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Americans are the No. 1 consumers of toilet paper in the world. | Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images It’s a truism that everything’s bigger in America — just look at the cars and houses. But perhaps nowhere is the virtue of bigger is better more bizarrely apparent than how toilet paper is sold. Wander into the bathroom products aisle at the supermarket and you’ve entered a topsy-turvy world where numbers shape-shift. A pack of 18 mega toilet paper rolls, for example, magically transforms into 90 “regular” ones. The labeling emphasizes this greater number in large font, lest you foolishly think 18 simply equals 18. Another pack might insist that 12 even-thicker rolls of toilet paper are the equivalent of 96 normal rolls. The advertising is clear: You’re getting a lot of toilet paper. That should be good news, since if there’s one rule of thumb everyone should live by, it’s never run out of TP. We saw anxiety around this eventuality reach new heights in the early days of the pandemic, when crowds of people fought to snap up as much toilet paper as they could, leading to a shortage and extreme price gouging. Americans’ enormous vehicles and palatial abodes may in fact exist in service of conveying and storing gigantic bulk packs of this bathroom essential. There’s some irony, then, that for all the trumpeting of gargantuan sizes, toilet paper rolls are generally getting smaller. It’s a key example of the trend of manufacturers charging the same price (or even slightly more) for less product that’s been dubbed “shrinkflation.” It makes it more difficult than ever to figure out if you’re getting ripped off. None of the three major toilet paper manufacturers Vox reached out to responded to a request for comment. “I really can’t think of any other category that’s as confusing as toilet paper,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at the consulting firm GlobalData. With dubious numerical claims about how much a “mega” roll is really worth, brands can promote the perception of value without actually having to show their work. Figuring out the price per toilet paper sheet is a hassle, but it would show how much more expensive the product has become. “The consumer wouldn’t like that, so they all keep it a bit opaque,” Saunders says. Get ready for some back-of-the-toilet-paper math The most glaring issue plaguing the toilet paper industry is a lack of standardization. Double, triple, and mega rolls are imprecise descriptors that vary by brand; they are not measurement units. In fine print, toilet paper packaging will often admit that these sizes are relative to the “regular” roll — sometimes they mean their own brand’s regular size, but other times, it’s against a competitor’s one-ply regular. Unsurprisingly, the so-called standard size has no consistency, either. Charmin’s regular roll has 55 two-ply sheets, for example, but it’s often hard to even find the regular size of a brand’s toilet paper in stores. The mega roll is often advertised as having four times as many sheets as the mythical “regular” it’s being compared to, which means that Cottonelle’s idea of a regular roll contains 61 sheets, Quilted Northern’s an awkward 73.75 sheets, and Angel Soft’s 80 sheets. But even these are perplexing figures since many real-life standard toilet paper rolls contain more than 100 sheets. The sheets-per-roll ratio is also subject to change depending on whether you’re looking at single-ply, two-ply, or three-ply. (Not to make your brain hurt more, but sheet dimensions vary too.) The mega roll is just one size out of many that brands offer, all with slightly different naming conventions. Cottonelle sells mega, family mega, or super mega, while Charmin now offers the mega-XXL and even the “forever roll,” which is so big you need a standalone holder. There appears to be no limit to the jumbofication of toilet paper jargon.  All this renders comparison shopping far more challenging than it is for the average household product. Making matters worse, there’s no single consistent method of unit pricing for toilet paper. Some retailers, like Walmart, Amazon, and Target, show the price per 100 sheets, but then you still have to factor in the variation in sheets per roll for each brand. Walgreens shows price per sheet, while Home Depot displays a pretty unhelpful price per roll. Irregular unit price labeling is a problem for many consumer products, according to Chuck Bell, programs director of advocacy at Consumer Reports. Unit pricing is “only mandated directly in nine states,” Bell says, while 10 others have voluntarily taken it up. “It’s hard to compare products online for value for money.” It’s no wonder people have taken matters into their own hands. In late 2018, a California man named Victor Ly launched a “Toilet Paper Value Calculator” that crunches the number of rolls, sheets per roll, and any discounts that apply. Ly told Wirecutter in 2022 that a good deal was probably around 0.253 cents per sheet. While there’s no longer a toilet paper shortage or people panic-buying pallets of them — though the impulse to do so lingers — it’s a much more expensive commodity today than before the pandemic, especially now that we’re a few years out from a period of high inflation. A report from consumer watchdog Public Interest Research Group noted that, before the pandemic, a pack of 36 Charmin Ultra Soft rolls cost $30.95 on Amazon. At time of writing, the same pack costs $59 on the site. (In December 