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Roe ruling shows complex relationship between court, public

The Supreme Court ruling to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is unpopular with a majority of Americans — but did that matter?

The relationship between the public and the judiciary has been studied and debated by legal and political scholars. The short answer: it’s complicated. There’s evidence that the public has an indirect role in the judiciary, but that might be changing.

In the final opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court “cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.”

Polls following the leaked draft of the opinion show approval of the Supreme Court — which was already suffering — slumped even further, driven by those who supported keeping Roe.

Michael Salamone.
Salamone

Michael Salamone, political science professor at Washington State University, explained that “specific support” for the court — what’s measured in polls — can easily fluctuate with reactions to court decisions. But “diffuse support” — faith in the institution’s role in democracy — is historically resilient. It remains to be seen whether that diffuse support will suffer because of the decision to overturn Roe.

“Just based on the amount of rhetoric and the high-profile nature of so many of these decisions,” he said, “I’m wondering if we’ve perhaps reached our limit to that resilience.”

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WSU Insider

WSU Planetarium offers views of the universe all summer long

June’s night sky is full of many summer constellations, and at the crack of dawn, Mercury, Venus, the moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can be seen like beads on a thread.

The Washington State University Planetarium is hosting events each weekend this summer. At 7 p.m. Friday and 5 p.m. Sunday, people can see the program titled The Sun, Our Living Star.

At the beginning of the event, the planetarium will open its roof to show and identify constellations in the sky. Later, a movie will be shown to educate people about the universe.

Guy Worthey.
Worthey

Guy Worthey, an astrophysicist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at WSU, holds these events as a way to introduce people to astronomy.

“It’s good to connect with reality and the universe around us,” Worthey said. “We all like to be connected with the world around us, and this is a really good way to learn some connections between yourself and the universe.

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Moscow-Pullman Daily News

Heat Waves Around the World Push People and Nations ‘to the Edge’

Millions of Americans are once again in the grips of dangerous heat. Hot air blanketed Europe last weekend, causing parts of France and Spain to feel the way it usually does in July or August. High temperatures scorched northern and central China even as heavy rains caused flooding in the country’s south. Some places in India began experiencing extraordinary heat in March, though the start of the monsoon rains has brought some relief.

It’s too soon to say whether climate change is directly to blame for causing severe heat waves in these four powerhouse economies — which also happen to be the top emitters of heat-trapping gases — at roughly the same time, just days into summer.

While global warming is making extreme heat more common worldwide, deeper analysis is required to tell scientists whether specific weather events were made more likely or more intense because of human-induced warming.

Even when scientists look at how often temperatures exceed a certain level relative to a moving average, they still find a big increase in the frequency of simultaneous heat waves.

Deepti Singh.
Singh

A recent study, coauthored by Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University, found that the average number of days between May and September with at least one large heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere doubled between the 1980s and the 2010s, to around 152 from 73. But the number of days with two or more heat waves was seven times higher, growing to roughly 143 from 20. That’s nearly every single day from May to September.

The study also found that these concurrent heat waves affected larger areas and were more severe by the 2010s, with peak intensities that were almost one-fifth higher than in the 1980s. On days when there was at least one large heat wave somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, there were 3.6 of them happening per day on average, the study found.

These “dramatic” increases came as a surprise, Dr. Singh said.

She and her co-authors also looked at where concurrent heat waves occurred most frequently during those four decades. One pattern stood out: Large simultaneous heat waves struck parts of eastern North America, Europe, and central and eastern Asia increasingly often between 1979 and 2019 — “more than what we would expect simply by the effect of warming,” Dr. Singh said.

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New York Times

Archaeology students aim to determine if Fort Vancouver National Historic Site was used for schools

More than 20 college students kneeled in the warm July heat, sifting through small square holes in the freshly dug ground on the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, searching for nails, ceramic remnants and other relics from the past.

Kaeli Stephens, an anthropology major from Washington State University Vancouver, said that she’s enjoyed the fact that the excavation is open to the public, where family and friends can walk up and ask questions about the work she loves doing.

“Seeing women in STEM out here is so cool,” she said. “And I love when little girls walk by and say, ‘I want to be like that when I grow up.’ ”

The crews will use the archaeology lab in the stockade to analyze their findings. After the field school the staff with the National Park Service will do a more detailed analysis and write a report on the excavation.

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The Columbian
KPVI

What Republicans Know (and Democrats Don’t) About the White Working Class

There’s an important social and economic divide that drives working-class whites that progressive elites mostly miss — to their political peril.

Ever since J.D. Vance became the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, journalists and pundits have been preoccupied with how Vance’s politics have shifted since the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other—those who work versus those who don’t. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the “settled” working class versus the “hard living.” A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits.

Vance has not renounced that divisive message. He no doubt hopes to garner the support of the slightly more upmarket of the two factions—which, probably not coincidentally, is also the group more likely to go to the polls. While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic, Vance’s competitiveness in the Ohio Senate race can be explained in no small part by his ability to politically exploit this cleavage.

As a scholar studying working-class and rural whites, I have written about this subtle but consequential divide. I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher’s aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the “settled” side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion.

Jennifer Sherman.
Sherman

Vance and my parents are mere anecdotes, yes, but scholars, including sociologist Jennifer Sherman of Washington State University, have studied folks like them in both urban and rural locales and have documented the phenomenon they represent.

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Politico