If you bike down a street on the edge of Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood, you’ll see a sudden change in the pavement on one block, where the black asphalt shifts to white. A little over a year ago, the city covered the street with a special coating—light in color, so it reflects the sun—as part of a plan to help cool L.A. as the world keeps getting hotter.
Like most cities, L.A. is facing more frequent and extreme heatwaves. One new study that mapped out rising heat across the country found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current path, the average number of days in a year across the U.S. that feel hotter than 100 degrees will more than double by the middle of the century. Some cities will have it worst: In Miami, by the end of the century, 153 days each year could feel that hot. Globally, cities that were relatively cool in the past are beginning to grapple with buildings that weren’t built for heat (like Berlin, where the average high in June is 72 degrees but climbed to 101 degrees one day last month, the hottest on record for the planet). Cities also suffer from the urban heat island effect: Hot temperatures get even hotter as pavement and buildings soak up and release radiation from the sun.
“Mommy, I wish I was never born,” my 4-year-old said to me last week. Crushed, I tried to keep from grimacing as I asked him why. “Because then, I would never die,” he replied.
My son often blurts out these types of thoughtful yet pessimistic musings. On Friday, I offered to take him to see his first movie at the cinema, and his initial reaction was concern that it might be too loud. Before a hike last weekend, he warned my husband and me that we’d better not forget to check everyone for ticks afterward. He’s a delightful kid who loves to let loose and have fun, but he sure knows how to worry.
Apparently, my son isn’t alone. Over the past few months, I’ve stumbled across a handful of articles and blog posts claiming that there is an epidemic of anxiety among youth today. Kids are stressed and worried about oh so many things, I’ve read, because they are over-tested, under-recessed, helicopter-parented, and spending too much time online. It seems 2016 is giving every American kid an anxiety disorder.
Manuel and Geiszel Godoy are military veterans, and they believe deeply in social justice. But above all, they are entrepreneurs who saw an underdeveloped sector in their industry and dove in.
“We have to show that we can pull a Tyler Perry as a community,” Manuel Godoy, president of Black Sands Entertainment, says in a recent video interview. “The idea is that the bigger the company gets, the better the IP does, the more everybody wins, and we can fund our projects ourselves because we have the experience, the expertise to do it.”
The Godoys’ niche is a growing one: indie comics by Black artists, written for Black families about Black people, with a focus on tales of Africa before slavery. Among their projects are an upcoming animated series and the Black Sands Publishing app, which will offer free access to 26 original comic books when it launches May 1, Free Comic Book Day. ’
“If we get this done,” Godoy says, “we’ve proven that you no longer have to walk through the gate they built in order to get to the main stage.”
Black Sands isn’t the first through the gate. It joins a growing hive of Black creators who’ve carved space in a format that for decades was steeped in racism and exclusion.
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John Jennings is a comic book illustrator and professor of media and cultural studies at UC Riverside.
“I’m afraid of losing my partner because he wants kids, and I don’t know what I want. I think I don’t want them.”
“I’m afraid of losing my identity, freedom, and comfort if I have children. Afraid of regretting it if I don’t.”
“I’ve always wanted to have a baby, but is it even ethical, knowing the environmental and political climate?”
“I need some peace and clarity from the torture of sitting on the fence for too long.”
This is just a sample of the questions, fears, and concerns I hear all the time from my clients. I’m a therapist who has dedicated my life to helping people figure out if they want to have children. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and have seen more clients than I can count of all stripes — men, women, single, married, and partnered people. People just out of a relationship and people just starting a relationship. People from ages 28 to 59. Our goal is to help people make possibly the biggest decision of their lives: whether or not they want to become a parent.
Most people who contact me say they feel like they’re the only one who can’t decide. I let them know immediately: They’re not the only one. Our society allows little room for ambivalence around this topic.
In 1990, not long after Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard began conducting a nationwide study of French centenarians, one of their software programs spat out an error message. An individual in the study was marked as 115 years old, a number outside the program’s range of acceptable age values. They called their collaborators in Arles, where the subject lived, and asked them to double-check the information they had provided, recalls Allard, who was then the director of the IPSEN Foundation, a nonprofit research organization. Perhaps they made a mistake when transcribing her birth date? Maybe this Jeanne Calment was actually born in 1885, not 1875? No, the collaborators said. We’ve seen her birth certificate. The data is correct.
Calment was already well known in her hometown. Over the next few years, as rumors of her longevity spread, she became a celebrity. Her birthdays, which had been local holidays for a while, inspired national and, eventually, international news stories. Journalists, doctors, and scientists began crowding her nursing home room, eager to meet la doyenne de l’humanité. Everyone wanted to know her story.
Calment lived her entire life in the sunburned clay-and-cobble city of Arles in the South of France, where she married a second cousin and moved into a spacious apartment above the store he owned. She never needed to work, instead of filling her days with leisurely pursuits: bicycling, painting, roller skating, and hunting. She enjoyed a glass of port, a cigarette, and some chocolate nearly every day. In town, she was known for her optimism, good humor, and wit. (“I’ve never had but one wrinkle,” she once said, “and I’m sitting on it.”)
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Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari
A child’s brain is not a miniature adult brain. It is a brain born under construction that wires itself to the world. And it’s up to parents to create a world — both physical and social — that is rich with wiring instructions.
Based on years of research in neuroscience and psychology, follwing are seven parenting rules to help your kid build a brain that is flexible and therefore resilient.
Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization have dropped to minuscule levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu. Influenza viruses are transmitted in much the same way as SARS-CoV-2, but they are less effective at jumping from host to host.
As Scientific American reported last fall, the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. “There’s just no flu circulating,” says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 600 deaths from influenza during the 2020–2021 flu season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago.
Because each year’s flu vaccine is based on strains that have been circulating during the past year, it is unclear how next year’s vaccine will fare, should the typical patterns of the disease return. The WHO made its flu strain recommendations for vaccines in late February as usual, but they were based on far fewer cases than in a common year. At the same time, with fewer virus particles circulating in the world, there is less chance of an upcoming mutation, so it is possible the 2021–2022 vaccine will prove extra effective.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Credit: Katie Peek
James' World 2 