Elizabeth Weil

“A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.”

Why is California burning? “We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years.

“How the first Williams sister changed the course of women’s tennis.”

“Max Harris did chores and collected rent at the artists’ warehouse where he lived. Now he faces trial for the deaths at a concert there — including some of his close friends.”

For The California Sunday‘s “Teens Issue,” Elizabeth Weil writes about raising a teenage daughter. The piece is annotated by her 15-year-old daughter, Hannah W. Duane.

Meet the schemers, investors, and dreamers who were bewitched by a big green rock that might not actually be worth anything.

After a father drops his three-month-old son, a family tragedy becomes a criminal case that raises questions about controversial nature of shaken baby syndrome.

In situations where girls are showing signs of puberty as early as age 6, should parents fight it with drug treatments, or figure out ways for the child and parents to understand and accept what is happening?

“‘I would have a long conversation with her family, show them all the data,’ Greenspan continues. Once she has gone through what she calls ‘the proc­ess of normalizing’ — a process intended to replace anxiety with statistics — she has rarely had a family continue to insist on puberty-arresting drugs. Indeed, most parents learn to cope with the changes and help their daughters adjust too. One mother described for me buying a drawer full of football shirts, at her third-grade daughter’s request, to hide her maturing body. Another reminded her daughter that it’s O.K. to act her age. ‘It’s like when you have a really big toddler and people expect the kid to talk in full sentences. People look at my daughter and say, “Look at those cheekbones!” We have to remind her: “You may look 12, but you’re 9. It’s O.K. to lose your cool and stomp your feet.” ‘ “

I have a pretty good marriage. It could be better. There are things about my husband that drive me crazy. Last spring he cut apart a frozen pig’s head with his compound miter saw in our basement. He needed the head to fit into a pot so that he could make pork stock. I’m no saint of a spouse, either.