Kavya Sukumar | Vox

Watch how the climate could change in these US cities by 2050

2019-05-24T16:26:47-04:00

Last month was the second-hottest April on record on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice hit a monthly record low.

Clearly, the planet is warming. And more records are likely to be broken this year.

As the climate crisis accelerates, it’s worth asking what to expect if we aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions now, and what would happen if we do nothing. As part of our Weather 2050 project, we used the latter scenario to look at what could happen to temperature and precipitation in US cities by the middle of the century.

We found that by 2050, many US cities may resemble hotter, more southern parts of the country today. We’ve mapped a few of the most striking transitions here:

As you can see in this map, climate change means cities could move further south in terms of their temperature and rainfall patterns. In some cases, the closest match may be hundreds of miles away. If you want to get a sense of what climate change could mean for your city, you might need to take a road trip.

By 2050, in Cleveland, Ohio, the average summer high is going to heat up by 5.4°F. The average winter low will rise by 5.3°F. That means Cleveland will have the climate of a St. Louis suburb more than 500 miles away.

Let’s zoom in on how climate in different regions could shift. Take a look at this animation of changes in the northeastern US:

You can see that Scranton, Pennsylvania, will have a climate that resembles that of Round Hill, Virginia, today. That’s a distance of about 220 miles as the crow flies, but it means that Scranton will face average summer peaks that are 4.8°F higher and winter temperature low that are 5.5°F higher.

We can also see this in the southeastern US:

Cities in the South are moving even further south. By 2050, annual temperature and precipitation patterns in Atlanta, Georgia, will look more like Selmont, Alabama, today. That’s a move of more than 200 miles, with the average summer high jumping 4.1°F to 92.6°F.

Other parts of the country may see smaller shifts by 2050, as you can see in this map of the Southwest:

Apache Junction, Arizona, will likely experience a year-round climate that’s more like Peoria, Arizona, a city that’s just 50 miles west. But that still means the average summer high from today, 103.5°F, will rise by 4.9°F by 2050.

As you might imagine, the shifts will be even greater by 2080. And in February (two months after this story was first published), two scientists unveiled in Nature Communications a new climate-analog mapping project for the US showing that by 2080, the “climate of most urban areas will shift considerably and become either more akin to contemporary climates hundreds of kilometers away and mainly to the south or will have no modern equivalent.” Play with their fascinating interactive here.

What climate change means for the United States

For any given city, a few more degrees of heat and a few additional or fewer inches of rain over a season may not seem like much. But it can be the difference between having enough rain for healthy crops and a drought that kills them. It’s the difference between wet winter and a white winter.

Not every part of the country is changing at the same rate. Broadly, the more northern parts of the US are warming faster than the southern ones, so the climate shifts tend to be larger. Cities in the eastern US and upper Midwest will likely see larger changes than those in the West.

But it’s clear that hundreds of cities will have to adapt to changes that could be quite profound for people’s way of life. More homes will need air conditioners as summers become filled with deadly heat waves. More vegetation will dry out, creating more fuel for wildfires. This in turn could affect the local economy as climate-dependent industries like agriculture or outdoor tourism decline.

It’s important to note the averages we cite don’t tell the whole story. Some of the more temperate parts of the US like the California coast will see sharper swings in their weather. Rather than spreading rainfall throughout the year, California is expected to see periods of intense rainfall followed by extreme dryness, a phenomenon researchers have described as weather whiplash.

The planet as a whole has already warmed by 1°C since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and we are currently on track to see upward of 2°C of warming by 2040. But we still have an opportunity to prevent the worst-case scenarios. And we already know what to focus on. Here are 10 ways to accelerate progress against climate change and a simple guide to the climate policies that work.

America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different by 2050.

How we made these maps

We generated our city pairs by matching the future annual temperature and rainfall projections to year-round climate patterns today, looking for present and future cities that most closely aligned.

To build our comparisons, we averaged daily minimum and maximum temperatures and rainfall patterns for each month over 30 years (1986 to 2015) to establish a climate baseline for cities. Then we looked at how these cities would warm by 2050, again averaging over 30 years (2036 to 2065).

These projections are based on a suite of climate models aggregated in the Localized Constructed Analogs data set developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

The scenario here is built on a standard set of assumptions in climate models known as RCP 8.5. This is generally seen as a high-end estimate of warming since it presumes the world will continue on the same course of carbon dioxide emissions with limited improvements in technology or efficiency.

That said, it tracks closely with where we are now and serves as a useful upper boundary for what we can expect. RCP 8.5 also doesn’t result in a vast difference in climate change estimates compared to other scenarios when looking at the middle of the century. The largest variations under RCP 8.5 emerge around 2100.

