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too few Americans think about heat waves, which claim more lives globally than any other weather-related hazard, as a problem for which systematic, long-term preparation is warranted. To protect human life as temperatures soar, we need to conceive of what we might call heat season as a phenomenon distinct from summer—a part of the year that people in much of the country have traditionally viewed with great fondness.

Historically, wildfire season in the United States has begun in May and ended in October; however, wildfires raged well into December last year.

The annual Atlantic hurricane season formally begins June 1 and ends November 30. The emergence of Tropical Storm Ana on May 22 made 2021 the seventh consecutive year that a storm strong enough to be named formed off-season.

The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season officially begins Tuesday, June 1, and the National Hurricane Center has designated 21 storm names for the six-month period ending Nov. 30.

On the bright side, forecast accuracy and advance warnings have continued to improve. Now, some of the most lethal consequences of hurricane season are not the storms but their aftermath. As NPR's Greg Allen reports, since 2017 at least 39 people have died following storms because of carbon monoxide poisoning from improperly used generators.

Last year's record number of storms used up the 21 names that forecasters had chosen, forcing them for only the second time to switch to the Greek alphabet beginning with storm No. 22, named Alpha. The World Meteorological Organization recommended that the practice be stopped, and now the National Hurricane Center will have a different set of extra names on hand.

Scientists have known for years that climate change is disrupting monsoon season. Past research based on computer models has suggested that the global heating caused by greenhouse gases, and the increased moisture in the warmed atmosphere, will result in rainier summer monsoon seasons and unpredictable, extreme rainfall events.

The monsoon season, which generally runs from June to September, brings enormous amounts of rain to South Asia that are crucial to the region’s agrarian economy. Those rains affect the lives of a fifth of the world’s population, nourishing or destroying crops, causing devastating flooding, taking lives and spreading pollution. The changes wrought by climate change could reshape the region, and history, the new research suggests, is a guide to those changes.

The core samples were 200 meters long, and provided a rich record of monsoon rainfall. Wetter seasons put more fresh water into the bay, reducing the salinity at the surface. The plankton that live at the surface die and sink to the sediment below, layer after layer.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping wants to "Make America Rake Again."

It's still not entirely clear how the Trump campaign ended up holding a press conference in Northeast Philadelphia near a sex shop, a crematorium and a jail. The hoopla was kicked off Saturday morning with a Trump tweet about an event at the Philadelphia Four Seasons.

At the press event, Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed without evidence that Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania was due to voter fraud. Four Seasons Total Landscaping declined requests for comment.

If baseball is a metaphor for American life, Opening Day brought a tantalizing springtime hint of better days ahead, despite reflecting a nation divided by the polarized politics of a pandemic and Georgia's battle over Republican voter suppression.

ongoing contact tracing postponed a game in Washington were a reminder of the still potent peril of Covid-19 as the country faces another infection surge.

But the fact that there were fans in the seats at all to watch teams play ball underscored how much of the country is tentatively itching for a return to some semblance of normality after a grim winter of sickness and death and as millions of vaccines go into American arms at an increasing pace.

Although neither RSV nor flu is shaping up to be particularly mild this year, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, both appear to be behaving more within their normal bounds.

But infections are still nowhere near back to their pre-pandemic norm. They never will be again. Adding another disease—COVID—to winter’s repertoire has meant exactly that: adding another disease, and a pretty horrific one at that, to winter’s repertoire.

“The probability that someone gets sick over the course of the winter is now increased,” Rivers told me, “because there is yet another germ to encounter.” The math is simple, even mind-numbingly obvious—a pathogenic n+1 that epidemiologists have seen coming since the pandemic’s earliest days. Now we’re living that reality, and its consequences.

HBO spared no expense for “Game of Thrones,” with episodes typically costing $10 million to make and some hitting the $15 million mark

The 19.3-million figure for Sunday night is likely to grow during the week, as fans who missed the finale catch up. This season, “Game of Thrones” averaged nearly 44.2 million viewers per episode when delayed viewing, video on demand and streaming platforms are factored in.

The audience for Sunday night’s finale is even more impressive given that HBO is in only 35 million of the country’s 120 million television homes.

The effectiveness of coronavirus measures in preventing flu transmission has left doctors in South Africa with a riddle: Why did they stop flu in its tracks while South Africa ended up in the top five countries globally for coronavirus cases, which now stand at nearly 600,000?

The answer lies in fundamental differences between the two viruses,

“It seems quite clear that the coronavirus is simply much, much more contagious than the flu,” she said. “This isn’t a fluke — this is proof that simple containment measures, when broadly followed, are effective against influenza transmission, but not enough for coronavirus.”

The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MTV and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of TV” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming.

It’s not just TV, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice.

offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality.

the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado, announced that the Arctic sea ice had reached a new low. The sea ice shrinks in the summer and grows again during winter’s long polar night. It usually reaches its minimum extent in mid-September. On September 16, 2012, the N.S.I.D.C. reported, the sea ice covered 1.3 million square miles. This was just half of its average extent during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly twenty per cent less than its extent in 2007, the previous record-low year.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this development. We are now seeing changes occur in a matter of years that, in the normal geological scheme of things, should take thousands, even millions of times longer than that. On the basis of the 2012 melt season, one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic ice cap, Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, has predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer by 2016. Since open water absorbs sunlight, while ice tends to reflect it, this will accelerate global warming. Meanwhile, recent research suggests that the melting of the Arctic ice cap will have, and indeed is probably already having, a profound effect on the U.S. and Europe, making extreme weather events much more likely. As Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Rutgers, observed recently in a conference call with reporters, the loss of sea ice changes the dynamics of the entire system: “It’s like having a new energy source for the atmosphere.”

