Nominated for a National Magazine Award, our second print issue features Hilton Als on Prince's Eyes, How Adderall Changed America, Sex with Neanderthals, New Fiction by Isle McElroy, Ordering Elements, and more.

Every Apocalypse Before

Air-conditioning is a distinctly American invention, as red, white, and blue as a double cheeseburger with a Coke and a side of fries.

Air-conditioning is not just a technology of personal comfort; it is also a technology of forgetting. 


Lethal Comforts

The warmth of the sun was a joy for most of human history; we’re programmed to smile when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and warms our shoulder blades. 

Cities are, of course, hotter than they’ve ever been. That’s what comes from letting our planet go to—well, go in the direction of—hell. 

Precious Shadows

I cannot see you glowing in the dark because our eyes cannot effectively collect light that cold, but I can see you with the aid of thermal goggles. I can see your Planck spectrum.

You would radiate blindingly in X-rays, decimated. The universe itself would be hysterically unstable. 

Picture This: Hot Bodies

I so deeply wanted to reach out to one of these strangers and show them the picture of my mollusk. But we were not telling people, not yet. 

Like a rite of passage that leaves a person with a mark or tattoo or piercing; this one bestowed on me by the sea. But I had not expected it to be permanent.

Tentacle Memory

Shannon Mattern

Tega Brain

Sam Lavigne

Climate Hacks

My friend Roy has remarked that every ruin is a testament to grandeur, a monument to human pride, and a warning.

The problem is how it dries up the soil and turns trees into tinder, how it melts the ice sheets, how it creeps up on the body. Especially if you are old. Or sick. Or young. Or poor. The slow violence of it.

You can’t see the heat in the family picture we took after the ceremony. Yet our graduate is down to his shirtsleeves, having removed the tie and jacket we bought for the occasion in Italy because it was too damn hot to maintain the fashion.

Among The Ruins

While the system has evolved since its early twentieth-century origins, it still bears the logic of its age, reducing the world’s complexity to five letters and swathing the Earth in colored bands on commonly reproduced maps. 

What is the point of a record when the certainty of its being broken is undeniable and in close sight?

Becoming Subtropical

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

Heat, once a matter of inconvenience, something to build one’s life around, is now a matter of life and death. 

After 20 years of reporting on migration I’ve come to learn that practically every migration story is also, in one way or another, and somewhere along the way, also a story of climate change.

Seasons, now, are just designations of time—not of weather. 

Edge of Paradise

In getting to the grips of heat, we’ve found ourselves facing questions of cosmic significance—about the fate of the universe, the origin of time, and the riddle of life itself.

Kelvin christened that gloomy future the Heat Death of the universe. Devout Christians were dismayed: what kind of eternal life was that? 

Since the beginning of all time and space, all change has followed a preferred direction: the one dictated by the second law, whereby heat flows from hot to cold and thereby gets inexorably more equal everywhere. 

Motion, Not Matter

Since that beginning of all time and space, all change has followed a preferred direction: the one dictated by the second law, whereby heat flows from hot to cold and thereby gets inexorably more equal everywhere. 

[TEST] HEAT WEEK TEST

An insidious dynamic of inequality is at play here: while Native and Indigenous Peoples contribute little to climate change, and thus to extreme weather, we are among those who are impacted first and worst in the country. 

These collapses are more than ecological—they are existential. 

It is a story of resilience, of systems built beyond empire, and of people confronting the climate crisis not just with science and technology—but with identity, sovereignty, and sacred relationships.

The Land Keeps The Score

The visual language this kind of map employs, aptly enough and like the Anthropocene itself, dates from the dawn of the industrial era when sapiens began spewing unrelenting amounts of heat-trapping carbon into our skies.

All maps, no matter their claims to objectivity, have a point of view; this is Lesson One in Cartography 101.

Heat Maps In Time

It’s Climate Week, and we’re sharing dispatches from a world on fire. Featuring Lucy Sante, Bill McKibben, Emily Raboteau, and Janna Levin, 

is considering heat as sensation, symbol, and scientific reality. We present 

—a gathering of artists, writers, and thinkers reflecting on life at the boiling point.

HEAT WEEK

I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life's ordinary rules are suspended. Summer is when we don't have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when nobody ever has to make eye contact. Summer is when nothing ever happened before this moment right now. Summer is when we trash the joint because whatever. Summer is when we fire guns into the air and the bullet never comes down.

All the very best countries celebrate their national holidays in summer. Summer is the season best adapted to modern commerce. When you think "Hollywood" you think "summer." Arson perpetuates summer; it makes it an action and not just a moment. In summer we think of rain as a calamity, and so does the weatherman. Summer craves fresh bodies. Summer has no consequences. Summer has children in every orphanage. Summer just walks into your house and goes straight to the refrigerator without saying hello. Summer has not spoken to the other seasons in decades. Summer cannot get served because it abjures shirts and shoes. There are open warrants out on summer.

But summer, however phlegmatic, dominates. There is no arguing or reasoning with summer. If you try to, summer just belches and everybody laughs. Summer doesn't need money because it has yours. Summer lies over the land like syrup on an ant hill. Summer wears your body like a shroud. Summer suddenly lashes out when everything is quiet. It pretends to retreat and then lashes out again. Summer knows your weaknesses, your blind spots, your unacknowledged biases, your unspoken shame. Summer pretends to love you but then burns you and runs. Your mind goes tilt whenever you try to think about summer. You try to tell people the truth about summer but no one believes you.

Summer wasn't always like this. It had a decent upbringing and a reasonable education. It lived in harmony with the other seasons, sometimes trading off bits of one another's weather. Just where it went wrong is uncertain, except that it happened in our lifetime. It was all those cars, all those drugs, all that red meat, all that money it sucked up and vaporized. Summer only remembers luxury and rage. Summer will not stop until it gets every inch of its way, and since that is impossible it will never stop. Summer will destroy everything we know and when called to account for itself summer will just belch. Summer is mindless. Summer is nothing but fun. Everybody loves summer. ♦

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist whose most recent book is 

. The following piece first appeared, in different form, in 

ser-kosugi-maru

I’ve been lucky enough to live my life in the mountains, where even on the hottest days you can generally find a breeze, and where the temperature drops at night. Happily, I’ve never needed AC; I like my air unconditioned. But this also means that I have a profound appreciation for shade; on a hot day it’s a screened porch or under a sugar maple for me. I’m a shade connoisseur; I know from long experience how the shadows are going to move while I nap, and I’m perfectly willing to turn my baseball cap sideways when demanded. 

I also know that most people lack these luxuries. They’re not in the mountains, they’re in cities. And cities are, of course, hotter than they’ve ever been. That’s what comes from letting our planet go to—

—hell. Our first job, obviously, is to reverse that descent, and I’ve spent my life fighting for climate action. But in the meantime, as temperatures continue to rise, we have to do what we can to stay cool. Which means, among other things, shade, as a matter of survival and as a matter of justice.

How important is it? Let me tell you a story. In the 1930s, a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, graded all of America’s neighborhoods and deemed some of them “hazardous” for investment, essentially because they were home to large minority communities. This grading system (from A for “best” and B for “still desirable” to C for “declining” and D for “hazardous”) underlies what came to be known as redlining. The grading system led to chronic disinvestment in the lower-rated neighborhoods, resulting, over time, in less of everything from parks and green spaces to street trees and air-conditioning in homes. Almost a century later, the results of that racism can be measured with a thermometer: in Portland, Oregon, neighborhoods that were graded A in the 1930s now “average 8 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the city’s mean temperature, while D-graded neighborhoods average 4.8 Fahrenheit degrees warmer,” according to the 

. Actually, you don’t need a thermometer—that’s a 13-degree gap that anyone can feel just by walking across town.

 set out to quantify the difference in its home city a few years ago. At noon one hot August day, with the aid of an infrared thermometer, reporters found that on the “tree-canopied block of West 94th Street near Central Park in Manhattan, the sidewalk temperature was 84. Just across town, at a treeless lot for sanitation trucks on First Avenue in East Harlem, the blacktop registered at 115 degrees, a full 31 degrees hotter.” As the reporter, John Leland, noted: “Plants and trees cool a neighborhood by providing shade, but also by a process called transpiration: as water evaporates from the leaves, its transformation into vapor consumes heat from the atmosphere.” A tree is a cooling machine.

