In Wisconsin, where late last year Donald Trump said at a campaign stop, “I’m an environmentalist … I want clean air and clean water—really clean water,” many people want that too. Like Americans across the country, many Wisconsinites have in recent years come to understand that they have been drinking water contaminated by highly toxic “forever chemicals,” compounds known as PFAS, for decades.  

This is a challenge for Trump the environmentalist, whose administration is widely expected to gut many environmental regulations and has already suspended work that would have put limits on PFAS. Yet Lee Zeldin, now the EPA’s administrator, said in his confirmation hearing last month that PFAS would be a “top priority” for the agency, and as a member of Congress, he sided with Democrats to back rules that would limit the chemicals in drinking water and make polluters pay for cleanup.

PFAS are the rare environmental issue that might evoke the bipartisan zeitgeist in which Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. By then, President Richard Nixon had already overseen the creation of the EPA but vetoed the landmark water bill, which he thought was too expensive. But 17 Republicans joined with Democrats to override his veto. “If we cannot swim in our lakes and rivers, if we cannot breathe the air God has given us, what other comforts can life offer us?” Senator Howard Baker, a Republican of Tennessee, said on the October morning of the vote.

In this century, some Republicans have argued that PFAS measures are costly and come with legal burdens for businesses; the chemical industry has lobbied heavily against regulation in the U.S. and abroad. But like the environmental disasters of the 1970s, this one is alarming enough that politicians who might otherwise oppose regulation want the government to do something about it.

In his first term, Trump’s EPA issued a PFAS Action Plan to designate the compounds as hazardous, set limits, and make cleanup recommendations. But the White House also opposed a PFAS bill in Congress after the chemical industry objected to it, and the closest the administration came to fulfilling its own plans was submitting a proposal to regulate PFAS in drinking water on its very last day. In the next four years, PFAS could test whether Trump’s version of the EPA—stripped of many career employees and staffed with industry lobbyists—can do the job millions of Americans may want it to.

PFAS, as I’ve written before, are the DDT of this era, though perhaps it is more accurate to say they’re worse: Where DDT was a single compound with a single use, PFAS is an umbrella term for thousands of compounds used in a plethora of quotidian ways. They are often the reason “performance” fabrics on couches can resist stains, a rice cooker wipes clean so easily, and boots are waterproof. They make paper plates grease-resistant and conditioner extra silky. In the places where they are manufactured or are used to manufacture other things, decades of effluent have contaminated groundwater and fed into municipal water supplies. No one has figured out how to destroy the compounds, whose fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable in organic chemistry, at scale.

And so they persist, virtually forever, cycling through the water system and accumulating in our bodies. PFAS weren’t a known concern when the Clean Water Act was created, nor were they on anyone’s radar when the Safe Drinking Water Act came into force in 1974. By the ’70s, however, 3M knew that a PFAS compound it had invented, and sold to DuPont to make Teflon, was accumulating in employees’ blood.

Now nearly every American has PFAS in theirs. Over the past half century, these compounds have been used in dozens of industries to manufacture thousands of products globally, creating a noxious waste stream that has infiltrated countless communities. Studies have linked exposure to PFAS with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, and developmental problems in children, among other issues.

Last year, some two decades after the EPA began investigating these compounds, the Biden administration ordered water utilities to test for several kinds of PFAS in their water, and then begin all but eliminating those compounds, for the first time. The agency says that, much like for lead, there is no safe level of two of the most common of these compounds. It also released a report warning of the dangers of spreading sewage sludge—often highly contaminated by PFAS—on fields as fertilizer, a practice that continues in many states. And it was about to set the first discharge limits for PFAS in industrial wastewater—a rule the Trump administration has now put on pause. (An EPA spokesperson told me this action was part of “common transition procedures.”) This means municipal water systems will have to test for PFAS, but manufacturers will not need to measure or limit PFAS in the wastewater they release to those systems.

In the meantime, American towns and cities are trying to deal with PFAS’s threat piecemeal. In Campbell, Wisconsin, a town on a riverine island where people watch bald eagles hunt for fish, and raise their kids in the houses where they were raised, water samples from residents’ wells first came back positive for PFAS in 2020. Firefighting foam, made of PFAS, was used to put out plane-crash fires and to train firefighters at a nearby airport for decades. Residents now wonder if that explains the many unusual diagnoses among their neighbors, Lee Donahue, a Campbell town supervisor, told me: testicular cancer in a 20-year-old, or an ovarian cancer that usually strikes later in life in a woman in her 30s.

