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Selasa, 31 Agustus 2021

Two more factors have popped up that add to the Fed's inflation worries - CNBC

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A home, available for sale, is shown on August 12, 2021 in Houston, Texas.
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Trends in home prices and consumer expectations that were part of data releases Tuesday pointed to more inflationary issues on the horizon for the U.S. economy.

The S&P/Case-Shiller index, which measures home prices across 20 major U.S. cities, rose 1.77% in June, bringing the year-over-year gain to a staggering 19.1%. That's the largest jump in the series' history going back to 1987.

For perspective, the biggest annual gain in prices prior to the subprime meltdown and 2008 financial crisis was the 14.4% increase in September 2005.

At the same time, The Conference Board reported that consumer inflation expectations ticked higher again, with respondents to the survey now seeing the metric running at 6.8% 12 months from now. That's up a full percentage point from a year ago, or 17.2% on a relative basis.

Both metrics sent important warning signs: Shelter costs make up an outsized portion of most inflation gauges – about one-third of the headline consumer price index and even more of the core reading, for example – while inflation expectations are considered a key indicator of how high price pressures will run.

"Every time you hear that inflation is transitory remember that double house price inflation hasn't yet shown up in the indexes. Housing represents 40 percent of the core CPI," former Treasury Secretary and Obama White House economic advisor Larry Summers said in a recent tweet.

The latest inflation-related readings come just days after a vigorous effort from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to defuse concerns over price pressures. Summers has been one of the most vigorous voices cautioning about inflation, but they're beginning to arise within the Fed itself and other economists.

A post last week on the Dallas Fed website specifically addressed housing costs.

Economists Xiaoqing Zhou and Jim Dolmas wrote that rising housing prices are usually a leading indicator for rents, which account for most of the shelter costs in the CPI calculations. The correlation, they said, hits with about an 18-month lag time, meaning that rising housing costs now promise heavier rent burdens in the years to come.

The bottom line is that they see rent and owners equivalent rent to steadily increase, with both hitting 6.9% by 2023. That would tack on about 0.6% to the overall inflation reading as measured by the core personal consumption expenditures price index, the Fed's preferred gauge.

Wall Street backs the Fed, even if Main Street doesn't

Still, many Wall Street economists think the Fed is correct in anticipating that inflation will cool as temporary factors like supply chain glitches and shortages of goods and labor subside.

"We think [inflation] expectations are close to peaking, and they should fall over the next few months as the moderation in oil prices feeds into retail gas prices," Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson wrote.

Indeed, economists tie consumer inflation expectations closely to volatile issues such as prices at the pump, which have nudged lower by a few pennies over the past couple weeks but are more than 41% higher than a year ago, according to the Energy Information Administration.

It's not just energy, though, and it's not only mom-and-pop consumers who are leery of persistent price increases.

Goldman Sachs said a composite the firm uses that looks at seven business inflation expectation measures hit the highest level in the two decades that the firm has been tracking them.

Moreover, company pricing-related announcements are at the highest level since 2011, and mentions of "inflation" among Russell 3000 companies were at their peak in a data series that also goes back to the same year, the Wall Street firm's economists said.

Yet Goldman is also in the transitory inflation camp, projecting that orders for long-lasting "durable" goods that soared during the pandemic will decline and offset the rise in shelter-related price increases. Goldman sees core PCE inflation of 3.8% in 2021 easing to 2% by 2023-24, in line with the Fed's longer-term target.

Not everyone is so confident the current pressures will yield so quickly.

The market will get a good look Friday when the Labor Department releases its nonfarm payrolls report along with a reading on average hourly earnings. Wage-price inflation is what scares the Fed the most, and there is concern that the central bank is being too complacent about the various factors converging that could fuel "bad" inflation.

"Energy, food, and rent are the most visible forms of inflation. Persistent increases in these items will eventually lead to higher inflation expectations, and the Fed will have a problem," Ned Davis Research chief global macro strategist Joseph Kalish wrote. "My biggest fear is that complacency gives way to concern, and that low interest rates suddenly surge, prompting a reaction from Fed officials."

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Two more factors have popped up that add to the Fed's inflation worries - CNBC
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There are mounting risks that make September a potentially hazardous time for stocks - CNBC

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In this article

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, on Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021.
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After seven months of gains, stocks face plenty of potential risks that could make September live up to its reputation as the worst month of the year for the market.

According to CFRA, the S&P 500 has been positive just 45% of the time in September going back to World War II. The average 0.56% decline in the month is the worst of all months, with February the only other month with an average negative performance.

Strategists say it's not clear a correction or pullback is coming, but the risks have been rising. They include Federal Reserve policy changes, the spread of the Covid-19 delta variant and political risks.

Charles Schwab chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders said it's too simplistic to assume the market will follow history. "Are there a myriad of risks out there that at some point in time could be a risk factor that could lead to more than a 3% or 4% pullback? Absolutely," she said. "Could it be in September? Sure."

The decline is even worse in September when it falls in the first year of a presidential term. On average, the S&P 500 has declined 0.73% in those years. CFRA also found that in years where the S&P 500 set new highs in both July and August — like this year — the benchmark fell an average of 0.74% and rose only 43% of the time.

The S&P 500 rose nearly 3% in August and was closed out the final day of the month with a flattish performance. For the year, the S&P 500 is up 20.4%.

Risks growing

September has built-in calendar risks, including the upcoming August employment report Friday, which could determine how much the Fed will tip its hand at its Sept. 22 meeting on plans to cut back its bond buying program this year.

According to Dow Jones, economists expect 750,000 jobs were added in August. If the number is dramatically higher, market pros say they could see the Fed ramping up its plans to wind down the $120 billion a month bond buying program and possibly announce it in September. If the payrolls data is as expected or weaker, the Fed could delay its tapering for a few months.

Sonders said weaker data may not be negative for the market, since it could indicate the Fed would move more slowly to pare back the bond purchases. The gradual decrease of the bond purchases is seen as a precursor to an ultimate interest rate increase by the Fed, though Chairman Jerome Powell last week stressed the two were not linked.

Sonders said the Fed will rely on the incoming data in making its decision. That makes the course of Covid and its impact on the economy an important factor.

"The bottom line is sadly, the market is still at the mercy of this ... virus," Sonders said. 

