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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

EVs are sending toxic tire particles into the water, soil, and air. Stop micromanaging the war in Ukraine.

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.

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.

The Supreme Court’s debt-relief ruling is a blow to President Joe Biden—and to the millions of people who expected that some of their loans would be forgiven. The Biden administration is quickly moving to its Plan B for relieving student debt, but little about this process will be quick.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Google isn’t grad school. Zombie Twitter has arrived. A radical idea for fixing polarization Compostable plastic is garbage.

Biden’s Plan B

The way President Biden talked about debt relief was vivid, almost epic: When he announced his sweeping student-loan debt-relief plan last August, he said in the West Wing, “People can start to finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt.”

Almost a year later, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that his plan could not move forward. This ruling is a blow to Biden—and to the millions of people who were reshaping their lives and their spending habits around the expectation that their loans would be forgiven. “I don’t think that people are properly understanding how difficult this payment restart is going to be from a logistical standpoint” for borrowers, my colleague Adam Harris, who covers higher education for The Atlantic, told me.

Biden’s initial debt-relief plan relied on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, or the HEROES Act. That law gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify” federal-student-loan provisions after national emergencies (President Donald Trump previously used it to pause loan repayment at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic). But last week, the Court determined that the 2003 law did not give Biden the authority to cancel debt. Chief Justice Roberts invoked the “major-questions doctrine,” which dictates that Congress must clearly authorize action on issues of major economic and political significance. (In a striking dissent, Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether the decision was constitutional. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent,” she wrote. In exercising authority it does not have, she concluded, the Court “violates the Constitution.”)  

Biden’s administration moved quickly to Plan B (and beyond). The Department of Education released a statement on Friday saying that it had already initiated a new rule-making process to open up different paths to push through debt relief, including using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which contains a provision giving the secretary of education the authority to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand.” It also announced other changes that would cut borrowers some slack, including a more affordable repayment plan and a year-long “on-ramp” to repayment.

Many advocates wanted Biden to use the Higher Education Act as the basis for debt relief in the first place. Braxton Brewington, the press secretary of the activist group Debt Collective, told me that his group has been “pushing” for Biden to use the HEA. “What we would love to say more than anything is that the Biden administration did everything they could,” he added.

One challenge that comes with pivoting to the HEA is that it needs to go through the negotiated rule-making process, which is likely to be long and drawn-out—“We’re talking several months at minimum,” Adam told me, and maybe up to 18 months. The desire for a quicker process may be one reason the Biden administration turned to the HEROES Act first, he said, though the main reason the Biden administration did things this way is that it thought it had broad authority under HEROES to provide debt relief. (Some Supreme Court justices agreed, Adam noted.) Asked for comment, the Department of Education sent a link to a press conference where Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona echoed that point, saying, “We believe that the HEROES Act pathway was quicker and we had the authority to do that.”

And a new debt-relief plan that uses the HEA instead of HEROES may face similar legal challenges. Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor who has written for The Atlantic, told me that, in his view, such a plan would be “dead on arrival” at the Supreme Court. He said that the Court had made this clear both in commentary surrounding the case and in the legal rule that it applied in Nebraska v. Biden. “The rule puts such a thumb on the scale against executive action that it precludes the Higher Education Act from being the basis,” he told me. (At the press conference last week, Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, said, “We think that the pathway that we’re choosing here, the Higher Education Act, is available even with [the major questions] doctrine in place.”)

Shugerman added, however, that it’s “perfectly appropriate” for the Biden administration to challenge the Court’s ruling while also pursuing other avenues to push through debt relief. He suggested that the Biden administration could simultaneously invite individual debtors facing hardship to apply for relief through a settlement process. That would take time, he said, and the plan may still face court challenges—but at least it would not be “simply raising similar problems that the Roberts Court identified.”

Shugerman had long been skeptical that using the HEROES Act to pass student-loan relief would make it past the Court. In The Atlantic last year, he argued that the Biden administration’s framing of debt relief as a COVID-era emergency measure, when in reality it was a much broader initiative, made it likely to fail. “That COVID is not the real reason for such a sweeping program is a serious legal problem,” he wrote.

Taking a bold stance on student debt could be politically useful for Biden and Democrats in the lead-up to 2024. Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me, “If President Biden cares about motivating young people, motivating communities of color, and motivating working people in general who are saddled with student debt, this is a really smart issue to keep leaning into and increase the volume on.”

All of this work may take time, potentially even bleeding into the next presidential race and administration. And broader issues in higher education persist: “Supporting students on the front end going to college and helping them get through would be preferable to having them accrue this large amount of debt” in the first place, Adam Harris told me.

Taken together, he said, the debt-relief ruling and the Court’s ruling on race-conscious college admissions last week tell us that “the Court does not adequately account for the broader history of higher education in these decisions.” He added that it “simply does not think about the weight that history has and continues to play.”

