Retired teacher and school librarian Marlene Peters settled into a familiar place in the lobby of Bayview this month and opened a favorite book to read to a dozen squirmy toddlers at her feet.
Although her delivery and cadence were calibrated to hold the attention of 4-year-olds, another audience was also listening closely: about a dozen of her fellow residents at Bayview, a retirement community at the base of Queen Anne Hill.
Peters, 85, has been reading to both children and adults for five years now, ever since she moved into Bayview. In fact, she moved here in part because Bayview offers childcare in its Uptown building — Bayview Intergenerational Children’s Center. “I love to be around children,” she said.
These little students are living and learning in the midst of a community of elders, in a building that’s home to people as old as their grandparents — playing in the same outdoor garden, blowing bubbles together, sitting near one another in the lobby to hear a story.
“There’s so much love back and forth between the residents and kids,” said Nancy Weinbeck, CEO of Bayview, a “life plan community” — a retirement center that offers independent living, assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing. The daycare is “exposing the kids to wheelchairs and walkers and canes and hearing aids, so it’s normal for them, it’s not scary … none of those things are seen as negative,” she said.
“To get a generation of young people embracing older adults that way is so cool,” she added. (continued on Page 2 or here)
Washington is a leader among the states in offering childcare in retirement centers, said Sheri Steinig, director of strategic initiatives and communications for Generations United, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group for intergenerational collaboration.
But even here, it’s not a common setup. Only about a dozen Washington long-term care facilities also offer childcare. It’s not easy to run both: These centers must jump through twice as many regulatory hoops — the ones written for daycare and those that govern long-term care
Last March, U.S. Rep. Marilyn Strickland, D-Tacoma, led a bipartisan effort to establish a grant program for long-term care facilities to operate or contract with childcare programs, and facilitate intergenerational activities. In a news release, she described the bill as a way to tackle the “disjointed caregiving infrastructure.”
Bayview is a small program, currently licensed to serve 42 children from 6 weeks to 5 years old in a facility where residents range in age from 62 to 101. The facility, which serves 200 adults, opened in 1961, the daycare in 1996.
Seattle’s oldest and largest intergenerational program is at Providence Mount St. Vincent, known as “The Mount,” in West Seattle. The “living care community,” which offers a continuum of elder care for 400 adults, also runs a preschool with space for 103 children, from 6 weeks to 6 years. The building was specifically designed to serve both programs.
The Mount’s program is a widely heralded model — it’s been the subject of a prizewinning documentary, “The Growing Season,” and has frequent international site visitors, including a news crew from Australia, which produced a 17-minute segment about the program.
The Mount’s program has been around for 35 years, and has scores of preschool graduates who are now adults in the workforce, with families of their own, said Molly Swain, director of The Mount’s foundation. Swain said kids who went through the preschool tend to be more comfortable with older adults, and more likely to initiate a conversation with someone in a wheelchair. A number of them have gone into careers in healthcare.
“Getting to know the elders really changed their lives,” Swain said.
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Support for older residents and children is woven into the program, which includes singalongs with a resident music specialist and two intergenerational plays a year.
“We have very intentional moments,” said Yona Dembele, director of The Mount’s Intergenerational Learning Center. “It can be as simple as a daily visit into a neighborhood, where children are doing color activities with residents, or making sandwiches for the homeless program.” (The Mount uses the term “neighborhoods” to describe clusters of resident rooms that surround a common kitchen, living room and dining room.)
Dembele said residents are encouraged to drop in to the preschool any time they like, and either join in or propose an activity of their own. Last year, a temporary resident recovering from a hospital stay put on musical theater classes with several classrooms, and directed a play with the children.
Swain described the program as “the antithesis of social media pressures.”
“In today’s world of social media, it’s imperative children learn how to have in-person relationships, and especially across the generations,” she said.
Kids at The Mount typically live in the West Seattle neighborhood, and many caregivers who work at The Mount also enroll their children in the program. “There’s peace of mind, knowing their children are in good care,” Dembele said.
Bayview, which modeled its program on the one at The Mount, also does a weekly music program, and adult residents often come down from their apartments to hang out in the garden with the children, just to watch them play, said Frani Pelaez, director of the center.
In a city — and state — where childcare costs can rival in-state college tuition, both programs say they’re able to keep daycare costs competitive.
The Mount is part of Providence Health & Services, a national not-for-profit Catholic health system, and raises money through its foundation to keep costs down for the daycare and for long-term residents, many of whom are on Medicaid. “We significantly fundraise to make this possible,” Swain said.
Bayview is a nonprofit, located on property originally owned by Charles A. Kinnear, a member of a pioneering Seattle family who gave the land to the First United Methodist Church for the care of the elderly and/or children. “The vision has always been an intergenerational one,” Weinbeck said.