There are several important caveats to our analysis. Part of the reason we’re not seeing such big geographic changes in analogous cities in the south is that we don’t have enough cities even further south available for comparison. Our dataset only includes the continental US, but a Texas city could see its climate look more like a city in Mexico, and a Florida city may resemble an island in the Caribbean. So there were many Southern cities for which we don’t have matches at all. We chose the best available matches with the data we do have.

We’re also only comparing cities based on temperature and precipitation, looking at which cities today most closely resemble a given city’s projected changes by 2050. These are just two variables out of dozens that define a local climate. In addition, temperature projections out to the middle of the century tend to be more robust than precipitation models, which are much more dependent on local variables and present more uncertainty.

However, the biggest uncertainty here is the same as it is for all climate predictions: How quickly will we act on climate change? Whether the world shifts to cleaner energy, eats less meat, manages land better, pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, or sticks to business as usual will mean vastly degrees of future warming.

What we do from here on out genuinely matters for our hometowns, our country, and future generations around the world.

Winters are warming faster than summers. These US cities could lose weeks of freezing days by 2050.

2019-12-26T09:26:47-05:00

White winters are overall beginning to turn mushy gray across the northern United States. And the longer we wait to get serious about limiting climate change, a White Christmas could become a thing of the past for many cities later this century.

As part of our Weather 2050 project, we examined how average winter low temperatures are projected to shift in the 1,000 largest US cities by 2050 if we do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In our analysis, we found that in 67 cities, the average winter low temperature could cross a critical threshold by 2050: the freezing point of water.

For cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, that have historically snowy winters, this shift in the average winter low means that snow and sleet could become rarer.

Around the country, warmer winters could mean the closure of skating rinks, more pollen, and more ticks carrying Lyme disease, since temperatures won’t be dropping below freezing as often to kill them off. Critical water resources out west that depend on snow will suffer large declines.

“I would argue that our winters are getting sick, and the reason why is global warming,” Amato Evan, an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December.

One way to take winter’s pulse to look at how winter low temperatures are shifting. Here’s a map of the 67 cities we found where the average winter low could shift from below freezing to above freezing by 2050.

Average winter low temperatures, of course, obscure important details about how climate change is affecting winters, like how the cold is distributed throughout the season.

So we also calculated how the number of days with below-freezing temperatures could change by 2050 in the same 67 cities.

Take a look at some cities in the northeastern United States:

You can see that by 2050, these cities could lose a month or more of days with temperatures below freezing.

And as we move further south, cities could experience even larger declines in the number of days with sub-freezing temperatures during winter:

In fact, the majority of the 67 cities that will see their average winter lows rise above 32°F are in southern states like North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. The winters here aren’t especially cold to begin with, so even a slight amount of warming can push temperatures above the melting point of ice.

We also see cities lose freezing days further west:

While these cities aren’t known for ice and snow, they do currently have freezing winters that are projected to become less so.

And the sharpest projected declines in freezing days are actually in the Pacific Northwest:

Here, we see cities that face more than two months-worth of days with temperatures below 32°F, with almost none by 2050.

The loss of freezing days will harm ecosystems, human health, and water resources

In general, scientists expect that winters will warm faster than summers across the US.

This will have several major consequences that are pretty worrying. For starters, many species are adapted to cold weather and snow, so having fewer or no days below 32°F is sure to impact them. We’re already starting to see those effects.

Animals like the snowshoe hare, found in the boreal forests of Alaska, undergo a seasonal molt from brown in the summer to white in the winter to camouflage with their environment. But less snow in the winter is making them more visible to predators.

Changes in winter temperatures are also starting to affect our health and our water resources.

“Some pests that are [typically] killed off by cold winters are able to thrive and survive,” said Daniel Cayan, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

Bark beetles, for example, have devastated forests across the United States as temperatures have risen. In California, bark beetles combined with years of drought have helped kill off 129 million trees across the state. And these dead trees pose a huge wildfire risk: They were one reason the deadly Camp Fire, which torched the town of Paradise, California, in November, got so big so quickly.

Critters that make humans sick are also benefiting from warmer winters. “In regions where Lyme disease already exists, milder winters result in fewer disease-carrying ticks dying during winter,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “This can increase the overall tick population, which increases the risk of contracting Lyme disease in those areas.”

Cold winters have served as a key check on mosquito populations that carry viruses like dengue and Zika. Freezing temperatures can kill off mosquito larvae, reducing their numbers in the spring. But as winters get milder, we’re seeing the range of species like Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus expanding further north and in greater numbers.

Many plants also rely on temperature signals. Seeds detect temperatures to see when it’s appropriate to germinate. Adult plants measure heat and cold to help determine whether to actively grow or go dormant. Some flowering plants are already starting to emerge earlier in the season in part due to warmer winters. This is creating a mismatch between when a plant flowers and when insects like bees are around to pollinate them.