2020, it was selling for as high as $114.99.) Most name-brand toilet paper today far exceeds Ly’s price threshold. A 30-pack of Charmin Ultra Strong mega rolls breaks down to 0.5 cents per sheet, though a 36-pack of Scott 1000 toilet paper is about 0.083 cents per sheet. Kirkland’s 30-pack of toilet paper, selling for $23.49 at time of writing, works out to 0.206 cents per sheet. The cost of making toilet paper may have gone up in recent years, according to the Los Angeles Times, due to a slowdown in lumber production (there’s less available wood pulp, which is what most toilet paper is made of). Combine that with the fact that, as journalist Will Oremus reported in a piece about the pandemic toilet paper shortage, more people are working remotely today, reducing the time spent in office bathrooms. It means that the average consumer is using more toilet paper at home, cringing at how much their budget for bathroom products has gone up.  Shrinkflation strikes – again Toilet paper manufacturers have come up with a way to keep prices roughly the same, though — at least at a quick glance. The same pack of toilet paper you buy every month might only be more expensive upon close scrutiny of the fine print, when you realize each roll is made up of fewer sheets. A recent analysis by loan marketplace LendingTree showed that toilet paper was among the top offenders among products whose size or volume had shrunk since 2019 or 2020. A pack of 12 mega rolls from Angel Soft went from 429 sheets per roll to 320 — essentially shrinking by a quarter — but at least the price went down by 15 percent too. Charmin Ultra Strong mega rolls, on the other hand, shrank by 15 percent while the price increased by 11 percent. This isn’t a new strategy that only toilet paper makers are employing. People have been complaining about product shrinkage for years; a Consumer Reports article from 2015 compared toilet paper rolls from top brands, showing that some had reduced by over 20 percent. The reason, manufacturers claimed at the time, was that better paper quality meant that people could use less of it. An older Charmin regular roll had 82 sheets versus just 55 today. Edgar Dworsky, a former consumer protection lawyer, has been tracking this shady practice — which he calls “downsizing” — for decades on his websites, MousePrint.org and ConsumerWorld.org. “I remember back in the 1960s when my Mounds candy bar used to be two ounces and became one point something or other,” he tells Vox. He notes that old Charmin toilet paper had as many as 650 sheets in a single-ply roll; its mega-XXL today has just 440 sheets. An older Charmin regular roll had 82 sheets versus just 55 today. The playbook is to shrink the current roll size, then invent a new tier (with a more ridiculous name) that can be priced higher. Consumer brands “are in the business of making you think you’re getting more,” Dworsky says. “It’s all a name game, it’s all a numbers game, and if you’re just oblivious to it, you’re going to get snookered.” How to avoid flushing money down the toilet Toilet paper is marketed both as a value product, where you’re getting four rolls for the price of one, and a weirdly indulgent luxury at the same time. It’s something meant to be quickly disposed of, literally flushed away, yet commercials for toilet paper are almost always focusing on its delightful, cushiony softness or a special “quilted” or “diamond weave” texture that adds a premium feel to the product. There’s scented toilet paper, and even toilet paper with colorful patterns. One of Quilted Northern’s April Fool’s Day ads pokes fun at the excessive promotional style of its own industry, proclaiming a “return” to hand-crafted, artisanal toilet paper. Ultimately, this is because we spend so much time with it, and in such an intimate way, so such bells and whistles do matter to some of us. “There’s obviously some people [who], for medical reasons, like to have really soft toilet paper,” Saunders says. “Some people just like extra strong toilet paper.” For others, it’s a pure bang-for-buck play, where they might just gravitate toward the pack with the most rolls (which isn’t necessarily the best value).  The range of options, from one-ply sparseness to lilac-scented plushness, isn’t the problem. It’s that it’s so hard to disentangle the value you’re actually getting. As Dworsky notes, consumers could bring a scale to weigh packs of toilet paper every time they go to the store, but then what can you do about it? You still have to buy one of the #ShrinkFlated options, and it’s not an area where we’re spoiled for choice. While there are plenty of different versions that a single brand offers, just three manufacturers — Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and Georgia-Pacific — make up some 80 percent of the bathroom tissue market. One could switch to commercial-grade toilet paper, which is much cheaper but is of (ahem) crappier quality. Where consumer toilet paper is soft, perhaps infused with lotion, often embossed with a delightful little pattern, the stuff we see in public restrooms is stiff and so thin that it breaks apart if you so much as look at it. Still, a 12-pack of commercial toilet paper at Home Depot is about $34 at time of writing, and one roll is about 700 feet long. Assuming that a square of consumer-grade toilet paper is about 4 inches long, a 440-sheet Charmin mega-XXL roll would still be under 147 feet.  