Brett Kavanaugh looks poised to become the newest justice on the United States Supreme Court on Saturday.

Senators spent the past two days taking turns in a room in a sub-basement on Capitol Hill to review the findings of an FBI investigation into multiple sexual assault allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. With Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine throwing her support behind Kavanaugh Friday afternoon, the most bitter and partisan confirmation fight of modern times looks like it will reach its conclusion with Saturday afternoon's vote.

If confirmed, there are widespread concerns that the attacks Kavanaugh both received and delivered over the past month could resonate long into the future.

For his sympathizers, his fiery statements last week were an isolated and commensurate defense against career-threatening allegations.

Accusing Democratic senators on the committee of “grotesque and coordinated character assassination,” Kavanaugh described the allegations as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit” fueled by anger over President Trump’s election victory, “revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Supporters argue that these have little bearing on how he would perform as a justice compared with his record and reputation from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Kavanaugh himself seemed to address concerns about his temperament and impartiality in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal Thursday evening, explaining that he was “very emotional” during the hearing and “said a few things I should not have said.”

“He’s always been fair and even-handed, and I would expect him to continue to do that if he were appointed to the Supreme Court,” says Jennifer Mascott, a former clerk for Kavanaugh who has known him throughout his 12 years on the D.C. Circuit and who teaches at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “What was happening at the hearing was a very specific set of circumstances, allegations brought against him that necessitated a personal response and direct response.”

Senator Collins didn't reference Kavanaugh's partisan comments in her speech today. Still, in the eyes of many others – from friends and former colleagues to a former Supreme Court justice – his defense against the allegations crossed a line that no nominee for the high court should cross.

His testimony “was a sad day for our country,” says Kermit Roosevelt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law in Philadelphia. “Kavanaugh’s sense of partisan bitterness was disturbing in that it suggests partisan concerns will affect his judicial behavior.”

Partisan showdown

Supreme Court confirmations have become political war zones in recent years, but this particular confirmation was always likely to have even more partisan energy. Mr. Trump has committed to only nominating jurists with strong conservative credentials, and this nominee would replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s longtime swing justice who ruled in favor of liberals on issues like same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and affirmative action.

“We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy,” Collins said in her speech on the Senate floor. “Despite the turbulent bitter fights surrounding his nomination, my fervent hope is that Brett Kavanaugh will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions, and so that public confidence in our judiciary and our highest court is restored.”

Given the context, it is perhaps unsurprising this confirmation played out as a more extreme version of another bitter confirmation battle.

Justice Clarence Thomas also fiercely defended himself against sordid allegations, in his case from Anita Hill, a former assistant at the Department of Education, during his 1991 confirmation. But while Justice Thomas, an African-American, famously called the eleventh-hour sexual harassment accusations a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” he displayed a calm temperament in his response, never directly blaming Senate Democrats. The Democrat-controlled chamber ultimately confirmed him 52-to-48.

Last week, Kavanaugh was combative and hostile toward Democrats. He interrupted Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California, the committee’s ranking member, and asked Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) of Minnesota whether she had ever blacked out from drinking (he later apologized). The tone took aback even those who supported his confirmation.

“I was very troubled by the tone of [his] remarks,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R) of Arizona, a moderate who last Friday pushed for the additional FBI investigation.

“I tell myself, ‘You give a little leeway because of what he’s been through,’ ” he added. “But on the other hand, we can’t have this on the court. We simply can’t.”

Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of the Lawfare blog who says he’s known Kavanaugh for 20 years, wrote in the Atlantic, “the Brett Kavanaugh who showed up to [last week’s] hearing is a man I have never met.”

“Faced with credible allegations of misconduct against him, Kavanaugh behaved in a fashion unacceptable of a justice,” he added. “Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable pro-choice woman would feel like her position could get a fair shake before a Justice Kavanaugh? Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable Democrat, or a reasonable liberal of any kind, would, after that performance, consider him a fair arbiter in, say, a case about partisan gerrymandering, voter identification, or anything else with a strong partisan valence?”

More than 2,400 law professors signed a letter saying his testimony displayed a lack of judicial restraint that should be disqualifying. On Thursday, retired Justice John Paul Stevens, a Gerald Ford appointee who served on the court for 35 years, agreed.

“I’ve changed my views for reasons that have no really relationship to his intellectual ability or his record as a federal judge. He's a fine federal judge,” he said. “I think that his performance during the hearings caused me to change my mind.”

If confirmed, Kavanaugh would join a court with eroding public confidence. About half of Americans had a great deal of confidence in the Supreme Court prior to its Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, according to Gallup polling. In June, the most recent Gallup measurement, 37 percent of Americans had faith in the institution.

