Helene and Milton, the two massive hurricanes that just swept into the country — killing hundreds of people, and leaving both devastation and rumblings of political upheaval in seven states — amounted to their own October surprise. Not that the storms led to some irredeemable gaffe or unveiled some salacious scandal. The surprise, really, may be that...

Walk into the grocery store and check the back of a container of food. Chances are, you’ll see a small box with instructions on how to dispose of the packaging when you’re finished with it: “empty & replace lid,” for example, or “recycle if clean and dry.” These labels are made by How2Recycle, a program operated by the nonprofit GreenBlue,...

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...