Lawmakers and President Joe Biden have wagged their fingers at corporations for shrinkflation and have even introduced a bill attempting to ban the practice, though neither Dworsky nor Bell thinks it’s likely to become law. But more transparency around product sizes, more consistent unit price labels, or even requiring a consumer notice when there’s a change in size would go a long way to help shoppers. Last year, in the lead-up to price negotiations with suppliers, French grocery chain Carrefour started attaching labels next to packaged foods and drinks that had gotten smaller.  What’s certain is that the deceptive, confusing accounting of toilet paper rolls shouldn’t be the norm — and, in fact, it appears to be mostly a North American tradition. While other countries do also sell “mega” rolls, there’s no fiddly math on the packaging insisting that a dozen rolls are somehow more than that. Toilet paper is no small matter, especially for Americans. Per capita, the US is the No. 1 consumer of it in the world, each American using about 141 rolls per year as of 2018. A Consumer Reports buying guide once compared the annual usage to the length of 23 football fields. One way to avoid the frustrating morass of counting rolls and sheets is to opt out of the game altogether. “I switched to a bidet 10 years ago,” Dworsky says.

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Private investigator Steve Ridge believes the mysterious disappearance of Iowa news anchor Jodi Huisentruit was a crime of "jealousy" and "passion."

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Welcome to the golden age of STI prevention. Sure, condoms are still an effective strategy for lowering the risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) — but now, they’re just one of a smorgasbord of strategies for decreasing your chances of catching an infection spread by sex.  That includes vaccines to lower your risk of certain STIs, and medications you can take to prevent infection — some with the ease of a morning-after pill, and many that can be mailed to your home after an online telehealth visit. It also includes new STI tests that people can take in their homes, with results available either instantly or within days to enable quick and discreet testing and treatment. In a world where getting sexual health care sometimes feels fraught with judgment, these new methods offer a level of discretion and convenience that feels nothing short of revolutionary. In-person care is still best for getting the most comprehensive and personalized evaluation and education, and we’ve got guidance on how to find that kind of care here. But even sexual health care clinicians recognize it’s annoying — or worse — to go to the doctor sometimes.  “Inconvenience — whether it’s cost, or travel, or parking, or taking off work, or other competing demands — is probably a big factor in why people aren’t necessarily engaged in … sexual health care that they might otherwise benefit from,” says Douglas Krakower, an infectious disease doctor and HIV prevention researcher at Harvard Medical School. Stigma — that shameful sense that people who know you have an STI look down on you, whether real or imagined — also sometimes prevents people from getting high-quality sexual health care in person.  The bottom line: People often prefer sexual health care that involves as few other humans as possible. Now, there are more ways to get that than ever. Not everyone gets to benefit equally from these advances. Some come with hefty out-of-pocket price tags or are still out of reach for pregnant or likely-to-be-pregnant people. Still, the changes represent a leap forward in an area of health care that needs as much help as it can get. Here’s what’s out there. You can greatly reduce your risk of HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and more  STIs include a range of bacteria and viruses that cause unpleasant genital symptoms, threaten your ability to have pleasurable sex, and may endanger your ability to have healthy children. Barrier protections like internal and external condoms are still the best (and usually cheapest) way to protect yourself from STIs.  However, if you anticipate having sex without condoms, there are now lots of other ways to prevent STIs. Vaccines have come a long way and several can prevent STIs, including HPV (a cause of genital warts and cervical cancer), mpox, and hepatitis A and B. Recent studies also suggest being vaccinated against meningitis can offer some gonorrhea protection, especially among gay men and the people they have sex with. There are also pills and injectable medications that can greatly reduce the risk a sexual partner will infect you with HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, or chlamydia. HIV prevention is available in a few forms: as a daily oral or every-two-months injectable medication you take before sex (called PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis), or as a month-long regimen of oral medicines you take immediately after sex. The latter option, called PEP, for post-exposure prophylaxis, has to be started within 72 hours of exposure to be effective. Both options work by entering the body’s cells and preventing HIV from replicating inside them. A smorgasbord of new STI prevention options PrEP, a daily oral or every-two-months injectable HIV-prevention medication you take before sex PEP, a month-long course of oral HIV-prevention medication you take after sex DoxyPEP, a morning-after pill to prevent syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia infections Home-based testing for chlamydia and gonorrhea, syphilis, HIV, and