Hello and welcome to Wednesday, July 1, 2026. The year just flipped past its halfway point. Whatever you meant to accomplish by now, the clock is running.
My magic calendar says it’s Canada Day, International Joke Day, National Postal Worker Day, and ZIP Code Day. So tip your mail carrier, tell them a joke, wish our neighbors to the north a happy birthday, and try to remember your ZIP code — five digits, no excuses. Or nine, if you’re really good.
Today in History
1690: William III defeats James II in the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland and settles, for the moment, who rules Britain. Ireland files that one away for several hundred years.
1858: Charles Darwin presents his theory of evolution to the Linnean Society in London. The room receives it politely. The world, eventually, does not.
1863: The Battle of Gettysburg begins in Pennsylvania. Three days and more than 50,000 casualties later, it becomes the turning point of the Civil War. Day one goes to the Confederates. Days two and three do not.
1867: The British North America Act takes effect, uniting Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into the Dominion of Canada. July 1 becomes Canada Day. Happy birthday to our neighbors.
1898: Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charge up San Juan Heights in Cuba.
1903: The first Tour de France gets underway — roughly 1,500 miles, 20 days, one obsessive idea. Still going, 123 years later.
1916: The Battle of the Somme opens on the Western Front. Nearly 20,000 British soldiers die on the first day alone — the bloodiest single day in British military history. The battle runs until November. Total casualties exceed one million.
1963: The U.S. Post Office introduces ZIP codes to speed mail sorting. Today is ZIP Code Day. The mail got faster. Whether the Post Office itself got faster remains a matter of spirited debate.
1979: Sony puts the Walkman on sale in Japan. Portable personal audio now exists in practice, on belts and in jacket pockets, with foam headphones and a cassette player. Nothing is quite the same.
1991: The Warsaw Pact is formally dissolved in Prague. Eight nations, founded in 1955 to counter NATO, simply stop being a military alliance. The Cold War’s architecture keeps coming down, piece by piece.
2002: The International Criminal Court comes into existence — the first permanent international tribunal empowered to try individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. How effective it has been is left as an exercise for the reader.
Birthdays today include: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, mathematician and philosopher, co-inventor of calculus (Newton would dispute this); Olivia de Havilland, actress, two-time Oscar winner, (Gone with the Wind); Carl Lewis, sprinter and long jumper, nine Olympic gold medals; Debbie Harry, singer, (Blondie); Dan Aykroyd, actor and comedian, (Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers); Pamela Anderson, actress (BayWatch) and model; and Liv Tyler, actress (The Lord of the Rings). Also, I was remiss yesterday in not mentioning that it was the birthday of Doctor Thomas Sowell.
If today’s your day as well, hope it’s a great one.
And for those whose memories I didn’t tickle with that title, let me introduce you to The Jamies, from 1958. Warning: it’s a bit of an earworm.
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So, it being the start of July, it’s hot. Hot enough that you can actually cook breakfast on the sidewalk. Yeah, I know — it wouldn’t say much for your sanitary cooking surfaces. But now that I have your attention, I’ll say that I find myself amused by so many people hitting the panic button over July 1 being hot in the northern latitudes.
Yes, the kind of heat we’re dealing with for the next few days can be a problem, particularly for folks with health issues. But look, July 1 is, by definition, the middle of summer in the Northern Hemisphere — it is supposed to be hot, kids. The sun is doing exactly what the sun does in July in these latitudes. This is not a new development.
The annual ritual of meteorologists and social media users treating a heat wave in July as though it were a heat wave in November has become its own reliable seasonal entertainment. “Dangerous heat grips the region” — yes, it’s called summer. It arrives every year, on roughly the same schedule, and has done so for the entirety of recorded human history, and even beyond that.
I grant there’s a reasonable conversation to be had about whether summers are getting hotter over time — that’s a legitimate climate data question. But when the answers come back in fractions of a degree, it’s hard to take it seriously. But that’s a different conversation from the one that actually happens every July, which is mostly people on television standing in parking lots to demonstrate that asphalt gets hot in direct sunlight. They’re trying to keep their paychecks up.
As I wrote at the end of May regarding the end of CBS Radio News, “Whatever you print those pages on — paper, pixels, photons, audio waves — the business model doesn’t change. Attract ears and eyeballs. Sell those consumers to advertisers. Keep the lights on. That’s the entire operation.”
All this knuckle-biting over temperatures in the 90s from our mainstream media is exactly what it looks like: theater. It’s the same genre as hurricane coverage, and it runs on the same script. The great James Gregory nailed it years ago — there has never, in the entire history of the world, been a surprise hurricane. Zero. Not one. And yet every single time, cable news treats landfall like a plot twist nobody saw coming. Gregory also pointed out that no matter how much lead time the warnings give, some people will still strap on a poncho and insist they’re riding it out — which, rather than prompting any self-reflection from the networks, just gets the adrenaline dial cranked up another notch. Can’t let a good crisis go to waste, even a weather one. Summer has never been a surprise, either.
Normally, weather forecasting would be the easiest job on the planet. Say there’s a 50% chance of rain and, no matter what actually happens, congratulations — you’re a 100% accurate forecaster. Heads I win, tails I also win. It’s the one profession where you can be wrong exactly never.
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In my own hometown of Rochester, N.Y., we had several summers where the high temps went to 100 degrees. New York City, too. In the summer of 1980, we saw similar temps. And again in 1983. The all-time hottest in Rochester was 102 degrees, on July 10, 1936. Again, these are not conditions we’ve never seen before.
But let’s be honest with ourselves about the other half of this: News outlets have a real incentive to staple every heat wave to the climate-change narrative, whether the staple fits or not. That’s scientifically defensible in the aggregate — attribution studies exist, nobody’s disputing that — but it gets asserted with a lot more certainty per event than the underlying science actually supports. “This exact heat wave is climate change” is a much better headline than “climate change makes events like this somewhat more probable in aggregate,” even though only one of those is what the researchers actually said. But at least it draws ears and eyeballs. It keeps the lights on at the TV stations.
So, relax. Take the normal summertime precautions, but don’t take the hype too seriously. It’s summer, after all.
Thought of the day: Sarcasm: the art of telling the truth in a way that makes you chuckle instead of cringe.
VIP members, you know the bit. Make those counters spin. It helps.
Take it easy today. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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