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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Did Climate Change Intensify Hurricane Harvey? </h1>
            
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>Every so often, the worst-case scenario comes to pass.</p><p>As of Sunday afternoon, the remnants of Hurricane Harvey seem likely to exceed the worst forecasts that preceded the storm. The entire Houston metropolitan region is flooding: Interstates are under feet of water, local authorities have asked boat owners to join rescue efforts, and most of the streams and rivers near the city are in flood stage.</p><p>Some models suggest that the storm will linger over the area until Wednesday night, dumping 50 inches of water in total on Houston and the surrounding area.</p><p>“Local rainfall amounts of 50 inches would exceed any previous Texas rainfall record. The breadth and intensity of this rainfall are beyond anything experienced before,” said a statement from the National Weather Service. “Catastrophic flooding is now underway and expected to continue for several days.” (In years of weather reporting, I have never seen a statement this blunt and ominous.)</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>This means that thousands of people—and perhaps tens of thousands of people—are facing a terrifying and all-too-real struggle to survive right now. In an age when the climate is changing rapidly, a natural question to ask is: What role did human-caused global warming play in strengthening this storm?</p><p>Climate scientists, who specialize in thinking about the Earth system as a whole, are often reticent to link any one weather event to global climate change. But they say that aspects of the case of Hurricane Harvey—and the recent history of tropical cyclones worldwide—suggest global warming is making a bad situation worse.</p><p>It may not be obvious why global warming has anything to do with hurricane strength. Climate change is caused by the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. These gases prevent some of the sun’s rays from bouncing back into space, trapping heat in the planetary system and raising air temperatures all over the world.</p><figure><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">As the world warms, evaporation speeds up. So on avg there's more water vapour for a storm to sweep up &amp; dump now, compared to 70 years ago. <a href="https://t.co/M4R9OFFZt9" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538158'">https://t.co/M4R9OFFZt9</a></p>
— Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) <a href="https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/900810732635336705" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538158'">August 24, 2017</a></blockquote>
</figure><p>This warmer air causes evaporation to happen faster, which can lead to more moisture in the atmosphere. But that phenomenon alone does not explain climate change’s effects on Harvey.</p><p>Storms like Harvey are helped by one of the consequences of climate change: As the air warms, some of that heat is absorbed by the ocean, which in turn raises the temperature of the sea’s upper layers.</p></section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright1" targeting-pos="boxright1" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="3" data-object-name="boxright"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-3"><p>Harvey benefited from unusually toasty waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm roared toward Houston last week, sea-surface waters near Texas rose to <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/7158" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538158'">between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average</a>. These waters were some of <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/900388963185295360" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538158'">the hottest spots of ocean surface in the world</a>. The tropical storm, feeding off this unusual warmth, was able to progress from a tropical depression to a category-four hurricane in roughly 48 hours.</p><p>“This is the main fuel for the storm,” says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Although these storms occur naturally, the storm is apt to be more intense, maybe a bit bigger, longer-lasting, and with much heavier rainfalls [because of that ocean heat].”</p><p>This also suggests an explanation for one of Harvey’s strangest and scariest behaviors. The storm intensified up until the moment of landfall, achieving category-four strength hours before it slammed into the Texas coast. This is not only rare for tropical cyclones in the western Gulf of Mexico: It may be unique. In the past 30 years of records, <a href="https://twitter.com/sezick/status/901181680102322176" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'538158'">no storms west of Florida have intensified in the last 12 hours before landfall</a>.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore">Harvey is just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms.</aside><p>Why do storms normally weaken—and why didn’t Harvey? As mentioned above, hurricanes feed and grow on warm ocean surface waters. But as they grow, their strong winds often pick up seawater, churning the oceans and moving the warmest waters deep below the surface. The same winds also bring newer, colder water closer to the atmosphere, which usually serves to drain energy and weaken the storm.</p><p>That didn’t happen with Harvey. The hurricane churned up water 100 or even 200 meters below the surface, said Trenberth, but this water was <em>still</em> warm—meaning that the storm could keep growing and strengthening. “Harvey was not in a good position to intensify the way it did, because it was so close to land. It’s amazing it was able to do that,” he told me.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector2" targeting-pos="boxinjector2" 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-4"><p>All of this said, a storm like Harvey could have happened even if there was no climate change. Planning experts have long fretted over the possibility of a major hurricane striking Houston. Harvey is also a powerful hurricane forming in one of the most hurricane-friendly regions of the world at the peak of hurricane season. Storms similar to it would form in any climate.</p><p>But Trenberth says that the extra heat could make the storm more costly and more powerful, overpowering and eventually breaking local drainage systems.</p><p>“The human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm,” he said. “It may have been a strong storm, and it may have caused a lot of problems anyway—but [human-caused climate change] amplifies the damage considerably.”</p><p>More generally, it’s still unclear what effect climate change is having on hurricane formation across the greater Atlantic Ocean. A draft version of a major U.S. government review of climate science due out later this year says there is “medium confidence” that human activities “have contributed to the observed upward trend in North Atlantic hurricane activity since the 1970s.”</p><p>Houston has been ground zero for super-damaging storms lately. It has seen four 100-year flooding events since the spring of 2015, <a href="http://grist.org/article/a-texas-size-flood-threatens-the-gulf-coast-and-were-so-not-ready/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'538158'">according to the meteorologist Eric Holthaus</a>. The city also sees 167 percent more heavy downpours than it did in the 1950s. Meanwhile, only one-sixth of its residents have federal flood insurance, though that program has <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Flood-insurance-program-deep-in-debt-costs-will-11009266.php" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'538158'">struggled to adjust to the increased flooding risk</a> associated with climate change.</p><p>Yet even compared to recent storms, Harvey is unprecedented—just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms. Harvey has already dumped more water on Harris County than Tropical Storm Allison, the area’s previous worst-ever flooding disaster in 2001, though it has only lasted half the time of that earlier storm.</p><p>And it will keep raining. As of Sunday afternoon, Buffalo Bayou, a major river near downtown Houston, is one foot above flood stage. It is projected to rise as much as another 12 feet today alone.</p><figure><div class="embed-wrapper" style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:56.25%;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;" class=" lazyload" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7Saq_ZYPS40?enablejsapi=1"></iframe></div></figure><section><hr><h3>Related Video</h3>
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Abraham Lincoln's Secret Visits to Slaves</h3>
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        <p class="dek">In the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed thousands of former slaves, some of whom claimed the president came to their plantations disguised as a beggar or a peddler, telling them they’d soon be free.</p>
        
