A troubling milestone: Most supreme court rulings are secretive votes with little justification
ProPublica conducted a new analysis that shows the court is deciding more consequential rulings than ever before in largely unsigned orders with little to no explanation. By Ken B. Morales for ProPublica In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot…
General incompetence
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These church members disagree on politics. Together they’re wiping out medical debt.
By Noam N. Levey for KFF Some issues, like immigration or student loans, are too divisive to unite Trinity Moravian Church. “We’ve got quite a spread of political beliefs,” said the Rev. John Jackman, who leads this 114-year-old red-brick church near Winston-Salem’s old textile mills. Conservative Republicans sit with liberal Democrats. Supporters of President Donald Trump mix with…
Supreme chaos
Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court handed down several decisions these past couple of weeks that have been nothing but a handout to President Donald Trump in his relentless and racist crusade against immigrants and his perceived enemies. Not only are these rulings disturbingly inhumane, but they also pave the way for Trump to continue inflating his executive power. And as America celebrated…
Here’s how you can help Daily Kos get out the vote
We just celebrated the 250th anniversary of the United States. Like many, I’m sure, I took the time to hang out with my family, eat some BBQ, and watch some fireworks. Typical, but a welcome distraction. Now I’m back to work. Daily Kos not only provides the opportunity to spark and enact change, but to also reflect on what’s next for the betterment of our democracy. It allows me to think…
A sizzling mix for summer listening
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 250 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. Over the years there have been a multitude of musical tributes to the summer and dancing. I have an earworm which won’…
Another perspective
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“Morally reprehensible”: Prediction Markets Offer Bets on Wildfires
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Sylvie Andrews and her partner didn’t just lose the new house they’d helped build when the Eaton Fire ripped through Altadena, California, in January 2025. They lost an entire decade’s worth of sacrifices they’d made to put down roots in their hometown, and the community they’d created. “We put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it,” Andrews said. “That’s what we lost in the fire.”
That fire, along with the Palisades Fire to the west, destroyed over 16,000 structures and killed 31 people. But while Andrews and thousands of Angelinos were racing to evacuate, other people saw a financial opportunity. Using Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, they made bets on the fires—how they would grow, how long they would last and how much they would destroy.
Prediction markets are essentially gambling websites where people bet on the outcome of events, including elections, sports, the weather and more. Anything is fair game, from oil prices and the spread of infectious diseases to international incidents. Markets usually frame questions in a “yes” or “no” fashion, with the price of a “contract” fluctuating between $0 and $1. A price of 50 cents on a “yes” contract means that the people doing the betting collectively believe the event has a 50 percent chance of happening. Market hosts make money by charging a fee on wagers.
“When you start gambling on somebody’s potential death or harm, you’re really diminishing the value that you’re placing on human life.”
In January 2025, Polymarket listed almost 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets team,” related to the wildfires burning up Southern California. How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades fire be 50 percent contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained before February?
People spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, according to Aeon Magazine. “Wow,” Andrews said repeatedly when she learned the figure. “My first take is that it’s morally reprehensible,” she said. “The fact that someone would feel OK doing that flabbergasts me.”
“The prediction markets are just the wild, wild West,” said Susan Sherman, who grew up in the Pacific Palisades. She lost her childhood home in the Palisades Fire; her late parents had owned it since 1963, and now, it was gone. She sold the empty lot a few months ago. “I look at (betting on the fires) as just being very crass and heartless.”
As prediction markets boom and a new wildfire season begins, fire survivors and ethicists say that the betting encourages and rewards callous thinking—and dangerous behavior, too.
One major concern stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson. “That’s what has me nervous,” Sherman said. Theoretically, making a bet could give someone the perverse incentive to start a fire, or help one grow. Unlike other disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding or extreme heat, a fire can be manipulated in minutes by just one person. “Systems that tie financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk encouraging misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with our mission,” a spokesperson for the US Forest Service said.
“Imagine what a bad actor might do,” said Ann Skeet, the senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “A market that might support that kind of activity, I think, is a dangerous market.” Firefighters or land managers with exclusive information about a fire’s behavior or an agency’s firefighting plans could even be tempted to bet on a fire, which would be considered insider trading.
