The bench is made in memory of Matthew Girard who died in 2020 from cancer.

TGIF, enjoy some movie chains for the long weekend. Here’s The Reel Deal #57. 🎬

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Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are expected to welcome around 1,000 guests at Madison Square Garden to celebrate their wedding, sources say.

Republican lawmakers are game planning legislative ways to try to challenge the Supreme Court’s ruling this week that upheld birthright citizenship as a constitutional right. Several GOP members have filed or are planning legislation to try to clamp down on birthright citizenship, such as by targeting “birth tourism” or defining which individuals are “subject to…

In order to make sense of Louis C.K.’s new Netflix special, “Ridiculous,” I find it’s helpful to consider how the controversial and once-“canceled” comedian looks. When I watch him move on stage, it seems he moves slowly. The camera trains on his face, weighed down by eye bags that cast shadows on his cheeks. His balding dome is potted with a few wisps of disobedient hairs sprouting this way and that. From a very specific angle, it appears two curved lines are indented on each side of his forehead, forming a set of parentheses around his mind. Within those parentheses he seems to be thinking: “I no longer give a f—!”

Fans of C.K.’s brand of absurdist nihilistic humor will love the show. He opens by mentioning that he contracted AIDS by having intercourse with a rat. He tells us he dreamt that he urinated on a baby (after sharing this with his shrink, he says, his course of therapy was promptly terminated). He appraises his mother’s genitals. He thanks his father for never having sexually abused him — though he concedes there’s still time for that to happen.

For me, the best bits were the ones that had little to do with his customary themes of pedophilia, incest, rape, sexism and casual racism, the abject staples of the C.K. canon. Rather, it was a series of more observational riffs that I found to be quite good. Reminding us how deft a physical comedian he is, C.K. ingeniously imitates trying to exit his row at a movie theater in order to access the bathroom (though even here he discharges his cannon, explaining to his importuned seatmates, “My father f—– me when I was 5”). 

A meditation on how vendors at farmers markets obsessively want to tell you their product’s “story” was hysterical, especially considering that a panicked C.K. purchased the soap in question to soothe his most intimate orifice. He marvels at how pejorative the term “boneless, skinless chicken breast” actually is (C.K. draws out the undertone: “You lazy, useless, boneless, chicken breast! Get a job!”). On another point, he’s totally right: Why do strangers feel they can speak to you when you’re walking your dog in Manhattan? 

One subject C.K. doesn’t address in “Ridiculous” is the massive controversy that erupted in November 2017 when a New York Times article alleged that he had masturbated in front of female colleagues without their consent. The comedian, as I noted here, responded by acknowledging the story was true. Critics have, for various reasons, doubted the sincerity of his contrition. Over at the Humorist Blog, Seth Simons does a nice job of explaining why C.K.’s apologies are difficult to fully accept. Factor in C.K.’s recent drift into the manosphere, and it becomes hard to gauge the degree to which he is truly, sincerely, sorry about the women he victimized.

In “Ridiculous,” C.K. makes no reference whatsoever to this career-altering, career-defining moment. I find that interesting. In my own work on canceled comedians, I have noted that they often deploy a peculiar and incendiary technique that I call “the meta move.” They bring the controversy about their jokes into their subsequent jokes. They make jokes about their jokes and especially about the rubes and pedants who didn’t laugh at them.

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Louis CK Says Sexual Misconduct Allegations ‘Are True’

November 10, 2017 / 04:05

When famous comedians do this, the fallout is often considerable. It can turn their audiences into snarling, partisan cheering sections. It also tends to deform the comedians themselves; they become entrapped in their own controversies and that impacts their material (and, in some cases, their mental health). Most importantly, the meta move further infuriates those who were originally insulted. They take to social media to register their discontent. The cycle of rage intensifies.

In a previous special, C.K. went meta, which I doubt mollified those who were mad at him for his sexual indiscretions. But there is no meta in “Ridiculous,” and I think this goes back to those parentheses mentioned above. Again and again, C.K. informs us he’s 58 years old. He appears to be at peace with his advancing age and who he is. He loves bad weather and craves “a dark day, a terrible day.” In a confessional moment, he observes: “I live in the present for the first time, not from wisdom or courage but from fear, because there is too much of the past and not enough of the future.” He then deadpans that “living in the present is harder to do when you have diarrhea most days.”

