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“When a storm moves slower, it lingers longer over the same location,” said Kimberly Wood, a geoscientist at Mississippi State University. “A rain rate of, say, an inch an hour — that’s not so bad if the rain only lasts 30 minutes. But if it lasts for half a day, that adds up quickly.”

Climate change has also led to wetter storms, Dr. Wood said, because warmer air holds more moisture. Between the slowing speeds and increasing moisture, with storms like Sally “there’s a combination effect,” she said.

Researchers increasingly see a link between stalling of hurricanes and climate change.

by lingering for longer, the storm may also have boosted storm surge, the wind-driven buildup of water that can quickly flood coastal areas, often with devastating results.

As for Ned Hallowell, he was shot three times charging with the left wing of the martyred 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, just behind his doomed friend Robert Gould Shaw. With Shaw’s body lying in a sandy ditch with his troops, Ned Hallowell assumed command of the regiment. Assigned the rear guard during a perilous retreat in a battle called Olustee, he and his men spent 20,000 cartridges checking the Confederates and then countermarched to save a train of intermingled black and white wounded soldiers that had broken down. When they couldn’t fix the motor, they attached ropes to the engine cars and manually hauled that bloody train to safety, with Confederate gunfire guttering at their backs.

Then there was that Princeton academic and assistant football coach named Woodrow Wilson, who rewrote the Civil War in volumes of purported American history so racist that they enraged Hallowell because they so “abounded with apologies for slavery.”

The vague phrase “systemic racism” is not just perpetuated by men with badges. It’s also propagated by our false victory narratives. There have been few more powerful cultural narrators than the NFL and the NCAA, with their close association with military triumphalism. They have been terrible teachers of historical truth, lousy with misplaced definitions of valor

Pen Hallowell was alive to hear Harvard football coach W. Cameron Forbes declare in 1900 that American football was “the expression of strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of the dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hope of permanence.”

every well-meaning but unread white athlete, coach, owner, athletic director and sportswriter needs to understand that Pen Hallowell, to whom black lives really did matter, lost his war. And football had no small part in that.

Hallowell tried to fight back in the post-war battle of values. He wrote essays and speeches devoted to the bravery of black soldiers and those conscientious outliers, abolitionists. On Memorial Day in 1896, he gave a remembrance address at Harvard. Sickened by romantic war myths in which the treachery and slave-driving of the Confederacy were painted over as cavalier spirit, Hallowell said, “To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war.”

Yet isn’t that what we have done? We have degraded that war — to the point that we hardly know what real honor is anymore, much less how to coach it on our playing fields.

Degraded it to the point that Pen Hallowell has faded to a relative obscurity, except among war buffs and historians, while the University of Mississippi kept Colonel Reb as a mascot until 2003. Even now frat boys will dress in the costumes of traitors to the flag at cotillions, without the first blush of hot shame

If we want football to be something worth preserving, we should demand that it celebrates the right qualities — and people.

most important is what Hallowell has to teach about courage and protest. “The courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order,” Hallowell wrote. He saw a “higher and rarer courage” in the “long suffering and patient endurance” of the soldiers so invested in their equal pay protest that they fought for 18 months without accepting a cent until they won fair treatment.

Hallowell and his brother are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., with headstones so small they seem like chips compared with Confederate monuments. When Hallowell finally died in 1914, his close friend and compatriot Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called him “the most generously gallant spirit, and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew.” If there was a peerless man who deserves to be on a height, it’s Pen Hallowell. Yet look what we have done to him. Look what we have done to all of us.

Mr Jones finds white evangelicals especially likely to express goodwill to African-Americans. But dig into their unconscious biases, he claims, and you see a different picture emerge. “In survey after survey” white Christians are much likelier than non-religious whites to express negative attitudes towards minorities and complacency about the rough treatment of African-Americans, among other indicators of racism.

Melding history, theology, statistical modelling and his own experience, as a Southern Baptist seminarian, Mr Jones suggests in “White Too Long” that white Christian traditions are so steeped in historic racism that “the norms of white supremacy have become deeply and broadly integrated into white Christian identity.”

Another explanation, argues a new book by Robert P. Jones, an authority on American religion and politics, and head of the Public Religion Research Institute, is that white Christians were especially receptive to Mr Trump’s race-baiting. Mr Jones also offers a grim theory for why this was the case.

And he finds that practising evangelicals score the highest on his index of racism.

white evangelicals are likely to be old, conservative and live in the South—characteristics that point to unreconstructed views on race independently of religion

two qualifiers are often added

Second, while people who simply identify as white evangelicals might hold such views, the most pious do not.

Mr Jones is unconvinced by either qualifier. He controls for age, partisanship and geography in his model—and finds the same pattern.

Asked whether police killings of black men were isolated incidents, 71% of white evangelicals said they were, compared with 38% of non-religious whites.

He concludes that white Christian identity is “independently predictive” of racist attitudes.

But, Mr Jones argues, the history of American Christianity makes this likelier than it might sound. The dominant southern strains of white evangelicalism were formed amid and sometimes in response to slavery.

Such claims are shocking.

