Sean Combs’s Arrest Has the Music World Asking: Is Our #MeToo Here?

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The mayor of the first US city to have an all-Muslim city council has endorsed former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, announced his endorsement in a Facebook post Sunday, just days after meeting the Republican candidate in person. “I believe he is the right choice for...

“I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors,” Robinson said in the release.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesDonald Trump has surged ahead of Kamala Harris in three key battleground states, according to a new poll.Trump is ahead by three points in North Carolina, four points in Georgia, and five points in Arizona, says the latest New York Times/Sienna College poll.They are three of seven swing states that are central to a victory in November and represent a possible turnaround for Trump after weeks of poor polling.Read more at The Daily Beast.

No one on USC’s staff comes out of the loss to Michigan looking worse than the Trojans offensive line coach.

Jessica Caloza gets The Times' recommendation for this Assembly district. She has extensive experience in local, state and federal government and would be an important pro-housing voice in Sacramento.

The social media trend is taking refrigerator organization to a whole new level. Here are the pros and cons.

Two quarterback player props to bet ahaed of "Monday Night Football."

Shenker, who hung Delvey's artwork in a listing featured on Owning Manhattan, also dished on her friendship with Chloe Tucker Caine and which celebrity she's working with.

Kiss those night sweats goodbye.

Businessman Guillermo Sohnlein founded Titan owner OceanGate with Stockton Rush, who was among the five people who died when the submersible imploded in June 2023.

Nadya Suleman announced that one of her sons welcomed a baby girl, making her a first-time grandma.

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott had a message after the team's three-point loss to the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday evening.

New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi allegedly "bombarded" Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for months with "increasingly pornographic" messages that the former presidential hopeful found difficult to resist, his friend has claimed.

"This includes scrutiny of their bank accounts both in Iran and abroad, as well as their travel history and that of their families."

North Carolina Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson lost four senior campaign staffers following a CNN report alleging porn website comments.

Nevada is a crucial state in the presidential elections due to close competition for 270 electoral votes. And, the United Nations is convening to discuss the world's most significant crises.

It was only fitting that the players whom this regime believed in during a franchise-identity-altering offseason saved their bacon.

J.J. Watt was trying to have a heartfelt moment by gifting his younger brother, T.J. Watt, a gift for expecting his first child, but it turned into a hilarious back-and-forth on TV.

The uptick in violence comes after the surprise arrest on U.S. soil of Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada in July.

The White House is warning Israel about escalation as the Jewish state continues to decimate Hezbollah terrorists, some with the blood of hundreds of Americans on their hands.

Injuries to Justin Herbert, Joey Bosa and Rashawn Slater played a big role in the Chargers' loss to the Steelers, so where does Jim Harbaugh go from here?

The Rams score twice late to defeat the 49ers, while Justin Herbert is injured as the Chargers fall to the Steelers.

Former President Donald Trump holds leads in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, three key states in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Israel's military says it has struck more than 300 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Monday as residents reportedly are being warned to leave certain areas.

"The grief is immense. It's never-ending. There's not an hour that goes by where my mind doesn't go to Bennett."

Israel’s intensifying strikes show how determined it is to stop Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks — and how far it is from achieving that goal.

Saul Loeb/GettyDonald Trump Jr. reposted a claim Sunday that Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her interview with Oprah Winfrey.The accusation was quickly debunked by supporters of the Democratic presidential nominee, who insisted that Winfrey was using the teleprompter and not Harris.The lines on the prompter were reportedly being fed to the former daytime TV queen as she wound up the virtual interview Thursday.Read more at The Daily Beast.

An Elon Musk-basked super PAC launched a website over the weekend to deploy canvassers in support of Republican presidential nominee former President Trump and other GOP candidates.

There should be better to come for the Jets. And there needs to be, because after playing Denver, the degree of difficulty in the schedule rises.

NBCFrom good doctors to sexy doctors to funny doctors to Chicago doctors, network TV has no shortage of medical professionals wandering its fictional hospital halls. Now NBC has a new twist on the age-old formula: What if there were a doctor with… face blindness?Okay, to be fair, face blindness is just one of the many quirks that characterize Zachary Quinto’s brilliant neurosurgeon Dr. Oliver Wolf. He also swims in the Hudson River, obsesses over his plants, hates interacting with his co-workers, and will do anything for his patients, including smuggling them across town on his motorcycle when he thinks they need a day out. Still, it’s hard to ignore the hook that sounds like the set-up for a joke even though it’s at least somewhat based on reality.Brilliant Minds, which premieres Sept. 23, is loosely inspired by real-life neurologist Oliver Sacks, who had prosopagnosia (aka. face blindness) and published stories of unique medical cases like his own in popular books like 1985’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. While Sacks was born in interwar London and started his career in the 1960s, Brilliant Minds sets its story in an overcrowded, understaffed present-day Bronx hospital that’s the only place in town still willing to take a chance on Dr. Wolf’s rule-bending approach.Read more at The Daily Beast.

