2026-03-30 20:00:00
You may generally disregard unfamiliar faces as background characters in the movie that is your life, but almost everyone you care about was once a stranger. Aside from the people who have been in your life since you were born, every relationship has a getting-to-know you process where you transition from unknowns to knowns.
Strangers can bring so much meaning to everyday moments, in big ways and small ones. In her new book Once Upon A Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life, Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, makes the case for why we should make more attempts to connect with unknowns. Sandstrom draws on research that both extols the virtues of interacting with strangers (talking with them improves well-being) and helps quell your fears (people enjoy talking to us more than we think).
Among the most nerve-wracking of stranger encounters are ones where you’re the unknown entity in a group: at a new job, a knitting club, or on the block. Everyone is unfamiliar to you, but to them, you’re the sole stranger. Here, Sandstrom offers some advice on how to integrate into the unit, and why you probably aren’t as embarrassing as you think.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Is there a difference between talking to a stranger on the street versus going into a new a cappella group and they all know each other and you don’t? Is the stranger scenario different for each of those contexts?
There is something different when you know that you might see the person again, because you probably worry more about their judgment. You want them to like you, so that when you see them again, you might want to talk again. Sometimes people worry [the other person doesn’t] want that. So you might think, I see the same person at the bus stop every day and I could say hi. But what if I do and then I don’t like them? Or if they’re boring and then I’m going to have to talk to them every single time I go to the bus stop? So it’s better to just not talk at all. It’s definitely scarier when you know that there’s the potential to see people again; you really want to make a good impression. It feels higher stakes.
Would this type of conversation fall under the umbrella of small talk?
The way you start a conversation works the same way whenever you’re talking to someone that you haven’t met before, regardless of what’s going to happen in the future, if you’re going to see them again or not. You have to figure out, What are we going to talk about? I don’t know you, so I don’t know which topics are good and which topics are not good, and we have to fumble our way to finding some common ground. The choir [you just joined] is a good conversation starter. You’ve chosen the same thing to do. Or you’re working for the same employer. You have something in common, which could be an easier conversation starter.
What stuck out to me in the book was what you call Sid, this insidious voice in your head who’s telling you not to talk to strangers, and that you’re not interesting and nobody likes you. That voice is even stronger in situations where everybody knows each other and you are the new person. What advice would you have to quiet that voice?
That voice in our head that’s like, “You suck, you don’t know what you’re doing, nobody likes you” — part of that comes from always comparing ourselves to others. There’s research showing that we generally think we’re better than average at almost everything, but not at social stuff. This is almost the only thing where we think we’re not better than average. Who are you comparing yourself to? We compare ourselves to highly social people, the people who are really good at this. That’s partly why we think that we’re not any good, because we’re comparing ourselves to the best of the best.
We have to be better at realizing, yes, there are some people like that, but we don’t have to compare ourselves to those people who are really good. If you look around the room, probably more people are like you desperately trying to figure it out and have a decent conversation.
I am a researcher, so I’m all about the data. Okay, Sid, what data do you have? Show me the receipts. We don’t talk to strangers very often, and when we don’t have enough data, we can’t [easily] be like, “Oh yeah, I remember that great conversation I had.” We remember the really bad stuff. If you ever had a conversation with a stranger that didn’t go well, or you tried to talk to someone and it was a bit awkward or they didn’t want to talk, that’s what you’re going to remember. For me, what helps quiet Sid is to be able to say, “No, you have no basis for what you’re telling me. You have no data.”
I was really struck by your study that showed most conversations with strangers go well; there are very few that are total trainwrecks. That speaks to the idea that we’re making this up. It’s not that bad.
When we don’t have data, we have to imagine stuff, and it’s easier to imagine those trainwrecks. That’s the stuff we remember. It’s the drama.
It also ups the stakes, especially if you’re the new person at work and thinking, “I’m going to say something stupid, and they’re going to see me every day and think I’m an idiot for the rest of the time that we work together.”
There’s this research on who we’re willing to confide in. People, in certain situations, would rather share something with someone they don’t know, because if they share it with someone they do know, every time they see that person they’re going to be reminded of the fact that they shared that thing. The same is true here. If you tell a joke that nobody laughs at, you might think that every time you see them, you’ll be reminded of that joke and it didn’t go over well. They’re probably not thinking of it. The spotlight effect is when we feel like other people are noticing all our flaws more than they actually do, and then, that changes how you act, and it makes things more awkward. There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy going on.
What if you said something stupid and everyone laughed. How do you move on?
If it was me, I’d try to make a joke about it. There have been so many times where I have continued to feel bad about something, and every once in a while, I bring it up and people are like, “I don’t even remember that.” What you could do is say, “I’m still thinking about that horrible joke I told last time.” Guaranteed, they’ll be like, “What joke? I don’t even remember.”
Why is it worth talking to strangers, especially the ones that you are going to see regularly?
It does not feel the same if you’re on a dodgeball team and you’re not talking to anybody on your team. The fun comes from being able to joke around and trash talk the opponents together and have a cup of tea afterwards. What would it feel like if you didn’t have any of that? It would be empty.
A lot of people join a group, and then, they find a couple people, and then, anytime they go to the group, they talk to those few people, and that’s it. I try really hard not to do that. I try to meet lots of people. I play in an amateur orchestra. How do you turn a chat at the orchestra to something outside of the orchestra? If you did want to turn it into something lasting, you need that repeated contact. If you’re seeing the same people every week, that’s a good start. But then, you also have to be willing and brave enough to say, “Let’s grab a coffee afterwards.”
What if you don’t want to take these relationships further?
