Sunday, September 06, 2026
Opinion | Summer Has Gotten Much Hotter. See How Bad It Is Where You Live.
Opinion | Summer Has Gotten Much Hotter. See How Bad It Is Where You Live.
“Summer 2026 may be the hottest and most humid since 1895, with heat and smoke spreading beyond the Sun Belt. Trump’s policies hinder adaptation, while Biden’s investments shifted clean energy; Congress should update permitting and states should adapt.
Opinion
The Editorial Board
It’s Not Just You.
America Has Gotten Much Hotter.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Summer has long been known for its spirit of adventure and reprieve, found in fire hydrants and backyard sprinklers, campsites and lemonade stands. It was the time of year when the outdoors could be most fearlessly embraced.
Now summer has a new set of fixtures: face masks, air purifiers and public health alerts. Children stay home from camp on smoke days, a gleeless version of winter’s snow days. People who work outside have turned to salt packets and cooling vests. The notion of enduring the summer rather than embracing it has spread far beyond the Sun Belt.
As Americans mourn this change, we hope it will motivate them to take action. The country needs to act both to better live with the new reality of summer and to prevent it from worsening. To do so requires escaping the binary of doom and apathy that too often defines climate conversations.
Heat is the most widespread change. Summer 2026 is on track to be both the hottest and most humid in the contiguous United States since records began in 1895. Even as the end of summer approaches, much of the country is experiencing waves of heat and humidity. Over the past two weeks, temperatures have climbed 15 to 20 degrees above historical averages in parts of California, the Midwest and the South, leading to school closures and early dismissals.
In many parts of the country, extreme heat affects much more of the year than it once did. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fulton County, Ga., which includes Atlanta, spent about 47 days a year with a heat index (a measure that combines temperature and humidity to estimate how hot it feels) exceeding 90 degrees. In recent years, Fulton County’s residents have typically endured 79 such days, an increase of a month.
Even historically temperate regions have become much hotter. St. Mary’s County, on the coast of Maryland, once spent less than two weeks a year in heat over 90 degrees. Now it experiences nearly five weeks. In Napa County, Calif., the number of days over 90 degrees has doubled, reshaping the region’s wine industry.
Heat in almost all other counties, especially in the southern and midwestern United States, has also increased:
The South and the Midwest are much hotter now
Note: Heat index is a measure that combines temperature and humidity to estimate how hot it feels.
Millions of people spend weeks of the summer largely indoors, venturing outside only to shuttle between air-conditioned cars and buildings. The change has had a dispiriting effect on children, for whom about a week’s worth of youth sports practices are now canceled every year from heat, smoke or flooding, according to the Aspen Institute. Of course, being stuck inside an air-conditioned home is a relatively fortunate situation. For people without air-conditioning, the season has become agonizing. For those who work or live outdoors, it can be deadly.
The confluence of weather crises is another alarming development. One condition can worsen another: Heat and drought increase the risk of wildfire. Wildfire razes vegetation and makes soil less absorbent, which in turn worsens flooding. The human body also suffers from overlapping weather events. A heat wave causes people to breathe faster, which can lead them to ingest more pollutants when the air is smoky.
In the Northeast in July, a spate of modern plagues seemed to arrive together: intense heat, wildfire smoke and thunderstorms. Or consider Washington State, where in August a wildfire leaped over a lake two miles wide because of extreme heat, drought and high winds. The coming year may be even more tumultuous, thanks to an intense El Niño system building in the Pacific Ocean.
Wildfires are polluting the West’s air
Note: Shows the number of days with wildfire-related pollution at “unhealthy” levels through Aug. 26, 2026. Source: Analysis based on work by Marshall Burke, Marissa Childs and Tina Bardot.
These miseries are the result of the rate at which humans have continued to burn fossil fuels in recent decades, priming the atmosphere for extreme weather. Yet just as the consequences arrive in force, our leaders are talking about them far less.
President Trump asks the nation to ignore the weather around us and treats climate change as a hoax. He has paid companies to cancel clean energy projects while forcing aging coal plants to stay open, including units in Indiana and Colorado whose executives requested permission to shut them down.
The administration has also made it harder for citizens to adapt. Shortly after Mr. Trump took office in January 2025, his administration stopped collecting data that helped the government prepare for natural disasters. It withheld funds to renovate hurricane-prone homes in North Carolina and cooling centers in Florida. Mr. Trump is hastening a future with hotter, smokier and stormier summers, and leaving citizens with fewer defenses.
