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Earlier this year, elected officials from 18 towns and counties devastated by Hurricane Helene gathered outside the Madison County courthouse in Marshall, North Carolina. Standing in a street still stained with the mud left behind when the French River overran its banks, they called for swifter state and federal help in rebuilding their communities. Everyone stood in the chill of a late January day because the first floor of the courthouse, built in 1907, remains empty, everything inside having been washed away in the flood. The countys judicial affairs are conducted in temporary offices as local leaders wrangle state and federal funding to rebuild. Local officials hope to restore the historic downtown and its most critical public buildings without changing too much about it. They, like most of the people impacted by Hurricane Helenes rampage in September, dont doubt another flood is coming. But they are also hesitant to move out of its way. When you talk about what was flooded and moving it, it would be everything, and thats just not realistic, said Forrest Gillium, the town administrator. Were not going to give up on our town. They may not have to. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is no longer enforcing rules, first adopted during the Obama administration, that required many federally funded construction projects to adopt strict siting and building standards to reduce the risk of future flooding. The rules were withdrawn by Donald Trumps first administration and then re-implemented by executive order under former President Joe Biden. Now theyve been withdrawn by Trump for the second time. The change eases regulations dictating things like the elevation and floodproofing of water systems, fire stations, and other critical buildings and infrastructure built with federal dollars. Ultimately, the rules were intended to save taxpayers money in the long run. Many other federal, state, and local guidelines still apply to the programs that help homeowners and businesses rebuild. Still, FEMA said rolling back the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will speed up recovery. Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements, the agency said in a statement released March 25. Trump rescinded the standard through an executive order on January 20. It had required federal agencies to evaluate the impact of climate change on future flood risk and weather patterns to determine whether 500- and 100-year flood plains could shift and, if so, consider that before committing taxpayer money to rebuilding. The guideline required building critical facilities like fire stations and hospitals 3 feet above the floodplain elevation, and all other projects receiving federal funding at least 2 feet above it, said Chad Berginnis, who leads the Association of State Floodplain Managers. The idea was to locate these projects so they were beyond areas vulnerable to flooding or design them to withstand it if they could not be moved. Easing the standard comes even as communities across the U.S. experience unprecedented, and often repeated, flooding. Homeowners and businesses in Florida, along the Mississippi River, and throughout central Appalachia have endured the exhausting cycle of losing everything and rebuilding it, only to see it wash away again. The Federal Flood Risk Management Standard was meant to break that cycle and ensure everything rebuilt with taxpayer money isnt destroyed when the next inundation hits. Why on earth would the federal government want it to be rebuilt to a lower standard and waste our money so that when the flood hits, if it gets destroyed again, were spending yet more money to rebuild it? Berginnis said. Last fall, federal climate scientists found that climate change increases the likelihood of extreme and dangerous rainfall of the sort Helene brought to the Southeast. Such events will be as much as 15% to 25% more likely if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. With more extreme rainfall come challenges for infrastructure designed for a less extreme climate. Youre going to have storm sewers overwhelmed. Youre going to have basins that were designed to hold a certain kind of flood that dont do it anymore, Berginnis said. Youre going to have bridges that no longer can pass through that water like it used to. You have all of this infrastructure thats designed for an older event. The Natural Resources Defense Council said the Obama-era standard was developed because it is no longer safe or adequate to build for the flood risks of the past and with the rollback, the federal government is setting up public infrastructure to be damaged by flooding and wasting taxpayer dollars. Officials across western North Carolina have expressed frustration with the pace of rebuilding while acknowledging that they dont want to endure the same problems over and over again. Canton, North Carolina, continues recovering from its third major flood in 20 years. Everything that flooded in 2004 flooded in 21. Everything that flooded in 21 flooded in 2024, Mayor Zeb Smathers said. Strategies like new river gauges and emergency warning systems, coupled with land buyouts, have helped mitigate the threat. However, mitigation brings its own risk. The town has seen its tax base dwindle as people who lost their homes moved on after accepting buyouts or decided that rebuilding was too much effort. When it comes to public buildings, Smathers struggles with the idea of moving something like the school, which has seen its football field flooded in each storm. He feels it is more cost-effective to rebuild than to move, and saves energy and hassle, too. I dont think its a one-size-fits-all situation, he said. But in the mountains, were limited on land and where we can go. Much of downtown Canton lies in a flood plain next to the Pigeon River. Smathers wants more flexibility from FEMA and greater trust in local decisions rather than more rules about where and how to build. Though local governments fronted some of the cost of rebuilding according to national flood risk standards, much of that required work has been federally subsidized. Josh Harrold, the town manager of Black Mountain, said the Obama-era rules werent onerous. Helene decimated the towns water system, municipal buiding, and numerous buildings and homes. We know this is going to happen again, he said. No one knows what thats going to be like, but we are taking the approach of, we just dont want to build it back exactly like it was. We want to build it back differently. Harrold and other officials said they dont yet know how Trumps order rescinding the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will impact reconstruction. And it comes as some municipalities adopt and refine stricter flood plain rebuilding rules of their own. In January, Asheville adopted city ordinance amendments to comply with the rebuilding requirements set forth by the National Flood Insurance Program. It is not clear what Trumps order might mean for that. City officials did not respond to a request for comment. Berginnis said communities may not see immediate results from this changebut the effects will be felt in the future if leaders bypass the added protection it required: Everything that gets rebuilt using federal funds will be less safe when the next flood comes. By Katie Myers, Grist This article was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here. The coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina.
