It always starts with a gentle head nod.

The bass and melody find my spirit, and the nod becomes more violent, expanding into a full upper-body sway. My neck bobs and rolls.

A woman sitting in a car a few parking spaces away sneaks a look at me through the corner of her eye. She smirks, then dips her head down to conceal her face.

She’s convinced I’m gay. I’m okay with that.

By track three, my face has aged. My brow is furrowed, and my mouth is poked out like a bratty, unsatisfied adolescent. And by the end of “Whisper My Name,” I’m suddenly rooting for Drake.

A soft ad-lib repeating, “Counted me out,” somehow transforms the biggest rapper of this generation into an underdog.

By track fourteen, “Make Them Remember,” I’m completely invested. I’m barely blinking, my mind drifting through those cumulus clouds Drake raps about. I even find myself frustrated with my favorite athlete, LeBron James, for his infidelity to his friendship with Drake:

“I shouldn’t be shocked to see you in that arena, ’cause you always made your career off of switchin’ teams up.”

“Yeah, get that n**a, Drake!” my mind roars.

By now, the sun has set over the lake, and the weekend afternoon shades into dusk. I step out of my SUV to stretch my limbs and throw a few shadow punches in the air, in quiet solidarity with Drake.

It’s actually been two months since Iceman dropped. I’ve listened to it a handful of times, but this was the day I was adamant about sifting through all of it.

Not just the production or the lyrics.

But everything.

It all moved so fast.

The beef, the diss tracks, the commentary, the zealous fans who almost ruined a legendary moment in hip-hop, the Super Bowl, the lawsuit.

True to who I am, I was determined to slow the whole world down and process this at my own pace without outside interference or jaded internet noise.

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There are certain things you expect to come with a Midwestern summer.

Beaches, baseball, cookouts. Sure.

Muscles out, yams out, toes out. Why not.

Yesterday morning, I stepped outside expecting another humid July day. Instead, the sky was washed in a strange peach-colored haze, and a thin veil of static dusted the morning horizon.

… It smelled like ashtray.

It didn’t register at first. It was just an unmistakable, misplaced wrongness in the air.

Then the data caught up with my senses. The smoke had traveled more than 800 miles.

I grew up in Gary. I’ve spent the last decade living in Northwest Indiana and Chicago. I’ve experienced blistering heat waves, lake-effect snowstorms, polar vortices, flooding, tornado sirens, and enough Midwestern weather mood swings to know that summer can be unpredictable.

But this? This didn’t exist. At least, not like this.

I wasn’t planning to write about Canadian wildfires. I was deep into reporting another climate-related essay. But when youth baseball games started getting canceled, park programs shut down, outdoor concerts postponed, and public health officials ordered people to stay indoors because the air itself had become dangerous to breathe, I needed to know more.

Because somewhere along the way, smelling smoke from another country stopped being an oddity and quietly became part of summer.

And I don’t remember anyone telling us.

Chicago summers have always felt almost mythical. “Summertime Chi” is the stuff of legend.

After surviving months of gray skies and bitter cold, the city erupts into something entirely different. Early joggers claim the lakefront. Boats crowd Lake Michigan. The Riverwalk pulses late into the evening. Distinct neighborhoods celebrate their own flavor. Rooftops overflow. Sunlight ricochets off glass towers.

It may be America’s greatest summer city.

Now there are days when the skyline is cloaked behind smoke drifting in from thousands of fires burning across Canada.

I wanted to know how we got here.

The short version is this: record heat, prolonged drought, and repeated lightning strikes have transformed huge sections of Canadian forests into tinderboxes. Ontario and Quebec have experienced unusually dry conditions, allowing hundreds of wildfires to ignite and spread. When weather patterns shift, upper-level winds carry enormous plumes of smoke directly into the American Midwest.

That’s how the Manhattan skyline disappears into an apocalyptic orange fog.

That’s how Chicago has repeatedly found itself with the worst air quality in the world.