Related:

Biden’s student-debt rescue plan is a legal mess. Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem.

Today’s News

President Trump’s personal aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty to federal charges in the classified-documents case. The president of Belarus claimed that the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has returned to Russia, despite a previous peace deal where he had agreed to house Prigozhin in Belarus. Meta unveiled Threads, its competitor to Twitter, yesterday. More than 30 million users signed up on the first day.

Evening Read

Samuel Aranda / Panos Pictures / Redux

In France, Nihilistic Protest Is Becoming the Norm

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched. To log on to social media or turn on the TV in France over the past week was to have been transported into Athena’s world.

Late last month, an officer in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who was driving illegally, after he accelerated out of a traffic stop. His death has triggered days of violence that have convulsed the country and at times verged on open revolt. Groups of disaffected youth have incinerated cars, buses, trams, and even public libraries and schools. Roving mobs have clashed with armored police; giddy teens have ransacked sneaker and grocery stores; frenzied young men have filmed one another blasting what look to be Kalashnikovs into the sky.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic

Read. No Longer Human, by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, is a cult classic that captures the stress of social alienation.

Listen. Sorry, honey, it’s too hot for camp. On the newest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin discusses how climate change is killing the childhood of our imaginations.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Yesterday evening, I read a lovely appreciation of Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor who died last month at the age of 92, in The New York Review of Books. The essay, written by Daniel Mendelsohn, recalled some delightful stories of years of friendship. But what I found especially moving was the way he highlighted Gottlieb’s roving curiosity. “Although Bob had a first-class formal education,” Mendelsohn writes, “he was ultimately self-taught in the way that many people who are voracious and indiscriminate readers in their formative years are self-taught: because he sampled everything for himself firsthand, his relationship to books and, later, to all culture was wholly unfiltered by received opinion or ‘theory’ or schools of thought. As a result, he was utterly without intellectual or cultural prejudice—not at all a bad model for an aspiring critic.”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

A heat dome in Texas. Wildfire smoke polluting the air in the East and Midwest. The signs are everywhere that our children’s summers will look nothing like our own. In this episode, we talk with the climate writer Emma Pattee about how hot is too hot to go outside. The research is thin and the misconceptions are many—but experts are quickly looking into nuances of how and why children suffer in the heat, so we can prepare for a future that’s already here.

Pattee grew up partly in a tent in the woods with the trees as her friends. And she expected her kids would do the same. But as a climate writer, she is realizing more quickly than the rest of us that we already need to let go of what we imagined summer might look like for our children.

“What climate change does is: It makes us realize that our blueprint is fantasy. It is no longer reality. And our children will not live the lives that we have lived. Our children are gonna live drastically different lives than we have lived.”

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Emma Pattee: In the 30 minutes between when the bus drops off all the kids and the parent picks up their kid, they’re just pouring water consistently over these kids to stop them from getting heat illness.

Do I want that for my kid? These become the difficult questions.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. We have a lot of romantic ideas about childhood, and especially about what childhood should look like in the summer. Kids mucking around in ponds, finding tadpoles. Nature camp. City kids learning outdoor skills so they won’t be totally useless in the apocalypse.

But then, like a lot of romantic ideas, they sometimes run up against … reality. Which these days means it’s too hot to muck around in ponds, or even go outside sometimes. This summer: 107 in Texas. 105 in Louisiana. And a couple of summers ago, a freak heat wave so dangerous that Emma Pattee, who is a climate writer, got trapped in her house with a new baby for days. And her fellow moms in Portland basically never recovered.

Rosin: So Emma, you told me that you were on your Facebook moms’ group one day. And what happened?

Pattee: So, you know, I’m a mom. Obviously you cannot be a mom without being part of your local Facebook moms’ group. And last summer we would have these hot days, and I would just see these Facebook groups explode. You know, “How hot is too hot to have my kid outside?”

Or the summer-camp counselors saying that they’re sending the kids home because of the heat: “But I don’t think it’s that hot. You know, what do I do?” Or the opposite: “The summer camp is saying 104 is the cutoff. That’s too hot.” Moms are posting photos of their kids, you know, these sweaty little kids, like, “Is this heat stroke?”

And it just was this big moment for me; nobody knew what was happening. Nobody knew what to do. Something dangerous was occurring, and nobody had any answers.

Rosin: Well, it sounds like people didn’t know if it was dangerous or not. Like before they could even get to dangerous, they were just in information-less panic. Because people essentially have this idea in their heads: Well, it’s nice. Kids are supposed to be outside. It’s summer; they’re not in school.

And yet, there were all these indicators that that was maybe not the right thing to do. So you’re trapped between this idea you have of what kids should be doing in the summer—and your worry and panic that this is really harmful. So is that the first time you’d seen the moms’ group get activated in the summer like that?

