James' World 2

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CLIMATEWIRE | Back-to-back disasters rocked Houston last year, when a powerful derecho struck the city in May, followed by Hurricane Beryl in July. Both events brought gale-force winds to the densely built downtown, with gusts exceeding 90 miles per hour.

But after the storms, researchers noticed something strange. The derecho caused more damage than the hurricane to Houston’s tallest buildings.

Now, scientists say there’s a need for more research on the impacts of powerful downbursts in urban centers. That’s especially true for places like Houston, the Gulf Coast’s largest city, where thunderstorms and hurricanes can both wreak havoc.

In a new study, published Friday in the scientific journal Frontiers in Built Environment, researchers from Florida International University demonstrated that different kinds of storms — which produce distinct wind patterns — can pose different threats to tall buildings.

Both hurricanes and derechos can produce high-speed winds. But derechos — long-lasting wind storms often associated with bands of thunderstorms — have unique traits. They’re often characterized by sudden bursts of winds that move in straight lines, often causing damage that radiates outward in a single direction.

The researchers compared the damage caused by last year’s storms on several of Houston’s tall buildings, each at least 600 feet tall. These include the Chevron Building Auditorium, Wells Fargo Plaza, Enterprise Plaza, Wedge International Tower and the Total Energies Tower.

Each of these buildings is designed to withstand gusts up to 150 mph — yet many still sustained significant damage, particularly during the derecho. The researchers noted that an assessment of 18 buildings revealed more than 3,000 broken windows during the storm. Hurricane Beryl, on the other hand, caused significantly less glass damage than the derecho.

The researchers wanted to know why there was such a difference between the two storms. So they conducted a series of experiments in a special wind chamber housed at FIU, altering the airflow to simulate the patterns of derechos versus hurricanes. Model buildings inside the chamber helped them evaluate the impacts of the strong winds on the built environment.

They found that derecho winds can produce unique forces compared with hurricanes, including stronger suction on the walls of city buildings, allowing them to dislodge glass panels and shatter windows. The findings suggest that even buildings designed for strong winds aren’t necessarily resilient for all kinds of storms.

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Before Central Park was created, the landscape along what is now the Park’s perimeter from West 82nd to West 89th Street was the site of Seneca Village, a community of predominantly African-Americans, many of whom owned property. By 1855, the village consisted of approximately 225 residents, made up of roughly two-thirds African-Americans, one-third Irish immigrants, and a small number of individuals of German descent. One of few African-American enclaves at the time, Seneca Village allowed residents to live away from the more built-up sections of downtown Manhattan and escape the unhealthy conditions and racial discrimination they faced there.

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Nearly 200 years ago, Central Park’s landscape near the West 85th Street entrance was home to Seneca Village, a community of predominately free African-American property owners.

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I’m a psychologist, and AI is coming for my job. The signs are everywhere: a client showing me how ChatGPT helped her better understand her relationship with her parents; a friend ditching her in-person therapist to process anxiety with Claude; a startup raising $40 million to build a super-charged-AI-therapist. The other day on TikTok, I came across an influencer sharing how she doesn’t need friends; she can just vent to God and ChatGPT. The post went viral, and thousands commented, including:

“ChatGPT talked me out of self-sabotaging.”

“It knows me better than any human walking this earth.”

“No fr! After my grandma died, I told chat gpt to tell me something motivational… and it had me crying from the response.”

I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t make me terrified. I love my work—and I don’t want to be replaced. And while AI might help make therapy more readily available for all, beneath my personal fears, lies an even more unsettling thought: whether solving therapy’s accessibility crisis might inadvertently spark a crisis of human connection.

Therapy is a field ripe for disruption. Bad therapists are, unfortunately, a common phenomenon, while good therapists are hard to find. When you do manage to find a good therapist, they often don’t take insurance and almost always charge a sizable fee that, over time, can really add up. AI therapy could fill an immense gap. In the U.S. alone, more than half of adults with mental health issues do not receive the treatment they need. With the help of AI, any person could access a highly skilled therapist, tailored to their unique needs, at any time. It would be revolutionary.

But great technological innovations always come with tradeoffs, and the shift to AI therapy has deeper implications than 1 million mental health professionals potentially losing their jobs.  AI therapists, when normalized, have the potential to reshape how we understand intimacy, vulnerability, and what it means to connect.

Throughout most of human history, emotional healing wasn’t something you did alone with a therapist in an office. Instead, for the average person facing loss, disappointment, or interpersonal struggles, healing was embedded in communal and spiritual frameworks. Religious figures and shamans played central roles—offering rituals, medicines, and moral guidance. In the 17th century, Quakers developed a notable practice called “clearness committees,” where community members would gather to help an individual find answers to personal questions through careful listening and honest inquiry. These communal approaches to healing came with many advantages, as they provided people with social bonds and shared meaning. But they also had a dark side: emotional struggles could be viewed as moral failings, sins, or even signs of demonic influence, sometimes leading to stigmatization and cruel treatment.

The birth of modern psychology in the West during the late 19th century marked a profound shift. When Sigmund Freud began treating patients in his Vienna office, he wasn’t merely pioneering psychoanalysis—he was transforming how people dealt with life’s everyday challenges. As sociologist Eva Illouz notes in her book, Saving the Modern Soul, Freud gave “the ordinary self a new glamour, as if it were waiting to be discovered and fashioned.” By convincing people that common struggles—from sadness to heartbreak to family conflict —required professional exploration, Freud helped move emotional healing from the communal sphere into the privacy of the therapist’s office.

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