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The Minecraft movie is crass, dumb, and barely coherent. It also just made almost $163 million at the domestic box office over its opening weekend. Video game adaptations have been on a hot streak in recent years. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie crossed the billion-dollar mark, nearly unseating Barbie as the years top-grossing film. Amazons Fallout shattered records with 2.5 billion viewing minutes in its debut week. And now, A Minecraft Movie stands as the highest-grossing film since Deadpool & Wolverine. Hollywoods obsession with intellectual propertyfrom comic book heroes to kids toysis nothing new. But for decades, video games were the outliers: critically panned, commercial duds. Thats no longer the case. Today, theyre becoming studios most reliable path to profit. The long history of video game movie flops While a few video game films trickled out in the late 1990s, the first major wave of studio-backed adaptations hit in the early 2000s. Many of these were helmed by German director Uwe Boll, who became notorious for a steady stream of critical and commercial failures. BloodRayne barely scraped together $3 million at the box office; Alone in the Dark grossed just over $12 million on a $20 million budget. In the Name of the King, starring Jason Statham, bizarrely carried a $60 million price tag but pulled in only $12 million. (Boll himself admitted that Alone in the Darkwith Christian Slater and Tara Reidwas not good.”) By the early 2010s, studios leaned into flashy visual effects to boost video game adaptations. These films made modest profits but often alienated audiences. Max Payne, starring Mark Wahlberg, scored just 16% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned Wahlberg a Golden Raspberry Award (better known as a Razzie). Disneys Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, fronted by Jake Gyllenhaal, was pitched as the next Pirates of the Caribbean-style franchise. That dream died quickly after the CGI-heavy film was trounced at the box office by Sex and the City 2 and Shrek Forever After. Around the same time, game developers began chasing global markets, especially in Asiaand most notably, China. That expansion opened new international audiences for video game films. The strategy peaked in 2016, when Universal released Warcraft. Though critics panned it and American audiences mostly shrugged, the film soared in China, earning more than $100 million there despite failing to reach $50 million in the U.S. Even as box office numbers climbed, video game movies still carried the stigma of cheap storytelling and poor production. The late 2010s and early 2020s saw a mix of live-action flops like Mortal Kombat and animated crowd-pleasers like Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu. They all turned a profitbut theyre often better remembered for their internet backlash than cinematic impact. When gaming adaptations started soaring Then, almost unexpectedly, these cash-grab adaptations started getting . . . better. Or at least good enough to justify their existence beyond box office potential. The Super Mario Bros. Movie didnt just rake in $1.3 billionit also delivered a viral hit with Jack Blacks Peaches. Critics may have panned Five Nights at Freddys, but audiences embraced it, giving it an 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and contributing to nearly $300 million in global revenue. Video games have also made major inroads into prestige television. HBO gave The Last of Us the coveted Sunday night slot, and the show went on to earn five Primetime Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series. Amazons Fallout became the platforms biggest premiere evereven surpassing YouTube juggernaut MrBeasts game show in viewershipand it, too, snagged a nomination for Outstanding Drama Series. Now comes A Minecraft Movie. Is it good? Not really. But its a box office magnetjust ask the legions of middle schoolers screaming Chicken jockey! and causing public disruptions in theaters. Its the clearest sign yet of the genres evolution. Video game adaptations are no longer synonymous with bad CGI and low returns. Theyve officially entered the IP big leagues.
