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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">When a Hurricane Hits an Offshore Oil Platform </h1>
            
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                        <span class="caption">An offshore oil platform in the North Sea, where it has to withstand choppy weather </span>
                    
                    
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p dir="ltr">For most of the year, the Gulf of Mexico is a nice place to be. It has warm waters; it doesn’t have ice or winter storms. All things considered, if you insist on attaching spindly structures to the ocean floor to drill for a highly flammable substance, the Gulf of Mexico is one of the less inhospitable places to do so.</p><p dir="ltr">But then there is hurricane season, when all that pent-up heat in the water threatens to turn into 100-mph winds and 12-foot storm surges. So here we are in August, with Hurricane Harvey heading toward the coast of Texas. In addition to causing <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-predictions/537933/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'537960'">serious flooding and power outages</a>, the hurricane could deal a major blow to the country’s oil and gas operations.</p><p dir="ltr">Offshore drilling in the Gulf accounts for 17 percent of America’s crude oil production, and the Gulf coast has 45 percent of its refining capacity. In preparation for Harvey, ExxonMobil has announced it is reducing output at its platform in the Gulf; Royal Dutch Shell and Anadarko Petroleum have already <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-storm-harvey-shell-operations-idUSKCN1B32MX" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'537960'">evacuated employees from their platforms</a>. Mobile drillships will be relocated and the drilling operations shutdown. Hurricane Harvey’s current projected path is not a direct hit on the densest area of offshore platforms and refineries, but paths are always hard to predict. It is time to wait and hope for the best.</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 dir="ltr">In 2005, the one-two punch of <a href="https://www.bsee.gov/research-record/category/hurricane-katrina-and-rita" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'537960'">Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 115 platforms</a> and damaged 52 others. Offshore oil and gas production in the Gulf shut down for weeks. “The overall damage caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita has shown them to be the greatest natural disasters to oil and gas development in the history of the Gulf of Mexico,” a <a href="https://www.boem.gov/boem-newsroom/press-releases/2006/press0119.aspx" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'537960'">government official said</a> some months later.</p><p dir="ltr">The 2005 hurricane season did force the industry to take hurricane preparations more seriously. In 2008, the <a href="http://www.api.org/news-policy-and-issues/hurricane-information/hurricane-preparation" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'537960'">American Petroleum Institute</a> released a new set of standards for offshore platforms. The changes included how high the platforms should be to account for the cresting waves of a 100-year storm. As the <a href="http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/energy_industry_adapts_but_sto.html" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'537960'"><em>Times-Picayune</em> has reported</a>, these heights have been a “moving target for the past century.” In the 1940s, offshore platforms were 20 to 40 feet above sea level. In the 1990s, more than 70 feet. And after Katrina and Rita, they are now at 91 feet.</p><p dir="ltr">The platform height is crucial, says Robert Bea, a professor emeritus in civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, because it is supposed to protect platforms from the most dangerous part of the storm. Offshore platforms can generally deal with wind and rainfall okay, but cresting waves will do real damage. “The pressures generated in those wave crests can exceed several thousand pounds per square inch,” says Bea. Everything below the platform has to reinforced to withstand those pressures.</p><p dir="ltr">Bea thinks that U.S. regulations are still too weak when it comes to protecting offshore platforms from Gulf hurricanes. Other countries like the United Kingdom, for example, use a “safety case” system. <a href="http://www.erm.com/en/news-events/platform/whats-the-case-for-a-us-version-of-the-safety-case/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'537960'">Safety cases</a> have their origins in the nuclear industry, and they proactively lay out all of the risks of a facility along with how they will be controlled. In contrast, says Bea, U.S. regulators take a more reactive approach to risks.</p><p dir="ltr">The United Kingdom operates offshore platforms in the North Sea, where inclement weather is common. “They have intense weather for a very long time,” says Bea. “It’s another factor that encourages them to be more proactive in these investments to prevent large failures.” The Gulf of Mexico, on the other hand, is placid and safe for most of the year. Until a hurricane hits.</p></section>
    
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                <a href="/author/sarah-zhang/" class="author-link">Sarah Zhang</a> is a staff writer at <em>The Atlantic.</em>

                
            
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        <p class="dek">Digital stardust won’t magically make future cities more affordable or resilient.</p>
        
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            <p>The term “smart city” is interesting yet not important, because nobody defines it. “Smart” is a snazzy political label used by a modern alliance of leftist urbanites and tech industrialists. To deem yourself “smart” is to make the <span class="smallcaps">NIMBY</span>ites and market-force people look stupid.</p>

<p>Smart-city devotees all over this world will agree that London is particularly smart. Why? London is a huge, ungainly beast whose cartwheeling urban life is in cranky, irrational disarray. London is a god-awful urban mess, but London does have some of the best international smart-city conferences.</p>

<p>London also has a large urban-management bureaucracy who emit the proper smart-city buzzwords and have even invented some themselves.  The language of Smart City is always Global Business English, no matter what town you're in.</p>


