{"id":11401,"date":"2024-08-01T18:36:55","date_gmt":"2024-08-01T18:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/08\/01\/climate-change-politics-immigration-growth-narrative-structure-reporting-sources\/"},"modified":"2025-03-19T16:07:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T16:07:30","slug":"climate-change-politics-immigration-growth-narrative-structure-reporting-sources","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/08\/01\/climate-change-politics-immigration-growth-narrative-structure-reporting-sources\/","title":{"rendered":"How a reporter glimpsed the future of America in a crystal-ball city"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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For almost a year, George Packer \u2014 a writer for The Atlantic and winner of the National Book Award \u2014 told people he was working on a long-form story about Phoenix, Arizona. The response he got didn\u2019t inspire the kind of confidence journalists seek.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cIf I were too susceptible to the expressions on people\u2019s faces I might have given up because it didn\u2019t inspire excitement,\u201d Packer said. \u201cIt was more a kind of bafflement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Serious readers are fortunate he persevered. \u201cWhat Will Become of American Civilization?\u201d<\/strong><\/a>  is a 25,000-word epic that casts Phoenix as a crystal ball of a city, defined in the story\u2019s subhed: \u201cConspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation\u2019s fastest-growing city.\u201d Phoneix is where the battlefields of America\u2019s future \u2014 blast-furnace heatwaves, bloody political violence, churning attitudes toward immigration and mean-dog partisanship that all but ignores the human toll \u2014 are already engaged.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Packer\u2019s piece, which combines shoe-leather reporting and with essay-like insights, was published online this past June; it runs in the August\/September 2024 print edition as \u201cThe Valley.\u201d Packer reported and completed his assignment as seismic events continued to play out in the U.S. Before an assassin\u2019s bullet grazed a former president, he wrote of a high-profile politician who weathered threats for standing up for his beliefs. Before the Supreme Court upended laws protecting unhoused people, he wrote of a homeless woman who suffered a second-degree burn from falling on hot pavement during a medical emergency. Beginning, ending and threading throughout his piece is water, a crucial survival resource that is both source and target of the region\u2019s extremist politics \u2014 politics likely coming to a community near you.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Packer portrays a number of people who live at the edge of the future, such as Rusty Bowers, formerly a powerful state legislator concerned about the real-world effects of the region\u2019s politics, and Fernando Quiroz, who helps asylum-seekers navigate the quotidian details of crossing the border. Along the way there are appearances by experts and scientists, elected officials and would-be elected officials, and one-time TV star Roseanne Barr.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The piece makes an invocation that Packer calls \u201cbold.\u201d He opens with a tight description of the sophisticated engineering of the Hohokam Indians, who built a thriving culture in the Sonoran Desert a millenium ago, then \u2014 for reasons still unknown \u2014 vanished. He quickly connects the dots between that past disappearance to the meteoric rise, and possible demise, of modern-day Phoenix. Here\u2019s his opening:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change\u2014drought, floods\u2014their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School<\/a>, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared<\/a> that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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He soon follows that with a tight and pointed summary nut :<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls\u2014belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I was taken with the boldness and complexity of that story frame, so reached out to Packer to talk about his story. His comments were as considered as his magazine piece. This comment stood out: \u201cIf it makes the stakes of the confluence of issues seem high, that\u2019s because they are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\"Author
George Packer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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He explained what brought him to that point: \u201cPeople in Phoenix wonder if Phoenix will be there in 50 years. There\u2019s a threat of extinction hovering over it, which is not something you\u2019d normally write in a more grounded and conventional piece of reporting about a city. But it felt true. I\u2019d heard it. I\u2019d felt it myself: the heat, the unnaturalness of a place in the desert that contributes to it. I wanted to capture that feeling at the start and have it hover over the whole piece, so you\u2019re never entirely at ease. You\u2019re always feeling like this could vanish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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To capture that mood, Packer and photographer Ashley Gilbertson<\/a> walk readers section by section, chapter by chapter through the issues and characters boiling away in the Arizona heat: the border, where asylum seekers decide what precious objects to throw away before officials do it for them; a homeless encampment in a county where heat killed hundreds of people last summer; a community where the presence of water is as expensive as it is precarious.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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While Packer spent a huge chunk of time on the project, he was sure to note it wasn\u2019t a one-person production: \u201cIn addition to Jeff Goldberg and Scott Stossel, the Atlantic\u2019s editors, copy editors, and checkers did a typically amazing job bringing this behemoth to the page.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Packer agreed to spend some time talking to Storyboard about how \u201cThe Valley\u201d came to be. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The sprawl of Phoenix seen from South Mountain at sunrise during an intense heat wave in July 2023.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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How did you settle on Phoenix as emblematic of the future?