That C.K. fears engaging with the past might be interpreted as a  retreat, a laying down of arms. It might be a dividend of the sex and love addiction counseling he has said he’s pursued. Or, it might be an epic evasion. Luckily for him, media conglomerates will platform him either way. Luckily for his fans, they get to hear him refine the dark comedic aesthetic of which he is undoubtedly a living master. 

So let this be a lesson about so-called “cancellation.” C.K. may have been “canceled,” but that doesn’t prevent him from plying his craft, making a fortune, getting a special and using his sets to work through his complex emotional feelings. This is not an option available to those he hurt, so their only recourse is to look the other way.  

The post Louis C.K. has mastered the art of the post-cancellation comeback appeared first on MS NOW.

Progressive victories in Colorado, including 29-year-old Melat Kiros’ stunning upset of 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette, are drawing new attention to democratic socialism and a movement that has steadily expanded its influence within the Democratic Party.

The wins follow a series of victories in New York by candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, while fellow progressive Brad Lander also won his Democratic primary, highlighting the growing influence of the party’s left flank.

The victories have renewed interest in democratic socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, the nation’s largest democratic socialist organization. The group grew rapidly following the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

While the movement has historically found success in deep-blue districts, recent wins in New York and Colorado suggest its influence may be expanding beyond a handful of urban strongholds, even as questions remain about its appeal in competitive statewide and general elections.

Here is what to know about the movement.

What is democratic socialism?

Democratic socialism is a political ideology that seeks to reduce economic inequality by expanding the role of government in providing public services while maintaining a democratic system and a largely market-based economy. 

“We are activists committed to democracy as not simply one of our political values but our means of restructuring society. Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives,” the DSA’s mission statement says on its official website, which notes that the movement represents “a more free, democratic and humane society.”

Unlike traditional socialism, democratic socialists generally do not call for government ownership of all businesses. Instead, they argue that essential services such as healthcare, housing and education should be more accessible through public investment and stronger regulation of private markets.

Most democratic socialists in the United States run as Democrats rather than through a separate political party, making the movement a faction within the Democratic coalition rather than its own ballot line.

DSA is the country’s largest organization associated with the movement and the group now claims to have more than 100,000 members nationwide.

What policies do democratic socialists support?

While platforms differ from candidate to candidate, several proposals have become closely associated with democratic socialists.

One of the movement’s signature messages is “tax the rich.” That often includes higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners, including millionaire taxes. Some candidates also support a wealth tax to help fund expanded government services.

Healthcare is another defining issue. Many democratic socialists back Medicare for All, a single-payer healthcare system that would replace or significantly reduce the role of private insurance with universal government-funded coverage.

Labor proposals also distinguish the movement. Democratic socialists have championed a 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay, arguing productivity gains should benefit workers rather than employers.

Housing affordability has become one of the movement’s top priorities. Candidates frequently advocate stronger tenant protections, expanded affordable housing construction and forms of universal rent control aimed at limiting rent increases.

The movement also opposes U.S. military aid to Israel, supports an arms embargo and backs the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, arguing that American military assistance enables Israel’s actions against Palestinians. The organization has also called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. support for Israeli military operations.

Other proposals include free childcare, tuition-free public college, paid family leave, higher minimum wages and stronger labor union protections.

Can the movement expand beyond deep-blue districts?

A looming question the movement faces is whether or not it can expand beyond deep-blue districts.

Democratic socialists have found their greatest success in cities and congressional districts where Democratic primaries effectively decide elections. Their candidates have increasingly defeated establishment incumbents, but they still represent a relatively small share of the Democratic caucus nationally.

Supporters argue the movement’s emphasis on affordability, universal healthcare and reducing wealth inequality resonates with voters struggling with high housing costs and inflation. But some critics, including Democratic lawmakers, say proposals remain difficult to sell in competitive races.

Still, the recent success of progressive candidates suggests democratic socialism is no longer a fringe movement within the Democratic Party. Whether advocating to tax the rich, enact universal childcare, pursue a shortened workweek or expand universal healthcare, democratic socialists have become an increasingly influential faction within the party — on that establishment Democrats can no longer easily dismiss.