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            <p>Shortly before the election of 1860, a man <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.130/?sp=231">came upon</a> a plantation near Marlin, Texas, some 20 miles southeast of Waco. Though nobody knew who he was, the plantation owner took him in as a guest. The stranger paid close attention to how the enslaved people working on the plantation were treated—how they subsisted on a weekly ration of “four pounds of meat and a peck of meal,” how they were whipped and sometimes sold, resulting in the tearing apart of families. Eventually, the stranger said goodbye and went on his way, but a little while later he wrote a letter to the plantation owner, informing him he would soon have to free his slaves—“that everybody was going to have to, that the North was going to see to it.” The stranger told the owner to go into the room where he’d slept, and see where he’d carved his name into the headrest. And when the slaveholder went and looked, he saw the name: “A. Lincoln.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The President's Power to Hide Secret Details About the Russia Investigation</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Executive power means Donald Trump can classify or declassify memos that may implicate him.</p>
        
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            <p>President Trump has been receiving classified information about the Russia investigation from the House Intelligence Committee as he reviews and declassifies evidence being used in a probe that could implicate him and his campaign team, raising concerns about a potential conflict of interest.</p>

<p>In their attempts to either chide or defend the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation, the House panel’s majority and minority members have written two separate memos describing a highly classified application submitted by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant targeting early Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The Republicans’ memo claims the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when applying for a warrant in October 2016 to surveil Page. The Democrats’ memo insists the bureau acted properly.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Once and Future Speaker?</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Is Nancy Pelosi's leadership the key to Democrats regaining the House, or the thing that will hold them back?</p>
        
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            <p class="dropcap">H<span class="smallcaps">ere,”</span> Nancy Pelosi likes to say, “the currency of the realm is the vote.”</p>

<p>With a majority of the votes in Congress, you have power. Without them, you have nothing. Pelosi, the House minority leader, knows it as well as anyone in Washington. She had the votes to make history in 2007 when she became speaker of the House, not only becoming the first woman to hold that title but in the process, rising higher in U.S. electoral politics—and closer in the line of presidential succession—than any woman before or since. Four years later, the votes were gone, washed away in a Republican wave that relegated Democrats back to the minority. Now, with Democrats poised to make a run at recapturing the House majority this fall, Pelosi has a chance to set another mark: the first person to reclaim the speaker’s gavel in more than 60 years and the first ever to do so after so long an interval.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What's Actually Behind Cape Town's Water Crisis</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/richard-poplak/" itemprop="url" title="Richard Poplak" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Richard Poplak</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Blame austerity-obsessed technocrats, irresponsible development, and willful ignorance.</p>
        
