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For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.

As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.

Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.

This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.

In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.

Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.

a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold

ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.

“It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”

Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.

In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage.

on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.

Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply

he degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.

Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.

. The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe. “Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.

The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.

The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000-square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.

From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.

enormous wedges of ice lie under Yakutia.

“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”

In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet. That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year

Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.

Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011

As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.

Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time.

. In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.

climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”

The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Siberia as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.

In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything

As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground

a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.

Other studies showed different consequences. Children born during the pandemic grew into shorter, poorer, less educated adults with higher rates of physical disability than one would expect

the microorganisms likely killed more people than the war did. And their effects weren’t confined to European battlefields, but spread across the globe, emptying city streets and filling cemeteries on six continents.

Unlike the war, the flu was incomprehensible—the influenza virus wasn’t even identified until 1931. It inspired fear of immigrants and foreigners, and anger toward the politicians who played down the virus

killed more men than women, skewing sex ratios for years afterward. Can one be sure that the ensuing, abrupt changes in gender roles had nothing to do with the virus?

the accompanying flood of anti-Semitic violence. As it spread through Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the Low Countries, it left behind a trail of beaten cadavers and burned homes.

In northern Italy, landlords tended to raise wages, which fostered the development of a middle class. In southern Italy, the nobility enacted decrees to prevent peasants from leaving to take better offers. Some historians date the separation in fortunes of the two halves of Italy—the rich north, the poor south—to these decisions.

When the Black Death began, the English Plantagenets were in the middle of a long, brutal campaign to conquer France. The population losses meant such a rise in the cost of infantrymen that the whole enterprise foundered. English nobles did not occupy French châteaus. Instead they stayed home and tried to force their farmhands to accept lower wages. The result, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, nearly toppled the English crown. King Richard II narrowly won out, but the monarchy’s ability to impose taxes, and thus its will, was permanently weakened.

The coronavirus is hitting societies that regarded deadly epidemics as things of the past, like whalebone corsets and bowler hats.

The American public has not enjoyed its surprise reentry into the world of contagion and quarantine—and this unhappiness seems likely to have consequences.

People sought new sources of authority, finding them through direct personal experience with the world and with God.

With the supply of European workers suddenly reduced and the demand for labor relatively unchanged, medieval landowners found themselves in a pickle: They could leave their grain to rot in the fields, or they could abandon all sense of right and wrong and raise wages enough to attract scarce workers

Within a few decades, Cohn wrote, hysteria gave way to sober observation. Medical tracts stopped referring to conjunctions of Saturn and prescribed more earthly cures: ointments, herbs, methods for lancing boils. Even priestly writings focused on the empirical. “God was not mentioned,” Cohn noted. The massacres of Jews mostly stopped.

the lesson seems more that humans confronting unexpected disaster engage in a contest for explanation—and the outcome can have consequences that ripple for decades or centuries.

Columbus’s journey to the Americas set off the worst demographic catastrophe in history

Somewhere between two-thirds and nine-tenths of the people in the Americas died. Many later European settlers, like my umpteen-great-grandparents, believed they were coming to a vacant wilderness. But the land was not empty; it had been emptied—a world of loss encompassed in a shift of tense.

Absent the diseases, it is difficult to imagine how small groups of poorly equipped Europeans at the end of very long supply chains could have survived and even thrived in the alien ecosystems of the Americas

“I fully support banning travel from Europe to prevent the spread of infectious disease,” the Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle remarked after President Trump announced his plan to do this. “I just think it’s 528 years too late.”

a possible legacy of Hong Kong’s success with SARS is that its citizens seem to put more faith in collective action than they used to

The result will be, among other things, a test of how much contemporary U.S. society values the elderly.

The speed with which pundits emerged to propose that the U.S. could more easily tolerate a raft of dead oldsters than an economic contraction indicates that the reservoir of appreciation for today’s elders is not as deep as it once was

the 2003 SARS epidemic in Hong Kong. That epidemic, which killed about 300 people, was stopped only by heroic communal efforts. (As a percentage of the population, the equivalent U.S. death toll would be about 15,000.)