Pattee: Yeah. And I live in the Pacific Northwest—we have a very outdoor culture. And I’ve just started seeing, year after year, that culture is changing. Now my kids get invited to indoor birthday parties. You drive by a playground in the middle of summer, and it’s empty. I started to see these kinds of indicators all around me. And it became clear to me this was a topic I was really interested in.

In places where it’s very, very hot, there are behavioral adaptations that have taken place over centuries and lifetimes. The culture itself has developed around extreme heat.

Rosin: You mentioned that you had a new baby during the heat wave. So can you say more? Like what happened?

Pattee: Yeah. I had a baby. A/C blasting. The issue was: Would the A/C be sufficient enough that I could stay home? It was 99 degrees, and the next day it was like 95 degrees, and the next day it was like 100 degrees. The next day it was like 102 degrees. And it just kinda went on like that.

Already, having a baby is a very intense experience. Big weather events can bring up really intense emotional and mental challenges. And I had this experience of having my second kid —I, as a climate writer, obviously had incredibly conflicted feelings about having a second kid.

I’m holding this tiny little baby, and I’m sitting in the dark, and all the shades are drawn and the A/C is blasting. It’s so loud. And I just sat that way all day, every day thinking, What have I done?

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, it’s been a while since I had my babies, but why can’t you go outside with the baby in the heat?

Pattee: Babies cannot regulate their own temperature, and they don’t sweat efficiently the way that older children learn to and that adults then obviously can. I could only go outside with the baby at 6 a.m., and we would come back in at 7 a.m. And we would not leave the house again until the following day at 6 a.m.

Rosin: Oh my God. That is very claustrophobic. Do you remember your state of mind during that period?

Pattee: Dark. Yeah. I mean, I think it was exacerbated by having this older kiddo who is like, I wanna go to the park. I wanna go play. And he’s in our living room, he is looking through the window, and he’s watching the neighbor kids jumping on a pogo stick.

And I’m having to explain to him, “You cannot go outside.” And he doesn’t understand. And I’m like, “It’s too hot.” Even now he does this—you know, he will open the front door and put his little hand out and say, “Mom, it’s not too hot.”

You know, I’m not gonna obviously exaggerate. People will go through a lot of worse things every single day. But it was not something I had expected. And I think that took me by surprise.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean when we had the smoke come in from the wildfires in Canada recently, we got an email from the school saying “All outside activities have been suspended.” So I guess we on the East Coast also had our first taste of Maybe our kids’ summer is not gonna look like the ones we had.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you grew up and what your relationship with nature in the woods was?

Pattee: Sure. I grew up on 40 acres in southern Oregon. I grew up deep in the woods, and for about one long summer, we lived in a big army tent on a wooden platform. And then, sort of slowly, my dad built a wood cabin. And at first there wasn’t running water. For a while there wasn’t a great working toilet.

So I spent my entire summer just kind of wandering in the woods, and I would go on hikes. I was really into tracking animals. Nature was very alive. I have this strong connection with this particular tree, and, you know, this particular field.

And I had this also this sense of like, Oh, this is my land. As everyone says in their Tinder profiles: “I love nature.” Instead of this kind of large, anonymous “nature,” it was so specific to this piece of land.

Rosin: You think of little kids having relationships with stuffed animals. Like, This tree has a personality. It knows me. I know it. Like, it was as intimate?

Pattee: Exactly. That it was like the stuffed animals of childhood.

Rosin: As you said, you had your own kids. And how did you transfer this upbringing to them?

Pattee: Now I live in Portland, in a pretty urban area. And it’s been very interesting, because I did not ever question that my kids would grow up the way that I had. I always thought, Of course they’ll wander alone in the woods. Of course they’ll run around barefoot, and we’ll go camping, and we’ll go hiking, and we’ll go swimming. But so far really that has not been the experience.

My [first] kiddo was born in 2018, and in 2020 COVID happened and we all went inside. And then we had our worst wildfire season. And I think since we have had a worse one, and I stayed inside for almost a week on end—like duct-taping the windows because the smoke was so severe.

And then we had, in 2021, the heat dome, and hundreds of people died. A heat dome is essentially when you have extremely high temperatures that do not go away—that stay consistently high. So, a key to surviving extreme heat is that it will cool off, and your body will be able to cool off before it gets hot again the next day.

And once again, children really could not leave the house at all. And then the following summer, I had a baby in a heat wave. So, you know, it’s been … not the childhood I had imagined for them.

Rosin: It’s not clear what you would’ve done without all these disasters, but it sounds like you didn’t even have the chance to ask yourself that question.

Pattee: Yeah; I sort of came to reality when I had my second child and realized, Oh, they’re gonna spend the majority of their summers indoors, and I need to prepare for that now emotionally and logistically. The question really is like: Who are we without nature? Who are my kids going to be if they do not spend their summers walking through trees?

And then I think you can expand that question to humanity at large and ask: Who are we going to be as we start to sever our relationship to the natural world?