But the biggest dilemma is largely an ethical one. “When you start gambling on somebody’s potential death or harm, you’re really diminishing the value that you’re placing on human life,” Skeet said.
Betting on a wildfire’s outcome isn’t just limited to general prediction market platforms anymore. This year, ahead of what’s likely to be a busy fire season in the West, a new prediction market specifically focused on California fires was launched. Called “Wyldfyre,” it bears the tagline: “You can’t predict wildfire. But you can trade on it.” High Country News was unable to determine the platform’s owner or the owner of its website’s IP address; the website is opaque, with no contact information listed.
Currently, Wyldfyre users can only simulate trading, but according to the site, the ability to bet with real money is “coming soon.” The platform purports to be the first prediction market of its kind, pricing county and city wildfire risk in real time. “California burns. Every year. And it’s getting worse. The question isn’t if— it’s where and when,” the site reads. It includes hotspot data from NASA and National Interagency Fire Center fire perimeters to help gamblers make predictions.
“If someone won money in gambling with our fate, I would hope that they might be ashamed of themselves.”
Proponents of prediction markets say the platforms generate useful information through crowdsourcing. Wyldfyre frames its platform as providing a public good. “Wyldfyre turns collective intelligence into better wildfire forecasting—one trade at a time,” the site reads.
But entities with a real need for wildfire forecasting, including federal and state firefighting agencies, say they aren’t interested in prediction market data. “The Forest Service does not use information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasting, and we do not rely on any system that treats wildfire as an event for speculation,” an agency spokesperson told High Country News. “Our priority is protecting firefighters, communities, and public lands, and our fire analysts use validated science, proven predictive tools, and data from federal partners such as the National Weather Service, NOAA, and the National Interagency Fire Center.”
California’s state firefighting agency has a similar policy. “CAL FIRE does not use prediction‑market-derived data in wildfire forecasting or operational decision‑making, nor are we currently evaluating that type of system,” said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of CAL FIRE’s intelligence program.
The agency uses a “scientifically based fire-behavior modeling” program to generate a fire-spread prediction when a 911 call for a wildfire is processed, SeLegue said. The automated program uses weather observations, forecast data, fuel and vegetation conditions, topography, location data and information on available resources. “Our modeling is deterministic and physics‑based; it is not informed by markets, wagering systems, crowd predictions, or any other form of prediction‑market mechanism,” SeLegue said.
As prediction-market betting soars in popularity, politicians are beginning to try to rein it in. Representatives from Utah and California introduced federal legislation in March that would prohibit betting “related to terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or illegal activity,” according to a press release. A California senator introduced companion legislation that would also prohibit contracts about “an individual’s death.”
Meanwhile, Minnesota just became the first state to outlaw hosting or advertising (though not betting on) prediction markets; the federal government promptly sued the state for over-stepping its authority. None of the proposed restrictions at a state or federal level explicitly include wildfire—at least not yet.
While state and federal governments struggle to control prediction market betting, Andrews has an idea. “If someone won money in gambling with our fate, I would hope that they might be ashamed of themselves,” she said, “and take that money and donate it directly to fire survivors.”
This Data Center Is Everything That Everyone Hates About AI
The Stratos Project was supposed to be an industrial marvel for the AI age. The proposal—a massive hyperscale data center in Box Elder County, Utah—was initially slated to be more than 2.5 times the size of the island of Manhattan. Once completed, it would use more than double the state’s average electricity demand and draw power from a dedicated natural gas supply. These immense figures would allow Stratos to train cutting-edge AI models, assist in advanced manufacturing, and even help with defense-related computing.
This, at least, was the idea when the project was officially announced in March 2026. Since then, however, the project has become an encapsulation of Americans’ distrust of the AI industry at large and the structural risk that unregulated data center development creates for investors across the board.
In Utah, opposition to the Stratos Project was driven in part by predictions that it would have severe adverse effects on the environment. Utah State University professor Robert Davies calculated that the heat from the completed Stratos center would raise local daytime temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit and a staggering 28 degrees at night, a thermal load equivalent to “23 atom bombs” worth of energy. Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University, warned that these temperature spikes would transform the local environment from semiarid into something more closely resembling the Sahara Desert. There were also additional concerns that the center would be a massive water draw in a region already prone to drought and facing increasing water shortages.