The post What is a democratic socialist? Inside the movement behind Mamdani’s rise appeared first on MS NOW.

Despite our differences, as Americans, we can all join together in the hope that when an enormous fireworks display happens at Mount Rushmore on Friday, it doesn’t spark a wildfire in the Black Hills National Forest. As in 2020, when the Trump administration suspended an 11-year ban on fireworks at the memorial, the show is being staged amid cautions about fire risk. The threat of catastrophe for a presidential photo op — indeed, the show appears to be largely for Trump’s benefit, as he will be in attendance — is par for the course in Trump’s Fourth of July celebrations. 

Let’s start with Graft Force One. Trump is scheduled to fly to South Dakota on the $400 million jet gifted by the government of Qatar, just one high-profile part of the grubbiest presidential cash grab in 250 years of American history. 

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‘Shameless’: Trump slammed for ‘cashing in’ on the presidency

July 2, 2026 / 11:43

According to the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, presidents aren’t supposed to accept gifts, certainly not ones worth mid-nine-figures. But since the terms of the deal say the plane is in the temporary possession of the U.S. government until Trump leaves office, when it becomes the property of his “library” — i.e., he can do whatever he wants with it — it’s not supposed to count. 

As mind-boggling as the size of that gift was when it was announced, it turns out that pales in comparison to the ways Trump has increased his personal wealth since returning to office. Trump made more than $2 billion last year, mostly through crypto schemes, according to a mandatory government financial disclosure report released Tuesday. Crypto appears to have provided an easy path to influence. In one case, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser — also known as its “Spy Sheik” — secretly invested half a billion dollars in a Trump family crypto company. Soon after, the Trump administration agreed to allow the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips to the UAE, a high priority for the Emirati government.  

What the Qataris got in exchange for Trump’s new plane is not clear. “There are no conflicts of interest,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told MS NOW. 

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New details on Trump family’s business dealings raise ethical concerns

July 2, 2026 / 11:37

But the president is excited about the plane, which was retrofitted at considerable taxpayer expense and required a massive $320 million custom hangar at Joint Base Andrews. “This was a gift from a country that’s treated us very well,” Trump said before boarding for its first official flight Wednesday. “Frankly, we couldn’t build a plane like this,” he added, although the plane was built in Washington state by Boeing. 

Never mind that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent to upgrade the communications and security systems of the Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8 for presidential travel for a mere two years, until the long-delayed jets ordered directly from Boeing are slated to arrive. Apparently, only the jet the Qataris draped in American-flag colors would do. (“You can low-key it. Or you can show it,” Trump also said Wednesday.) Journalists who toured the plane reported lie-flat leather seats equipped with massage functions and library bookcases. On some of the walls, the Journal reported, hung “[p]atriotic pieces of art, including a photo of a duck swimming in the Reflecting Pool.” (Yes, the Reflecting Pool, whose botched renovation now stands as a symbol for this presidency, complete with outlandish promises, bumbling incompetence and angry blame-shifting.) 

Trump is clearly pleased that the plane was ready in time for the country’s semiquincentennial celebration. Pity that the festivities under his direction have been so shambolic.

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White House officials reportedly concerned about crowd size at Trump’s July 4th speech

July 2, 2026 / 10:49

When preparations began 10 years ago for events marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the idea was that Americans in communities large and small would have the opportunity to reflect on our history and rededicate themselves to the higher ideals that inspired the Revolution. But things like essay contests and library exhibits apparently weren’t, well, Trumpy enough. 

Although Congress had already created a commission to plan commemorations of the anniversary — known as America250 — Trump signed an executive order to create his own organization, Freedom 250, which would mount competing events and programs. 

Under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration slashed funding that would have gone to local celebrations across the country. Instead, money would be funneled to Trump-friendly initiatives. Freedom 250’s first major planned event was to be a concert on the National Mall. It collapsed after most of the acts pulled out, saying they hadn’t realized it was a political event. So Trump, criticizing the artists, canceled the concert and staged a (lightly attended) rally for himself.

