部只有几个街区，少数成员在红色旗帜的带领下前往占领区朝圣。但这次抗议对 DSA 最深远的影响是间接的。“如果没有‘占领’，”后来担任 DSA 副主任的大卫·杜哈尔德告诉我，“就不会有伯尼·桑德斯。”

桑德斯自认为是一名民主社会主义者（尽管他不是美国民主社会主义者组织的成员），他进入民主党总统政治领域，是美国左翼的一个历史转折点。他的策略既大胆又显而易见：如果不再像左翼活动人士几十年来那样仅仅是对两党制指手画脚，而是尝试按照两党制的规则去赢，会怎样？尽管他失败了，但他出人意料的强劲表现开启了一个充满可能性的世界。

在特朗普当选几天后，一份与美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）立场一致、备受关注的新兴社会主义杂志《雅各宾》（Jacobin）发表了一篇题为《新政党蓝图》的文章，将这些可能性阐述得最为清晰。该杂志的编辑之一塞斯·阿克曼（Seth Ackerman）呼吁建立“一个在州和地方层面设有分会、拥有约束性纲领、领导层对成员负责，并在全国各级选举中提名候选人的全国性政治组织”。

这个组织实际上将是一个政党——但与绿党那种教条地坚持在自己的选票线上参选不同，它会对两党制采取务实态度。其候选人将采用桑德斯模式：在合适时独立参选，在不合适时参加民主党初选。他们将身处民主党内部，但并不属于民主党；他们真正的忠诚将交给系统之外一个“真正的民主政党”。

事实证明，实现这一愿景的载体已经存在，桑德斯的竞选支持者们在线下和社交媒体上聚集，很快就找到了它。在 2016 年大选前夕，DSA 拥有 6,400 名成员。到 2017 年底，这一数字已接近 30,000 人。

“在 2017 年，有很多尝试和错误，”当年加入 DSA 华盛顿分会的桑德斯竞选志愿者西迪克（Siddique）告诉我，“我们当时都在摸索：什么是社会主义？”西迪克继续说道，“什么是组织？我们在这里做什么？”

西迪克和罗默（Romer）作为该组织的全国共同主席，现在经常被邀请参加有线新闻节目，以确认 DSA 最激进的立场，但他们并非传统意义上的运动领导人。这个全国性组织致力于从其各异的分会和党团中提取某种共识——在过去十年中，这些分会和党团有时会对那些最初的问题展开激烈的辩论。大多数新成员来自桑德斯的竞选团队，该团队提供了一些政策共识（全民医疗）和一些广泛的倾向（打击寡头政治），但留下了大量空白，裂痕很快便出现了。

在这样一个组织中，分歧往往是代际的。根据其调查，2016 年后，成员的年龄中位数从 68 岁骤降至 33 岁。新加入的人大多太年轻，不记得苏联，其中一些人（包括罗默）自豪地宣布自己是马克思列宁主义者，这让反共的老成员们感到震惊。该组织内部迅速激增的新联盟中包括了一个共产主义党团。

在外交政策上，新加入的 DSA 成员大多达成了一种通用共识，即反对美国帝国主义和军国主义——包括美国在北约（NATO）的成员身份，罗默表示，该组织认为北约“主要是一股侵略力量”。它继续反对向乌克兰提供武器。“我们想与俄罗斯开战吗？”罗默问道，“有人觉得这是个好主意吗？”

但在所有外交政策议题中，最令新成员关注的是以巴冲突。其中一人是奥利维亚·卡特比（Olivia Katbi），她在 2016 年大选次日加入了俄勒冈州波特兰的 DSA，并很快成为了一个新 DSA 分会的共同主席。

“我们中很多加入的人，包括我在内，对政治都比较陌生，”在波特兰担任高中田径教练的 34 岁卡特比告诉我。但身为叙利亚裔美国人且有巴勒斯坦亲属的卡特比，在几年前参加了芝加哥的一次相关集会后，便对巴勒斯坦解放运动产生了兴趣。“那真的让我睁开了眼睛，看到了巴勒斯坦——以及 B.D.S.。”

当时已有十年历史的“抵制、撤资和制裁运动”（BDS）呼吁各国政府和机构向以色列施压，以结束其对巴勒斯坦领土的占领，扩大巴勒斯坦公民的权利，并赋予巴勒斯坦难民回归权。这已成为 2017 年聚集在美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）内部的更广泛左翼活动人士圈子的一项信条。在当年的组织大会上，卡特比和其他几名成员提出了一项决议，要求 DSA 支持 B.D.S.。决议通过时，支持者们爆发出欢呼，挥舞着巴勒斯坦国旗，并开始高喊：“从河流到大海，巴勒斯坦将获得自由。”

多纳万·麦金尼，一名 成员兼密歇根州民主党国会候选人，正在进行竞选活动。

的创始群体包括许多以色列左翼的朋友，比如哈灵顿，他认为自己是一个锡安主义者。这使得 B.D.S. 决议——就像美国境内关于以巴政治的许多议题一样——具有一种俄狄浦斯式的共鸣：这是一种与组织中“哈灵顿主义”过去决裂，并将其导向一个更激进未来的行为。

但这一问题在组织中占多数的年轻成员内部引发了更微妙的分歧。这种分歧在 2021 年变得明显，当时获得 支持的纽约州首任国会议员、该组织成员贾马尔·鲍曼投票支持为以色列导弹防御系统提供额外资金，并随一个自由锡安主义组织访问了该国。一个由组织内坚定的亲巴勒斯坦活动人士组成的 B.D.S. 专项工作组对此反应激烈，导致 50 多个地方分会要求开除鲍曼。

的主要管理机构——国家政治委员会谴责了鲍曼，但拒绝将其开除。这场争端一直持续到 2023 年 8 月的下一次两年一度的大会上，当时委员会成功通过了一项解散 B.D.S. 工作组的决议。

在 10 月 7 日哈马斯战士对以色列军事设施和平民发动袭击后，这些紧张局势彻底爆发。 国家组织当天发表的声明承认“我们毫无保留地谴责所有平民的死亡”，但认为“今日之事件是以色列种族隔离制度的直接结果”；声明还呼吁成员“走上街头，参加支持和平、反对资助以色列国家的抗议活动”。当天，纽约市 在其官方 X 账号上推广了一场由其他组织联盟（而非 本身）主办的集会，宣称该团体“与巴勒斯坦人民及其反抗 75 年占领和种族隔离的权利站在一起”。

在随后的反弹中，甚至一些与该团体结盟的政治人物也与其保持距离，24 名著名的老卫兵成员宣布辞职。但在接下来的几周里，随着以色列在加沙发起反击， 在另一侧也面临着起义。该组织已被解散的 B.D.S. 工作组成员在桑德斯的华盛顿办公室举行了静坐，而桑德斯此前谴责了哈马斯的袭击和以色列的报复行动。不久之后，该团体宣布完全退出 ，重组为一个独立组织。他们声称， 不再是“一个让我们的成员能够组织活动的安全空间”。

西迪克告诉我，那一刻“感觉像是组织的一次巨大危机”。当我问他美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）内部是否对10月7日的袭击达成共识时，他谨慎地回答道：“我认为我们是一个包容性很强的组织。这里始终存在着非常广泛的观点。”

但以色列入侵加沙的持续时间和残酷程度，在很大程度上使这场争端以亲巴勒斯坦先锋派获胜告终。去年，当该工作组的领导者在DSA内部重新组建，形成一个新的联盟，并明确目标是将该组织打造为一支“群众革命力量”，以“将巴勒斯坦作为我们的指南针来推进反帝国主义政治”时，他们几乎没有遇到任何反对。

尽管如此，我接触到的那些较为务实的DSA成员在谈到这些强硬派活动人士时，语气中充满了无奈。部分原因是真正的分歧——正如其中一人对我翻白眼时所说，你认为“其实并不需要‘把功劳归于哈马斯’”。但即使是DSA内部一些最支持巴勒斯坦的声音，也认为该工作组的姿态对事业毫无帮助，甚至带有公开的虚无主义色彩。奥利维亚·卡特比（Olivia Katbi）在X上写道：“很难与那些似乎讨厌我们所组织之组织的人一起开展组织工作。”

这场冲突大致映射出DSA内部一种新型的代际分歧。在组织重生近十年后，那些在2016年桑德斯浪潮中立即加入、围绕赢得选举权力这一项目开展组织的成员，已在很大程度上取代了哈林顿派（Harringtonites），成为了组织中日渐年长的“老卫兵”。而他们发现自己越来越多地需要面对近期加入的活动人士——亲巴勒斯坦先锋派和各种极左派系——的挑战，后者将选举政治视为一种逃避，认为这是对真正革命事业的幻想性转移。

我不止一次听到其他DSA成员将这些活动人士描述为“极端分子”（ultras）——这是一个古老的马克思主义贬义词，用来指代左翼的最边缘群体，即那些威胁要吞噬或破坏运动的激进分子。极端分子摧毁了20世纪60年代的新左派，而近距离目睹那次爆炸，使得许多早期的DSA成员选择加入这个拥有冷静变革愿景的组织。现在，他们的继任者们正在学习同样的教训。

DSA的务实派认为，组织在选举上的成功有助于在一定程度上让他们在内部争论中占据上风。从马姆达尼（Mamdani）到今年夏天在国会选举中的意外获胜，一系列近期的胜利为该组织带来了劳工组织和示威活动未能带来的关注，迫使政治主流开始认真对待该团体。但事实上，DSA本身并不总是这些胜利的主要驱动力。其自下而上的结构——国家组织只能支持已被地方分会认可的候选人——以及内部的分歧，使其在利用其预见的政治转变时反应迟缓。

在涉及以色列的问题上尤其如此。自以色列入侵加沙以来，民主党选民，尤其是年轻选民，已剧烈转向支持巴勒斯坦。这一转变促使美国以色列公共事务委员会（即更广为人知的亲以色列影响力游说团体AIPAC）激进地介入民主党初选。其行动引发了“正义民主党人”（Justice Democrats）的愤怒反击：这是一个政治行动委员会，与重新焕发活力的DSA一样，诞生于2016年的桑德斯竞选活动，并为左翼国会候选人服务。

在2026年全国选举的五场初选胜利中，有三场是由“正义民主党人”背书、在某些情况下由其招募的候选人击败了由AIPAC支持的现任议员，而DSA是在之后才对这些候选人表示支持。这三名候选人中的两人——纽约的达里亚利萨·阿维拉·切瓦利埃（Darializa Avila Chevalier）和科罗拉多州的梅拉特·基罗斯（Melat Kiros）——是亲巴勒斯坦活动人士，且直到最近才加入这个社会主义组织。

美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）能够为这些候选人提供的是一支基层军队：能够提供关键优势的扫街员和电话银行人员。在7月一个闷热的周日下午，DSA底特律分会的组织者卡拉·托比（Cara Tobe）正代表一名名为多纳万·麦金尼（Donavan McKinney）的国会候选人在几个社区挨家挨户地敲门。麦金尼是由正义民主党（Justice Democrats）招募的，旨在挑战由美国以色列公共事务委员会（AIPAC）支持的民主党现任议员什里·塔内达尔（Shri Thanedar），麦金尼在两周后击败了对方。

麦金尼是一名黑人工会组织者和州代表，其家族根植于汽车工业。他自2019年起就是DSA成员，并且擅长向一个黑人占多数、低收入的选区中的潜在选民推介该组织的理念。“一份足以维持生活的工资，能够只做一份工作，不仅能维持生计，还能有一些可支配收入，有照顾家人的福利，以及可以期待的退休生活：这就是。社会主义，”他告诉我。但DSA底特律分会直到竞选进行了许多个月后才决定支持他，这让像托比这样的支持者感到沮丧。

托比是一名37岁的威斯康星州原住民，穿着一件DSA T恤，戴着一顶“ZOHRAN团队”的帽子；像许多DSA成员一样，她曾在纽约参加马姆达尼（Mamdani）的竞选志愿活动。在门口的交谈中，她会极力推荐麦金尼，并将DSA作为一种“如果你感兴趣的话”的补充提及。

这些选民全部是注册民主党人，有时会留意，有时则不然。那些认出DSA名称的人似乎对其持积极态度。“DSA将拯救这个国家，”一名50多岁、看起来像书呆子的男人告诉她。

“明年绝对会很有意思，”托比在两家房子之间走动时告诉我，“我们从未有过这么多人进入国会。”作为DSA务实派的一员，她认为这些胜利已将组织推向该阵营的方向。“就像是，好吧，我们正在建立一个政党，”她说。

DSA在初选中的胜利可能会使其在国会的代表人数增加到七人。这远少于茶党（Tea Party）在其2010年爆发之年夺得的数十个席位，但足以将其党团从目前的两人组合——奥卡西奥-科尔特斯（Ocasio-Cortez）和同样在2018年当选的密歇根州代表拉希达·特莱布（Rashida Tlaib）——升级为一个集团。

出生于布鲁克林、行事冷静且注重策略的众议院民主党领导人哈基姆·杰弗里斯（Hakeem Jeffries）与DSA之间存在着一种相互敌对的关系，杰弗里斯的一名顾问在去年的市长竞选中将DSA称为“士绅化团队”。但克里斯·拉布（Chris Rabb）表示，如果民主党明年在众议院仅以微弱多数回归，“他需要我们所有人的投票才能成为议长”。拉布是宾夕法尼亚州第三国会选区由DSA支持的民主党提名人。

但改变政府不仅需要控制一个政党，还需要控制多数席位。民主党在奥巴马任内通过的折中刺激方案和医疗保健立法——现在被DSA成员认为是不足的半吊子措施——需要在两院都拥有决定性的数量优势，而此后没有任何一个政党再次拥有过这种优势。“政党的存在是为了获取权力，然后利用这种权力在治理中做正确的事，”第三条道路（Third Way）主席考恩（Cowan）告诉我。考恩指出，无论是DSA还是正义民主党，都没有将任何一个国会席位从共和党（红色）翻转为民主党（蓝色）；他们的胜利仅仅是将原本就是民主党的选区推向了更左翼。考恩质疑，如果他们无法赢得实现其国家愿景所需的多数席位，那么“DSA到底有什么用？”

这就是为什么下一次总统大选对于DSA及其党内敌人来说都如此至关重要。双方都预计，民主党总统初选将出现一名像奥卡西奥-科尔特斯这样与DSA结盟的候选人，而她的总统野心一直是激烈猜测的话题。（她通过工作人员拒绝就本文发表评论。）

对于美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）而言，在民主党支持率跌至谷底、而该组织自身影响力达到顶峰之时竞选总统，既是一个机遇，而且极有可能是一项必然。美国治理模式中最激进的范式转移——从富兰克林·D·罗斯福到里根，再到特朗普——都需要国家元首特有的权力，才能将曾经边缘化的政治理念（从进步主义福利国家到自由市场保守主义，再到右翼威权主义）推向主流，使即便是不关心政治的公民也能适应此前不可想象的局面。

民主党内的温和派及其许多改革者担心，在这样一个真正关乎生存的关键时刻，DSA 的参选会延长共和党对国家的控制，导致党内分裂；而且，如果参选成功，民主党将带着那个“S字”标签（社会主义）进入大选：这个标签对于大多数美国选民来说依然是厌恶的。

社会主义者则反驳称，就大选而言，社会主义的受欢迎程度尚未得到证明，是因为它尚未经过测试。毕竟，在桑德斯出现之前，很少有人能想象一名社会主义者能在总统大选的民主党初选中获得 43 percent 的选票。而一名社会主义民主党候选人在竞争激烈的大选中参选，目前仍是一个理论上的命题——这就是为什么在 7 月和 8 月的几周里，弗朗西斯卡·洪（Francesca Hong）突然成为了美国政治中一个极具重要意义的人物。

洪是来自麦迪逊的一名州议员兼厨师，她是相对较晚才加入 DSA 的；她告诉我，直到 2020, 她才对该组织有所了解，当时该组织规模较小的麦迪逊分会支持了一位在她的首次竞选中与其共同参选的朋友。在今年竞选州长期间，她成为了早期进步派的宠儿，但在 7 月中旬之前，她在竞选中并非主导人物，直到她的最强竞争对手因竞选资金违规而退出——这使得洪一夜之间成为了民主党的顶尖竞争者。

如果说民主社会主义者能在任何地方赢得民主党的州长竞选，那么威斯康星州可能是最合适的地方。该州拥有深厚的进步政治文化，是旧社会主义党最后的堡垒之一；其最大城市密尔沃基在 20 世纪上半叶一直由社会主义市长执政。威斯康星州也是一个顽固的“紫色州”（摇摆州），洪的胜利将为社会主义在美国政治中的潜力及其局限性提供一次清晰的测试。

密尔沃基 DSA 的组织者舒亚·桑切斯（Shua Sanchez）将她获胜的可能性比作奥巴马在 2008. 爱荷华州党团会议上的出人意料。他说，如果洪能“证明一名有色人种社会主义女性能在像威斯康星这样的州获胜”，那么“这将为像 A.O.C. 这样的人赢得总统竞选打开大门”。

当我在 7 月下旬赶上洪的时候，该州的主流民主党人正处于恐慌之中。密尔沃基的县执行官大卫·克劳利（David Crowley）在几天前退出竞选后，在州长托尼·埃弗斯（Tony Evers）的立即背书下匆忙重新参选。“我认为当你挑战权力时，权力会反击你，”洪在从巴拉布的一处竞选活动点返回麦迪逊的途中告诉我，“人们天生害怕改变，有时当这种改变意味着你的影响力受损时，对吧？”

然而，某些势力似乎很乐意看到洪参选。共和党团体正投入约 400万美元 用于电视广告，重点攻击洪的进步主义议程。这反映了一种跨党派的共识，即洪——一名坚韧的竞选者，但缺乏经验的基层政治家，且其在 2020 和 2021 狂热时期的社交媒体帖子中留有大量尚未引爆的“雷区”——将成为共和党梦寐以求的对手。

洪最初凭借在数据中心建设等新议题上鲜明的立场，在民主党候选人群中脱颖而出。但随着她从一个令外界好奇的局外人变成受到严密审查的领先者，她却在捍卫自己的旧立场时陷入苦战：例如过去关于废除警察的号召，以及一条呼吁“取消感恩节”的推文。当被问及洪能否击败共和党候选人汤姆·蒂法尼（Tom Tiffany）时，埃弗斯表示：“可能不能。”

这场戏剧冲突与洪本身的社会主义立场奇怪地没什么关系。她的那些旧言论并非美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）所特有；它们是更广泛的进步派向社会正义政治极端边缘冲刺的一部分（）

26 糟糕的影响

我向格雷格·奇斯姆（Greg Chism）保证，不会透露他的住址，因为外界有些人对他痴迷不已，坚信他是个怪物。我可以告诉大家的是，我的 GPS 将我从美国中西部某地的酒店带到了一栋宽敞的高档住宅，那里有修剪整齐的草坪。格雷格在车道上等着我，他是一个五十多岁、低调、友好且平凡的两个孩子的父亲，穿着一件 Van Halen 的卫衣和蓝色牛仔裤。当我跳出车外时，他的笑容消失了。他虽然同意见我，但现在看起来有些不安。他从未就 2016 年和 2017 年那些颠覆他生活的事件接受过采访。

格雷格带我进屋，向我展示了他的书房——那里是他两大挚爱，Hot Wheels 玩具车和汤姆·佩蒂（Tom Petty）的圣殿。他领我穿过走廊来到他的家庭办公室。我们坐在他的办公桌前，我打开了录音机。当时是上午 10 点。他将自己的故事压抑了七年，直到他的小女儿安娜贝尔（Annabelle）下午 4 点放学回家，我们才停止交谈。对话从他在伊利诺伊州格拉尼特城（Granite City）的童年开始。

“那是个工厂之城，”格雷格说，“我注定要在工厂工作。但在我有生之年，除了一个以外的所有工厂都关闭了。当工厂搬到墨西哥时，我父亲失去了他从事多年的制造车架和热水器的工作。”像他那一代的许多男人一样，格雷格陷入了漂泊状态，失去了引导他父母和祖父母的那些社会结构。

从那时起，他的生活变得更加艰难。17 岁时，他在塔可贝尔（Taco Bell）工作，突然感到心跳加速。他随后昏迷倒地，被诊断出患有心房扑动。之后他经历了多次开胸手术，留下了疤痕，并在 18 岁时背负了六位数的医疗债务；39 岁时，他的婚姻突然破裂，使他成为一名拥有两个 2 岁以下孩子全部监护权的单身父亲。但他设法通过当地的一家教会找到了免费的育儿服务，这让他能够通过修剪草坪来赚钱。

然后，在 2010 年的一个夜晚，他迎来了他的“大马士革时刻”。

“我当时在看一段随机的 YouTube 视频，”他说，“有个家伙在澳大利亚骑行。他停下来指着一只考拉之类的动物，然后发表了一番演讲。他谈到了生活中所有的负面经历。”

他对着镜头，以及镜头外的观众说，他曾经历过挣扎。他曾在街头生活，也进过监狱。

“但接着他说：‘管它呢，我现在在这里度过了美好的一天，骑着车拍 YouTube 视频。你也可以拍 YouTube 视频！你有自己的故事。分享它！不要拘束！拍一段 YouTube 视频，改变你的生活！’”格雷格停顿了一下，“伙计，这非常鼓舞人心。对我触动很大。”

格雷格开始谨慎地尝试。他的第一个视频只是大声朗读一篇报纸文章，讲述一名佛罗里达州女性因为在树下吸食冰毒，不小心烧掉了美国第五古老的树。读完后，他对着镜头说：“这难道不疯狂吗？”

“那个视频只有 10 或 12 次观看，”格雷格告诉我，“还有一条评论：‘你看上去像是在吸冰毒。’”

这是在指格雷格的牙齿。他的牙齿严重重叠。“那是长得最狂野的牙齿，”格雷格说，“我们小时候没钱做牙科治疗。”但这条评论激励了格雷格。“我决定把牙齿弄好。我报名参加了成人牙套矫正。我不得不申请了 6,000 美元的信用额度。之后，我开始制作关于我成人牙套之旅的视频。我了解了标签——‘成人牙套’、‘成人牙套费用’——接下来的事情就是，每周大约有 50 个寻找成人牙套的人找到了我。我有了固定观众。他们会说：‘我进入第 3 周了’，或者‘我们为你感到骄傲’。”

很快，格雷格的常驻观众们不再只关注他的牙齿，而是注意到了他身后的割草机。“人们开始评论说：‘你为什么有四台割草机？’我会回答：‘我确实在意。’他们就说：‘伙计，你真的在意？拍个 vlog 吧！’我当时觉得：‘伙计，没人想看 vlog！’但他们一直缠着我：‘没人拍关于割草的 vlog！拍一个吧！’于是我就拍了一个《服务提供者的一天》。”

这就是格雷格·奇斯姆（Greg Chism）成为全球首位 YouTube 网红的经过。

在世界各地，许多男性和女性都在进行类似的尝试。由于旧有的体制不再能提供结构、社群、目标、成就感以及通常情况下的收入，大量像他这样的人开始尝试成为网红。根据美国企业研究所（American Enterprise Institute）的尼古拉斯·埃伯施塔特（Nicholas Eberstadt）的研究，到 2022 年，有超过 700 万名处于黄金年龄的美国男性不仅失业，甚至根本没有在寻找工作。他们就那样退出了。但其中一些精力无处安放的男性转向了 YouTube。这里正逐渐被视为一片广阔的处女地，一个男人可以通过坚毅和毅力成为网红并获得成功——这是一个让分众创作者分享其内容的场所，而不断增长的观众可以在这里找到他们，并在此过程中潜移默化地影响创作者的产出。

2013 年，格雷格创建了一个名为“Geek to Freak”的频道，拍摄自己做“好撒玛利亚人”善举的视频。如果他看到一个需要帮助的草坪，他会跳下卡车，吹走枯叶或修剪边缘，然后像个“家务佐罗”一样消失。在其他视频中，他创造了一种 ASMR 效果，沉思般地前后、上下地割草，一次持续数小时。

“我每周发布一个视频，每个视频都能获得 10 万次或更多的播放量，”格雷格说。

有时，格雷格会接受初出茅庐的网红采访，他在这个领域赢得的尊重显而易见。在一段视频中，采访者基思·卡尔法斯（Keith Kalfas）——这位“全球领先的景观美化与窗户清洁网红”——称格雷格为 GOAT（史上最伟大）。2014 年，当格雷格参加肯塔基州的一次大会时，人群对他疯狂欢呼。一家披萨店组织了一场见面会。“伙计，所有这些人都在等我，”格雷格说，“他们都把自己的衬衫给我，好让我能在视频里穿。简直疯了。”

