Preparing for a Water Crisis

This year’s Oscars race has been great for film and weird for discourse. There’s the friendly Best Picture duel between two crowd-pleasing films from the same studio. The acting categories are stacked with talent. And yet the final week of campaigning has been dominated by talk a ...  Show more

Are work spouses actually a thing? And what turns a desk-mate into a ride-or-die? In this special episode of The Assignment, Audie Cornish reunites with former work husband and longtime co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, Ari Shapiro. They dive into the stories that defined t ...  Show more

A Times investigation revealed that in much of the United States, communities and farms are pumping out groundwater at alarming rates. Aquifers are shrinking nationwide, threatening supplies of drinking water and the country’s status as a food superpower.

Christopher Fla ...

Over the past two weeks, world leaders and delegates from nearly every country have gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, for COP26. This annual summit on climate change will attempt to update the 2015 Paris agreement with accelerated action, higher targets and more ambitious cuts to ca ...  Show more

How can the most vulnerable countries protect against climate change if they’re drowning in debt? A major international aid agency revealed this week that 93% of the world’s worst-affected countries can’t afford to safeguard against natural disasters. Some are being forced to sla ...  Show more

“People can’t go to work, can’t cook. We aren’t even sure if the water that’s brought in by trucks is clean. Enough is enough.” Residents of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa have been dealing with water shortages for months. A long drought and ageing infrastructure are b ...  Show more