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After a chaotic summer of air travel in 2022, flights have been running relatively smoothly this year. But then storms in the Northeast this past week caused a series of flight cancellations. Here’s what to expect as the country heads into a projected record-high travel weekend—and how to keep your cool amidst air-travel unknowns.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Being alive is bad for your health. Elite multiculturalism is over. Dave Grohl’s monument to mortality How to lose a century of progress

First Snag of the Season

An airport concourse after midnight is not a happy place: The travelers—bone-tired, their anticipation curdled into boredom and despair—rest their weary heads on benches and jackets. The restaurants have turned off their lights; the newsstands have pulled down their grates; the bars have flipped up their stools for the night.

Until this week, it appeared as if many Americans would be spared such indignities this travel season. Flight cancellations were down from last summer, and Memorial Day weekend went off with few travel hitches. After a summer of pain last year, when airlines and airports buckled under demand from travelers, and chaos last winter, when weather and tech problems snowballed into a yuletide imbroglio, things were going pretty smoothly.

In June of last year, 2.7 percent of flights were canceled, whereas 1.9 percent of flights have been canceled this month so far (that number may change after cancellations today), Kathleen Bangs, a spokesperson for FlightAware, a company that tracks flights, told me. Although that difference might not sound like a lot, Bangs said, travelers feel the difference. She added that delays have gone up slightly, from 24 percent last June to 26 percent this June.

Then, last weekend, storms hit the Northeast. Cancellations and delays spiked as weather issues collided with established staffing and operational issues. “Last weekend was the first real snag of the season,” Bangs said. Airlines canceled thousands of flights this week—more than 8 percent of scheduled flights were canceled on Tuesday, according to FlightAware—ahead of what is projected to be the busiest Fourth of July travel weekend on record. “Did weather start it? Yes. Why it caused a cascade for them, we just don’t know,” Bangs added.

Various parties are pointing fingers. United, which canceled more than 3,000 flights this past week, according to FlightAware, was quick to blame the Federal Aviation Administration for some of its woes. “The FAA frankly failed us this weekend,” United’s CEO reportedly wrote in a memo to staff. In an email, United told me that it is ready for the holiday weekend and is seeing far fewer delays today than in previous days this week.

“There’s shared responsibility between Mother Nature, the airline’s own actions, and the FAA,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst for Atmosphere Research Group, told me. “The FAA is not the sole cause and shouldn’t be made out to be the bogeyman.” It doesn’t help matters that we are at the end of a calendar month, when pilots and flight attendants may be running up against their maximum flying hours, he added.

Indeed, the FAA is currently quite understaffed—though it has said that it did not have staffing issues along the East Coast on Monday or Tuesday of this week. The FAA told me that it hires controllers annually and is hiring 1,500 people this year, adding that it recently completed a review of the distribution of controllers. (Republic and Endeavor, a subsidiary of Delta, also saw high rates of cancellations, according to FlightAware. Republic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Delta told me that “as always, Delta and our connection partners work with our partners at the FAA to meet our shared top priority of safety, while running the most efficient operation possible for our customers.”)

The good news is that, after a few rough days, operations were recovering by yesterday. There were fewer flight cancellations that day compared with the ones leading up to it. Things may go okay for the airlines from here—“barring a computer meltdown,” Bangs said—as long as the weather cooperates. She added that even dense smoke could impact visibility and operations. That could remain an issue this summer as fires continue both in the U.S. and Canada.

Travelers cannot control acts of God—if only!—or airline-personnel issues. Indeed, what can be so frustrating about air travel is that so many factors are out of your control. But there are things travelers can do to try to avoid problems—or at least to increase the chances of having a decently comfortable time in the face of all the unknowns.

Bangs told me that if she were flying this weekend, she would try to get on the first flight of the day. “Statistically, there’s such a better chance of that flight not getting canceled,” she said. Harteveldt echoed that advice. If it’s doable for you, Bangs said, it could be worth looking into trying to change your booking to get on an earlier flight—or switching to a direct flight in order to reduce the chance of one leg of a trip messing up connecting flights. Also, download your airline’s app. It’s an easy way to make sure you have up-to-date info and can communicate with the airline in case things go awry.

Some of their other tips came down to preparation and attitude: It might be rough out there. Wake up early, pack light, and have your necessities consolidated in case you need to check a carry-on. Lines may be long at security. Give yourself time, and be flexible.