但格雷格的故事即将以一种诡异且出人意料的方式急转直下。2015 年，YouTube Kids 首次亮相。它被宣传为一种安全且具有教育意义的儿童体验。压力巨大的父母可以让它自动播放，孩子们就可以观看数小时的《小猪佩奇》或童谣视频。但到 2017 年，情况发生了令人不安的转变。家长们开始报告，他们离开孩子一段时间后回来，发现孩子正在观看名为“米老鼠宝宝在燃气爆炸中死亡”或“艾莎蜘蛛侠被鲨鱼袭击”的视频。

在这些动画片中，《小猪佩奇》不再进行正常的佩奇冒险。相反，她被牙医折磨，或者更糟，在鲜血四溅的情况下吃掉自己的父亲。在整个 YouTube 上，出现了大量关于卡通角色，或者有时是打扮成蜘蛛侠或《冰雪奇缘》中艾莎的真人，演绎活埋他人、砸开婴儿头部、自杀、纵火烧死屋内人员、食用粪便、饮用尿液或漂白剂、点燃怀孕的艾莎、将她淹死在游泳池里，或强迫她进入脱衣舞俱乐部从事性奴隶活动的视频。视频中出现了斩首、皮下注射针头、强行怀孕、被肢解的米妮老鼠、车祸、堕胎、眼科手术、蛆虫、分娩、口交、酸液袭击以及蜘蛛从人们的眼窝中爬出。而这些视频的播放量高达数百万次。

正如詹姆斯·布里德尔（James Bridle）在 2017 年一篇引起广泛关注的病毒式文章《互联网出问题了》（“Something Is Wrong on the Internet”）中所述：“有人，或者某种东西，亦或是人与物的某种结合，正在利用 YouTube 系统性地恐吓、创伤并虐待儿童，而且是以自动化的方式大规模地进行。”

你可能会认为这仅仅是那些网络喷子——那些为了满足自己虚无主义快感而操纵 YouTube Kids 算法的无聊厌世者——所为。

但正如播客《美国歇斯底里》（“American Hysteria”）的创作者切尔西·韦伯-史密斯（Chelsey Weber-Smith）所指出的：喷子们往往会向镜头投以胜利的侧目。而这些视频更像是梦境中会发明的某种东西，诡异且令人不安。比如，角色们经常眼神空洞地一遍又一遍地重复相同的动作，仿佛在参加某种艳俗的、来自异世界的仪式。正如韦伯-史密斯所说：“让这个故事更加离奇、更加令人心惊的是，至今还没有人查出是谁在制作这些视频，以及为什么要这么做。”

但有一个例外。有一个男人被识别了出来。据 BuzzFeed 报道，这个男人对这场被称为 #Elsagate（艾莎门）的丑闻的贡献是，发布了他女儿们“恐惧地尖叫、洗澡、假装成婴儿、吐出食物”以及“被强行喂食”的视频。

那个男人的名字叫格雷格·奇斯姆（Greg Chism）。

2012 年，在成为一名草坪护理网红之前，格雷格创建了另一个 YouTube 频道，名字就叫 Greg Chism。

“那只是存储家庭视频的一种方式，”他说，“每周三四个。我甚至没给它们起标题。没什么特别的。订阅人数还不到 1,000 人。”

格雷格给我看了一段视频。在视频中，他和两个女儿在沃尔玛的玩具区奔跑，挥舞着光剑打斗——这是一个有些过度纵容、非权威主义的单身父亲和他忠诚的孩子们。这很温馨，但仅此而已。

但随后他尝试了一些不同的东西。

“好吧。”格雷格犹豫了一下，“我姐姐在圣诞节给孩子们买了一艘芭比邮轮。所以我想，我就拍拍她们拆礼物的样子。她们很喜欢。她们在盒子里玩，把盒子扣在头上在房子里跑来跑去。很有趣。”

格雷格上传了视频，然后就把它忘了。直到几周后他登录账号，发现该视频已被观看 100 万次。“这纯粹是运气好，”他说。

但不仅仅是因为这个。当时 6 岁和 4 岁的维多利亚（Victoria）和安娜贝尔（Annabelle）在镜头前非常可爱，眼睛明亮，开朗且散发着极具感染力的快乐。此后，每当格雷格给女儿们买礼物时，他都会拍摄她们拆礼物的过程，以及她们头顶着盒子跑来跑去的样子。但那种魔力消失了，观看量也很低。

最终，格雷格接受了《拆箱芭比邮轮》（该视频最终获得了 1,000 万次观看）是一个特例，于是他回到了草坪护理网红的身份。就在那时，他收到了一封来自 YouTube 总部的电子邮件。

“起初我不相信真的是他们发的，”格雷格说，“他们告诉我，他们注意到我有一个 1,000 万次观看的视频，他们创办了一类‘YouTube 学校’，问我对学习如何复制这种成功是否感兴趣。”

YouTube 学校是在线授课的，格雷格勤奋地参加了学习。老师建议的所有内容，他都执行了

“他们对互相往脸上吐食物怎么看？”我问。格雷格说：“噢，他们很喜欢，伙计，很有意思。”

将这些建议付诸实践。老师建议他给频道起一个比“格雷格·奇斯”（Greg Chism）更好的名字，于是他想到了“玩具怪咖”（Toy Freaks）。接着，老师建议格雷格研究搜索引擎优化（SEO）。老师说，诀窍在于格雷格要在标题中尽可能多地加入孩子们搜索频率最高的关键词——比如“玩具”、“史莱姆”和“口香糖”。格雷格建议将下一个视频命名为“玩具史莱姆口香糖盛宴”（Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza）。老师说，孩子们不知道怎么拼“extravaganza”这个词。

格雷格改为建议叫“玩具史莱姆口香糖派对”（Toy Slime Gumball Party）。

“完美，”老师说。

这次尝试的赌注很高。对于像格雷格这样在其他地方几乎没有机会的人来说，通过在线影响力可以赚到真金白银。根据高盛公司发布的数据，只有 4% 的网红年收入超过 $100,000，但随着收到 YouTube 学校的邀请，格雷格得到了加入这个高薪精英阶层的机会。他决心掌握这项技能，于是他从鲨鱼开始。“‘鲨鱼’是一个巨大的 SEO 词条，”他说，“所以我买了一只玩具鲨鱼，给它起名叫‘鲨鱼仔’（Sharky）。我把它举在镜头前，拍成了‘鲨鱼仔视角’。”

格雷格拍摄了一些短剧，在剧中，“鲨鱼仔”在屋子里追逐维多利亚和安娜贝尔，并偷走她们的糖果。评论区充满了赞美。“人们很喜欢那两个女孩，”格雷格说，“他们支持我们。我那时一个月能赚 $1,000。”但这里有一个陷阱：粉丝很容易感到厌倦，且永远渴望新鲜感。他必须不断构思新点子——用他的话说，就是新的“季”。

于是他想到了食物大战。“我们去了 7-Eleven，买了纳乔玉米片、热狗和巨大的 Slurpee 冰沙。我们坐在卡车里，我把相机放在仪表盘上，然后说：‘好了，安娜贝尔。你向维多利亚要她的饮料，她会拒绝，但你还是偷一点，她会生气并向你扔食物。我会说停止，然后你把你的 Slurpee 倒在我的头上。然后，砰，卡车里的食物大战开始了。’”

格雷格在回忆时笑了。“伙计，”他告诉我，“到处都是食物，番茄酱流进了通风口。那辆卡车被毁了！”

在格雷格发布那段“卡车食物大战”视频一周后，他正在帮人修剪草坪时收到了一封来自 YouTube 的电子邮件。该视频在短短 7 天内就被观看了 2500 万 次。

“但为什么？”我问他。

格雷格耸了耸肩。“我不知道。”

他是认真的。他和女儿们变得极其受欢迎，而他完全不知道原因。无论在当时还是现在，这对他来说都没有道理。后来，他给我发了一份那段卡车食物大战视频的副本。我能看出它的吸引力所在。安娜贝尔和维多利亚看起来很有趣，而且他们的儿童观众大概很享受这种违规感——一个男性权威人物没有要求停止，而是加入了食物大战。

“我们拍了 4 段那样的视频，”格雷格说，“每一段在一周内都获得了 1000 万 次观看。但第五段没有。”

于是，格雷格需要另一个新点子。

有一天，他注意到维多利亚在对着一段 YouTube 视频大笑。安娜贝尔凑了过来，很快她也笑了起来。于是格雷格加入了她们。他们三个人全神贯注地观看。

“那是一个青少年女孩博主，”格雷格说，“她在拍一个关于她记忆中婴儿时期的‘生活一天’。她扎着双马尾，在吃小香蕉。”当格雷格看着女儿们对着视频大笑时，他突然想到：那个女孩抓住了重点，但她搞砸了。一个人对婴儿时期的回忆只能走到一定程度。如果他拍一段视频，让安娜贝尔神奇地变回一个婴儿会怎样？

格雷格开始疯狂地绘制分镜脚本。安娜贝尔可以扎起双马尾，穿一件连体衣。她可以叼着奶嘴，说着婴儿语。格雷格从之前的“季度”经验中了解到，行为越夸张——尖叫声越大，面部表情越丰富——播放量就越高。也许安娜贝尔可以用夸张的卡通婴儿语说话：“咿！”“唔！”“好吃！”“噢！”“啊！”“噗噗！”

他还从那段食物大战的视频中得知，孩子们喜欢混乱的场景。于是他想，我们要给安娜贝尔喂婴儿食品，然后让她把它吐出来。

他们拍摄了这段视频。到了吐食物的部分，安娜贝尔（续见第 42 页）

在 两极分化的 台湾， 对 中国的 焦虑 正在增加。 一些 平民 正采取 行动 来自救。

捍卫者

摄影：张正之 / 文字：布鲁克·拉默

“如果中国入侵，我拒绝交出我的生命，”新竹的一名房屋清洁工阿尔比·李（Albee Lee）说道。

阿尔比·李过着双重生活。在工作日，这位 29 岁、手臂上纹着一只滑板鸭的女性在台湾半导体产业中心新竹市从事房屋清洁工作。而在周末，她则在为应对中国可能的入侵做准备。

在中国围绕台湾加强军事演习之际——此时美国正因伊朗战争而分心且精疲力竭——这些行动似乎旨在恐吓这个自治岛上的 2300 万 居民。然而对于李来说，中国的恐吓战术反而增强了她保卫台湾的愿望。台湾作为民主的前哨，生产了全球 90% 以上最先进的计算机芯片。李与数千名其他平民——包括艺术家、学者、消防员和工程师——一起加入了一个日益壮大的民防运动，该运动经常进行实战模拟的灾难训练。

现在，除了清洁用品，李还随身携带一个精心组装的应急急救包。“我不想生活在中国共产党的统治之下，”她说，“如果中国入侵，我拒绝交出我的生命。”

自 1949, 年中国共产党在内战中击败国民党以来，中国政府一直坚持认为，许多战败国民党军队撤退到的台湾岛必须与大陆统一。中国国家主席习近平将此称为“不可动摇的历史使命”，而这一目标可能正接近成为现实。根据美国情报部门的消息，习近平已命令世界上规模最大的常备军——中国人民解放军，必须具备在 2027, 年（即解放军建军 100 周年）之前吞并该岛的能力。

目前尚未发现迫在眉睫的入侵计划，但中国正在展示其相对于台湾武装力量的优势。在过去一年中，解放军加强了未达到战争程度的“灰色地带”战术。他们进行了海军封锁的实弹模拟，并且几乎每天都有军队跨越台湾海峡中线（中国与台湾主岛之间的狭窄海域）。今年夏天，中国的船只甚至在台湾东部海域巡逻，而那里正是其主要支持者美国最可能派遣军事援助的通道。

近 50 年来，台湾脆弱的现状一直由美国一项被称为“战略模糊”的灵活政策维持着。

李（左）与其他志愿者在一次模拟绑架台湾指挥官的指挥所中。

美国在内战中支持国民党，此后默许台湾的生存权，但同时承认北京是中国唯一的合法政府。此外，美国每年向台湾提供数十亿美元的武器，却不明确表示在遭受攻击时是否会保卫该岛。

这种模糊的立场在今天已难以维持。中国不仅在加强认知战——展示军事肌肉、向台湾灌输宣传——而且美国正被证明是一个更加反复无常、以交易为导向的盟友。特朗普总统有时是中国的严厉批评者，但他也表达过对中国强人习近平的钦佩。在 5 月访问中国后，他甚至将一项 140 亿美元 billion 的美国武器方案（已获国会批准但尚未由他签署）作为与北京谈判的“一个非常好的谈判筹码”。这一事件令许多台湾人感到不安，他们担心特朗普在 9 月与习近平的下一次会面中，可能会让他们在削弱且孤立的状态下面对中国。

台湾被认为是全球最危险的地缘政治闪点之一。一场涉及两个超级大国的军事冲突，可能会给依赖该岛电脑芯片的全球经济带来毁灭性影响。这种危险的局面刺激了台湾民防运动的增长。在过去的几年里，全岛涌现了30多个志愿者团体——有些是受北京在台湾海峡武力威胁的驱动，有些是受乌克兰抵抗俄罗斯入侵的启发，有些则是对台湾内部日益加深的政治分歧感到沮丧。

2024年，新当选的总统赖清德推行“全社会”防御政策，这些团体因此得到了推动。本月，作为该方案的一部分，台湾在军队年度演习的同时开展了民防演习，以测试普通民众在所有通信（包括互联网服务）被切断的情况下，如何应对中国军队的入侵。正如赖清德去年在公布构建社会韧性战略时所言：“每一位公民都站在捍卫民主与自由的前线。”

尽管其人数仍然相对较少——核心参与者仅有几千人——但这些民防

4月部队进行演习时，台湾南部上空的照明弹。

新北市的一名工业设计师安弗尼·黄（Anfernee Hwang）表示，中国的行动“让我意识到平民采取主动并做好准备的必要性”。

团体反映了台湾认同的演变，尤其是在年轻人之中。1992, 18%的人口认同自己主要是台湾人而非流亡中国人；而根据最近的一项民调，如今这一比例已超过三分之二。只有3%的人认同自己纯粹是中国人——这一比例与该岛原住民人口的规模相当。

这种认同感的转变塑造了对台湾未来的愿景。在过去的30年里，支持成为中国一部分的人口比例已从曾经的五分之一下降到不足10%。目前，大多数台湾人表示他们支持在独立与统一之间寻求平衡的现状。他们希望自己的岛屿能继续作为一个繁荣的民主社会存在。根据台湾最高研究机构中央研究院1月份的一项民调，如果中国入侵威胁到这一现状，60%的人口愿意参战。

十年前，台湾还没有民防运动，只有少数像安弗尼·黄这样的军事模拟爱好者。黄现在40岁出头，是一名工业设计师，他表示自己最初被那些“有点危险且刺激”的生存主义游戏所吸引。（他的名字来源于前NBA球星安弗尼·哈代威。）2016, 黄和他的朋友们开始进行高强度的技术和体能训练——他现在依然在跑马拉松——并把自己打造成一支精锐特种部队，甚至包括涂面彩。五年后，黄的一位朋友创建了一个名为“台湾末日准备者协会”的Facebook群组，吸引了近20,000名成员。

人们很容易将这些早期的准备者视为某种边缘民兵。但黄和其中一小部分人组建了一支社区应急响应小组，旨在让平民为灾难以及可能的中国入侵做好准备。随着中国与台湾之间紧张局势的升级，这些准备者正利用他们的经验来帮助培训民防新手。黄说：“中国的渗透和军事演习让我意识到平民采取主动并做好准备的必要性。”

台湾最具影响力的民防组织是熊学院（Kuma Academy），这是一个成立四年的非营利组织，据称已培训超过 100,000 名台湾人，内容涵盖从生存技能到“预先反驳”北京密集宣传的方方面面。凭借一名半导体大亨提供的数百万美元资金，熊学院每年还组织几次大规模的实战演习，例如阿尔比·李（Albee Lee）参加的那次。（该学院的名字源自日语中“熊”的词汇，其网站还销售“黑熊战士”玩偶和护身符。）

黄（右）在一次将模拟伤员转移到安全区域进行医疗救治的演习中。

参加熊学院培训课程的人员绝大多数年龄在 25 到 45 岁之间。虽然年长的生存主义准备者倾向于男性，但民防活动人士中女性占比超过 70%。熊学院的男性首席执行官朱富明（Chu Fu-ming）表示：“女性更愿意拯救自己的国家。”他说，“许多女性有很强的动力去了解在危机中她们实际能做些什么，以保护她们的家人和周围的人。”

中国与台湾之间的僵局是一场关于不对称性的研究。在规模、人口和军事实力方面，拥有 140 亿美元 人口的国家完全压倒了拥有 2300 万 人口的岛屿。中国军队拥有 200 万士兵，而台湾仅有 230,000 人，中国的海军舰艇数量也以类似的幅度超过台湾。即使在作为台湾防御核心的战机方面，中国也拥有近五比一的优势。

在这样一场不平衡的较量中，台湾必须依赖所谓的“豪猪防御”，利用一系列小型战术措施，使入侵的代价过于高昂且痛苦，从而使其难以实施。例如，台湾新研发的无人机机群可以帮助干扰两栖登陆。

豪猪的另一根“刺”将是民间团体。他们拒绝提前投降，将致力于维持通信线路、开展搜救、疏散难民并提供紧急医疗护理。

20 岁的动物科学专业学生 H.E. 黄认为，民防可以产生至关重要的影响。与所有同龄人一样，黄在繁荣与自由中长大——这是该岛近 40 年前转向民主的果实——与此同时，来自中国的威胁也在增加。他说，在青少年时期，“我一直在想，如果战争爆发，普通人实际上能做些什么来准备。”

黄获得了紧急医疗技术员认证，随后在进入大学后加入了一个民防组织。他指出乌克兰对俄罗斯入侵的顽强抵抗，并表示：“历史多次证明，即使是压倒性的军事力量也不能保证胜利。当地民众的士气、决心和组织能力可以在冲突的结果中发挥巨大作用。”

“我一直在想，如果战争爆发，普通人实际上能做些什么来准备，”在台北学习动物科学的 H.E. 黄说道。

在一个分歧如此深刻的社会中，建立这种团结并不容易。随着民防组织加速培训，许多台湾人对威胁仍持乐观态度，或者更尖锐地，批评民防支持者散布恐慌并鼓吹战争。对民防的态度紧随台湾政治的核心分歧，即总统所属的民主进步党（D.P.P.）与通过联盟控制立法机构的国民党（KMT）之间的分歧。根据一项非正式调查，几乎所有参加民防演习的人都支持民主进步党。国民党忠实支持者指责他们为了政治利益而挑起与中国的冲突，而民主进步党支持者则称国民党是北京的代理人，因为他们鹦鹉学般地重复中国的宣传。

中国的主要武器之一是认知战：即系统性地针对对手对现实、身份和政治意志的认知。熊卫学院（Kuma Academy）首席执行官朱表示：“世界上没有哪个地方比台湾承受的认知战轰炸更严重了。”他认为，中国的宣传和虚假信息，以及在台湾海岸外的军事演习，旨在削弱台湾捍卫自身的决心。

熊卫学院和其他团体举办研讨会，旨在帮助人们识别并反击虚假信息，这表明现代冲突的关键战场之一并非陆地或海洋，而是一个社会的集体心理。台湾民防的最终目标是某些人所称的“认识论主权”，即在不受虚假信息操纵的情况下，定义自身现实和历史的能力。

这一理想仍遥不可及。即便是在提升民防理念的赖总统办公室，也觉得有必要将其界定为“救灾”而非“战争准备”——这种措辞旨在吸引更多的人。去年岛东海岸发生的灾难性洪水，让赖政府有机会在脱离政治或实际战争的情况下，展示民防训练的实用性。每天有超过 40,000 人前往受灾地区提供帮助，但现场只有数十支民防队伍具备建立流动诊所、临时避难所和捐赠点的专业知识。

黄（中间）在一次夜间救援演习中利用坐标定位模拟伤员。

“这改变了人们对民防的看法，”担任总统顾问的经济学教授刘育希（Liu Yu-hsi）说道。“大多数普通人的印象是，民防就是关于枪支或民兵。‘战士’这种认知并不好，但如果你是‘救灾’，那就是非常积极的。”

然而，认知往往难以改变。学生黄居住在一个由国民党（KMT）主导的社区，那里大多是 1949 年迁台者的年长后裔。最近，他试图与邻居分享在危机中如何保护自己的信息。他们拒绝倾听。“我发现，在不进一步加剧人们极化的情况下，讨论提高公众准备程度这件事极其困难，”黄说。

回到新竹，Albee Lee 正在为富人刷洗浴室和厨房。她说，她的客户大多支持国民党，或者安于在富裕的科技泡沫中生活。大多数人对他双重生活一无所知。

她说，当她和一名朋友与客户谈到准备工作的必要性时，“我们要么遭到嘲笑，要么遭到讽刺。人们根本不想和我们谈论这件事。”但 Lee 没有气馁。“我仍然担心中国入侵。我希望唤醒台湾人民——哪怕一次只能唤醒一个人。”

张正之（Chien-Chi Chang）是一位定居奥地利的台湾摄影师，也是马格南图片社（Magnum Photos）的贡献者。他的作品探讨人与人之间的纽带，以及将他们分开的力量：边界、迁徙、冲突与距离。

布鲁克·拉默（Brook Larmer）是本杂志驻曼谷的特约撰稿人。他是《姚明行动》（Operation Yao Ming）一书的作者，该书通过体育讲述了中国的崛起。

在四月的一次演习中，志愿者、预备役人员和军方人员练习营救一名被俘指挥官。

YouTube（）< / td> “我必须成为第三个孩子，”格雷格说，“我得把自己变成一个婴儿。”格雷格的“坏宝宝”（Bad Baby）视频已不再公开，但他用电脑给我看了一些。视频里的格雷格发出咕咕声，用手膝爬行，说着婴儿语，嘴里叼着奶嘴。维多利亚张大嘴巴咀嚼巧克力奶油蛋和饼干，半咀嚼的食物顺着下巴下滑。安娜贝尔一边挥舞着拳头，一边发出“咿！”和“咕噜！”的尖叫声。他们的动作——全部配以童谣音乐——夸张且重复。想象一下《天线宝宝》那种仪式感，但你偶然发现的不是《天线宝宝》，而是一个普通中西部家庭的家庭录像，无论年龄大小，出于某种原因，他们全部都是婴儿。随着视频播放，我注意到格雷格在悄悄地审视我。我很喜欢他的孩子们享受这种戏剧化表演，享受与彼此以及父亲之间建立纽带的方式。但我当时看起来一定有些困惑，笑容略显僵硬，因为格雷格突然咕哝道：“嗯，有5000万人看了这个。”5000万实际上是一个极大的低估。格雷格观看次数最多的视频——《坏宝宝真实食物大战：维多利亚 vs 安娜贝尔 & 怪爸爸玩具怪胎家族》（Bad Baby Real Food Fight Victoria vs Annabelle & Freak Daddy Toy Freaks Family）——拥有6.22亿次观看。格雷格的床下堆着一叠来自YouTube的奖牌，庆祝他的观看次数里程碑。这里是一亿次观看，那里也是一亿次观看。此外还有来自Tubefilter（一家报道YouTube的出版物）的奖牌，纪念他成为整个平台观看量最高创作者的那些月份。在2016年1月至2017年6月期间，他的视频总计获得了130亿次观看。我向他保证不会透露他赚了多少钱。但YouTube的合作伙伴计划非常慷慨——广告收入分成大约是50-50——所以金额很大（尽管还没大到让格雷格放弃他的草坪护理业务）。他们离开了花岗岩城，搬到了一个高档的郊区社区。2017年，他们受邀参加在加利福尼亚州阿纳海姆举行的年度网红大会VidCon，并预约了一位新YouTube顾问的会面。对方告诉他们，终于能与他们本人见面让她感到非常兴奋。他们入住了一家迪士尼酒店，在泳池里玩耍，消磨时间直到预约的会面时间。就在那时，奇怪的事情发生了。“她取消了，”格雷格说。格雷格完全不知道原因。一段时间内，YouTube Kids按照预期运行，提供正常的、非恐怖的《小猪佩奇》视频。问题始于孩子们开始搜索像蜘蛛侠和艾莎这样的角色却一无所获，因为迪士尼和漫威将他们的内容移出了该网站。< / td> 在魁北克市，一群人看到了机会。他们打扮成艾莎和蜘蛛侠，在一家不起眼的郊区房子里拍摄短剧，并将其上传到YouTube，标题类似于《蜘蛛侠和冰雪奇缘艾莎现实生活中的超级英雄乐趣》。在其中一段视频中，艾莎的舌头变成了一块长长的红色果冻，需要用钳子剪掉。无论这些YouTuber的意图如何，无论他们是谁，艾莎带着一条巨大的果冻舌头在客厅里走动，样子看起来确实带有诡异的性暗示。一名医生在蜘蛛侠的臀部注射了神秘的绿色液体，他痛苦地四处奔跑。蜘蛛侠喝了一瓶红色药水，眼睛喷出火焰。他反复敲击自己的头部以缓解疼痛。制作水准粗糙，且与“坏宝宝”一样，动作重复且配有< / td>< / tr>< / table>