Democrats have rightly decried these policies while making the politically reasonable decision not to put climate change at the center of their midterm campaigns. Polls make clear that most voters are more concerned about the cost of living than the weather. Many people worry that a politician who focuses on the environment will not focus on lowering their energy bills. Nonetheless, Democrats — and Republicans looking for a productive post-Trump agenda — should be working behind the scenes to design the climate policies that the nation needs. Every 2028 presidential candidate should have a clean energy plan, not least because it is a matter of global influence: China has outpaced the United States in clean energy technology, giving it a strategic advantage.
Large investments in clean energy under President Joe Biden accelerated the shift toward solar and wind power, and future administrations will not need to focus as much on deploying those technologies. They can instead prioritize research and development of other technologies, including geothermal, hydroelectricity, nuclear power and batteries. These options have the advantage of offering more consistent energy than solar and wind, helping industries to adopt them.
More immediately, Congress can make it easier to build clean energy capacity. Lawmakers should update America’s onerous permitting system, which has prevented the country from sufficiently upgrading its electric grid. The House has passed a bipartisan bill that represents a good start, but the effort has been stuck in the Senate. The Senate should act.
Even without federal support, state and local officials have important roles. They should focus on helping communities adapt to climate hazards. Iowa’s flood alert system offers a model. States should do more to create early warning systems, prevent wildfires, help farmers adapt to new conditions and protect vulnerable people from extreme heat.
In July and August it can feel too hot to think, too hot to move, too hot to act. Now that the heat is starting to break, Americans should remember that progress is still possible, and that future summers will be more scorching if we do not act.
Methodology and sources
The heat index was calculated hourly from 1986 to 2025 from NASA’s NLDAS-2 data on a roughly 14-kilometer grid. Each 2020 Census block group was matched to the nearest cell by center of population, and daily peaks were averaged by population. Alaska, Hawaii and 44 counties where two other data sets both diverged sharply from NASA’s are excluded. Connecticut is reported by its former counties.
Data for some narrow seaside counties, like Barnstable County, Mass., is influenced by the surrounding water temperature.
Graphics by Gus Wezerek.“
Saturday, September 05, 2026
Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists
Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists
“Dan Bongino and federal officials launched an expansive investigation targeting at least eight scientists, including Anthony Fauci and David Morens, over alleged lab-leak cover-ups. Morens pleaded guilty to concealing records and receiving gratuities; Fauci received a pardon.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced public scrutiny from congressional Republicans, the D.O.J. has pursued a quieter and more expansive effort against a wider circle of researchers.
In early 2025, Dan Bongino, the fiery No. 2 official at the F.B.I., summoned dozens of agents to the bureau’s Washington headquarters.
Mr. Bongino, a conservative media personality recently elevated to the deputy’s role, demanded to know why a yearslong inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic had stalled — and why investigators had not more forcefully scrutinized the role of government scientists, current and former officials said.
At one point, he squared off against an official who questioned the theory that he and many supporters of President Trump had long promoted: that the virus had not merely leaked from a Chinese lab, but that American researchers, among them Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, had orchestrated a conspiracy to cover up that fact.
The meeting became so heated that Mr. Bongino ultimately asked the official to leave the room, an attendee said.
Mr. Bongino, who stepped down from the F.B.I. in January to return to podcasting, and other officials helped set in motion a sprawling and aggressive investigative effort that has outlasted his tenure, The New York Times has learned.
As part of that effort, F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors have sought evidence related to at least eight scientists, among them a Nobel laureate and influential former government researchers like Dr. Fauci.
Investigators have demanded phone, email, grant and payment records, as well as grand jury testimony by scientists.
This account of the investigations is drawn from interviews with six current and former officials familiar with them, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly, as well as documents reviewed by The Times.
It is not clear what evidence those inquiries have produced or what their status is. Dr. Fauci, once the government’s chief infectious disease scientist, received a pre-emptive pardon last year from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that protects him from federal prosecution for official actions from 2014 to 2025.
The inquiries were underway well before Republican lawmakers last month asked the Department of Justice to investigate Dr. Fauci’s refusal to answer questions before a Senate panel. They have continued playing out behind the scenes as those lawmakers released documents that have bruised Dr. Fauci’s reputation.