If Kavanaugh becomes part of a conservative majority in a controversial 5-to-4 decision, that could further damage the court’s reputation, says Jon Michaels, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.

“Every time [a 5-to-4 decision] comes up we’re going to revisit those moments” from the hearing, he adds. “That’s going to reinforce concerns that the court is entirely political, and for some it will say this is a further reason why it’s not a legitimate body.”

‘I have not changed’

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kavanaugh wrote that his testimony last week “reflected my overwhelming frustration at being wrongly accused ... [and] my deep distress at the unfairness of how this allegation has been handled.”

“Going forward, you can count on me to be the same kind of judge and person I have been for my entire 28-year legal career: hardworking, even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good,” he added. “I have not changed.”

“The best example of his judicial temperament is the temperament he brought to the bench for 12 years on the D.C. Circuit,” says Adam White, an assistant professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School. “He was an impartial and well-regarded judge throughout his time on the D.C. Circuit even after having worked in the Bush administration and for Ken Starr,” the independent counsel whose investigation of former-President Bill Clinton led to an impeachment vote.

And while Supreme Court confirmations are always political, what institutional damage they cause is typically confined to the Senate.

“What detracts from the court’s legitimacy is the conduct of the court in deciding cases,” he adds. “All judges are expected to take their personal attachments and personal instincts and personal feelings and set them aside as best as anyone can.... I would presume he like all judges will do the best he can, and he will succeed in that.”

The vote Friday morning suggests the investigation may have been enough to assuage the concerns the likes of Senator Flake harbored about Kavanaugh’s temperament. But for others, there are still lingering doubts.

For Professor Roosevelt “the main concern was less the emotion than the partisanship” Kavanaugh displayed last week.

“It’s very standard for judges to proclaim themselves nonpartisan, even when they then go on and act in partisan ways,” he adds in an email. “I take the more or less open admission of a partisan understanding of the world to be more informative than the standard denial.”

Ultimately, time would be the test of whether the Kavanaugh from the first hearing or the Kavanaugh from the second hearing would best reflect a Justice Kavanaugh.

Justice Thomas’s post-confirmation behavior is the closest, albeit still an imperfect, parallel. Already deeply conservative before he joined the high court, legal scholars don’t think the confirmation process changed his jurisprudence. It may have changed his behavior off the bench, however.

Unlike other conservative justices, such as Antonin Scalia, for many years Thomas kept a more selective public speaking schedule. For years he refused to speak at Ivy League law schools (including Yale, his alma mater), and fraternized mostly with other conservatives, according to Charles Fried, a conservative Harvard law professor and colleague of Thomas’s in the Reagan administration.

“The effect of that has been to harden his point of view and to make him more extreme and isolated in his ideas,” Professor Fried told NPR in 2011.

If he is confirmed, Kavanaugh will face a similar choice about whether to similarly cloister himself by socializing only with like-minded people.

Earlier this week he withdrew from a Harvard Law School class he had been scheduled to teach in January. Hundreds of alumni have called for his lectureship at the school to be rescinded, and current students have called for a school-led investigation into sexual assault allegations against him.

“He’s going to have to pick his battles if he is looking to win people over rather than just hunker down in his own camp,” says Professor Michaels. “Which way he goes will also be quite revealing.”

No matter how Kavanaugh conducts himself after he is confirmed, significant partisan opposition would remain. Senate Democrats have questioned the depth of this week’s FBI investigation – the White House barred agents from interviewing either Kavanaugh or his first accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Other Democrats have discussed investigating whether he should be impeached. Gallup polling last week shows that Americans are closely and ideologically divided on his confirmation.

The court has responded to a fraught partisan moment in the recent past. Two years ago, as Senate Republicans blocked Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination, the short-handed and ideologically-split court avoided major cases and resolved many others on narrow legal grounds.

Still, every justice is a human being who is “the sum of the parts of a personal past,” wrote Lyle Denniston, a journalist who has covered the Supreme Court for 60 years, for the National Constitution Center. If Kavanaugh takes the anger and hurt feelings he says he’s felt in the past few weeks, his colleagues on the high court would be in a position to ensure that doesn’t damage the institution’s credibility.

“In the disciplines of the Court’s methods and habits, in the almost constant need to persuade others who bring their own visions and are just as smart as he is, in the reality that what he personally writes and makes public ought to read like law rather than spite, and that his ultimate standing in history will depend at least in part upon whether he has overcome the emotion of his experience as a nominee,” he wrote. “His colleagues would help him with that.”

