Heat has bigger effects on us than we may realize.
A few weeks ago, the world recorded the hottest day ever, breaking a record set just the day before. The milestone for hottest single temperature on the planet may fall any day now as Death Valley approaches 130 degrees Fahrenheit. And last month was the hottest June ever measured across the world.
It’s the hottest summer of our lives, and summertime isn’t even halfway over.
These are the effects at about 1 degree Celsius of warming — just an early warning sign of a world that, on its current trajectory, is poised to warm three or more times that amount.
Heat is a particular kind of killer. In the United States, it leads to more deaths than hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and earthquakes — combined. But heat is also called the silent killer because we simply don’t know all of its effects on our bodies. In fact, we only have data on a slice of the deadly consequences. Heat also puts an unequal burden on more vulnerable populations, harming older and lower-income people, outdoor workers, and prisoners while other parts of society try to look away from inside air-conditioned homes.
There are just as many non-fatal health consequences in a heat wave. The toll grows the longer a heat wave lingers, which leads to the exact conditions a large part of the world finds itself in this summer.
Even our best metric for understanding all of the consequences of heat is flawed. Most health research on heat focuses on deaths and to a lesser extent hospital admissions. Vivek Shandas, Portland State University professor of climate adaptation, calls the focus on mortality overly “blunt measures” that fail to capture how climate change is harming the world’s mental and physical health. While most of the studies discussed below track heat-related deaths, they are more likely missing a bigger picture: There’s an even broader population suffering from heat, but in ways that don’t lead to hospitalization or death.
What’s the physical toll of extreme heat?
Cardiovascular
The primary performer in helping cool the body down is the heart. It is under special strain when temperatures rise, and the vast number of deaths associated with a heat wave isn’t directly from heatstroke, when the organs can shut down from overheating, but because the heart can’t keep up.
Several systems in the body work overtime to keep internal organs cool as temperatures rise. In hotter temperatures, the heart moves more blood to the skin, so that the heat can dissipate into the environment. The evaporation of sweat is essential to the process. But as the body ages, it becomes less efficient at achieving all this, less able to pump enough blood with every beat, worse at increasing skin blood flow, and less able to sweat to cool down. Not only does the body become less efficient at cooling down, but older adults are also more likely to be taking medications that affect their ability to regulate internal temperatures.
Healthy individuals, young and old, aren’t immune either. The cause can be environmental: The Texas Tribune reported that last month at least five prisoners died of heart attacks during heat waves, in a state where two-thirds of prisons lack air conditioning. Two of the men were only 34 and 35.
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Cardiovascular failure is one reason death counts in a heat wave are highly disputed and chronically undercounted. Health researchers try to make up for the gaps in reporting by looking at excess mortality to nail down more accurate data.
A recent study published in Nature Medicine found that the 2022 summer heat waves led to over 60,000 deaths in Europe, with younger men and older women at higher risk. It almost broke the previous record of as many as 70,000 excess deaths across Europe in the summer of 2003. During a heat dome in the Pacific Northwest two years ago, official estimates registered a few hundred deaths, but ultimately the death toll was likely well over 1,000.
Respiratory
Some of the excess mortality in a heat wave can also be blamed on more air pollution.
Hot, sunny weather enables the chemical reactions that form ground-level ozone. Ozone reacts to lung tissue, causing what the American Lung Association calls a “sunburn on the lungs.”
The summertime rise of ozone is a well-documented and understood phenomenon, but the data on widespread health impacts in a heat wave is usually mixed. In the UK, hospitals have reported a spike in respiratory admissions in summer heat waves, and a report looking at hospitals in Finland found that heat waves between 2001 and 2017 were associated with a 20 percent rise in hospital admissions for respiratory illness like pneumonia.
Air temperature doesn’t just affect what’s in the air, but also how it moves. “Heat domes” have become more common weather patterns, trapping air pollution in stagnant air in the lower atmosphere. An analysis by Climate Central of federal air data back to 1973 found that high summer temperatures closely correlate with more stagnant air. It’s only getting worse. “As the climate warms, stagnant days are projected to increase further, with up to 40 more days per year by late-century,” according to the outlet.
Heat waves make for poor air quality in even more indirect ways. Heat dries up the soil, contributing to drought, and in turn creating the perfect conditions for a wildfire to spark and spread. Wildfires are the main contributor to another dangerous air pollutant, particulate matter, which is tracked by the EPA’s Air Quality Index.