For Native peoples, the U-shaped curve was as devastating as the sheer loss of life. As an indigenous archaeologist once put it to me, the epidemics simultaneously robbed his nation of its future and its past: the former, by killing all the children; the latter, by killing all the elders, who were its storehouses of wisdom and experience.

Past societies mourned the loss of collective memory caused by epidemics. Ours may not, at least at first.

Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.

But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate.

Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”

If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.

he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.

Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”

For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.

What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”

The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…

it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.

disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:

in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-sate is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions

Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.

Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.

its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.

These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.

This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.

There are three general phases in the history of Europe's colonial expansion, all including wars of ownership between the Europeans and indigenous people, as well as between the Europeans themselves.

During the same period, European nations also gained influence in Africa, India, Asia, and Australasia (England colonized the whole of Australia), especially the many islands and landmasses along the trading routes.

However, this second phase is characterized by the 'New Imperialism,' a renewed interest and desire for overseas land felt by many European nations which prompted 'The Scramble for Africa,' a race by many European countries to carve up the entirety of Africa between themselves.

In 1914, the First World War began, a conflict partly motivated by imperial ambition. The consequent changes in Europe and the world eroded many beliefs in Imperialism,

The Early Imperial Nations

England, France, Portugal, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The Later Imperial Nations

England, France, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.

Several U.S. states have carbon pricing programs, notably California.

But several people familiar with the forthcoming infrastructure package in the United States said that there were no plans currently to price carbon emissions. Instead, the president plans to greatly raise fuel efficiency standards for cars, forcing automakers toward electric vehicles through regulation, not legislation.

Court challenges by those three provinces of Mr. Trudeau’s carbon pricing law ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s decision.

Like Republicans in the United States, conservative premiers in the oil-producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan have long strenuously campaigned against carbon pricing.

Republicans in Congress remain firmly opposed to a carbon tax and have voted repeatedly and nearly unanimously over the years to bar the government from imposing one.

While the Supreme Court decision’s detailed the dangers of climate changes to Canada and its coastlines, Arctic region and Indigenous people in particular, none of the three provinces that started the legal challenges dispute its effects.

In 2019, Mr. Trudeau set a minimum price for carbon. It will become 40 Canadian dollars a metric ton on April 1 and will reach 170 dollars a ton in 2030.

The federal government has stepped in only when a province, like Ontario under Mr. Ford, refused to price carbon. In those cases, it placed a tax on fuel and set other fees for industrial emissions.

Jason Kenney, the premier of Alberta, who canceled his province’s program, told reporters that he was disappointed with the decision but declined to say whether his province would come up with a carbon pricing system to replace the federally imposed one.

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law in part because the federal plan kicks in only if provinces do not set up their programs, thus maintaining the shared jurisdiction the two levels of government hold on environmental issues.

“Addressing climate change requires collective national and international action,” the court wrote. “This is because the harmful effects of GHGs are, by their very nature, not confined by borders.”

Alaska's public health structure was built for complications -- its size and tendency for inclement weather require it. So when it came time to start vaccinating residents, the state didn't have to build a robust public health system from scratch like some others, said Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska's chief medical officer.

A localized approach to vaccination hasn't worked everywhere, but it's worked in Alaska, Zink said. The state distributes vaccines to different regions but doesn't give directives, she said -- it's up to the communities to decide how to administer vaccines based on their needs.

Because so much power has been turned over to different regions of Alaska and the health care providers trusted in those areas, health care workers have been able to "meet people where they're at," Zink said: That means they'll deliver vaccines by boat, dog sled, helicopters and small planes, or go door-to-door in small communities to vaccinate as many community members as possible.

Vaccine eligibility in Alaska is more expansive than it currently is in most other states: Vaccines are available to anyone 55 years or older, people with certain underlying conditions, essential workers, residents of a multigenerational household, anyone who assists a senior in getting vaccinated and anyone who lives in a community where 45% of houses don't have pipes or septic tanks.