Weinbeck called the programs a rarity, but said “it really shouldn’t be unique. … We don’t connect anymore with the generations like we used to.”
Earlier this month, while her neighbor Marlene Peters read a book to the kids at Bayview, Debbie Cutter joined in, watching the dozen wriggling bodies on the carpet of Bayview’s lobby.
“It’s energizing for me to be around the raw energy of all the kids,” said Cutter, 67, who is president of Bayview’s residents council. “It picks me up and makes me happy.”
Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched.
I walked around the block to the Hoa Mai playground, named for a Vietnamese flower that signifies rebirth. City workers had installed gates to keep drug users away, but at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, I counted 27 people smoking drugs and nodding off. No children were in sight.
Half a mile to the south, in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, I visited a 10-acre park named after the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal. It has a playground and the remnants of an apple orchard, and at night you can peer downtown and see the city lights. As I arrived, a drug user squatted next to a child’s slide and relieved himself. Others had set up tents and colonized the park pavilion, where they heated fentanyl on tinfoil and inhaled the fumes with glass pipes. A few went old-school and injected it.
Across the street, I spoke with Angelina Monsegur as she waited at a bus stop. When she was a kid, she told me, she and her father ate candied apples in the park and watched Fourth of July fireworks. A few weeks earlier, she and her 6-year-old daughter had gotten on the bus and seen a man smoking fentanyl on board. “Are you serious?” she’d shouted at him. “My daughter has asthma.” I asked if she had called the police, and she smiled at my naivete. “All the city does is send out teams who hand out aluminum foil and fentanyl pipes.”
Seattle is one of the wealthiest and best-educated cities in the world. It can afford to try various strategies to address its drug epidemic and high rate of fatal overdoses. Yet many of the city’s leaders, apparently supported by voters, view enforcing bans on the open sale and use of narcotics, and forcing addicts off the streets and into treatment, as akin to an act of state repression. (continued on Page 2 or here)
Even the sportscasters now mock Trump for his lunacy. Last night Al Michaels, narrating an aerial shot of the Cleveland Browns’ waterfront stadium during the first quarter of last night’s Browns-Patriots preseason NFL game, pointed out Lake Erie this way:
“That is Lake Erie. We think it is still called Lake Erie on the right. We’re not quite sure at this point. But we’ll be by Lake something like Ontario or whatever it’s going to be called by the time we get to Buffalo [for the Bills-Lions game on September 17]. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about—some of you do …. Read the news.”
Since 1975, Canine Companions has been pairing service dogs with adults, children, and veterans with disabilities — completely free of charge.
On August 21, the nonprofit shared a video on social media that quickly garnered over a quarter of a million views, with one Instagram user calling it “the best thing anyone will see on social media today.”
In the Instagram Reel, service dogs were given a chance to reunite with the volunteers who trained and raised them one last time before they “graduated.”
The emotional video was filled with a lot of happy whines, wagging tails, and one black labrador that completely knocked their former trainer onto the ground with excitement.
“So beautiful,” one person commented. “They can be a puppy one last time before heading out into the world with their person. Congratulations on puppy raisers, brand new service dogs, and new handlers.
“In my experience, they never forget you,” one dog trainer chimed in. “No matter how long you have to wait.”
Tami Kelly, a PR representative for Canine Companions, told Good Good Good that this tradition is a regular occurrence for dogs trained through the nonprofit.
“Right before they graduate as service dogs matched with a person who needs them, most of our dogs reunite with the volunteers who raised them from eight weeks to about 18 months of age,” Tami Kelly said via email. “These reunions are so heartwarming.”
According to Kelly, less than 1% of people with disabilities have a service dog.
“Canine Companions is battling a global shortage of service dogs that can only be solved by recruiting more volunteer puppy raisers,” she said. “More than 500 people are currently waiting for a Canine Companions service dog, with thousands more in need.”
By CNBCTV18.com August 25, 2026, 7:38:18 AM IST (Updated)
Submitted by Pam Peterson
When eight-year-old Maxime recorded a video asking New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to help reopen his neighbourhood playground, he was hoping to get one park back.
The playground at McKinley Park in Brooklyn had been closed for almost two years. A couple of weeks after Maxime made his appeal, it reopened. Now, his experience has become an early example of what Mamdani’s new Renew Crew is designed to do: fix the smaller but highly visible problems in New York City’s parks without making residents wait months for a larger capital project At the launch of the 24-member team, Maxime thanked Mamdani and NYC Parks for “hearing me out” and helping bring the playground back.
What is Renew Crew?