When Americans file their taxes next spring, most of them will find the process easier. The new tax law offers such a generous standard deduction that there will be less incentive to spend time looking for deductions and other tax breaks.

The savings in time and effort could save the nation $3 billion or more in compliance costs, by one estimate. That’s what tax reform is supposed to do: Simplify things and close the loopholes.

But for a small group of Americans, the opposite is true. President Trump’s new tax law introduces new loopholes, and experts say that will encourage business owners and the wealthy to game the system in some of the same ways that Mr. Trump the businessman and his father reportedly did over the course of several decades.

This infusion of complexity runs opposite to the typical theory of tax reform.

“Reform should be about eliminating loopholes and, to the extent possible, lowering tax rates,” says Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington-based research and analysis group. “When we load the tax system up with so much rubbish, it weighs the system down and the aggressive and the abusers try to get away with as much as they can.”

Many of the tax loopholes have been around for decades. In a long and detailed exposé published Tuesday, The New York Times described a series of highly questionable financial maneuvers that Trump’s father, Fred Trump, used during the 1980s and ‘90s to move money to his children and avoid taxes. Although some of the maneuvers appear illegal, according to tax experts, the loopholes themselves are not. In some cases, the Trumps merely used these loopholes so aggressively that they may have crossed the legal line, these experts add.

The Trumps claim no line was crossed. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone,” a Trump lawyer told the Times. “The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate."

What is clear is that Trump has used loopholes repeatedly in his business career. In fact, when the Times reported one month before the 2016 election that the GOP candidate used a huge loss to avoid paying income taxes for up to 18 years, his campaign issued a statement touting his acumen: “Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”

New openings for avoidance

For most Americans, Trump’s tax-cut package passed late last year will simplify things. In exchange for a near-doubling of the standard deduction, it trims several deductions, such as for state and local taxes (capped at $10,000), and eliminates others, such as unreimbursed business deductions, moving expenses, and alimony.

“Ninety percent of people will use the standard deduction this year, according to estimates,” says Nicole Kaeding, director of federal projects at the Tax Foundation, an independent tax policy nonprofit in Washington. “For most individuals, this will make the tax code easier and also make it easier for the IRS to administer.”

Of course, simplicity isn’t the sole criterion for whether the tax code is fair. Some complexity is inherent in any system, for example, that tilts toward the popular idea that rich people should pay at higher rates.

But many provisions, in practice, allow the very wealthy to pay at a lower rate than the less-rich do.

And for business owners and the wealthy, many tax loopholes were retained and some were added. One tax loophole the new law didn’t eliminate, for example, is “stepped up basis,” which the Trumps and other people have used to pass assets to children without the heirs having to pay for the appreciation in the asset.

The new tax law also slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. That’s likely to make the US a more competitive place to set up business. But it also offers an enormous incentive for wealthy individuals to reclassify their labor and interest income (where the top tax rate is effectively 40.8 percent) to corporate profits, where it will be taxed at nearly half that rate.

“As we know, when people can manipulate things, they do – to their advantage,” says Ken Vacovec, head of a tax law firm for businesses and wealthy individuals in the Boston area. “We’ve had people talk to us about splitting up their businesses, moving things to different corporations, even to the point where they have different owners of corporations, so they could take advantage of some of these issues.”

The poster child for this complexity is Section 199A of the Internal Revenue Code.

The new provision offers up to a 20 percent tax deduction for owners of so-called pass-through businesses. These are firms whose owners use their individual income tax return to report their business income. And the 199A break was passed by Congress to offer small business a tax cut similar to what large corporations were getting.

But the reality is that many pass-through businesses are also quite large. By 2024, according to estimates by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, 61 percent of the benefits of the Section 199A will flow to the top 1 percent of taxpayers.

The new deduction “is heavily tilted toward the wealthy, loses much-needed revenue, and opens massive new avoidance opportunities that weaken the integrity of the tax system,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) concluded in a blog post in May.    

Concern about the deduction is coming from Republicans as well Democrats, says Nicole Kaeding of the Tax Foundation. And the Internal Revenue Service has issued guardrails to try to limit the type of pass-through firms that qualify for the deduction. But those safeguards are inadequate, she argues. “Congress should actually repeal that provision.”

The IRS, outgunned?

Trump supporters have cast doubt on the Times’s reporting of the Trump family’s tax maneuvers, arguing that such a high-profile figure would have received lots of IRS tax scrutiny. According to Trump’s lawyers, his tax returns from 2009 on are still being audited by the agency. So how could reporters detect something the IRS missed?