The Southern Baptists, America’s biggest denomination, was launched to defend it biblically—which it did by representing black skin as the accursed “mark of Cain”. Many southern pastors were cheerleaders for the Confederacy, then shaped the culture of nostalgia and lament (the “religion of the lost cause”) that precluded a reckoning with Jim Crow’s legacy.

Post-war pessimism also led evangelicals to adopt a premillennialist theology, which viewed the world as irredeemable by man. Instead of wasting their time on social justice, it urged them to focus on their individual spirituality

The perverse effect, argues Mr Jones, was to imbue white evangelicals with “an unassailable sense of religious purity” that blinded them to their own behaviour.

As African-Americans fled north, mainstream protestants and Catholics increasingly adopted the mores of southern evangelicals.

The moral majority of the 1970s and 80s, fuelled by a Catholic aversion to abortion and common fears of the civil-rights movement, was the culmination of this fusion

Mr Jones’s model suggests the same racial attitudes are common to most white Christian traditions. Evangelicals are merely the most extreme case.

This troubling past was always the real mark of Cain, Mr Jones writes. And “today God’s anguished questions—‘Where is your brother?’ and ‘What have you done?’—still hang in the air like morning mist on the Mississippi River.

The new history of slavery seeks to obliterate the economic and moral distinction between slavery and capitalism, and between the South and the North, by showing them to have been all part of a single system

Critics of the new history of slavery chastise it for downplaying developments like Britain’s abolition of slavery in its colonies and the American Civil War, and for overstating slavery’s importance to the growth of the early American economy, even if the plantation was a particularly ruthless business enterprise.

The arguments about slavery imply larger arguments about America.

for some the national enterprise can still be seen as a slow and often interrupted progression toward a more just and democratic society; for others, it amounts to a set of variations on racial hierarchy and economic exploitation.

At least among respectable academic historians, the days of triumphant historical accounts of the greatness of the United States are long past.

Once slavery is positioned as the foundational institution of American capitalism, the country’s subsequent history can be depicted as an extension of this basic dynamic.

This is what Walter Johnson does in his new book, “The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States” (Basic)

Johnson’s guiding concept is “racial capitalism”: racism as a technique for exploiting black people and for fomenting the hostility of working-class whites toward blacks, so as to enable white capitalists to extract value from everyone else.

“The history of racial capitalism, it must be emphasized, is a history of wages as well as whips, of factories as well as plantations, of whiteness as well as blackness, of ‘freedom’ as well as slavery.”

For his purposes, St. Louis is a case study in the pervasiveness and the longevity of racism outside the formal boundaries of slavery.

A parade of men (most of them, in Johnson’s telling, closely connected to St. Louis) who were long presented to schoolchildren as the heroes of American history are revealed to be anything but.

“The Broken Heart of America” is a history populated by good guys and bad guys—many more of the latter.

Johnson doesn’t hesitate to use terms that didn’t exist at the time to describe the motivations of historical actors: “genocide,” “settler colonialism,” “ethnic cleansing”—terms given a honed edge by being relieved of historical specificity.

Johnson’s propensity for pasting condemnatory labels on his characters displays a concern that, without his firm guidance, readers may not draw the proper conclusions from the material he is presenting.

He is disinclined to describe any situation as ambiguous

In the craft of history, tendentiousness is an ever-present temptation; Johnson is as insistently moralizing in his way as previous generations of romantic, heroic historians of the West were in theirs

A story centered on a transhistorical force of oppression—spotlighting St. Louis as the capital of racial capitalism—offers an all-encompassing explanation but doesn’t leave much room for racism untethered from capitalism or capitalism untethered from racism

Johnson, impatient with such particularity, always goes both smaller, in the sense of depicting St. Louis as a fulcrum of history, and bigger, in the sense of making racial capitalism an eternal, all-powerful force, floating free of any specific time or place.

Other scholars have found different ways of explaining the same parlous present-day conditions in distressed black neighborhoods

Reading “The Broken Heart of America” inevitably prompts the question of how what’s broken might be repaired. Does a politically charged history come with a politics for the here and now?

Today, Johnson writes, “I have never been to a more amazing, hopeful place in my life.” Underlying his stated optimism is an implicit conviction that it wouldn’t do much good to look for help from the larger society; the victims of oppression must find a way forward by themselves.

deflating and deriding the progress it has made in the past and the promise it might hold for the future invites the hazards of defeatism. It distracts from the kinds of economic, educational, and criminal-justice reforms that mainstream progressives hope to enact. These are the tools we have at hand. It would be a shame not to use them

It also was used by Nazi doctors in human malaria experiments in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.German scientist Claus Schilling, an expert in tropical diseases, infected hundreds of patients with malaria by exposing them to parasite-carrying mosquitoes.He then treated them with quinine and other drugs to see how they reacted.“Thirty or forty died from the malaria itself,” Franz Blaha, a physician and Czech inmate at Dachau, testified after the war. “Three hundred to four hundred died later … because of the physical condition resulting from the malaria attacks. In addition there were deaths resulting from poisoning due to overdoses.”

At that time, malaria was mostly treated with the quinine-like synthetic Atabrine, a medicine designed by German chemists in the early 1930s.

