The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

MEGAN MCARDLE COLUMNAdvance for release THURSDAY, Dec. 1, 2022 and thereafter(For MCARDLE clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By Megan McArdle
 On the Friday before Thanksgiving, a form of elegiac madness swept over Twitter's power users in media and academia. Watching the mass exodus of staff under Elon Musk's new leadership, they concluded that the site would go down any minute. While they still could, millions of them began saying goodbye to one another, trading wistful eulogies about all the good times they'd had tweeting together.
 When dawn came and Twitter was still running, this all looked a little silly. But if their concerns were premature, they were hardly unreasonable. Though it seems possible that Musk is just in the early, messy days of turning around a company that had become dysfunctional under complacent management, it's distressingly hard to tell whether we're witnessing a process of creative destruction, or Silicon Valley's favorite chaos muppet destroying the company he wanted to save.
 Since Musk took over in late October, his whiplash-inducing policy changes have spooked advertisers and sent approximately 75 percent of Twitter's workforce packing. While a skeleton crew can probably stave off a catastrophic implosion, smaller features of the service might soon start to break (indeed, some already have), and the loss of advertising revenue will mean less money to rebuild. Meanwhile, Musk himself is dangerously overleveraged, having pledged most of his Tesla shares to finance this and other deals. If the ship starts to sink, he won't necessarily be able to muster the resources to bail it out.
 It is hard to see how this ends well. And yet I hesitate to say it won't, because anyone who's been following Musk's adventures for a while has seen him survive more than one prophecy of imminent doom, only to emerge as the richest man in the world.
 While the denizens of Twitter were pointing at Musk's mistakes and preparing for the apocalypse, a successful entrepreneur of my acquaintance pointed out that Musk has helmed multiple start-ups in various industries, with well north of $500 billion in collective market value. This included some very tight squeezes - in 2013, when Tesla turned its first quarterly profit, it was on the brink of a "death spiral of missed sales targets and falling shares," and Musk was in negotiations to sell the company to Google for about 1/100th of what it's now worth.
 There are three possible ways to think about this:
 1. Musk knows quite a lot about running companies, and has at least a decent shot of succeeding with Twitter.
 2. Musk used to know how to run a company, but has now overreached, or succumbed to some sort of neurodegenerative condition.
 3. Musk never knew how to run a company, and amassed his fortune through either charlatanry or luck.
 Musk's fiercest Twitter critics seem to believe it's some combination of two and three. And, hey, I concede that his current behavior does not inspire confidence.
 And yet. It's not obvious that Musk is any crazier than he ever was, or that running Twitter is inherently harder than running an automaker, a payment processor, a business directory, or a rocket-and-telecommunications firm. As for luck, as my entrepreneurial friend says: "I don't know anybody who's ever gotten that lucky."
 In fairness, if a million people flip a million coins each, then some of them will, by chance, turn up a very long series of heads. Since humans are bad at thinking probabilistically, we'll be tempted to deem those folks flipping geniuses, rather than see their achievements as predictable points on a normal distribution of outcomes. This happens a lot in financial markets, where active fund managers can look like overperformers right up to the point where their luck runs out.
 Yet, while we do underestimate the role of luck in business, that can't really explain Musk's serial successes. Yes, an investor can earn passive income through random chance (as the Wall Street Journal used to regularly prove with portfolios they constructed by throwing darts at a table of stock listings). But no one can build a whole company like that - much less multiple companies.
 Does that mean I should be more bullish on Twitter's chances? Well, though luck is far from the only thing that Musk has going for him, he does rely on it more than most entrepreneurs do. He appears to enjoy raising the stakes to existential levels. And, of course, that's part of why he's the world's richest man: He takes bigger bets than most people would be comfortable with.
 Risky behavior can be a way to force everyone in a company to rise to the occasion and overperform, as happened with Tesla in 2013. That's clearly what Musk is hoping for now, demanding that people commit to become "hardcore" or leave the company. But "existential stakes" also necessarily mean there's a real danger the company won't survive. So, while it might be too early to write Twitter's obituary, it's fair to acknowledge that the fate of the "digital public square" now rests on one man's audacious gamble. In the end, both Musk and Twitter may well come to grief.
 - - -
 Follow Megan McArdle on Twitter, @asymmetricinfo.

Has Elon Musk succeeded by luck - or does he know what he's doing?

National Press Club Angele Gingras Award for Humor Writing 2016, Shorty Award 2016, Forbes 30 Under 30, Fifty Funniest People Right Now (Rolling Stone)

A Field Guide To Awkward Silences 

Nothing Is Wrong And Here IS Why

ALEXANDRA PETRI COLUMNAdvance for release Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022 and thereafter(For PETRI clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By Alexandra Petri
 "This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead."
 - Elon Musk, on Twitter, the social media site he owns
 - - -
 Free speech is dying!
 If you don't pay me money for my product, that means that this great country is wrecked! Wrecked on the shoals of oppression and political correctness!
 Free speech is when you pay me money for goods or services. That's free speech. When you do not give me money, that is censorship. Every second that you spend not paying me money for my services is another arrow stuck into the craw of liberty. Ah, liberty bleeds, and I weep for her! Please give me thousands of dollars; it is the only thing that can save her. Even if you must give them to me in small increments of $8 at a time, that is better than nothing. I believe that if you give me enough money (speech), we can still rescue this godforsaken country!
 You might have thought that free speech was when a corporation gave a lot of money to a politician. This is a very, very important form of free speech, and it is getting freer all the time! But that is certainly not the only kind of speech you can make. Just as important is when you take your small-dollar amounts and press them into the hands of a billionaire, or when an advertiser does the same thing with a larger dollar amount.
 No, I am not taking advantage of you. I am offering to give you a voice. It is very sad that you are letting liberty die because you are refusing to give me your wallet. I can't believe you hate free speech so much!
 Oh, okay, I see where there may be some slight confusion: There is the word "free," right there, at the start of "free speech." It almost sounds as though you didn't need to pay for it! But this is a common misunderstanding. This is free as in "buy one, get one," the kind of free that is only free if you have made a purchase first.
 Why I remember when our Founders, our brave Founders, fought so strongly and so bravely for free speech. Benjamin Franklin stood there begging and beseeching the business owners of his day to put their advertisements in his Poor Richard's Almanac. Everyone knew then as they know today that the only true free speech is when you pay somebody money to run advertisements for your business. The Bill of Rights is absolutely clear about this. Why do you think it is called a bill if not because rights require somebody to pay money to somebody else?!
 And the people who do not have money? What of them? As though they had anything to say!
 - - -
 Follow Alexandra Petri on Twitter, @petridishes.

To be very clear, free speech is when you give me money

Harvard College, BA in English, Classics Secondary Field

Named among the 25 most influential Washington journalists by the National Journal

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Political Science Association’s Carey McWilliams Award, 1996

Empathy Award from the Volunteers of America, 2002

National Human Services Assembly’s Award for Excellence by a Member of the Media, 2004

Hillman Award for Career Achievement from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, 2011

One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (co-authored with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann)

Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism – From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond

Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent

Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right

Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge

They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era

Why Americans Hate Politics

We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama (co-editor)

One Electorate Under God?: A Dialogue on Religion & American Politics (co-editor)

United We Serve: National Service and the Future of Citizenship (co-editor)

Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Should Government Help Faith-Based Charity? (co-editor)

Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (co-editor)

What’s God Got To Do With the American Experiment? (co-editor)

Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America (co-editor)

Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country

E.J. DIONNE JR. COLUMNAdvance for release Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022, and thereafter(For DIONNE clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By E.J. Dionne Jr.
 WASHINGTON -- Do you think Republicans should break decisively with Donald Trump over his dinner with a white-supremacist antisemite? So do I. But there are deep structural reasons for what many of us see as the moral rot inside the GOP. Let's call it the Trump Vicious Cycle -- vicious being the operative word in many senses.
 Viewed from outside the party, it is easy to say that Republicans should toss the former president overboard. He probably cost the party control of the Senate with his candidate picks. He was a drag on the party in many closely contested House races. At the state level, his insistence on election denial as infallible doctrine was an albatross.
 But here is where the vicious cycle kicks in: The weaker Trump makes the party, the harder it is to displace him. The more he drives nonextremists away, the more pro-Trump the party's core electorate becomes.
 Republicans who actually win office are, with a modest number of exceptions, deeply dependent on Trump's coalition for their victories and have more reason to worry about losing primaries than general elections. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, only two survived. Four lost primaries, and four retired.
 The 2022 elections made this problem worse in the House, where red districts became, on the whole, even redder. As Dan Keating, Harry Stevens and Nick Mourtoupalas reported in an excellent analysis for The Post: "Districts that voted for Trump [in 2020] are where Republicans saw many of their largest swings." Dave Wasserman, one of the country's premier election analysts, ratified the view that Republicans gained votes in seats they already held and told me that they "picked up the most votes in noncompetitive districts in general."
 So the political world in which Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader and would-be speaker, lives is a very Trumpy place. No wonder he engaged in an awkward tap dance on Tuesday in responding to Trump's dinner with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the very definition of a far-right antisemite. To get a sense of who Fuentes is, consider that during a speech this year discussing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he said, "They compare Putin to Hitler like it's a bad thing." He thought this was funny.
 McCarthy did say the obligatory thing: "I don't think anybody should have a meeting with Nick Fuentes." But he also tried to get Trump off the hook, saying -- falsely -- that the former president had condemned Fuentes "four times."
 Why that very specific "four" when Trump never condemned Fuentes once is something of a mystery. Maybe it just sounded good. When a reporter corrected McCarthy, he retreated to a general statement about Fuentes that again avoided Trump. "I condemn his ideology," McCarthy said. "It has no place in society at all."
 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was more robust in his condemnation: "There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy. And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States."
 Unlike McCarthy who is still clawing together votes to be speaker, McConnell has already secured reelection as minority leader. Also, McConnell is smarting from how Trumpist candidates lost Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire; endangered Georgia, which votes in a runoff next week; and forced him to spend a bundle to save seats in North Carolina and Ohio.
 Still, even McConnell limited himself to that "highly unlikely" formulation. How about "never"? How about saying the guy's name?
 Trump seems to realize that dining with Fuentes was not such a good idea. He let it be known on Wednesday that he blamed the whole thing on Ye, insisted he was totally sandbagged (the reports had him using more colorful language), and stuck to his story that he didn't know who Fuentes was.
 That will certainly be enough for McCarthy, who has been pandering desperately to the pro-Trump right of his caucus to win the speakership. How worried is he? Appearing Monday on Newsmax, the network for those who think Fox News is too moderate, McCarthy warned that if Republicans don't stick together and vote for him, "the Democrats can end up picking who the speaker is." Not exactly a declaration of confidence -- and also an intriguing idea if a handful of GOP moderates decide to bolt.
 As it is, the disconnect between a country fed up with Trump and a GOP still in the grip of Trumpism does not bode well for governing over the next two years.
 But governing has never been a priority for Trumpists -- or for the man who can't even take responsibility for his own dinner parties.
 - - -
 E.J. Dionne is on Twitter: @EJDionne.

Kevin McCarthy is caught in Trump's vicious cycle

Oxford University, D.Phil.

