News Today: What We're Following

Illustration of a bald eagle wearing a blind fold. — Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

America Is in Denial

Mitt Romney

Too many Americans are blithely dismissing threats that could prove cataclysmic.

Even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses, and growing water-thirsty crops.

As inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for ever more spending.

As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice.

When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation’s southern border, many of us change the channel.

And when a renowned conservative former federal appellate judge testifies that we are already in a war for our democracy and that January 6, 2021, was a genuine constitutional crisis, MAGA loyalists snicker that he speaks slowly and celebrate that most people weren’t watching.

A child in a white hat with lots of sunscreen on her face — Chris Maggio

You’re Not Allowed to Have the Best Sunscreens in the World

Amanda Mull

Newer, better UV-blocking agents have been in use in other countries for years. Why can’t we have them here?

At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. The first memories I have of sunscreen are from the day camp that my brother and I attended in the 1990s, where we spent every day on a playground in the direct Georgia sun but were prompted to slather it on only once every two weeks, when we were bused to a community pool. On those days, mom dropped an ancient bottle of Coppertone, expiration date unknown, into my backpack, where I usually left it. In 2000, I started high school, just in time for the golden age of the tanning bed.

illustration of man from neck down wearing collared pink aloha-style shirt with pattern of crushed cans, broken beach umbrellas, fish skeletons, and bendy straws — María Jesús Contreras

Beware the Luxury Beach Resort

Lauren Groff

These ostensible paradises have a dark side.

I hate the beach. My skin burns and blisters as soon as the sun touches it, I dislike sweating without exercising, and sand makes no sense at all to me—it’s just hot and gritty dirt that other people apparently enjoy rolling around in. I was raised by parents whose idea of leisure is cutting miles of trails in the woods and painting an entire house by hand, so the prospect of enforced idleness makes me panicky. Plus, the ocean itself, while aesthetically pleasing, is terrifyingly untrustworthy, with its riptides and hurricanes and tsunamis and sharks and microplastics and slithering monsters of the deep. It has just too many sneaky ways to kill you.

When I have gone on beach vacations, it’s been under duress. I married into a family of generous people who are also horrifying extroverts, and whose notion of a good time is a nice, boozy, mostly reclined stay on some tropical island together. But for catastrophists like me, the luxury beach resort raises a whole new set of psychological torments on top of those provided by more ordinary beaches. The entire time that we’re in our ostensible paradise, I’m busy obsessing over the unintended consequences of our stay, such as the environmental degradation caused by bringing wasteful tourists to delicate ecosystems and the racist and classist issues of displacement. The Situationists, as usual, said it best in Paris in the spring of 1968, when, in protest of capitalism, they scrawled graffiti reading CLUB MED: A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY.

Illustration of the North Carolina state flag balancing a broken scales of justice — The Atlantic; Getty

North Carolina Is a Warning

James Piltch

With its even partisan split, its history of racist policies, and its stark urban-rural divide, the state has proved to be a microcosm of national conflicts before.

The ad that signaled the coming catastrophe for democracy in North Carolina appeared just four days before the November 2012 election. As the ad opened, a woman’s voice wondered aloud whether voters “can trust Sam Ervin IV to be a fair judge.” Ervin, captured in black and white, looks shifty, moving his eyes back and forth before turning his head suddenly as if he is on the run. Ervin and his family, the ad announced, had donated to the campaign of the former Democratic governor, and later convicted felon, Mike Easley. The camera lingers on Ervin’s face as the ad explains that he went on to get a $100,000 state job; the portrait could be mistaken for a mug shot, were it not for his suit and tie.

A photo of mosquitoes — Sarah L. Voisin / The Washington Post / Getty

As if Mosquitoes Weren’t Evil Enough

Penghua Wang

How viruses alter your scent in a way that attracts the world’s deadliest bug

This article was originally published in The Conversation.

Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal. Hundreds of thousands of deaths a year are attributed to mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, Zika, and chikungunya fever.

How mosquitoes seek out and feed on their hosts are important factors in how a virus circulates in nature. Mosquitoes spread diseases by acting as carriers of viruses and other pathogens: A mosquito that bites a person infected with a virus can acquire the virus and pass it on to the next person it bites.

For immunologists and infectious-disease researchers like me, a better understanding of how a virus interacts with a host may offer new strategies for preventing and treating mosquito-borne diseases. In our recently published study, my colleagues and I found that some viruses can alter a mouse’s, and perhaps a person’s, body odor to be more attractive to mosquitoes, leading to more bites that allow a virus to spread.