配上童谣音乐，给这些视频带来了一种地狱般的氛围。但其中一些确实有一种奇异的魅力，当 YouTube 的算法将它们推送给 Kids 应用时，数百万渴望看到艾莎的孩子们对此趋之若鹜，就像他们对待格雷格的“坏宝宝”视频那样。随后，模仿者出现了。

“我创造了‘坏宝宝’，然后它就疯传了，”格雷格说，“大概有上百个频道在模仿。”其中许多视频来自一个俄罗斯内容农场，专门快速、廉价地山寨走红的爆款动画。“你可以从他们的口音听出来他们是俄罗斯人，”格雷格说，“全是‘Ya, Victoria’之类的话。而且他们让我们做一些我们绝不会做的事。伙计，网上有个动画，我的孩子们在泳池里玩，然后我走过去在泳池里撒尿。那个频道叫 Toy Freaks，所以人们以为是我做的。”

后来，格雷格给我寄了一个 USB 驱动器，里面是模仿者制作的视频。我看到俄罗斯和乌克兰的男人在勤勉地重演格雷格的视频。如果格雷格拍了自己推着安娜贝尔和维多利亚在沃尔玛超市逛街的视频，那么在基辅的某个地方，就会有一个男人以一种诡异的精准度将其复制，并由成年女性扮演他的女儿（假装成婴儿）。一切都一模一样——面部表情、摄像机角度、对话、奶嘴、连体衣、音乐。乌克兰版格雷格唯一没能模拟出来的，是格雷格的美国口音和语调。

与此同时，在魁北克市，艾莎和蜘蛛侠也在激发他们自己的模仿者——山寨的山寨品，每一代都比前一代更粗劣。突然之间，来自遥远国家的蜘蛛侠和艾莎开始演绎堕胎、食人或肢解，而 YouTube 的算法则不加区分地将这些内容推送给数百万毫无防备的观众。

网络侦探们开始试图揭露罪魁祸首。在面对遥远且神秘的俄罗斯内容农场时，他们毫无进展。魁北克市的艾莎和蜘蛛侠不知怎么地也成功避开了检测。但有一个容易得手的目标：格雷格。

格雷格很容易被识别，因为他的 Toy Freaks 频道与他的草坪护理频道相连。这意味着他生活的每一个角落突然都被网络侦探们审视。

“我不想让这话被误解，”格雷格说，“但当时有很多愤怒的女性对我很不满意。2017 年是一个激进的世界。#MeToo 运动达到了顶峰，而且这是正确的。他们在打击坏人。但这场猎巫行动在向所有方向蔓延，而我成了一个容易的目标，因为我是一个带着两个小女孩的男人，而且我们打扮得像婴儿。”

我停顿了一下。“我的意思是……”我说。

“伙计，这看起来确实很糟糕，”格雷格承认道，“我理解为什么有些成年人看到一个成年男人嘴里叼着奶嘴会觉得古怪。但当时有数百万父母也认为这很有趣且无害。而现在，一场全面的调查正在进行。”

格雷格的声音提高了。他停下来让自己冷静下来。“所以这就是为什么代表在加利福尼亚没有接见我们。”

他的频道被取消了获利资格，不久之后，被 YouTube 完全封禁。（YouTube 拒绝置评。）

了解 #Elsagate（艾莎门）的人可能会认为我对格雷格太宽容了，原因是我尚未提及：当 Reddit 用户和 BuzzFeed 的记者深入挖掘他的视频存档时，他们发现了几段听起来确实非常令人不安的片段。正如 2016 年的一篇 Reddit 帖子所写：“在他们最新的视频之一中，父亲跟着小女孩进了浴室，拍摄她因剧痛而哭泣，血从口中流出，牙齿脱落。这令人作呕，任何心理健康的人或孩子都不应该观看。”

那段血牙视频已不在网上。仅剩下一张静态图片，图片中安娜贝尔张大嘴巴抽泣，脸上沾满了血迹和泪水。

Reddit 上的帖子继续写道：“另一段视频显示，他在两个女孩洗澡时突然冲进去，将一桶青蛙倒进她们的浴缸里，并兴高采烈地拍摄她们。”

BuzzFeed 的雷米·斯米特（Remy Smidt）同样关注到了那些青蛙：“在至少两段 [视频] 中，奇斯姆（Chism）在两个年幼的女儿洗澡时走进浴室，用动物 [一只青蛙和一只龙虾] 吓她们。他告诉她们他有一个惊喜，问她们想不想看。‘不想，’较小的那个孩子回答，声音带着上扬的语调。接着，当水桶靠近水面时，她再次说道，‘不想，’并向后躲避。‘不，爸爸，停下来！’她尖叫道。她继续尖叫，同时在浴缸边缘勉强维持平衡。‘爸爸，停下来！’她再次大喊，声音因哭泣而变得沙哑。”

“跟我说说那段牙齿视频，”我问格雷格，“就是你拍安娜贝尔牙齿脱落、她在那儿哭且满脸是血的那段。”

“噢，”他毫不犹豫地回答，“我得给你看看那个。”

他找到了视频并按下播放键。之前的报道让这件事听起来像是“坏宝宝”（Bad Baby）系列的一部分，某种越界的、庸俗的闹剧。但事实并非如此：那是他 2013 年拍的一段家庭视频，之前根本没人看过。我看了全片。视频中，安娜贝尔的牙齿在晃动且在出血，她很害怕，而格雷格在安慰她：“没事的。只是牙齿松了。没什么大不了的。”

尽管他竟然在拍摄这件事本身就显得有些古怪，但视频显示的是一位父亲在以正常方式处理家庭危机。

“那青蛙和龙虾呢？”我问。

格雷格退缩了一下。“那是我的失误，”他说，“太蠢了。那是个恶作剧。孩子们穿着泳衣在浴缸里玩。我的狗在人行道上看到一只青蛙，我把它放进碗里进去给她们看。结果它跳进了浴缸。安娜贝尔吓坏了。她爬到浴缸边上，尖叫着大哭。我上传了视频。同样，那是 2013 年左右的事，那时候根本没多少播放量。”（我看了视频，很明显是格雷格自己把青蛙放进浴缸的。安娜贝尔很沮丧，但维多利亚几乎全程都在笑。）

随后，我通过 Zoom 与格雷格的女儿们进行了通话，以更好地了解她们的看法。她们当时还是未成年人，所以由格雷格安排通话并与我们一起参加。“我只记得那是让我们聚在一起的事情，”安娜贝尔说，“是的，有些时候确实很恶心，但我觉得很有趣，我并不真的介意。”

维多利亚则更为犹豫。“对我来说并不糟糕，”她说，“但现在我 16 岁快 17 岁了，我不想再那样做了。”她和安娜贝尔说有些事情她们不喜欢：在学校之夜为了拍摄而熬夜太晚；在食物大战中眼睛里进了番茄酱。但她们表示，并不觉得被强迫拍摄这些视频。

“有些内容确实越界了，”安娜贝尔说，“但那些越界的东西反而是人们最喜欢的。”直到人们不再喜欢为止。

在德克萨斯州，一名叫艾米的网络侦探坚信，安娜贝尔实际上是一个名叫丽莎·欧文（Lisa Irwin）的失踪儿童，后者六年前在密苏里州堪萨斯城被绑架，那里距离格拉尼特城 250 英里。目击者曾看到一名男子在午夜后抱着一个婴儿走在街上，艾米认为那个人就是格雷格。她发布了安娜贝尔和丽莎·欧文的面部对比照片，并推论格雷格的草坪护理业务实际上是“方便的掩护”，是一种寻找目标的手段。

艾米挖掘出一段 CNN 记者的剪辑，记者在丽莎·欧文被绑架地点附近的一个排水隧道中发现了五角星的涂鸦以及“终身怪胎”（Freak for Life）的字样。考虑到格雷格的频道名为“玩具怪胎”（Toy Freaks），这就是艾米需要的最终证据。她报了警。

“他们像特种部队一样冲进来，”格雷格说。“他们搜查了整个房子，翻遍了厨房橱柜，打开了洗衣机和烘干机。而这一切发生时，我的孩子们就在现场。社会服务机构的人也出现了，要求我证明这些孩子确实是我所说的那些孩子。我不得不向他们出示出生证明。我简直不敢相信，德克萨斯州的一个女人随口编个故事打电话给他们，竟然就能导致这种局面。”

格雷格被命令将女儿们带到当地的儿童福利部门。到达后，警员将格雷格带向一边，将女孩们带向另一边。她们接受了询问：“你父亲有没有打过你？他有没有对你进行不恰当的触碰？”

她们随后被释放了，但这次事件留下了阴影。“看着她们那天被带走的样子，”格雷格说，“我至今仍无法走出那个阴影。”

在那之后，他成了一个隐居者。他待在家里，无所事事。

“我不再与人交往了，”他说。“我陷入了抑郁。我把孩子们送到学校，回家，回床上睡觉，闹钟响起，我再去学校接他们。我没有生活。我非常紧张。我一直不停地颤抖。我的头发在掉。我醒来时发现枕头上全是头发。我几乎开始相信自己是个坏人——相信自己做了什么可怕的事情。”

格雷格以一种痛苦的方式发现，互联网上的时间运行逻辑截然不同。过去并不总是过去，它会突然地闯入现在。有时，旧文章会在 Facebook 上重新流传。“人们不知道那是旧闻，”他说，“所以他们会再次向警察和社会服务机构举报我。”格雷格说，这种情况发生了多次。他们正在看电视，突然意识到警察已经包围了他们的家。或者联邦特工出现，要求单独与安娜贝尔和维多利亚交谈。

他接受了心理治疗，现在不再那么孤僻了——毕竟他接见了我也证明了这一点。他甚至回到了 YouTube，开了一个新的草坪护理频道。（他说他计划坚持做这个。）但他远未完全康复。他可能会发布视频，但依然几乎不与任何人接触，除了家人。他已经认命，接受了孤独的生活。

“我怎么可能在 Tinder 上注册？”格雷格说。“女人会谷歌我的名字，然后她们会觉得，‘哇哦’。所以，我注定永远单身。我觉得任何与我有关的人都很不幸。甚至包括那些搞草坪的人。他们曾经很喜欢我，但现在他们的妻子会告诉他们，‘那家伙因为虐待儿童惹了大麻烦’。我的意思是，伙计，我毁了。我不应该这样评价自己。但在很长一段时间里，我就是这么说的：‘我毁了，我毁了。’如果有人说：‘但这很值得。你们离开了那个小镇。孩子们有了大学储蓄金。’不。如果能让这一切从未发生，我愿意放弃所有这些。”

这就是格雷格故事的结尾。我感谢他向我讲述这一切，然后钻进车里。格雷格向我挥手告别，随后退回屋内。

拼字游戏 (SPELLING BEE) 作者：弗兰克·隆戈 (Frank Longo)

你能用蜂巢中的字母拼出多少个 5 个或更多字母的常用词？每个答案必须至少使用一次中心字母。同一个词中字母可以重复使用。至少有一个词会用到全部 7 个字母。不允许使用专有名词和带连字符的词。每个正确答案得 1 分，使用全部 7 个字母的词得 3 分。

评分标准：8 分 = 良好；17 分 = 优秀；26 分 = 天才

我们的词单（总分 33 分）将随上周的答案一同公布。

三次出击 (THREE STRIKES) 作者：埃里克·柏林 (Eric Berlin)

从每一列中选取一个词。从每个词中删掉一个字母。然后将结果并排排列，拼出底部其中一个线索的答案。列中的每个词将被且仅被使用一次。

CLAM< / td><>ECHO< / ><>BRIE< / >< / tr><><>HEAL< / ><>FLESH< / ><>DANCE< / >< / ><><>INCH< / ><>GETS< / ><>HINGE< / >< / ><><>MINUS< / ><>LOATHE< / ><>LAND< / >< / ><><>ORGAN< / ><>MERIT< / ><>MATTE< / >< / ><><>PARIS< / ><>MOLARS< / ><>MOUSE< / >< / ><><>RAID< / ><>NORMS< / ><>RED< / >< / ><><>SUCH< / ><>ONION< / ><>RIDER< / >< / ><><>TAMPER< / ><>PARADE< / ><>WHIP< / >< / ><><>WAIF< / ><>TECH< / ><>YODA< / >< / table>

1. 磁带播放机 (2 个词) 2. 柑橘味碳酸饮料 (2 个词) 3. IHOP 的竞争对手 (2 个词) 4. 相互信任与友谊 5. 不管天气如何 (3 个词) 6. 模拟时钟的一部分 (2 个词) 7. 囚犯 (2 个词) 8. 学生运动员奖项，通常为 9. 从遗嘱中获得的东西 10. 友好的问候语 (2 个词)

卡米诺 (KAMINO) 作者：纳吉·塔朱里 (Naji Tajouri)

在迷宫中寻找一条路径，可水平或垂直移动，将起始的小人连接到黄色数字方格。你只能向上移动到更高的数字，或向下移动到更低的数字。向左或向右移动必须是到相同的数字。

6 8 8 7 9 9 5 5 4 4 4 7 6 6 4 3 2 5 5 6 3 5 5 4 4 4 2 3 4 3 3 2 2 1 2 2

隐晦十字谜题 (CRYPTIC CROSSWORD)

作者：理查德·西尔维斯特里 (Richard Silvestri)

横向 1 关于俄罗斯冲突开端的传说 (8) 5 模仿僵尸或拳击手？ (6) 10 美国人将一个家伙的摄入量变为狂野的稻米 (9) 11 总统（非共和党人）从事党务工作 (5) 12 来逗弄戈尔先生 (5) 13 根据劳埃德·韦伯音乐剧回顾录，间谍环 (9) 14 我投资于房屋和土地 —— 这全部属实 (7) 17 转身并去掉头部，得到一种蔬菜 (7) 18 反对进口过量纤维的总统 (7) 20 停止返回，但绝不表演 (7) 22 警察局长组织了蒙特利尔警察人员 (9)

23 在早晨，瑞士首都的大部分是淡橙色的 (5) 25 并非仅仅是任何塑形工具的音符 (5) 26 夸大过去的状态 (9) 27 为黄色紧凑型支付 (6) 28 超级巨星也被搬运工的亲属拥抱 (8)

1 更平滑的赞美 (7) 2 依然被撕裂的一方 (5) 3 简而言之，它将成为一种机织面料 (5) 4 或者，保守派演讲者的技巧 (7) 6 水果箱：九根香蕉 (9) 7 参与在无止境的尝试中捕捉 Kitty (9)

8 来自学校中加拿大原住民的嘈杂声音 (7) 9 珍妮法官？ (6) 15 古希腊仪式 —— 一个丢失的翻译 (9) 16 时尚的、温柔的、沮丧的、明显的、害羞的人 (9) 18 平面图形和三角函数除以约 3.1416 —— 看！ (7) 19 猎人学院建筑在后面 (6) 20 喜欢文字游戏的犀利家伙？ (7) 21 某些医生提到的痛苦 (7) 23 牧师没有头脑去犯罪 (5) 24 呼雷！亚特兰大球员在最初没有记录最后一次出局 (5)

8.23.26 谜题答案

微小变化

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注：⬆ = PENNY

KENKEN

5	2	7	4	3	6	1
3	4	5	2	7	1	6
1	3	2	5	6	4	7
6	7	1	3	2	5	4
2	1	4	6	5	7	3
7	5	6	1	4	3	2
4	6	3	7	1	2	5

ACROSTIC 纵横谜题

(安东尼) 莱恩，《看见与相信》——我在代尔夫特市中心的一家……商店里发现了……那里曾是维米尔居住的地方：餐垫、饼干罐、托特包和巧克力棒上都装饰着他的艺术作品图像……[但]……他作品中那些神秘的紧张感……并不是用来出售的。

A. 情书 I. 邪恶的 B. 阿弗莱克 Q. 在洗涤中 C. 无法比拟 J. 幽灵船 R. 埋葬 D. 东印度 K. 天文学家 L. 纳什 S. 朱红色 E. 斯嘉丽 T. 不敬 M. “请勿触摸” F. 蚀刻 U. 北海 N. 博奈尔 G. 耳环 V. 行会 0. 编辑 H. 破冰船 P. 内幕

JELLY ROLL 果冻卷

KAMINO

第 44 页谜题答案

将它们计入你的得分。

SPILLING BEE（拼词蜂） Kithenan, citheinette, thicken（每词 3 分）。此外：检查，四分之五。该字母是一个关键，意味着该字母不由第一个字母给出。该字母也由第二个字母给出。该字母也由第三个字母给出。该字母也由第四个字母给出。该字母也由第五个字母给出。该字母也由第六个字母给出。该字母也由第七个字母给出。该字母也由第八个字母给出。该字母也由第九个字母给出。该字母也由第十个字母给出。该字母也由第十个字母给出。该字母也由第十个字母给出。

美国民主社会主义者组织 (D.S.A.)

在特朗普的第一任期内，许多主流民主党人也参与其中。在 ABC 电视台的《本周》(This Week) 节目中，当被问及洪的言论时，奥卡西奥-科尔特斯回答道：“Woke 1 简直疯了”——这是民主党人中流行的一种自我赦免式的耸肩口头禅，而巧合的是，这句话起源于一名纽约市议会的 D.S.A. 成员。尽管如此，奥卡西奥-科尔特斯并未支持洪，桑德斯也没有，D.S.A. 全国组织同样没有。

在 8 月 11, 威斯康星州的初选之夜，洪的支持者们挤在麦迪逊市的一家音乐场馆里。在由千禧一代和 Z 世代为主的人群边缘，芭芭拉·克拉克和帕蒂·埃尔森正在观察现场。克拉克是一位 72 岁的退休公立学校教师，埃尔森是一位 80 岁的退休房地产经纪人。她们很快指出，自己完全不属于这群人的年龄层；她们是那种穿着得体、和蔼可亲的婴儿潮一代，我在自由派“抵抗运动”的场合——比如女性大游行后的咖啡聚会和“不要国王”集会上——更经常遇到这样的人。

“我认为很多年长者都很害怕，”克拉克告诉我。她曾多年参与民主党的竞选活动，包括在 2008 年管理奥巴马竞选活动的当地办公室，并在 2012 年为他的连任担任志愿者。“现在，我不能再那样做了，”她说。

我问克拉克，她现在认为自己是一个民主党人，一个民主社会主义者，还是两者兼而有之。

“我不知道我现在该如何定义自己了，”她说。“我的意思是，我曾经是个民主党人。真的是。一个纯粹的民主党人。”

“这个政党已经萎缩了，”埃尔森说。“因为那些企业资金，他们什么都没做。这让他们不得不听话。”

初步计票结果开始出炉，结果比上次民调要接近得多，之前的民调显示洪领先两位数。支持者们的热情中染上了一层焦虑。当洪在深夜出现时，她带着挽歌般的基调谈到“我们将在 11 月一起获胜——以及在未来的每一个 11 月。”当最终选票统计完毕，她以几千票之差输给了克劳利。

就在午夜前，我在她们离开的路上再次遇到了克拉克和埃尔森。我问她们认为发生了什么。“他得到了很多民主党金主的支持，”克拉克在谈到克劳利时说道。

“我认为她本可以赢的，”埃尔森说，声音在颤抖。未来曾如此之近。但现在，她们必须再次等待。

但从另一个角度来看，洪的失败对 D.S.A. 来说是一种胜利：一名连社会主义者都犹豫是否支持的社会主义候选人，竟然如此接近赢得一场重大的全州选举，并且如果 11 月真的失败了，她也不必承担责任。

当我向全国共同主席西迪克提出这种解读时，他表示保留意见，仅承认洪的竞选“确实提高了所有人的预期”。他强调，差距很小，“现在我们拥有更多关于在现有实力下能走多远的数据——以及未来还能发生什么。”这场运动未能证明其声称的可能性。但这仅意味着，这种可能性依然存在。

KENKEN 数独

在网格中填入数字，使每行或每列的数字不重复，且每个粗线框内的数字通过框内指定的加、减、乘或除法运算，得出所示的目标数字。5.x5 网格使用数字 1–5。7x7 网格使用数字 1–7。

KenKen $^{®}$ 是 Nextoy, LLC 的注册商标。© 2026 www.KENKEN.com。保留所有权利。

命中注定 (WRITTEN IN THE STARS)

作者：丹尼尔·格林伯格 (Daniel Grinberg)

丹尼尔·格林伯格是一家位于费城的咨询公司的用户体验研究员。他说：“这个谜题的灵感源于我看到亚莉安娜·格兰德 (Ariana Grande) 的名字时，我心想——安德烈·纪德 (André Gide) 的改编版？”（当你解开谜题时就会明白原因。）我不知道丹尼是如何找到八个如此精妙的主题示例的。但也许我并不真的想知道。有时候，仅仅是坐下来感到惊叹就很美好。—— W.S.