That’s how millions of Americans now check air quality forecasts before deciding whether it’s safe to take their children outside.

So I started asking a simple question: When did all this start?

The answer surprised me.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires has drifted into the United States for generations. There are documented cases dating back to the 1950s. But for decades, the smoke was usually too light and too infrequent to become a widespread public health crisis.

Then I came across the summer of 2023.

If you lived in Chicago, you probably remember the headlines.

CBS News Chicago put it bluntly: “Chicago has the worst air quality in the world due to Canadian wildfire smoke.”

This wasn’t a problem happening somewhere else. More than 350 million people across North America were exposed to hazardous wildfire smoke. Baseball games were canceled. Outdoor events were postponed. Schools kept children inside for recess. The smoke had become impossible to ignore.

But what caught my attention wasn’t just the headlines. It was the science.

A Columbia Climate School analysis of the research found that the summer of 2023 was Canada’s most significant wildfire and smoke season on record. Looking across roughly 70 years of data, researchers also found evidence that it was part of a longer-term shift toward smokier skies across North America.

They knew 2023 was not an exception. It was an introduction. The smoke has returned every summer since.

Looking back, you can see the story unfolding.

In 1950, smoke from Canadian wildfires spread so widely that some Americans feared a nuclear attack.

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By the time Jaylen Brown arrived in Philadelphia following his blockbuster trade from the Boston Celtics this week, the whispers had already beaten him there.

They were not really about the mechanics of the trade, or the future of the Celtics, or how Brown will perform on the court. They were about the man himself. His temperament. His ego. His intelligence. His ability, or supposed inability, to move through an organization without making the powerful uncomfortable.

The accusation, as it often does now, arrived without a face.

A source said. An executive believed. Someone around the league felt.

None of them signed their names.

I have spent enough time in newsrooms to understand the value of anonymity. When I was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, granting a source anonymity wasn’t treated as a casual favor. It was something closer to a burden. You did not grant it because a source wanted to speak freely. You granted it because the truth might otherwise stay buried.

The source risking a job to expose corruption. The employee speaking against a corporation. The person inside a public agency describing misconduct that could never be proven from the outside. In those cases, anonymity served a purpose larger than the source’s comfort. It protected someone with less power from someone with more.

That was the bargain. We concealed one name so the public could learn a greater truth.

What we are watching now in sports media is something different, and far uglier. Anonymous sourcing is no longer used primarily to protect people speaking truth up the hierarchy. Increasingly, it protects people speaking down it.

Front-office executives, scouts, agents, and league personnel can anonymously define a player’s character, while the player has to answer for the damage in public. The source remains hidden. The accusation travels. The reputation absorbs the bruise.

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It started with two grown men in matching outfits arguing like a married couple.

One moment they were threatening to stop speaking to each other forever. The next they were laughing so hard neither could finish a sentence.

Somehow, a once-prodigious boxing champion named Adrien Broner and a young internet streamer named DeenTheGreat had become one of the internet’s most hypnotic duos. And like thousands of other people, I got hooked.

Amid the internet’s oversaturated, banal ecosystem emerged this unlikely bromance. Chaotic. Unscripted. A Three Stooges-meets-Step Brothers dynamic that felt tailor-made for the algorithm.

It felt good to watch a fallen champion sidestep the has-been doldrums in real-time, flashing that infectious charisma that originally made him a superstar.

Because before the algorithm, boxing fans knew exactly who AB was becoming.

Back in April 2012, a 22-year-young Broner had the sports world by the throat. Fresh off a fourth-round knockout that pushed his record to 23-0, Broner stood in the ring and delivered one of the wittiest impromptu post-fight answers I’ve ever heard.

“Listen Man, They call me The Problem. But you could call me the Can Man because anybody can get it. Africans! Americans! Dominicans! Mexicans! Anybody can get it!”

He was primed to be the next megastar. Young, talented, flashy, with quick hands and an even quicker tongue. Make no mistake, he went on to have an ultra-successful career by any metric, winning multiple world championships across several weight classes.