That speech was the kickoff of the Great American State Fair, a hastily planned gathering on the National Mall that Trump’s Freedom 250 billed as “A world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair.” 

It has been a gigantic dud. 

First, it’s taking place during a brutal heat wave (temperature forecast for Friday: 102 degrees, with a heat index of 111). Second, the whole operation is janky, especially the replica of Trump’s planned triumphal arch — a project cobbled together by a high school shop class might look better. Crowds have been embarrassingly thin. At times, attendees seem outnumbered by the Fox News anchors trying desperately to hype it.

One hopes that the Mount Rushmore festivities Friday do not suffer a similarly embarrassing outcome, even if the display is staged with Trump no doubt dreaming his likeness will one day be carved into the rock alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, making real the artificial intelligence image he has posted to social media.

The post Trump’s Mount Rushmore trip is heavy on symbolism. And it starts with his $400 million plane. appeared first on MS NOW.

Celebrities love an all-white look just as much as we do. Here’s how to recreate our favorite tonal moments, from Kendall Jenner to Olivia Wilde.

One writer describes her weekend trip to Aegina—where to stay, what to pack, and what to bookmark.

Come time-travel with us to the fall 2016 couture, where designs inspired by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Boho princess, fairy tales, and bubbles walked the runway.

It was not the postcard-worthy aesthetics that prompted Greek islanders to first drench their cliffside-carved homes, churches, and pathways in a thick layer of pearly white paint. 

Much like wearing a white tunic on a hot sunny day, painting your house a shade of reflective white is a fine way to keep an ancient island cool, bouncing some of the sun’s heat back into space instead of absorbing it into the structure of the buildings themselves. Before air conditioning existed, people in warmer areas of the world often built with similar techniques in mind: Iran’s picturesque chimney-like badgirs or wind catchers have helped desert dwellers stay cool for millennia, for example, and in the tropics, Malaysians have long engineered their homes on stilts to avoid floods and let a breeze in. 

Many homes and cities in Europe are still living as if AC had never been invented, relying largely on their thick shutters, ventilated courtyards, and other strategies to encourage shade and airflow. But after a deadly, record-shattering heat wave tore through western Europe last week, killing at least 1,300 people, it has become increasingly clear that old-world buildings are not cooling enough on their own for our new world of heat. 

As a similar heat dome now pulses over the eastern US, a nation of AC aficionados faces the inverse of this problem. Since just after the end of World War II, the US has built its homes, schools, and hospitals so thoroughly with AC in mind that most buildings have no built-in defense against the heat at all. The air conditioner made possible America’s cavernous McMansions, megamalls, and frigid glass office towers, engineered like ectotherms, liable to soak up a heat wave like a cold-blooded lizard sprawled out on a rock on a scorching summer’s day. 

Clearly, climate change has, to some extent, vindicated America’s hyperreliance on the AC. Unlike in Europe, with its suddenly vulnerable passive cooling systems that kept things temperate back when weather used to be normal, the US can take the heat as long as the air is on. In the aftermath of the AC-enabled postwar housing boom, the likelihood of an American dying on a scorching hot day fell by a staggering 80 percent. 

But the roaring, life-saving success of the AC has also embedded a profound vulnerability: the moment the power goes out, as it’s prone to do in a heat wave — or that electricity bills get too onerous, which tends to happen when the AC is cranked — the nation’s cold-blooded buildings convert into furnaces. 

In most conventional American houses, if you “lose power in the middle of an extreme heat wave or in a blizzard, you’ve got hours before you need to get out,” said Alexander Gard-Murray, executive director of Passive House Massachusetts, a group that encourages the state to build naturally cooler buildings – or “passive houses” – from the start. Some techniques are state-of-the-art and technologically novel, others are ancient, and still many others are basic common sense: don’t build facing the sun, plant trees, add an awning, and replace heat-radiating asphalt driveways with gravel. 

Notably, none of these strategies involve shoving your AC unit out the window. But they can help your air conditioning work a lot less hard — which, by the way, could cut your electricity bills in half — at a time when America’s electrical grid is desperately straining to keep everything online. Most importantly, it ensures that “if something does go wrong, if the power goes out,” said Gard-Murray, “you’re still going to be okay.”

