For all the trouble it has caused, River Caney is an unassuming creek. The rustling strip of water meanders slowly, less than a foot deep in some parts, along a sandy bank behind a few dozen homes that occupy a narrow hollow in eastern Kentucky. But in 2022, a horrific flood tore through this quiet lane of green land, framed on either side by the Appalachian Mountains, killing 45. Sherry Mullins watched her double-wide trailer tip toward raging floodwaters before she and her neighbors were rescued by helicopter. Much of the land that had been in her family since the 1700s was eaten away by toxic, mud-soaked water. She can never build in the floodplain again, but she still owns a patch of lawn where her house once stood. “I don’t care if there’s six inches left,” Mullins told me. “We won’t sell it.” As I reported in an article published today, Mullins is one of many flood survivors that have relocated to new communities built on former coal strip mines that top the mountains surrounding her old hollow. From her kitchen window in the Blue Sky neighborhood, she can watch the construction of new houses where her old neighbors have also chosen to relocate. Others have chosen to stay. What happens to your community if it’s been upended by the kind of extreme weather that’s becoming increasingly common under climate change? That’s a question that River Caney residents have been facing since the flood and that tens of thousands residents in Los Angeles have been struggling with since fires destroyed whole neighborhoods this month. Since I began reporting on floods affecting my home state of Kentucky in 2021, there’s been a tension in the region between escaping the floodplain and honoring generational ties to the land. As communities across the country are being altered by extreme weather and climate change, financial resources, familial bonds and trauma often shape the decision of whether to stay or leave.Seven high-ground communities under construction by the state of Kentucky embody the complicated relationships between frontline communities and extractive industries. (Blue Sky, where Mullins lives, predates the 2022 disaster.) Eastern Kentucky’s connection to the coal industry has always been one of give and take. Almost every family I met during my visit had at least one member who’d worked for a coal company, from miners to mechanics to security guards. These well-respected jobs could earn upward of $80,000. But coal jobs have dwindled, creating a gaping hole in the region’s economy and making it difficult to keep schools, infrastructure and local government running. The burning of fossil fuels, like coal, is the primary cause of climate change, which causes more intense and frequent rainfall and floods. Down the street from Mullins, folks she’s known all her life, like her neighbor, Farmer Baker, and her niece, Heather Robertson, are buying new houses above the floodplain. Baker lost his wife, Vanessa, as they were escaping their home during the flood. Robertson lost her sister, Amy Henson, who was rescuing her horse from a barn in the backyard. Robertson, 38, said she was heartbroken to leave River Caney, the only place she’s ever lived. Her home wasn’t damaged in the flood, but she said she wanted a more secure future for her kids, ages 9, 5 and 2. “I wanted to get my children out of the flood zone,” she said.But even with the risks, not everyone can afford to leave the floodplain, and not everyone wants to. Since the flood, about three-quarters of the community has stayed, but the population has dwindled from relocation and death, Mullins, and her aunt, Deborah White, told me. White lives next to Mullins’s former home on River Caney. In late December, she stood on her front lawn in an old sweatshirt while her dog, a flood rescue named Liberty, ran at her feet. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT These hollows are stitched together by families who have often invested in their land and their homes for generations. White has tried to keep the tradition of close family ties alive by hosting weekly Sunday dinners where dozens, including Mullins, crowd into her modest blue home that’s often heated with coal. But even with a regular flow of visitors, she’s struggled with her mental health. “I don’t care how much therapy you get, it’s still in the back of your mind,” White said of the flood. Overhead, clouds gathered as we spoke. Rain, then hail, began to fall. “It may never leave us,” she said. Even for people like Baker who chose to leave River Caney, they remain bound to what they left behind. Down the road, I stopped by a memorial that Baker built for his wife: a wooden pergola adorned with wind chimes and statues of angels erected where his house used to stand. He spent the insurance money from the 2022 flood to buy an excavator, truck and trailer that he uses to search for her body. She’s the only victim from the flood who’s never been found. “I said I’d never leave River Caney until this happened,” Baker told me from his living room higher up the mountain in Blue Sky, a photo of his wife resting on his knee. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Now I don’t want to live there. Because I know it’s going to happen again.”

The California Historical Society, facing longstanding financial challenges exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, has decided to dissolve and transfer its collections to Stanford University. The society, a private nonprofit organization established in 1871 and designated the state’s official historical society in 1979, is one of California’s oldest historical organizations. But unusually among state historical societies, its leadership said, it received no regular state funding, which left it vulnerable to the vagaries of private donations.Tony Gonzalez, the organization’s board chair, said the decision to dissolve the organization, which is headquartered in San Francisco, was “bittersweet.” But he emphasized that the arrangement with Stanford ensured that the society’s collections, which include more than 600,000 items stretching back a century before the Gold Rush, would remain intact and accessible to the public. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We think of it as a rebirth,” Gonzalez said. “Stanford will not be a state historical society, but the collection will be in better hands with them than it could be with us.”The society’s treasures include the Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing, which features books, pamphlets, product labels, trade catalogs and other items produced in the American West between 1802 and 2001. The society also holds the archives of many organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the California Flower Market, Inc., founded by Japanese American flower merchants in 1912. It is also the official repository for records relating to the People’s Temple, whose members, led by Jim Jones, drank poison in Guyana in 1978, leading to the death of more than 900 people, a third of them children.Anh Ly, Stanford’s assistant university librarian for external relations, called the historical society’s collection a “huge addition” to its own holdings of more than 15 million items, which would help fill in some gaps, particularly relating to California’s early history. The board’s decision to dissolve the society and transfer its collection follows a decade of failed attempts at a turnaround.In 2016, it was tapped by the city of San Francisco as its lead partner for a potential restoration of the Old United States Mint in downtown San Francisco, one of the few structures to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. But restoration of the building, which had been largely unused for decades, was deemed prohibitively expensive. In early 2020, the group announced a new strategic plan that involved selling its 20,000-square-foot building near Union Square and using the proceeds to support traveling shows and partnerships with smaller organizations around the state. But that effort was thwarted by the pandemic and downturn in San Francisco’s real estate market, as well as the unexpected death in 2022 of Alicia L. Goehring, the executive director and chief executive who helped formulate the plan.Gonzalez, a Sacramento lawyer who joined the board in 2012, said that private philanthropic support had become unreliable over the past two decades, as many foundations and donors pivoted away from the humanities toward efforts more directly aimed at solving social problems. And unlike in other states with robust historical societies, he said, California’s legislature had never provided any regular appropriation for operational support. In 2022, Gonzalez said, the group requested a one-time grant of $12 million to support a partnership with the University of California, Riverside, which would have involved collaborating with Native American tribes to bring historical projects to underserved parts of the state.The request was rejected. “The legislature gave us the same answer we heard from philanthropic organizations: This sounds like something a university should be doing,” Gonzalez said. The group took out a $5 million loan against its building, to help cover its budget, which Jen Whitley, the group’s interim executive director, said was about $3.5 million. But finances remained unworkable, and last summer the board voted to begin the process of dissolution. Four years after it was first listed, its building — a former hardware store painted the same shade of red as the Golden Gate Bridge — was sold for nearly $6.7 million, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.Under terms of dissolution, which had to be approved by the state attorney general, Stanford will also receive the society’s endowment of roughly $3.2 million. While most of the staff of roughly two dozen have been let go over the past several years, Whitley said, three people will move to Stanford with the collection. Gonzalez said it was “painful” to see history lose a footprint in San Francisco, at a moment when many of the city’s history and preservation groups are struggling to stay afloat. But Stanford’s stewardship of the collection, he said, would allow the continual discovery of new stories about the past.He cited the example of Juana Briones, a businesswoman and healer born in 1802 in Santa Cruz who lived in California “under three flags”: Spanish, Mexican and American. In 2011, local preservationists helped save a portion of adobe wall from her home in Palo Alto, which became the centerpiece of a bilingual exhibition at the historical society. “We all know about the Gold Rush,” Gonzalez said. “But there are also all these unsung heroes.”