This is not an isolated phenomenon, of course. A recent 

, which looked at 530 locations in 51 countries, found that 30 percent more shade could reduce mortality in our new killer heatwaves by remarkable numbers—that would have cut mortality by more than a million human souls so far this century. How do people die from heat? So many ways. Just to give you an example that may not have occurred to you offhand: “Nephrolithiasis” is the technical term for the development of kidney stones, those small formations that, as they pass, can cause excruciating pain. (I’ve never had them, but I know more than one man who has said he came away from the experience with a newfound appreciation for what his wife had undergone during labor.) Doctors have long known that higher temperatures lead to more sweat, which reduces urine volumes and thus increases “the saturation of the insoluble salts that cause kidney stones.” During heat waves in the U.S., it takes just three days before emergency-room visits for kidney stones begin to spike.

If you think it's bad here, imagine what it’s like in truly hot places: a couple of years ago a 

 that a third of the people in the kidney transplant center in Kathmandu were young Nepali men who had worked overseas, mostly in the Gulf. It described, for instance, a young man named Suraj who journeyed to Kuwait in order to send money back to his impoverished family, and to build up enough of a nest egg to someday get married. He “found himself on construction sites where he installed massive, one-ton window frames on skyscrapers rising from the Kuwait desert. Because elevators were not operational, he recounted, he had to walk several stories to access water. But with work schedules so pressing, most workers gathered around the water tank only during their one-hour break. On many days, the water would be gone before the break ended. Often, Suraj didn’t drink anything all day.” When the temperature is well into the triple digits, that’s a bad idea; now he’s back home, living with his sister who wheels him a few times a week to the hospital. “To pay for his kidney transplant and the tests, they’ll sell Suraj’s half-built house with the propane stove. They’ll squeeze back into Panmaya’s mud-and-bamboo hut and cook on the ground with open fire. His dream of getting married was now ‘in ashes,’ Suraj admitted.”

In the ideal world, you’d figure out some ways to provide shade at the same time as you were doing something about the causes of all that heat in the first place. Which, as it turns out, is entirely possible. You’ve seen a solar panel; we’re used to looking at its top, and thinking about the way it faces the sun, turning photons into usable electricity, in the great miracle of our time. Its rapid spread—solar energy is now growing faster than any energy source at any point in human history—is the one scalable hope we have for actually reducing the flow of heat-trapping carbon into the air. 

But solar panels have an underside, and that underside is, by definition, shady. If, say, you built solar panels over California’s irrigation canals, they would cut evaporation in those crucial arteries by 63 billion gallons of water a year.

And on land? A recent survey found that 72 percent of German farmers are considering deploying agrovoltaic arrays on their land, and the French energy giant Total recently set up a “Center for Expertise” in the art of growing food next to PV panels. And no wonder a 2024 study found that solar panels can increase yields for Chardonnay grapes by as much as 60 percent. There are a lot of studies like that, and they serve as a reminder that for many crops, some shade and extra humidity are a blessing, especially as temperatures rise. Near Phoenix, temperatures topped 110 degrees for 31 straight days in the summer of 2024, smashing old records. “The solar arrays help reduce our water use,” a USDA agronomist told a local reporter. “Plants don’t really need as much sun as they get in the West.” Even skipping irrigation every other day, soil moisture under the panels was 15 percent higher than nearby unshaded plots, and black-eyed peas were growing faster because they were less stressed.

Researchers have found much the same in Africa—test plots in Tanzania and Kenya, for instance, revealed that corn, Swiss chard, and beans were thriving under panels. “We created a microclimate that helped certain crops produce more, but they were also better able to survive heat waves and the shade helped conserve water, which is crucial in a region threatened by climate change,” the study’s lead author explained. In Phoenix, which is surrounded by desert, windstorms increasingly blow dust hundreds of feet into the air—that’s because the crust of the desert’s soil is so easily broken, even by a footstep. But this “biocrust” seems to be naturally re-growing under solar panels, which researchers at Arizona State described as “beach umbrellas.” Indeed, they’re now growing these crusts under solar arrays to replant in damaged desert areas; “crustivoltaics,” they’re calling it. In China, where great dust storms have swept off the Gobi into the cities of the country’s north for decades, they’re finding the same thing: the ground under solar arrays had higher plant and microbial diversity than the surrounding desert.

The warmth of the sun was a joy for most of human history; we’re programmed to smile when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and warms our shoulder blades. Thanks to human foolishness, this source of life has become the curse of our age: every tenth of a degree increase in the global temperature now moves another 100 million people out of comfortable climate zones. But now it’s going to have to be our salvation—harnessing the sun is our one way out. And that means luxuriating in the shadows that our planet-saving technology can cast. Some of that technology is coniferous, some of it is deciduous, and some of it is photovoltaic. All of it is delicious. ♦

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is also co-founder of Third Act, which mobilizes people over 60 for action on climate and justice.

How do you map climate change? As a species given to trying to visualize complex processes and our round planet in two-dimensional charts, maps have been key to bridging the gap between knowing and comprehending. That’s true of all large-scale phenomena. But it’s proven especially so in the context of a crisis whose cascading effects we wake to each day, whether in the form of haze from wildfires or heatwaves out our windows, or news stories about monstrous hurricanes or sea slugs called 

For the concerned human wanting to synthesize the varied aspects of a planetary crisis, and to envisage its future effects, the internet is awash in maps that chart the average date of 

 that result; of the fast-changing likelihood, depending on where you live, of 

When Rebecca Solnit and I created an atlas of New York City predicated on the truth that there are at least as many ways to map a place as it has people, we enlisted the climate scholar Daniel Aldana-Cohen to help create a map of climate change in the city. Like all the maps in 

, this one aimed to deepen our sense of cities like New York as places of radical coexistence. The background layer of 

 charted per-capita carbon footprint by zip code. It revealed how that city’s wealthiest precincts are most destructive of our climate—and was overlaid with two other distinct geographies: locations of entities driving petrocapitalism (fossil fuel companies, banks), and of organizations resisting its effects (community and activist groups, the route of the Climate March in 2014). Gotham emerged as both a key driver of the climate emergency and a vital locus for imagining other futures.

But in the larger visual lexicon of the crisis, as considered not on a municipal scale but a global one, one kind of map above all—maps of heat—have become a hallmark of our age. The visual language this kind of map employs, aptly enough and like the Anthropocene itself, dates from the dawn of the industrial era when 

 began spewing unrelenting amounts of heat-trapping carbon into our skies. For it was in the early 1800s that scientists like Alexander von Humboldt—the great Prussian naturalist who conceived of all our planet’s ecologies and species as being profoundly interrelated with its climate—also devised maps whose mode of charting temperature remains with us today.