Many scientists see the federal government’s investigative effort as an attempt to punish political enemies and deflect blame from the first Trump administration for the catastrophic effects of the pandemic.
While the origins of the coronavirus have not definitively been established, these researchers point to the fact that the inquiries have failed to produce any clear evidence that Dr. Fauci or other American scientists covered up knowledge of a lab leak, or funded or collaborated on research that led to one.
Mr. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, accuse those scientists of helping to start the pandemic and aggravating its harms, and believe the inquiries represent overdue accountability.
The F.B.I.’s efforts during the Biden administration focused mainly on whether Covid emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, though federal investigators also began examining some individual scientists.
Under Mr. Trump, the investigation has expanded as federal agents and prosecutors sought evidence against new targets and intensified their scrutiny of scientists.
Last month, Dr. David Morens, a former adviser to Dr. Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal federal records by steering government emails into a personal account. In those emails, Dr. Morens discussed efforts to defend researchers who were under suspicion for collaborating with the Wuhan lab.
Dr. Morens wrote that he was trying to protect researchers from what he described as baseless “political charges” of a lab leak.
A subpoena for documents in that case, dated September 2025 and reviewed by The Times, showed that federal prosecutors in Maryland sought evidence about Dr. Fauci, too, including any emails he sent to certain researchers from his personal account or payments he received for intervening on behalf of federal grantees.
Prosecutors in Maryland also recently demanded the testimony before a federal grand jury of a former staff member at EcoHealth Alliance, a defunct nonprofit that the Trump White House has said used N.I.H. funding to facilitate “dangerous” research at the Wuhan lab where the administration believes the pandemic started.
EcoHealth executives have denied those claims. The N.I.H. has said that viruses being studied there with American funding bore no resemblance to the one that set off the pandemic.
In a separate line of inquiry, agents in the F.B.I.’s Cleveland office have recently examined whether Dr. Fauci and other government scientists pressured virologists in early 2020 to downplay the possibility that the pandemic originated in a lab. Mr. Bongino last year singled out one of those agents as a key player in an expanded investigation.
The F.B.I. and Department of Justice declined to comment for this article. Mr. Bongino conceded on his podcast last month that “there are a lot of complications with any case that may develop against Anthony Fauci because of the pardon,” even as he credited “the cleanup operation we instituted when we went over there” for Dr. Morens’s indictment.
On his podcast in 2024, Mr. Bongino said that government scientists had dismissed the lab leak theory because they wanted to undermine Mr. Trump.
“They knew that would be a destructive narrative for them because Donald Trump had been talking about the danger of China the entire time,” Mr. Bongino said. “So they hid the lab leak.”
A Theory About a Cover-Up
Shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, his administration pulled down a website meant to help Americans find Covid vaccines and treatments and, in its place, posted a full-length image of Mr. Trump atop a new page that described why true blame for the pandemic rested with scientists.
“LAB LEAK,” the page declared — a leak that it suggested Dr. Fauci, Dr. Morens and EcoHealth scientists had helped to conceal.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr. Fauci ran for nearly 40 years, financed collaborations between EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that studied coronaviruses in the city where the Covid outbreak began.
Some researchers favor the idea of a lab leak, whether or not American funding was involved, citing assertions by intelligence officials that the lab probably failed to use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time.
Most scientists favor a so-called natural origin theory, pointing to new datapublished in recent years supporting the idea that the virus spilled from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, a tried-and-true route for emerging deadly viruses, including past outbreaks in China.
American intelligence officials have said there was no indication that the Wuhan lab had been in possession of the pandemic coronavirus “or a close progenitor” before the Covid outbreak.
In Congress, Republican lawmakers began gathering evidence against scientists as the 2024 election approached.
“You make a pyramid,” said Mitchell Benzine, the staff director of the Republican-run Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic from 2023 to 2025, describing the panel’s strategy. “You talk to and get documents from the bottom of the pyramid, and you work your way up.”
If Dr. Fauci was at the top of the pyramid, Dr. Morens, his former adviser, was nearer its base. The subcommittee discovered a trove of brash emails from 2020 and 2021 in which Dr. Morens described plans to evade federal records laws, including by learning how to “make emails disappear.”
Dr. Morens wrote about trying to quietly involve Dr. Fauci in efforts to defend against what he described as threats to “scientific independence” and to EcoHealth, whose N.I.H. grant was canceled under orders from the first Trump administration in 2020.