Rosin: Okay; before we get to those big philosophical questions, I would like to take care of some of the basics. Because people are experiencing a heat dome in Texas this summer. Like: What do we actually know about “How hot is too hot for children?”

Pattee: So the data that we have shows that ER visits go up, obviously, during extreme heat. There’s certainly, you know, cognitive performance issues that come up in extreme heat. Medical professionals in emergency rooms and clinicians don’t always know what they’re looking at when they see heat illness.

It is possible that we are missing some heat deaths, because they don’t look how we expect. And I predict that over the next 10 years, our understanding and sophistication about tracking heat death is gonna change, and the numbers are gonna be higher than what we had understood.

Rosin: And so is there any data that gives us guidance on what to watch for or what to avoid?

Pattee: What I found was there’s so much that we do not know about kids and heat. And the pediatrician whom I interviewed described it as being in the dark ages, [with] what we understand about children in heat. And the main reason for that is just because it’s very hard to justify doing heat studies on children. Like, we cannot stick them in a sauna and see who comes out.

So much of our data is like being extrapolated from other areas, and that leaves a lot of room for confusion.

Rosin: Yeah. So have there been any studies done that we could look at?

Pattee: No, there have not been studies done that would give us an exact answer of how hot is too hot. I spoke with Dr. Aaron Bernstein, who’s a pediatrician and is also an expert on children and climate.

He talked about this frustrating challenge—when you know something is happening as an expert, but you cannot locate it in the data. He has gone back and looked through emergency-room visits through many, many, many heat waves. And he cannot locate what he knows is happening, which is that more kids are getting sick.

Is that because their parents aren’t taking them in? Is it because their parents aren’t identifying it as heat illness? Is it because they’re not getting that sick? And so, what’s best is for them to just stay home, and then there’s no record of it. So there is not, right now, reliable data around exactly what happens to kids during heat waves and during extreme heat. What we are starting to understand is that for a long time the medical field thought that only children who were athletes and only very ill children were sensitive to heat, and that you had to be running around outside to be sensitive to heat. That is not true.

There also was for a long time this idea that one size fits all: “If my kid did fine in 95 degrees, then your kid should do fine.” And really, what doctors are starting to understand is that there’s so much nuance in that. It’s like, What’s the humidity? Is the child walking through a city or a forest? How hydrated were they the day before? What was the temperature of their bedroom the night before? Like, that’s gonna play into if your child gets heat illness. And so, of course some children are going to be much more sensitive than others.

I didn’t realize if you were taking a stimulant, you are much more sensitive to heat illness. And you might think, well, what does that have to do with kids? But there’s millions of kids who are being medicated for ADHD taking stimulants every single day, and whose parents may not even realize that there is this sensitivity.

Rosin: Wow. I mean, listening to you, I feel simultaneously more educated and more confused. If I were a camp director, or even a parent of little children, is there any reliable guidance or line that they can stick to to make these kinds of decisions?

Pattee: Yeah; I was impressed by how the camp directors that I spoke with, even though they were not following any sort of government rule, they were all very savvy. They follow something called the heat index, and that combines the humidity level with the temperature to let you know when it’s too dangerous to be outside.

There is a lot of great knowledge about very dangerous heat: heat that’s dangerous for everyone. I think it’s the gray area where you start to get a little bit more iffy, like, “At what temperature are we gonna start seeing behavioral issues from kids?” Or, “At what temperature are 15 percent of the kids gonna be susceptible to heat illness, but the rest are gonna be fine? Is that enough to send all kids home early?” You know, these are very big logistics challenges.

Rosin: Got it. Is there a number, by the way? Like, is there a bright line at 104 degrees which is not good for anyone?

Pattee: There really is not a number. And I can see that my insistence on finding that number was speaking to my misunderstanding of this issue—that I think it would be more dangerous to have a set number.

Rosin: Oh, interesting.

Pattee: Because it would allow people to think this is a simple issue, and it’s not. What we need is more education around extreme heat and what heat illness looks like. I think that’s gonna be more important than trying to come up with a hard and fast number that will work across all situations, all ages, and all regions. Because we will never find that.

Rosin: Just as we’re talking about heat, we’re only talking about kids in nature — but actually the things I have read talk a lot about city kids. Particularly kids of color, kids who are poor, kids who don’t have air conditioning. That’s a heat issue, which is very relevant to what you talked about in terms of education and how hot is too hot.

Pattee: Yeah. Researchers have found something called an “urban heat island,” which is essentially what happens when people live in areas where there is so much asphalt, and there are no trees. And what they found is that in one city the temperature can vary as much as 20 degrees.

And so if in Portland we had a 95-degree day, there might be a child who’s being exposed to 20 degrees above that—and his parent is thinking, Well, it’s 95 degrees. Go out and play.

Rosin: So the question is: What’s the number on your street? Do you have air conditioning?