That’s fine. You shouldn’t feel like you have to get their name and their contact info and do something, but you can if you want to. There’s research on how having a diversity of interaction partners is important. You learn different things from different people.
What misconceptions do you think people have about the value of interacting with strangers?
People start by thinking, I’m not going to have anything in common with them. Why would I? What’s in it for me? One of the reasons that we connect with other people is because we can do more together, and we feel safer when we’re in a group. We’re going to thrive. The workplace is going to be able to produce more, because we’re going to be better at teamwork, and we’re going to trust each other more. But for that to happen, someone has to go first. You have to be thinking about the “we.”
I like the way you put it: Someone has to go first. It almost feels like we’re at a school dance, and we’re all standing on the sidelines, but we want the same thing.
That’s the biggest misconception in terms of talking to strangers, period: We walk around thinking we’re the only ones who are anxious and that we don’t know what to do and that they don’t want to talk to us. But everybody’s feeling that way. It takes one person to be brave, to figure out how to ignore Sid’s voice in their head and just do it anyway.
2026-03-30 18:30:00
When candidate Donald Trump promised mass deportations on the 2024 campaign trail, it was hard to imagine exactly what that might turn into.
Though he boasted about implementing the “largest domestic deportation operation” in history, you could be forgiven for believing he meant something more limited — a “sequential” approach (as JD Vance suggested), starting with recent arrivals, “violent criminals,” and suspected gang members.
That, at least, seemed to be what a lot of voters who trusted him on this topic, imagined — including many immigrant-heavy communities who voted Republican in historic numbers, and were also concerned about the sometimes chaotic flow of asylum seekers into the country.
Pollsters were quick to note that though many of these deportation proposals were quite popular with the average American, support varied dramatically depending on the details. Targeted ICE arrests of convicted felons and those who arrived in the United States during the Biden presidency polled significantly better than separating mixed-status families, carrying out arrests at or near churches and schools, and deporting longtime residents — who might be your neighbors or friends.
Instead, American cities were occupied by federal law enforcement agencies; the National Guard was deployed to quell protests; unidentified and masked agents strolled through neighborhoods, chased suspects into stores, and arrested immigrants at courthouses; protesters, politicians, and journalists were arrested or injured; people with pending asylum cases were seized and deported to a notorious foreign maximum-security prison; and two American citizens were shot and killed.
Much of the Department of Homeland Security remained shut down or operated without pay as Democrats demanded new limits attached to any funding this month. In response, Trump deployed ICE to airports — to help beleaguered TSA agents and even rehabilitate their image, he says, but also implicitly to pressure an opposition party that has come to see them as the president’s personal army and associate them with repression. “That’ll drive the Democrats crazy,” US Rep. James Comer (R-KY), said on Fox Business News recently.
A year into this deportation program, it’s safe to say that the joint work of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US Border Patrol, and other federal agencies have reshaped American life, from coast-to-coast, in both dramatic and more quiet ways. It has touched all kinds of ethnic communities — Somalis in Minnesota, Haitians in Ohio, Arabs in Michigan — and has had a particular impact on the nation’s largest cohort of recent immigrants, those from Latin America.
A new kind of civically conscious activist has risen in places that experienced ICE surges or are continuing to see enforcement actions. Local economies were devastated by deportation efforts, and are still struggling to recover. And fear, suspicion — and, in some cases, paranoia — have remade the social fabric of communities touched by ICE.
But in conversations with affected people across the country, there’s also a sense of hope — and a sense that the Trump administration is realizing how far it has gone, and may be attempting to tone down or change how it pursues its immigration goals.
When rumors began circulating last year that ICE was planning a surge of agents to the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, locals were alarmed and looking for something to do.
“I was never really an activist, but the stuff that I was seeing, I just didn’t like,” Jonathan Pierce, a drugstore employee in Hickory, North Carolina, told me. “I didn’t like how Trump talked about immigrants and I was seeing how the immigration stuff was affecting people that I work with, who are my friends, who have been active in church.”
Fortunately, for Pierce, he had options. Concerned citizens had an easy entry point into local activism and a clear blueprint for action that had been prepared months in advance and was being tested and updated in cities around the country.
In November, Homeland Security officially announced Operation “Charlotte’s Web.” Soon, unmarked vans and masked federal agents patrolled the city and its suburbs. They would end up carrying out raids, arresting and detaining hundreds, and sparking fear in the region’s primarily Hispanic immigrant communities. But locals were already organizing and responding.
It started at the grassroots level, with support from religious leaders. Immigrant rights’ groups and legal aid organizations were already in contact with pastors, priests, and preachers in the region to iron out ways they could support immigrant neighbors. Congregants at the First United Methodist church in Taylorsville, North Carolina — Pierce among them — had already begun attending trainings on how to respond.
The original plan was to teach volunteers how they could help vulnerable neighbors get to and from churches and schools, the Rev. Joel Simpson, a First United Methodist pastor, told me. As they watched ICE tactics grow more aggressive in other cities where they had launched major operations, “those trainings shifted from what we had originally planned once we realized this could get much more violent and intense.”
Working with groups like Siembra NC and the Carolina Migrant Network, churches began to host more trainings and activate neighbors to sign up to monitor ICE operations. They learned deescalation tactics, how to communicate via whistles, and how to document interactions between ICE agents and detained people. They refreshed their frightened neighbors on what their rights were, shared how to get legal assistance, and how to be aware of potential danger.
In all, more than 2,000 people were trained and organized during that first week of ICE operations in the area, Simpson told me.
The defining image of resistance during Trump’s first term was the mass protest: The Women’s March at its start, the March for Our Lives in the middle, and finally Black Lives Matter protests at the end. In his second term, it has become more about individual action: Recording federal agents with a smartphone or sounding a car horn to alert a street to their presence.
