This story is the third feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. There’s a modest hill in Seneca Bowen’s yard that gently slopes upward, away from an inlet that leads into southeastern Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy ripped through Long Island, those few feet of elevation were the only thing standing between the flood waters and Bowen’s house.  On a recent August afternoon, Bowen and I walked around his land as he recalled how Sandy wiped away the small beach at the edge of the property, where Bowen grew up swimming and fishing. Bowen showed me exactly how high the water came that year: 100 yards past the usual high tide mark. In the years since, that beach has become a grassy wetland that floods regularly, encroaching ominously on his home.   Bowen, who is 36, lives on the Shinnecock Nation reservation on the eastern end of Long Island, where his community is facing a dire situation.  About half of the Shinnecock Nation’s 1,600 tribal citizens live on an 800-acre reservation that includes 3,000 feet of shoreline on Shinnecock Bay. Of the roughly 250 homes within Shinnecock territory, around 50 are on the coast and in immediate danger from rising sea levels and increasing flooding. Powerful storm surges, which are also becoming more frequent, make all of this even worse.  “We’re running out of space,” Bowen, who is the treasurer of the Shinnecock Nation Council of Trustees, told me. “Our population is going up. We haven’t been able to acquire more land.” But water isn’t the only thing hemming the Shinnecock in. In every direction, they are surrounded by the multimillion-dollar homes of Southampton, sometimes mere feet from the border of the Shinnecock Nation. As Bowen stood facing the water at the edge of his land, he pointed out the Southampton Yacht Club, a private club directly across the water from his home. “We’re surrounded by some of the most wealthy people in the country and then you have us sitting here struggling to just make ends meet,” Bowen said. “I mean, hell, I’m a council member and I live paycheck to paycheck.” For nearly 400 years, since Southampton was settled in 1640, the Shinnecock have fought to stay where they are. Now, climate change is making the fight to stay on their homeland even more difficult as sea levels rise and storms grow stronger and more frequent. In the past few years, the Shinnecock have employed a combination of strategies to protect themselves against rising seas, like planting beach grass to strengthen dunes and developing oyster reefs to blunt tidal energy.  But unless the pace of climate change can be slowed, these solutions will not be enough to save Shinnecock lands, which currently represent only a fraction of their ancestral territory. The tribe’s 2013 climate adaptation plan predicted that nearly half of the Shinnecock reservation will flood after a major storm in 2050. Forecasts have only gotten worse since then.  “At some point — I don’t want to say in the near future, but certainly by the time my kids are old enough to be in charge — half the rez is going to be underwater,” Bowen said. “We obviously don’t want to leave our homeland, but at some point we’ll probably be forced to do that.”  What Bowen is talking about is known as managed retreat: the strategic relocation of people or communities away from areas vulnerable to climate impacts like flooding.  Centuries of colonization have robbed Indigenous nations of most of their land, but as the Shinnecock grapple with climate change and retreat, they’re pursuing a solution that’s radical in the face of contemporary history: expanding their territory.   “[Other] Council members and I have realized that we need to start making some serious money so that we can start purchasing land, not just for commercial use, but for residential purposes,” he said. Unsurprisingly, most people are not excited about having to move away from their homes, especially when the impacts of climate change can sometimes feel abstract. But projections show that more people in the coming years — those who live near the coast, in overgrown forests, or in paths of destruction like tornado alley — may be forced to relocate.  On Shinnecock territory, coastal areas represent such a large portion of their land that they will feel every inch they lose. Even without storms, Gavin Cohen, the Shinnecock Environmental Department’s natural resource manager, estimates that at least 7 percent and 15 percent of the current Shinnecock territory will be completely lost to water by 2050 and 2100, respectively. While all of Long Island, including Southampton Village, is projected to lose land, many of these communities have more land to fall back on, not to mention more resources to deal with climate change.  