Despite this, and the complaints of thousands of residents, the project was approved by the Box Elder County Commission in May 2026—barely two months after it had been announced. The relative alacrity of their decision-making was partially enabled by the fact that Stratos utilized Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, a state entity whose involvement let it bypass ordinary county zoning and the public review such projects normally require (since the project could theoretically help improve military AI adoption and cybersecurity).
Stratos’s chief backer is Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity billionaire investor better known for his role on the TV show Shark Tank than as an AI infrastructure guru. He has claimed that Stratos would create 2,000 permanent jobs (despite the fact that Stratos is yet to have a tenant, and that data centers have historically created far fewer jobs than advocates claim).
But O’Leary’s promises have done nothing to dampen local opposition to Stratos. In fact, opposition intensified throughout the month of May until Utah Governor Spencer Cox—who had initially backed the project when O’Leary met with him in January 2026—signed an executive order on May 29 to ensure that the state properly evaluates data center proposals. While the Stratos Project was not specifically mentioned in the order, the timing of the announcement, coupled with the significant statewide pushback to the project, showed it was clearly an inflection point. Less than a week later, O’Leary agreed to significantly scale back the proposed data center from 40,000 acres to just over 20,000.
“People are concerned about data centers,” Cox said in a press conference, “they’re concerned about the lake, they’re concerned about resources, and they should be concerned.”
So, six months after the supposed “industrial marvel” of the Stratos Project was introduced, the results have been an angry local community, an embarrassed investor, and a local state government belatedly searching for a sensible framework with which to govern data center growth. The backlash has not stopped yet, either. On June 23, Utah state Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who was also the chairman of the Utah agency that initially approved Stratos, lost his Senate seat to a rival who explicitly criticized his support of O’Leary’s project.
But data center investors face a more significant problem than public embarrassment—they risk losing money. In Utah, there are now two separate lawsuits underway against O’Leary’s project, each likely to further slow the already scaled-back data center. The problem isn’t confined to the Stratos Project, either. According to a recent analysis by JPMorgan, more than 60 percent of data center capacity planned for 2027 isn’t yet under construction. The research firm Data Center Watch has claimed that in the first quarter of 2026, over $130 billion worth of data center projects were either delayed or canceled.
Together, this suggests that regulatory and community friction is already taking a significant toll on investors’ bottom lines, alerting them to the dangers of rushing headlong into new proposals. A May 2026 note from the law firm Ropes & Grey warned as much, noting that “permitting challenges and local [community] resistance are emerging as serious obstacles” and that “standstills are a real risk absent industry engagement or federal preemption.”
States have caught on to this problem. Beyond Spencer Cox’s executive order, which directs Utah agencies to protect the environment while promoting economic growth, Maine passed a bipartisan data center moratorium act in April. Initially vetoed by outgoing Governor Janet Mills, the act could come back into consideration after the November 2026 midterms. Ohio and California, meanwhile, have both passed legislation, with Ohio requiring data center operators to cover their own grid costs, and California mandating that they disclose their electricity consumption.
Big Tech firms are now keenly aware of the need for their data centers to have at least some environmental protections and community considerations built into development plans. Microsoft, for instance, announced its “Community-First” AI infrastructure plan in January 2026, shortly after it was forced to cancel a proposed data center in rural Wisconsin. The plan calls for covering the grid and electricity costs its data centers create, minimizing and replenishing local water use, and paying its full share of local property taxes rather than seeking the tax breaks data centers typically negotiate. OpenAI has called for significant investment in renewables to help modernize the U.S. electrical grid and make data center build-out more sustainable, while Anthropic has pledged to cover the grid infrastructure improvements and electricity cost increases that are generated from the data centers it uses.
These actions from both big business at one end and state actors at the other are a recognition of the problem. But they are the inverse of the kind of investment that the Stratos Project represents: rushed ad hoc investment on one side of the coin, and reactive ad hoc regulation on the flip side.
What’s more, both actors have fundamental limitations. Data centers are a footloose industry, meaning if one state is deemed to be overregulating, investors can easily shop for a friendlier jurisdiction. And while Big Tech firms might talk a good game, they are also subject to severe market pressures that could make them put their plans for equitable, environmentally friendly data centers on the back burner.