For other plants, like pollen-spewing ragweed, a warmer winter is effectively a shorter winter. That means ragweed and other plants start producing pollen earlier in the season, which will lead to more misery for allergy sufferers.

Another important consequence of winter temperatures rising above freezing is less snowfall. In the western US, the mountain snowpack slowly discharges water as it melts in the spring and summer. The slow release is critical to waterways like the Colorado River to ensure a steady flow.

But the US is now in the midst of a long-term decline in its snowpack, which has already fueled floods in the spring and droughts in the summer. The timing of when the snow melts is also critical. In the Sierra Nevada, earlier snowmelt leads to more wildfires as it leads to a bumper crop of fast-growing vegetation that then dries out in the summer. In some biomes, a dusting of snow can help prevent the ground from freezing, allowing root systems to survive the winter.

The loss of snow and ice is already a major problem for winter recreation. Researchers have found that climate change will shrink the number of days for downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, and snowmobiling across 247 winter recreation areas. For some resorts, the length of skiing season will likely be cut in half by 2050, and across the country, warming winters will cost the industry more than $2 billion. For more on this, check out Climate Central’s new research brief, ON THIN ICE: How Climate Change is Shaping Winter Recreation.

This all goes to show that we cannot ignore the dramatic changes unmitigated climate change could bring to our winter months.

America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation.

How we did our analysis

To calculate projections for average winter low temperatures in the 1,000 most-populated cities in the United States, we averaged daily minimum temperatures in winter months for a baseline period over 30 years (1986 to 2015). Then we looked at how these cities would warm by 2050, again averaging over 30 years (2036 to 2065). Since we’re only looking at the continental United States, this analysis does not include Alaska and Hawaii.

We’re using a standard set of assumptions in climate models known as RCP 8.5. In general, it’s considered a high-end, some would say pessimistic, projection of warming: It assumes that the world will continue on the same course of carbon dioxide emissions with limited improvements in technology or efficiency.

It’s useful because it tracks closely with where we are now and serves as an upper boundary for what we can anticipate. RCP 8.5 also doesn’t result in a vast difference in climate change estimates compared to other scenarios when looking at the middle of the century. The largest variations under RCP 8.5 emerge around 2100.

The biggest unknown is what the world will actually do to address climate change. Nations recently agreed at the latest round of United Nation climate talks in Poland to a set of rules to govern how they implement their pledges to cut emissions under the Paris climate agreement.

But current pledges are not enough to limit warming to 2°Celsius this century above preindustrial levels, the target under the Paris accord. That means countries will still have to do more to fight climate change, drastically slashing fossil fuel use, electrifying their economies, and sucking CO2 out of the air. They’ll also have to adapt to the warming that’s already happening. We can’t escape its effects, even during the coldest times of year.

Special thanks to David Pierce, of the Climate Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, for guiding the data analysis.

Hurricane Florence: where the storm is and where it’s heading

2018-09-13T09:49:11-04:00

Hurricane Florence is heading to the Carolinas and Virginia, and is expected to bring life-threatening storm surge and coastal flooding, punishing rains, and high winds. The storm is forecasted to slow down as it approaches landfall Friday, brining with it a massive amount of rain. Communities along the coast are evacuating in preparation. The most dangerous aspect of a hurricane is often the storm surge, which is expected to top 9 or 13 feet in some areas. (View a storm surge warning risk map for the storm here.)

Luckily, there’s still time to prepare. This map below charts the course the storm has taken so far and NOAA’s National Hurricane Center’s best available forecast for where it’s heading. The map will update automatically when new forecasts are published. Regardless of its exact category rating, it will remain a dangerous situation.

Map by Ryan Mark and Casey Miller

How to follow Hurricane Florence:

The National Hurricane Center has a page updating every few hours with the latest watches and warnings for Florence. Check it out.
Follow the National Hurricane Center on Twitter; it will keep you up to date with all the latest forecasts, hazards, and warnings. Also follow its Charleston, South Carolina, branch.
Follow the Capital Weather Gang’s Twitter account. These folks tend to live-tweet storm updates.
Here’s a Twitter list of weather experts via meteorologist Eric Holthaus. These experts will give you up-to-the-second forecasts and warnings.

More fire than ice: how Game of Thrones’ use of color has changed over 7 seasons

2019-04-15T12:57:10-04:00

After seven seasons, Game of Thrones has reached the point where dragons are burning people to crisps on one hand and the army of the dead is marching south on the other, making it hard to tell which way this epic battle between fire and ice will ultimately tip.

But in terms of its color, at least, Game of Thrones is more fire than ice — for now.

We analyzed the series’ use of color in all 67 episodes so far, capturing the screen every 10 seconds and averaging the colors in each image. We found that scenes where the average color is warm — that is, closer to red than blue — outnumber the ones with cold colors.