In areas where the population is mostly Alaska natives, there's a greater amount of people living in multigenerational housing. That qualifies young people who may live with an at-risk elderly person to get vaccinated, too, said Dr. Bob Onders, administrator of the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. And since 25% of rural Alaska doesn't have running water or sewage, which can heighten residents' risk for respiratory illness, it didn't make sense to exclude rural residents from the first round of vaccinations, Onders said.

Alaska Natives have borne the brunt of Covid-19 in the state -- the Kaiser Family Foundation's Covid-19 data tracker shows that Alaska Natives make up more than a quarter of Covid-19 cases but 15% of the population, compared to White residents, who made up 38% of cases but 68% of the population.

"Rather than a top-down mechanism, where someone from outside of Alaska or rural Alaska is dictating how things are going, it's much more about giving them supplies," Onders said.

Alaska asked the federal government to be treated "like a territory instead of state," so it would receive a monthly allocation of vaccines versus a weekly or biweekly lot. That made it easier to plan ahead and deliver vaccines "creatively," Zink said.

It can be costly to transport vaccines to some remote reaches of Alaska -- over $15,000 for one trip, in some cases, Zink said. To make vaccinations more cost-efficient, some areas that are less densely populated receive their entire vaccine allotment, which makes it possible to vaccinate entire communities in one go.

"We've been doing redistribution of vaccines for years," said Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska's chief medical officer. "It was pretty easy for us to stand up our existing [public health] structure."

Invest in protecting minority communities. Alaska expanded its eligibility for the first round of vaccines to include Alaska Natives and low-income residents of the state that are more vulnerable to Covid-19. While there's still work to do to alleviate that disproportionate risk, Onders said so far, it's working.

Another way to alleviate that burden is to prioritize zip codes in addition to age and health status, Karmarck said. Vaccinating residents of low-income neighborhoods or areas where the majority of residents are Black, indigenous or people of color could reduce Covid-19's disproportionate impact, though backlash is likely: In Dallas, county officials axed their plan to prioritize residents in "vulnerable zip codes" after the state threatened to reduce its vaccine allocation, the Texas Tribune reported in January.

Enlist trusted members of communities to educate. In communities where residents are hesitant to get the vaccine, particularly among Black and Latino Americans, sharing information about vaccine access is crucial to address Covid-19 racial disparities, Karmarck said.

Customize the approach. States that were lagging in vaccinations are catching up, Karmarck said, as they formalize an approach to vaccination that best fits their state. In Massachusetts, for example, large vaccination sites have opened up at Fenway Park and Gillette Stadium to accommodate more people and storage the vaccines require. It's improved the state's vaccination rates, she said.

instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to open a special enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act through HealthCare.gov,

"As we continue to battle COVID-19, it is even more critical that Americans have meaningful access to affordable care," a White House fact sheet reads.

His second executive action aims "to protect and expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care" by rescinding the Mexico City policy, also known as the global gag rule. This policy, reinstated and expanded by the Trump administration, bars international nongovernmental organizations that provide abortion counseling or referrals from receiving U.S. funding. Biden on Thursday called the gag rule an "attack on women's health access."

Last November, the Trump administration and several Republican-led states argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the program should be voided, which would have eliminated popular elements of the law such as protections for those with preexisting conditions.

The Supreme Court will hear a case that could decide the legality of work requirements for Medicaid recipients.

Biden is reversing course and directing federal agencies to reconsider those work requirement rules. He is also asking agencies to review policies that undermined protections for people with preexisting conditions, including complications related to COVID-19.

The administration faced pressure to open HealthCare.gov for anyone to enroll in the Affordable Care Act in response to the pandemic, but it never did.

For decades, Democratic and Republican presidents have alternately rescinded or reinstated the global gag rule, with Democrats, such as Biden, opposing the policy. Republicans have argued that the rule would reduce the number of abortions.

However, a study released last year suggested the policy failed to reduce the rate of abortions and ultimately had the opposite effect. The study said the rate of abortions increased by about 40% in the countries studied — most likely because the funding ban caused a reduction in access to contraception and a consequent rise in unwanted pregnancies.

