The Cut - Weathering the Weather

Seven years ago, when I started talking incessantly about the climate crisis, my parents thought I was having a mental breakdown. It was 2014, and the drought in California that summer was particularly bad — the driest year in nearly a century before that record was surpassed this past summer. My dread stretched beyond what I saw in my suburban Los Angeles surroundings, in the crunchy grass and smoggy skies. After staying up into the night reading about melting ice sheets, I began having nightmares about tsunami waves swallowing my family’s house. My parents sent me to my therapist, Ken, who gently suggested my condition was related to post-traumatic-stress disorder from a sudden loss a few years earlier, and that made a comforting kind of sense.

In September, I asked Ken if, should I present the same symptoms again today, he would offer the same diagnosis. It was a few weeks after Hurricane Ida set a record for rainfall in New York, breaking the one that had been set less than two weeks before and turning the streets of my low-lying neighborhood into toxic lagoons. After thinking about my question for a few days, Ken told me that his approach had changed: “It would be easier now for me to tell you, honestly, that you’re in good company.”

Who would you rather have crash your wedding: Tom Hanks, or this bear? Either way you’re getting upstaged. We’ve gotta know which Food Network stars bribed their way in with ham. Google is now making it easier for minors or their parents to have photos of them deleted from search results. First of all, Mitt Romney, you are nothing like Ted Lasso. Second, “clear eyes full hearts” is from Friday Night Lights. Kudos to this rare and notoriously difficult (and seemingly shy) “penis plant” for blooming for the first time in over two decades. This week’s wisdom from Arthur C. Brooks’s column: “Just as a surgical mask can’t be worn 24/7, our metaphorical masks must come off eventually.” We’re not playing pickleball, but our moms are. And here, what it’s like when your mom is a ghost-hunter.

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