Yet tax experts suggest that cuts in the agency’s funding, plus the sophistication of the alleged tax dodges, make it hard for the agency to sniff out suspicious activity. In inflation-adjusted terms, the agency’s enforcement budget is down 23 percent since 2010 and it has lost more than a quarter of its enforcement staff, the CBPP points out.

“The IRS is wildly outgunned,” says Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a think tank in Washington. “You can’t keep cutting IRS funding and not expect more things like what The New York Times wrote about the Trumps. That’s bound to happen even more now.”

Alex Brandon/AP

Sen. Jon Tester (D) of Montana speaks during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Sept. 26, 2018.

A rare breed of voter lives under Montana’s big sky, where the sun sets over jagged mountain ridges and illuminates swaths of freshly cut wheat in alternating shades of gold.

This is a state where voters propelled President Trump to a 20-point victory in 2016 and, on the same ballot, elected a Democrat governor. Where almost everyone seems to have a close relative with diametrically opposed political views – and yet many a bipartisan family has found a way to coexist. Where diner talk ranges from close encounters with grizzlies to how to save America’s democracy.

So it’s not surprising that one of the fiercest battles for control of Congress this fall is being waged here in Montana. Though the sparsely populated state has fewer registered voters than many major cities, outside groups have already poured close to $18 million into the race – and are likely to increase their spending in weeks to come. 

At stake is not only which party will get the upper hand in the Senate, but also whether the forces of partisan polarization sweeping the United States will trump Montana’s uniquely thoughtful brand of politics.

On paper, this race is between two-term Sen. Jon Tester (D), a burly farmer who lost three fingers as a 9-year-old while helping his family butcher their Montana-raised beef, and Republican challenger Matt Rosendale, a Maryland developer who bought a ranch here in 2002 and served three terms in the state legislature before becoming state auditor.

But in many ways the race, like so many this cycle, is also about President Trump – his personal quest to prove that his 2016 win was no fluke, and that his popularity among GOP supporters can surmount a highly energized Democratic base and translate to down-ballot success. Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Donald Trump, Jr., have each visited the state twice, hosting massive rallies to fire up the Republican base.

“You have to realize that Donald Trump is on the ticket in six weeks,” the president’s eldest son told a crowd at a Sept. 25 rally in Bozeman, warning against complacency after his father’s resounding win in the state two years ago. “I don’t want to take a two-year hiatus where nothing gets done ... because we were sitting at home, fat and happy, saying, ‘No, we’ve got everything we want, this is great.’ ”

While Senator Tester held a lead in polls throughout the year, boosted in part by the disproportionate energy and enthusiasm of Democratic voters, the race has tightened dramatically in the final stretch. This week, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its rating for Montana Senate from “lean Democratic” to “toss-up.” 

Experts say it was always likely to be close. Tester, who won his two previous elections by no more than a few points, is hardly liberal by Democratic Party standards. But he has carved out positions that are to the left of many other Democratic senators fighting for reelection in red states – and he has been more outspoken against the president. 

In these final weeks, the high-stakes battle over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the sexual assault allegations against him also appear to have shifted the dynamics, by galvanizing conservative voters.

Mr. Rosendale’s campaign says that in the past week, the No. 1 issue voters have raised is the Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings and what they see as a liberal smear against Trump's nominee – a theme the campaign hammers home in a new ad. Tester announced last week that, after doing his research, he had come to the conclusion that Judge Kavanaugh would not be good for Montanans, citing concerns about his record on privacy and campaign finance, as well as the allegations of sexual assault.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

President Trump looks to GOP Senate candidate Matt Rosendale during a rally in Great Falls, Mont., July 5, 2018. Mr. Rosendale, the state auditor, has made his support for Trump a centerpiece of his campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.

“If things have become so polarized that folks are unwilling to look at facts in an objective fashion, that’s definitely harmful to Tester,” says David Parker, a professor of political science at Montana State University and author of a book about Montana’s 2012 Senate race.

If Tester loses his seat – and, more broadly, if Trump and the GOP overcome historic midterm trends to maintain or even increase their margin in the Senate – that would have enormous implications about the staying power of Trumpism as a significant force in politics, he adds. 

“I think this race matters a lot,” Professor Parker says, as a test of “whether or not Trump is indeed changing politics as we know it, whether or not he truly has captured and tapped into building a new Republican coalition that is potentially enduring.”

Poking the hornet’s nest

Tester, who goes back to Montana to tend to his farm on weekends – and brings the meat he raises back to Washington with him – portrays himself as a salt-of-the-earth politician who votes with Trump when it’s good for Montanans and holds him accountable when needed.

