A Royal Soldier Fainted in the Heat. It Holds a Lesson for All of Us. by Jon Mooallem

It’s the subhead of Jon Mooallen’s essay that articulates its importance: “Even as climate change upends our lives, we seem set on doing things the way we’ve always done them.” The impetus for the piece was the spectacle of three different royal soldiers passing out because they became overheated in sweltering conditions during a training exercise, their immediate cohorts providing no assistance because of antiquated rules of British military decorum. As the effect of our askew climate cause more and more dismay, there’s a real need to confront our broad society’s stubborn resistance to adapt to obvious changing conditions, usually for the dumbest of reasons. Continuing to do something because it’s always been done that way is the height of foolishness when the conditions around the activity change so drastically. This article is published by The New York Times Magazine.

In Phoenix, Firefighters Battle an Invisible Inferno by Jack Healy

A couple days later, The New York Times published this news piece about just what this extreme heat is doing to the citizenry. In Phoenix, Arizona, which is among the fastest growing cities in the U.S., municipal resources are overtaxed by responding to infrastructure strain and medical emergencies. Jack Healy’s is attuned to the details that express the toll of people exactly by this crisis that too many leaders have flagrantly ignored.