Oklahoma education leaders approved a plan on Tuesday to request proof of citizenship or immigration status from families when they enroll their children in public schools. The new rule would not prevent students who are not citizens or legal immigrants from enrolling, a practice that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1982. But it would require districts to track and report the number of students whose families have not provided proof of citizenship or legal status. The rule was a remarkable departure from the noncooperative approach that many large school districts across the nation have taken in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, which are expected to cause waves of deportations and could lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to visit schools. It could also prompt swift legal challenges across the state. Ryan Walters, the state superintendent of schools and a firebrand Republican who supported the new rule, said it aimed to provide the White House with the information needed to enforce its immigration policies in Oklahoma. Mr. Walters, who clashed with the Biden administration over immigration, has claimed that schools across the state have been “crippled by the flood of illegal immigrants,” and said that “we will do everything possible to help put Oklahoma students first.” He has announced his intention to support immigration raids in schools “to ensure that deported parents are reconnected with their children and keep families together.” “We’re going to work with the Trump administration in any way they see fit,” Mr. Walters said in a recent television interview. “We will not allow schools to be sanctuary schools anymore.” The move in Oklahoma comes as some educators and principals in American school districts are feeling anxious over immigration enforcement. In Fort Worth, for example, the school system began an investigation into social media posts apparently made by a substitute teacher who called for ICE agents to come to the high school where he worked. In Chicago, reports of immigration agents appearing at the entrance of a public school set off widespread fear last week, but they were later proved false. The plan in Oklahoma — approved unanimously by the six-member Oklahoma State Board of Education — will now move to the state legislature and the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, for review. The text of the rule change asserts that the policy would help “assess statewide and local educational needs,” including English as a second language teachers and tutoring programs. That rationale has not sat well with many teachers, civil liberties organizations and immigration groups across Oklahoma, who convened protests over the proposed rule outside the state education headquarters in the lead-up to the vote on Tuesday. Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement that the requirement would violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. “All children have a constitutional right to equal access to education, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status,” Mr. Espíritu said. “Requiring school districts to collect information about immigration status illegally chills access to this opportunity, interfering with their ability to focus on their core mission.” He pointed to a similar move in 2011 that made Alabama the first state in the nation to require its public schools to check the immigration status of students. The rule was later overturned after a federal lawsuit, but it still led to “markedly higher rates of absenteeism for Latino school children,” according to the American Immigration Council. It was unclear whether all of Oklahoma’s more than 500 school districts would comply with the rule. Many districts have refused to follow a mandate from Mr. Walters last year that they teach the Bible across grade levels and subjects. Unlike the Bible directive, though, the enrollment rule would carry the weight of the law. Still, Jamie C. Polk, the superintendent of schools in Oklahoma City, said in a letter last month, after the proposal was announced, that her district “does not, nor do we have plans to, collect the immigration status of our students or their families.”

The Trump administration directive seeking to pause federal financial assistance seeded widespread chaos and concern across the educational landscape on Tuesday, from early childhood programs to university research efforts. At least one university leader urged professors to pause spending on research projects. The cash flow for Head Start, the early childhood education program that serves 800,000 children, was cut off in some places before the federal government clarified that the program was not included in the directive. And there was widespread uncertainty over which other programs might face scrutiny or be dismantled. The directive would pause funding at least until mid-February while the government investigates whether programs align with President Trump’s policy priorities, including ending “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.” By Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., had blocked it in response to a lawsuit. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But the day unfolded in a kind of whiplash, as educators and students frantic about federal programs scrambled to understand how the directive might affect them. The Trump administration clarified that some programs, like Pell grants and funding for low-income schools and disabled children, would be exempt and sought to push back on early fears of funding being cut for children.Some Head Start providers were blocked when attempting to access a federal online payment portal on Tuesday, setting off a panic for program directors who worried that they would not be able to make payroll in the next pay period. A few moved to lay off staff because of the uncertainty, before a clarification was issued by the administration. Katherine Baicker, provost of the University of Chicago, asked university researchers not to make additional spending commitments, purchase new supplies or equipment, start new experiments or embark on funded travel. “This is not a request that I make lightly,” she said in an email obtained by The New York Times. “The research enterprise is at the core of our university’s mission and is of profound importance to the daily work of our faculty, researchers, staff and students.” She said in the email that the university was struggling to understand the full effect of the directive and she wished she had more information. “But we must for now proceed under the assumption that grant expenditures incurred after today while this memorandum is in effect may not be covered by federal funding,” she wrote. Daniel W. Jones, a former chancellor of the University of Mississippi who also led the medical school there, said universities would have to decide whether to tap their own money to sustain projects if the pause resumed. Wealthier flagship institutions would have the funds to continue their research, but would have to worry about the legal risk of defying the directive, he said. But more financially precarious institutions may find their research in jeopardy. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities put out a statement calling the pause “overly broad” and “unnecessary and damaging.” “While we understand the Trump administration wants to review programs to ensure consistency with its priorities, it is imperative that the reviews not interfere with American innovation and competitiveness,” the association’s president, Mark Becker, said. He called for the Trump administration to rescind the directive. The association said the directive could disrupt researchers working on projects ranging from cures for cancer to supporting American farmers. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities, said in an interview that the organization’s priority was “to make sure that Pell grant funds will continue to flow,” referring to financial aid for low-income students. “We’re not going to exclude students from our campuses,” he said. “That’s not what we do.” But later in the day, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Madi Biedermann, said that the pause did not apply to Pell grants. The Department of Education clarified that the directive only applied to discretionary grants, and not to formula grants, like Title 1, which provides aid to high-poverty schools, or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which supports children with disabilities. Some 3,000 people joined a hastily convened webinar by the American Council on Education on Tuesday afternoon to try to decode the directive. In a statement, AASA, the school superintendents association, said the fate of other federal funding streams used to pay for school meals, aid to Native American students and specific educational programs was uncertain. “Yesterday’s announcement includes a lot of information without a lot of specifics,” AASA said. “Given the very unique approach of the proposal, we can’t, with the information the president has released, have any certainty on what it will mean.” Other education officials said they were trying not to overreact. Public school leaders in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, told employees in a letter that they “do not anticipate an immediate interruption to district programs and students’ services.” Most researchers “are willing to take a deep breath,” said Karl Scholz, president of the University of Oregon. And Jim Henderson, the president of Louisiana Tech University, said school officials did not believe the directive, which was issued Monday night, was so sweeping as to cut off support for existing projects there. “I couldn’t be less in freakout mode on this communication,” he said. “It doesn’t appear to be targeted toward anything we pursue at this university.” But Dr. Henderson said that if future orders threatened work at Louisiana Tech, school officials would appeal to the state’s congressional delegation for help. Some researchers were scratching their heads over how a directive seemingly concerned with “woke” education might be applied to them. Universities were not sure how far, exactly, the directive reached. “There is certainly concern and fear, but we are still trying to wrap out arms around the scope of the impact,” said Charles L. Welch, the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which includes many regional schools and historically Black institutions. Bruce Fuller, an education researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that a pause could backfire. “Research on top administration priorities, like parent vouchers or charter schools, will go undone if the department insists on censoring scientific findings,” he said. Dr. Fuller is conducting research to determine how Covid-19 pandemic recovery funding has affected the performance of California students. On Tuesday, he said, the Department of Education informed researchers on the project that they must not post any new material about their research on the web, or on social media, without written approval from Ms. Biedermann. At least one university researcher said her project had already been shut down under a different order issued last week. Meredith Dank, a professor at the N.Y.U. Marron Institute of Urban Management, had grants from the U.S. State Department for five projects — in Thailand, India, Tanzania, Kenya and Costa Rica — meant to combat human trafficking. On Friday evening, she got an email from the State Department stating that all foreign aid was being paused for 90 days while the agency reviewed how each program aligned with national priorities and agenda. That put all of those grants on hold. Then, on Saturday evening, she heard that the grant in Thailand had been terminated. That grant was the only one specifically “focused on L.G.B.T.Q. individuals who were at risk or had been sex trafficked,” she said. For the $4 million, five-year program to be terminated was “heartbreaking,” Dr. Dank said. The local staff members involved still “can’t believe that it’s true.”

Hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump rescinded America’s commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement as part of a flurry of executive actions meant to swiftly pivot the nation from the Biden administration’s agenda. Trump made the rollback of America’s climate change mitigation efforts a key campaign promise, arguing that the agreement undermined Americans’ economic interests. But the accord actually has been poised to be fruitful in a number of ways in bolstering the long-term economic stability of Americans, especially when it comes to housing—a major drain on consumers’ wallets—by making it more environmentally durable and energy-efficient. According to a September 2024 poll released by Data for Progress, 76% of Americans believe housing affordability is a growing problem. That’s not totally surprising. Over the last two decades, housing demand in the U.S. has grown much faster than housing supply, and housing costs have risen much faster than incomes. Tack on climate change, a pronounced factor in the nation’s deepening housing crunch, and we have the perfect recipe for a national housing crisis. And the crisis isn’t just about the availability and cost of housing. When considering climate change, it's also about location and quality. Nowhere clearer is this convergence than in Black communities, where housing costs have become exceptionally hard to juggle in recent years. In general, Black people spend more money on housing than any other race, and despite that, they’re still generally less likely to have access to stable housing, contributing to them being disproportionately represented in the nation’s unhoused population. Black homebuyers also pay significantly more than white homebuyers for similar homes. And when it comes to climate change, Black people are a staggering 40% more likely than other races to currently live in places with the highest forecasted increases in extreme temperature-related deaths, according to a study done by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). All of these imbalances flow from one common source: the U.S. finance industry. For decades, America’s finance industry has found increasingly complex ways to advance and capitalize on the racial anxieties and biases of the broader American public. That history begins most famously with the practice of redlining. Redlining, a New Deal-era technique that emerged in the 1930s and soared through the late 1980s, refers to how financial institutions deliberately avoided providing mortgage loans to racial minorities—namely Black individuals—under the guise of the customer being high-risk or otherwise non-creditworthy. When lenders didn’t outright reject Black customers, they would offer them loans in locations considered undesirable—for example, on low-lying land that was prone to flooding, near pollution-producing highways or industrial waste sites, or on land with poor soil that would foster structurally unsound housing and make agriculture and recreation difficult. That has created an intergenerational phenomenon of Black populations living today on significantly less safe, less productive land with lower levels of appreciation in value. Climate change is beginning to more directly and deeply exploit these vulnerabilities. Relative to white populations, Black populations are more likely to dwell on so-called “heat islands” (communities with a predominance of heat-absorbing infrastructure like buildings and concrete roads and little tree shade) and to be exposed to extreme heat. They also carry a substantially higher risk of living in an area that will be impacted by floods. And when it comes to key climate-proofing and adaptation solutions—like improving flood management systems, expanding green spaces, and making energy systems more efficient—Black communities are consistently behind due to ongoing commercial disinvestment and government neglect. These challenges are poised to get even more amplified through the rise of bluelining, a more agile iteration of redlining that is guided by the growing hazards of climate change. Bluelining is a recently coined term referring to the process by which property insurers minimize their potential losses by intermittently inflating insurance costs and trimming and removing coverage in communities most directly confronting climate change. Because of the legacy of redlining, these imperiled communities tend to be nonwhite. The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires help put the bluelining practice into perspective. In California, towering wildfires have long loomed large as the most nightmarish and concerning outgrowth of climate change. Apart from the visceral damage wildfires cause, Californians are keenly aware of how expensive housing and insurance already are in parts of the state—namely Southern California and the Bay Area—due to the growing intensity and frequency of wildfires. Wildfires cost America up to a stunning $893 billion a year, according to analysis done by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee’s Democratic majority, most of this massive expense coming from diminished real estate. Against this backdrop, in recent years, national insurers, including Allstate, Nationwide, and Travelers, have adjusted, quietly retooling their policies and redrawing their coverage maps to lower their risks in markets like California. The outcome has been customers getting increasingly low-quality or bare-bones coverage, similar to trends observed in the healthcare industry. In other cases, insurers have paused or entirely withdrawn from state or local markets, thereby creating “home insurance deserts.” In a poll conducted in 2023, 4 out of 10 Californians indicated they were considering moving out of the state, most citing the costs of living as a primary reason. Black Californians have particularly felt the pinch. The Black population in California decreased from 2.2 million in 2000 to 2.1 million present-day. During this time, cost concerns in California and other parts of the country have become inextricably tied to environmental matters. According to a 2018 study that assessed tens of thousands of census tracts across the U.S., majority Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities were found to have up to 50% higher susceptibility to wildfires in contrast to majority white communities. Beyond the heightened vulnerability, the burden of recovery is often far steeper for Black populations. Payouts are often significantly lower and more delayed in Black compared to white communities. Altadena, for instance, home to some of the West Coast’s most historic and flourishing Black middle-class neighborhoods, was decimated by the area wildfires. And it’s likely not lost on Altadena’s Black residents that, without intervention, insurance hikes and climate gentrification are likely on the immediate horizon. Racial minorities in places like New Orleans, Houston, and Puerto Rico have vividly experienced this domino effect first-hand in the years following large-scale environmental crises in their communities. In fact, another 2018 study showed that white households often actually gain wealth in the aftermath of disasters, while Black households indeed lose wealth. Why? White homeowners tend to not only get more aid following disasters, but they also tend to get aid above and beyond the appropriate property valuation. In addition to the expansive damage to homes that can drive deep, costly repairs, extreme weather events like these also cause catastrophic damage to minority communities’ basic infrastructure and functionality, stifling local commerce, transportation, and access to healthcare. This serves as yet another barrier to recovery. Ultimately, while the physical and psychological toll of natural disasters like the LA wildfires may appear racially universal, community resilience is very much racialized. So whether speaking figuratively or literally, it remains clear that racial minorities will be paying the biggest price for climate change.