You know the kind of map I’m talking about: take 

, for example, that sits atop Wikipedia’s page for “climate change”—an ovoid projection of Earth’s continents and seas, bathed in oranges and reds, with colors and lines corresponding to data from NASA. This image depicts the change in average surface temperature over the past 50 years (upwards of four degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic and Europe, less toward the South Pole). Heat maps like this—static images indexing change—have become signal artifacts of our new cartographic age in which the ever-growing power of computers to turn data into images has transformed what was once an analog art and science into a digital one. Today the tag “heat map” is attached to many maps that don’t chart temperature but rather visualize intensity or frequency—whether as tied to where users 

But the mainstay visual guide to the current crisis are heat maps of a more literal type, whose color code dates from when industrial designers began using a shorthand now lodged in our minds and on bathtub faucets everywhere: warmth is represented by the color of flames and of our cheeks when we’re flushed; cold is the hue of ice and frost-bitten limbs. This chromatic symbology matches what you learned in art class about “warm” and “cool” colors, which perhaps made those lessons easier to retain (at least if you didn’t also learn, in astronomy, that stuff is different in outer space, where blue stars are hot and red ones are cool). It’s a system that also tints countless maps used by citizens and policy-makers to engage the climate emergency’s larger implications—like 

, made by New York City Council to visualize the so-called urban heat island effect, a map of relative temperature across a city whose green parks and leafier precincts, in this rendering, beckon as beacons of cool. Poorer areas register as expanses of treeless concrete, whose lack of green compounds summer temperatures that menace the health of residents who, as other city maps show, also lack access to 

Such correlations across space and time—whether absorbed at the scale of a city or of the planet, and whether correlating economic, cultural, and climatic data or all of the above—are vital for understanding the cascading and complex interdependencies of climatic shifts, which are by no means uniform in their effects. Ours is a planet whose deserts are growing drier and forests wetter but also whereon long-temperate regions like Northern Europe may in fact grow far colder if warm 

 stop coming their way. Which is all a part of why it’s fascinating to look back, as we gaze warily ahead, at the most notable early attempts to map the earth, in scientific terms and as Alexander von Humboldt put it, as “one great living organism where everything was connected.”

It makes all kinds of sense that the person most responsible for making this ancient idea central to science was also a keenly visual thinker who historians of cartography have 

 as being “one the first scientists to use maps to generate and test scientific hypotheses.” Today Humboldt’s name is more famous than he is: his moniker adorns ocean currents and counties and mountain ranges around the world, along with over 100 species of animals, including the Humboldt penguin and Humboldt’s woolly monkey. In his own era, the man himself was famous indeed—so famous that the centennial of his birth, a decade after his death, witnessed celebrations around the world in 1869 that included a mass gathering in New York’s Central Park attended by 25,000 people. Like other of Humboldt’s celebrants from Boston to Berlin, they turned out to hail the memory of a scientist who did more than any of his peers to inject into the discourse of science the principle that, as he put it, “all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven.” 

Humboldt’s determination to prove that point saw him embark on years-long expeditions to America’s tropics whose research yielded many books and influential maps like the one he produced in 1802 after climbing 

, an Andean peak in Ecuador which at the time was thought to be earth’s highest. In that map, which Humboldt made with a French botanist named Aimé Bonpland, a vertical cross-section of the mountain charted how each of the species they encountered, from tropical ferns by its base to windswept lichen and a single butterfly they spotted at its tree-line, correlated to its distinct climate at different elevations. Their map inspired numerous 

. It’s also proved a remarkably useful document, more recently, for scientists 

ing how slopeside ecologies in the Andes, over the past 200years, have shifted uphill by 700-900 feet.

But if that Andean map was both an object of beauty and science, it was Humboldt’s charting of climatic variation across the scale of our entire Earth that secured his place in cartographic history. As a 

 describes his legacy, Humboldt may have been the “inventor of nature,” at least as an idea and worthy object of study in the West. But he was also the inventor of 

: a cartographic tool whose name you may not know, but which you’ve seen hundreds of times in weather reports on TV. Described by Humboldt as “a curve drawn through the points on the globe which receive an equal quantity of heat,” he devised his isotherms to show that climatic zones don’t hue to rigid lines of latitude.

His research in this direction, which he first shared at a meeting of the Paris Academy of Science in 1817, derived from his travels through California in what was then known as New Spain. There, he had observed a fact at which many visitors to America’s West Coast still wonder today: the comparatively mild aspect of its winters as compared to the same season at similar latitudes in America’s Midwest and East. The main reason for that seeming anomaly, scientists later proved, owes in large measure to the regulating effects of the Pacific. But in 1817, Humboldt was concerned to explore the physical laws governing the geography of heat with his isotherms’ help, and according to his sage 

 that “a map…overcharged with signs becomes confused and loses its principal advantage, the power of conveying at once a great number of relations."

He created a simple chart which joined cities across the Atlantic and Eurasia, via isotherm, of similar mean daily temperature—Philadelphia was connected to Paris; Newfoundland to Stockholm; a line starting in Havana arced through Madeira to Cairo. That 

 was only printed in an obscure scholarly journal and wasn’t reproduced much. But Humboldt’s ideas and tools most certainly were.

His friend and collaborator Heinrich Borghaus, whose 

(1838–1845) represented a landmark in thematic cartography, put those ideas and tools to use. His atlas included world maps of vegetation and growing seasons, geology and magnetism, hydrology and ethnography. Borghaus riffed on Humboldt’s isotherms to produce a map connecting areas of congruent annual rainfall with lines he called 

 across various locales, which “provide[d] a system of curves analogous to isotherms and isohyets.” That insight, along with the cartographers’ will toward geographical synthesis, evinced his Humboldtian ethos. But perhaps his atlas’s finest map was one that used Humboldt’s foremost cartographic invention to stitch together data from meteorological sites. Borghaus’s 

 marked differentiations of four and five degrees and covered 80 degrees of overall change, from the equator to the poles.

Borghaus’s maps lent Humboldt’s isotherms their foremost realization in his lifetime, but the most influential world map to employ them was made by an educator from Connecticut. William Channing Woodbridge met Humboldt in Paris before he returned home to Hartford in 1823 to craft a world map for use by school children, which he called his 

Isothermal Chart, or View of Climates & Production, Drawn from the Accounts of Humboldt & Others

. Woodbridge was an educational reformer and pedagogue who often taught deaf students; he was a strong advocate both for bringing visual aids into the classroom and for making geography central to education. His map’s isotherms divide thick bands of color demarcating the globe’s growing seasons, with a chromatic symbology that remains hugely prevalent today. Beginning with the rosy-hued “Equatorial or Torrid Region,” those bands radiate through ensuing zones labeled Hot (orange), Warm (yellow), Temperate (green), Cold (teal), Winter (azure), and Frozen (blue).

The power of Woodbridge’s map is its simplicity. But this simplicity also betrayed the biases of his time. All maps, no matter their claims to objectivity, have a point of view; this is Lesson One in Cartography 101. And Woodbridge was a man of his age. He expressed its biases by affixing to the mid-Atlantic latitudes a label—“temperate”—that natives of those regions have long viewed as a climatic ideal. Conversely, he labeled the thick band of earthly habitats straddling the equator with a more pejorative descriptor. His “torrid” zones may not be great for growing wheat, but the tropics are of course superb for thousands of other flora and foodstuffs, as Humboldt might have told his disciple. Woodbridge’s wariness of tropical climes, in any case, was expressed here in a wash of crimson. And his map’s rhetorical force foreshadowed the emergence, later that century, of maps delimiting climatic zones devised by another German, Wladimir Köppen––and according to whose criteria many locales that were once comfily ensconced in bands marked “temperate” or “cold,” including New York City, are 

The means by which we know and show this to be so are maps whose basic language was devised by Humboldt and his admirers at the dawn of an Anthropocene age now witnessing the migration of warm-weather isotherms toward earth’s poles. But the bends and shifts of these lines are by no means uniform. And in an irony Humboldt would have appreciated, the temperate climes of Europe’s northern latitudes, once the climatic anomaly that sparked his conception of isotherms in the first place, may also shift. New 

 signal an increasing likelihood that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), which brings tropics-warmed waters to northern Europe, may collapse before this century’s end. If it does, the northward swoop of isotherms in the Atlantic will flatten and swoop southward instead, plunging Britain and its neighbors into cold.

In our era, climate scientists reach such conclusions with the help of satellites overhead and buoys at sea that grow our capacity for “remote-sensing” and data collection daily: many climate maps are now built not from lines at all but from a dense wash of data points. But for us humans trying to visualize our world and how it’s changing in maps, as our brains are wired to do, those lines of Humboldt’s devising—climbing and plunging and swirling over the aqueous skin of our warming planet—have the power not merely to chart where we are, but to point where we’re heading. ♦

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is Pioneer Works’ Director of Publishing and co-editor-in-chief of

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

I took my kid to Rome in June. It was hot as the mouth of a lion. We were there to celebrate the end of middle school, surely the worst years of anyone’s life. The trip marked his coming of age—sort of like a bar mitzvah, minus the Torah portion. Round-trip from New York City, our footprint was over six metric tons of heat-trapping CO₂. I felt guilty about that, but I also wanted to make up for the sucky pandemic years when we were trapped in our apartment without escape. Back then, aged eight, aged nine, the kid would spin his globe, studying the shapes and names of other nations while dreaming of travel, or longingly flip through his book on the wonders of the world. Now, aged 14, he’d finally made it across the ocean to the boot of Italy, a full head taller than I, his mama, who hadn’t planned for the extreme heat.

