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.

This First

This morning, five days after The Atlantic published a profile of then–CNN CEO Chris Licht by staff writer Tim Alberta, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery announced that Licht would be leaving CNN immediately. Read the profile here.

About 75 million people across the country are under air-quality alerts. Below is a brief guide to what comes next, and what this moment explains about our warming planet.

First, here are three more recent stories from The Atlantic:

Chris Licht’s fundamental mistake The next crisis will start with empty office buildings. French people are fighting over giant pools of water.

Surreal Skies

In much of the northern United States and parts of Canada, a look outside the window right now might paint a more vivid picture of the current reality than any news article can. Wildfire smoke from Canada is spreading south over many regions of the Midwest, Ohio Valley, the Northeast, and the mid-Atlantic. Midtown Manhattan has been orange. About 75 million people across the country are under air-quality alerts. Here’s what to know about how to protect yourself, what comes next, and what this moment explains about our warming planet.

Air-quality levels pose health threats ranging from small to serious.

Let’s start with some context: Good air quality lands from 0 to 50 on the Air Quality Index (AQI), which measures the density of air pollutants such as carbon monoxide and particulates. Any air-quality level higher than 100 can cause health issues for people at risk, such as children, the elderly, and those with asthma or lung diseases; air-quality levels higher than 150 can cause problems for even healthy people. As of 4 p.m. EST today, the New York City metro area had reached an AQI of 413, falling within the “hazardous” category.

The research on health effects from wildfire-smoke exposure in particular is not expansive, but evidence suggests links between exposure and various health effects, both cardiovascular and respiratory. Wildfire smoke contains small particulate-matter pollutants; when these are inhaled, they can get into the lungs and may enter the bloodstream. For healthy people without underlying medical conditions, brief exposure will likely not cause more than temporary irritation, but such levels of exposure are concerning for vulnerable people and those with certain health issues—and prolonged exposure is concerning for all people.

So what can you do while waiting this out? Experts suggest that you stay inside as much as possible, and keep windows and doors closed. If you have a window air conditioner, check that the unit is recirculating air from indoors instead of pulling air from outside. And as my colleague Katherine J. Wu reported today, wearing an N95 mask that fits flush against your face can help minimize the particles inhaled when you’re outside, but your cloth mask probably won’t do very much (although it’s better than not covering up at all).

A new wind pattern is expected to improve air quality in some areas this weekend.

How long this level of air quality will last in the northeastern U.S. depends on wind direction. Today into tomorrow, an even worse round of wildfire smoke could move south out of Canada and hit Pennsylvania, New York State, and the mid-Atlantic. But starting on Friday, the winds are expected to change direction, which experts predict should keep new smoke from moving south from Canada.

The time and location of Canada’s wildfires are highly unusual.

Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist for Capital Weather Gang, and Jason Samenow, The Washington Post’s weather editor, explained yesterday that though wildfires are somewhat normal across Canada and the western United States in the summer, “outbreaks as widespread and numerous as these are virtually unheard of in late May into June. The amount of smoke pouring into the Northeast is thus also exceptional.”

And these wildfires are a clear effect of climate change.

Cappucci and Samenow explain:

While wildfires can be sparked in many different ways, the rapidity with which they spread is proportional to how hot and dry the ambient environment is. There exists a strong link between the frequency and intensity of heat domes and human-caused climate change. A number of high-end heat domes have already fostered wildfire outbreaks across Canada this year, and more appear to be in the offing.

Wildfire hot spots may soon pop up in unexpected places.

A wet winter and cool spring curbed wildfire potential in parts of the West, but experts anticipate that warmer, drier conditions in America’s northern tier will drive new fire risks this summer, particularly in the Great Lakes states.

And eventually, parts of the East Coast may catch up. As the climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote in The Atlantic last year, “the Northeast is now primed for more frequent droughts that will harm agriculture, intermittently reduce drinking-water supplies, and increase wildfire risk. The East will not emerge unscathed from the infernos that are quickly becoming a hallmark of western summers.”

Related:

Photos: Smoke from Canada’s wildfires drifts south The not-COVID reason to mask is here.

Want to get our latest climate-change coverage in your inbox? Sign up for The Weekly Planet.