MubiWho would ever want to turn Demi Moore into a monster? That’s precisely what director and writer Coralie Fargeat does in Moore’s latest film, The Substance, which is in theaters now. And as it happens, the transformation is a career-defining role for Moore.In the film, Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who, on her 50th birthday, is fired from her long-running fitness show. In her grief about losing her job and aging, she begins taking a drug, referred to as “The Substance,” that promises to make her into a better and younger version of herself.Taking The Substance is not exactly what it seems. Elisabeth essentially births, in quite grotesque fashion, a younger version of herself, called Sue and played by Margaret Qualley. There are processes that must be followed to keep Sue and Elisabeth separate. When Sue goes haywire and ignores those rules, there are unexpected, monstrous side effects that slowly change Elisabeth’s body in disgusting ways.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Picture yourself near the front of a long line at an ice-cream shop. You’re getting close—but there’s this guy. He’s parked himself at the counter and seems truly baffled by the 30 tubs of flavors. “Do you mind if I sample one more? Maybe the mint chip? Or, no, how about the double-chocolate fudge?” You know this guy. We all know this guy. The toddlers behind you are getting restless. He gives one more flavor a try, sucks on the little spoon, and shakes his head. Has he never had ice cream before? Does he not have a fundamental preference between, say, chocolate and vanilla? Does he not realize that we are all waiting for him to make up his fickle mind? This is the undecided voter: a figure of hair-pulling frustration, the man whose face you want to dunk in the tub of butter pecan. The majority of Americans likely can’t comprehend how anyone would look at Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and see gradients of gray. A fairly common consensus about these people, as one poster on a Reddit thread recently put it, is that they must be either “enormously stupid or willfully ignorant.”But I don’t think they are either. Look again at that guy in the ice-cream shop. He is seeking out more information. He is not lazily falling back on the flavor he always orders. He doesn’t seem ignorant, just genuinely confused about how to make the best, tastiest choice. Interviews with undecided voters reveal people struggling with a dilemma. Take Cameron Lewellen, a voter in Atlanta who spoke with NPR. He seemed very well informed. He’s interested in whose policies would be most advantageous for small businesses. He even watched the recent debate with a homemade scorecard. The decision, he said, “does weigh on me.” Or Sharon and Bob Reed, retired teachers from rural Pennsylvania, two among a handful of undecided voters being tracked by The New York Times. Interviewed for the Daily podcast, they expounded knowledgeably on the war in Ukraine, tariffs, and inflation. But, as Sharon put it, “I’m not hearing anything that’s pushing me either way.”So if they aren’t checked out, what is holding them up? Perhaps undecided voters are just indecisive people. As I read interview after interview, they began to sound more like that friend who’s been dating someone for seven years but just can’t figure out if he’s ready to commit, or that relative who goes down an internet rabbit hole of endless research every time they need to purchase anything—like, even a new kettle—incapable of pressing the “Buy” button.According to Joseph Ferrari, a social psychologist at DePaul University who studies indecision, this is a type. After synthesizing research conducted in a wide range of countries, Ferrari has found that 20 percent of any given population are what he calls “decisional procrastinators.” “Twenty percent may not sound very high,” he told me. “But that’s more than clinical depression, more than alcoholism, more than substance abuse, more than panic attacks.” Ferrari said the indecisive are afraid to make a choice, because they worry about the consequences, about failure—so they stall in all kinds of ways, including by seeking more and more information. This is, he insisted, a learned behavior, particularly prevalent among people who grew up with “cold, demanding, stern” fathers who reprimanded them for their wrong choices. “They produce people who tend to be indecisive,” he said.[Read: The RFK-curious women of Bucks County]Or maybe, as Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice, put it to me, some of these undecided are “maximizers”: those people “who look at 2,000 pairs of jeans online before they buy one.” Schwartz created a scale for figuring out who the maximizers are, and it seems plausible to him that some voters might fall into this category. Choosing among an endless number of jeans is one thing, but “suppose instead you’ve only got two options,” Schwartz asked. “There are dozens of attributes of each option, so it may make it just as complex a calculation … because there are so many dimensions that have to be evaluated. And when you’re looking for the perfect, there are always doubts.”Seen this way, undecided voters deserve pity, not annoyance.Once I stopped seeing their inability to choose as somehow self-indulgent, I also began to find it strange that Americans think so negatively of indecision in electoral politics to begin with. Sure, as Ferrari and Schwartz pointed out, there are pathological manifestations of indecision. But the impulse to reserve judgment, to accumulate more data, to really investigate one’s options—couldn’t that also be considered a good thing?“You can turn this around and say, ‘What would the world be like if there weren’t any undecided voters?’” Timothy A. Pychyl, author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, told me. “There’d almost be no point in having an election. There’d be no one to convince; there’d be no reason to debate. And so, in some ways, these people who’ve already decided are either very, very partisan, or they can’t tolerate ambiguity and so they foreclose on a decision.”Instead of “chronic procrastination,” he thought it was possible that undecided voters were engaged in “sagacious delay”—which is a much nicer way to put it. And when you consider how much tribal sway the parties have on our allegiance, defining our very identities, it becomes even more remarkable that some people are willing to ignore this pressure and choose for themselves.While many voters now decide on a candidate based on one issue—abortion or Israel, for example—this subset seems to be considering a range of topics. CNN recently reported that when asked what their “top issues” were, 30 percent of undecided voters said “Economy/Inflation” but almost as many, 28 percent, said “No Top Issue.” You can read this as proof that these folks are not paying attention. But what if they have no top issue because they care about a lot of different issues, including some that point them in contradictory directions? What if you believe that Trump will be stronger on foreign policy but don’t trust that he will uphold democratic institutions as well as Harris? Or what if you’re unsatisfied with Harris’s plan for bringing down inflation but also don’t like the way Trump talks about immigrants? The more issues you take into account, the more liable you are to be indecisive.[Read: An unexpected window into the Trump campaign]These cogitations may sound absurd to many Americans because this time around, as the candidates themselves keep endlessly reminding us, the choice does feel nearly existential, a decision between two diametrically opposed visions of America. Everything else is commentary. But, not, apparently, for the undecided voter.This commitment to parsing differences in policy and approach could be what we want in a democracy, “closer to the ideal voter,” said Ruth Chang, a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford who studies choice. But this is only true if the questions these undecideds are asking are the right ones. And often, to her, they sound more grounded in self-interest. “Voting shouldn’t be like deciding what you most want for lunch,” she said.Among the interviews with the undecided, I did hear a lot of that kind of thinking. Who would be best for my family? Who will turn the fortunes of my business around? They often sounded like consumers, and less like citizens, focused on what they could see and feel in their own lives—the Reeds, for example, said they were frustrated that Harris only mentioned economic policies that would affect young voters and said nothing about what she would do for retirees like themselves. Chang’s suggestion? Tell undecided voters to pretend they are God and can take the country down one path or another. Blocking out all the ways they are personally affected, what would be a better direction? This exercise might, admittedly, be hard for them. “They can’t think that way, because they can’t square all the complex factors that they’re intelligently, perfectly aware of,” Chang said. “So they fall back to, ‘Well, what would help my family?’ Because that’s something they feel like they have control and dominion and expertise in.”People seriously confronting this dilemma are becoming more and more rare, though. According to some CNN number crunching, 10 percent of voters were undecided at this stage in the election cycle in 2016; 8 percent were in 2020; and 4 percent are now. If the trend line continues, the next election will have hardly any undecideds. This is not a good thing. A political landscape marked by absolute decisiveness is, of course, a highly polarized one; it also lacks dynamism, moving us away from reasoned debate and toward emotions, such as fear or joy, that bolster allegiance on one side or the other—essentially all vibes all the time. The undecided might drive us crazy, busy splitting hairs while the house burns, but they capture what elections are for at their most elemental: a chance for citizens to truly consider all their options, and then choose.

