2026-09-29 04:44:18
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
I have good news and bad news for the holiday shoppers in the audience.
The good news is that the US and China announced this morning — in the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to DC — that the two countries are suspending tariffs on $60 billion of goods, including Christmas ornaments, toys and other tchotchkes.
The bad news is that, because retailers ship goods for the winter holidays well in advance, these reductions might come a bit too late to affect this year’s bills. But there’s always 2027, right? Barring another unforeseen trade altercation.
The tariff rollback represents a real and continued de-escalation in the trade war between China and the US, which — at one point last year — was slapping Chinese goods with a whopping 145 percent tariff.
But it’s not a conclusive truce, either. The new agreement doesn’t address the touchiest products for either country, like rare earth minerals (which are used in electronics and clean energy tech) and advanced chips (which are critical to AI development). China also didn’t lower its tariffs on soybeans, which have hit some American farmers so hard they’re thinking of voting for Democrats.
There’s a certain irony to President Donald Trump’s about-face on the Chinese tariffs, incomplete though it may be. For years, the president made confrontation with China central to his political identity and reaped the benefits in votes. Now he appears to be circling back to what was, for decades, the mainstream, default Republican position: Namely, that more and freer trade with China is ultimately good for American consumers and businesses.
President Richard Nixon first set that tone 54 years ago, when he famously became the first US president to visit Beijing. Subsequent GOP leaders leaned further into free trade with China, even as they railed against the evils of communism. Greater trade will bring “great benefits…to all our peoples,” George W. Bush said in a 2001 statement celebrating China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
But those “great benefits” were a mixed bag for some Americans, history suggests. The price of US consumer goods did fall in the early 2000s as trade between the US and China exploded. At the same time, US manufacturing towns suffered job losses so severe and concentrated that some still haven’t recovered.
Those job losses may have helped propel Trump to the White House, at least in his first term. Researchers have found that communities hit hardest by Chinese competition elected more extreme Congressional candidates in 2010, and then swung hardest to Trump in the 2016 election.
One 2016 paper by a highly regarded team of economists actually calculated that — in an alternate reality where US-China trade grew half as quickly between 2001 and 2016 — Hillary Clinton would have won North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan…and thus, the presidency.
In other words, Trump tapped into real harms and anxieties when he veered from the GOP’s usual stance on China 10 years ago. And he might be attempting to address new economic anxieties about inflation and living costs by reversing his course on China again now.
Call it Trump’s Nixon-to-China moment. The question, of course, is whether voters will give Trump credit for (partially) solving a problem that he himself created.
➨ “Microdose” movement. As the weather gradually and inexorably gets colder, many of us will see our daily step counts fall off. You could do as the Swedes do and load up on layers…or you could stay safely indoors and try microdosing movement. Just five minutes every half hour can help reduce the health impacts of extended sitting. Try tying little walks to a specific cue, like the need to refill your water bottle or the end of a meeting.
2026-09-28 23:05:34
Vegan and vegetarian dining options might be more common than ever, but around the country, vegan restaurants are closing at a quicker rate than their non-vegan peers. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Marina Bolotnikova investigates what’s happening to those restaurants as her own favorite vegan establishment closes its doors. And she tries to answer the bigger questions about the closures: What’s lost for the vegan community as restaurants disappear, and what does it tell us about the future of the plant-based movement? Also in this issue: falling in love with friends. 20th-century affordable housing is staging a comeback. A free, lightly feral hobby to escape your phone. And why are doctors paid less to treat women?
By Rachel Cohen Booth
By Shayla Love
By Marina Bolotnikova
Coming September 29
By Rachel Wilkerson Miller
Coming September 30
By Anusha Subramanian
Coming October 1
2026-09-28 19:30:00
To no small extent, Americans have grown accustomed to being watched.
For more than a decade, CCTV cameras have recorded a hefty portion of many people’s public movements, while ubiquitous smartphones have made us all perpetually vulnerable to unsolicited documentation (if not, social media notoriety).
Until recently, however, technical limitations constrained the reach of government surveillance (at least, in the physical realm). Police may have been swimming in CCTV footage. But using such videos to track any given person’s movements was an extremely time-intensive endeavor. To do so, an officer would need to sift through hours of footage captured on many different cameras.
