Washington is entering the final stretch before the midterms with Republicans confronting a problem that would be considerably easier to solve if the problem were not also insisting on personally visiting approximately 35 congressional districts. President Donald Trump told vulnerable Republican lawmakers Wednesday that they should run on his record and promised to campaign aggressively in the races expected to determine control of Congress, despite sagging approval and growing voter frustration with both the economy and the war in Iran. His advice was essentially that Republicans simply need to explain how wonderfully everything is going, which should certainly come as a tremendous relief to anyone currently paying for groceries, utilities, healthcare, housing, or the privilege of existing anywhere near an electrical outlet.
Iran, meanwhile, deserves a brief update because the renewed escalation continues. Iran launched missiles and drones toward Kuwait early Thursday after another round of U.S. strikes, with Kuwaiti air defenses responding to the attacks. The escalation began again over the weekend after U.S. forces struck Iranian launchers near the Strait of Hormuz, followed by Iranian attacks on American forces and additional U.S. bombardment inside Iran. Iranian officials have also accused the United States of striking a wedding in southern Iran, killing civilians, and have called for an investigation. There is quite obviously much more developing there, but for today I am going to resist allowing another war update to swallow the entire newspaper whole.
Last night we took some time and got the house back in order, and it was wonderful. Ezra crawled around inspecting everything he could find, ensuring that we were appropriately organizing things, because naturally the nearly one-year-old has appointed himself quality-control manager. One of my favorite moments of the entire experience came while I was putting the older kids’ nutrition shakes into a different container. He noticed what I was doing, started pulling them out of the box one by one, and gently placed them into the container for me. It’s such a small and silly thing, but he was trying to help, and that means just about everything.
We played music, which meant, naturally, that Ember had to listen to KPop Demon Hunters, which, for those of you who don’t have small children currently controlling the household sound system, is apparently the musical pinnacle of human civilization. Mozart had a good run, Dire Straits contributed what they could, but the children have spoken and history must move forward. I would still prefer driving down the road blasting Dire Straits with my mom, but seeing Ember light up makes surrender considerably easier.
She hasn’t gotten to see her best friend in nearly a week, so today, while attempting to report the news, I have both girls, my sweet baby, and my nephew because my brother, our resident contractor, had his daycare fall through this morning. Auntie to the rescue, and in return he shall haul my trailer full of trash to the dump, which is the sort of mutually beneficial economic arrangement I believe Congress should study.
My oldest is back from his mom’s too, and it is wonderful having him around again. He spent the morning building his engineering box and is now out in the woods with his dad, which makes me happier than almost anything. My husband, my woodland hero, the architect of my imagination, is somewhere beneath the trees teaching our oldest boy about nature, and I am so grateful that I get to be his bonus mom, his ADHD buddy, and eventually the woman crashing through the woods behind them with Ezra strapped to my back.
The trailer will soon depart, which means we can begin building the deck so our sliding glass door no longer opens onto a roughly two-and-a-half-foot drop. I remain firm in my position that it would be objectively hilarious, for perhaps one second and assuming nobody was injured, to watch someone unknowingly walk through the door and continue forward like Wile E. Coyote discovering gravity. My husband remains committed to the radical proposition that exterior doors should lead to surfaces rather than brief airborne experiences, and unfortunately he appears to have building codes on his side. The deck will be wonderful, though. It will make the house safer, give us another place to gather, and become one more piece of this old home that we have repaired and made ours.
I miss the sunshine already. It will be back in a few days, at least for a while, but summer is beginning to close and soon there will be cold nights by the fire and the smell of rain. There are things I love about every season, although apparently every season now also comes with an invoice. My water bill is higher, my gas bill is higher, and insulation costs enough that I have considered simply asking everyone upstairs to wear several coats. I can’t seem to leave the grocery store for less than $300 despite somehow returning home with what appears to be enough food to prepare one elaborate dinner and perhaps half a lunch. I need to go to the dentist for a cleaning, and the estimate has reminded me why I floss with the dedication of a woman attempting to protect a small investment portfolio.
