President Joe Biden is scheduled to speak at a union hall in northern Virginia Thursday afternoon, attempting to cast himself as a defender of the middle class by leaning into his economic accomplishments and contrasting them with the Republican proposals he says would be catastrophic for Americans' pocketbooks.

New Year’s resolutions had barely been resolved before parents across the nation started thinking ahead to summer. The scramble to sign kids up for summer camp begins in January, because limited slots and huge demand have led to a highly competitive environment that verges on absurd. Case in point: Rachael Deane, a mother in Richmond, Virginia, has a summer-camp spreadsheet. She joked to me that it is “more sophisticated than a bill tracker” she uses to follow legislation in her work at a children’s-advocacy nonprofit; the spreadsheet is color-coded, and registration dates are cross-posted onto her work calendar so she can jump into action as soon as slots open.

Deane’s intense approach reflects the state of modern parenthood. The lack of universal child care is a pain point for parents throughout the year, but the summer is a unique headache. As with after-school care, parents have to navigate a confusing patchwork of options, but in the summer, they need a plan for all day, every day, for three months. And society leaves them largely on their own to figure it out: A 2019 survey from the Center for American Progress found that for three-quarters of parents, securing summer care was at least a little bit difficult. The system is essentially a competition that has winners and losers, and rests upon a willful ignorance of the reality of most American families—only one-fifth of all parents are stay-at-home. Change is long overdue.

I believe part of the problem is that in the U.S., education is a right for kids, and a responsibility for the state, while care outside schools, despite being just as vital for child development, is seen as solely the parents’ responsibility. So when the academic calendar ends, the government bows out. As Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who has studied summer care, told me, “We’ve made a decision culturally to push the burden of caring for kids during the summer fully onto parents, and forcing them to manage. It’s in some ways a throwback to an idealized family setup and work setup that never existed for most people anyway.” Indeed, the system’s assumption that one parent (read: the mother) should be available to watch the kids is a prime example of what the historian Stephanie Coontz calls “the way we never were.”

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

Although some people wax nostalgic about lightly supervised summers spent mainly by themselves or with friends, the landscape has shifted since the 1980s, and this is no longer a viable option for many families. The sociologist Jessica Calarco explained in an interview with the writer Anne Helen Petersen that several factors led to the change. These included new laws about the minimum age at which children can be home alone, and a desire among certain parents for specialty camps to give their kids a leg up in college admissions. In parallel, the economic challenges of running camps drove a decline in options and an increase in prices.

The lack of affordable summer care leads to very different choice sets for parents in different income brackets. The mid-winter dash for summer-camp spots occurs mostly, though not exclusively, among wealthier, more educated parents. Lenhart’s research found that about one-third of parents in 2018 were sending their kids to camp; another study concluded that the kids of college graduates had an attendance rate seven times higher than that of kids whose parents had only a high-school diploma or less.

Parents who go this route face a logistical puzzle: Few summer programs run for multiple weeks, cover the hours when parents are working, and are reasonably affordable. Although many municipal parks-and-recreation departments valiantly try to provide inclusive low-cost options, there simply aren’t enough slots to go around. Making matters worse, camp sign-ups tend to be first come, first served, provoking a page-refreshing scrum more appropriate to acquiring Taylor Swift tickets than securing care for one’s children. I was discussing this topic with my literary agent, Laura Usselman, and she told me that in her small Georgia city, camp registration opens at 9 a.m. on one day in January, and “many of the camps are full by 9:03.”

Lower-income parents, for whom camps are often entirely out of reach, sometimes have to shape their entire work lives around the need for summer care. The Center for American Progress survey found that, to accommodate summer-care needs, more than half of families had “at least one parent [plan] to make a job change that will result in reduced income.” Calarco explained that in her research interviews with mothers, “quite a few have talked about how they made their own career decisions around the fact that their kids would be home in the summers and after school”—choosing a lower-paying job because it was closer to family who could help, for example, or taking part-time gig jobs.

The most obvious solution to this problem—year-round school—has never really gained traction in the United States. A mere 4 percent of U.S. schools have year-round schedules, and these still have substantial breaks. Summer vacation’s place in the American cultural mindset is deeply entrenched; there is also a fair case that children need opportunities for open play and creativity through an extended summer break to complement academic study.