Under the actions announced on Thursday, the president is telling federal agencies to review a Trump-era rule that limited the use of Title X federal funds meant for family planning and reproductive health services for low-income patients. Under this program, organizations that provided abortions or abortion counseling could not have access to those federal funds. The White House said, "Across the country and around the world, people — particularly women, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low incomes — have been denied access to reproductive health care."

The council will be co-led by Julissa Reynoso, chief of staff to Jill Biden, the first lady, and Jennifer Klein, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was first lady. The team will have four other officials, including senior advisers who focus on policies to prevent gender-based violence and on promoting equity for Black, Latina and Indigenous women and girls.

The Council's staff will include a special assistant to the president to focus specifically on "policies to advance equity for Black, indigenous and Latina women and girls of color," Klein said

Areas of long-term focus for the Council, Reynoso said, will include "increasing economic security and opportunity by addressing the structural barriers to women's participation in the labor force; decreasing wage and wealth gaps; and addressing the caregiving needs of American families and supporting care workers."

The second executive order the president signed Monday is directed at the Department of Education, and seems expressly aimed at reversing a controversial rule on campus sexual assault and harassment that was issued last year by then-President Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

"[guarantee] an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex, including discrimination in the form of sexual harassment, which encompasses sexual violence, and including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity."

Schools rarely provide education about relationships. Teenagers aren’t often taught that extreme jealousy is not romantic, but is a sign of an unhealthy relationship.

As anyone can tell you — as history can tell you — this is ultimately a fool’s errand. Ideas don’t disappear when they’re challenged; banned books have a funny way of enduring. But that doesn’t mean these efforts are without consequences.

Today in the United States, books that feature characters who are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, queer or trans — or are written by authors who identify that way — frequently make up a majority of the American Library Association’s annual list of the top 10 books most often censored in libraries and schools. These book bans deprive students of a better understanding of themselves and each other. As a writer, I believe in the power of words to cross boundaries at a time of deep division. Now more than ever, literature matters.

Now that it’s out in the world, I receive easily a dozen messages a week from readers. They thank me; they open up to me; they describe the life-changing experience of feeling seen. More than one person has told me my book gave them the clarity and strength to leave an unhealthy relationship.

I understand that for a parent, it’s almost unthinkable to imagine that your child could experience such trauma. But preventing children from reading my book, or any book, won’t protect them. On the contrary, it may rob them of ways to understand the world they’ll encounter, or even the lives they’re already living. You can’t recognize what you’ve never been taught to see. You can’t put language to something for which you’ve been given no language.

In March of 2020, for example, he forwarded a correspondence about the possible Covid-19 immunity of indigenous people harvesting guano (bat excrement), as well as an idea from a psychiatry professor about using the antibiotic minocycline to slow viral replication. He commented on an email from a Swedish psychiatrist, "There may be nothing to this, but we should at least be aware." And in April of that year, he told a persistent doctor with multiple ideas for possible antiviral agents, "You are not being ignored."

I find the emails about the funding of Fauci's agency particularly fascinating. Over the course of the messages, budget discussions transition from small funding increases to tremendous week-on-week growths in expenditures -- particularly when the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was empowered by Congress to dream bigger thanks to $1.532 billion in supplemental appropriations. To put a finer point on this group of emails: it was these bigger dreams and bigger trials that provided us with important answers and, ultimately, with the vaccines.

At other times, it feels like looking at the celebrity photos on the front pages of People magazine: "He felt that way, too?!"

Finally, in between the lines, we watch him manage this pandemic as a human. There are emails where he is clearly overwhelmed, forwarding media request after speaking request to his assistants at the Office of the Chief of Staff. (One has to wonder: who wouldn't be overwhelmed by this number of requests?)

There are emails where he is tremendously kind, thanking people for their service, telling staff to "stay well and safe" or complimenting folks on well-written papers and columns.

Again and again, he responds to concerned citizens, scientists and journalists with: "Thank you for your note." He pays attention both to people he knows -- apologetically telling Ralph Nader at 7 p.m. on a Sunday, "I receive over 1000 e-mails per day and even with staff screening, I do not see them for days." -- and to those he probably doesn't. There are times when he's funny, times when he's frustrated and times when he's clearly exhausted, admitting that he's simply too tired to make sense of something.