Nearly five years after those water tests, residents are still drinking bottled water while the town board works to reroute the drinking-water supply away from contaminated wells and toward a new source. That switch is partly funded by grants from President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Trump has put on pause, and partly by EPA grants secured by Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, and the town’s representative, Derrick Van Orden, a Republican. “This isn’t the most popular Republican position, I don’t really care,” Van Orden told the local ABC affiliate at the time the grant was announced. “When you turn on your faucet, it doesn’t ask if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

Campbell is a microcosm of a swing state: It split its vote almost exactly 50–50 between Trump and Kamala Harris, Donahue, who is also a town election worker, told me. On the other side of the state, Marinette, a city of 11,000, is an “extremely red community” that is dealing with its own PFAS problems, Cindy Boyle, a former town-board chairperson, told me. At 53, Boyle realizes she may have been drinking water tainted with PFAS her whole life: Tyco Fire Products tested its firefighting foam on land a half mile from the house where she raised her three sons, and its effluent was spread as sludge on fields within a mile of the house she grew up in, she said. The company was sued by the state, public water systems, and some residents in the area. Boyle was not one of them; still, the company is now providing a whole-house filter at her home, and distributing bottled water. (Tyco settled the suits with the water systems and residents without admitting wrongdoing; the state’s suit is on pause.)

But damage may have already been done. She had her thyroid removed in her 30s; her sister has thyroid disease now, and her mother had kidney cancer. Her husband has Parkinson’s disease; recent research shows that PFAS can accumulate in the brain and links them to neurological disorders. Boyle is registered independent from a conservative family, and she’d “take a Bush any day now,” she told me. But she says she can’t vote for anyone who isn’t interested in clamping down on PFAS.

In Wisconsin, Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in a battle at the statehouse over how to do that. Republicans have been holding up a proposed fund for testing and remediation out of fears it could force landowners to pay for cleanups of pollution they didn’t cause; on Tuesday Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, announced a state budget meant to resolve their concerns and release the funds—if the legislature passes it.

In the absence of federal regulation, states’ efforts to address PFAS have been patchwork and politically unpredictable. In West Virginia, which voted for Trump by a ratio of 7 to 3 and is arguably the birthplace of the PFAS crisis in the U.S., former Governor Jim Justice, a Republican, passed legislation to curb it. In North Carolina, where an estimated 2.5 million residents have PFAS in their tap water, Republican appointees to a state commission have stalled rule making that would set clear limits on PFAS’s presence there. Maine, which has a Democrat-controlled legislature and a widespread PFAS crisis, has passed some of the most stringent PFAS bills in the nation. New York was among the first states to declare certain PFAS hazardous substances, but it also plans to double the volume of sludge it spreads on fields by 2050.   

Tackling PFAS contamination meaningfully will require federal effort. During Trump’s previous term, he appointed a former chemical-industry executive to oversee toxic chemicals at the EPA, where she rewrote rules, making it harder to track their health impacts. Back then, Americans in some states were just beginning to understand the threats PFAS posed. Now, eight years later, the landscape is very different—and states are watching. In his time as a congressional representative from New York, Zeldin was in favor of getting rid of PFAS contamination, going so far as to urge the EPA to move faster to regulate it. At his confirmation hearing, he gave no details of how he would proceed on PFAS as EPA administrator, and when I asked the EPA for more specifics, a spokesperson pointed me to the action plan from the first term. Whatever steps Zeldin does take will show what making an issue a priority looks like for Trump’s EPA in this term, and define how far this administration’s environmentalism actually goes.

This story incorporates reporting from cnbctv18, The New York Times, The Financial Express, ABC and NBC New York.

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David Lynch died yesterday at the age of 78, after a career that made him perhaps the most consequential American art filmmaker in the history of the medium. But his singular voice extended far beyond cinema, into television, music, internet fame, coffee making, furniture design, transcendental meditation, and practically any other creative endeavor you can imagine. He was a brand, though a fiercely independent one: Beginning with his debut movie, Eraserhead, in 1977, Lynch became the rare kind of artist whose last name seemed to describe an entire genre. He established a style that offered an otherworldly reckoning with our way of life, incorporating classic Hollywood storytelling, pulpy romanticism, and abstract surrealism all at once.

Lynch’s canon was so tremendous that each of his many fans and acolytes  likely had different entry points into it. There was the aggressive midnight-screening oddness of Eraserhead in the 1970s; the frightening mix of throwback folksiness and depraved sexuality in Blue Velvet in the 1980s; and the bizarre-but-incredible TV phenomenon that was Twin Peaks in the early 1990s. Others found him through 2001’s Mulholland Drive, a staggering collision of Hollywood dreamscapes, or 2017’s inimitable Twin Peaks: The Return, which exploded the form of “prestige television” that its predecessor had helped plant the seeds for. These are just a few of Lynch’s achievements in a body of work that spanned big-budget and micro-budget, highbrow and low. His output was also defined by his personal celebrity—a folksy, chain-smoking former Eagle Scout who produced art of high complexity while also rhapsodizing about the simple pleasures of eating a donut with a cup of coffee.