Harvard University, BA

1977 Pulitzer Prize for commentary

1979 National Magazine Awards: Finalist in the essay and criticism category

1978 National Headliners Award

1980 Silurian Award for editorial writing

1985 The Washington Journalism Review named Will best writer, any subject

1997 Named among the 25 most influential Washington journalists by the National Journal

The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts

The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions

The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses 1981-1986

Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home 1986-1990

The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News, 1990-1994

The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric

With a Happy Eye, But ... America and the World, 1997-2002

One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation

Statecraft as Soulcraft

The New Season: A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election

Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball

Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy

The Conservative Sensibility

American Happiness and Discontents

GEORGE WILL COLUMNAdvance for release Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022 and thereafter(For WILL clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only. Changes "identifiers" to "identities" in graf 3By George F. Will
 WASHINGTON - Anyone acquainted with human nature - and with government, which exists to cope with human nature - should not be surprised: When government allocates opportunities on racial grounds, dispensing lucrative preferences when awarding contracts and subsidies, this gives rise to rackets. And given contemporary academia's susceptibility to intellectual fads and political nonsense, it is unsurprising that logical absurdities and moral contortions accompany the use of racial preferences based on almost comically arbitrary racial categories in pursuit of a "diversity" supposedly beneficial to education.
 Until a few years ago, Robert Taylor, a business owner in Washington state, identified as White. Then he realized that his insurance business could benefit if it were classified as a minority enterprise. A DNA test purported to show him 4 percent sub-Saharan African. Lots of litigation later, a federal court said the state nevertheless could deny his minority status. Elsewhere, Steve Lynn had better luck in the racial lottery. His business qualified as a minority business enterprise because his ancestors were Sephardic Jews who fled Spain centuries ago, making him, in the government's squint, Hispanic.
 Your government decrees that immigrants from India are Asians but their cousins from Afghanistan are White. In America's benighted days of yore, hearings and trials determined racial identities (octoroon, quadroon, etc.). In today's America, such determinations are progressive because they protect the integrity, such as it is, of affirmative action programs.
 In 1970, when only 5 percent of Americans were Hispanics, they were generally considered White. Today, however, minority status is coveted because it is potentially a lucrative key to unlocking government largesse. So, European Hispanics from the Iberian Peninsula, alone among European national or ethnic groups, are a government-preferred minority, eligible to be what David E. Bernstein, George Mason University law professor, terms "identity entrepreneurs."
 This story-beyond-satire of government is recounted in Bernstein's slender (185 pages) "Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America," potentially 2022's most consequential American book. It reveals the rickety foundations of today's identity politics. And because it is distilled in an amicus brief he filed for the Supreme Court as it considers racial preferences in college admissions. The brief demonstrates that such preferences depend on irrational classifications that mock their users' intellectual and moral pretenses.
 The post-1970s proliferation of government-preferred classifications means, Bernstein says, that they mostly benefit not African American victims of centuries-old abuses, but post-1965 immigrants and their descendants. And Cupid has added to the confusion: "As of 2017, 46 percent of Asian and 39 percent of Hispanic American newlyweds born in the United States married a spouse from a different category."
 Furthermore, those inconvenient Asian Americans keep spoiling the progressive narrative: A New York Times story reported that Google offers "a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man's world." A few lines later, Bernstein notes, the Times stated that a third of Google's American employees are Asian Americans.
 In 1977, to facilitate gathering racial and ethnic data, the government promulgated racial and ethnic categories, but stipulated that they should not be "determinants of eligibility for participation in any federal program." This was promptly ignored, and has been exacerbated by the American tradition of self-identification.
 Soon a scramble was on to win victim status, and to deny that status to groups which, if they clambered aboard the gravy train, would leave less gravy for the supposedly more deserving. Some classifications are racial (e.g., Black). Hispanic is cultural, and capacious enough to include South Americans of German descent and Ted Williams, whose mother was Mexican. The geographic classification "Asian" assumes that Vietnamese and Pakistanis are somehow akin.
 An 1895 New York advertisement seeking workers promised Whites up to $1.50 a day, "colored" workers up to $1.40 and Italians up to $1.25. During World War II, the government deemed Joe DiMaggio's father an enemy alien, seized his fishing boat and banned him from San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. But despite said indignities, Italian Americans' quest for affirmative action has been mostly unavailing.
 The racial/cultural/geographic/whatever spoils system is now so entrenched, it is too late for what would encourage a shared national identity: complete separation of race and state. Meaning, government abstention from racial and ethnic classifications.
 Today's ever-more-arbitrary system vindicates Bernstein's warning that such classifications are "self-fulfilling": They encourage people to think of themselves not as individuals but as members of grasping grievance groups. Young people are taught this unattractive orthodoxy at colleges that celebrate a "diversity" that is skin-deep.
 - - -
 George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

How racial preferences feed grasping grievance groups and grow ever more absurd

Trinity College 

Oxford University

Princeton University

Gerald Loeb Award, Commentary, 2021

National Association of Black Journalist Salute to Excellence Award, Commentary, 2021

The Washington Post Eugene Meyer Award, the paper's highest journalistic honor, 2020

Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, the organization’s highest honor, 2019

Hall of Fame for the Society of Professional Journalists Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter, 2019

Fellowship, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton Seminars for Business Journalist, awarded by National Press Foundation, 2018

Salute to Excellence Award for Community Service, National Association of Black Journalists, 2010

Best in Business, series of columns, Society of American Business Editors, 2008

What To Do With Your Money When Crisis Hits: A Survival Guide

The 21 Day Financial Fast: Your Path to Financial Peace and Fre

Your Money and Your Man: How You and Prince Charming Can Spend Well and Live Rich

Spend Well, Live Rich: How to Get What You Want with the Money You Have

MICHELLE SINGLETARY COLUMNAdvance for release Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2022, and thereafter(For SINGLETARY clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)For Print Use Only.By Michelle Singletary
 I have a year-end tax tip for you: Be prepared to prove money you received via PayPal or any other payment app - to split a dinner check or as a cash gift for your wedding - was not business income.
 Let me explain.
 As of 2022, all third-party payment processors in the United States, including Venmo and Cash App, must report payments of more than $600 a year received for goods and services.
 This isn't a new tax, just the IRS trying to catch people who are underreporting gig or self-employment income. Even if you hadn't previously received a Form 1099-K, you were still required to report any taxable income received through these platforms on your tax return.
 Before the reporting change, the app companies were required to submit a 1099-K only for transactions totaling more than 200 a calendar year with gross payments exceeding $20,000. Now a single transaction or multiple payments that exceed $600 can trigger a 1099-K. It's harder to avoid having the IRS find out your earnings when there's a digital trail.
 You can see how gig workers or any cash-driven business - including a teenager earning extra money babysitting or mowing lawns - getting paid via these apps could fly under the income radar. The reporting requirement was part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus package that also amended some sections of the Internal Revenue Code.
 But - and this is important - money received through these payment apps from friends and relatives as personal gifts or reimbursements for expenses such as splitting a restaurant meal is not taxable.
 If, however, there's a mistake and personal payments get misclassified, the IRS says to sort it out with the app company.
 "Those who receive a 1099-K reflecting income they didn't earn should call the issuer," the agency said in a year-end tax tip. "The IRS cannot correct it."
 And so begins what I predict could be a hot mess next year when tax season opens if folks incorrectly receive 1099-K forms and then have to prove to the IRS that the money was not, in fact, payment for goods and services.
 This is what a bride-to-be from Boston worried about after setting up an online account to receive gifts and cash for her wedding.
 She and her fiance used the website MyRegistry to list the gifts they wanted, such as a Crate &amp; Barrel dual citrus squeezer for $21.95. They also arranged on the site for family and friends to send cash gifts to help with their honeymoon expenses by linking to a PayPal account. (She asked not to be named, to protect their privacy.)
 However, once the total in cash gifts crossed that $600 reporting threshold, PayPal, which is processing the payments for MyRegistry, asked her for her Social Security number. She became worried that the $100 from a cousin and other cash gifts would be taxed.
 And thus started her journey to clarify whether her gifts were taxable.
 On sites like PayPal, you should be able to designate whether a payment is a personal or business transaction.
 Unsure about the notices she was getting, the Boston bride reached out to the customer service departments for both companies.
 "Our company is classifying all transactions as gifts with PayPal," said Nancy Lee, president of MyRegistry.
 Lee said the company had heard from several customers concerned that their gifts would be taxed.
 "These transactions are gifts," she said. "They are absolutely not taxable."
 Payment apps have been notifying customers about the new reporting requirement.
 "If a customer receives a 1099-K form, which needs to be corrected, they should contact our customer service, and we can work with them to investigate and, if verified, issue a corrected form," a PayPal spokesperson said in an email. "In this instance, the customer would not receive a 1099-K form."
 My advice: Keep good records. Go to irs.gov and read "Steps to Take Now to Get a Jump on Your Taxes." Scroll down to the explanation about the new reporting for payment platforms.
 Should you receive an incorrect 1099-K, contact the company immediately to protest. The 1099-K forms must be sent by Jan. 31.
 "If unsuccessful, report correctly on your return, including attaching an explanation," IRS spokesman Eric Smith said.
 My warning: You do not want to have to attach a statement that requires the IRS to manually review your return. There is still a backlog of tax returns at the IRS.
 As for the couple getting married, they stopped accepting cash payments for their wedding.
 "I do not have a tax person, but I do really want to make sure I do my taxes accurately," the bride said. "So I think I probably will be trying to get one to resolve this if I do get a 1099. But getting one will cost about as much as the gifts we received for our honeymoon."
 ---
 Call Michelle Singletary at 1-800-Ask-Post. Readers can also write to Michelle Singletary c/o The Washington Post, 1301 K St. NW, Washington, DC 20071. Her email address is michelle.singletary@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter (@SingletaryM) or Facebook (facebook.com/MichelleSingletary). Comments and questions are welcome, but because of the volume of mail, personal responses may not be possible. Please also note comments or questions may be used in a future column, with the writer's name, unless a specific request to do otherwise is indicated.

Here's what to do if a payment app reports your cash gifts to the IRS

University of Maryland

Johns Hopkins University

2004 2nd place in the National Headliner Awards

2006 3rd place in the National Headliners Awards presented by the Press Club of Atlantic City

2002 & 2003, the Dallas Observer named him Best Columnist at a Daily Newspaper

A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano (1993)

Contributer to Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul (2000), of the best-selling "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series.

RUBEN NAVARRETTE COLUMNFOR IMMEDIATE PRINT AND WEB RELEASE(For Navarrette clients)By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
 SAN DIEGO - Dear America, we good? You don't know me. Even though I'm your native son. 
 As a Mexican American in the Southwest - a gem of a region snatched from our neighbor more than 170 years ago - I never know what my country wants from me. 
 (BEG ITAL)Love me, hate me? Can't live with me, can't live without me? Put me to work, want me to leave?(END ITAL) 
 I'm also never sure whether fellow Americans consider me - and those like me - a blessing or a burden. 
 I hope many of them are now leaning toward the former, thanks to Club Q shooting hero Rich Fierro. 
 Note to fellow journalists: The name is not pronounced "Fee-row," as I heard from White reporters who understand Spanish only (BEG ITAL)un poquito(END ITAL). It's "Fee-EH-roh." It means "iron." 
 Apparently, that's what the 15-year veteran U.S. Army major is made of. When Fierro realized a man armed with multiple firearms, including an AR-style rifle, was spraying bullets inside a LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, his military training - "Go to the fire. Stop the action." - kicked in. 
 He moved to disarm the shooter, who was decked out in body armor, and yanked him to the ground. He yelled for help from Thomas James, a fellow patron. James kicked the shooter in the head, while Fierro punched him into submission. "I tried to finish him," Fierro said.
 We interrupt this tale of heroism for a bulletin of hate. Fierro is having to suffer idiocy and bigotry from conservatives on right-wing social media, because that's how the trolls roll. 
 For the close-minded, the most troubling part of the Nov. 19 attack on Club Q is not that five people were killed and at least 17 others were wounded. It's not that there are too many guns, that guns are easier to get than tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or that our gun laws are a joke because the ghouls in the gun lobby totally own GOP lawmakers.
 For the "deplorables" on the extreme right, the worst part of this story is that a no-nonsense Army veteran like Fierro - who did three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, receiving two Bronze Stars and a Combat Action Badge - was in a place like Club Q to begin with. 
 According to Vice News and researchers at Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit that tracks online extremism, Fierro's tormentors include far-right troll Jack Posobiec, who said on social media: "Are we just not supposed to talk about the US Army Major taking his family down to the local drag club for a night out?" One of Posobiec's followers chimed in: "Heroes don't take their kids to drag shows."
 Fierro was at the club with his daughter Kassy, her boyfriend, Raymond (who was fatally shot), and other friends to see one of Kassy's friends perform in a drag show and celebrate a birthday. 
 During the melee, Fierro told another clubgoer who ran by to kick the gunman. That patron stomped the attacker's face with a high heel. 
 Police credit Fierro and the others with saving lives. 
 Gun fanatics worship the idea of a "good guy with a gun." Well, sometimes a few good people without a gun can still save the day.
 As a Mexican American, I'm tempted to say that it means something extra that Fierro - who led the resistance - is Latino, and specifically Mexican American.
 It doesn't. It means (BEG ITAL)everything(END ITAL). 
 A cohort that represents nearly 1 in 5 Americans but is still maligned and misunderstood, Latinos are the great American paradox. We're the ultimate insiders who are constantly made to feel as if we're on the outs. We assimilate and serve and sacrifice in search of America's approval, and we can't even get a "gracias." We always have to show our worth, prove our value, pledge our loyalty. It's exhausting. 
 Plus, we're turned into piñatas by opportunistic and race-baiting politicians, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The Republican said nothing as Mexican workers built the Lone Star State over the past few decades. Now he declares an "invasion" on the Southern border. 
 Latinos needed a feel-good story, and we've been waiting for a hero we can be proud of. 
 Rich Fierro is the one. His bravery helps the nation see who we really are and what we bring to the party. The story of Latinos in the United States must be told - in full. In a bloodstained crime scene at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, an inspiring chapter was written.
 ---
 Navarrette's email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, "Ruben in the Center," is available through every podcast app.