Westeros’s long summer, scenes from tropical-looking Essos, and occasional bursts of dragon fire have accounted for much of the series’ warm scenes. But as Game of Thrones’ main action shifts to the North and beyond the Wall, things have started to cool considerably. Season seven — which alternated between extremes of dragon fire and the icy North — was more cool than hot.

Hue is only one part of the Game of Thrones color story, though. The series has also seen a steady decline in its overall warmth and saturation, a seeming portent of the long winter the series has been promising since the beginning.

To illustrate these trends, we’ve generated an annotated, interactive color spectrum for each episode for you to explore. But first, some key data points.

The darkest and brightest episodes

The darkest episode of the series to date is “Blackwater,” the penultimate episode of season two.

The Battle of Blackwater Bay, between Stannis Baratheon’s fleet and the Lannisters’ King’s Landing army, is fought at night, which accounts for the episode’s permeating darkness. The entire episode stays in King’s Landing — with a brief cutaway to show Stannis’s ships making their way across the Narrow Sea — so there are no scenes from other locations to break up the color pattern. The only flash of color in this episode comes from the fluorescent green of the wildfire blaze that destroys Stannis’s fleet.

“Watchers on the Wall,” the ninth episode of season four, is almost as dark as “Blackwater.” Like “Blackwater,” this episode also centers on a nighttime battle, when Mance Rayder’s army of wildlings clashes with the Night’s Watch at Castle Black.

In contrast, the brightest Game of Thrones episode was the very first one of the series.

This makes sense: When the series opens, it’s still summer, and there are a lot of outdoor daytime scenes that contribute to the episode’s overall brightness. Scenes from the bright, warm Pentos, where Daenerys and Viserys Targaryen are living in exile, are a big contributing factor.

Explore the color spectrums of all 67 episodes

There’s a lot of episode-to-episode variation in colors throughout the series. So with that in mind, we’ve stitched together the average colors in every single one of Game of Thrones’s 67 episodes so far. The result is an annotated, interactive color spectrum for each episode that you can explore.

What is color anyway?

There are some loose trends we can pull out of Game of Thrones’ overall color story. But before going any deeper into the analysis, let’s back up a bit: To fully understand what’s going on here, it’s helpful to know how color is represented.

One of the ways to convey color in a digital image is by breaking it into its three properties: hue, saturation, and lightness. This is called the HSL color space.

When we name colors, we are usually referring to their hue. Red, blue, orange, pink, etc. are hues. Hue is measured in degrees, starting with red at 0 degrees, transitioning to cyan at 180 degrees, and then coming back full circle to red at 360 degrees. Colors in the top half of the circle are considered warm colors, and those in the bottom half are cool colors.

The second property, saturation, reflects the purity of the color by measuring how much gray is mixed in. Saturation of 0 percent is entirely gray, while 100 percent is the purest version of the color.

Lightness is the amount of white in the color. When lightness is at 0 percent the color is black, and when lightness is at 100 percent the color is white.

The human eye is not very adept at perceiving these properties independently. For instance, it’s easier to discern which color is lighter between two shades of red than it is to discern which color is lighter between different colors.

But we can examine subtle shifts in each property independently by ignoring the other two properties.

Here are three colors with their hue, saturation, and lightness values. All of them look muddy and not drastically different from one another:

But if we ignore changes in saturation and lightness by setting them to the same value across the board, we can see the hues more clearly:

And here is what saturation looks like if we ignore hue and lightness:

The color patterns of Game of Thrones season seven came down to dragons versus Night King

Using the methods outlined above, we analyzed the average hues and saturation for each episode and each season of Game of Thrones.

As Daenerys made her way toward Westeros over the first six seasons of the series, the show’s average hue shifted toward cooler colors. The saturation also dropped, resulting in bleaker tones as the main characters spent time in the dreary North, imprisoned in poorly lit dungeons, or battling in the dark.

Season seven’s hue was all over the place, oscillating between extremes as ice and fire clashed against each other. Whenever dragon blaze pushed up the warmth, the snow and ice of the North was there to counteract it.

As the season concluded, cooler colors took the upper hand.

While hue fluctuated from one episode to the next, however, saturation largely stayed put. The colors looked muted in a majority of scenes.

And one aspect of Game of Thrones’ color has remained consistent throughout the entire series: It has always been incredibly dark.

Game of Thrones’ seventh season was the series’ coldest so far, as well as one of the bleakest. It remains to be seen whether season eight will bring more fire or ice.

A running list of Trumpland’s often-shifting stories on their Russia ties

2017-07-25T12:26:46-04:00

Donald Trump Jr. is the latest in a growing list of people in President Trump’s inner circle to change their story about their connections to Russia.