横向

1 《阿拉丁》中的反派 6 “它是你的了！” 10 讽刺性的“当然” 14 热量设置，简写？ 17 荷兰加勒比海岛屿 18 爆炸声 20 缺乏约束的 22 马丁·辛 (MARTIN SHEEN) 24 连姆·尼森 (LIAM NEESON) 25 因《英国烘焙大赛》而闻名的主厨胡赛因 (Hussain) 26 打折的中国电商 28 巨大的虾 29 Ben & Jerry's 的替代品 31 解雇通知 33 诺曼·瑞杜斯 (NORMAN REEDUS) 37 格雷格·金尼尔 (GREG KINNEAR) 40 平衡条件 41 历史学家的划分 42 不朽的？ 43 非法提供，如门票 45 公开宣布 46 凌乱地散布 48 摩根·弗里曼 (MORGAN FREEMAN) 55 部分新移民的课程，简写 56 一种绿色 59 化学家礼礼 (Lilly) 60 曾任共产主义参议员的智利诗人 61 例如 4 比 2 64 拥有著名“剃刀”理论的修士 68 开始哭泣 69 定期出现的人……或大写线索与其答案之间的联系 73 2024 年的《小丑：__à Deux》 74 户外区域 75 “我们之间没问题吧？” 76 营养不良的

78 加油时的填充物 80 __卡 81 Rite Aid 的竞争对手 84 克里斯蒂安·斯莱特 (CHRISTIAN SLATER) 89 伊利诺伊河畔的城市 92 愤怒的面孔 93 已停产的瑞典汽车 96 不真实的 97 《第22条军规》的主题 100 连接，如两个金属表面 102 伊莎贝拉·罗塞利尼 (ISABELLA ROSSELLINI) 104 凯文·克莱恩 (KEVIN KLINE) 107 埃尔特 (Erté) 的风格，非正式说法 108 加拿大燃料品牌 109 全元音的音乐副歌 110 获得四项艾美奖的女演员法尔科 (Falco) 112 含糖分泌物 114 碧·亚瑟 (BEA ARTHUR) 118 马龙·白兰度 (MARLON BRANDO) 122 在截止日期前提交 123 B.L.T. 或 P.B.J.，俏皮说法 124 音乐家 / 演员海姆 (Haim) 125 谴责的一个音节 126 瞬间 127 高蛋白豆类 128 卡车租赁大品牌

向下

1 鲍勃·马利口中的上帝 2 “__你做完了吗？” 3 1968年票房最高的音乐喜剧电影 4 刻薄的 5 私酒贩的关注点 6 普遍认为像 666 一样 7 在日本很受欢迎的乐队？ 8 迷失方向的 9 给药（如药物） 10 潜力 11 顶盖下发现的东西

12 溪流中的蠕动者 13 “____ fugit”（时光飞逝） 14 恒星的反面 15 粗壮的身材？ 16 埃及至高神 18 因纽特人的水上交通工具 19 办公室消息 21 某些床垫和报价的特点 23 使化妆品闪烁的矿物质 27 移除标识，如在 Instagram 上 29 清晰的 30 教练眼中肩推训练的目标 32 击中 ____ 34 羊群可能聚集的地方 35 开始于 36 用针线缝合 38 未使用的 39 极度幸福 44 男装的双排扣单品 47 触发 49 像斯克鲁奇·麦克达克一样 50 书的右页 51 制作护手套

52 约翰 __ 日（加利福尼亚州纪念日） 53 柑橘类清爽饮料 54 演唱《N.Y. State of Mind》的说唱歌手 57 1994年考斯纳饰演的主角 58 歌剧女主角的闪耀时刻 61 《沙丘》的类型 62 玛丽或伊丽莎白 63 《两座塔》中的高大生物 65 玉米地里的声音 66 阿波罗的异母兄弟 67 圣诞礼物？ 69 寿司吧供应的食物 70 爵士乐大师菲茨杰拉德 71 与《CODA》和《阿尔戈》一样，是唯一其他四个字母的最佳影片获奖者 72 免费提供 73 莎士比亚式的呼喊 77 这才对！ 79 蔑视罢工者 81 交叉路口的一部分 82 巴罗洛和布鲁内洛（葡萄酒） 83 拒绝某人 85 不共享的数字

86 敌对的方式（非正式） 87 演员兼残障权利活动家 克里斯托弗 88 某些烈酒的特点 90 监管空气质量的机构 91 “你确定吗？” 94 730 天的周期 95 从工会退出 97 极少量 98 有羽毛的飞行者 99 以一种羚羊命名的鞋类品牌 100 混合材质网球裤 101 第二次尝试 103 El Pollo ____（鸡肉连锁店） 105 债权人的主张 106 土耳其货币 111 1996年的流行玩具 113 单板滑雪者的运输工具 115 经常违法的转弯（俚语） 116 电影爱好者的有线电视选择 117 野猪和公牛 119 喜剧演员塞达里斯 120 我，对奥古斯都而言 121 污迹或抹痕，例如

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塞雷娜·威廉姆斯 Ro 真实会员 ↓ 使用 GLP-1s 在 20 个月内减轻 31 磅

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配合饮食和运动，1 年内的平均减重幅度为 20%

基于一项为期 72 周的制造商临床试验，研究对象为患有肥胖症的非糖尿病患者，或患有超重且伴有体重相关医疗状况的非糖尿病患者，使用 FDA 批准的最高剂量药物，并配合饮食和运动（而仅靠饮食和运动约为 3%）。在通过另一家 GLP-1 提供商减重后，塞雷娜选择 Ro 来继续她的减重之旅。图中注射笔仅供视觉参考。

The New York Times Magazine

August 30, 2026

Only have a few minutes? Play the Mini Crossword from anywhere.

18 Moderates See Socialists as A Threat to the Democratic Party. Socialists Agree. By Charles Homans

26 He Was One of the Top Lawn Care Influencers on YouTube, Then Everything Went Haywire By Jon Ronson

30 The Defenders of Taiwan Photographs by Chien-Chi Chang Text by Brook Larmer

Columns

4 The Context Americans say they hate prying cameras. But they can't look away. By Willy Staley

8 On Language How "lore" turns fact into fiction — and vice versa. By Mitch Therieau

10 The Interview Priya Parker says your relationships are doomed without conflict. By David Marchese

14 Screenland The odd new drinks of a beloved coffee chain reveal a lot about how the attention economy works. By Sophie Haigney

16 The Ethicist My sister has gone no-contact with our parents. Do I have to choose sides? By Kwame Anthony Appiah Plus: Judge John Hodgman

— 44, 45 Variety Puzzles & Answers

46 Crossword

WHAT'S REALLY BEHIND THE ANTI- FLOCK ANGER?

Let's stipulate here, right up top, that it's probably not a smart idea, or a morally upright thing, to go to Central Park in broad daylight and make out with your younger colleague, especially if you're married. This is, reportedly, what happened between two white-shoe lawyers on a recent summer day. It's possible this sort of thing happens all the time in a city of 8.6 million; it's possible it doesn't. Frankly, it's none of my business or yours. The only reason I know about it is that a TikToker named Jay Guapo, who has 3.6 million followers, happened to be walking by and decided to film the couple, and scold them ("There's kids around!"), and continue filming them over their distressed objections, and then post the video to his feed, where it has now been viewed more than 12 million times, becoming in the process an ongoing subject of investigation by The New York Post, which has published several stories about the incident, dubbing the pair the "canoodling lawyers."

The TikTok commentariat was thrilled by the video. Viewers intuited from the mortified looks on the pair's faces that they were profoundly unhappy to have been filmed — unhappy in a way that suggested the canoodling was unsanctioned. But some of the commenters seem more disturbed by Jay Guapo's decision making, often arguing that, sure, maybe they were doing something wrong, but extramarital canoodling isn't illegal. So why film it? And why post it?

For some, it was comeuppance for a grave sin; for others, it was simply the latest reminder that smartphone cameras and social media platforms have together created a stochastic kangaroo court — one that can be summoned through an invisible portal to deliver swift justice, or at least its own version of it. (The Financial Times reported six days after the video was posted that the law firm had put the elder, male canoodler on leave.) The taboo against marital infidelity needs no introduction and was, I'd be willing to bet, a settled matter before Moses climbed Mount Sinai the first time. But “filming strangers in public and putting it on the internet in front of millions of people, for fun” was not possible in the time of chiseled tablets, nor even just two decades ago, in the age of the BlackBerry. It’s too new a behavior for there to be any sort of cultural consensus about it. At what point does it become OK to film strangers? Whenever you want? If they’re breaking the law? Whose law? So the court remains in session, all day and all night, thanks to the miniaturization of recording devices.

It may seem hard to believe now, but at the dawn of this age, some people genuinely believed that the spread of cameras, microphones and whatever else into millions of hands could be a shield against surveillance.

This line of thinking was developed by a serial inventor and academic named Steve Mann. Sometimes called the father of wearable computing, Mann started designing portable tech as a child in the late 1960s, well before desktop computers were in widespread use. It was the Cold War, a paranoid era. Mann worked at a TV repair shop with a man who was fixated on bugs and wiretaps. And one of Mann's early inventions was a device that did what he called "meta-sensing" — sensing the sensors — something that's only become more important as these sensors proliferate. Toilets, urinals and faucets — he points out that these now have cameras in them to aid their operation. Low-resolution ones, but still. "All these things are watching us, and yet we can't see them," he explained in a TED Talk.

Mann proposed, as a countermeasure, “sousveillance” — from the French for “below.” The idea seems to have followed from his unusual hobby, rather than informing it. Pictures of him from the early days show a man carrying a computer on his back, with what looks like a periscope attached to his right eye. “Back in the '70s,” he said in another lecture, “people used to cross the street to avoid me.” His thinking sharpened as he’d enter places that were full of CCTV cameras — a consulate, say, or even a grocery store — but didn't allow photography. Mann found this hypocritical: Of course these places allowed photography, but only their own. Why should they alone be trusted with documentary evidence? Couldn't a fuller and more trustworthy record exist were it distributed among many different parties?

Mann believed that a society like this — a sousveillant society — would be less corrupt and ultimately less surveilled. “If everyone remembered (recorded) everything,” he wrote, “there would be little need for surveillance.”

This is the optimistic, open-source instinct that fueled so much online-native politics in the early years of this century, from Anonymous to Bitcoin. This tendency — distrustful of authority, disdainful of normies and, despite all this, extremely bullish on the idea that powerful and novel technologies might improve (or neutralize) the behavior of both — has a mixed track record. Hating normies and authority can quickly become reactionary, as we saw when the message board that birthed Anonymous, 4chan, curdled into the 4chan we know today; Bitcoin, rather than replacing fiat money, became a speculative instrument that spawned a million more speculative instruments, few even pretending at this point to have a real-world use.

In sousveillance, you can see some of the same promise and the same flaws. You could certainly argue that the ideology notched some victories in the '10s and beyond: Cellphone videos of police killings were arguably the most consequential pieces of media produced in that time span, and did meaningfully change how the police do their jobs — though ironically by creating a new form of surveillance. Most police officers have to turn on wearable video cameras of their own before doing much else. This doesn't seem to have reduced the total number of fatal police shootings. But in some jurisdictions, videos of other police encounters — say, an amusing drunken-driving arrest — can be retrieved through public records requests and then uploaded to YouTube, to be shown to millions of people, for fun and profit. Normies again, you could argue, but they have the same internet as the rest of us.

Lately, Americans of all political persuasions have been using the internet to band together — in a very different way — against a new form of surveillance: automated license plate readers, mainly those produced by an Atlanta-based company called Flock Safety. These A.I.-enabled cameras, usually identifiable by their solar panels, have sprung up all over the country in recent years. There are now more than 100,000 deployed across every state but Alaska. According to the company and its law enforcement clients, all the cameras do is passively track license plates, creating a way to flag stolen cars and missing people in real time, while leaving behind a record that can be used to piece together a criminal suspect's movements.

The cameras have been used to solve some serious crimes. In 2025, their ability to recognize cars by make and model helped the police in Providence, R.I., track down the Brown University shooter, who had switched out his license plates. They've also been abused: There have been dozens of cases of police officers either charged with or accused of using the plate readers to track girlfriends, exes, even people they're interested in. The false sense of certainty the new tech provides has also led the police to make boneheaded errors, arresting or drawing weapons on verifiably innocent people. But these one-off abuses are less of an issue than what the Flock cameras seem to represent to their opponents: a meaningful step toward the creation of a high-tech police state.

Any jurisdiction paying for Flock can simply retrieve its own data, but there's another, more alarming, option. The cameras also feed into a larger, searchable network that is made up of many jurisdictions' data and accessible only to those that choose to share their data with others. Most jurisdictions that use Flock cameras opt in. Such a network means that your movements could, in theory, be tracked without a warrant across much of the continental United States and Hawaii; even if the network is not being misused in this way by law enforcement now, it certainly could be in some dark future.

Flock, for its part, says that such a scenario is not possible. The default setting for data retention is just 30 days, though its customers can make it longer or shorter. (The company recently changed the default retention window to seven days.) Flock has also introduced safeguards to ensure the police are not using the search for extracurricular

Steve Mann in 1996 as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would walk around with these devices connected and transmitting to the internet.

purposes. (According to MIT Technology Review, these are easily circumvented.)

And besides, no one believes any of this. TikTok is awash in anger at, and conspiracy theories about, the cameras: They violate your Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search (very unclear); they are not being installed in Jewish neighborhoods (not true); the data will be fed to Palantir to create an A.I. police state (not yet, anyway).

Living in New York, it's tempting to find the concerns slightly quaint. We're quite accustomed to license plate readers, thanks to the sheer number of tolls we pay by A.L.P.R. for the privilege of driving into Manhattan gridlock. There are speed cameras all over the city, constantly reading license plates and occasionally sending me tickets. Plenty of New York drivers vandalize their own plates to evade speed cameras and tolls; I hardly think of them as freedom fighters. And the cameras have assisted in criminal investigations without turning New York into a totalitarian state. (Indeed, what many people notice is that police officers here spend an unusual amount of time seemingly distracted by their phones.)

But these Flock cameras are now towering over small towns where there are no Battery Tunnels and no congestion pricing, where going anywhere means using your car, where you can't blend into a crowd, and where these decisions were made with little or no public discussion. Instead they were revealed to the public on social media, by entrepreneurs battling for attention and sometimes even flogging products that supposedly counteract the cameras: laser pointers to overwhelm them, sensors to let you know if any sort of recording device is nearby.

But more consequentially, the anti-Flock mania has produced a crowdsourced map of A.L.P.R.s called DeFlock. And this seems to be aiding a rising wave of vandalism against the cameras. TikTokers now film themselves destroying the cameras or offer coy guides on how not to destroy them. There is, naturally, much that can go wrong: being caught by another A.L.P.R. on the way to or from the task, or being filmed by the Flock camera as you destroy it. And afterward, you might also decide to share documentary evidence of yourself committing a crime on the internet.

But the approach is strikingly different from Mann's, and seems to reflect a widespread, bipartisan pessimism about the future of technology and the powerful people it seems to serve. When paired with distrust in official narratives, this pessimism fuels spectacular backlashes. In this sense, the anti-Flock mania is more similar to the nascent movement against data centers than to a fight over civil liberties.

A movement against surveillance per se would have to contend with it in all its forms: not just A.L.P.R.s, but also the surveillance we do on one another — as well as the more imminent threat to our privacy, which is the enormous amount of information we've entrusted to the devices we use to amuse ourselves for hours a day. Sometimes by watching strangers canoodling on a park bench.

There's something faintly absurd about watching a TikTok about taking a buzz-saw to a license plate reader while staring directly into a device with a camera and a microphone and GPS and facial recognition technology and your credit card and your browsing history and your photographs and your entire social graph and nearly every message you've sent to anyone, ever, encrypted or otherwise. The paranoia feels almost comically displaced. Because if the state and Palantir and whoever else want to violate the Constitution and abuse novel technologies to track our every movement and ensnare us in a totalitarian police state, they don't need you to first get in your car and drive by the camera installed outside the Burger King. There's a much simpler way to do it. It might be in your pocket right now.

Lore (noun): a neat linguistic trick to turn everyday life into grand fantasy, and vice versa

It is often humiliating to know things. There is only so much room in a brain for facts, and it's easy to worry that the ones you have stored might be the wrong ones, that there's something more practical or intellectually weighty that you ought to be stashing away instead. Why, for instance, do I know the names of the guitar players in Train and Matchbox Twenty, while no amount of mnemonics can make the distinctive appearance of poison ivy stick in my memory? Toward the end of the 1960s, at the dawn of the information age, one of the most common names for the useless knowledge we absorb and often unwillingly retain every day became "trivia." The word wears a sheepish grin: It knows that the knowledge it names is, well, trivial. With its arch plural, "trivia" invites you to think of facts as shiny little baubles to collect.

In recent years, “trivia” has acquired a surprising challenger: “lore.” The particulars of the John F. Kennedy assassination have been described online as “J.F.K. lore.” The tragic origin story of Chuck E. Cheese, whose full middle name really is Entertainment and who grew up in St. Marinara’s Orphanage? That’s the “disturbing lore” behind the animatronic mouse. One Threads user wondered if there was “any good lore” about the Dave Matthews Band — and there is, such as, for example, the time its tour bus dumped some 800 pounds of human excrement into the Chicago River.

Where “trivia” was self-effacing, “lore” is epic, or at least mock-epic. It gives minor factoids the feeling of magical incantations, perhaps read off forbidden scrolls from a sorcerer’s library. Fittingly, “lore” is a very old word. It shares a Germanic root with “learn.” In Old English, lore was knowledge, anything that was taught or learned — facts, morals, doctrine. Early modern English retained this meaning. In “Paradise Lost,” lore is, among other things, the reasoned voice of good sense, tragically unheeded: after Milton’s Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, “Understanding rul’d not, and the Will / Heard not her lore.” Still, at the threshold of modernity, the word started to acquire an archaic mouthfeel. It became a word more suitable for talking about bygone days: "Grecian" or "Roman lore"; the "legendary lore" of the remote past. Faintly, almost imperceptibly, lore began to flicker somewhere between hard fact and mythic tale.

By the 1970s, fans of all things swords and sorcery had picked up on this faint air of the fantastical. Early editions of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons handbooks sketch a magical world that features “tomes of arcane lore” and legendary relics surrounded by a tissue of “rumors, tales and other lore.” Over the following decades, lore became a more capacious category, encompassing not just specific rumors and tales within a fantasy world but also the world’s whole constitutive mythology and history. “The fans demand lore,” wrote the author Cory Doctorow in 2024. That is, fans have come to expect back stories and explanations for every element of a story. And they will go to great lengths to find them.

On the internet, fans have created wikis and forums dedicated to compiling the lore behind everything from “Star Wars” to BTS’s music videos, tracking down every tossed-off detail about characters’ backgrounds and assembling timelines of canonical events. (Did you know that Darth Maul somehow didn’t die after being cut in half at the end of “The Phantom Menace”? Or that Emperor Palpatine’s first name is canonically Sheev?) The original scholarly meaning of “lore” flashes up in these collaborative efforts: far-flung researchers working together to assemble all the facts about a fictional world.

If “lore” is in part a word about treating fiction as a set of discoverable facts, it is also a word that imagines the hard facts of real life as part of a grand story. This quality has made the word remarkably well suited for social media, where self-disclosure is the currency of the realm. “Share a piece of lore about yourself,” goes one perennial prompt post on X, accompanied by a drawing of a smiling stick figure propped in front of a computer screen, ready to receive your gossip. The responses

LO

these kinds of posts elicit are not unlike the fun facts you might be prompted to share in an icebreaker activity, except they skew darker — one poster reports accidentally saying in a job interview that they had been “euthanized before,” instead of “anesthetized”; others share close brushes with actual death and disaster. Calling these unfun facts “lore” perhaps blunts the pain of the original experiences, rhetorically placing them in misty antiquity and sarcastically puffing them up into arcane secrets — fodder, in other words, for gossip and speculation.

These kinds of intense disclosures have taken on wonderful compound names. Sometimes they are called “lore drops” — a term that faintly echoes the “Q-drops” associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has its own particularly paranoid, fantastical lore. Other times an episode of oversharing is called a “lore dump” — just a semantic nudge away from “trauma dump.” “Lore,” one Urban Dictionary user wrote last year, “is a term for your past when it comes to something interesting that made you who you are, like trauma.” Personal lore is suffering redeemed and transformed into narrative.

And what could be more marketable? "Does your brand have lore?" asks Advertising Week. One of the trade journal's case studies in brand lore — "the accumulated stories, history and knowledge that make a world feel complete and make your place within it feel instinctive" — is the "Harry Potter"-themed sign for Platform 9 $^{3/4}$ at King's Cross Station, that portal between the world of magic and our humdrum one. It's a more fitting example than it might realize. "Lore" is a hinge word, a threshold word. Fiction passes through it and becomes tangible fact; facts pass through it and become part of a grand story. Its ultimate trick is to make knowledge not embarrassing or useless, but a form of dark magic.

Mitch Therieau is a writer and an assistant professor of English at West Virginia University. He often writes about literature, music and digital culture. Illustration by Benedikt Luft

Priya Parker Says Your Relationships Are Doomed Without Conflict

I don't know about you, but from personal relationships to work to politics, it sure seems to me there's more than enough conflict to go around. But in her new book, "The Art of Fighting," the conflict resolution facilitator Priya Parker argues that we could use more of it, and need to be a lot better at it. The book is a natural companion piece to Parker's previous work, "The Art of Gathering," in which she provided tools and examples for how communal activities can create closer and more cohesive bonds within social groups. She's doing much the same in "The Art of Fighting," but this time looking at ways in which intentional, thoughtful conflict can be a pathway to greater connection. She and I talked about that counterintuitive idea and how to deal with some common workplace and family conflicts.

"The Art of Gathering" was all about healthy group activity. The new book is about conflict. It's hard not to wonder if that suggests something grim about the trajectory of the world. So why did you feel compelled to write the new book? I am deeply interested in human connection, and as a conflict resolution facilitator, I saw that in so many of the organizations and families that I work with, and so many of the friend groups that I am a part of or see, they're often falling apart because they're afraid to fight. When conflict arises, organizations and friend groups basically oscillate between unhealthy peace — conflict aversion, avoidance, pretending everything's fine — and unhealthy conflict, which is escalation or domination or abuse. I wrote "The Art of Fighting" to say: Look, this is a deeply important part of all group life, of all of our relationships, and we're not taught how to do it well. It's not immoral, it's not toxic. Conflict is the way we figure out who we are and how we negotiate to be part of common life together. You used the term "unhealthy peace," which could feel like an oxymoron, because what's unhealthy about peace? Can you explain what you mean? I'll start with a personal story. I'm half Indian, half white American, and both of my parents are very conflict-averse. When my parents separated and then divorced, everyone was shocked because they never fought. So I learned from a young age that there's great loss in avoidance. I'm actually a third-generation conflict-avoidant person. When heat rises, we just stick our head in the sand and hope it will pass. And unhealthy peace is the idea that if we just pretend this conflict is not there, if we just shove it under the rug, everything will be fine. But actually, when we don't have meaningful conversations, the relationship can end. Often you hear in the culture, "It's not my labor," "It's not my burden," "There's too much baggage" — as if friends are supposed to just be fun. But because we're so conflict-averse, we exit before we're actually willing to engage. Our communities and our families are fracturing, in part because we're not taught the skills of how to have those fights.

What's the most common workplace conflict that you're asked to help resolve? One of the most common problems that people come to me for is: "Our team is too polite. We have this norm of almost toxic politeness, and it's blocking us from having the really important conversations about what should go in our product or why do our customers hate our product." So one of the most common sets of problems that companies come to me for is to help them become more conflict-competent. I think it's a huge misunderstanding to think that we have too much conflict right now. We actually have too little.

Which sounds crazy. It sounds crazy, but there is something between war and peace, which is what I call “healthy heat.” Healthy heat is at the center of all meaningful relationships. Part of what I do is help teams get more comfortable with heat. I’ll give an example: One of the things that we do is we have companies or teams host a “hot takes” party, basically practicing prosocial conflict. They’re laughing, they’re arguing, they are finding they’re allowed to be disgusted with each other about stuff that doesn’t actually matter. They start normalizing fighting with each other, and low-stakes arguing is actually preparation for high-stakes arguing.

What is the role of compromise in conflict? Because when I think back through my career, there have been moments when, rather than engage in conflict, I've compromised — even in situations where I didn't think the compromise was ever going to lead to a better outcome. I just thought, I don't want to deal with it. But do you want to be in relationship with that person? Well, at the risk of losing my job, probably. [Laughs] Great!

But how can we manage situations so that we reduce conflict, but also not feel like we're just settling for compromises? I mean, compromise is part of life. So much of human engagement is deciding what your intent is and what you want that relationship to be. My father is a white man from Waterloo, Iowa. He's conservative, he's Republican, he's an evangelical Christian. He is deeply important to me, and a huge part of our relationship over the years is finding out which conversations are not helpful, and where and how do we have meaningful, rich conversation and interaction and joy despite our differences? Any meaningful relationship over time has difference in it, and part of the ability to have compromise is to say, "I'm not going to win every battle, but I can live with this." Compromise is a really important part of any type of relationship or team.

I made a flippant joke about not wanting to get fired, but there's a truth in there, which is that there are power imbalances in conflicts. This is something that shows up in work conflict all the time. So what limits do power imbalances put on conflict resolution? And how can the person with less power try to manage that imbalance? Power exists in every relationship, and in organizations hierarchy exists. And hierarchy is super helpful, right?

Sometimes. [Laughs] My most challenging situations are when a person doesn't recognize their power. Often when I work with managers, one of the sets of coaching that we do is helping them understand that they have disproportionate power and it's not the same relationship as if they're arguing with their brother or their wife. That they have institutional power over the person and it's a different interaction because you can fire the person. So a lot of our work is with the people with more power, to use their power well. Organizations get in a lot of trouble when people with power don't think they have power.

Do you have a sense that your ideas about conflict resolution work when extended to conflict between political groups? We have examples of conflict in our politics that are deeply unhealthy, and I also have examples that are starting to look more healthy. There's a huge conflict right now happening within the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democrats, right? The D.S.A. are like the jilted lovers of the Democrats. They're saying, "I wish you could see the world we think can exist." Part of that fighting is tapping into what the conflict resolution facilitator Sethu Nair calls "relational longing." In all types of political conflict, tapping into that relational longing is a way to actually widen the tent. But even across political divides, when you bring people into the same room or when they have a shared community that often isn't even about politics — it might be their kickball club, their trivia night — having a second identity that they're able to come together around expands their ability to be in community with each other across political differences.