In many ways, Club Q hero Rich Fierro embodies the spirit of U.S. Latinos

Cynthia gets sent to the principal for her question about Henry Hudson.

Barney & Clyde

Pearl tells Joe she'll solve the problem by building a bonfire out back.

Fort Knox

Lizzie laments her misadventures with mushy snap peas to Ann.

Reply All

Maybe Ann should close some windows while she's video chatting.

Reply All Lite

Joe proposes to warm up Jane and Wes by making them do push-ups.

Lizzie just hoped she was fun to hang out with; she didn't ask people.

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 SEARCHLIGHT, Nevada - From the highway, Spirit Mountain - a 5,642 foot-high peak - appears gray. But at times, it glows a majestic pink. For the Fort Mojave and 11 other tribes, these mystical rocks are the site from which their ancestors emerged.
 "There's a spiritual connection that makes us Mojave people," said Tim Williams, chair of the tribal council. "If it's not protected, our generation will not have done our job."
 Two decades ago, Congress preserved the mountain - called Avi Kwa Ame (ah-VEE-kwah-may) in Mojave - and 33,000 acres around it as wilderness. Now the Biden administration is readying a proclamation that could put roughly 450,000 acres - spanning almost the entire triangle at the bottom of the Nevada map - off limits to development under the 1906 Antiquities Act.
 President Biden will commit on Wednesday at the White House Tribal Nations Summit to protecting the area, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision was not yet public.
 The transformation of this 700-square-mile wedge between California and Arizona is likely to rank as the largest act of land conservation that Biden will undertake this term. The designation enjoys the support of tribes, local officials, environmental groups and the rural business community but has frustrated some renewable energy advocates, who warn it could undercut the nation's climate goals.
 Sitting between the Mojave National Preserve on the California side and Lake Mead National Recreation Area along the border of Nevada and Arizona, the monument will provide an expanse that will allow desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and dozens of other species to live and migrate uninterrupted.
 "This is the missing link connecting the Mojave Desert and the Colorado Plateau," said Neal Desai, a senior project manager for the National Parks Conservation Association who has been working for more than a dozen years to protect the area.
 Wind and solar companies, Desai said, will have to stay on the other side of the monument boundaries.
 When it comes to having a chance to protect this much land, he added, "This really doesn't happen very often. Not at this scale."
 
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 In mid-November, nearly 250 people gathered at the Aquarius casino resort in Laughlin, Nev., for a two-hour public hearing with officials from the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management to discuss the prospective monument. A little more than two months before, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland had visited the area and held a roundtable on the topic with Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.).
 Amid a standing-room-only crowd at the casino, only about half of the monument's backers got time to speak.
 "Today is special," Williams said. "We've established a map. It's been a collaboration of a lot of different people, a lot of organizations . . . This is something that you don't see every day, especially in this day and age, in this type of political environment, you don't see this type of collaboration. And it's here, and it's now."
 Tribes spread out along the Colorado River have adopted resolutions endorsing a monument, including 27 of 28 tribes in the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada and all 21 in the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona.
 Several sent representatives to Laughlin, offering their two-minute testimonies about how ancient sites in the area are still an active part of their lives. Artists, environmentalists, birdwatchers, dark night-sky preservationists, hunters and off-road-vehicle enthusiasts also showed up to voice support for the monument.
 Frank DeRosa, vice president for policy and public affairs for the solar energy firm Avantus, said he supported the creation of a monument, but asked BLM to consider "a modest request" for a small adjustment to the map - a "sliver," he called it, that "avoids all cultural and environmentally sensitive areas" so renewable energy companies can access transmission infrastructure from a long-decommissioned coal-fired plant in Laughlin.
 This expanse of Nevada offers some of the best prospects for clean energy development in the country. The canyons here produce tremendous wind, and the sun shines 292 days per year, usually without any cloud cover. The area also boasts dozens of mining claims for rare earth elements, now coveted by the clean tech sector.
 Four massive solar farms loom along U.S. 95 between Las Vegas and Searchlight. More than 100 turbines from the White Hills wind farm in Arizona are visible from some of the higher points within the proposed monument.
 The Avi Kwa Ame map, as it's been drawn, prevents similar projects from breaking ground. In previous negotiations between the town of Laughlin and Avantus - then called 8minute Solar Energy - the tribes agreed to exclude 23,000 acres from their proposal so a large solar project at the southern tip of Clark County could continue. But they would not make similar concessions for an area abutting California's Dead Mountains Wilderness, on the grounds that the area is sacred.
 Redrawing any portions of the plan now, Williams said, was not an option. "All the resolutions, all the agreements, were based on that map being presented as final."
 A week ago, according to an individual familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, the chief of staff to Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) met with an official from the White House Council on Environmental Quality to discuss the coming proclamation. Sisolak's aide raised concerns about whether hunters and had sufficient input into the process, this person said, and what impact the designation would have on renewable energy development.
 Biden officials assured the governor's office that hunters could continue to sustain artificial water sources, known as guzzlers, to attract bighorn sheep, according to the senior administration aide. The officials added that the state would be allowed to access and maintain existing infrastructure - including water resources and electric transmission lines - under any monument designation.
 Sisolak hasn't taken a public position on the monument. The Democrat-controlled Nevada legislature passed a joint resolution in 2021 supporting it, and the lieutenant governor, who is also a Democrat, has been championing the economic benefits of Avi Kwa Ame since the spring.
 
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 For decades, activists had been working to safeguard key tribal, cultural and ecological lands in this region in a piecemeal fashion. But that strategy changed in 2017, when President Donald Trump scaled back three national monuments and voiced his support for industrial development.
 "This was a big shift for the whole environmental community," Desai said. "Not only did the Trump administration have a different outlook on public lands use, but we were seeing site-specific threats."
 In 2018, Crescent Peak Renewables - the American subsidiary of a Swedish wind power company, Eolus Vind AV - sought to build 248 wind turbines on 32,500 acres of BLM land in southern Clark County. Trump administration officials rejected the proposal, dubbed the Kulning Wind Energy Project.
 Crescent Peak tried again last year, seeking access to just 9,300 acres to erect 68 turbines in a scaled-back version of the project. But BLM designated the application as "low priority," effectively killing it.
 "If we don't do something, we're going to lose this landscape," said Alan O'Neill, a retired former superintendent for the Lake Mead National Recreation Area who consults for the National Parks Conservation Association.
 The Fort Mojave tribe passed a resolution in September 2019 calling for protections of their ancestral lands extending far beyond Spirit Mountain, in a 381,300-acre national monument. By the time Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) introduced a bill supporting the plan this year, the proposed size had expanded to 443,671 acres.
 Monument supporters got a boost when Interior laid out a 10-year plan for locally led efforts to restore and conserve the country's lands, water and wildlife in May 2021. The "America the Beautiful" initiative promised to protect 30 percent of the country by 2030.
 
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 That's when Kim Garrison Means, an artist, curator and college art instructor who lives in Searchlight (population 348), began going door-to-door to talk to residents about the proposed monument and to find out what it would take for them to support it
 Garrison Means, who lives a mile away from her nearest neighbor, said she talked to nearly everyone in town, making the case that people who loved their rural way of life needed to support this measure.
 "It was still pretty covid-y at the time. Some people hadn't seen other humans for quite some time," Garrison Means said. "We did a lot of listening."
 She said she found strong support for protecting the land around Searchlight from industrial development. "You don't appreciate what you have until people want to make changes to it."
 While wind and solar companies promise good-paying construction jobs, the Avi Kwa Ame activists contend that having this national monument on their doorstep will welcome what Garrison Means calls "gentle economic growth" - businesses related to camping, hunting, birding, hiking, stargazing and other forms of outdoor recreation.
 "It was surprising how together our community was," she added. "It didn't matter what flag they were flying outside their house, people wanted to protect this land."
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 </story></html> nevada-repeat Biden to honor tribes with Nevada national monument, his biggest yet Climate Dan Michalski ellipsis