other STIs (click here for free resources; some direct-to-consumer options are listed here) Vaccines for HPV, mpox, hepatitis A and B  There’s even more progress to come in this area: An every-six-months injectable drug for preventing HIV infection called lenacapavir has shown huge promise in preventing HIV infections in both women and trans and nonbinary people and could be available for US use as soon as late 2025. Krakower says an oral option isn’t far behind. Syphilis has been rising explosively in the US for the past few years, affecting gay men and the people they have sex with as well as heterosexual men and women, especially those whose sexual partners include sex workers and people who inject drugs. The trend has huge stakes: Women can spread syphilis to their pregnancies, leading to serious illness or death in their newborns.  Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines for using doxyPEP, a morning-after pill to prevent syphilis infection. This breakthrough strategy involves taking the antibiotic doxycycline the morning after sex — and because this medication also fights other germs, doxyPEP also reduces gonorrhea and chlamydia transmission. The problem is that doxycycline’s effects on pregnancy are unclear, but there’s suspicion they’re not good. Many clinicians are therefore hesitant to prescribe it to younger patients in their care. Still, because congenital syphilis has become such a dire national emergency, scientists are seeking ways doxyPEP can protect pregnant people and their fetuses. One focus is getting more men who have sex with men and women to use doxyPEP; another approach may involve prescribing the drug to women at high risk of syphilis infection. In a Japanese study of female sex workers, this strategy led to plummeting syphilis and chlamydia rates. You can get at-home testing for a range of STIs  It used to be that if you’d had unprotected sex with a new partner or had unusual genital symptoms — like painful urination, funky discharge, or skin changes like a bump, ulcer, or rash — you’d have to jump through a lot of hoops to figure out whether you had an STI. You would start by visiting a clinic or emergency room; getting your parts swabbed by a clinician (or peeing in a cup or getting blood drawn); waiting for a lab to process those results; waiting for the doctor’s office to communicate those results to you; going back to the clinic for medicine or picking it up at a pharmacy; and then potentially going back again to be retested once treatment was done.  Now, a variety of new testing options allows clinics to get test results within hours for a range of STIs. Once these get adopted broadly by clinics and emergency rooms, it’ll be a lot easier for people to get testing and treatment all in the space of one health care visit. Hopefully, that will lower the number of people who get diagnosed with an STI but never get treated for it. Another huge step forward: New tests now enable people to do most or all of the STI testing and treatment process at home, online, or through the mail — without a doctor or another clinician having to get involved. “Agency is what home testing gets people,” says Yuka Manabe, an infectious disease doctor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who leads the home-based HIV and STI testing program, I Want the Kit.  The FDA has only approved a handful of these tests, and they’re not perfect. For example, the only FDA-approved test that screens for chlamydia and gonorrhea with home-based sample collection is the Simple 2 test —  it’s only approved to test samples from penises and vaginas. That means the test can’t be used to diagnose throat and rectal infections, which are more common in men exposed through oral or anal sex with other men. So while the Simple 2 is a great choice for people who engage only in heterosexual sex, it leaves out gay men and people they have sex with.  Another important innovation is the First to Know Syphilis Test, which can detect within minutes syphilis-fighting antibodies in blood samples collected at home with a simple skin prick. The FDA approved the test in August. However, it has a catch: The test doesn’t distinguish between new syphilis infections and old, already-treated infections. That means people who’ve had syphilis before can’t use the test to rule out a new infection. It’s worth noting that home-use HIV tests have been FDA-approved for more than a decade, although they also require follow-up testing for positive results. Just because these tests are FDA-approved doesn’t guarantee they are covered by insurance; you can check with your insurer to find out what it will cost you. If it’s not covered, it’s worth checking to see if you live in a part of the country where free HIV, gonorrhea and chlamydia, or trichomonas test kits are available (the American Sexual Health Association lists free HIV and STI home test kit resources).   