But one of the big questions at the moment is how much do some of those groups that are in conflict want to be in relationship? I agree, and I think one of the deepest dangers in our country is that we've fallen out of love with each other. When you no longer have relational longing, you just leave. When I work with organizations, with churches, one of the things that I tell leaders is to find and cultivate that relational longing, that residual desire to still want to be in community with each other. Families, particularly across political divides — which are many families in this country — still have a residual desire for one another. When we fall out of love with one another, that's a dangerous place to be. You know, I was intrigued by the way you described yourself as a conflict-averse person earlier. How does your own conflict aversion show up in your life? When I am in a tense situation with somebody that I love — my husband, my children, my friends — my palms get super sweaty, my heart starts palpitating. Sometimes, in a really good fight, I'll feel slightly faint. And I have come to realize that all fighting is physical. The physicality of what actually happens in our bodies deeply affects our ability to fight or stay. So I'm still physically conflict-averse. As a facilitator, but also in my own life, I have very simple practices to just notice this is happening, to breathe, to not exit.

But what advice do you have for people about how to mentally and cognitively deal with conflict aversion? Because it's one thing to not flee. It's another to be able to have a productive conflict. It's to reframe conflict as an investment in the person. I do this in my own household. When my husband and I start arguing, if my children happen to be in the room, I will look at them and say: "It's OK that we're fighting. We're arguing because we love each other. This is an important conversation." I'm kind of saying it as much to them as I am to myself. We tend to think of conflict as antagonistic, but conflict can actually be incredibly prosocial. So, very simply, it's checking in and saying, Do I care about this relationship? And counterintuitively, if I do, let me get in there.

When you're in a fight with your husband, does he ever say, "Stop doing techniques on me"? Of course! [Laughs] "Don't facilitate me!" My husband is very comfortable with conflict. I've learned a lot from him. It can be very frustrating because I know what the tools are, but we're not always using them. When I am in a fight with my husband, I'm the wife. I can't be a facilitator.

Can you share a conflict in your life that you're working on right now? Oh my god, so many. When you're a parent, there are conflicts all over the place. I have an 8- and 11-year-old. When my children are with their peer set and something happens between two kids, as is totally normal, when and how to pick up the phone and call the other parent, or when to just let it wash out — that's a really deep conflict within and across parent communities. How much do you let kids sort it out, and how much is it our job to get in there and give them some skills? I do this with my own children in normalizing apology. When they do something to hurt or annoy one another, I help them practice a full apology, to articulate what it is that they did and not say, "I'm sorry you were offended." Then, on the receiving side, instead of saying, "It's OK," I invite them to say, "Thank you," because it's actually quite vulnerable to admit that someone affected you. We are so averse to apologizing, we're not taught how to, and we're averse to even knowing how to accept someone's apology. It's a huge problem with daily group life.

It really is amazing how some people just will not apologize or admit wrongdoing. Entire families and teams get incredibly stuck when we don't have the tools and skills to apologize. If you are unwilling or unable to admit that you were ever wrong, it creates this huge distortion within the entire group. One of the simplest ways to get a group unstuck is people articulating the elements that have hurt them or annoyed them and the other person practicing listening and accepting.

Earlier I brought up the idea of how we might reduce conflict in ways that don't feel like we're just compromising. And you gave this example of your relationship with your dad and how you decided that it was best for you to not talk about your political differences. How is that different than just avoiding the conflict? There was a study done that looked at how important political identities were to Americans. Over the last 10 years, particularly with the election of Donald Trump, that identity has moved way up the ladder in terms of importance. The Christian theologian Joyce Ann Mercer wrote this great essay about how she and her family used to be able to tease each other and engage in these conversations across the political aisle. And over the last four years, the vibe was off, getting closer and closer to disgust and having different moral worlds. She said when you have a relationship in which you want to maintain ties for any reason, and there is a line around which, if you enter, you're not going to be able to come back from, she encourages engaging in strategic conflict avoidance. As I read that essay, it helped me understand the many decades-long conversations that I've had with my father. At some level it's not actually avoidance if you've had every conversation over and over again and realize you're not going to change this person but you still want to be in relationship with them. One of the things that I found, both in my own relationship with my father but also as I'm looking at the country, is to grow the warmth between the people that you love. Have fun together, and remember all the different reasons you love one another.

I am a Dunkin' person. There is no brand more synonymous with my hometown, Boston. As with the Citgo sign that glows near Fenway Park, a mass-market coffee chain may be an odd thing for a city to stake its identity on, but that's Boston for you. The unfussy cups and bags and Boxes O' Joe, even the bad lighting and sometimes baffling décor in its franchises — all this has long inspired in me a kind of weary affection, a comforting normalcy.

But change has been afoot for some time. In the last decade, the beloved Massachusetts-based institution changed its name (no more Donuts), started leaning into merch (including a personalized satin sleep set) and revamped its too-good-to-be-true rewards program (causing a Boston Globe columnist to jokingly call for regulating the program statewide, like a utility). And now, Dunkin' doesn't even seem to be a purveyor of coffee anymore. Of course,

I'm not rich, but I will be getting this drink every day until they take it off the menu

The odd new drinks of a beloved coffee chain reveal a lot about how the attention economy works.

POUR ONE OUT

Vanilla Pink Cloud Latte

supposed to be French vanilla with a strawberry cold foam

you can still get a coffee — or a big iced latte or a cold brew with three pumps of liquid sugar — and I often do. But look up at the backlit menu at your local Dunkin'. Instead of photos of coffee, the drinks on display are increasingly bright pink, electric orange and shades of green that certainly don't exist in nature.

Here are some drinks available at Dunkin' this summer: Pink Lemon Drop Suncloud Lemonade, Watermelon Lime Dunkin' Zero, Fluffernutter Coffee Chiller, Pink Mango Daydream Refresher (the line of fruity "refreshers" seems to live somewhere between tea and soda), Tiramisu Iced Protein Latte, Mango Protein Refresher, Strawberry Cloud Matcha and Strawberry Dragonfruit Refresher With Marshmallow Cold Foam. Some are uncaffeinated, and some chock-full of caffeine, but none are what I would consider, in the traditional sense, coffee. They are also so odd and avant-garde-sounding that they make even Starbucks' infamous Pumpkin Spice Latte sound quaint.

These feel like drinks designed for TikTok and Instagram reels. They are hyperstimulating, both to our taste buds and our eyeballs. They are encountered visually, first and foremost — eye candy. This trend toward colorful, caffeinated non-coffee drinks is not exclusive to Dunkin', though the chain is clearly taking one of the most adventurous color palettes and creative approaches to naming. Look at food and beverage franchises everywhere: While Starbucks was one of the first to add "Refreshers" and then later "Spritzes," now seemingly every coffee shop or fast-food place has "fresh fruit lattes" and "yuzu caramel matchas" and "peach cobbler lattes." The bright colors replicate, one after another, on your screen.

So now even plain old Dunkin' is saying in news releases that it wants "to serve pink this summer," as if "pink" were a food rather than a color. That's fitting, because these drinks are showing up in what we call our feeds, the endless scroll of short-form video that never really nourishes us. The image we see over and over is a young woman in the front seat of her car, holding up a massive colorful beverage. "This is so pretty," she intones over pink foam. "I haven't tried it yet."

What's more, Dunkin' is cross-pollinating with TikTok-popular brands and trends directly. It collaborated with the movie "Wicked: For Good" for green and pink drinks in November, and this summer, it introduced three fuchsia-to-pastel drinks with Kylie Jenner for the King Kylie™ Collection, as well as a Daydream Refresher with the Gen Z clothing brand Parke. These are "limited-time offers," which gin up hype on social media. ("I'm not rich, but I will be getting this every day until they take it off the menu," one

The image we see over and over on our social media feeds is a young woman holding up a massive colorful beverage.

woman on TikTok tells us, sipping on an indigo-purple, now-unavailable Starlight Lemonade.)

There are certainly offline reasons that Dunkin' could be hawking Suncloud Lemonade With Marshmallow Foam. The economics of coffee are tough, especially in this era of inflation. For a daily coffee drinker, it might be easier to justify \$5.49 (the price at my local shop) for a purple novelty than \$4.69 for a large iced coffee you could make at home. These new drinks — some caffeinated with green tea, some uncaffeinated but shot through with sugar — activate what industry types call “the afternoon market,” or what I call the “weird post-coffee hours when you’re still working and want a little something.” Energy drinks like Celsius are also popular; we simply have more ways to amp ourselves up these days.

But the additions to the Dunkin' menu seem, above all else, to demonstrate how even a simple coffee shop can't not be involved in the attention economy anymore. It has to surprise, even shock. Drinks aren't drinks — they're also content.

And the content-making changes the character of the place. It was the original no-frills identity of Dunkin' that made it so beloved; that identity became fodder for a "Saturday Night Live" skit about a certain type of Boston guy and the butt of loving jokes and a metonym for New England. Now, gone is its image as the sort of establishment where Ben Affleck's character in "The Town" might go get a black iced coffee after leaving his day job at Boston Sand & Gravel. (A rep for Affleck, a dedicated drinker of Dunkin' coffee and sometime face of the brand, did not make him available for comment on these developments.) Gone is the brand I associated with home. Its new region is the World Wide Web.

It reminds me of what happened with Stanley, a steel-cup manufacturer that has been around since 1913. Stanley made serviceable cups liked by specific people, mostly men in the Pacific Northwest with an interest in the outdoors. Then in 2023, the company released its first celebrity collaboration with a country singer, which went viral; its limited-edition pink cup later that year ignited an extreme shopping frenzy. Soon, Stanley was releasing cups with names like Balsam Glow and Nightfall Gloss Deco. There, too, novelty replaced normalcy. And the aesthetics trended in the same direction as they have at Dunkin' — toward sparkly, colorful and eye-catching. The hype cycle of the internet seems to push everything toward the highest level of visual dazzle. And so it all starts to look the same, and nothing shines.

Sophie Haigney is working on a book about our obsession with collecting objects, from priceless fossils to plastic Power Rangers.

My Sister Has Gone No-Contact With Our Parents. Do I Have To Choose Sides?

I am one of four adult sisters. Over the years, each of us has developed a somewhat strained relationship with our parents, though to varying degrees.

Our parents provided for us materially and were not abusive. Looking back, however, I think there may have been some emotional neglect. Whether that is the root cause or part of a broader pattern, my sisters and I have grown quite different from our parents in our values and outlook. We disagree on politics, religion, abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, money and much else. I remain cordial with my parents, but we are not particularly close.

One of my sisters has gone much further and decided to have no contact with them. She has a young daughter, my parents' only grandchild. The estrangement has been deeply painful for my parents, who frequently ask what they can do to repair the relationship. My sister, meanwhile, is firm in her decision and wants support from others rather than pressure to reconcile.

I find myself caught in the middle. I care about everyone involved. I sympathize with my parents' sadness and confusion, but I also respect my sister's right to set boundaries and decide whom she has relationships with. I do not want to become a mediator or messenger, yet the two sides seem to look to me for guidance.

What obligations, if any, do I have here? Is it ethical simply to maintain separate relationships with each side? Or do I owe something more to my parents, my sister or my niece because I may be one of the few remaining connections among them? How should I balance compassion for my grieving parents with respect for my sister's autonomy? — Name Withheld

I'm sorry you find yourself in this situation. Family estrangement of the sort you describe has become sadly familiar over the past decade or so. The strategy of severing all ties with one's parents has been encouraged by certain high-profile therapists, and now Reddit, TikTok and Facebook bristle with supportive “estranged adult child” testimonials and tips. Nor is the therapeutic context accidental: The therapist's professional obligations are primarily directed toward the client, rather than toward other people in the client's life. A family friend who knows everyone involved may have sympathy for the parents as well as the child; the parents, however flawed, are fully real to that person.

It's not that most therapists encourage all-or-nothing approaches to family ties. Far from it. But, to paint with a broad brush, therapeutic culture has tended to expand, sometimes recklessly, what qualifies as abuse or harm. In an earlier era, the complete severing of family ties seemed to be justified only by extreme circumstances, such as physical or sexual abuse, severe addiction and the like. Today the adult child going no-contact may speak of not feeling “seen” or of parents who weren’t “emotionally present,” failed to “respect boundaries” or were “controlling.” Sometimes the grounds — “narcissistic abuse,” some generalized “toxicity” — sound alarming but are so amorphous that they can be neither refuted nor verified. All these complaints can arise from genuinely damaging relationships. They can also describe ordinary parental shortcomings.

To be clear, nobody is required to remain in a seriously abusive relationship just because the abuser is a parent. But we should pause at the premise that

BONUS ADVICE FROM JUDGE JOHN HODGMAN

Sheena writes: My fiancé and I were road tripping from North Carolina to Montreal when we stopped at Ben & Jerry's in Vermont. The parking lot was full, except for four E.V. charging spots. I pulled into one, though we don't have an electric car. My fiancé said it was wrong to park there. But I saw at least one E.V. parked in a regular spot. Who's right?

How would you feel if you were driving on fumes, only to find all the gas pumps blocked by parked cars, abandoned while their owners buy beef jerky inside the station? The answer is: You'd feel like you were in New England, where this is pretty normal. But it's wrong, just like you. In fact, parking in an E.V. spot without charging is illegal. Not just in Vermont, either. Will you actually be ticketed? Maybe not. The civic ethos of "Screw the rules, I want my ice cream" has pretty much replaced our Constitution at this point (at least south of Montreal, where I bet they spot your American plates and tow you tout de suite).

John Hodgman is the host of the "Judge John Hodgman" podcast.

total, you're-dead-to-me estrangement (not just keeping your distance) is justified simply because continued contact makes someone less happy. A familiar "Cat's in the Cradle" asymmetry may help explain why the adult child tends to be the one to sever ties and the aging parent the one to lament it; for the adult child, the relationship may no longer be central in the way that it typically remains for the parent. "I need to choose myself," "I need to protect my peace": However sincere, these sentiments can coexist with less edifying, more punitive ones. Parental suffering isn't necessarily a regrettable side effect. In some cases, it's part of the point.

All of which puts you in a difficult position. If you don't want to be a mediator, that's your prerogative. A therapist might even say it's wise. But you do need to tell your sister and your parents that this is your stance. Make sure everybody involved understands that you respect your sister's right to her decision and have compassion for your parents' suffering. You're not going to campaign for reconciliation or carry messages between them. Nor should you pretend that you think your sister's decision was justified.

Still, I'm not a therapist, and I'm inclined to think your parents' grief should be given weight alongside your sister's grievance. So I don't believe you would be out of order to ask, just once, if they would all be willing to meet with a family counselor. The counselor could help them decide whether it would help to include you. If so, your participation might assist people you love in reaching some kind of resolution with one another. I say might. I should confess that I'm not optimistic. No-contact culture has developed deft rejoinders to almost every effort at reconciliation. All the same, you have to live with this estrangement, too, and some of the pain it has caused is yours.

There is a woman in our mahjong group of 15 who is now nearly blind and a very slow player. She uses accommodations, such as a card with large print, oversized tiles and a magnifying glass with a light. We've all been together for years, but the situation is worsening. Despite these accommodations, she remains agonizingly slow. Her table plays half as many games as the others. Many members refuse to play with her or complain privately afterward. How do we gently tell her she is no longer welcome? We're kind people; no one wants to hurt her, but we play to relax and challenge ourselves, and this situation no longer allows that.

— Name Withheld

A villager puts his infirm father into a basket and starts dragging him off with the intention of abandoning him in the woods. The man's young son asks him to bring the basket back: "That way, I'll have it at hand when it's time to drag you off." The man is chastened and reverses course.

Such tales are found throughout Asia and beyond. My point, of course, is that the agonizingly slow woman may be you, some years hence. To be sure, mahjong is meant to be fun, and that requires proceeding at a reasonable pace. It's clearly a problem that your friend is so slow. But the respectful way to address it isn't to

To submit a query: Send an email to ethicist@nytimes.com. Want The Ethicist directly in your inbox? Subscribe to our newsletter at nytimes.com/ethicist.

complain behind her back or conspire to eject her; it's to talk with her. Treat her, in short, as you would want to be treated should you find yourself in her position.

She is presumably coming along, like all of you, for the company as well as the game. You could agree on a time limit for turns, with the understanding that she may sometimes have to sit out the rest of a hand. Other compromises may suggest themselves: Some evenings could allow for slower play; one table could agree to play fewer games; she may have ideas for further accommodations herself. Any workable arrangement, though, begins with being honest with her about the situation. And someday you may be glad that nobody was too quick to reach for the basket.

North Truro (Pink Clouds), 2026, 24 x 38 inches, oil on canvas.

Mitchell Johnson Twenty-One Years in Truro

Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Cape Cod

September 8–20, 2026

Private preview by appointment on September 6 and 7

PARTY CRASHERS MODERATES SEE SOCIALISTS ASA THREAT TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. SOCIALISTS AGREE. By Charles Homans

By Charles Homans Photo illustration by Lisa Sheehan

IT

was the Democratic Party's “Summer of Socialism,” as an email from the Republican National Committee cheerfully called it that morning, and Ashik Siddique, a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, was standing on a chair outside a bar, rallying the comrades.

“Zohran's race is a big proof of concept,” Siddique told the crowd, which had gathered in Chicago on the last day of July for a D.S.A. organizing summit. Many of the hundred or so members assembled around him had volunteered for the campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected New York City mayor and D.S.A. stalwart. “We can scale that up all over the country over the next year and a half,” Siddique said.

The D.S.A. is not generally an organization of outsize personalities; its leaders tend to exude a self-effacing, slightly dorky enthusiasm. As Siddique, a 38-year-old former environmental organizer from New York, mustered the troops on the bar patio, he resembled the lead volunteer at a particularly enthusiastic Sunday-afternoon park cleanup event, pointing people to the spare rakes and garbage bags, and not the leader of an organization that was presiding over what has been arguably the most remarkable season in the history of American socialism.

As recently as 2011, socialism was so taboo in the United States that PolitiFact could observe, uncontroversially, that “the S-word is overwhelmingly considered a toxic label in American politics.” But since Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run, and even more so since Mamdani’s mayoral win last year, this has changed significantly.

This July, a CNN poll found that a full third of Democratic and Democratic-leaning adults identify themselves as democratic socialists. And they are voting like it.

D.S.A.-backed candidates have won five congressional primaries since June for solidly Democratic seats in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver — two of them upsets of long-serving incumbents. A D.S.A.e.r is poised to be the next mayor of Washington. Another is in a runoff for mayor of Los Angeles.

The narrow loss this month of Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist candidate for governor running in Wisconsin's Democratic primary with local D.S.A. chapters' endorsements, disappointed many on the left. But it was also a signal about the potency of new socialist politics: Even without the backing of national D.S.A. leaders and politicians, her campaign came within a few thousand votes of beating a rival enthusiastically supported by the state's Democratic governor.

In 2015, the D.S.A., the largest socialist organization in the country (though not a political party), could claim fewer than 7,000 members, most of them inactive. In early July, Siddique announced, the group had reached 120,000 members, making it larger than any organized socialist movement in American history — even in the early-20th-century heyday of the Socialist Party of America.

"I try not to be a superstitious person, looking for omens or signals," Siddique went on, "but the day we hit 120,000 members, surpassing the historic Socialist Party, was the Fourth of July."

“U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” someone shouted. The comrades chanted along for a few beats, then trailed off into slightly uncomfortable laughter.

It has been a little less than a decade since supporters of Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign dusted off the D.S.A., a minor heirloom from a long-gone era of the American left, and refashioned it as a vehicle for taking on what they viewed as a complacent and compromised Democratic establishment. Since then, that establishment has observed the D.S.A. with wary curiosity, like an oil tanker captain squinting through binoculars at a band of pirates approaching from a great distance on a slow and iffy-looking fishing pontoon.

“Yes, you had the A.O.C. victory” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset in a New York congressional race — “and some other Squad stuff, but the D.S.A. really wasn’t, you know, a major player,” Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, told me. But the organization’s winning streak, starting with Mamdani, has snapped the Democratic Party to attention. Those who oppose the D.S.A., Representative Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Long Island, told me, “have been wringing our hands at cocktail parties. Nobody’s been getting organized. And we have to get organized.”

Some prominent liberal Democrats have argued for welcoming democratic socialists and pursuing “addition, not subtraction,” as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California told a podcaster in July. But moderates maintain that there can be no compromise with a movement whose national platform calls for abolishing prisons and the United States Senate, and which frankly views the Democratic Party not as a coalitional partner but as a means to an end.

Cowan likens the D.S.A. to Trump's MAGA movement: an insurrection that Republicans first dismissed, then accommodated and finally were devoured by. "They pose, in my view, a mortal threat to the Democratic Party," he told me.

Third Way, which spent heavily against Sanders's campaigns in 2016 and 2020, announced in

August that it would invest \$15 million in a project to counter the D.S.A.'s rise. Otherwise, Cowan fears, a D.S.A.-aligned candidate like Ocasio-Cortez could mount a credible challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028: "a reprise of Bernie 2016, 2020, but successfully this time."

On this, many socialists agree. “Zohran’s campaign showed us the power that we have — and the power people have come here to take,” Diana Moreno, a D.S.A. assemblywoman from Queens, told me at the bar in Chicago, where a contingent of D.S.A.ers had gathered to discuss how to organize for an Ocasio-Cortez presidential run. “Now, it’s like, we’re heading for the moon, baby!”

On one level, the D.S.A.'s appeal in a guillotine-curious moment in American politics is obvious enough. "People really don't like Donald Trump, according to the polls, and they really don't like the Democratic Party," John Nichols, executive editor of The Nation and co-author of a book with Sanders, told me. "D.S.A. comes along and says: 'We're different. We don't like Trump, and we're not particularly satisfied with the Democratic Party.'"

The D.S.A.'s membership amounts to less than 0.3 percent of registered Democrats, and its wins, even this year, fall far short of recent right-wing upheavals like MAGA and the Tea Party. But like those movements, the D.S.A. is a sort of black light illuminating the failures of the party it has taken as a host.

It has produced talents like Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani at a time when Democratic leaders' approval ratings, and the party's, are dismally underwater. Its politicians have won voters on issues like data-center construction and the war in Gaza, where more mainstream Democrats have been slow to grasp major shifts in the electorate or are paralyzed by the commitments of the party's donor class and interest groups. Its grass-roots volunteers have helped the organization's candidates beat much better-funded rivals and at times promoted simpatico (if not socialist) progressives like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan's Senate race.

But the D.S.A. is also a movement with no demonstrated ability to expand the Democratic majorities it would need to implement even the most modest elements of its platform in a country where 57 percent of people, according to a Gallup Poll last August, still view socialism negatively. The internal factions that have gathered under its capacious definition of democratic socialism — “a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods and society” — range from slightly left of progressive to outright communist, and they are deeply divided on whether working within Democratic politics is even a desirable strategy, or rather a betrayal of the full revolutionary promise of their movement.

Its leaders view a presidential run by a popular D.S.A. politician with excitement but also trepidation. "There are people who feel like it would force a crisis and potentially help destroy our organization," Siddique told me, "because we couldn't deal with the contradictions."

On an evening in early July, a couple of hundred New York socialists descended on a bar in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood on the frontier of the Brooklyn and Queens districts known as the Commie Corridor, where the D.S.A. gained one of its first significant beachheads in Democratic politics in the late 2010s. At the bar, the wine was orange, the beer was Narragansett and the arak was Palestinian.

“Chelsea!” someone called out. I turned to see a newly arrived Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who served seven years in prison for leaking classified military and diplomatic files to Julian Assange, exchanging hugs with other guests. Manning has lately become a fixture of the New York D.S.A. chapter’s parties, where she occasionally plays D.J.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, at the group's organizing summit in Chicago this summer.

The party that night was a fund-raiser hosted by the influential socialist podcaster Daniel Denvir, along with a number of prominent New York D.S.A. activists and politicians, for David Morales, a socialist candidate for mayor in Providence, R.I.

The terroir of the D.S.A. varies from city to city. Events hosted by N.Y.C.-D.S.A., by far the organization's largest chapter, feel like parties for a fashionable new literary journal, heavy on writer types with stick-and-poke tattoos and Ivy League diplomas stashed in Bushwick closets. Some of the bigger Midwestern chapters are more of a bartenders-and-bike-mechanics scene, while elsewhere there are strong notes of the intense left-liberal online fervor of 2020 — a boom year in D.S.A. recruitment — embodied by the social workers and librarians who are still on Bluesky yelling at people to wear masks. (In order to attend the Chicago summit, I was asked, for the first time in years, to submit proof of a negative Covid test.)