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 WASHINGTON - In July, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) spotted some of her Republican colleagues on the Senate floor and rushed over to tell them the good news. Forty-seven House Republicans had just voted in favor of protecting same-sex marriage rights for gay couples, following the Supreme Court's decision reversing Roe v Wade that raised fears the court could overturn same-sex marriage next.
 "We could do this," she recalled saying excitedly to Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Thom Tillis (N.C.), who Baldwin, the first openly gay senator, had worked with before in other discussions on protecting LGBTQ rights. Portman, who was the first in his caucus to endorse same-sex marriage back in 2013 and whose son is gay, said he initially felt less optimistic, aware of just how many of his colleagues had "strongly held views" on the issue.
 The discussion set off months of negotiations by a bipartisan group of five senators with their Republican colleagues, LGBTQ rights groups and religious organizations, which resulted in Tuesday's historic Senate vote to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and guarantee protections for same-sex married couples as well as interracial couples if the Supreme Court were to ever reverse its decisions protecting them. That every present Senate Democrat and 12 Republicans would vote to protect gay unions, after years in which opposing same-sex marriage was the consensus position in Washington, and later, a rallying cry for the GOP base, shows how quickly public opinion has changed on the issue, prompting many lawmakers to follow suit. The bill now heads to the House, where it's expected to pass and land on President Biden's desk.
 Baldwin supported legalizing same-sex marriage as a state lawmaker back in 1994, before Gallup was even asking the public if they supported that policy in polls. Support has risen from 27 percent in 1996 to 70 percent now in that poll, but national Republicans have been slower to embrace the change, often bringing up fears that religious institutions that don't support same-sex marriage will be discriminated against. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) argued in an op-ed that the bill would "inflict harm on those who, for reasons rooted in sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction, do not embrace same-sex marriage" and ultimately voted against the bill.
 "Some people think that the world has moved on - that's really not accurate as it relates to many parts of the country," Portman said. "It's still a matter of convincing people, persuading people, helping people understand what it all means."
 The surprising show of Republican support for the same-sex marriage bill in the House over the summer showed that what was initially seen as a way for Democrats to force Republicans to take a vote that could alienate some of their constituents during an election year could actually lead to real legislation. The Supreme Court's unpopular Dobbs decision had changed the political atmosphere. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas's comment in his Dobbs concurrence that the court "should reconsider" its opinion protecting gay marriage set off a panic among some same-sex couples that their marriages could be invalidated in the future.
 But to convince at least 10 Republicans to back the measure, Baldwin knew she had to overcome skepticism from many Republicans that Democrats just wanted to put them on the spot on an issue that public opinion had recently deserted them on, as well as fierce opposition from social conservative groups and some religious institutions.
 This account of the months-long effort to pass the legislation is the result of interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, staffers and advocates involved in the bill.
 "I think there was a short period of time where there was a belief that this was being pushed for political reasons," Baldwin said. "My Republican colleagues would say to me, 'Nobody thinks you're pushing this for political reasons. They think others are, like the Democratic Party. But nobody is questioning your motives.' I think that's helpful. I mean, I really am earnest about this."
 The senators, including Baldwin, Tillis, Portman, Collins, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), divided up their Republican colleagues and began to contact them and gather their concerns. Tillis, the former speaker of the North Carolina House, is an experienced vote-counter, while Collins brought a tireless energy to the job, Portman said.
 Baldwin was immediately struck by how many more senators appeared open to the legislation after the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell decision, given how many more of them had openly gay people in their lives.
 "I have so many colleagues who have friends, relatives, staff members who are gay and married," she said. "So there are a lot more people based on those relationships who want to get to yes. And again, those were really moving conversations."
 But Republicans had many concerns, and each one seemed different. The first wave of worry surrounded whether the legislation might be interpreted to mean the federal government recognizes polygamy, so the group quickly agreed to clarify that it didn't. Others wanted to know whether the bill would affect adoption agencies, or religiously affiliated colleges and universities. And many wanted the legislation to be crystal clear that religious institutions that did not perform or support same-sex marriages would not be punished under the law.
 The opposition among some Republicans led to some awkward moments, as many argued that they did not believe the Supreme Court would ever overturn Obergefell and that the legislation was unnecessary. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called the bill a "stupid waste of time" to a reporter in July before walking into an elevator and finding himself squished next to Baldwin. She began making her case for why the bill was necessary in the elevator and continued trying to whip his vote for months, attempting to convince him that the Obergefell decision really was under threat, she said. Rubio voted no on the measure on Tuesday.
 By the end of the summer, the group had five Republicans who publicly said they'd support the legislation, and about five more who privately said they would support it. They wanted a couple of more to come along so that no one had to be the "deciding vote" to reach the 60 total votes necessary to move the bill forward, and so that there was wiggle room if anyone got cold feet. One of the original five Republican senators who said publicly they'd back the bill, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), later rescinded his support, saying its religious liberty protections did not go far enough.
 Baldwin ran point on the LGBT advocacy groups, and Collins dealt with the coalition of religious groups while the senators worked to amend the bill to explicitly state that the legislation did not infringe on religious liberty. Sinema, who grew up Mormon and is close with key swing vote and Mormon Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), was the chief negotiator with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to Collins, and stressed the importance of bringing the "elders" on board the process.
 "My goal when working to find bipartisan consensus is to listen first and foremost to what someone needs and hear what that person needs and then I try to figure out - 'Is this something I can do? Can I give this person whatever they need?' " said Sinema, who is the first openly bisexual member of the Senate. "Whether it's specific language or answering questions."
 But with the midterm elections fast approaching, many Republicans who wanted to back the bill feared taking a potentially controversial vote at a tricky time.
 A key turning point for the effort came in mid-September, when the group asked Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a meeting in his office to delay the vote until after the elections, when they believed they'd have enough Republican votes to pass it. Collins said she was "surprised" and pleased when Schumer, who's known as a ferocious campaigner and could have been tempted to use the issue politically, agreed. But Baldwin wasn't.
 "It's personal for Chuck Schumer, too," Baldwin said, referring to Schumer's daughter, who is in a same-sex marriage. "It's a family member, and he would not play politics with this. I've known that all along. But when you're the leader of a party [as Schumer is], I'm not sure necessarily other people know that, too."
 The decision to delay prompted blowback from some Democrats who wanted to exert maximum pressure on Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.
 "Many questioned if it was the right thing to do," Schumer said in an emotional floor speech on Tuesday, in which he noted his first call after the bill passed would be to his daughter. "Many on my side of the aisle felt, 'Put everyone on record right now.' "
 Over the weeks-long recess during the election, the key members of the negotiating group continued to stay in touch and contact their colleagues to try to convince them to back the bill. They would tag-team calls to members on the fence, backing up each other's work.
 "Thom Tillis throughout the recess kept calling me and said, 'I talked to fill-in-the-blank today. Can you give a call too?' " Collins said. "We tried to reinforce each other."
 Baldwin worried as Election Day neared that if Democrats lost control of the Senate, the calendar would be filled with judicial nominations and must-pass legislation in the final days before the new Congress, crowding out the bill. "My biggest fear was we would not have the time to consider this," she said.
 After Democrats flipped a Republican-held open seat in Pennsylvania and defended their incumbents in key swing states, those fears eased.
 But the group still needed to secure the support of at least 10 - and ideally more - senators before the first procedural vote to move forward on the legislation in November. In a Senate split 50-50 between both parties, 60 votes would mean Democrats could overcome any threat of a filibuster to kill the bill.
 "We've been over our list over and over again and had Zoom meetings and in-person meetings but as I kept saying to everybody, 'You never know till the roll is called,' " Collins said. "I've learned the hard way you never just get 10 because inevitably it seems somebody you thought you had will end up voting the other way."
 A key moment came when the Mormon Church released a statement praising the Respect for Marriage Act's approach on religious protections. Romney quickly announced his support.
 As the group prepared for a 3:30 p.m. procedural vote in mid-November, they felt increasingly confident about having the 10 Republicans they needed to break the filibuster.
 Retiring Sens. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who've signed on frequently to past bipartisan compromises, backed the bill. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), also bipartisan-minded senators, threw their support behind it as well. Sens. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.), fresh off his reelection, and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who are both young for the Senate at 50 and 52 years old, also decided to vote for it. Along with Romney, Portman, Tillis and Collins, they would have had their 10.
 But the group also gained support from two more Republicans who were more surprising allies to the effort. Sen. Dan Sullivan (Alaska), who supported altering the Alaska constitution to ban same-sex marriage less than a decade ago, voted to advance the bill. And Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (Wyo.), who opposed same-sex marriage and was given a zero percent rating by the Human Rights Campaign gay rights group during her time in the House, joined the group of Republicans after she asked for an 11th-hour wording change to the bill's religious liberty section that nearly delayed the vote as senators frantically cleared the new language with the coalition of groups supporting the bill.
 Lummis faced pressure back home to vote no and explained her vote several times on Tuesday on the Senate floor.
 "My days since the first cloture vote for the Respect for Marriage Act as amended have involved a painful exercise in accepting admonishment and fairly brutal self-soul-searching, entirely avoidable - I might add - had I simply chosen to vote no," she said.
 The Wyoming Republican Party criticized the conservative's vote to let the bill go forward, and she also faced pressure from a conservative group of state legislators and a letter signed by more than 45 Wyoming pastors asking her to "reverse course" and vote no.
 "These are turbulent times for our nation," Lummis said, adding that she hoped her vote would make the country less divided and more tolerant on Tuesday. "For the sake of our nation today and its survival, we do well by taking this step."
 Three other Republican senators who expressed interest in supporting the bill ultimately backed off after facing political pressure or deciding the final bill did not do enough to protect religious liberty, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.
 On Tuesday evening, the members of the group of five were in a celebratory mood. Sinema shook Young's hand while Tillis slapped his shoulders, and Sinema later gave Lummis a hug.
 Baldwin, who said earlier on Tuesday that she would be "nervous" until the vote closed, fielded a hug from Schumer, a fist bump from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and a high five from Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). When the 12 Republicans again all voted yes, a look of relief passed over her face.
 Portman, who is retiring and said it was "impossible" for him to imagine such a bill passing the Senate just 10 years ago, called his son, who is in a same-sex marriage, to tell him the news. Portman said his son, who never "pressures" him to vote on anything, appreciated "the significance of it not just for him but for the country and other couples."
 "It was an important moment for our family as well," he added.
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 </story></html> marriage-vote How a bipartisan group of senators got same-sex marriage protections passed Politics Liz Goodwin ellipsis

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 On their final push to and back from the Pacific Ocean, early 19th century explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark forever changed the Pacific Northwest and its inhabitants. Retracing their steps today offers a vivid contrast to the harsh conditions they encountered.
 Contemporary travelers can comfortably immerse themselves in three captivating Northwest towns along the route taken by Lewis and Clark's party, known as the Corps of Discovery. Oregon's Hood River and Astoria and Washington's Walla Walla - all within striking distance of Portland - have evolved in recent decades from resource-based economies to tourist draws with vibrant, historic downtowns.
 Each bears its own distinct character and relative advantages: Hood River is home to adrenaline-fueled adventurers swigging beer and cider, Astoria plays the colorful madam with a rich history, and Walla Walla has wine, wonderful food and nearby spaces devoted to Native American heritage. At the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute about an hour southwest in Pendleton, Ore., you can trace the tribal genocide hastened by the Corps' passage, and ultimately celebrate recent years of Native American resurgence.
 Pick one, two or all three of these towns, with an eye on the season. Hood River and Astoria are glorious in summer and fall, or if spring is mild. Walla Walla is ideal in spring and fall, but hot in summer. Hood River offers skiing and other snowy adventures on nearby Mount Hood in the cold months, but lend an ear to Clark before braving an Astoria winter.
 " . . . rained all the last night we are all wet . . . the wind blew with Such violence that I expected every moment to See trees taken up by the roots . . . O! how disagreeable is our Situation," he wrote in his journal on Nov. 28, 1805.
 As Oregon residents, my wife, Mica, and I don't allow a little rain to dampen our travel plans. We watch the weather and look forward to being behind the wheel as the magnificent Columbia River Gorge fills the windshield.
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 Hood River
 From Portland, it's just over an hour's drive east to Hood River, past some glorious scenery. Plan a stop at Multnomah Falls, detour over and back on the aptly named Bridge of the Gods, and break for lunch in Cascade Locks at Brigham Fish Market, where manager Terrie Brigham Price has landed much of the catch.
 "I've been fishing up and down this river since I was little," says Price, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
 The river represented a formidable danger here when Lewis and Clark's party first passed through in their canoes in late 1805. In "Undaunted Courage," author Stephen E. Ambrose describes how Native Americans "gathered by the hundreds along the banks to watch the white men drown themselves . . ."
 They survived the portage, however. Today, three locks and four dams have erased those rapids. The river is now a playground, with kiteboarders and windsurfers racing around, propelled by the breeze.
 Like the fast lane? Paddle the White Salmon River's middle section with Wet Planet Whitewater, where guide Alex Taylor promised we would get plenty wet while running rapids such as Top Drop and Corkscrew. He was right.
 Or pedal an electric-assist bike along the scenic Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail and beyond to Mosier with Sol Rides.
 Later, unwind those sore muscles with a soak at the Society Hotel in Bingen, which opened in 2019. The rooms are utilitarian, but the complimentary soaking pools and sauna will recharge spent batteries.
 If the slow lane is more your speed, point the wheel toward the Hood River Fruit Loop, where the scent of fresh-picked lavender from Hood River Lavender Farms will fill the car, then stop for a bite and the ciders at the Gorge White House. End the day with the Grateful Feast Tasting Experience (beer, cider, wine, pizza and more) and Mount Hood views at Grateful Vineyard.
 Or discover just how well craft beer combines with great food at two of Oregon's best breweries. PFriem Family Brewers has gained a national reputation for its incredible array of Belgian-influenced artisanal beers. Down the street, innovative brewmaster Dan Peterson and wife Jenn opened Ferment Brewing Company in 2018 and are making their mark with unique offerings like the Sentinel, a saison brewed from wild yeast and Douglas fir tips.
 Or walk past the downtown brick storefronts, stopping at the bookstore or the toy store. Grab a cone at Mike's Ice Cream or a table on the deck at 3 Rivers Grill and dig into the seafood and sausage pasta, taking in the river view.
 The historic Hood River Hotel, which opened in the heart of downtown over a century ago, has been lovingly restored. Start the day downstairs over the delightful Scandinavian breakfast dishes from Broder Ost.
 The Columbia Gorge Discovery Center &amp; Museum, nearby in the Dalles, includes displays on the Corps of Discovery.
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 Astoria
 Founded as a fur-trading post a few years after the Corps' visit, Astoria later became a 20th century salmon-packing boomtown before the fishing dwindled. Those passages are captured in two worthwhile local museums: the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and the Clatsop County Historical Society's Heritage Museum.
 The city is about a two-hour drive northwest of Portland, where the river meets the Pacific. The sense of history here is palpable, whether seen on the Astoria Column's murals or in displays at the Hanthorn Cannery Museum, commemorating a once-bustling fish cannery since converted to shops and restaurants.
 History comes alive at nearby Fort Clatsop, a reconstruction of the site where Lewis and Clark's party wintered in 1805-06. Here, rangers dress in period clothing daily from late June to Labor Day and over Christmas week, describing the Corps' daily routine and their desperate winter.
 "Their clothes were literally rotting off their bodies," said Zachary Stocks, an interpretive park ranger.
 You can hike the 6.5-mile (one way) Fort to Sea trail, or circle the 2.4-mile trail around Coffenbury Lake a short drive away at Fort Stevens State Park, which also has extensive bike trails.
 Nothing here seems to move at a hurried pace.
 From your room at the luxuriously appointed Cannery Pier Hotel &amp; Spa, newly renovated in 2022, watch giant car-carrying ships crawl past, destined for Portland.
 You can borrow a hotel bike and pedal along the waterfront, or stroll the downtown shops, including Finn Ware, a nod to the region's longtime Nordic connections. Drive past the colorful hillside homes, park your car, trudge up the Astoria Column's steps and launch a balsa-wood glider into the wind.
 Surprise yourself with delicate fried mushrooms or sautéed shishito peppers from Busu, a Japanese-influenced takeout hole in the wall, linger over seafood at the Silver Salmon Grille, or dig into a Caprese panini at Gaetano's Market &amp; Deli. You can sit inside or out and savor a craft beer at the Astoria Brewing Company Taproom or the Fort George Brewery and Public House.
 Among the relative newcomers for drinks stand Blaylock's Whiskey Bar, with its tall library of spirits just a ladder away, and Galactix, a taphouse/arcade with vintage games in a futuristic Star Wars setting.
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 Walla Walla
 In fall, the rolling hills surrounding Walla Walla, about four hours east of Portland, shimmer with ankle-high harvested wheat. The yellow-gold is interspersed by green vineyards heavy with grapes awaiting harvest and their future home inside a wine bottle.
 When Joan Monteillet was growing up here in the 1960s, she said, "it was just a Podunk town surrounded by wheat farms."
 That assessment arrived while we sampled a selection of creamy, subtle sheep and goat's milk cheeses that she and her husband, Pierre-Louis Monteillet, have perfected over the past 25 years at Monteillet Fromagerie.
 The area's food scene has evolved during that span to keep pace with Walla Walla's burgeoning reputation as a wine-lover's destination. More than 120 wineries call the Walla Walla Valley home today, more than double the total in the early 2000s.
 The downtown core is thriving, with restaurants, shops and more than 30 wine-tasting rooms. One of the very few that also houses a production winery is the gorgeous Seven Hills Winery, set in a century-old wood mill. As we sampled a series of robust reds - merlot, cabernet sauvignon, a Bordeaux blend and petit verdot - winemaker Bobby Richards passed through, his mind on imminent harvest scheduling.
 "We're on the high dive, about to take the plunge," he said.
 Also in town, and mixing art with wine, is Foundry Vineyards, with a big patio and gallery space. The Walla Walla Valley is divided into six winemaking districts that even reach slightly into Oregon; options are many, and we enjoyed Reininger, L'Ecole No 41 and Pepper Bridge Winery.
 Dining options are varied, from the hearty, homestyle breakfasts at the Maple Counter Café to handmade pasta at Passatempo Taverna to the Southern flair (think summer corn and grilled pork collar) of Hattaway's on Alder.
 To be simply transported by a meal, stop for the heavenly tacos (short rib, brisket, marinated pork and more) at AK's Mercado. Chef/owner Andrae Bopp's attention to detail includes importing corn from southern Mexico and grinding it on-site for tortillas.
 A short drive from town, the Inn at Abeja offers a peaceful respite on a 38-acre farmstead, with luxurious surroundings (imagine Norman Rockwell's vision of a turn-of-the-century farm), superb dining and the opportunity to sip a 2014 cabernet sauvignon on your veranda.
 Vestiges of Lewis and Clark's journey remain nearby. At the Fort Walla Walla Museum, a diorama demonstrates the Corps' exchanging of gifts with a local Native American chief. About 45 minutes northeast of the city, the Patit Creek Campsite's metal silhouette sculptures represent party members, a lingering reminder of their passing.
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 Pulaski is a writer based in Portland, Ore.
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 </story></html> travel-pnw Add these 3 scenic cities to your Pacific Northwest itinerary Alex Pulaski By The Way ellipsis