Yet AI is now making it possible for the government to trace ordinary citizens’ movements with unprecedented ease and precision. Or at least, this is what the security firm Flock Safety has effectively promised — and the company’s critics have loudly warned.
Flock provides police departments with networks of surveillance cameras — primarily, automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that photograph each vehicle that passes them.
The firm’s main selling point is also its chief political liability: Its ALPRs log not only license plate numbers, but also generate textual descriptions of all vehicles they detect and store this information in a nationally integrated, searchable database. This makes it technically feasible for police to monitor the travels of most any driver with a few keystrokes.
Alas, some cops cannot be trusted with that power. In August, the Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged or accused of using license-plate readers for illegitimate purposes, often to stalk their exes or romantic interests. Even more alarmingly, some police departments appear to have used ALPR data to surveil their own critics and protesters.
These revelations fortified an already growing movement against license plate readers. In August alone, more than 90 cities and counties canceled contracts with Flock. And this backlash has been remarkably bipartisan. Deep blue cities like Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have backed out of partnerships with Flock, while Republicans in Florida have barred local police from installing ALPRs on state highways, and the Texas GOP has paused funding for Flock cameras.
The anti-ALPR movement is responding to real problems with how that technology has been deployed. And yet, according to Flock and many police departments, these cameras are also helping to nab car thieves and locate missing persons.
All this raises the questions: Do ALPRs really have significant public safety benefits? And if so, is there a way to have our license plate surveillance and civil liberties too?
To find out, I reviewed the latest academic research, dug through the worst horror stories in the news, and reached out to criminologists about the risks and rewards of ALPRs. Although the available evidence is limited, the technology appears to have modest — but genuine — crime-fighting benefits. And while the ALPR databases have been badly misused, this is in part because the tech has gone largely unregulated. With stringent safeguards, there may be a way to make it much harder for creeps and authoritarians to monitor law-abiding citizens’ comings and goings without forfeiting a useful law-enforcement tool.
On a late summer day in Chamblee, Georgia, Leslie Barrera was pushing her 1-year-old son Mateo in a stroller when a car pulled up next to her. A man sprung out of the vehicle, pointed a gun at Barrera, and tried to grab the baby from his carriage. But he’d chosen his victim poorly: Barrera charged him, wrested away his gun, and tried to shoot the kidnapper, only for the firearm to jam. A woman (oddly, disguised as a man) then emerged from the car and snatched the child. The baby-nabbers proceeded to pile back into their vehicle and speed away.
With the aid of surveillance cameras, police quickly identified the car as a maroon Acura SUV. Unfortunately, the abductors had swapped out its valid license plate with a paper dealer tag. Decades earlier, that might have delayed, if not thwarted, the recovery effort. But this was 2020 — and Chamblee police had access to a Flock ALPR system. By searching through its database of vehicle photos, the cops discovered a shot of the same Acura with its registered metal license plate from days earlier. The plate led them to the suspect’s name and address — and thus, within just five hours of his abduction — to Mateo.
Flock has a lot of stories like this. The company boasts that their cameras “supported more than 1 million criminal investigations” and helped locate “more than 10,000 missing persons” last year.
“Every single day, law enforcement across this country is using FLOCK technology to solve crime and find missing people faster,” Paris Lewbel, a spokesperson for Flock, told me.
The limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped.
But Flock’s colorful anecdotes and raw tallies tell us only so much. A Flock camera can be used in an investigation without making a decisive difference in its outcome. Without ALPR photos, Chamblee police may still have been able to tie the maroon Acura to Mateo’s kidnappers.
To gauge Flock’s actual impact on public safety, we need (at a minimum) some quasi-experiments: When jurisdictions deploy advanced ALPR systems, do they see lower crime or higher clearance rates — both compared to their own past record and to simultaneous trends in Flock-less places?
There has been remarkably little research into these questions. But a recent study from the University of South Carolina’s Ian Adams and Scott Mourtgos sheds some light into them.
Drawing on Flock’s installation records, the criminologists identified the month that 216 law enforcement agencies activated their first camera. They found that during the first year after Flock deployment, these areas saw an 11 percent decline in motor vehicle theft, relative to similar places that remained un-Flocked. Jurisdictions that put up the ALPRs also saw the success rate of their car theft investigations rise by 16 percent.