The Shinnecock are far from the only ones who will need to deal with this. Around 129 million Americans — nearly 40 percent of the population — live in coastal communities. Even if the world can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the average sea level in the US could still be about 2 feet higher in 2100 than it was in 2000. With less aggressive climate action, projections show that sea levels in the US could rise by over 7 feet by 2100.  Sea level rise at these rates means that millions of Americans will have to move, which will lead to devastating impacts on roads, schools, and other critical infrastructure. By 2050, for example, damaging floods are predicted to be 10 times more frequent than they are today. “It’s getting bad, and it’s only going to get worse because Mother Nature is far more powerful than we are,” said Sunshine Gumbs, project manager of the Shinnecock Ethnobotany Project.  In July, the Atlantic hurricane season got off to a deadly start when Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 storm on record, made landfall, leading to dozens of deaths and billions of dollars in damage. The hurricane season, which NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecast to be above normal, extends to the end of November, and many of the strongest storms may be yet to come.  These storms come with violent winds, storm surges, and rainfall that can cause flooding and other damage in coastal communities. As climate change makes these storms more frequent and more devastating, many more coastal communities must reckon with their increasingly precarious positions.  But relocating an entire community is an enormous task.  When Shavonne Smith, the director of the Shinnecock Environmental Department, thinks about possible relocation, she thinks about her massive extended family, nearly all of whom live on the reservation. “How do we take as many of us together as we can?” she said. “Because when people say that, you know, ‘you just have to move,’ it’s not that simple just to move. It’s not like me moving by myself. We’re talking whole families. How do you have somewhere for whole families to restart again?”  I met Bowen at the end of a day trip I took from my apartment in New York City to Shinnecock territory, about an hour and a half east. I was especially interested in learning about the Shinnecock because of where I come from. I’m a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, another wealthy East Coast vacation destination. For decades, my tribe, like the Shinnecock, has coexisted with some of the country’s richest families.  The dynamics in these communities is complex, and climate change is exacerbating social and economic inequality. I knew that the Shinnecock Nation’s conversation about managed retreat — the prospect of retreating away from the coast, from their ancestral lands, to protect themselves from rising seas — would sound a lot different from the conversations happening in adjacent communities.  I wanted to explore the story of a place and its people who have, despite decades of economic pressure and racism, maintained sovereignty over their land yet are forced to reckon with the effects of climate change today.  — Joseph Lee Smith, who has worked for the tribe for nearly 20 years, says she understands that some people may never leave, even as the waters reach their door. But she believes it is her job to prepare everyone for what’s coming and give them the tools to make choices.  To do that, Smith has partnered with Malgosia Madajewicz, a Columbia University economist who is running a three-year study of community adaptation to coastal flooding. The study consists of four community workshops and is designed to help the tribe develop a multifaceted response to flooding.  After just one workshop, Madajewicz says she is already finding valuable lessons in the Shinnecock approach. “They’re really planning for a few generations, whereas in other communities, there’s often a time horizon that revolves more around political cycles and is much shorter,” Madajewicz said. “If we have a hope of rescuing life from this crisis, protecting it into the future, we have to lengthen our planning horizons.”  But relocating an entire people — especially around some of the most expensive real estate in the US — will take a massive amount of money and land.  If the Shinnecock do buy more land for the community to relocate to, they would prefer for it to be in their ancestral territory, which covers thousands more acres and several adjacent towns. But Bowen says he and a few others have floated the idea of land in the Catskill Mountains, a forested area about a hundred miles north of New York City, and far from Shinnecock ancestral land.  Leaving Shinnecock lands would be devastating, Bowen says, but buying land in the Hamptons is prohibitively expensive and rife with nimby — not in my backyard — opposition.  