Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan announced in a statement on Friday that he has been "diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, a serious but curable form of cancer."

The parents of a teenager who shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan in November 2021 are set to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter after an appellate court last week rejected their contention that the charges have no legal justification.

One of the most memorable lectures during my first year of medical school at the University of Michigan was delivered by Dr. Julian "Buz" Hoff. He was the chair of neurosurgery and a master at teaching the natural history of brain diseases. We learned about brain tumors, vascular diseases and trauma.

• Buttigieg says he won't seek US Senate seat in Michigan in 2024

The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.

“I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”

It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.

[Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots]

Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.

According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.

But he isn’t the only one.

Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.

The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.

“I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.

At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.

“Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”

It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)

It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.

“A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”

The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.

“He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”

[Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement]

Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.

“Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”

Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.

Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.

There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.

In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.

There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]

Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.

“So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”

She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”

This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.

DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.

“He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.

Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.

Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.

Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?

“It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”

[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”

In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.

Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.

Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

“The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.

Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.

Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.

“He fights,” Byrd replied.

The Michigan Republican Party sparked criticism Wednesday after the organization used imagery from the Holocaust to argue against what it says are Democrats' restrictive gun proposals.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

I held off on asking a new question of the week last Wednesday so I could share more of your reflections on cars. Below are the remainder of your thoughtful replies.

Eden fondly recalls a moment of peak freedom in a mechanically questionable vehicle:

Like most of my friends in 1995, I got my driver's license on my 16th birthday. My stepdad had hordes of busted-up cars on the front lawn, and he gifted me a royal-blue 1976 Volkswagen Scirocco that barely ran. Even though the car was a total POS, the excitement and joy I felt at driving that car by myself will always be one of the best feelings I have experienced in my life.

That first night, I picked up my friend Cody from his shift at the North Seattle Arby’s. He didn’t have to take the bus home that night for once. I put a battery-powered boom box in the back seat (there was no radio in the car, of course) and played a Led Zeppelin tape at full blast, reveling in my newfound freedom. Even now, it’s hard to imagine a time when I have felt freer than at that moment.  

The car would die if it idled for even a second. I could barely slow down to a full stop before I had to rev the engine. The driver and passenger seats weren’t even bolted down! If I gunned it at the bottom of a big hill, we would literally flip into the back seat, laughing until tears fell from our eyes. I remember the smell so vividly. Sometimes, I’ll get a whiff that reminds me of it, and I am transported back to flying down the street, my car packed with friends. My soul stirs with the sound of laughter and the crackling of the fuzzy boom box. I remember how many times we would go for drives just to drive.  

I had to learn a great deal about automobiles to make sure the car kept running and didn’t kill us. The number of times I locked my keys in there, or left the lights on until the battery died, is laughable. But I was never once embarrassed by the state of that car. As far as I was concerned, I was the envy of all my friends, rich as a sultan, and as free as a bird.

I’ll be nostalgic about it until I die.  

Amelia found that getting her driver’s license wasn’t all she imagined it would be:

I’m 16 and I’ve wanted to drive for as long as I could remember. I’ve been driving on my own for about three months. Even before I started driving myself, I considered the act of owning and driving a car emblematic of the independence you receive as an adult. Being able to drive yourself to school, to sports practice, to anywhere you wanted to go seemed too good to be true. I held these aspirations close, and no one rebuked me, thus my life was shaped by this modern, American version of independence. I saw teens living their best lives on TV and in movies, and they all had one thing in common: cars.

I live in a sprawling and rather car-dependent suburban area, so I can never walk anywhere. I can vividly remember my summers before my 15th year complaining or wandering around the house aimlessly because I didn’t have a job yet, and my parents and brother were gone for the day. None of my friends reached out, yet I still watched their lives continue on through a screen while faking my own in the same way. I remember one instance where, in a burst of confidence, I tried to ride my bike three miles to a local ice-cream shop and almost got run over by a car.

