#United States

Electric vehicles have a peculiar way of making gasoline cars feel complicated.

You plug the car in. Electricity flows into a battery. Later, that electricity turns a motor, and the motor turns the wheels. There is no gasoline to pump, no miniature sequence of explosions under the hood, and much less energy disappearing as waste heat. After spending some time with a good EV, it becomes surprisingly easy to look at the internal-combustion automobile and wonder whether we are seeing the mature form of transportation or an extraordinarily successful transitional technology.

That raises a much bigger question.

Suppose the United States eventually converted essentially its entire passenger-vehicle fleet to electricity. Where would all that electricity come from?

One intriguing answer begins in the enormous stretches of open land across the American interior. The Great Plains and neighboring regions contain abundant solar and wind resources, along with vast areas where large generating projects can be built. Could we simply build enough solar capacity there to provide the energy currently supplied by gasoline?

And if we could, could that electricity eventually appear wherever Americans currently expect to find fuel: interstate exits, highway service plazas, neighborhood filling stations and thousands of other places across the country?

It sounds like a project of almost cartoonish scale.

The surprising part is that the arithmetic itself does not rule it out.

The closest personal connection I have to the epidemic of gun violence in the United States is not through a statistic, or a headline, or a political argument.

It is through a teacher.

His name was Steve Wolf, and from 2010 to 2011, he was my AP Environmental Science teacher at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the time, I knew him as a young, energetic, slightly eccentric teacher who made science feel connected to real life. He was serious about the subject, but not in a way that drained the room. His class had a pulse.

He was also a runner.

That mattered to me. I was a runner too, and I remember being impressed that he would go for runs during his lunch break. There was something quietly heroic about that to me as a teenager: an adult with a job, a classroom, responsibilities, and still, in the middle of the day, he made time to go outside and run. It made running seem less like a school sport and more like a lifelong form of freedom.

He also introduced me, indirectly, to Dean Karnazes.

Mr. Wolf had read Ultramarathon Man, and he told us stories from the book: Dean Karnazes turning thirty and transforming his life through running, pushing himself through absurd distances, ordering a pizza during a long run and folding it into a kind of burrito while still moving down the road. Those stories lodged somewhere in me. They had that teenage magic of being ridiculous and inspiring at the same time. They suggested that the human body was not just a machine for getting through the day, but a strange instrument capable of endurance, comedy, pain, and joy.