One of the many indignities of being a patient is that you won’t always be taken seriously. Perhaps the most frustrating—and startlingly common—experience is being told your medical symptoms, which have nothing to do with mental health, are anxiety. Steph Fowler can tick off a long list of conditions she was initially told were anxiety or otherwise all in her head: endometriosis, a stomach infection from H.pylori, insomnia, and mast cell activation syndrome. She was sent for a full neuropsychiatric evaluation before her doctors eventually diagnosed her with Long COVID. Figuring out what was really going on “is such a mixed bag,” she says. “It’s a combination of relief that somebody knows I'm not making it up, and that I can trust myself. Anger and frustration also come in, plus the grief of knowing it could have been different.” Fowler, 43, a therapist in Chicago, has now shifted her practice to supporting clients who live with chronic and misunderstood illnesses, often helping them advocate for themselves when dealing with doctors who dismiss their symptoms as anxiety. “It’s been alarming to discover how common this is,” she says. We asked experts what to do if a doctor doesn’t take your symptoms seriously and instead dismisses them as anxiety. Bring someone to appointments with you It’s helpful to have someone with you, Fowler says, especially if you tend to get nervous or have a lot of symptoms to remember. A friend “can help jog your memory, but also give outside validation and input about what they've seen happening,” she says. Some research suggests that physicians sometimes treat female patients differently than they do males; anecdotally, Fowler has found that if you bring a man to your appointment, “they might listen more,” she says. “I’ve unfortunately felt this and experienced this, and I know clients who have experienced this, too.” Read More: 8 Symptoms Doctors Often Dismiss As Anxiety Track your symptoms Lots of apps—like Bearable and Visible—allow you to digitally track health symptoms like mood and migraines. The more information you can supply your doctor with, the better, Fowler says. Or you can simply use a pen and paper, writing down what you’re experiencing, the exact date and time, any potential triggers (like what you ate beforehand), and how long it lasted. "It's an unfortunately necessary use of energy and capacity—which, if you're sick, is limited,” she acknowledges. “But it can really help make your case and see trends over time.” Describe your symptoms clearly Good health care hinges on strong communication. Before talking to your doctor, spend time planning the best way to paint a vivid, accurate description of your symptoms, suggests Dr. Robert Gee, assistant dean of student affairs and a behavioral sciences professor at Ross University School of Medicine. “I’m short of breath even when I feel calm,” for example, tells a different story than “I feel anxious sometimes,” he says. Make sure you mention where you feel pain, what medications you're taking, any associated symptoms, and whether anything exacerbates or relieves what you're experiencing. Be prepared, too, to rate how severe your symptoms are on a scale of 1 to 10. Encourage your providers to collaborate Ideally, your provider will practice “collaborative care,” which means specialists like a psychiatrist or social worker are embedded within the primary care unit. That kind of integration can help ensure physical symptoms aren’t mistaken as mental-health symptoms, says Dr. Monika Roots, co-founder and president of Bend Health, which provides pediatric mental-health care. “They’re helping that pediatrician or family physician or internal medicine doctor think through, ‘Hey, have you looked at this lab, have you looked at that vital sign?” Read More: Long Dismissed, Chronic Lyme Disease Is Finally Getting Its Moment If you’re not able to go to a collaborative-care practice, you can still ask different doctors to communicate with each other. For example, Roots say, you could ask your primary care doctor: “Could you talk to the psychiatrist I'm also seeing?” Or ask your psychiatrist: “Could you talk to my primary care physician?” Doing so encourages collaboration, she says, and helps ensure doctors are comparing notes and making sure they don't miss an important diagnosis. Ask specific questions You can help your doctor feel like you’re part of the team, Gee says. He suggests phrasing a request for additional workups like this: “Could we do a few extra tests just to rule things out? It would really help to put my mind at ease.” If your doctor continues to brush off your symptoms as being all in your head, Fowler recommends responding like this: “If it’s not anxiety, what else could it be? And how are you ruling this out?” If your doctor still isn’t willing to run tests, ask them what symptoms—or duration of symptoms—would indicate they would be necessary. Doing so “helps the doctor show their work to the patient,” she says. “It helps make apparent why it is that they're not thinking this is a heart attack or a stroke or any of the big scary things people might be concerned about.” Ask your doctor to document that they opted not to pursue further testing If you believe you need additional testing, and it’s not happening, tell your clinician you’d like that marked in your chart. “It’s a paper trail,” Fowler says. “It also causes doctors to slow down and consider that this is documented.” Upon reflection, they may decide to pursue more tests after all. Appeal to your doctor’s human side Fowler has found it can be helpful to ask: “If you had a loved one with these symptoms, what would your next steps be?” The question often spurs doctors to consider the situation with genuine patience and care. That way, “It’s not just the patient they’re seeing at 12:35 before their lunch break,” she says. “If it's somebody they care about, they're more likely to be engaged.”

Since COVID-19 first took off, political leaders, infectious disease specialists, and the lay public have debated its origins. Eventually, two hypotheses emerged: Either the virus crossed over from animals to humans in a wet market in Wuhan—the city in which the disease first appeared—or it leaked from a Chinese lab, likely the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The truth is still unknown. But on Jan. 25, 2025, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) weighed in, saying in a statement to reporters that the virus is “more likely” to have come from a lab than a natural reservoir like a bat or other animal at the wet market. The conclusion did not come from new evidence—merely a fresh look at existing data—and the agency has “low confidence” in the findings, suggesting the analysis is based on incomplete data. Accordingly, the CIA said it would “continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open source information that could change CIA’s assessment.” Such hedging notwithstanding, the announcement came as a thunderclap to China, which has long insisted that the Wuhan lab was not responsible. In response to the CIA’s new determination, the Chinese government doubled down on that position. “Origins-tracing is a matter of science and any judgement on it should be made in a science-based spirit and by scientists. It is extremely unlikely that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning at a press conference. “The U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once, and stop scapegoating others.” The political backdrop Only one day before the CIA’s statement, the agency’s just-sworn-in director, John Ratcliffe, signalled that a new position on the origins of COVID-19 was coming. “One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News. “That’s a day-one thing for me.” Restoring a city’s charm Branded Content Restoring a city’s charm By China Daily That confrontational approach to Beijing is a consistent one for Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence during President Donald Trump’s first term. “The lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence, and common sense,” he said in 2023. Read More: The Dire Consequences of Trump Withdrawing America From the WHO The newly announced position stretches across political lines. The finding was reached during the final days of the Biden administration, under then-CIA chief William Burns, according to reporting by the New York Times, and Ratcliffe ordered it declassified and released. A hotly debated question since the start Early in the pandemic, back in 2021, the World Health Organization reached a different conclusion. In collaboration with Chinese epidemiologists,they conducted an extensive review of the likely origins of the COVID-19 virus and saw a natural spillover from an animal host to humans as the likeliest route. A contamination of the food-supply cold chain—with the virus hitching a ride in refrigerated food somewhere in the production and delivery line—was also considered. The lab theory did not gain much traction. “Introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway,” the report concluded. Mao Ning, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, cited that finding at her Jan. 27 press conference, describing it as an “authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the WHO-China joint mission based on science following their field trips to the lab in Wuhan and in-depth communication with researchers.” But this was hardly the last word. Scientists from the U.S. and elsewhere had no role in that study, and the research occurred while the pandemic was still boiling, with a lot about the virus still unknown. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reached a conclusion similar to the CIA’s new one: that a lab leak was responsible for the pandemic, though it could also say so only with “low confidence.” That same year, former FBI Director Christopher Wray echoed the DOE’s conclusion, if somewhat more confidently, telling Fox News, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan." The Chinese foreign ministry hit back then too. “By rehashing the lab-leak theory,” said Mao Ning, “the U.S. will not succeed in discrediting China, and instead, it will only hurt its own credibility.” Widespread disagreement The problem for the lab-leak position is that the U.S. has never had access to the Wuhan lab and has thus been unable to reach a definitive answer for more than five years. Now that the CIA has at last come to a conclusion, not all scientists are sold on what it has reported, seeing the results as thinly scientifically sourced. Read More: Why People Believe Trump and RFK Jr.’s Dangerous and Debunked Claims about Vaccines and Autism “We have at least a half-dozen scientific papers in the best scientific journals, including Cell and Science, which convincingly demonstrate how the SARS-2 virus emerged through zoonotic spillover,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, in an email to TIME. “In contrast, I’ve not seen a single published scientific paper on lab leak…nor even a serious scientific explanation [of] how that would occur given the scientific evidence to date. So I don’t understand how the CIA came to its conclusions.” The debate is more than an academic one. If the virus indeed spilled over in a Wuhan wet market, the resulting seven million deaths worldwide make a strong case for better regulating the way we interact with the ecosystem, such as in outdoor food bazaars. If, instead, the pandemic was the result of what went on in a laboratory, then China, the U.S., and any other country that performs such biological tinkering are gravely in need of more oversight to make these labs safer. As scientists have argued for years, both precautions are necessary—no matter how COVID-19 originated.