As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee of Veterans Affairs, he torpedoed Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, former White House physician Ronny Jackson. In airing anonymous allegations from nearly two dozen current and former colleagues of the doctor, Tester, along with other Democrats, painted Dr. Jackson as unethical, temperamental, and unfit to lead the second-largest government agency.

He may have poked the hornet’s nest one too many times, to his own detriment, but he’s unapologetic.

“The people elected me to do my job,” he says in an interview. “That’s how I’m wired.” 

National polls have shown Rosendale pulling even with Tester in recent weeks, despite Tester raising seven times more money so far. Across the state, Tester’s small blue and orange campaign signs proliferate like mushrooms in the liberal urban centers, while Rosendale’s large navy signs can be seen miles apart on an occasional hillside or weathered fence spanning Montana’s sweeping plains. 

“To be a Democrat in Montana and win a statewide election is hard,” says Parker. “You've gotta have a special sauce.”

Crucial to a Tester victory will be the vote of young people, who are disproportionately liberal but tend to turn out in far lower numbers than older voters.  

At a recent Friday afternoon rally at Montana State University, Tester eschewed the podium altogether, propping a leg up on a chair in the front row, and chatting with several dozen students about why this election was vital for their generation. Not only did Congress’s recent tax bill, which he opposed, saddle their generation with an even larger federal debt – they also have debts of their own from getting an education.

“How much student debt are you going to leave here with? Let’s say $30,000 – am I too low?” he asks.

Heads nod. 

“$40,000? $50,000?” he offers.

“More like $60,000,” someone says. Would he, like Bernie Sanders, support free tuition?

“I think you need some skin in the game,” he answers, “because if you have skin in the game, you’re more inclined to stick with it. But $60,000 bucks is way too much.”

Widely considered likable and down-to-earth, Tester may be more conservative than many young people. But given the alternative, those who vote are likely to go with him.

“At this point, I just think it’s so important to take control of the House and Senate,” says Kevin Bell, who was a self-described ski bum until 2015, when he got energized by Bernie Sanders’ campaign and went back to school. Though the MSU political science major says he’s an anti-establishment Democrat, the stakes are too high this year not to support Tester.

“I want to do whatever it takes to stop the Trump agenda,” he says. “Normally Montana isn’t that important ... but if they want to have the Senate, they need this seat.” 

The Kavanaugh factor

Control of the Senate has taken on even greater significance since Kavanaugh became embroiled in an escalating series of sexual harassment allegations. Republicans are on the brink of achieving a decades-long conservative goal to secure a majority on the nation’s highest court. But the bitterness on both sides over how this process has unfolded suggests future nominees could face a difficult if not impossible path to confirmation if the president’s party doesn’t hold a Senate majority. 

“There is nothing that is more important than the role that a US senator has in confirming or denying – or denying – [nominations] to the Supreme Court,” Rosendale says at a rally in Bozeman, repeating the word for emphasis. He sends grumbles through the crowd when he reminds them that Tester supported Obama nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who said that owning a gun is not a fundamental right.

Rosendale is known for being fervent, even intense, in his convictions. 

Critics suggest he isn’t a real rancher or a real Montanan – and is little more than a puppet of Trump. But long before the billionaire New Yorker took American politics by storm, Rosendale was working for conservative causes in the Montana state legislature, where his fellow Republicans elected him majority leader of the Senate. 

A key issue for him is health care. Rosendale advocates repealing the Affordable Care Act – under which Montana’s premiums have increased by double digits annually for the past few years – and replacing it with more affordable options. As a state senator, he supported a bill to allow direct primary care agreements, which give individuals access to basic care by paying a doctor of their choice as little as $70 per month. Though that bill and a subsequent one were vetoed by Montana’s Democratic governor, Rosendale authorized such services after becoming state auditor.

“You don’t have that level of success without delivering results and serving the will of the people,” says campaign spokesman Shane Scanlon. “That’s what his record shows, and that’s what he wants to do in Washington.”

Still, few Rosendale supporters at the Bozeman rally could point to substantive policy achievements – instead highlighting broader character traits, describing him as a man of integrity, a Christian who is pro-Constitution and pro-family values.

“What’s he going to push? What’s his passion? I don’t know yet,” says Tom Rossetto, a former coal executive, who says he supports any Republican. “The proof is in the pudding – when they get up there [to Washington].”

As for Tester’s track record in the nation’s capital, he was rated last year by the Center for Effective Lawmaking as the 4^th  most effective Democratic senator, based on the number of bills sponsored, how far they progressed, and how important they were. That success comes in part from his bipartisanship – a fact he highlighted in a campaign ad that touted his support for 13 bills that Trump signed. 