Over the past few months, various reports have linked key members of Trump’s campaign and administration with Russia — connections they had all failed to report and sometimes outright denied.

A number of these Trump associates have caught the attention of those investigating whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia.

Here are all of Trump’s aides’ Russia dealings, and their often-shifting accounts of what happened, in one place.

Dowries are illegal in India. But families — including mine — still expect them.

2017-02-06T11:34:44-05:00

An Indian bride on her wedding day in Udaipur, India, 2003. | Leisa Tyler/LightRocket via Getty Images

Growing up in India, my sister and I used to play a game of, “What would you do if you had 1 lakh rupees?”

One lakh rupees — about $1,500 — to our young minds was an unfathomably large amount that could buy you the entire universe. The game kept our imaginations active during long car rides and power outages. Our answers were always variations of buying a beach bungalow somewhere exotic where there are no power outages or buying a really fast car.

One day, an aunt overheard us playing this game. She suggested that we ought to save the money for our dowries instead of wasting it on “useless things.”

That sucked all the joy out of the game, and we never played it again. Until a few months ago, when I found myself playing it with my husband, Srini, in our house in Seattle.

This time the stakes were higher, the money was not imaginary, and the choices were less glitzy. We were asking ourselves what would we do with half a million dollars. We had to pick between Srini’s dream of us retiring in our 40s and paying my sister-in-law Priya’s dowry.

According to his elaborate calculation, that extra $500,000 in our retirement savings would allow us to retire 12 years from now — five years sooner than otherwise. But those five years would be punctuated with pangs of guilt for having “ruined Priya’s life,” my mother-in-law warned us.

I am against dowry. But I am also not a fan of ruining anyone’s life.

Dowry is payment made in cash or kind to a bride’s in-laws at the time of her marriage. The amount depends on a large number of factors, including region, religion, caste and subcaste, groom’s education, bride’s skin tone, and the negotiation skills of both the families involved.

Even though dowry has been illegal in India since 1961, it is still prevalent. Actual numbers are not known, but anecdotally about half of the weddings in my family and friend’s circles involve dowry.

Still, it’s rarely reported as a crime. According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, in a country with nearly 10 million weddings a year, less than 10,000 cases of dowry were reported in 2015. Dowry gets reported only when the groom’s demands go beyond what the bride’s family can afford or when the bride is physically abused or, worse, killed, as cases that gained media attention show.

More often, dowry related-abuses are filed under a law that prevents domestic abuse: in 2015, more than 113,000 women reported abuse by their husbands or in-laws, and 7,646 deaths were classified as related to dowry disputes. That is nearly 21 women killed every day by their husbands or in-laws because their families could not meet the dowry demands.

Is five years of retirement worth taking a chance on that kind of odds?

In April, Srini got a call he’d been dreading for the past 10 years. His uncle in Chennai was calling to talk about getting Priya, who also lives in Chennai, married. He bluntly asked, “How much are you willing to give Priya?”

Within India’s arranged marriage system, finding your own partner is frowned upon. Parents and extended family take it upon themselves to find you potential matches when you reach the marriageable age of early to mid-20s for women and mid- to late 20s for men.

Arranging a marriage is conducted much like a company merger. It is all business with very little room for feelings like love. So much that “love marriage” is often used to refer to a marriage that is not arranged by the family. Nearly 90 percent of the marriages across India are arranged, according to research by Statistic Brain Research Institute.

The Telugu Reddy community that Srini belongs to is infamous for its exorbitant dowry demands. To begin window-shopping for potential grooms, the uncle on the phone wanted to know Srini’s dowry budget. He was hoping to hear at least Rs 4 crores — the equivalent of $585,000.

Srini’s initial reaction was to offer “absolutely nothing” as dowry. Our reservations have nothing to do with parting with such a large amount of money. They were about the sexist and regressive idea we would be supporting.

The lopsided, nonsensical economics of dowry

Every social studies textbook I remember from my childhood contained this sentence: “Dowry is a social evil.” It was mentioned often alongside sati, the practice where a widow self-immolates on her husband’s funeral pyre as a sign of loyalty. Sati is more or a less a thing of the past. It has been accepted as a barbaric practice that had to end.

But not dowry. The subtext of “social evil” when it came to dowry is often “social necessity.”

My sister and I went to the same school and had the same teachers, though five years apart. Both of us remember our social studies teacher attempting to justify dowry right after the lesson on “social evil.” The teacher said that she would accept dowry for her son and give dowry when her daughter got married. She said it was basic economics that we were too young to understand.

Instead of being regarded as a crime and a source of shame, dowry has become a matter of pride. It is not as discreet as one would expect with an act of illegal transfer of assets. It is flashy and in your face. It is discussed over coffee at family gatherings. Sons-in-law are often introduced with the price tag they come with. “He works in the US. We gave my daughter 4 crores.”