Most of this testing would be free or low-cost if you got it in person, says Elizabeth Finley, the senior director of communications and programs at the National Coalition of STD Directors. “There’s some equity implications” in the reality that higher-income people can afford to pay out of pocket for the convenience of home-based testing, while lower-income people often cannot, she says. Choosing a test is just the beginning An array of companies have created home-based STI tests that haven’t yet been approved by the FDA, including ones for hepatitis B and C, which are often overlooked. Non-approval doesn’t mean a test is garbage — it just makes it harder to be certain that it’s effective at doing what you want it to do. “There are no real guardrails for the companies in terms of the quality they have to offer to customers,” Finley says. “The tests have to work, but I’m not sure customers are fully informed about, if they see a test available on social media, ‘Is this a good one? Is this a bad one?’” The appeal of these tests is strong for people who hate having someone else get their genital sample. Many of them have you pee in a cup, pinprick your own finger and blot blood on a card, or swab a range of body parts at home (including your vagina or penis, your butt, or your throat), then mail that sample to a lab that runs the usual tests on it, which can be retrieved in an online portal.  Home testing kits also often make an end-run around the process of getting to a brick-and-mortar clinic to figure out next steps or pick up medication. Many use a telehealth platform to connect people who test positive for an STI with clinicians, who can provide counseling, suggest ways to get partners tested, and mail some medications directly to patients.  Curing many STIs requires one or more antibiotic injections, and experts sometimes recommend additional evaluation after a diagnosis. Both of these scenarios require an in-person visit with a clinician. If you test positive for one of these STIs, your test company’s telehealth provider should direct you to a clinic where you can see an in-person clinician. Giving people the option of self-directed sexual health care isn’t just good for people’s sense of autonomy — it’s also a sensible response to impending health worker shortages. Out of concern for an inadequate global supply of clinicians, the World Health Organization has recently recommended a range of self-care interventions for people all over the world, among them many of the latest innovations in STI self-sampling and testing.  It’s about time, Manabe says: “We’re not trusting the public enough.”

The unit was torched by Chuba Hubbard during the Giants’ 20-17 loss to the Panthers at Allianz Arena in Munich on Sunday. He recorded 153 rushing yards — a career-high — on 28 carries (5.5 yards-per-carry) with a touchdown.

The first thing you need to know about the writer Dorothy Allison, who died last week at 75, is that she could flirt you into a stupor.As a scrawny, know-it-all stripper girl in 1990s San Francisco, I was in a position to know this. I’d often see her at leather-dyke gatherings, and we had a hugging acquaintance, so I was happy to spot her at a party at a mutual friend’s house. She glided toward me in the kitchen and said, “I see you’ve got a hickey there, Miss Lily.” Dorothy raised her eyebrows and dropped her voice—just a little. The overhead light glinted in her long copper bangs. “Maybe you’ll let me give you a hickey sometime.” A proud southern femme, she knew what her drawl could do, and she worked it like a strut. I stood there in that kitchen, a 22-year-old punk-ass bigmouth, dumbstruck and immobilized by her charm.“Her friends loved Dorothy like hard rock candy,” the feminist writer Susie Bright wrote in a remembrance last week on Substack. To many scrappy queers and misfits in the Bay Area, Allison was a real-life friend, but to legions more of us, she was a true intimate on the page. Her words, sweet on the tongue, drew us to a body of work that managed to be both a delicacy and a necessity. Each devoted reader can cite the quote that broke them open. Though her essay collection Two or Three Things I Know for Sure would become my survival guide, the sentence that first grabbed me by the throat was Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright’s line from Allison’s debut novel, Bastard Out of Carolina: “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1949, to a 15-year-old mother who’d left school to work as a waitress and cook. After a childhood of privation marked by incest and violence at the hands of her stepfather, Allison became the first of her family to graduate from high school. Writing her way through various day jobs after college, she reckoned with class struggle, poverty, abuse, lesbianism, desire, illness, and the long-reaching legacy of trauma. Her poetry, fiction, and essays ranged across varied terrain, but they always sprang from a root of astonishing tenderness and almost unbearable clarity.An outspoken member of the “ungrateful poor,” Allison knew that literature is medicine—as are community, pleasure, and even recreational flirting. She preached that a dogged commitment to honesty, however dark or knotty or elusive its pursuit, was essential for healing from the lacerating edge of life. Always quick to credit the women’s movement for giving her the tools to reenvision herself, Allison, through her work, her teaching, and her way of moving through space, transformed the cornball self-help concept of “radical embodiment” into a living gospel.