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When Peggy Frank returned to her mail route following three months of medical leave, Los Angeles was in the middle of a scorching heat wave. The 63-year-old letter carrier had slipped on a patch of wet leaves and broken her ankle in March, and she spent the spring at home in a walking boot. Although the injury still bothered her, Frank had been cleared to go back to work. She was just two years away from retirement when she climbed back into her U.S. Postal Service truck on July 6, 2018.The temperature had topped out in the high 80s in the first days of the month, but then it shot up dramatically after the July 4 holiday, putting Southern California under an extreme heat advisory. On July 5, the highs surpassed 100 degrees. (Jamieson, 7/15)

There’s a fire up north, the woman says, the Kincade Fire. It flickered into existence on the nighttime horizon, a shapeless brightness billowing into the sky. Now the wind’s whipping it south toward Santa Rosa. Evacuations are under way, and she worries her home will burn. Allison Chapman listens in silence. She’s modeling for a makeup demo when the woman walks into the studio, where Allison studied after moving south a couple of years ago, at 18. She knows this woman from back home in Northern California, knows how close this woman lives to her grandparents, knows that if the fire is threatening this woman’s home, it’s threatening theirs, too. She feels the panic coming on.It begins, usually, with a quickening of the heart and a tightening of the chest. Then comes a rush of cold, which is ironic, in a way, because her fear is fire. Her mind jumps backwards first—to the flames tearing across the mountainside on a late-summer evening in 2015, to the dark smoke rising from the woods around her house, to the toy wagon wheels discovered weeks later amid the wreckage—then springs forward and explodes like a shotgun shell into a million imagined tragedies. She shivers. (Stern, 7/20)

In Mid-City, a refrigerator stands on the sidewalk outside Little Amsterdam coffee shop. This is no ordinary sidewalk fridge — dank and empty, waiting to be picked up by sanitation services — but a community fridge: cold, clean and well-stocked with food. Behind its frosty glass door is a wheel of Cacique queso fresco, a carton of eggs, squash, kale, Lunchables and half a gallon of milk. On its side, there’s a mural of a young man eating an apple, the words “Eat to Live” etched into his curly cropped hair. (James, 7/14)

One Tuesday this past May, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announced she was spending the night at the hospital. The announcement sent the usual shivers down the spines of liberals across America, who, given Ginsburg’s advanced age and serial bouts with cancer, are stricken with fear each time word comes that she is facing yet another health scare while Republicans are in a position to name or control the Senate‘s approval of her successor. (Gerstein, 7/19)

Longer Looks at families and parenting —

The Black Lives Matter movement has changed the country and shifted conversations about police, social justice and structural racism. Nowhere is the impact as great as it is for Black families, especially those with children. NPR spoke with five couples about how their family conversations have changed and how they try to support and inform their children in the face of police violence and racism. The parents spoke about how painful it is to have these issues rupture the innocence of childhood, and the importance of having these discussion proactively. They say they try to model a measured optimism about the future, teaching their kids "to stand up and speak out", as one mother, Dr. Rhea Roper Nedd puts it. (Neighmond, 7/19)

It’s easy to get the impression that the majority of Americans are spending their days at home, isolated with their nuclear family. The idea of the family as the main source of care and refuge has dominated both media coverage and public-health messaging since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.If doctors, politicians, and reporters think of the family as the default source of care in our lives, that’s likely because Americans have idealized the two-parents-plus-kids household since the mid-20th century. But this fixation on the nuclear family overlooks the diversity of U.S. living arrangements, as David Brooks pointed out in a recent cover story for The Atlantic. In fact, as of 2017, only 20 percent of American households were composed of two parents with children. The rest were single parents living with their children (7 percent), childless cohabiting couples (25 percent), adult roommates (20 percent), and people who live alone (28 percent). (Len Catron, 7/18)

Talking with young children about their bodies and sexuality paves the way for open communication as they get older, said Tanya Coakley, Ph.D., a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who has studied how parents communicate with their children about sex, with a focus on African-American fathers and sons. (Marder, 7/16)

It didn’t take long. We are only just now approaching the end of the beginning of the pandemic, and already the futurists are confidently sketching out the “new normal”—a world in which every sector of life, from workplaces to the way we shake hands, will be transformed. One of these sectors is higher education. As colleges and universities debate how, or whether, to hold classes in the fall, prophecies about their longer-term future are sprouting like mushrooms after a good rain. We’re told that the schools that have been focused on harvesting tuition dollars from the wealthy will collapse in the recession, or that, on the contrary, schools will use the opportunities of viral disruption to become more learning-centered and sophisticated about online offerings. Business school professors and technologists declare that college as we know it is over. (Roth, 7/18)

Before it reopens next month, Colby College will require all students coming to its campus in Maine to be tested for the novel coronavirus. But that’s just the beginning of its pandemic safety plan. The private liberal arts school will require everyone on campus, from nearly 2,000 students to the college president, to swab their lower nasal cavities three times a week at the start of the semester. Then they’ll do it twice weekly until the term ends. A laboratory in Massachusetts will deliver results within 24 hours to the school in the riverfront town of Waterville. (Anderson, 7/20)

Longer Looks at COVID-19 —

"We tried our best to be polite about it. I’d frame it to customers like they were doing us this big favor: 'Would you please consider wearing a mask?' 'May we offer you a free mask?' 'We sure do appreciate your cooperation.' ... We found out how much they cared. It became clear real quick." (Saslow, 7/18)

When Google and Apple announced plans in April for free software to help alert people of their possible exposure to the coronavirus, the companies promoted it as “privacy preserving” and said it would not track users’ locations. Encouraged by those guarantees, Germany, Switzerland and other countries used the code to develop national virus alert apps that have been downloaded more than 20 million times. But for the apps to work on smartphones with Google’s Android operating system — the most popular in the world — users must first turn on the device location setting, which enables GPS and may allow Google to determine their locations. (Singer, 7/20)

They were the most depressing headlines I’d read all year. And that’s saying a lot. "Immunity to COVID-19 Could Be Lost in Months,” The Guardian declared last week, drawing on a new study from the United Kingdom. Forbes grimly accelerated the timeline: “Study: Immunity to Coronavirus May Fade Away Within Weeks.” And the San Francisco Chronicle took things to a truly dark place: “With Coronavirus Antibodies Fading Fast, Vaccine Hopes Fade, Too.” Terrified, I read the study that launched a thousand headlines—and did not come away much less terrified. Researchers at King’s College London had tested more than 90 people with COVID-19 repeatedly from March to June. Several weeks after infection, their blood was swimming with antibodies, which are virus-fighting proteins. But two months later, many of these antibodies had disappeared. (Thompson, 7/20)

Breathe. We do it roughly 25,000 times a day, but until recently few of us gave much thought to this automatic bodily function. “If there’s some good to come out of Covid, it’s that people are paying more attention to how they’re breathing,” said James Nestor, author of “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art,” which explores how we breathe, how that’s changed and how to do it properly. “You can’t be truly healthy unless you’re breathing correctly.” How we breathe affects us at a cellular level. Research shows changing the way we breathe can influence weight, athletic performance, allergies, asthma, snoring, mood, stress, focus and so much more. You can learn to breathe better and these exercises can help. (DiNardo, 7/18)