Today’s News

Former Vice President Mike Pence officially launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, in which he denounced former President Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attacks.    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the German newspaper Bild that Russian forces are shooting at Ukrainian rescuers in parts of occupied Kherson, where flooding from the collapsed Nova Kakhovka dam has trapped residents. The Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi said that he plans to sign with the Major League Soccer club Inter Miami.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The next crisis will start with empty office buildings, Dror Poleg writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Carolina Moscoso

It’s 5 a.m. Somewhere

By Rachel Sugar

JFK Terminal 8—It is 9:22 a.m., and I am learning about consumer protections from a food-safety inspector who is on her second Bloody Mary. There is nothing quite like alcohol to facilitate an expansive conversation: I should encourage young people, she tells me, to consider careers in food safety. She’s on her way back from a work trip, and I learn that she always drinks Bloody Marys when she travels, which is often, but never drinks them at home. We move on to other topics: reincarnation, ExxonMobil, karma, the state of labor unions. The only thing that seemed to be off limits was her full name (her job, she said, prevents her from speaking with the media).

We’re sitting in the New York Sports Bar across from Gate 10, which is next to Solstice Sunglasses and a vending machine selling ready-to-eat salads in plastic mason jars. In the corner, two blond women drink white wine. A passing traveler pops her head in: Does the bar serve French fries? The bartender says no, they don’t start serving French fries until 10:30. It is too early for French fries. But it is not too early for white wine.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The PGA Tour’s stunning hypocrisy A big problem with college admissions could be about to get worse. The Snowden revelations reconsidered

Culture Break

Sony Pictures

Read. Elena Knows, by the Argentine novelist Claudia Piñeiro, is both a gripping mystery novel and a reminder of “the incredible multitude of perspectives that exist in this world at once,” one of our critics writes.

Watch. The latest offering from the Spider-Man multiverse, Across the Spider-Verse, challenges the basic structure of a superhero story.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Smartphone cameras get confused by wildfire skies, my colleague Ian Bogost noted in 2020. In some cases, photographers found that their cameras rendered California’s orange overlay in a neutral gray.

“The un-oranged images were caused by one of the most basic features of digital cameras, their ability to infer what color is in an image based on the lighting conditions in which it is taken,” Bogost explained back then. “Like the people looking up at it, the software never expected the sky to be bathed in orange.”

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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.

Apple’s recently unveiled Vision Pro presents an all-screen future, but generative AI’s growth in recent months has also hinted at ways we might move toward the opposite experience. What will our tech look like in 50 years?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside baseball’s desperate effort to save itself from irrelevance Why is everyone watching TV with the subtitles on? Phones at schools are a disaster.

Beyond Four Corners

If I am lucky, I will still be alive some 40 or 50 years from now—a senior citizen in an easy chair reliving my son’s birthdays, graduations, and wedding through a 3-D video playback on a thin piece of glass hovering just in front of my eyes. Another possibility, depending on how technology develops, is that I’ll speak aloud to a robotic simulacrum that’s loaded with the latest generative-AI software and trained on decades of his audio and text messages. It seems certain, in any case, that I won’t be looking at a smartphone.

We may one day remember 2023 as the moment when the world started to bend toward one of these two futures, each of them a divergence from the era of glass-and-metal bricks that the original iPhone ushered in nearly 16 years ago. Yesterday, Apple unveiled a $3,499 headset called the Vision Pro that will engulf your field of view in pure screen. The company pitched the device in part with a marketing video that shows a man wearing the thing alone on a couch, flipping through photos and videos of his children that float a few feet away in his dark living room. (It would be a shattering evocation of divorce if you didn’t briefly see his wedding band.)

Although the Vision Pro has a lot in common with virtual-reality products that have existed for years, it features a uniquely Apple twist—one that may prove crucial in normalizing the gadget for the very many people who, until now, have shown zero interest in grafting a personal computer to their brow. If you want to engage with the outside world while you wear the headset, it will display footage of your eyes on an external screen, an effect that makes the Vision Pro look almost like a transparent pair of goggles. As I wrote yesterday, the idea is to minimize the barrier that the technology might present:

The look is disquietingly cyborg, but the selling point is clear. We live our lives in digital space but also outside of it. Picture the thin pane of glass between you and this article simply vanishing. This is, it seems, an attempt for Apple to have its cake and eat it too. You’ll wear a computer on your face, sure, but you can still exist in real life, talk to your family, kick a soccer ball.