Back to normal?

September has also been lauded as a month where Americans were supposed to feel a sense of normalcy, as children return to school in classrooms. Labor shortages have been expected to subside in September, as parents of school age children rejoin the work force and extended unemployment benefits expire.

The spread of the delta variant of Covid, however, has now created more uncertainty around the economy, as some companies push back reopening dates. Businesses from retailers to restaurants are seeing consumer traffic drop off in reaction to the spreading virus.

"Consumer confidence has already rolled over. It's less about what's the virus doing now. We all assumed things were going to be closer to normal in September," BITG head of equity and derivatives strategy Julian Emanuel.

Charles Schwab's Sonders said the focus on the Fed will be an overriding theme in September, but Covid is also a potential factor.

"I think the back-to-school component of this is more than just a potential needle mover," Sonders said. "It's whether we can stay in a general schools stay open without a much worse situation developing in some of the states where vaccination rates are lower. That's clearly a calendar specific Covid risk."

Emanuel said the market will be looking for the Fed to continue to push forward its plan to taper the bond purchases.

"This could be one of those ones by the time we get to the 22nd, the market may want the Fed to announce the tapering schedule because the implications of no announcement is this concern that they might know about the virus' impact on the broad economy and the labor market," he said.

Other risks in September could include inflation data. The consumer price index is slated for release Sept. 14. If data continues to run hot, Emanuel said that could push up Treasury yields, a negative for the market.

Emanuel said the market is also keeping an eye out on any discussion of when the U.S. will reach the debt ceiling, and it's also awaiting the fate of the multitrillion-dollar infrastructure bill, expected to be considered by Congress in September.

The U.S. exit from Afghanistan also hangs over the market as a risk factor. Final evacuation flights left Kabul on Monday. "The event has come and gone and the political fallout could be longer lasting, particularly if there are signs for greater instability in the region," Emanuel said.

September is worst month

Emanuel has been expecting a sizeable sell-off, and September and October are often choppy times.

"It doesn't mean the market is going to go down, but from our point of view there's a lot of complacency and belief that as long as the Fed isn't raising rates, the market cannot go down," he said.

He said investors should protect against a decline, and suggests using options.

"We're not saying you should be fearful," he said. "What we're saying is be prudent. You have fantastic gains in your portfolio."

Sonders said there have been major corrections in the market under the surface, even though some investors see the market as resilient because the major indexes have advanced to records. She said her biggest concern has been speculative froth.

"You've had rotational corrections and bear markets in areas like the meme stocks, SPACs and cryptos," she said.

Sonders said she maintains one outperform, and that is health care. She is looking more at factor-based investing than sector-based. She's looking for factors in individual stocks that reflect quality and is screening for things like stocks with strong free cash flow or earnings revisions.

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Sean Payton - 'Realistic' that New Orleans Saints host Week 1 game on road - ESPN

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Jameis Winston will definitely be the New Orleans Saints' Week 1 starter, Sean Payton confirmed Tuesday. Whether that game will be played in New Orleans or somewhere else remains to be determined.

Payton said the Saints are leaning toward staying in the Dallas area for the next several weeks until they are able to return home following the destruction of Hurricane Ida. And there is a good chance they will "host" their Week 1 game scheduled for Sept. 12 against the Green Bay Packers in Dallas or elsewhere if they are unable to host the game in the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.

"And we've got enough fans in this area and Houston and certainly from Northern Louisiana that we think that would be something that's very realistic," Payton added.

Despite Payton's comments, AT&T Stadium does not appear to be an option for Sept. 12 because of the preparations for a concert at the venue on Sept. 15, sources told ESPN. It is unclear whether the game could be played on a different date at AT&T Stadium or if a different stadium would have to host the game.

Neither the Superdome nor the Saints' practice facility in Metairie, Louisiana, sustained much damage from the hurricane. But it could take weeks for power and other services to return throughout the area. That could make it difficult for New Orleans to host its opening game, in addition to the staffing and security that will be required.

Payton said the team is making contingency plans to set up somewhere else through Week 4 -- then "reel it back" from there if they are able to return home sooner.

Payton said the team initially considered Oxnard, California, where the Cowboys regularly host their training camp and where the Saints spent a week during training camp in 2011. But that didn't make sense, considering the Saints' Week 2 and 3 games will be on the East Coast, at Carolina and at New England.

They also considered Indianapolis, which is out because of a Guns N' Roses concert, and The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, which is expected to host the San Francisco 49ers in Week 2.

Payton said an indoor practice space is also a priority. And they would have ample resources in the Dallas area, where they could practice inside AT&T Stadium if needed -- and where both SMU and TCU have offered to share their facilities and resources.

On Monday, Saints owner Gayle Benson announced an initial donation of $1 million to support those impacted by the storm in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. On Tuesday, others from around the NFL announced donations as well, including Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, who announced two grants totaling $1 million to the American Red Cross and the Greater New Orleans Foundation, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Leonard Fournette, who tweeted he is donating $100,000 to help his hometown of New Orleans.

While the Saints' relocation because of the storm has been a rushed decision, the team's choice as the starting quarterback was in the making for months. Payton said he ultimately chose Winston over Taysom Hill because "he's done a great job, he's earned that."

"The No. 1 thing is leading your offense and moving the ball and scoring points. And we feel like he's got a unique skill set with his arm talent -- boy, he can get the ball down the field," Payton said. "He's done a really good job of working through some of the progressions."

Payton said both Winston and Hill "competed their tails off"

"I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate how those guys have handled it," said Payton, who added that "we feel good about that room," which also includes rookie fourth-round draft pick Ian Book and possibly veteran Trevor Siemian, depending on the results of roster cuts and practice squad transactions.

Payton said he heard a lot of speculation that if the Saints chose Hill as their quarterback, they wouldn't be able to keep using him in his versatile QB/RB/TE/WR role. "We couldn't make the decision just based on that. We wanted to look at it completely from an open eyes standpoint," Payton said in response.

Payton said he had a "real good dialogue" with Hill, even though he knows it was "challenging and disappointing" for him to lose out on the starting QB job. But Payton said he still expects Hill to be a big part of the offense in his unique role.

"I've got a very clear vision relative to how he's gonna help us this year," Payton said. "Those two are both gonna be extremely important if we're to play well and win games this year."

