Your SF Bay Area friends are not OK. We are baking inside our homes. But we can’t open the windows not only because of the heat wave, but because the air quality is in the red zone. A Tweet from Melissa Hung @melissahungtx Writer & Journalist. Words in NPR, Vogue, Longreads on culture & immigrant communities. Writing about chronic pain @catapultstory. Founding editor @hyphenmag. San Francisco, CA melissahung.xyz

The things to me that makes 2020 different than other moments of national and global crisis are: 1) the scale of the threats 2) the absolute ability we have to mitigate those threats 3) our inability to actually do so for political or societal reasons the climate crisis in particular operates on a scale that is apocalyptic, and yet we mostly understand it, we already have the technologies to mitigate its impact, and we just aren’t doing it, covid, nasty as it is, is much less in scale, but again we understand how viruses work and how it spread and we just aren’t doing the things we need to do. There have been so many moments of intense crisis throughout human history, but I can think of nothing compared to a world on fire and oceans rising, happening with the full knowledge and understanding of humanity, and yet no action. A series of Tweets from David M. Perry @Lollardfish Journalist and historian. Pub musician. Dad. Husband. I also do dishes. #TheBrightAges http://patreon.com/lollardfish. https://paypal.me/lollardfish.Twin Cities davidmperry.com

Yesterday, it was somewhere around one hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside and we spent the day inside – no air-conditioning of course, this is coastal Northern California, for crying out loud – waiting for it to cool off outside as the inside temperature slowly climbs. At ninety one inside, it is still warmer outside but feels more comfortable. Only slightly, still, the air is clear and we go outside seeking the fresh air. Sitting In the late afternoon shade, it feels great after waiting most of the day in a stuffy house.

This has been a year of waiting, mostly inside. Waiting for the plague to run its course and waiting for the smoke to go away. Waiting for widespread testing, waiting for a vaccine. Waiting through a chilly early summer for it to get warmer and now waiting for it to get cooler. Waiting for summer and, now, waiting for summer to end. Waiting for Biden to pick a running mate and waiting for the ballots to arrive so we can vote and then wait for the results.

In the background, always in the background – and that’s the problem with watching the world while quarantined, everything seems to be in the background – the headlines announce some daily carnage; protests in Oregon getting violent, a colossal explosion in Beirut destroying much of the waterfront, two hurricanes hitting the gulf coast, fires in California, fires in Siberia and the Amazon, and on and on. All the time, every day, the plague invisibly getting worse, people we don’t know dying. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the death count is raising – today it totaled 136 deaths in San Mateo County, 13,764 in California, 189K in the United States, and is approaching 900K in the world – as we sit trapped inside and waiting, feeling fortunate we have an inside in which to sit.