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            <p>The city of Cape Town was plonked by its founders onto a peninsula where the Indian and Atlantic oceans merge, often violently, beneath the imposing banks of Table Mountain. To its north lie the fertile fruit and wine farms that weigh down the city’s restaurant tables with unimaginable bounty. Every day when the clock strikes noon, a canon blast echoes from Signal Hill, a reminder of the city’s colonial heritage. It was established first as a vegetable garden by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, then repurposed as a stronghold for the British until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910; later it served as the apartheid regime’s parliamentary stronghold. In 2014, The <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/10/travel/2014-places-to-go.html">declared it</a> the best place in the world to visit. Britain’s <em>Daily Telegraph</em> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/africa/south-africa/galleries/reasons-why-cape-town-is-the-best-city-in-the-world/">concurred</a>.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">American Carnage</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/conor-friedersdorf/" itemprop="url" title="Conor Friedersdorf" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Conor Friedersdorf</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">“Your child isn’t going to be shot,” Donald Trump vowed. It was a promise he could never have kept—but there’s no evidence he even tried.</p>
        
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            <p>In his inaugural address, Donald Trump declared, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” He knew it would not. We know it did not.</p>

<p>“I’ll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in your inner city, or wherever you are, you’re not going to be shot,” he <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/trump-black-hispanic-voters-shot-227369">declared</a> during the campaign. “Your child isn’t going to be shot.” He has not been able to make sure of that––ask any parent whose children were caught up in any of the recent school shootings.</p>

<p>Trump gave those credulous enough to believe him false hope.</p>

<p>“The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he vowed at the Republican National Convention. “Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.” But safety was not restored that day. Neither crime nor violence ended. The vow was a cynical ploy to get votes.</p>


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    <a href="/technology/archive/2018/02/what-happened-to-american-diplomats-in-cuba-nobody-knows/553343/" class="article-link" data-article-id="553343" data-omni-click="inherit" itemprop="mainEntityOfPage">
        
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                <img data-src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2018/02/RTSA1YE/hero_wide_640.jpg?1518649260" alt="The U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, which is near the ocean " class="lazyload">
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Case of the Sick Americans in Cuba Gets Stranger</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/alexis-madrigal/" itemprop="url" title="Alexis C. Madrigal" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Alexis C. Madrigal</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-15T07:00:00" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The suspects include Cubans, Russians, cicadas, and psychology.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Toward the end of 2016, years into a slow rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, something strange started happening to CIA agents posing as diplomats in Havana.</p>

<p>This something may or may not have been a sonic attack. It may or may not have been deployed by Cubans, Russians, Venezuelans, or any other country with whom the United States has beef. A detailed new accounting of the affair <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/diplomats-in-cuba">appeared</a> in <em>ProPublica</em>, the investigative news outlet, Wednesday. After talking with three dozen officials in different countries and looking at what were described as “confidential government documents,” the reporting confirms that no one has any idea what happened in Havana.</p>

<p>The facts of the case, so far as <em>ProPublica</em> has been able to suss out, are as follows: In November of 2016, an American official newly arrived in Havana with his family heard a strange, loud noise. Something like cicadas or insects, but really loud, and perhaps too “mechanical-sounding.” In December, a young man experienced the same thing—and began to suffer serious symptoms. These two people discussed their experiences of the sound in March. Shortly thereafter, the older diplomat and his wife began to receive medical attention for hearing loss and other problems.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What Color Is a Tennis Ball?</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/marina-koren/" itemprop="url" title="Marina Koren" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Marina Koren</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-15T07:00:00" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">An investigation into a surprisingly divisive question</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr">It seemed like an easy question.</p>

<p dir="ltr">The query came from <a href="https://twitter.com/cgpgrey/status/961700363131908096">a Twitter poll</a> I spotted on my news feed last week, from user @cgpgrey. “Please help resolve a marital dispute,” @cgpgrey wrote. “You would describe the color of a tennis ball as:” green, yellow, or other.</p>

<p dir="ltr"><em>Yellow, obviously</em>, I thought, and voted. When the results appeared, my jaw dropped with cartoonish effect. Of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with “other.”</p>

<p dir="ltr">I was stunned. I’d gone from being so sure of myself to second-guessing my sanity in a matter of seconds. More than that, I could never have imagined the question of the color of a tennis ball—surely something we could all agree on, even in these times—would be so divisive.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Why Can't the U.S. Treat Gun Violence as a Public-Health Problem? </h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/sarah-zhang/" itemprop="url" title="Sarah Zhang" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Sarah Zhang</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">A 1996 bill has had a chilling effect on the CDC’s ability to research firearms.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>After a deadly shooting, the debate always, it seems, breaks down like this: One side argues for gun control, and the other argues there is no research proving those measures work. There is, in fact, <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2595514">little research into gun violence at all</a>—especially compared to other causes of death in the United States.</p>

<p>The modern origins of the impasse can be traced to 1996, when Congress passed an amendment to a spending bill that forbade the Centers of Disease Control and Protection from using money to “advocate or promote gun control.”</p>