Pregnancy
Extreme heat affects the pregnant person as well as the fetus, and exposure is linked to premature birth and low birthweight. It also strains their cardiovascular system, which is already in overdrive during pregnancy.
Since a pregnant person has a harder time cooling down, it’s more likely for them to experience symptoms like fatigue, muscle cramping, dizziness, and dehydration, which can lead to more life-threatening conditions like heatstroke.
The effects of heat are also unequal across pregnant populations. Black women faced the most risk associated with higher temperatures, being more likely to have a preterm birth when researchers studied 60,000 births in California between 1996 and 2006. The study, and a 2018 follow-up, found about a 9 percent increase in deliveries before 37 weeks for every 10-degree rise in weekly outdoor temperatures, according to BuzzFeed News.
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A wider literature review, published in the journal BMJ in 2020, found that across 24 countries, every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter led to a 5 percent increase in preterm birth and a 5 percent increase in stillbirth. Longer periods of abnormally high heat raised the risk even more.
How does hot weather affect our sleep?
Heat is, somewhat counterintuitively, deadliest overnight.
Our internal body temperature naturally drops at night to help us fall asleep; the body achieves this by moving some of its core heat to the hands and feet. The air temperature affects how well the body manages this process. So not being able to cool down makes the heart work harder all over again, after an entire day of added strain.
In theory, nighttime should be a respite for the body to recover. But climate change is making summer nights warm up even faster than days. “In general, since records began in 1895, summer overnight low temperatures are warming at a rate nearly twice as fast as afternoon high temperatures for the US and the 10 warmest summer minimum temperatures have all occurred since 2002,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The effect is more pronounced in urban heat islands, where concrete, asphalt, and steel radiate heat back, keeping temperatures artificially high overnight.
Our sleep quality is closely associated with temperature, too. You can toss and turn on a hot night as deep sleep suffers. A hotter room is associated with shorter REM sleep, which is tenuously linked to motor skills, memory formation, and regulating emotions.
What’s the emotional and mental toll?
Heat can affect a lot more than physical health. Research shows learning, emotions, stress, and anxiety can all suffer when it’s hot. Exactly what’s driving this, though, is much harder to pin down. With the age-old warning about not confusing correlation with causation in mind, consider some alternative theories: It could be that poor sleep quality is causing a lot of these problems; that there’s some other bodily process scientists don’t fully understand; that the stress of coping with heat and paying high AC bills causes extra anxiety; or that other things about society’s annual rhythms are making these problems more pronounced.
Still, a large body of research shows a correlation between heat and well-being. ER visits and suicide rates go up when temperatures are high, which suggests that there are a lot more people struggling who go unreported. Violent crime also becomes more frequent in hotter months.
Heat also impacts learning. A study that compared test scores of more than 144 million students on a standardized international exam and 270 million exam scores of US students found days above 80 degrees affected academic performance. “Temperature has been shown to affect working memory, stamina and cognitive performance, and to lead individuals to reduce time spent engaging in labour activities,” the researchers wrote. “This suggests that … heat may directly affect students’ capacity to learn or teachers’ ability and willingness to teach.”
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There’s even evidence showing that people’s decision-making at all levels of society may change in heat waves. A 2019 study published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics found that 266 US immigration judges made harsher judgments when temperatures were higher, even if they were issuing them from the comfort of a climate-controlled courtroom. After controlling for other factors, the researchers found “a 10°F degree increase in case-day temperature reduces decisions favorable to the applicant by 6.55 percent.”
Some work has also found that individuals’ perception of risk changes when they are in a hotter environment, especially if they haven’t had the weeks needed to adjust or acclimatize. In other words, when caught off guard by heat, people seem to be more likely to engage in riskier behavior.
The toll that research fails to capture: the “human face of heat”
Heat harms mental, emotional, and physical health, but we have even fewer answers for how much these impacts could be minimized if we only responded differently.
“You see more social scientists working with climate scientists, architects, and designers [on heat research],” said Daniel Vecellio, a climate and health scholar at George Mason University. “There’s behavioral issues, mental health, and medical issues. You need a coupled approach [to address] the very complex questions of human behavior.”
What’s happening inside people’s homes is the biggest mystery of them all. Shandas worked on a study for the city of Portland, Oregon, placing sensors in 53 homes last year, and found that even with the AC running at full blast through the night, temperatures in public housing were not getting below 85 degrees.