This is the all-screen future: Apple’s promotional video shows the Vision Pro being used in tandem with the Apple Watch and a MacBook, but not the iPhone, suggesting that this is the future of mobile technology. You don’t need the small rectangle: You need your entire universe to be a screen.

But recent months have also hinted at ways we might move toward the opposite experience. AI, you might have heard, is getting pretty good: The path forward might involve digital assistants that listen and speak, replacing the old paradigm of punching queries into an on-screen search engine or text-message box.

It might also involve stranger outcomes. Last November, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a program that responds to queries with startling coherence. Trained on an unimaginable volume of text, the application clarified unlike anything else how generative AI might disrupt digital life as we’ve known it. These large-language models might augment or replace human work, flood the internet with gray-goo content, or revolutionize the creation and distribution of disinformation. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance described:

We may see whole categories of labor, and in some cases entire industries, wiped away with startling speed. The utopians among us will view this revolution as an opportunity to outsource busywork to machines for the higher purpose of human self-actualization. This new magic could indeed create more time to be spent on matters more deserving of our attention—deeper quests for knowledge, faster routes to scientific discovery, extra time for leisure and with loved ones. It may also lead to widespread unemployment and the loss of professional confidence as a more competent AI looks over our shoulder.

With all of this in mind, I’ve wondered if the supposed AI apocalypse wouldn’t mean the destruction of humanity but instead a crisis of trust. Generative AI is known to “hallucinate,” or confidently present false information as true. Combined with the gray goo, the supercharged fake news, and the potential for our personal data to be turned against us in alarming new ways, AI might turn us away from screens—even ones that rest on our face—simply because we cannot fully believe anything they show us. Human-to-human interactions, unmediated by technology, may become the norm once again.

Reality is unlikely to map perfectly onto these scenarios. But there’s clearly an urge—from Big Tech and its many subjects—to imagine a world beyond the four corners of a handheld screen. History is long; the smartphone era could, and even likely will, seem to be a blip in retrospect. So much can change. Perhaps it’s starting to now.

Related:

The age of goggles has arrived. One more screen for your face

Today’s News

A dam in southern Ukraine has collapsed, flooding villages in both Russian- and Ukrainian-controlled areas. Both sides have blamed the other for the breach. The Atlanta City Council voted to approve $31 million in funding for a major police- and fire-training complex that critics have dubbed “Cop City,” despite two years of protests. Ajike “A. J.” Owens, a Black woman and mother of four, was shot and killed Friday in central Florida. The county sheriff said the alleged shooter, a white neighbor, cannot be arrested until law-enforcement officials determine whether “deadly force was justified” under the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the world’s best songwriters.

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Evening Read

John Provencher

“Hell Welcomes All”

By Spencer Kornhaber

When I listen to the voice recording I made at the Irvine, California, headquarters of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment this past January, I hear a noise that many gamers find blissful: the sound of utter mayhem. Playing a prerelease version of Diablo IV, the latest installment in a 26-year-old adventure series about battling the forces of hell, I faced swarms of demons that yowled and belched. My character, a sorcerer, shot them with lightning bolts, producing a jet-engine roar. I jabbed buttons arrhythmically—click … click … clickclickclick—while trying to stifle curses and whimpers. But the strangest sounds came from the two Diablo IV designers who sat alongside me. As I dueled with an angry sea witch, Joseph Piepiora, an associate game director, gently noted that I was low on healing potions. “But that’s okay,” he said, “because you’re conducting an interview while doing a boss fight. It’s okay.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Sterilizing cats, no surgery required Chris Christie isn’t here to make friends. Welcome to a world without endings.

Culture Break

A24

Read. Rubik, by Elizabeth Tan, is a stunning debut novel about how the dead become digital ghosts—a book that feels like a puzzle.