<p>The National Rifle Association had pushed for the amendment, after public-health researchers produced a spate of studies suggesting that, for example, having a gun in the house increased risk of homicide and suicide. It deemed the research politically motivated. Gun-rights advocates zeroed in on statements like that of Mark Rosenberg, then the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. In response to the early ’90s crime wave, Rosenberg had <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/us/new-tactics-urged-in-fight-against-crime.html">said in 1994</a>, “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes ... It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol—cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Donald Trump's Language Is Reshaping American Politics</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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        <p class="dek">Republicans—and some liberals—downplay the significance of the president’s outbursts. But his words are quietly radicalizing both the left and right, with untold consequences for the future of policy.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr">Do the president’s words matter?</p>

<p dir="ltr">In Donald Trump’s first year in office, there has been a surprisingly widespread effort to argue that they do not. Liberals and moderates <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gyjavm/the-case-for-ignoring-trumps-tweets">occasionally</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/business/media/if-trump-tweets-it-is-it-news-a-quandary-for-the-news-media.html">insist</a> that the media and the public should shift their attention from the president’s vulgar statements to the real policy work happening at federal agencies. Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have <a href="https://newrepublic.com/minutes/146577/trumps-embarrassing-fisa-tweets-show-republicans-simply-ignoring-him">repeatedly</a><a href="https://nypost.com/2017/07/02/gop-senator-ignore-trumps-tweets-focus-on-health-care/"> ignored and dismissed</a> Trump’s most shocking comments;<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/focusing-trumps-tweets-will-make-you-out-touch-americans-republican-senator-695725"> criticized the media</a> for paying attention to his tweets;<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/1/12/16885312/trump-shithole-countries-denial"> feigned forgetfulness</a> of his vulgarities; and even<a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/356338-ryan-roasts-trump-i-scroll-twitter-to-see-which-tweets-i-will-have-to-pretend"> made jokes</a> about all that ignoring, dismissing, and forgetting.</p>

<p dir="ltr">The upshot seems to be: <em>Ignore the words, heed the substance.</em></p>

<p dir="ltr">But Trump’s words are his substance. “Politics is persuasion as well as coercion,” the political scientist Jacob Levy <a href="https://niskanencenter.org/blog/the-weight-of-the-words/">wrote</a> last week, rightly arguing that Trump has “changed what being a Republican means.” He has done so not through legislative coercion—indeed, he <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-trump-demanded-loyalty-asked-for-end-1496859119-htmlstory.html">barely seems to understand</a> the basics of American government—but through persuasive insistence. On issues as diverse as the alleged dangers of immigration and the nature of truth, Trump’s words have the power to cleave public opinion, turning nonpolitical issues into partisan maelstroms and turning partisan attitudes on their head. Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t produce the legislative artifacts that journalists typically use to analyze presidential power—it hasn’t translated to many actual laws passed. But the country is only just beginning to understand the scope of Trump’s lexical influence.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Another School Shooting—But Who’s Counting?</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/isabel-fattal/" itemprop="url" title="Isabel Fattal " data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Isabel Fattal </span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Seventeen people were killed in an attack on Wednesday. America’s inability to track gun violence is standing in the way of preventing the next one.</p>
        
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            <p>A high-school shooting in Parkland, Florida, on Wednesday afternoon has left 17 people dead and numerous others injured, according to officials. The suspect, a 19-year-old former student named Nikolas Cruz who was expelled for unspecified disciplinary reasons, is in custody, according to officials.</p>

<p>As details of the attack emerge, news organizations are engaging in a grim tradition: tallying the massacre on an ever-growing list of school shootings in the U.S., and of mass shootings more generally. <em>The Daily Beast</em>, for example, on Wednesday cited data from <a href="https://everytownresearch.org/school-shootings/">Everytown</a>, the gun-control advocacy group, which called it the 59th shooting at or near schools this academic year.</p>

<p>But the counting of school shootings, and of other types of shootings and incidents of mass violence, isn’t a straightforward process. Even <em>The Daily Beast</em>’s reference raises the question of whether reporting ought to distinguish between shootings <em>near </em>schools and those <em>in </em>schools. Meanwhile, many oft-cited statistics disregard forms of school violence that may not have involved guns but are similar to shootings in intention or impact. The messiness of counting school shootings often contributes to sensationalizing or oversimplifying a modern trend of mass violence in America that is seemingly becoming more entrenched. Wednesday’s news out of South Florida has already spurred <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/14/politics/chris-murphy-florida-school-shooting/index.html">renewed</a> calls for policy changes and other forms of action to prevent future shootings—but such initiatives are informed by the information that’s available, and currently, that information is confusing at best and inaccurate at worst.  </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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