Welcome to the July issue of The Highlight

For the past three summers, Americans — desperate to escape pandemic quarantines and still hampered by limited international travel — have spent their summers on the road. The result has led to many more drivers on national highways, more exploration of our own backyard, and more connection to geography.

Our summer outings, as well as geography and our connection to it, proved to be the loose inspiration for this month’s issue of The Highlight. Our cover story points to a very specific Florida road, US-19, which has been a local source of consternation for years because of the danger it poses to motorists, and pedestrians in particular. Meanwhile, the evidence is piling up nationally that America is going through a fateful pedestrian crisis which has reached a disturbing new high in the past two years. cafemadrid senior correspondent Marin Cogan visited US-19 to understand how a powerful combination of the pandemic, suburban infrastructure, larger SUVs and other systemic forces could contribute to the rapidly rising number of pedestrian deaths – in Florida and in the US.

The West, and the lore surrounding it, inspired photographer Gabriela Hasbun, who discovered an astonishingly modern, inclusive black cowboy culture that challenges the image of the white during a chance visit to the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo stop in California in 2007. cowboy perpetuated by old westerns. (In fact, black cowboys are estimated to make up a quarter of all cowboys.) Hasbun’s photographs, spanning more than a decade, are helping to rewrite our understanding of the West, who it belonged to, and what rodeo culture is like today.

Writer Addison Del Mastro has been writing about urban and suburban change for years; cafemadrid instructed him to think about what’s happening in the suburbs right now, as new workers remotely inhabit the space around them rather than commute, and as more millennials turn to the burbs to push their housing dollars a little further. causing prices around the world to rise. nation. He believes the change brought about by newcomers could indicate a major shift in the whole definition of suburban life, one that we might have seen coming.

Most of the climate solutions we hear about are aimed at property owners, who are free to make all kinds of changes to their land and buildings. But tenants are much more limited – they depend on their landlords to make structural changes that can reduce their climate impact. There are a few things tenants can do, writes Neel Dhanesha.

We also look at country identifiers: what are they and why are they everywhere from movie credits to bar menus? And finally, it’s not just you – the world around us is noisier than ever, and that’s having an effect on your attention span and your life.