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What This Smoky Summer Means for Kids

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 07 › smoke-summer-kids-camp-damaged › 674756

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The wildfire smoke blanketing cities this summer can be harmful for children, both physically and emotionally. But caregivers can take some steps to make things a little easier.

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Little Lungs

On the day the sky turned orange, I woke up with a nosebleed. I have gotten only a handful of nosebleeds in my life. I’d slept on that night in June with my windows open, and those hours of exposure had apparently left my relatively young and healthy body disrupted. I was alarmed that this had happened to me. But I was also alarmed about what the haze might mean for people in more vulnerable bodies than mine.

As plumes of toxic smoke from Canadian wildfires have blanketed parts of America this summer, East Coasters and midwesterners are getting a dose of the environmental hazard that people on the West Coast (and around the world) have been dealing with for years, and extreme smoke days will likely continue in the months ahead. My iPhone’s weather app has warned me on several days this summer, including today, that the air in New York is “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”

Children are sensitive, in part because, simply put, they are little: Kids breathe in more air each minute than adults do. “High levels of particulate matter can get deep into lung fields” during a bad smoke day, which may cause adverse effects, Marissa Hauptman, a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, where she works on environmental health, told me. And children’s developing organs are more prone to injury. “The younger the child, the more vulnerable they are,” she said. Kids with existing health conditions, such as asthma or diabetes, or children born prematurely, can be especially at risk on smoky days. Rima Habre, an associate professor at the University of Southern California with expertise in environmental health, told me in an email that “cough, runny nose, itchy or burning eyes, wheezing or difficulty breathing, and irritation in their eyes and throats” are among the issues children may face after being exposed to wildfire smoke.

The Canadian fires are likely to continue raging this summer. Nearly 900 fires are currently burning in Canada, including about 560 that the Canadian government has marked “out of control.” As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce has written, “millions of Americans will have to brace themselves for more extreme smoke days. For exactly how long depends on a number of factors, including, quite literally, which way the wind blows.”

Parents and caregivers cannot control the wind. But they can take steps to protect kids from toxic air. The best thing to do to reduce exposure—as you might’ve already guessed—is to stay indoors with windows closed. Having HEPA filters, or AC units with filters, can improve air quality in your home too, Hauptman said. If you’re driving long distances, she recommended using your car’s air-recirculation mode while running the AC. If children do need to go outside for short periods on smoky days, experts advise that kids old enough to wear masks wear well-fitting NIOSH-approved N95 masks.

Parents should stay abreast of air-quality changes in their area, and they should “prepare at least one clean air room in their residence,” Habre said. She noted that the EPA website airnow.gov offers free resources on how to set up a clean-air room, as well as reliable updates on air quality.

The physical effects of smoke can be hard on small children, but so can the emotional ones. In addition to the terror of hearing about the fires, downstream impacts such as canceled days at camp can be difficult. Smoke is cutting into the summer rituals that give children’s days meaning, texture, and fun. Hauptman said that it’s important to avoid saturating kids with scary images and news stories. Caregivers should reinforce to children that, in spite of the bad circumstances, there are people helping: Talking with kids about the firefighters, nurses, and others keeping the community safe can be a balm, Hauptman added.

When the air outside is toxic, parents need to consider a number of factors, including their children’s age and health conditions. Kids are often active, and the time they spend outdoors running and playing can be great for their health. But on bad-air days, that calculus changes. These types of decisions aren’t easy, but they are, and will remain, the reality as parents consider choices about smoke, extreme heat, and COVID. “I think we’re going to be facing more and more days where you’re going to have to weigh your risk tolerance and think about how the environment is directly impacting your health,” Hauptman told me.

Smoky days are especially brutal when they coincide with the hottest days. And both can disproportionately affect those with fewer resources. Families that can afford reliable air-conditioning and air filters will be able to stay relatively insulated from heat and smoke, Hauptman noted. Households without AC or filters, meanwhile, are in a difficult position. Many schools have solid resources in place to handle smoke, but others don’t have up-to-date systems. Toxic air, coupled with rising temperatures, is a severe health concern—and it’s also “an environmental-justice issue,” Hautpman said.

Today’s News

Two IRS whistleblowers have alleged that the Hunter Biden criminal probe was mishandled, leading Republicans to call for the impeachment of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University, will resign after a report found significant flaws in his research. The investigation did not find evidence of fraud or misconduct—which Tessier-Lavigne has denied—but he said that he will step down “for the good of the University” and retract and correct the flawed papers. Wesleyan University announced that it will end legacy admissions, citing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on affirmative action.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; The Hollywood Archive / Alamy.