<\/strong>Jeff Goldberg, The Atlantic\u2019s editor<\/a>, came to me two years ago and said \u201cI want you to fill an issue of the magazine with a story about some place in America that allows us to ask the question, \u2018Is this country a viable concern?\u2019\u201d Which was a rather intimidating assignment.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I\u2019d written a book called \u201cThe Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,\u201d<\/a> which looked back at 40 years of American history from 2012-13. I knew you could take individual lives and extrapolate. So I had an idea: How would that work if it was one place?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As I was pondering this, my editor, Scott Stossel<\/a>, said, \u201cYou should go to Phoenix.\u201d Not the Rust Belt. That was my first thought \u2014 Pittsburgh, Milwaukee. But those are well-known stories. They\u2019re the stories of the past more than the future. Phoenix is the story of the future. (Storyboard Note: Read more about Scott Stossel\u2019s editing approach<\/a> in our series \u201cWhat makes an effective editor?\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It wasn\u2019t something I particular relished. I\u2019m not a fan of high heat or urban sprawl and Phoenix has both in amplitude. I feared sitting in a hotel room not knowing how to begin \u2014 a kind of dread setting in as I try to figure out how to find my way around this place geographically as well as socially and culturally.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Reporters depend on the kindness of strangers. You\u2019re looking for someone who seems to welcome your presence.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The first two trips, in the summer of 2023, were pretty disappointing. I had the full blast of the desert heat. I didn\u2019t know anybody. I had a few names and hung on to them for dear life. It\u2019s such a big, sprawling place you feel lost, very easily lost. There\u2019s no sense of \u2018Here\u2019s where the core of the story is. Here\u2019s the neighborhood you can build out from.\u2019 Or \u2018Here\u2019s the community organization that will allow you to make connections between different kinds of people.\u2019 It doesn\u2019t feel that way in Phoenix.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Things got better on subsequent trips. I\u2019m just remembering how much unease there was for me in the first two trips.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When you say things got better, was there one thing that helped you turn the corner? Or was there an accumulation \u2014 meeting the right people, going to the right places?<\/strong>
In my experience as a reporter, you begin to know you\u2019re getting somewhere when you pull on a string and it turns out to be connected to more than one thing. Those things lead you to other things. Then you notice a pattern. You start hearing the same names, keep hearing about the same issues and events. You sense the structure of the place, the things that matter to people.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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One of them was water. That came up not in a single event or interview but over and over again \u2014 first with two experts I went back to again and again to understand this incredibly complicated subject of water, and groundwater especially, but then in finding people whose lives were in crisis because of disappearing water. Like this woman who ran a donkey rescue ranch in the hills of unincorporated Maricopa County; they had their water cut off by the city of Scottsdale. She told me how she got through the summer and kept her donkeys alive, and it turned out she did it without a reliable well. She depended on hauled water. Well, who hauled it? A man who had a business hauling water. I ran him down and we drove around in his truck.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Reporters depend on the kindness of strangers. You\u2019re looking for someone who seems to welcome your presence. That was true of the donkey-rescue lady and hauled-water guy, and it was true of Rusty Bowers. He was one of the names I kept hearing. \u201cYou should talk to Rusty Bowers if you\u2019re interested in politics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I didn\u2019t know enough about him and Arizona to know how important he was. So I texted him along with 600 other people and the answer came back almost instantly. He was in Washington D.C. painting a fountain outside the White House \u2014 because he\u2019s a painter \u2014 and he said he\u2019d be glad to see me when he got back. So right away there\u2019s readiness to spend time with me.