That total has since increased to 20. Of those, a dozen were bills designed to help veterans – from improving access to education and health care, to making it easier to fire bad employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

He and his supporters count them off until Tester gets to eight and holds up both of his beefy hands.

“I’m out of fingers,” he says with a smile, “but I’m not done getting things done for Montanans.”

Courtesy of UC Davis

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, used 3-D lidar technology to construct this image of the Borrego Fault, which ruptured during the 2010 El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake in Baja California, Mexico. The various colors represent elevation changes during the earthquake.

Impatience led Chris Fisher to the discovery of a lifetime.

Like most archaeologists, he spent his days in the field plodding along on foot, perhaps hacking through jungles with teams of grad students and other scientists looking for pieces of ceramics or signs of ancient structures, mapping what they found as they went.

“There’s got to be a better way,” Dr. Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University, recalls venting to a colleague, frustrated that in one year he could cover only a fraction of a square mile while surveying the ruins of Angamuco in west-central Mexico.

“There might be,” his colleague replied, “Have you heard of this thing called ‘lidar’?”

Lidar – short for light detection and ranging – is a scanning technology similar to radar, that can be used to reveal a sort of topographical map. Fisher decided to try it out. And sure enough, 45 minutes of airborne lidar in 2010 accomplished what would have taken at least a decade of traditional archaeology: a map of a city more extensive than anyone fathomed.

“I almost started crying,” Fisher recalls when he first saw the lidar map of Angamuco.

In the past decade or so, lidar has facilitated dazzling archaeological discoveries from medieval metropolises buried beneath the forests of Cambodia to small cities of a previously unknown culture in dense Honduras rainforest, a project of Fisher’s.

“Everywhere we point a lidar instrument, we find stuff,” he says.

Lidar isn’t actually an archaeological tool. Like it’s cousin, radar, it’s a technology that can be used quite universally – and it has facilitated breakthroughs across many fields. Lidar has been deployed in self-driving cars, weather forecasting, air quality assessments, space missions, atop wind turbines, to measure sea level rise, and after natural disasters to assess infrastructure damage. And it’s poised to become even more influential in the next decade.

“A tipping point in the public imagination stands right before us,” says Todd Neff, a writer whose latest book due out October 9, “The Laser That’s Changing the World,” explores the history of lidar. “It’s a really powerful, massively adaptable tool. It is the wheel. It is the hammer.”  And as lidar gains publicity, he says, that will be increasingly recognized.

A new way to 'see'

Since the first lidar prototype bounced a laser off an object in 1961, the technology has enabled scientists to observe and measure the world in new ways. The concept behind the technology is that if you measure how long it takes for the light to reflect back, you can calculate the distance of the object it bounces off, giving you a sort of inverse topography.

Atmospheric scientists seized on the new technology, as the precision of lasers allowed them to see the smaller particles, revealing things such as smoke, smog, and aerosols. The laser technology quickly took to space, too; NASA's Apollo missions used the instrument to map the lunar surface starting in 1971.

LeddarTech Inc./PRNewsfoto

Lidar is integral to the efficacy of automated vehicles. The technology enables vehicles to ‘see’ the road and surrounding area.

As laser technology developed and engineers began using a variety of wavelengths of light, lidar became a useful tool across even more disciplines. Lidar has been used to make archaeological maps, to construct virtual models of urban landscapes, to scan the ocean floor at some shallower depths, and to map changing coastlines and ice sheet melt. As long as light can penetrate anything between the lidar instrument and its target, it can be mapped.

After recent natural disasters, some cities were able to use comparisons of before and after lidar scans to assess which infrastructure needed the most attention. Government officials from Washington, D.C., to Utah have used lidar data to study things like flood plains, tree planting strategies, bike trails, and potholes.

“The use of the technology is definitely increasing,” says Craig Glennie, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Houston and principal investigator at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping. “I think it’s always been increasing since it came about. It’s just that there started to be some very high-profile use cases of the technology” in recent years, and that has inspired others to try it. Archaeology is one field where breakthroughs from lidar have made a big public splash. Another is the development of autonomous vehicles.

A driving force

Autonomous cars have been instrumental in driving the technology forward, Mr. Neff says. The sheer size of the market has spurred innovation and development of lower cost instrumentation. Self-driving cars as we know them today would not be possible without lidar, he says, as the use of the technology gives the vehicle an immediate view of its surroundings in terms of distance to objects.