On a balmy December morning in Boston, Richard Daynard is sitting at his dining-room table watching a livestream on his laptop. “Pure. Horsesh-it,” he declares as a witness testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearing has been called to discuss what seems to be becoming America’s new favorite pastime: throwing down bets on sports, 24/7. And what has set the bearded, bookish law professor off is a former gambling regulator from New Jersey’s use of a talking point favored by both the industry and the professional sports leagues: that the reason it’s so easy to wager on sports these days is this is what the American people want. To Daynard, president of the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) at Northeastern University’s law school, such language deflects from gambling’s heavy social toll. “This is consumer choice!” says Daynard, the sarcasm driving home his point. “This is freedom!” Daynard has been fighting big public-health battles for decades. He played a foundational role building landmark legal cases in the 1980s and ’90s against U.S. tobacco companies, which ultimately resulted in cigarette manufacturers’ agreeing to pay more than $200 billion in settlement funds to the states. Now, at 81, he is no less indignant about the way companies seem to put profits over customer well-being. His latest objective is curtailing the excesses of sports gambling. “We’re talking,” says Daynard, “about addiction.” Americans bet an estimated $150 billion on sports in 2024, up 24% from the prior year, according to the American Gaming Association, and sports books kept some $14 billion of that, up 27%. State governments collected about $2.5 billion in sports-betting tax revenue in 2024, a 19% jump. Networks broadcast incessant advertising, featuring premium pitchmen like Kevin Hart, LeBron James, Peyton Manning, and Jamie Foxx, from gambling companies like DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM. But America’s burgeoning love affair with sports gambling has come with costs. Calls to problem-gambling hotlines have spiked. Emerging research suggests that sports betting depletes investment accounts of already financially vulnerable households, increases bankruptcy risk, and even contributes to upticks in intimate-partner violence. “I am presently, or have recently been, treating divorces, breakups, estrangement from children, criminal charges, incarceration, loss of all savings, foreclosure of homes, end of careers, suicidal ideation, hospitalization for a suicide attempt,” says PHAI director of gambling policy Harry Levant, a former gambling addict who’s now a clinical gambling-disorder therapist and also testified at that December congressional hearing. “The deepest forms of despair.” Daynard argues that sports-betting operators, much like tobacco companies, have engineered their product to foster addiction, through the constant stream of bonuses, promotions, and opportunities to microbet—on the speed of the next pitch, on the rebound totals of a particular player, on who will score the next touchdown—on your phone during a sporting event. “You’re just pushing buttons,” says Daynard. “You’re just going after action.” His approach to reining in the industry is twofold: litigation and legislation. In late 2023 PHAI filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of customers in Massachusetts accusing DraftKings, one of the biggest gambling operators in the U.S., of utilizing deceptive marketing practices. Last summer, a judge denied DraftKings’ motion to dismiss the case, allowing it to potentially advance to the discovery phase. Daynard’s team also helped Representative Paul Tonko, a New York Democrat, draft the SAFE Bet Act, a federal law that would ban sports-gambling advertising during live events, prohibit gambling operators from accepting more than five deposits from an individual in a 24-hour period, and eliminate the use of AI to track a bettor’s gambling habits for customized promotions. “Nobody’s had more experience with fighting addiction as a scholar and activist and thought leader,” says Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who as state attorney general in the 1990s worked with Daynard to file lawsuits against tobacco companies and introduced the SAFE Bet Act with Tonko. “He was a very powerfully articulate advocate at a time when there were not a lot of them, making our lawsuits credible.” As he sips soup in the three-bedroom Back Bay apartment he’s lived in since 1974, Daynard seems energized by the challenge ahead. After all, he not only knows what it’s like to take on a deep-pocketed adversary, he also understands the impact he can have if he prevails: Over the past 30 years, the price of a pack of smokes has gone up more than 450%, thanks in large part to the 1998 settlement that requires tobacco manufacturers to compensate states as long as cigarettes are sold in the U.S. Big Tobacco has stopped advertising to kids. And cigarette sales have fallen 59% since the settlement. “People laughed at Dick Daynard in the ’70s and the ’80s because they thought his ideas about going after the tobacco industry were harebrained,” says Thomas Sobol, a Boston plaintiff attorney who worked on the litigation against Big Tobacco. “They were wrong. People should think twice before even questioning his foresight.” A New York City native whose father ran a clothing business and mother worked as a public-school administrator, Daynard developed a smoking aversion when he was 12. He was the youngest member of the ham-radio enthusiast group that would meet in the back room of a Manhattan tavern, and the space would grow so thick with smoke, he’d have to retreat to the bar to get away. After attending the Bronx High School of Science, which counts more alumni as Nobel Prize winners than any other secondary school in the world, Daynard went to Columbia, where he majored in philosophy. “I was a nice, bright Jewish kid from New York,” he says. “There are two things I could do in life. I didn’t like blood.” So he was off to law school, at Harvard. He spent one summer working for a fancy Manhattan firm, drafting a brief on behalf of a marquee client, Ford Motor Co. But oiling the wheels of commerce wasn’t for him. “I’m sitting in my chair thinking about when I’m 50,” says Daynard. “What will my life be like? I’ve only got one of these things. What will I have to say for myself?” Daynard joined the Northeastern law faculty in 1969. (He also got a Ph.D. in urban studies and planning at MIT in 1980.) He started going to meetings for a quirky smoking-opposition group in the 1970s that, according to Daynard’s wife of close to 50 years, Carol, included a Boston landlord with a “huge” hat, a hermit who’d monitor TV transmission towers in Needham, Mass., and an MIT engineering professor who’d ride a recumbent bicycle throughout Boston. “It was sort of a weird combination,” she says. The couple’s son spread the anti-cigarette gospel: once, when he was about 6, he spotted a Boston motorcyclist lighting up and told the biker he shouldn’t do that. “My wife is watching him, feeling lucky that he didn’t get slugged,” says Daynard. In 1983, Daynard became president of the Massachusetts chapter of the Group Against Smoking Pollution (GASP). While teaching a course on consumer protection, he solicited recommendations on what to do in his new gig. “This was a class of law students,” says Daynard. “So the answer was ‘Sue the bastards.’” Naturally. But since the 1950s, that had been a failing strategy. Big Tobacco hadn’t lost a court case brought by an individual smoker or paid a penny in settlements or damages. Still, Daynard started the Tobacco Products Liability Project out of Northeastern; in 1985, the group published the inaugural Tobacco Products Litigation Reporter, devoting a portion of that first issue to documenting a case out of New Jersey in which Rose Cipollone, a smoker for 40 years, sued tobacco companies for causing her cancer. The case continued after her death in 1984, and Daynard began publicizing documents from the