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        <p class="dek">The PRC’s “social credit” scheme might have consequences for life in cities everywhere.</p>
        
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            <p>For all the particularities of life in China, its big cities offer a familiar cosmopolitanism. Teenagers giggle over K-Pop videos in a Chengdu Starbucks. Strollers and dog walkers compete with an almighty clutter of dockless share bikes on the sidewalks of downtown Shenzhen. In Beijing’s trendy Sanlitun district, weekend shoppers size up Uniqlo parkas like bargain hunters anywhere. Here are all the signs and markers of placeless, globalized consumerism, and the metropolitan lifestyles that go along with it.</p>

<p>Home to half a billion human beings, beset by pressures both shared with other urban places and uniquely Chinese, it’s remarkable that churning conurbations like Shanghai, Chengdu, or Beijing are not constantly breaking out into open, ungovernable chaos. Just like cities anywhere, though, they do not—a stability that appears to arise almost entirely from self-organization.</p>


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        <p class="dek">Three theories as to why the poll numbers are improving for the president and his party.</p>
        
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            <p>It would be easy to read the headlines this week and conclude that the Trump administration is in even more trouble than normal. The White House still can’t get its story straight on Staff Secretary Rob Porter’s departure amid domestic-violence accusations. Chief of Staff John Kelly seems to be losing support from his subordinates and his boss. And the boss himself is stubbornly refusing to offer even a wisp of sympathy to victims of abuse.</p>

<p>This interpretation wouldn’t be wrong—these scandals are real and they are disturbing on a number of fronts—but it threatens to eclipse the ways in which the political picture has improved in recent weeks for both President Trump and his sometimes uneasy Republican allies.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Syria's War Has Never Been More International</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The next phase of a seven-year conflict has begun.</p>
        
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            <p>If the coming defeat of ISIS and rebel forces in Syria was supposed to bring an end to the seven-year conflict there, no one told Iran, Israel, Turkey, Russia, or the United States.</p>

<p>Consider the stunning events that have occurred in the last three weeks alone: Last month, Turkey, with Russian approval, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/world/middleeast/us-turkey-manbij-kurds.html?mtrref=www.google.com&amp;mtrref=www.nytimes.com">launched</a> a military offensive in northwestern Syria against Kurdish fighters it views as terrorists and America views as counterterrorism allies. Last week, the United States <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-13/u-s-strikes-said-to-kill-scores-of-russian-fighters-in-syria">killed</a> numerous Russian mercenaries who were advancing on a U.S.-Kurdish base in eastern Syria. Last weekend, Israel <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/opinion/the-middle-easts-coming-war.html?mtrref=undefined&amp;assetType=opinion">intercepted</a> an Iranian drone in Israeli airspace and struck Iranian and Syrian military targets in Syria, prompting Syria to shoot down an Israeli fighter jet and Russia to reportedly pressure the Israelis into holding their return fire—for the time being at least.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous</h3>
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek"><span><span>Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.</span></span></p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p><span class="smallcaps">J.G. is a lawyer</span> in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.</p>

<p>J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.</p>

<p>His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Another School Shooting—But Who’s Counting?</h3>
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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>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <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">What Iran Is Really Up To in Syria</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/sam-dagher/" itemprop="url" title="Sam Dagher" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Sam Dagher</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-14T14:05:32" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The recent flare-up with Israel gives Tehran and its Shiite allies a chance to further entrench their dominance.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>BEIRUT—On the day Syrian anti-aircraft missiles downed an American-made Israeli F-16 fighter jet, a banner boasting of the feat in both Arabic and Hebrew script went up in a village in southern Lebanon. To the northeast, loyalists of Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, distributed sweets to passersby on the streets of Damascus while the owner of a men’s clothing store put up a sign in his window reading: “Discount on the occasion of the downing of the enemy’s jet!” In a television studio in southern Beirut, the media arm of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and stalwart ally of Iran and the Assad regime, broadcast live commentary declaring the incident a major turning point. “We are witnessing a strategic transformation on the ground,” declared one of the pundits. “From now on, we can’t speak about [the] Syrian army, Hezbollah, Yemeni army, Iraqi army, and Iranian army. We must speak about one resistance axis operating in all theaters.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">People Have Believed a Lie About Rabbit Domestication for Decades</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Scientists don’t know when bunnies became docile—and they're not even sure if that's an answerable question.</p>
        
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<p>Back then, Pope Gregory the Great had allegedly decreed that laurices—newborn or fetal rabbits—didn’t count as meat. Christians could therefore eat them during Lent. They became a popular delicacy, and hungry monks started breeding them. Their work transformed the wild, skittish European rabbit into a tame domestic animal that tolerates humans.</p>

<p>This was the story that Greger Larson from the University of Oxford heard when he first started studying domestic rabbits. Almost on a whim, he told his student Evan Irving-Pease to find a reference from the Vatican that they could cite. “I said: I’m sure there’s an edict or something,” Larson tells me. “Evan comes back a couple of weeks later and says: ‘Er, small problem, it doesn’t exist.’”</p>


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