Iran’s newish president and foreign minister could hardly be more different in demeanor. President Masoud Pezeshkian speaks informally, often goes off script, and loves to crack jokes. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, a career diplomat who earned his Ph.D. in Britain, chooses his words with painstaking precision. But the two men have been saying the same things about the direction they want to see foreign policy take in Iran.The pitch goes something like this: We would like to make amends with the United States and Europe so that we can get the sanctions lifted from our economy. But we will not sacrifice our relations with Russia and China—the partners that have stood by us. Nor will we give up our support for the Axis of Resistance, the collection of Arab anti-Israel militias that plague the West and many regional Arab countries.In his first press conference as president last Monday, Pezeshkian put it bluntly: “Those guys sanctioned us,” he said, referring to the West. “These guys helped us,” referring to Russia and China. But he also promised a peaceful approach to the West, even suggesting that the United States and Iran could be “brothers.” A few days earlier, Araghchi said in a televised interview: “We approach relations with Europe from a new angle and a new perspective,” but “our priority lies elsewhere.”This is a vision riven with contradictions. Pezeshkian has been clear (as has his boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) that Tehran’s priority is solving its dire economic problems. Doing so requires increasing foreign investment and getting Iran off the blacklist of the Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based anti-money-laundering outfit. And these things will not happen unless Iran negotiates with Western powers over its nuclear program, its support for the Axis, and its arming of Russia in its war in Ukraine. In simpler words, if Iran wants to get to its domestic priorities, the West must become its foreign-policy priority.Pezeshkian’s ascent to the presidency likely sounded alarm bells in Moscow, because the diplomats around him are known to be skeptical of Iran’s ties to Moscow and Beijing. Javad Zarif, the former foreign minister who now serves as vice president for strategic affairs, is openly critical of those who tie Iran too closely to Russia, saying that the relationship limits Tehran’s options. His chief achievement as Iran’s top diplomat was the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States and five other world powers, which President Donald Trump withdrew from three years later. Zarif’s No. 2 in the talks that led to that agreement was Araghchi. Another member of that negotiating team is now Araghchi’s No. 2. A fourth heads the parliamentary nuclear subcommittee.In short, Iran’s West-facing faction is back in the saddle. Of course, none of these people calls the shots; Khamenei does. But the fact that the supreme leader allowed Pezeshkian to run for and win the presidency in the first place suggests that he, too, sees the need to deal with the West.[Jonathan Rauch: The world is realigning ]What that means for Moscow is less certain. The new government has made some loud protestations of friendship with Russia, but these seem meant partly to reassure a jittery Vladimir Putin and partly to play hard to get with the West. Pezeshkian has also sought to mollify the Kremlin by appointing Mehdi Sanayi, a former ambassador to Russia, as a vice chief of staff. Sanayi is fluent in Russian and holds a Ph.D. from the country’s prestigious Academy of Sciences—making him a rarity among Iranian officials, who far more commonly speak English and hold European or American degrees.But within the power structure, critics of Iran’s relationship with Russia seem to have found new courage since the new government took power. Some point to the fact that in recent years, parts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have propounded a Russia-facing policy called “Look East”—and then benefited mightily from military deals with China and Russia. “Russia toys with Iran as a playing card and supporting Russia doesn’t serve national interests and only benefits Iranian Russophiles,” Afshar Soleimani, a former ambassador to Baku, said in a recent interview. “I don’t blame Russia. It’s our fault that we are fooled by it.”Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, a former head of Iran’s parliamentary foreign-policy committee, is perhaps the chief Russia skeptic in Iran. Questioning the notion that Russia and China should be thanked for trading with Iran despite Western-imposed sanctions, he recently said: “They weren’t ‘our friend in the hard times’ as some said. They abused us. If we have a rational foreign policy, we shouldn’t put ourselves in a situation to permanently need countries like China and Russia.” Zarif and Pezeshkian aired similar notions on the campaign trail, but Falahatpisheh went further, suggesting that those Iranians who advocate for ties with Beijing and Moscow have a personal interest in keeping Iran under sanctions so that they can benefit from the shadowy oil trade.Russia is not, in fact, a natural partner for Iran. If anything, it’s been a boogeyman to Iranians for hundreds of years, starting with Moscow’s colonial designs on Persia in the 18th and 19th centuries. For a very long time, Iranians considered Russia the main threat to their country’s sovereignty. And lately, Russia has given Iranians renewed cause for concern by stepping on basic security priorities that are matters of broad national consensus.First, in joint statements with the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council, Russia backed the position of the United Arab Emirates on three disputed islands in the Persian Gulf. Iran considers its sovereignty over these islands nonnegotiable; the UAE also claims them and wants a diplomatic process to adjudicate the matter. But more consequential was Putin’s trip last month to the Republic of Azerbaijan, his first in six years.Baku’s relations with Tehran have been rocky. The gas-rich Turkic state has close ties with Israel and sometimes riles up separatist sentiments among Iranian Azeris, who make up more than 15 percent of the population and include both Khamenei and Pezeshkian. Alarmingly for Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov backed Baku’s demands for a transit corridor to connect mainland Azerbaijan with its autonomous exclave, Nakhchivan. This corridor would run along Iran’s sole border with Armenia, effectively blocking it and cutting off an important access point to Europe.[Arash Azizi: Iran’s supreme leader is worried]Following Lavrov’s remarks, Iran’s foreign ministry and several Iranian officials vehemently protested. A conservative outlet owned by the judiciary attacked the corridor as a “dream that will never be realized.” Iran’s foreign-policy council, an authoritative body appointed by Khamenei, has criticized the project in the past—suggesting in an article on its website that the corridor is the design of “the United States, Britain, and international Zionists.”Could these complaints help give the Pezeshkian administration the space to lessen Iran’s reliance on Russia—and perhaps make a deal with the West? Maybe Iran could even make its ties with Russia a bargaining chip, as the United States and its allies are surely keen to weaken them.Even if Pezeshkian wants to do this, he will have to contend with the influence of the IRGC and the military, says Nicole Grajewski, the author of a forthcoming book on Iran-Russia ties and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Russians know this, she told me: “They’ve observed how each time an Iranian president has come to power with the promise of better relations with the West, it’s either been obstructed by internal factors, such as the hard-liners or the IRGC, or by external events, like during the Trump administration.”Meanwhile, she noted, despite the “real and deep tension, plus distrust” between Iran and Russia, the military and technical relationship between the two countries has grown extremely close. “Iran is now integrated into Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” Grajewski pointed out, with real implications for European security.During his televised interview, Araghchi acknowledged that the Ukraine war has “complicated” Iran’s relations with Europe. But he called for “a new direction … based on mutual respect and dignity.” Iran was willing to listen to Europe’s security concerns if Europe would listen to Iran’s, he added.Pezeshkian was, again, more forthright, promising on Monday that Iran wasn’t after “exporting its revolution” and repeatedly pledging good-faith attempts at peace with the West and with neighboring countries. He even waxed philosophical. “Who knows how we’ve found the opportunity to live in this galaxy, on this little blue ball called Earth,” he said. “We should enjoy this life instead of fighting all the time … We can create an Earth on which everybody lives happily.”[Michael Young: The Axis of Resistance has been gathering strength ]Such is likely to be the tone of Pezeshkian’s rhetoric during his visit to New York this week—both in his address to the United Nations General Assembly and in the many meetings he plans to hold among American civil society. The talk of universal harmony doesn’t sit comfortably with Iran’s track record of repressing its own population, arming anti-Israel terror groups, and aiding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it does signal a shift from just a year ago, when the hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi fulminated at a UN podium. It might be narrow, but if you look hard enough, you’ll see a new opening in Tehran.

