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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Houston Flooding Pushed the Earth's Crust Down 2 Centimeters</h1>
            
            <p class="dek" itemprop="description">The 275 trillion pounds of water from Hurricane Harvey deformed the ground in Texas.</p>
            
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                        <span class="caption">The weight of Harvey's water pushed Houston down.</span>
                    
                    
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>The weight of water can deform the Earth’s crust, if there’s enough of it. And we can measure that change with the ultraprecise global-positioning satellites humans have launched into orbit.</p><p>On Monday, Chris Milliner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory <a href="https://twitter.com/Geo_GIF/status/904808613339848704" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538866'">tweeted a simple map</a> visualizing data from the <a href="http://geodesy.unr.edu/about.php" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538866'">Nevada Geodetic Laboratory</a>. It showed that the GPS data from special stations around Houston detected that the whole area had been pushed down roughly two centimeters by the weight of the water that fell during Hurricane Harvey.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">GPS data show <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Harveyflood?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538866'">#Harveyflood</a> was so large it flexed Earth's crust, pushing <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Houston?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538866'">#Houston</a> down by ~2 cm! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/EarthScience?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'538866'">#EarthScience</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/HurricaneHarvey?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'538866'">#HurricaneHarvey</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/txflood?src=hash" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'538866'">#txflood</a> <a href="https://t.co/88lNScJBq9" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'7',r'538866'">pic.twitter.com/88lNScJBq9</a></p>
— Chris Milliner (@Geo_GIF) <a href="https://twitter.com/Geo_GIF/status/904808613339848704" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'8',r'538866'">September 4, 2017</a></blockquote><p>Why this would happen is simpler than you might think. A gallon of water weighs about 8.34 pounds. And by one estimate, Harvey dropped <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/30/harvey-has-unloaded-24-5-trillion-gallons-of-water-on-texas-and-louisiana/?utm_term=.267846a0a7cf" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'9',r'538866'">33 trillion gallons of water</a> across the area it hit. So that’s roughly 275 trillion pounds.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>And it turns out that scientists have measured the effects of loading a bunch of water onto land many times. For example, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JB008925/full" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'10',r'538866'">a 2012 study of the Himalayas</a> detected a seasonal flux in the height of the mountains as water fell, and then ran off those mountains into Asia’s rivers.</p><figure style="max-width: 700.0px;"><picture style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:69.2857142857%;"><img alt="" data-srcset="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/Screenshot_2017_09_05_10.26.17/6e9c4e473.png" class="lazyload" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;"></picture><figcaption class="caption">The rise and fall of different GPS stations in Nepal and Tibet (Fu and Freymueller)</figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6343/1161.full" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'11',r'538866'">A 2017 study in <em>Science</em></a> found that the Sierra Nevada exhibits “vertical surface displacement [with] peak-to-peak amplitudes” of 0.5 to one centimeter. More water is more mass. Less water is less mass. And the crust underneath that water responds to the changes.</p><p>One could see Harvey’s deposition of water as a fast-action version of what happens in the Earth’s mountain ranges each year.</p><p>There are some caveats, Milliner later explained. Some of the change could come from the soil underneath the GPS stations becoming compacted by the water’s weight. But because some stations located on bedrock also experienced the depression, he believed that the key mechanism was crust deformation. It’s also possible, he elaborated, that some areas outside Houston were pushed <em>up</em> by the way the water squished the Houston crust.</p><p>Perhaps a hurricane seems a match for the crust of the Earth, in mental scale. But humans can also have this sort of effect (even without calculating how much of Harvey’s water was due to climate change). Huge dams can impound water on a scale of Hurricane Harvey’s rains. The Hoover Dam and Three Gorges Dam both created reservoirs with a capacity of roughly <a href="http://ceeserver.cee.cornell.edu/lwl3/cee3510/Short%20topics/3%20Gorges%20dam%20(2012).pdf" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'12',r'538866'">10 trillion gallons of water</a>.</p><p>The effect of the filling of the Three Gorges Dam has <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095927317303845" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'13',r'538866'">experienced substantial attention from Chinese researchers</a>, in part because there was a marked increase in small earthquakes in the region as the reservoir was filled. That’s not a concern in Houston, which is not a seismically active region.</p><p>It also remains to be seen how quickly the Earth rebounds in Houston, given that the water is rushing back to the sea, rather than sitting on mountaintops as glaciers or in reservoirs as hydrologic storage. And one assumes there’s an interesting paper in that for a geodetic researcher.</p><p>And there are (at least) two more ways humans are changing the crust of the Earth. Because the climate is warming, there’s less ice—and therefore less mass—attached to the world’s mountaintops. “The Earth, behaving like an elastic body, uplifts in a response to the load loss,” the Himalayan researchers write.</p><p>Meanwhile, in Houston, the ground had already been sinking—scientists call it subsidence—because humans have <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/For-years-the-Houston-area-has-been-losing-ground-7951625.php" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'14',r'538866'">pumped the groundwater out of the aquifers</a> under the city.</p><p>With each passing year, the combined and uncoordinated efforts of humanity force the mountains a little higher and the flats a bit lower.</p></section>
    
