Reporting from Truth or Consequences, N.M.

From his tiny gem store in southern New Mexico, Robert Hanseck spends his days untangling chakra beads and answering questions about the healing properties of amethyst crystals. After four decades behind the register, he has met thousands of wellness-minded tourists eager to explore the hot springs that span the region.

But he almost never sees the type of traveler he was promised would transform his small town of Truth or Consequences: space enthusiasts.

“It’s been a flop,” he said of Spaceport America, a project that was conceived as the vanguard of commercial space travel — and that has been promoted by state officials for more than two decades as a launchpad for the local economy.

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This article was reported from several cities, including Salt Lake City, Atlanta and San Francisco

I slide into a cushy leather chair in this bustling shop next to a small flooring business. The hum of clippers echoes throughout the room.

Jay Organez swoops a crisp cape across my shoulders and grabs a pick, combing it through my hair as I describe my go-to cut: a little off the top with a shadow fade on the sides.

My eyes scan the Northern California shop — 22 chairs in a half circle around the room, some of the individual stations with the Instagram handle of a barber painted above the mirror. A framed photo of former President Barack Obama hangs on a wall, and the TV is tuned to highlights from a recent Golden State Warriors basketball game.

But the volume is turned down low, and instead I hear snippets of conversations — quick descriptions of desired cuts, followed by comfortable banter about politics (Donald Trump running for president — again!) and sports (LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the N.B.A. career scoring record) and life (a 20-something moving in with his girlfriend).

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LOS ANGELES — In the two years since nationwide social justice protests followed the murder of George Floyd, California has undertaken the nation’s most sweeping effort yet to explore some concrete restitution to Black citizens to address the enduring economic effects of slavery and racism.

A nine-member Reparations Task Force has spent months traveling across California to learn about the generational effects of racist policies and actions. The group, formed by legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, is scheduled to release a report to lawmakers in Sacramento next year outlining recommendations for state-level reparations.

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a member of the task force.

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NEW YORK  — Kristina Peterson anxiously tapped the heels of her boots on the tile floor inside the brightly lit lobby. Moments earlier, she had given her date of birth to an intake coordinator and answered an inquiry about the drug she planned to use.

“Heroin,” she said, referring tothe tiny glassine envelope stamped “Off White” tucked inside her black purse.

For much of the last decade, Peterson has been hooked on heroin, her addiction becoming increasingly severe and public. Occasionally, she has shot up in quiet corners of subway stations as she waited for the E train back to the apartment where she lived in Queens. She sought to battle her addiction by taking methadone, but soon relapsed and was rushed to an emergency room after she overdosed in a park a few blocks from an elementary school.

“This is nothing I’m proud of,” she said on a recent afternoon while sitting inside an overdose prevention center, one of two in New York City that are the first authorized by a local government in the U.S. But “if I’m getting high, I want to do it here.”

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SEATTLE — Thuy Do couldn’t look away from the devastating clip playing on a loop on television news — hundreds of Afghans running alongside a massive U.S. Air Force cargo plane, desperately trying to flee their home country. The frantic frowns felt so familiar, reminding her of images of refugees packed onto helicopters to escape Vietnam more than four decades earlier.

So during the summer, Do, a doctor in her late 30s whose family left Vietnam when she was a girl and resettled in Seattle, sat down in her living room with her husband and talked about how they could help.

“We just knew we had to do something,” she said, reflecting on the initial shock of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August. “This is a time for us to give back.”

Many time zones away, past jagged mountain ranges and the vast Pacific Ocean, Abdul Matin Qadiri settled into a corner inside Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he and his wife and their four children would spend two nights waiting anxiously for an evacuation flight. As soon as word had begun to spread of the Taliban entering Kabul, the nation’s capital, Qadiri, who had worked alongside the U.S. military as a mechanic, decided to flee as soon as possible.

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LAS VEGAS  — Jake Crandall took a deep pull from his vape as a woman emerged from the darkness of Fremont Street and into the parking lot of the Desert Moon Motel. She gripped the final $20 she owed him.

“Here you go,” she said. He didn’t ask how she got it.

“Thanks,” Crandall, the property manager, replied. “We will figure it out again tomorrow.”

It was just after 9 p.m., and since she had now paid the full daily rate — $57 — Room 5 would again be hers for the night, a welcome reprieve from the woman’s other option: the back seat of her red Pontiac sedan. Crandall knew the woman, who asked that her name not be used because of the sensitivity of her situation, didn’t have anywhere else to stay.

For much of the last week, she and her two teenagers, both autistic, alternated between sleeping at the motel or inside the car. The 45-year-old woman said she lost her one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Ever since, she’s been traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, staying with family when she can.

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MILWAUKEE — Jeremiah Hughes was mowing a lawn on a Wednesday afternoon when two men barged through an alley gate. They were armed. Shots rang out.

Hughes died in the yard and was taken to the morgue and then to El Bethel Church of God in Christ, where days later he lay in an open, emerald-green casket as muffled cries rose through a hymn on a loudspeaker. He was 24 and had his mother’s name — Gwen — tattooed on his left hand.

Velvet ropes surrounded his casket to prevent people from grabbing for him in their despair.

“My only son,” said his father, Stan Lindsey. “Gone like that.”

Milwaukee is in the grip of the worst violence in its modern history. There were 189 killings here last year, a 93% increase from 2019 and the most ever recorded.

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MINNEAPOLIS — Philonise Floyd wrapped his arm around Gwen Carr’s shoulder, staring into the throng of television cameras outside the Hennepin County Government Center.

Before the news conference on a recent afternoon, the two — bound by the grief of losing a loved one at the hands of police — had only met a few times.

Carr, whose son, Eric Garner, was killed by a police officer’s chokehold in New York in 2014, traveled here in the days after George Floyd, Philonise’s older brother, died last May under the knee of a police officer.

They cried together and prayed together. And now, they were together, again, publicly calling for justice.

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TUSKEGEE, Ala.  — Omar Neal often thinks back on the calculated betrayal of hundreds of Black men and how it still shapes so much about this rural Alabama community.

He remembers the mechanic who went from house to house fixing cars and the sharecropper who lived off a narrow dirt road. He thinks too of his uncle Freddie Lee Tyson, a carpenter, and how the betrayal shaped his life.

“These men believed so-called medical experts and were deceived,” said Neal, a lifelong resident of Tuskegee.

The name of the town evokes feelings of both pride and pain — for its legendary Black airmen and for the infamous government-backed healthcare study. For now, the legacy of the study, in which Black men with syphilis were left untreated for decades, stands front of mind for many contemplating whether to get a COVID-19 vaccine recommended by federal officials.

Neal’s uncle was among the more than 600 African American men from here who were enrolled under false pretenses in the deadly long-term health study coordinated and financed by the federal government beginning in the 1930s.

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