Other countries have different approaches that preserve summer vacation without leaving parents scrambling every year. Municipalities in Sweden, for instance, are required by law to offer parents slots in programs known as fritidshem, or “leisure-time centers,” until their children turn 13. These centers provide both before- and after-school supervision and care during school breaks. In Germany, children have a legal right to day care; although there isn’t a corresponding policy for school breaks, some towns and cities organize comprehensive holiday programming, often in partnership with local schools. It’s not free, but the costs are moderate and financial aid is generally available.

Approaches like these in the U.S. would, of course, require funding, and maybe even legislation. Sadly, this country has shown time and again that it is unwilling to commit major resources to child care, laying the problem at parents’ feet instead. A cultural shift is needed to smooth the path for potential policy shifts. The summer scramble seems unlikely to end unless U.S. society moves its philosophy away from “every family for itself” and toward an understanding that school, work, and child care are all interconnected.

[Read: Why child care is so ridiculously expensive]

There have been recent glimmers of possibility. Although it was interrupted by the pandemic, two New York City council members introduced legislation in early 2020 to offer free summer camp for all youths in the city. Last year, several school districts across the country used pandemic-relief funding to temporarily provide free summer programming. Yet the fact that such policies are new and notable underlines the absurdity of America’s inconsistent ideas about when and where families deserve support. As Lenhart told me, “We’ve decided culturally and politically that the care of very young children, and the care of children in one season [of the year], is a burden to be borne by the family as opposed to spread across the community.”

Child care shouldn’t be a luxury good that the wealthy fight over, the middle class squeezes to acquire, and low-income folks do without. But that’s what it becomes every summer when parents’ options are shelling out for expensive camps, fighting for limited slots in affordable programs, or nothing. Until action is taken, forcing parents to sprint to sign up for summer camp in the dead of winter is a not-so-subtle message about how the nation really feels about them.

Almost every day since the beginning of 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown, I have texted with my friends Suzanne and Kate. We’re not all that similar. I am Black, and they are white. We live in different parts of the country. They are in long-term, child-free relationships. I am married and have a child. But we are all writers who share a deep connection with the natural world. And our writing reflects our frustration at the way many people’s stories are erased from books held up as masterpieces of environmental literature.

Some years ago I edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. One of the anthology’s most remarkable statements was that Black people write with an empathetic eye toward the natural world. Because of erasures from so many narratives about the great outdoors, the idea that Black people can write out of a personal relationship to nature and have done so since before this nation’s founding comes as a shock to many people. Conducting a review of more than 2,000 poems included in key nature-poetry anthologies and journals published from 1930 to 2006—80 years of the environmental literary canon—I found only six poems by Black poets.

This article is adapted from Dungy’s forthcoming book.

But that doesn’t mean Black people weren’t writing these poems. Like so many writers who wander out into nature to find themselves, Black writers also find peace in connections to nature. Just as strong as the pull of legacies of trauma that this nation inflicted—and inflicts—on Black people is the self-recognition some of us find in stories of hope and renewal that grow out of the wild world.

“Thank you,” one Black poet told me when I requested poems for Black Nature. “I have been writing this way my entire life, but no one has ever seen me in this light.”

People are part of the natural world. And yet, loads of canonical nature writing excludes people. Such writing spends so much time in solitary meditative observation that the writers ignore nearly every human experience outside their own. During the early days of the shut-in, in March, I texted Kate and Suzanne about some books I’d recently reread, including Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, about the passage of a year in Roanoke Valley. “Why,” I asked my friends, “had Dillard felt the need to erase the messiness of both mundane domestic undertakings and complex national politics from her book about the world?” Dillard expressed doubt that people would want to read a memoir by “a Virginia housewife,” so she left that part of her own story out. Her book also deletes the daily experiences of many other people in her direct vicinity. Around the time she was writing, some of the most significant integration struggles of the civil-rights era roiled just beyond her door, but Dillard’s book maintains a segregation of focus and care. Such books don’t only erase Black neighbors. They erase nearly everyone.

