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Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

著者： Colin Wright
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概要
 A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright 政治・政府
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  • 2026 Blue Wave

    2026 Blue Wave
    2026/11/10
    This week we talk about the US midterm elections, the unusually broad Democratic victory, and what a change in congressional control means for the remainder of President Trump’s term. We also discuss the cost of living, the limits of a congressional majority, and what these results may, and may not, tell us about 2028.Recommended Book: 1873 by Liaquat AhamedTranscriptOn November 3rd, 2026, Americans voted in an election that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been expected to make governing a little more difficult for the sitting president. The party in the White House often loses seats in midterm elections, as voters register their frustrations and the coalition that elected the president proves more difficult to assemble without the president, the party’s figurehead, on the ballot.This time, though, the losses were substantial enough to change who controls both chambers of Congress. Democrats won the House of Representatives, and they won the Senate, picking up seats in states that would have seemed like especially difficult targets, perhaps even borderline impossible to win, not that long ago. They also won several governorships, including in until recently unlikely-seeming places, like Texas, Iowa, Ohio, and Georgia.The precise size of those majorities are still in flux as of the day I’m recording this, as the last close races are still being counted and have yet to be called. But the basic result is settled: when the new Congress takes office in January, President Donald Trump will be working with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate after two years of enjoying a Congress run by his party, in addition to his spot at the top of the executive branch, and a Supreme Court stacked with loyalists and ideological fellow travelers.What I’d like to talk about today is how that happened, what it allows the Democrats to potentially do after they’re seated, and what it might mean for the next presidential election.—As I mentioned, at the start of this election cycle, Republicans held the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Their House majority was narrow, which made a Democratic takeover there plausible. The Senate, as is often the case for Democrats hoping to win it, looked like it would be a far heavier lift, to the point that it wasn’t really in play. Senators serve six-year terms, so only about a third of them face voters at any given midterm, and Democrats needed to win seats in places where Republicans had recently been quite strong, in some cases leaning toward the Republicans in the double-digits.But the Dems managed to win those seats, and then some. Democrats flipped Senate seats in North Carolina and Maine, but also in Kansas, Iowa, Texas, and South Carolina. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown returned to the Senate after losing his seat two years earlier. As I’m writing this, Democrats have secured at least 54 seats, with a couple of contests still unresolved, and 51 seats represents a majority in the Senate.That Kansas result is especially striking: the state hadn’t elected a Democrat to the US Senate in nearly a century. Texas hadn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than three decades, but voters there chose James Talarico for the Senate and Gina Hinojosa for governor in this election—both Democrats.The House results were widespread and numerous, too, with Democrats flipping more than two dozen Republican-held districts, according to the Associated Press. And across the country, some voters elected new Democratic governors even where the state legislatures will remain Republican. This matters because a governor can shape budgets, appointments, and the administration of state government, but generally can’t enact their whole agenda without the legislature.That said, for a sense of how unusual this is, the House and Senate have both changed hands during a midterm election only three other times since World War II: in 1946, 1994, and 2006. A president’s party losing ground halfway through a term is common. Losing enough ground to hand over both chambers, including one with the Senate’s electoral map and offset election cycle, is not.So let’s take a moment to consider why this happened, because election results, even unusual ones, tend to get appealingly simple explanations in the press and think pieces, but there are several different things going on here, all at once.One is the cost of living. In the Associated Press’s large survey of people who voted, those who were especially concerned about grocery bills, healthcare, gas, and other daily costs overwhelmingly favored Democratic House candidates. Many voters blamed Trump’s economic policies, including tariffs, for making prices worse. The war with Iran also pushed fuel costs higher, and was unpopular with many voters who had expected a different approach to foreign policy.None of which requires a recession or other dramatic economic state of affairs. People can have jobs and still feel that ...
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    17 分
  • Urban Fire Smoke