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 In Elena Karpova's household, the rumbling sound of a clothes dryer has become an unfamiliar noise.
 "I use the dryer maybe twice, three times a year, just when it's an emergency," says Karpova, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who studies textile and apparel sustainability.
 Instead, Karpova prefers to air dry her clothes. Dryers, she says, are "energy gobblers" and when combined with machine washing too often can wear out clothes much more quickly, in addition to having huge environmental and climate impacts.
 Washing "can be the most significant thing that you do" to your clothes, says Mark Sumner, a lecturer focusing on sustainability within the textile, clothing and fashion industry at the University of Leeds' School of Design. Laundering a garment could cause it to shrink, become misshapen, fade or pill (when small balls of fuzz form on the surface of clothes).
 "It can be really quite harmful to the clothes itself," shortening the life of the garment and leading to purchases of new clothing, Sumner says. "And of course, let's not forget about energy and water and detergents used in the washing process," which can also release microfibers into waterways and exacerbate the problem of microplastic pollution. "It's a double whammy."
 Making simple changes to your laundry routine, he and other experts say, can go a long way in helping you reduce emissions, save money and take better care of your clothes.
 - Understand the impact
 While many people focus on manufacturing when calculating their clothes' environmental impact, machine washing and drying clothes can often be a major source of pollution and emissions.
 In fact, the impacts of laundry can be "on the same order of magnitude" as the production phase of clothing, says Roland Geyer, a life cycle assessment expert and professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
 "People are washing their clothes more frequently than they ever did before," Sumner says. According to Energy Star, the average American family does 300 loads of laundry each year.
 A standard washing machine uses around 20 gallons of water for each load and electric dryers, on average, can use anywhere from 1,800 to 5,000 watts of energy, or about 1.8 to 5 kilowatt hours of electricity per cycle, according to Energy Star.
 Choosing more efficient washers and dryers can make a difference for the planet and your wallet. Energy Star certified washing machines generally use about 25 percent less energy and 33 percent less water than regular models. Meanwhile, certified dryers are 20 percent more efficient compared to standard dryers.
 A household that uses washers and dryers certified by Energy Star could reduce their carbon footprint by more than 400 pounds of CO2 annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is equal to planting a quarter acre of trees.
 If every American household swapped out their appliances for more efficient models, the impacts would be even greater. The combined cost savings would swell above $4.8 billion each year and more than 41 billion pounds of annual greenhouse gas emissions would be prevented from entering the atmosphere, the EPA estimates. That's equivalent to the emissions from nearly 4 million cars.
 But even if you have high-efficiency machines, experts say it's still important to cut down on the loads of laundry you're doing.
 "Every time we put that garment in the washing machine, part of it is gone down the drain," says Cosette Joyner Martinez, an associate professor in the department of design, housing and merchandising at Oklahoma State University. "Then we lose another piece of it in the dryer in the lint trap, so we're disintegrating our garments."
 - Know what needs washing and when
 Aside from noticeable odors or visible stains, when your clothes need to be laundered largely depends on how the garments are worn and the type of material. Clothes that you exercise and sweat in, for instance, should be washed more frequently than the outfit you wear to work a desk job.
 "Lots of people just have a T-shirt worn once and then they put in the laundry basket without thinking whether it's clean or not," Karpova says. "People don't think about, 'Is it clean? Does it need to be laundered?' It's just you go through the motions."
 What your clothes are made out of also determines how long you can go between washes, experts say.
 Natural fibers like wool or cotton typically need to be washed less than synthetic materials, such as polyester. While polyester works well for activewear because of its moisture wicking properties, the material is "oleophilic," or oil-loving, attracting oil from skin that can contribute to body odor. To make matters worse, research has shown that sweaty-smelling compounds can cling to polyester fibers and not wash out completely, leading to a buildup of odors over time.
 The chemical structure and "fiber morphology" of natural fabrics are very different from synthetics, says Preeti Arya, an assistant professor of textile development and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Wool, for example, is naturally odor resistant. The fibers can absorb large amounts of moisture which helps to keep skin drier, and prevent the sweat and bacteria that cause body odor from collecting. Wool fibers also have another unique property: The ability to trap odor molecules and only release them when laundered.
 Odorous compounds, perspiration and oil are locked away in the center of wool fibers, Arya says. Even if you've been sweating, you likely won't see sweat stains or smell.
 On the other hand, she says, if you wear polyester for a few hours, "You have to wash it because polyester loves our body oils and odors."
 - How you wash matters
 Water heating consumes about 90 percent of the energy it takes to operate a washing machine, according to Energy Star. Changing your washer's temperature setting from hot to warm can cut energy use in half. Washing with cold water can reduce your energy footprint even more. By washing four out of five loads of laundry in cold water, you could cut 864 pounds of CO2 emissions in a year, an amount equivalent to planting 0.37 acres of U.S. forest, according to the American Cleaning Institute.
 Experts encourage using the cold cycle as much as possible. "The temperature that we're washing with is often way too warm," Joyner Martinez says, adding that hot water settings are only really necessary for sanitizing. Modern laundry detergents, even those that aren't marked for cold-water use, are typically formulated to clean just as well at lower temperatures. While single-dose detergent pods have become increasingly popular, a debate is raging over whether they may contribute to the growing plastic pollution problem that threatens human health and the environment.
 Keep in mind that washers use about the same amount of energy regardless of the size of the load, so try to only run your machine when it's full. And consider using higher spin settings if your washing machine has the option, which can reduce drying time.
 Some experts also caution against dry cleaning too often. In addition to the energy needed to power dry cleaners, traditional operations often use polluting chemicals that can harm human health and the environment. Some research also indicates that the chemicals can stay on dry cleaned clothes.
 In January, the Environmental Protection Agency added 1-bromopropane, a powerful dry-cleaning solvent and airborne pollutant that has been linked to cancer and neurological damage, to its list of hazardous air pollutants - a designation that allows the agency to limit its emissions.
 Certain clothes, such as those with heavy beading or embellishment, require dry cleaning. But some of the delicate materials that you might send to the cleaners such as silk or wool can be gently washed by hand, says Katrina Caspelich, who directs marketing and partnerships for Remake, a global nonprofit organization advocating for fair pay and climate justice in the clothing industry. Test a small section of your garment to make sure it's suitable for hand-washing - any color bleeding, warping or shrinkage is a bad sign - and use cold water and mild soap.
 If you do need to dry clean something, you can ask for more environmentally friendly cleaning options, Caspelich adds. Some cleaners offer professional wet cleaning, where clothes are laundered in computer-controlled washers and dryers that gently clean. Another option is liquid carbon dioxide cleaning, which uses pressurized CO2 in combination with other cleaning agents.
 You also don't always need water and energy guzzling machines and detergent to keep your clothes fresh. "Really what people are trying to do when they launder is to make [their clothes] smell good," Joyner Martinez says.
 If possible, Sumner recommends hanging clothes outside in the sun where they can be exposed to UV rays. Steam is another way to de-wrinkle and help refresh your garments. Hang up your clothes in the bathroom while you're showering or use an at-home steamer.
 - Air dry more
 Whenever possible, choose to air dry your clothes, experts say. "If you're air drying, that's saving the most energy," says Joe Vukovich, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on energy efficiency.
 If you are using a dryer, make sure to regularly clean the lint screen, dryer duct and moisture sensors to maintain efficiency. Instead of using timed drying, choose the automatic cycle, which uses moisture sensors to determine when your clothes are dry and reduces the chance of running the machine for longer than needed. You can also dry loads of laundry back-to-back and make use of residual heat.
 Newer dryer models also often use less energy to dry typical loads on low heat than on high heat, even though it may take longer to dry clothes, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
 But if you want to increase your clothes' life span, experts recommend avoiding the dryer. Air drying clothes that need to be washed more frequently, such as workout gear, can make a "huge difference," Joyner Martinez says. "The life extension that we get in the product is very dramatic."
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 </story></html> climate-laundry Why you should almost always wash your clothes on cold Climate Solutions Allyson Chiu ellipsis