But Atabrine, like quinine, had side effects, including gastritis, hallucinations and psychosis, Masterson wrote. Plus, it turned the skin of GIs and Marines yellow.“The most hair-raising [side effects] were rashes that … progressed grotesquely, with skin falling off in sheets, creating open sores that attracted flies,” Masterson wrote. Other side effects included “erratic mood swings, violent anger, and deep depression …[along with] the standard diarrhea, vomiting, and cramps.”Then came the rumor the drug caused impotence.During the fight for the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, Marines rejected Atabrine. Their officers had to watch them take the pills and make sure the pills were swallowed. But the Marines would later spit them out.Thousands got sick. “For every battle casualty, ten men lay sick with malaria,” Masterson wrote.

Other bizarre remedies hadn’t worked, Duran-Reynals, the quinine historian, reported.One ancient cure went: “Take the urine of the patient and mix it with some flour to make … seventy-seven small cakes … Proceed before sunrise to an anthill and throw the cakes therein. As soon as the insects have devoured the cakes the fever vanishes.”

“A tree grows which they call ‘the fever tree’ … whose bark, of the color of cinnamon, made into powder … and given as a beverage, cures the fevers … it has produced miraculous results,” he reported.“Thus … did Father Calancha announce to the world that a cure had been found for the most widespread disease of the time,” Duran-Reynals wrote.

In the 1670s, despite the hidebound medical establishment, a young English pharmacist, Robert Talbor, became an expert in treating fevers. He had moved to the southeast coast of England, where fevers were “epidemical."By trial and error, he came up with a secret formula — “my particular … medicine,” he called it. He would reveal only that it was “a preparation of four vegetables,” and he warned people about using the “Jesuits’ Powder.”

The whole virtue of the pills consisted in the quinine alone.

According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites

During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according a British think tank.

The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that "fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity." Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month.

"I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart," said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon's influence is distressingly pervasive.

Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories.

Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account.

"If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you," reads the ministry's website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism," said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.

Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).

QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.

Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter -- no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.

In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.

If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.

"It's kinda like checking Fox News or CNN," -- that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a masters in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. "It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought."

"What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government," she said, "and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times."

It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It's obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion -- and hero -- in President Trump.

That's no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.

"That's a recruiting tactic," said Travis View, a host of "QAnon Anonymous," a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. "It's their red pill." (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )

View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them."The 'Save the Children' messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children."

"People who start with 'saving the children' don't stay there -- and that's the problem," he said. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality."

"This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it," he said. It's an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.

When Jesus didn't arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.

"Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side," Neff said, "as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work."

He is asking the Supreme Court to delay the December 14 Electoral College vote and block the four states from casting their votes in the Electoral College for Mr. Biden. The president-elect won the popular vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, and they all have certified their election results, formalizing Mr. Biden's victory over Mr. Trump.

"Texas's effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact," he wrote. "The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated."

A group of attorneys general from 17 states filed their own friend-of-the-court brief in support of Texas, while the president filed a motion with the Supreme Court asking the join the case.

Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah — requested Thursday to join Texas in the case, while the state of Ohio told the Supreme Court it does not support Paxton's proposed relief.

"Federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to change the legislatively chosen method for appointing presidential electors. And so federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to order legislatures to appoint electors without regard to the results of an already-completed election," they argued. "What is more, the relief that Texas seeks would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the states are sovereigns, free to govern themselves."

Gray is the first person in the United States to be successfully treated for a genetic disorder with the help of CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing technique that makes it much easier to make very precise changes in DNA.

The treatment boosted levels of a protein in the study subjects' blood known as fetal hemoglobin. The scientists believe that protein is compensating for defective adult hemoglobin that their bodies produce because of a genetic defect they were born with.

The New England Journal of Medicine published online this month the first peer-reviewed research paper from the study, focusing on Gray and the first beta thalassemia patient who was treated.

"I'm very excited to see these results," says Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the Nobel Prize this year for her role in the development of CRISPR

But the results from the first 10 patients "represent an important scientific and medical milestone," says Dr. David Altshuler, Vertex's chief scientific officer.

All the patients appear to have responded well. The only side effects have been from the intense chemotherapy they've had to undergo before getting the billions of edited cells infused into their bodies.

showed the gene-edited cells had persisted the full year — a promising indication that the approach has permanently altered her DNA and could last a lifetime.

"This gives us great confidence that this can be a one-time therapy that can be a cure for life," says Samarth Kulkarni, the CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics.

Gray has also been able to wean off the powerful pain medications she'd needed most of her life.

haven't needed the regular blood transfusions that had been required to keep them alive.

For the treatment, doctors remove stem cells from the patients' bone marrow and use CRISPR to edit a gene in the cells, activating the production of fetal hemoglobin. That protein is produced by fetuses in the womb but usually shuts off shortly after birth. The patients then undergo a grueling round of chemotherapy to destroy most of their bone marrow to make room for the gene-edited cells, billions of which are then infused into their bodies.

Doctors have already started trying to use CRISPR to treat cancer and to restore vision to people blinded by a genetic disease. They hope to try it for many other diseases as well, including heart disease and AIDS.

"This is really a life-changer for me," she says. "It's magnificent."

