First in a series on changing cities

When Pat Kelley was growing up in the 1960s, Chattanooga was still a bustling industrial town. Textile factories, chemical plants, and steam boiler manufacturers employed men and women by the thousands. As a boy, Kelley caught glimpses of fire flashing in the foundries and watched as steel mills hurled atomized carbon into the humid Southern air.

The United States issued an emergency order on Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday that killed all 157 on board. President Donald Trump announced the order, citing “new information” that had come to light in the ongoing investigation into the incident.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump unveiled a $4.75 trillion budget for fiscal year 2020 on Monday that includes a request to Congress for an additional $8.6 billion to pay for a 722-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The 150-page proposal, dubbed “A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First,” outlines the White House priority of boosting defense spending and infrastructure and slashing expenditures in other departments.

A power outage affecting 22 of Venezuela’s 23 states continued for a second day Friday, further complicating the country’s ongoing political crisis. The blackout began Thursday afternoon due to a suspected failure at a major hydroelectric plant in the southern state of Bolivar. Commuters in the capital city of Caracas had to walk home after the outage affected subway service, and the international airport remained mostly without power.

Alienated America, by Tim Carney, is the latest book (following Bowling Alone in 2000 and Coming Apart in 2013) about our culture’s loss of community bonds. That loss could be the endgame of one of the great conflicts in human history. The conflict has taken many forms: the one and the many (philosophical), the pluribus and the unum (political), the id and the other (psychological).

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission announced Tuesday it will abandon its latest effort to force baker Jack Phillips to make custom cakes in violation of his religious beliefs. The U.S. Supreme Court previously ruled that the state commission showed hostility toward religion in its earlier prosecution of Phillips for declining to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

At least 22 states, irked by the Trump administration’s move to defund Planned Parenthood, are challenging the U.S. government’s authority to direct family planning funds toward clinics that focus on healing, not hurting.