James' World 2

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I love vacations, but my dog Evvie makes them a bit more complicated — and expensive.

If my partner and I want to take her with us, it means we have to drive, because at 50 pounds she’s too big for air travel. That adds time and limits the number of potential destinations. Then there’s the question of where we can stay: Hotels often add a pet surcharge (anywhere from $10 to $100 per night) and many Airbnb rentals don’t allow pets.

We could leave her at home, but there isn’t always a friend available to stay with her, and pet sitters are expensive — ranging anywhere from $35 to $85 if we drop her off at their house (where she’ll probably be with a few other animals), and more if they come to ours. (We live in the high-priced Washington, DC, metro area — rates are likely a bit lower elsewhere.) We could put her at a boarding facility, which cost around $75 per night, but she’d have to spend our holiday in a new, unfamiliar environment without us — and with a bunch of other dogs equally out of their element.

My partner and I always manage to cobble together something, but it adds an additional layer of planning — and often stress — to our vacations because it’s harder to unwind if we’re worried about her well-being. Is she bored? Is she getting enough play time? Was she given meds at the right hour? So on and so on.

If you live in one of the nearly 48 million households with a dog — or one of the 32 million with a cat — you can probably relate. But there’s a lot we can do, and should do, given how frustrated and bored our pets may be even when we’re home. When we go on vacation, which disrupts their routines and likely means they’ll have fewer opportunities for exercise and play, we should be extra mindful to give them a good time.

Evvie wasn’t available for comment, but I spoke with two dog experts, one cat expert, and an experienced housesitter on how to give our companion animals the best life possible while we’re out trying to live ours — and if we think that means including our pet on vacation, how to bring them along for the ride.

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Naomi Elliott for Vox

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During the Great Recession, public discourse about the economy underwent something of a Great Disappointment.

For much of the country’s history, most Americans assumed that the future would bring them or their descendants greater affluence. Despite periodic economic crises, the overall story seemed to be one of progress for every stratum of the population. Those expectations were largely borne out: The standard of living enjoyed by working-class Americans for much of the mid-20th century, for example, was far superior to that enjoyed by affluent Americans a generation or two earlier.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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Jaime Colindres’ third-floor room at the American Hotel in Los Angeles was tiny, but in it, he painted expansive scenes of the American West on salvaged pieces of wood. Guitar sounds filled the halls, and neighbors kept their doors open. Some residents landed there when the city’s ruthless rental market slammed its doors on them, but they quickly soaked up the creative soul that creaked and hummed, rattled, and swelled through the battered hotel.

That was 10 years ago.

The American is now a boutique tourist hotel in LA’s downtown Arts District. Nearly all of its longtime residents have been replaced. But the culprit is not gentrification. It’s the city’s failure to enforce its own laws to preserve affordable housing.

A 2008 city ordinance sought to protect residential hotels like the American. Residential hotels often offer single-room dwellings and are sometimes the only housing that elderly, disabled, and low-income people can afford. But Capital & Main and ProPublica found 21 such buildings, including the American, offering rooms to travelers.

Under the ordinance, owners who convert or demolish residential hotel rooms must either build new units or pay into a city housing fund. None of the 21 have received clearances from the city showing that they’ve done either, according to Housing Department records. But the agency has cited only four of the hotels for residential hotel violations, even as some buildings went through obvious transformations and publicly advertise rooms on travel websites, the news organizations found. The American wasn’t one of the hotels cited.

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Jaime Colindres lived at the American Hotel in the 1990s and again for about five years in the 2010s.

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Still, the meetings succeeded in giving Cirque du Soleil a sweeping plan to transform itself. This week, the company will release a video game on the popular gaming platform Roblox. It produced a show last month for Motorola to introduce a new phone. It is working on a line of home goods (think psychedelic curtains) and a television documentary series (current title: “Down to Clown”).

“They’re saying: ‘Forget the circus. Forget the red-nosed clown and the big tent and the popcorn. Think about this as an artistic statement,’” Emma said. “And they’re trying to channel that into selling consumer products.”

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Marie-Andrée Lemire/Cirque du Soleil

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Scientists are raising alarms about the risk of simultaneous crop failures occurring in multiple regions across the globe as a result of human-driven climate change, a catastrophe that poses an underestimated threat to the global food supply, reports a new study.

Using sophisticated climate models, researchers zeroed in on the effects of the jet stream, a system of rapidly flowing winds in the atmosphere, on heat extremes around the world. The results revealed that “meandering” jet stream patterns can produce weather anomalies in some of the most important crop-producing lands on Earth, an ominous signal that “synchronized” harvest collapses could occur in the future.