On top of everything else the Saints are dealing with right now, Payton said it has been especially difficult to make roster cuts while players and their family members are spending time together in their Dallas-area hotel.

Among the most notable roster moves the Saints are expected to make, sources told ESPN's Adam Schefter that receiver Michael Thomas will miss the first five games of the season on the physically unable to perform list, and running back Devonta Freeman will be released.

ESPN's Todd Archer contributed to this report.

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30 stocks that shined in the pandemic are still poised for huge growth through 2024 - MarketWatch

Explainer: What happens now that U.S. troops have left Afghanistan? - Reuters

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U.S. Army soldiers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division patrol Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan August 17, 2021. Picture taken August 17, 2021. U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Taylor Crul/Handout via REUTERS

WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) - For the first time since 2001 there are no American troops in Afghanistan after the United States completed the evacuation of most of its citizens and thousands of at-risk Afghans.

More than 114,000 people have been airlifted from Kabul airport in the past two weeks as part of the U.S. effort.

But the end of the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan raises a new set of questions for Biden and his administration.

WHAT HAPPENS TO AMERICANS AND AT-RISK AFGHANS LEFT BEHIND?

The United States has evacuated more than 5,500 U.S. citizens since evacuation flights began on Aug. 14. A small number of American citizens have chosen to continue to stay in Afghanistan, many of them so they can be with family members.

The Biden administration has said it expects the Taliban to continue allowing safe passage for Americans and others to leave Afghanistan after the U.S. military withdrawal is completed.

But there are concerns about how those citizens will be able to leave if there is no functioning airport.

Tens of thousands of at-risk Afghans, such as interpreters who worked with the U.S. military, journalists and women's rights advocates, have also been left behind.

It is unclear what their fate will be but officials are concerned that the Taliban may retaliate against them.

The Taliban have pledged to allow all foreign nationals and Afghan citizens with travel authorization from another country to leave Afghanistan, according to a joint statement issued by Britain, the United States and other countries on Sunday.

WHAT HAPPENS TO KABUL AIRPORT AFTER U.S. FORCES LEAVE?

For the past two weeks, the U.S. military has been securing and operating Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport with nearly 6,000 troops.

The Taliban are in talks with governments like Qatar and Turkey to seek assistance to continue civilian flight operations from there, the only way for many people to leave Afghanistan.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Sunday that repairs need to be made at Kabul airport before it can be reopened to civilian flights.

Turkey, which is part of the NATO mission, has been responsible for security at the airport for the past six years. Keeping the airport open after foreign forces hand over control is vital not just for Afghanistan to stay connected to the world but also to maintain aid supplies and operations.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE U.S.-TALIBAN RELATIONSHIP LOOK LIKE?

The United States has said it does not plan to leave diplomats behind in Afghanistan and will decide on what to do in the future based on the Taliban's actions.

But the Biden administration will have to determine how it is able to ensure a humanitarian and economic crisis does not break out in the country.

The United Natinos says more than 18 million people - over half Afghanistan's population - require aid and half of all Afghan children under 5 already suffer from acute malnutrition amid the second drought in four years.

Some countries including Britain have said that no nation should bilaterally recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.

WHAT KIND OF THREAT IS POSED BY ISLAMIC STATE?

The one area of cooperation between the United States and Taliban could be on the threat posed by Islamic State militants.

There are questions about how Washington and the Taliban can coordinate and potentially even share information to counter the group.

Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), named after a historic term for the region, first appeared in eastern Afghanistan in late 2014 and quickly established a reputation for extreme brutality.

The group claimed responsibility for an Aug. 26 suicide bombing outside the airport that killed 13 U.S. troops and scores of Afghan civilians.

The United States has carried out at least two drone strikes against the group since then and Biden has said his administration will continue to retaliate for the attack.

ISIS-K is a sworn enemy of the Taliban. But U.S. intelligence officials believe the movement used the instability that led to the collapse of Afghanistan's Western-backed government this month to strengthen its position and step up recruitment of disenfranchised Taliban members.

(This story refiles to add dropped word in first paragraph)

Reporting by Idrees Ali and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Mary Milliken, Grant McCool and Daniel Wallis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Peak raises $75M for a platform that helps non-tech companies build AI applications - TechCrunch

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As artificial intelligence continues to weave its way into more enterprise applications, a startup that has built a platform to help businesses, especially non-tech organizations, build more customized AI decision making tools for themselves has picked up some significant growth funding. Peak AI, a startup out of Manchester, England, that has built a “decision intelligence” platform, has raised $75 million, money that it will be using to continue building out its platform as well as to expand into new markets, and hire some 200 new people in the coming quarters.

The Series C is bringing a very big name investor on board. It is being led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with previous backers Oxx, MMC Ventures, Praetura Ventures, and Arete also participating. That group participated in Peak’s Series B of $21 million, which only closed in February of this year. The company has now raised $119 million; it is not disclosing its valuation.

(This latest funding round was rumored last week, although it was not confirmed at the time and the total amount was not accurate.)

Richard Potter, Peak’s CEO, said the rapid follow-on in funding was based on inbound interest, in part because of how the company has been doing.

Peak’s so-called Decision Intelligence platform is used by retailers, brands, manufacturers and others to help monitor stock levels, build personalized customer experiences, as well as other processes that can stand to have some degree of automation to work more efficiently, but also require sophistication to be able to measure different factors against each other to provide more intelligent insights. Its current customer list includes the likes of Nike, Pepsico, KFC, Molson Coors, Marshalls, Asos, and Speedy, and in the last 12 months revenues have more than doubled.

The opportunity that Peak is addressing goes a little like this: AI has become a cornerstone of many of the most advanced IT applications and business processes of our time, but if you are an organization — and specifically one not built around technology — your access to AI and how you might use it will come by way of applications built by others, not necessarily tailored to you, and the costs of building more tailored solutions can often be prohibitively high. Peak claims that those using its tools have seen revenues on average rise 5%; return on ad spend double; supply chain costs reduce by 5%; and inventory holdings (a big cost for companies) reduce by 12%.

Peak’s platform, I should point out, is not exactly a “no-code” approach to solving that problem — not yet at least: it’s aimed at data scientists and engineers at those organizations so that they can easily identify different processes in their operations where they might benefit from AI tools, and to build those out with relatively little heavy lifting.