The Minneapolis uprising that forced ICE to pull out in January — and eventually led to the firing of DHS secretary Kristi Noem — confirmed the ascendance of a new type of activist movement that had already established itself around the country: Small, nimble, local, and constantly adopting new tactics to protect neighbors from harassment, detention, or deportation.
“It’s churches and neighborhoods and grassroots community organizational networks that are already existing that mobilized to help immigrant families first and foremost,” Theda Skocpol, an expert on political organizing in the US, told me in January.
While Minneapolis was the culmination of these forms of networking, elements of this activism preceded it in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC, all following similar blueprints.
TheTrump administration sees it differently: Officials have argued that these protests and community organizing tactics are impeding normal enforcement operations — particularly deporting criminals — and that participants have endangered officers with disruptive behavior. Earlier this year, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and use federal troops to quash protests.
Pierce’s life feels a lot different now than a year ago. He’s participated in those November trainings; he’s joined protests in both Raleigh and in Washington, DC, and he now cares about more than just immigration.
Though he’s been limited by his work schedule — child care responsibilities as a single parent — and weather, he’s tried to remain active, trying to convince neighbors in Hickory to care about ICE and other economic concerns ahead of the 2026 midterms: organizing letter-writing campaigns to local and state representatives, and talking with neighbors about the future of SNAP benefits, health insurance, and affordability.
Pierce is an example of what another preacher told me has changed in the Charlotte area: of politically agnostic or sympathetic neighbors being convinced to practice what they believe.
“I knew that there were people in Charlotte that cared for the immigrant community, but it wasn’t until Border Patrol was in Charlotte that I saw the action that came attached to that,” Erika Reynoso, a Pentecostal preacher in Gastonia, a neighboring suburb, told me. “It gave them a chance to take action as opposed to just having an ideology.”
“They know what it takes. So if Border Patrol shows up again, we’re ready.”
Erika Reynoso, Pentecostal preacher in North Carolina
Reynoso knew plenty of people who were detained or racially profiled during the Charlotte surge. She herself feared what might happen to her as ICE behaved more aggressively. Though she began to participate in ICE watches and mutual aid groups early in November, once she heard reports of Latino citizens being detained and questioned, she pulled back.
“I went to one of the sightings and thankfully there was already a white male verifier there, and I asked him, ‘Hey, are you here to verify?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you should leave immediately,”” she said. “I knew that in that moment there was something terrible happening in that neighborhood and he was protecting me.”
Instead, she shifted her activism toward more quiet forms of mutual aid, of educating neighbors, and preaching about social justice at her church. And though ICE’s heavy presence is gone now, those memories and that fear still linger.
But these communities have been changed for the better too, Reynoso said. The training has stuck with them, and so has the confidence that it can make a difference in practice.
“They know what it takes,” she said. “So if Border Patrol shows up again, we’re ready.”
Anchored by taquerias, grocery stores, boutique shops, and bakeries on 26th Street southwest of downtown Chicago, Little Village is known as the “Mexico of the Midwest.”
It’s renowned for being the economic engine of Chicago’s Latino community — city officials told me that along with the Magnificent Mile downtown, Little Village is among the top tax-revenue-generating stretches of Chicago.
And it’s not just the locals driving commerce: Little Village, and specifically the 26th Street corridor “is a tourist destination for other Latinos in the United States,” Jennifer Aguilar, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce, told me. “We see a lot of visitors from the Midwest and East Coast that come to buy things that they can’t find in the states that they live in, like food, quinceañera dresses or ingredients that they need to cook traditional dishes. And since a lot of them can’t go to Mexico, this is the next big best thing.”
Then the immigration authorities arrived.
When Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander-at-large, came to town, residents, leaders, and business owners knew to expect disruption. They just didn’t expect how bad things would get, how hard the economic hit would be, and how long it would take to recover.
Immediately, the midwestern Latino visitors who made the trek by car to drive under the corridor’s iconic welcome arch were too afraid to come in “because they heard that ICE was targeting Little Village,” Aguilar said.
News coverage at the time showed scenes of a ghost town in Little Village, of canceled Mexican Independence Day celebrations in downtown, of ICE targets being chased into shops and restaurants, of seemingly random traffic stops, and of protests prompting armored vehicles and federal agents to deploy tear gas — including at least three times in Little Village.
The effect was immediate. From September to late October, when ICE was most active in Chicago, business owners in Little Village were reporting 50 to 60 percent drops in sales compared to the previous year, according to the local alderperson, Michael D. Rodriguez. Some shops struggled to make a single sale in a week, while others temporarily closed their doors.
Wherever ICE and CBP officers have surged, a trail of economic devastation has often followed. Local businesses in multiple cities have complained of foot traffic shutting down, frightened employees staying home, and vendors scared off streets.
Nationally, these enforcement operations have remade the economy. The flow of immigrants into the United States — both documented and undocumented — has turned net negative for the first time in 50 years, according to a Brookings Institution report, with more people now exiting the country overall. The report estimated the change could result in a $60 billion to $110 billion drop in consumer spending between 2025 and 2026, and further worsen prices because of higher labor and production costs, particularly in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing.
While the White House has touted every migrant worker removed as a potential job opening for a native-born one, hiring has slowed nationally over the same period. The administration has also made some concessions to immigrant-heavy industries, particularly agriculture, by discouraging raids.
But these big-picture statistics can obscure the very real way these economic hits have damaged American communities. And perhaps no place is a better example of this pattern than Little Village.
When trying to describe the economic pain caused over these weeks, the Chicagoans I spoke to tended to come back to a chilling comparison: the Covid-19 pandemic.