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Is doomscrolling on your phone unhealthy for your brain? Oxford University Presss word of the year, brain rot, seems to suggest so. It defines the condition as the supposed deterioration of a persons mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. The key word, though, is supposed, as there is there is no such thing as mindless scrolling, says Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, the author of The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience and a Harvard physician who specializes in stress. Brain rot is not a word or phrase that I would use as a physician, because it connotes that our brains are passively withering away, she says. Scientifically what is happening to your brain when you sit and scroll and scroll is not passive. [Scrolling] has a very active effect on your brain, and it signals all sorts of hormones and chemical cascades and neural circuits. While thats a relief, we do love our digital devicesmaybe too much. According to a recent survey by Reviews.org, Americans pick up their phones an average of 205 times a day. Eighty percent check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up, and 43% consider themselves to be addicted. Having a true addiction to your phone is rare, says Nerurkar. Whats common, though, is popcorn brain, a term coined by University of Wisconsin researcher David Levy. Popcorn brain is the sensation of your brain popping when you spend too much time online, explains Nerurkar. Its when you’re chronically online, overconsuming. It has an effect on your sleep, your mood, your emotional reactivity, irritability, fatigue, and in some cases, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Finding balance If you feel popcorn-y, finding a sene of balance can help. But where do you start? Howard Lewis, author of Leave Your Phone at the Door: The Joy of OFFLINE, says its not the technology thats the problem, its a growing fear of missing out. I think there’s a fear of being irrelevant, he says. The advent of social media has made the problem much worse. People used to get their news from newspapers, and the process could take three or four days. Now, if you wait more than three or four hours, there is a sense that youre not very relevant, and I think that’s a big error of judgment. There’s a fine line between consuming and overconsuming, and the first thing to do is to cut yourself some slack about your phone habit. Doomscrolling is a primal urge, says Nerurkar. Your brain is governed by the amygdala, and the main purpose of your amygdala is survival and self-preservation, she explains. Back when we were all cave people, there would be a night watchman who would scan for danger while the others slept. In modern times, we are all our own night watchman. The modern equivalent of scanning for danger is scrolling. To find balance, you need to get your prefrontal cortex online. This is the part of the brain that governs strategic thinking, complex problem-solving, and adulting, says Nerurkar. Building healthy phone habits intentionally dials it down, she says. The goal is to become more intentional with your media use. The truth is that the environment and big tech and the news is going to continue. Your brain and body is doing exactly what it was intended to do when you’re feeling stressed. Its not about abstinence from our devices. Its about creating some digital boundaries to preserve your mental health while remaining informed to what’s happening in the world. How to build healthier habits with your phone Nerurkar teamed up with the mental health app Calm to create a five-part series called Building Healthier Phone Habits. The first step toward becoming more intentional about your media consumption is an awareness of your current state. Start by monitoring a three- to four-hour block of time. Put a pen and paper nearby and every time you have the urge to pick up your phone, create a tally mark. At the end of the time block, identify how many times you felt like reaching for your phone. Next, address the urge with a three-second brain reset exercise called Stop, Breathe, Be, which helps you strengthen your mind-body connection. Instead of giving into the impulse to reach for your phone, stop, take a deep breath in and out, and be in the moment, says Nerurkar. What it does over time is it decreases the volume of your amygdala and gets that prefrontal cortex back online. Another strategy is leveraging the grayscale of your phone. Nerurkar recommends switching your phone off color mode and into black-and-white mode. Go to your Settings page. Tap on Accessibility and then Display and Text Size. Switch your color filters to grayscale. You can easily toggle the grayscale on and off. What it does is it makes scrolling less addictive, less enticing, says Nerurkar. Good times to use grayscale are when you’re trying to focus on a task at work, but you notice that you keep reaching for your phone and you’re not able to finish that task. It’s a visual boundary that you’re creating. Building healthier phone habits is a process, so give yourself lots of grace, says Nerurkar. Compassion, and particularly self-compassion, helps rewire the brain and decrease your reliance on your devices, she says. It also decreases the volume of your amygdala. Why detachment is important Phones and applications may be enticing, but they offer less value than we think, says Lewis. They do provide a sense of comfort and belonging, which is fine, but the difficult thing is that they become a replacement for adjunct and real-life conversations, he says. Lewis regularly hosts dinner parties where guests must leave their phones at the door. He recommends breaking the cycle of dependence by putting your phoneaway wherever youre engaging with someone in person. People have certain preconceptions about the way they should look and behave around others, he says. What matters most is that you give people your time and your attention in a meaningful way. By leaving your phone at the door, you are enabled to embrace life. Give yourself permission to be different by untethering yourself from your device, urges Lewis. Being offline opens the door to randomness and serendipity, he says. Life behind a screen, in my opinion, is not real life.
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