There have also been different market factors that have also played a role. Covid-19, for example, and the boost that we have seen both in increasing “digital transformation” in businesses, and making e-commerce processes more efficient to cater to rising consumer demand and more strained supply chains, have all led to businesses being more open to and keen to invest in more tools to improve their automation intelligently.

This, combined with Peak AI’s growing revenues, is part of what interested SoftBank. The investor has been long on AI for a while; but it also has been building out a section of its investment portfolio to provide strategic services to the kinds of businesses that it invests in.

Those include e-commerce and other consumer-facing businesses, which make up one of the main segments of Peak’s customer base.

Notably, one of its big, recent investments specifically in that space was made earlier this year also in Manchester, when it took a $730 million stake (with potentially $1.6 billion more down the line) in The Hut Group, which builds software for and runs D2C businesses.

“In Peak we have a partner with a shared vision that the future enterprise will run on a centralized AI software platform capable of optimizing entire value chains,” Max Ohrstrand, senior investor for SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement. “To realize this a new breed of platform is needed and we’re hugely impressed with what Richard and the excellent team have built at Peak. We’re delighted to be supporting them on their way to becoming the category-defining, global leader in Decision Intelligence.”

It’s not clear that SoftBank’s two Manchester interests will be working together, but it’s an interesting synergy if they do, and most of all highlights one of the firm’s areas of interest.

Longer term, it will be interesting to see how and if Peak evolves to be extend its platform to a wider set of users at the organizations that are already its customers.

Potter said he believes that “those with technical predispositions” will be the most likely users of its products in the near and medium term. You might assume that would cut out, for example, marketing managers, although the general trend in a lot of software tools has precisely been to build versions of the same tools used by data scientists for these less technical people to engage in the process of building what it is that they want to use.

“I do think it’s important to democratize the ability to stream data pipelines, and to be able to optimize those to work in applications,” Potter added.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Trumpet - The New York Times

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Listen to Louis Armstrong’s sweetness, Miles Davis’s wild squall, Handel’s Baroque majesty and other favorites.

In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies and Stravinsky.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the trumpet. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.

The musical term “intrada” suggests a fanfare, music to mark an entrance. This one, written in 1947 by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, captures the many personalities of the trumpet: noble and bombastic, mischievous and meditative. Hakan Hardenberger seamlessly glides between these moods, driving the energy through the rollicking finale.

Honegger’s Intrada in C

Roland Pontinen, piano (Bis)

Here is my impassioned clarion call to understand the trumpet! See that exclamation point? That’s what a trumpet does. It punctuates emotions. My trumpet teacher Bill Fielder would always ask, “What is the trumpet?” I would ponder for a moment and offer an encyclopedic answer like “A metal instrument with … blah, blah, blah.” To that Mr. Fielder would say, “It is a mirror of your mind.”

Ordinarily, I would invite you to listen to Miles Davis’s “Porgy and Bess,” a classic collaboration between Miles and Gil Evans. This album set the stage for people thinking differently about the orchestra and jazz. But as I write this, yesterday was the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. My song “Funeral Dirge,” from the album “A Tale of God’s Will,” originally composed for the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s first Katrina documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” still haunts me today. Actually, I don’t feel like I composed it. I feel like it was being screamed at me: my personal clarion call to hear and weep with my hometown, New Orleans.

Dead bodies floating. Dead bodies on top of cars. Dead bodies in the grass. Dead bodies in places I knew. Dead bodies in neighborhoods I grew up in. I saw these bodies in the raw footage of Spike’s documentary. One dead body I didn’t see in the video was that of an old neighborhood friend who died trying to help people stay on their roofs while floodwaters raged beneath. I never cried so much, shedding tears for the many bodies I saw, and the many, many more I didn’t see. This dirge is my tribute to those brave, valiant, fallen heroes. God bless those souls from Katrina — and, today, those souls from Ida.

Terence Blanchard’s “Funeral Dirge”

(Blue Note)

Conventional wisdom holds that Louis Armstrong’s peak came with his pathbreaking recordings of the late 1920s and early ’30s. Don’t believe it! He remained a potent creative force well into the middle of the century, and his 1947 Town Hall performance of “Dear Old Southland” shows how he continued to deepen his understanding of a tune.

This duo rendition, with the pianist Dick Cary, starts out as a stiff-upper-lip confession; the opening trumpet lines suggest a speaker confiding some sadness in a suavely guarded manner. But eventually the attempt to keep up appearances dissolves, as Armstrong sends torrents of welled-up feeling bawling forth. The beaming assurance of his technique — bending notes, reaching for new climaxes — gives this unraveling unmistakable dignity. And the ending’s brief hint of a striding, sunnier future provides one more look at the malleability of a soul.

Turner Layton’s “Dear Old Southland”

(Sony)

The best way to get to know an instrument is to write for it. It’s like getting to know somebody well; you learn their strengths, their weaknesses. The trumpet has a very limited range: Writing this four-trumpet piece was like being in prison, because the range is so small; it’s like four people in a little room. But inside those two and a half octaves it can really climb. If you go from an A to a C, it’s like you’re going from the basement to the sky.

Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 5”

American Brass Quintet (Summit)

Who would have imagined that light touching light is connected to comprehension, that inspiration and creativity are bound together in the heart and soul of a true artist? Hearing Miles Davis’s “Calypso Frelimo” was for me an inspired moment of music as art.

The piece begins at a shockingly intense level. First the trumpet solo, beautifully inspired music with long-and short-changing sonics, bellowing glissando multiphonics interspersed with nuanced micro-sonics: pure melodic development with a creative range matched by emotion, and just the right amount of space and silence perfectly arched across a vast, still environment mysteriously, without effort.

Miles Davis’s “Calypso Frelimo”

(Sony)

The first time I heard a recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, I was mesmerized by the metamorphosis of the sound of the trumpet to the eloquent, distant timbre of the post horn, emerging from offstage in the third movement. This was Leonard Bernstein’s version with the New York Philharmonic, with John Ware playing the solo, and as a very young trumpeter who had grown up steeped in commercial and Afro-Cuban music, I had never heard such a simple yet poignant melody. It was one of the listening experiences that had the most impact on my early career as a symphony orchestra musician.