Changes in the technology have happened quickly, says John Ristevski, chairman and CEO of CyArk, a company that uses lidar to create digital models of historical monuments around the world to facilitate restoration in case of damage. He also formerly worked with lidar for autonomous vehicles.

When Dr. Ristevski first started using lidar as a graduate student in 2001, a lidar scanning device was large, heavy, and cumbersome, and he recalls that it would’ve cost a couple hundred thousand dollars. “Now it’s a much more accessible technology across the spectrum,” he says, as some lidar instruments can cost just hundreds of dollars now, largely due to the autonomous vehicle industry.

Cost reductions have facilitated more uses of the technology, which in turn has motivated development of more nuanced, specialized, and efficient lidar systems. “It’s a feedback loop,” says Joe Shaw, director of the Optical Technology Center at Montana State University.

Professor Shaw is familiar with that loop, as colleagues have approached him about working together to try new applications of lidar, some of which have required the engineer to tinker with the technology to make an instrument suited for more specific uses.

For example, an entomologist asked Shaw if he could perhaps track honeybees using lidar. The scientist was working to see if honeybees could be used to detect buried landmines and he needed a way to monitor them. It was a particular challenge, Shaw says, because tall grasses were obscuring the insects as they foraged. To resolve the problem, Shaw developed what he has called “wing beat modulation lidar,” which can sort out an insect from blades of grass swaying in the wind by detecting the changing angle of its wings as it flies.

“It’s an interesting window into human creativity and scientific creativity, if you look at the breadth of the applications and the way people have decided to use it in totally different ways,” Neff says.

And lidar appears set to continue on its path to ubiquity.

“I would be overly ambitious if I said there were no limits,” to how lidar can be used, Shaw says. “But I absolutely think there are still new applications to which we have not yet applied lidar.”

In 2015, aspiring author Angie Thomas turned to Twitter for advice. Would a young adult novel that deals with a sensitive current issue, like the Black Lives Matter movement, be a “no-no,” she wondered.

Her future literary agent, Brooks Sherman, tweeted back that same day: “For me, no subject should be off-limits in children’s books.” It was the push Ms. Thomas needed to move forward, and just two weeks later, more than a dozen publishing houses fought over rights to her book, “The Hate U Give,” in a heated auction.

Since the book’s debut in 2017, 1.5 million copies have been sold in North America. The movie version, set to open Friday, is poised to bring the novel’s race-relations themes to a wider audience and add to an already complicated national discussion. Although embraced by many educators and book critics, “The Hate U Give” has also been banned for its language and criticized by police officers for its potential to create distrust of them. The release of the movie version coincides with the investigation of Dallas officer Amber Guyger – accused of shooting her neighbor – and the outcome of the trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who fatally shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014.

“There’s a way in which, assuming the verdict [of the Van Dyke case] is reached in the coming days, this movie will remind people that we are still very much in the era of racial justice protests against state violence...,” says Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass., speaking before the Van Dyke verdict was reached Friday.

A familiar plot

“The Hate U Give” reflects Thomas’s reaction to the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant, an unarmed, 22-year-old black man whose death led to riots in Oakland, Calif. In her story, a young black teenager is shot by a white officer who mistakes a hairbrush for a gun. The protagonist, 16-year-old Starr Carter, who is also black, witnesses the event and must decide whether to speak up or stay silent, a choice that will affect her community, family, and friendships at her white suburban high school. 

Starr’s story resonates with young people in a way that few books do, says Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Part of its appeal is its ability to bring the reader into Starr’s world, looking out from her vantage point as she navigates the aftermath of her friend’s death. 

“Good stories don’t take a side. They show you a slice of life and then invite you to say, well what do you think? Where do you stand?” Ms. Jago says.

Professor Muhammad adds that “The Hate U Give” will reach people who have perhaps not tuned into the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The book – and to some degree the movie – has been read and will be read by students in all-white spaces, where otherwise the urgency of these issues has not affected them personally,” Muhammad says. He sees it as a vehicle to raise awareness in adults as well. “[O]ne can always hope that good storytelling and works of art can speak to people when otherwise they might choose to be deaf, dumb, or blind to the problem,” he adds. 

Beyond its racial themes, the novel has been compared to fantasy books like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent,” where strong young women battle established systems. “ ‘The Hate U Give’ is, yes, a novel about race – but it is also a dystopian young adult novel that happens to be set in reality,” writes Los Angeles Times critic-at-large, Adriana Ramírez. “A student in my class, Nicole, stood up one day and asked why Katniss [Everdeen] was white. She made the point that right now, the people she knows most like Katniss are the black girls in her neighborhood. ‘Where I grew up, it’s always “The Hunger Games.” ’ ”

Anissa Hidouk

Author Angie Thomas's novel, 'The Hate U Give,' featuring Black Lives Matter themes, has sold 1.5 million copies in North America since it was first published in 2017.