Photographs by Donavon Smallwood for The AtlanticOn a warm November afternoon in 2021, I drove out from New Orleans, following the Mississippi River north to the town of Reserve, in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish. As I approached the green mound of the river’s levees, a shadow fell over my windshield. The towering silhouettes of massive chemical plants and refineries dominated the horizon. Nestled among them were clusters of schools, stores, and houses. It was a fitting welcome to the region known to many as “Cancer Alley”—the 85-mile stretch along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.Michael Regan, at the time still new in his job as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, stood in a field beside a small wooden house. Behind him, a Marathon refinery complex belched bright-orange gas flares. The house belonged to a 65-year-old man named Michael Coleman, who had detailed to Regan a list of health problems that he said had come from living in the shadow of the refinery. Regan worked the crowd in attendance, a group of residents and activists, and did the usual politician things: remembering and repeating names, flashing a brilliant smile, performing those two-handed-clasp handshakes that signal extra authenticity.But certain other things that needed no signaling endeared Regan to the crowd. First was the fact that he was there at all. Second was, bluntly, the fact that, like most of the people he was meeting, Regan is Black. The crowd listened intently as the administrator spoke. “I’m able to put faces and names with this term that we call ‘environmental justice,’” Regan said. He promised the crowd that he would use the power of his office to make sure that those who needed resources the most got them.As Regan observed, the people there were reminders of a brutal reality: Black, Indigenous, Latino, and low-income communities are far more likely to experience environmental problems—contamination, dumping, flooding, burning—than people in high-income, majority-white areas. To give one example: Black people suffer 54 percent more pollution from industrial facilities than do other Americans, which contributes to child-asthma rates that are about twice as high as those of white children. Black people are also 75 percent more likely than other Americans to live close to industrial facilities that generate hazardous waste. The movement to combat such inequalities is known as environmental justice.Many of those gathered for Regan’s visit were veterans of that movement, and had been part of local campaigns to curb air and water pollution. In the face of hostility from the oil, gas, and chemical companies that dominate the area, and of disregard from all levels of government, they had commissioned independent studies showing extraordinary rates of exposure to carcinogens among Black residents, along with cancer rates 44 percent higher than the national average. After decades of silence, a visit from the administrator was a breakthrough. Left: A road between the Marathon Petroleum Refinery and the Cargyll Grain Mill in Reserve, Louisiana. Right: Michael Regan stands near the Marathon refinery in Reserve. (Bryan Tarnowski; Gerald Herbert / AP) I joined Regan in the back of a black SUV on the way to his next destination, in nearby St. James Parish. We took the bridge across the Mississippi, overlooking the historic Whitney Plantation, then followed the curve of the levee west. “You know,” he said, “it’s not lost on me that these people look like me and I look like them.” I asked him what the folks in Reserve had told him privately after his public remarks. “They said that this visit felt different than the visits before, but there were no visions of grandeur,” he responded. His predecessors had failed to deliver on promises, and people here remembered that.As we sped along, I envisioned how the area must have looked generations ago, with a sprawl of plantations where the ancestors of many of Cancer Alley’s residents were forced to toil. I thought about how those plantations had been reborn as sharecropping hubs and then, ultimately, after Louisiana struck oil, repackaged into the massive complexes one sees today. I wondered how Regan’s focus might be tested when faced with the weight of all that history, a history that is inseparably linked to the environmental picture today.Regan was and is guarded and disciplined, and has learned the political art of cliché, as I discovered during a series of conversations with him over the past three years. When asked about the challenges of delivering on environmental-justice promises, he often asserted that environmental justice is “in the DNA” of the EPA, a contention that seems more aspirational than realized. When we talked about the relationship between the history of white supremacy in America and the reality of environmental injustice today, Regan consistently defaulted to the need to be “laser focused” on the present. In our conversations, Regan made clear that he didn’t intend to spend much time talking about the past.In the three years since that November visit, Regan has rebuilt an EPA that was gutted by Donald Trump and has presided over an era of unprecedented climate-policy gains. The EPA has enforced a stronger Clean Air Act, advanced new rules to limit pollution from power plants and vehicles, enacted a landmark rule to eliminate “forever chemicals” in drinking water, and doled out billions of dollars to projects that transform local energy grids and reduce greenhouse gasses. Partly as a result of the EPA’s new rules, the U.S. reduced its emissions in 2023 and looks poised to continue that trend.At the same time, the EPA has faced a string of adverse rulings in federal courts that could seriously limit its effectiveness. And its record on environmental justice is more uneven than many of those who attended that meeting in Reserve back in 2021 might have hoped for.Regan regularly touts environmental-justice victories as central to the EPA’s mission. But following attacks from Republicans seeking to disempower the agency, he has made some awkward tactical retreats. He may wish to keep a laser focus on the here and now, but his agenda—and his very presence, perhaps, as a Black man wielding broad authority—has stirred up the ghosts of the past. He has learned the hard way why environmental justice has always been a struggle against long odds.On the day he was confirmed to lead the EPA, in March 2021, Michael Regan stared down an enormous task. Over the previous four years, the agency had been the main casualty of Trump’s assault against the federal bureaucracy in the name of “draining the swamp.” Trump’s first pick to lead the EPA, the climate-denier Scott Pruitt, sought to scale back much of its core work and repeatedly proposed a dramatic reduction of the budget. More than 1,500 employees left the agency in the first 18 months of the Trump administration, reducing the workforce to levels not seen since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. By the time Regan got there, staffing and morale both were depleted.President Joe Biden entrusted Regan with a climate agenda that would require the EPA to be more aggressive, nimble, and creative than it had ever been. But the White House couldn’t immediately secure additional funds to expand the EPA’s ranks of experts. So, in the first year and a half under Regan, the agency’s staff worked long hours and late shifts to try to handle a brief that had expanded dramatically.On the heels of the murder of George Floyd and the purported “racial reckoning” of 2020, the Biden administration also made racial justice one of its key priorities throughout the government. As only the second Black person to lead the EPA, Regan became a natural face for this effort. He had worked in the agency before, during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and was well known in environmental-justice circles for his time leading North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality.The EPA, however, had never enjoyed a great reputation for environmental justice. In the years since its inception, the agency had in many cases sided with industry on decisions to locate plants and hazardous-waste facilities near minority neighborhoods. Across all of its different roles—coordinating cleanups, distributing funds, advancing laws to limit air and water pollution—the agency has been accused of excluding or actively hurting minority communities.Moreover, in its capacity as a civil-rights watchdog, the EPA had been a clear failure. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the EPA is explicitly authorized to take action against the unfavorable treatment of racial minorities by entities that it regulates and funds. A 2015 analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found that the EPA had rejected a number of civil-rights petitions from communities on the grounds that they had missed a 20-day statutory deadline—but the EPA itself appeared to have held up those petitions for an average of 254 days. The same report revealed that the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights had not made a single formal finding of discrimination—ever. Theoretically, any such finding would have given the EPA the power to compel polluters to clean up and to negotiate with affected communities, along with the power to penalize companies that failed to cooperate, but that authority was never defined or tested, because it was never used. Michael Regan talks to residents of the Fifth Ward during a tour in Houston on November 19, 2021. (Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle / Getty) Regan’s first big move upon taking office to address the EPA’s previous failures was a listening tour, which the EPA called its “Journey to Justice.” In addition to Cancer Alley, stops included Black neighborhoods in Jackson, Mississippi; Houston; and New Orleans. Regan also visited Puerto Rico, North Carolina, and Appalachia.I traveled with the administrator on several of these trips, and his personal presence seemed to me as important as any policy that he might put forward. He inspected a cistern in a rural mountain town in Puerto Rico and listened as Jackson residents told him about having to boil their water to make it potable. At every stop that I attended on Regan’s tour, residents told me the visit itself had changed their outlooks. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime” thing, Sharon Lavigne, the president of Rise St. James, an environmental-justice organization, said after Regan’s visit to Cancer Alley. For her, the fact that the EPA went to people who had been overlooked and forgotten represented a major reversal.At Texas Southern University, in Houston, Regan was greeted by Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy, widely known as the “father of environmental justice.” Bullard had pushed for many of the environmental-justice powers that the federal government now holds, and helped create some. Over the previous three decades, Bullard had often criticized the EPA for what he believed was the agency’s abdication of its duty to protect communities of color. Yet, he embraced Regan, and praised him lavishly. To me, it seemed like the passing of the torch from the father of a movement to the man who hoped he’d be the son. Michael Regan at the EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Donavon Smallwood for The Atlantic) Michael Regan was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1976. At the time, Robert Bullard was a young sociologist in the early stages of studying the very communities where Regan’s family fished and farmed. Regan’s mother worked as a nurse, and his father served with the National Guard in Vietnam before working as a USDA agricultural-extension agent. Previous generations had been farmers, and Michael Regan was keenly aware of the drive among Black families to own and work the land.The flip side of this tie to the land has always been a profound vulnerability. Goldsboro is a mostly Black town in a belt of Black towns, all emerging from plantation slavery, in North Carolina’s inner coastal plain. Since emancipation, the area has been known for its tradition of freeholding Black farmers and independent Black communities. It is also known, not coincidentally, for its pollution, floods, and environmental devastation. (Like Regan, I am from a farming family in eastern North Carolina; both of our hometowns were submerged by Hurricane Floyd in 1999.)When Regan was a toddler, with the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s not far in the rearview mirror, this landscape of inequity became the setting for a different kind of movement. In 1978, the government of North Carolina scrambled to find a way to clean up thousands of tons of soil that had been contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals classified by the EPA as probable carcinogens, after truckers had illegally dumped oil containing the chemicals on state roads rather than disposing of it properly. With the approval and assistance of the EPA, which had then been in existence for only eight years, the state chose to dump the contaminated soil in a landfill in Afton, a mostly Black hamlet in rural Warren County, about 80 miles north of Goldsboro. Officials had decided to clean up the land—by saddling a Black community with the pollution.The decision sparked one of the most consequential and well-organized Black protests since the heyday of the civil-rights struggle. In 1982, after years of legal challenges and complaints, Black and white Warren County residents and sympathetic protesters lay down in the road to try to bar construction vehicles from the landfill site. Hundreds of people were arrested. The residents lost that battle—the landfill was built and trucks duly tipped the toxic dirt into it—but the national attention the campaign garnered helped recast it not as a local one-off but as the face of a larger problem. After being arrested for participating in the 1982 protest, the activist and publisher Ben Chavis coined the term environmental racism to describe the actions by the state and the EPA. Bullard would later define environmental justice as environmental racism’s opposing force. For its actions in Warren County, the EPA itself became the first villain of the environmental-justice era.Regan was steeped in this history. He also understood the deep tensions between organizations like the EPA and communities like Afton, especially during a time when, as Bullard recalled when we spoke, justice was “a novel idea” within the agency. Regan believes that decisions such as the one involving the Afton landfill were made not out of malice but out of ignorance and neglect. “They definitely were not well acquainted with the communities,” he explained, referring to EPA officials. “So it was almost as if Warren County and those community members didn’t matter.”It was fitting, then, that Regan would return to Warren County in September 2022 to announce the formation of the new Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which would enjoy the highest possible status in the EPA. Flanked by Chavis and by the Reverend William Barber II, a civil-rights champion who, like Regan, is from eastern North Carolina, Regan pledged that everything he and the EPA did from then on “will be rooted in the realities and the demands and the aspirations of communities like Warren County, North Carolina; Mossville, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; and so many others whose future hasn’t always felt certain.” Reverend Ben Chavis raises his fist as fellow protesters are taken to jail at the Warren County PCB landfill near Afton, North Carolina, on Thursday, September 16, 1982. (Greg Gibson / AP) The EPA’s environmental-justice agenda is broad. Much of it is powered by the agency’s ability to spend money. As part of the Justice40 Initiative, rolled out by the White House in the early days of Biden’s presidency, the EPA was directed to ensure that 40 percent of the benefits of its broadened climate powers assisted marginalized communities; as part of this commitment, the agency has announced billions in grants from the Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change in places affected by environmental injustice. The EPA also allocated billions of dollars from the 2021 infrastructure bill for lead-pipe removal and pollution cleanup in disadvantaged communities. In his role as the head of the agency, Regan has had immense influence.But Regan wanted to do more than direct