Mahler’s Third Symphony

(Sony)

Kenny Dorham (1924-72) did not command attention with Gabriel-like power and bravura technique. A favorite of jazz connoisseurs, he seduced listeners with the soulful warmth, colorful wit and understated wisdom of the hippest bon vivant on the scene. Everything about his approach to the trumpet and improvisation was expressive, relaxed and personal. The dappled smears of his crepuscular tone and the flirty bounce he brings to the standard “I Had the Craziest Dream” in 1959 make a beeline for your heart. His improvised phrases, delivered with nonchalant charm, enchant you with clever melodic and rhythmic rhymes and piquant note choices. He’s telling a story, inviting you into his dream — where you not only fall in love with the trumpet, but also the man with the horn.

Harry Warren’s “I Had the Craziest Dream”

(New Jazz)

Every year “Messiah” comes around, and every year, almost at the end, comes the moment to hold your breath. Many performances of Handel’s classic oratorio now take place on period instruments, and the Baroque trumpet is an unwieldy beast: long, straight and lacking the valves that allow players on modern trumpets to hit notes reliably. So while it hopefully doesn’t sound like it, the soaring, angelic, regal solo part that crowns this bass aria is a merciless test of skill, as the player announces the Day of Judgment — and endures his or her own.

Handel’s “The trumpet shall sound”

Chris Dicken, trumpet; Matthew Brook, bass; Dunedin Consort; John Butt, conductor (Linn)

In 1958 my father, the conductor Felix Slatkin, commissioned the composer Leo Arnaud to create pieces that would demonstrate the then-new audio format of stereo. Utilizing various military fanfares as well as original tunes, “Bugler’s Dream” included what would become known as “The Olympic Fanfare.” The track was featured on a Capitol Records album called “Charge!” and has been reissued several times.

With trumpets of all sizes and the musicians separated into two different studios, there was simply no better way to show off not only the new technology but also the incredible skill of the 26 players. If you do not love the trumpet after listening to this, I suggest the track that contains the 12 bagpipers.

Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream”

The Military Band (Beulah)

The trumpet is an length of impossible plumbing — physically demanding and fickle — and playing it involves an act of illusory control. Trumpet players, at their best, give up some part of this deception, and their imperfection lets the listener in on a secret: the musician’s humanity. They strive toward something essential and the failure to reach it shows their true virtuosity. What Ron Miles achieves on “Witness” demands that he go beyond his prodigious technique, and the heart-rending sound that comes from his breaking of the illusion is the trumpet at its most essential: vulnerable, virtuosic and real.

Ron Miles’s “Witness”

(Capri)

No fewer than 14 trumpets (and 11 other brasses) blaze mightily through the fanfare finale of Janacek’s Sinfonietta. Written in 1926 for the opening of a mass gymnastics festival that was part fitness bonanza, part explosion of Czech national pride, the work was inspired by a military band its composer heard — and whose raw, brilliant sound and determined spirit he sought to capture. An armed forces paean sounds awful, but Janacek created something both local — a portrait of Brno, his hometown — and universal. The music reflects not reactionary jingoism, but wild liberation.

Janacek’s Sinfonietta

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Rafael Kubelik, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)

Johnny Coles paints a spectrum of the trumpet’s timbre possibilities at their finest: soft blues, golden butter tones and brazen oranges that reveal a tender underside of the horn. He makes it easy to forget that the trumpet was born as an instrument of fanfare and war. But ultimately it’s the breadth of expression I love most here, the spaces left in order to bring these colors to light. And while Coles’s harmonic contours glide mostly inside the lines, the fleeting moments where the trumpet skates outside — smearing, curving, soaring — bring forward a purple-hued beauty, sounding the blues inside a feminine form.

Gil Evans’s “Sunken Treasure”

Gil Evans Orchestra (Verve)

In this recording, I’m drawn to how the trumpet speaks the message of the song as clearly as the lyrics. In my career I’ve seen firsthand how the compositions of Gabriella Smith, the poetry of Paul Simon and the power of Justin Vernon’s voice can express a wide range of feelings so directly. If you think about music as the communication of complex human emotions from an artist to a listener through sound — and if you think about classical music more broadly in the American tradition — no one does it better than Louis Armstrong. What initially drew me to the trumpet, and keeps on drawing me, is how similar the sound is to the human voice, both in its expressive capabilities and its means of production: breath, vibration, projection.

Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue”

Live in New York, July 22, 1929

Alessandro Ignazio Marcello’s Concerto in C minor was originally an oboe concerto, but has since been adapted to be played by other instruments, and one of its more popular recordings features Tine Thing Helseth on piccolo trumpet. The first time I heard this piece, I was in the sixth grade. I didn’t know what a piccolo trumpet was at the time, but I knew that eventually I wanted to get to a point in my career when I would be able to play a piece as rich and interesting as this one.

Alessandro Marcello’s Concerto in C minor

Norwegian Radio Orchestra; Andrew Manze, conductor

Leroy Anderson, the master of the light orchestral miniature, recalled that his 1949 piece “A Trumpeter’s Holiday” had its origins backstage during a Boston Pops concert. The great trumpeter Roger Voisin, then principal with the Pops, was complaining that trumpet works tended to be loud, martial, triumphant. Voisin suggested that Anderson try writing something different.

The result was this mellow lullaby. Of course, it was still a trumpet piece, so Anderson couldn’t help letting jazzy bits slip in: The beguiling melody has a slightly jumpy repeated-note figure, even as the orchestra maintains a lulling mood in the background, and a middle section turns restless and syncopated in a moment of mischief.

Leroy Anderson’s “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby”

Susan Slaughter, trumpet; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor (Sony)

As a violin-playing child, I was slow to appreciate the trumpet, which seemed, like other brass instruments, temperamental and resistant to expressiveness — especially compared with strings. How wrong I was. Take the Thursday installment of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-day opera cycle “Licht.” The drama of Act II, “Michaels Reise um die Erde” (“Michael’s Journey Around the Earth”), unfolds with the characters represented with instruments, not singing voices. In this excerpt, Michael (portrayed by a trumpet) and Eve (a basset horn) engage in a duet that’s flirtatious, funny and — contrary to what I once naïvely believed — full of humanity.