Now I can drive myself. I’m independent; I get to choose what music to play! I finally got what I wanted. But I still go everywhere mostly alone. Don’t get me wrong; I consider myself an extrovert. I see my friends as often as I can in and outside of school, but the thing is, nothing changed. We don’t carpool, because it’s too out of the way and everyone else drives alone anyways. Driving my own car wasn’t the magical switch I’d been looking for after all. Maybe it wasn’t as much me that was the problem, but the infrastructure that surrounded me.

J. is a driving enthusiast:

Goddamn I love cars! I realize they are polluting and occasionally murderous, but the convenience and freedom can’t be denied. Plus driving is just so fun! My commute is short, and at work, I get to drive a fire engine. Code 3 with lights and sirens! Running red lights! Wrong way down one-way streets to attempt to help society! It’s pretty great.

Cars have been a key part of my identity for more than three decades: My first car was a hand-me-down 1981 Ford Escort. Since that first car, I’ve owned the quirky (1987 Nissan Pulsar), the blue-collar (1977 Chevy pickup), the classic (1965 Chevy Bel Air), the sporty (1991 Nissan 300ZX), the practical (2006 Toyota Tacoma), the baby-mover (2008 Lexus RX350), and now, the grown-up (and first new) family car, a Mazda CX-5—with turbo! Some had custom wheels or paint. Almost all had custom sound systems.

My cars were my peacock tail, my rack of antlers. They enabled my life, which has been a pretty good one. I asked my wife to marry me in our car, and she accepted.

They also enabled some unsavory behavior: I used to pick up prostitutes, after a night out drinking, for years. Until the last time—when the prostitute turned out to be an undercover cop. I’ve been (at times) incredibly reckless, and (very often) incredibly lucky, behind the wheel. By the grace of God I never hurt anyone … and now I have a career where I drive fast (but not so recklessly) to help people in need.

Life is weird. And cars are awesome!

Maxx makes a case for glory without gasoline:

Last September, I gave my car to my college-town-bound little brother. I now live car-free in Minneapolis. I’m 25 and did not get my license until I was 19. I am now a passionate cyclist, scrappy public-transit enthusiast, and bold pedestrian. And I love it.

When I bike to work, I’ve shown up positive and awake, coffee optional. Figuring out how to get somewhere new is an opportunity to plan a pleasurable route. In summer, my friends and I take to our bicycles and hop from concert to park to bar to apartment. Cutting gas, insurance, and car payments out of our budgets, in whole or in part, gives us disposable income we can still afford to spend locally—and foolishly. Rather than letting it restrict us, there’s incredible freedom. You hardly worry about where to park, and, if folks behave responsibly enough, no one has to be shunted to the role of designated driver.

The day-to-day is a joy. My diet has to be up to the challenge of biking 80 miles a week in the summer, and 30 a week in the winter. And the conditioning and fresh-air perspective have expanded my imagination when it comes to travel and leisure; my brother and I are planning to bike across Minnesota, the long way, once he graduates. It would be a rather constrained road trip, but feels like a downright adventure on a bicycle.

In Minnesota, folks lampoon us car skeptics with the complaint that it’s winter for (an exaggerated proportion) of the year. I don’t want to be glib, but when I’m riding a fat-tire bike in fresh snow, I’m usually matching the speed of any responsible driver on city streets. Being free of the anxieties, expenses, and constant gripes of driving and car ownership is a seriously underrated luxury.

I aspire to have a family and realize that someday my weekends won’t revolve around the question of what pleasure we can find on quiet wheels. But I hope I can stay car-lite—walking to the grocery store, instilling active living and community in my children. We live in a world of people, places, and things. It can be hard to see them—or appreciate them—in a moving metal box.

A.l. opines on not having a car:

My family lives in a fairly dense suburban environment that was first developed about 100 years ago as a “streetcar neighborhood.” I live pretty close to my office and I ride my bike year-round. I also live nearby a bus line that runs directly to my office with no transfers.

