Imagine a mother in Pennsylvania, standing in her kitchen in the dim light of early evening, holding a phone that cannot stop vibrating. The news is everywhere—on the television in the other room, in the group chats that will not quiet, in the urgent voice of a relative who wants to know whether it is still safe to send the kids to school. Across the country, children have died from measles. Not in some distant century, not in a place without doctors or modern medicine, but here, in the United States, in the year when these deaths should have been…

At first glance, a data center sounds like the ideal neighbor. It is quiet in the traditional sense, makes no visible smog, fills only a handful of parking spaces with full-time employees, and pays taxes out of proportion to its actual footprint. But once you live next to the blank boxes full of blinking fans, or sit across the table from a project begging to use ten million gallons of water and enough electricity to light a town, the ideal quickly becomes real. That is the moment the Georgia Chamber of Commerce is trying to fix. With public anger rising,…