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 ORIKHIV, Ukraine - It was the only time of day when the Russians weren't shelling, so the people of Orikhiv rushed toward city hall, looking for the woman in charge.
 They found the acting mayor, Svitlana Mandrych, where she always is, in the building's basement, running what is left of her town from a cramped bunker.
 Much like the rest of Orikhiv, the city hall's battered walls looked as if they were falling apart.
 Its second floor was blown out; the windows and doors were all shattered or badly damaged. The building has been hit by artillery fire so incessantly that 51-year-old Mandrych was forced to move her office to a cold, concrete-walled room underground, lit by a single lightbulb.
 Residents packed the passageway outside Mandrych's bunker-office, pleading with her for help: boards to cover up their bombed-out windows, money to repair their roofs, firewood to heat their homes, water to cook their food.
 Misery was setting in here in Orikhiv, now a skeleton of a town not quite three miles from the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Russian President Vladimir Putin claims to have annexed. Mandrych was one of the only people left who could try to keep the town, once home to 20,000 people, from collapse.
 A former kindergarten teacher turned deputy mayor, Mandrych took over leadership of the town when the mayor moved to the city of Zaporizhzhia a few months ago along with much of the city council. She spends her days underground fielding nonstop calls with the help of two remaining council members and the company of a dog named Bullet.
 "Everybody has a different fear tolerance," she said. "I cannot leave the people of Orikhiv behind."
 Mandrych embodies a remarkable resilience that is playing out in towns and cities across Ukraine, as ordinary people work in extraordinary conditions to survive a full-blown war that a year ago seemed almost unimaginable in 21st century Europe. They struggle to subsist, unsure what each day will bring.
 After months of war, Orikhiv is on the cusp of becoming unlivable for the 2,000 residents left.
 Virtually all of the town's 56 apartment complexes are damaged or destroyed, and 70 percent of homes are damaged, Mandrych said. Most of the day, its streets are practically empty; residents spend most hours underground or near a bunker, emerging only to seek humanitarian aid in the mornings, before 11 a.m., when the shelling usually subsides.
 There is no power, water, or gas in town. There's no longer a hospital or ambulance in the town. Residents must rely on the military to rush them to a field hospital when missiles - or illness - strike.
 And there's no end in sight to the constant shelling by Russian forces surrounding the area. Last week, missiles hit a school in town, where 10 people were packing bags of produce to give to residents. One person died, and another was critically injured.
 Some Ukrainians hope their military will launch its next big offensive here, pushing south through the Zaporizhzhia region. But after the liberation of Kherson city, analysts doubt Ukrainian forces can pull it off soon. The Russians have dug into more fortified defenses, and muddy terrain is slowing all movement.
 "We are waiting for this offensive to happen," Mandrych said. "We wish it could happen sooner."
 Mandrych and her small team have managed to give out 600 wood-burning heating units to residents and have ordered 350 more, but that will still be short of the nearly 1,300 they estimate are needed to heat all remaining households. She worries people will fall through the cracks, especially those in remote areas.
 "I fear forgetting about them and not getting them enough attention," she said. With the cold winter ahead, she said: "People could die."
 On Monday morning, Mandrych was being asked to do many things at once: A woman came to her with a list of residents requesting food. Another showed her a list of addresses of people needing blankets. A man with a cigarette asked her how to deliver financial stipends to residents.
 There are so few people left to serve the town that Mandrych has had to devise creative solutions. A former city hall custodian is now a secretary. A city-employed driver delivers humanitarian aid. The car owned by the mayor's office was bombed - what's left of it is still parked outside - so the driver uses her personal vehicle.
 Daily life depends on leadership, and so much of the work falls on Mandrych. She sleeps only three to four hours a night. Whenever she gets to go home to her husband and adult son, they live in a basement.
 "It's a good thing my mother taught me to be tough," she said. "We will relax after we win the war."
 Raised by a widow, Mandrych has spent her whole life in Orikhiv, studying in the town's now-destroyed school and working for the government since she was 17.
 The Ukrainian soldiers based nearby gave her the call sign "Angel." At one point, early in the war, she was helping them build concrete barriers on Orikhiv's outskirts when shelling began. A soldier shouted: "Angel, get down!" They asked later whether she was afraid. She said she was not.
 The shelling is getting louder and more frequent, residents say. One man waiting in line in the city hall bunker to report damage to his home was Oleksii Belik, 67, a mustached retired engineer who returned alone to Orikhiv after evacuating with his wife earlier in the war.
 Belik said he came back to protect his belongings. He doesn't have a proper bomb shelter; his basement ceiling is about an inch thick. He said he brought a couch down there to sleep on, but it grew moldy after two days. So he stays upstairs, where half the windows are bombed out and the city-provided heating unit warms just one room.
 There's no electricity to watch the news, but Belik said he sometimes manages to listen to the radio. He heard about Kherson city's liberation, he said, giving him hope for his own region.
 "We can only live with hope," he said. "It keeps us alive and sane."
 In line in front of Belik was Eleonora Syzonenko, 44, who wanted help fixing the windows, door and roof of her home. Doing so required extensive paperwork, and she was frustrated by the chaotic process in the cramped, understaffed basement hallway.
 So, like many other people at the city hall on Monday, she went looking for the acting mayor.
 "We don't have a representative from our neighborhood, we don't get information about the aid and when it will be delivered," she told Mandrych. "Right now, I want to get some more water, but because there is no one responsible for my neighborhood, I don't know what to do."
 "That's simple: just make a list of people, and go get the water," Mandrych replied, explaining the process.
 The woman thanked her. On her way out, she told a reporter: "These people are very good. They help us with everything. It's just too many people here at the same time."
 By the time she got back in line to continue her request, the crowd had thinned. Residents were returning home as their unofficial 11 a.m. cutoff for life above ground approached.
 The acting mayor listened closely to the skies, hoping for a quiet afternoon.
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 </story></html> ukraine-mayor From a bunker, an acting mayor keeps her front-line Ukraine town alive Europe Samantha Schmidt Serhii Korolchuk ellipsis

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 Former surgeon general Jerome Adams and his wife, Lacey, often find themselves talking about what they have named the "Trump Effect."
 It followed them from Washington to their home in the Indianapolis suburbs. They felt it when he was exploring jobs in academia, where he would receive polite rejections from university officials who worried that someone who served in the administration of the former president would be badly received by their left-leaning student bodies. They felt it when corporations decided he was too tainted to employ.
 Now, two years after Adams left office as only the 20th surgeon general in U.S. history, the couple feel it as acutely as ever. As Donald Trump announced this month that he will run for president again, they had hoped it all would have faded away by now.
 They would rather talk about public health, in a very personal way. This summer, Lacey Adams was diagnosed with a third recurrence of melanoma. Both Adamses have been sharing her experiences on social media and in public appearances, hoping to spread a message about skin-cancer prevention. But the stigma of his association with Trump, even though neither of them is a supporter of his political campaign, remains.
 Trump is "a force that really does take the air out of the room," Adams, 48, said. "The Trump hangover is still impacting me in significant ways." He said the 2024 Trump campaign "will make things more difficult for me."
 The former surgeon general's predicament underscores one of the givens of today's political environment: Association with Trump becomes a permanent tarnish, a kind of reverse Midas touch. Whether indicted or shunned or marginalized, a cavalcade of former Trump World figures have foundered in the aftermath of one of the more chaotic presidencies in modern American history.
 Lacey saw it coming. She said she "hated Trump" and did not want her husband to leave his comfortable life in Indiana, where he practiced anesthesiology and served as state health commissioner under then-Indiana governor Mike Pence, who was Trump's vice president when Jerome became surgeon general. Lacey, 46, worried about a lasting "stigma" but her husband talked her into supporting their move by saying he thought he could make a bigger difference inside the administration than outside it, especially when it came to his efforts to combat opioid addiction.
 Now Jerome bristles at his forever label as "Trump's surgeon general," an image sealed by his highly public role during the much-criticized early White House response to the coronavirus pandemic. Other surgeons general, he feels, have been less intensely identified with the president who appointed them, permitting them to glide into a life of prestigious and sometimes lucrative opportunities, unencumbered by partisan politics.
 Not him. "It was a lot harder than he thought to find a landing spot because of the Trump Effect," Lacey said. For eight months after leaving office, Jerome could not find a job. The couple started to worry about how they would support their three children, especially since Lacey does not work outside the home.
 "People still are afraid to touch anything that is associated with Trump," Jerome said. Though he was quick to add in the interview that he is "not complaining." He added, "It is context."
 Finally, in September 2021, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, a former Indiana governor and Republican stalwart, hired Adams as the first executive director of health equity initiatives at the school.
 Even as Adams was seeking to define the next chapter of his life, he was engaged in an almost constant battle on social media. His frequent tweets about everything from his personal life to public health issues have invariably drawn attacks from both the right and the left. Rather than ignore his critics, he has often punched back, engaging in Twitter spats that stretch for days.
 He has battled on social media over his recommendation that people continue to wear masks in crowded indoor settings, his criticism of President Biden's declaration of an end to the pandemic and about his advocacy for coronavirus vaccinations for children and for adults to get booster shots. He takes heat from the left for a pro-life stance on abortion and from the right for his opposition to laws that dictate what a doctor can say to a patient about abortion.
 "I get mad at him for being addicted to Twitter," Lacey said. "People hated him because he was part of Trump's administration. Now the Trump people hate him."
 Carrie Benton, an Ohio medical lab scientist who has tangled with Jerome Adams on social media, is critical of what she considers "blanket statements" he is now making about topics such as masking. But she also feels he should still be held accountable for errors committed by the Trump administration early in the pandemic.
 The pushback has done little to dissuade Adams. He invites debate. He wants to argue, genially. He tries to search for ways to use his platform as a former surgeon general that do not turn into politically charged spats.
 "It is hard to find an issue," he said.
 In August, an issue found him, and it was precisely the topic that he had hoped would not feel so personal anymore. During a routine follow-up check, doctors discovered tumors on the outside of Lacey's right thigh.
 "Here we go again," Lacey said to herself.
 She had first been diagnosed with melanoma 12 years ago, in 2010, when she spotted a "weird mole." She had it removed. She thought she was in the clear.
 "No big deal," she said.
 As an adolescent growing up in the Midwest, she had been a frequent visitor to tanning beds. She did not worry much about the sun, even though she is very light-skinned. After having the mole removed, she changed her ways. Sunscreen. Long sleeves. She joked that her mother would chase her around with floppy hats. She started getting regular dermatology checks. It was all good. Until it was not.
 In early 2018, just as her anesthesiologist husband was starting as surgeon general under Trump, she noticed lumps on her groin while shaving her bikini line. The doctor in her house, newly minted as America's doctor, was constantly on the go as he sought to get a grasp on his job, serving as a public health advocate and overseeing thousands of members of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. "The doctor in my house is my absent-minded professor, always running in 100 directions," she said.
 So Lacey called the doctor next door: her neighbor in Indiana and dear friend, Amy Hoffman, an emergency room physician. When Hoffman realized why her friend was calling, she put her on the speakerphone, so that her husband, an oncologist, could listen in.
 He just had one question: Was it on the same side as the melanoma from years earlier? Yes, she said. She could hear the worry in their voices.
 "Stop unpacking," she said they told her. "Stop going to fancy events with your husband. You need to make this a priority."
 She was soon ushered into a special area of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center reserved for high-ranking officials and their families. She was given a fuzzy robe with an embroidered White House logo.
 "All of a sudden it is like you are in the Ritz-Carlton," she recalled, and asked herself, "Why am I deserving of this special attention?"
 A scan showed a tumor somewhere between the size of a pea and a grape. She needed to have surgery. Doctors eventually removed 12 lymph nodes, some of which were cancerous. While she was recovering from surgery, still groggy from the anesthesia, her husband came into the room with a request that was hard for her to comprehend through the fog of the drugs: He wanted her Facebook password.
 She had taken a selfie at the medical center and posted it to her Facebook page, and she also took a little dig at the administration. The White House was not happy, he told her. They wanted it taken down.
 In the months to come, she would again think she had beaten cancer. She underwent a year of immunotherapy treatments. She rang the bell, a tradition among cancer patients completing treatments, at Walter Reed after scans showed she was cancer free.
 "Cancer, schmancer," she thought.
 There were other things to worry about. Her husband had come to Washington hoping to focus on opioid addiction, a plague that had hit members of his family. Instead, he was thrust into a much more public role with the arrival of the coronavirus. As the Trump administration struggled with effective responses, the new surgeon general kept setting off firestorms.
 He shared a Valentine's Day poem on social media that said the regular flu was a greater risk than covid and urged people to get flu shots. He told African Americans, who were contracting the coronavirus in disproportionate numbers, to take precautions to protect their "Big Mama."
 In each instance, he fumbled the messaging, making incomplete or poorly explained statements. He asked people not to buy masks because there was a shortage. He said people were at a greater risk of catching the regular flu than covid because projections by the Trump administration, later shown to be inaccurate, suggested more people would get the regular flu.
 He used the words "Big Mama," which led to accusations that he was using Trump-style racist dog whistles, because it was a term of affection in his own family that he thought would help him connect with African Americans.
 Those missteps, which Adams has blamed on a partisan atmosphere, drew heavy criticism, which might be expected. What he had not anticipated was how people would come for his loved ones. On social media, trolls called his family ugly. They criticized Adams, who is Black, for marrying a White woman.
 While her husband was trying to fend off critics and nasty commenters by sharpening his messaging, Lacey, like many Americans, was putting off medical appointments while limiting her movements because of the risk of contracting the coronavirus. She had a clear scan in January 2020. It was not until July that year that she returned for another scan. It revealed a tumor on her back.
 The cancer had returned for a second round: This time it was Stage 4. She started immunotherapy. And again she beat it. For two years she passed routine scans, with good results. Then, this past summer, came the tests that revealed the cancer had returned. His wife cries herself to sleep some nights. He marvels at her resilience.
 She has been speaking and writing about the disease that lurks inside her and threatens to deprive her of so many things she looks forward to, like the days her children, now 18, 16 and 12, graduate or get married.
 Some days she is too ill from side effects of her treatments to do much. But other times she is full of energy and ready to go. People might look at her and not know she is sick, and that is one of her points: Melanoma is a stealthy disease, the doctors keep telling her. It can hide inside people without any outward signs. She had once had a mole, but other times nothing showed up on her skin. The disease was hiding from her.
 She understands that she has been given a platform few have. No one would be listening to a mom from Indiana if she were not the wife of the former surgeon general.
 The other day, her husband asked if he could post a photo of her on Twitter. She said for him to go ahead. It showed her in profile, lying in bed with the covers partly obscuring her face, on a day when she was not feeling great. He asked for prayers, but he also gave some advice: "See a dermatologist right away if a mole changes/looks different from your others!"
 What happened next was nothing short of amazing to them. People wished the best for Lacey even though they were not fans of Jerome: "I don't agree with your politics. God bless your sweet wife." "I'm sorry your wife has cancer, even though I completely disagree with some of your decisions."
 Some people even wanted advice. "Should we worry about a single mole or look for odd shapes and changes in several?" That person did not mention Trump at all. That might be a person they could help. That might be, they dared to imagine, the end of the Trump Effect, and the beginning of a Lacey Effect.
 