The last time they had felt a shock like this had been during the peak of the coronavirus shutdowns. But unlike in 2020, there were no equivalent grant programs or federally backed loans, like the Paycheck Protection Program, to help keep businesses and employees afloat.
“At least people were getting paid; you had essential workers, and I never stopped working,” Christina Gonzalez, the co-owner of the Los Comales taqueria and catering group, told me. “But we were recovering from 2020 and this [with tariffs] hit us like a one-two punch.”
When ICE and CBP arrived, businesses were already struggling with higher costs as a result of tariffs, and dealing with financial hits from some enforcement actions in the city in the first half of the year. Shop owners had to furlough or lay off employees; others couldn’t convince workers to commute to the area, for fear of being detained. This all created a cycle: Lost wages meant less purchasing power, which meant lower sales for these small businesses.
In response, city and local officials have tried their best to take stock of what was happening and track the lingering fallout. Since October, local, state, and federal representatives have met with business owners, collected testimony, connected businesses with small grant funds, and promoted campaigns to convince people of means — often wealthier, white, or citizens — to visit Little Village and other primarily Mexican American neighborhoods to shop and spend.
Still, the impacts have lingered. Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia, whose office started the “Shopping in Solidarity” initiative to promote visits and investment from those outside Little Village, said there’s only so much she and local communities can do without more state and city support. She’s called for the creation of a joint public-private relief fund to help with small business recovery and investment efforts in 2026. And she’s preparing for more bad news in April across the city.
“When the tax returns are filed, you’ll be able to actually see the real numbers,” she said. “But we know that it’s already going to be devastating just by hearing the stories and seeing it with our own eyes — the ghost towns of a lot of our neighborhoods.”
All these months later, residents across the country, particularly those in immigrant or diaspora communities, continue to describe a kind of “survival mode” — a feeling that extends beyond economic pain.
It’s a sense of wariness that sometimes borders on paranoia, that ICE will return or is hanging around the corner. And it lingers even as residents prepare for better weather and more time spent together outdoors — a footprint still left on residents’ souls as they navigate public life across the country.
The stories of Latino residents in the greater Phoenix area gave me another window into this reality, in addition to stories from Charlotte and Chicago. Immigrants, mixed-status families, citizens, and activists in Maricopa County have a long history with immigration politics, deportations, and the inevitable shearing of the social fabric that comes with it.
This part of the country was the focal point of enforcement in the pre-Trump years, when the battle over immigration and what to do about those who had been living in the US for years was most acrimonious. Championed by hardline anti-illegal immigration officials like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, state law SB 1070 essentially deputized local law enforcement to enforce immigration law: requiring police to check immigration status during stops if they suspected someone might be undocumented. It made a lack of documentation a state crime, and empowered Arpaio, “America’s toughest sheriff,” to continue an aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the county that sparked accusations of racial profiling and mental and emotional distress to brown people in the region.
The law was largely blocked in court after years of long legal battles. But that memory — and the activism and organizing that sprung up in response by primarily Mexican Americans in the area — still remains.
Though Phoenix hasn’t seen the same kind of mass deployments that Chicago, Charlotte, or Minneapolis have faced, the area has experienced similar kinds of quiet enforcement, targeted raids, and rumor-mill sightings of federal agents across the area, as in those other cities.
“Our community is thinking twice when they open their doors, when they leave their homes,” César Fierros, an organizer and spokesperson for the immigrant rights group Living United for Change in Arizona, told me. “It’s this thing in the back of your head: What if you get stopped because of the color of your skin? or they inquire about your citizenship because of the color of your skin.“ It’s a fear, Fierros said, “even among citizens and people that have the proper documentation to be in the country,” of having to encounter a federal officer, of being racially profiled, of being harassed — because community members feel like it’s happened before.
Fierros told me that he’s had to have conversations with his family similar to the ones his organization is having with community members: of carrying a REAL ID, a passport, or permanent residency card at all times and making plans if a family member without documentation is detained.
“My mom’s a school bus driver. She has an accent because English is not her primary language and she’s very proud of being an American. But at the same time, she’s fearful of potentially being racially profiled by ICE or by a federal agent or by law enforcement,” Fierros told me. So his mother carries her passport with her, something that she has never done before.
It’s not just Fierros’s community that has this fear, or has changed their behavior like this. I heard similar stories from each of the people I spoke to for this story. Driven by news reports that not only undocumented immigrants have been detained or targeted for deportation, but also people in legal asylum proceedings, refugees, green card holders, students, and US citizens, their personal safety has never felt more precarious.
This uneasiness has registered in national polling as well. A Pew Research Center survey published in November analyzing the mood and feeling of Latinos living in the US found a consistent shift in how they are changing their behavior as a result of Trump’s second-term enforcement agenda. Some one in five Hispanic adults told pollsters they changed their daily activities out of fear they’ll be asked to “prove their legal status.” One in 10 say they carry a document to prove citizenship or legal status now, more often than they used to do.
And then there are more difficult conversations, about what a family will have to do in the case that someone is detained.
Yolanda Landeros, a 56-year-old resident of Buckeye, a Phoenix suburb, told me that in addition to carrying a REAL ID and avoiding spending too much time outdoors, she’s had to develop different plans with her extended family in the Southwest and Iowa about what to do if ICE comes knocking or detains a member — memorizing phone numbers to alert family or attorneys, knowing not to open doors, and asking for warrants.
She’s most worried about an undocumented cousin living in Iowa, who deals with chronic health issues and requires dialysis treatment.
“If he gets detained, he could be there for days, weeks, or months. He can’t do that. He won’t survive,” Landeros told me.
