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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Indigenous lands from Canada to Ecuador to Nepal are increasingly being hit by catastrophic storms, fires, and floods. Worse, these climate disasters often come one after the other as overlapping crises rather than isolated incidents. Still, despite the ongoing destruction, Indigenous peoples continue to prove that they have the knowledge and skills to respond, if only global powers will let them.

As scholars of democracy, we are watching America’s warning signs flash red. We expect America’s long-building constitutional crisis to soon escalate. Earlier this year, we hosted a national workshop to assess the threats facing our society in the months leading up to and following the November midterm elections. We also studied the preparations of American social movements, communities, and institutions to meet those threats. Our basic goals were straightforward.

Look, I’ve been around the block. I know what it means when a feature of my life is suddenly appended with words like -coded and -core. It means the things about myself that I can’t or don’t want to change are being sold back to me as a lifestyle choice, or worse, a movement. It means I’ve become real in the realest way possible: in the eyes of marketers and assignment editors running on fumes. I knew what the dad-bod trendlet amounted to.

The following story is co-published with Matt Bivens’ Substack newsletter, The 100 Days. “No,” said the priest. “It is not necessary to accept everything as true. One must only accept it as necessary.” “A melancholy conclusion,” said K. “It turns lying into a universal principle.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial You thought you were a patient in the hospital? Wrong, says Medicare. You were never in the hospital. “But I was!” says the patient.

“Following Harry” is available on Amazon, Apple and other digital platforms starting Oct.13. For more info see: https://www.followingharry.org/. Born in 1927 in Harlem, Grammy, Tony, Emmy and Oscar award-winner Harry Belafonte grew up in Jamaica and helped popularize Caribbean music in America. His 1956 album “Calypso” – which included Belafonte’s signature song “Day-O (Banana Boat Song)” – hit number one on Billboard’s charts and became the first album by a solo artist to sell a million albums.

Since the Supreme Court handed down its infamous Citizens United ruling in 2010, billionaires have poured ever larger sums into candidates aligned with their interests. They now have American politics in a chokehold: In 2024, the top 300 billionaire donors spent over $3 billion on the federal elections, accounting for nearly 20% of all contributions made that year. By comparison, in 2008, the last election before Citizens United, they accounted for a mere 0.3%.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. If there was a year the world began waking up to climate change, it might have been 1988. That June, the NASA climatologist James Hansen testified to Congress that the climate was warming and would continue to do so as long as humans pumped fossil fuel pollution into the atmosphere.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with StreetsblogMASS. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Marvin Martin was in the Four Corners area of Dorchester, Massachusetts, one day when a train sped by on the Fairmount Line into downtown Boston. It was filled with white people, sitting comfortably and reading newspapers. It made him wonder why the commuter line seemed to pass through communities of color without stopping, leaving people in his neighborhood to crowd into buses.

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More from Staff Join our newsletter Don't miss out on the latest investigations, art critiques, provocative insights and original reporting from a progressive perspective — delivered straight to your inbox. Comments Now you can personalize your Truthdig experience. To bookmark your favorite articles and follow your favorite authors, please login or create a user profile. Now you can personalize your Truthdig experience.