James' World 2

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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.

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Photo by borchee/Getty Images 

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“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.

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Illustrations by Natalie Matthews-Ramo.

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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

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