So they developed a Plan A, B, and C:
The stories of changed social and family life around the country reminded me of what my colleague Anna North recently dubbed the “ICE pandemic” — the sense that even beyond the lasting fear and economic damage that ICE surges created, there is also lingering damage to community trust and willingness to participate in social life. Kids have been kept home from school or educated remotely; churchgoers skipped services or were issued dispensations to forgive a missed Mass; scared workers stayed home and refused to expose themselves to potential stops; sick kids or adults in need of medical care opted to delay or postpone checkups for fear of ICE exposure.
And there’s the sadness that comes with knowing people who have opted to uproot their lives preemptively, retire early, or self-deport.
“They want to wear people down, and it has worked in some instances,” Aguilar, the Chicago small business activist, told me. “Some business owners have shared with me stories of regular clients that they’ve had for years that decided to self-deport because they’re like, Well, I’d rather take my stuff with me. I’d rather go home in a dignified way than end up in one of these camps and God knows where I’ll end up and if my family’s going to be able to reach me.”
Gonzales, of Los Comales in Chicago, recalled how her son asked her if he should be carrying his passport or ID around with him in order to prove his citizenship.
“I said, ‘No, fuck ’em.’ Somebody needs to vet me? I’m not living in a Kafka-esque Nazi government,” she said. “You can find me with my fingerprints or you can figure out who I am based on the information I give you from my mouth. But I should not have to show you my goddamn ID to walk down the street.”
Ratings of Trump’s immigration policy have been solidly negative for months now among voters, shifting most dramatically among Latinos, Latino Republicans, and Trump 2024 voters. A Fox News poll in March found his overall approval at 28 percent with Hispanic respondents, with 72 percent disapproving. Democrats have also made gains in elections with Hispanic communities that swung right in 2024. Trump has reportedly told his inner circle that he fears his early plans for “mass deportation” have gone too far for voters.
For now, residents in these communities remain in a bit of a holding pattern. They all expect that ICE or CBP will return at some point, particularly after the outrage and attention that the Minneapolis operations sparked dies down. But they also feel some optimism about how their communities and neighbors will respond in the future. In each of my conversations, a silver lining was repeated: that even though there is more suspicion and fear now, there are new bonds that have been forged among neighbors, in faith communities, and among Latinos themselves, specifically.
“Whatever divisions there may have been across the Latino community with the us versus them, the documented versus the undocumented, the criminals versus the noncriminals…there’s a greater sense of unity now and a willingness to help,” Reynoso, the Pentecostal pastor in North Carolina, told me. “We must exercise grace and compassion with each other in these uncertain times.”
2026-03-30 18:01:00
Crafting as protest has a long history in America, dating back to before the American Revolution when colonists would boycott British textiles, choosing to spin their own instead. More than 250 years later, the medium is alive and well: A knitting pattern for a “Melt the ICE” hat, for example, has raised more than $700,000 for immigration aid groups following ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Anna North reports on the resurgence of resistance crafting, how crafters are thinking about their art, and how it looks different from the first Trump term. Also in this issue: public or private school? The decline of smoking in the US. And alone time that’s actually restorative.
By Bryan Walsh
By Sigal Samuel
By Constance Grady
Coming March 31
By Rachel Cohen Booth
Coming April 1
By Allie Volpe
Coming April 2
By Anna North
Coming April 3
2026-03-30 18:00:00
How old am I? Old enough to have flown on planes that had ashtrays in the armrests. Old enough to remember restaurants with smoking sections separated from the nonsmoking section by, essentially, nothing. Old enough to remember when “smoking or non” was a question the restaurant host actually asked you. Old enough that in the year I graduated high school — 1997 — more than a third of high schoolers smoked.
I’m 47 — not ancient, even if I sometimes feel that way — and yet the America I grew up in the 1980s was still so saturated with cigarette smoke that these memories feel like dispatches from another civilization. In 1980, roughly a third of American adults still smoked. The smoking mascot Joe Camel, whom critics would later accuse of being designed to appeal to children, debuted the year I turned 10.
Now here’s a figure from 2024: 9.9 percent. That’s the share of American adults who smoke cigarettes, according to data from the National Health Interview Survey analyzed in a paper published this month in NEJM Evidence. It’s the first time the rate has fallen below 10 percent in the history of the survey. In the language of public health, smoking in America is now officially “rare.”
This decline — from 42.4 percent in 1965 to 9.9 percent, over about 60 years — is one of the great public health achievements of the modern era. It didn’t happen because of a single breakthrough or a miracle drug. It happened because science, policy, litigation, and sheer collective will chipped away at the problem for six decades against the fierce resistance of one of the most powerful industries on Earth. If you’re looking for evidence that large-scale, long-term progress is possible — even when the odds seem impossible — there are few better examples than the story of smoking.
The scale of the change is hard to appreciate now. At the peak, Americans consumed more than 4,000 cigarettes per person per year, or more than half a pack a day. Roughly half of all physicians smoked. Cigarette companies spent billions on marketing and lobbied ferociously against any regulation while actively suppressing evidence of harm.
The toll was staggering. Since 1964, more than 20 million Americans have died from smoking-related causes. Smoking still kills approximately 480,000 Americans per year, contributing to about one in five deaths. Globally, tobacco killed roughly 100 million people in the 20th century — more than the total number of people killed in WWII. It is, by a wide margin, the leading cause of preventable death in the modern world.
The turning point came on January 11, 1964, when Surgeon General Luther Terry convened a press conference at the State Department to announce what his advisory committee had found after reviewing more than 7,000 scientific articles: Cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and probably causes heart disease. He deliberately chose to announce the findings on a Saturday — both to minimize stock market fallout and maximize Sunday newspaper coverage. It worked. The report, as Terry later recalled, “hit the country like a bombshell.”