[Read: The Thoreau of the suburbs]

“Dillard adopts the whole ‘man-alone-in-the-wilderness (or in her case the pastoral)’ trope,” Suzanne added to our text thread. “I mean, Edward Abbey was generally with one of his four wives out there in the desert, but they never show up. It’s pure fantasy.”                                                             

“That’s part of why I like Amy Irvine’s Trespass so much,” wrote Kate, referring to the wilderness activist’s 2009 memoir. “She’s so fucking honest.”

Published in 2018, Irvine’s next book after Trespass is the contrarian meditation Desert Cabal. That book deals with the implications of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—the same Abbey who stayed in the desert as frequently by himself as with one of his wives and their children, though you wouldn’t know about his family from what he wrote in that seminal book. In this case, there could be no more appropriate descriptor than seminal, a word often used to laud the unmatchable genius of an individual man.

Why disappear the people who people your world?

“Irvine doesn’t get that level of love for Trespass,” I wrote to my friends. “Partially because she was so busy raising her kid that she couldn’t do the promotional work. But partly because nature dudes like a certain kind of story.”

The nice thing about texting is that I can carry on a conversation while vacuuming or stirring risotto. Sometimes seconds pass between messages. Sometimes long days. The flow of thoughts can meander as well. “It’s noteworthy that Dillard wanted to write in a ‘genderless’ way (read: presumably male),” I continued, “but they wouldn’t let her publish the book as A. Dillard.”

Suzanne, who had been offline, came back to tell us some of the phrases an editor used to replace the simple dialogue tag I said in her manuscript. Many of the substitutions magnified a kind of servile femininity: I pleaded, I confessed, I admitted, I bustled, I apologized. “As in,” Suzanne wrote, “‘I’m sorry,’ I apologized.”

“Every time the word bustle comes up,” wrote Kate, “we’re doing a shot of tequila.”

“I need to read Trespass,” wrote Suzanne.

In Desert Cabal, Irvine writes about the precautions she takes as a woman, including giving careful thought to what she drinks and with whom. She writes about the ways her life—the life of a white, culturally and economically privileged woman—is often in jeopardy in the wild. Especially when she’s in the company of men.

I returned to an earlier moment in our conversation—“There’s so little quotidian honesty in nature writing during that generation”—and started my own contrarian environmental-lit list. Several books by contemporary writers do pay significantly more attention to the realities of domestic life than I’ve seen in previous generations. For The Book of Delights, Ross Gay wrote small daily essays about things that delighted him in the everyday world. At some point, he even describes someone doing the dishes. And I know of at least two places in Deep Creek where Pam Houston shares her shopping lists, including what she planned to prepare for her housemates at dinner. Gay and Houston write of lives surrounded by both nature and people. Though they are sometimes prone to ecstatic reveries, they also deliver instruction on how to live in the occasionally brutal landscape of our world. In Gay’s case: in a Black man’s body. In Houston’s: as a white woman and survivor of childhood abuse.

[Read: Environmentalism was once a social-justice movement]

“Maybe what I’m missing particularly is the parenting aspect,” I told Kate and Suzanne. “Child-free writers versus mothers.” The routine tasks that consume a parent. I wasn’t reading about what keeps me from writing one small essay a day.

I’m not judging the reasons a person might not be a parent, or why they might not write about motherhood even if they do have a child. I’m being honest in my own writing about that for which I hunger.

Even though they aren’t mothers themselves, Suzanne and Kate admitted an interest in such stories. “I think Ellen Meloy and Eva Saulitis both write with quotidian honesty,” wrote Suzanne. “But as you say, both were childless. You have me running to my bookshelves!”

We have to deliberately search out these books, because the environmental imagination we were trained in did not admit children, or the women who raise them, into the canon of work about the wild. Just as something in that same imagination had not admitted Black writers.

But it’s not hard to find writers who defy such limiting narratives. In more than one of her nonfiction books, Barbara Kingsolver writes about the family garden and her children. Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book), which she published in 1999, begins with a gift of gardening tools she received on Mother’s Day. In 2013’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer reimagines the ways we might interact with the greater-than-human world. She also writes about lessons she learns as a mother. And in World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, published in 2020, Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes about the family she creates with her husband almost as much as she writes about her own childhood and family of origin. Still, what’s the old saying? The exceptions prove the rule.

