U.S. stock futures were little changed in premarket trading on Friday; S&P 500 futures were flat, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures dipped 0.6%, and Nasdaq futures rose 0.4%.

Read more...

During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed. Trying to relax, I would drive around just to drive around, the palm trees and sun exactly where they always were, the strip malls endless. But one morning, I turned the radio dial, and on came the lizardy voice of David Lynch. And he was doing the weather report.

Lynch, the bizarro-baroque filmmaker who died this week, at 78, will be remembered for being a cinematic giant, for Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive as well as the warped TV soap opera Twin Peaks and its avant-garde sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. But what I want to recall is a much smaller gift he bestowed on me and other Angelenos when he started airing weather reports every day on the local public-radio station KCRW in May 2020, just as life under the coronavirus was becoming a long-term slog.

These dispatches were quick flashes of absurdity, many of them lasting just a bit more than a minute. The Lynchean joke of it all was, of course, that in La-La Land, the weather is pretty much always the same.

He would start off with the date and day of the week and read off the weather (in Fahrenheit and Celsius), almost invariably saying that it was “sunny” and “very still right now.” And then he would ponder for a moment: “Today, I was thinking about …” What followed was a nugget from the man’s mind, almost always the title of a song, actually something you could imagine him thinking about as he brewed a pot of black coffee that morning—Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You,” or “Moon River,” or the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Sometimes he would just narrate his plans for the day, but in surreal splendor: “Day two of weekend projects, and the fun work train is rolling. I’m going to get to the dining car and get a hot coffee, maybe a cookie, maybe some popcorn. Today I’m going to be working with oil paint, tempera paint, mold-making rubber, resin, and … varnish.”

But the pièce de résistance was the last 10 seconds of each broadcast, when Lynch described what the sky would look like that afternoon: “We might have some clouds visiting until lunchtime. After that should be pure blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way,” or “It looks like these clouds will evaporate by mid-morning, and after that we’re going to be having those beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.”

“All along the way” became a kind of catchphrase. It always made me think of The Wizard of Oz, which was a Lynch touchstone—both the glossy campiness of Glinda and the sickly green skin of the Wicked Witch. And that was it: “Everyone, have a great day!”

(His other catchphrase was “If yoouu can believe it, it’s a Friday once again!” Especially during the early pandemic, this felt like a lifeline to normal times, with a strong undernote of irony.)

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

I heard these dispatches on the radio every morning on my aimless drives, but I later learned that Lynch posted videos of the reports, and in these he appears in a black shirt buttoned to the top, his shock of white hair standing straight up, and—always, always—big dark sunglasses. Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch his first major-studio directorial gig (The Elephant Man, which Brooks produced), famously once called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” It also seems true to say that if Mars had a weatherman, this is exactly what he would look and sound like. (Perhaps: “A blazing red sun outside, folks, but we’ll be down to –153 tonight.”)

David Lynch’s final weather report.

These daily moments of zen opened something up in me, and made the Valley seem a little less ordinary. After all, Lynch was manifesting in these reports the duality that was a hallmark of his aesthetic, a kind of excessive, pathological normalcy. It’s in his reference to many 1950s songs, his clothing and hair, the very idea of a jolly weatherman providing a tether to sunny, physical reality. And yet, the creepy, creaky edge, the excitement with which he pronounced “very still” every single day, pointed to something dreamier and much darker. It made me attuned to the freeway underpasses, brightly lit and menacing, to the sadness of the blinking neon signs on liquor stores, to the Valley’s surrounding hills, which grow shadowy and hulking at night. Listening to Lynch on the radio suddenly made me feel like I was inhabiting a noir of some sort, as if Raymond Chandler were narrating the events of my very boring and predictable COVID day of bleaching vegetables and washing masks.

There was a charm to Lynch’s weather reports. He genuinely seemed to enjoy embodying this role for a few minutes a day. And it came through. My editor told me that his then-7-year-old son thought of Lynch as his “favorite weatherman,” and it’s funny to think of a new generation encountering the director as a grandfatherly figure wishing them a good day as they opened up their laptops for remote school. Wait until they see Dennis Hopper sucking on gas in Blue Velvet.