In the past five years, the Shinnecock have embarked on a number of economic ventures, such as a gas station and travel plaza, only to see them delayed by lawsuits and local opposition. Bowen says they have had to fight for every dollar and permit, especially for proposals on land that the Shinnecock own outside of the reservation, in nearby Hampton Bays.  “Every project that the tribe has ever tried to do has been slowed or stopped by some special interest group that’s in this area, by the town or the village itself,” Bowen said “What should have been a money-making opportunity has now turned into a revenue stream that goes to our lawyers to fight our battles in court.”  As a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, I’m used to the juxtaposition of tribal communities and wealthy summer homes, but the level of ostentatious wealth on display in Southampton was jarring, even to me. On Southampton’s main street, I walked past real estate offices advertising homes in the tens of millions of dollars. I saw summer crowds flocking to boutique shops and restaurants. Minutes from Bowen’s home are verdant streets where tall hedges shield multimillion-dollar homes, pools, and tennis courts from view. Despite living just minutes away, Shinnecock territory residents are excluded from resident parking rates for Cooper’s Beach, a nearby beach that proudly advertises its recent ranking as one of the top beaches in the country. William Manger Jr., the Mayor of Southampton Village, did not respond to a request for comment. On the reservation, Bowen says that the median income is around $30,000, which is a tiny fraction of what some Southampton homeowners likely pay to maintain their manicured lawns. To be clear, that’s just the grass, not the horses, private chefs, cars, boats, or any of the other trappings of Southampton wealth. “As soon as you walk off of our territory, we’re surrounded by millionaires and billionaires,” Bowen said. “You know what that does to a person?” Michael A. Iasilli, the Southampton Town Council liaison for the Shinnecock Nation, is trying to build bridges with the tribe. He acknowledged that some Southampton residents outwardly discriminate against tribal members. This October, Southampton Town will recognize the first Shinnecock Heritage Day, an initiative led by Iasilli, which he says is part of a broader mission of healing old wounds, educating the town about Shinnecock history, and finding ways for the tribe and the town to work together. “Look, they’re not going anywhere, and they were here before us,” he said. “And so I think we really need to try to work as best as we can with the most honest and sincere effort to really build this relationship together with them. I’m really hoping that we can, but it’s going to take time.”  According to Iasilli, Southampton has the resources and the Shinnecock have the vision. Southampton already has funds in the form of its Community Preservation Fund and a Community Housing Fund. These are the kinds of financial resources that Seneca Bowen and the Shinnecock government are trying to build up.  When I visited in August, Cohen, the Shinnecock natural resource manager, showed me drone pictures he had taken of the Shinnecock coastline. The alarming images showed just how close the water was to encroaching on not just homes but the powwow grounds and other important gathering places. The cemetery, which sits just feet away from Shinnecock Bay, has already flooded on multiple occasions. Charles Cause, a 26-year-old Shinnecock musician, thinks that the cemetery flooding more severely could be the trigger that fully wakes up the community to the dangers of climate change. “I think once that starts to happen, you know, people are going to kind of get that, ‘holy moly, this is real’ feel and we’re going to take a lot more action on things,” he said.  Even as she leads community conversations around relocation, Shavonne Smith is not ready to leave either, even though she understands there may be no other option. “This is all I’ve ever known,” she said.

Apple announced a new set of AirPods Max during its event last week, updating them with USB-C and in a new set of colors. The switch to USB-C is a welcome one, to be sure, but Apple changed nothing else about them. And that feels weird, right? What gives? Apple’s high-end luxury headphones were impressive when they launched in 2020. They had all the features of the AirPods Pro and made clever use of the Apple Watch’s digital crown for volume control. They also sounded fantastic — still do, in fact! But the rest of the market didn’t sit still; alternatives from Sony, Bose, and more recently, Sonos, all offer comparable features and sound — most notably, they each compete with the AirPods Max when it comes to noise cancellation (Bose does...