Unlike other heat waves that have scorched Europe in recent years, such as Charon and Cerebus (named for the ferryman and fearsome three-headed dog in Dante’s 

) and Lucifer before them, this one had no name. Some climate experts argue that christening heat waves and categorizing them according to levels of severity, as government agencies do with tropical storms and hurricanes, might help raise public awareness of the dangers of heat through branding and PR. 

The World Meteorological Association disagrees

. Too sensational. Yet heat is a silent, invisible killer, claiming more lives than any other climate hazard. You can’t see it the way you can see a wildfire or a flood, which are secondary effects of planetary warming. Heat is the first order effect. You can’t photograph it directly. The problem is how it dries up the soil and turns trees into tinder, how it melts the ice sheets, how it creeps up on the body. Especially if you are old. Or sick. Or young. Or poor. The slow violence of it.

Picture this. The open bowl of the Colosseum at high noon, 104°F, with nothing so much as a cloud to protect us from the broiling sun. Above us the jet stream was splitting apart, leading to high pressure zones. An anticyclone had compressed and shoved down the air, which sizzled as it reached the ground, trapping us and much of Europe in a heat dome. To be sure it grew hotter this summer in cities across the globe—ranging from Isesaki (107°F), Rio de Janeiro (111°F), Phoenix (118°F) and Kvormuj (127°F)—but to me the Roman Colosseum felt like the hottest spot on Earth. How many gallons of sweat did we, the tourists walking through the ruins of empire, perspire that day? We hired a tour guide who gamely recited the marvels of engineering, but I felt so dehydrated, exposed, and concerned about how such warming would warp my kid’s future that I only absorbed two facts about the Colosseum. Number one: it was built by the hard manual labor of some 100,000 slaves. Number two: in its heyday, the world’s largest amphitheater had a retractable roof made of canvas sails that bathed its spectators in enviable shade.

One wonders, what is the breaking point? For food production? For human, let alone nonhuman, life? My friend Roy has remarked that every ruin is a testament to grandeur, "

," and a warning. Somewhere between the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, we saw someone in a nearby tour group pass out from heatstroke. With fear on his face, the guide cut our tour short. For quite some time, guides have been agitating for extended hours at major attractions in Rome to allow for tours at cooler, less punishing, parts of the day. Two months after our visit, a guide showing another group around the Colosseum in the baking heat collapsed and died of a suspected heart attack on the job.

As for my son—who may at my age recall this summer as one of the coolest of his life rather than one of the warmest in recorded history—he retained almost everything we learned about the Colosseum. I could remark about shifting baselines and how my son is adapting to the new normal. But climate change is only part of his unfolding story. More remarkable to me than record-breaking temperatures, the death toll of this June’s particular heat dome (2,300) and the number of European heat deaths two summers prior (over 47,000) was that my baby’s voice had changed. How was it possible that he already needed to shave? On our crawl back to the pensione, my teenager stopped by a Madonnelle installed on a street corner overlooking one fountain or another to call his grandmother. 

She would appreciate the hundreds of shrines to the Madonna and child, he figured, since she was Catholic. It saddened him that she’d never been to Rome when he was enjoying it so much. The new pope was originally from Chicago, just like her. This was a jubilee year, when Catholics are invited every quarter century to renew their faith. The theme for 2025: “Pilgrims of Hope.” Was she planning to get here before she died? he asked. No, my mother answered from the other side of the warming ocean—he would have to be her eyes. He told her with delight about what went down at the sites we’d seen: the vestal virgins buried alive if found unchaste, the battles between gladiators, the crimes of the house of Borgia, the cruel methods of papal executioners, the technique of chiaroscuro mastered by Caravaggio, the artfully arranged bones in the crypt of the Capuchin monks including the tiny skulls of children. He told her dutifully about the Madonnelles, candlelit symbols of Marian devotion. How back before gas and electricity provided streetlight, the votives lit up the dark. He latched on to the sacred and the profane, I realized, alongside the concept of memento mori. 

What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be.

Here are some mortifying heat index stats shared by 

Jeff Goodell in The Heat Will Kill You First

 Almost twice as many people now die per year from extreme heat than from firearms. Owing to climate-driven heat and drought over the last 20 years, global agricultural production has dropped 21 percent. Land animals are migrating to cooler, higher latitudes at an average speed of one mile per year; malaria-carrying mosquitoes at 2.5 miles per year. 75 percent of urban trees are forecast to die from a combination of heat and drought by 2050. Today, 30 million people live in extreme heat. By 2070, the number of people likely to live in extreme heat is two billion. By 2100, half of the world’s human population will be exposed to life-threatening combinations of humidity and heat.

We flew back to the Bronx. New York City, with its average 500-plus heat deaths a summer, was—I kid you not—even hotter than Rome. Much has been reported about the urban heat island effect, with our buildings, concrete, pavement, dark asphalt and roofs absorbing the sun’s heat and re-radiating it at night, worst of all in poor neighborhoods where there’s not enough green. We can be five degrees hotter than the leafy suburbs around us; 20 degrees hotter at night. “Heat like this can kill,” NYC Emergency Management warned on social media upon our return. Bad as it is now, by the 2050s, when my kid may have kids of his own, New York can expect our number of 90-degree days to double. Heatwaves could triple or quadruple.

With the heat index factoring for humidity, the weather forecast for my son’s graduation day was an ungodly high of 109℉. I wrestled with whether to invite my mother to the ceremony. What if her car broke down on the highway? Unlikely, but still. In the time it takes to hard boil an egg, the temperature inside a car can increase by 20 degrees or more. In 30 minutes, on a hot summer day, the inside of a car can reach up to 140℉, which is the temperature at which tap water can give you a third-degree burn. In the end, I left the decision up to her. She adjusted for the weather by rising before the sun to make the drive.

I felt grateful that my mother got to watch her grandson graduate. I felt alarmed when one of his classmates fainted in the heat before crossing the auditorium stage. The incident went unremarked by the school principal whose speech about the bright future of MS141’s class of 2025 sounded frankly like fiddling while Rome burns; disconnected from the actual level of risk we were all experiencing just by being there. You can’t see the heat in the family picture we took after the ceremony under an awning rigged with blue and yellow balloons. Not directly. Yet our graduate is down to his shirtsleeves, having removed the tie and jacket we bought for the occasion in Italy because it was too damn hot to maintain the fashion.

With working papers in hand, the kid wanted a summer job. I had hoped he might spend July and August working with friends in the garden of the neighborhood community center, growing vegetables as part of a program that runs a farm stand and helps to feed local seniors my mother’s age. But it feels too dangerous now to work safely outdoors in the summer. The upper end of human adaptability to humid heat is a wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees. Higher than that, hyperthermia can set in. An estimated 2.4 billion people worldwide are exposed to heat stress at work. My son is privileged not to have to participate in the sweat economy. He wound up working instead through a hybrid youth employment program for city kids that met indoors twice a week, and remotely, online. 

I take note of similar pivots to summer plans among friends with kids to avoid the heat or the smoke from wildfires, factoring for canceled camps and staying indoors with the AC running instead of taking trips to the lake, beach, or pool. We are able to recalibrate unlike more vulnerable folks delivering packages, picking crops, laying asphalt, patching potholes, fixing roofs, or doing any of the other low-wage outdoor jobs nobody else wants to do, made as dangerous by ICE raids targeting immigrant workers as by sweltering heat. We live in an air-conditioned bubble on an urban heat island. Yet I can’t help mourning the little losses adding up in the shadows of the bigger ones: the crop failures, foreclosed farms, disrupted food webs, concentrated casualties, metabolic stress, mass die-offs of marine life, the spread of invasive species, water scarcity, melting permafrost, rampant wildfires, global displacement, increased gun violence, ecological damage, and economic burn.

