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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What 35 Inches of Rain Dredges Up</h1>
            
            <p class="dek" itemprop="description">Hurricane Harvey’s unusual path could hit Houston with rain and storm surges at the same time—surfacing gators, snakes, sewage, and coffins.</p>
            
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                        <span class="caption">An alligator after Hurricane Ike in 2008</span>
                    
                    
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>Hurricane Harvey is expected to hit Corpus Christi, Texas, late on Friday, and that will just be the start of it.</p><p>Over the next four or five days, the slow-moving storm could dump up to 35 inches of rain over the hardest-hit areas of Texas. Looking at a NOAA forecast this morning, meteorologist and writer Eric Holthaus <a href="http://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/901081863489323010" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538044'">tweeted</a>,“This is scary. I have never seen a rainfall forecast like this in my entire career.”</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">According to <a href="https://twitter.com/DRmetwatch" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538044'">@DRmetwatch</a>, this is the most rain ever predicted by NOAA's Weather Predition Center, going back several decades. <a href="https://t.co/IbtzANhX2r" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538044'">pic.twitter.com/IbtzANhX2r</a></p>
— Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) <a href="https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/901162324786110465" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538044'">August 25, 2017</a></blockquote><p>All this is compounded by the unusual curve of Harvey’s projected path. After the hurricane makes landfall at Corpus Christi, it is expected to go back out toward the ocean and then make landfall second time near Houston. Hurricane flooding usually comes from some combination of rain and ocean water pushed inland by heavy winds.</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>“Usually, you don’t get peak rainfall and peak surge at the same time,” says <a href="http://www.tamug.edu/mars/Faculty%20Biographies/SamuelDavidBrody.html" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'538044'">Samuel Brody</a>, a flood expert at Texas A&amp;M University. If the forecast holds for Houston, rainwater would be running down streams and rivers while ocean water is surging up to meet it. In other words, that unprecedented amount of rain will have nowhere to go. “That would add catastrophe on top of catatrasophe,” says Brody.</p><p>There will be a lot of water, yes, but plenty of other consequences, too. Floods have habit of surfacing things we’d rather stay hidden.</p><p>Humans, for example, aren’t the only ones looking for higher ground. Alligators are too. Rising waters have also <a href="https://weather.com/storms/severe/news/texas-flooding-pushing-wildlife-into-homes" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'538044'">carried snakes from their natural habitats</a> to where humans congregate.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Gators and flooding advice via <a href="https://twitter.com/txgatorsquad" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'538044'">@txgatorsquad</a>: Expect them to be displaced. Simply looking for higher ground. Leave alone until water recedes <a href="https://t.co/nN1B5jvMyV" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'7',r'538044'">pic.twitter.com/nN1B5jvMyV</a></p>
— FBCSO Texas (@FBCSO) <a href="https://twitter.com/FBCSO/status/900793654192869376" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'8',r'538044'">August 24, 2017</a></blockquote><p>In New Orleans, floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina unearthed nearly a thousand coffins and vaults, sending the dead miles along the coast. “Coffins were torn out of mausoleums like a child’s blocks,” Louisiana’s emergency medical director <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/us/nationalspecial/coffins-and-buried-remains-set-adrift-by-hurricanes.html?mcubz=0" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'9',r'538044'">told <em>The New York Times</em></a>.</p><p>Overloaded sewage systems will start spewing raw sewage. The city of Houston <a href="http://abc13.com/weather/city-of-houston-sewage-spills-cant-be-prevented/1052536/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'10',r'538044'">pretty much admitted in 2015</a> that there’s nothing they can do to prevent sewage spills after heavy rains. Residents have been <a href="https://patch.com/texas/houston/some-houston-residents-advised-boil-water-after-sewage-overflows" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'11',r'538044'">advised before to boil water</a>.</p><p>A large metro area like Houston is also particularly vulnerable to flooding. Large swathes of the city are concrete and asphalt, which prevents rainwater from properly draining. It doesn’t help that Houston is naturally a low-lying city with clay soil that doesn’t drain well anyway. The <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/five-reasons-houston-is-especially-vulnerable-to-flooding-1503676480" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'12',r'538044'">drainage system the city has built is outdated</a>, engineered to to withstand only a 10-year flood.</p><p>The Houston Ship Channel is also vulnerable to flooding from storm surges. As <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-predictions/537933/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'13',r'538044'">my colleague David Graham notes</a>, it is a major center for the petrochemical industry, and flooding could spill millions of gallons of crude oil.</p><p>By the time Hurricane Harvey is all over, Texas may have much more than water to deal with.</p></section>
    
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<h2 class="hed">Conservatives Must Save the Republican Party From Itself</h2>
</a>
<p class="dek has-dek">
    David Frum argues that if the Republican Party believes in democracy, its politicians must fight for it.
</p>

<ul class="metadata">
    
    
    <li class="byline"><a href="/author/david-frum/" title="David Frum">David Frum</a></li>
    
    
    <li class="date">
        <time datetime="2018-02-14">
        
            Feb 14, 2018
        
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                <h2 class="module-label">About the Author</h2>
                


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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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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Nancy Pelosi Dilemma</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/russell-berman/" itemprop="url" title="Russell Berman" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Russell Berman</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Is the former speaker’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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    <ul class="metadata">
        <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>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <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>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <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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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-15T09:13:30" />
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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>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <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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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Another School Shooting—But Who’s Counting?</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <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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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-14T19:00:10" />
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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">Donald Trump's Language Is Reshaping American Politics</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <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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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <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">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" />
    <meta itemprop="dateModified" content="2018-02-15T11:34:06" />

    <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">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 Case of the Sick Americans in Cuba Gets Stranger</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The suspects include Cubans, Russians, cicadas, and psychology.</p>
        
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            <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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<hr><p><strong>Jeffrey Rosen:</strong> What are your thoughts on the #MeToo movement and will it prove lasting progress for women’s equality?</p>


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        <p class="dek">One of President Trump’s fiercest Republican critics may have hit upon the compromise capable of getting through the Senate.</p>
        
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            <p>Consider the possibility, slim though it may be, that Donald Trump, the most stridently restrictionist U.S. president in decades, will be the one who breaks the current immigration impasse by signing a DACA amnesty, or, to use the locution preferred by the Trump White House, a DACA solution. How exactly would this come to pass?</p>

<p>On Wednesday morning, the Trump administration announced that the president is seeking a broader immigration overhaul, which would, in addition to offering legal status to those eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—or DACA—program, address a number of his other priorities, including curbing family-based admissions, bringing an end to the visa lottery, and, of course, building a not-entirely-metaphorical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The clear implication is that President Trump would veto any immigration legislation that falls short of this package deal.</p>


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