Tag: Rural communities
America’s Climate Boomtowns Are Waiting
As my airplane flew low over the flatlands of western Michigan on a dreary December afternoon, sunbursts splintered the soot-toned clouds and made mirrors out of the flooded fields below. There was plenty of rain in this part of the Rust Belt—sometimes too much. Past the endless acres, I could make out the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, then soon, in the other direction, the Detroit River, Lakes Huron and Erie, and southern Canada. In a world running short on
Trump Is Coming for Obamacare Again
Donald Trump’s renewed pledge on social media and in campaign rallies to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has put him on a collision course with a widening circle of Republican constituencies directly benefiting from the law.
In 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, they faced the core contradiction that many of the law’s principal beneficiaries were people and institutions that favored the GOP. That list included lower-middle-income
The GOP’s Big-City Problem Is Growing
The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.
The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn
Why Don’t Grocery Stores Stock the Most American Fruit?
By the time I arrived at Brooklyn’s Park Slope farmers’ market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold out within an hour. “You have to get here early,” Jeff Rowe of Orchard Hill Organics, the market’s lone pawpaw vendor, told me. The day before, I had struck out in Manhattan’s expansive Union Square Greenmarket, where a seller told me pawpaws were extremely rare. The most upscale grocery
How Zoning Broke the American City
Until recently, zoning was a sleepy backwater in the policy world. The mere thought of a weeknight hearing or a 700-page ordinance was once enough to make even the most eager wonk’s eyes glaze over. If a layperson knew anything about zoning, chances are she didn’t have an opinion about it. The rules dictating where and how Americans lived and worked attracted curiously little attention.
A decade of urban upheaval has changed all of that. Amid ongoing crises of housing
Whoever Controls Scotland’s Land Controls Its Climate Future
The wind turbine judders to life with a boom that echoes down its central shaft. It rotates slowly at first, then gathers speed as its blades pick up the direction of the wind. Andy Clements, who looks after the small wind farm on the tiny Scottish Isle of Gigha, steps out of the control hub at the base of the turbine and looks up with satisfaction. A minor problem required a restart, he tells me, but now the turbine is
Will Omicron Leave Most of Us Immune?
Even before Omicron hit the United States in full force, most of our bodies had already wised up to SARS-CoV-2’s insidious spike—through infection, injection, or both. By the end of October 2021, some 86.2 percent of American immune systems may have glimpsed the virus’s most infamous protein, according to one estimate; now, as Omicron adds roughly 800,000 known cases to the national roster each day, the cohort of spike-zero Americans, the truly immunologically naive, is shrinking fast. Virginia Pitzer,
How People Voted in 2020
Can Big Data explain the passion and vitriol of American politics? Like almost everything else in modern life, the choices are multiplying for analysts looking to understand how the key groups in American society divide in presidential elections.
Once, researchers and political operatives had only a few options: some postelection academic surveys (particularly the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies), precinct-level analyses, and, above all, the mainstay of Election Day television broadcasts—exit polls.
Now the choices for understanding the