    Urban Fire Smoke
    2026/11/03
    This week we talk about urban fires, wildland fires, and AQI.We also discuss PM2.5, chemicals, and plumes.Recommended Book: Biological War by Annie JacobsenTranscriptOn January 7, 2025, a fire began in the hills above Altadena, California, and surged through a community of homes, businesses, vehicles, and everything inside them. To someone watching the plume from a distance, it was indistinguishable from any other wildfire smoke. As it turns out, though, the composition of that smoke was a lot more dangerous than the emissions of a typical fire.A study published in October 2026 found that, during the most intense period of structural burning, the smoke from the Eaton Fire carried far more lead and other hazardous material than smoke measured during a fire that burned mostly vegetation. The researchers estimate that roughly seven million people in the Los Angeles area were beneath air containing lead at more than eighty times its usual local concentration for a twenty-four-hour period.Which is a striking number; though importantly, that doesn’t mean seven million people developed lead poisoning, or that a fire produced eighty times some established threshold of danger. The study measured the air and modeled where it went, it didn’t measure how much of that air ended up inside of people, and what happened inside of body that inhaled some of that air.This finding does raise a practical question, though: when a wildfire moves into a city, do our standard ways of describing and responding to smoke give us enough information to make informed decisions about it, and the danger it potentially represents?What I’d like to talk about today is the difference between a burning forest and a burning neighborhood, and what we still need to learn about protecting people downwind from this sort of disaster.—Smoke is not just one thing, it’s a mixture of gases and tiny particles. And its nature is shaped by what’s burning, how hot the fire is, and what happens to the plume as it travels.In a vegetation fire, the fuel might be trees, brush, grass, and other organic material on the ground. A fire moving through a built-up area burns those things, too, but also burns through roofing, insulation, wiring, cars, furniture, electronics, paint, and cleaning products stored in kitchens and garages. Some of those materials contain metals and synthetic chemicals that a stand of trees does not contain.The location where homes and other development meet burnable vegetation is often called the wildland-urban interface. Which makes it sound like a narrow line on a map, but in practice this interface area contains neighborhoods where fire can make the leap from vegetation to buildings, and then from one building to another. It’s at this point that a landscape fire becomes, in part, a structure fire, and potentially a structure fire on a very large scale.Researchers had reason to expect that structure fires would produce different smoke from wildfires. A National Academies report in 2022 described major gaps in our knowledge of what happens when the materials in a town burn alongside vegetation, though. Earlier EPA work found elevated metals in smoke associated with fires that destroyed buildings, but the aforementioned Eaton Fire gave us a more detailed look at how this mixture of smoke elements can change over a matter of hours.Let’s take a moment to talk about how we measure this sort of thing. Most of us think of smoke, when we think of smoke, through the lens of an air-quality number. On a smoky day, a map might show that the air is unhealthy because of the presence of PM2.5, which are tiny particles that are small enough to be inhaled deep into the lungs. The PM2.5 number represents how much particle pollution is in the air, and it’s useful: decades of research link fine-particle exposure to breathing and cardiovascular problems, and the Air Quality Index tells people when to reduce their exposure, because the air is laden with such particles.But PM2.5 describes particle size, not a single type of chemical. Two samples can contain the same mass of fine particles, the same amount of PM2.5 in the air, while having different ingredients—tiny bits of different sorts of things. An ordinary smoke reading won’t necessarily tell you whether those particles came from burning trees, a row of houses, or some combination of the two.That was the opening for this new study. About eleven miles south of Altadena, in Pico Rivera, Caltech researchers had installed an advanced air-monitoring station that’s part of a twelve-site research network called ASCENT, which tracks not just the quantity of airborne particles but aspects of their chemical makeup. Importantly, it also collects measurements continuously, rather than gathering a sample every few days and then analyzing that sample later.As wind carried the Eaton Fire’s plume past the station, the instruments recorded changes to the smoke composition hour by hour. The ...
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    13 分
  • 2026 French Protests

    2026 French Protests
    2026/10/27
    This week we talk about schools, riots, and police violence.We also discuss Le Pen, Macron, and international reporting.Recommended Book: This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-LeeTranscriptOn October 17, 2026, hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across France. Many were protesting the price of fuel, groceries, and other necessities. Others were high-school students, parents, teachers, and union members demanding better schools and public services.Most of those marches were peaceful. But in several cities, there were clashes with police, shops broken into and looted, and public buildings attacked. The town hall in Limoges caught fire. In Paris, images of burning vehicles and smashed storefronts made headline news, often without clear context, explaining where the peaceful marches ended and the violence began.Those two realities, peaceful protests on one hand, violence and widespread theft and destruction on the other, have since competed to define this story. Many people who marched, and in some cases continue to march, are concerned that their demands will become inextricably associated with all that widely shared footage of rioting. For shopkeepers and residents whose neighborhoods were damaged, that footage represents a real event with real costs. And for politicians facing a presidential election next spring, the unrest has become a test of who can speak to both protestor grievances and concerns about public safety.What I’d like to talk about today is how these protests started, why a movement about schools became entangled with a cost-of-living crisis and, then, serious disorder, and what all of this might mean for French politics; especially for Marine Le Pen, the far-right politician who’s leading the race to succeed President Emmanuel Macron.—The current protest wave began in September, at a high school in Créteil, outside Paris, where students were angry about unfilled staff positions. Walkouts and blockades spread to other schools, then to other parts of the country.The specific complaints varied by school, but the broad list was fairly consistent: teaching roles remaining unfilled, crowded classrooms, aging buildings, and school days that can stretch from eight in the morning to six in the evening. Some students also object to Parcoursup, the government system that sorts students who apply for higher education into schools, which students say adds uncertainty and a lot of pressure to the tail-end of their high school experience.These are not just complaints about aesthetics or convenience. If a student loses weeks of instruction before an exam, or has to spend a winter in a poorly heated classroom, that can affect what they learn and what opportunities they have later. And the experience isn’t evenly distributed. France’s national education system is meant, in part, to make citizenship and opportunity less dependent on where someone was born. Yet the OECD has found that students’ socioeconomic background remains strongly associated with their educational outcomes, despite these attempts at establishing opportunity equality.The French education ministry has pointed to investments it has made and improvements in filling teaching posts. But national spending and staffing figures don’t guarantee that the right teacher is available in the right classroom on Monday morning. A vacant specialized post, a long absence without a substitute, or a building whose repairs are delayed can still shape a student’s educational experience for an entire year.The government’s early response to these demonstrations mixed acknowledgment with policing the protestors. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu promised work on teacher replacements, building repairs, and schedules. Authorities also moved to clear blockades and arrest people accused of vandalism or attacking police and school staff. As the confrontations continued, teenagers suffered severe injuries attributed to police crowd-control weapons, including one young protester who lost a hand. Officers and school staff have been injured, too.These injuries and all that pushback intensified an existing dispute over whether forceful policing was preventing violence, contributing to it, or doing both in different places at different times. That question does not have a single answer, but it does help explain why some parents and students who were originally focused on school conditions began talking about policing as well: the police response to those protests blended that existing conversation and its associated complaints with those related to schooling in the country.Meanwhile, another source of anger was building well beyond the schools.France has been hit by an energy-price surge connected to the broader disruption of oil and gas markets in the Middle East. Its statistics agency reported that consumer prices were up 3.1% in September compared with a year earlier, but energy prices were up more than 21%. Diesel was up more than 44%, ...
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    18 分
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