Bangs’s final tip: Be nice to flight attendants. Bangs, a former pilot, said that many flight attendants are scarred from “air rage” and difficult passenger interactions over the past few years. Though an airplane can be the site of frustration, seat kickers, and nonpotable water, it is also a place of work for people who have been through a lot. Be cool, everyone. And good luck if you’re traveling.

Related:

Air travel is a disaster right now. Here’s why. (From 2022) Air travel is going to be very bad, for a very long time.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s student-debt-relief plan, arguing that it overstepped the Education Department’s authority and required clear approval from Congress. Poor air quality is still affecting American cities, with experts warning that northern summer winds could continue to bring smoke from Canadian wildfires all season. Brazil’s electoral court voted to ban Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for the next eight years on account of making false claims about voting-system integrity.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf solicits readers’ thoughts on affirmative action. The Books Briefing: Anyone looking for a guide to surviving our unstable era should look no further than the work of Eileen Chang, Maya Chung writes.

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More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Read. Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad expands upon the history of the Black Americans who nurtured their creativity overseas.

Watch. The second season of The Bear (streaming on Hulu) cements it as the rare prestige show that actually succeeds at radical reinvention.

Or check out these 11 undersung TV shows to watch this summer.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you plan to play pickleball this weekend, be careful: Analysts found that pickleball injuries may cost Americans nearly $400 million this year, and picklers appear to be driving up health-care costs.

The sport has grown massively over the past few years and is projected to keep growing. Many people love the sport, and I myself have enjoyed a bit of pickle from time to time. But not everyone is a fan. The game has notably angered many tennis players, and The New York Times reported today that people have been filing lawsuits complaining about the game’s noises. “The most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-pop emanating from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball courts,” the reporter Andrew Keh writes.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Over breakfast yesterday, I read that physicists had discovered a sonic hum perhaps caused by enormous objects like black holes converging and rippling the space-time continuum. I grew up in my grandparents’ railroad apartment in South Brooklyn, and now live a life that stuns me with its privilege and creative freedom—I’m someone who thinks a lot about space and time, and how one traverses them. The idea of the ripples intrigued me: For a moment, I fantasized about my alternative futures. If I were born today, what might I become?

In the early morning, any future seemed possible. By lunch, after the Supreme Court had struck down affirmative action in college admissions, that was no longer true. The time of infinite possibility for a Latina from a low-income background like me was over. At least in this space called America.

When you’re an “other” at a predominantly white, elite institution, you share the knowledge that this place was not created for someone like you, no matter how welcome you might be now. Your presence relies on someone before you being the first—the first African American student, the first Latino, the first Asian American. This knowledge creates cross-cultural affinities—alliances and bonds among races and ethnicities that might not exist in any other setting. An understanding is born: We are all here, though our grandparents could not be. How can we be here for one another?

Almost immediately, texts began coming in from my college friends. One, a Latina who’d grown up in a New York City housing project and was the first in her family to attend college, proclaimed numbness, insisting she’d long ago lost faith in institutions, only to later admit that she was just pretending to feel that way as a form of self-protection. Another first-generation classmate, an Asian American woman from the Midwest, was distraught. “The entirety of what made you and me feel connected is like a separate universe now,” she said.

I went to Brown in the mid-’90s, when the minority-student population was so small that we had little choice but to stick together. At that time, I didn’t realize that I would spend my life navigating white power structures; I thought the challenges of life at Brown were just a temporary discomfort. A discomfort that I weathered with the help of my friends: Black, Latino, Afro-Latino, East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Native American. Our shared resources—deans, campus space for cultural clubs, access to public computers—were limited, but our support for one another was bountiful. During Black History Month, or Latino Heritage Month, or the annual Legends of the SEA (Southeast Asian) dance performance, we could count on our collective minority community to turn out. Every Friday was Unity Day at the minority-student center, and we danced and snacked and gossiped together.

The blow of the ruling, of the way it will deny access by denying the existence of racism, was made more painful by how it happened. The cases relied on the cynical recruitment of a handful of aggrieved Asian American plaintiffs who felt, alongside white plaintiffs, that less-qualified Black and Latino students were taking their spots. After this decision, The New York Times reported, “campuses of elite institutions would become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.” There it was, in black and white: We were all to be pitted against one another.

Young people of color aren’t just losing or gaining “spots”; they’re losing that multicultural community that once meant so much to me. Diversity will dwindle, but so too will the sense of shared grace that students of color extended to one another in these white spaces.