The weather reports stopped in late 2022, just as the world attempted to return to its own version of normal—and around the time I moved back to New York. But I like to think of Lynch having grabbed that brief period to fulfill his own fantasy of messing with us all a little bit, and also providing something that he wasn’t always known for but should be: a kind of innocent joy. I know that I’m wishing him blue skies all along the way.

Germs are in the air again: Indicators indicate that the winter wave of flu and COVID is finally under way. Are you on the verge of getting sick? Am I? My 5-year-old does feel a little warm to me; his sister seems okay. Maybe I should take their temperature?

Maybe I should not. Here’s my resolution for the year ahead: I will not take their temperature. No parent should be taking temperatures. Because doing so is next to useless. Home thermometers are trash.

The thermometer I have is the kind you point at someone’s head. Clearly it’s a scam. At times, I’ll pull the trigger and the number that I get seems almost right. At other times, the readout is absurd. I know when it’s the latter case because, as a human being, I possess a sensate hand. Evolution has deployed a field of thermo-sensing cells on the glabrous surface of my skin, and I’ve found that when these are laid against the forehead of my child, they may produce the following diagnosis: He is hot. Or else: He seems normal. No further probing is required.

I bought my noncontact fever gun in 2020, during what was, in retrospect, a fever-screening fervor, when thermal bouncers were deployed at concert halls and other venues to test your forehead from however far away. I think we all knew in our hearts that this was silly, even those of us who thought the fever guns might be better used in other circumstances. But to call the practice “silly” may have been too kind.

The published evidence on fever guns is damning. One study from the FDA compared their readings, as produced under ideal conditions, with those from oral thermometers; it found that they were often grossly out of whack. The very best-performing models, according to this research, were able to detect a threshold fever—100.4 degrees Fahrenheit—about two-thirds of the time; the very worst could never make the proper diagnosis. Another study, led by Adrian Haimovich, who is now an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, identified visits to emergency departments in which patients had received both forehead temperature checks and readings with oral or rectal thermometers. The forehead guns were successful at identifying fevers in fewer than one-third of cases.

But let’s not single out the gun, which was to some extent a product of its COVID moment. The standard infrared tympanic probe—which takes a temperature quickly in the ear—is also, in important ways, a waste of time. “I was an ER doc practicing full time when these tympanic thermometers came out,” Edmond Hooker, a professor of health-services administration at Xavier University, told me. He quickly came to think they didn’t work: “I would have a kid come back who was so hot, I could fry an egg on their forehead, and the tympanic thermometer had said 98.6 or 99.” So he started running tests. A paper from 1993 found that the ear thermometers were missing children’s fevers. Another of his studies, conducted in adults, found that the devices were dangerously miscalibrated. (More recent research has raised similar concerns.)

Oral thermometers are fairly accurate, but they present some challenges for use with small children. Rectal probes are the most precise. As for armpit readings, those are also pretty unreliable, Hooker told me. I began to ask him about another means of checking temperature, the light-up fever strip that my parents used to lay across my forehead, but he wouldn’t even let me finish the question. “Absolutely worthless! Your mother was better,” he declared. “That’s what my other study showed: Mom was pretty damn good.”

His other study: Having demonstrated that ear thermometers were ineffective, Hooker decided to compare them with human touch. A parent’s hand—nature’s thermometer—did pretty well: It correctly flagged some 82 percent of children’s fevers, versus the tympanic probe’s 75 percent. Parents’ hands were more prone to overdiagnosis, though: Among the kids with normal temperatures, nearly one-quarter felt warm to their parents. (The false-positive rate for ear thermometers was much lower.)