But the tobacco industry didn’t go quietly. Internal documents showed that cigarette companies knew smoking caused cancer as early as the late 1950s and worked tirelessly to conceal it. A famous R.J. Reynolds internal memo distilled the strategy: “Doubt is our product.”
For decades, the industry funded sham research organizations, lobbied Congress with enormous budgets, and targeted children with advertising. In 1994, the CEOs of the seven largest tobacco companies testified before Congress that they did not believe nicotine was addictive. Internal documents proved they knew otherwise.
The industry had, at that point, never lost a lawsuit — in more than 800 cases. But that would change. In 1998, 46 state attorneys general reached the Master Settlement Agreement with the tobacco companies — a $246 billion settlement, the largest redistribution of corporate wrongdoing costs in American legal history. In 2006, a federal judge went so far as to rule that the tobacco companies had violated the RICO Act — the racketeering statute typically reserved for organized crime.
No single policy killed the cigarette. It was a combination of interventions deployed over decades: warning labels on packages (1965), a ban on broadcast advertising (1970), smoke-free workplace laws (spreading from Minnesota in 1975 to most of the country by now), growing awareness of the risks of secondhand smoke (1986), progressive tax increases (a 10 percent price hike reduces consumption about 4 percent), FDA regulatory authority (2009), and cessation programs from nicotine patches to the CDC’s Tips From Former Smokers campaign. Maybe most importantly, smoking went from being something almost everyone did to something that was banned in most public spaces — which changed social norms as much as any law.
The result: an estimated 8 million lives saved between 1964 and 2014 alone, representing 157 million years of life — an average of about 20 extra years for each person who didn’t die prematurely from smoking. A 40-year-old American man in 2014 could expect to live nearly eight years longer than his 1964 counterpart, and roughly a third of that improvement comes from tobacco control alone.
But we still have a ways to go in the effort to permanently stub out tobacco.
For one thing, 9.9 percent is an average, and averages lie. Smoking rates among people with a GED — meaning they didn’t graduate high school — are still 42.8 percent, barely less than the national rate in 1964. Rates remain high among low-income Americans (24.4 percent), rural residents (27 percent), people with disabilities (21.5 percent), and workers in construction and extraction jobs (around 29 percent). As overall consumption rates have declined, smoking has increasingly become a disease of poverty and disadvantage. The people who still smoke are disproportionately the people with the fewest resources to help them quit.
Second, even as cigarette smoking goes away, nicotine hasn’t. E-cigarette use holds steady at 7 percent among adults, and while cigarettes are almost extinct among 18- to 24-year-olds, nearly 15 percent vape nicotine.
But vaping is still better for you than smoking is. E-cigarettes have helped people quit tobacco and are generally less harmful than lighting dried leaves on fire and inhaling the smoke, even if their full long-term effects won’t be known for years.
Third, notably, this milestone of government action was not actually announced by the US government, even though that’s where the data comes from. Federal cuts have decimated the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, the very office that has tracked and driven this progress for decades. Instead, the analysis was published by an independent researcher through NEJM Evidence’s “Public Health Alerts” initiative — a new collaboration created specifically to fill gaps left by the gutted CDC. There’s every reason to worry that the federal health infrastructure as it stands now will struggle to keep the momentum going against tobacco.
And in the rest of the world, we have a lot more work to do. About 80 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion tobacco users live in low- and middle-income countries. Tobacco kills over 7 million people a year worldwide, a number is projected to rise to 10 million by 2030 on current trends. While the 20th century saw roughly 100 million tobacco deaths, mostly in rich countries, some estimates project up to 1 billion in the 21st century, mostly in developing nations. Cigarette consumption in the Eastern Mediterranean and African WHO regions actually increased by 65 and 52 percent, respectively, between 1980 and 2016.
But looking at what’s happened in the US, we know those trends can change. From 42.6 percent to 9.9 percent, in 60 years. Eight million lives saved. This is the kind of progress that’s so gradual you barely notice it happening. And then you look at the numbers, and they’re astonishing.
The ashtrays are gone from the armrests now. The smoking sections are gone from the restaurants. The yellowish ceilings have been repainted. Most Americans under 30 have probably never seen anyone light a cigarette indoors. And the world they live in is measurably, dramatically safer because of decisions that were made — over decades, against long odds — before most of them were born. That’s what progress looks like.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2026-03-30 18:00:00
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
I’m trying to decide whether to keep my elementary school-age kid in the neighborhood public school or move him to a more exclusive private school. Our public school is okay, but my partner and I feel that he might be more challenged and ultimately better off moving to a private school.
But I’m very aware of the increasing flow of students around the US out of public schools, and the effect that is having on the children who remain there. For one thing, since public schools get more funding the more students they have, every family that leaves effectively takes money with them. I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to that problem, but I also don’t want my child to bear the personal burden of my politics.
Dear Public School Parent,
The way you’ve framed the question makes it sound like keeping your kid in public school means imposing a burden on him. And if that were the case — if we really were talking about sacrificing your child’s well-being — I know exactly what I’d tell you.
I’d tell you not to be bullied by utilitarian philosophers. They argue we have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for our own kids, so they’d probably say it’s wrong to give your child a fancy education while consigning other children to a school with fewer resources. But the 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams argues that this sort of total impartiality is an absurd demand — and I agree.
