--- title: "Future Tense" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/33/futures" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/33/futures" issue: 33 section: "futures" description: "Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today" authors: ["Yuki Tanabe","David Kern"] published: 2026-05-25 updated: 2026-05-20 articles: 10 --- # The Docket > The Docket is a weekly publication about the decisions climate change is already putting in front of Americans: whether to buy the generator, whether the flood insurance is enough, whether to stay in the city you love. It follows the people making those choices now. It treats climate anxiety as a reasonable response to real conditions. It won't tell you what to do, but it shows the tradeoffs clearly. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 33 — Future Tense Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today ### The Favorite Season - [My Favorite Season]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-05-19 · Format: The Favorite Season A seventh-grader in Houston writes about the few weeks each year when she can walk outside without checking anything first. ### The Uncle's Digressions - [The Hunt]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-05-19 · Format: The Uncle's Digressions A boy follows his uncle through Montana timber that used to be too thick to see through. The elk are higher than they should be. The creek runs thinner than it did. His uncle keeps stopping to describe what used to be here, and the boy listens carefully, patient with lessons that never quite match the ground. ### Common Sense Criteria - [Forty-Three Columns and One Question She Won't Answer]() — Published 2026-05-19 *Val Okafor-Peña is not a real person. She is a fictional character drawn from documented patterns in how South Florida teenagers are navigating the college application process in 2026. Her spreadsheet, however, is entirely plausible, and several versions of it almost certainly exist on laptops across Miami-Dade County right now.* ### Show and Tell - [Show and Tell]() — Published 2026-05-19 Lily goes third, after the geode and the pinecone. She holds it up with both hands. White, branching, light as chalk. ### Further Reading - **The Lifetime They Were Born Into** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-19 A child born in 2020 will live through roughly seven times more extreme heat events than her grandparents did. Scientific American traces the full-lifetime projections, and the numbers land differently when you realize these kids won't experience the shift as loss. For them, this is just the shape of a life. - **The Calendar Keeps Moving** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-19 Districts across the South and Southwest are pushing start dates later, shortening recesses, canceling outdoor PE. The Hechinger Report documents how school calendars now bend around heat the way they once bent around snow. For the kids inside those buildings, August indoors is just what school feels like. - **What Smoke Does to Small Lungs** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-19 Children's Hospital Colorado lays out the pediatric reality of wildfire smoke: smaller airways, faster breathing rates, lungs still building the tissue they'll carry for decades. Smoke season is now a recurring line item in raising a healthy kid in the Mountain West. The children checking AQI apps before recess don't think of it as a crisis. They think of it as Tuesday. - **A Word for the Grief That Stays Home** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-19 Solastalgia names the distress of watching your home environment degrade around you while you remain in it. Medscape explores the term's growing clinical relevance, and reading it surfaces a quiet question at the center of this section: the word requires a before, a remembered version of home that no longer matches. Their children may never need it. - **The Generation That Can Do the Math** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-19 One in five young Americans reports hesitating about having children because of climate change. Among those who've survived severe weather events, it's closer to one in three. Time covers the survey data, but the statistic that lingers is simpler: these are people young enough to be the children in our fiction, already deciding what kind of future they're willing to pass on. - **Why Fiction Goes Where Data Cannot** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-19 Harvard Magazine profiles the growing field of climate fiction and the scholars who study it, making a case we'd put more bluntly: projections tell you what's coming, but only a story can put you inside the body that lives there. That's the wager of this section every week. The piece is worth reading as a companion to whatever you just felt. ## Other sections in Issue 33 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Climate Past]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()