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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.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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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.

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How Musk and Biden Are Changing the Media

found Jul '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 07 › elon-musk-twitter-biden-journalism › 674629

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Elon Musk and Joe Biden are the unlikely tag team changing the way American journalists approach their jobs.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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An Unlikely Tag Team

Reporters spend lots of time critiquing the president, so perhaps it’s only fair for Joe Biden to take a turn as a media critic.

During an interview last week with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Biden recounted a story that a reporter at “a major newspaper” told him. According to Biden, this reporter’s editor told them, “You don’t have a brand yet.”

“They said, ‘Well, I am not an editorial writer,’” Biden continued. “‘But you need a brand so people will watch you, listen to you, because of what they think you’re going to say.’ I just think there’s a lot changing.”

I’m curious from whom Biden heard this, because he speaks on the record to the press less than any president in recent memory—he’s given the fewest interviews and press conferences since Ronald Reagan. But for most reporters today, the dynamic the president is describing will be very familiar. Celebrity reporters have always existed, as Elliot Ackerman’s great recent article on the famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle underscored, but over the past 15 years, even cub reporters have felt intense pressure to become public personalities, whether the impetus comes from one’s editors or peers or the marketplace.

Yet as I watched Twitter melt down this weekend, I started to wonder whether that moment might actually be starting to pass—a casualty of the unlikely tag team of Joe Biden and Elon Musk. The two have, respectively, helped kill the demand and the means for journalists to brand themselves.

Donald Trump isn’t responsible for the celebrification of the press, but he supercharged it, especially in political journalism. During his presidency, the American public was more fixated on the news than it had been in decades. Journalists, in turn, became celebrities in their own right: Maggie Haberman of The New York Times became a household name thanks to her perpetual stream of Trump scoops. CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press-room grandstanding elevated his renown. The TV-retread Tucker Carlson found his moment as Trump’s greatest media apostle. Books about Trump seemed to shoot up the best-seller lists on a weekly basis.

This has all slowed to a crawl in the Biden era. The president has intentionally pursued a strategy of being boring and normal, and the result is much-reduced attention from the press. It’s hard to think of any reporter who has become a new, massive star since 2021. No Biden-book boom has ensued. Readership at news sites dropped after the 2020 election, and so have TV-news audiences. The calmer mood reverses an infamous tweet: The change is good for our country, but this is dull content.

Musk’s purchase and gradual demolition of Twitter is an even bigger part of the equation. Twitter was a branding machine that allowed reporters to make a direct connection with consumers. A clever or funny or piquant or simply hyperactive journalist could bypass the traditional gatekeepers of their outlet and become famous for something other than—or in addition to—whatever appeared under their byline.

Now Twitter is disintegrating for reasons of both ideology and technology. Although it has always been true that Twitter is not real life, the site brought together an unusually wide spectrum of the population, all in one place. Musk was mocked for calling Twitter a “town square,” but he was right. And because so many journalists were on the site, getting big on Twitter was usually enough to get big outside of it. But Musk’s takeover has encouraged the metamorphosis of the site into what my colleague Charlie Warzel has called a “far-right social network.” That drives away centrist and liberal reporters, but more importantly their audiences. Meanwhile, the site is mired in technical chaos much of the time, which is a problem for users of any political persuasion.

What comes after Twitter is a much more fragmented landscape. Many social-media sites command significant audiences, but no single platform can do what Twitter once did. A journalist can make a big bet on one platform, or they can try to hedge and be active on Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, and, as of this week, Meta’s Threads—give or take a dozen more. But who has the time? And besides, you don’t get the same reach. TikTok and YouTube command enormous but typically niche audiences. Substack grows slowly and seems to mostly reward writers who were already well-known before migrating to the platform, such as Matt Taibbi or Matt Yglesias. As Twitter refugees joined Bluesky this weekend, my following jumped by roughly 20 percent—to 221. Compare that with the nearly 34,000 followers I have on Twitter. (If I have a brand, it’s a boutique label.)

I’ve been working on reducing my own Twitter use, and I have mixed emotions. Not feeling the pressure to be part of the conversation each day has been freeing (of my time, among other things), though I miss the validation of a clever remark getting lots of engagement. I am not so naive as to hope that the era of journalist branding is over, but with a little luck, 2023 might someday look like a turning point on the road to its demise.

Today’s News

A suspicious powder was found in the White House while President Biden and his family were at Camp David this past weekend, and tests confirmed it as cocaine. The world’s hottest day ever was recorded on July 3, a record that was subsequently broken again on the 4th. Yesterday, a district judge prevented Biden administration officials and certain federal agencies from working with social-media companies to discourage or filter First Amendment–protected speech.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: E-bikes are going to keep exploding, Caroline Mimbs Nyce explains. We’re stuck in battery purgatory. Work in Progress: Leading economists said we’d need higher unemployment to tame inflation, Adam Ozimek writes. Here’s why they were wrong.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

The Great American Eye-Exam Scam

By Yascha Mounk

On a beautiful summer day a few months ago, I walked down to the part of the Connecticut River that separates Vermont from New Hampshire, and rented a kayak. I pushed myself off the dock—and the next thing I remember is being underwater. Somehow, the kayak had capsized as it entered the river. I tried to swim up, toward the light, but found that my own boat blocked my way to safety. Doing my best not to panic, I swam down and away before finally coming up for air a few yards downriver. I clambered onto the dock, relieved to have found safety, but I was disturbed to find that the world was a blur. Could the adrenaline rush have been so strong that it had impaired my vision? No, the answer to the puzzle was far more trivial: I had been wearing glasses—glasses that were now rapidly sinking to the bottom of the Connecticut River.

If the whole experience was, in retrospect, as funny as it was scary, the most annoying consequence was the need to regain the faculty of sight. I did not have any backup glasses or spare contact lenses on hand. The local optometrists did not have open slots for an eye exam. Since the United States requires patients to have a current doctor’s prescription to buy eyewear, I was stuck. In the end, I had to wear my flowery prescription sunglasses—in offices and libraries, inside restaurants and aboard planes—for several days.

Then I went to Lima, Peru, to give a talk. There, I found a storefront optician, told a clerk my strength, and purchased a few months’ worth of contact lenses. Though my Spanish is rudimentary, the transaction took about 10 minutes.

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