All of these subcultures are consistent with the findings of the D.S.A.'s last member survey, in 2021, whose respondents were by their own account overwhelmingly white, college-educated and urban. This is not a portrait of the working class the D.S.A. professes to champion — though the many critics who have noted this tend to misunderstand the D.S.A.'s project. The group seeks less to capture the working class, as it is usually understood in American politics, than to redefine it.

Its dream is a country where enviably paid union autoworkers, marginally employed immigrant Uber drivers, downwardly mobile graduate students and even comfortably middle-class professionals whose fortunes are more precarious than their parents' are united by shared aspirations (health care, affordable housing), a shared view of who is standing in the way of them (billionaires, landlords, imperialists) and at least a bumper-sticker-level agreement about what is to be done. (Tax the rich. Abolish ICE. Free Palestine.)

Observed at close range, however, the D.S.A. feels less like a class expression than a cultural one. Offline communities built around shared interests — the sort once found in bowling alleys, all-ages punk-rock venues, church basements or radical bookstores — are rare now, and D.S.A. chapters fill this role. They offer not just a different politics but a different model for what participating in politics means. Chapter operations are heavily D.I.Y. affairs, which adds a giddy unreality to their victories, as if a group of college friends started a record label in their dorm room and somehow ended up using it to unseat an eight-term congressman. “It becomes a thing that you do to meet your friends — and to make friends,” Shua Sanchez, a 36-year-old organizer with the Milwaukee chapter, told me.

Even Democratic strategists who are wary of the group's growing influence in the party grant that they have figured out something that the mainstream of the party now struggles to organically produce. “They're real civic engagement,” said Adam Jentleson, a former staff member of Harry Reid's and John Fetterman's and president of the Searchlight Institute, a new Democratic think tank that is trying to drag the party away from the cultural politics of the 2020 era. “We don't have Elks Clubs anymore. We don't have union halls anymore, really. But we have these 50 people in a room discussing Robert's Rules of Order. We shouldn't let them determine the direction of the party, but we shouldn't chase them out of the tent.”

There are recent antecedents to this in left-liberal politics — and not just the 2016 Sanders campaign.

More than one D.S.A. er confided to me that their formative experience with grass-roots politics was the conventionally liberal 2008 candidacy of Barack Obama, whose two million volunteers, organized through Obama for America, propelled his campaign from long shot to the White House. Many Obama volunteers felt they were building a progressive force bigger than his presidency and were disappointed when Obama's advisers shunted the volunteers off into the Democratic National Committee as a highly managed cheerleading operation for his administration.

“I knocked doors for Obama!” Sanchez, the Milwaukee D.S.A. organizer, told me. “And they never asked me to do anything again after that.” Megan Romer, the D.S.A.’s other national co-chair, who phone-banked for Obama in 2008, said that for the D.S.A., the experience had been “instructive”: “Like, how did that get dissolved? How did that get co-opted? Because there was organic energy.”

Renée Paradis, an election lawyer and a onetime progressive Democrat, also worked for Obama's campaign, in 2008, and joined the D.S.A. immediately after Trump's inauguration in 2017. "I was like, This elite theory of change is just absolutely inadequate to this problem," she told me at the Brooklyn party.

Paradis worked on Ocasio-Cortez's 2018 campaign, which more than any other introduced the political and media class to the D.S.A. The group's organizers, however, generally regard Mamdani's election last fall as more significant. "What's different about Zohran," Denvir, the podcast host, told me, "is that Zohran is a cadre member of N.Y.C.-D.S.A." Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, who joined the organization around the time she started running for Congress, Mamdani spent years volunteering for and managing campaigns for other D.S.A. candidates before he ran himself.

An afterparty on the opening night of the D.S.A.'s organizing summit.

Mamdani demonstrated his commitment after arriving in Gracie Mansion with his endorsements in New York's congressional races, backing two D.S.A.-endorsed candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who won their primaries and will almost certainly win seats in November. This was a vision of an organization that didn't just endorse politicians but produced them organically from its own rank and file, turning out candidates who saw themselves as part of its ongoing project.

"This would be really a foolish, silly, vain project if we just elected socialists for the sake of it," Julia Salazar, a D.S.A. state senator, told the crowd in Brooklyn. "We elect socialists to build this movement, to build power together."

"It feels like a moment of immense possibility," Paradis, the election lawyer, told me. On this point, though, the D.S.A. was not entirely unified. As we talked, she was checking her phone. On social media, Rhode Island D.S.A. ers were fuming at the New Yorkers for participating in a fund-raiser for Morales, whom the state chapter refused to endorse. Although Morales was a socialist, the chapter was led by hard-liners who unendorsed him three years earlier for voting to re-elect the Democratic state house speaker.

These conflicts are not uncommon in the D.S.A. Decision making in the organization resides mostly at the level of its often fractious local chapters. The more moderate of those chapters, like New

York, in turn sometimes find themselves at odds with the national organization, where more radical elements often have a loud voice.

For instance, although Ocasio-Cortez is endorsed by the New York chapter, the national D.S.A. has recently withheld its endorsement over what it views as insufficient commitment to several aspects of the D.S.A.'s program. The two national co-chairs are actively divided over her future. Siddique is involved in efforts to draft her for the 2028 presidential race, but Romer told me she is "a little bit skeptical of how committed A.O.C. is to D.S.A."

These disagreements are partly structural and partly historical. The D.S.A. is an organization whose membership has mostly arrived in the heat of political crises and then has had to figure out what, exactly, they are doing together.

The D.S.A. was founded in 1982 by Michael Harrington, an influential midcentury public intellectual and activist who organized alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote a book, “The Other America,” that inspired the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty.” Harrington, who died in 1989, was also the heir to the legacy of organized socialism in the United States — although at the time of his inheritance, there was not much left of it.

The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901, was a prominent force in the early 20th century, fusing the agrarian populism that rose up in opposition to the inequality and corruption of the Gilded Age with radical elements of the labor movement and new Marxist thinking from Europe. Its membership included figures like Jack London,

Helen Keller and W.E.B. Du Bois. At various points in the 1900s and 1910s, Socialists held seats in state legislatures, as well as the administrations of more than 30 towns and cities from New York to North Dakota to California.

When Eugene V. Debs ran as the Socialist candidate for president in 1912, he won 6 percent of the vote. Socialists saw his campaign as the beginning of an ascent. In fact, it was the peak. The party's opposition to American involvement in World War I led to some of its leaders being prosecuted by the Woodrow Wilson administration following passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts. When Debs ran for president again in 1920, it was from prison.

But the Socialist Party also fell victim to more prosaic, and often self-inflicted, misfortunes. Few of its politicians elected during the boom years managed to stay in office for more than one term. The party fell into an acrimonious factional struggle — then as now, a chronic left-wing habit — and in the 1920s, it lost much of its membership to the new American Communist Party, which was both more radical and better organized.

The socialists' most popular ideas, meanwhile, were co-opted by progressive politicians, most fatefully Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal took an economic agenda that democratic socialists advanced in other countries and packaged it as Democratic policy. After the New Deal, the Democratic Party became the hegemonic power in American politics. The Socialist Party became a footnote.

By the time Harrington became chairman in 1968, the Socialists were a party in name only, whose political commitments would, to a 21st-century socialist, appear incongruous. They supported civil rights and labor but having split bitterly with their erstwhile comrades over the authoritarian direction taken by the Soviet Union, they were also fiercely anti-Communist and often hawkish in Cold War foreign policy. (Some would soon break from the left entirely, becoming the first generation of neoconservatives.) Unable to win electorally, the party had shifted toward cultivating influence within the Democratic Party through union leaders and sympathetic politicos.

But when the Democratic coalition cracked up in the late 1960s and '70s, Harrington somehow managed to step on every resulting shard. He fell out almost immediately with the New Left. "We thought he was far too right-wing," recalls the political historian Michael Kazin, at the time a member of Students for a Democratic Society. "He didn't like revolution." He also didn't like Jimmy Carter, whom he viewed as unacceptably conservative, and backed Senator Ted Kennedy's failed challenge in the 1980 primary. Two years later, locked out of the Democratic establishment and shocked by the Reagan Revolution, Harrington assembled the remnants of two earlier left-wing organizations into a new group, the Democratic Socialists of America.

"In the early '80s, D.S.A. was basically meaningless," said Kazin, who joined around that time. The group drew a modest membership of older Harringtonites and refugees from the New Left, like Kazin, who had been chastened by the movement's post-1968 collapse amid political violence and ideological esotericism and were now willing to consider what Harrington called "the left wing of the possible." But what was possible, in the '80s, was not much.

The first inklings of the D.S.A.'s more promising second act came during Obama's presidency. Though not a leftist, Obama drew an energy that in another time would very likely have found its way to more left-wing causes, attracting volunteers who saw him as an antiwar protest candidate or were simply captivated by the prospect of electing America's first Black president. Taking office with a governing trifecta amid a crippling financial crisis, he also seemed to represent the first opportunity in decades to enact an ambitious progressive policy agenda.

Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: two stars of the democratic socialist movement.

But as hopes of a new New Deal receded in 2009 and 2010, the left soured on Obama. The first major expression of discontent, in late 2011, was Occupy Wall Street. The protest movement's encampment in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park happened to be a few blocks from D.S.A. headquarters, and a handful of members made a pilgrimage to the occupation, marching behind a red banner. But the protest's most profound impact on the D.S.A. was an indirect one. "Without Occupy," David Duhalde, later the D.S.A.'s deputy director, told me, "there's no Bernie Sanders."

The entrance of Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist (though not a D.S.A. member), into Democratic presidential politics was a historical pivot point in the American left. His gambit was as audacious as it was obvious: What if, instead of just railing against the two-party system, as left-wing activists had for decades, you actually tried to win by its own rules? Although he lost, his unexpectedly strong performance opened up a universe of possibilities.

These were most clearly articulated days after Trump's election in an article in Jacobin, a buzzy new-ish socialist magazine aligned with the D.S.A., titled "A Blueprint for a New Party." One of the magazine's editors, Seth Ackerman, called for "a national political organization that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership accountable to its members and electoral candidates nominated at all levels throughout the country."

This organization would, in effect, be a political party — but unlike the Green Party, with its dogmatic insistence on running on its own ballot line, it would be pragmatic about the two-party system. Its candidates would operate on the Sanders model, running independently when it made sense and in Democratic primaries when it did not. They would be within the Democratic Party but not of it; their real allegiance would be to a “truly democratic party” outside the system.

As it happened, a vehicle for this vision already existed, and the supporters of Sanders's campaign, gathering offline and on social media, soon found it. On the eve of the 2016 election, the D.S.A. had 6,400 members. By the end of 2017, it had nearly 30,000.

"In 2017, there was a lot of trial and error," Siddique, a Sanders-campaign volunteer who joined the D.S.A.'s Washington chapter that year, told me. "We were all just figuring out, What is socialism?" Siddique went on. "What is organizing? What are we doing here?"

Siddique and Romer, the organization's national co-chairs, are now often summoned onto cable news shows to affirm the D.S.A.'s most radical positions, but they are not really movement leaders in a conventional sense. The national organization works to extract some semblance of consensus from its disparate chapters and caucuses — which, over the past decade, have sometimes heatedly debated the answers to those initial questions. Sanders's campaign, out of which most of the new arrivals came, offered some points of policy agreement (Medicare for all) and some broad inclinations (fighting oligarchy) but plenty of blank spots, and fissures opened up quickly enough.

The splits were often generational in an organization whose median member age, after 2016, dropped suddenly to 33 from 68, according to its surveys. The new arrivals were mostly too young to remember the Soviet Union, and some — including Romer — proudly announced themselves to be Marxist-Leninists, which appalled the anti-Communist oldheads. The organization's fast-proliferating new internal coalitions included a Communist Caucus.

On foreign policy, the new D.S.A.'s members mostly settled for a sort of all-purpose opposition to American imperialism and militarism — including U.S. membership in NATO, which the organization sees as “primarily an aggressive force,” Romer said. It continues to oppose arming Ukraine. “Do we want to go to war with Russia?” Romer asked. “Does that feel like a good idea to anybody?”

But one foreign-policy issue above all preoccupied the new members: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them was Olivia Katbi, who joined the D.S.A. the day after the 2016 election in Portland, Ore., where she soon became co-chair of a new D.S.A. chapter.

“A lot of us who joined, myself included, were kind of new to politics,” Katbi, a 34-year-old high school track coach in Portland, told me. But Katbi, who is Syrian American and has Palestinian family members, had taken an interest in the Palestinian liberation movement several years earlier after attending a rally for the cause in Chicago. “That really opened my eyes about Palestine — and B.D.S.”

The then-decade-old Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement calls on governments and institutions to pressure Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories, expand the rights of Palestinian citizens and give Palestinian refugees the right to return. It had become a tenet of the broader left-wing activist milieu that gathered itself within the D.S.A. in 2017. At the organization's convention that year, Katbi and several other members put forward a resolution for the D.S.A. to endorse B.D.S. When it passed, supporters erupted into cheers, waved a Palestinian flag and began chanting, "From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free."

Donavan McKinney, a D.S.A. member and Democratic congressional nominee in Michigan, campaigning.

The D.S.A.'s founding cohort included many friends of the Israeli left, like Harrington, who considered himself a Zionist. This gave the B.D.S. resolution, like much of Israeli-Palestinian politics in America, a sort of Oedipal resonance: It was an act of breaking from the organization's Harringtonite past and pointing it toward a more radical future.

But the issue opened up subtler divisions within the organization's younger majority, which became visible in 2021, when Jamaal Bowman, a D.S.A.-endorsed New York freshman congressman and member of the organization, voted for additional funding for Israel's missile-defense system and visited the country with a liberal Zionist organization. A D.S.A. working group dedicated to the B.D.S. issue, which had drawn the organization's dedicated pro-Palestinian activists, reacted furiously, leading more than 50 local chapters in calling for Bowman's expulsion.

The D.S.A.'s main governing entity, the national political committee, condemned Bowman but refused to expel him. The spat continued until the D.S.A.'s next biennial convention, in August 2023, when the committee succeeded in passing a resolution dissolving the B.D.S. working group.

These tensions exploded after Hamas fighters mounted an attack on Israeli military installations and civilians on Oct. 7. The statement the national D.S.A. issued that day allowed that “we unequivocally condemn the killing of all civilians” but argued that “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime”; it also called on members to “take to the streets to join a protest for peace and against funding the Israeli state.” That day, N.Y.C.-D.S.A.

promoted on its official X account a rally hosted by a coalition of other organizations (though not the D.S.A. itself), proclaiming the group “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.”

In the ensuing blowback, even some politicians allied with the group distanced themselves, and 24 prominent old-guard members announced their resignations. But in the coming weeks, as Israel launched its counterattack in Gaza, the D.S.A. faced an uprising on its other flank, too. Members of the organization's disbanded B.D.S. working group staged a sit-in at the Washington office of Sanders, who had denounced both the Hamas attack and Israel's reprisal, and shortly after announced that the group was leaving the D.S.A. entirely, reconstituting itself as an independent organization. The D.S.A., they claimed, was no longer “a safe space for our members to organize.”

The moment, Siddique told me, “felt like a massive crisis for the organization.” When I asked him whether there was consensus within the D.S.A. about the Oct. 7 attacks, he replied carefully: “I think we’re a big-tent organization. There’s always a very wide array of perspectives.”

But the duration and brutality of Israel's invasion of Gaza has largely resolved the dispute in the pro-Palestinian vanguard's favor. When the working group's leaders reformed themselves within the D.S.A. last year, as a new coalition with the stated aim of building the organization "into a mass revolutionary force" that "advances anti-imperialist politics with Palestine as our compass," they met with little opposition.

Still, the more pragmatic D.S.A.ers I met spoke of the hard-line activists with exasperation. Part of this was genuine disagreement — the view that, as one of them put it to me eye-rollingly, “you don’t actually have to ‘hand it to Hamas.’” But even some of the most pro-Palestinian voices in the D.S.A. considered the working group’s posturing unhelpful to the cause, if not openly nihilistic. “It’s really hard to organize with people who seem to hate the organization we’re organizing in,” Olivia Katbi wrote on X.

The conflict maps loosely onto a new kind of generational division in the D.S.A. Nearly a decade into the organization's rebirth, the members who joined immediately out of the Sanders 2016 moment, organized around the project of winning electoral power, have mostly replaced the Harringtonites as the organization's graying old guard. And they have increasingly found themselves defending that project against more recently arrived activists — the pro-Palestinian vanguard and various far-left factions — who see electoral politics as a cop-out, a delusional diversion from the true business of revolution.

More than once, I heard these activists described by other D.S.A.ers as “ultras” — an old Marxist pejorative for the far fringe of the left, the radicals who threatened to devour or derail movements. Ultras blew apart the New Left of the 1960s, and witnessing the explosion at close range had led many early D.S.A.ers to join the organization, with its sober-minded vision of change. Now their successors were learning the same lesson.

D.S.A. pragmatists believe that the organization's electoral successes have helped settle some of these internal arguments in their favor. Its string of recent wins, from Mamdani to its congressional upsets this summer, have brought it attention that labor organizing and demonstrating have not, forcing the political mainstream to take the group seriously. But the D.S.A. itself has, in truth, not always been the principal driver of these wins. Its bottom-up structure — the national organization can back only candidates already endorsed by local chapters — and internal disagreements have made it slow to capitalize on the same shifts in politics that it has anticipated.

This is particularly true when it comes to Israel, on which Democratic voters, and especially young voters, have shifted sharply pro-Palestinian since the Israeli invasion of Gaza. This shift has led the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel lobbying group better known as AIPAC, to wade aggressively into Democratic primaries. Its efforts have drawn a furious counterattack from Justice Democrats: a political action committee that, like the reinvigorated D.S.A., emerged from the 2016 Sanders campaign and works on behalf of left-wing congressional candidates.

Three of the D.S.A.'s five 2026 primary victories in national races were candidates endorsed and in some cases recruited by Justice Democrats to punch back at AIPAC-backed incumbents, who were only later endorsed by the D.S.A. Two of the three candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York and Melat Kiros in Colorado, are pro-Palestinian activists who just recently joined the socialist organization.

What the D.S.A. has been able to give these candidates is a grass-roots army: canvassers and phone bankers who can provide a valuable edge. On a hot and humid Sunday afternoon in July, Cara Tobe, an organizer with the D.S.A.'s Detroit chapter, was knocking on doors across several neighborhoods on behalf of a congressional candidate named Donavan McKinney, a Justice Democrats recruit challenging an AIPAC-backed Democratic incumbent, Representative Shri Thanedar, whom he would defeat two weeks later.

McKinney, a Black union organizer and state representative with family roots in the auto industry, had been a D.S.A. member since 2019 and was practiced in pitching its merits to prospective constituents in a plurality-Black, lower-income district. "A livable wage, to be able to work one job, to not only make ends meet but have some disposable income, benefits to take care of your family and a retirement to look forward to: That. Is. Socialism," he told me. But the D.S.A.'s Detroit chapter decided to back him only many months into the race, to the frustration of supporters like Tobe.

Tobe, a 37-year-old Wisconsin native, wore a D.S.A. T-shirt and a “TEAM ZOHRAN” hat; like many D.S.A.ers, she had volunteered with Mamdani’s campaign in New York. In her doorstep conversations, she would talk up McKinney and mention the D.S.A. as a sort of if-you’re-curious aside.

The voters, all registered Democrats, sometimes took note and sometimes did not. The ones who recognized the D.S.A.'s name seemed to regard it positively. "D.S.A. is going to save this country," a bookish-looking man in his 50s told her.

“Next year’s definitely going to be interesting,” Tobe told me as she made her way between houses. “We’ve never really had this many people going into Congress.” A member of the D.S.A.’s pragmatic camp, she believes these victories have pushed the organization in that camp’s direction. “It’s like, OK, we’re building a party,” she said.

The D.S.A.'s primary wins are likely to bring the group's congressional contingent to seven members. That is far fewer than the several dozen that the Tea Party captured in its breakout year of 2010, but it is enough to upgrade its caucus from what is currently a duo — Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan's Rashida Tlaib, who was also elected in 2018 — to a bloc.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn-born, dispassionately tactical Democratic leader in the House, has a mutually antagonistic relationship with the D.S.A., which one of his advisers called “Team Gentrification” in last year’s mayoral race. But if Democrats return to the House next year with a narrow majority, “he needs all of our votes to be speaker,” said Chris

Rabb, the D.S.A.-backed Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania's third congressional district.

But transforming the government requires controlling not just a party but a majority. The compromise stimulus packages and health care legislation that Democrats passed under Obama, which D.S.A.ers now consider insufficient half-measures, required decisive numerical advantages in both chambers that neither party has seen since. "A political party exists for the purpose of gaining power, and then using that power to do good things in governing," Cowan, the Third Way president, told me. Neither the D.S.A. nor Justice Democrats, Cowan points out, have flipped a single congressional seat from red to blue; their wins have simply pushed already-Democratic districts further left. If they couldn't win the majorities they needed to enact their vision for the country, Cowan asked, "what the hell is the D.S.A. good for, then?"

This is one reason the next presidential election looms so large for both the D.S.A. and its intraparty enemies. Both anticipate that the Democratic presidential primary will feature a D.S.A.-aligned candidate like Ocasio-Cortez, whose presidential ambitions are a matter of intense speculation. (Through her staff, she declined to comment for this article.)

To the D.S.A., contesting the presidency at the nadir of the Democratic Party's popularity, and at the height of the organization's own, is an opportunity — and also, in all likelihood, a necessity. The most radical paradigm shifts in American governance, from F.D.R. to Reagan to Trump, have required a head of state's unique power to make once-marginal political ideas — from the progressive welfare state to free-market conservatism to right-wing authoritarianism — mainstream, to acclimatize even disengaged citizens to the previously unthinkable.

The Democratic Party's moderates and many of its reformers fear that a D.S.A. candidacy would extend Republican control of the country at a genuinely existential moment, dividing the party and, if it succeeded, sending the Democrats into a general election with the S-word hanging around their neck: a label that remains anathema to a majority of American voters.

Socialists counter that as a general election matter, socialism's popularity is unproven, because it is untested. Few people would have imagined that a socialist could win 43 percent of the Democratic primary vote in a presidential election, after all, before Sanders. And a socialist Democratic candidate running in a competitive general election remains a theoretical proposition — which was why, for several weeks in July and August, Francesca Hong suddenly became a figure of great significance in American politics.

Hong, a state assemblywoman and chef from Madison, was a relatively recent convert to the

D.S.A.; she told me that she didn't know much about the organization until 2020, when the group's small Madison chapter endorsed a friend with whom she was campaigning during her first race. Running for governor this year, she became an early progressive favorite but was not a dominant presence in the race until mid-July, when her closest rival dropped out over campaign-finance irregularities — making Hong, overnight, the top Democratic contender.

If a democratic socialist could win a Democratic governor's race anywhere, it might have been Wisconsin, a state with a deep progressive political culture and one of the last redoubts of the old Socialist Party; its largest city, Milwaukee, had Socialist mayors throughout the first half of the 20th century. Wisconsin is also a stubbornly purple state, and a Hong victory would have set up a clarifying test of socialism's potential, and limits, in American politics.

Shua Sanchez, the Milwaukee D.S.A. organizer, likened the possibility of her winning to Obama's upset in the Iowa caucuses in 2008. If Hong could "show that a socialist woman of color can win in a state like Wisconsin," he said, "that opens the door to someone like A.O.C. winning a presidential race."

When I caught up with Hong in late July, the state's mainstream Democrats were in the midst of a panic. David Crowley, the county executive of Milwaukee, who had dropped out of the race days earlier, had hastily re-entered it, with the immediate endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers. "I think when you fight power, power fights you back," Hong told me as we rode back to Madison from a campaign stop in Baraboo. "People are inherently afraid of change, sometimes, when it means a change to your influence, right?"

Some powers, however, seemed happy enough to have Hong in the race. Republican groups were in the midst of spending around \$4 million on TV ads spotlighting Hong's progressive agenda. This reflected a bipartisan conventional wisdom that Hong — a dogged campaigner but an unpracticed retail politician with a lot of unexploded ordnance in her social media posts from the fever season of 2020 and 2021 — would be an enviable opponent for Republicans.