“We don’t have temperature measurements of indoor spaces,” Shandas said. “We don’t have the behavioral response. We open cooling centers, we provide water bottles, and we put misters in places. But we really don’t know what humans, specifically who are a bit more sensitive or have difficulty coping, are doing in the heat.”
Officials are flying blind in responding to a heat wave more often than they’d like to admit, even though there might be more effective immediate interventions. People may benefit far more by getting direct assistance so they can pay their energy bills in the summertime.
Even if we learn all the answers to what’s happening to the body in a heat wave, Shandas said we still don’t understand “a lot of the human face of heat,” as in, how people actually cope. What scientists do understand is that this is just the beginning of these consequences playing out on a global scale. It’s only going to get hotter from here.
Brand collabs and Barbenheimer memes catapulted Barbie hype to new heights.
The fact is, it’ll be nearly impossible for Barbie to live up to its hype. Just as perfection only exists as an ideal never quite made flesh, Greta Gerwig’s desperately anticipated film based on the blonde plastic doll will necessarily disappoint some when the fantasy of its stunning promotion gives way to the reality of seeing the actual movie. That’s the double-edged sword of so much frenzied buzz.
A kind of mob hysteria has taken hold of us in the past few months: the people are demanding cinematic Barbie — the version artfully masterminded by an esteemed auteur director, starring two beautiful and seriously regarded actors. But of course, Barbie fever is in many ways manufactured mania, with the backing of a Hollywood blockbuster marketing budget. Barbie’s total marketing spend hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s not uncommon for big studios to fork over $100 million or more on major releases (according to Deadline, global marketing for The Little Mermaid cost around $140 million.) After a few extremely shaky years for moviegoing, studios are ramping up to blowout ad campaigns again.
The biggest stars of Barbie arguably aren’t Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken but the movie’s uncanny marketing team, which has worked overtime to ensure the doll, movie, and brand are inescapable this summer. They’ve acquired an almost mythic stature, spawning memes and parodies of their terrifying prowess. Never mind all the traditional advertising you might see on the street or on TV, as well as the magazine covers, talk show interviews, and Margot Robbie’s to-die-for red carpet outfits that come with a press tour (a tour, however, that has been interrupted by the WGA/SAG-AFTRA double strike). No, this Barbie is all about securing brand deals.
The amount of Barbie film branded merch is pretty mind-numbing. You could build an entire closet out of them: A collection with Gap, Barbie x Bloomingdales, hot pink roller suitcases with luxury luggage brand Beis, a capsule collection with sneaker brand Superga, more makeup and skin care sets than we’re willing to count, accessories with Fossil, even a full-on assortment of clothes and accessories at Hot Topic, which has in recent years become a bastion for feeding fandom obsession and millennial nostalgia. (Also important to note that Trisha Paytas did a haul vid of every Hot Topic x Barbie piece). Furniture brand Joybird has a slate of Barbie Dreamhouse-inspired seating to adorn your home. In Brazil, there’s even a limited-edition Barbie cheeseburger from Burger King that’s dressed with a disturbingly pink sauce.
There were some standout moments, like the blindingly neon Barbie rollerblades from Impala Skate, which went viral after the set photos leaked. An army of rollerbladers wearing those exact skates promoted the movie at New York City Pride this year. Or take the surprise reveal of a Barbie Dreamhouse in Malibu, bookable on Airbnb. There’s a Barbie Xbox that looks like a little dollhouse (though, personally, a Barbie-pink edition of the Nintendo Switch would have been way more enticing). If your brand exists in 2023, chances are you did some kind of Barbie collab: a Bumble event featuring online dating tips from Barbie and Ken; a Progressive Insurance commercial set in the Barbieverse; a redesigned Roku City featuring Barbie’s Dreamhouse and a movie theater marquee advertising the film. A Barbie selfie generator went somewhat viral a few months back. Google any keywords related to the film right now, and watch the search engine’s typically staid colors turn pink, with pink sparkles raining down the screen.
What stands out for brand strategist Moshe Isaacian is how much of the promo around the film has savvily drawn on “what makes Barbie and the movie iconic,” he tells Vox — such as the rollerblades. In a viral Twitter thread listing Barbie’s copious brand tie-ins, Isaacian noted, “The devil works hard, but @Barbie’s marketing team is INSANE.”