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When I met him, he was impressive to the point of almost intimidating, with a deep faith in both his Latter-day Saints religion but also in public service. He\u2019d been Speaker of the House of Arizona until he refused to do Donald Trump\u2019s bidding and throw the election to him 2020. After that, he became a pariah, ostracized from the Republican Party, his career was destroyed.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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By the second or third visit I was able to articulate a question\u2026\u201cCan a political culture so divided and prone to extremism solve a problem as big and complicated as water?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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He was also just wonderful to spend time with. We spent many hours together during several visits. By then, I knew I was getting somewhere. I was getting into the politics of Arizona through Rusty Bowers and that led me to other people. I was understanding water and seeing the human face of water through others. And on and on.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In December I went to the Turning Point USA<\/a> convention at the Phoenix Convention Center. That gave me a set piece that allowed me to capture something of the extremist, right-wing politics of Phoenix and the country.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Finally, in my last trip in February, I went to the border. Even though the border is not exactly Phoenix, it\u2019s so important to politics and life I had to see for myself what it was like.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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So \u2026 five trips. By the last one, I felt like I\u2019d like to keep coming back. I liked it there, partly because I was meeting people and learning things. But it was time to start writing.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Did you go to Phoenix knowing, \u2018OK, I\u2019m going to write about extremism. I\u2019m going to write about heat. I\u2019m going to write about water?\u2019 Or did you let the topic come to you?
<\/strong>I\u2019d say a mix of those. I knew Arizona had the threat of election violence every time there was an election. It happened in 2020: Armed people outside the counting center chanting, \u201cStop the steal!\u201d In 2022: Every defeated statewide Republican claiming they\u2019d been cheated of victory; armed guys sitting outside drop boxes, watching who came and went. That was certainly something I wanted to write about.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And I knew Phoenix was hot. I knew climate change was causing a drought that was threatening the water supply, not of the city so much but of surrounding areas.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What I didn\u2019t know was the connection between those two stories. By the second or third visit I was able to articulate a question, which is how I like to see it \u2014 not as an answer, but as a question. And the question was, \u201cCan a political culture so divided and prone to extremism solve a problem as big and complicated as water?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Once I hit on that I knew that would be the throughline. It\u2019s a real question, and it\u2019s an interesting question, and I hadn\u2019t seen much written about it before. When I phrase it that way to people they would say, \u201cYeah! That\u2019s the question. Can we do this?\u2019<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And a lot depends on the answer.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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You made five visits. How many people do you think you talked to?
<\/strong>Actually talked to for more than five or ten minutes? Probably 50 or 60. I had both notebooks and recordings to transcribe, and I\u2019m hopelessly a Luddite about these things; I don\u2019t like to send them out to have another human being or AI do it for me. It ended up being something like 350 single-spaced pages. At this point, I\u2019m approaching the level of research a short book would have. And of course, most of it ends up not being used. I have to overreport to get what I need.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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So you have 350 pages of notes. How did you begin to organize the piece?