About once a week, not having a car is a big hassle. Getting to work when it’s pouring rain, trying to get to a doctor appointment in a different part of town, stopping off for a work event in a different part of town on the way home from work, leaving for a business trip from home to the airport, etc. It’s a real pain.

Going to work, I have no issue using public transportation and no issue riding my bike, but both of them can be inflexible from a schedule standpoint in that both incur additional non-value-add time, roughly an hour each day—and that’s for someone who pays through the nose to live in a part of town where most of what I need is close by.

I’m struck by the strong downward pressure on my quality of life that comes from not having access to a car, and I empathize with people who don’t have the money to buy a car if they need one to manage their routine. I also feel a profound sense of guilt burning fossil fuels. I’ll never buy another gas-powered car. So I’m proud of being car-free, but somewhat conflicted.

Kate has appreciated many places she never could have gone but for trucks:

For me, a vehicle is a ticket to adventure. When I was 7 (1967), my parents hooked up a rented U-Haul trailer to the back of a six-cylinder Chevy truck, threw three kids in the back, and drove us from Reno, Nevada, to the Arctic Circle in Alaska. We navigated some 6,000-plus miles of highway, dirt roads, permafrost, sinkholes, mosquitoes, and wildlife. We camped out in national parks, roadside rests, KOAs, and gravel pits. In subsequent years we toured Canada, drove to Mexico City, and made it to most of the national parks. That upbringing fueled a love of the outdoors and the vehicles that could get me there.

In my younger years, I loved my 4x4s. They enable you to get stuck in more remote places!!! Grandkids and gas prices changed my preferences over the years. We still own a Chevy truck. However, my current adventure vehicle is a Subaru Outback. It can navigate dirt roads, is great in the snow, averages 25 mpg, and has plenty of room to sleep in the back. Can’t wait for the hybrid version.

Vasav has fallen out of love with cars over the years:

I went to the University of Michigan to become a mechanical engineer because I loved cars. My parents were immigrants from India, and every 4th of July we’d go on a road trip and they’d say how wonderful superhighways were and how they made America so great. We loved trains too. We never saw a conflict. You could love trains and cars. Most of our family vacations were road trips. There were a lot of them. And cars were incredibly cool.

In Ann Arbor, I didn’t need a car for most of my daily needs. A bike worked better. Then I joined the Air Force and had a two-year stint in Japan, where I had a similar relationship with cars. I now live in an inner-ring suburb of an overpriced metro. And I don’t hate cars. I appreciate them. I can’t imagine a lot of my outdoor adventures without them. But I much prefer walking, riding a bus or train, or even biking for most of my regular needs. What happened? I got old.

I now view cars as a tool, not the toy they were. I now view working on my car as a chore, not fun. And I had enough acquaintances die in accidents that I realized the dangers. I still think cars are incredible machines—a number of ingenious systems that all work together. I still love Detroit. But there are a lot of neat machines out there, and most are less dangerous. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine taking a bus to go backpacking or trail biking, so there’s a happy medium.

Chris lists what he sees as the ills of car culture:

Car culture has reconfigured the landscape to accommodate drivers, as opposed to pedestrians. It has hollowed out small towns and many large cities by sucking commerce from downtown to the banal, ugly world of strip malls, vast parking lots, and endless suburban sprawl. It has atomized society by isolating commuters who would once have enjoyed random, face-to-face interactions on foot or public transport. It has poisoned the atmosphere and exacerbated global warming. Once a convenience, cars are now an expensive necessity. Car culture itself is a textbook example of path dependence—an optional mode of behavior that grew so dominant, it’s the only available mode.

Jack doesn’t have a car for a different reason:

Oakland, California, has bent over backwards to accommodate the livelihoods of criminals. In the hectic adjustment, I’ve had two cars stolen from my driveway after an earlier heist of four tires at a public-transit parking lot. Now I am a devoted Lyft customer. It’s a hot trend here.