Fancy food on dinner plate — Christopher Morris / Corbis / Getty

You Can Spot Climate Change in Old Restaurant Menus

Ian Rose

In the 1880s, Vancouver’s seafood joints served lots of salmon. These days they serve squid.

Vancouver, British Columbia, is nothing short of a seafood paradise. Situated at the mouth of the formerly salmon-rich Fraser River, the city overlooks Vancouver Island to the west, and beyond that, the open Pacific Ocean. Long before it had a skyline or a deepwater port, this was a bountiful fishing ground for the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, who still depend on its waters for cultural sustenance. Today, tourists come from all over the world to taste local favorites, such as salmon and halibut, fresh from the water. But beneath these waves, things are changing.

Climate change is an intensifying reality for the marine species that live near Vancouver and for the people who depend on them. In a new study, a team from the University of British Columbia (UBC) shows one unexpected way that climate effects are already manifesting in our daily lives. To find it, they looked not at thermometers or ice cores, but at restaurant menus.

.Travelers disperse as they exit a section of an airport. — Dustin Chambers / The New York Times / Redux

Air Travel Is a Disaster Right Now. Here’s Why.

Derek Thompson

The U.S. seems to suffer from chronic Nothing Works Syndrome.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.

“The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one: nothing worked.” The sentiment is old—it comes from Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City—but it’s hard to think of a better epitaph for the economic vibes of 2022. From the oil markets to the baby-formula markets to the general sense of safety and disorder, the U.S. seems to suffer from chronic Nothing Works Syndrome.

The latest victim of acute NWS is air travel. Around the world, security lines are getting brutally long and cancellations and delays are spiking. The major carriers JetBlue, American Airlines, and Delta canceled nearly 10 percent of their flights last weekend, creating mayhem at major airports.

An illustration of the globe wrapped in an American flag — Ben Hickey

America’s Necessary Myth for the World

Tom McTague

The great paradox in the world today is that the “dumb simplicity” of America’s self-perception is both obviously bogus and fundamentally true.

For European officials and politicians, a great fear gnaws at the back of their minds when they look at the ongoing war in Ukraine: What happens if the United States loses interest?

Despite the war being in Europe, involving European powers, with largely European consequences, America remains the essential partner for Ukraine. For most of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and Britain, in particular, the reality that Ukraine would likely already be lost were it not for American military support has only proved the intrinsic value of living in an American world order. For others, including the French, such dependence is now a source not only of shame, but of long-term vulnerability. America might care enough to supply Ukraine today, but with Donald Trump limbering up for his second shot at the presidency, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to picture a time when this is no longer the case.

Two students walk down steps past a historical mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco. — Yalonda M. James / San Francisco Chronicle / AP

If It Can Happen in San Francisco, It Can Happen Anywhere

Gary Kamiya

The deep-blue city seems to have grown weary of the more radical elements of the new racial-justice movement.

The San Francisco School Board recently returned the admissions policy at Lowell, the city’s most prestigious public high school, to the merit-based system that it had used for more than a century. Thus ended a short-lived lottery introduced in the name of racial equity. The board also abandoned a campaign to erase “The Life of Washington,” a WPA-era mural at George Washington High School by the artist Victor Arnautoff. Arnautoff was a Communist, and his mural, which depicts slaves picking cotton at Mount Vernon, was intentionally subversive. But an earlier incarnation of the board had voted first to destroy it, then to cover it up, saying that removing it from view was a form of “reparations.” The board member Alison Collins had said, “This mural is not historic. It is a relic.”

Photo of the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich bowing on stage — Tony Comiti / Sygma / Getty

Truly Humbled to Be the Author of This Article

David Brooks

How to flaunt your modesty online, in three easy steps

“I was humbled to be awarded an honorary degree by the London School of Economics earlier this week. Thank you so much for this prestigious honour!”

— Tweet from Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank

Whenever I feel particularly humble, I tweet about myself. I have never earned an honorary degree from the London School of Economics, but if I ever did, I’d certainly tweet the hell out of it. I’d want to let the world know how humbled the experience had made me. I’d tweet my humility, Instagram my humility, and maybe even TikTok it if I could find dance moves humble enough to make my point.

In the meantime, I’m humbled by Lagarde’s tweet. I have spent years studying the fine art of humility display, and I am humbled by her masterful show of it. If you’ve spent any time on social media, and especially if you’re around the high-status world of the achievatrons, you are probably familiar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must never tweet about any event that could actually lead to humility. Never tweet: “I’m humbled that I went to a party, and nobody noticed me.” Never tweet: “I’m humbled that I got fired for incompetence.”