trial. He held a 1987 press conference to disclose a memo, written by a government doctor, saying that a tobacco-company lawyer admitted in a meeting with the U.S. surgeon general that cancer is linked to cigarettes. In 1988, Cipollone’s husband won the first-ever jury award ($400,000) involving the death of a smoker, though an appeals court later overturned it. Taking on tobacco sometimes stressed out his family. “I told him he couldn’t go south of D.C.,” says Carol. “I was worried about backlash from some crazy tobacco farmer.” She once accompanied him to a meeting in Chapel Hill, N.C., and they received a police escort. In 1990, Daynard flew to Orlando to meet with a mysterious character posing as a woman in written correspondence: Merrell Williams Jr. was a theater Ph.D. who, while working as a paralegal at the firm repping tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, stuffed damning internal documents into a girdle, ripping open a bag of chips as he passed a security guard to cover the sound of rustling papers. The whistle-blower told Daynard about the documents, which included an admission from a Brown & Williamson lawyer that the company was in the business of selling “an addictive drug.” They were eventually funneled to congressional lawmakers, who had just held hearings in which seven tobacco CEOs had said under oath that nicotine wasn’t addictive; a medical professor who disseminated them online; and the Mississippi attorney general, who with the assistance of Daynard and private litigators filed the first state lawsuit against Big Tobacco. Daynard introduced the theory of “unjust enrichment” into the proceedings. It posited that while tobacco companies were making money off smokers, the state had to pay medical costs for sick customers and was thus the injured party. Other states followed Mississippi’s lead, and within just a few years, an agreement was in place that would transform cigarette consumption in this country. “As a physician and public-health professor, we often don’t view lawyers as partners and leaders in promoting public health,” says Dr. Howard Koh of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But Dick has saved so many lives.” oduct can be addictive and enacts reasonable measures to protect consumers. “People fall off the cliff,” says Daynard. “The ‘responsible gaming’ approach is, we are here with the ambulance. The public-health approach is, you put a fence up on the top.” Daynard happens to live a few blocks from DraftKings headquarters. Since way before the legalization of Massachusetts sports betting, he’s parked in the garage beneath the building that now houses the company’s offices. He jokes he should carry a picture of DraftKings CEO Jason Robins with him, to recognize the executive in a pinch. “I have this fantasy that if I’m not watching,” says Daynard, tongue firmly in cheek, “Jason Robins will be there with a bat.” PHAI’s lawsuit against DraftKings alleges that the company’s offer “to get a $1,000 deposit bonus” on the sign-up page of its mobile app, and a similar offer on its website, tricked Massachusetts customers who were new to sports betting into funding new accounts and engaging with a known addictive product. Unbeknownst to them, the suit alleges, the customers would receive a $1,000 bonus only if they deposited $5,000 up front, bet $25,000 within 90 days, and bet that money on games in which you had at least a 25% chance of losing your skin. And even if someone fulfilled those requirements—which were, according to the suit, spelled out in “unreadable” small print—the $1,000 wasn’t a cash bonus. It was a credit to be used for more gambling. “The old dope peddler actually hands over the stuff,” says Daynard. “These guys can’t hand over, to use a technical term, the f-cking $1,000. They’ve just hooked somebody. But they can’t give you a goddamn $1,000?” In its argument for dismissal, DraftKings contended the promotion wasn’t misleading, and wrote that “no reasonable consumer would believe that a deposit of any amount would result in the immediate transfer to them of 1,000 U.S. dollars.” The company also claimed the plaintiffs failed to specify any financial harm caused by the promotion, as not receiving an expected bonus is not the same as losing money. Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Debra A. Squires-Lee, however, wrote that the extent of any DraftKings deception “must be developed in discovery,” and that the plaintiffs “plausibly suggest that they were harmed because they bought into a service worth less than they believed.” As in most class actions, legal experts say, the odds seem stacked against the plaintiffs. “But the fact that this case has survived that motion to dismiss is fairly significant,” says Holden. “That doesn’t spell victory automatically. But it is a signal that hey, this isn’t a nothing.” If the case does proceed to trial, experts say, a jury could be turned off by the way DraftKings marketed its promotion offer to novice customers. “The lawsuit does a good job of saying, ‘Of course, you put it in your terms and conditions, but you don’t emphasize that,’” says Keith Miller, a professor at Drake Law School. “You don’t emphasize how much people have to deposit. What the play-through is. Those sorts of things are the hardest for them to defend.” Law is like the NFL: a copycat operation. Innovations spread fast. As the Massachusetts suit progresses, lawyers in other states will file similar claims, just as they did in the tobacco wars. It’s already happening. In September, a suit similar to PHIA’s action was filed in New York; so far in 2025, DraftKings has been hit with lawsuits in New Jersey, Illinois, and Kentucky concerning its “no-sweat” and “risk-free” bet promotions. “DraftKings provides a legal and regulated platform that prioritizes integrity and responsible gaming,” a company spokesperson writes to TIME in a statement. “Our products are designed for fun and entertainment, giving players opportunities to follow their favorite teams and athletes while connecting with friends. We believe our promotional terms are clearly and fairly disclosed in plain language, and we fully adhere to the regulations set forth in each jurisdiction where we operate. We remain committed to resolving the matter in question through the legal process.” Meanwhile, the SAFE Bet Act— which would also ban such “bonus” and “no sweat” advertising, require that operators conduct customer affordability checks for wagers in excess of $1,000 in a 24-hour period or $10,000 in a 30-day period, and prohibit operators from accepting deposits via credit card—is also an underdog. After all, two Democrats are pushing for regulations in a Republican-controlled Congress. “I’m very clear-eyed that it will be an uphill fight,” says Blumenthal. “It will depend a lot on whether my Republican colleagues want to stand up to the industry and produce some decent reforms.” His Democratic colleagues, moreover, don’t count as no-sweat bets. “The power of the industry affects legislators on a bipartisan basis,” says Blumenthal. “To be very blunt, it’s not like Democrats are immune to campaign contributions and other forms of influence.” Through it all, Daynard, who’s well past retirement age, plans to keep fighting. He works out with a trainer and says he’s in the best physical shape in his life. He’s still teaching at Northeastern while pursuing a public-health agenda. “I love being productive and useful,” he says. “I don’t play tennis. I don’t play golf. I don’t sail. There’s a limit to how much solitaire I can play. I haven’t learned how to play pickleball.” He’s promised to go part time if he makes it to 100. “One of the great upsides of being older is you’ve seen a lot of things,” says Daynard. “And you can recognize them. So you see something, you say, ‘Aha.’” Daynard snaps his finger. “What’s similar with the tobacco industry is that they’ve designed the trap. The customers are in there, and they extract whatever money they can from them. And what happens with a trapped customer? Nothing good.”

