Good morning. Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in American history, is dead at 84. You can read his obituary here. And across America, it’s Election Day — the first big test at the ballot for the second Trump administration. We’re following major races in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia. As the day unfolds and results roll in, here’s what you should pay attention to. Since I last wrote, we’ve reached a town in Jamaica destroyed by Hurricane Melissa, the most powerful storm ever to hit the island. President Trump and his energy secretary sent different messages about something important — nuclear weapons tests. And after 34 days, the government shutdown is about to tie for the longest in history. We’ll get to all of it, and more, below. But first, I’d like to draw your attention to a remarkable investigation that reveals a danger for many Americans who shoot guns.
Under the gunThere are more guns in the United States than there are people. More than 30 percent of adults own one. (I’m one of them.) Every day, thousands of people travel to indoor ranges across the country — to learn to shoot, to hone their shooting skills, to compete against other shooters, to have a good time. Safety measures abound at ranges. Shooters wear eye and ear protection. They generally stand in a booth, separated from others by bulletproof walls. But they still face an overlooked hazard: the concussive blast waves set off by the firing of weapons indoors, which can damage the brain. A revelationThomas Gibbons-Neff, a domestic correspondent for The Times, has experienced those blast waves. He’s a former Marine infantryman whose beat is guns, gun policy and gun culture. Going to the range is part of his job. Among other things, it’s a way to meet sources while keeping his skills up. You can learn a lot at a gun range. Some months ago, T.M., as we call him, drove to his local range to fire his AR-15 rifle. When he was done, he told me, he felt “distinctly weird.” It took him a long time to pack up his gear. “I’d had lunch,” he said. “I wasn’t dehydrated. I didn’t have a headache. But it took me forever just to raise my wrist to look at my watch.” He wondered: Can you get a brain injury at the gun range? T.M. teamed up with Dave Philipps and Jeremy White to find out. Dave, who covers the military and veterans, has written extensively about how firing some weapons can damage brain cells, and how exposure to concussive waves of energy may cause permanent injuries. Jeremy’s a graphics editor who has covered gun culture in the United States on and off for years. They were eager to find out what happens when people fire civilian weapons indoors. “Guns are just such a big part of our culture,” Jeremy told me yesterday. An experiment
The team members did their own testing and gathered their own data. They measured the blast waves of several popular civilian guns at an indoor range, using the same sensors the military uses to study larger weapons. The data showed that smaller-caliber guns can pose a danger pretty quickly, and that large-caliber civilian rifles delivered a blast wave that exceeds what the military says is safe for the brain. Indoor ranges, designed to make shooting safe, can worsen blast exposure, they discovered. Jeremy and his colleagues brought the data to life. Using a high-speed camera, they captured what happens when a person fires guns at an indoor range. Jeremy illustrated what happens when those waves reflect off the hard surfaces of a shooter’s booth. And to show what happens when you fire a large-caliber rifle, he hung a sheet of silk chiffon fabric alongside the prone body of the shooter. (“I spent way too much time in fabric shops in the garment district looking for that,” he said.) Seen in real time, nothing really happens. When he slowed the film, though, the illustration tells a whole story: A powerful wave runs through the fabric when the firing pin hits the cartridge, all but enveloping the shooter’s skull in 7.6 pounds per square inch of concussive pressure. Here’s what that looks like:
How harmful are those concussive waves on the body? Scientists have yet to answer that clearly, though the military considers some of them unsafe. A recently retired Army blast safety researcher told Dave that repeated blast exposures, however small, may cause damage. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times and it bounces back, but there are microtears forming,” he said. “The 101st time, it breaks.” See how the blasts can affect your brain in their investigation. I’m looking into archery, myself. Now, let’s get you caught up.
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The city of El Fasher fell last week to a rebel paramilitary in Sudan’s civil war. Videos online showed fighters casually executing civilians. Some of the survivors walked 40 miles out, on roads littered with bodies, to reach the nearest aid zone. There, aid workers collected their accounts on behalf of The Times. “There were bodies of men and women everywhere — some people were run over by vehicles,” Saeeda, a 28-year-old woman, said. “While we were on the road, they took girls from our group — choosing them and dragging them away.” Hundreds are arriving with bullet wounds and many bear the signs of torture, according to local medics. Children — presumably orphaned in El Fasher or along the way — are often being deposited not by their parents, but by other escaping strangers. “I’m here alone,” said one young boy with a broken foot. “At night I find places where people gather and sleep on the ground near them,” he added. “I hope someone helps me.” The civil war in Sudan has displaced 12 million people and may have killed about 400,000. It is, as Declan Walsh, our chief Africa correspondent, called it, “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Experts call it a genocide. Read more about the escapees from El Fasher.
If data centers limited their electricity use just slightly, households wouldn’t have to pay so much for energy, Tyler Norris argues. We usually associate healthy eating with cooking at home. But food can be convenient and healthy at the same time, Julia Belluz writes. Watch today’s stories, free in the app. The new Watch tab brings you closer to the story with videos across news and culture. Watch free in the app.
Baby Shark (danger remix): In news from the world of apex predation, a pod of killer whales in the Gulf of California hunts juvenile great white sharks, flipping them onto their backs to stun them and then eating their nutrient-rich livers — and only their livers. “It’s sort of like they’re going for the cheeseburger surrounded by a bunch of celery,” a marine biologist told The Times. Search query: Dating apps have run into a hurdle the industry calls “the cycle of despair.” That’s when people download a dating app, burn out on swiping and getting ghosted, and then delete it, only to redownload it months later. Can A.I. matchmakers break the cycle and set you up with the right people? They’re trying. Fare thee well: Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, a singer who helped shape the sound of the Grateful Dead in the 1970s, died at 78. She and her husband Keith Godchaux, a piano player, joined the band after she approached Jerry Garcia at a club and petitioned him for a tryout.
$360 billion— That’s about how much Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have spent on capital expenditures in the last 12 months, mainly to meet consumer demand for artificial intelligence.
N.F.L.: The league’s trade deadline is this afternoon. What happens when players gets traded? Players explain what goes down. N.B.A.: A former Atlanta Hawks finance executive was charged with embezzling nearly $4 million from the franchise to buy a Porsche, among other things.
I came up with this recipe for slow-cooker pork tacos with hoisin and ginger years ago, riffing on a classic recipe from the cookbook author Corinne Trang. |