An opportunity for affirmation 

For readers and viewers who already walk in Starr’s shoes, the story can be an affirmation of their identities and the struggles they experience. Bridget Jarrett, a district librarian in Jarrell, Texas, says she knows of a middle-schooler who read the book five times. The student, who is biracial, has attended the same small private school since kindergarten, where classmates have called her “Oreo” and other derogatory names.

“She told me she read it five times because she understands the pull that Starr felt to be part of two different worlds, to be black but also to not be black, and to be as nonblack as possible around her private school friends,” says Ms. Jarrett. “It’s speaking to who she is as a person.”

The book, a bestseller, has been well-received but is not without critics. In the city of Katy, Texas, former superintendent Lance Hindt banned the book districtwide in November 2017 after a parent complained about its explicit language, discussion of drug use, and sexual content. (At least one activist argued that other books in the district’s collection contained these same elements, such as “The Outsiders”  by S.E. Hinton and some of Shakespeare’s works, according to the Houston Chronicle.)

Elsewhere, in South Carolina, a local police union issued a complaint to Wando High School in Mount Pleasant in June 2018 over its inclusion of “The Hate U Give” in its summer reading list. Union leader John Blackmon said that the book was “almost an indoctrination of distrust of police” – even though it includes a character, Uncle Carlos, who acts as a father figure to Starr and is also a police officer. The school did not end up pulling the book.

Jarrett says this kind of reaction is common, especially for works that disrupt the status quo. Books like the Harry Potter series, “A Wrinkle in Time,” and even “Charlotte’s Web” have been banned at certain points in time, she notes, but generally become more accepted as opinions evolve.

“[In this case], I think it was about the Black Lives Matter movement, and the story it was portraying made people uncomfortable,” she says. “As time goes on, I don’t think this book will be banned in places.”

Advanced reviews of the movie have been mostly positive. Even so, Jago at UCLA has a concern: Will it be so good that it discourages kids from reading the book, as was the case with some Harry Potter fans?

“I don’t blame Angie Thomas for having a movie made,” she says, “but I’m an English teacher, and my first priority is getting kids’ noses in books.” 

Editor's note:  This story has been updated to reflect the correct town in Texas where Bridget Jarrett is a librarian. 

AP

Denis Mukwege (left), a doctor in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman from Iraq, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

For 74 years, a nuclear weapon has not been used in war. Chemical weapons, once readily deployed in early-20th-century wars, are now rarely used. Land mines, too, have generally become condemned and not installed in battlefields.

It is now time to curb – with an expectation to end – another “weapon” that also targets innocent civilians in a conflict: mass rape.

Since 1993, when the United Nations launched a campaign to curb violence against women, the world has steadily come to recognize that wartime rape is not inevitable. In 2012, Britain led a global effort to challenge assumptions about sexual violence during wartime. And the #MeToo movement has lately added to such efforts.

Now that momentum could gain even more speed. On Friday the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to two current campaigners against sexual violence in conflicts.

One is a woman, Nadia Murad, who is a former captive of the Islamic State. After overcoming the shame of revealing that she was repeatedly raped, she has spoken on behalf of her religious minority in Iraq, the Yazidi, and the need for women who have been raped to speak out. Her courage has emboldened many survivors to end their silence in order to reduce the culture of impunity and gender inequality that fuels the cycle of abuse.

The other is a man, Denis Mukwege, a gynecological surgeon who treats rape victims in the war zone of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. He has also spoken worldwide – despite threats to him and his family – on ways to end rape as a strategy of war.

The key message of these moral activists is that the world must change the common notion that wartime rape is unavoidable. “I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine,” wrote Ms. Murad in her autobiography, “The Last Girl.”

Men are essential to this cause, a point reflected in the peace prize being shared with a man. In a few African countries, many men with a history of violence against women during a conflict have been trained to speak to other men about their change of heart.

“Women’s bodies have always been used as battlefields,” says Dr. Helen Durham, director of international law and policy at the International Committee of the Red Cross. “But we need to be clear that sexual violence in war is not something inevitable. It is preventable and we all need to work together to strengthen efforts in prosecution, prevention, and in finding practical solutions to help those affected.”

Today’s heroes of peace can include those who have lifted the stigma of wartime rape and led others to challenge its use as a weapon. Some weapons are best left to the barbarous past in order to embrace a future based on the protection of the innocent.