Stockhausen’s “Michaels Reise um die Erde”

Markus Stockhausen, trumpet; Suzanne Stephens, basset horn (ECM)

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Opinion | Hurricane Ida Offers a Glimpse of the Dystopia That’s Coming for All of Us - The New York Times

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As a boy, Louis Armstrong worked for the Karnofsky family. The Karnofskys’ tailor shop on South Rampart Street in New Orleans became a second home to him, and the family helped him buy his first cornet. On Sunday night, the Karnofsky building, long neglected by the city and a succession of private owners who promised to restore it, finally collapsed under the force of Hurricane Ida’s winds.

I live in New Orleans, but I saw the news on my phone, as I scrolled from the safety of a rented apartment in Birmingham, Ala. My family and I arrived on Friday. We are among the Louisianans who could afford to evacuate. We got here by driving I-59 to I-20, which is to say, we relied on the comparatively well-funded public infrastructure of interstate highways to get out of harm’s way.

Our less wealthy neighbors rely on streetcars and buses to get around, modes of public transportation that burn less gas and therefore contribute less to the rising seas and stronger storms that imperil us all. But there is limited regional bus or train service around New Orleans, and they largely were left to experience Hurricane Ida, one of the strongest to make landfall in Louisiana’s history, firsthand.

The reports I got from those who stayed, by necessity or obligation, were mixed. My wife’s cousin, a surgeon at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, said that for the first time in recent memory, the emergency room was quiet. A doctor friend in Thibodaux, 60 miles southwest of the city, texted to say that a floor of his hospital had lost power and staff were having to manually pump air into the lungs of intubated Covid patients as they moved them to a floor with a working generator. When he got a break, he texted again to say, “I mean this is traumatizing.”

The big story, for New Orleans, is that the levees held. This was a huge relief, a vindication of the work the Army corps did to build what it calls a “risk reduction system” for the city and its suburbs after Hurricane Katrina. Still, the system is less ambitious than the one Louisianans lobbied for after Katrina, and the protection it offers grows weaker every day, as the wetlands that buffer the city from the Gulf of Mexico get wetter.

It could not save the Karnofsky building from the wind, it did not prevent the failure of the New Orleans’s sewer system and it did not stop the region’s electrical transmission towers from toppling, leaving the hundreds of thousands of people who remain in the region without power for the foreseeable future. But it kept the Gulf of Mexico out of the city, which was its job.

The situation in Thibodaux, LaPlace and other towns east of the city, is much worse. In this region along the Mississippi River — variously called the petrochemical corridor or Cancer Alley — people live with the constant threat of flooding, toxic emissions and other costs of our technological achievement.

LaPlace, where a storm surge in Lake Pontchartrain during Hurricane Isaac flooded 7,000 homes in 2012, has long lobbied for flood protection; Congress approved $760 million for a project in 2018. But it isn’t slated for completion until 2024, and the levees that residents knew would protect them weren’t anywhere near finished. As I write, there are people there standing in water up to their chests, waiting for rescue.

Houma, a city of more than 30,000 people near the coast, endured 150-mile-per-hour winds for hours. So too did many smaller communities, places like Isle de Jean Charles, Cocodrie, Chauvin and Golden Meadow, where Native people and other Louisianans make a life fishing and, often, working for the same oil and gas companies whose pipelines and emissions imperil their homes. Many houses along the coast are built on pilings, 10 feet or more in the air, because floods are so frequent. It is difficult to imagine what might be left.

Hurricane Ida’s lesson, therefore, is not that Louisiana’s storm protections are good enough. Its lesson is that investments in infrastructure save lives.

Nobody in Louisiana needed another hurricane to teach us this. Because of repeated hurricanes and coastal erosion, the population of Cameron Parish, on the state’s western border, is nearly half what it was in 2000; depending on how you look at it, this is either despite or because of an enormous new liquid natural gas facility in the parish.

Many residents of Lake Charles, just north of Cameron, remain in dire straits since last summer’s Hurricane Laura. Relatively little attention or recovery aid followed that Category 4 hurricane. The Trump administration bears much of the blame for not getting people the resources they need, but it did not help that it is growing ever harder for journalists and citizens to keep up with the floods, storms, wildfires and other dystopian manifestations of our changed climate. That’s why I worry the attention paid to Louisiana after Hurricane Ida will be short lived, too.

New Orleanians understood why the Biden White House gave Louisiana a D+ on the national “infrastructure report card” it released in April. With increasingly regularity, for example, clouds have been dumping water into our bowl-shaped city faster than our drainage pumps can take it out. Earlier this summer, President Biden came to tour a linchpin of the city’s water system, called the Carrollton Water Plant, which supplies drinking water to much of New Orleans. “Infrastructure is all about making life livable for ordinary people,” he said outside the plant, stumping for the infrastructure bill that has since passed the Senate and awaits action in the House of Representatives.

A few days after the president’s visit, a problem in the electrical grid — unrelated to the gas shortage that was then vexing much of the South — caused a loss of power at the Carrollton Plant, prompting the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board to issue a “precautionary boil water advisory” for a large section of the city.

This too is a familiar problem here. Mostly you hope you hear about the warning before you have made your coffee or brushed your teeth. If you don’t, you can console yourself knowing that the precautions usually turn out to be unnecessary — even if it is hard to shake the fact that not long ago, two people died nearby after drinking water that contained Naegleria fowleri, which is known colloquially as “the brain-eating amoeba.”

And even before Hurricane Ida blew through, the city’s hospitals were filled to capacity.

Yet through it all, New Orleanians continue to prove themselves capable of making beautiful moments. From an unfamiliar apartment in Birmingham, I think of Joe Krown playing a piano mounted in the back of a pickup truck or Kermit Ruffins advertising “shots for shots”: a free drink at his Mother-in-Law Lounge to people from the neighborhood who got their Covid vaccine.

I think, too, of the brass band staying limber by practicing on the front porch around the corner every week, with my neighbors dancing on the lawn, six feet apart. On a drizzling afternoon this winter, I walked over with my daughter, who was 4 then, just as the band was packing up. She cried because we had missed the music. The trumpeter saw her tears, called for all the instruments to come out of their cases, and the band played her request: “What a Wonderful World.”