Mamdani has brought together 24 plumbers, painters, electricians and other skilled tradespeople as part of the Renew Crew, which will carry out repairs at playgrounds, sports courts and recreation centres across the city’s five boroughs. The team is intended to handle relatively small repair and maintenance jobs that can otherwise get caught up in longer capital-project timelines. The city says it aims to complete each project in three weeks or less, with the crew expected to take on as many as 30 projects a year.
“The only thing worse than waiting for your turn on the swings is waiting for the swing to be fixed,” Mamdani said at the launch. “New Yorkers shouldn’t have to wait months for the basic repairs that make our parks better.”
From broken equipment to damaged courts
The Renew Crew’s first project is already underway at Dry Harbor Playground in Queens.Workers are repainting two basketball courts and play equipment and repairing benches, fencing, a drinking fountain and other park facilities. The work also includes repairs to shuffleboard, bocce and horseshoe courts and the park house exterior. Crews are also carrying out tree pruning, mulching and other horticulture work, including improvements around the park’s 9/11 memorial. Other projects have been identified at Fort Four Playground in the Bronx, American Playground in Brooklyn, Annunciation Playground in Manhattan and Old Town Playground on Staten Island. The programme is aimed at problems ranging from damaged playground equipment and sports facilities to broken amenities, fences and other park infrastructure.
$2.3 million for faster fixes
The programme has a $2.3 million budget this year, according to The New York Post. The newspaper also reported that more than 5,000 complaints about deteriorating recreation areas had been made through the city’s 311 system over the past year. Mamdani has urged New Yorkers to use 311 to report broken facilities, saying the Renew Crew will be dispatched to address them. The mayor announced the initiative with a blunt message on X: “Broken equipment and broken promises. New Yorkers deserve better from their government.” Renew Crew is separate from the city’s larger capital programme for parks. In March, Mamdani’s administration announced $50 million in capital investments across 10 parks, aimed at larger-scale reconstruction and improvements. The distinction is one of speed and scale: while major capital projects are meant to address substantial reconstruction needs, Renew Crew is designed to deal with everyday repairs quickly.
It won’t go down as one of the higher moments in foreign diplomacy.
It did hint, though, at how low relations with our northern neighbors might go.
At a news conference, Ontario provincial premier, Doug Ford, was asked whether he’d like to walk back his suggestion, made earlier that day, that President Donald Trump could “kiss my ass as far as I’m concerned.”
“No,” Ford said, then he heartily invited Trump for another round of bum-bussing.
What was most interesting about this moment was the reaction. None of the Canadians at this event, called to sternly denounce U.S. tariffs, looked startled or even the slightest bit uneasy.
The construction workers arrayed behind Ford all chuckled and nodded appreciatively, as if he’d given a wedding toast. Ford grinned and looked positively … cheeky. It was said that even the businesslike Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, didn’t disapprove of these crude invitations to the U.S. leader.
What is going on here?
“They’re not scared of Donald Trump anymore — that’s my sense of the situation. I think Canadians were always expecting another big Trump fight to erupt. So they’re used to it now.”
That’s Len Saunders, an attorney in Blaine, a town on Washington state’s border with Canada. He’s become a sort of “border whisperer,” as he’s a dual citizen, born in Canada, who crosses the line almost daily as part of his legal work.
Last year, Canadians were rattled. They said they had “elbows up” after Trump called their country “the 51st state.” But the truth is they were on their heels.
Now, not so much. Now they’re turning their backs to him — or their backsides, anyway.
Saunders said Canadians today are resigned to waiting out the indignities of the Trump term. They see how Trump’s bluster is wearing thin, including inside America.
Example: The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal called the tariff fight with Canada the “dumbest trade war in history.” Then it went further.
“It got dumber,” the Journal said this weekend, “as Mr. Trump escalated with another round of border taxes on Canadian imports, a mere 10 weeks before midterm elections.”
If you’re keeping track at home, that makes it dumber than the dumbest.
“One reason for Mr. Trump’s frigid approval rating is that voters believe Mr. Trump is waging blunderbuss wars without a strategy, and on trade they’re right,” the Journal concluded. (continued on page 2 or here)
After reports surfaced of rare cases of myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination, some parents worried that mRNA vaccines might cause heart disease in their children.
But a study published last week in Vaccine looking at more than 4 million children and young adults concludes that those who receive a Pfizer/Biotech COVID-19 vaccine have a lower risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), pericarditis (inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart), and death than those who do not.
“Public debate has focused on the cardiac risk of vaccination alone. Our findings reframe that discussion by comparing vaccination risk with infection-associated risk in the same healthcare network,” wrote the authors, led by researchers at SUNY Upstate Medical University.