There’s only so much heat a body can take. The planet is approximately 1.8 to 2.3 degrees hotter now than it was in 1990 when I graduated from eighth grade. How much warmer it will be by the time my son reaches my age depends on how quickly industrialized nations act on their commitments to curb fossil fuel emissions. Scientists have long warned that 3.6 degrees of warming from the preindustrial era is the threshold for limiting the most severe impacts of climate change. It’s likely we’ve sailed past that target and are on track for six degrees of warming, or more, by century’s end. Given the thresholds we’ve already crossed, I ask myself daily: What acts do we owe these children graduating into a warming world?

Here is one answer, with its own extreme logic. On April 14, 2018, a 60-year-old civil rights lawyer turned environmental activist named David Buckel burned himself to death in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in what has been described as the first self-immolation to protest climate change. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote in an email to news media before dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself on fire. Prior to his final act, he worked towards marriage equality for same-sex couples, then ran a community compost site. He told nobody about his plan—not his husband, nor the lesbian couple with whom they parented a college-aged daughter, nor the volunteers he worked with. He chose a remote area, out of sight. Unlike the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire on a busy street in Saigon to protest oppression in 1963, there is no photograph of Buckel’s death to evoke an emotional response. And although his act is not one that I would ever choose, I name it to amplify the final line of his suicide note. “Here is hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded action.”

Here are some facts about the saving grace of trees, another answer with a similar hope. They are terrific combatants of climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow, filtering air pollution, exhaling oxygen, reducing water loss, managing erosion, and preserving biodiversity by supplying nectar, nuts, fruit and shelter to nonhuman life. In cities like ours, trees take the edge off heatwaves. They cool the air by sucking up water from the soil and sweating it out through their leaves via evapotranspiration, lessening our need for air conditioning and its greedy demand for energy. They offer us shade and solace, improving our mental and physical health.

For example, I need only lay my hand on the trunk of the enormous London plane tree growing streetside out our front door to calm my overwhelm. Maybe that’s why, among the many climate actions being made in cities around the world to adapt to rising heat—including putting up plexiglass awnings in open air markets to protect shoppers, renovating ancient aqueducts to irrigate parks with reclaimed water, painting streets white to make them more reflective, retrofitting old buildings with insulation and shutters to cool them down, agitating for a legal limit to indoor temperatures to reduce heat deaths, advocating for energy assistance programs to help the poor afford air conditioning, banning traffic to improve air quality, greening roofs to absorb heat and grow food, designating public cooling centers to help people cool off, extending the hours of public pools to offer reprieve, pushing for laws that would mandate rest and water breaks and heat protection standards for workers at outdoor sites, developing community centers with back-up power where residents can find refuge during blackouts or other disasters—the act I latch onto is expanding the tree canopy of the inner city.

New York is a city of roughly eight million people and seven million trees. There are more trees, of course, where the moneyed live. In poorer neighborhoods like ours with legacies of racially restrictive redlining, the canopy can’t compare. Trees in low-income communities of color are less likely to be maintained and replaced when they die. Even when cared for, urban trees have a tough life. They are crowded and pissed on by dogs, beset by drought, heat, and compacted soil. Through the urban forestry arm of the Department of Parks and Rec, the city aims to increase its tree canopy from 22 to 30 percent, equitably, by filling out some of the bald spots, selecting for climate resilient species and training folks to nurture them when they’re young so they can take root. The deadline proposed for reaching that goal is 2035, by which time, God willing, my kid will have graduated college and the saplings going in the ground now will have matured along with him. So far, workers and volunteers in the city have planted over a million trees. In our part of the Bronx, there are plans for sweet gum and swamp white oak to be planted on a narrow path alongside 

a brook in the process of being unburied to alleviate flooding

Just as every 25 years the Catholic Church invites the faithful to come back into right relationship with God, with one another, and with all of creation, every 10 years the NYC Parks Department invites New Yorkers to count trees. 

 will be the fourth such census to measure the location, species, and health of the city’s trees. Thousands of volunteers, myself among them, will contribute to a data-driven effort to manage and grow our urban forest. It’s not enough, but it’s something. 

Another record-breaking summer is almost done. It’s September again. When I look back at the picture someone took of me and my son inside the Colosseum with a panoramic view of the ancient arena floor, I can’t see the heat. All I see is my kid at the threshold. The sweetness of him. His curiosity and potential. Despite its fame, the Colosseum was not his favorite part of our Italian holiday. He liked best of all the day trip we took to Naples by high-speed rail where we ate pizza and toured the underground tunnels of the ancient Roman aqueduct, repurposed as a bomb shelter during air raids in World War II. The underground was my favorite part, too, not only because that network of tunnels was cooler by several degrees than the city overhead, but because of the little tricycle someone had left down there during the war, now covered in dust. A mother had thought of that, I figured, so even in a hellscape, her kid had room to play. How else could she endure that scene, but to make it good for him?

At sunrise on his first day of high school, my kid rode the 1 train without me, down to Times Square, and walked three avenues west to his new school in Hell’s Kitchen. I was somewhat worried for his safety but trusted he'd survive. Meanwhile, I rode a Citi Bike to Starlight Park to count trees with other New Yorkers in the South Bronx. We learned to identify leaves by their shapes: football, spade, teardrop, hand. A young man had been fatally shot in the park the night before and the sun bore down with a vengeance. Adjacent to the crime scene, we faithfully measured and recorded the circumference of the trunks of some thirsty-looking trees on a bank of the Bronx River. The data set included a black locust, a pin oak, and an American elm. We determined their condition was fair. We added them to the inventory. This was a collective action with its own prayerful logic, like lighting candles in the dark. So many trees are still alive, and so many new ones on the way. ♦

Emily Raboteau is a Black Studies professor at the City College of New York and the author of

when someone asks if I've been writing new poems

it’s the coldest summer of the rest of my life.
third trimester ablaze, that July
the air conditioning gave out on my birthday
and I sat sweating in a bikini before two fans,
downing glasses of lemon water while the fetus protested,
all the blinds closed against a hundred-degree heat dome.
that summer the tomato plants succumbed
their green fruits to thirsty squirrels
who sucked them dry and then sprawled on fence posts
like exhausted mothers. who could blame them?
we all had a job to do, which was life.

while the organs were forming
I couldn’t think of metaphor, only of nephrons
layering like honeycomb in tiny kidneys.
each week I imagined alveoli proliferating,
tissue paper bubbles filling a tiny chest.
I couldn’t compose while possessed so,
but later I wrote all about it.
water was scarce that summer, words scarcer,
but I put fat on the bones, pumped iron into
the baby’s blood before its long journey.
I imagined ancestors at the beginning of every
apocalypse before, reviewing the way to water.

how has becoming a mother affected your writing?


the act of creation went back inside.
heavy with energy, I wasted no words.
I found the liquid buried in stones.
I refused burning. instead, I transformed
from the inside.
a mother is a creature who revises. ♦

Once, on my first ever trip to Greece, my husband and I took what we thought was going to be a short walk around the island of Hydra, only to end up on a 13-mile hike through a seared, shadeless expanse of scrubby hills, completely lost. It was 96 degrees, and the final two thirds of the hike—after it had become plain that the “towns” we’d seen on the map were just sun-bleached ruins, and it was too late to turn back—offered not a single scrap of shade. We had just two tiny bottles of water between us.

This wasn’t how the day was supposed to go. We’d arrived in Greece in the middle of a merciless heat wave, and, after a few days, had opted to defect to Hydra from Athens because we couldn’t bear the city’s swelter and clog. Sleep had been hard to come by on account of the jetlag and our feverishly hot rented apartment; opening windows brought little relief, and along with it mosquitos and the neighborhood’s clamor of all-night partying four stories below. We’d been in search of the fabled ease of Hydra—a place where people hauled goods and water with donkeys instead of cars, replete with a horseshoe harbor, lovely cafes, and so many beaches in which to bob in the sea.

