Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. I’m Jake Bittle, and today we’re going to shift the focus away from the storm-battered Southeast and take a look at one of the nation’s hottest battleground states. Election Day is just two weeks away, and the high-octane race for president is consuming almost all the media’s attention — we’ll have...

The morning temperature is nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Keith Seaman sweats beneath his bucket hat, walking door to door through the cookie-cutter blocks of a subdivision in Casa Grande, Arizona. Seaman, a Democrat who represents this Republican-leaning area in the state’s House of Representatives, is trying to retain a seat he won by a margin...

Brittany Powell moved from the Bay Area to Vermont in 2016, just as wildfire smoke was becoming a regular summertime occurrence in California. She watched in horror from afar as friends and family living in her home state fled wildfires made larger and more intense by climate change-driven drought.  “You’re so lucky you live there,” they told...

When the Racetrac chain of convenience stores was deciding whether to install electric vehicle chargers, project lead Rushi Patel started with a blank Excel sheet and a lot of questions. Did the financials make sense? Where is the best to install them? What features should they have? The answers to questions like these could go a long way toward establishing...

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region. A row of executives from grain-processing behemoth Archer Daniels Midland watched as Verlyn Rosenberger, 88, took the podium at a Decatur City Council meeting last week. It was the first meeting since she...

Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were looking forward to their annual Cherokee Indian Fair this year — 2024’s event was to be the 112th celebration. There were going to be Indigenous stickball tournaments, bubble gum-blowing contests, and a longest-hair competition. But the tribe, located in the western part of North Carolina,...