What’s needed is a concrete set of enforceable federal standards that can slow down the ad hoc gold rush in favor of equitable (and ultimately faster) long-term build-out. But here, the Trump administration is doing the exact opposite. In its July 2025 executive order, the White House moved to ease regulatory burdens on data centers costing at least $500 million, while compressing review windows and streamlining environmental evaluations meant to identify those burdens, and saying nothing about the water consumption or community frustration driving the backlash.
It’s a counterproductive way to win the AI race. On one hand, the Trump administration (as well as backers like O’Leary) insist that data centers are a strategic imperative for the United States. But the administration is blocking the one thing—a clear set of rules—that would allow for data center construction without risking a backlash in every county they touch.
The alternative is another dozen Stratoses, each one announced in the dark and built in haste, before an angry public demands concessions. That option leaves everyone on the losing end—including, it turns out, investors.
Why Republicans hate the Constitution
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. The right has spent decades associating itself with traditional imagery of the Constitution. That means years and years of Revolutionary War cosplay, references to the “original intent” of the Constitution, and right-wing figures…
Burn, baby, burn
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One year on, Los Angeles is still living with the fallout of the raids
New analysis and firsthand accounts reveal the toll of the crackdown on immigrant communities in L.A. County and beyond. By Elizabeth Aguilera and Ben Poston for Capital & Main When immigration agents arrived at the Los Angeles car wash where he worked, Giovanni didn’t see them until one was standing beside him. Giovanni’s thoughts turned to his family: How would they get by without…
For Trump, not all constitutional amendments are created equal
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Estimated attendance
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Supreme Court decision loosening campaign finance rules could be boon for Paxton in Senate race
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Republicans can’t do anything right, not even throw a party
The Conversation is a weekly dive into the most popular stories on Daily Kos and what it tells us about the national political environment. Republicans suck at governing. That’s not a partisan observation. Objectively, Republicans prioritize ideology over competence and expertise. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the party insisting that government can’t work also can’t run one.
Caribbean cruises, tourism, and the Fourth of July
Not wanting to sound overly critical, I’ve avoided articles on Caribbean tourism for the most part. The Fourth of July weekend is being heavily promoted in spite of warnings about the dangers of contracting an illness aboard ship and the potential damage to the islands visited. Here’s a video critique, though: The tourism industry plays a major role in the Caribbean…
Come on down …
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Celebrating America Doesn’t Have to Mean Erasing Our History
In the leadup to the semiquincentennial, President Donald Trump has waged a war on topics he deems “divisive,” from DEI to critical race theory. As a reporter and fact-checker, I’ve examined this attack on our history closely. I’ve interviewed historians about how our past shapes our current moment, observed the spectacles put on by administration, and chronicled an organization’s fight to preserve local historic memorials.
Through this work I’ve realized how much my own personal relationship to patriotism and history has evolved. As a kid in school, learning about the disproportionate amount of violence marginalized people faced throughout history made me pessimistic about the future. It was bizarre to read textbooks that minimized and dehumanized those moments of oppression along with the moments of achievement by anyone who wasn’t a white man. In American history marginalized people’s stories are often asides or relegated to stereotypes— if mentioned at all. Over time I became almost desensitized by the erasure as a way to focus on the ever-changing present moment.
In September, I spoke to former Alabama poet laureate Ashley M. Jones about her book, Lullaby for the Grieving, where she described “political grief”—the feeling of “being in a place which never wanted you to be human and reminds you every day that it still doesn’t consider you a human.” I realized that my political grief created a skepticism about how American history is told and those who chose to celebrate it at all.
Though I was skeptical, speaking with historians, nonprofit organizers, and protestors about America’s 250th birthday has made it clear to me that “celebrating” American history doesn’t have to mean ignoring historical moments that the Trump administration says “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” Telling an honest and complete history that actually acknowledges the harm marginalized people endured in this country helps us reckon with what we’ve been through in the nation, and what we’d like to see in the next 250 years.