My brain has been spinning lately because so much is changing at once, and so much of what feels permanent suddenly doesn’t. I wanted to take my family into the Umpqua National Forest to hike a trail I walked often as a child, only to discover the place I remembered had burned. There is a strange grief in losing somewhere you assumed would simply wait for you.
So while the rest of us are trying to survive the increasingly expensive act of being alive, raise our children, keep the house standing, protect the places we love, build the deck before someone discovers gravity, and figure out how to visit the dentist without financing our molars, the people running the country seem remarkably committed to removing more of the guardrails.
Healthcare offers a particularly unsettling example today. For generations, Americans could reasonably expect the federal public-health apparatus to provide the baseline recommendations physicians used when respiratory-virus season arrived. This fall, some of the country’s largest medical organizations have decided they cannot rely on that process alone.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Physicians, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and Infectious Diseases Society of America have released coordinated recommendations for flu, COVID-19, and RSV vaccination, while the American Medical Association is helping collect the recommendations and supporting evidence in one place. They’re doing this because federal vaccine guidance has become increasingly unstable. The CDC’s traditional advisory process remains caught in legal and political turmoil, federal officials have pulled back some longstanding recommendations, and the professional organizations say patients and physicians need clear, consistent, evidence-based information heading into fall.
In other words, the nation’s doctors have begun constructing a backup instruction manual because the official instruction manual is currently experiencing some administrative difficulties. The groups remain broadly aligned on flu vaccination beginning at six months old, while several recommend COVID vaccination more widely than current federal approvals and recommendations. Family physicians recommend vaccination for adults, pediatricians recommend it for infants and young children and support access for older children whose parents want it, and obstetricians continue to recommend vaccination during pregnancy.
This is bigger than a disagreement about individual vaccines. Medical recommendations can reasonably evolve when evidence evolves, but a functioning public-health system depends on people believing that the process producing those recommendations is rooted in evidence rather than whichever political winds happen to be blowing through Washington that morning. Trust is extraordinarily difficult to build and remarkably easy to burn.
Access is becoming another problem entirely. A new KFF analysis examining hospitals that provide inpatient maternity care to Medicaid patients found that the typical rural hospital offering those services sits about 43 minutes from the next in-state hospital providing maternity care. In urban communities, the median distance is only 13 minutes. For one in four rural hospitals, the next maternity hospital is at least an hour away.
That matters because rural obstetric care has already been disappearing. Between 2010 and 2022, 238 rural hospitals closed their obstetric units while only 26 opened them, and almost half of rural counties had no hospital providing obstetric services by 2023. Researchers and rural-health advocates are now concerned that changes to Medicaid financing and already-thin hospital margins could push additional maternity units or entire hospitals over the edge.
We have talked about this before because I live in rural America, and this is what gets lost when healthcare becomes a statistic on a congressional spreadsheet. A maternity ward isn’t simply a department inside a building. It’s the difference between driving fifteen minutes while having contractions and driving an hour through mountain roads while praying your baby respects the speed limit. We discuss America’s maternal-health crisis endlessly, but safe childbirth requires considerably more than talented doctors and nurses. It requires there to actually be a hospital when someone needs one.
The climate news today follows almost exactly the same pattern. The warnings could hardly be clearer. The World Meteorological Organization announced Thursday that El Niño is now firmly established and expected to strengthen into a very strong event over the coming months. Its forecasting centers put the likelihood that El Niño persists through February 2027 at nearly 100 percent, with the organization warning of significant disruptions to rainfall and temperature patterns and increased risks of flooding, drought, and extreme heat around the world.
That announcement arrived one day after the United Nations Environment Program released a report acknowledging something scientists and policymakers have spent decades desperately trying to prevent: exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming is now widely considered unavoidable under current trajectories.
The best remaining scenario examined by UNEP has warming peaking around 1.8 degrees before eventually declining, which means the conversation has shifted from preventing an overshoot altogether to determining how high temperatures climb, how long they remain there, and whether humanity acts quickly enough to bring them back down.