Pattee: I mean, air conditioning is a perfect example of inequality in action, because families of color are much less likely to have air conditioning. And so then you reach this double whammy—where you’re living in an area that is so much hotter than the rest of your city, and you don’t have access to air conditioning.

These are incredibly troubling things that are gonna become sort of the reality of our summers, if they aren’t already. And in these transition years is when things, I think, are gonna get pretty weird.

Rosin: You mean, climate change is already warping our reality? And our kids’ realities? But we just haven’t psychologically caught up to that yet?

Pattee: Absolutely. Yes. This is about adaptation happening in real time.

Rosin: Okay; so here you are, coming to consciousness that things are happening and things are changing. And that we’re just a little behind in adapting. And you visited a summer camp with an environmental educator. Can you tell us more about that?

Pattee: Yeah. So I had the chance to meet with Tony Deis, and he is the co-founder of Trackers. Trackers is one of the biggest summer camps in Oregon. And they had made the decision to rent out an empty department store in a large indoor shopping mall, into a summer camp haven.

Rosin: No!

Pattee: And we’re walking through the linoleum floors and the fluorescent lighting, and it’s completely empty. There’s still clothes hangers here and there, and some signage up and stuff. It was interesting, because I had gone to the shopping mall as a teenager with my friends. And so I’m walking through this empty department store, and I suddenly realized that it is the Marshall’s that I shopped at as a teenager and that I bought makeup at.

And I’m having this intense memory of being a teenager in this store. And of course, now it’s a summer camp. And he’s saying, like, “Here’s the ax-throwing range, and here’s where we’re gonna do art, and here’s the climbing wall.”

It was chilling, because I, at the same time, was looking for summer camps for my kid. So I was all too aware that I was going to be that customer who sent my kid to that camp.

Rosin: Ugh. I mean, I can just imagine the scene of like, he’s juggling and trying to make it seem fun—“And we’re gonna have art over here”—and you’re slowly dying inside.

Pattee: He’s in an impossible situation.

And I felt for him—this person who, you know, is a savvy outdoor survivalist. And I could tell that this was a very, very hard decision for him. And I respected that.

I think that he sees the future, and he’s trying to get ahead of it. And I think that it’s actually a really smart plan, which is, you know, “Let’s adapt.” Now they have this backup location—so they’re still gonna have outdoor camps, but if there’s bad wildfire smoke, their kids can go throw axes.

I mean, you got that message from your school last week saying there won’t be any outdoor activities. But what if they said, “Oh, we’re moving all of our outdoor activities into this awesome, giant play space.” Of course you would prefer that for your kid.

Rosin: I guess? Maybe?

Pattee: I think that there’s a part of us that does not wanna face what is happening in our world. And so we don’t face it by ignoring it, and we end up in much more dangerous and messy situations.

And it is incredibly painful to face it. And you get pushback from people who do not wanna face that summer is different, right? Like, if you host an indoor party for your child in August, which I have done, you will hear from everyone: “That is crazy.” And your own kid will ask you, “Why can’t I have it at the park?”

And so I think that it takes a brave person to say, This is the future. You may not like it, but it’s here, and I’m going to plan for it.

Rosin: When I read your writing about children and heat and summer camp, the first place my mind went, without even knowing you, was, Oh, Emma’s an environmentalist who’s looking for ways to make us all pay attention to climate change. Because she knows by invoking the children and worry about the children, we’ll all jump to attention.

True or false?

Pattee: I’m that mom at the playground who talks about climate change, and nobody will stand by me.

But if you talk about, you know, “My kiddo’s birthday is in August; are you guys doing indoor or outdoor parties?”—you can get into a one-hour-deep discussion that will end with climate change, that will end with a parent saying, “Man, I have an August birthday, and I always had an outdoor birthday party.” Or like, “Man, I wonder about the future.” And so I’m always looking for an inroad.

And if you meet people with the concerns of their everyday life, like summer camp, you can grab a moment of their attention.

Rosin: Oh, that’s so interesting. It’s absolutely true. You’re getting them at a place where they care and can pay attention, and where it’s really under their skin. It’s close to home. And then you can sort of tiptoe your way through the bigger issues.

You said earlier that you grew up in the woods and then moved to the city. When did you start to care about climate change as an adult?

Pattee: I mean, I’ve always been pretty aware of climate change. You know, I was a teenager in the years of the Prius. And my mom once actually backed our van down a hill trying to pick up a piece of Styrofoam and completely totaled the car, because that was her dedication to getting that Styrofoam off the road. So I grew up with An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that Al Gore did about climate change, and this idea that we need to get off fossil fuels. And yet, climate change never really bothered me in the sense of—I never shed a tear about it. It didn’t keep me up at night. I didn’t spend a lot of my time thinking about it.

Rosin: Like it felt far away. Like it felt like a thing that, you know, you should rally—like picking up trash on the street—but not anything with emotional heft.

