This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Olivia Rodrigo’s big, bloody return The Biden White House is following an ugly Trump precedent. The juicy secrets of everyday life

Culture Break

Bettmann / Getty

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.

It is unnerving to know you are living in history. In the past decade, as words I’d first encountered in books erupted into my daily lexicon—words like fascism, global pandemic, and ecological disaster—then settled, with alarming speed, into the static of how things are, I have often felt dizzy and uncertain of how to live. I have felt, as the writer Eileen Chang once wrote, like my everyday life “is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree.”

Sometimes I have consoled myself with what feels like the exceptionalism of our present instability. Has the pace of change—social, political, ecological, technological—ever moved with such hallucinatory, destructive intensity? But this consolation doesn’t reach the more urgent question: While I am being hurled into the scary future, what am I supposed to do about breakfast, and vacuuming, and laundry? When I feel caught like this, between the tidal tug of the times and the calls of my small but pressing life, reading a writer like Chang is what brings me true comfort.

Zhang Ailing, also known as Eileen Chang, became a literary wunderkind in her native Shanghai for her stylish and slyly observant stories of city love affairs and romances—“some of the trivial things that happen between men and women,” as she put it, with characteristic understatement—before falling into obscurity after the 1949 Revolution, when she and her work were no longer welcome in mainland China. She was later rediscovered by Taiwanese and Hong Kong readers.

The facts of her historical era serve a healthy dose of humility to my own sense of contemporary tumult: As Chang was coming of age, competing warlords were still trampling the grave of the Qing dynasty. China was fighting the invading Japanese while also embroiled in a civil war. Mao’s Communist rebels were marching steadily in the provinces, preparing to overturn everything. Elsewhere, World War II was raging. All of this historical noise flickers in the background of Chang’s writing—and if you look closely, informs its very core—but somehow, her eye remains determinedly trained on the individual human life, catching and examining those fluttering bits of reality that the tides of history threaten to wash away. A new edition of her early essays, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (and edited by Jones and Nicole Huang), captures Chang’s irreverent voice and her stubborn everyday sensibility. This sensibility, powered by a modest humanism and formed by a subtle and heartbreaking discipline, has become my manual for surviving history.

In 1944, when Written on Water was first published, Shanghai was a city of commerce and fashion and unwilling political entanglement. China’s most cosmopolitan city because it was chopped up for foreign concessions after the first Opium War, Shanghai to this day has a reputation for “mean” and savvy people who know “how to fish in troubled waters,” as Chang wrote. Like many Shanghainese, Chang herself was a “traditional Chinese [person] tempered by the high pressure of modern life,” one of many “misshapen products” of a place where so many ideologies, cultures, and trends met and clashed and melded.

Her life, too, was misshapen by the wild instability of her time. In “Whispers,” Chang divulges that her father, once a favored aristocrat in the Qing dynasty court, was an opium addict who ruled dictatorially over his wife, concubines, and children. Once, he punished Chang by locking her in a room for months, refusing her medical treatment even when she got dysentery; only with the help of a servant did she escape that room, and that household, one “cold bitter” night. Her mother, a bourgeois woman who preferred all things European, left Chang with her father for years at a time while she traveled. Later, when Chang was a student at the University of Hong Kong, the arrival of Japanese bombers cut her studies short, forcing her to return to Shanghai. She was only in Hong Kong at all because the world war had made university in London an impossibility.

But what is captured in these essays is not Chang’s life so much as her way of living and seeing. These are dashes of vivid observation, sketches of whatever Chang happens to want to write about: movies, money, her friends’ favorite sayings. Take “On Carrots,” a two-paragraph transcription of a memory her aunt once recounted over a meal of turnip soup, about Granny feeding carrots to the pet cricket, which Chang thought a “stylish little essay.” Or “Under an Umbrella,” a bite-size riff on a rainy day that doubles as a parable about class. “Those who don’t have an umbrella press against those who do, squeezing beneath the edges of passing umbrellas to avoid the rain,” she writes. “But the water cascading from the umbrellas turns out to be worse than the rain itself and the people squeezed between umbrellas are soaked to the skin.” Her crisp moral? “When poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked.”

Then there is the structurally fascinating “Epilogue: Days and Nights of China,” which follows the writer step by step on a walk to the vegetable market. Chang describes in fastidious detail the interesting people she passes on her way, as if transcribing one of the lively character drawings interspersed throughout the book (“a tangerine seller,” “a Taoist monk,” “a servant woman”). Then she goes home, writes a poem, and the essay—and the book—ends.