The trip was an important one for me, because I had always dreamed of visiting Greece. It was constantly pitched to me, a third-generation Greek-American, as a personal homeland. Here, finally, I was. I’d come to research the migration crisis—the real crisis that resulted in a humanitarian strangulation of refugees, not the manufactured one of their arrival and how it threatened the nativist vision of both Greece and Europe at large. But I was also researching my family’s Greek origins from the Ellis Island generation some 100 years prior, and grappling with the asymmetry with which we humans—within families, neighborhoods, nation-states, newspapers, and within our own souls—narrate stories of our migration.

And now, I was grappling with the unholy heat. On that hike, the path kept appearing and disappearing, leading us astray. Though we could see the port town of Hydra down below, miles away, and the boats and bathers on beaches nearby, we could never figure out how to reach them. How was it possible to slip so quickly from paradise into a sweltering hellscape of no exit? As we searched for the path I became so dehydrated that my legs wobbled, and I involuntarily peed my pants. I hallucinated patches of shade and sat in them, unaware I was fully bared beneath the sun. Each time I stopped, horseflies bit up my brush-scraped legs and feasted on the patches of blood. Knuckle-sized spiders began to appear on webbing spun across the pathway, crawling up my face and arms. Or was this, too, hallucination? I had begun to see an elaborate pantheon of gods and beasts.

Greece is a place plump with mythology—or rather, because of the nature of the cannon, Greece’s landscape is plump with a mythology known and legible to many of us who venture there, whether we trace roots there or not. Myths teach us something about the business of living, of staying alive. What was this mythic landscape revealing to me?

The future, I think. Many of us travel to Greece to study the past. But when it comes to our climate reality, Greece—which is heating up faster than most other places in the global north—is an oracle, helping us see, in terms both stark and enigmatic, what the future holds.

Eventually, we made it back to the harbor. No big thing. But this experience has continued to trouble me. It wasn’t just a foolish misadventure with a happy ending. My hike story reveals something about life in our era of climate emergency. We need only scratch the surface of a place (Google Hydra, behold its stunning beaches, and you’ll see what I mean), deviate only slightly off the well-trodden sections of the map, to reveal a precariousness, a peril—in the place itself, and in us humans trying to live upon it. How quickly a state of careless ease becomes one of mortal peril. Enter the future.

“Oh, everyone here knows never to go hiking after April,” a journalist acquaintance told me over coffee when I was back on Hydra a few summers later. It’s just a fact: too hot. The summers are for swimming, for sticking closer to town, for Freddo coffees, for afternoons of shade.

My great grandparents probably knew this, too, on their own island in the Cyclades, where walking paths loop from house to house, town to town, monastery to hillside to spring to mountaintop. But then again, Greece is some four degrees hotter now than it was in the pre-industrial era when my great grandparents were born. The country has always experienced summer heatwaves, but now such spikes are not anomalous, but the norm. In the past 20 years alone, the average temperature has risen two degrees, and 2023, 2024, and 2025 have been the hottest years on record.

Right now, as with every summer, part of Greece continues to be paradisal, while other parts have become seething conflagrations of wildfire and parch. In 2021, 125,000 hectares of land burned, cloaking parts of the country in a mask of black smoke. This past June was the third hottest June on record.

Anyone who has been to Greece in the summer knows the quality of the heat I’m talking about here—inescapable and unrelenting, an entity unto itself, so thick it feels as if you could grab a hunk of it and hold it in your hand. How soothing it is to slip into the water, beneath a patch of shade—to disappear the air. Greeks know how to manage the heat (build houses made of whitewashed stone, irrigate the olives during waves of heat, wear linen, hide out during the unholy hot of midday, don’t take moronic hikes during a heat wave in late June) but the heat is mutating in degree and in kind. Tourists—we’re hopeless. We trudge uphill to the Acropolis (that “monument to doomed expectations,” as Delillo once called it) and to the oracle at Delphi, panting, seeking the ancient ruins’ shadows. We take those ill-advised hikes. That day up on the shadeless hilltops of Hydra, I had been mortally afraid of how hot I had gotten, how disoriented. It wasn’t a total overreaction. In 2024, half a dozen tourists died of heat-related deaths.

“Who needs the scorching Med? Readers’ Tips for Cooler European Coastal Holidays” ran a recent 

 headline. But the heat isn’t, in fact, dissuading people—not yet; the number of tourists visiting Greece in 2024 was higher than ever before, and this year that record is likely to be broken yet again. But the tourism industry, which constitutes some 13% of Greece’s economy, is also under stress as the water table of the Mediterranean basin rapidly depletes. Greece’s government is forced to make difficult decisions about who gets the water as it becomes more and more scarce. The hotels need water for their pools and spas and cooling mid-day showers. The water-stricken islands like Hydra need it shipped in as they work to build more desalination plants. The farmers need it for their olives and tomato and sunflower crops. And the people need water to drink—to live.

The heating up of Greece is, of course, a global trend, but Greece—and southern Europe more broadly––is being hit particularly hard. The temperature of the Mediterranean basin is rising at a rate 20% faster than the rest of Europe, and in Greece, the cost of climate chaos per capita—basically, how much the average person ends up spending to offset, prevent, or recover from climate emergency—is some 10 times higher than any other Mediterranean country. Meanwhile, Greece’s rate of heat-related deaths is 393 per million—the worst of any country in Europe. Heat, once a matter of inconvenience, something to build one’s life around, is now a matter of life and death. And Greece is a disturbing harbinger for what is to come worldwide.

Heat death takes many forms: death by fire, death by asphyxiation, death by hyperthermia, death by drought, death by economic strangulation, even spiritual death from the grief of a landscape dying. As a reporter, my focus on Greece is always on some aspect of migration—the history of migration to and from Greece, the high numbers of people arriving to Europe by way of Greece today, the inhumane treatment they receive once they arrive, the government’s attempt to keep them out or remove them, the way Europe saddled Greece with the unequal responsibility for the migrants’ care. But climate change—the inhuman heat, and its effects—is always a topic impossible to avoid.

Refugees on the island of Lesvos complained mightily of the heat in summertime, when they practically cooked beneath their makeshift tents (the lucky ones managed to save up for fans they plugged into the camp’s dubious and makeshift network of wires). In September of 2020, that island’s camp burst into flames and, most likely as a result of high winds, historically dry temperatures and the cramped, shantytown nature of the camp quarters, spread so fast that within two days practically the entire place was turned to char. Many of the refugees living there had come from places stricken by their own climatic chaos: people leaving Gambia due to the encroaching Sahel, or the unreliable rains of Ethiopia, or the famine in Sudan. After 20 years of reporting on migration I’ve come to learn that practically every migration story is also, in one way or another, and somewhere along the way, also a story of climate change. To migrate, particularly from south to north, is to move through a multitude of ecosystems that are also migrating and mutating as a matter of survival.

It's an old truth about migration: we leave one kind of trouble only to find another. Last January, I was in Greece researching the future of the country’s olive harvest. The short of it: not good. Olives have been cultivated in this region for millennia because they thrive in arid climates—able to sustain themselves within great domes of heat, through long stretches of no rain. But wildfires have devoured hundreds of thousands of Greek olive trees in the past few years, some of them hundreds and even thousands of years old. Climate chaos has strangled the predictability of the harvest. Two years ago, farmers told me there are so few olives on trees that it wasn’t even worth harvesting them for oil. Part of the problem is the summer heat, but it’s the rising winter temperatures that do the most damage. Winter signals a tree into dormancy, which is what allows it to regenerate enough to burst buds in spring. Seasons, now, are just designations of time—not of weather.