Only 40 percent of U.S. adults approved of the court, down from 53 percent a year earlier. According to Gallup, a majority (53 percent) of U.S. adults now disapprove of the way the court is handling its job.

“The justices are plainly conscious of public attitudes toward the court,” said Lawrence Baum, a political science professor at Ohio State University. “But that’s only one consideration for the justices and not necessarily the most important one — particularly on issues like abortion or gun rights where they may have intense personal preferences about the right outcome.”

when Congress introduced more bills designed to curb the court, the justices struck down fewer laws. According to Clark, that suggests that the court saw the bills as a signal from Congress that they were going too far, even though the bills were unlikely to pass.

“Is legitimacy something that’s enough to get a justice to move away from something [he or she] strongly feels?”

In that sense, this new term might be a turning point — and not just because of the importance of the cases or the risk of a backlash to an individual decision. The next few months might be the beginning of a new era in which the conservative justices move sharply away from where most Americans stand on major issues, and dare politicians to do something about it.

First, let's be clear that the Court could and likely will decide the SB8 case without saying anything about the continuing vitality of the abortion right. That's easy to see if a majority holds on procedural grounds that neither the U.S. nor the abortion providers (in the companion case) can bring suit for injunctive relief. If the federal court plaintiffs lack standing or a cause of action, or if the Court holds that state court judges are not proper party-defendants, or that for injunctive relief to be effective it must--but is not permitted to--run against private non-parties, then the Texas law will remain in effect pending resolution in state court and a possible eventual return to the US Supreme Court posing the question whether a six-week ban is permissible on the merits.

For the U.S. and/or the abortion providers to win, at least one of the Justices who might vote to overrule Roe v. Wade in Dobbs would need to nonetheless allow a challenge to SB8 to go forward. Why would they do so? Perhaps they'll see the case in purely procedural terms. If the stakes were lower, it would be relatively easy to imagine any Justice thinking Case X is ripe for overruling but until we overrule it, state legislatures must abide by it.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that that happens--say that next month the Court rules 5-4 that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to lift the preliminary injunction in the DOJ case. Then suppose that a different 5-4 majority or a 6-3 majority rules in late June that the Mississippi law is constitutional but that they're not deciding whether to overrule Roe (even though they would have de facto overruled much of Roe). At that point the news coverage would indeed likely be muddled. Is there still a constitutional right to abortion? When? Where? Pro-choice activists might have a harder time mobilizing voters based on Dobbs if there is also floating around the notion that the Supreme Court had invalidated the Texas law just a few months before--even though that would have been only a procedural holding.

(2) Quite apart from the substance, the procedural grounds for reinstating the injunction are strong. I acknowledge that there are genuine questions of standing, causes of action, remedy, proper defendants, and more, but the bottom line for me is fairly straightforward: As I argue in the column, the case fundamentally presents a question whether states and other government actors can use trickery to evade their constitutional obligations. Tax law has a substance-over-form principle that should be universal. Texas has made no secret of the fact that it crafted SB8's trapdoors with the clear purpose of preventing lawsuits and thus chilling the exercise of a constitutional right. Permitting this kind of evasion and defiance will invite more.

Not only is the process still prohibitively expensive, research has shown that so far it hasn’t been very effective. A 2019 study at Stanford University found that current carbon capture projects miss well more than half of the carbon dioxide in emissions.

Project Tundra’s managers hope they can achieve a significant breakthrough, aiming to capture 90 percent of the CO2 once they have the project in operation. Essentially, the carbon dioxide would be absorbed out of the “flue gas,” or exhaust, by amine-based solvents, which would be pumped to a regeneration unit that would heat the solvents and free the CO2 again, in a pure form. Then it would be condensed and pumped to natural caverns deep underground.

For now the project is still in the design and engineering phase, together with financial analysis. Equipment at the site has been used to test the process; now the results are being analyzed. If the pieces fall into place and the project gets a green light from regulators and company officials, construction could get started as early as next year.

“This carbon sequestration project really gets us excited,” he said. “It gives coal a role in stabilizing the grid.” He added: “If there are better solutions than coal out there, so be it. We just believe those solutions don’t exist.”

There are warning signs, nonetheless. Even though the price of oil has bounced back after the disastrous months when the pandemic struck last year, and production at existing wells is humming along, there’s little new drilling in the Bakken. The number of rigs has fallen from 55 in early 2020 to 23 today.

Her attitude about the coal-powered electricity she uses in her car is that it’s not great, it’s probably on the way out, it’s better than using gasoline.“Gas is a continuous circle of energy wastage,” she said. “You have to use energy to extract it, you have to use energy to transport it, you have to use energy to refine it, you have to use energy to transport it back.

Kathy Neset moved to the Bakken with a degree in geology from Brown University in 1979 and built a successful oil-field consulting company on the vast, windswept jumble of low hills and ridges, once good only for cattle raising. She understands perfectly well that electric cars are coming, yet she has faith that new uses for petroleum will keep the oil sector in business.

“Do we blow away like tumbleweeds? Or do we evolve?” she said in an interview at her gleaming office building in Tioga, N.D. “This is an industry that has a history of adopting, evolving and changing with the nation. I don’t see oil going away in any of our lifetimes. It’s our way of life. Where we lose out on transportation we will gain on new technologies.”