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<p dir="ltr">Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this <a href="https://hbr.org/2008/05/why-zappos-pays-new-employees">originated</a> at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)</p>


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<p>It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre">edging out Columbine,</a> which killed 13 in 1999).</p>

<p>What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.</p>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">We are too young to be losing friends like this.</p>
— Javi 🥀 (@Javier_Lovera__) <a href="https://twitter.com/Javier_Lovera__/status/964183117350297600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2018</a></blockquote>


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        <p class="dek">Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.</p>
        
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            <p>The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the <em>New York Times</em> writer Bari Weiss <a href="https://twitter.com/splinter_news/status/963191268917567489">commented</a> “Immigrants: They get the job done.”</p>

<p>What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-times-diversity-bari-weiss-tweet_us_5a833d4ee4b0cf06751f3f44"><em>Times</em></a><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-times-diversity-bari-weiss-tweet_us_5a833d4ee4b0cf06751f3f44"> colleagues</a> were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. <a href="https://splinternews.com/can-someone-explain-this-bari-weiss-tweet-to-me-1822942452">The</a><a href="https://splinternews.com/can-someone-explain-this-bari-weiss-tweet-to-me-1822942452"> critics’</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/soledadobrien/status/964009334178009088">objection</a> was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “<a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/963232760868425728?ref_src=twsrc%255Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%252Fentry%252Fchrissy-teigen-bari-weiss-mirai-nagasu_us_5a830bbbe4b00ecc923ed36d">perpetual othering</a>.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Why Don't More Female Figure Skaters Wear Pants?</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.</p>
        
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            <p>Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.</p>

<p>More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/french-figure-skater-may-not-won-medal-pants-took-peoples-choice-181422813.html">raved</a> Yahoo! News, and AOL <a href="https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2018/02/12/pyeongchang-2018-figure-skating-outfits-from-the-winter-olympics/23359525/">named</a> Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Airbnb and the Unintended Consequences of 'Disruption'</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/derek-thompson/" itemprop="url" title="Derek Thompson" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Derek Thompson</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-17T07:00:00" />
    <meta itemprop="dateModified" content="2018-02-17T22:34:10" />

    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr">The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people <a href="https://www.cydiageeks.com/best-sleep-tracking-apps-for-apple-watch.html">sleep</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wework-story-how-adam-neumann-changing-way-we-work-live-aman-mehta">work</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-restaurant-robot-waiters-2016-7">eat</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/future-retail/546119/">shop</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/style/tinder-relationship-dating-study.html">love</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/the-rise-of-speed-listening/396740/">read</a>, and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/">interact</a>.</p>

<p dir="ltr">At least, that’s one interpretation.</p>

<p>A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-powers-that-were.html">a productivity bust</a> and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. <a href="https://som.yale.edu/blog/peter-thiel-at-yale-we-wanted-flying-cars-instead-we-got-140-characters">People wanted flying cars</a> and got Netflix binges instead.</p>

<p dir="ltr">Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Mueller's Message to America</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/paul-rosenzweig/" itemprop="url" title="Paul Rosenzweig" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Paul Rosenzweig</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.</p>
        
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            <p dir="ltr">With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible  that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.</p>

<p dir="ltr">For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies  publicized  that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.</p>

<p dir="ltr">Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">When Malls Saved the Suburbs From Despair</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/ian-bogost/" itemprop="url" title="Ian Bogost" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Ian Bogost</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an <a href="https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/">offer</a> the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.</p>

<p>The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Swiss Have Liberal Gun Laws, Too</h3>
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        <p class="dek">But they also have fewer gun-related deaths than the U.S.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.</p>

<p>“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”</p>

<p>Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the country<strong> </strong>has <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137689?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">deep historic roots</a> and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What If Voters Don't Care About Infidelity at All?</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/david-a-graham/" itemprop="url" title="David A. Graham" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">David A. Graham</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">The shrugs that have met credible recent allegations of affairs by Donald Trump force a reconsideration of the post-Bill Clinton narrative about voter morality and politicians’ sense of shame.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Right up until 2016 or so, there was a clean narrative about political infidelity. Back in the day, the story went, politicians had affairs with abandon—John Kennedy, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/jackie-and-the-girls/309000/">of course</a>, but also Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and plenty others. (It’s a curiosity that Richard Nixon, the most famously unethical president, is one of the few without serious allegations of infidelity.)</p>

<p>The voters would have been appalled, of course, but the press discreetly ignored these infidelities, for whatever reasons—prudishness, excessive closeness to sources, whatever. When Jimmy Carter copped to having “committed adultery in my heart many times,” it was laughable, but not that <em>that </em>far beyond the puritanical mores of American society. Perhaps the press was wise to look away from mistresses to the presidents.</p>


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        <p class="dek">For 200 years, this Mardi Gras krewe has kicked off the festival at the crack of dawn with a very important message.</p>
        
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Conservatives Must Save the Republican Party From Itself</h3>
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        <p class="dek">David Frum argues that if the Republican Party believes in democracy, its politicians must fight for it.</p>
        
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">'Don't Sneak': A Father's Command to His Gay Son in the 1950s</h3>
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