The truth is that it’s hard to live in Louisiana. The truth is also that it’s hard to live many places these days, and Louisiana has the benefit of being comparatively easy to love. In fact, it seems everybody loves New Orleans enough to want to come for a long weekend, because seemingly every block now has an Airbnb — or two or three — driving up housing costs, especially in neighborhoods on higher ground.

Evidently fewer people love New Orleans enough to insist, once they get back home, that their congressional representatives vote for the climate, infrastructure or social welfare legislation that might give this city a few extra decades, or expand the number of people who can make a viable life here, or anywhere else in the United States.

Instead, we’re told to be resilient, which usually means that we should attempt to find individual solutions to our structural problems.

Standing in front of the Carrollton Water Plant last May, Mr. Biden joked to reporters, “I’m taking up a collection.” If Louisiana’s vulnerability were unique, maybe charity would be enough.

But if you live near a coast yourself, I counsel solidarity today. Or, for that matter, if you drink water from the public supply, take medicine produced by federally funded research and development, entrust your children to a public school or your parents to a nursing home, or simply enjoy the occasional convenience of a bridge that does not fall, you might take an interest in that infrastructure bill.

At $1 trillion, it offers a modest down payment on our collective needs — shoring up the roads and bridges like those that my family and I will use to return home whenever the power comes back on and schools reopen. Take an interest though, too, in the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package Congress is also considering, which gets a little closer to the scale of the problems before us.

Structural problems need structural solutions. Don’t give charity to Louisiana because it’s unique. Demand that Congress take meaningful action, because Louisiana is not unique, and you may be next.

Andy Horowitz (@andydhorowitz), a history professor at Tulane University, is the author of “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Enduristan Launches New ADV Luggage Options - RideApart

I don’t know about you, but there seems to be a paradigm shift when it comes to adventure oriented luggage options. Back in the day, hard luggage such as top cases and side panniers were all the rage, with adventure ready riders supporting these accessories on their rugged machines. Don’t get me wrong, hard cases and luggage options definitely have their benefits. However, it’s hard to deny the versatility of a good set of soft luggage.

We recently covered an innovative hybrid luggage solution by Mosko Moto, the Backcountry, which is something of a cross between hard and soft luggage. If this product's $750 price tag is a tad too steep for you, then you may want to consider this modular soft luggage solution by Enduristan. This Swiss motorcycle accessory manufacturer has an impressive array of motorcycle oriented luggage solutions. The latest of which consists of a versatile set of soft panniers which can be used with or without a pannier rack.

Enduristan’s New luggage solutions consist of the Blizzard saddlebags and the Monsoon EVO bag. Of course, unlike hard luggage, these soft bags occupy a lot less space, retaining the motorcycle's narrow width. It also makes it easier for you to remove the bags and carry them along when you’re off the bike. Enduristan’s bags offer sturdy construction as well as waterproofing capabilities. Instead of regular stitching, these bags’ seams are RF-welded together, similar to what you find in a traditional dry bag.

Enduristan states in its official website that these bags are “100% water, dust, mud, and snow proof.” The Monsoon EVO can be used as a soft pannier, and is ideal for bikes with an upswept exhaust system, as you can mount the smaller 24-liter bag on the exhaust side, and the larger 34-liter bag on the other side to retain visual symmetry when looking at your bike from behind.

Enduristan Launches New ADV Luggage Options

As for the specific product options, the blizzard saddlebags are available in four sizes. The smallest of which has a carrying capacity of 12 liters, with the largest option standing at 34 liters. You can also up for a 17 and 24 liter option. Prices range from $299.99 to $399.99 USD. Meanwhile, the Monsoon EVO bags are available in two sizes with the smallest one featuring a 24-liter capacity priced at $419.99 USD. The larger 34-liter bag is priced at $449.99 USD.

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Feds to investigate whether 5 states that ban mask mandates are violating student rights - NBC News

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The Department of Education has launched a civil rights investigation into whether states that have banned mask mandates are discriminating against students with disabilities who could be at a higher risk for severe illness from Covid.

The department's Office for Civil Rights has opened directed investigations in five states — Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah - that have barred schools from requiring masks among students and staff.

“The Department has heard from parents from across the country — particularly parents of students with disabilities and with underlying medical conditions — about how state bans on universal indoor masking are putting their children at risk and preventing them from accessing in-person learning equally,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “It’s simply unacceptable that state leaders are putting politics over the health and education of the students they took an oath to serve."

Aug. 25, 202103:37

The state policies conflict with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends universal mask wearing for students and teachers in the classroom. If the investigations determine that the state mask bans have discriminated against students with disabilities, it could lead to sanctions including a loss of federal education funding.

The Education Department said the Office for Civil Rights has not opened investigations in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, or Arizona because their bans on indoor mask mandates are not currently being enforced. "However, the Department will continue to closely monitor those states and is prepared to take action if state leaders prevent local schools or districts from implementing universal indoor masking in schools or if the current court decisions were to be reversed," the agency said.

Brian Symmes, communications director for South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, called the probe part of the Biden administration's attempt "to force a radical liberal agenda on states and people who disagree with them."

"Under South Carolina law, anybody who wants to wear a mask – in a school setting or elsewhere – is free to do so, but the governor isn’t going to ignore a parent’s fundamental right to make health decisions for their children,” Symmes said in a statement to NBC News.

The states that are getting letters are headed by Republican governors, and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds accused the administration of trying to "pick a political fight."

"In Iowa, we will continue to support individual liberty over government mandates,” she said in a statement.

Cardona indicated the move was coming during an interview with said NBC's "Meet the Press" last week.

“We're going to use our Office for Civil Rights to investigate any claim that comes forward to make sure that students' rights are kept. And we're also going to ensure that the funds are available to those districts that are doing the right thing to make sure students come in safely," Cardona said, adding that his agency had been in conversations with school districts, like those in Illinois, that are violating governors’ statewide mask mandates.

“We shouldn't be putting students at risk. So yes, we are involving ourselves in conversations with those leaders, with those elected officials, to make sure that student safety is at the top of the list,” he said.

Cardona’s directive came after President Joe Biden issued a memorandum earlier this month calling on Cardona “to take steps toward the initiation of possible enforcement actions” in order to “prepare for a safe return to school for our Nation's children.”