Culling American history also just leaves gaping holes in the American story that make it unintelligible. I keep returning to one of the administration’s most literal displays of this erasure: an animated show projected onto the Washington Monument itself which tells the American story from the Declaration of Independence to space exploration, while blatantly omitting historic systemic oppression like the expulsion of Native Americans or marginalized people’s contributions to the nation, like the three Black women who were essential to the space race.
The alternative to these revisionist displays is to accept that history is more complex and ambiguous than we often like to see it. As historian and American Association for State and Local History senior staff member John Garrison Marks noted during our conversation in April, when we use American history as a tool to win political and cultural fights, that argument over the past prevents us from seeing the future. Marks hoped that this anniversary would be an opportunity to bring people together and have complex conversations, an idea I heard echoed by many others.
Kitcki Carroll, the United South and Eastern Tribes executive director and I connected in April to talk about how to honor Native American perspectives during this anniversary, and he told me that for many Indigenous people, the semiquincentennial and events surrounding it are an opportunity to “course correct and make sure that for the next 250 years we’re not dealing with the same shortcoming and failures.”
While historians and community leaders have reminded me of the importance of keeping our eyes on the past for our future, I’ve been inspired by those who continue to fight for preservation as a link between the two. In response to Trump’s 2025 executive order to get rid of materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” a group of librarians, public historians, and data experts created Save Our Signs. Through this online archive, people take pictures of National Park signage and inform others of ones that have been removed. There’s also a map that highlights materials that were flagged for removal from leaked NPS Data. This effort has created a database of over 15,000 photos from 422 sites, an archive of material that is otherwise at risk of disappearing.
I got to see resistance to the administration’s erasure in person, too, when the Philadelphia organization, Avenging the Ancestors Coalition fought for the reinstallation of the President’s House slavery exhibit they helped get installed 15 years ago. During one of the rallies, Hannah Gann, a high school African American history teacher, said when her students heard the memorial was torn down, they were “upset that their real history was being erased and a huge part of our city’s history was being taken away and covered up.”
Though we often picture history as a stagnant thing that can be engraved on plaques, behind plexiglass in museums, or written in textbooks, really our story belongs to all of us, and there are numerous ways to preserve it. In art and literature, I’ve talked to creatives and academics like Jones, Carmen Emmi, Victoria Chang, Isaac Butler, and Kimberlé Crenshaw who’ve emphasized the importance of personal histories to the larger historical canon. Their art highlights lesser known events, like the 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California or overpolicing and history of entrapment of queer people. These artists’ perspective on the American story also adds personal weight to the historical moments the public is already familiar with, like censorship during the AIDS crisis or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
These sorts of personal stories are a reminder of the inherent humanity in history that sometimes gets lost in the big picture of it, and show how honoring a diversity of perspectives helps connect us back to it. Diversity isn’t just about race or ethnicity, for many it’s about where they’re from. As a former resident of Alabama, when I first learned about the 250th I thought I’d be more of a spectator to the celebration happening in DC. Yet, I realized the semiquincentennial isn’t just about the founding, and although Alabama has its share of shortcomings, it has a complex culture and history, from its pivotal role in the Civil Rights movement to being home to the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio where legends like Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones recorded hit songs.
It’s cliche to say that “those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it,” but the more reporting I’ve done, the more I’ve found it to be true. San Francisco State University history professor Marc Robert Stein told me that history isn’t cyclical—it has patterns. Often, in interviews with historians, I ask them where they think our society stands and where they think we’re headed, and usually they start by pointing out the patterns they’ve seen over time, highlighting how the past can’t be removed from our present or future.
Despite what’s happening on the National Mall, in many ways, the necessary conversations about how we mend our relationship with history and move forward are happening. To me, the hope of this semiquincentennial is that more people are listening.
America’s 250th Birthday Will Be a Scorcher Not All Will Survive
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As New York City braces for an extreme heat wave amid the July 4th weekend and World Cup festivities, government officials and local hospitals are ramping up efforts to prevent heat-related illness.
Temperatures were expected to reach 100 degrees F on Thursday, with a heat index between 105 and 110 degrees—unusually hot for New York. Friday was expected to be just as sweltering. “These are extremely dangerous conditions, and they will affect every part of our city,” New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a press conference on Tuesday.