“In these Classical lands,” wrote Théophile Guatier over 100 years ago, “the past is so alive that it leaves hardly any room for the present to survive.” Greece, the history books often tell us, is where all of “Western Civilization”—that fictitious creature—began. Greece projects an outward story of its own centrality, in part as a bid for continued inclusion and relevance in the European project, one that consistently sidelines and maligns Greece (strapping it with interminable debt after the 2008 financial crash, for instance, and marooning refugees in Greece’s care, rather than the more resourced countries of the North, as they navigate the asylum process.) The invitation as one climbs the Acropolis Hill is to believe in the origin story—to look backward in order to better understand democracy, civilization, the nation-state, oneself. But up on that hillside in Hydra, I came to understand that while Greece is known for its past, the place offers the most insight into what will become of the sea, as the fish rise to the surface in suffocation; at what will become of the trees, the branches bared of olives; the forests, charred black with fire. What will become of us?

Many of us all over the world will, as we always have, be forced to move. And in this dimension, too, Greece speaks more to an increasingly barricaded future than to the more porous, borderless past.

Once, I was reporting from the Evros region of Greece, the borderland with Turkey. It’s a beautiful and brutal mountainous region with lonely little towns, and an abundance of police and immigration trucks scouring the landscape. I studied the map and drove south, toward a green swath on the map where the river border emptied into the Thracian Sea—what turned out to be the Evros Delta National Park. Though few of the signs were in English, I gathered that the place was a sanctuary for birds—geese, pelicans, storks, flamingos. It was flat, and the wetlands stretched for what felt like miles. I was still close to the border (the border is everywhere, as the refrain goes) but felt liberated from its logic. Here, the river ran into the sea. The birds did their skyward work. And—best of all, on this blistering day—there was wind.

I walked through the wetlands on a rickety boardwalk, the occasional plank wobbling underfoot, and out toward an observation tower in the distance. No one else was around—not a soul. I managed to glean from a sign that in a few months, the flamingos would make a waystation here on their journey south to Africa.

I’d spent the past 20 years studying human rights abuses and borders, parsing questions of belonging and exclusion. I’d been in Greece for just two weeks this time, reporting on the fire that had burned down the refugee camp on Lesvos and the six young refugees who, with zero evidence, were arrested for arson. It was July, and it was hot, and the country was studded with fires, more erupting each day. I was weary from it all and, though I would never give up my ceaseless inquiry into borders—not today, not ever—I did need a rest, a waystation, just like the birds. The future…it worried me—what we were doing to the planet, to one another. What might thwart this instinct to barricade and to bunker? What better temporary waystation from that future than this protected place, no people, crowded with birds, so much water. It was a place where you could almost imagine the world intact again, a future full of life. ♦

Lauren Markham is a writer based in northern California. Her latest book

Where were you when New York City’s climate was reclassified from humid continental to humid subtropical? I was in a borrowed apartment on 101st Street, overlooking the west side of Central Park. The apartment belonged to a widower, a man who kept a gun in a filing cabinet that he warned us not to open. His hallways were lined to the ceiling with boxes overflowing with photos and paper scraps, a memorial of sorts to his deceased wife, and to the grief he would not let go of. There was no table in this apartment, so we stacked some of these boxes by the window overlooking the park, a view worth more money than I’d ever care to have. Living in that apartment felt like one of those rare summer days in this century—not too hot, almost indecently pleasant, but already unraveling at the edges. The type of day where sublimity is found in a makeshift table of a single plank of wood laid upon a lifetime’s worth of loss.

I was sitting at that makeshift table when I saw the July 2020 

’ headline, tucked into the Climate section, a headline worthy of the opening lines to a romance novel: “Sultry Nights and Magnolia Trees: New York City Is Now Subtropical.” As I sent the article to friends, I realized its insinuations of pleasant, exotic things like palm trees and mild winters did not aid my insistence to anyone who would listen that this mattered. That August was ranked the third hottest on record globally—a title that was superseded just last month. Despite the heat, or perhaps amplified by it, demonstrations for racial justice were shaking the streets of nearly every major city across the U.S. A close friend of mine, who was encamped outside New York’s City Hall, called me after sleepless nights of being terrorized by the police, insisting that the revolution was nigh. I believed her. The city's energy that summer felt unstoppable, ready to build a new world from the detritus we’d leave behind. And amidst the cacophony of protests, joyous and furious alike, a different barrier was crossed. Though that threshold break barely registered as news, our city on the North Atlantic is now, climatologically speaking, a part of the tropics.

The Earth’s climate resists Cartesian logic, yet humans persist in their classifications. The Köppen system, the most renowned climate classification system, was created by Wladimir Köppen in 1884, a botanist so hubristic that he believed all life forms could be named and classified. He used the same logic to fit all the earth’s continents and regions into five discrete climate zones.

The ongoing usage of Köppen’s zones, and their ever-shifting boundaries, offer a dire signal that geological changes are occurring on human timescales. But there are other, bitter ironies attached to the continued use of a system that dates from an era when European empires were carving up the planet. There were other consequences to devising systems of classification, like Köppen’s, to render colonized landscapes and peoples, many of them in the tropics, legible to northern ears and tongues. In Köppen’s system, there are five major climate types: A (tropical), B (arid), C (temperate), D (continental), and E (polar). All of them use temperature as their primary criterion, except for B. While the system has evolved since its early twentieth-century origins, it still bears the logic of its age, reducing the world’s complexity to five letters and swathing the Earth in colored bands on commonly reproduced maps. On the day the climate zone shifted, it was clear that we had to find new colors for subtropical New York City on these maps.

, meaning “a turn” and once referred to the point at which the sun reaches its apogee at the solstice. To call a place tropical is to place it at the imagined center of the Earth, where heat resides, within the celestial realm where the sun hangs high. The tropics are now expanding at a rate of 30 miles per decade—a prophecy that recalls past epochs in Earth’s history. 50 million years ago, palm trees, those eternal symbols of tropical delight, grew in the Arctic. If the Köppen categories were in competition with each other to consume more of the Earth, it is Type A, tropical, that stands poised to devour the rest.

When the whole world is tropical, what words will we use to describe and define ourselves?

We bemoan the fact that every summer is now one of the hottest summers ever. But the notion of “records” as benchmarks to be broken no longer holds weight. What is the point of a record when the certainty of its being broken is undeniable and in close sight? Will future records revolve around how cool a summer is? Where will the line be drawn between the era of accounting for the hottest summers and that of accounting for the coolest ones? After decades of denialism around the perils of fossil fuel use, which saw companies like ExxonMobil spend millions on marketing campaigns to frame those perils as 

,” not even certain to occur, it’s not hard to understand why many are tempted to see the planet’s crisis as a mere shift. A crisis, by definition, should abide by binary logic—either there is one or there is not. It’s harder to see a crisis as a creep or ever-worsening condition. This binary between crisis and non-crisis demonstrates one of the many ways in which our classification systems fail in the face of climate breakdown. We cover our eyes from both consequence and source. As Amitav Ghosh has reminded us, the climate crisis isn’t singular or new; it’s inseparable from the history of colonialism, whose primary actors, in the ruthless pursuit for riches, relied on classification systems to render the world and its beings knowable and expendable. Our systems of classification, as we know them, are often not far removed from our systems of exploitation.

What anchors a memory of heat? I remember that on June 24, this past summer, temperatures breached 100 degrees. Descending to the train platform uptown felt like entering into the innards of a large, inhospitable animal, its density a flesh that my body had to press through. It was hot, and the station’s fever seeped into my skin, slicking me with a layer of sweat that ran. I remember how the sweat slid into my contact lenses and burned my eyes, blurring my vision while I waited for that train. At lunch, I felt an eerie sense of anguish wandering in desolate public spaces. Madison Square Park, usually packed at midday, was at half-capacity. And among those who were there, I glimpsed a shared sense of uneasiness. What were any of us doing, after all, outside in these conditions? Heat stretches the limits of imagination because imagination is so often visual, and the visuals of heat are often images of absence: people not outside, events not attended, deaths not recorded. We often depict heat by showing the means by which people evade it. Look at the children splashing in the spray of fire hydrants; look at the families dipping into pools; look at the young women sunbathing. The dangers of visualizing extreme heat in these ways have been the focus of advocacy campaigns like one by 

, which begins with the assertion: “Heat is Not Fun.”