The first Lynch film I saw in a theater was Mulholland Drive, at the age of 15. A budding cinephile, I was only somewhat aware of the director’s titanic reputation and of the movie’s circuitous journey to the screen. (It was initially intended as a television pilot, a Twin Peaks successor that ABC ultimately rejected.) Mulholland Drive was an artistic thunderbolt like no other for me, and watching it for the first time is still probably the most transformative experience I’ve ever had in a cinema. I can palpably recall my terror during the early sequence at Winkie’s Diner, in which two men discuss a dream one had involving some ineffable monster out back, and the transfixing mystery of Club Silencio, one of Lynch’s many on-screen environments that seemed to have a foot in multiple realities. The film was at certain times a chilling representation of fear, trauma, and death, but at others hauntingly lovely and funny. It opened my eyes to what movies could be, beyond just the entertaining product they usually were.

[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]

Mulholland Drive resisted easy explanation, as did all of the director’s stories. But, boiled down, many had a sweet purity to them, involving battles of good and evil and harsh realities endured by pure spirits. The director had a charmed and normal childhood, by all accounts; he was born in Montana but moved all over the country as a kid, living in Washington, North Carolina, Idaho, and Virginia at various points. Still, he would later recall moments that punctured that idyll. “When I was little, my brother and I were outdoors late one night, and we saw a naked woman come walking down the street toward us in a dazed state, crying. I have never forgotten that moment,” he once told Roger Ebert, evoking an image that would serve as Blue Velvet’s centerpiece many years after the fact.

More adult life events inspired his first feature, however. A quiet, eccentric, ink-black comedy about a peculiar young man who works at a factory in an industrial dystopia, Eraserhead is plainly Lynch’s way of processing his life as an early parent in Philadelphia. Its protagonist struggles to raise a mutant creature while also dealing with nattering in-laws and a mundane job. Most theatergoers were likely to find the film off-putting—what with its clanking, abrasive soundtrack, beautifully cloying interludes of simple songs, and unabashedly nonnarrative strangeness. Eraserhead could have died in obscurity, but it became a cult-movie sensation instead, the kind that circulates among artsy gatherings, comic-book shops, and other underground scenes, as much of Lynch’s filmography now does.

The veteran comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks saw the movie and, somehow, it resonated with him. He then hired Lynch—over far more objectively qualified, well-known names—to direct a project that Brooks had been nurturing, The Elephant Man. It was a critical smash that landed several Oscar nominations, and Lynch’s industry ascension seemed set. His follow-up was the sci-fi epic Dune, an adaptation of the blockbuster Frank Herbert novel, for which Lynch claimed he had passed on Return of the Jedi. But it was an artistically compromised box-office failure; the director never made a big-budget film again. He instead found greater success once he’d swerved back to his more personal fascinations: His next film was the alternately astonishing and repellant Blue Velvet, a nasty noir fairytale of gangsters and abuse in a picture-perfect suburban town.

[Read: David Lynch's unfathomable masterpiece]

Lynch took many, many creative risks over the years, but Blue Velvet is the movie that perhaps best melded grim violence and white-picket-fence cheerfulness—a vision that came to characterize him in the public eye. The director continued to dig beneath idealism’s rot for the remainder of his career, and the 1990 premiere of Twin Peaks brought his worldview to a broader swath of viewers. Co-created by the writer Mark Frost, the ABC show was an uncanny soap opera, powered by a murder mystery that briefly captured the country’s imagination. Twin Peaks ran out of ratings steam quickly over the course of its initial, two-season run, but it’s since emerged as Lynch’s quintessential work. The series’ legacy was powered by both its empathy—the stark and sincere emotion the director could deploy so beautifully—and the way it transformed between various media over time. Twin Peaks evolved into a larger, decades-spanning project, encompassing the aggressively tragic and beautiful prequel film, Fire Walk With Me, in 1992, and the confounding, hilarious, and formally defiant sequel show, The Return, which premiered 25 years later.

In his later life, Lynch charged into the digital frontier in his typically singular fashion. He used grainy digital video cameras to shoot the bizarre California epic Inland Empire mostly on his own dime; he uploaded original, offbeat episodic projects and crudely animated cartoons exclusively for subscribers to his website. The director was an excellent marketer of himself, despite his preference for alienating themes and aesthetic choices: His trademark non-sequitur-filled humor and rambling sincerity connected both him and his oeuvre to generation after generation. Lynch, more than many of his peers, could expose audiences to the harshest, most discomforting imagery while also balefully commanding them to “fix their hearts or die.” If the American experience had a cinematic poet, it was him. The news that Lynch had left us was shocking only because it seemed that he’d be here with us forever.

