Stephen is off this week, recovering from the budget. He’ll be back next week. In the meantime, catch up on this profile of Gov. Josh Shapiro he wrote with Angela Couloumbis for NOTUS.

On an early morning in June 2023, a tanker truck transporting thousands of gallons of gasoline crashed on an exit ramp underneath I-95 in Philadelphia. The truck burst into flames, killing the driver, causing an overpass to collapse, and shutting down a vital commercial and commuter corridor traveled by about 160,000 vehicles every day. Experts predicted it would take months to rebuild.

At that point, Josh Shapiro had been Pennsylvania’s governor for five months. This was the kind of disaster that, if handled well, could earn a state-level politician considerable acclaim, or, if handled poorly, could doom their career. And Shapiro seemed to know it. He quickly signed a disaster declaration to secure federal funds. Then he and a crew of emergency management and construction specialists concocted a creative temporary fix for the highway, involving recycled glass and a jet-engine-powered dryer normally used on NASCAR tracks. They even livestreamed the repairs. To everyone’s surprise, the roadway reopened in 12 days.