Living in a world of storms. Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in the Southeastern United States in late September, killed more than 230 people. Two weeks later, it was Milton—which intensified so fast in the Gulf that Florida officials were forced to order millions to evacuate their homes with almost no notice. Hurricanes are becoming more powerful, more rapidly. How are these changes affecting American life?

Today, Andy Horowitz looks at how increasingly out-of-phase U.S. policies and planning are with environmental reality.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘Enthropist.’ How about seven minutes of drone jazz from Norway? Splashgirl is a three-piece—piano, double bass, and drums. Here, they work with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, a free-jazz keyboard whiz and composer. It might sound like the perfect soundtrack for a spy-movie car chase in the rain.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Race beneath the Earth. As Hurricane Milton threatened heavily populated areas of Florida in early October, U.S. President Joe Biden postponed a planned trip to Angola until December. It will be Biden’s first (and last) visit to Africa as president. Last year, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to neighboring Zambia, while the U.S. plans to make its largest railroad investment in Africa ever: a line connecting Angola’s Atlantic coast to Zambia’s central rail line.

But the Americans aren’t the only global superpower building railroads in sub-Saharan Africa these days: China has pledged billions to build a new rail line linking Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast with Zambia’s central line. Why are the world’s two biggest powers doing this—and why are they doing it here?

Minerals.

The new railways will give Washington and Beijing access to 70 percent of the world’s cobalt and 12 percent of the copper, along with enormous reserves of lithium, nickel, manganese, and chromium. These are all elements that go into critical military and computing technologies, including the semiconductor chips in cellphones and most home appliances.

Last year, Nicholas Kumleben explored why these minerals were now one of the few areas of competition where China had a distinct advantage over the U.S., as Washington scrambles to build a supply chain for them outside Beijing’s reach.

—Michael Bluhm

Friends like these. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, don’t usually issue news releases about the deals they make—but it seems they’ve been making more and more of them. Western intelligence officials said in September that Iran had sent about 200 ballistic missiles to Russia. They worried that in return, Moscow might be ready to share secrets for making a nuclear bomb with Tehran. Iran has also provided the Kremlin with thousands of drones for the war in Ukraine.

These deals belong to a pattern of closer ties among Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea: North Korea has given Russia more than a million artillery shells; Russia reportedly built a drone factory in China; and China now says it supports Iran in the widening conflict in the Middle East. What’s happening here? Today, Lucan Way looks at how the increasing collaboration among the world’s most powerful autocracies is grounded in Russia’s war on Ukraine—and at what this collaboration means for the world’s democracies.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘The Soldier.’ Lara Rix-Martin, a British ambient and experimental keyboard ace, records as Meemo Comma. Last month, she released a new album, Decimation of I, inspired by a 1972 Soviet science-fiction novel, Roadside Picnic. To say this track is haunted may not fully capture the mood.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Magliabechi’s: The Hollow Parties. As the U.S. presidential election on November 5 nears, Americans face a choice between two candidates whose paths to the top of their parties seem super-divergent: Donald Trump took over the Republican Party from the outside, serially knocking out established candidates in the 2016 primaries; Kamala Harris rose through the Democratic Party before Joe Biden picked her to be his running mate in 2020 (despite her failure to run a competitive primary campaign herself). The rest is recent history.

These different paths might seem to represent the essence of what separates the two parties’ current identities: the former outsider and disruptor vs. the consummate insider and defender of the establishment.

But as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld illustrate in their recent book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, the different paths also illustrate a transformation common to both parties.

Schlozman and Rosenfeld show how, over the past half-century, both major parties have lost what previously defined them—their roots in American civic life. Previously, the parties had lively local branches across the whole country, where party members would come together to organize local political initiatives—be it housing policy or reforms to trash collection—but now, they serve that function less and less. Now, the parties themselves don’t mobilize voters or fundraise for political campaigns; that’s mostly left to organizations aligned with the parties but not controlled by them.

This transformation enabled Trump's rise, Schlozman and Rosenfeld write. The Republican Party’s hollowness, as they say, meant its leadership couldn't control its base as it had in the past. And the Democratic Party’s hollowness has left it largely immobilized, splintered by competing internal factions that struggle to come together in the pursuit of common goals—which, paradoxically, has strengthened the party’s leadership at the expense of its rank and file.

This book was published before Harris became the Democratic nominee; but as Schlozman and Rosenfeld have said since, the Democrats’ months of passivity about Biden’s faltering campaign—followed by their suppression of any competition to succeeded him—is only symptomatic of the same hollowness.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘Choir Waits in the Wings.’ The Chicago post-rock deity David Grubbs is back with a record blending his instrumental prowess with the guitarist Loren Connors’s. Together, they build anticipation and tension with piano, guitar, and what sounds like a cavernous room to record in—all atmosphere.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Night in Tunisia. President Kais Saied was re-elected to a second five-year term in Tunisia on October 6. But the election was largely a sham: Saied won around 91 percent of the vote, but his main challenger had been jailed during the campaign and sentenced to 12 years in prison for allegedly falsifying election documents. The country’s election authority—under Saied’s control—disqualified more than a dozen other candidates. Officially, fewer than 28 percent of Tunisians even turned out to vote—though the government refused to allow independent election observers to monitor the balloting, so who knows.

Back in 2019, Saied was elected in free and fair elections, but in 2021 he dissolved Parliament and has ruled by decree since, turning Tunisia squarely into an autocracy—using his powers to undermine the country’s institutions, replacing judges and all regional governors with people loyal to him.

Notably, Tunisia is where the anti-regime Arab Spring began in late 2010, after a fruit vendor in a small town immolated himself to protest his treatment by local officials. The revolution there ignited uprisings across the Arab world, eventually toppling dictators in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen—and sparking a civil war in Syria that continues today. Longtime tyrants later fell in Sudan and Algeria. But all these countries have variously gone back to autocratic rule. Why couldn’t democracy take root in the Arab Middle East and North Africa?

In September 2021, shortly after Saied disbanded Parliament and declared an indefinite state of emergency, Michele Dunne explored the problems Arab countries faced after their dictators fell.

For Dunne, two key factors thwarted their hopes for transitions to democracy: Regional powers like Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. quickly moved to undermine them, while the United States and other Western democracies largely stood by without giving them much help.

—Michael Bluhm

Hamstrung and unpopular in Paris and Berlin. France looks set to pull a new government together—but it’s a minority cabinet that’ll have to rely on the populist-right party National Rally to stay in operation. Germany’s chancellor is his country’s most unpopular leader in more than 30 years, as members of his government bicker with one another in the media over why they can’t get things done. And Bulgaria’s governments keep collapsing. What’s the problem? Today, Matthias Matthijs explores an emerging set of overlapping political crises in Europe—and how the rise of so many new parties generally is ultimately supporting the rise of the nationalist right specifically.

—Michael Bluhm