Mets still control own destiny if they can halt untimely funk in time

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An earthquake registering magnitude 4.2 shook part of central California

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On Tuesday night, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, a man who may well have been innocent of the crime he was convicted of. No physical evidence linked Williams to the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle in her Missouri home, and his trial was marked by a shoddy defense and a jury-selection process that empaneled 11 white jurors and only one Black juror (Gayle was white; Williams was Black). Williams’s execution had been scheduled and halted twice before amid concerns about his guilt; Missouri’s prior governor, Eric Greitens, not only granted Williams a day-of stay but also appointed a committee to investigate his case. The committee was dissolved by the current governor, Mike Parson, in 2023 without ever issuing a report.Earlier this year, Wesley Bell, the current prosecutor of the district where Williams was convicted, filed a 63-page motion in court seeking to set aside Williams’s death sentence on grounds of possible innocence, and later offered Williams a deal that would have commuted his sentence to life without parole. But Missouri’s attorney general rejected the plan, and Williams is now dead. Bell issued a statement after the execution, saying, “If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”Why are innocent people—and those with a good chance of proving their innocence—still being executed? A death sentence does not necessarily reflect guilt, which is why death-row exonerations are not uncommon. By the Equal Justice Initiave’s count, one person is exonerated for every eight people executed. And not everyone who is innocent is exonerated. The Death Penalty Information Center maintains a list of executed people who had “strong evidence of innocence”; it numbers 20 cases, almost all of which are from the past few decades. Other sources offer higher estimates. “At least 30, and likely more, innocent people have been executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed in the 1970s,” Robert Dunham, the director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me.The likelihood of executing innocents has moved several state legislatures to end the death penalty within their borders. As the governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley cited innocence in his 2013 decision to sign a bill abolishing capital punishment. So did then-Governor Pat Quinn in 2011 in Illinois. “Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death-penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it,” Quinn said. “With our broken system, we cannot ensure justice is achieved in every case.”[Elizabeth Bruenig: Not that innocent]Surveys suggest that supporters of capital punishment are aware of the possibility of executing innocent people. According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of Americans acknowledge that there is some risk that innocent people will be executed; only 21 percent say that there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent it. Moreover, only 30 percent of death-penalty supporters say that the criminal-justice system successfully prevents the execution of innocents. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 59 percent of respondents said they believed that innocent people had been executed within the previous five years.It’s not possible that current supporters of capital punishment simply don’t realize that the death penalty occasionally results in the execution of innocents. They must know, and they support it anyway. I suspect this is because capital punishment serves a variety of purposes; carrying out justice is merely one. Perhaps death-penalty advocates don’t care about the lives being extinguished, innocent or not—death-row prisoners are disproportionately Black and poor. And perhaps others are loath to admit that the criminal-justice system is prone to error. But for some, the death penalty offers another major benefit: It is an opportunity for the state to exhibit ultimate force, the destruction of a human life. From that perspective, innocence versus guilt only distantly matters. Some people welcome displays of state power—think military parades—because a government capable of destruction is also one strong enough to offer protection. That many small-government conservatives nevertheless wish to see that kind of power in the hands of the state is not just ironic; it is a major obstacle to the abolition of the death penalty.America is currently experiencing an execution spree: One person was executed the week before last, four this past week, and three more are scheduled for October. Maybe all of the people being put to death now are guilty, but there’s more than a sliver of a chance that someone among them is or was innocent—that’s eight executions, after all. For some, that falls between a worthwhile risk and a necessary evil. For others, it’s just murder.

