Meet the People’s Warrior of Puerto Rico | Vault Ahead With OZY's Exclusive Election Model

After Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico last year, Carmen Yulín Cruz challenged President Trump to step up.

One year after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory is still struggling to rebuild. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to deny that as many as 3,000 people may have died from the hurricane, despite Harvard research putting the death toll at more than 4,000.

After Maria hit last year, the people of San Juan saw their mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, spring into action. She trudged through waist-high water, bringing food and supplies to devastated neighborhoods, and lived and worked out of shelters with thousands of displaced Puerto Ricans for weeks.

She also put on her boxing gloves ...

From a cliff-hanger of a film to a demon-shaking dance, here’s the best of OZY this week.

This week millions have been looking anxiously to the skies, to two major weather events. In the U.S., East Coasters faced a deadly Hurricane Florence (now a tropical storm). And on the other side of the world, millions in the Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan nervously eyed super Typhoon Mangkhut, the equivalent of a Category 5 Atlantic hurricane.

The power of water has also been the subject of two stories on OZY this week. One reveals how a dam could cause the world’s worst natural disaster. But there’s also a story of hope, with a man who has developed technology that might harvest water from desert air, an invention that could help mitigate the world’s growing thirst.

Wherever you are in the world, be safe. Here are some of the best stories on OZY this week.

We teamed up with consulting firm 0ptimus to bring a unique projection of how the midterms will go.

Election projections got it so wrong in 2016 when Donald Trump shocked the world by winning the U.S. presidency. But we don’t want to be caught off-guard again. So to prepare for the topsy-turvy 2018 political season, we here at OZY thought long and hard about how to make our readers smarter about where the country is heading. All year, we’ve delivered extensive on-the-ground coverage of races across the U.S., but we wanted to take it a step further to build a better product to analyze the national political picture.

So we teamed up with 0ptimus, a data and technology firm based in Washington. Founded in 2013, 0ptimus is a Republican firm — they once worked on Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign — that aimed to develop an unbiased, nonpartisan prediction model so it could show its clients in the worlds of both politics and finance where the winds were blowing. Check out our exclusive first forecast.