the distribution of new funding: The EPA also began to use civil-rights powers that it had previously neglected, enabling direct remediation of environmental injustices—not always at federal-government expense—and also calling out discrimination by name. In April 2022, the agency launched a civil-rights investigation of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. The investigation was aimed at the Denka Performance Elastomer facility (Denka has denied wrongdoing) and another proposed plastics plant in St. James Parish, as well as at the general permitting practices of state and local bodies up and down Cancer Alley. In September of that year, the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights sent a letter to Louisiana officials to report its preliminary findings. The office asserted that “based on the data EPA has reviewed thus far, Black residents of the Industrial Corridor Parishes continue to bear disproportionate elevated risks of developing cancer from exposure to current levels of toxic air pollution.” In October, the EPA also opened an investigation in Jackson, Mississippi, based on a civil-rights complaint from the NAACP, which alleged that the state had withheld funds for fixing the majority-Black city’s failing water infrastructure, and had done so for reasons based on race.These moves faced a significant obstacle: Without clear proof of racist intent, discrimination can be hard to establish. When it comes to environmental laws, permitting decisions, and industrial siting, unfavorable treatment rarely comes with outright declarations of bigotry. More typically, minority communities become de facto targets because they lack the political capital and other resources to challenge industrial polluters. Additionally, many communities inherit zoning laws, land-use ordinances, and hazardous sites that originated decades ago under more explicitly racist rationales—essentially making them victims of environmental redlining. Time is a great launderer.A company may claim that a siting decision, say, was based simply on the availability of cheap land and had nothing to do with discrimination. But discrimination may explain why the land was cheap in the first place. In the 1950s, when big petrochemical companies came to Louisiana’s river parishes, they invariably built near Black communities, where most residents were disenfranchised. Those communities then became the anchors for an entire corridor—a “sacrifice zone,” as such locales are known. A legal approach known as “disparate-impact theory” attempts to acknowledge this reality. Instead of solely trying to establish purposeful bigotry, it looks plainly at the racial effects of specific policy decisions. This theory has proved to be a powerful corrective when it comes to enforcing civil-rights law, particularly in voting-rights cases, and in policing, where so-called color-blind policies have clearly and consistently hurt Black citizens. After a police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, for example, the Justice Department found that Black residents of Ferguson were disproportionately likely to be stopped by police; under a consent decree, the police have overhauled their policies and procedures.But disparate-impact theory is controversial. It is detested by many conservatives, who generally view its use as a way to divine racism where there is none, and who often counter that forcing companies and states to proactively take race into account in their decision making is itself racism. Those detractors have hoped for decades to use the courts to invalidate the disparate-impact approach. Oil- and chemical-refinery plants sit beside Black communities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge, in October 1998. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty) Michael Regan prays alongside marchers on March 6, 2022, during an anniversary commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama. The Edmund Pettus Bridge was the site of police beatings of civil-rights activists during the first march for voting rights, on March 7, 1965. (Brandon Bell / Getty) Amid a wider backlash against racial-justice efforts in America, the civil-rights investigations launched by Regan and the EPA in the Deep South made them targets. Among Republicans, the investigations helped earn the agency a reputation for being “woke.” And, undoubtedly, it was easier to pin that reputation on a Black man, no matter how meticulous he was about focusing on the present, not the past. In response to the EPA’s preliminary finding of a disparate racial impact of pollution in Cancer Alley, Louisiana’s then–attorney general, Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit in 2023 alleging that the agency had overstepped its civil-rights authority and had also become too closely allied with environmental-advocacy groups. Landry, now the governor and the leader of a conservative movement reshaping the state in every sphere, said in the filing that EPA officials had decided to “moonlight” like “social justice warriors fixated on race.” (Landry’s office did not respond to requests for an interview or for comment.)As Republican attacks and threats of vigorous litigation proliferated, the agency began to pull back on its civil-rights investigations. In June 2023, just over a year after it began the Cancer Alley proceedings, the EPA dropped the investigation, citing a procedural issue. “I feel like we were put on the back burner,” Sharon Lavigne told The Washington Post. A few weeks later, the EPA resolved a civil-rights inquiry in Flint, Michigan, with no substantive changes to the state’s environmental-permitting process.The civil-rights cases had been risky. An adverse ruling in any lawsuit could jeopardize the future of the disparate-impact theory—not just for one agency but for the whole government. That this could happen is a legitimate concern for the EPA, which has little by way of precedent or expertise to work with when it comes to applying disparate-impact theory in environmental law. But for citizens of communities like those in Cancer Alley, who waited years while being stonewalled and redirected, and who felt ignored even during the administration of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, the agency’s retreat was perceived more as a lack of will than an abundance of caution.Meanwhile, the backlash against the EPA’s use of its civil-rights authority continued. In January, Judge James Cain of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary ruling in favor of Landry, temporarily enjoining the use of disparate impact in the EPA investigations in Louisiana. He wrote in his opinion that “pollution does not discriminate.” In April, after Regan traveled to Louisiana to announce stricter controls under the Clean Air Act on industrial emissions of ethylene oxide (a known carcinogen) and chloroprene (a likely carcinogen), Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins said on X that “this EPA criminal should be arrested the next time he sets foot in Louisiana” and should be sent to the notorious Angola prison—a former slave plantation where a mostly Black inmate population is still forced to pick cotton.A week later, a group of 23 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the EPA demanding that it end all civil-rights investigations based on disparate impact. The letter said that the concept of environmental justice “asks the States to engage in racial engineering” and argued that disparate-impact theory was forcing states to violate the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The petition was skeptical of the idea of considering race at all in assessing the effects of pollution. “Indeed, the mere act of classifying individuals by their race,” the attorneys general wrote, picking up a formulation from Sandra Day O’Connor, “may stigmatize those groups singled out for different treatment.” In other words, according to the petitioners, it was Regan who was being racist.Three weeks after the letter from the attorneys general, the EPA dropped its investigation into Mississippi’s handling of the water crisis in Jackson, citing insufficient evidence. Louisiana, meanwhile, pressed ahead in federal court. In late August, Judge Cain made his injunction against the