Earlier this month, Drew Wallace started paying the cooks, bussers and the rest of the 20 or so employees of his restaurant the Bull and Beggar, in Asheville, N.C., for the first time since two feet of river water flooded its dining room in September. “It’s a really victorious feeling,” Mr. Wallace said, his feet planted on a floor that had recently been buried under several inches of fine brick-colored silt. He seemed a little surprised as the words came out of his mouth. “It’s strange to say, ‘I can’t wait for payroll to kick back in.’” Payroll is one of the biggest expenses in operating a restaurant, but it can’t be funded unless there’s a restaurant to operate. In that sense, the Bull and Beggar is among the lucky ones. If it starts serving dinner again on Jan. 31, as Mr. Wallace hopes, it will be one of the first restaurants in Asheville to reopen after taking on water on Sept. 27, when Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina. President Trump’s visit to Asheville on Friday brought a fresh round of media attention to Helene’s devastation in the state, estimated at $60 billion. The storm washed away buildings near the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers. It also toppled what Stu Helm, who has led culinary tours of the city since 2016, likes to call the “three-legged bar stool” of Asheville’s tight-knit food community: “the growers, the makers and the eaters.”While the lights are back on in most of the city’s bars and restaurants, those in the low-lying River Arts District and Biltmore Village neighborhoods are still dark. Bottle Riot, a wine bar next door to the Bull and Beggar, closed permanently, along with El Patio de Guajiro, the four-month-old brick-and-mortar site of a beloved Cuban food truck. Dozens of other trucks, bars, smokehouses, breweries and bakeries are gone. Gourmand, a nearby farm-to-table restaurant — the phrase is almost redundant in Asheville — was knocked off its foundation weeks before it was scheduled to open. The owners now aim to have it up and running next year. Eda Rhyne, a distillery that flavored its fernet and other spirits with Appalachian forest plants, and Plēb Urban Winery, which fermented grapes from Appalachian vines, were destroyed. So was the pottery studio that made the expressive little ceramic pigs that hold toothpicks on every table at the downtown tapas restaurant Cúrate. About 90,000 people live in Asheville, but over the past decade or so its food scene has drawn the kind of national spotlight that typically shines on cities that are many times larger. Its farm-to-table restaurants and their chefs — Katie Button of Cúrate, Silver Iocovozzi of Neng Jr’s, John Fleer of Rhubarb, Meherwan Irani of Chai Pani, Ashleigh Shanti of Good Hot Fish and others — are regularly noticed by the James Beard awards, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, Esquire and The New York Times. For several years its craft breweries won it the title Beer City USA in a drinkers’ poll run by the brewer and writer Charlie Papazian. As the eating and drinking scene has grown, so has tourism. Almost 14 million visitors came to the city and surrounding Buncombe County in 2023 — about 154 people for each resident. According to the local Chamber of Commerce, leisure and tourism make up the second-largest business sector in Asheville’s economy, after health care and education.The outsize role that food and drink play, a source of strength in good times, made Asheville especially vulnerable to Helene. Damage to the reservoir system left the city without potable water until the middle of November. Even the many restaurants that weren’t flooded were unable to operate unless they could afford to buy clean water delivered by tanker trucks. One restaurateur who did, Mr. Irani, said private water cost him about $7,000 a week for each of his three Asheville restaurants, an amount that would have been far out of his budget a decade ago, when he owned just one small Chai Pani location.For almost two months last fall, local officials asked tourists to stay away. Not that there was anywhere for them to stay, with most of the area’s roughly 90 hotels closed. The county’s unemployment rate spiked to 10.4 percent in October before falling slightly in November to 7.2 percent, according to the state’s Department of Commerce. Although the quality and quantity of Asheville’s places to eat and drink are striking for its size, in many ways it is typical of towns and cities across the United States that fell apart after World War II but are thriving in the 21st-century service economy, led by restaurants and other small businesses. This new order, though, is remarkably fragile, as seen in the pandemic, the Los Angeles fires and countless major storms. Mass closings of restaurants can ruin their owners, destroy jobs and ripple out to dozens of vendors, who are often small, independent operators themselves. “Every dollar that comes in our door goes right back out to our suppliers — local honey, cheese, eggs, our cleaning service,” said Ms. Button, the chef and owner of Cúrate. Since September, she has permanently laid off more than 50 employees of her company, which includes a wine club, a culinary travel program, a line of charcuterie and a second restaurant, La Bodega, which she said may not reopen. Her insurance company has so far not reimbursed her for most of her business’s losses, she said, an all-too-common experience that has angered many restaurateurs in the city. “It’s truly a fraudulent situation where the business-interruption insurance that everybody’s been paying for is not coming through,” said Molly Irani, chief hospitality officer of the Chai Pani Restaurant Group, which she founded with her husband, Meherwan. None of their establishments received business-interruption insurance money, either. Federal programs to help small businesses survive natural disasters mostly take the form of loans that restaurateurs and other entrepreneurs with slim margins are reluctant to take on. “This cannot happen anymore,” Ms. Button said. “Something has to change.” For Asheville, the storm could not have come at a worse time, just as the mountain slopes around the city were starting to light up with scarlet and gold. Millions of leaf-peepers make October the busiest month of the year for the hospitality business. Thanksgiving and the weeks around Christmas are almost as profitable. Then come January and February, when the city is quiet even in normal years.Neng Jr’s, on high ground in the West Asheville neighborhood, did not flood, but it stayed closed until mid-December. Its first few weeks back in business have been healthy. “You kind of ride that wave of the holidays for a while and then people start to go down into their caves,” said Cherry Iocovozzi, who is married to and owns the restaurant with the chef, Silver Iocovozzi. “That’s my underlying anxiety right now, how slow will the next few months be.” The Iocovozzis have delayed the opening of a Harmony, a small wine shop and bar down the hall from their restaurant, originally set for October. Bottles of natural wine are stacked up, and a complete set of the classic wine-cult manga “Drops of God” lines the shelves of a cabinet bought from a River Arts District antique shop that was destroyed by the storm. “Once we realized we were going to stay open we thought, ‘Let’s dig in our heels here,’” Cherry Iocovozzi said. In part because of the money the restaurant lost last year, Neng Jr’s is likely to drop its à la carte menu in favor of a fixed-price model. Silver Iocovozzi hopes the more predictable cash flow will allow him to spend more on regional farmers, who already supply about 60 percent of Neng Jr’s ingredients. “I only want my money to go toward western North Carolina right now, and see everyone survive after this,” he said. “And see us survive.” For the region’s farmers, the pain came from many directions. A landslide killed Brittany Robinson, the owner of Four Winds Farm in Boone, N.C., at age 36. Rushing waters drowned livestock, washed away whole fields and spoiled crops in the ground. On Evan Chender’s farm in Weaverville, winds tore apart the steel frames of four of the eight plastic-covered tunnels where he grows mizuna, purple-leafed Padovano broccoli and several rare varieties of radicchio that can be found in the kitchens of Neng Jr’s and a handful of other restaurants. In 2023, Mr. Chender sold $635,000 worth of produce. All of it went to fewer than two dozen restaurants within 30 miles of his land, some of which have been buying from him since his first week, in 2013.Before September, “I felt like I had finally figured it out,” he said. Local restaurants “were getting their quantity and their quality, and we were making a lot of money. Now it’s really hard to say what the future looks like.” The storm also destroyed the home of one of the city’s oldest and most popular farmers’ markets, in the River Arts District. The vendors have moved to a parking lot on a windswept hill on the campus of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, but the crowds seem not to have followed them yet. On a frostbitten Wednesday afternoon, Gwen Englebach stood behind baskets of shaggy lion’s manes, amber-colored chestnut mushrooms and other fungi she and her husband grow at Black Trumpet Farm in Leicester, N.C. She said sales for the month at the new site were about 75 percent what they were at the old market last January. Mushroom purchases by restaurants have taken a hit, too. “They’re just doing what they can to stay afloat,” she said. In West Asheville and other areas outside the flood zone, business goes on as usual, although downtown is so empty on weeknights that on one recent night men were racing toy remote-control cars in the middle of the street. To spread the word that it’s safe to dine in Asheville again, the visitor’s bureau is spending $700,000 to air a TV ad, “Be Part of the Comeback,” with footage of smiling chefs and a couple drinking at one of downtown’s rooftop bars. The bureau is also working with the James Beard Foundation to sponsor a food-policy symposium in April, the Chef Action Summit. Asheville Restaurant Week was just produced by the Chamber of Commerce in January as usual, with more than 50 establishments offering discounts or deals, but this year the chamber is repeating the promotion in February. Everyone you meet in Asheville will tell you that the storm changed them, and most say it has made their commitment to the city stronger. “I guess we’re all feeling like there’s nothing to do but survive,” said Mr. Helm, the tour guide. “If we want to live here, we have to fight for it.”