“For patients and families, the key message is that myocarditis was rare after both exposures, but recorded myocarditis, pericarditis, and all-cause mortality were consistently more frequent after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after BNT162b2 vaccination,” they added.
‘A real but uncommon event’
The scientists conducted a retrospective, multicenter cohort study of the electronic health records of nearly 4.1 million people ages 16 to 25 from December 1, 2020, to September 30, 2025.
Participants fell into one of four groups. The first group included about 3.6 million (87.7%) vaccine- and COVID-naive young people. The second group consisted of 248,546 (6.1%) unvaccinated and infected teens and young adults.
Those who received a vaccine but never had COVID (241,152 youth [5.9%]) made up the third group. And the last group (10,677 [0.3%]) had hybrid immunity, because they had contracted COVID-19 prior to vaccination.
For patients and families, the key message is that myocarditis was rare after both exposures, but recorded myocarditis, pericarditis, and all-cause mortality were consistently more frequent after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after BNT162b2 vaccination.
Being unvaccinated and infected was associated with the highest risk of mortality, pericarditis, and myocarditis, while being vaccinated but uninfected was tied to the lowest risk of those three outcomes.
“Clinicians should communicate these findings using both absolute and relative risks: the absolute risk of myocarditis was low, but the observed risk was higher after infection than after vaccination,” the authors wrote. “This framing acknowledges vaccine-associated myocarditis as a real but uncommon event while also conveying that infection itself carries a greater cardiac risk.”
Today, we sit down with Washington’s Secretary of State, Steve Hobbs, to talk about what voters need to know ahead of the November election. Hobbs said that Washingtonians can still vote by mail, but because of changes in USPS postmarking policy, if it’s less than a week out from the election you should visit a drop box to ensure your ballot will be counted. Hobbs also provided assurances that the state’s election system is very secure, and encouraged voters to visit their local elections center to observe the process for themselves.
Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus, immortalized in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” is preparing for one more run. And to its owners, America sure could use it.
By Heather Knight in the New York Times (thanks to Mary Jane Francis)
Visuals by Ricardo Nagaoka
Among the rolling hills outside Eugene, Ore., down a winding gravel path and inside a big barn sits a school bus built in 1939. Its once-blazing colors have faded. Its roof is crumbling. Its windows are cracked. The only regular occupants these days are insects.
It might look like a hunk of junk, but the muted technicolor splotches tell the story of one of the most exuberant periods of San Francisco history.
Sixty years ago, this bus symbolized the city’s counterculture revolution, the embrace of psychedelic drugs and the live-out-loud, love-your-neighbor ethos for which the era is remembered.
With the nation once again facing war, polarized politics and cultural battles, Zane Kesey thinks some of that old bus magic is needed. And that is why he has agreed to send the bus, the one he helped cover in swirls of Day-Glo paint when he was 3, back to the city that spawned a movement.
“I would love to see it adored again,” he said. “And for people to feel that pure, innocent love that came out of it.”
His father, Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, had just written the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when he purchased the former school bus that a large Bay Area family had tricked out with beds, benches and a refrigerator for road trips. Mr. Kesey and his freethinking friends, called the Merry Pranksters, painted the bus in psychedelic colors, cut a sun roof into it, added a powerful sound system and installed a balcony on top.
The author Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, bought the bus. His son Zane has never known life without it.
Sixty years ago, the bus symbolized San Francisco’s counterculture revolution, the embrace of psychedelic drugs and the live-out-loud, love-your-neighbor ethos for which the era is remembered.
A sign on the back read, “Caution: Weird Load.” Above the windshield, where a bus typically displays its destination, somebody painted the misspelled word, “Furthur.” And the name for the bus stuck.
The pranksters set out on a cross-country trip, smoking weed, tripping on LSD and spreading the gospel of opening your mind, man.
The journey was documented in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” hailed by The New York Times back then as not only “the best book on the hippies,” but also “essential.” The bus and its beatnik driver, Neal Cassady, appeared in the Grateful Dead song “The Other One,” which references “Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never-ever land.”
The bus became part of the landscape of San Francisco’s counterculture movement. In 1967, Mr. Kesey drove it into Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, a gathering to protest a California law banning LSD. The event was a precursor to the city’s Summer of Love later that year, during which tens of thousands of young, idealistic people poured into the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and the park to protest the Vietnam War and promote hallucinogenic drugs and free love. (continued on page 2 or here)
On August 17, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg recorded a video to assure those Americans who oppose the Trump administration that they are in the large majority. He noted that the strategy Republicans are pursuing shows how unpopular they are.
“Think about it,” he said. “They’re not out there showing that the economy is somehow better than it looks…. They’re not defending their cuts to healthcare, they’re not defending the tax cuts for the wealthy. They’re not defending the corruption that’s going on in Washington.”