He is just like us -- or, at least, he's how most of us like to imagine ourselves to be, on our best days.

When people say that America is a racist country, they don’t necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist.

however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.

Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”

America is not the same country it was, but neither is it the country it purports to be. On some level this is a tension between American idealism and American realism, between an aspiration and a current condition.

As Mark Twain once put it: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Haaland was a frequent critic of the Trump administration's deregulatory agenda and supported limits on fossil fuel development on public lands. She opposes hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. She was also one of the first lawmakers to support the Green New Deal, which calls for drastic action to address climate change and economic inequality.

Republican lawmakers grilled her over those stances during her confirmation hearing in an effort to portray her as a radical choice to manage the nation's public lands, but Haaland struck a moderate tone, repeatedly saying that as interior secretary she would aim to accomplish Biden's environmental goals — not her own.Biden has not supported the Green New Deal or bans on fracking, and he has taken a more balanced approach to fossil fuel development on public lands. He put a temporary pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands while his administration reviews the broader federal leasing program.

Haaland has called the climate crisis the "challenge of our lifetime," and as interior secretary, she'll play a key role in the Biden administration's efforts to address it. Biden has pledged to make America carbon neutral by 2050,

The Interior Department manages roughly one-fifth of all land in the U.S., as well as offshore holdings. The extraction and use of fossil fuels from those public lands account for about one-quarter of the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2019 exports from the province totalled $17.6bn, about the same as in 2017 ($17.5bn), including more than $300m in goods that went to the American market in each of those years.

Until last year, governments and industry leaders around the world said little to directly challenge China over allegations of forced labour.

In March a bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which would establish a presumption that all goods from Xinjiang are made with forced labour, blocking them at the border unless companies can prove otherwise.

American customs officials have issued a series of orders blocking certain shipments from Xinjiang,

On December 23rd the Fair Labour Association, a consortium that counts Nike and Adidas among its affiliate members, declared that it was “prohibiting sourcing and production” from Xinjiang, including raw materials like cotton that might end up in finished goods elsewhere.

In December a bill similar to America’s was introduced in Australia’s parliament.

subject of intense lobbying from industry, including representatives of big clothing-makers, who have sought, among other changes, a delay of up to one year in enforcement.

it will take time for all of them to shift supply chains, and to encourage more cotton-growing elsewhere.

they expect the incoming Biden administration to continue the Trump administration’s enforcement actions against Xinjiang imports

they argue that it is difficult to penetrate deep into their supply chains to verify the origin of raw materials

Experts (as well as industry groups) argue that the efforts of Congress and the Trump administration will have a limited impact unless other governments follow suit.

In the European Union the issue of Uyghur forced labour hangs over an investment deal that has been negotiated with China

Not all businesses appear ready to decouple from Xinjiang entirely, or at least quickly

88% of China’s textiles and clothing are produced for domestic consumption. Large non-Chinese firms are among those who profit.

American laws, aided by forensic science, will help to combat forced labour in Xinjiang. But more countries and multinational companies will also have to forgo their immediate self-interest and take on China directly

McConnell has not denied the possibility of voting against Trump at a potential Senate impeachment trial, precipitated by the House vote to impeach the president for an unprecedented second time over his role in the insurrection.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who will take over that role in less than 24 hours, said Tuesday the Senate will move ahead with an impeachment trial with a plan for a separate vote to bar Trump from holding any future federal office if the Senate votes to convict.

While millions wait for a life-saving shot, the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus continues to soar upwards with horrifying speed. Today, the last full day of Donald Trump's presidency, the official death count reached 400,000 — a once-unthinkable number. More than 100,000 Americans have perished in the pandemic in just the past five weeks.

In the U.S., someone now dies from COVID-19 every 26 seconds. And the disease is now claiming more American lives each week than any other condition, ahead of heart disease and cancer, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Given its relatively large population, the U.S. death rate from COVID remains lower than the rate in many other countries. But the cumulative death toll of 400,000 now exceeds any other country's overall mortality — close to double what Brazil has recorded, and 4 times the death count in the U.K.