I Am a Joke Machine

By Natasha Vaynblat

I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her. Specifically, I’m just a girl, waving a picket sign in front of a studio exec, asking him for fair pay. Picture John Cusack holding a boom box that blasts “What do we want? Contracts! When do we want them? Now!”

I write for late-night comedy but I’ve always seen my life through film tropes. And these past two and a half months since the Hollywood writers’ strike began have made me feel like I’m trapped in the labor-dispute version of a rom-com. If the metaphor sounds like a stretch, please remember: I’ve been picketing in 90-plus-degree New York, so I’m operating on heat-stroke logic.

Read the full article.

How Hollywood’s Businessmen Got It So Wrong

found Jul '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 07 › hollywood-writers-strike-2023-streaming › 674748

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Last week, the roughly 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA went on strike, joining the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May. As my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez put it, “The Hollywood machine … has officially ground to a halt.” I chatted with Xochitl about who really broke Hollywood.

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C-Suite Ignorance

Writing yesterday about the Hollywood strikes, my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez—herself a screenwriter on strike—coined the term C-suite ignorance to explain what’s happening in the entertainment world. “Hollywood CEOs saw the success of Netflix and raced to copy a model without knowing whether it was sustainable, a model that relied on the constant production of new (and costly) entertainment content created by unionized talent,” she explained. “They were wrong about the business, but they were even more wrong to presume that labor would comply.” I called Xochitl to chat about how entertainment executives got it so wrong, and whether she and her fellow strikers feel hopeful right now.

Isabel Fattal: What was the big mistake C-suite executives made when they went all in on streaming?

Xochitl Gonzalez: I remember during COVID times in particular, obviously these things had been in the works, but suddenly everybody was in an arms race to rush out a streaming platform. At that point, I was working on a pilot adaptation of my debut novel. My first thought was, How is this sustainable? It didn’t seem like a model that could work, let alone be matched again and again and again.

Now executives are realizing that this model isn’t making money, which I’m not denying. I think it’s hard to say that you’re going broke and going under when you’re seeing executives get so well compensated, and it’s even more hilarious that even laypeople could see that this would be a difficult model to keep up with. Now executives say that they can’t afford to pay the talent. But they designed a model that exploited a contract—essentially, it was a workaround for the way that actors and writers had always been paid, through residuals.

Isabel: Explain that workaround.

Xochitl: The actors on Friends, for example, are so wealthy because of all the different places that Friends has been licensed and has been watched on cable and broadcast TV. Now that Friends is streaming on Max, the actors make much, much less from that platform. In the past, no one had a substantial issue with the idea that if a show is well viewed, writers and actors should see a piece of that, because we created it. This is not a new idea that we’re introducing. We’re attempting to merely correct the way in which the new system has exploited a loophole.

Isabel: Do you feel hopeful about the strike?

Xochitl: I do. A lot of the concerns of SAG and WGA overlap. I think a lot of people don’t always realize this—and it might be especially true for SAG—but a lot of people that are able to make a living as an actor or a screenwriter are middle-class people. The lion’s share of people are not raking in the dough. The fact that these issues are so existential is making people more resolved. The last time we were on strike together, we got absolutely historic gains. So I am feeling hopeful, but I’m worried in the short term. There’s a food bank in L.A. that’s doing free groceries worth more than $300 for members of SAG. There are people that need those free groceries; it’s a challenge.

I think the people on the ground are going to hold strong, because it’s about more than just being valued for your work. It’s about, are we ensuring that this is a sustainable profession going forward? I think it will get bloody. It’s going to hurt people on the ground a lot. But at the end of the day, I feel we’re going to win. Mainly because, as I said when I wrote about the WGA, without us and the stories and performances, what is there?

Today’s News

Former President Trump said that he had received a letter informing him that he is a target in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, creating the possibility of another indictment. A U.S. soldier broke away from a border-tour group and ran into North Korea; he is believed to be in custody. According to an email obtained by news outlets, Texas trooper-medics from the state’s Department of Public Safety were told to push people attempting to cross the southern border into the Rio Grande River and to deny them water amid extreme heat.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Researchers at UC San Francisco have released the largest representative survey of homeless people in more than 25 years, Jerusalem Demsas writes. It hints at the root cause of homelessness.

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Evening Read

The Atlantic

A Voicebot Just Left Me Speechless

By Saahil Desai

It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.

More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic. Once, a college classmate read my name, paused, and then confidently said, “Hi, Seattle.”

Read the full article.