“It’s too late for that,” he said, because “we’ve all seen that those policies have failed. They made us all pay tariffs and said the reason we got to do this is to bring back manufacturing jobs…. Well, we paid the tariffs, and then America lost manufacturing jobs. They cut taxes for the rich. They said we’ve got to do that in order to speed up economic growth. And what happened? Economic growth slowed down…. They said they were going to cut costs and prices. Inflation is actually higher now than the day Donald Trump took office. They said they were gonna drain the swamp. And then they expect us to be okay with the first family making a billion dollars or more in crypto deals while the president’s in office….
“A lot of people believed this president and Republicans when they said no new wars. Then, what do we get? A war with Iran in the Middle East right now, which means all of us here at home are paying higher gas prices.”
The Republican strategy is not to change their policies, Buttigieg said. “It’s changing the maps. Changing the rules. Because that’s the only way they could win. They know they’re on the wrong side of the American people….
“You’re already in the majority if you think that we need healthcare for all, not Medicaid cuts and cutting Obamacare…. Right now, if you think that the wealthiest people in the country need to be paying their fair share in taxes, which is more than they’re doing today, where they currently pay less than a lot of teachers and nurses and firefighters. You are definitely in the majority if you believe that the wealthiest nation in the world ought to do the best job of funding public education and making sure it works. Not this Republican approach, which is to literally eliminate the Department of Education. You’re not alone if you think that in any decent economy, one job ought to be enough. And you’re certainly not alone if you believe that a woman’s healthcare decisions ought to be up to her and no one else, that in a free country, you should get to be who you are, and love who you love, and live a life of your choosing. When you believe these things, you’re not just not alone. You’re part of a powerful majority. Really a supermajority of the American people.
“So, whether you’re a Democrat, an independent, or someone who has generally voted Republican in the past, most voters want the same things right now: to be led and represented by normal people who are good at getting things done. People want leaders who respect those who disagree or vote differently instead of calling them the enemy. People who know that God does not belong to a political party in the United States of America. Most voters want to elect leaders who are not simply trying to rebuild the past, but trying to create something new and better.”
By Niki Stojnic Seattle Times Aug. 17, 2026 at 6:00 am Updated Aug. 17, 2026 at 6:00 am
Michelle and Al Vaas browse an expansive aisle at Emerald City Orchids in Tacoma. (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times)
SLIM GREEN-WHITE ROOTS cascade from hanging pots. Lush green leaves and pseudobulbs sprout from burled brown tree fern logs. Bright flowers perch along green or purple-red spikes. And rustic hand-painted signage tells you what you’re looking at: vandas, oncidiums, dendrobiums, bulbophyllums.
Emerald City Orchids boasts the largest retail selection of orchid varieties in the Pacific Northwest. The two greenhouses at its 3,500 square-foot shop envelop visitors in moist, tropical air. A riotous collection of plants includes everything from easy growers to rare species.
Families may come in searching for a new houseplant, while orchid owners come seeking advice. The shop also hosts classes, usually on weekends, which offer a tour of the greenhouse, growing strategies and tips, and repotting and mounting guidance.
If you think orchids are delicate hothouse specialties beyond your tending capabilities, Emerald City’s owner Joe Grienauer and his small team of orchid enthusiasts stand ready to change your mind. Anyone can nurture these beauties — some of which thrive on neglect — you just need to find the right one. (continued on page to or here)
This story was originally published by The 19th and was republished with permission.
Jenny McBurney, a librarian specializing in government publications, was in Washington, D.C., in June when she heard the news that the Department of Interior, the agency responsible for overseeing the national park system, had produced a spreadsheet listing dozens of sites where it had removed materials deemed disparaging to Americans or unrelated to the beauty and grandeur of our national parks.
She and other people who happened to be in town for a convening about the importance of public history in telling the complete American story, decided to visit some of the places on the spreadsheet to see exactly what had been modified in the nation’s capital.
“We were calling it our little sign quest,” quipped McBurney. “We were going to go, and you know, hunt down as many as we can.”
One of the stops was the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, designated by the Obama administration in 2016 to honor the National Woman’s Party, which fought for women’s equality and was founded by suffragettes Alice Paul and Lucy Burns.
McBurney helped inspect the informational plaques outside the brick building until they found what they had been looking for: a recent alteration on a sign describing some of the tactics used by suffragists to fight for the right to vote.
A 2025 photo of the plaque shows the sign stating that after women were imprisoned for a protest outside of the White House in 1917, they were “beaten and force-fed when they went on hunger strikes.”
The sign now reads: “The women, many of whom came from prominent and politically connected families, demanded to be treated as political prisoners.”