But all that hustle seems poised to pay off. National Research Group, which releases box office projections, is now expecting Barbie to make $110 million in its opening weekend. (Meanwhile, rival Oppenheimer’s projections are a more modest $49 million.) To compare that with other blockbuster openers, Top Gun: Maverick banked $124 million in its domestic opening weekend. Over $100 million in the first three days is pretty impressive for a film about a popular child’s toy that’s aimed at adults — though we do live in a world where the Super Mario Bros. movie destroyed box office records. Not unlike Barbie, Super Mario Bros. also snared a lot of brand deals in the lead-up to its release: a mushroom-heavy Shake Shack menu and a line of body care products with Lush Cosmetic, just to name two.
Isaacian says that such quirky, at times outlandish brand tie-ins are a callback to how big and bold movie marketing was in the ’90s — like the now-coveted McDonald’s Szechuan sauce, which was originally released to promote Disney’s Mulan. “What we’re seeing [that’s] different is that with Barbie, it’s not about getting all this movie marketing to sell Barbie toys,” says Isaacian. “It’s to bring what Barbie stands for to our real world.”
“It’s been appealing to the gamers, it’s been appealing for people who like collecting stuff for their home, people who love skating, and shoes,” he continued. That’s a large part of the appeal — the world of Barbie has always been hyper-surreal fantasy. A doll living in a perfect world, who jumps from career to career with no barriers in her way and a million friends by her side. A doll whose feet literally never quite touch the ground. With each new piece of Barbie promo, we’re asked to imagine, what if it were all real and possible? Wouldn’t la vie en rose be so delightful?
Gerwig’s Barbie, with its tongue-in-cheek tone and PG-13 rating, is not for young children. It’s camp that promises to hit hardest for adults of a certain generation — with a cast that includes Helen Mirren, Will Ferrell, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Michael Cera, and Rhea Perlman.
Beyond the tangible Barbie logo stuff stans can buy, much of the promo has targeted a kind of digital culture cachet — catnip for adults who keep tabs on art, design, and whatever the latest vibe shift is. Of course there was an Architectural Digest tour of Barbie’s house. The alleged discovery of Margot Robbie’s secret Letterboxd list of films to watch for Barbie (with the likes of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg appearing on it) set cinephiles trembling. Recently, Gerwig did an actual interview with Letterboxd of her “official Barbie watchlist” (it did in fact include Umbrellas). The very fact that it’s a project helmed by Gerwig — whose past work includes Little Women, Lady Bird, Frances Ha — with a screenplay co-written with Noah Baumbach, was an absurd enough premise to draw an audience in. With their names attached, there’s been a permeating sense that the film is bound to be subversive, boundary-breaking, a technicolor acid trip. Axios reports that almost half a million Barbie pieces have been published in 2023 — reports, essays, takes, odes to all that Barbie means in the culture — like this Artsy deep dive into the film’s “hyperfeminine” kitsch. Tumblr and Instagram accounts dedicated to aesthetic film stills will be eating good off Gerwig’s Barbie for decades.
It’s also coming at more or less the right time, in the post-bimbo wave of pop culture theory, which says that there’s actually no need to choose between hyperfemininity, in whatever forms we typically conceive of it (like, for example, wearing a lot of pink) and being taken seriously as a smart, competent person — that was always an illusory choice anyway. Meanwhile, the platonic ideal of a man is pretty much Ken, a himbo who displays an unpracticed wisdom, and impeccable taste, through his total awe and adoration of the Barbie in his life. You see, he’s the polar opposite of a dude who’ll smugly observe that you’re not like the other girls. A few years earlier, and Gerwig’s Barbie might not have seemed so cool; a few years later, it could have felt extremely stale.
And then there are the memes. Barbie fever isn’t just driven by nostalgia or Gerwig heads or the prospect of a big theater-worthy event to look forward to after the lean pandemic years. Hype itself is the energizing pleasure, a wink and nod that you’re in on the joke. The biggest catalyst, without a doubt, is the fortuitous fact that Christopher Nolan’s gritty biopic Oppenheimer, about the man who created the atomic bomb, is opening on the same day as Barbie. On social media, there’s been joke after joke about the movie’s made-up rivalry. People are arguing about the correct itinerary for what amounts to summiting Mount Everest in terms of moviegoing this summer: the Barbie-Oppenheimer Double Feature. We have to ask ourselves, would Barbie thirst as we know it today exist without Oppenheimer? If the Extremely Online writers and meme purveyors weren’t so tickled by the situational irony of it?