I did not deserve, on paper, to go to Brown. I had a perfect GPA in high school, but so did plenty of others who applied. I took what AP courses my public high school offered, which turned out, in the scheme of things, to be limited. I’d crushed my PSATs only to find myself crushed (twice) by the real thing. I was passionate about a handful of extracurriculars. Yet what I had and what they saw in me must have made me a good fit for their Open Curriculum: intense curiosity and the drive to act on it. I had not, like most of my classmates who’d gone through rigorous preparatory schools or well-funded suburban public ones, been “bred” to go to a school like Brown. But because of affirmative action, the admissions office looked past this imperfect pedigree, and saw me not for my limited experience in this elite arena, but for my possibility.

Like most things white society does for minorities, the concession came with a cost. It stung to have to endure—at the tender age of 17, when I was admitted (early, no less)—accusations from white students in my honors classes of having “used my ethnicity” to “take a spot.” In the beginning, it was hard to overcome this sense of needing to prove myself, to prove that I deserved my place there. But I chose to see it this way: Brown had taken a chance on me and I had taken a chance on Brown. For all parties, the gamble paid off.

I say I took a chance on Brown because there were easier paths. I could have gone full ride to any number of wonderful New York State or City schools, or even smaller private ones. I could have gone to a college where minority cultures were integral and not peripheral to campus life. Instead I went to Brown, a place that had taken 223 years to graduate a mere 100 Latinos. I took a chance and moved to Providence, and what I got in return was an expanded view of the world. An understanding of capital in all its forms. Entrée into spaces—whether or not people like to admit it—that only institutions like Ivies provide.

Above all, I gained from college a new sense of community and its importance. Yes, some of us were raised to go to places like Brown and others were not, but what we shared were curiosity, ambition—a desire to understand, and possibly better, the world. These are qualities that I still seek out in friends and colleagues.

But the gamble of affirmative action also benefited my alma mater—and all the predominantly white, elite institutions whose very DNA was changed by the practice. Though Clarence Thomas has clearly never gotten over what some see as the “stigma” of affirmative action, I certainly did. The same way that my worldview was expanded at Brown, the presence of minority students expanded the worldviews of our classmates.

We pretend we live in an equal and integrated society despite increased segregation over the past generation in our neighborhoods and our schools. A 2014 study found that three-quarters of white people didn’t have a single nonwhite friend. For many of my white classmates, college was their first chance to have meaningful relationships with a person from a different background. They participated—by force or by choice—in difficult conversations in dorm rooms about money or noise, and in classrooms about different assumptions. They were introduced to other cultures—salsa, banda, stepping, bhangra. In so many ways, the growing presence of people of color improved the “enrichment experience” for everyone around us.

Today, when I speak with minority students about imposter syndrome, I remind them that they are doing a service. They will likely be the only nonwhite friend most of their white college friends have for the rest of their life. I know that I am.

It may seem that this ruling affects only the most prestigious schools and the annoying overachievers who want to attend them. “Who cares?” you might ask. “If these kids have enough ganas, they can do just fine going to any school.” And to that I could reply: Eight out of the nine justices who just made this decision went to Ivies for undergraduate or law school (nine out of nine if we widen the category to “elite private schools”).

But even more important is the effect that diversity has on the research that elite institutions create. I have met many Latino academics, all probably products of affirmative action at some level, who simply did not exist in academia when I was in college. Their work on Latino health, voting patterns, emotional trauma, and other topics isn’t just good scholarship. It’s publicly accessible information that journalists like me can rely on to buttress a more expansive cultural conversation. Other minority researchers are studying unequal access to medical care, environmental racism, and the class disparities of health crises like long COVID. Affirmative action was designed to benefit minorities, but as America careens toward becoming a majority-minority nation, it has, in ways great and small, benefited us all.      

I am about to celebrate my 25th college reunion. Of its Ivy League peers, Brown is probably known as the most bohemian. But when it does tradition, it does it very well. Reunions

and commencement happen concurrently and involve a tradition called “the inverted sock.” The alumni cross our campus gates, oldest to youngest, lining the street all the way down to the church where the undergraduates have their ceremony. And when the graduates come out, the alumni all parade past them.

It is a way of paying tribute. Of creating a sense of lineage. But it is also like counting the rings of a very old tree. You can see when the school became co-ed—the women marching with Brown banners instead of Pembroke ones. And you can see the effects of affirmative action, as each reunion class that walks through those wrought-iron gates becomes more reflective not of white power, but of America. Immigrants, and the sons and daughters of immigrants, and descendants of slaves walking side by side—and having equal thoughts and potential and merit—with the descendants of slave owners.