Dr. Morens said in the emails that he wanted to protect scientists from attacks he suggested were analogous to the “Salem Witch Trials.”
It is not clear precisely when federal prosecutors in Maryland began investigating those emails, but documents reviewed by The Times indicate it was toward the end of Mr. Biden’s presidency.
By last fall, federal prosecutors were also examining Dr. Fauci and a half dozen other scientists, including Richard J. Roberts, a Nobel laureate in medicine, who had organized a letter denouncing the cancellation of EcoHealth’s grant, according to a September 2025 subpoena to EcoHealth.
The subpoena asked for evidence that Dr. Fauci had drafted or edited documents for EcoHealth, including records related to the Wuhan lab; correspondence from Dr. Fauci’s personal email address to EcoHealth; and evidence that the group had compensated Dr. Fauci with “currency, gift baskets, wine, meals, travel” or other items.
In addition to violations of federal records laws, Dr. Morens pleaded guilty last month to receiving illegal gratuities in the form of two bottles of The Prisoner Red Blend Napa Valley wine from Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s former president.
Dr. Daszak said the wine had been a joking allusion to calls in 2020 for his and other scientists’ imprisonment. (Dr. Daszak and EcoHealth were later barredfrom federal contracts under Mr. Biden over allegations that they failed to properly monitor work at the Wuhan lab, which Dr. Daszak and the nonprofit denied.)
Government oversight experts criticized Dr. Morens’s efforts to hide critical correspondence about the pandemic, while noting that Trump administration officials have themselves been said to conduct government business on private email accounts or an encrypted messaging app.
“It seems like retaliation,” Dr. Daszak said of the case, in which he appears as an unnamed co-conspirator. “The right learned pretty early on in Covid that public health is a threat to power.”
Timothy Belevetz, Dr. Morens’s lawyer, said that Dr. Morens “has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.”
Dr. Fauci has said he “knew nothing” about Dr. Morens’s actions. His lawyers have created a defense fund to respond to what they described as a “legal barrage” that followed his refusal to answer questions from a Senate panel in July, including the announcement of state investigations. The panel voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.
“Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong, and there is no basis for any investigations, whether by Congress, the Department of Justice, or state attorneys general,” David Schertler, his lawyer, said.
“The only thing that will come from these completely unjustified efforts to besmirch Dr. Fauci’s reputation and his lifelong commitment to public health is wasted time and resources that would be better used on real issues.”
The F.B.I., which has for years asserted that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, has also more recently examined whether Dr. Fauci pushed a group of scientists in early 2020 to downplay early suspicions that the coronavirus may not have evolved naturally.
Republicans have long suggested that Dr. Fauci pressured those scientists into changing their view as they prepared an article about the pandemic’s origin, perhaps by plying one of them with a federal grant.
Dr. Fauci and the scientists deny those claims. The grant in question was reviewed and approved for funding before Dr. Fauci discussed the origin with those scientists, he said.
The researchers said their initial suspicions were allayed instead by more extensive analyses of coronaviruses in other species, like bats and pangolins, which showed that unusual-seeming features of the novel virus were in fact present in naturally occurring viruses.
Democratic lawmakers said that the attacks on Dr. Fauci and other scientists echoed past efforts to prosecute political enemies.
“It smacks of McCarthyism because it seeks to demonize individuals for seemingly fictional and illusory reasons,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “The question is whether there’s selective targeting.”
Mr. Bongino has blamed Dr. Fauci and other government scientists not only for financing research that led to the pandemic, but also for using the resulting catastrophe to push social distancing measures and mail-in balloting provisions in 2020.
He has said on his podcast that those measures were introduced for one purpose, referring to an outcome that multiple investigations have established did not happen: “Steal the election. One hundred percent.”
Kirsten Noyes and Georgia Gee contributed research. Adam Goldmancontributed reporting.
Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.“
Friday, September 04, 2026
What Gloria Steinem Can Teach Us
What Gloria Steinem Can Teach Us
“Steinem’s death follows a decade reversing gains, yet her emphasis on real-world networks remains vital. She championed organizing beyond screens, urging a national honeycomb of groups as an antidote to algorithmic isolation.
What a wretched time for Gloria Steinem to die.