I didn’t write anything else to Kate and Suzanne about books that followed or resisted the limitations of this genre, because I got caught up preparing and serving my family’s dinner. Then the nighttime rituals: combing and braiding my daughter’s hair; asking, “Did you brush your teeth and wash your face?”; removing still-unfolded laundry from the bed so she could sleep. The thicket of human happenings—a different kind of woods. Suzanne wrote, “Nothing more natural in humans than the messiness of giving birth. She bustled.”

“Drink up, sister!” wrote Kate.

I may or may not have had a drink that night. I didn’t write it down. What I know is that in the rush before picking my daughter up the next day, I threw a handful of fruit into a smoothie, without turning off the blender’s blades.

Next in the text chain: a photo of my cabinets coated in vegetal goo. Instead of following up on ideas I shared with my friends or cutting back the winter scrabble that wilded our March garden, I focused on cleaning the kitchen walls and cabinets and floors.

I couldn’t draft a text in the same way as so many old, white, mostly male nature writers. Not on a morning like that. I couldn’t look away from the messiness. I wouldn’t want to erase the goo, or my girl, or my Black hands scrubbing our kitchen from my account of the wild world I so deeply love.

This essay has been adapted from Camille T. Dungy’s forthcoming book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.

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Kevin McCarthy has begun his job as speaker by servicing the demands of the most extreme—and weirdest—members who supported him, thus handing the People’s House to the Clown Caucus.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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The Ringmaster

Now controlled by its most unhinged members, the Republican Party has returned to power in the People’s House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the ringmaster of this circus, is happily paying off his debts by engaging in petty payback, conjuring up inane committees, threatening to crash the U.S. economy, and protecting a walking monument to fraud named George Santos, who may or may not actually be named “George Santos.”

In the enduring words of Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Politics, in Washington or anywhere else, is about deals. No one should have expected McCarthy to make his way to the gavel without signing a few ugly promissory notes along the way. Sometimes, friends are betrayed and enemies are elevated; an important project can end up taking a back seat to a boondoggle. Just ask Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, who got pushed out of the chairmanship of Ways and Means in favor of Jason Smith of Missouri, a choice preferred by the MAGA caucus. “You fucked me,” he reportedly said to at McCarthy on the floor of the House. “I know it was you, you whipped against me.” Buchanan, a source on the House floor told Tara Palmeri at Puck, was so angry that the speaker’s security people were about to step in. (McCarthy’s office denies that this happened.)

It’s one thing to pay political debts, even the kind that McCarthy accepted despite their steep and humiliating vig. It’s another to hand off control of crucial issues to a claque of clowns who have no idea what they’re doing and are willing to harm the national security of the United States as long as it suits their political purposes.

Let us leave aside the removal of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee. The republic will not rise or fall based on such things, and if McCarthy wants to engage in snippy stoogery to ingratiate himself with the MAGA caucus and soothe Donald Trump’s hurt feelings, it is within his power to do so. In his letter to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the speaker claimed his decision was all about “integrity.” This is not just the death of irony; it is a North Korean–style, firing-squad-by-anti-aircraft-gun execution of irony. Worse, McCarthy even has the right to channel, as he did, Joseph McCarthy, and smear Swalwell by alluding to derogatory information that the FBI supposedly has about him. It might not be honorable or professional, but he can do it.

McCarthy’s shuffle of the Intelligence Committee pales in comparison to the creation of two new committees, both of which were part of the Filene’s Basement clearance of the new speaker’s political soul. One of them, on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of the Republican assault on science that predated Trump but reached new heights with the former president’s disjointed gibbering about bleach injections. The committee will include the conspiracy theorist and McCarthy’s new best friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ronny Jackson of Texas, the former White House physician who assured us in 2018 that Trump only weighed 239 pounds and was in astoundingly good health.

The COVID committee is unlikely to move the needle (if you’ll pardon the expression) on public health. No one’s mind will be changed if Jackson and Tucker Carlson bloviate to each other about things neither of them really believes. Most of the damage from such a committee will likely be concentrated among the vaccine refusers, who already seem determined to get sick and die to make a political point.