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 </story></html> adams Former surgeon general faces his wife's cancer - and the 'Trump Effect' Manuel Roig-Franzia Style ellipsis

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 Over 10 days, people across the country woke up to a version of the same news on three different mornings: another high-profile shooting and a new death toll. Three, last week, on a college bus. Five, on Saturday, inside a nightclub. Six, on Tuesday, in a Walmart. And now, on a uniquely American holiday of thanks, the nation must once again reckon with the reality that its uniquely American crisis can end a life at any time, in any place.
 "We are not free," said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, "if we're worried that no matter where we are, we are at risk of being shot."
 Watts, known in part for tweeting out the details of nearly every mass shooting, had hoped that this week would provide her a break. She spent Tuesday finding ingredients for stuffing and making airport runs to pick up her children flying home for the holiday. Then she saw the news from Chesapeake, Va., and shared it. But when she noticed the shooting still hadn't started to trend on Twitter, a sense of dread swept over her. She worried people were looking away.
 "We aren't numb - we're traumatized," posted Watts, who had been inspired to launch her gun violence prevention group a decade ago, after 20 first-graders were slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.
 "When you are constantly exposed to gun violence, whether you're a survivor or someone who has experienced this in their community or even secondhand, watching it on the news, it impacts us," she said later. "The violence bleeds into our consciousness."
 America is enduring a historic stretch of gun violence that spiked at the start of the pandemic and has yet to subside. Bullets killed more than 47,000 people last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And though a Washington Post analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive shows the pace of mass shootings - where four or more people are wounded in a single incident, not including the shooter - lags slightly behind last year at this time, 2022's total could double 2018's.
 School shootings, meanwhile, have never been worse. The number of incidents, deaths and children exposed to campus gunfire are all expected to set records.
 The epidemic's relentlessness has left many Americans exhausted.
 On Nov. 13, police say, a 22-year-old student at the University of Virginia fired at his schoolmates after returning from a bus trip to Washington, D.C., where the group had watched a play and eaten together. All three of the young men who died played on the football team.
 Six days later, in Colorado Springs, authorities allege that another 22-year-old, this one wearing camouflage and a bulletproof vest, opened fire inside an LGBTQ nightclub, killing five and wounding at least 18 others.
 And there was the shooting late Tuesday in Chesapeake, where authorities and witnesses said a Walmart employee fired in a break room, killing six co-workers and wounding others before taking his own life. Then came the familiar responses: demands for change from gun-safety activists, dismissiveness of those demands from the National Rifle Association and, from Virginia's Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, a call to save the debates for some day in the future.
 After each mass killing, gun rights activists suggest that what the country really needs to protect itself from is even more lethal weapons, a persuasive refrain to millions of gun owners. That's despite the fact that armed guards have repeatedly failed to stop school shootings, and years of research has shown that the mere presence of a firearm in a home substantially increases the danger to the people who live in it.
 Regardless of the disagreements, only more carnage awaits, as the recent past has made clear.
 Less than a month before the Chesapeake shooting, a man with an AR-15-style rifle and more than 600 rounds of ammunition killed two people at a St. Louis high school. And Thanksgiving marks the six-month anniversary of the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed.
 Then there are the shootings that go mostly unnoticed but that, nevertheless, devastate millions of people each year.
 This month, a man fatally shot three people, including his wife, in rural Pennsylvania and then was killed as he fired on troopers. Just more than a week later, a 3-year-old boy died after he accidentally shot himself with a gun he found in an apartment in Utah. A day after that, a Maryland man was accused of gunning down his former girlfriend and her three children.
 "What keeps me up at night is the question of whether this country is just learning to live with this," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has long fought for gun-safety reform. "We have to maintain our sense of outrage at this. And I know that becomes harder and harder."
 Zoe Touray understands that, too.
 Touray, 18, survived the massacre at Oxford High School in Michigan on Nov. 30, 2021. As time has passed, she has noticed how many people have forgotten the shooting at her school and the four teenagers whose lives it took.
 "It bothers me that people sometimes forget we had tragedy because maybe it was 'smaller' than others," she said. "But in reality, they all have a huge impact."
 Touray recently started a group, Survivors Embracing Each Other, in the hope of supporting more victims. She hosted her first event on Saturday, in Uvalde, just hours before the Colorado Springs shooting 850 miles away. Dozens of kids competed in limbo competitions, played with therapy dogs, munched on wings and made tie-dye shirts.
 She learned about the nightclub attack the next morning, on her way to spend the day with a 10-year-old girl who had escaped from Robb. They were supposed to go to an arcade together and eat pizza. Touray had to turn her phone off.
 Back in Michigan on Wednesday, she also had to avoid news about the Walmart shooting. She and her former schoolmates had planned to light lanterns together in honor of their friends killed almost exactly one year earlier.
 For many people, this trio of widely covered mass shootings felt like a single, inescapable event, with the anguish of one lingering into the next. That was especially true for Johnny de Triquet.
 As a U-Va. alumnus, he was stunned to learn that his alma mater's idyllic campus had been the scene of such terror. As a 38-year-old gay man, he was horrified again last weekend after the killings in Colorado that led the suspect to be charged with a hate crime. And then, finally, as a native of Chesapeake, he was devastated by the attack in his hometown, a bastion of "Southern hospitality" where he and his partner were traveling to from New York City for the holiday.
 "You never know what may happen - who's going to act crazy, in any kind of situation," he said. "And we end up with a tragedy the next day on the news."
 For millions of Americans, the fatigue and frustration stem both from the rate of gun violence and from how little people in power have done to address it.
 The public might never learn why the shooters in Charlottesville or Colorado Springs or Chesapeake pulled their triggers. Investigators haven't divulged what made them so angry or if anyone could have intervened before blood was shed. They were different people from different places, each with different backgrounds and circumstances, motives and hatreds. But they all had one thing in common: access to guns.
 The NRA on Tuesday insisted America's Second Amendment protection of gun ownership had nothing to do with any of the killings.
 "These are heinous acts by deranged criminals," Amy Hunter, an NRA spokeswoman, wrote in a statement to The Post. "Rational Americans know that these crimes have nothing to do with the constitutional and the self-defense rights of the law abiding."
 Yet America is the only high-income nation on Earth that contends with such extraordinary levels of gun violence, and experts say the only clear difference between this country and those is the number of firearms in this one - more than 400 million, by some estimates - and laws that are less effective at regulating them.
 "There might be some diseases that don't have a cure. What do you do? But there are things about gun violence that are time-tested, and perhaps wouldn't prevent every act of gun violence, but with the law of averages and big numbers, we would prevent a lot of them," said David Chipman, a former agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and one-time nominee to lead the agency. "Our political people in power are unwilling to do that."
 Youngkin was criticized online after calling the shooting at U-Va. an "event" on Twitter and making no mention of the word "gun." In his first tweet about the Walmart shooting, he condemned "heinous acts of violence" but again did not note that the act was committed with a gun.
 Pressed about potential gun-control reforms by reporters on Wednesday, Youngkin said he was open to discussing it, but - as conservative politicians often do - he insisted now is a time for mourning, not solutions.
 "Today is not the day. It's not the day," he said. "But it will be. And we will talk about it."
 Murphy said he suspects elected officials, both in state capitals and in Washington, won't be able to avoid the issue much longer.
 "I think this country has made the decision that they aren't going to live with this," he said. "There were lots of reasons Democrats did fairly well in this last election. But clearly, gun violence was a motivating issue. Of those that showed up for the midterms, the vast majority of them wanted tougher gun laws. And those folks all voted for Democrats. So I think Republicans are beginning to realize that their political future is at risk if they don't start joining us in these efforts."
 This summer, with the help of 15 Senate Republicans, Congress passed a gun-control bill for the first time in decades, and though the legislation didn't include the sweeping changes that activists have long demanded, Murphy said it was a significant victory that he believes will lead to more.
 But for a senator whose career has been shaped by the Sandy Hook massacre, Murphy has accepted that nothing will end mass shootings in America.
 They are inevitable.
 On Tuesday, a former Olympic boxer in Miami was arrested after police discovered that he planned to commit a mass shooting. He made a $150 deposit for a AK-47 semiautomatic rifle at a pawnshop and posted threats online, writing on Instagram that he was "willing to shoot with a actual gun." He would go through it "for righteousness sake."
 His target, according to police? A local gym that had revoked his membership.
 - - -
 The Washington Post's Gillian Brockell, Peter Jamison and Gregory S. Schneider contributed to this report.
 ---Video Embed CodeVideo: Chesapeake area residents described tears and "heartbreak" when speaking to The Post about the deadly shooting at Walmart on Nov. 22.(John Warner,REF:yij/The Washington Post)Embed code: &lt;iframe src=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/1c1fd2d5-ef6c-4006-b5a0-20bf055e85ce?ptvads=block&amp;playthrough=false&quot; width=&quot;480&quot; height=&quot;290&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</text>
 </story></html> mass-killing 'We aren't numb; we're traumatized': Another mass killing rocks U.S. John Woodrow Cox National ellipsis