To be clear, the online memes have spilled over into the real world. Barbie’s virality has taken on a life of its own, growing into a self-sustaining creature that no marketing team on Earth could predict or wrangle. I actually don’t know many people are clamoring to buy Barbie merch — but, according to AMC, over 40,000 people have bought tickets to both Barbie and Oppenheimer this weekend (somewhere in the world, Nicole Kidman is beaming with pride). I went to a Barbie-themed birthday party last weekend, the first in my life, adult or child. A few weeks ago at the Soho REI store, among the Camelbaks and carabiners, employees were conducting a poll asking customers whether they were seeing Barbie or Oppenheimer first. (An REI spokesperson confirmed that the company wasn’t a part of either film’s marketing campaigns.)
We’ve talked each other’s ears off about the movie for free — a thing that no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy or well-funded, could buy. The real Barbie (2023) was all the friends we made along the way.
The country’s upcoming elections could see a hard-right party enter national government for the first time in generations.
After its July 23 national elections, Spain could be partially governed by a far-right party for the first time in generations.
It’s a development that would be significant both for Spain — and the rest of Europe. Domestically, it would mean that Vox, the country’s hard-right party, could help influence policy, advancing harsh attacks on LGBTQ people, women, and migrants. Broadly, it would also send a message outside Spanish borders, adding to the victories of the far right in places like Greece, Finland, and Italy in the last year.
Ever since the demise of the ultranationalist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in the 1970s, Spanish voters have been hesitant to give the far right federal power. That this could change in the coming elections signals how much ground the movement has gained in Spain and elsewhere.
According to polls, the July 23 elections are likely to see unpopular center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez voted out and a new conservative coalition government voted in. While the center-right Partido Popular (PP) — home to Spain’s traditional conservatives — is set to win the most legislative seats, it’s not poised to get enough to secure the outright majority needed to form a government. As a result, it will likely need the help of Vox, and the seats that the hard-right party is able to secure, in order to set up a coalition.
That puts Vox in the position of becoming PP’s “junior partner” in government, a role that will give it influence over key leadership positions in the administration and a much bigger platform to tout hard-line immigration policies as well as misogynistic and homophobic views.
“If the party were to enter into government as a junior partner to … PP, I would expect the party to push the government toward the right on a whole host of issues, including social justice, gay rights, and gender parity,” Omar Encarnación, a Bard politics professor who studies Spain, told Vox.
What is Vox (Spain’s version)?
The two largest parties in Spain are PP, which is running Parliament member Alberto Núñez Feijóo for prime minister, and the center-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), which is running Sánchez for reelection.
As Vox’s Jen Kirby has previously explained, discontent with how these two parties handled the 2008 financial crisis and a subsequent austerity program, as well as conservative blowback toward the Basque and Catalonian push for independence, led to the emergence of several smaller political parties, including Unidos Podemos on the left, and Vox on the right.
The Vox party was officially launched in January 2014. Breakaway members of the center-right PP formed the party, disgruntled by what they viewed as the PP’s lackluster economic policies and weak response to separatists in Catalonia and the Basque country.
Vox shares similarities with other far-right movements in Europe, such as the National Front in France or Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. Vox is anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and skeptical of elements of the EU. It is also very conservative on issues like LGBT rights, abortion, and women’s rights.
Vox’s platform is founded heavily on nationalism and a return to “tradition” on social issues: The Spanish nation, to hear the party tell it, should prioritize its residents and practices like bullfighting rather than welcoming migrants, should be skeptical of efforts to advance gender equity, and should be actively opposed to LGBTQ rights, including gay marriage. Key stances Vox has championed include claiming that gender violence doesn’t exist, pushing to reverse a trans rights law that just took effect this year, banning abortion, and closing shelters housing foreign minors.
A campaign poster in Madrid captures the party’s stances: In it, a hand can be seen throwing symbols that represent women’s empowerment and LGBTQ rights into the trash.
Vox despliega una lona en Madrid contra contra el feminismo, independentismo, el lobby LGTBIQ+ y la Agenda 2030. pic.twitter.com/PKNlFQfcQ3
— Wall Street Wolverine (@wallstwolverine) June 18, 2023