When former President Donald Trump told 67 million Americans last week that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets, he was repeating a racist conspiracy theory that was years in the making — if not even longer. Since 2020, thousands of Haitian immigrants moved to the Rust Belt town in southwestern Ohio to take advantage of new manufacturing jobs there. As Vox’s Li Zhou has reported, “while the growth in population has helped rejuvenate the town, it’s also put pressure on social services in the form of longer wait times at medical clinics and more competition for affordable housing, fueling some animosity toward the newcomers.” That animosity morphed into something entirely different in the days leading up to a presidential debate thanks to right-wing social media accounts, which seized on baseless rumors about immigrants in Springfield — conflated with a story about a Canton, Ohio, woman, who is not Haitian and was accused of killing and eating a cat — to create an online frenzy. Since then, members of Springfield’s Haitian community tell reporters they are nervous about leaving their homes as the town remains on high alert after a series of bomb threats, while Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance and others continue to double down on the made-up story. Gaby Del Valle, a reporter for The Verge, talked with Today, Explained host Noel King about an ecosystem of right-wing influencers that turned a lie about immigrants in a small town into a Republican campaign talking point. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Let’s look back in time to when this was just an online rumor. Where does it start?  One of the earliest tweets that I saw was from an account called End Wokeness, which posted on September 6 a screenshot of that Facebook post that was like, my friend’s neighbor’s sister’s cousin or whatever got her cat kidnapped and she found it outside a house where Haitians live. And also posted a picture of a man holding a goose, and said that ducks and pets are disappearing in Springfield, Ohio, a place where there are a lot of Haitian migrants. And then on September 8, Charlie Kirk posted the same screenshot from Facebook and Elon Musk replied to it, saying, apparently people’s cats are being eaten. The original End Wokeness post right now has 4.9 million views. Musk’s reply to Charlie Kirk has 1.6 million views. Charlie Kirk’s post was viewed at least 4 million times. This kind of left the ecosystem of right-wing Twitter partially because Elon Musk got involved.  What happens, generally and in this case, when Elon Musk gets involved? Why does he matter?  In addition to owning Twitter and letting go of the content moderation team, the Trust and Safety Council… I can’t speak with certainty here, but I will say that Elon Musk has several pet causes that he posts about a lot. One of which is immigration, another one of which is quote-unquote “wokeness.” And there is a sense that what Elon cares about gets pushed out to users on the app. And even if there’s not an algorithmic change that is putting content that Elon cares about in front of everybody, he has a lot of influence, a lot of followers, and a lot of power. All right. So this is not true. It is not true in Springfield. It is not true in the way it’s being presented. And then we hear it again on the debate stage. Again, there’s a round of debunking, this isn’t true. Has the debunking had any impact on this rumor’s staying power?  The debunking has done absolutely nothing in terms of the rumor’s staying power. In some senses, it actually kind of fueled the narrative because the narrative on the right is not just, like, people are eating cats in Springfield. It’s well, you know, maybe actually this isn’t happening. But even if it’s not happening, why is the media so focused on debunking whether people are eating cats in Springfield? And why are they not talking about the Haitian immigrant invasion of Springfield? Why are they not looking at that? On Truth Social, Trump has posted a bunch of different images of him saving cats, of cats and ducks watching the presidential debate. The Republican Party of Arizona put out 12 billboards in the Phoenix area that say “Eat less kittens, vote Republican.” This has become the new Republican Party rallying cry.  The cat memes are almost like a shorthand for this overall belief about not only Springfield, but communities across America supposedly being taken over by migrants. It’s like a visual representation of what is called the Great Replacement Theory, which is this conspiracy theory that there is an outside force replacing local, often white populations with imported migrants of color. Sometimes the proponents of that theory claim that Democrats are turning a blind eye to illegal immigration and allowing undocumented people to vote so that they have staying power. Sometimes a conspiracy theory is about how Democrats or other elites want to foment demographic change. But the underlying premise is always local American populations, which almost always means white populations, are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants.  Anti-immigrant rhetoric and the kind of, at times, really outlandish lies that accompany it are part of a pretty familiar playbook for Donald Trump. Does 2024 feel different to you than, for example, 2020 or 2016?  I would say yes and no. Like, Trump’s 2016 campaign famously began with these racist claims about Mexican immigrants being rapists and murderers, very bad people, etc., etc. So I think that this is kind of the logical outcome of that. It’s pure, unvarnished racism. And the point is to dehumanize Haitians. But it’s definitely escalated. It’s gone further than before. [In] some circles of right-wing Twitter, people are talking about, like, the links between race and IQ. And there’s this implication and sometimes just outright statements that migrants from Haiti and elsewhere are not intelligent enough to be assimilated into American society. And for them, it’s about more than culture. It’s about more than even skin color. It’s this kind of biological hatred. And that’s the extreme rhetoric that has not only gone unchallenged, but has gotten more and more extreme as the years have gone on.

Hours-long videos of ’80s and ’90s Weather Channel broadcasts set to vaporwave tunes are all over YouTube. They’re perfect for those moments you want to remember a time when weather was a little less scary.