Destiny Wolf, 39, an upbeat advocate for electric vehicles, also feels the stigma of driving a Tesla — in her case a Model 3.Oil workers, Wolf said, see electric vehicles as an attack on their livelihoods. “You know, sitting there at a red light, they drive up, roll down their windows, they start yelling and cursing at me,” she said. “If that’s your existence, it’s really sad.”

Neset said she believes that investment firms, especially those that have signed on to corporate governance protocols that embrace environmental and social goals, “just don’t want to put their capital into new drilling until we figure out a way to handle this in a clean way.”

“In rural America there is very little you can do without that [oil],” Ness said. “We just don’t have opportunities here. It enables us to build schools, rather than close schools.”

Charles Gorecki, CEO of an incubator at the University of North Dakota called the Energy and Environmental Research Center, is promoting a plan similar to the coal industry’s Project Tundra. But it would go further — he envisions the injection of carbon dioxide into deep caverns as a way of enhancing the extraction of more oil. More carbon would go into the ground than would come out of it as petroleum, he said. North Dakota could even import carbon dioxide from other states.

“There is an enormous amount of space to store CO2,” he said. “What we need to do is make it an economically attractive option. The goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It should be by any and all means.”

A new state body called the Clean Sustainable Energy Authority is charged with promoting clean-energy technologies — with the understanding that the energy being talked about is from coal, oil or natural gas. Carbon capture is one idea; another is hydrogen-powered vehicles, using “blue” hydrogen from natural gas.

“Even if we transition to all electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, North Dakota will have a part to play,” said Joel Brown, a member of the CSEA. “I think of it as a moonshot for the state of North Dakota.”

In the history of the Bakken, 3 billion barrels of oil have been pumped out. Brown said 30 billion to 40 billion more barrels is still in the ground and recoverable.

“We have to make that Bakken barrel just a little bit cleaner than every other barrel in the world,” said Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a trade group. “You look at the standard American family and the affordability of the combustion engine, and I think gasoline is going to be around for a long time.”

North Dakota went from being the 10th-largest oil-producing state in 2005 to the second in 2015.

Watford City is in McKenzie County, which between 2010 and 2019 was the fastest-growing county in the United States, according to census figures. In the late 1990s, said Steve Holen, the school superintendent, people thought the county would soon have nothing but bison and nursing homes. Oil changed all that, and residents are reluctant to let that go.

So the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture.

Consequently, there’s a widespread conviction in the Bakken that electric vehicles will never amount to much. “It’s a cultural challenge,” said Neset. “I’m not sure how many of these cowboys and cowgirls are going to want to jump in an electric car.”

A question about EVs that was put to a Bakken Facebook group elicited scathing, vulgar responses. “Let the retirees living in Florida, Arizona and California buy them. I am from North Dakota, give me a gas guzzling ‘truck,’” wrote one.

“Anyone that supports electric over gas and works in the Bakken is a hypocrite. Your job revolves around oil. No oil = No job for most. Easiest math I have ever done,” wrote another.

“Never, ever, ever,” wrote a third.But there are signs this hostility to electric is cracking.

This convergence of fossil-fuel dependence, cultural conservatism, and isolation from the most dynamic modern industries captures how comprehensively the two parties are divided by their exposure to, and attitudes about, the changes reshaping America.

The irony is that the energy transition may represent the best chance for the states most reliant on fossil fuels to benefit from the new sources of economic growth.

Last year Walter co-wrote a detailed study on how a shift away from fossil fuels would affect the states. Replacing fossil fuels with lower-carbon energy sources, she said, will create “a tremendous amount of jobs in Republican states.”

The 19 states that top the EIA’s latest rankings—for the most carbon emitted per dollar of economic output in 2018—present a singular profile. They begin with Wyoming, West Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Alaska at the top of the list and then extend across the South (including Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas), the heartland (including Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska), and the Mountain West (Montana, New Mexico)

The political leadership in these states has opposed most efforts to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. Fourteen of these states, for instance, have joined in a lawsuit (led by West Virginia) now before the Supreme Court that could undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.

The Republican senators from these states have also uniformly opposed proposals to limit carbon emissions, such as a clean-electricity standard to phase out carbon-emitting electricity.

The most important exception to this pattern is that many congressional Republicans have backed tax credits to encourage deployment of wind and solar power.

all Senate Republicans are opposing the Build Back Better Act’s more sweeping incentives, which energy analysts agree could enormously accelerate the development of those sources.

Almost all of the states fighting the energy transition are expressing equally intense resistance to social change. In effect, they are fighting the future on both fronts.

The core problem for these states, Muro notes, is that most of them tend to lack the well-educated workers who are, in essence, the crucial raw material for not only internet, computing, and communications firms but also advanced manufacturing.

the torrent of culturally conservative legislation across the fossil-fuel-reliant states (and GOP-controlled states more broadly) adds another barrier to tech companies pursuing significant expansions in them. “They want to decentralize somewhat, but they are very concerned about how this plays with the people they are trying to hire,” Muro says. Companies, he adds, “need to make sure the talent is not put off” by these restrictive social policies.

