1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:
With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
And that’s just the beginning.
Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Southern California — will decide to move north in search of better economies + a more temperate environment.
Those who stay behind will be disproportionately poor and elderly.
In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people.
(The opioid crisis, by comparison, causes 15 additional deaths per 100,000.)
But it‘s not just the south.
Across the country, it’s going to get hot.
For example...
In a few decades, Buffalo, New York, may feel like Tempe, Arizona, does today.
Tempe will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century.
Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly **ubiquitous** west of Missouri.
At the same time, 100 million Americans — largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin — will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke.
Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama, all the way through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.
“One day, it’s possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine country and America’s new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle...”
Some of the nation’s largest metro areas — Miami, New York, Boston and more — will be profoundly altered.
Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia.
For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in our own backyards.
The decisions we make about where to live are distorted by politics that play down climate risks AND by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature.
Until now, market mechanisms have essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development.
People have gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.
But...
As the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.
On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout.
On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar.
This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵
2/ It starts with a viral Elon Musk post.
“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the graphic read, falsely claiming that USIP was funding the terrorist group through Halimi, whose work with the independent nonprofit involved providing expert advice to help U.S. diplomats understand Afghanistan.
3/ Halimi initially wonders if Musk’s accusation is an April Fool’s joke. After all, the decades of work he had done consulting for U.S. diplomats wasn’t in service of the Taliban; it was the opposite.
THREAD: The Trump administration said their research did not "enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness."
Thousands of scientists disagreed.
We heard from 150+ researchers impacted by the NIH grant terminations on what is being lost in the cuts. 👇
2/ Their experiences reveal consequences that experts say run counter to scientific logic and common sense.
They spoke of the enormous waste generated by an effort intended to save money: Years of research that may never be published. Blood samples that may never be analyzed.
3/ Grant Terminated: An examination of the consequences of abortion restrictions.
Diana Greene Foster set out to study the outcomes of pregnant patients who showed up in emergency depts, examining if state restrictions were causing delays in care.
In April, President Trump and Salvadoran President Bukele shook hands in the Oval Office to celebrate a deal to ship gang members to the notorious CECOT prison.
But a new ProPublica investigation found there’s more to the story. 🧵👇
2/ Bukele has a reputation as a crime fighter. He’s jailed some 80,000 gang members. Crime rates have plunged.
It turns out, though, that he’s protected another set of gangsters: the leaders of the violent MS-13 street gang, U.S. and Salvadoran officials told us.
3/ In 2019, when Bukele was elected, crime was a big problem. So U.S. prosecutors say Bukele’s aides made a deal with the devil. They allegedly worked with El Diablito, alias for the head of MS-13, to trade money and power for votes and less violence. documentcloud.org/documents/2595…
This is Mertarvik, Alaska, population 300. It’s a new town.
Its residents, the vast majority of whom are Yup’ik, began moving in around 2019.
The move was by necessity: The nearby village where many residents previously lived, Newtok, is sinking, its riverbanks eroding. THREAD:
2/ These residents are climate refugees, a term you may have heard before.
While many stories tend to focus on the conditions that displaced them, @EmilySchwing wanted to know: What is the quality of life for people after they’re forced to move? propublica.org/article/newtok…
3/ To find out, Schwing visited Newtok and Mertarvik more than half a dozen times. It’s no easy feat; neither Bethel, AK (where her newsroom KYUK is based) nor Mertarvik have roads going in or out.
If you search for directions between the two, Google Maps returns a blank stare.
1/ For ProPublica’s “Life of the Mother” series, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for public service, we reported on five pregnant women who died after not receiving timely medical care in states with strict abortion bans.
These are their stories 🧵
2/ Amber Thurman went to the hospital with telltale signs of sepsis, yet it took 20 hours for doctors to intervene with a D&C procedure after abortion became a felony in Georgia. propublica.org/article/georgi…
3/ Doctors warned Candi Miller that another pregnancy could kill her. Under Georgia’s abortion ban, she died trying to navigate the process alone.
“She was trying to terminate the pregnancy, not terminate herself,” Miller’s sister said. propublica.org/article/candi-…