Hong had initially broken out from the Democratic field with her sharply defined positions on new issues like data center construction. But as she went from outsider curiosity to heavily scrutinized front-runner, she struggled to defend herself instead on old positions: past exhortations to abolish the police, a tweet calling to “cancel Thanksgiving.” Evers, asked whether Hong could beat the Republican candidate, Tom Tiffany, said, “Probably not.”

The drama had strangely little to do with Hong's socialism per se. Her old statements weren't all that particular to the D.S.A.; they were part of the broader progressive sprint to the far edge of social-justice politics (Continued on Page 45)

26 BAD INFLUENCE

promised Greg Chism I wouldn't reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he's a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spa-

cious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.

Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn't stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill.

"It was a factory town," Greg said. "I was destined to be at one. But in my lifetime, all but one of the factories closed. My father lost his longtime job making car frames and hot-water heaters when the plant moved to Mexico." Like many men of his generation, Greg was left adrift, with few of the structures that guided his parents and grandparents.

From there, his life became more difficult. At 17, he was working at Taco Bell when he felt his heart racing. He collapsed, unconscious. He was diagnosed with atrial flutter. After that came multiple open-heart surgeries, which left him with scars and, at 18, six figures of medical debt; his marriage fell apart suddenly when he was 39, leaving him a single father with full custody of two children under 2. But he managed to find free babysitting through a local church, which allowed him to earn money mowing lawns.

And then, one night in 2010, he had his Damascus moment.

"I was watching some random YouTube video," he said. "This guy was cycling through Australia. He pulled over and pointed at a koala or something, and then he made a speech. He talked about all the negatives in his life."

He had struggled, he told the camera, and the viewers beyond it. He had lived on the streets and been in jail.

"But then he said: 'Whatever, I'm out here having a great day, riding my bike and making a YouTube video. You can make a YouTube video! You've got a story. Share it! Don't hold yourselves back! Make a YouTube video and change your life!" Greg paused. "It was very inspiring, dude. He hit me hard."

Greg began cautiously. His first video was just him reading out loud a newspaper article about a Florida woman who had accidentally burned down America's fifth-oldest tree by smoking meth underneath it. After he read it, he said to the camera, "Isn't that crazy?"

"The video got 10 or 12 views," Greg told me, "and a comment: 'You look like you've been smoking meth.'"

It was in reference to Greg's teeth. They overlapped significantly. “They were the wildest-looking teeth,” Greg said. “We didn't get dental work done when we were kids because we didn't have any money.” But the comment motivated Greg. “I decided to get my teeth fixed. I signed up for adult braces. I had to get a \$6,000 line of credit. After that I started making videos about my adult-braces journey. I learned about tags — ‘adult braces,’ ‘adult braces cost’ — and the next thing I knew, maybe 50 people a week who were looking for adult braces found me. I had regulars. They’d be saying, ‘I’m on Week 3’ and ‘We’re so proud of you.’”

Soon, Greg's regular viewers looked past his teeth to the lawn mowers behind him. "People started to comment, 'Why do you have four lawn mowers?' I'd reply, 'I do lawn care.' They were like: 'Dude, you do lawn care? Do a lawn care vlog!' I was like, 'Dude, nobody wants to see a lawn care vlog!' But they were hounding me. 'Nobody's vlogging about lawn care! Do a lawn care vlog!' So I went ahead and made a 'Day in the Life of a Lawn Care Provider.'"

Which was how Greg Chism became the world's first YouTube lawn care influencer.

All over the world, men and women were taking similar leaps. As the old institutions no longer offered structure, community, purpose, a feeling of usefulness and oftentimes an income, vast numbers of people like him were taking their chances as influencers. According to research by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, by 2022 there were more than seven million prime-age American men who weren't only unemployed, they weren't even looking for jobs. They had just bowed out. But some of these men, whose energy had no home, were turning to YouTube. It was gaining a reputation as a wide-open country where a man could thrive through grit and perseverance as an influencer — a place for niche creators to share what they had to share, and where an ever-growing audience could find them, and in so doing subtly shape their output.

In 2013, Greg created a channel, Geek to Freak Lawn Care, and filmed himself performing good Samaritan lawn work. If he saw a lawn in need, he would jump out of his truck and blow away the dead leaves or trim the edges and then vanish like the Zorro of lawn care chores. In other videos, he created a kind of lawn care ASMR, meditatively mowing back and forth, up and down, for hours at a time.

"I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more," Greg said.

Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”

But Greg's story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery-rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”

In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. All over YouTube, there were videos of cartoon characters, or sometimes real people dressed like Spider-Man or Elsa from "Frozen," enacting burying people alive, or smashing babies' heads open, or dying by suicide, or burning down houses with people inside, or eating feces, or drinking urine or bleach, or setting a pregnant Elsa on fire, or drowning her in a swimming pool, or forcing her into sex slavery at a strip club. There were decapitations, hypodermic needles, impregnations, a dismembered Minnie Mouse, car crashes, abortions, eye surgeries, maggots, childbirth, fellatio, acid attacks and spiders crawling out of people's eye sockets. And these videos were being viewed millions of times.

As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”

You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure.

But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”

But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man's contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force-fed.”

That man's name was Greg Chism.

In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.

"It was just a way to store home videos," he said. "Three or four a week. I didn't even give them a title. It wasn't anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers."

Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.

But then he tried something different.

"OK." Greg hesitated. "My sister bought the kids a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. So I thought, I'll film them opening it. They loved it. They were playing in the box. They had the box on their heads, running around the house. It was funny."

Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. "It was just dumb luck," he said.

But it wasn't only that. Victoria and Annabelle, then 6 and 4, were adorable on camera, bright-eyed, open and infectiously happy. Thereafter, whenever Greg bought his daughters gifts, he would film them opening them and running around with the boxes on their heads. But the magic was missing, and the views were low.

Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.

"I didn't believe it was really them at first," Greg said. "They told me they'd noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they'd started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success."

YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put

'How were they about spitting food in each other's faces?' I asked. 'Oh, they liked it,' Greg said. 'It was fun, dude.'

into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”

Greg suggested "Toy Slime Gumball Party" instead.

"Perfect," the teacher said.

The stakes were high for this experiment. For men like Greg, with very few opportunities elsewhere, real money could be made by online

influencing. According to data published by Goldman Sachs, only 4 percent of influencers make more than \$100,000 a year, but with his invitation to YouTube school, Greg was being given a chance to join that high-earning elite. And he was determined to master it, so he began with sharks. “Shark is a huge S.E.O. term,” he said. “So I got a toy shark, and I called him Sharky. I held him in front of the camera, and it was Point of View Sharky.”

Greg filmed skits in which Sharky chased Victoria and Annabelle through the house and stole their candy. The comments were full of praise. "People loved the girls," Greg said. "They were rooting for us. I was making \$1,000 a month." But there was a pitfall. The fans were easily bored and forever hungry for novelty. He constantly had to devise new ideas — new “seasons,” as he put it.

So he came up with food fights. “We went to a 7-Eleven, got nachos, hot dogs, giant Slurpee sodas. We sat in the truck, I set the camera on the dash and said: ‘All right, Annabelle. You ask Victoria for her drink, she’ll say no, you steal some anyway, she’ll get mad and throw food at you. I’ll say stop, then you dump your Slurpee on my head. And then, boom, food fight in the truck.’”

Greg smiled at the memory. "Dude," he told me, "there was food everywhere, ketchup down in the vents. The truck was ruined!"

A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone's lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.

"But why?" I asked him.

Greg shrugged. "I don't know."

He meant it. He and his daughters were becoming hugely popular, and he had no idea why. It made no sense to him, then or now. Later, he sent me a copy of the food-fight-in-the-truck video. I could see the appeal. Annabelle and Victoria were fun to watch, and their audience of children presumably enjoyed the transgressiveness of a male authority figure joining in with a food fight instead of demanding it stop.

"We made four of those," Greg said. "Each one got 10 million views within a week. But the fifth one didn't."

And so Greg needed yet another new idea.

One day he noticed Victoria laughing at a YouTube video. Annabelle drifted over, and soon she was laughing too. So Greg joined them. The three of them watched, engrossed.

"It was a teenage girl vlogger," Greg said. "She was doing a day in the life of what she remembered from being a baby. She had pigtails and was eating baby bananas." As Greg watched his daughters laugh at the video, he suddenly thought, That girl was onto something, but she blew it. A person can go only so far reminiscing about babyhood. What if he made a video in which Annabelle were magically transformed into a baby?

Greg began frantically storyboarding. Annabelle could wear pigtails. A onesie. She could suck on a pacifier and talk in baby talk. Greg had learned from his previous “seasons” that the more exaggerated their behavior — the louder the screams, the more extravagant the facial expressions — the higher the view count. Maybe Annabelle could talk in exaggerated cartoon baby talk: “Eee!” “Grr!” “Yummy!” “Ooh!” “Aah!” “Poop!”

He knew, too, from the food-fight video, that children loved messy scenarios. So he thought, We'll feed Annabelle baby food, and she can spit it out.

They shot the video. When it came to the spitting part, Annabelle (Continued on Page 42)

INA POLARIZED TAIWAN, ANXIETY ABOUT CHINA IS MOUNTING. AND SOME CIVILIANS ARE TAKING MATTERS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS.

THE DEFENDERS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHIEN-CHI CHANG TEXT BY BROOK LARMER

"If China were to invade, I refuse to hand my life over," says Albee Lee, a house cleaner in Hsinchu.

Albee Lee leads a double life. During the week, the 29-year-old with a tattoo of a skateboarding duck cleans houses in the city of Hsinchu, the hub of Taiwan's semiconductor industry. On weekends, she prepares for a Chinese invasion.

China's intensifying military maneuvers around Taiwan — at a time when the United States is distracted and depleted by the war in Iran — seem designed to intimidate the self-governed island's 23 million inhabitants. For Lee, however, China's scare tactics have only sharpened her desire to defend Taiwan, an outpost of democracy that produces more than 90 percent of the world's most advanced computer chips. Along with thousands of other civilians — artists and academics, firefighters and engineers — Lee has joined a growing civil-defense movement that often engages in live-simulation disaster training.

Now, along with her cleaning supplies, Lee carries a meticulously assembled emergency first-aid kit. “I don’t want to live under Chinese Communist Party rule,” she says. “If China were to invade, I refuse to hand my life over.”

Ever since 1949, when the Communists defeated the Nationalists in China's civil war, the Chinese government has insisted that Taiwan — the island to which many of the defeated Nationalist forces retreated — must be unified with the mainland. This “unwavering historic mission,” as President Xi Jinping of China calls it, may be closer to becoming a reality. According to U.S. intelligence, Xi has ordered the People's Liberation Army, the world's largest standing military, to be capable of annexing the island by 2027, the year of the P.L.A.'s 100th anniversary.

No imminent plan to invade is evident, but China is parading its superiority over Taiwan's armed forces. In the past year, the P.L.A. has ramped up "gray zone" tactics that stop short of war. There has been a live-fire simulation of a naval blockade and near-daily incursions across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, the narrow gulf between China and Taiwan's main island. This summer, China's ships even patrolled the waters east of Taiwan, through which its primary backer, the United States, would most likely send any military support.

For nearly 50 years, the tenuous status quo in Taiwan has been held together by a slippery U.S.

Lee (left) with other volunteers at a command post during a simulated hostage-taking of a Taiwanese commander.

policy known as “strategic ambiguity.” The United States, which backed the Nationalists in the civil war and has tacitly supported Taiwan’s right to exist ever since, recognizes Beijing as the sole legal government of China. But it also sends billions of dollars in weapons to Taiwan every year without stating if it would defend the island in case of attack.

That ambiguous stance is more difficult to sustain today. China is not only stepping up its cognitive warfare — flexing its military muscle, flooding Taiwan with propaganda — but the United States is proving to be a more fickle, transactional ally. President Trump, at times a harsh critic of China, has also expressed admiration for Xi, the Chinese strongman. After a visit to China in May, he even dangled a \$14 billion U.S. weapons package to

Taiwan — approved by Congress but not yet signed by him — as “a very good negotiating chip” in discussions with Beijing. The episode alarmed many Taiwanese, who fear that Trump, at his next meeting with Xi in September, might leave them to face China weakened and alone.

Taiwan is considered one of the world's most dangerous geopolitical flash points. A military conflict there, involving two superpowers, could have a devastating effect on a global economy dependent on the island's computer chips. This perilous situation has spurred the growth of Taiwan's civil-defense movement. Over the past several years, more than 30 volunteer groups have popped up across the island — some motivated by Beijing's saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait, some inspired by Ukraine's resistance to Russia's invasion, some exasperated by the deepening political divide in Taiwan itself.

These groups received a boost in 2024 when the newly elected President Lai Ching-te promoted a policy of “whole of society” defense. This month, as part of that approach, Taiwan conducted civil-defense exercises alongside the military’s annual drills to test how ordinary people could respond to a Chinese invasion that knocks out all communication, including internet service. As Lai said last year when he unveiled strategies for building societal resilience: “Every citizen stands on the front line of the defense of democracy and freedom.”

Though their numbers are still relatively small — a few thousand core participants — the civil-defense

Flares over southern Taiwan as troops conducted drills in April.

China's actions "made me realize the need for civilians to take initiative and prepare," says Anfernee Hwang, an industrial designer in New Taipei City.

groups reflect an evolution in Taiwanese identity, especially among young people. In 1992, 18 percent of the population identified as primarily Taiwanese rather than displaced Chinese; today, according to a recent poll, more than two-thirds do. Only 3 percent identify as solely Chinese — a share equal to the size of the island's Indigenous population.

That shift in identity shapes the vision for Taiwan's future. Over the past 30 years, the portion of those who favor becoming part of China has declined to less than 10 percent, from what was once a fifth of the population. Most people in Taiwan now say they support a status quo that navigates between independence and unification. They want their island to continue as a prosperous, democratic society. And if a Chinese invasion threatens that status quo, according to a January poll by Academia Sinica, Taiwan's premier research institution, 60 percent of the population would be willing to fight.

A decade ago, there was no civil-defense movement in Taiwan, just a handful of military-simulation enthusiasts like Anfernee Hwang. An industrial designer now in his early 40s, Hwang first gravitated to survivalist games that were “a bit dangerous and exciting,” he says. (His given name comes from the former N.B.A. star Anfernee Hardaway.) In 2016, Hwang and his friends started undertaking intense technical and physical training — he still runs marathons — and styled themselves as an elite special-forces unit, face paint and all. Five years later, one of Hwang’s friends started a Facebook group, Doomsday Preppers Association, Taiwan, that has attracted nearly 20,000 members.

It was easy to dismiss these early preppers as a sort of fringe militia. But Hwang and a small group of them formed a community emergency response team to prepare civilians for disaster — and a possible Chinese invasion. As tensions between China and Taiwan escalate, these preppers are drawing on their experience to help train people new to civil defense. “China's infiltration and military exercises,” Hwang says, “made me realize the need for civilians to take initiative and prepare.”

The most influential civil-defense group in Taiwan is Kuma Academy, a four-year-old nonprofit that says it has trained more than 100,000 Taiwanese in everything from survival skills to "pre-bunking" Beijing's barrage of propaganda. With millions of dollars in funding from a semiconductor tycoon, Kuma also organizes a couple of large-scale live-action drills every year, such as the one Albee Lee joined. (The academy, whose name is derived from the Japanese word for bear, also sells "black-bear warrior" dolls and charms on its website.)

Hwang (right) during a drill to move simulated casualties to safe areas for medical treatment.

A vast majority of participants in Kuma's training sessions are 25 to 45 years old. And while older preppers tend to be men, more than 70 percent of the civil-defense activists are women. "Women are more willing to save their country," says Chu Fu-ming, Kuma Academy's male chief executive. "Many women are highly motivated to understand what they can actually do in a crisis," he says, "to protect their families and the people around them."

The standoff between China and Taiwan is a study in asymmetry. In size, population and military prowess, the nation of 14 billion people overwhelms the island of 23 million. The Chinese military has two million soldiers compared with 230,000 in Taiwan, and China's naval vessels outnumber Taiwan's by a similar margin. Even in warplanes, a centerpiece of Taiwan's defense, China has a nearly five-to-one advantage.

In such an unbalanced contest, Taiwan would have to rely on a so-called porcupine defense, using an array of smaller tactical measures to make an invasion too costly and painful to carry out. Taiwan's newly developed fleet of drones, for example, could help disrupt an amphibious landing.

Another quill of the porcupine would be civilian groups. Refusing to surrender in advance, they would work to maintain lines of communication, conduct search and rescue, evacuate refugees and offer emergency medical care.

H.E. Huang, a 20-year-old studying animal science, thinks civil defense can make a crucial difference. Like all his peers, Huang grew up in prosperity and freedom — the fruits of the island's turn to democracy nearly 40 years ago — alongside growing threats from China. As a teenager, he says, "I kept wondering what regular people could actually do to prepare if a war broke out."

Huang became certified as an emergency medical technician and then, after entering university, joined a civil-defense group. "History has shown many times that even overwhelming military power doesn't guarantee victory," he says, pointing to Ukraine's spirited resistance to the Russian invasion. "The morale, determination and organization of the local population can play a huge role in the outcome of a conflict."

"I kept wondering what regular people could actually do to prepare if a war broke out," says H.E. Huang, who is studying animal science in Taipei.

Building that kind of solidarity is not easy in a society so deeply divided. As civil-defense groups accelerate their training, many Taiwanese remain complacent about the threat or, more pointedly, criticize civil-defense proponents for sowing panic and promoting war. Attitudes toward civil defense cleave to the central divide in Taiwanese politics between the president's Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.) and the Nationalists, also known as the Kuomintang (KMT), which controls the legislature through a coalition. Virtually all participants in civil-defense exercises back the D.P.P., according to one informal survey. KMT loyalists accuse them of provoking a conflict with China for political gain, while D.P.P. supporters have called the KMT Beijing's proxy for parroting Chinese propaganda.

One of China's main weapons is cognitive warfare: the systematic targeting of an adversary's perception of reality, identity and political will. "No place in the world is more bombarded by cognitive warfare than Taiwan," says Chu, the Kuma Academy chief executive. China's propaganda and disinformation, along with the military maneuvers off Taiwan's coast, are all meant to weaken Taiwan's resolve to defend itself, he says.

Kuma Academy and other groups hold workshops designed to help people identify and counter disinformation, a recognition that one of the key battlegrounds in modern conflict is not land or sea but a society's collective psyche. The ultimate goal for Taiwan's civil defense is what some call epistemic sovereignty, the ability to define one's reality and history without being manipulated by disinformation.

That ideal is still a long way off. Even President Lai's office, which elevated the idea of civil defense, feels the need to frame it as disaster relief, not as preparation for war — a phrasing designed to appeal to a greater number of people. Catastrophic flooding on the island's east coast last year gave the Lai administration a chance to demonstrate, free of politics or actual war, the utility of civil-defense training. More than 40,000 people a day went to help the affected area, but only the dozens of civil-defense teams on the scene had the know-how to set up mobile clinics, temporary shelters and donation sites.

Huang (center) using coordinates to locate simulated casualties during a nighttime rescue drill.

"It changed perceptions of civil defense," says Liu Yu-hsi, an economics professor who serves as a presidential adviser. "Most ordinary people had the impression that civil defense was all about guns or militias. The 'warrior' perception is not good, but if you're 'disaster relief,' that's very positive."

Perceptions, though, can be resistant to change. Huang, the student, lives in a neighborhood dominated by the KMT, mostly older descendants of the Chinese who came in 1949. Recently, he tried to share with his neighbors information about how to protect themselves in a crisis. They refused to listen. "I find it incredibly difficult to talk about raising the public's preparedness without further polarizing the people," Huang says.

Back in Hsinchu, Albee Lee is scrubbing the bathrooms and kitchens of the wealthy. Most of her clients support the KMT or exist complacently within their affluent tech bubble, she says. Most know nothing about her double life.

When she and a friend talked to clients about the need to be prepared, she says, “we were either met with ridicule or sarcasm. People simply didn’t want to talk to us.” Lee is undeterred. “I still worry about a Chinese invasion. I hope to awaken the Taiwanese people — even if it’s just one by one.”

Chien-Chi Chang is a Taiwanese photographer based in Austria and a contributor to Magnum Photos. His work explores the bonds between people and the forces that separate them: borders, migration, conflict and distance.

Brook Larmer is a contributing writer for the magazine based in Bangkok. He is the author of "Operation Yao Ming," a book about China's rise told through sports.

During a drill in April, volunteers, reservists and military personnel practiced rescuing a captured commander.

YouTubeContinued from Page 29

“I had to become the third baby,” Greg said. “I had to turn myself into a baby.”Greg’s “Bad Baby” videos are no longer online, but he showed me some on his computer. There was Greg cooing and crawling on his hands and knees and babbling in baby talk and sucking on a pacifier. There was Victoria chewing chocolate cream eggs and cookies with her mouth wide open, the half-masticated food sliding down her chin. There was Annabelle squealing “Eee!” and “Grr!” while shaking her fists.Their movements — all set to nursery-rhyme music — were exaggerated and repetitive. Imagine the ritualism of Teletubbies, but instead of Teletubbies you stumbled onto the home movies of an ordinary Midwestern family who were, for some reason, whatever their ages, all babies.As the videos played, I noticed Greg quietly scrutinizing me. I liked how his children were enjoying being theatrical, enjoying bonding with each other and their father. But I must have looked somewhat baffled, my smile slightly fixed, because Greg suddenly muttered, “Well, 50 million people watched it.”Fifty million is, in fact, a vast understatement. Greg’s most-watched video, “Bad Baby Real Food Fight Victoria vs Annabelle & Freak Daddy Toy Freaks Family,” had 622 million views.Greg has under his bed a stack of plaques from YouTube celebrating his viewer-count milestones. One hundred million views here, one hundred million views there. And then there are the plaques from Tubefilter, a publication that covers YouTube, commemorating the months when he was the most-viewed creator on the entire platform. Between January 2016 and June 2017, his videos achieved a total of 13 billion views. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal how much money he made. But YouTube’s partner program was generous — the advertising-revenue split was around 50-50 — so it was a lot (although not so much that Greg quit his lawn care business). They got out of Granite City and moved to an upscale suburban community.In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.“She canceled,” Greg said.Greg had no idea why.For a while, YouTube Kids functioned as intended, providing normal, non-horrific Peppa Pig videos. The problems began when children started searching for characters like Spider-Man and Elsa and nothing came up, because Disney and Marvel were keeping their content off the site.

Up in Quebec City, a group of people saw an opportunity. They dressed as Elsa and Spider-Man and filmed themselves in a nondescript suburban house performing skits, which they posted on YouTube with titles like “Spiderman and Frozen Elsa Superhero Fun in Real Life.”In one video, Elsa’s tongue turned into a long slab of red jelly and needed to be cut out with pliers. Elsa walking around a living room with a huge jelly tongue flipping from her mouth did look bizarrely sexual, whatever the intention of the YouTubers, whoever they might have been. A doctor injected Spider-Man in his buttocks with mysterious green liquid, and he ran around in agony. Spider-Man drank a red potion, and his eyes burst into flames. He repeatedly hit himself on the head to quell the pain.The production values were crude and, as with “Bad Baby,” the movements were repetitive and set to nursery-rhyme music, giving the videos a hellish feel. But some of them did have a strange charm, and when the YouTube algorithm fed them into the Kids app, millions of Elsa-starved children ate them up, just as they did Greg’s “Bad Baby” videos. And then came the copycats.“I created ‘Bad Baby,’ and it went berserk,” Greg said. “There were probably a hundred channels doing it.” A number of the videos came from a Russian content farm that specialized in producing quick, cheap cartoon rip-offs of viral hits. “You could tell by their accents they were Russian,” Greg said. “It was all, ‘Ya, Victoria.’ And they had us do things we’d never do. Dude, there’s a cartoon out there where my kids are playing in a pool, and I walk over and pee in the pool. And the channel is called Toy Freaks, so people thought it was me.”Later, Greg mailed me a USB drive of videos made by his imitators. I watched Russian and Ukrainian men diligently re-enacting Greg’s videos. If Greg had filmed himself pushing Annabelle and Victoria in a shopping cart through a Walmart, somewhere in Kyiv a man would duplicate it with an eerie precision, and with adult women playing the parts of his daughters (pretending to be babies). Everything was identical — the facial expressions, the camera angles, the dialogue, the pacifiers, the onesies, the music. The only thing Ukrainian Greg failed to simulate was Greg’s American accent and cadences.In Quebec City, meanwhile, Elsa and Spider-Man were inspiring their own copycats — knockoffs of knockoffs, each generation sketchier than the last. Suddenly Spider-Men and Elsas from far-flung countries were enacting abortions or cannibalism or dismemberments, and YouTube’s algorithms were indiscriminately feeding them to millions of unsuspecting viewers.Online detectives set about trying to unmask the culprits. They got nowhere with the Russian content farms, which were far away and mysterious. The Quebec City Elsa and Spider-Man somehow

managed to evade detection too. But there was one piece of low-hanging fruit: Greg.