Written on Water evokes a lyric Chinese conception of ephemerality while also alluding to Keats (his gravestone reads “Whose name was writ in water”). As Huang writes in an afterword, the title came to Chang in English first. But for me, it can’t capture the barbed playfulness of the Chinese, 流言 (Liu Yan), which translates to “flowing words” but also means “gossip.” Indeed, Chang relished any occasion to take a “stealthy glance at one another’s private lives.” She declared, “The secrets of everyday life must be made public at least once a year.” She thought literature should “plainly sing in praise of the placid.” She preferred the “noise and clatter” of city streets to “rousing” symphonies. She wished historians would write more about “irrelevant trivialities.”

With this assertion, she opens “From the Ashes,” her account of the Battle of Hong Kong, Japan’s December 1941 attack on the then–British colony. In the essay, Chang recalls surviving weeks of shelling and unhappily volunteering as a makeshift nurse. But what she foregrounds is a string of almost devastatingly flippant observations: the “wealthy overseas Chinese” dorm mate who’d packed clothes for dances and dinner parties but didn’t know what to wear for a war; “hardy” Evelyn who stuffed herself with more rice than ever while rations ran out, and then got constipated; defiant Yanying—“the only one of my classmates who had any guts”—who left the basement to take a bath, singing even as a stray bullet shattered the window. These anecdotes are told with amusement and some gentle mocking, but also with admiration: Here are people who, in a literal war zone, insisted on the small pleasures of living.

Chang defended her trivial stories against those who might wish them more heroic. Ordinary people going about their lives, falling in love, and acting on petty fancies might not make a “monument to an era,” but, she wrote, “people are more straightforward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution.” Chang had no desire to write about “supermen,” who “are born of specific epochs.” Why, when the “eternal”—the grist of daily life that is the only true stability—was right there? She understood the contradiction in her belief: that although everyday life is fundamentally “precarious,” “subject at regular intervals to destruction,” it is also the material from which springs the truly human, and the divine. (Also: “Chest-pounding, wildly gesticulating heroes are annoying.”)

[Read: Great sex in the time of war]

I read in Chang’s determined apolitical gaze a transgressive, feminine ethos. For a great deal of history—and still, amazingly, today—men have shaped epochs, with their empires and conquests. Meanwhile, women have sustained the reality that is accrued in days: going to the market, mending garments, cooking and cleaning, carrying and caring for the people who are coming next. In “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” Chang documents the passing fashion fads—collars rising then disappearing, necklines going from square to round to heart-shaped—as “warlords came and went.” Chang loved clothes and designed many of her own. Fashion is decidedly trivial, and Chang’s interest in it is a powerful aspect of her “misshapen” morality, one way of insisting on something minorly meaningful in a world of constantly shifting values. Buffeted from place to place by war, Chang could control little of her external circumstances, but she could decide, every day, what to wear.

“Each of us lives inside our own clothes,” she writes. We live inside our clothes; we live inside our days. Imagined as a container for life itself, the vanities of fashion gain urgent moral significance. In this light, the dullness of menswear can be seen as a form of depravity: “If men were more interested in clothing,” Chang writes, they might be “a bit less inclined to use various schemes and stratagems to attract the attention and admiration of society and sacrifice the well-being of the nation and the people in the process of securing their own prestige.” Think of the uniforms of men like Steve Jobs or Mao Zedong, who preferred to preserve the energy it took to dress for accomplishing what Chang called “earth-shattering deeds.” Chang was already famous when she published this book, but she distances her writing from this epic realm, comparing herself instead to a child running home from school, eager to gab about everything she’s seen to any available adult.

Can seeing be an ethic, a way we choose to live? For Chang, it was also a way to continue living. To fix a gaze is also to find something—anything—to hold on to amid terror and chaos. In “Seeing With the Streets,” Chang teaches us how to see the reality that can be irrevocably disrupted by history. She walks through the city, observing the displays of shop windows, passing through the smoke and scents of street vendors, and noticing the usual people and things, before a military blockade brings her walk and day to a halt. Everyday life is eternal; in war, the eternal is in grave danger.

Behind Chang’s knowing irony, I hear a desperate urgency. I hear the rapt attention of someone who loves her world and sees that it is disappearing. I hear: What you treasure, however silly, might not be here tomorrow. Chang wrote like the devil was chasing her. It is as if she knew that when the era she lived in reached its culmination, there might no longer be a place for someone like her—a writer between nations, epochs, and ideologies—“in the barren wastes of the future.” “Hurry! Hurry!” she wrote. Hurry to capture reality, as closely as possible; hurry, hold on to it and keep it. Then you might have it for tomorrow, to turn over in your hand, for just a little pleasure, a little amusement, a little laugh, even after it is no longer real.