The Golden Hour: climate, children, mental health

“Worse than torture not being in the news, it was no longer news.” -Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering The Golden Hour is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a lament, but also a mea culpa. What’s on my mind this week are the many and various strands of the polycrisis that I have not written about at all in eight months.

Hi. I’m at the beach for a week with my parents, husband and kids. One night a small family of deer crossed the beach at dusk. We also passed under the solar eclipse, standing in a perfectly calm sea. And that night, spied a meteor from the Perseids, streaking the cloudy sky. Undeniably a moment of transition. I had a different post lined up ahead of time, so that I wouldn’t have a piece of writing to work on this week.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, releasing energy over a billion times higher than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. A new scientific paper posits that most of the dinosaurs were charbroiled alive. Nothing could have been done to prevent that scorching mass extinction event, which is not something we can say right now.

This is my mother’s mother, Ethel. I knew her to be intelligent, sophisticated, a passionate reader, lover of antiques and gardens, materialistic, anxious and miserable. And totally obsessed with her appearance for her whole life. Starting as a toddler, when she won a “prettiest baby in Brooklyn” contest and had her picture in the newspaper. When my closest-age cousin and I were 11 and 13 or so, our grandparents took us on a literary bus tour of England and Scotland.

I went on a beautiful, joyful vacation to California with my partner this month and walked nearly every day, gratefully, with thoughts of aging, mourning, and death. Yep, it’s midlife. Our first stop was a riverside campout celebrating the 50th birthday of a friend of decades. I gave her my marked-up copy of How To Die, the James S. Romm short collection of Seneca’s meditations on death and dying. I think she took it as both the sincere offering and the morbid gag gift it very much was.

I’m writing to you from outside the smoke plume. My husband and I are spending a few days in Esalen, in Big Sur, a retreat center in one of the sacred spots of the continent, in between sky and sea, soaking in hot springs, watching the sea otters frolic in the waves and hummingbirds dart through the gardens, replenishing our spirits and working through some of our pent-up bullshit with communal dancing and singing led by some of the beautiful alive humans of this planet. The O.G. hippie dream.

I research and write these pieces without using AI. If you appreciate artisanal, brain-churned, hand-typed writing, please support with a paid subscription or leave me a tip on Ko-fi. Strap in, folks, cause this is a dark one. But it gets better at the end. “C'est long temps la fin du monde,” says a character in the dark, fantastical desert survival storySirat. The end of the world takes a long time. I’ve been obsessed with the future as long as I can remember.

I said I wouldn’t write to you this week! But then came the heat wave, and I have some big feelings. More than 180 million people across the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast were under “major” or “extreme” heat warnings as of Tuesday morning. Temperatures are expected to peak above 100 degrees on the East Coast over the holiday weekend as a high pressure “heat dome” traps hot, humid air in place. The heat index…predicted to hit as high as 115 degrees in some places.

Lately I am feeling over-informed. I read recently that 42% of Americans “sometimes” or “always” avoid the news, which is a record high for that survey. On the other end of the spectrum, psychologists advise that some Americans suffer from something called “problematic news consumption”, compulsively consuming negative information to the point where they feel unwell; media consumption of upsetting information can even lead to vicarious traumatization, with both acute and long-term impacts.

AI is a hyperobject. Just like climate change. My kid is only pretending to swim in and is not actually touching the Yves Klein blue—this is a real photo of a real painting As coined by philosopher Timothy Morton, hyperobjects are phenomena that are real, but so massive— in both time and spatial dimensions—that the human senses struggle to perceive them and the human mind struggles to understand them. Think of the fable of the three blind men and the elephant.