Tales of Loss: 6 Great Reads by Mexican Women | OZY’s Weekend Highlights

From Broadway’s next rock star to Nicaragua’s Forrest Gump, here’s the best of OZY this week.

The week started with a warning from a United Nations panel on climate change that our planet is headed for an unprecedented crisis by 2040 at the current rate of warming. The week is ending with the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which struck the Florida Panhandle with unprecedented fury.

Need some good news? A new solar farm is being opened on the uninhabitable site of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And a Minnesota man revived a squirrel with CPR.

The weekend is here — a good time to relax with some great reading: Here are our favorite stories on OZY this week.

Slovakia is emerging as the next political battleground between the West and Russia.

Atop multicolored motorcycles, nationalist Night Wolves bikers revved their engines outside the Russian embassy in Bratislava before driving 44 miles to establish their newest European base — in Dolna Krupa, a village in Slovakia, the former Eastern bloc nation that in the years since the Berlin Wall fell had mostly escaped Russia’s interference.

Their muffler-marked arrival in late June set off alarms in the capital, with the Slovak foreign minister saying the gang — which has called Stalin a hero and NATO a criminal organization — would be closely watched. More than 200 public figures penned an open letter asking the Slovak government to take action. But the biker gang remains, with officials saying they don’t have evidence to convict them of any crimes. Their stay in Slovakia is just one very visible sign of growing pulls and pressures between the country’s Western allies and an increasingly aggressive Russia trying to reclaim its old sphere of influence.

Clean energy, long seen as a luxury, is now reaching more low-income homes.

In a white hard hat, cargo work pants and sunglasses, Krystal Ruiz climbs the scaffolding of a multifamily public housing unit on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Ruiz is installing solar panels on the building as an installation supervisor with GRID Alternatives, a nonprofit providing solar energy to low-income communities in cities across the U.S. She’s excited. A public housing tenant herself, Ruiz is helping to realize the potential of solar power for communities that simply couldn’t access it a decade ago.

It’s a silent revolution sweeping across America’s landscape even as the federal government rolls back its climate commitments under President Donald Trump. When engineers Erica Mackie and Tim Sears founded GRID Alternatives in 2001, after working in renewable-energy installation in the private sector, they were loners. Now, lower costs, policy changes and recognition of disadvantaged communities' market potential are changing that. What were once government- and nonprofit-led do-gooder initiatives are becoming attractive for the private solar-energy sector too.