<\/strong>This is the hardest moment because it\u2019s a radical shift in spirit. Rather than being a curiosity machine and hoovering up as much information and observation as I can, now I have to tell a story. The amount of information I have is almost the enemy of telling the story. But it\u2019s essential to it. If I don\u2019t get lost and don\u2019t feel like I\u2019m drowning, I will not have the authority to write it the way I need to write it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The amount of information I have is almost the enemy of telling the story. But it\u2019s essential to it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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There\u2019s a temptation to turn the piece into the sum total of all the research: \u2018Well hell, I did that, that was hard. i spent hours on that. I had to write 10 e-mails to get that interview.\u2019 But that doesn\u2019t matter. All that matters is, can you write a good story? Will people want to read it? Will it move them? Will they want to stick with you for 25,000 words, which is what I was given?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For that, you really need to get away from the burden of your own reporting and think more like a novelist or short-story writer. In that phase I\u2019m always reading or listening, while on my dog-walks, to fiction in order to have the rhythm, the imagery, the feel of narrative.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I also need an outline. In this case, the outline was not obvious because the story was so kaleidoscopic. It was a little book, and the thing that united it was Phoenix. But there was so much pulling it in different directions: Politics. Climate. Immigration. We haven\u2019t even mentioned education. All these categories: How do they fit together, and in what order?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Storyboard Note:<\/em> The outline of Packer\u2019s story played out in ten chapters, bookended by a prologue and epilog. The chapters vary in length, though most are the length of a substantive magazine piece.  While the chapters inform each other, each has a clear focus that almost lets it stand alone.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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  1. The Conscience of Rusty Bower<\/strong>s profiles a former state legislator who has experienced the full range of issues threatening Phoenix<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. The Heat Zone<\/strong>\u00a0faces the reality of climate change, often through the experience of Phoenix\u2019s growing homeless population<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Democracy and Water<\/strong>\u00a0gets to heart of a dwindling resource that affects everything else, including survival<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Sunshine Patriots<\/strong>\u00a0profiles far-right conservatives and some of the conspiracies that define their views<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. The Aspirationalist<\/strong>\u00a0squints at an innovative future through the eyes of a university president<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. The Things They Carried<\/strong>\u00a0gets to the gritty reality of border crossings<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. America Dreams<\/strong>\u00a0profiles the challenges and triumphs of an immigrant family<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. Campaigners<\/strong>\u00a0follows select people who hope to provide a voice of leadership<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  9. The Good Trump Voter<\/strong>\u00a0is a short profile of one man who has lost trust in the system<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  10. Dry Wells<\/strong>\u00a0returns to water and the political and policy decisions that rule it<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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    Usually, the order has a logic that unfolds according to the demands of the story. But in this case, the pieces were disparate enough that my editor, Scott Stossel, and I went through the piece, asking: Well, what if you put heat before the first water story? You\u2019d miss a few things because there are references in the first water story that then come up in heat. But heat is so basic to people\u2019s sense of Phoenix, and it\u2019s so vivid maybe you want to go to heat before water.\u201d<\/em> Those are calculations based on what will keep people reading. They\u2019re always ready to throw the magazine across the room, so how do you keep them reading?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    There\u2019s a little prologue to the piece that set the mood. It\u2019s very short and sort of poetic, and I wanted that literary style to inform the whole piece. But from there I had to get to the stories I\u2019d found. The first one is of Rusty Bowers, partly because it sets up politics as the crucial pillar of this whole thing, but it\u2019s also a compelling human story of one person, with (former President Donald) Trump and (Trump lawyer Rudy) Giuliani hovering in the background.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    All sorts of questions about the order kept popping up:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    Water\u2019s so complicated, maybe it can\u2019t be too early; you might lose people.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    It also can\u2019t be too long.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    It has to have human faces. It can\u2019t get technical.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    It has to be simplified.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    All these considerations went into writing of individual sections, and the organization of the whole thing.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    Then there are throughlines. One is politics. Rusty Bowers is at the beginning, and he\u2019s at the end. Extremism is there in several chapters.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    But the other is water. There are two specific water chapters, but it\u2019s there in other ways, maybe mentioned in a sentence or two in almost all of them.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    To back up what you said, this might be a facile way to think of it, but if I\u2019d started the piece and it started with water policy, I might think, \u2018Oh, is this about issues?\u2019 It\u2019s less visceral than the scene of Rusty confronting protesters outside his home while his daughter is dying inside. Once you read that scene, you have to keep reading and see what happens. You have to see how this affects and winds through everything else.