EPA in Louisiana permanent. But the legal challenges might not stop there. In his ruling, Cain also opened the door for broader, national challenges to all federal civil-rights enforcement based on disparate impact. Meanwhile, activists are pushing the EPA, strenuously, to resist the backlash against disparate impact, hoping that the agency won’t give up any more ground. This September, a group of about 50 individuals—lawyers, academics, and directors of environmental-justice organizations—sent the EPA a letter countering the petition from Republican attorneys general and urging the agency to “to take the time needed to fully analyze Title VI and its history and purpose.” The letter specifically criticized the EPA’s actions in Cancer Alley, asserting that the agency “caved” as a result of the Louisiana lawsuit. Among the signatories was Robert Taylor, a resident of St. John Parish, who had joined Regan during his first visit to the town of Reserve. In late June, I attended an address Regan gave to hundreds of his staff, gathered together under the gilded ceiling of the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, next door to the EPA’s offices. Heralded by Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much” and again accompanied by the civil-rights activist Ben Chavis, Regan walked to the podium. He gave a rousing address celebrating the agency’s achievements on climate and environmental justice, and lobbed more than a few shots at Biden’s predecessor, whom he did not name. The auditorium was packed—a reminder of Regan’s success in attracting professionals back to the agency.The next day, I met Regan in his office at the EPA’s headquarters in Washington. Just a few minutes earlier, as I was heading to the interview, the Supreme Court had issued its pivotal decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturning Chevron v. NRDC, a 40-year-old ruling that had given the EPA broad discretion to interpret environmental law. In another ruling the previous day, the Court had paused the EPA’s ability to enforce a rule regarding pollution that crossed state lines. Regan’s vision for the EPA had never been more imperiled.“We’re kind of digesting and taking a look at what was written by the judges,” Regan told me as we settled into armchairs. “It’s worrisome that there are certain interests in this country that are trying to take power away from the very folks that need protection from environmental injustices.” We sat by an unlit fireplace in a room that he’d clearly grown into. A couch was adorned with a blanket from his alma mater, North Carolina A&T. The office displayed artwork from his 10-year-old son, Matthew. Regan told me about his frequent trips back to our home state, where his parents always demand more time with their grandson, and where he goes fishing to clear his mind.I asked Regan about the notoriety he’d achieved in the eyes of the Republicans. “Quite frankly, it just seems to me that anything we do, no matter what it is, is going to be criticized,” Regan said. “And so with that in mind, it only makes me more emboldened, more strident, but also cautious in terms of the actions that we take.” To Regan, boldness and caution are not at odds with each other. I, however, was not so sure.Regardless, caution of a sort is understandably top of mind at the EPA today, and it was on my mind too. I wanted to know how, in the latter half of this year, Regan might future-proof the EPA against the possibility that Trump returns to office. “The previous administration was something that no one had ever seen before,” he said. “There was a shock that happened to this place that I think shook it to its core.” I suddenly understood that the previous day’s event had been intended as a pep rally, hoping to persuade career employees to stay committed in uncertain times, especially after losses in federal courts. That effort—to manage morale, to bet on the bureaucracy—is itself perhaps the best available form of future-proofing, if still imperfect. A large team of seasoned professionals in the middle ranks of a government agency, committed to a mission, is a significant force.Regan never bit on my questions about doomsday scenarios under a possible Trump presidency. He wanted to talk about the EPA’s wins instead. Regan and the agency may have had to abandon some of their broader civil-rights investigations, but they had other levers to pull—the investment of many billions, for one, and a variety of enforcement actions. The EPA is overseeing the federal takeover of the water infrastructure in Jackson while also providing a $600 million grant for an overhaul of the system. The same Clean Air measures that earned Regan the threat of arrest in Louisiana will in all likelihood dramatically reduce pollution by the Denka plant in Cancer Alley—although the state recently secured a two-year deadline for the plant to comply, superseding the EPA’s original 90-day compliance window. Regan meets with senior officials at the EPA headquarters. (Donavon Smallwood for The Atlantic) Many activists had visions of the EPA playing a role akin to the Department of Justice in the 1960s, actively naming racism and rooting it out. Those visions have not been realized. I asked Regan why the agency had dropped the investigations that had been the signature of its environmental-justice efforts—why caution had trumped boldness in those cases—and he all but confirmed my suspicion: The EPA feared that pushing too hard could backfire. As Regan saw it, any vulnerabilities in the cases could undercut the disparate-impact approach altogether—perhaps destroying much of the Civil Rights Act in the process. The threat, he said, was especially acute given the inclinations of a conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans, and activists such as Landry, who want “to use the court system to take away these tools.” We returned more directly to one of the major lessons Regan has absorbed during his time in office: the necessity of caution. Regan has encountered the quintessential paradox that all Black politicians in America face: Aggressively working to protect the communities that sent them into government in the first place is usually the quickest way to find oneself out of government. Those who remain typically find success in bending the system rather than attempting to break it.If the bending saves even one Black community from lead poisoning or one Puerto Rican neighborhood from carcinogens, isn’t that worth it? This is, in many ways, the age-old debate of politics on the margins in America: whether the country can achieve freedom and equality incrementally through institutions or whether those institutions have poison at the root and must be fundamentally remade. The EPA, in pursuing environmental justice, strains against its own history and against some legal interpretations of its powers. But a more forthrightly activist agency would certainly find itself undone.As a native of eastern North Carolina myself, I began covering environmental justice because I wanted more people to hear about and understand communities like my own—communities like Jackson and Cancer Alley and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Regan’s time in the EPA has been a success on that same front: awareness. His visits to polluted communities alone were radical reinventions of the agency’s relationship with justice, and have elevated it in the national consciousness.At the same time, in terms of civil-rights adjudication itself, the EPA will likely finish Biden’s term with a record little better than the ones under his predecessors. And it hangs its hopes on a set of enforcement actions that might be reversed under a Trump administration. As Regan prepares the agency’s rearguard contingencies, one opportunity—the chance for the EPA to put the government’s imprimatur on a statement that places like Cancer Alley have been made to suffer because of racism—slips away.Regan and I have gone back and forth about this: about the costs and benefits of naming things, about exactly how America’s past should be accounted for in its present governance. “It’s scary for some to think that environmental justice has focused in on past transgressions and how we got there,” Regan said. He is right: It is, for some, indeed scary.