[Read: The great American novels]One might say that she wrote from the heart, but it would be more accurate to say that she wrote from the hips. She eschewed such distancing techniques as overt sentimentality, the taxonomic graphing of oppressions, and theory-headed la-di-da. Instead, she went straight to skin and bone and viscera, sites of both injury and regeneration among the bodies of the queer, the poor, and the sick. Few other writers could so perfectly express the way that shame bathes you in a wave of prickling heat, or the hole-in-the-chest sorrow of loving a mother you couldn’t trust. She evoked delight just as vividly, describing the satisfaction of stirring ingredients together to make a simple gravy and the glinting, double-edged appeal of masochism. Most crucially, she articulated the way that societal hatred can fester in your gut, rotting you from the core, and that the only remedy strong enough to stanch its spread is plainly naming the truth of it.She said as much: “Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I’d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.”It’s easy to dismiss so-called trauma plots after several decades of confessional literature, but in 1992, when Bastard Out of Carolina came out, none of us queer kids held any hope that we could see our complicated stories get published beyond the margins, let alone ushered into the literary canon. With Bastard, which fictionalized her abusive childhood, Allison made real money and a real impression, and she used that security to solidify her role as a teacher and an advocate of the historically unheard. She exploded any idea we had about what was possible. When she said, “The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing,” we believed her.I can’t help dwelling on the timing of Allison’s death, on the day of a presidential election that marked the ascension of J. D. Vance—as disingenuous a chronicler of the working class as there ever was. I remember what she wrote in her first nonfiction collection Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature: The worst thing done to us in the name of a civilized society is to label the truth of our lives material outside the legitimate subject matter of serious writers … I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has, is the remade life. There are a few more things that you need to know for sure about what Allison meant to those she leaves behind.Know that her deeply personal stories introduced us to ourselves. Know that she taught us to fight for liberation with all five senses, and to forge a weapon out of beauty. Know that when she broke through, she brought all of us with her. This rock-candy-hearted revolutionary, through her devotion to art and to truth, didn’t just pull us forward into new territory; she redrew the map.

Today, TIME reveals the second annual TIME100 Climate list, featuring the 100 most influential leaders driving business to real climate action. The 2024 TIME100 Climate list includes president of the World Bank Ajay Banga, founder of Travalyst Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, actor Rosario Dawson, founder of TerraPower Bill Gates, United States Secretary of Energy…

Telling my story makes me feel empowered because what was taken from us Jews and so many others was our very humanity, writes Gidon Lev.

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Over the weekend, a very small wildfire broke out in a hilly and densely vegetated area of Prospect Park, a swath of green space in Brooklyn. The 2-acre blaze drew about 100 firefighters as residents were warned to stay out of the park. Meanwhile, on the New York-New Jersey border, another blaze, the Jennings Creek wildfire, has burned thousands of acres, sending smoke drifting across much of New York City and killing an 18-year-old New York state forest ranger volunteer who died while responding to the fire.  Is this typical? Not exactly. But the Northeast has been under severe drought conditions for weeks. These fires, and the dozens of others currently burning in the Northeast and across the Ohio River Valley, as well as the scores more in the Western US, are the consequence of months of unseasonably hot and dry weather across large swaths of the country.  Okay, pause: What is a drought? Simply put, a drought is a dry period — that is, a long stretch of time without any rain or snow — that leads to a water shortage. Droughts can (and do) happen all over the world; they are not just a characteristic of a desert or a regional problem. Extreme drought can stress landscapes and water tables, regardless of whether a city is built on top of them or not. If a drought lasts long enough, people in that place can lose access to water.   This story was first featured in the Today, Explained newsletter Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Sign up here. While the Western United States is associated with aridity, it is remarkable to see this extent of drought spread across the Northeast. And current forecasts show that the conditions will persist for weeks or even months. “It’s problematic to see drought in all parts of the country. It’s not just a regional issue,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center. “Regardless of where you’re at, drought can and will impact you.” Firefighters extinguished the Prospect Park fire. Rain mercifully moved into New York on Sunday night and snuffed much of the smoke drifting across the East Coast, obscuring the fact that a cluster of fires in New Jersey continued to burn.  As the smoke fades, attention shouldn’t: Millions of people in the Northeast remain under red flag wildfire warnings, which signal conditions where anything that can generate a spark could likely lead to a fire. But we all live with drought, extreme heat, and fire now — and our relationship to water is connected to just how bad things could get. Why is the drought so severe? For much of the country, October was an extremely hot and dry month. We are currently on pace for 2024 to become the hottest year ever recorded, a declaration that forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization are making with confidence even with more than a month left.  