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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.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What happened when Oregon decriminalized hard drugs The humiliation of Ron DeSantis Oppenheimer is more than a creation myth about the atomic bomb.

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.

Related:

Podcast: “Sorry, honey, it’s too hot for camp.” How long will Canada burn?

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.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Warner Bros

Read. “The Ferguson Report: An Erasure,” a poem compiled from the redacted pages of the Department of Justice’s report documenting racist policing practices after the killing of Michael Brown.

Watch. Get ready for the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie on Friday, a charming blockbuster adventure about the tribulations of simply existing as a woman in society.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Today, I wrote about hard decisions early in life. Recently, I read a book about hard decisions at the late stages of life that moved me: Don DeLillo’s Zero K. In one passage that has stayed with me, a character reflects on the small, beautiful elements that make up a life. She describes a shower to her stepson: “I think about drops of water,” she says. “I think about drops of water. How I used to stand in the shower and watch a drop of water edge down the inside of the sheer curtain. How I concentrated on the drop, the droplet, the orblet, and waited for it to assume new shapes as it passed along the ridges and folds, with water pounding against the side of my head.”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Before his stump speeches in his reelection campaign last year, Ron DeSantis liked to play a video montage that showed him being gratuitously rude to reporters at press conferences. It was petty, graceless—and warmly received by the Florida governor’s base. At a DeSantis rally in Melbourne, Florida, last fall, I watched the video from an elevated press pen alongside a gaggle of local reporters. The disconnect between the unflagging politeness that DeSantis’s young volunteers showed the press corps and the ostentatious douchebaggery of the candidate was stark.

Last night, though, Dunking Ron was replaced, briefly, by Conciliatory Ron. His decision to grant CNN’s Jake Tapper a sit-down interview in South Carolina was a reflection of how far behind Donald Trump he is trailing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But more than that, the interview was a rejection of one of the Florida governor’s most cherished principles: Mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt. DeSantis’s problem is that his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong. He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil. Now, belatedly, the Florida governor appears to have decided that the only way to save his campaign is to execute a pivot from peevishness.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

DeSantis played that montage in Melbourne, I think, because he had seen Trump railing against “fake news media” and leading his supporters in Two Minutes Hate sessions at his rallies, and he had drawn an entirely wrong conclusion. Despite being a smart guy, DeSantis apparently had not grasped that Trump’s routine was all for show. An act. All his life, Trump has phoned reporters to gossip. After leaving office, he welcomed multiple authors to Mar-a-Lago to spill his guts for their various books about his White House. Trump doesn’t hate the press; if anything, he likes it too much. This is a man who once pointed at the reporter Maggie Haberman and said, “I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.”

DeSantis, by contrast, seems to genuinely hate the media, with their intrusion and attention and awkward questions. He has an unfortunate habit of waggling his head like a doll on a dashboard when receiving an inquiry he considers beneath him; he did it on a visit to Japan just before he formally announced his presidential campaign, when someone had the temerity to ask whether he was running, which he obviously was. The move creates an odd effect where his eyeballs seem to stay in the same place as the rest of his head oscillates around them. It’s a startling tell that he’s irritated or uncomfortable. Please let me play poker against this man.

Facing Tapper, though, DeSantis kept the wobble in check, offering instead a performance of earnest dullness. He stonewalled over whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and whether the ex-president should face criminal charges, claiming that he preferred to “focus on looking forward.” He admitted that many people who attack “wokeness” can’t even define the term. And he dodged a question on whether he would extend Florida’s new six-week abortion restrictions countrywide by asserting broadly that he would be a “pro-life president” and claiming that, in any case, a Democratic Congress would try to “nationalize abortion up until the moment of birth” and even permit “post-birth abortions.” (Tapper did not challenge this at the time but later clarified the meaning with the campaign, which said it was referring to medical care being denied to any fetus that survived the abortion procedure.) The governor’s only gaffe was claiming that “the proof was in the pudding” when it came to suggestions that his campaign was failing, which brought to mind an unkind story, denied by the candidate, that he once ate a chocolate dessert with three fingers straight from the tub.

