The Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut was named after an N.F.L. player who died of exertional heatstroke. The lab’s main research subjects have been athletes, members of the military, and laborers. But, with climate change, even mild exertion under extreme heat will affect more and more of us; in many parts of the United States, a heat wave and power outage could cause a substantial number of fatalities. Dhruv Khullar, a New Yorker contributor and practicing physician, visited the Stringer Institute to undergo a heat test—walking uphill for ninety minutes in a hundred-and-four-degree temperature—to better understand what’s happening. “I just feel puffy everywhere,” Khullar sighed. “You’d have to cut my finger off just to get my wedding ring off.” By the end of the test, Khullar spoke of cramps, dizziness, and a headache. He discussed the dangers of heatstroke with Douglas Casa, the lab’s head (who himself nearly died of it as a young athlete). “Climate change has taken this into the everyday world for the everyday American citizen. You don’t have to be a laborer working for twelve hours, you don’t have to be a soldier in training,” Casa tells him. “This is making it affect so many people even just during daily living.” Although the treatment for heat-related illness is straightforward, Casa says that implementation of simple measures remains challenging—and there is much we need to do to better prepare for the global rise in temperature.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an unlikely literary star. A botanist by training—a specialist in moss—she spent much of her career at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. But, when she was well established in her academic work, having “done the things you need to do to get tenure,” she launched into a different kind of writing; her new style sought to bridge the divide between Western science and Indigenous teachings she had learned, as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, about the connections between people, the land, plants, and animals. The result was “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a series of essays about the natural world and our relationship to it. The book was published by Milkweed Editions, a small literary press, and it grew only by word of mouth. Several years later, it landed on the Times best-seller list, and has remained there for more than three years; fans have described reading the essays as a spiritual experience. Kimmerer herself was recently recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship. Parul Sehgal, who writes about literature for The New Yorker, went to visit Kimmerer on the land she writes about so movingly, to talk about the book’s origin and its impact on its tenth anniversary. “I wanted to see what would happen if you imbue science with values,” Kimmerer told her. She is an environmentalist, but not an activist per se; her ambition for her work is actually larger. “So much of the environmental movement to me is grounded in fear,” she explains. “And we have a lot to be afraid about—let’s not ignore that—but what I really wanted to do was to help people really love the land again. Because I think that’s why we are where we are: that we haven’t loved the land enough.”

The New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley in 2002. Titled “Lost and Found,” it described a friendship between two women who had been close since childhood.  Hadley’s fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale: tight dramas close to home. She captures, within these relationships, an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion. The New Yorker recently published its thirtieth story from Hadley—a higher count than any other fiction writer in recent times. That figure is particularly remarkable because Hadley had such a late start to her career, publishing her first work of fiction in her forties. She talks with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman about her long struggle to stop imitating the writing of others, instead telling stories authentic to her own experience and voice. “I was just a late developer, and I was trying to write other people’s novels for all that time,” she says. Treisman also asks Hadley about why her work has been labelled “domestic fiction” by many critics. The term is disproportionately applied to female writers, and “tends to have a bit of condescension to it,” Hadley says. But she is willing to at least consider whether her work is too focussed on certain kinds of bourgeois-family relationships. “I almost completely accept the challenge,” she tells Treisman. “I think one should feel perpetually slightly on edge as to whether your subject matter justifies the art.”

Even in a summer of record-breaking heat and disasters, Republican Presidential candidates have ignored or mocked climate change. But some conservative legislators in Congress recognize that action is necessary. David Remnick talks with a leader of the Conservative Climate Caucus about her party’s stance on climate change, her belief that fossil fuels cannot be rapidly phased out, and the problems she sees with the Inflation Reduction Act. Then, the authoritative climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert talks with Ben Jealous, who was recently named executive director of the Sierra Club, about his strategy for building support in Republican-led states.

The author Esmeralda Santiago has been writing about Puerto Rico and questions of immigration and identity since the early nineties. But, in 2008, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to decipher words on a page. In the months that followed, she relied on some of the same strategies she’d used to teach herself English after moving to the United States as a young teen-ager—checking out children’s books from the library, for example, to learn basic vocabulary. Santiago’s latest book, “Las Madres,” includes a character named Luz who goes through a similar experience after a traumatic brain injury. “That sense stayed with me long after I was over that situation—that feeling between knowledge and ignorance,” she tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “For me, Luz is almost representative of Puerto Rico itself. We have this very long history that we don’t necessarily have access to. . . . Those of us who live outside of the island, we live the history but we don’t really know it.”

The practice of legacy admissions—preferential consideration of the children of alumni—has emerged as a national flash point since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in June. Even some prominent Republicans are joining the Biden Administration in calling for its end. David Remnick speaks with the U.S. Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, about the politics behind college admissions. Cardona sees legacy preference as part of a pattern that discourages many students from applying to selective schools, but notes that it is not the whole problem. How can access to higher education, he asks, be more equitable when the quality of K-12 education is so inequitable?    Plus, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, looks at the problems facing admissions officers now that race cannot be a consideration in maintaining diversity. Gersen has been reporting for The New Yorker on the legal fight over affirmative action and the movement to end legacy admissions. She speaks with the dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, one of the schools that voluntarily announced an end to legacy preference after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action. “So far, the responses have been overwhelmingly positive,” Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez tells her. “But we’re obviously some time removed from the results of the decision. . . . I think it’s both symbolic and potentially substantive in terms of signalling our value to not have individually unearned benefits.”

James McBride’s new novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” centers on the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well in a small town in Pennsylvania. What unfolds is the story of a young Black boy raised by a Jewish woman decades earlier, a story that has been closely held secret among the communities that call the area home. McBride has been writing at the intersection of race, Blackness, whiteness, and Judaism in America since his 1995 memoir “The Color of Water,” a tribute to his own Jewish mother. He speaks with the staff writer Julian Lucas. “I want to read a book that makes me feel good about being alive,” McBride says. “If I want the bad things to happen, I’ll just read the New York Times. I want a book to take me to a place that I like to be.”

Last month, the country singer Jason Aldean released a music video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a song that initially received little attention. But the video cast the song’s lyrics in a new light. While Aldean sings, “Try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / ’Round here, we take care of our own,” images of protests against police brutality are interspersed with Aldean singing outside a county courthouse where a lynching once took place. Aldean’s defenders—and there are many—say the song praises small-town values and respect for the law, rather than promoting violence and vigilantism. The controversy eventually pushed the song to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The staff writer Emily Nussbaum has been reporting from Nashville throughout the past few months on the very complicated politics of country music. On the one hand, she found a self-perpetuating culture war, fuelled by outrage; on the other, there’s a music scene that’s diversifying, with increasing numbers of women, Black artists, and L.G.B.T.Q. performers claiming country music as their own. “I set out to talk about music, but politics are inseparable from it,” Nussbaum tells David Remnick. “The narrowing of commercial country music to a form of pop country dominated by white guys singing a certain kind of cliché-ridden bro country song—it’s not like I don’t like every song like that, but the absolute domination of that keeps out all sorts of other musicians.” Nussbaum also speaks with Adeem the Artist, a nonbinary country singer and songwriter based in East Tennessee, who has found success with audiences but has not broken through on mainstream country radio. “I think that it’s important that people walk into a music experience where they expect to feel comforted in their bigotry and they are instead challenged on it and made to imagine a world where different people exist,” Adeem says. “But, as a general rule, I try really hard to connect with people even if I’m making them uncomfortable.”