These findings should be taken with a few grains of salt. For one thing, police departments will be more likely to invest in an ALPR system if they’ve got a serious stolen vehicle problem. And if car thefts in an area spike, they are liable to regress back toward historically typical levels, no matter what the local police department does.
What’s more, agencies will often install ALPRs as part of broader anti-vehicle theft efforts, which may include deploying more officers to high-crime areas, among other things. Adams and Mourtgos’s data suggests that such simultaneous actions may be responsible for a portion of their results: Although Flock adopters solved stolen car cases at a higher rate after putting up the cameras, this rise tended to begin before the ALPRs were installed.
Nevertheless, the working paper indicates that Flock cameras do make some difference. “We’re not talking huge numbers here,” Mourtgos told me, “but it’s not nothing either.”
And there is reason to think that ALPRs have greater potential to deter and solve crimes than existing results suggest, as police departments may be deploying them in suboptimal ways.
Consider a 2025 study of Atlantic City’s ALPR rollout. On paper, the municipality was an ideal candidate for the technology: As a barrier island, Atlantic City has only eight access points, so an ALPR network could easily capture every car entering and exiting the city.
As one would hope, the research found that car theft declined after the cameras were erected, although the authors could not rule out other explanations. Perhaps more significantly, however, they discovered that the cameras produced vastly more leads than the department was capable of logging or investigating. Between November 2022 and November 2024, the city’s ALPRs issued 12,384 stolen vehicle alerts, virtually all of which went unnoticed or ignored by department personnel; over the studied period, the ALPR system prompted only 72 vehicle stops, of which just 52 concerned stolen cars.
“In an ideal world, someone would be monitoring the alerts in real time and dispatching an officer, who would successfully make a traffic stop,” the paper’s co-author, Rowan University criminologist John Shjarback, told me. “But yeah, that kind of rarely happened.”
Shjarback concludes that the department lacked enough patrol officers to respond to a significant portion of alerts, while its civilian surveillance center monitors appeared to simply miss a large proportion of serious hits. “They have a lot to do in that real-time crime center,” Shjarback said. “There’s a relatively high amount of crime and gun violence and whatnot in Atlantic City. One or two retired officers on duty just weren’t enough to do the live monitoring.”
Similar operational flaws and resource constraints may have limited the efficacy of Flock systems in at least some of the areas analyzed by Adams and Mourtgos. Indeed, Mourtgos noted that many departments in his study lacked enough ALPRs to cover most significant thoroughfares. “Even in jurisdictions that are at the higher end on cameras, you’re still covering an extremely small minority of these roadway structures,” Mourtgos said. “So, that’s probably another reason why we see only modest effects.”
Taken together, the limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped; its ALPR networks do not appear to be the “single greatest change” in policing tech “since DNA,” as the company touts on its website. But, as common sense might suggest, automatically logging all license plates on major highways and intersections seems to make it at least a bit harder to get away with stealing cars (and perhaps, babies).
Of course, the fact that ALPRs offer some benefits to public safety does not mean that they’re necessarily worthwhile. Sewing a GPS chip into every American’s forearm would surely make crimes easier to solve and less tempting to commit. But most would regard such trackers as dystopian infringements on privacy and invitations to authoritarian control.
And Flock’s ALPRS are much the same, in the view of their staunchest critics.
The “DeFlock” movement’s fundamental argument is that the cameras give police departments more information than they can be trusted with. One danger is that wayward cops can exploit the data to stalk their exes. The more profound threat, however, is that police agencies will use ALPR systems to deter or punish lawful dissent.
And that hazard is not entirely hypothetical. After a writer named Canyen Ashworth published an op-ed criticizing local police in Lenexa, Kansas, that town’s police began tracking his movements with its ALPRs (apparently, because Ashworth’s column led the police chief to conclude, incorrectly, that he must have been the dastardly perp behind a recent spree of…unpermitted poster-hanging incidents).
More broadly, a 2025 investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies had run hundreds of searches related to protests or activist groups through Flock’s ALPR system. It’s not clear how many of these queries were motivated by an illiberal desire to monitor dissenters. In theory, a police officer could search for, say, “red sedan at No Kings protest” because a car of that description tried to run over protesters or committed some other criminal offense in the demonstration’s vicinity. And some of the searches tallied by EFF appear to fall into that category. But many others had no discernible purpose beyond the surveillance of activists.