Pattee: Absolutely. And I think you can always compare it to your hair. Like, Do I spend more time worried about my hair or climate change? And when I look at that, nope: definitely cared more about my hair all those years. And so I think that’s always a good bar to know how much you care about current topics.

And then I had a child and I went to a moms’ group, a postpartum moms’ group. My kid was three weeks old. And a woman said, “I grew up in Miami, and I’m realizing that by the time my child is an adult, Miami will be underwater.” I was like, What is she talking about? That’s not true. These crazy moms.

And then that night I woke up and I thought, like, Is that true? And I Googled it, and I can say that within about five minutes, I found out that that was true. And that her concerns were not a mom being crazy, but were very legitimate, scientifically backed concerns.

And I felt such existential panic. I saw in this brief moment so clearly that climate change is completely real and terrifying. A very profound threat to our species. And that I had been doing lip service to it all those years.

And so I had this very profound wake up, and once you see it, you really can’t unsee it.

Rosin: Yeah; I’ve been around people who have gone through that. There’s just such profound loss in My children will not have access to the things that I had access to. Like, the continuity of generations is suddenly broken. And there’s just something really scary about that. Is that why it happened in that kind of atmosphere with other moms?

Pattee: I think there is something about having a child that can bring you very face-to-face with climate change. Because I think it gives you a context to think about the future. Like before I had a kid, I never thought about 30 years from now. What? Who even knows what’s gonna happen? That’s bizarre.

And as soon as you have a kid, you think, I wonder what the world’s gonna be like in 30 years. I wonder what my kid’s gonna be doing. I wonder where my kid’s gonna live. You have this urgency to thinking about the future, but you also have this blueprint for the future.

And I think what climate change does is: It makes us realize that our blueprint is fantasy. It is no longer reality. And our children will not live the lives that we have lived. Our children are gonna live drastically different lives than we have lived. And having a child can put that into sharp focus.

Rosin: Maybe we should end on the coyote story? I’m not sure if it will inspire people or depress them. For me it did both. So, can you retell the story that the camp director told you as you were walking around that fluorescent-lighting place that used to be a Marshall’s?

Pattee: So, you know, toward the end of our tour, I kinda sheepishly asked him, “You’re like this total outdoors guy. Isn’t there a part of you that kind of flinches at the idea of keeping kids inside this fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned indoor shopping mall?” And he said that at first he was like, Oh, no way. A team member had suggested it.

And he said, “There’s just no way that will ever happen.” And then he kind of came around to the idea, because of all this severe weather. And then he’d had this realization, which is that a coyote doesn’t look at things as “nature” or “not nature.” Right? A coyote looks at everything as nature. And so what he was gonna do is just be that coyote, and look at the Marshall’s as nature.

Rosin: Wow. It’s a really calming and beautiful idea. It has a lot of resignation in it, but it also has a little bit of optimism in it. And I don’t know how to feel about it. Have you thought about it more since he said that?

Pattee: Yeah. I thought it was beautiful. I instantly thought He’s right—but standing in that Marshall’s, you know, every cell in my body was saying “No.”

Rosin: Of course. I bet. I mean, the big, big philosophical question that’s in your head was, Who are we without nature? And so hearing that coyote story, I feel like that is an answer to that question. Like possibly, we’re people who live in a different kind of nature, or we have redefined nature.

And I wonder about these camps, thinking about adaptation, if you’ve landed anywhere with a “Who are we without nature?” question.

Pattee: You know, as part of my journey through climate grief to some kind of reconciliation, I think I have had to become very resigned and excited about the concept of adaptation and evolution. And to see that things that I thought of as forever—things like nature, things like walking in the woods—that I cannot really see as separate from my identity.

To see that those are just temporary states of being, and that things that I think of as absolute are not absolute, and to try to find some excitement about what the future might hold, even if it looks nothing like anything I’ve ever known.

Rosin: I love it, because I feel like it takes something natural, which is this idea of the cycles of nature. Like, everything changes; everything becomes other things. We’re obviously mutually inhabiting a very optimistic space right now, but it takes that “cycles of nature” idea and it rolls with it. So I feel like that’s maybe the best choice we have right now.

Pattee: Yeah. I mean it is, right? Like, I was thinking today about how we all think of adaptation as this kind of sexy thing some tech bro is gonna create for us. Like, This was the past, and now we’ve adapted, and this is the future. And they unveil whatever it is: the AI garden.

But this is adaptation. Adaptation is a summer-camp headquarters in Marshall’s. Adaptation is moms on a Facebook group saying, “Is it too hot to go to the park?” Like, it’s messy. It’s brutal. And we’re in it.

Rosin: Yeah. And it’s done day to day. And we’re in it, exactly. We’re in it.