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If I asked you to tell me the one issue that makes you feel the most pessimistic, what would it be? I feel pretty confident saying that the most popular response — certainly one of the most popular responses, anyway — would be climate change. But is climate despair really as tempting and reasonable as it seems? The problem isn’t imaginary. Climate change is real and terrifying, but even if it’s as bad as the worst predictions suggest, do we gain anything by resigning ourselves to that fate? What effect might our despair have on our ability to act in the present? Is our fatalism undercutting our capacity to tackle this problem? On a recent episode of The Gray Area, I invited Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on to talk about how we might collectively address climate change without falling into despair or getting mired in false hope. She’s a marine biologist, a co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and the author of a new book called What If We Get it Right? It’s a curated series of essays and poetry and conversations with a wide range of people who are all, in their own ways, trying to build a better future. And this is not a blindly optimistic book: The point isn’t that everything is fine. The point is that we have to act as though the future is a place we actually want to live in — not centuries into the distant future but now and in the decades to come.  According to Johnson, there are already many concrete climate solutions. If we were motivated by a belief in a better tomorrow — not a worse one — we would implement more of those solutions (and find new ones). So, if you’re someone looking for inspiration, or reasons to feel hopeful — or, even better, for guidance on what to do and where to start — then this book, and this conversation with Johnson, is for you. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing You’re a marine biologist, which I think is a standard top-five dream job for kids. Was that your gateway to environmentalism? Is that why you do this work?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Super common dream job — like many 5- to 10-year-olds are very into marine biology as a life path. But I was really just a kid who loved nature, which is honestly not very unique. How many kids like bugs and fireflies and shooting stars and octopuses and autumn leaves and all the rest of it? I was just like, “This all seems very cool.” That innate curiosity — that biophilia, as E.O. Wilson calls it, the magnificent entomologist — is just part of who we are as humans.  It’s normal to love the world. It’s less common to make that your job. But of course, once you fall in love with nature — whether it’s with one ecosystem or a few specific species — and you find out that it’s threatened, you’re like, “Wait a second, what are we doing about this? Is there a grown-up who’s already on top of this? Is this not sorted? Seems like we should protect forests and coral reefs and all the rest.” My mom was cleaning out the closet and found these old school papers, and apparently I was writing the same essays since I was like 10 about nature being great and how we should protect it. So, it wasn’t always going to be the ocean. I wanted to become a park ranger at one point, an environmental lawyer at another. But the ocean seemed like it needed more advocates at the particular moment that I was thinking about graduate school.  Sean Illing You open your book by saying that any time you tell people that you do climate work, they invariably ask, and I’m quoting you — “how fucked are we?” Well, Ayana, how fucked are we?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson We’re pretty fucked, but there’s a lot we could do to have a better possible future. And I think it’s important to always hold both of those things together. We have already changed the climate. We are already seeing the intense heat waves and floods and droughts and wildfires and hurricanes. All of that is already supercharged by our changed climate.  But there’s still so much we can do. We basically have the solutions we need. We’re just being really slow at deploying them, at implementing them. We already know how to transition to renewable energy and stop spewing fossil fuels. We know how to protect and restore ecosystems that are absorbing all this carbon. We know how to green buildings, insulate buildings, shift to better public transit, improve our food system — the solutions are all right there. My book has a reality check chapter where I lay out all the bad news, but that’s three pages. And then the rest of the book asks, what are we going to do about it?  Sean Illing There’s no point anymore in talking about how to solve the problem of climate change, right? I mean, that ship has sailed. It’s all about adaptation now.  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Yeah. I mean, the climate has already changed. There’s not a time machine back to before we put a completely mind-boggling amount of excess carbon into the atmosphere. Whether and how well we address the climate crisis determines the outcomes of life on Earth for all 8 million species and whether hundreds of millions of people live or die, and how well we all can live. So even though perfection is not an option, there’s such a wide range of possible futures, and we just need to make sure we get the best possible one.  Sean Illing This is really about degrees of suffering and the consequences of specific choices we make — or won’t make, as it might be. The difference between temperature spikes of 2 and 4 degrees is the difference between lots of people living and dying. Right?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson It’s easier for me to think about it in terms of the human body running a fever: the difference between you having a fever of 100 and 102 or 103 is a huge difference. And that’s the level of sensitivity to temperature that all species and ecosystems have. If we can prevent a half a degree of warming or a degree of warming, that actually makes a big difference. It’s worth the effort.  Sean Illing People like to use different words to describe the project ahead of us — words like “sustainability” or “revolution.” You like to use the word “transformation.” Why is that a better way to frame this?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson The two words that I pair together are “possibility” and “transformation.” There’s this wide spectrum of possible futures. I’m not an optimist. I’m not particularly hopeful given human history because we don’t have a great track record of addressing collectively major challenges that we face. There are some important exceptions to that, but the sense of possibility really drives me because the future is not yet written. Like, what if we just wrote a better one than the trajectory that we’re on?  Sean Illing How do we reshape and reimagine how we live on this planet and with each other? I can get excited about possibility and transformation — like, what kind of future do we want to create together?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Okay, you can’t see me right now but I’m wiggling — I’m wiggling my fingers, gesturing with like, possibility, excitement, sparkles. I just feel like we need to be asking more big questions of ourselves and each other in this moment. We’re at this inflection point in human history. We either get our shit together or we don’t. And obviously I would like us to at least try.  Sean Illing But you don’t like the word “sustainable,” right? You feel like that’s setting the bar too low?