A special session of the Tennessee General Assembly that began on Monday reflects the way President Trump’s aggressive conservative agenda is already emboldening Republicans to pursue his priorities at the state level. Gov. Bill Lee has proposed new measures to toughen immigration enforcement, including the creation of a position in state government that would directly coordinate with the Trump administration’s enforcement policies. And he has called on lawmakers to revisit his plans to expand the use of public funds for private schools across the state. What happens next in Tennessee may signal the extent to which conservative-led states will carry out Mr. Trump’s broader policy agenda. Many states’ regular legislative sessions are just getting underway. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Republican supermajorities, particularly in the South, have spent years rallying behind a litany of conservative policies. The Biden administration often condemned their decisions or challenged them in court, but the Trump administration is far more likely to be on the same page with them. “During the Biden administration, red state legislatures were frustrated with what they saw the Biden administration doing or not doing,” said David Shonerd, senior director of state operations at MultiState, a state and local government relations firm. “Now they have a willing and excited partner.” He added, “They’ll be able to push the envelope if needed.”Mr. Lee has also asked the Tennessee legislature to take up a third issue in the special session: disaster aid for communities in the eastern corner of the state, which were devastated late last year by floods caused by the rainy remnants of Hurricane Helene. Supporters say using a special session to tackle the three issues is a way to fast-track high priority legislation by limiting what can be debated. “People are going to complain about anything, whether it’s optics or whatever it may be, so that’s just part of it,” said Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican. He added, “it allows us to focus on a few issues in a very short period of time and to really dive in and explore those topics.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Trump has called on other governors to follow suit on targeting immigration policy. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has already called state lawmakers into a special session that begins Monday. He asked them to consider legislation that would expand local officials’ power to detain and deport people who are in the country illegally. Legislative leaders said they would consider only some of the governor’s proposals. Individual state lawmakers have put forward their own proposals to advance Mr. Trump’s crackdown against undocumented immigrants. In South Carolina, state lawmakers are pushing requirements for certain hospitals to report data on the immigration status of their patients. Lawmakers in both Georgia and Tennessee have called for more penalties for cities and local governments that defy state prohibitions on being a “sanctuary” jurisdiction.A bill introduced in Mississippi last week would create a bounty hunter program with a $1,000 reward. In Tennessee, a bill would charge undocumented students tuition to attend public schools. It is too early to say which of the bills will stand a chance of becoming law. In Tennessee, Mr. Lee has backed the creation of what he described as a new chief immigration enforcement officer for the state. He has also backed bills that would further penalize cities and local officials that did not wholeheartedly cooperate with immigration enforcement. Legislators may introduce other bills on the issue as well. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We are seeing the governor falling in line with Trump’s shortsighted and narrow vision of what it means to belong in this country,” said Judith Clerjeune, the advocacy director for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. She added, “It’s absurd that we would use local funding to go after immigrant families.”Democrats, who broadly oppose such policies, have accused Mr. Lee of playing politics with hurricane aid by pairing it in the same special session with the more divisive proposals on immigration and school vouchers. Though they are covered in separate bills in the Tennessee session, some lawmakers in other states and in Congress have increasingly been trying to tie crucial emergency aid to obtain partisan policy changes. “Providing overdue and much-needed financial aid and relief for the Tennessee families and communities devastated by flooding in September should be our focus and singular priority during this special session,” said State Representative John Ray Clemmons, the chairman of the Democratic caucus. But with Republicans in control of a supermajority, there is usually little need for Democratic support to pass legislation. On Monday, hundreds of students rallied outside the State Capitol in favor of tougher gun laws after a female student was killed in a shooting at a Nashville high school. They condemned the limited scope of the special session, chanting “cowards” as Republican lawmakers walked past them. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Approval of Mr. Lee’s long-held ambitions for a statewide school voucher program is perhaps the most tenuous of the three policy items. Mr. Lee’s office has highlighted support from several eastern Tennessee mayors, but some school boards in the state have voted to publicly oppose the plan. Conservative activists have worked to fund voucher programs and elevate elected officials who support them. Republicans pushed through a pilot version for Tennessee’s largest counties in 2019, despite concerns about undermining public education. But a heavily funded push to spend millions of dollars on a statewide plan has so far failed to overcome objections from rural conservatives who are protective of their local public school districts. After falling short last year, Mr. Lee signaled that he would push lawmakers to take up the issue again. His proposal’s prospects for passage this year have been boosted in part by Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly said he favored creation of a federal school choice program. Mr. Trump recently tapped Penny Schwinn, a former Tennessee state education commissioner who oversaw the initial stages of the state voucher program, to serve in the U.S. Department of Education. In the days leading up to the special session, Republicans circulated glowing endorsements for the voucher plan, including one from the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing group deeply involved in drafting the Trump administration’s policy agenda. It remains unclear, though, whether that support will be enough to pass the legislation. “President Trump being in favor of school choice has really helped us,” Mr. Sexton said. The proposal would initially allocate about $7,000 in scholarship money a year to each of 20,000 students, about half of whom would be students with disabilities or students from families far below the income threshold to qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. Thousands more students would be added in the following years. It would also provide a one-time $2,000 bonus for public-school teachers who are teaching this school year.