The new placard also leaves out a reference that this was a turning point that helped change public opinion on women’s suffrage. In other words, they are “removing the fact that that action worked,” McBurney said.
INSIDE THE BELMONT-PAUL WOMEN’S EQUALITY NATIONAL MONUMENT COURTESY OF NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
The 19th has contacted both the National Park Service and the Department of Interior to comment about this and other removals at national park sites and did not receive a response. (continued on page 2 or here)
The West Wing’s explosive response to a fleeting jab didn’t kill the story. It enabled days of coverage. By Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic.
You are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.
I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.
The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.
But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.
In Trump’s second term, his White House is populated by true believers. And no one believes more truly than Harp, whose devotion to Trump is unparalleled. A cancer survivor who credits the president with saving her life, the 35-year-old aide seems firmly glued to his side, an adoring smile stretched across her face. Harp has become an Oval Office gatekeeper, a ubiquitous travel companion, and one of only a few people with the keys to the president’s social-media account. She’s become one of the most unlikely powerful people in the administration—often seen in public but rarely heard from—and her presence has turned into a curiosity. Although she got some mentions in the press as well as in a new, best-selling book about Trump, Harp largely stayed out of the headlines even as she became the subject of Washington gossip and some West Wing grumbling.
But things changed because of a Turkish catering truck. The Washington Post reported last week that Harp was one of a handful of aides chosen to join Trump when he was furtively whisked off Air Force One at the Ankara airport earlier this summer because of Secret Service concerns about a threat from Iran. The questions were immediate: Why did this young aide, whose official responsibilities remain murky at best, hide with Trump in the truck as the president secretly boarded a different aircraft, even as the secretary of state and the secretary of the Treasury were left on board what became, in essence, a decoy plane? Just who is she, and what does she actually do? That chatter is likely what prompted Ossoff to name-drop Natalie. But it was the White House that pushed the story into the national discourse.
This White House rarely does things subtly—just look at all of the gold in the Oval Office or the maps depicting Canada as the 51st state. And when it comes to pushing back against a story aides don’t like, the two options are usually a) scorched earth or b) total obliteration. But even by that over-the-top standard, the outsize reaction was eyebrow-raising. Beyond some winking posts and passing mentions on cable-news shows, the story really wasn’t going anywhere until White House Communications Director Steven Cheung unleashed a flamethrower of a post on Monday morning, writing, in part, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country.” Just a few minutes later, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle chimed in with “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.”
Well then! Suddenly, the story had life. A few hours later, the press pool was invited into the Oval Office for a photo op as Trump honored a heroic California lifeguard. The president prides himself on his accessibility to the media and took a few questions. Kristen Holmes of CNN asked, “Jon Ossoff said that you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp than build the ballroom and do your job as president. What is your response?” Trump responded with his standard, 1980s-vintage insult about Ossoff—he called him “Pee-wee Herman”—and then, well, he proved the senator’s point by launching into a several-hundred-word defense of the ballroom. Later, he shushed Holmes as she tried to ask another question by snapping, “You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news. Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet.”
A short time later, the official White House Rapid Response X account went a step further, posting that Holmes was an “embarrassment to her alleged profession” and then, in a deeply personal attack, declaring, “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.” The ugliness of the comment drew immediate pushback from CNN and other journalists, who defended Holmes.
Meanwhile, White House aides and Trump allies began an all-out shielding of Harp. One of the president’s sons defended her, as did a Cabinet member and a congresswoman. With some prodding from the White House, a whole bunch of conservative media members and MAGA influencers joined them, I was told by one of the people who’d received a nudge. (Ossoff, for his part, told MS NOW yesterday that Harp was fair game because “these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust.”)
If the goal was to shut down talk about Harp, it backfired spectacularly. Suddenly, media outlets that had ignored her felt the need to write about her. Questions about her security clearance came up, along with this one: When was the last time First Lady Melania Trump was seen in public anyway? (July 19, at the World Cup final.) And as more stories were written, West Wing aides got angrier, taking their cues from a furious president, two outside allies and a senior staffer told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to have that ire turned their way. “It’s rare to see them this worked up about anything,” one of the outside allies told me.
That furor, in a way, underlines Harp’s importance in Trump’s world. She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. She has learned his cadence—and unorthodox capitalizations—well enough to draft social-media posts for him to approve. She trawls social media for material that the president can use in his feeds, including posts that have led to trouble, such as one depicting the Obamas as apes. Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.
Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does. Haberman now says that Harp is Trump’s “human binkie.” Tales of Harp’s commitment to Trump are legion: She rode in the trunk of an SUV to accompany him to court. She sprinted across a golf course in Scotland so he wouldn’t be out of her sight. She left notes for the president that documented her intense devotion. And so on.