Sons are seen as assets. There is a strong preference for male children, which has been blamed for years of female feticide. (Side note: Fetus sex determination has been illegal in India since 1994. But the sex ratio in the age group 0 to 6 continues to decline.)

This has left India with a very unbalanced sex ratio. There are 940 women for every 1,000 men according to 2011 census. India has 37 million more men than women, making it hard for men to find suitable brides. In certain parts of the country, wife sharing among brothers has become common.

Low supply and high demand should have tipped the scales in favor of women. Yet the dowry market has not seen any discernible drop.

As research points out, dowry has become an institutionalized and integral part of the Indian marriage. Social and economic realities do little to keep it in check.

Often, education is touted as the cure-all for social malaises and inequalities. But research shows that educated grooms tend to demand higher dowries. Education is reduced to just another factor that determines your market rate.

A good education generally translates to higher earning potential. A well-educated groom could cash that in for a good hike in the dowry. A well-educated woman, on the other hand, might be penalized for it. The conventions in arranged marriages do not permit the wife earning more than the husband. A high-salaried woman would be matched only with a higher-salaried man who commands exorbitant dowry because of his income.

The odds are stacked steeply against women and their families.

Growing up in India, I heard mixed messages about dowry

The messages about dowry we received were very mixed. On one hand, there was the textbook, and then there were all the people who talked about dowry as an inevitable and natural rite of passage for women.

But thanks to our feminist mother and a steady diet of Malayalam movies that featured stories about women murdered by exploding gas cylinders for not meeting dowry demands, I never once doubted which side I was on.

Still, conversations involving our dowries happened around my sister and me all the time.

Growing up in a middle-class family in India, I was made to believe that my parents not having a son was the biggest tragedy that had been visited upon them. Strangers would give my parents a look of sympathy on learning that they had two daughters and no sons. When my father did anything that might be considered irresponsible, his sister would remind him that he has two daughters. He has liabilities. He could not afford to goof off.

Our parents were often accused of failing to put our best interests in focus. Our mother was told by well-meaning elders to rein in our independence and to save for our marriages instead of buying us video games and computers.

It was not uncommon for my mother to get a call from an uncle who just read about a drop in gold prices in the morning paper, urging her to “invest in your daughters’ futures today.”

When my sister chose to stray away from the beaten path of engineering or medicine — the only two career choices children in my extended family are given — strangers warned my parents that they would have to pay more dowry to get my sister married. My sister chose to be a fashion designer. And fashion designing, I learned then, is not very high on the list of preferred jobs in the marriage market.

I have since then wondered many times the reasoning behind the bias against fashion designing, which could be as lucrative as engineering. I’ve come to accept that it comes from a place of fear of the uncommon. We were taught to stick to the tried and tested. Fashion designing was not it.

Just a few minutes into our game of “dowry or no dowry” a few months ago, it was very clear to Srini and me that our personal ideologies and morals were pitted against the fear of letting down the family. This was not going to be an easy decision.

So we turned to the person at the center of all this — Priya — for guidance.

She said she is against the idea of dowry. “I would rather be alone than marry a guy demanding money from my family, ” she said.

Priya is a 27-year-old human resources consultant who is trusted to make important decisions every day at work. But she was not included in any of these discussions about her marriage. On the rare occasion she was consulted, the extended family members were not happy with her attitude. “If I say anything against dowry, they start shouting at me,” she said. She was told that the “grown-ups” would decide the dowry.

She asked us not to advertise a bounty for marrying her.

We thought it was settled, but guilt started gnawing at us. I would often wake up in the middle of the night to see Srini staring at his financial portfolio, willing it to make a decision for him.

My husband’s family expects a lot of him as the firstborn son

Srini and I met 10 years ago at work in Hyderabad, India. We both were software engineers at the same large company. Apart from our workplace and alma mater — both of us graduated from the same college, but our times there did not overlap — we had very little in common. We grew up in different states. Our families did not speak the same language. We belonged to different castes and social circles.

We were the antithesis of an arranged marriage match.

On our third date, he asked me to help him choose interior options for his new house. It scared me. It felt too presumptive, too forward, too fast. I barely knew this guy, and here he was planning the interiors of our house.

Later I learned that he began investing in real estate right out of college. This new house was just another investment, and he was merely asking me for help. He never planned to live there.

He said he was saving to retire in his 40s. I had just started my first job out of college, earning about the same amount as my mother did then after 25 years as a professor. I was enjoying the perks of that generous paycheck. Why would someone want to retire at 40? It sounded bizarre to me.