Air conditioning reshaped how America builds for heat

American homes used to reflect the cities they were built in. Cool air flowed beneath the floorboards of New Orleans’ breezy raised shotgun houses. Boston’s winter winds met the saltbox house’s long, sloping roofs, and Pueblo tribes used thick blocks of mud to build adobe homes that withstood the desert’s daily fluctuations.

But in 1947, an engineer named Henry Galson transformed how America builds with his invention of “the people’s air conditioner,” a low-cost AC unit — until then, a luxury item — snug enough to nestle into a residential window. With millions of service members, then returning from World War II, the nation needed more housing, and it needed it fast. Cheap air conditioning allowed builders more flexibility to mass-produce the suburbs that sprawled out as a solution to America’s post-war housing crisis — even in hot climates like the Sunbelt.

Air conditioning made large swaths of the country newly habitable, fueling the spectacular growth of many now-flourishing metropolises across the American South and Southwest. In less than a century, the AC transformed blisteringly hot Phoenix from a small desert town, population 65,000, into the fifth-largest city in the country.   

 At the same time, as the AC became ubiquitous in America, “many architects stopped designing buildings for their specific context,” said Sonia Chao, associate dean of architecture at the University of Miami and author of Calibrating Coastal Resilience. “What we have today are buildings in South Florida that look a lot like the buildings being built in California or Arizona” or more temperate climates, when in fact “we really shouldn’t be building in the same ways.”

Most homes in South Florida once sat atop crawl spaces that protected them against floodwaters and let in a breeze to naturally cool the rooms above, said Chao. But many local buildings are now built directly atop concrete, meaning that “as the earth itself gets warmer,” the homes above absorb the heat too. 

Of course, if you blast your AC high enough, you probably won’t feel it. And, for decades, that gave American developers tacit permission to pare down the elements like thick masonry, high ceilings, shaded porches, and window shutters that once naturally kept us cool in favor of cheap drywall and easier-to-construct boxy floor plans that helped them cram sprawling tracts of readymade starter homes across suddenly bustling desert cities such as Phoenix and Albuquerque. They cleared trees and poured asphalt, churning out decades’ worth of leaky, heat-absorbent neighborhoods. But it didn’t matter — so long as the AC kept running. 

The problem with America’s hyperreliance on the AC

AC proved transformational to American life in profoundly positive ways, stretching the boundaries of where one can comfortably live and greatly reducing extreme heat as a public health threat. The problem is, if for whatever reason, the AC is not running, many American homes now become immediately and extraordinarily exposed. “We all like to believe that the grid is safe and stable,” said Katrin Klingenberg, executive director of Phius, which sets standards for passive homes constructed in the US. “But it’s actually way more vulnerable than we all think.”

Researchers estimate that if Phoenix were to experience a two-day blackout during one of its regular heat waves — knocking out air conditioning citywide — it would quickly kill 12,800 people, or roughly 1 percent of the population, while a full half of the city would require emergency medical care. 

Arizonans will always need AC to stay safe from the heat, but they could be far more resilient to temporary lapses if their homes and neighborhoods were better designed to stay cool without it. If Phoenix planted enough trees to shade half of its streets — which would be enough to lower the city’s temperature by at least a few degrees— 27 percent fewer residents would die in such a blackout, according to the study. If every building installed a “cool roof” — simply painting it with a white material to better reflect sunlight — then the death toll would plummet by 66 percent. 

This is not just a thought experiment. Driven by extreme weather and an aging electrical grid, the number of power outages in the US has doubled over the past two decades. After Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for millions in Texas in 2024, at least dozens — and possibly hundreds — of people died from heat-related causes, meaning the outage may have been deadlier than the storm itself. 

“It overcomes you really fast,” said Patricia Solis, executive director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, which focuses on Maricopa County, where hundreds of people die from heat-related causes each year, many inside their own homes, their air conditioning broken, turned off, or unplugged.

One of them was Stephanie Pullman, a 72-year-old who died in Phoenix in 2018, a day after her electricity was cut off over a $51 unpaid bill. Another was Patricia Miletich, a 70-year-old with memory issues, whose busted AC was blowing hot 110+ degree air into her RV when she died in June 2024. Upwards of a quarter of Arizonans who succumb to heat inside their homes live in mobile houses, structures whose thin walls, poor insulation, and cramped concrete quarters make them especially expensive to cool with AC, and especially deadly without it.