I hate to think that, 25 years from now, watching that procession, our diversity and excellence will seem but a blip, and fade away in the ripples of time.

When caring for two toddlers during the pandemic felt impossible, I took solace in knowing that raising children used to be considerably more difficult. During the early 20th century, infectious organisms in tainted food or fetid water exacted a frightening toll on children; in some places, up to 30 percent died before their first birthday. In those days, there was often little more to offer children suffering from dehydration and diarrhea than milk teeming with harmful bacteria or so-called soothing syrups laced with morphine and alcohol.

Since then, deaths during childhood went from commonplace to rare. Partly as a result, the average human life span doubled, granting us, on average, the equivalent of a whole extra life to live. The field of public health is primarily responsible for this exceptional achievement.

Medicine revolves around the care of individual patients; public health, by contrast, works to protect and improve the health of entire populations, whether small communities or large countries. This encompasses researching how to prevent injuries, developing policies to address health disparities, and, of course, tackling disease outbreaks.

George Whipple, a co-founder of the Harvard School of Public Health, proclaimed in 1914 in The Atlantic that “one of the greatest events of the dawning twentieth century is the triumph of man over his microscopic foes.” Even he’d likely be shocked by the success of public health over the past century.

[From the May 1914 issue: The broadening science of sanitation]

But as the coronavirus pandemic wanes, the field of public health has come under a barrage of criticism. Some are calling to curtail the field’s power. Even many of public health’s strongest proponents are disappointed with how the profession navigated the pandemic.

While it is essential to learn from mistakes of the recent past, such rhetoric could have awful consequences. Our public-health workforce is already burdened by massive attrition. Simultaneously, a growing body of legislation and litigation is chipping away at public health’s ability to address current and future health threats. Politicians have accused health experts of being “wrong about almost everything” during the pandemic. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican who fundraised his reelection bid with “#FireFauci” ads, introduced a bill to eliminate the position that Anthony Fauci recently left at the National Institutes of Health and to split the agency in three.

Public health wasn’t perfect during the pandemic; it never has been. But its remarkable track record—on the provision of clean water, prevention of childhood lead poisoning, tobacco-cessation programs, vaccine development and promotion, and much more—has driven unprecedented gains in better health and life expectancy worldwide. Public health saves lives, and is an essential component of protecting and improving our collective health.

Exacting revenge on the field following a devastating pandemic may feel satisfying to some people, but curtailing public health’s programs, credibility, and funding will not help anyone. What it will do is put a century of progress at risk.

I understand why the backlash has been so intense. There were errors at many steps. The CDC botched testing for SARS-CoV-2 early in 2020, delaying our ability to track the virus from day one. Much of the communication about masks and vaccines from public-health officials was unclear and unhelpful. We too often failed to put our best public-health knowledge to use in schools to keep kids learning while reducing spread, leading to closures that went on far longer than necessary; at bars and restaurants down the block, meanwhile, life continued as normal. The full extent of the damage done to a generation of students will not be known for years to come.

But at the same time, while critics love to talk about everything public health got wrong throughout the pandemic, they rarely stop to recognize all that it got right—and under truly challenging circumstances. For example, when asked to reflect on the COVID-19-vaccine rollout, many will note the confusion about eligibility or countless hours spent frantically clicking “Refresh” on appointment sites. But the fact is that in just six months, almost half of the U.S. population got vaccinated. As a health-care provider, I can say that the effects were dramatic: We quickly saw fewer and fewer patients arriving with severe illness. The phenomenal achievement of the vaccination rollout—coordinated by federal, state, and local public-health agencies—averted millions of deaths from COVID-19 to date and serves as a blueprint for how to mobilize mass-vaccination campaigns in the future.

[Read: 23 pandemic decisions that actually went right]

Rapid antigen testing feels routine now, but consider how widespread and accessible it became, and how quickly. For the first time, people are able to easily diagnose a respiratory infection at home without a doctor, helping prevent spread and avoiding unnecessary office visits. At the outset of the pandemic, we relied on time-consuming, expensive, and severely limited PCR tests. Within months, at-home tests were approved, and now hundreds of millions have been produced, shipped, and used across the country. This helped improve timely access to antivirals such as Paxlovid, which saved more lives yet. And the lessons learned from using rapid tests in this pandemic will help bolster preparedness and response in future disease outbreaks. Additionally, at-home rapid tests for other respiratory pathogens, such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, are on the immediate horizon.