Representative Paul Ryan’s fitness routine—he’s a big fan of what’s known as the P90X workout plan—has received three times as much television coverage as the ice loss

Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.

convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.

Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.

A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk.

We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.

“No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,”

While holding a press conference on Friday in Atlanta about the current coronavirus outbreak, President Donald Trump said that he didn't know people died of the flu. His grandfather died of influenza in 1918, according to Trump biographer Gwenda Blair.

Trump is right that tens of thousands of Americans die each season from the flu. The CDC estimates that there were more than 34,000 deaths from the flu in the 2018-2019 flu season. The previous season that number was estimated to be more than 61,000.

Blair: He is not a student of history. He's only looking forward. He has no rearview mirror and that means he learns little. There's that old cliche about people who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it, and I think that's what he's currently in the middle of re-enacting.

No such human-challenge experiments have been conducted to study immunity to SARS and MERS. But measurements of antibodies in the blood of people who have survived those infections suggest that these defenses persist for some time: two years for SARS, according to one study, and almost three years for MERS, according to another one. However, the neutralizing ability of these antibodies — a measure of how well they inhibit virus replication — was already declining during the study periods.

These studies form the basis for an educated guess at what might happen with Covid-19 patients. After being infected with SARS-CoV-2, most individuals will have an immune response, some better than others. That response, it may be assumed, will offer some protection over the medium term — at least a year — and then its effectiveness might decline.

One concern has to do with the possibility of reinfection. South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that 91 patients who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then tested negative for the virus later tested positive again. If some of these cases were indeed reinfections, they would cast doubt on the strength of the immunity the patients had developed.

Did the summer’s protests reflect a racial reckoning or seasonal solidarity?

Millions of Americans — many of them white — poured into the streets to demand justice and assert that Black Lives Matter. It’s clear now that the summer protests, which took place during a pandemic during which congregation was discouraged, were for some participants less a sincere demand for justice than they were a social outlet.

About 49 percent of registered voters said they supported the movement, compared with around 38 percent in opposition — similar to BLM’s net approval before Floyd’s death. That drop in popularity has largely been driven by increased opposition among white Republicans (80 percent of whom oppose the movement, higher than before Floyd’s death) and white independents (who now support BLM at similar levels as before Floyd’s death).”

The N.F.L. signed new media rights agreements with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon collectively worth about $110 billion over 11 years, nearly doubling the value of its previous contracts.

The contracts, which will take effect in 2023 and run through the 2033 season, will cement the N.F.L.’s status as the country’s most lucrative sports league.

“Along with our recently completed labor agreement with the N.F.L.P.A., these distribution agreements bring an unprecedented era of stability to the League and will permit us to continue to grow and improve our game,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.

Retail sales, a measure of purchases at stores, restaurants and online, declined a seasonally adjusted 0.7% in December from the prior month, the Commerce Department said Friday. That marked the third consecutive month of declines, and November’s retail sales were revised lower to a 1.4% drop, after a stretch of growth last spring and summer.

According to the National Retail Federation, holiday sales rose 8.3% compared with the same period a year ago, exceeding the trade group’s estimate of a 3.6% to 5.2% increase. Home-improvement and online retailers posted big gains, while sales at apparel chains and department stores—which historically tend to do well during the season—continued to decline. Holiday sales exclude restaurants, gasoline and auto sales, and measure the year-over-year gains in the combined November-December period.

Recent private-sector data suggested a mixed start to this year. NPD Group, which tracks retailers, said Thursday that sales at retailers focused on items such as apparel and personal-care products increased 27% in the week ended Jan. 9—the largest increase in that category since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s tracker of 30 million credit and debit cardholders recorded a 2.7% decline in spending from a year earlier in the week through Jan. 11.

Indigenous fire practitioners have warned that Australia’s bush will regenerate as a “time bomb” prone to catastrophic blazes, and issued a plea to put to use traditional knowledge which is already working across the top end to reduce bushfires and greenhouse gas emissions.

“A lot of areas will end up regenerating really strongly, but they’ll return in the wrong way. We’ll end up with the wrong species compositions and balance.

As Australia comes to terms with this season’s catastrophic fires, Indigenous practitioners like Costello are advocating a return to “cultural burning”.

Australia’s unprecedented bushfire crisis has unfolded in waves across the spring and summer, demanding coverage across many months that has encompassed a vast geographical area and has tried to make sense of dozens of interrelated narratives, from the personal stories of individuals caught in the disaster to the devastation of wildlife, social media misinformation and the overarching relevance of the climate crisis.

Reporting on the fires requires a lot of driving, instinct and guesswork. There is often more information in the newsroom than on the ground, and we relied a lot on firefighters, the fire and traffic apps and radio broadcasts. I also received text updates on wind and weather changes from my dad, who can read charts better than I can.

Reporting events on this scale has been challenging enough, but putting them in the context both of Australian domestic politics and the wider question of climate change has put even greater demands on our reporters and opinion writers. From the start we have been at pains to keep the climate crisis at the forefront of our coverage, by explaining the science and holding the government to account for its response.