All this is unquestionably alarming. And if widespread misuse of ALPR networks were inevitable, then their costs to civil liberties would likely outweigh their modest (and as yet, not wholly certain) benefits for public safety.
But this probably isn’t the case. Rather, governments can likely limit ALPR’s downsides — while preserving their utility to law enforcement — by more stringently regulating the technology.
“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation. Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation.”
Barry Friedman, founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project
Until recently, legislatures had placed scant guardrails on ALPRs. As the Congressional Research Service noted in 2024, there is “no specific federal legislative framework” governing law enforcement’s use of such cameras. And most states have no comprehensive ALPR regulations. Thus, if we’re failing to prevent police departments from misusing these cameras, it may be because most state and local governments haven’t actually tried.
“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation,” Barry Friedman, the founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project, told me. “Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation. The police decided to do this on their own. Them and their vendors made the decision and didn’t disclose what was happening.”
Fortunately, there is a long list of ways for policymakers to constrain abuse of ALPR data. To name just a few, governments could:
Virginia’s recently enacted ALPR law includes many of these provisions, while several other states have embraced a subset of these policies.
To be sure, for some, even heavily regulated ALPR systems will entail intolerable costs to privacy and unacceptable risks of authoritarian misuse. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supports efforts to regulate license plate readers, but only as a second-best alternative to banning the technology outright.
“No guardrails can completely address the chilling effect of mass surveillance,” Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said. “When people know that they are being surveilled all the time, they may not intellectually dig into the, ‘Well, what exactly is happening with this data? What’s it being collected for? How long is it being stored?’ The average person isn’t going to go through all those steps.”
Rather, Marlow argues, many will simply see cameras and fear that they’re being watched — and fearful of those doing the watching.
“Someone who is an alcoholic and wants to go to an AA meeting — but doesn’t want the public or any of their insurance companies or the government knowing they’re an alcoholic — and knows there’s a camera outside of the church that hosts the meeting may just say, ‘You know what? It’s really important for me to keep this struggle private. And so I can’t go to that AA meeting,’” he said.
These are legitimate concerns, although there is little hard evidence that license-plate readers have a chilling effect on protests or personal behavior. And given how much sensitive information people publicly share on social media — or willingly generate, through their internet activity — there’s some reason to doubt that many will refrain from lawful activity, merely because they spotted an ALPR by the side of the road. In fact, license plate readers have actually been in wide use for more than a decade and, until recently, few seemed to register their existence, much less, reorganize their lives around avoiding the cameras’ gaze.
Still, reasonable people can disagree about how to weigh ALPRs’ trade-offs. My point here is merely that governments may be able to secure modest but meaningful public safety benefits from the cameras — while greatly reducing their misuse — by giving regulation a chance. Using the ALPRs of 2026 probably doesn’t require accepting the authoritarian nightmares of 1984.
2026-09-27 19:30:00
Recently, while taking the metro to work, I encountered something that shocked me. The train was pulling up, just as the man in front of me tapped to pay to go through the gate, and a woman pushed past me to cut me in line. I still made the train (after I briefly considered acting in a way that would have made us both late for work), but as I passed each stop I got angrier and angrier. Why did she think her commute was more important than someone else’s? We learn to wait our turn when we’re children — why was that lesson lost all these years later?
I’m not the only one irritated by this kind of thing. Almost half of Americans say that they’ve noticed people are ruder in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Whether it’s poor behavior at the airport or blasting music from your phone with no headphones in public, it’s like people don’t know how to act anymore.
Kirsty Sedgman is a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of the book On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better. She argues that while people might not mind them as much anymore, manners are important.
“They encourage us to think about others and to behave in ways that are not antisocial and potentially even dangerous,” she told Vox. “How can we have these conversations so that we figure out what we all want social life and public space to be like in a way that benefits everybody and doesn’t accidentally exclude [anyone]?
While some etiquette rules are pretty self explanatory (let’s not cut in line!), others are more difficult to navigate. “I always try to make a point and I’m not perfect, believe me,” Sedgman said. “I’m not saying that I know how to behave in every single circumstance and I’m always right. I’m no Emily Post.”
Post was the socialite who literally wrote the book on the subject: Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home was first published in the 1920s. More than a century later, her family is still in the business of teaching us how to mind our manners.