A presidential election is coming up and people are mad at Nate Silver again. In itself, that’s nothing new: Silver’s election forecasts have drawn at least some controversy in every presidential cycle since he started doing them in 2008. The current anger is about how Silver’s forecast has shown Trump as the slight favorite to win the election since late August. As of Monday, it still gave him a 59.6 percent chance of victory.  But the roots go deeper. People have never really stopped being mad at Silver since the last election, and the people maddest at him are Democrats and progressives. In some of these circles, the mere mention of Silver’s name brings derision, contempt, or even fury. This is largely because of a change in Silver’s own work and public commentary. He rose to prominence by taking aim at innumerate pundits and poll-denying Republicans, but he’s increasingly used his combative social media presence to challenge progressives, Democrats, and public health experts when he feels they are wrong — which, in recent years, has been often. “I think progressive epistemics have really deteriorated,” Silver told me in an interview last week. Back in 2012, he “naively thought” only conservatives “were quite so capable of being detached from reality,” he said. Put more politely, he went on, many progressives are “unaware of how much the combination of partisan bias and the internet, especially Twitter, infects people’s thinking and makes them insane.”  His critics would argue that that’s just what’s happened to him. The rap on Silver has long been that, when he isn’t forecasting elections, he’s just another contrarian centrist pundit prone to bad takes on issues far from his realm of expertise.  And while some of the criticism progressives direct at Silver is simply because people are uncomfortable with what his model is showing, much of it is a reflection of Silver’s new approach to commentary: He’s far less hesitant about expressing his opinions than he used to be, and he’s unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom, including on controversial subjects. Still, the issue where he stuck his neck out most over the past year was his commentary that Democrats were headed for disaster by renominating Joe Biden, and that’s a take that held up. “It’s just the most obvious thing in the world, this guy’s a fucking walking corpse,” Silver told me. “To say he could be president for another four years was delusional.”  When Silver first rose to fame, his forecasts functioned as something of a security blanket to nervous Democrats. In 2008 and 2012, his election forecasts crunched the polling numbers and projected Barack Obama as the clear favorite to win. Online progressives were thrilled at his debunkings of vacuous pundits and conservative poll-unskewers and believed him to be a kind of election prediction wizard; he spent the 2012 cycle at the New York Times and afterward sold his FiveThirtyEight website to ESPN, which would fund its expansion into a full-blown data journalism publication under his leadership. But Silver’s goal was never to reassure the anxious, it was to call the outcome correctly. Though he shared the generally liberal politics of the Obama era (his initial election writings were posted on the progressive website Daily Kos), they weren’t really his main interest. His background was in baseball stats-crunching and online poker playing; he wanted to forecast the future and beat the odds. His first book, 2012’s The Signal and the Noise, was about his efforts to separate data that is actually meaningful in determining outcomes (the signal) from distracting, useless, or misleading information (the noise). When Donald Trump first ran for president, Silver found that was easier said than done. In his previous coverage of presidential primaries, he believed that early polling was essentially noise. It had shown Hillary Clinton far ahead of Obama in 2008, and Mitt Romney struggling against various fringe or celebrity figures in 2012, and now it showed Trump ahead. So throughout 2015, he voiced confidence that Trump was doomed. “That was one thing that I think I deserved to be criticized for,” he says now. “We ignored a lot of polling data showing Trump doing well in the primary.”  The 2016 general election was a different story. In the now-crowded election forecast space, Silver’s model matched the others by calling Clinton the favorite, but in the final weeks stood out for offering Trump an unusually high chance of winning, unlike other models that said he’d almost certainly lose. He cannot claim to have predicted Trump’s win (the final forecast gave that a 28 percent chance of happening), but his arguments for why the polling in fact pointed to an uncertain race were vindicated.  But, to his great annoyance, some on the left criticized him beforehand for underrating Clinton’s chances, while others blasted him afterward for not having made Trump the favorite. “I was trying to warn everybody it was a close election,” Silver says. “And afterward, I was villainized for that.”  His souring on the left-of-center discourse world began then and continued during Trump’s presidency, when he occasionally bristled against what he saw as a censorious “groupthink” (progressives getting mad at tweets he sent that he thought were innocuous).  