Watch. The A24 film Past Lives (in theaters now) imagines a love that can be both platonic and romantic.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

We would be remiss not to point you toward the April 30 edition of the Atlantic Daily, featuring Damon’s excellent and wide-ranging culture and entertainment recommendations. They include, among others, contributing writer Ian Bogost’s 2022 Atlantic story on “web3”—“the smartest, most clear-headed and creative essay on the issues with that particular technological paradigm that I’ve come across,” per Damon—and Holedown, “a simple game that involves aiming balls at numbered barriers that halt your progress through a tunnel.”

— The Editors

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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.

Housing-policy experts largely agree that the solution to a housing-affordability crisis is to build more housing. Many residents support this notion in theory, until they’re faced with the possibility of new housing developments in their own backyard—in other words, NIMBYs. But Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas argues in a recent article that maybe these presumed villains of progress aren’t the problem. Instead, they’re a symptom of an approach to housing development that’s doomed to fail.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the meltdown at CNN America is headed toward collapse. Why Putin’s secret weapon failed

Local Control

Kelli María Korducki: You’ve written extensively about the national housing shortage and how it’s making housing unaffordable for many people across the country. Why do new building projects often get held up or shut down, over and over again, by residents who say they want more affordable housing in their communities?

Jerusalem Demsas: People are very unhappy with the lack of housing affordability. They’ll say in polls that they want there to be more types of housing available, that they want there to be more affordable types of housing available. They want their kids to be able to live near them. They want there to be senior housing. They want teachers to be able to afford to live in their communities; there’s concern about police officers policing communities that they’re not actually able to live in too. And yet, time and again, projects fail, because no individual development can check every single box for everyone.

In the story that I write, I’m zeroing in on Denver and Colorado. But a lot of the point that I’m trying to make is that you could replace those geographical names with basically anywhere and see the same story playing out. The promise of localism, of local control, is that you are responding to the particular needs and concerns of the people who live in that specific area. But if municipalities across the country keep reaching the same roadblocks—which ultimately lead to anti-development, anti-growth outcomes—is that actually a response to particular concerns? Or is that a structural problem?

Kelli: You make a bold assertion in your article: “Sometimes NIMBYs have a point.” What do you mean by that?

Jerusalem: A single development can’t balance all of the concerns people have about housing. If the question is “Should we allow this block to turn into duplexes?” community members who support the idea of building more housing in general might respond, “Why here?” And that response could be informed by reasonable concerns about housing that are broader than what that single development project entails. They may have concerns about gentrification, or about open space, or about the types of housing that are currently available.

If I’m representing a city, and I’m trying to convert one hotel into homeless housing, it’s not going to respond to green-space concerns. It’s not going to be able to speak to that, or to senior housing, or to teacher housing, or anything like that. Similarly, if you’re trying to build a new condo development in an area where increasing numbers of rich young people are moving for jobs, that’s not going to respond to the needs of people who have different kinds of concerns. And because no individual developments can check every single box, many projects end up falling through.

Kelli: So what you’re saying is that when hyperlocal political players are given too much power in these development plans, the bigger picture of a municipality or state’s housing needs can get lost. And this can end up sabotaging progress in actually building the new housing that people want and need.

Jerusalem: Exactly. We live in a pretty segregated society, both by class and by race, and on a variety of other different measures. When you restrict a development discussion to a very hyperlocal level, then you can’t have necessary conversations to balance the wants of various interest groups. If you’re dealing with a very rich, white area whose residents are wedded to their exclusionary zoning, they’re always going to resist giving up their space for, for example, homeless housing. And even if these people want homeless housing to exist in general, they have no power to make that occur somewhere else. The only power they have is to exclude it from happening in their own place.

When you expand the development process beyond a very hyperlocal level, then you can actually have broad conversations about what the state needs, and not just what this one locality says they want because they happen to live there right now.