The tendency to focus on public health’s slipups rather than its successes is not new. Americans have long undervalued public health: We almost never have to question if the food we consume or the medicines we’re prescribed will inadvertently sicken us and send us to the hospital. This disconnect between what we value and what truly benefits us becomes clearer when we compare public health with the field of medicine.

Throughout the pandemic, while public-health officials were met with pitchforks—forced out of their job or taunted with death threats—health-care providers (like myself) were applauded with pots and pans, in recognition of the challenges we faced on COVID’s front lines.

This is a classically American pattern. Public health is focused on the health of communities; medicine, on individuals. Almost all of the more than $4 trillion spent on health care annually supports individual patient care, with only 4 percent of funding going to public health. This is strikingly inefficient and helps explain why the U.S. has one of the lowest life expectancies and the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality among high-income nations.

Armed with a growing array of treatments and diagnostic tools, medicine has gotten much better at treating infections. But it can still do very little to stop a novel pandemic, and in March 2020, its ability to save lives from COVID wasn’t markedly better than during the 1918 influenza pandemic. America needs a robust field of public health to do what medicine cannot: keep people safe from emerging pathogens, environmental toxins, and gun violence. Medicine can treat people who are sick, but only public health can preserve their health in the first place.

It’s easy to assume that progress in public health is linear, and that over time the world’s population will only get healthier. But we’re witnessing profound challenges that may turn back the field’s achievements.

In 1972, the Noble-laureate immunologist Macfarlane Burnet predicted, “The most likely forecast about the future of infectious disease is that it will be very dull.” His optimism seemed justified in 1980, when the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated.

But the triumph over microbes was short-lived. In 1981, a CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report outlined the first five cases of what would eventually be called HIV/AIDs, a global pandemic that has since killed 40 million people worldwide. More recently, outbreaks of measles, polio, and other diseases most of us know only from playing Oregon Trail pose new threats and challenges. Syphilis cases in the U.S. are at their highest level in 70 years.

The anger directed at public health following the pandemic could further weaken the field, accelerating this backslide. Dozens of states have implemented restrictions on public-health powers, intended to limit what politicians regard as the field’s overreach during the pandemic. This means greater gatekeeping and restrictions on the role of public-health authorities by politicians, a flawed and problematic setup in the midst of crises.

The problem isn’t coming only from politicians. A judge recently overturned the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the first time a judicial appointee overruled the national authority on drug safety, which could open a challenge to all medications, vaccines, foods, and other products regulated by the FDA. Before the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act—the progenitor of our FDA—there was virtually no regulation of patented medicines or other “treatments” sold for a variety of illnesses. Many contained toxic chemicals and addictive substances, or were dangerously misbranded.

[From the May 2021 issue: You won’t remember the pandemic the way you think you will]

And another judge recently struck down a mandate that required private-health insurers to provide free preventive services. (Earlier this month, the Department of Justice reached a tentative deal to preserve preventive services while the legal case proceeds.) Such rulings would threaten access to mammograms, pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, and other basic health care for nearly 150 million Americans. The U.S. is already last in preventable deaths among 16 high-income nations, and the loss of preventive services will only make an already dismal situation worse.

If what we desire is a better response to future outbreaks and health threats, we must all—adversaries and advocates alike—push for a stronger, bolder, and better-resourced field of public health. In denouncing the failed policies of U.S. pandemic response, critics frequently point to Sweden as an exemplar of success during the COVID pandemic. Rarely do they point out that its public health-care system is one of the most robust and well resourced in the world.

In 1903 C.-E. A. Winslow—who created the standard definition of public health and founded what would become the Yale School of Public Health—wrote in The Atlantic that “immunity from certain diseases is accepted, like the sun­shine, without thought, by a generation which has not felt their incidence; and this condition has its dangerous side, for it leads often to a neglect of the pre­cautions necessary to retain the advan­tages won.”

The same sentiment can be applied to how public health more broadly is appreciated—or rather underappreciated—today.

You don’t need to recognize everything public health does for you in the background; it is used to being ignored. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, one of the greatest global public-health initiatives since smallpox eradication, just celebrated its 20th anniversary with almost no public recognition, despite saving tens of millions of lives around the globe.

But Americans must make sure that public health keeps working, even if it remains unnoticed. It’s how you know that the cauliflower at the supermarket isn’t crawling with Cyclospora or that the water from your faucet won’t keep your children from seeing their first birthday. We’re lucky we haven’t had to think about it, but that doesn’t mean we can take it for granted.