In the film September 5, the ABC Sports studio at the 1972 Munich Olympics seems like an uncomfortable space in which to work, let alone think. The control room is smoky, the air conditioner barely functions, and every piece of machinery generates a frustrating amount of background noise. Yet the producers and reporters inside are more than capable of focusing on their jobs as they put together engaging, daily live broadcasts of the Games.

That changes when a militant Palestinian group sneaks into the Olympic Village and takes members of the Israeli team hostage one morning. But unlike other films that have examined the incident, such as Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated Munich, September 5 holds the sprawling political implications of the attack itself at a distance; it’s a taut thriller that concentrates solely on how the ABC Sports team pivoted to crisis coverage. Given the demands of live television, the journalists had only moments to confront ethical questions as they tried to stay on the air. What happened in the crew’s cramped quarters on September 5, 1972, the movie argues, blurred the line between delivering journalism and creating spectacle—even as the team’s work made history by keeping 900 million viewers glued to their television sets.

Directed by Tim Fehlbaum, September 5, now in theaters, frequently drops the audience into the middle of the action via walks and talks, heated phone calls, and even archival footage from the actual broadcast. The addition of such real-life clips—including that of the anchor Jim McKay—gives September 5 a documentary-like feel, cleverly immersing viewers into the uneasy headspace of those inside the studio. The hostage crisis is unfolding just 100 yards away from them, but most of the employees watch the events as they’re filtered through a camera lens. Geoffrey Mason (played by John Magaro), the eager and anxious young producer leading the newsroom that day, is practically trapped in the control room.

Then again, that’s where he can best see the time; it is, in other words, where he wants to be. Time, not the hostage crisis, drives the film’s action: Verbal countdowns punctuate the dialogue; large, glowing analog clocks loom over the control-room monitors; and a crucial scene involves Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the president of ABC Sports, aggressively negotiating with another network executive for more broadcasting slots with the live satellite. Time—and the limited quantity of it available—also tends to prevent the team from doing its best work. When Geoffrey, Roone, and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), a veteran producer, begin debating whether they should be pointing cameras at where the hostages might emerge—what if one of them is killed on live TV?—they’re told by other staffers that they have only two minutes to decide. When Geoffrey sees that a German outlet is interviewing a released hostage nearby, he sends staffers to whisk the man into the ABC studio as soon as possible. He can’t give more thought to the subject’s well-being, because he can’t waste the limited programming opportunities they have.

[Read: Spotlight: A sober tale of journalism done right]

That tension between empathy and urgency is the key to September 5’s success. At a lean 94-minute length, the film mostly moves at a brisk pace, matching its characters’ feelings of stress. Yet Fehlbaum also slows the momentum in some scenes to show how the station’s crew members operate equipment: Captions are spelled out by hand. Developing a larger version of a photo takes several minutes inside a darkroom. To make footage play in slow motion, a technician gently rotates a roll of tape at a precise speed.

Such intimate moments emphasize the contrast between the typical patience inside the studio and the frenzy the team succumbs to when news breaks. The pressure to get ahead of other networks—via more updates, more sound bites, more footage, more everything—takes over. Staffers such as the station’s German translator, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), and the correspondent Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) resemble storm chasers as they charge to the front lines with camera crews in tow. The producers don’t stop to consider whether broadcasting the locations of the German police officers might affect any rescue attempts. When onlookers later swarm the militants and the hostages as they finally leave the building, the footage looks surreal—those involved in the attack have become celebrities, surrounded by cameras, hounded by crews seeking the grabbiest story rather than the sharpest one. The ABC team caves to those impulses, too, rushing the confirmation of a tip that eventually proves devastatingly inaccurate.

[Read: A #MeToo movie devoid of sensationalism]

September 5’s storytelling can occasionally become heavy-handed, with pat dialogue (“It’s not about politics; it’s about emotions,” Roone argues) and claustrophobia-inducing production design. But its unwavering focus on ABC’s small studio in Munich underlines how the journalists inside drifted toward sensational coverage. By every quantifiable metric—viewership, satellite time, other outlets citing ABC’s reporting first—they were doing their jobs well.

It’s hard to see the film’s depiction of that day and not also think about how fraught the expectations for live coverage are, for both its creators and its consumers—the predilection for drama over fact, the frequent prioritization of expedience over quality. When the movie has its characters repeatedly raise concerns over what to air, their criticisms echo long-standing questions in journalism, including how to reconcile the need for an audience with a story’s actual importance. September 5 is effective because it doesn’t claim to say anything original about the perils of reporting and consuming breaking news. It’s simply—and bluntly—showing how easily those familiar perils can be overlooked.