Related:

Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis Housing breaks people’s brains.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden is expected to sign the debt-ceiling bill before Monday and will deliver a rare Oval Office address on the topic this evening. At least 50 people were killed after trains collided in India’s eastern state of Odisha. The Department of Justice is ending its investigation into classified documents at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence and has decided not to file charges.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize last fall for her highly personal books, Gal Beckerman writes. She’s also interested in … supermarkets.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

AI Doomerism Is a Decoy

By Matteo Wong

On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products. Hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and other tech and business figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates, signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Those 22 words were released following a multi-week tour in which executives from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies called for limited regulation of AI. They spoke before Congress, in the European Union, and elsewhere about the need for industry and governments to collaborate to curb their product’s harms—even as their companies continue to invest billions in the technology. Several prominent AI researchers and critics told me that they’re skeptical of the rhetoric, and that Big Tech’s proposed regulations appear defanged and self-serving.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The labor-shortage myth A tragically American approach to the child-care crisis Will Ted Lasso or Succession leave more of an imprint? Ed Kashi / VII / Redux

Read. Brave Men, by Ernie Pyle, a war journalist who wrote about the plight of the average frontline soldier.

Listen. The surgeon general warned about social media’s impact on teens, but there’s a problem with comparing social media to Big Tobacco. Hanna Rosin discusses the issue in a new episode of Radio Atlantic.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’re looking for a more narrative perspective on the social and economic divisions feeding America’s development deadlocks, check out Atlantic staff writer George Packer’s National Book Award–winning 2013 book, The Unwinding. In it, George traces the nation’s descent toward a modern era in which “winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.”

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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.

Yesterday, news outlets reported the existence of a recording in which Donald Trump discusses his possession of classified documents. The recording could prove legally damaging, but its existence also reveals something important about how the former president operates.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

America’s approach to addiction has gone off the rails. Don’t avoid romance. Online ads are about to get even worse.

Image Above Law

Yesterday evening, CNN and The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors have a 2021 recording of Donald Trump discussing a military document he held on to after leaving the White House. According to multiple sources, Trump indicates in the recording that he is aware that the document in his possession is classified.

The content of this recording could play an important role in Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s handling of secret records in Mar-a-Lago. A strong prosecution would need to prove that Trump was aware that what he was doing was illegal, and the 2021 tape could offer that evidence. (Neither CNN nor the Times heard the recording, but multiple sources described the audio to reporters.)

But, as my colleague David Graham noted today, the apparent recording plays another role in our understanding of Trump too: “The circumstances of the recording,” he writes, reveal “the way he seems to understand bad press as a graver threat than criminal prosecution.”

David walks us through the circumstances behind the tape: The recording was reportedly made during a meeting Trump held with two writers who were working with Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, on Meadows’s autobiography. At the meeting, Trump was apparently upset about a recent New Yorker report claiming that, in the final days of his administration, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had tried to prevent Trump from ordering a strike on Iran. Trump reportedly referenced a classified document that he suggested could undermine that claim. Meanwhile, Margo Martin, a Trump aide, was reportedly recording the meeting because Trump was worried about being misrepresented or misquoted.

In other words, David writes, “Trump’s fear of damaging press—whether in the Milley reports or the Meadows book—was so much greater than his fear of criminal accountability that he ended up making an incriminating recording that could be a key piece of his own prosecution.”

Trump has long viewed tapes as a protective currency, my colleague Sophie Gilbert noted in 2018—“a talisman against future malfeasance.” But he’s been burned before, when allies or employees use his own techniques against him. Two notable examples: the attorney Michael Cohen, and the former presidential aide Omarosa Manigault Newman.

This time, Trump could get burned by his own recording tactics—but David argues that he has some cards left to play: “Over and over, he’s managed to wriggle out of potential legal jams with bluster, brazenness, and the occasional large check.” That strategy worked even when Trump was president; by rallying political support, Trump was able to escape serious consequences from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, as well as conviction in both impeachments. He will try these tricks again, David reminds us:

No matter how damning the evidence that Smith is able to assemble, Trump is seeking to bully the Justice Department out of charging him. If that doesn’t work, he hopes to be reelected to the presidency in November 2024, which would allow him to shut down any investigation or prosecution against him, or to pardon himself. It might yet work.

And although 2024 is still a year away, one thing is for sure: Trump can consistently rely on political support from the GOP’s base. In an article aptly titled “They Still Love Him,” also published today, David noted that the majority of GOP voters don’t want a better Trump alternative than the candidates on offer. They want Trump himself. They still love him, and they will continue to love him—all the way to 2024, when he gets the chance to shove his legal troubles out of sight.

Related:

Lordy, there are tapes. They still love him.