Many major cities have heat emergency plans that involve setting up cooling centers, conducting outreach to vulnerable populations, and sending out emergency alerts. With heat waves becoming more intense and common as the planet warms, more cities are writing and implementing these types of plans to keep residents safe.
The risk of heat-related death and illness is expected to grow as extreme heat events become more frequent and intense.
This year, New York City first activated its heat emergency plan on May 19—the earliest it’s ever done so—due to a severe spring heat wave that pushed temperatures past the 90-degree mark across the Northeast. It activated that plan again in preparation for this latest heat wave.
As part of that emergency plan, the city will have more than 650 cooling stations up and running, including at libraries, recreation centers, and Petco stores, as well as some extra “nontraditional” cooling stations, which include government buildings, says Christinia Farrell, commissioner of the New York City Emergency Management Department. She says excessive heat warnings are becoming more common in New York.
The Mamdani administration is deploying cooling vans across the city to provide wellness checks, medical care, water, electrolytes, sunscreen, as well as transportation to cooling centers or health care facilities. LinkNYC kiosks, which have replaced old pay phones throughout the city, will also be programmed to display walking directions to the nearest cooling center, another new initiative under Mamdani.
To help the grid cope with more residential cooling demand, business owners are being asked to set their thermostats to 78 degrees, which the Department of Energy recommends during peak summer months.
Workers with the city’s Department of Social Services will be conducting in-person outreach to unhoused people. Individuals who need short-term housing will not be required to go through the typical intake procedure at shelters under the heat plan.
Philadelphia is also bracing for high heat. The city—which is hosting a World Cup match on July 4—has activated its heat emergency plan and has moved the hours for its FIFA Fan Festival to the evening. The city will have cooling and tents, free water refill stations, shaded areas, and multiple medical stations for fans. Still, the match between Paraguay and France will kick off at 5 pm ET, when it’s forecast to still feel well above 100 degrees with the heat and humidity.
The risk of heat-related death and illness is expected to grow as extreme heat events become more frequent and intense. A recent study from Yale University found that deaths associated with high temperatures nearly doubled in the US over the past two decades, from an annual average of 2,670 between 2000 and 2009, to more than 4,000 between 2010 and 2020. Most heat-related deaths occur indoors after prolonged exposure to heat without air-conditioning.
“Anybody who has an altered mental status who is hot, that is an indicator that they may be critically ill.”
New York emergency departments say they’re preparing to handle an increase in patients with acute heat illnesses in the coming days.
Erik Blutinger, an emergency medicine physician at Mount Sinai Queens, says the hospital is stocking up on towels, fans, and other supplies to make sure patients with heat sickness can be adequately treated. He says it’s important for people to be able to recognize the symptoms of heat-related illness so they can seek treatment as soon as possible.
Heat exhaustion can cause excessive sweating, nausea and vomiting, muscle cramps, and weakness. While it can often be managed outside the hospital with hydration and cooling down the body, heat exhaustion sometimes turns into heat stroke, which is more severe and can be life-threatening. People with heat stroke have dry, hot skin and a rapid pulse. They may feel confused, have slurred speech, or become unconscious.
“Anybody who has an altered mental status who is hot, that is an indicator that they may be critically ill,” says Reed Caldwell, chief of service at Tisch Hospital’s emergency department, part of NYU Langone Health.
When a person’s body temperature gets dangerously high, clinicians mimic sweating using a technique called evaporative cooling that involves stripping away clothing, misting the patient’s skin with water, and fanning them continuously. Cold water immersion and even ice-filled body bags can be used for the same purpose.
Excessive heat also worsens heart conditions, lung disease, and kidney problems, and people with chronic diseases are more vulnerable to severe heat sickness. Babies and older adults are also at higher risk because their bodies are less efficient at regulating temperature.
Prevention is key. “It’s important that we all drink water before we are thirsty,” Caldwell says. Sunscreen is also important, he says, since sunburns make the skin feel hotter and pulls fluid from other areas of the body, which can lead to dehydration. Limiting alcohol before going out in the heat is also a good idea, since alcohol causes dehydration—advice that’s particularly salient on a holiday and during World Cup matches, both of which feature plenty of day drinking. “There’s great value in pre-hydration and even greater value in not being dehydrated before you go somewhere.”