Since he was 7 years old, Pascal Tessier has been a Scout. Before he hit middle school. Before he realized he was gay.

He figured that out in the sixth or seventh grade, and he came out in the eighth, to his family and friends at school. He had no idea at the time that the Boy Scouts of America had a policy banning him from the organization he’d already spent six years in. By then he’d graduated from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, with an eye on Eagle. On Wednesday he finds out whether he’ll earn that rank or be forced to quit the most important extracurricular activity in his life, as some 1,400 local leaders vote on a proposal to reverse its 103-year-old policy banning openly gay boys at a national annual meeting at the Gaylord Texan Hotel in Grapevine, Texas. Banning Pascal Tessier.

Mike Daisey confessed at the outset that he had little idea what he was going to say for the next two hours, in a first-ever monologue titled “Journalism” at the Tiffany Center on Tuesday night in downtown Portland. The question was whether anyone could believe him.

This, after all, was the guy who took on the Cult of Apple and in dramatic monologues across America appeared to expose its shoddy treatment of its underaged and overworked and malformed and poisoned workers, only to find himself the subject of exposure, for the embellishments and outright fabrications he repeated on This American Life, eventually forcing the radio program to issue an unprecedented retraction of an entire show.

After one of the most severe tornadoes ever to hit the United States ravaged Moore, Oklahoma, on Monday, about 15 student football players were found alive, wearing football helmets in the interior locker room of a field house at Southmoore High School. Their regular practice having been canceled in anticipation of a severe storm, the students were watching a video of a previous practice as the tornado approached. Their coach’s instruction to cover their heads with helmets was a spur-of-the-moment suggestion to take advantage of the football equipment handy, but researchers, brain-injury experts, and meteorologists agree that helmets should be a key component in every family’s storm-safety kit.

Following April 2011’s historic spate of tornadoes that killed 338 people in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and, in particular, Alabama, a team of researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Injury Control Research Center set out to find a way to prevent such a death toll from future storms. They came up with what they call a “practical, inexpensive solution”: helmets. According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22 percent of the deaths during that four-day outbreak were caused by head injuries. What’s more, a review of research over the past 50 years found that head injuries are responsible for the majority of deaths from tornadoes. Therefore, the UAB researchers determined, the most basic piece of equipment used to prevent head injuries, from the baseball field to the back of a motorcycle, also should be used during a tornado. They began petitioning the CDC to update its tornado-preparation page to include helmets as a key component to every home tornado-preparedness plan.

After a wrenching night full of hope and sorrow, Gov. Mary Fallin was functioning on three hours’ sleep Tuesday when she visited First Baptist Church in the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore. The church—one of those fortunate buildings that wasn’t blown to smithereens by Monday’s monster tornado—had been turned into a makeshift Red Cross facility offering food and shelter to victims and helping relatives separated in the lethal storm to reunite.

“When I was in the church,” the governor recounted in an interview with The Daily Beast, “I heard several ladies wailing really loud, because they’d just been told that they’d lost a loved one. It was a very emotional, hard experience to listen to utter grief—the dimensions of the tragedy and the voices of those ladies. One of them had just found out she had lost her husband. I don’t know about the other ones. But I never heard people scream and cry that loud.”

It seems that every major weather-related event becomes a skirmish in the climate-change wars. The terrible tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma is no exception. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, for example, suggested a connection between the tornado and climate change. Climate change deniers responded in the usual way, with accusations of fear-mongering.

With respect to the connection between climate and tornadoes, things seem to have already settled down and most media discussions seem to be getting the question about right. Given the current state of our scientific knowledge, we cannot say with any confidence that climate change makes tornadoes stronger or more common. Tornadoes require two things—energy and wind shear. Climate change increases the available energy, but reduces the wind shear, making the net result hard to predict.