Climate change, which is driven by human consumption of fossil fuels, is placing enormous new pressures on humans and other lifeforms on the planet. In particular, rising temperatures are fueling more intense extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms, all of which have adverse effects on food production worldwide. Given that disruptions to the global food supply can be deadly, especially for import-reliant nations, scientists have been galvanized to better understand the complex risks that climate change poses to global crop yields.

To that end, scientists led by climate scientist Kai Kornhuber from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory set out to study meandering jet streams, which are especially wavy wind patterns in the sky that have remained a wild card in climate and crop models. 

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Image: skaman306 via Getty Images

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As a physical therapist in Shanghai, Zheng Wang worked with people recovering from strokes after their brains had been damaged by oxygen deprivation. They usually followed a predictable recovery pattern, making lots of progress over the first few visits, then hitting a wall. Patients asked when they’d finally feel normal, and Wang told them that they’d get better with time. “But actually,” he remembers, “I knew from the bottom of my heart that they wouldn’t improve much, no matter how hard we tried.”

Meanwhile, halfway across the world, Marc Dalecki, then an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology at Louisiana State University (LSU), couldn’t stop thinking about oxygen. Dalecki spent much of his early career studying scuba diving, and remembers divers using nasal cannulas of O2 to help with everything from hypoxia to headaches. He always wondered whether this simple treatment could help neurological patients in rehab. “I promised myself that I would study it when I got my own research lab,” he says.

For its relatively small size, the brain consumes a ridiculous amount of power: 20 to 30 percent of the body’s energy at rest. To fuel all of its neurons, the brain depends on oxygen. When someone has a stroke or a head injury, the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain gets disrupted. Starved of oxygen, the brain tissue is damaged, leading to a host of problems with memory, speech, strength, and motor control.

Rehabilitation from brain trauma usually involves working with a physical therapist to relearn motor skills, building up the strength and coordination required for daily activities, like making coffee, writing, and brushing your teeth. Many physical therapists already use high-tech devices to help patients recover faster, from robots that move impaired limbs to virtual reality games that simulate aspects of day-to-day life that can’t be easily replicated in a hospital setting. But Wang and Dalecki both wondered whether oxygen could be the simple, cheap, accessible addition to neurological rehabilitation they’d been looking for. If they could give patients a little extra oxygen during early motor rehab sessions, they thought, it might help them relearn old skills faster.

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Photograph: RAJAAISYA/Getty Images

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Russia has suspended participation in a deal that let Ukraine ship its grain through its ports on the Black Sea, upending a pact that mitigated a global food crisis. Russia’s exit could again threaten food prices, and food insecurity, worldwide.

Since withdrawing on Monday, Russia has launched strikes against Odesa, one of three critical Black Sea ports that exported Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products under the Black Sea Grain Initiative. On Wednesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense said it would consider any ship bound for Ukraine to potentially be carrying military cargo, suggesting commercial ships could be deemed targets.

The White House said Wednesday it has information indicating that Russia has laid additional sea mines in the approaches toward Ukrainian ports. “We believe that this is rather a coordinated effort to justify any attacks against civilian ships in the Black Sea, and then blame them on Ukraine in what we would consider — and have in the past talked about considering — a false flag operation,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Thursday.

This apparent escalation from Russia is another blow to the grain deal brokered less than a year ago by Turkey and the United Nations. Russia had already been substantially obstructing the deal, but quitting it officially will make it even more challenging to export Ukrainian grain. That could destabilize global food prices and jeopardize the most food-insecure countries and populations, which often rely on agricultural exports. Russia’s decision to quit the deal, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said, “will strike a blow to people in need everywhere.” On Wednesday, wheat prices surged to some of the highest levels since the invasion in February 2022.

Indeed, this deal existed to help avert a greater global crisis in food security, of which Russia’s war in Ukraine is just one part. Eliminating Ukrainian supplies may tighten agricultural markets and potentially put more pressure on places experiencing hunger emergencies. The World Food Program (WFP) estimates about 345 million people face high levels of food insecurity in 2023, with about 129,000 people potentially confronting famine in places like Burkina Faso, Mali, Somalia, and South Sudan.

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The Turkish bulk carrier TQ SAMSUN, loaded with Ukrainian agricultural products as part of the Grain Initiative, leaves the Port of Odesa, southern Ukraine, on July 16.Yulii Zozulia/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images

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