    <\/strong>I\u2019m always looking for and holding on to moments of tension, of vividness.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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    The guy who took me along the border was handing out water and snacks and advice to migrants who had just literally crossed to the wall. At nighttime, with the wall behind us \u2014 the whole thing had this ominous and chilling feeling because we are in this little area with a handful of people who look exhausted and afraid. In that corner of Arizona, I\u2019d found a way to portray an issue that\u2019s a giant abstraction most of the time, one that\u2019s driving politics everywhere.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    But really, the opening was so important to get right. It\u2019s written in a looser and more poetic style than most of my work. The sentences are longer than usual for me. It makes claims that are a bit bold. Like people in Phoenix wonder if Phoenix will be there in 50 years. I know our country won\u2019t vanish off the map. But there are things that seem fragile about it right now and Phoenix embodies that.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
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    How did you find out about the disappearance of the Hohokam tribe and then land on it as your opening?
    <\/strong>I read about the Hohokam in one of the books I was reading about water in Arizona. It was fairly technical but it began with the story of the Hohokam Indians, who had a 1,000-year civilization in the Sonoran Desert and had built canals and turned the desert into farmland before mysteriously vanishing in the middle of the 15th century. To this day archeologists and anthropologists don\u2019t know what happened to their civilization, whether it was climate change or social upheaval. You can see traces in different part of the Phoenix Valley \u2014 ruins of canals and structures.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    I\u2019m always looking for and holding on to moments of tension, of vividness.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    I spent time at an Indian reservation south of Phoenix with the Gila River Indian Community leader Stephen Roe Lewis and he told me, \u201cHohokam means \u2018Those who came before.\u2019\u201d His tribe feels it is descended from Hohokam and inherited a lot of their culture, so it\u2019s not extinct. But in some ways, it has vanished because there was a physical civilization that\u2019s no longer there.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    All of this fired my imagination. There\u2019s a vibration that tells you this is something powerful and, from a literary point of view, useful. So the first sentence occurred to me all at once: \u201cNo one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished.\u201d That sets a tone and mood I hope are potent throughout the piece.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    You said you turn to fiction to inform and inspire your writing. Do you tailor what you listen to or read based on what you\u2019re writing?<\/strong>Yes. For \u201cThe Valley,\u201d I was reading a lot of American fiction, my favorite writers: Faulkner, Ellison, Fitzgerald. I was reading some of Didion\u2019s essays \u2014 not fiction, but informed by the same sensibility as her fiction. I love Dickens but don\u2019t think he would have been the right voice to have in my head. These were different American dialects and certain American rhythms of the sentences I wanted to get into my bloodstream.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    Tell me about the response to the piece.
    <\/strong>The response has been almost uniformly positive, which isn\u2019t always the case with my work. I was grateful The Atlantic put so much behind it. They put it on the cover, they gave it promotional muscle.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    My more polemical work gets potshots and criticism from the right and the left. This did not. It isn\u2019t polemical; it\u2019s more an attempt to encompass something large rather than take a narrow view.  I think people were glad to have that.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    I did hear that some found it depressing \u2014 terrifying with little bits of hope. I didn\u2019t realize it was so terrifying. I didn\u2019t intend for it to be. But maybe it\u2019s the only way it could be.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    * * *<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

    \n
    \n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
    \n
    \n \n

    Trevor Pyle <\/strong>is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Atlantic writer George Packer takes readers to the grounded realities of America’s battles over growth, race, climate change and water<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[11],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-11401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5-questions","authors-trevor-pyle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow a reporter glimpsed the future of America in a crystal-ball city - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/08\/01\/climate-change-politics-immigration-growth-narrative-structure-reporting-sources\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How a reporter glimpsed the future of America in a crystal-ball city - 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