The Golden Hour: climate, children, mental health

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.

This week, I’m bringing you a guest post from Elizabeth Svoboda. It's an exclusive excerpt from her upcoming book, The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving. Svoboda is an award-winning science writer (Scientific American, the Boston Globe, Psychology Today), whose work has appeared in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. She’s also an exceptionally thoughtful, curious person whose thinking I’ve enjoyed since we were in college together.

In the last two months a small domestic tragedy has unfolded. Our fourth grader has given up bedtime. The culprit is some book series about child spies that is just too captivating; she wants to read it herself, to herself, faster than we can read aloud. So instead of the previous hourlong routine, now all we do is remind her to go upstairs and take a shower, and then sometime later, come in for a quick kiss and hug and to turn off the lights. My bedtime era has been a third of my life to date.

And almost no one noticed “Old Tree,” by Pamela Rosenkranz It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on with climate change. The main reason is because thinking about it is terrifying. Trying to get climate change facts into your head can be like pounding butter into the wall. They just slide right off the cerebral cortex. The second reason it’s hard to know what’s going on with climate change is that it’s complex. Predictions are just projections based on probabilities.

And one thing I've never been able to learn Hi friends. This is a screengrab of me featured in a PBS docuseries by the legendary Judy Woodruff after my first book, Generation Debt, came out. I was living with my now-husband in a 275 square foot, 6th floor walkup on the Lower East Side. The crew couldn’t fit all the requisite lights and cameras in my teeny tiny living room so we ended up shooting the interview itself on the roof. I’ll be honest. I’m writing this, a little bit, out of desperation.

“Have you been to the End Of The World?” Causeway span over Lake Ponchartrain My sister and I had been talking on my parents’ porch til our voices got scratchy and the blue night deepened well past black. It was one a.m. Time for a change of scene. We stopped at Hank’s, the all-night package store, and headed to the spot where the Mississippi River meets the Industrial Canal. Along the train tracks. Up top of the levee. In the tarry shadow of the hulking abandoned naval base.

Hello friends. Maybe, by the time she is grown Seven years before I was born, Roe vs. Wade protected women's fundamental human right to bodily autonomy for the first time in U.S. history. A year after that, women gained the right to open a credit card in their own names. Im other words, I was born into a country where women’s full legal equality was new. To receive new posts and support The Golden Hour, consider joining more than 15,000 subscribers, or upgrading to paid.