Hi everyone, happy Friday. Last week, we asked you to tell us your favorite episode from the week, and our team Slack channel was soon filled with screenshots of your kind messages. So thank you, we appreciate you listening and sharing. |
In today's newsletter, we have two notes from our recent guests: Dionne Searcey writes about the conflicted reality of climate denialism in Rawlins, Wyo., and Isabel Kershner writes a letter from the future about attending concerts in Israel. And finally, Still Processing is back for a new season (!), with an episode both provocative and personal. Check it out. |
Meeting Mayor Terry Weickum |
 | | Some residents in southeastern Wyoming oppose wind turbines on the principle that they mar the state's open vistas.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times |
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On Tuesday's episode, we visited coal country via Terry Weickum, the mayor of Rawlins, Wyo., a town of 9,000. He spoke to our correspondent Dionne Searcey about his town and what makes it beautiful, the pain of the decline of the coal industry and why he's come to embrace wind energy. We asked Dionne what made Terry such a compelling character: |
The minute Terry Weickum picked up the phone I knew I was going to focus a story on him. His folksy humor, colloquialisms and general vibe was just a joy to engage with, even as he spoke on a difficult topic: the closure of coal mines in Carbon County. |
Mr. Weickum loves his community and was cut up when his friends moved away after losing coal jobs. But he didn't just "walk around on his bottom lip," as he likes to say. (That's Wyoming-speak for pouting.) He did something about it. He won a seat on the county commissioners board and got to work trying to decide whether he should welcome renewable energy to an area built on coal — and one that still profits from fossil fuel revenue. |
After a lot of anguish and consultation with leaders and residents across the state, and after sifting through the particulars of pitches from wind developers, Mr. Weickum decided to vote for the wind projects, including one that is on track to be perhaps the biggest in the nation. |
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Still, he isn't so sure climate change is real. I got coffee at a local spot in Rawlins with Mr. Weickum and one of his friends, a retired coal worker, as they explained their views that eschewed the verified science behind human-induced climate change. Mr. Weickum told me about how he got a lot of flack for his decision to support wind, even from his friends. |
 | | Terry Weickum, the mayor of Rawlins, moved there hoping to profit off the fossil fuel industry.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times |
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But he knew the revenues would help his community. Now, as mayor of Rawlins, he is seeing that come to fruition with budget surpluses from wind revenue. His decision shows that selling communities on the moral case for fighting climate change might not be the best path forward in some areas for pushing green energy. |
Climate change denialism in Rawlins is as widespread as mule deer. I saw the creatures with their teddy-bear ears lounging in the cemetery, the high school football field and in front yards across town. Everyone had a story about them. Mr. Weickum and his coal miner friend told me about how they had been chased by charging mule deer. One deer even had stomped to death Mr. Weickum's beloved six-pound Chihuahua, Cujo. |
I wondered why there were so many mule deer in town. It turns out climate change might be to blame. Rawlins is seeing more deer munching on town grass, as drought overtakes their normal roaming territory. |
Even as they continue to question if climate change is real, Mr. Weickum and the residents of Rawlins are probably seeing signs of a warming planet every time they open their front door to find a 200-pound, round-eared, antlered creature staring back at them. |
| LISTEN TO TUESDAY'S EPISODE: | | |
Diary from a concert in Tel Aviv |
At the top of Monday's episode on the reopening of Israeli society, we heard audio snippets of our correspondent Isabel Kershner attending a concert in Tel Aviv — her first concert in at least a year. Below, she describes what it was like to re-experience live music, and the return to normalcy in a country where nearly half its population has been vaccinated: |
As the lights were dimmed and the band started to play, a moment of emotion and exhilaration washed over me. Immersed in live music, the tensions of a whole, bizarre year melted away. |
This was what the Israeli government was dubbing "Back to Life": a country emerging from the coronavirus pandemic by virtue of its successful, nationwide vaccination campaign after 12 months stalked by infection and death. |
As a fully vaccinated Israeli, I had used my so-called Green Pass, via an app downloaded to my cellphone, for the first time to gain entry to the concert, one of a weekend series organized by the Tel Aviv municipal authorities. The singer was Dikla, a popular Israeli chanteuse of Egyptian and Iraqi parentage, who performed in Hebrew, English and Arabic. |
 | | A shot of the Dikla concert at Bloomfield Stadium in Tel Aviv.Isabel Kershner |
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A spokesman for the municipality said the first concerts were sold out within 15 minutes of the tickets going online. |
Still, nothing was quite normal. The concert was taking place in the open air in a soccer stadium that seats nearly 30,000, but the audience was limited to 500. The surrounding streets were deserted, save for one small, Parisian-style cafe, with lights burning and tables out on the sidewalk. There was plenty of parking. |
Alternating seats in one section of the stands had been sold, to allow for social distancing. The audience was warned not to make their way down and gather in front of the small stage. They danced by their seats and sang along through their masks. |
By mid-March, more than four million Israeli citizens had been fully vaccinated and were eligible for a Green Pass, out of a total population of nine million. But some two million people younger than 16 could not yet get vaccinated, and another million or so Israelis, among them many ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab citizens, had so far chosen not to. |
An already divided society was being further divided between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, and the two-tier system has raised some complicated legal, moral and ethical questions. |
Still, having a Green Pass at my fingertips is a privilege. After bitter wrangling over obligations and responsibilities, Israel's Palestinian neighbors are, for the most part, just beginning to get vaccinated. My mother in England is patiently awaiting her second shot. |
But for a transcendental hour or so, the music drowned out the background noise. |
| LISTEN TO TUESDAY'S EPISODE. | | |
The Return of Still Processing |
 | | The New York Times |
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Still Processing is back for its spring season! On the first episode, the hosts, Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, two culture writers for The Times, confront one of the most offensive words in the English language: the N-word. |
"What happens when I, as a Black person, am in an environment where I don't want to hear that word?" Wesley asks in the opening of the episode. |
As much as they'd like to escape hearing the N-word, Wesley and Jenna talk about how it surfaces over and over in their lives: in an exercise class, on public transportation, in gatherings of friends and in childhood memories. The word is "so much bigger than one instance, one mistake, one rap lyric," Jenna says. "It really enters your life even before you get a chance to figure out how you want to live your life." |
Wesley and Jenna remind us that any use of the N-word conjures its violent beginnings as a tool of oppression. But in this episode they also discover the "impossible beauty" — yes, beauty — of it. |
Listen to the season premiere, and tune every Thursday for new episodes. |
| LISTEN TO THE SEASON PREMIERE: | | |
That's it for The Daily newsletter. See you next week. |
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