Because this extreme heat is “going to happen increasingly to more and more of us around the world,” Solis warned, we have to “make it a part of the way that we build our environments, that we build our homes, that we rebuild our homes.”

How to build a home for the climate we actually have

It’s not as hard or expensive as you might think to build a cooler home, one that does at least some of the work needed to keep things more comfortable in extreme temperatures.

Something as simple as facing an RV away from the sun, adding an awning or garden trellis, or installing vinyl skirting around the foundation to prevent hot air from coming up through the floor, could make a mobile home safer to be in if the power goes out, says Solis. And even in less catastrophic conditions,  these age-old adaptations would make an AC unit cheaper to run. When she began her work,  some mobile home park owners sought to outright forbid residents from adding cooling features like a small window garden for purely cosmetic reasons. Solis and her team later helped pass a law outlawing such practices. 

Even earning the gold standard of building cooler buildings — a “Passive House” certification from Phius — isn’t “some space-age, super advanced crazy thing,” said Gard-Murray, of Passive House Massachusetts. “It’s not about doing extraordinary things; it’s about doing ordinary things extraordinarily well,” he said, like making sure your walls are airtight and thick enough to act as a buffer against outside temperatures.  

If most American buildings absorb heat like a plastic water bottle left out in the sun, a passive house is built like a thermos, keeping things relatively temperate regardless of the temperature outside. To illustrate that, a group of architects once built two miniature houses, one according to normal building codes and the other like a passive house, plopped them in a park in New York City, and filled both with 1,800 pounds of ice. One month later, the mini passive house had 40 percent of its ice left, while the other one had only 7 percent.

You can imagine how much safer that makes you if your AC ever goes out, and makes it up to 90 percent less energy-intensive to run — enough to cut your utility bills in half — when it’s on. “If we’re much more intentional about insulating the property, the heating and cooling systems have to do a lot less work,” said AJ Patton, founder of the Chicago-based developer 548 Enterprises, which is currently building Chicago’s largest-ever Passive House-certified affordable housing complex. 

“Too often we’ve used sustainable technologies as a luxury item,” said Patton, but the biggest benefits to these homes are for lower-income households who could really use the savings on their bills or are more vulnerable to having their power cut off. 

As of now, only about one percent of homes being built in the US are built according to passive standards. One might assume that building such a sensible, sustainable, and safer home must be prohibitively expensive, or else it would be much more common. After all, who doesn’t want a significantly lower utility bill, all other things being equal?  But in reality, at least in Massachusetts — where passive designs are now the mandatory norm in many cities — a survey found that such buildings only cost as little as two to three percent more than conventional buildings. 

Equally important in a country with a notorious housing shortage, the municipalities in Massachusetts that have opted into more stringent requirements continue to build new homes at a faster clip than those that haven’t, and they approved more new housing permits after the change. There could be a lot of factors at play in those differences, but at the very least it shows that requiring strict standards in this case might not, as some skeptics fear, “crash our housing production,” Gard-Murray said.

The real reason why these building techniques don’t happen more often comes down to a lack of awareness, experts told me, along with the fact that the biggest financial benefits are for whoever pays the utility bill, not the developer who has to pay the upfront costs. It doesn’t help either that the Trump administration has cut or let expire tax credits that helped defray the extra costs of energy-efficient buildings. Some projects like Patton’s lost out on $300,000 in expected incentives in real time. 

“The moronic government policies of the last 18 months are not helping us,” said Mark Ginsberg, a founding partner of Curtis + Ginsberg Architects, which has completed about 25 multi-family passive projects in New York City, most of them affordable or supportive housing. 

“There are too many people burying their heads in the sand and saying climate change isn’t real,” he said. That’s easier when the AC hides the worst effects of extreme heat from us. But on the verge of a heat wave poised to put 175 million Americans at risk, it may be past time to give our AC a little boost, too. 

Here’s why Hampstead Heath will always hold a place in Londoners’ hearts—and how to look chic while canoodling in the grass.