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 The nation's 17 million college students have confronted a new and chaotic reality on campus this fall: a fast-changing legal landscape and entirely new norms in the wake of the Dobbs decision on abortion. For some, the changes are joyful, a protection of human life. For others, they are terrifying, pushing them to consider scenarios that would have been unthinkable just months ago, such as having to drop out of school if they became pregnant.
 For this story, The Washington Post partnered with student journalists in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Indiana and D.C. to help solicit voices from across the country.
 Their responses were nuanced and widely varied, reflecting the diversity of the student population and the tremendous legal uncertainty.
 One of the students elated by the ruling said she wept at the prospect of so many babies' lives being saved. Some students spoke of their intensified fears of rape. Many were furious and said they would focus their energy on protests and politics. Students in medical fields wondered how their education might shift. Some worried about the possibility of reprisals for speaking out. In those cases, The Washington Post abbreviated the last names.
 Here's what they said:
 COLLEGE &amp; CAMPUS LIFE
 "Hook up culture is dead."
 - Helena Woroniecka, 24, University of Arizona
 "I honestly feel like I cannot catch a break. Graduating high school in 2020 in the midst of a pandemic and trying to navigate coming of age within it was difficult enough. Now, having to worry about having my bodily autonomy taken from me and millions of other people makes me feel sad and fearful for the new school year."
 - Lindsey Gonzalez, 20, University of Central Florida
 "I mean, it feels daunting. I'm lucky that I'm attending a school in a state where abortion is still accessible and will likely remain. But that's the thing: I am lucky."
 - Lizz Murray, 18, Mt. Holyoke College, Massachusetts
 "Going back to campus this year was more difficult than I anticipated. I'd known the decision that was coming, and I still felt like the ground had been ripped out from underneath my feet."
 - Molly Kaspar, 24, Boise State University, Idaho
 "It sucks. I haven't heard anyone who thinks, 'This is awesome. This rocks.'"
 - Nick Escue, 19, Collin College's Frisco Campus, Texas
 "I'm very excited to be able to go to school in a post-Roe America. No one has been able to do this for 50 years, so I am very happy about it."
 - Sara De Rosa, 19, Chandler-Gilbert Community College, Arizona
 "It was extra hard coming back to school here this fall. It's crazy how a two-hour plane ride can take you back 50 years."
 - Gwyneth Corrales, 21, Arizona State University
 "I go to school in Massachusetts, but my home is Arizona. This year, going back to college means I can escape to a state where I know my reproductive rights will be upheld."
 - Piper Corey, 19, Smith College, Massachusetts
 "Panic set in" after the ruling, said Rhianna San Soucie, 20, a junior at the University of New Orleans. Some students have been posting QR codes in the bathrooms with information about how to order contraceptives and how to get an abortion despite Louisiana's ban, she said. "They keep trying to hide them in the trash cans and the stalls and stuff," she said, but the stickers keep getting removed. She faults the government for that.
 "It feels like there is a war on women," she said, "and no one knows exactly how to fight."
 - - -
 SEX &amp; PREGNANCY
 "I practice abstinence so this is not a concern."
 - Jacob Ferns, 20, Concordia University, Michigan
 "I am lucky enough to have a strong support system to help me if I were to become pregnant. Myself and my female roommates have made a point to always have contraceptives in the home."
 - Izzy Knight, 20, University of Georgia
 "I really don't want to have sex now. It seems too dangerous; the stakes are too high for me to be in a sexually active relationship."
 - Italia Caro, 19, Arizona State University
 "I am pro-life and waiting until marriage. . . . I decided long ago that if I got my girlfriend of over 2 1/2 years pregnant, I would marry her immediately and do whatever it takes to provide for her and our child."
 - Mark P., 21, University of Texas at Austin
 "As soon as Roe was overturned, I booked an appointment for an IUD (I'm writing this right now in the waiting room for my follow-up appointment!). College is stressful enough without having to worry about an unwanted pregnancy."
 - McKinley Lettre, 20, Davidson College, North Carolina
 - - -
 Yuri Singletery was a freshman when she became pregnant. She never considered leaving college. "I was always determined I was going to finish no matter what," she said.
 "I was born when my mom was 19 years old. No one encouraged her to go to school. That's been a cycle within my family," Singletery said.
 Singletery got an abortion, an experience she said was traumatic.
 "I think many people have a misconception of abortion and think people do it for selfish reasons," she said. ". . . I felt I was treated as a number and not as a person. . . . I didn't really feel like anybody actually cared about my mental well-being.
 "Because it wasn't an easy thing to do."
 So when she got pregnant again while still in school, she chose to give birth.
 She was determined to finish her degree. She started her final semester at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University virtually this fall because she couldn't find affordable housing or child care in Greensboro for her 1-year-old son, Midas. She and her partner have an apartment outside Charlotte, where he works and they have family support while they take care of Midas and she juggles school and a part-time job. She is on long-term birth control, but she worries about another pregnancy.
 With ongoing shortages of formula, child care and affordable housing, she said, "I think that's pretty outrageous to force women to have children, and they can't even find formula to feed their babies."
 - - -
 SAFETY &amp; SECURITY
 "I am terrified for the health and safety of my peers."
 - Alison Turner, 20, Drew University, New Jersey
 "Honestly, I'm feeling scared. I just transferred to this school and am still getting to know my surroundings. It makes me nervous to go to social events with the risk of being sexually assaulted. I don't want to have to sacrifice my social life because I'm scared someone will rape me and I won't have any choice in my future."
 - Leah B., 19, University of Georgia
 "I feel unsafe and unimportant. If I were choosing what university I would attend again, I would not choose a school in a place where I couldn't get an abortion if needed."
 -Erica Kahn, 22, Emory University, Georgia
 "I feel uncomfortable considering I know so many people who pay for college themselves. They don't have the funds to even pay for doctors visits."
 - Ruby Maderafont, 21, Arizona State University
 "I have very much retracted from the scene and have been having conversations with friends who are continuing about what the 'game plan' is - especially if one of our friends is assaulted."
 - Alex Gustafson, 19, University of Idaho
 "My partner and I are pretty nervous about our sexual health. He is a transgender man without hormone replacement therapy or surgeries because he cannot afford them. Thus, we are extremely careful when it comes to our sexual health. But if something bad happens and we get pregnant, there will be little that we will be able to do."
 - Kay S., 18, Arizona State University
 "Sexual assault is always a possibility no matter how careful I could be. Without the choice to make my own decision about my reproductive health, it makes me even more afraid for if something were to happen."
 - Maia Witte, 20, University of Missouri-Columbia
 - - -
 This summer, after the ruling, Kiana Hawley, 18, got an IUD. It was painful, she said, but it is reassuring to have it for her first year at the University of Georgia. "Hopefully it'll keep me protected and safe."
 The ruling is constantly on her mind. It made her angry and upset - but most of all scared.
 "It felt like a big takeback," she said, one that would disproportionately harm people with fewer options. "It was definitely an attack on women of color - especially, I think, those of lower classes."
 But most of all, the ruling left her feeling much more vulnerable, especially as she moved at 18 to an unfamiliar place. "When I go out, I have mace. I also have a knife I keep on me, that my father gave me. I'm planning on getting a taser. Whenever I go out downtown with my friends, we always go in groups, share our locations on Life360 to make us feel safe because we're all girls. So I want to make sure everyone is okay and safe."
 - - -
 POLITICS
 "I fear they won't stop at abortion."
 - Hannah Breslau, 19, University of Maryland, School of Public Policy
 "As someone who is pro-life and thrilled that Roe was overturned, I am looking forward to having discussions with pro-choice students about this issue and how the pro-life movement helps pregnant women."
 - James George, 21, College of William &amp; Mary, Virginia
 "While living in Colorado I know my right to an abortion is protected, but I go to school in a very conservative area. I am worried about how the community will view my school and its response to this situation. I am also anxious to voice my opinions on this issue because of how conservative the area is."
 - Caitlin Loughry, 21, University of Northern Colorado
 "I feel the same because at the end of the day, the states can decide. They gave us the option, they didn't exactly rule it out."
 - Jimmy Cornette, 21, Morehead State University, Kentucky
 "Pregnancies by younger mothers are common in this state, and our legislature and government do not reflect the values that young women desperately need. We need an empathetic voice to stand up for us, as we are barely adults ourselves."
 - Hannah Crouch, 22, University of Georgia
 "I think the original Roe v. Wade decision was a gross misinterpretation of the Constitution that has led to an organized genocide of literally tens of millions of humans."
 - Kara Moran, 18, University of Alabama
 - - -
 Noah Slayter's parents hosted about 10 foster kids over several years at their home in Manassas, Va. "There's a lot of people that will say, 'Oh, we should just abort the kids because they might end up in foster care,'" he said. "And I always say, 'You're talking about the people that I saw that slept in the room across the hall from me that, you know, I woke up and went to school with, and all of those things - those are real people. And you're saying that their life should be ended because they could end up in the situation they're in?' I don't see that as correct."
 The 20-year-old started with Students for Life of America at his high school, and he is a student spokesperson with the organization as a sophomore at Catholic University.
 He felt a lot of energy from other students on campus this fall. "There's definitely a different attitude . . . a higher rate of engagement. . . . One of our clubs at school prays weekly at the local Planned Parenthood. And they've had an uptick in people who have gone to pray with them." People keep asking him, "How can I help? How can I do something?"
 He hopes that is the start of a real change in awareness of the options for people during and after pregnancy. "That would be huge. We have all these states now that are banning abortion, and that will definitely leave people feeling like they're in the depths. They feel like they're left alone," he said. "But we really need to make sure that they know they are not alone and that they have resources."
 - - -
 THE FUTURE
 "If I have sex and mess up, there is no plan C."
 - Mattheus Wardle, 18, Utah State University
 "I am in the process of applying to graduate schools, and I feel like my options are increasingly limited due to my unwillingness to move to a state where my reproductive rights are not protected."
 - Alexis Hogan, 23, California State University at Los Angeles
 "It's changing how I think about graduate school. I don't want to move to a state where my rights are restricted. This isn't a factor I ever thought I'd have to consider."
 - Isabel Long, 21, University of Colorado at Boulder
 "My partner and I have a plan. We will do a surprise trip to California on the down low and get an abortion. It's heartbreaking, but it's what we gotta do to stay in school and continue the path we both want."
 - Emily Radics, 20, Arizona State University
 "In my field, I'll need to pursue graduate degrees. Not only do I intend to leave the deep red state my school is located in, I plan to leave the entire country."
 - Antares Brown, 27, Weber State University, Utah
 - - -
 When she was deciding which law school to go to this spring, Maggie Crain was convinced by the child care available at the University of Mississippi for her three-year-old son, Munro.
 But she was also nervous about the idea of moving to Mississippi, because she had seen the leaked draft opinion of the landmark Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
 "I was scared," she said. "Very scared."
 At 28, her thinking on abortion had changed dramatically from her evangelical Baptist childhood in Pensacola, Fla., where a doctor who provided abortions was fatally shot in the 1990s and protesters carried signs plastered with gruesome images. As she got older, she came to think of abortion as essential health care, not violence.
 She didn't know how she could get through law school if she got pregnant again. "If I have another kid, it would completely derail what I could possibly do in my legal career," she said.
 She hopes to become a federal public defender, and perhaps a judge someday.
 And she wondered how abortion bans could change criminal defense - especially for low-income women who would be more likely to rely on a public defender and might have fewer options with an unexpected pregnancy. In her University of Mississippi School of Law classes, law-review journals and the news, she planned to watch whether women who miscarried would be accused of illegal abortions. "As a woman who wants to do that kind of law, I'm paying close attention."
 Before they moved from Florida, she got a 10-year IUD inserted.
 She told her husband, "I don't feel comfortable going to Mississippi without one."
 - - -
 Methodology
 To garner responses from students, The Washington Post partnered with several college newspapers across the country. They include: the Red &amp; Black, University of Georgia; the State Press, Arizona State University; the Hilltop, Howard University; the Diamondback, University of Maryland; the Daily Texan, University of Texas at Austin; the A&amp;T Register, North Carolina A&amp;T State University; and Ball State Daily News, Ball State University.
 - - -
 The Washington Post's Lizzy Raben contributed to this report.
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 </story></html> colleges-abortion Terrified, elated, anxious: College students on campus life without Roe Julie Vitkovskaya Higher Education Susan Svrluga ellipsis

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