Today’s News

The debt-ceiling deal passed the House with a vote of 314–117. It will now go to the Senate and, if it passes there, can then be signed into law by President Joe Biden. Russia says it repelled three more cross-border attacks from pro-Ukraine forces while its aerial assaults on Kyiv killed three people. The Senate passed legislation to block President Biden’s debt-relief program. Biden has said he will veto the measure, but the Supreme Court is expected to rule on two cases on the plan this month.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf makes the case for redirecting DEI funds.

Evening Read

Video by The Atlantic. Source: Sobli / RDB / ullstein bild / Getty.

NASA Learns the Ugly Truth About UFOs

By Marina Koren

At a meeting in NASA headquarters yesterday, the public had some blunt questions about UFOs, or, as the government now calls them, “unexplained anomalous phenomena.” A NASA spokesperson summarized them aloud: “What is NASA hiding, and where are you hiding it? How much has been shared publicly? Has NASA ever cut the live NASA TV feed away from something? Has NASA released all UAP evidence it has ever received? What about NASA astronauts—do they have an NDA or clearance that does not allow them to speak about UAP sightings? What are the science overlords hiding?” In short: Are you guys lying to everyone?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Biden White House doesn’t know when to keep quiet. The problem with wealth-based affirmative action

Culture Break

Jeong Park / A24

Read. A new collection of Susan Sontag’s 1970s writing and interviews about feminism, On Women, showcases the writer’s stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the debates of her era.

Watch. You Hurt My Feelings, in theaters, is made by a filmmaker who knows what’s wrong with your relationships.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For those of you who are fans of The Wire, my colleague Adam Serwer’s 2019 story on the “Stringer Bell rule” offers a useful descriptor for the most important rule of a conspiracy—one that Trump and his inner circle have violated over and over again.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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.

As my colleague Matteo Wong noted earlier this month, a hotter-than-usual summer may await many Americans. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s temperature and precipitation outlook for June through August shows a significant chance of above-normal temperatures across much of the country. I spoke with NOAA experts about how these predictions are made, what to expect in the weeks and months to come, and how to stay safe in extreme heat.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The DEI industry needs to check its privilege. The indignity of grocery shopping Semi-retirees know the key to work-life balance. Above Normal

What kind of summer do we potentially have in store in the United States? How should Americans interpret these weather predictions?

Johnna M. Infanti, a scientist at NOAA who was the forecaster for the June-July-August Climate Prediction Center outlook released this past month, told me that “generally, what we’re seeing is a pattern that favors above-normal temperatures for much of the country. But our outlooks really speak to the probability that the average temperature will be above normal. It doesn’t really indicate whether or not these temperatures will be extreme or set any records.”

“We take the average of temperatures for the June-July-August period from 1991 to 2020, and our models give us an indication of whether we should expect the upcoming summer to be warmer or cooler or dryer or wetter than the average,” she explained.

Morgan Zabow, the community heat and health information coordinator at NOAA, added that the likelihood of above-normal temperatures is expressed in percentages, which doesn’t tell us exactly what temperatures to expect but gives us an idea of what could be coming in different geographical areas.

“A temperature outlook like this really helps your decision makers—your city planners, your public-health officials, emergency responders—be a little bit more aware of what this could mean,” Zabow told me. “An increased risk of heat-related illnesses and deaths that disproportionately affect children under 5 and older adults, people experiencing homelessness, athletes, and so many other populations.”

So how do these predictions get made?

Infanti told me that her team uses dynamical climate models—“basically, computer models of what we might expect in the upcoming season based on the current state of the atmosphere, land, and ocean. They then show predictions for the temperature and precipitation for the next season.”

“We also look at things like long-term decadal trends,” she said. “For example, if a region has seen increasing temperatures over the last 10 years, that’s something we would take into consideration. We’d also look at sea-surface temperatures, both along the coast and globally if there’s something like an El Niño happening.”

How much of a role will El Niño play in shaping the climate of the coming months?

First, an explanation of how the phenomenon works: “El Niño and La Niña are opposite phases of a natural climate pattern across the tropical Pacific Ocean,” Infanti said. “And that natural climate pattern swings back and forth every three to seven years on average. We just ended a period of La Niña in the tropical Pacific, which means cooler-than-average temperatures across the tropical Pacific.”