“Our priority must be the safety of students, families, educators, and staff in our school communities. Nothing should interfere with this goal,” the memorandum said.

The Associated Press contributed.

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Climate change is radicalizing young people — here's what that means and how to combat despair - CNBC

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Sarah Ray, a professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, and author of "A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet."
Photo courtesy Sarah Ray

Young people are not coping well with climate anxiety.

Sarah Ray, a professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, has had a front row seat to the way climate change has landed on young people and most notably, how the weight of that anxiety has changed over the decade-plus years she's been a professor.

Ray wrote a book on what she's learned: "A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet," which came out in 2020.

CNBC is publishing a series of accounts of how climate watchers, leaders and others are facing the emotional toll of climate change and finding a way through their anxiety, and this is a piece in that series.

The following are excerpts of Ray's comments in a telephone interview with CNBC. They have been edited for brevity and clarity.

'This new generation is radically different' 

The existential weight that my students were bringing to me personally and into the classrooms to each other was something I had no tools to deal with.

I was seeing a great impatience with doing the work of classes: "Why am I wasting my time in college when this stuff is happening out there?" Very much like what we hear from Greta Thunberg and the youth climate movement. This sense of impatience with the types of activities we do in classes, a real desire for action, a real desire for getting out there, rolling your sleeves up and doing something and fixing these problems. The urgency has totally sunk in. There was a fetishizing of action over thinking or talking or reading.

Economics, politics, law, engineering, science used to be the places where students would go into if they wanted to get into environmental stuff. And they were predominantly white, and they often came in with a nostalgia about wanting to get things back to nature the way it was before "bad stuff happened to it." And that was the modus operandi of the field.

This new generation is radically different.

Sarah Ray, a professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, with her two kids, ages 10 and seven.
Photo courtesy Sarah Ray

There is a real awareness of the social justice dimensions and the sort of systems change thinking around climate change. The new generation doesn't think of this as just something that we need to go into science to fix or technology to fix or engineering to fix or even politics or law. There's a sense of this being a systemic thing that we need all hands on deck to address. We need all the talents, we need all the skills we from the artists, to the creative types, to the imagination people, to the children's book writers, to the teachers to the parents — in addition to all of the usual suspects that used to be in sort of thinking about the major leverage points of affecting climate change.

It used to be that climate change was sort of imperceptible, abstract, hard to get your head around hard to deal with. It was a communication conundrum. It evaded all of the risk perception, tick boxes that need to be checked to create a good villain, for people to perceive something as a problem — especially for young people for whom the future feels really far away.

No longer is it abstract, or in the future. It is now, and it's perceivable. And that has been a huge achievement, because by definition, climate change is the least narratable villain in a story. 

The younger generations are thinking, "In my lifetime, I'm going to be the one who's going to be beset with the worst of this." And they know from the IPCC reports, and all the successful science communication that's come out, that the next 10 years is the most important. So they see themselves coming of age, coming onto the political and professional scene of their lives, coming into adulthood, when the most important effects can happen, the most responsibility the most urgency is on them.

They won't be flying as much. They will refuse things that my generation takes for granted, like plastic and single-use containers. They will slowly, hopefully, successfully change how infrastructure works, how their transportation works, how they build their families, how they build their homes, how they live on this planet and walk on this Earth. Their lifestyles won't accept what my generation has accepted as normal.

There's going to be a real reckoning around reproductive refusal. What's fascinating about that is environmentalists have long chosen not to have children as a way to reduce their impact on the planet, but this generation is choosing not to have children because they don't think their children will have a livable future. That's a very, very, very different reason to do it.

Environmentalists have long chosen not to have children as a way to reduce their impact on the planet, but this generation is choosing not to have children because they don't think their children will have a livable future.
Sarah Ray
Professor and author

The climate movement forever has thought, "We're never going change capitalism, this is never going to happen." This real sense of futility of the whole endeavor, and that futility is less, I feel like that is diminished.

The younger generations are saying, "No, actually Covid has shown us that we can change a lot of stuff." They feel more politically powerful than previous any previous generation before them, except for maybe in the '60s. In the last 50 years, this is the most powerful feeling generation, and they have good reason to feel that way.

Necessity is the mother invention. Desperation is the mother of action. These two things absolutely go together. You can't have such a politically organized generation and group without such clear and present danger.

For a sustainable future: Focus on what's working

The story is not already prewritten. The dominant narrative is about inevitability. And that is an excuse for inaction. And I am utterly early against that. My favorite book on this is the newest book by Elin Kelsey, "Hope Matters."

The story that we can build the future we want has to be the central story with young people. I don't care whether that's rose tinted. I don't care if that's Pollyanna to some people. The science is out there on what happens with young people if they think that their future is already written for them, and that is not good. That is not an option for me.

The future of climate communication, the future of climate psychology has to simply be the "both-and" orientation. It's just going to have to be, because we're all going to learn at some point that living in doom and gloom narratives is very ineffective, and it makes us literally want to kill ourselves. This is very scary. We've gone from nobody caring enough about climate change to people caring so much that they're nihilistic. We cranked up the urgency and then we've like overshot the mark.

It's not that urgency is a bad thing. Urgency has a rhetorical situation and purpose and audience that is very effective and needs to happen. And we need to keep using urgency where appropriate. So I am not rejecting urgency outright. But for people who do really care a lot, it is not a productive thing.

We are going to be in this for a while. There is some urgency needed, but we need to focus on those fears that we do have control over, and slow down and do the work in a way that is sustainable for ourselves. And simply put that is the recipe for engaging in this work without burning out, without getting overwhelmed.

We need to be clear-eyed about it. I'm not suggesting that we block out everything that we can't control. Taking in of all this information through the news, social media, all the ways that we have a 24-7 news stream, in general, that negativity bias of media and negativity bias in our psychologies and in our brains does not equate to reality. And it does equate to serious depression and anxiety.

We can be aware of how bad things are, and also how good things are. We can counterbalance the overwhelming negativity of news and our own biases around negativity by consuming and actively seeking out things that are positive. And that's not about being in denial or naive. That is about making sure we are consuming, that we're exposed to reality, which is not all bad.

Also in this series:

Grief and anxiety over climate change drove this 30-year-old to write a letter to his future child

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