Brad believes his early experiences with cars were character-building:

At 15, I got my first job, aiming for enough money to buy a car by my 16th birthday. I wanted to be as independent as possible from my family. Within a few weeks of my birthday, I paid $1,300 for an old Mazda and learned how to keep the car insured and fueled. Over the next five years, I drove Frankie (so named because his blue paint matched Sinatra’s famous eyes) more than 80,000 miles, shuttling myself and friends to jobs and activities, going on school trips, and traversing the 500 miles between college and home. That first car taught me a lot about financial responsibility and how to literally navigate my own life.  

Even back in 2004, when I started college, I found these qualities lacking in many of my peers. The rare individuals who had purchased and maintained their own cars before college generally seemed more likely to embrace and handle their new independence.

My second car, a used Audi A6, taught me resilience and the value of due diligence. Shortly before I started law school, I purchased Rita (so named because she was beautiful, troubled, and destined for tragedy, like the character on Dexter). On the drive home from the dealership, she broke down, beginning a parade of maladies that drained my savings in six months, completely overlapping with the first year of law school. I’d bought a lemon at a stunningly inopportune time in my life. It was a painful lesson, but better learned at 24 than 54. I offloaded Rita quickly, and have owned practical, reliable cars since. After all of this, I really don’t enjoy driving. I yearn for the days when public transportation will obviate the need for me to own a car, which will be better for me and for the planet.

If you’re going somewhere with Joanne, let her drive:

I grew up on a farm. At 5, I could steer a tractor up and down the rows of baled hay so my dad and a hired man could throw them on the wagon. I could drive our truck at 10, and if my parents were away, my twin brother and I would whip into town for a Dairy Queen. Fast-forward to high school, where we had an excellent driver’s ed instructor. The lessons were during our Ontario winters, and often involved practice pulling out of skids on empty but ice-covered parking lots. A useful skill! I am a senior now and back in the country, dealing with long country driveways, ice, snow, freezing rain, and whiteout conditions. They don’t faze me, or at least not yet, because of all that early driving experience.

And if you’re trying to improve our transportation infrastructure, consider this advice from K.S.:

My family emigrated to Detroit from Poland when I was 8 years old. My father still works for General Motors there. My mom had never had a driver’s license before we moved. Every well-meaning person helping our family to settle in would be quick to tell her that “if you’re not going to learn how to drive, you might as well go back—you can’t survive here if you don’t drive.”

Despite growing up in the Motor City, going to the North American Auto Show every year, and being frequently encouraged to become an engineer by my parents (the Detroit equivalent of immigrants pushing their kids to be doctors or lawyers), I never took to caring about cars. After college I moved to Chicago, then New York, and happily adopted a car-free urban life along with my Millennial cohort—we were killing cars, in addition to marriage and golf. I took it a step further and went to urban-planning school—became the kind of person who peddles 15-minute cities. I made killing car culture my actual job.

When I left New York and moved to L.A., I held strong(ish) for six months before I got a car. It was liberating to drive everywhere—eastside to westside, Malibu, day trips to Death Valley. I worked for the public-transit agency in L.A. You might think that I was a bit of a sham, but most of my colleagues drove to work. Like the many Angelinos who support tax measures to improve transit, we wanted better transit for L.A., but we wouldn’t be taking it to work ourselves. It wasn’t my fault. How else was I supposed to get to the beach and take selfies in the desert on the weekend? As a bonus, my relationship with my dad was on the up now that we had oil changes and cabin filters to talk about.

A few months ago I got a job offer in San Francisco, at an urban-design firm that’s all about building bike-friendly, walkable cities. While I was hesitant to give up my winter tan, the opportunity to reclaim my urban cred in S.F. was a bonus. All the driving in L.A. was getting old, and I missed taking the train to work and walking to get my morning coffee. I moved to the Bay but kept my car. I’ll need it to go on day trips and keep those hiking selfies going.  

The shameful secret not seen in those selfies: I’m three months into living in S.F., in a central, well-connected neighborhood, and I have yet to take public transit. I’ve been walking more—I walk to the gym and to get my coffee, just as I had imagined, but for all intents and purposes I’m stuck on driving. I drive to work many days, even though it’s less than two miles away; I drive to the grocery store; I drive 10 minutes to go on Hinge dates.