Devashree Saha, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute, told me most economic models project that, overall, the transition from a fossil-fuel to a clean-energy economy will create more jobs than it destroys in energy-related sectors.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed last year included several provisions designed to channel jobs in the clean-energy economy toward places that would be hurt by diminished reliance on fossil fuels, such as coal communities. The now-stalled Build Back Better plan contains further incentives to steer that investment, though those haven’t been sufficient to overcome the opposition from Republicans representing the fossil-fuel states, or Manchin.

That resistance underscores the extent to which the energy transition has been woven into the larger struggle over the country’s direction between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the competing Republican “coalition of restoration.”

The loud demands for more domestic oil and gas drilling since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the fierce opposition to any regulation of carbon emissions, show how a low-carbon future has become just another count in the indictment Republicans use to convince their voters that Democrats want to uproot America from its deepest traditions and transform it into something unrecognizable

ucing snowfall in the northern Plains and the Upper Midwest, with heavy snow in parts of Minnesota and Iowa coming down at rates of one to two inches per hour

In a weekend forecast, NBC’s "TODAY" weather anchor Al Roker said the storm system could bring 6 to 12 inches of snow stretching from the Dakotas down to Missouri.

Snow is also expected to develop over parts of the central and southern Appalachians, with pockets of rain and freezing rain potentially developing over the Carolinas and the southern Appalachians overnight Saturday into Sunday morning.

Roker said the system was expected to move south before making its way up the Eastern coast into Sunday and Monday, bringing heavy wind and rain if it continues along its expected track. On Sunday, a wintry mix is expected to hit parts of the Southeast, including Atlanta, as a significant ice storm unfolds across the Carolinas.

to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent: to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress. More important, it had stipulated that in the future, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30’ parallel) in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.

They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity.

In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state.

This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was elected to the presidency in 1844. Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.

Wilmot’s measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West–a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom–that proved to be “the knell of the union.”

But after the number changes to 988 — a shift that involves upgrading telecom infrastructure and bringing more call centers online — use of the hotline is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. (The current number is 800-273-8255.)

The only call center in South Carolina, for instance, until recently operated out of an old, dark basement, near a boiler room. The last remaining one in Louisiana has struggled to keep up with an influx of calls after another center closed and its replacement went offline during the pandemic. Minnesota and Wyoming have had periods with no centers at all. When local centers cannot pick up, calls are pushed to national backup centers, where counselors are less likely to be familiar with local resources and wait times can be too long for people in crisis.

As a teenager, she made dozens of late-night calls to the Lifeline. A volunteer named Chris, who worked the late shift, usually would pick up and talk her to safety. But during the last several years, she has found it increasingly difficult to reach a counselor. Several times, she said, she hung up and harmed herself.

A woman from Michigan, who said she waited twice for over an hour before hanging up, likened the experiences to calling airline customer service — except that she was seeking suggestions on “not killing myself.” A teenager from Mississippi recounted calling three times one night without getting through, and then overdosing.

“There are thousands of users — many of whom may be in suicidal crisis — who seek assistance and are unable to get the lifesaving help they deserve,” the report said.

“Our concern is very much about whether there will be someone to answer that call when someone is in crisis,” said Hannah Wesolowski, chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

For 988, such fees could also help pay for mobile response teams that can be dispatched to people in crisis, as well as for specialized triage centers — both significant, and costly, elements of what advocates see as a watershed opportunity to recast the delivery of mental health care.

Paying for 988, and what comes with it, has emerged as a contentious issue for states. Some lawmakers are wary of adding what they see as a new tax. Others think 988 is redundant with other resources. And telecommunications lobbyists, while broadly supportive of 988, have pushed back on some proposed fees.

“It is just like the United States Congress, though, to send us something like this” — with instructions that “you are going to fund it,” he said.

“With all due respect, 988 is going to save the taxpayers a whole lot of money,” he said.

“The crisis centers are like, ‘You don’t get any of those other things if people aren’t here to answer the phone,’” said Ms. Battle, director of access at the Harris Center, which provides services for mental health issues and developmental disabilities.

One goal of 988 is to eventually answer 95 percent of all incoming calls within 20 seconds. The data analysis showed that only two states had Lifeline answer rates above 95 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. Thirty-three states had more than 15 percent of their calls abandoned.

“People call in their most dire state of need.”

West Virginia’s lone call center answering the Lifeline, First Choice Services, also answers more than 15 other numbers, including ones for gambling, tobacco and drug and alcohol addiction, most with volume rising during the pandemic.

“We have a very real fear that without funding our program in a substantial way,” she said, “our West Virginia callers will suddenly be facing what has been a problem nationally.”

I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.

when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were

And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.

The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.

it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.

it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.

There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.

it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.

It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.

And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.

We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.

So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.

He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.

Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?

to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.

Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.

So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means

nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.

I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.

So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?

Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.

something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it

— that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.

But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.

for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.

So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category

When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.

It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve

I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.

It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.

there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?

what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them

here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.

as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.

And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life

there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.

he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.

the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.

So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics

the concession.

So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.

The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.

He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.

The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.

so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?

here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.

he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.

He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X

How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?

I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.

So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.

the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community

So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.

And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.

When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.

He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.

I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.

King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.

There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.

What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.