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson It’s sort of just an everywhere word. It is useful — but it doesn’t have a lot of meaning. It’s very general. A useful analog I’ve heard is: If someone asked you how your marriage was going and you were like, “Eh, it’s sustainable,” I would probably say, “Well, okay, don’t want to trade lives with you.”  So, yes, I would say we should set a higher bar than sustainability, especially given that we’ve already degraded nature so much that I don’t want to just sustain what we have. I want to protect and restore.  Sean Illing A beautiful question you pose in your book is: What if climate adaptation is beautiful? So, let’s talk about that. What if climate adaptation is beautiful? What then? Is it rainbows and sunshine? What are the kind of things we have to look forward to? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Well, I think we will always have rainbows and sunshine. That’s the good news. But imagine if we were just deliberate about building things that were aesthetically pleasing and durable and could be deconstructed and repurposed instead of demolishing things. Some cities and towns are now passing essentially deconstruction ordinances that say you have to take apart buildings instead of demolishing them, instead of just pulverizing everything and sending it to the landfill. You have to take it apart so the pieces can be reused like Legos, which seems obvious, almost like, “Why wouldn’t we always have been doing that?” There are so many choices that we’re currently making that shape our societal trajectory. Every day, we are building a piece of the future, something that will be here in 10 years or a century or more. So let’s just be really thoughtful about all that and make it nice.  Sean Illing Are you encouraged by the direction of the climate movement as it stands at the moment? What are your major concerns?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson My primary concern is that we’re just not moving fast enough, given that we have basically all the solutions that we need to begin to make a difference. It’s just incredibly frustrating how politics are holding us back.  I mean, in this country, there’s division between the two major parties about whether climate change exists and whether it’s something we should address, which is just so retrograde, I don’t even know where to start. And it’s especially frustrating because most Republican politicians are literally just pretending they don’t think it exists; they are fully aware that climate science is real, but it’s untenable politically for them to admit that. That’s a huge part of why we’re in this mess, as well as the fact that the fossil fuel lobby is ridiculously powerful in this country. And, you know, so many politicians are bought and paid for in one way or another, even though the fossil fuel industry doesn’t account for very many jobs.  Then you have the banking sector, which is funding all these fossil fuel corporations to continue expanding their extraction and infrastructure. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, 60 banks have provided 6.9 trillion in financing to fossil fuel companies. But the top four US banks alone, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, have provided almost $1.5 trillion to finance fossil fuel companies.   So, yeah, if you have your money in any of those banks, I would encourage you to do something like move your retirement savings to a place that does not make the problem worse.  Sean Illing What would be the difference between a Harris administration and another Trump administration? What are the stakes on the climate front?  Ayana Elizabeth Johnson The stakes are sky high. There are actually graphs projecting the difference in greenhouse gas emissions between the two. It’s really remarkable because on one hand, you have Vice President Harris, who was the deciding vote in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest ever investment in climate solutions in world history. This Biden-Harris administration has created the American Climate Corps that has put tens of thousands of young people to work implementing climate solutions from reducing wildfire risk to installing solar panels to replanting wetlands. We have a loan program office in the Department of Energy that has hundreds of billions of dollars that they’re giving out to businesses that are figuring out this renewable energy transition. All of that could be completely wiped out, essentially on day one of a Trump administration.  And so on the other hand, you have in Trump a candidate who has offered to fossil fuel executives that if they donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign, he will basically do their bidding once he gets into the White House. That is how stark a difference this is.  Sean Illing There’s part of the book where you write — I’m quoting again— “Fuck hope. What’s the strategy?” Do you feel like we, meaning all of us collectively, have a clear, concrete strategy for creating a better future in the face of climate change? Or are we going to keep doing what we’ve been doing? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson This is where I think media, Hollywood, music, art, culture makers broadly matter so much. I cannot literally show you what the future could look like. I can talk about it. I can write about it. I can interview people about it. I can, as I did for this book, commission art about it.  But if it’s possible to go through our day-to-day and not encounter anything about climate, that’s a huge problem. Right now, climate coverage accounts for less than 1 percent of the minutes on major TV news stations; that’s actually gone down from recent years, so we’re going in the wrong direction.  If this is not part of our day-to-day exposure, then it’s just always on the back burner. There’s always something more important. And we’re thinking about climate as something separate from our other concerns, whereas it’s actually just the context within which everything else right now is playing out.  So there’s a chapter in the book called “I Dream of Climate RomComs,” where I interview producer Franklin Leonard, founder of The Blacklist out in Hollywood, and Adam McKay, filmmaker, writer, director, about the role of Hollywood in this. Because basically, to date, Hollywood has just shown us the apocalypse, the fire and brimstone, The Day After Tomorrow kind of stuff. And there are very few examples of not like utopian rose-colored glasses stuff, but like literally, what if we just used the solutions we had and projected that forward? What would that look like? To hear the rest of Illing’s conversation with Johnson, listen to our latest episode on The Gray Area, available wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Animated GIF by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyListen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and Stitcher.Brian Glenn, the national campaign correspondent at far-right outlet Real America’s Voice and the boyfriend of MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, wants voters racially profiled at polling places to ensure election integrity.“If you go to a polling center and you see busloads, van loads of people walking up to vote that clearly perhaps look like they could be… let’s just make sure people are checking IDs because if people are going in with zero ID and they’re not a U.S. citizen then they shouldn’t be allowed to vote, period,” he said while covering a Trump rally last weekend. “So we need poll watchers that can perhaps sound the alarm if they think that is going on so that maybe some election officials can double check on that. So if we start to see all these caravan of people coming in, let’s make sure they’re all legal before we allow them to vote. It’s as simple as that.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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