According to the US Drought Monitor, the long periods of hot and dry conditions have left every state in the country facing drought — an unprecedented statistic.  There isn’t a single driver responsible for the scope of the current drought conditions. Even as our global average temperatures are rising thanks to climate change, our short-term weather patterns will shift all of the time. For example, despite Hurricane Helene bringing heaps of moisture to places like North Carolina a little more than a month ago, even western North Carolina is now abnormally dry. How can that be? Because it’s been that hot and dry in the weeks since — enough to erase any sign of a so-called thousand-year event.  “When I started looking at data over the past six months, you see that places like New Jersey, the Ohio River Valley, much of the plains have 12 to 15 inches below normal precipitation for this time of the year,” Fuchs said. “New York has a deficit of 10 inches. That’s very extreme for this part of the country.” And then there are these warmer temperatures later in the year that end up amplifying the ongoing drought’s worst effects. Temperatures usually fall significantly by November. Trees will drop their leaves and go dormant. Certain critters hibernate or go into low-power mode. Snow begins accumulating in the higher elevations, banking moisture that will melt out — gradually — during the warmer periods.  But when it’s 80 degrees in New York in November, trees and vegetation are still consuming water. There’s an extra period of demand on the overall water system, and that taxes water sources — lakes and streams begin to draw down and the ground holds onto less moisture. Vegetation that grew earlier in the year begins to dry out — and fuel wildfires.  “It really doesn’t take much time to transition to a hot and dry environment and you all of a sudden have all of this extra fuel for wildfires,” Fuchs said. “This is the perfect mix for fires to blossom.” Should we expect more wildfires?  Drought is a normal part of our climate, but it’s not normal to see this much drought across so much of the country.  Resources to help you understand how drought will impact where you live There are two monitors produced by the US Drought Monitor from the Climate Prediction Center that reflect what areas in the US will be most affected by drought and water scarcity. These projections, which update regularly, give a real-time pulse on conditions across the country and are created through a partnership between the US Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These tools are also  helpful in getting a clearer picture of how the climate is impacting your local landscape and will give you the heads-up if you’re likely to face water shortages. The monthly outlook is a great snapshot for this moment in time. It provides a gradient of drought conditions, shaded by severity, impacting the country. If you live in a place where drought is persisting, conserve your water and be aware of acute wildfire risk.   The seasonal outlook currently shows projection through January 2025 and will update again in mid-November to show conditions expected to the end of February. This map is helpful for getting a longer-range view of aridity and whether it’s likely to lessen or become more severe.  This extreme period of dry weather is a part of the larger picture that scientists have come to expect: that our weather will become more extreme and unpredictable and that we will collectively experience more pronounced swings from incredibly dry periods to incredibly wet periods.  Those dry periods, Fuchs says, are connected to warmer temperatures persisting into what should be the colder parts of the year and ramping up the demand on our water systems. That demand, by the way, includes water consumption by you and me and everyone else. Just multiply our daily showers, drawing from the tap, running our dishwashers and washing machines, washing our cars, watering our house plants (and so on) by the millions of people who live in a watershed, the area that shares a single water source for a particular region.  If there’s too much demand on an already stressed landscape, the wildfire risk increases as water levels in streams and in our water table drop.  To better navigate the conditions we see today and the climate we should expect in the future, we need to understand that no place is immune to drought conditions, Fuchs said. “Even if you think you’ve not been impacted by drought in the past, it’s increasingly important for people to know where their water comes from and conserve it the best you can at any time,” he said. “We’re actively experiencing severe climate change impacts,” said Aradhna Tripati, a climate scientist from UCLA who helped author the latest national climate assessment. Climate change “is no longer theoretical or a distant threat, an abstract one. It is not something that happens in the future here. It is not something only happening in places far away from where we live. All weather is now being affected.” Yes — even in New York City.

He is far from the only distressed asset I envision the New York teams (and others) will consider.

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The second annual TIME100 Climate 2024 list identifies 100 leaders driving measurable, successful, and equitable climate action

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