That isn’t permission to give up, quite the opposite. Every fraction of a degree still matters, because every fraction changes how many people are displaced, how much coastline disappears, how intense the heat becomes, how much food production is disrupted, and how many ecosystems are pushed beyond their ability to recover. In Palau this week, Pacific leaders are trying to explain what those fractions of a degree actually look like when translated into human lives. Residents of the low-lying community of Melekeok are already trying to move inland as the ocean increasingly floods homes, but adaptation funding has arrived too slowly to relocate the entire community.
One resident summed up the problem in seven words: “We cannot move faster than climate change.”
I keep thinking about that sentence. I think about the trail I wanted to show my children because it existed so clearly in my memory that I never really considered a version of the world where it wouldn’t be waiting for us. I think about Ember growing up believing KPop Demon Hunters represents the absolute height of musical achievement, about my oldest walking through the woods beside his father, about Ezra someday becoming big enough to walk those trails himself instead of riding on my back. Places become part of families too.
And while the World Meteorological Organization is warning governments to prepare for an exceptional El Niño and the United Nations is telling us that we’re entering an era of climate overshoot, the Trump administration is simultaneously moving to narrow one of the mechanisms states and tribes use to scrutinize large energy projects that could affect their water. Inside Climate News reports that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with revisions to Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which allows states and authorized tribes to grant, deny, or condition water-quality certifications for federally permitted projects that could discharge into protected waters. That authority has played a role in decisions involving pipelines, export terminals, dams, and other large infrastructure projects.
The administration argues that states have sometimes stretched that authority beyond what Congress intended and says the new rules would prevent water-quality certification from becoming a tool for pursuing environmental objectives unrelated to water pollution. States, tribes, and environmental organizations see something considerably different. Critics argue the proposal would narrow reviews so sharply that regulators could be prevented from considering some of the broader and interconnected water-quality effects created by large projects, while also reducing the ability of tribes without their own full water-quality regulatory programs to participate. There is certainly a legitimate argument to be had about the boundaries of state and federal regulatory authority, but the timing captures something larger about this political moment.
The alarms are ringing. Doctors are building alternative systems for communicating medical guidance because they no longer trust the federal process to remain stable. Rural maternity units are disappearing while pregnant women are being asked to travel farther for care. The world’s meteorological agency is warning about an exceptional El Niño. The United Nations is acknowledging that humanity is about to cross a climate threshold it spent decades promising not to cross. Pacific communities are literally trying to move away from the sea.
And our response is to debate whether perhaps we have been excessively cautious about pipelines near water. Last night, my baby noticed that I was putting nutrition shakes into a container, so he picked them up and helped me. He doesn’t understand organization. He doesn’t understand grocery bills or insurance premiums or federal regulation or atmospheric carbon concentrations. He simply saw someone he loves trying to take care of something, so he reached down, picked up what he could carry, and joined in.
There is something almost embarrassingly simple about that. You see something that needs tending, and you tend to it. You see something that needs protecting, and you protect it. You see someone trying to carry something heavy, and you pick up whatever portion you can manage.
At home, we build the deck because a two-and-a-half-foot drop outside the door is dangerous even if Wile E. Coyote would have found it entertaining. We maintain the house because the roof matters before it rains. We take our children to doctors because prevention matters before they’re sick. We protect forests because a burned trail can’t simply be reconstructed from memory.
Guardrails are rarely glamorous, their entire purpose is to be there before the moment you discover why they were necessary. Perhaps that’s what bothers me most about the news right now. We’re being told, repeatedly and from nearly every direction, exactly where the edges are. And instead of moving the children back from the ledge, this administration keeps taking down the railing.
Just the right balance of facts and analysis. So skilful a narrative that points out out what matters and how we can use our attention to confront scenarios for the future that need attention right NOW. Respect and responsibility have to start right now to enable the future to be good enough to survive. And if we make the best choices we can make a future where we will not mourn the good old days but thrive in the good new days. Attention must be paid. Actions speak loudest. Do what matters most….most of the time for more of us.