Williams points out that moral agency — the capacity to act on values and commitments — always comes from a specific person. And as specific people, we have our own specific, individual, core commitments. These “ground projects,” as Williams calls them, are the commitments that give a life its meaning and continuity. A parent has a commitment to ensuring their kid’s well-being, over and above their general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Williams would say any moral theory that requires you to ignore such personal commitments severs you from the very things that make your life recognizably yours.
So if keeping your kid in public school really meant hurting him, I wouldn’t say you have to do it.
But you said your neighborhood school is okay. It sounds like it’s not bad and not unsafe. So I don’t have reason to think that it is actually hurting him. In fact, it might be helping him in ways you’re not fully accounting for.
Just fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does, and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here.
Education is complicated. If I were to get into all the details about school choice and vouchers and charter schools and magnet schools, I’d have to write a whole book. So let me just stick to the main points relevant to your dilemma, starting with this: There’s a popular narrative that says private schools are better than public schools, but the evidence does not support that — especially if we take a broad look at what we mean by “better.”
Although studies do show private school students outperforming their public school counterparts on tests, the studies also show that private school advantages disappear mostly or entirely once you control for family background.
Longitudinal research led by Robert Pianta and Arya Ansari at the University of Virginia tracked more than 1,000 children from birth to age 15 in 10 locations nationwide. After controlling for family income, parental education, neighborhood socioeconomic makeup, and other background variables, the private school advantage…vanished.
“If you want to predict children’s outcomes — achievement test scores, the things we care about socially — in high school, the best thing you can use to predict that is going to be family income — regardless of what high school you go to,” Pianta said.
Pianta’s was a modest-sized study with some methodological limitations. But another analysis of two large, nationally representative datasets also found that public school kids did just as well in math as private school kids — or even outpaced them — after accounting for demographic differences. (Math is considered a particularly robust indicator of school quality writ large because, unlike reading, it’s a subject learned mostly at school and not at home.) The researchers suggested that might be because public school teachers have to do stricter certification and can be required to do more frequent professional development, so they may be more reliably up-to-date on the latest pedagogical approaches, like those developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Admittedly, the very fanciest of private schools do offer some special advantages. Network effects are real. Maybe you want your kid rubbing elbows with a future senator. And maybe if you send your kid to ultra-elite Andover or Exeter, he’ll have a leg up if he applies to a fancy private college.
But that is not the same as ensuring your child actually thrives. I’m sure you also care about your child’s psychological well-being. And here, some of the evidence about exclusive, high-achieving schools is worrying.
The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.
The unrelenting pressure to compete and achieve can be brutal in those schools. When students constantly compare themselves to others and peg their self-worth to achievement, the results are alarming. Studies conducted over decades by psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues found that students attending high-achieving schools are at significantly higher risk for anxiety, depression, and substance use. (These are often private schools, though hyper-competitive public schools can also fall into this trap.) In fact, the National Academies of Sciences now names these students an “at-risk” group for mental health problems, alongside kids who live in poverty or in foster care or who have incarcerated parents.
In addition to potentially providing a less stressful environment, public schools can confer other important advantages. For one thing, your local public school can help you and your child be part of the neighborhood community, which is incredibly valuable for social development and countering loneliness. And being in an environment that’s more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, or class can teach your kid to empathize and get along with a wide variety of people.
As the American philosopher John Dewey pointed out, these are essential skills and capacities for a flourishing adult life and for a flourishing democracy. Democracy is a way of being in community with people unlike yourself; that’s a mode of life that has to be cultivated, and public schools are great grounds for learning to navigate a shared world.
Plus, public education is free! (Well, “free” — you’ve already paid for it with your taxes, whether or not your kid uses it.) So you could save all the money you’d spend on private school and instead use it on enriching opportunities to expand your child’s horizons. Personally, I’d take my kid to Italy and teach them about Ancient Roman gladiators and Renaissance art and the many flavors of gelato! Or you could collaborate with your child to decide where to donate some of that money to fund education resources for kids elsewhere.
On balance, since the evidence suggests that a child at a decent public school, with involved parents, probably won’t gain meaningful advantages from switching to an exclusive private school — and may face real psychological risks in a hyper-competitive environment — I don’t see a compelling reason to make the move. If you’ve got the resources to even consider private school, then your home life will probably play the biggest role in your kid’s academic trajectory, regardless of which building he sits in during the day. The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.
That said, I’m not arguing that parents should never pick private school. To some extent, this depends on the unique needs of your kid and your family. Maybe your kid is absolutely in love with music and the private school nearby has an amazing music program. Maybe your kid is being bullied at his current school but has a couple great friends who attend the private school. Or maybe a religious education is very important to you, so a private parochial school makes sense.
If you do make the choice to send your kid to private school, you’ll have to grapple with the collective action problem you hinted at: Any single family’s departure from a public school barely registers, but when every family with options reasons the same way, the cumulative effect on the school’s funding — and on the kids who remain — can be devastating.
Here, the American political philosopher Iris Marion Young can help you. She points out that our usual model of responsibility — the “liability model,” which says that when something bad happens we should assign blame to a particular individual — is inadequate when we’re dealing with situations of structural injustice. In these situations, it’s a whole system that’s producing predictable patterns of disadvantage.
Just look at the complex web that breeds educational inequality: Historical housing segregation has concentrated poverty in certain neighborhoods. Poorer neighborhoods generate less property tax revenue, which means less money for local schools. States can try to offset that, but schools in poorer areas still tend to end up with fewer resources. Families with options leave for better-resourced schools, enrollment drops at the local public school, and the school loses even more funding. The kids who remain get less of the materials — from textbooks to counselors — that would have set them on the path to success. There’s a clear downward spiral, but no one person or decision is the villain.