Lizzie Post is Emily Post’s great-great granddaughter and co-president of the Emily Post Institute. That’s a title and pedigree that could come with a lot of pressure. But Post says it’s all about your audience. “A lot of times, as long as I don’t get the sense that they would prefer a very formalized version of me, I try to reassure people: laugh, joke, swear, it’s okay,” Post said.
Audience isn’t the only thing that’s changed — the times have too. How has etiquette shifted over the years? And how do we navigate newer things — like our phones? We find out that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Post, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
For a long time etiquette has just been something that’s agreed upon. You have to have certain manners to socialize in certain circles and within certain classes. But I think that’s changed. Why do you think that’s happened?
My great-great-grandmother wrote from 1922 to 1960. While she talked about the standards of the day, she also allowed those standards to change. Think about 1922 to 1960 — there were huge swings in how people behaved. Chaperones were gone from the book by her second edition. Life was changing and evolving and she changed and evolved with it.
Etiquette is a French word — it sounds fancy. I think that it can very easily have these connotations of being something that is about a secret society, or it’s only about formality, or it’s only for people who are very wealthy. It can also start to feel a lot like judgment.
One of the reasons etiquette can feel so out of sorts, particularly right now, is because times are changing and they’re just changing really quickly.
I think phone etiquette is really, really emblematic of that. One thing that is so common is people playing music or having their phone on speaker, no headphones. Do we just not know how to act when it comes to our phones?
There are definitely rules of courtesy and blaring anything out of your phone, whether it’s a phone call, it’s a FaceTime call, it’s your TikTok feed, or that movie that you’re watching, is all inappropriate when other people are a captive audience and haven’t asked to be.
It’s this mindful moment where people forget where they are. They’re so used to being in their own world with their phone six inches from their face that they forget that anyone can even hear what it is that they’re doing on their phone at that particular moment.
It’s really hard to correct this behavior because generally, we don’t correct other people’s behaviors.
I admit, especially in public spaces, I am Team Mind My Business. But at what point do you step in?
It’s a really tough judgment call, and it’s going to be different for every situation.
I think that when I am in a space that I’m only going to occupy for a short time, I am telling myself, “Mind my own business, don’t worry about it.” When it’s that train ride that we’re starting, or that four-hour flight that you’re on, I think we start to have to say something and to ask, “Hey, could you put some headphones on while you’re enjoying that or watching that or on your call?”
I say, “Could you,” because they might not have headphones with them, but even if they don’t, it’s a reminder. It’s like that check of awareness that, “Oh, this thing I’m doing is impacting people around me.”
Here’s the rub: You can’t control other people’s behavior. You cannot control if this person is going to get defensive. If you’re going to ask the question, be prepared for rudeness in return. And I hate saying that, but it is the reality. We can’t control other people’s behavior.
So there’s clearly a wrong way to use speakerphone and FaceTime. What’s the right way to use them?
We do a lot of talking on our speakerphones, even in our own homes. You might be moving from one room to another, passing through the living room where people are watching TV or you’re in the kitchen and all of a sudden a roommate has come into the room while you’re on a call that’s on speakerphone. You really want to let the person on the other end of the phone know that there’s other people present now.
My cousin is so good about this. He always tells his daughter when she gets into the car, “Hey, Aunt Lizzie is on the phone. Say hi to her.” Then I know to watch my language. She knows to say hi to her auntie. And that’s just so much nicer than all of a sudden having a voice pop up and realizing, “Oh my gosh, I was just telling a really personal story and I didn’t realize there was a bigger audience for it.”
What about having your phone on the table you’re at dinner? People feel very passionately about that one.
I am so bad about this one. I often have mine face down on the table. The funny thing is, I’m not looking for someone to call with an interruption, but it’s not good etiquette.
It is really best to have that phone put away, to make sure that it’s on silent and it’s not going to interrupt your time together. To have it there, especially face up where any message that comes in is now going to catch the attention of everyone at the table, that’s an unnecessary distraction.
Is there an obligation when you need to text someone back? Does it have to be within a certain time? You go about your day and the next thing you know, you look at your phone and you have 80 unread texts and it’s like, “Oh no, what do I do? My friends will all be mad at me.”
I wish there was, but it depends on the text itself.
The ones I don’t think you should wait on is when friends or potential romantic partners offer a time to get together. Don’t let that sit. If there’s a reason why you’re letting it sit, talk to someone about that. Say, “Oh, I’ve got to check with my partner about that. I know we had talked about doing something else Saturday at that time.”