He was already tired of all the financial responsibilities, he said. For him, retirement was to be the freedom I was enjoying at that moment — enough money to live comfortably with no obligations. He wanted to travel. He wanted to work on fun projects. He wanted to maybe take a career chance that he never could otherwise. His retirement plans sounded much like my plan for my early 20s: Live selfishly for myself.

Srini had more obligations at 25 than I have ever had in my whole life.

There are certain undeniable truths to be being the firstborn son in a middle-class Indian family. One of them is that you are expected to help support the family financially.

“The narrative was always, ‘Study well so you can support the family,’” Srini said when I asked him when he first knew he would have to take on some heavy responsibilities.

It did not come as a surprise to him when he became the sole provider for his parents, sister, and maternal grandparents immediately after he graduated from engineering school. He bought them a house at the age of 22. So much for the millennial’s carefree life.

Two years after we met, we decided to get married. A love marriage.

Before we got engaged, I had made my stance on dowry clear to Srini. He had the same opinion. Srini had conveyed that to his parents. No demands were made.

My parents, however, decided to give me — a person who does not wear any jewelry, not even a wedding ring — a pound or two of gold jewelry. A matter of pride.

“Your father is a doctor and mother is a professor; people will expect you to wear some gold,” an aunt explained.

“What you do today will reflect on your sister and will affect her wedding,” another aunt said.

Weddings are hard, and I had no fight left in me. So I went along with it. I wore an armor of gold. The numerous chains were stitched onto my sari to keep them in place. I never saw that jewelry again after the wedding. My mother-in-law has it safe in a bank locker somewhere.

One of the first conversations I had with my mother-in-law was when she told me that her son had certain responsibilities to his sister. She then asked me to not stop him from fulfilling those.

Years later, I decoded that cryptic message.

She was trying to tell me that when the time came, I should support my husband in paying his sister’s dowry.

But I don’t think I can support a system that turns women into bargaining chips.

The murky origins of dowry — and why it persists today

Scholars cannot agree on the origins of dowry. One of the theories is that it originated from the country’s gendered inheritance rules.

Women, traditionally, did not inherit family’s wealth. Dowry was seen as a way for the family to give women their share. This is often used a justification even today, despite laws like the 1956 Hindu Succession Act, which gave daughters equal rights to their family’s property.

Traditionally, an Indian bride moves in with her husband’s family, a practice that is not uncommon even today. The sons are expected to stay and support their parents while their wives take over the domestic responsibilities like cooking and cleaning. The women’s contributions to household duties are not assigned any monetary value. So she is essentially considered a freeloader unless she pays for her lodging and food expenses in dowry.

Now with more women joining the workforce, this justification falls by the wayside too. But like the gender wage gap seen even in countries like the US, some things are so entrenched in the culture and gender politics that they defy all logic. It is not easy to get rid of them.

India recognized dowry as one of the problems it needed to tackle as a young republic. The Dowry Prevention Act of 1961 and later amendments aimed to outlaw the practice and empower women to report dowry extortions. The law criminalized both giving and receiving dowry, and it recommended a minimum imprisonment of five years and a fine equal to the amount of the dowry.

But the law has a rather narrow definition of dowry that excludes any voluntary gifts when no demands were made. This has given rise to a whole new vernacular when it comes to stating dowry demands without explicitly stating them.

Even when the groom’s family does not make demands, the bride’s family pays a dowry because it is a matter of pride and a symbol of social status.

Instead of outright refusing dowry, often people tell the bride’s parents, “You can give your daughter whatever you want.” And just like that, the burden of defining a “respectable” amount is shifted to the bride’s parents. And legally it would no longer be dowry.

Our dowry dilemma: We’re caught between our convictions and family expectations

Refusing to give dowry would reflect badly on Srini and his family, his uncle warned him. “After all, the bride’s brother is in the US. People will have expectations,” he said.

Srini and I have no pride invested in dowry. In fact, I would be ashamed if we caved in.

“What can we do? Society is like that,” said a friend when I talked to her about my dilemma. She is against dowry, she claimed. But her parents gave and received dowry for her and her brother. She calls it a necessity that she had no say in.

Blaming the society and washing our hands of the culpability is a classic move when it comes to appeasing our consciences. I realized I was doing nothing different. My guilt of letting family down was, I realized, pushing me toward my own justification of dowry.

But I would not be able to live with myself.

Maybe some potential groom will come along for Priya who does not want dowry. Maybe India’s recent demonetization will crash the real estate market and take dowry down with it. Just maybe I’ll be able to avoid a very difficult conversation with my in-laws.

It is unlikely any of that will happen.

Srini and I realized we could not delay this decision any more. So we decided.

We are more than willing to share our wealth with Priya and to provide her any support she needs. But we will not stand behind a marriage propped up on such promises or gifts.

There will be no dowry. Not from us.