So instead of blaming any one individual for their personal lifestyle choices, Young says that in cases of structural injustice, we should adopt the “social connection model” of responsibility. Under this model, you don’t bear blame if you send your kid to private school, because systemic problems shouldn’t rest on one family’s shoulders. Young doesn’t think you need to discharge your obligations through personal lifestyle choices.
But that doesn’t mean you owe nothing.
You do still have a political obligation: to work toward changing the structure that produces injustice. As a participant in the political system that shapes education in this country, you have some power to act on it. You can vote and organize and advocate. You can pressure decision-makers and support reform movements. The more power you’ve got, and the more privileged you are by the current system, the greater your obligation to take action.
Make the effort to act on that obligation. Let your child watch as you do. Better yet, involve them in the process. Kids learn from seeing what their parents do: Show them that you’re bent on enacting your values, and you’ll be giving them an education for life.
2026-03-29 19:15:00
While President Donald Trump has been flexing America’s might overseas, he’s also working to impose his will on the nation’s capital.
Trump’s urban interventions in DC’s built environment have raised eyebrows and sparked lawsuits.
The changes to DC are already underway, from the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom, to a makeover of the White House Rose Garden, to the planned two-year closure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for renovations.
And more changes could be coming soon: a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery, a plan to paint over the exterior of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and a sculpture park near the National Mall.
Past presidents have added to or modified parts of Washington DC’s historic core. But Trump’s disregard for design review processes has irked many preservationists.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram discussed these changes with The Washington Post’s longtime architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, who wrote a column about the threat Trump poses to D.C.’s architectural splendor.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Philip, you recently published a column about Donald Trump’s changes to Washington, DC in which you make a very bold argument. You say that Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architecture and design since the city was burned down by the British in the War of 1812. Tell us how you justify that argument.
That sounds like hyperbole maybe, but, in fact, he really is turning out to be an amazingly influential force in terms of the design of the city. The War of 1812, the British come through and they burn the White House and they burn the Capitol, and they have to be rebuilt.
Donald Trump has torn down the East Wing of the White House, and he’s making major changes, major additions. He’s taken out the Rose Garden at the White House. He wants to build a new giant memorial triumphal arch at Arlington Cemetery. He’s talking about a Garden of National Heroes that would really change the kind of sylvan landscape along the Potomac River.
It goes on and on. And more important even than those changes is the fact that he wants to change how Washington manages change. He really wants to kind of force this through by personal fiat rather than go through a longstanding process of design review, which has been absolutely essential to keeping Washington the city we know today.
Essential to the argument you’re making here is that DC isn’t New York. It isn’t a city that was slowly built over time, that progressed and evolved with the times. The intention behind Washington, DC sets it apart.
Yes, it begins as a planned city. Very few American cities begin with a plan.
A designer named Pierre L’Enfant created what was called the L’Enfant Plan, and that was to take a typical city grid of streets, ones that run north-south, and east-west of big boxes that were generally for the neighborhoods, for commerce, for the daily stuff of life, and then lay over them these sweeping avenues that connect important civic nodal points. Maybe there’s a statue there, maybe that’s where the Capitol or the White House is. And these create a much grander architecture.
In some ways, the vistas of these avenues stand in for the ambition of the country — a sense of being far-seeing. And Washington has done an awful lot over the years to preserve that. Among the most basic things is: We didn’t build skyscrapers. We’ve kept a very low-slung skyline. And one of Trump’s changes, which is this giant 250-foot-tall memorial arch, would actually be one of the very tallest buildings in Washington and would fundamentally change that skyline.
[The public] voted this president into office twice. His hotels in New York are tourist attractions. People around the world go to his golf courses. If he plants an arch on the edge of Virginia in front of Arlington National Cemetery behind the Lincoln Memorial, is there a chance that people end up loving it the way they ended up loving the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, even though they might not have been clear wins when they were initially built?
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I wrestle with that all the time. One of the things that’s disturbing to me is that the impulses and the instincts that Americans had about the markers of monarchy — we used to be really allergic to that stuff. We used to really bristle at the idea of a president being in any way imperial or king-like.
Now, I think there’s less understanding of the connection between values and politics on one side and aesthetics and architecture on the other side. And so, in some ways, the story I’m writing is an attempt to introduce Americans to what is, in a sense, a hidden history and a hidden aesthetics in Washington that are very vital and very important. You may not get that just by taking a quick tour on a double decker bus of the city, but it’s there. And it was extremely important to the people who made Washington into the city that is greatly beloved today.
If he has his way, is he also suggesting to future presidents that you can have your way with this city, and its monuments, and its environs and then creating some kind of aesthetic seesaw for the nation’s capital?
Oh, I think it’s more than just suggesting. I think he’s laying out the roadmap.
I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that one of the real victims in all of this is the idea of design review. There are these groups in Washington, including one that goes back to 1910, that have the ability to come in and look over plans, and they’re usually staffed by professional architects, professional designers, professional landscape artists, and they improve things.
Trump has stacked those committees with his own people, including his 26-year-old personal assistant, who, as far as I can tell, has no expertise in any of these questions. And they’re basically just kind of rubber stamping these things. So that’s a roadmap for any future president coming in.
If you want an unfortunate example, you might think back to the days of ancient Rome when new emperors would come in, and if they really didn’t like their predecessor, they wouldn’t just necessarily raze down the triumphal arch erected by the predecessor. They might even take the statues off and replace the heads with heads of their own symbolism, a kind of constant retrofitting of the symbolic landscape of Rome to represent the current person in power. And you can say, “Well, that’s just politics,” but that makes for a landscape that doesn’t have the historical gravitas and temporal lastingness that you would want and that we’ve had in Washington for a very long time.