I’ve thought about taking the bus or train—I’ve checked routes, but every time I’ve chosen to drive. I always have an excuse: It’s raining; I’ll have to carry things; it’s late; I’m tired. Did L.A. ruin me? Probably not. I’m learning a new city and settling in. Driving feels safer—even though it literally is not—in a new environment. It’s allowed me to see a wider swath of the city in less time. As the weather gets nicer, and I learn the transit routes better, I will settle into a routine that will likely include using transit often.

People choose travel modes based on what is available to them and will maximize personal utility for a particular trip, not based on ideology alone. Like everything else, our ideas around cars have become politicized and positioned as yet another reason to polarize us against one another. As we sit and stare at our crumbling transit systems, the smog hovering above cities, or the annual car-related death tolls, picking a side—pro-car or anticar—isn’t going to help much. The solutions are likely to lie somewhere beyond the corners we’re backing ourselves into. They will require all of the tools and political will available.

If we’re all hovering at the ends of the spectrum, we may fail to see the most impactful solutions available to us. If we approach these challenges with curiosity, seeking to understand rather than debate, we may just come up with new and surprising systems to allow us to safely and sustainably move around and between places.

Since Sunday’s daylight saving, many of us are feeling new excitement for spring after months of being beaten down by a frigid winter. Right? Or at least that’s the prevailing narrative across a large part of the country—that we suffer through the doldrums of winter and the payoff is a glorious lead-up to summer’s main event. The idea of winter as a season full of dark, depressing, cold days that people barely survive seems ever-present in American culture, bolstered by articles on how to beat the “winter blues,” a billion-dollar light-therapy industry, and even a countdown in the Pacific Northwest (where I live) to what we call “The Big Dark.” But some researchers have long interrogated that notion, calling winter’s psychological effects into question and wondering whether we hear so much about how terrible winter is for our psyches that we’ve come to believe it unequivocally.

The term seasonal affective disorder, or rather its catchy acronym SAD, is so popular that it’s used in casual conversation. Steve LoBello, a psychologist and researcher at Auburn University at Montgomery, set out to do his own assessment of the nationwide scale of SAD—annual depression that follows a strict seasonal cycle, typically occurring in fall and winter and receding in spring and summer. LoBello and his team analyzed data from the CDC’s behavioral risk-factor survey, which asks hundreds of thousands of Americans each year about their health and well-being, including a separate screening for depression and anxiety, to see whether major depression rates followed a seasonal trend. “We expected cases to increase in the wintertime and then for that to subside starting in early spring and so forth, and there was nothing like that in the data,” LoBello told me of the study they published in 2016. “It was just flat as a pancake all the way through the year.” They also found no correlation between major depression and the respondent’s latitude (or hours of daylight). A couple of years later, in 2018, LoBello published another paper that found no correlation between even mild depression and the seasons. Still, the idea that we are all more likely to be sad and depressed in winter has dominated, and LoBello argues that that view is more steeped in folklore than science.

SAD was introduced to the psychology world in a 1984 paper that presented an American study of 29 patients. Those patients had volunteered for the study by responding to a newspaper ad, and were prescreened to include only those who had already been diagnosed with a major affective disorder. Most of them had bipolar affective disorder and reported having experienced, over at least two previous winters, depression that receded in the spring or summer. A “seasonal pattern” specifier was soon added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders chapter on affective disorders, and the criteria for SAD diagnosis was set: A person must experience major depression during a specific season, that depression must go away during another season, and that pattern must repeat for at least two years. Today, an estimated 4 to 6 percent of the U.S. population experiences SAD during the winter months—a smaller percentage of SAD cases are summer-induced—which is in no way commensurate with the casual way so many Americans apply the term to themselves.