Many such experiments have been conducted now, in health-care settings all around the world: so much effort spent to measure our ability to diagnose a fever with nothing more than touch. (In medical lingo, this practice is properly—and ickily—described as “parental palpation.”) As a rule, these studies aren’t large, and they may be subject to some bias. For instance, all of the ones that I reviewed were carried out in health-care settings—Hooker’s took place in an emergency department—so the participants weren’t quite “your average kids who might or might not have a cold.” Rather, it’s likely that those kids would have had a higher baseline rate of being feverish, and their parents might have been unusually prone to thinking that their children were very sick.

Some researchers have tried to look at all the little studies of parental touch in aggregate, and although this can be an iffy practice—pooling weak research won’t make it any stronger—these studies do yield about the same result as Hooker’s when taken on the whole: Parents’ hands have a solid sensitivity to fever, of nearly 90 percent, but their specificity is low, at about 55 percent. Put another way: When a kid does have a fever, his parents can usually detect it with their hands, but when he doesn’t, they might mistakenly believe he does.

The latter isn’t great, given that a kid with a fever is supposed to stay home from school or day care. In that case, a thermometer could provide a helpful (moderating) second opinion. But taken as a measure of the risk to your child’s health, palpation must be good enough. The very hottest children—the ones whose infection may be most imperiling—are also the least likely to be misdiagnosed by touch: If your kid’s head feels like the side of a convection oven, then you’d almost certainly say he’s sick, and you’d almost certainly be correct. (And you’d be correct to call his doctor.) As for the borderline conditions—a temperature of, say, 101 or 99 or 100.4—your hand won’t name his fever with as much precision as a good thermometer would. But the added benefit that thermometer provides, both to your child’s health and to your peace of mind, is next to nothing.

It’s important to remember that the very definition of a threshold fever is arbitrary and subject to the ancient scientific law of Hey, that sounds like a nice, round number. Converted into Celsius, 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit comes out to an even 38 degrees. The established “normal” temperature of 98.6 degree Fahrenheit maps on to 37 degrees Celsius. (In truth, the temperatures of healthy, older adults will range from 98.9 to 99.9 degrees throughout the day, as measured with an oral thermometer.) Under normal conditions, a measured fever is nothing more than a single aspect of a broader picture that informs the course of treatment, both Haimovich and Hooker told me. An elderly patient with symptoms of a urinary-tract infection might receive a more comprehensive course of antibiotics if she also has a fever, Haimovich said; the heightened temperature suggests that an infection may have spread. But a kid who has a mild fever and is otherwise okay won’t need any treatment. Some evidence suggests that a light fever may even fortify an immune response; so in principle, slightly elevated temperatures should be left alone unless your child is uncomfortable, in which case, maybe ibuprofen? (Conversely, a kid whose temperature is “only” 99 but who seems listless and confused should probably be seen.)

Haimovich said he has small children, so I asked him how he checks their temperature—does he ever feel their head? “Oh, yeah,” he said. He told me that his wife seems better at detecting fever than he is, which fits with known neurophysiology: Some research suggests that women’s hands are more sensitive to warmth than men’s, on average. One study, though, done at a hospital in Canada, found that dads are just as good as moms at detecting fever with their hands. (The moms were much more likely to believe that they possessed this skill.) Other research has examined whether having multiple children—and thus perhaps having more experience feeling heads—might also be a factor. The answer is no. This suggests that sussing out a child’s fever is not so much a practiced art as a basic fact of our perception.

  

As for Hooker, he said he doesn’t even own a thermometer. He has four kids, and he used to feel their heads all the time. “They’re now all grown adults,” he told me. “They all survived me and my lack of concern for fever.” He advises parents not to waste their money on fancy thermometers that probe the ear or forehead. “Just buy an ice-cream cone for your kid; it’s a lot better,” he said. “And if you really feel you need to know your child’s temperature—if it’s an infant—go up their butt” with a rectal thermometer.

Infants are a special case: Tiny babies with any sort of fever could need treatment right away. But for parents who are beyond that stage, your plan of action will be easy: I will not take their temperature. No parent should be taking temperatures. Just place your hand against their forehead, or use your lips instead. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or maybe he just needs a kiss.