It’s anachronistic and harmful for us to ascribe carefree images and language to heat, as the 

invoking “sultry nights.” But what’s even more harmful is how all of us are beginning to respond to extreme heat emotionally and relationally—not through the shock or horror with which we’d respond to a hurricane, but with the silent, subconscious rewriting of social norms. This creeping, unclassified disaster reshapes us in ways we barely perceive. In asking people to adjust their behavior, we excuse the conditions for their discomfort.

I knew many people this summer who got heat exhaustion and heat stroke—all in the Northeast. One of them, a friend of my mom’s, is a neighbor I grew up with and a marathon runner who’s always been in rude health. On one of this year’s hot days, though not the hottest, she went for a run around the loop in Central Park. That evening, she came down with an illness that could not be diagnosed by her husband, a doctor, who suggested it was because she had spent three hours that day rigorously moving her body in 92-degree heat. My mom ended the story with a judgment—“So stupid, right?”

My impulse was to agree—of course, it’s insane to believe that the way you've lived your life for its entirety up until the past few years is the way you can live your life today. I spend every day steeped in climate-related content, with “heat” being my primary keyword search. But I realized that the day my mom’s friend took ill hadn’t even registered for me as a particularly bad day. In fact, on that same day, I had gone on a seven-mile walk.

My own notion of danger was in part shaped by a threshold for extreme heat I first learned about in college, when I spent a summer working on a climate adaptation plan for the city of Penang. The number I had seared into my mind then was 95°F wet-bulb, or 35°C wet-bulb—the maximum temperature at which the human body, through perspiration, can cool itself. In New York City, where the average August humidity is 70%, this would mean a temperature of 104°F—a threshold that is breached on occasion in the Northeast, though far more commonly in some of the hottest regions of the world. This upper boundary was recently thrown into question by research suggesting that 

 better represents the maximum safe temperature for humans. In a New York City August, this threshold would be reached when the temperature hits 96°F—which it did, multiple times this past summer. But although this number wasn’t hit on the ill-fated day when my mom’s friend went on a run, the issue is that heat and the human body do not abide by binaries. What is safe for a 65-year-old marathon runner on a hot day is not the same as what is safe for a 25-year-old on a long walk, or an elderly person with lung disease, or an energetic child. All of us possess unique combinations of exposure risks, access to adaptive measures, and physiology. This variability begs for classification systems that are as sophisticated as they are simple.

When systems for classifying the external world fail, it is this constant recalibration of social norms that serves as a hastily constructed bulwark against external threats. We create new systems that are directed at our fellow human beings.

A close friend of mine got heat stroke in Boston this summer while moving her furniture from one apartment to another on a 90-degree day in August. She is from Karachi, where temperatures of 118°F have been recorded. And still, despite her familiarity as a climate and health professional who has first-hand experience with the dangers of heat exposure, she fell ill and was sick for three days. “Since when do people from Pakistan get heat stroke in Boston?” she asked me, incredulous. Not only do our recalibrations get redirected at others—we turn them on ourselves.

The result is often punitive. A firm line is drawn between those who are affected by heat and those who are not, between those with “common sense” and those without, which weaponizes the evolving notion that while impacts of heat exposure may be horrid, they are still avoidable, and therefore it is your fault if you fall ill. It is an ethos of individualism that pervades American culture and our historic and ongoing treatment of those who are sick, differently-abled, or otherwise fail to survive in a landscape that is less livable for some than others.

Last summer, my grandmother died on one of the hottest days of that year. I was sitting in a stifling subway station in Downtown Brooklyn when I got the news. For some reason, her care attendant had not turned on the air conditioner that day. I still find it hard to shake that fact.

The next morning, I woke up at 5 am and marched to a bank that funds fossil fuels. With other activists in tow, we blocked people from entering the corporate headquarters for two hours. I remember standing at an entrance with my arms locked in step with another activist, preventing employees from passing as a woman who had tried to shove me to the ground five minutes earlier screamed “IDIOTS” again and again. She’d found her classification.

In that moment, she drew a boundary. Her anger, her fear, her inconvenience were real—and mine, her screams told me, were not. My body did not belong there, neither did the cresting anxiety I felt in the heat of the morning, nor the grief I carried from the day before. And so, too, was my body a boundary, one that sought not to define but reframe what constitutes violence in the age of climate breakdown. When the whole world is tropical, the only boundary left to cross will be whether we remember one another, or whether we let the heat unmake us alone. ♦

Zoe Voss Lee is a New Yorker living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She works at the intersection of climate justice, data, and urbanism. 

The heat wave warnings sent my phone vibrating across the hardwood floor the morning I had the first scan. The warnings came in German, and often came in the form of videos, also in German—charming clips of weathermen standing in front of illustrated boards in a newsroom, the whole country divided into icons of blazing sun and strong winds, nearly all of it alarm-red. I found the weather videos vaguely old fashioned and somehow redolent of the sober and predictable weather reports of childhood, although I could rarely understand what they were telling me.

Neel was already out of bed, gone to work, the apartment empty, the balcony door and all the windows open to let the slack breeze in. I turned the radio on. We had it programmed entirely with stations based in the countries where we had lived: 3RRR in Melbourne, WFMU in New York, ABC Radio National Sydney. This morning, BBC 6. The half-hour news was full of people collapsing from the heat all over Europe. Electricity grids shut down, wildfires spreading across drought-dried grasslands. Children in Paris excused from school.

I rolled my eyes. Nobody let us out of school in Sydney when it was over 35 degrees, we still had to sit through Maths in puddles of teenage sweat. I said this aloud, forgetting for a moment that Neel wasn’t there. In the night, my screaming had woken him. I had been a child in my dream, and somebody was coming. That was all I remembered. After holding me, calming me, Neel had said that the screaming was frightening. Shrill peals of terror. Someone was coming, I repeated, before falling back to sleep. Now, on my phone, I could see he had messaged to ask if I’d slept okay in the end, and to let him know how the scan went.

By 11 I was sitting in the office in Moabit, tastefully decorated with a six-foot-tall light sculpture of a luminous naked woman, as if to present us with an ideal to aspire to. She was perfectly proportioned but somehow solid, a distinctly German vision of femininity I recognized from Nazi-era photography and the GDR-era statues decorating the lobby of the pool where I habitually swam. A woman waiting for her blood to be taken was red-eyed from weeping. Another jiggled her foot against her knee. She was wearing pants; a poor decision. My name was called. When I stood up, I checked the chair beneath me, finding a stripe of sweat demarcating where the skin of my back had rested on the black plastic, and another smear on the seat, advertising the wet space between my legs. I wiped hurriedly at them with the skirt of my dress, and left the waiting room quickly, afraid of catching someone’s eye.

 was brisk. She confirmed the date of my last period and asked me to undress. Underwear off, shoes off. I sat myself in the chair, put my feet in the stirrups, pulled my dress up to my waist, and breathed deeply when she told me to relax. She pushed the ultrasound wand into my vaginal canal and up to my cervix.

See that, she asked, pointing to the screen that was flickering to life in greyscale abstraction. There was a black oval on the screen, with a grey and white smudge floating inside of it. That’s your baby, she said.

She rotated the wand with her eyes fixed to the screen, and then pointed to the pulsing white dot in the middle of the smudge. That’s the heart, she said. It is, and she paused, trying to think of the word in English. It is 

I didn’t even think to correct her. It was obviously, in that moment, the most perfect and most beautiful word for the action of a heart.

She had me dress, then sit opposite her. Everything looked perfect, she said. I should come back in two weeks, make an appointment at reception. She advised me not to spend time with cats and said the fatigue and nausea I’d been experiencing were common and to be expected, but told me to keep an eye out and let her know if they got any worse. She said she would prescribe me custom-made compression tights for the long-haul flight I would need to make to Australia the following month. She handed me a printout of the sonogram, the tiny smudge more like a mollusk than a baby. I beamed at it, and as she opened the door to invite me to leave, she warned me about the heat. It can be dangerous in pregnancy, she said. Be careful.