Had Steinem, an icon of second-wave feminism, left us a decade ago, the arc of her life would have seemed one of unequivocal triumph. Steinem began her career at a time when abortion was illegal and male domination largely unquestioned. Moving to New York in 1960, she had a hard time finding an apartment on her own: “Landlords felt single women were not financially responsible, and if you could earn enough, you must be a hooker,” she once said. In 1969, the year she wrote her first piece about women’s liberation, there was one woman in the Senate, a widow who’d succeeded her husband. Until 1971, the year Steinem helped launch Ms. Magazine, women still weren’t allowed to join the National Press Club.
By September 2016, the world Steinem helped so many women imagine seemed closer than ever. Steinem’s friend Hillary Clinton was widely expected to become the next president. Feminist journalism was flourishing in unexpected places, including Teen Vogue. “There is a changed consciousness now,” she said in a speech in 2016.
But Steinem has died at the end of a decade that undid some of what she struggled for. We are ruled by a thuggish cabal of cartoon misogynists. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited a pastor who wants to repeal women’s suffrage to give a sermon at the Pentagon. The right to abortion has been lost, and there’s a growing call among anti-abortion activists to imprison women who terminate their pregnancies. Some big companies, including Zoom and Deloitte, are rolling back parental leave. Alex Karp, head of the tech surveillance behemoth Palantir, openly fantasizes that A.I. will eliminate jobs done largely by educated women and thus reduce their power in society.
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At such a dark moment for gender equality, there’s something particularly bittersweet about the outpouring of encomiums to Steinem that have followed her death. We have no way of knowing if we’re living through a momentary backlash to the causes she championed or a new age of barbarism that will stamp out even more of the freedoms she helped win. But the bleakness of our time makes her example more important than ever. She didn’t vanquish crude sexism, but she was part of a movement that made it marginal, at least for a while. If it was done before, it can be done again.
Steinem’s emphasis on women building flesh-and-blood networks seems particularly significant right now. She once wrote that consciousness-raising groups, where women gathered weekly to talk about their lives, “gave feminism its heart, depth and most lasting legacies.” Even as consciousness-raising fell out of fashion, Steinem continued to believe that there was no substitute for organizing in the real world. In that 2016 speech, she said, “Something happens when we are together in a room like this with all five senses, that cannot happen on the printed page — as much as I love books — that cannot happen on a screen.” Often she turned her Upper East Side apartment into a feminist salon.
In the 1960s and 1970s, of course, women had to meet in the real world if they were going to meet at all. But I don’t think we can separate the vicious anti-feminist reaction we’re enduring from the fact that so much of our public life is mediated by toxic, isolating algorithms. Steinem, who started her career as a journalist, helped show women how to breach a hostile media. Her descendants have what is in some ways an even greater challenge, which is how to operate within a hostile media delivery system.
I recently read Jon Ronson’s new book, “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men.” It’s about why so many men seem unmoored, and often the internet is a big part of the answer. Ronson describes an online course for aspiring YouTubers that teaches, “Opposition and conflict are what bring people together. They cause your community to link arms and identify with you.” The instructor told Ronson, “The unfortunate thing is it only works if it continues to push the boundaries, increasing the vilification of the nonbeliever.”
This dynamic has proved deeply destructive to feminism. Social media’s rage-based economy led contemporary feminism to rip itself apart internally with ever-escalating purity tests. At the same time, it fueled the rise of the manosphere, where enterprising creators learned they could make their names both channeling and exacerbating their audience’s resentments. The algorithms built to keep people attached to their devices are inimical to social progress and a terrible substitute for human connection. A workable strategy to escape from the dystopia these algorithms have helped create can be built only outside of them.
This is something that the Democratic Socialists of America seems to grasp. The movement has grown powerful not just because of its ideology, but because its constant roster of events — soccer leagues, running clubs, standup comedy nights — offers an antidote to a culture plagued by loneliness and atomization. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign became, for some New Yorkers, a rich social world in addition to a political cause.
Second-wave feminism once had that quality, and Steinem often said she wanted to recapture it. In the afterword to her 1992 book “Revolution From Within,” Steinem dreamed of a “national honeycomb” of small groups, at once personal and political, that would provide the social infrastructure for a revitalized feminism. She saw Alcoholics Anonymous as a model. “If two white male alcoholics could start a national network of meetings that are free, leaderless and accessible,” she wrote, “so can we.”
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.“
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