Ingle, the White House spokesperson, perhaps unsurprisingly reacted strongly when I asked for a comment about the matter, sending me a statement that read: “The media should get back to reporting real news and stop regurgitating Trump-Deranged liberal talking points.” And there is no expectation that, despite the whirlwind week, Harp’s role will change; a senior official told me that Harp was “upset by the unfair attention” but would not allow it to deter her from her duties. But those in the West Wing are bracing for more scrutiny. And, it just so happens, Melania Trump chose today to make an appearance in public.
“Good afternoon, I heard you missed me,” she told a Rose Garden crowd gathered for a foster-care initiative. “Here I am.”
This fall’s updated COVID-19 vaccines should target the SARS-CoV-2 XFG variant, the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) said yesterday.
At the meeting, the first since FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, MD, MPH, resigned earlier this month, Natalie Thornburg, PhD, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) respiratory division, said XFG is a hybrid of two Omicron subvariants and has mutations linked to immune escape. As of April 11, the most recent date with available CDC variant data, XFG strains make up just over half of circulating variants in the United States.
FDA expected to give vaccine makers go-ahead
Vaccine makers Moderna and Sanofi discussed data on mice research suggesting that vaccines targeting XFG trigger higher antibody concentrations against circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains than Pfizer’s and Moderna’s current LP.8.1-targeting vaccines.
Earlier this month, the World Health Organization Advisory Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Composition recommended that vaccines target the LP.8.1 variant but said that XFG, NB.1.8.1, or other variants could also be used.
The recommendation now goes to the FDA, which is expected to allow vaccine manufacturers to start producing doses for the fall and winter respiratory illness season.
“With a son on the fire line, what I’ve learned about protecting the air we breathe”, by Matt Willis – published by Your Local Epidemiologist.
Ed note: This morning Seattle’s air is quite clean and free of the smoke from fires burning is British Columbia and Eastern Washington. Yes, the west winds are currently protecting us in Western Washington. But things can change as the winds do. This article gives us some practical steps we could take.
The text came on July 27: Made it to Bend. Heading to the fire line tomorrow.
My son just finished his wildland firefighting certification. He’s spent the summer working as an EMT and was sent to the fires burning in Oregon. He’s 22, and this was his first fire.
For years, I approached wildfire smoke as a health professional: caring for patients with smoke-related illness, writing advisories as a health officer, and researching its health impacts. But as a dad, all that boiled down to one urgent question: when the skies fill with smoke, how do we keep the air we breathe as clean as possible?
I went deep into air filtration. My son’s exposure may be more extreme, but the lessons are increasingly relevant for all of us. This is what I learned.
Yes, wildfires are increasing.
When I’m not writing with Katelyn for YLE, I work with climate scientists to model the health impacts of climate change. Our report will be out in December (stay tuned), but here’s a teaser—the increased burden of wildfires we’re feeling isn’t a one-summer fluke. Even the best-case scenarios show an upward trend in wildfire size, frequency, and intensity until we can slow global warming.
This doesn’t just matter for those of us with houses in dry areas. Wildfire smoke risk isn’t limited to “fire county.” Our most fire-prone states are in the West, and prevailing winds blow east. In late July, smoke from the fire my son was fighting in Oregon reached Florida.
Wildfire smoke plume, July 29, 2026. Source: NOAA
Long-term climate models indicate that we can expect increased smoke exposure in the coming years.
We need to adapt quickly. That starts with filtering air.
We breathe in about 2,000 gallons of air a day at rest—almost enough to fill a swimming pool. On smoky days, every gallon we take in carries potentially harmful compounds. The most damaging bits are smaller than 2.5 microns (a centimeter has 10,000 microns), called “PM 2.5”, which is much smaller than a human hair.
Source: EPA
So, any air filtration for wildfire smoke needs to have a very fine weave. On smoky days, scrubbing the particles out of that air before we breathe it can be surprisingly simple. Outside, it’s a mask. Inside, it’s your home’s air filtration system.
Outside masks are a neglected tool.
A well-fitted N95 mask is highly effective against wildfire smoke. A 2025 review of 33 studies found that N95 face masks removed up to 94% of PM2.5. The authors also concluded that “masks were relatively underutilized” in wildfire response.
Until recently, masks have not been prioritized in wildfire response. In fact, until last year, wildland firefighters weren’t allowed to wear anything beyond a bandana on the fire line. Somehow, despite mountains of evidence of the benefit, the U.S. Forest Service only authorized voluntary N95 use for firefighters in 2025. This is a massive occupational health failure that harmed generations of firefighters. It’s finally being corrected, just as my son joins the ranks.