Give them some kind of an understanding, because it’s a really beautiful thing to be invited to go spend time with someone. I think we want to treasure that a little more than we do in today’s age.
2026-09-27 19:00:00
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk Collaboration.
At a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, where indoor temperatures hover around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius), atmospheric researcher Anthony Bernal Ayala slices hailstones with a band saw, revealing layers of icy growth like the rings of a tree. These frozen rings — clear or cloudy, thick or thin — indicate the conditions in which the hail formed: A clear layer signals the water froze slowly, while a cloudy layer means it happened quickly, trapping air bubbles. Bernal Ayala then analyzes the crystalline structures, particles, and isotopes preserved in these layers.
“All that information can tell you a wonderful story of how the hailstone was growing, but nobody — not until now — was able to tap into that history,” said Bernal Ayala, who works for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of the JANUS Research Group.
Bernal Ayala’s research, conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of a historic effort to study one of the costliest weather hazards. Researchers hope their findings will help protect lives and property from the stones that careen to Earth, battering roofs, pummeling crops, and pockmarking cars.
From 2023 to 2025, annual severe thunderstorm losses exceeded $50 billion nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety — more than double the losses seen just a decade earlier. Hail accounted for 60 percent to 80 percent of the damage.
In Colorado, one of the country’s most hail-prone states, hail — not wildfire — is the main factor driving up insurance premiums. And researchers expect larger, more damaging hailstones to become more common with climate change.
“It’s going to just keep getting costlier and costlier,” Bernal Ayala said.
Even basic questions about hail have been notoriously hard to study. But a long-awaited resurgence in research, including the first major US field campaign to study hail in more than 40 years, could help change that.
ICECHIP — the “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains” — aims to improve forecasts, make warnings more precise and help communities better prepare. It received $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in 2024, just before deep cuts hit the foundation in 2025.
For six weeks in spring 2025, about 100 scientists and university students chased hailstorms across the Central Plains and Front Range, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, using radar trucks to track storms and drones to take aerial footage. Researchers photographed hail with high-speed cameras, measured its impact with a tool called a disdrometer, recorded hail’s distribution and size based on its imprints on foam pads, captured it in specialized funnels, and crushed it to test its strength.
Scientists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also used balloons to release golf ball-sized sensors into storms. Once aloft, each hail-like probe collected data on how fast it was traveling and whether ice was growing on it; a microphone even recorded water droplets and hailstones hitting it.
“This has really been the first time where we’ve been able to do a real comprehensive look at hail on the ground, hail aloft, the storm itself, the environment around the storm — just everything all at once,” said Becky Adams-Selin, ICECHIP’s lead investigator and a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, JANUS Research Group.
ICECHIP’s samples were packed into 26 cooler-sized boxes and brought to NCAR. This internationally renowned hub for weather and climate research has been used to study hail for decades. In one of its last major campaigns, in the 1970s, the US investigated Soviet claims that it could suppress hail.
Researchers say there’s no other US lab like it; the backup plan to store ICECHIP’s samples involved using a walk-in freezer from a fast-food restaurant.
Now NCAR’s own future is uncertain: In late 2025, the Trump administration said it would dissolve the center and transfer its work out of state. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, sued the administration in March, alleging that it’s targeting NCAR to punish Colorado for retaining its mail-in voting system and because Gov. Jared Polis initially refused to release former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a 2020 election denier imprisoned for breaching election security and undermining election integrity.
In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from dismantling NCAR. The government has until Sept. 30 to respond to the lawsuit.
“I can’t even quantify the impact that it would have to our community if we lost NCAR,” Victor Gensini, professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told HCN. “They are the beating heart.”
Previous research has predicted climate change’s effects on hail, noting that warmer temperatures could melt smaller hailstones before they land but also fuel stronger updrafts, keeping hailstones airborne longer and allowing them to grow bigger, enabling the most damaging hail to become more common.
A record-setting stone recovered in Yuma County, Colorado, in 2023 measured more than 5 inches across. That year, the state logged 176 reports of hail 2 inches or greater, surpassing the previous record of 91 reports in 2018, according to the Colorado Climate Center.