And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.

that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.

How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.

there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.

King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.

for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.

This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.

And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.

So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question

it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.

I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.

But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.

What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?

BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.

But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.

And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.

that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.

The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.

How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.

It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.

And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.

he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?

He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.

BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.

So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.

then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.

Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.

as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.

And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.

it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.

BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.

That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.

so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.

one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.

That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community

I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy

King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.

for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.

today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.

BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.

Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.

there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.

So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.

where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.

When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.

King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.

where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow

How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?

n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.

So the most classic example is that structural unemployment gets reframed, in part by racism, as questions of laziness or pathology or criminality instead of as a feature of the economy as such. So King always talks about the critique of racism as part of the diagnosis of the disease in order to cure it.

So even in the privileging the least well off and being concerned with poor people of all races, he wants to say that the critique of racism helps us see through the kinds of blindnesses that obscure the nature of our economy and the commonalities across race and the things that we need to address the questions of economic justice precisely

The second thing is that, in his critique of Black power, one of the things he says is that he worries that Black power gives priority to the question of race in a way that confuses our analysis of social reality. So what does he mean by that?

if you think that all Black disadvantage is primarily about anti-Black racism, you can start to miss the fact that there are broader economic dislocations that need to be addressed, that there are structural features of the American constitutional order, the ways in which municipal boundaries are structured, ways that funding decisions are made, that aren’t primarily driven by racial animus, that need to be addressed.

You can lose sight of those things and start to think that the real battle is in something like a totality of anti-Black racial ideology that can be battled in Hollywood movies and comic books and school curricula and legislation and political rhetoric

it’s not to say that those things don’t exist. It’s just to say that there’s a confusion about what’s going to make the biggest impact in improving the life circumstances of the least well off.

King really calls us to constantly be very precise about what the causal mechanisms are for Black disadvantage and to not be confused by the fact that there’s discrimination and injustice and cruelty in these other realms but which might not have as much causal impact as some of these other things.

King was very adamant that Black pride, that a concern with representation, that thinking in expansive ways about how do you affirm the somebodiness of Black youth, that those things are really, really important and that they’re not to be dismissed.

So it is a question of justice if people in Hollywood just constantly demean or diminish the talent of nonwhite actors. That is a question of justice. It’s just that we have to be honest about what the import of those struggles will be for the broader group. And the only way we can do that is by being attentive to the class differences within the group.

there’s a way in which — and King diagnoses this very incisively — there’s a way in which some genres of Black nationalism are so pessimistic about the possibility for multiracial democracy in the United States, for any kind of Black flourishing in the United States that they essentially foreclose real interest in political organizing and social movements

But the energy they still managed to generate — the outrage, the sentiment, the sociality — they find their outlet, instead, in a practice of humiliation, counter humiliation. So that there may not be hope that we can actually change the country, but at the very least, we can enjoy a feeling of retaliation, a kind of self-respecting sense of resistance, by engaging in a practice of trying to humiliate our opponents in the public spher

there’s a titillation to that. There’s a catharsis in watching someone — at that point, it would have been called stick it to whitey. Now it would be stick it to the libs or own the libs.

this is a significant amount of people that could cause real damage in the places where they don’t face many countervailing forms of power. And they can exercise a much more toxic impact on the broader state of American politics in a time where the media environment is way more fragmented

I see those elements. And I think that we need more people operating, in the kind of mode that King did, in his critique of Black power, to try to turn people away from their understandable feelings of hostility and resentment, toward more productive forms of political engagement.

the word, “emotion,” which is a neglected part of politics, maybe of King’s thought in particular is that he understood — I think he understood part of the goal of politics and political action as creating a particular structure of political emotion.

, what structure of emotion, of political emotion, we’re actually living in.

BRANDON TERRY: My mentor and friend, Karuna Mantena, at Columbia, political theorist, a brilliant political theorist working on a book on Gandhi — I learned this from her, thinking a lot about how nonviolence is a kind of realism, in part because it doesn’t engage in of fiction that politics is operating on, in the model of rational discussion. It takes very, very, very seriously the problem of emotion.

for King, thinking about the history of racial oppression in America, they’re key emotions that you have to think about. One of the most important ones is fear

If that fear is a longstanding, deeply-structuring feature of American culture and political life, if it’s something that animates our comedy movies, our stand-up routines, our political discourse, you can’t operate as if it’s not there. You have to do things that will somehow disarm, disrupt, dispel those fears, in order to make progress on the political questions you want to pursue. That was one of King’s deepest, deepest commitments.

He’s thinking a lot about anger, which we’ve talked at great length about. And one of the disappointments I’ve had with radical politics in the present, as sympathetic as I am to most of the aims, is that I just don’t think the emotion question has been adequately considered

people often defend their politics as like, King was unpopular. And the things we’re saying are unpopular. So we’re operating in that tradition.

it’s not enough to just say, I’ve started a conversation, I’ve provoked something toxic in the culture. He’s not trying to do that, necessarily. He’s trying to elicit reactions that bring forward certain emotions but not let those emotions unravel the society itself. He’s trying to channel them into other forms of political affect that are much more congenial to reconciliation and justice.

what we’ve unfortunately ended up with is that the sophistication of mobilization strategists, the depth of the polarization, has made anger the principal affect of American politics at this moment.

a King-inspired political philosophy, both at the state level and the activist level, has to do, is think about how do we transform the recalcitrant nature of today’s political anger and channel it into forms of constructive politics that might point toward a more just future and that might dissolve the forms of anger that are illegitimate and ill founded, in part, by doing the kind of work sometimes described as a moral jujitsu, turning those affects against themselves, in part, to try to transform them into something different.

maybe it’ll be easier to use myself as an example, here.

