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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.

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.