One of the most uncompromising artists of the 21st century, Anohni Hegarty makes gorgeous music to warn humankind of its demise. Whether with gentle orchestration on the classic 2005 album I Am a Bird Now or with electronic beats on the 2016 release Hopelessness, her quavering voice has prophesied the death of herself, our species, and our planet with haunting, almost paralyzing, clarity. A writer of manifestos who can boast of an Oscar nomination and a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 200 singers of all time, she commands a sense of gravitas more common to Nobel laureates than working musicians.  

Now, on her band’s new album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, she explicitly situates herself within the American protest-music tradition. The songs’ shuffling rhythms and searching refrains recall Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, and other singers of the civil-rights struggle. Some of the lyrics, such as the one that titles the opening track, “It Must Change,” could be slogans chanted at a march. The album cover is a photo of Marsha P. Johnson, the activist who helped consolidate the queer liberation movement and inspired the name of Anohni’s band, the Johnsons. (Her image is, among other things, a reminder that Anohni has been singing about her own transgender identity since long before trans rights were a mainstream concern.)

Although lovely, these new songs still have a gruesome honesty. “Scapegoat” envisions a hate crime from the point of view of the criminal: “I can use you like a toilet / I can punch you / And take all of my hate / Into your body.” On “Why Am I Alive Now?,” she paints an all-too-recognizable hellscape of smoky skies and dying animals, lamenting, “I don’t want to be witness.” What course of action are these bleak visions meant to inspire? I wanted to speak with her to understand.

As it turns out, interviewing Anohni was as intense an experience as listening to her music. After she greeted me in a giggly and friendly manner, her speech turned halting. Each answer was painstakingly produced and employed custom terminology: Musical styles were “technology”; tolerance was the “mandate of care.” She repeatedly paused and asked to revise her thoughts, and at times seemed to be speaking through tears. At the end of the conversation, the spell broke and she was back to conviviality. “Sorry if I got a little—I don’t know what I got,” she said before we ended the call. I felt drained but reassured: Within this viscerally fearful music lies a rigorous theory of how we all might survive.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Spencer Kornhaber: Is the title of “It Must Change” a command, telling people to change? Or is it a statement of fact: Inevitably, things change.

Anohni: It was a feeling in me. It’s forcing a space in one’s imagination to exist. I watched society go from the ’90s, where people were in denial about the gravity of environmental changes that we were already experiencing, to within 10 years just having this resigned attitude about it. That space in our imaginations—why was it suffocated?

It’s probably partly because people feel so disempowered. We’ve all been forced into these complicitous stress positions in relationship to consumerism, where it’s impossible to even eat food without doing harm. It’s hard, when we’re facing so much shame and guilt about our own complicity as consumers, to imagine broader change.

Kornhaber: Your last album was Hopelessness, and it sat in that feeling of hopelessness. The vibe this time is a little different. Does that reflect you gaining hope or just changing how you’re expressing yourself?

Anohni: Hopelessness was probably the most strategically executed record I made. I set out to disrupt people’s assumptions about what my voice was for. It was no longer a voice of solace or comfort. I wanted to embody complicated conversations about my own complicity.

But what was interesting about Hopelessness is that as much as I thought I was doing this battle cry, attempting to break down denial, the people who cared were people that felt the same way I did but appreciated someone singing their thoughts. It’s nice to hear someone sing “I don’t want to be a part of this drone bombing campaign that’s taking the lives in a part of the world that I don’t even understand.”

Singing is a different channel of communication. It comes from the spirit. It’s ancient, and it bypasses a lot of bullshit. When you put really direct, clear words or ideas onto those streams of sound, they can reach into a different part of you. I mean, that’s what Marvin Gaye did with What’s Going On. He took all that technology of music and then he weaponized it with a plain-speaking script describing life as he saw it. It wasn’t just one song. It was an accumulation of songs that systematically identified issue after issue. And it culminated in a single vision that comprised a worldview. It’s powerful.

And ironically, for all the people saying Hopelessness is so hopeless, my desire was to use more vigorous language to talk about how I actually felt. The music I was making was too pastoral. It wasn’t responding to the times. It wasn’t sufficiently vigorous. And that was why I did Hopelessness. It wasn’t me going off and dillydallying with classical musicians.

[Read: Drones, global warming, and other excellent topics for pop songs]

Kornhaber: Where does this new album land in relation to that feeling?

Anohni: This record came about as an impulse. I contacted my label during COVID and said, “I’d like to make a ‘blue-eyed soul’ record.” Blue-eyed soul is obviously a very complicated, problematic idea. And yet, it’s all wrapped up in the truth about where my voice comes from.

Why, as a 10-year-old, was I listening to New Wave singers like Boy George and Alison Moyet, who were singing with these intensely soulful, evocative voices in American accents? I was sitting by the radio as a child in the South of England hearing these vocalists express a kind of knowledge that I didn’t see in evidence anywhere else in the society that I was part of. Here was this oasis of gracious resilience, embodied in the form of a 20-year-old Irish London queen named Boy George, singing like a 50-year-old Black, American woman. It was the beginning of an outpouring of white, English voices that were founded on the soulful technology of Black, American music from the ’50s and ’60s. The British kids grabbed it like a life raft, and I find myself wondering why.