Let’s not go as far as the CNN pundit Bakari Sellers, who claimed that in the interview, DeSantis “started to give the vibe that he could be president of the United States.” But this was a far more emollient version of the Florida governor than any journalist an inch to the left of Fox News has ever encountered before. That’s because he now needs establishment media to treat him as a credible threat to Trump: The polls are bad, the vibes are shifting, and his campaign laid off several staff members last week. Added to that, although DeSantis raised an impressive $20 million from mid-May to June, his reliance on high rollers has become a problem. “More than two-thirds of DeSantis’ money—nearly $14 million—came from donors who gave the legal maximum and cannot donate again,” an analysis by NBC found. Those rich backers are also more likely to act strategically than grassroots true believers; they don’t have any interest in backing a loser because they admire his principles. In a similar vein, the formerly supportive Murdoch empire’s ardor for the Florida governor has noticeably cooled in recent weeks.

Hence DeSantis’s venture out of the warm shallows of Fox News and weirdo partisan sites and into the shark-filled ocean of journalists who might actually ask him difficult questions such as “Who won the 2020 election?” He needs to prove he is more than just the most popular of the also-rans, yet the whole race still revolves around the former president. “Team DeSantis refuses to see the race for what it is,” the Washington Monthly’s politics editor, Bill Scher, tweeted recently. “The race is not about who has the best tax plan. The race is: Trump, yes or no.” Even the airing of the CNN interview offered further evidence of the problem: It was pushed later in the hour by a potential third Trump indictment. It also competed with news of the Michigan attorney general charging 16 people accused of filing false claims that Trump won the 2020 election.

For DeSantis to recover, he must overcome four factors—three within his control and one outside it. The first is his squeamishness about criticizing Trump directly; you can’t defeat a bully if you look scared. The second is his decision to run to the right of Trump on several big cultural issues, including COVID policy, LBGTQ rights, and abortion. That strategy could be poison in the general election, but it’s not even paying off in the primary. The third is that DeSantis still looks lightweight on foreign and economic policy; he briefly minimized the importance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, apparently to curry favor with Tucker Carlson, before revising his view. His book The Courage to Be Free and his campaign speeches are heavy on his pandemic policies and his fight against Disney, and notably light on pocketbook issues.

[Read: The forgotten Ron DeSantis book]

Granted, Trump has taken wildly inconsistent positions on any number of subjects and probably couldn’t identify Ukraine on a map. But that brings us to DeSantis’s fourth problem, the one he can’t seem to control: his personality. He is not naturally funny, entertaining, or charming. Just as he doesn’t understand the pro-wrestling-style kayfabe involved in Trump’s ostensible hatred of media outlets, he doesn’t understand that Trump’s regular flirtations with bigotry are softened with a knowing wink.

In recent days, the DeSantis team shared a video made by a Twitter user who goes by “Proud Elephant,” which attacked Trump for saying in a 2016 speech that he would “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.” The clip was nakedly homophobic, and I mean that literally—rippling male abs featured prominently, between approving citations of headlines about DeSantis passing “anti-trans” bills. In response, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.” Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, offered an even sharper verdict: “This is actually very gay.” Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing LGBTQ members of the party, tweeted: “Conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women’s sports, safeguard women’s spaces and strengthen parental rights, but Ron DeSantis’ extreme rhetoric has just ventured into homophobic territory.” Take away the clownishness and the cartoonishness of Trump, and what is left is overtly, obviously repellent—even to many within the GOP.

Last night, DeSantis told Tapper that he had been consistently written off, whether in his first race to be governor or in his battle against Disney. He pointed out his proven fundraising abilities. He did not need to say, because everybody knows, that Trump might be in deep legal jeopardy by the time the election comes around. The race is still open. But by granting the interview at all, DeSantis conceded that his biggest problem is not that the establishment media hate him—as he regularly claims—but that his reluctance to confront Trump directly makes him all too easy to ignore.