What we thought was a rising star was, instead, a shooting star. A brilliant flare across the sky, dazzling even as it surrendered to gravity and burned toward Earth.

The flameout was slow, public, and mostly self-inflicted. He wanted to flash the cash like Floyd, but lacked the legendary work ethic, packing on heavy pounds between training camps, getting mixed up in dangerous street situations, and landing in jail cells.

So when Broner unexpectedly re-emerged on my feeds with a prominent pot belly and an internet streamer at his side, it brought an undeniable sense of joy.

But the longer I watched, the harder it became to laugh.

The clips stopped feeling like harmless entertainment.

The drinks stopped looking recreational.

The nightlife stopped looking celebratory.

Little by little, the streams gave way to something darker. Something more sinister.

Watching Broner receive his first meaningful streaming check was one of the genuinely heartwarming moments of this digital second act. He smiled. He embraced Deen. But the deeper I sank into the footage, the more I realized the money hadn’t changed Broner. It simply amplified who he already was.

In one clip, while speaking to the mother of one of his children, Broner grinned and said, “The numbers in my account has changed. You can’t talk to me a certain way. You got to talk to me nice.”

That wasn’t just trash talk. It sounded like a worldview.

His bank account didn’t represent wealth. It represented worth.

Once you notice that, the gambling starts looking different too. Random $1,000 bets. Dice games. Buying rounds of drinks for strangers. Flashing cash. It felt less like celebration and more like someone constantly trying to prove—to everyone else and maybe even to himself—that he was still Adrien Broner.

Then came his behavior toward women.

At first, it was easily dismissed as late-night nightclub bravado. But as the sun went down, the streams routinely devolved into something entirely predatory—a former world champion aggressively prowling in a desperate search for sex. The illusion of the happy-go-lucky champion evaporated, replaced by a dark, volatile entitlement that turned petulant the moment a boundary is set.

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See, back then, I thought the American flag was majestic.

The Fourth of July helped.

It was a day where getting fresh was mandatory. Dress to impress. Rocking some combination of red, white and blue: shoestrings, wristbands, oversized T-shirts, or even an American flag durag.

Then, a parade. Block parties. All while inhaling that ubiquitous smell of the grill.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, explosions echoed and soaring rockets colored the sky. Residual smoke lured out those wretched mosquitoes. But us kids persevered through the night.

All in the name of America.

I’d gingerly insert the stick of bottle rocket into an empty Budweiser bottle. My skin slick from either sweat or a fourth round of Off spray.

Yet, we persevered.

It was late.

I reached my hand in the red cooler, which is now mostly water with speckled ice cubes, and grabbed a cola.

My mother appeared out of nowhere.

“Tay, you’ve had enough pops. Get out that cooler.”

I mumbled my frustrations–in my head, of course. I’m no fool. Then I scurried back to the fun.

All in the name of America.

Back then, the flag was simple. Looking back, I’m struck by how uncomplicated America felt.

As I got older, the flag didn’t change. I did.

It was the late ‘90s, the early 2000s, and we were told we were living in a post-racial society. Sure, there was slavery.

But that was ancient history.

Jim Crow, segregation, dogs, and fire hoses? That was in Black-and-white, thirty years backward. This was my forward.

This was an America that made mistakes but fixed them. Or so I thought. We were a melting pot.

It didn’t matter if our ancestors arrived as settlers from England or were shipped in from Africa. We were all here now, building this thing together. Right?

At least, that’s how simple it felt to me then.

Then came 9/11.

We watched a terrorist attack break the heart of the country. And like millions of Americans, we rallied around the flag. We leaned into it because it felt like a shield.

The shield didn’t break all at once. It cracked in a dorm lounge at Purdue University.

I was working as a counselor for a camp of gifted students. Late one night, while the campers slept, a group of us sat in the quiet room trying to unwind. Then the radio delivered the verdict.

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