Then the Covid-19 pandemic began, and Silver began trying to crunch the numbers and offer his takes on the unfolding situation — to the chagrin of some epidemiologists and public health experts, who believed he didn’t know what he was talking about and should defer to them. One common theme was that Silver wanted a speedy rollout of vaccines and then a quick return to normal. He argued that public health experts were underrating the costs of prolonged school closures, comparing them to “disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq (or perhaps greater)” mistakes. “These people don’t understand cost-benefit analysis,” he tweeted. Silver further earned the experts’ ire by opining that the “lab leak” theory of Covid-19’s origins was plausible. “I would bet 60-40, 70-30 on lab leak probably,” he told me, though he acknowledged that we’d probably never know for sure. Last year, Silver struck out on his own with a Substack email newsletter after economic headwinds at Disney led to layoffs at FiveThirtyEight and spurred his departure. And if there was one theme of his first year of writing, it was that Biden’s age was a very serious problem for Democrats. “If the expert class doesn’t understand that Biden’s age is both a real concern for voters and a valid concern,” he wrote last September, “they’d better be prepared” for a second Trump term. At that point, he thought it was “probably too late not to nominate Biden” and that Harris would probably lose to Trump. But in November, he changed his mind, writing: “If Biden can’t run a normal campaign, he should step aside.” Many Democrats at the time cried foul and argued that the focus on Biden’s age was a media invention akin to the old focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails. Silver pushed back, writing: “Not everything is #ButHerEmails.” He argued that the White House’s shielding of Biden from public appearances was a clear indication that he would perform poorly in such appearances.  In mid-February, he wrote that Biden stepping aside was “an option that Biden, the White House and Democratic leaders need to seriously consider.” He called it “very far from an ideal option,” but said: “It might nevertheless be Democrats’ best option for beating Trump.” It took five more months and one disastrous debate performance, but eventually, the party accepted that this judgment was correct. For nearly all of August, Silver’s forecast showed Harris as a very narrow favorite, giving her a 52 percent chance of winning. But at the end of the month, Trump jumped out ahead, and the forecast now says he’s the narrow favorite with a 59.7 percent chance. (This led to some praise from Trump, who said recently that Silver was a “very respected guy, I don’t know him, but he has me up by a lot.”) Many people reading Silver’s forecast tend to place great importance on whether their preferred candidate is a slight favorite (which makes them feel relieved) or a slight underdog (which makes them feel anxious and/or angry). Silver always insists that that’s the wrong way to think about it and that such a race can very easily go either way, but few take his advice. Accordingly, the uproar over the current forecast, from people who want Harris to win, has been quite pronounced. “Who bought #NateSilver and how much did he go for?” actress Bette Midler posted on X. Baseless conspiracy theories have been hatched that Silver’s recently announced gig as an adviser to the online prediction market Polymarket is spurring him to do the bidding of right-wing billionaires and skew his analysis against Harris. (Silver has strongly denied those claims. “Peter Thiel isn’t paying me any more than he’s paying someone who works for Facebook or Lyft,” he recently posted on X.) Among the more data-literate, the main critique of Silver’s model lately has been that it’s unfairly punishing Harris for not getting a big polling bounce after the Democratic convention. (Nominees typically get a bounce then and lose some of that advantage later on, but this is an unusual cycle and perhaps Harris got her “bounce” earlier, when she entered the race.) On September 7, Silver wrote that if the “convention bounce” setting was turned off, the model would show something extremely close to a pure 50-50 contest; he has also said that this effect will dwindle the further we get from the convention. It seems undeniable that current polls show an extremely close Electoral College race, especially in the most important state, Pennsylvania. So outrage over whether Harris should be considered a narrow favorite or a narrow underdog seems to me to be splitting hairs. As for the criticism of Silver’s commentary more broadly, he told me, “I don’t give a shit.” Dismissing what he called the “circlejerk” of “Blue MAGA,” he said that beyond them, “there’s a huge audience for the work I do,” and pointed out that his new book is a New York Times bestseller.  His progressive critics, he said, “don’t impact my life in any way” — except, perhaps, that he “may create a little bit of conflict” with them, “because it’s fun.”