Scientists say it’s difficult to know how much of the rise in damage is due to the increase in large hail versus the increased development in hail hotspots. The connection between a rapidly growing human footprint and higher insured losses has been dubbed the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.”
Gensini, a principal ICECHIP investigator, cites the development boom east of the Front Range, along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor, which has grown explosively in recent decades. The population of the Fort Collins metro area alone has doubled since 1990 to around 375,000 residents, according to the US Census Bureau.
This is happening across the Western US, as previously rural or open areas become densely populated, increasingly expensive targets for hail.
“Colorado is the poster child for what I expect the next 25 years to look like for hail,” Gensini said.
In 2019, Fort Collins became one of the first cities to adopt hail-specific roofing requirements for new builds and remodels. Marcus Coldiron, the city’s chief building official, said it was partly in response to all the shingles and roofing materials taken to the landfill after a catastrophic hailstorm in 2018.
It’s still unclear how well the requirements are working: Coldiron said fewer permits were being issued for roof replacements and fewer shingles were going to the dump. However, Fort Collins also hasn’t experienced a hailstorm as devastating as the one that hit in 2018.
A growing number of Front Range communities now require impact-resistant shingles in their building codes, and Colorado legislators recently passed a law offering grants to residents who install more resilient roofing.
ICECHIP’s researchers are also investigating how they can improve building materials as billion-dollar losses from single storms become more common.
“The dollars are simply piling up so fast,” said Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, one of ICECHIP’s key partners. “We’re still trying to understand how do we get the best materials onto roofs, onto people’s homes, onto businesses to actually start shaving off these losses.”
2026-09-26 20:00:00
William Lawrence is a Democrat running to represent Michigan’s Lansing-area Seventh Congressional District with a campaign that largely focuses on data centers and affordability. It’s not an unusual story in 2026 — but not long ago, Lawrence was cutting his teeth in progressive politics as a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, primarily focused on organizing around the climate crisis.
His arc, from progressive activist to politician, is emblematic of a bigger trend, as a wave of millennial progressives in midterm races across the country try to lean into issues that have broader, more immediate appeal with voters.
But that arc also raises big questions about the left’s changing priorities. In a recent interview for Vox’s podcast and video series America, Actually, host Astead Herndon spoke with Lawrence about his past activism and how he has pivoted. “It can sometimes feel like…folks hop from issue to issue, whether it’s climate, even anti-AI right now, without those things being solved,” Herndon told Lawrence.
According to Lawrence, “that’s the reality of the time. It seems like everything is unraveling, and it is because the whole social, economic, political compact is being renegotiated, not just in this country, but on a global stage.” Still, Lawrence said, that earlier organizing shapes how he sees different challenges today.
The two also discussed whether opposition to data centers and AI has wide, regular-voter appeal in places like Michigan and how Lawrence went from hopeless and disengaged to regaining a sense of agency through organizing.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.
You started in Sunrise and were at the forefront of a young progressive movement that was aligned at that time — in 2018, 2019, and I think still — with progressive members of Congress like Rashida Tlaib or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I remember reporting about Sunrise at the time. The goal was to elect a Bernie Sanders, but the other goal was to have the party largely embrace things like a Green New Deal. How would you grade the efforts of the climate movement of that time, looking back?
I think we did some things very well.
We put climate jobs and justice at the top of the agenda for the incoming Biden administration. I think the Bernie-Biden task force is an often overlooked but very important chapter of that whole story, where Bernie and Biden both understood they had to bring their people to the table.
And that’s how Build Back Better got negotiated. We fought hard for Build Back Better, and ultimately came up two votes shy in the United States Senate.
Do you see that as a success or a failure of the climate movement?
I think Build Back Better was a success in coming to the table and negotiating, from the Green New Deal to Build Back Better, and then what we ended up with was the Inflation Reduction Act after it passed the final filter, which was Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. At the time, now, how I felt about it was, this is historic. This is the largest investment in green jobs and infrastructure in United States history. I know how hard it was to get here. I’m tremendously proud of the work that I did and so many others did.
Just in my district alone, we’ve delivered $26 billion in investment for manufacturing and sustainability because of the Inflation Reduction Act. But at the time, we knew that this is maybe 5 percent or 10 percent of what we need in scope. And now we’re experiencing the consequences of that.