Next, Infanti and her colleagues predict that we will enter an El Niño phase, “which means that the conditions in the tropical Pacific are favorable for the development of El Niño conditions within the next few months, bringing warmer-than-average tropical Pacific sea-surface temperatures that can cause local changes in convection patterns over that region. And that sets off a kind of a chain reaction—we call them teleconnections—across most of the globe. But we wouldn’t see related weather effects in the U.S. until the wintertime.”

Back to those above-normal temperatures: How does climate change factor into volatile weather patterns?

“With climate change, we’re seeing heat waves that are occurring more frequently. They’re more intense, and they’re also lasting longer, plus the heat-wave season is increasing,” Zabow said. “A heat-wave season could have typically been just during the summer months, but now we’re starting to see it before the typical summer months and after what people would consider summer months too.”

What can people do to keep cool and safe?

“Extreme heat events can be very deadly, especially at the beginning of the heat season, because people aren’t acclimated to the heat yet,” Zabow told me. “It’s important to note, though, that heat-related illnesses and deaths are largely preventable. It’s about taking simple measures, such as wearing a hat when you’re outside or wearing light-colored clothing to reflect some of the heat, making sure that you are staying inside in a space that has access to air-conditioning.”

If you don’t have access to air-conditioning at home, Zabow recommends finding a cooling center—you might try a local mall or library, or a special designated cooling center in your area. She encourages Americans to check out heat.gov for more guidance on what to do before, during, and after heat waves.

Related:

Nowhere should expect a cool summer. Why California can’t catch a break Today’s News House members will vote on the bipartisan debt-limit deal this evening. A new study shows that Earth has entered danger zones for seven out of eight scientifically established safety limits. A federal appeals-court panel ruled that the Sackler family will receive full immunity from current and future civil legal claims regarding their role in Purdue Pharma’s prescription-opioid business. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: The one thing holding back the mass adoption of electric cars in America isn’t the cars themselves, Patrick George writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ thoughts on Ron DeSantis’s run for the 2024 GOP nomination.

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Evening Read Kevin Mazur / TAS23 / Getty

Fans’ Expectations of Taylor Swift Are Chafing Against Reality

By Spencer Kornhaber

Three songs have been playing every night before Taylor Swift has taken the stage on her current tour, and each one seems to convey a different message. One track is Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” a classic assertion of female independence. Another is Lady Gaga’s “Applause,” a pump-up jam in which a celebrity confesses her hunger for approval. Then there’s Ice Spice’s “In Ha Mood,” a recent hip-hop song whose presence shows, among other things, that Swift is paying attention to what’s hot in pop culture—an important fact to keep in mind when evaluating the controversy now brewing around her.

Ice Spice is a 23-year-old Bronx emcee whose whispery voice and puff of red hair have become internationally famous in a very short span of time, following the TikTok success of her August 2022 single “Munch (Feelin’ U).” She features on the new remix of Swift’s track “Karma,” released last week, and this past weekend she joined Swift to perform the song at the singer’s three concerts in New Jersey. From a distance, the story feels familiar: Established star allies with rising star for mutual benefit. But the remix has unleashed a wave of indignation online, making Swift, not for the first time, a focal point for conflicting attitudes about what entertainers owe their audience.

Read the full article.

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Some animals have no choice but to live at airports now. Jack Teixeira should have been stopped again and again. The Succession plot point that explained the whole series Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Matt Squire / Lookout Point / AMC.

Read. “Near Darwin,” a new poem by Carl Dennis.

“Why turn from the table / To write a lament on the power of time / To undermine human effort when he can describe / How the work of worms helps sustain us?”

Watch. Happy Valley (on AMC+ and BBC America), which, according to our Culture writer, features the most compelling female character on television.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

When we discussed the long-term temperature impact of climate change, Zabow, the NOAA heat and health information coordinator, pointed me to Climate Explorer, a web tool hosted by the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center. “You’re able to type in any county in the United States and see what the historical average temperatures were in the area, and then what the projections are,” she told me. “You could see how hot your neighborhood might be by 2050, or by 2090, depending on whether or not we implement emissions-reducing measures.” It’s a sobering yet useful climate-reality check.

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.