My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection.Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the larger international medical NGOs operating in Gaza. He has worked closely with the humanitarian community to address one disaster after another. But now diseases such as polio and hepatitis are starting to spread through an already battered, weak, sick, tired, malnourished, and desperate population. Raw sewage, trash, and unsanitary conditions are present throughout the Gaza Strip; Mohammed has no way to avoid them while working in the field.The spread of disease, breakdown of law and order, proliferation of crime, rise of food insecurity and malnutrition, collapse of the health-care system, and continued cycles of displacement from one area to another have completely and utterly broken Gaza’s population.After enduring unimaginable suffering and loss, the people of Gaza are desperate for a future that does not include Hamas or Israel controlling their lives. They want the sacrifices that were forced upon them to produce a radically different future. And yet, as I write this, there is still no end in sight.In my brother’s story, you can get a small glimpse of what the most destructive war in Palestinian history has meant in human terms. In October, a week after Hamas’s murderous attack killed 1,200 people in Israel and captured hundreds of hostages, an Israel Defense Forces air strike destroyed the four-story home where I grew up with my extended family. My brother, his wife, and their four children miraculously pushed their way out of the rubble, sustaining only minor injuries. Other members of my family weren’t so lucky.[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: What I’ve heard from Gaza]That same air strike killed my 12-year-old cousin, Farah, and it badly injured her twin sister, Marah, and both her parents. In addition, my dad’s middle and youngest brothers, Ibrahim and Riyad, were badly wounded. A follow-on series of air strikes against the El-Yarmouk neighborhood in Gaza City, where the house used to be, destroyed the homes where some of the survivors had sought shelter with neighbors. Uncle Riyad was killed in that strike; his body wasn’t retrieved until nine days later, reduced to mushy human tissue. Uncle Ibrahim’s daughter, Israa, was thrown out of the building by the blast. She landed on the street and was crushed by a concrete slab that fully paralyzed her.Over the weeks that followed, my brother sought shelter in different neighborhoods of Gaza City. He and his family endured bombardments that frequently came heart-stoppingly close to their places of refuge. In November, they made it to the southern part of the Gaza Strip, which at the time had been designated as a safe zone by the Israeli military.Mohammed rendezvoused with his co-workers and together they orchestrated a plan to resume their work, providing medical support to the population. They began to receive truckloads of medical supplies and other crucial items, which they distributed across Gaza’s network of hospitals and other medical facilities.Within a few weeks of his arrival in southern Gaza, though, he faced another tragedy. An Israeli air strike on the home of my mother’s family, my second home in Gaza, killed 29 family members and left others terribly injured. The house was packed with people who had fled northern Gaza and sought safety in the south. At the time, the Brazil neighborhood of Rafah was in a relatively quiet area, far from any active fighting. The New York Times’ Liam Stack asked the IDF why my family’s home was targeted and how such a strike could be justified, given the enormous loss of life among women and children. The IDF provided only a boilerplate reply about Hamas embedding itself among the population.The strike killed all of my maternal aunts and uncles, and many of their children—my cousins. The oldest killed was my Aunt Zainab, a matriarch of the family who spent decades as an UNRWA teacher. She was known for being immensely generous, always offering her space, food, and resources to the less fortunate. If you ever entered Zainab’s home, you were sure to leave with a full stomach; she would offer up one dish after another on a nonnegotiable basis, disregarding any pleas to stop the hospitable offerings.Then there was my Uncle Abdullah, a doctor known for running Rafah’s main hospital and for the care he provided during the Second Intifada. He treated thousands of patients who were hit by Israeli gunfire or maimed in air strikes or other forms of bombardment. Sometimes he would ride in ambulances along with the paramedics to collect the most seriously injured, hoping to stabilize patients long enough to make it to the operating room. Once, desperate to stop the bleeding of a teenager’s heart pierced by an Israeli bullet, Uncle Abdullah stuck his thumb into the hole, saving the teenager’s life. He was lauded for that effort by the Ministry of Health and the general public.In addition to his other humanitarian work, Abdullah operated a clinic in his basement. That made the family house a neighborhood landmark, which people would reference when providing directions or taking taxis. When his children and I would play rough, he would reprimand us sternly. But when I needed support most, including when I required stitches in his clinic, he offered empathy instead. After my Uncle Yousef died, Abdullah assumed the role of family elder, regularly hosting my mother for family get-togethers and taking particular care of her as a widow.My brother was at the house just two days before the air strike, having lunch with Zainab and Abdullah. He was in Khan Younis when he heard the news, where he had been sheltering with his family, and he frantically raced back to Rafah. He spent three days searching for remains, many of which were so charred, they were challenging to identify. My brother ultimately retrieved Zainab’s remains—headless, her legs entirely crushed, recognizable only by the petite size of her torso. Too many identification processes play out like a gruesome and painful jigsaw puzzle with human pieces, in which memories of features, shapes, and sizes are matched to human remains.The home in Rafah was extraordinarily special to me while I was growing up. We were there practically every weekend. It was my refuge from school and from life in the crowded streets of Gaza City. It was a place where we watched movies, played video games, and did projects in the massive backyard.As a child in the 1990s, I met Yasser Arafat, Mohammed Dahlan, and other senior Palestinian political figures in the Rafah house. Abdullah’s oldest brother, Uncle Yousef, worked for the Palestinian Authority, heading the Palestinian Special Olympics. He used a wheelchair himself, and was highly revered for his fairness and independence, frequently visited by other political and social figures.The Rafah house was like a mini United Nations, a safe harbor of sorts in a sea of inflammatory rhetoric, incitement, and passionate differences about the path forward. Within its walls, people could talk. That’s where I got my introduction to the complicated realities of the Palestinian cause. And that, too, was destroyed by the air strike.These are my family’s stories, but every family in Gaza has its own. The war has erased not only lives but generations’ worth of history and memories. Monuments and historical landmarks have been reduced to rubble; family papers and mementos incinerated; elders killed before their knowledge could be passed on or recorded.[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Israel killed my family, but not my hope]The Palestinian people had never experienced this level of day-to-day suffering. Although periods of intense violence have occurred, especially at the height of the Second Intifada and during the 2014 war in Gaza, the norm has been low-intensity conflict. In a Palestinian context, the current war in Gaza is unprecedented.This war must be Gaza’s last. The territory’s leaders should abandon any form of armed or violent resistance against Israel and focus instead on making Gaza the best possible version of itself. The Israelis, for their part, must truly relinquish both their military occupation and their control, allowing Palestinians to exercise real independence and sovereignty over their territorial waters, airspace, and border with neighboring Egypt, even as Israel’s legitimate security needs are accounted for and addressed.I still believe that this transformation is attainable. Gaza’s small size and compact population make it relatively easy to implement pragmatic changes, which can quickly stabilize the territory and end the suffering. Despite its current straits, Gaza has a chance to become a model of effective Palestinian self-governance, demonstrating what an occupation-free West Bank would look like.Gaza can, should, and will become the beating heart of a future Palestinian state.

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Wikimedia CommonsA swimmer who scratched a racial slur onto the body of another student is no longer enrolled at Gettysburg College, the school said. The incident, in which the N-word was allegedly cut into a student’s chest using a box cutter, happened at a gathering of the Pennsylvania college’s swim team at which the victim was the only person of color, the victim’s family said in a statement. “The reprehensible act was committed by a fellow student-athlete, someone he considered his friend, someone whom he trusted,” the victim’s family added, saying their loved one was the victim of a “hate crime.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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