Obviously, we still have a very volatile economy. We still lack energy security because we now have closed the Strait of Hormuz. We’re still too dependent on a global oil market, and we could use many more investments in solar and other kinds of renewable energy than we have now.
And ultimately, it wasn’t enough for the Biden-Harris administration to be able to win reelection, because people didn’t feel it enough in their pocketbooks.
Why do you think Democrats are talking less about climate?
I think it’s the intensity of the crises that we face. It feels like we’re falling through midair, after the end of all of the constitutional protections, the rule of law, and the economic security that people had previously enjoyed.
There are a lot of very acute and urgent crises, and I think that that has bumped climate, which is a super massive but also somewhat slow-moving crisis, a little bit lower on the priority list just in terms of what comes up for people on the Hill.
You went back to Michigan to focus on housing and advocacy. Did that make you think a little differently about the national work you were doing?
I think it’s fair to say that when I was younger, I got very focused on this climate issue, and I was very focused on it because it is this existential crisis we all face.
But it was after the pandemic that I wanted to bring my work closer to home. I wanted to do the work of putting down roots in the place that had raised me and make my life there. And in seeking to organize there, it was clear that we needed an in to organize that was more immediate.
“I believe in the agency of regular people taking charge of our own lives and working together to build a better future.”
More immediate than the Green New Deal.
Than the Green New Deal or than the looming climate crisis. People know that that’s an issue, but they’re like, “I’ve gotta pay rent at the end of the month.” And as an organizer, I believe that you have to listen to people, you have to hear what’s going on for them, and then work on issues that have the potential to bring people together.
Housing is one of those issues. Whether you’re in the city of Lansing, whether you’re in small towns, urban, rural, suburban, young or old, everybody can agree that the rent is too damn high and it’s too hard to buy a home anymore.
Were you surprised Trump won the state in 2024?
No.
Why not?
Because I saw it all unfold. We hoped to deliver more through the Biden-Harris administration than we ultimately did through Build Back Better. We didn’t deliver as much to relieve the economic anxiety that people were feeling. And then I do believe that the war and the genocide in Gaza and our blank check to allow that to happen with our money and our tax dollars destroyed the Democratic coalition that had been assembled from 2017 through 2020 for the purpose of beating Trump.
I just saw that unfolding over the course of the whole year, just like a slow-motion train wreck.
I want to ask locally, what do you think is most important in this race: housing, data centers, or pushing back against Donald Trump?
If I had to choose, I’d say data centers because that’s where people in the district are finding some common ground across the spectrum — in fighting back against the concentrated power in Silicon Valley, which has been fully enabled by [incumbent Rep.] Tom Barrett and Donald Trump.
So you’re saying that’s the issue that allows you to create cross-ideological coalitions?
Yeah.
Our last question is, just thinking through the scope of your career and the kind of progressive work: It can sometimes feel like folks hop from issue to issue, whether it’s climate, even anti-AI right now, without those things being solved, right?
Like, we still have a climate crisis. The rent is still too high. All of these things are still happening. How am I to trust that AI is the crisis of our time when I’ve heard so many crises of our time?
Some have called it a polycrisis — overlapping crises.
That’s the reality of the time. It seems like everything is unraveling, and it is because the whole social, economic, political compact is being renegotiated, not just in this country, but on a global stage. I don’t think it serves us to lie about that. I mean, here’s the reality, folks.
Everything is up in the air. Does it feel like you’re falling through midair? It’s because we are. All the old protections, all the old agreements have been chopped up. So we have got to come together. This is what I believe in more than anything, if there is a through line…I believe in the agency of regular people taking charge of our own lives and working together to build a better future.
That’s what I learned as an organizer, and that’s what gave me hope actually, at a time when I was doomer-ing in my younger years. And I told you, I wanted to just drop out of society and all that. It was seeing that regular people have come together before, and they’ve won a better future for their kids and grandkids, that gave me a path to follow in.
It does feel like a powerless time, I have to tell you. And a lot of this AI revolution, to your point about control or about agency. We’ve talked to so many people who just think that these things are happening to them, rather than feeling that they are participating in the changes afoot.
But you’re telling a kinda hopeful story.
I’m a hopeful guy. I was angry too, even when I got into this race. I was angry especially about the wars. But then in campaigning, I’ve met so many people across the district, old friends, new friends, and they give me a lot of hope because you just see the way that people are already performing miracles on a daily basis.