The “weaponization” committee is worse, and likely to do far more damage to the United States, because it is starting from the premise that the machinery of the United States government—law enforcement, the intelligence community, and federal agencies—has been turned against the average American citizen. Jim Jordan, who stands out even in this GOP for his partisan recklessness, will serve as chair. The committee will include members whom I think of as the “You-Know-Better-Than-This Caucus”: people with top-flight educations and enough experience to know that Jordan is a crank, but who nevertheless will support attacks on American institutions if that’s what it takes to avoid being sent back home to live among their constituents. Two standouts here are Thomas Massie (an MIT graduate who apparently majored in alchemy and astrology), and the ever-reliable Elise Stefanik (Harvard), whose political hemoglobin is now composed of equal parts cynicism and antifreeze.

The committee will include other monuments to probity, such as Chip Roy; Dan Bishop, who has claimed that the 2020 election was rigged; Harriet Hageman, the woman who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming; and Kat Cammack of Florida, who alleged that Democrats were drinking on the House floor during the speakership fight. All of them will have access to highly sensitive information from across the U.S. government.

Jordan and his posse are styling themselves as a new Church Committee, the 1975 investigation into the Cold War misdeeds of American intelligence organizations headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church. This dishonors Church, whose committee uncovered genuinely shocking abuses by agencies that had for too long escaped oversight during the early days of the struggle with the Soviet Union. Church himself was a patriot, unlike some of the charlatans on this new committee, but even Church’s investigation did at least some damage with its revelations, and some of the reforms (especially the move away from relying on human intelligence) undertaken later based in part on its findings were unwise. In any case, his fame was short-lived: He was defeated for reelection in 1980 and died in 1984. (Full disclosure: I spoke at a conference held in Church’s honor many years ago and met with his widow.)

The Church Committee was, in its day, a necessary walk across the hot coals for Americans who had invested too much power and trust in the executive branch. I suspect that the Jordan committee will not look to uncover abuses, but rather to portray any government actions that it does not like as abuses, especially the investigations into Trump. It will be the Church Committee turned on its head, as members of Congress seek to protect a lawless president by destroying the agencies that stand between our democracy and his ambitions.

Kevin McCarthy will be fine with all of it, as long as he gets to wear the top hat and red tails while indulging in the fantasy that he is in control of the clowns and wild animals, and not the other way around.

Related:

Speaker in name only Why Kevin McCarthy can’t lose George Santos

Today’s News

President Joe Biden announced that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and Germany announced that it would send an initial shipment of 14 Leopard 2 tanks. The arraignment of the suspect in the Half Moon Bay, California, mass shooting was postponed until Feb. 16. School officials were warned on three separate occasions that a 6-year-old who later shot his first-grade teacher in Virginia had a gun or had made threats, according to an attorney for the teacher.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Public outrage hasn’t improved policing, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

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Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

Why the French Want to Stop Working

By Pamela Druckerman

If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris.

“Retirement before arthritis” read one handwritten sign. “Leave us time to live before we die” said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the beans!” he exclaimed to the crowd, using a popular expression to mean that pension reform is the last straw.

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P.S.

The Church Committee revealed outrages (including assassination plots) that today might seem like they were taken from bad spy-movie scripts. But such things were deadly serious business, as the United States moved from World War II into the Cold War determined to do whatever it took to defeat Soviet communism. For decades, Americans romanticized spies and spying as glamorous and exciting, but in reality, espionage was a nasty business. Our British cousins knew this better than we did, which is why British spy fiction was always grittier than its American counterpart. (The James Bond novels are pretty dour, sometimes even sadistic; Hollywood cleaned them up.)

But just because we lost our innocence about spying doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the culture it produced back in the day. In that spirit, let me recommend to you Secret Agent, an offering on a wonderful, listener-supported San Francisco–based internet radio station called SomaFM. There are plenty of great channels on SomaFM—I especially like Left Coast 70s, which is just what it sounds like—but Secret Agent is a lot of fun, a mixture of 1960s lounge and light jazz, soundtracks, and other tidbits, with the occasional line from 007 and other spies spliced in here and there. It’s a nice throwback to the days when espionage was cool, and it’s great music for working or a get-together over martinis, which should be shaken and … well, you know.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.