The class system in the U.K. was a guillotine. And I’m imagining kids from the suburbs of London going to see concerts by Otis Redding or sitting around listening to Nina Simone. It’s like an enlightenment. Children hear these voices that are expressing a knowledge of how to navigate untenable circumstances with grace, resilience, and joy. And their fucking minds are blown. That technology was taken up and imitated across generations.

Kornhaber: As you said, this is such a tricky and problematic tradition. How do you reckon with the appropriation discourse?

Anohni: I am from a naive generation. I mean, Culture Club: Boy George was an effeminate queen in Liz Taylor makeup wearing Hasidic outfits—with a bassist descended from the islands, a Jewish drummer, and a white guy with blond hair on guitar—singing with the voice of, like, Millie Jackson. It’s like, what is that? To me, that’s cultural biodiversity. Now we would call it a naive vision of multiculturalism as urban paradise. And that was what I was raised on. We would go to the city hoping to see everyone who was different, and that was where I felt safe. Because if everyone was different, then I was normal.

The whole conversation about appropriation—it’s real. It’s all real. And the first part of it is: Let me name where I come from. There’s no way for me to justify it. I’m just trying to be honest about where my voice technology comes from. And also say “thank you,” because this technology saved my life.

Kornhaber: This reminds me of the Marsha P. Johnson album cover. On Instagram, you wrote about how in the past six years, she has finally been recognized “as the Rosa Parks of the trans and gay Civil rights movements.” Why do you think this recognition has arrived in the past six years?

Anohni: Because there’s a Netflix movie.

Kornhaber: It’s as simple as that?

Anohni: Yeah, it’s as simple as that.

Kornhaber: Do you think that instances of cultural representation of queer and trans people make a substantive difference? Does it matter to you that there has been a trans singer on the American pop charts?

Anohni: Of course it matters to me. I’m thrilled that there’s a trans singer in the pop charts, but it has very little bearing on the safety of normal people’s lives, or whether they’re being preyed upon in the media, in the schoolyard, or in their places of work, or whether they’re even allowed to get jobs.

Representation is useful, but the mandate of care waxes and wanes depending on the conditions that societies are undergoing. There could have been times in the ’70s where gay people were a lot safer, generally speaking, than they are now. It’s not like this inexorable progress. That’s a fantasy. Things can get worse, and they do, and just because there’s a trans pop star doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be coming with pitchforks.

And that’s what people are being incited to do—by people that don’t give a shit about trans people. All they care about doing is making sure that no one gets themselves together to have a broader conversation about the fact that malevolent figures are making decisions that are operating like ushers of death into all of our communities. They don’t want us to have that conversation, and that’s why they’ve reanimated a loathing for gay people and trans people, and miraculously managed to reinvigorate a fantasy that women shouldn’t have a right to govern their own bodies. It’s a disease. We’re unwell. And that’s actually a message of hope.

Kornhaber: How so?

Anohni: Because if we can’t acknowledge what’s really happening, we’re never, ever gonna be able to shift our trajectory. The difference between this record and the last record is that I’m trying to introduce, in my own life, a sense of mercy and self-forgiveness in this conversation about complicity. We’re gonna need some tenderness if we’re going to be able to withstand the truth about who we are, and what we’ve done, and where we’re headed. We’re going to have to find ways to forgive ourselves.

But that’s a very adult challenge. And most of us are floundering in infantile, reactionary responses to the current moment. The adult response will be to find gracious strength and resilience—the same kind of strength and resilience that I saw modeled in those soul songs.

Kornhaber: The song “Why Am I Alive Now?” makes me wonder whether there are other eras that you wish you had been in, or that you escape to in your mind.

Anohni: In my way of dreaming about things, all the different eyes of the past are looking through our eyes. And I imagine that if I dream deeply enough, I’ll be able to hear the thoughts of coral reefs that I was once a part of.

There’s a tremendous amount of suffering right now on the planet. We’ve managed to keep it out of sight as, quote, “first world” consumers, but you don’t have to dig very deep to imagine the hurting hands through which most of the nourishment we suck on has passed through. Like foods, or animal products, or plastic wrappings. So “Why Am I Alive Now?” is just asking a question from a place of porous sensitivity to a broader condition of hurting that permeates the material world. How did it come to be that this was the window through which my eyes would shine? And how do I manage it?

The thing about “Why Am I Alive Now?” that I love is that the music is very joyful and abundant and complex. Hopelessness isn’t a fact. Hope isn’t a fact. It’s just a feeling. And so there’s this narrative, the human narrative, that’s preoccupied with suffering, and then there’s this environment that’s still in process. That’s a big part of the structure of the song, the message of that song.