Is there any way we can avoid half a million deaths before the end of February?" says Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

Certain parts of the country have a disproportionately high death rate. Alabama and Arizona, in particular, have experienced some of the highest death rates, given their populations. The virus continues to kill Black and Indigenous Americans at much higher rates than white Americans.

In rural America, the chance of dying from COVID-19 remains much higher than in the urban centers.

Vaccine rollout has yet to catch up with an accelerating mortality rate

So far, about 3 in every 100 people have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, placing America ahead of many other countries, but behind the optimistic promises made in the early days of the rollout.

It is this polarity — the advent of a life-saving vaccine and hospitals filled with more dying patients than ever before — that makes this particular moment in the pandemic so confounding.

In rural America, the chance of dying from COVID-19 remains much higher than in the urban centers.

Vaccine rollout has yet to catch up with an accelerating mortality rate

So far, about 3 in every 100 people have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, placing America ahead of many other countries, but behind the optimistic promises made in the early days of the rollout.

It is this polarity — the advent of a life-saving vaccine and hospitals filled with more dying patients than ever before — that makes this particular moment in the pandemic so confounding.

Lulewicz' findings suggest that the ruling elites drew their power from social networks created by the masses.

"That is, even though elite interests and political strategies waxed and waned and collapsed and flourished, very basic relationships and networks were some of the strongest, most durable aspects of society."

"Because these very basic networks were so durable, they allowed these societies -- especially common people -- to buffer against and mediate the uncertainties associated with major political and economic change. They may have said, 'You go live on top of that huge mound and do your sacred rituals, and we will go about life as usual for the most part.' These communication networks served as a social constant for these people and allowed their cultures to persist for thousands of years even across transformations that could have been catastrophic."

The Arctic’s ice helps preserve these snippets of human history.

They found that instead of Arctic archaeological remains taking at least a century or more to fully decompose, up to 70 percent will likely vanish in the next 80 years. In Greenland alone, there are over 6,000 registered archaeological sites. This number includes both Norse and Inuit sites.

Vandrup Martens studies remains on Svalbard that stand a good chance of decomposing at a rapid pace over the coming years, and she hopes this new research will help archaeologists like her when it comes to prioritizing which of those sites they need to work to preserve.

We don’t know which ones contain something that could be fantastic,” he said. “You don’t know what you haven’t found yet.”

in 2003, Bolivia had an elected president in Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Hard-left radicals didn't like it when Mr. Sánchez de Lozada proposed the export of liquefied natural gas via Chile. They launched violent protests and blocked the nation's highways. Their objectives to bring down the government coincided with the goals of the coca growers' movement, which was led by Mr. Morales. It joined in the uprising.

When the president decided to use the army to escort supply trucks, clashes ensued. Mr. Sánchez de Lozada decided to leave the country as a way of defusing the violence, and the U.S. State Department told him that if he did not resign before doing so, it would cut off foreign aid. The president complied, providing, under duress, a legal patina for an illegal coup.

The terrorism had worked and there was nary a peep of protest from the international community. So it was used again to force the resignation of Mr. Sánchez de Lozada's successor and the president of the senate. That meant new elections had to be called. Mr. Morales ran and won.

Upon taking office in 2006, Mr. Morales began using his office to persecute officials of previous governments. Some were jailed, others fled. He made sweeping changes to the judiciary and the electoral council. Any time there was an opposition challenge, his street thugs or his judges put a stop to it

while many in the police and military did eventually join in the protests, and the commander in chief of Bolivia’s military finally called on Mr. Morales to step down, they did so long after the protests began.

Once in power, Mr. Morales had steadily concentrated power in his hands and planted loyalists in key institutions. Nearing the two-term limit for presidents set in the Constitution he himself had helped introduce, he called a referendum that would have allowed him to stay in office indefinitely. When it was defeated, he had the Supreme Court, by now stuffed with his loyalists, rule that limiting his time in office somehow violated his human rights

The citizens who went into the streets in Bolivia were not seeking to reverse Mr. Morales’s social or economic reforms, from which many of them benefited, but to uphold democratic rules and institutions he tried to subvert