Breaking this news to the family is not going to be easy. We are going to be labeled selfish. Distant relatives will place the blame on me, the outsider, for breaking the culture. And Priya may never get married to a man from the same caste and community as her.

But I can only hope that Priya will be happier because of this decision.

“I don’t want a marriage that is a business deal,” Priya said.

Kavya Sukumar is an engineer with the Vox Media storytelling studio.

Design for graphic by Kelsey Scherer.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Electoral College map 2016: make your election result predictions

2019-03-06T15:04:54-05:00

The Electoral College is one of the more bizarre quirks of the US presidential race. Instead of relying on the popular vote, a presidential candidate needs the majority of the Electoral College — 270 out of 538 electoral votes — to win the White House on Election Day. (And, of course, if all the candidates fail to receive at least 270 votes, then the race is sent to the House.)

Each state and Washington, DC, is allocated a share of electoral votes based on the US Census. A state’s entire share of electoral votes goes to whoever wins the most votes — except in Maine and Nebraska, where instead votes are split up based on each state’s number of congressional districts and popular vote winner.

If you’re ready to predict how the Electoral College will split in the 2016 election, you can click on each state below to toggle among Democrat, Republican, and third parties.

A few tips:

You can split Nebraska and Maine's electoral votes, but be warned that it's only ever happened once — in Nebraska in 2008.
Polls suggest there's a chance independent Evan McMullin might take Utah, but it's extremely unlikely that any other state will have a majority third-party vote.
The Vox Politics team thinks some states will definitely go Republican or Democrat but that there are 13 swing states left that are too difficult to predict right now. The map is prefilled with our suggestions above, but you can alternatively fill it out with 2012 results or clear out the entire map and start fresh.
Want to share your map? Once you've made your selection, use the tweet button below the map to share a link to your own version on Twitter.

Election Day emotion tracker: share your feelings, and we’ll tell you where you stand with others

2017-12-14T11:44:08-05:00

The 2016 presidential election has been one of the most polarizing political cycles in recent history, and the effects have Americans stressing out, regardless of political party. One recent survey found that a slight majority of Americans (52 percent) say this election “is a very or somewhat significant” source of stress in their lives.

So today, we’re tracking how you’re dealing with it all. Tell us how you’re feeling, and we’ll grid your emotion by its level of happiness and intensity. You’re limited to submitting one reaction an hour, so come back at the top of every hour to see how your reactions line up with others’. We’ll also tell you the most popular emotion of the hour, as well as how many other people are feeling the way you do.

We’ll save your reaction in your browser so you can track how you’re feeling all day — and so we can see how emotions vary over the course of what promises to be a very tumultuous day. (This won’t work if you switch browsers or are viewing the site in incognito mode.)

How does this work?

How do we know where to grid your emotions? We’re using a publicly available dictionary of words rated by their emotional valence — i.e., whether they evoke positive or negative feelings — and arousal, or how intense the word is. These dictionaries are commonly used for emotion research and sentiment analysis.

With that, go ahead and chart your feelings — maybe it will even help you feel a bit better.

Clinton dominated the CBS Saturday debate. These charts prove it.

2019-03-05T13:05:20-05:00

No matter how you slice the numbers on Saturday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton comes out ahead — and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley comes out far, far behind.

Clinton spoke more than her two challenges, beating out Bernie Sanders by five minutes and O’Malley by about nine. This is now the second time Clinton has managed to get the most airtime during the debate, too; she also had the most words spoken at the first Democratic primary debate last month.

How long each candidate spoke

Clinton drew the most attention from the other candidates, getting more name checks than her opponents. O’Malley, meanwhile, garnered a sparse three mentions, as one might expect for a long-shot third-place candidate. Clinton and Sanders just didn’t seem to feel a need to engage with him.

Mentions

We can also measure who generated the most Google searches on each candidate, a way to get a sense of which candidates got viewers interested enough to start searching for information. There, again, Clinton saw the biggest spike in traffic, just about halfway through the debate.

Search interest in Democratic presidential candidates

Syria’s tangled proxy wars: a simple visual guide

2019-03-05T11:30:13-05:00

Syria’s civil war, four-plus years after it began with protests and crackdowns in 2011, has grown into an international proxy conflict. It includes regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as global powers such as the US and Russia. There are foreign militias, Syrian militias, and Kurdish militias. There are crisscrossing alliances and rivalries. Even the countries and groups ostensibly on the same side often have very different goals and strategies.

To help you follow what’s going on, who’s involved, and what each side is trying to do, we’ve charted out the most important actors and their relationships. Click on the logos to see the web of relationships, or click on the line between any two actors to see how they interact.

One thing you’ll notice: For all the complications and contradictions, the conflict at the center of it all, the one dynamic around which so much of the war organizes, is still the battle between Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian rebels.