When I started out in blogging and political writing and journalism, particularly blogging, I think I thought a lot about politics in terms of winning and losing, and in my corner of it, winning and losing intellectually, that I was involved in political arguments, and arguments could be won or lost in front of some kind of audience.

One is having been in a lot of arguments. And I think I’m a reasonably good arguer. And so I’ve done, by my own likes, well, and then noticed it didn’t have it all the effect I wanted it to have, which is, if anything, it usually — if you really beat somebody in an argument and they feel humiliated, they go further into views they already held

And two things have begun to corrode, for me, that sense

so you lose by winning.

then the second is, particularly in the Trump era, the sense that if you met something awful with an equal and opposite energetic force, that in some weird way, you just added energy to what was now an awful system and conversation.

What do you do to not create a sense that this is a right conversation to be having? And I don’t the answers to it. And I’m not saying like I’ve ascended to some higher plane and don’t argue or any of that. I have all the same intuitions and senses I’ve always had.

that’s why I find King so interesting and challenging in this way, because it’s just really, really, really different to ask the question, how do I reshape the emotional politics and the emotional structure of myself, of the people I’m in conflict with and then of the people who are bystanders or watchers of that conflict, for the better

It’s just a really different goal to be targeting, and just unimaginably harder than, can I come up with an argument that I think is a winning argument.

I think you see it — when he’s assassinated, the leading figures of the Black-Power generation, they’re heartbroken. They mourn his loss. They grieve for him, in part because — and you can read any of these memoirs, particularly Stokely Carmichael’s — they felt like he never — that even when he disagreed with them, he loved them, and not just because they were friendly, but because he loved in the sense that he always invoked, of agape love, that he wanted goodwill for them, and that his arguments weren’t from a place of trying to humiliate them or embarrass them or expose them as ridiculous.

He wanted to affirm their right to make the arguments they were making, to affirm their intelligence and judgment and to enter into their mind, to try to reconstruct a position with sympathy, but then show why it falls short for the sake of goals that he was forthright about, about justice, about reconciliation, about love

we are in a moment of extraordinary cynicism. And cynicism can take advantage of your intellectual honesty, your practice of agape love. But I think that’s in the short term.

In my better moments, I’m of the view that the only way to start to turn the tide against the cynicism that has so corroded and corrupted our political culture is to try to have these demonstrations of humility and authenticity that cause us to put ourselves at some risk, the way that King did

So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And if I can put one spin on that, you mentioned the many books King wrote. If people want to start with one thing he actually wrote to read, one book, which one should they start with?

I think you get the best sense of his mature thought from his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is still our question. So I would definitely recommend that. I also really love “A Trumpet of Conscience,” his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures that were published posthumously.

I really strongly recommend Peniel Joseph’s, “The Sword and the Shield.” It’s a dual biography of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and think really highly of it. It’s a great meditation on the ways they influenced each other. And it gives you a good sense of the broader intellectual milieu of the period.

I also really like Jeanne Theoharis’s “A More Beautiful and Terrible History.” I think for people coming to the study of the civil rights movement for the first time are kind of curious about why some of the things that I’ve said don’t sound familiar to them. She writes, in a really accessible and intelligent way, about some of the myths, that structure, how that history is taught and popularly conveyed. We have a lot of agreements there.

And then a where do we go from here question, I want to recommend my colleague, Tommie Shelby’s book, “Dark Ghettos,” which is a King-inspired philosophical reflection on the deep structure of ghetto poverty and what it requires of us, as a society, to do to redress it. It’s a book that’s very demanding on how far we’ve fallen short and questions of justice that pertain to the kind of neighborhoods that we grew up in and around.

During that same period, 29 states had, on average, at least one federally declared disaster a year somewhere within their borders. Five states have experienced at least 20 disasters since 2011.

The numbers exclude disaster declarations related to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Climate change is here,”

“Every single taxpayer is paying for climate change.”

By focusing on federally declared disasters, the report is able to equalize those differences, offering something close to a true accounting of which places are most exposed to climate shocks they cannot cope with on their own.

At the top of that list are five counties that have each experienced, on average, more than a disaster a year since 2011. Those counties are concentrated in two areas: Southern Louisiana (where counties are called parishes) and eastern Kentucky.

“Heat has the highest mortality of all climate impacts, but their disaster declarations were so low,” Ms. Chester said. The reason: Federal disaster declarations focus on property damage more than direct human consequences like illness, injury or death.

Since 2011, California has received 25 federal disaster declarations, including for wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that resulted in $2.5 billion in federal money to rebuild public infrastructure. Mississippi and Oklahoma have each suffered 22 disasters. Iowa has had 21, mostly for severe storms and flooding