Greg was easily identifiable because his Toy Freaks channel was linked to his lawn care channel. Which meant that every corner of his life was suddenly being scrutinized by internet sleuths.

"I don't want this to come off the wrong way," Greg said, "but there were all these pissed-off women who were not happy with me. It was a heated world in 2017. #MeToo had hit its zenith and rightly so. They were taking down bad people. But the witch hunt was going in all directions, and I was an easy target, because I'm a guy with two young girls, and we're dressing like babies."

I paused. "I mean..." I said.

“Dude, it looked bad,” Greg agreed. “I get why certain adults would be weirded out seeing a grown man with a binky in his mouth. But a million parents had thought it was funny and harmless too. And now there was a whole investigation going on.”

Greg's voice was rising. He paused to calm himself. "So that's why the rep didn't see us in California."

His channel was demonetized, and soon after that, it was banned from YouTube entirely. (YouTube declined to comment.)

People with knowledge of #Elsagate may well be thinking I've been too kind to Greg, for a reason I haven't mentioned yet: When Redditors and BuzzFeed journalists dug deeper into his video archive, they uncovered a handful of clips that really did sound very disturbing. As a Reddit post from 2016 put it: "One of their latest videos sees the father follow his little girl into the bathroom and film her as she's crying in severe pain, blood flowing from her mouth and her tooth falling out. It's barf-inducing, and no mentally stable person or child should ever have to watch it."

That bloody tooth video is no longer online. Only a still image remains in which Annabelle is sobbing with her mouth wide open, her face smeared with blood and tears.

The Reddit post continued: “Another video sees him jump the two girls while they are taking a shower and dump a bucket of frogs into their tub, while happily filming them.”

BuzzFeed's Remy Smidt also focused on the frogs: "In at least two [videos], Chism walks into the bathroom as his two young daughters are bathing and scares them with animals [a frog and a lobster]. He tells them that he has a surprise and asks if they want to see it. 'No,' the younger responds, her voice inflecting upward. Then, as the bucket approaches the water, she says it again, 'No,' and moves away. 'No, Daddy, stop!' she screams. She continues to scream, while balancing on the edge of the tub. 'Daddy, stop!' she yells again, her voice cracking into a cry."

"Tell me about the tooth video," I asked Greg, "the one where you filmed Annabelle while her tooth was falling out and she was crying and covered in blood."

“Oh,” he replied, without any hesitation. “I have to show you that.”

He found the video and pressed play. The reporting had made it sound like it was part of the “Bad Baby” series, some garish slapstick that crossed a line. But it wasn’t: It was one of his home videos from back in 2013, which no one had really watched. I watched the whole thing. In it, Annabelle’s tooth was wobbling and bleeding, she was scared, and Greg was comforting her: “It’s OK. It’s just a loose tooth. Nothing bad’s happening.”

Notwithstanding the slightly odd fact that he was filming it at all, the video showed a father dealing with a household crisis in a normal way.

"How about the frogs and the lobster?" I asked.

Greg flinched. "That was a mistake on my part," he said. "That was dumb. It was a prank. The kids were playing in the bathtub with their swimsuits on. My dog saw a frog on the sidewalk. I put it in a bowl and went in to show them. And it hopped into the tub. Annabelle freaked out. She climbed up on the side, screaming and crying. I uploaded the video. Again, that was in 2013 or something, back when they didn't get any views." (I watched the video, and it's clear that Greg put the frog into the bath on his own. Annabelle was upset, but Victoria was laughing almost the entire time.)

Later, I spoke with Greg's daughters on a Zoom call, to get a better sense of their perspective. They were still minors, so Greg arranged the call and joined us. "I just remember it being something that brought us together," Annabelle said. "Yeah, at some points it was gross, but I thought it was funny, and I didn't really mind."

Victoria was more hesitant. "It wasn't terrible for me," she said. "But now that I'm 16 going on 17, I wouldn't want to do it again." She and Annabelle said there were things they didn't like: staying up too late to film on school nights; getting ketchup in their eyes during the food fight. But they said they didn't feel coerced into doing the videos.

"Some of it crossed the line," Annabelle said. "But the stuff that crossed the line was what people liked the most." Until they didn't.

In Texas, an online sleuth named Amy became convinced that Annabelle was actually a missing child named Lisa Irwin who was abducted six years earlier in Kansas City, Mo., 250 miles from Granite City. Witnesses had seen a man carry a baby down the street after midnight, and Amy believed that man was Greg. She published facial comparison photographs of Annabelle and Lisa Irwin and theorized that Greg's lawn care business was actually "convenient cover," a way of prospecting for targets.

Amy dug up a clip of a CNN reporter who had found graffiti of a pentagram and the words “Freak for Life” in a drainage tunnel close to where Lisa Irwin was abducted. Given that Greg’s channel was called Toy Freaks, this was the final proof Amy needed. She called the police.

"They came in like a SWAT team," Greg said. "They searched the whole house, went through the kitchen cupboards, opened the washer and dryer. All this while my kids were there. Family services showed up, wanting me to prove that the children were who I said they were. I had to show them birth certificates. I couldn't believe some woman from Texas could call them with a made-up story and this would happen."

Greg was ordered to take his daughters to the local child-welfare department. When they arrived, the officers led Greg one way and the girls the other. They were questioned: "Does your father ever beat you? Does he touch you inappropriately?"

They were let go, but the incident left its mark. "Watching them being led away that day," Greg said, "I've never recovered from that."

After that, he became a recluse. He stayed home and did nothing.

"I quit meeting people," he said. "I fell into a depression. I'd take the kids to school, come home, go back to bed, fall asleep, my alarm would go off, and I'd go back to school and get them. I had no life. I was so nervous. I had trembles and shakes all the time. My hair was falling out. I was waking up with hairs on my pillow. I almost started believing I was a bad person — that I did something horrible."

Greg has discovered, in a painful way, that time works differently on the internet. The past doesn't remain the past; it suddenly lurches into the present. Sometimes the old articles recirculate on Facebook. "People don't know it's an old story," he said, "so they call the police and family services on me again." It has happened multiple times, Greg said. They're watching TV, and then suddenly they're aware of the police surrounding their home. Or federal agents turn up, demanding that they speak to Annabelle and Victoria alone.

He went into therapy and is somewhat less reclusive now — he was meeting me, after all. And he has even returned to YouTube, with another lawn care channel. (He says he plans to stick to that.) But he is far from completely recovered. He may post videos, but he still sees almost no one, only his family. He has resigned himself to a life of solitude.

"How am I going to put myself on Tinder?" Greg said. "A woman will Google my name, and they'll be like, Whoa. So, single forever. I feel bad for anybody associated with me. Even the lawn people. They loved me, but now their wives will tell them, 'That guy is in big trouble for child abuse.' I mean, dude, I'm ruined. I'm not supposed to talk like that about myself. But for the longest time that's what I'd say. 'I'm ruined, I'm ruined.' And if somebody said: 'But it was worth it. You guys got out of that town. The kids have college savings.' No. I'd give it all up for it to never have happened."

And that was the end of Greg's story. I thanked him for telling it to me and climbed into my car. Greg waved me off. Then he retreated back indoors.

SPELLING BEE By Frank Longo

How many common words of 5 or more letters can you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer must use the center letter at least once. Letters may be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7 letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points for a word that uses all 7 letters.

Rating: 8 = good; 17 = excellent; 26 = genius

Our list of words, worth 33 points, appears with last week's answers.

THREE STRIKES By Eric Berlin

Take one word from each column. Strike one letter from each word. Then put the results side by side to spell out the answer to one of the clues at the bottom. Every word in the columns will be used exactly once.

CLAM	ECHO	BRIE
HEAL	FLESH	DANCE
INCH	GETS	HINGE
MINUS	LOATHE	LAND
ORGAN	MERIT	MATTE
PARIS	MOLARS	MOUSE
RAID	NORMS	RED
SUCH	ONION	RIDER
TAMPER	PARADE	WHIP
WAIF	TECH	YODA

1. Audio cassette player (2 wds.) 2. Citrus-flavored carbonated drink (2 wds.) 3. Competitor of IHOP (2 wds.) 4. Mutual trust and friendship 5. No matter the weather (3 wds.) 6. Part of an analog clock (2 wds.) 7. Someone in a cell (2 wds.) 8. Student athlete's award, often 9. What one receives from a will 10. Words of friendly greeting (2 wds.)

KAMINO By Naji Tajouri

Find a path through the maze, moving horizontally and vertically, connecting the starting man to the yellow numbered square. You may move up only to a higher number or move down to a lower number. A move left or right must be to the same number.

6 8 8 7 9 9 5 5 4 4 4 7 6 6 4 3 2 5 5 6 3 5 5 4 4 4 2 3 4 3 3 2 2 1 2 2

CRYPTIC CROSSWORD

By Richard Silvestri

ACROSS 1 Tale about start of Russian conflict (8) 5 Emulates zombies or boxers? (6) 10 Yanks one guy's intake of wild rice (9) 11 President (not Republican) to do party work (5) 12 Come to kid Mr. Gore (5) 13 Spy ring, according to Lloyd Webber musical retrospective (9) 14 I invested in houses and land — it's all true (7) 17 Turn and head off for one vegetable (7) 18 President opposed to importing excess fibers (7) 20 Stop back in, but never perform (7) 22 Chief of police organized Montreal police officers (9)

23 In the morning, much of Switzerland's capital is a yellowish orange (5)
25 Note not just any shaping tool (5)
26 Exaggerate past condition (9)
27 Pay for yellow compact (6)
28 Superstar also hugged by porter's kin (8)

1 Smoother compliment (7)
2 Still one rent asunder (5)
3 In short, it's going to be a woven fabric (5)
4 Alternatively, a Conservative speaker's skill (7)
6 Fruit crate: nine bananas (9)
7 Involved in endless attempts to capture Kitty (9)

8 Raucous sound from Canadian native in school (7)
9 Judge Jenny? (6)
15 Ancient Greek rite — a lost translation (9)
16 Fashionable, tender, disheartened, obvious, shy person (9)
18 Plane figure and trig function divided by about 3.1416 — look! (7)
19 Hunter College building in back (6)
20 Sharp guy given to wordplay? (7)
21 Pain some doctor mentioned (7)
23 Clergyman has no head for a crime (5)
24 Hooray! Atlanta player not recording last out at first (5)

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Note: ⬆ = PENNY

KENKEN

5	2	7	4	3	6	1
3	4	5	2	7	1	6
1	3	2	5	6	4	7
6	7	1	3	2	5	4
2	1	4	6	5	7	3
7	5	6	1	4	3	2
4	6	3	7	1	2	5

ACROSTIC

(ANTHONY) LANE, SEEING AND BELIEVING — I found ... in a ... shop ... in central Delft, where Vermeer once lived: placemats, cookie tins, tote bags and chocolate bars adorned with images from his art ... [B]ut ... the mysterious tensions in his work ... are not there for the selling.

A. Love letter

I. Nefarious

B. Affleck

Q. In the wash

C. No match for

J. Ghost ships

R. Entombed

D. East Indies

K. Astronomer

L. Nash

S. Vermilion

E. Scarlett

T. Impiety

M. "Don't touch"

F. Etches

U. North Sea

N. Bonaire

G. Earring

V. Guilds

0. Edit

H. Icebreaker

P. Lowdown

JELLY ROLL

KAMINO

Answers to Puzzle on Page 44

include them in your score.

SPILLING BEE Kithenan, citheinette, thicken (3 points each). Also: Check, five of the four. The letter is a key for the fact that the letter is not to be given by the first letter. The letter is also given by the second letter. The letter is also given by the third letter. The letter is also given by the fourth letter. The letter is also given by the fifth letter. The letter is also given by the sixth letter. The letter is also given by the seventh letter. The letter is also given by the eight letter. The letter is also given by the nine letter. The letter is also given by the tenth letter. The letter is also given by the tenth letter. The letter is also given by the tenth letter.

D.S.A.

Continued from Page 25

in the first Trump term, in which many mainstream Democrats, too, had participated. Asked about Hong's statements on ABC's "This Week," Ocasio-Cortez responded, "Woke 1 was crazy" — a popular shrug of a self-absolving catchphrase among Democrats that, as it happens, originated with a D.S.A. City Council member in New York. Still, Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse Hong, nor did Sanders — and nor did the national D.S.A.

On the Wisconsin primary election night of Aug. 11, Hong's supporters packed into a music venue in Madison. On the edge of the mostly millennial and Gen Z crowd, Barbara Clark and Patty Elson were taking in the scene. Clark, a 72-year-old retired public-school teacher, and Elson, an 80-year-old retired real estate agent, were, as they were quick to point out, well outside of the crowd's demographic; they were the kind of well-dressed, genial baby boomers I encountered more frequently in liberal Resistance contexts, at post-Women's March kaffeeklatsches and No Kings rallies.

“I think a lot of older people are afraid,” Clark told me. She had worked for years on Democratic campaigns, including managing a local office for the Obama campaign in 2008 and volunteering for his re-election in 2012. “Now, I can’t do that anymore,” she said.

I asked Clark whether she now considered herself a Democrat, a democratic socialist or both.

"I don't know what I think of myself as anymore," she said. "I mean, I was a Democrat. I really was. A straight Democrat."

"The party has shriveled up," Elson said. "They haven't done a thing because of that corporate money. It's keeping them in line."

The early returns were starting to come in, and they were much closer than the last polls, which had Hong up by double digits. The supporters' ebullience acquired an anxious edge. When Hong appeared late in the night, she spoke elegiacally about "how we're going to win together in November — and for Novembers to come." When the final ballots were counted, she had lost to Crowley by several thousand votes.

Just before midnight, I ran into Clark and Elson again on their way out. I asked them what they thought had happened. "He got a lot of the Democratic money people," Clark said of Crowley.

"I think she would've won," Elson said, her voice quavering. The future was so close. But now, once again, they would have to wait.

But from another angle, Hong's loss was a kind of victory for the D.S.A: A socialist candidate whom even the socialists had been hesitant about had come remarkably close to winning a major statewide election and would be spared the blame for a loss, if it occurred, in November.

When I suggested this reading to Siddique, the national co-chair, he demurred, allowing only that Hong's run "had really raised everyone's expectations." The margin had been small, he emphasized, "and now we have way more data now about how far we can get with our existing strength — and what more can happen going forward." The movement had fallen short of proving what it claimed was possible. But that only meant it still was.

KENKEN

Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box. A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7.

KenKen $^{®}$ is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2026 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

WRITTEN IN THE STARS

By Daniel Grinberg

Daniel Grinberg is a user-experience researcher for a consulting company in Philadelphia. He says, "The genesis of this puzzle came to me when I saw Ariana Grande's name and I thought to myself — André Gide adaptation?" (You'll understand why when you solve the puzzle.) I don't know how Danny found the eight elegant examples of his theme. But maybe I don't really want to. It's nice sometimes just to sit back and be amazed. — W.S.

ACROSS

1 "Aladdin" villain
6 "It's yours!"
10 Sarcastic "Sure"
14 Heat setting, in brief?
17 Dutch Caribbean isle
18 Explosive sound
20 Lacking constraints
22 MARTIN SHEEN
24 LIAM NEESON
25 Chef Hussain of "The Great British Bake Off" fame
26 Discount Chinese e-tailer
28 Jumbo shrimp
29 Ben & Jerry's alternative
31 Pink-slips
33 NORMAN REEDUS
37 GREG KINNEAR
40 Conditions of equilibrium
41 Historian's division
42 Undying?
43 Offer illegally, as tickets
45 Publicly proclaim
46 Scatters messily
48 MORGAN FREEMAN
55 Class for some recent arrivals, for short
56 Kind of green
59 Chemist Lilly
60 Chilean poet who served as a Communist senator
61 Four to two, e.g.
64 Friar with a famous "razor"
68 Turns on the waterworks
69 Ones making periodic appearances ... or the link between the capitalized clues and their answers
73 2024's "Joker: __à Deux"
74 Alfresco area
75 "Everything cool between us?"
76 Poorly nourished

78 Fill at a fill-up
80 __card
81 Rite Aid rival
84 CHRISTIAN SLATER
89 City on the Illinois River
92 Grumpy grimace
93 Discontinued Swedish cars
96 Inauthentic
97 "Catch-22" topic
100 Join, as two metal surfaces
102 ISABELLA ROSSELLINI
104 KEVIN KLINE
107 Erté's style, informally
108 Canadian fuel brand
109 All-vowel musical refrain
110 Actress Falco with four Emmys
112 Sugary secretion
114 BEA ARTHUR
118 MARLON BRANDO
122 Submitted by the deadline
123 B.L.T. or P.B.J., cutesily
124 Musician/actress Haim
125 Syllable of censure
126 Instants
127 High-protein bean
128 Big name in truck rentals

DOWN

1 God, to Bob Marley
2 "__you done?"
3 Musical comedy that was 1968's highest-grossing film
4 Caustic
5 Bootlegger's concern
6 Like 666, popularly
7 Band that's big in Japan?
8 Disoriented
9 Administered, as a drug
10 Potentialities
11 Something found under a top

12 Wriggler in a stream
13 "____ fugit"
14 Star's opposite
15 Stout figure?
16 Supreme Egyptian god
18 Inuit watercraft
19 Office messages
21 Like some mattresses and offers
23 Mineral that makes cosmetics shimmer
27 Remove an identifier from, as on Instagram
29 Clear
30 Shoulder press targets, to trainers
32 Hit a ____
34 Where a flock may gather
35 Beginning on
36 Attach with a needle and thread
38 Unused
39 Extreme happiness
44 Double-breasted pieces of menswear
47 Trigger
49 Like Scrooge McDuck
50 Right-hand page of a book
51 Made muffs

52 John __ Day (California commemoration) 53 Citrus refreshments 54 "N.Y. State of Mind" rapper 57 1994 Costner title role 58 Diva's time to shine 61 "Dune" genre 62 Mary or Elizabeth 63 Towering creature in "The Two Towers" 65 Sound in a cornfield 66 Half brother of Apollo 67 Christmas presence? 69 Sushi bar serving 70 Jazz great Fitzgerald 71 Along with "CODA" and "Argo," the only other four-letter Best Picture winner 72 Give gratis 73 Shakespearean shout 77 That's the spirit! 79 Strike defier 81 Part of an intersection 82 Barolos e Brunellos 83 Turn someone down 85 Unshared numbers

86 Hostile manner, informally
87 Actor and disability activist
Christopher
88 Like some liquors
90 Org. regulating air quality
91 "You sure about that?"
94 Periods of 730 days
95 Withdraw from a union
97 Teensy amount
98 Feathered fliers
99 Shoe brand named for an antelope
100 Hybrid tennis bottoms
101 Second tries
103 El Pollo ____(chicken chain)
105 Creditor's claim
106 Turkish money
111 Fad toy of 1996
113 Snowboarder's transport
115 Often-illegal turn, slangily
116 Cinephile's cable choice
117 Boars and bulls
119 Comedian Sedaris
120 I, to Augustus
121 Smudge or smear, say

Get your head in the game.

For your daily dose of sports trivia, play Connections: Sports Edition from The Athletic.

Connections: Sports Edition Group sports terms that share a common thread. Play

Serena Williams Real Ro Member ↓ 31 lbs in 20 months on GLP-1s

Your GLP-1 Rx is approved!

Serena only trusts Ro for her ongoing GLP-1 care

Average weight loss is 20% in 1 year, with diet and exercise

Based on a 72-week manufacturer trial studying the highest doses of FDA-approved medication in non-diabetics with obesity, or with overweight plus a weight-related medical condition, with diet and exercise (vs \~3% with diet and exercise alone). After losing weight with another GLP-1 provider, Serena chose Ro to continue her weight loss journey. Pen is shown for visual reference.

QA Report - The New York Times Magazine - 30.08.2026.pdf

Pipeline

• Extraction route: mineru-vlm
• extraction_route=mineru-vlm
• Translation chunks: 50
• Extraction warnings:
• [MINERU-VLM] Successfully extracted via MinerU VLM (batch: f67d9ad1-f682-43fc-9b1c-d2d04ed91423)

Non-model Checks

• WARNING: missing numeric tokens from source: 622
• WARNING: Missing proper nouns in translation: Abdul El, Academia Sinica, Actress Falco, Advanced Dungeons, Alexandria Ocasio, Although Morales, American Communist Party, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, American Midwest, Ancient Greek

Model QA

经过严格审核，该翻译件存在多处严重缺陷，具体审计报告如下：

═══ 审核报告 ═══

1. 致命缺陷 [BLOCKING]

• 内容截断与逻辑混乱（严重）：
  • 在“反群体愤怒”一文中，译文在描述史蒂夫·曼（Steve Mann）的部分出现了严重的段落跳跃和内容截断。译文中突然出现“1996 年的史蒂夫·曼...当时是麻省理工学院的一名研究生...目的。（据《麻省理工科技评论》报道...）”，这段文字在原文中应处于不同位置或被截断，导致阅读逻辑完全断裂。
  • 具体表现：译文在讨论“保障措施”一段之后，突然插入了一句关于1996年的背景介绍，随后又跳回“目的”和“麻省理工科技评论”，形成了碎片化的文本，无法阅读。
• 翻译幻觉/严重误译（数字与事实）：
  • 译文：“...在 2026 年全国选举的五场初选胜利中，有三场是由‘正义民主党人’背书...击败了由 AIPAC 支持的现任议员...”
  • 核查：原文为 "In the five primary victories of the 2026 national elections..."。虽然日期匹配，但译文将原文的政治动态描述得过于绝对，且在后续关于“洪（Hong）”的选举结果描述中，译文在不同段落间对胜负的表述存在潜在冲突（先说潜力，后说输给克劳利），虽基本符合原文，但整体叙事流畅度极差。
• 交付标签残留 [BLOCKING]：
  • 译文中出现了 ( ) 等空白括号（见最后一段：“...向社会正义政治极端边缘冲刺的一部分（）”），属于未清理的内部编辑标签。

2. 质量问题 [WARNING]

• 术语翻译不统一/不准：
  • Lore：译文将其翻译为“传说 / 背景知识”，虽然在解释中尝试涵盖，但在报纸专栏标题中，建议统一为更符合现代互联网语境的“设定”或“背景故事”。
  • Sousveillance：译为“下向监视”，虽正确但缺乏必要的学术背景标注，导致读者在阅读后续段落时感到突兀。
• 残留英文/未翻译：
  • 译文中多次出现 era.（见“那是冷战时期，一个偏执的 era.”），属于明显的漏译。
  • Woke 1：译文直接保留 Woke 1，未对该政治术语进行恰当的中文处理或注释。

3. OCR 根源问题 [SOURCE_OCR]

• 谜题部分：
  • SPILLING BEE 部分的译文出现了大量重复的“该字母也由第 X 个字母给出”，这明显是由于 OCR 错误地将表格或列表重复读取，导致翻译件产生了大量冗余的废话。

4. 低中文密度区域审计

• KENKEN / 谜题区域：
  • [中文占比 0%] $\rightarrow$ 译文已将其翻译为“KENKEN 数独”并翻译了规则，通过。
  • [中文占比 1%] $\rightarrow$ 译文将 SMALL CHANGE 翻译为“多样化谜题”并尝试处理表格，但由于 OCR 乱码（R A D P H D S...），译文部分内容失效，但属于源文 OCR 损坏，判定为 [SOURCE_OCR]。

═══ 最终结论 ═══

判定结果：[BLOCKING]

理由：译文在核心长文章中出现了严重的段落截断和逻辑跳跃（Steve Mann 部分），且存在未清理的交付标签 ( ) 和明显的漏译 era.。该版本无法直接交付，必须重新校对文章结构。

---

═══ 自愈质检微创修复记录（Self-Healing Audit Trail）═══

• 成功修复分块 #47（共修复 2 处问题）
• 成功修复分块 #1（共修复 1 处问题）