That history also helps us understand the impact of repeated, unprotected– and preventable exposures. Career wildland firefighters have an estimated 8–43% increased risk for lung cancer and a 16–30% increased risk of cardiovascular death, depending on years of service and season intensity. A more recent study of almost 13,000 firefighters, looking back over 25 years, found that emphysema, pneumonia, asthma, and cardiovascular disease all increased with more fire line hours.
The wide range of effects isn’t surprising—the smallest inhaled particles damage lung tissue directly and enter the bloodstream, causing inflammation in sensitive blood vessels, including those in the heart and brain. These health impacts aren’t just during an event, but accumulate, fire after fire. This “dose-response” curve means higher exposure levels lead to worse health outcomes—and any measure that reduces exposure helps.
What this means for you: Wear a well-fitting N95 mask when you’re outside anytime it’s smoky. An air quality index (AQI) of 150 is a good trigger point for masking up. People in sensitive groups should consider masking at an AQI of 100 or higher. (Check AirNow’s Fire and Smoke Map for AQI in near real time during a fire.) I’m relieved that my son and his crew finally have access to the protection we’ve been promoting to the public for years.
“Go indoors” is only a start.
Here’s something I wish I’d been clearer about in twelve years of writing smoke advisories as a health officer: “move indoors” treats your house like it’s a sealed box, and it isn’t. AQI is generally measured outdoors, but being inside doesn’t automatically protect you.
Air moves through gaps, doors, windows, even walls. Researchers tracking indoor and outdoor air side by side during smoke events (the “infiltration ratio”) have found that, without indoor filtration, 60% of outdoor pollution can enter indoors within hours. If the AQI is 300 outside, it can approach 200 inside without filtration.
With proper filtration, the indoor/outdoor ratio can drop below 20%. Your indoor AQI can be below 50 on the same day the outdoor AQI is 300.
What this means for you: Clean indoor air.
Every home can have good air filtration through a few simple steps:
Know what kind of system you have. If your home has vents blowing heated or cooled air and a thermostat, you’ve got a central air system—it already has a filter, and that’s your main asset. If your house uses radiators, baseboard heat, or window units, you’ll probably need portable filters.
Use the right filter. For central air, look for the MERV rating, a 1 to 16+ scale for how fine a particle it catches. MERV 13 is recommended for PM 2.5 in smoke. Most systems come with MERV 8 as default, so you may need to upgrade. For portable purifiers, look at two factors—the filtration type, and how large an area it can purify. Look for HEPA-rated filters, which effectively capture 99% of wildfire smoke particles. For room size, CADR (clean air delivery rate) is the number of square feet of air it can filter per minute. As a rule of thumb, CADR should be close to your room’s square footage. (A 10 ft by 10 ft room is 100 square feet and would need a filter with a CADR of 80-100.)
During a smoke event, run it continuously, not just on “auto.” Filtration only works while it’s running. A central system on “auto” may only cycle for a few minutes an hour. During a smoke event, switch the setting to “on” so air keeps moving through the filter. Portable purifiers should run around the clock, too; shutting one off lets a room’s air quality slide back within an hour or two.
Pick one room and make it your clean-air refuge. If you’re using portable filters, you don’t need to filter the whole house. One well-sealed room, usually the bedroom, gives your household somewhere reliable to breathe easy and sleep.
Close the gaps before smoke season, not during it. Weatherstripping around doors and windows makes the house less leaky and improves the inside/outside ratio. For renters, removable weatherstripping, draft snakes, or even a towel under a leaky door can help.
A box fan can get you most of the way there. A box fan paired with a MERV-13 filter taped to the intake side costs a fraction of a purifier and effectively captures fine particles. It’s also fully portable, which helps if you’re renting or moving between rooms.
While we can take personal measures, we’re also seeing promising policies that will help bake some of these protections into more resilient communities. These include building codes that mandate MERV-13 filters, rebates for portable HEPA filters, and free mass mask distribution policies for smoky days.
Bottom line
My son is home now, safe and sound. He slept in a trailer near the fire, where AQI readings reached the 600s. I texted him daily, probably annoyingly, reminding him to wear his N95 mask outside and run the HEPA filter in his trailer. I knew what stood between him and hazardous air was technology that’s available to all of us. These are simple measures, but getting the basics right is more than half the battle in public health.
Most of us won’t ever fight a fire at its source. But we can decide, before the next smoky day arrives, how ready we’ll be to respond to it.
Dr. Matt Willis is the author of Your Local Epidemiologist in California. He’s served as a primary care physician, a CDC epidemiologist, a public health officer for Marin County, and a climate researcher. He lives in Marin with his family and their dogs, Teddy and Ramona.