[Read: The secret to loving winter]

As with a lot of psychology research, the question of how seasons affect our brains is complicated, and varies widely. Many studies suggest that there is some connection between the seasons, light exposure, and depressive symptoms for some people. Others challenge these findings, such as a 2008 literature review by a team based in northern Norway that reported that, even in their extreme winter environment, they found “no correlation between depressive symptoms and amount of environmental light.” In Sweden and Britain, too, national health systems have reported that the evidence for light therapy in treating depressive disorders is inconclusive. That isn’t to say no one experiences depressive symptoms in the winter because of the weather, just that a population-wide connection explaining that winter = bad mood is hard to pin down.

What’s certain is that no one’s mood and cognition are affected by the seasons the same way. In fact, while longer, warmer days are commonly thought of as a kind of folk remedy for feeling down, some people who live in climates where the sun always shines report feeling a bit out of sorts by the absence of winter. Kate Sedrowski, a 42-year-old rock climber and writer, grew up in Michigan and went to college in Boston before moving to Los Angeles. “The lack of seasons—particularly winter—just did not feel right to me,” she told me by email. “The chill in the air of winter makes me feel more alive and alert, while summer heat makes me lethargic like a sloth. The shortness of the days in the winter forces me to take advantage of the daylight to get things done before I relax and hibernate when it gets dark.” Sedrowski, who now lives in Golden, Colorado, said she feels the highest energy in the cold, snowy, winter months.

Some folks even discover a different kind of productivity in the winter. Living in Atlanta, Muriel Vega doesn’t experience harsh winters by any means, but she grew up in a tropical country where it was always sunny and warm, and she now finds the cooler, southern winter to be her favorite time of year. Vega likes the break from the heat and the constant social obligations. “Winter is a very special time to stay inside,” the 36-year old product manager told me. The summer tends to be filled with friend hangs, beach days, and park visits, but in the winter she’s able to be productive in other ways, such as spending more time with her family, reading, cleaning her house, and cooking time-intensive recipes.

[Read: How to find joy in your Sisyphean existence]

The question of whether winter actually makes us mentally sluggish is also gaining attention from brain researchers. Timothy Brennen, a University of Oslo psychology professor with a focus on memory and cognition, studies whether seasonal differences produce any changes in cognitive tasks such as memory, attention, or reaction speed. He based his research in Tromsø, Norway; it’s located above the Arctic Circle, and for two months of the year the sun doesn’t rise above its horizon at all, making the city a favorite for this kind of study. “Most tests showed no difference in performance between summer and winter, and, of those that did, four out of five actually suggested a winter advantage,” Brennen wrote in his paper. Even so, many of us frequently attribute sleepiness or a lack of brain productivity to seasonal depression. If we were all truly depressed in winter, Brennen told me, “this would have quite huge effects on society, and it just doesn’t.”

The seasons do affect our lives, Brennen clarified, although a growing body of research shows that major psychological effects such as depression and cognitive slowdown are likely not what most of us are experiencing during winter. Waking up on dark winter mornings can be tougher than waking up in the summer, for instance. “But being groggy when you’re woken up from a deep sleep has nothing to do with depression,” he said. What you may be feeling in those instances are the effects of a disruption to your sleep cycle, or the draw of a cozy, warm bed on a cold morning. We may be uncomfortable in lower temperatures, or feel inconvenienced by hazardous weather such as blizzards, and we may even joke about wanting to hibernate for the entire season. Yet our nervous systems and lives don’t just come to a halt. Some of the busiest travel weekends happen over the winter holidays, and throughout January and February, many people flock to the mountains to ski, snowboard, or sled. Sure, winter can be dark, and navigating it can be a pain, but for the majority of us, the season isn’t necessarily to blame for anything more serious than that.

A Michigan man has been charged with unlawfully owning several firearms after federal agents uncovered online death threats he allegedly made against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and President Joe Biden.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer talks about living under the threats she and her family have faced since 2020. Watch Chris Wallace's interview with Governor Gretchen Whitmer Sunday, March 12, at 7pm ET on CNN or on HBO Max.