how baseball changed my life essay

Pen to Paper with Andrew Parks

Making complex simple

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” – Jim Bouton 

With my playing career officially complete, I wanted to look back and share my experiences in baseball and how they’ve impacted who I am today and who I want to become. I always dreamed at a young age that I wanted to play collegiate baseball, but I never could have imagined where it would have taken me many years later. My hope is that my story can urge you to follow your dreams on the diamond and relentlessly work to make them a reality.

Growing up, baseball was always something I loved to do. Going to practice was my favorite time of the day. I loved hanging out with some of my best friends, seeing my skills progress, and competing in games. I spent my weekends practicing at the park and in the backyard with my dad and brother. If I learned anything from those years, I learned how to show up and work hard – even though it never really felt like hard work because I loved to do it.

I got my first reality dose of baseball my freshman year of high school when I was cut from the junior varsity baseball team. I was crushed as I went to all the workouts, hitting sessions, and did everything I could to give myself the best chance to make the team. It would be the first spring where I wasn’t able to play with my friends as they instead were all playing on the junior varsity team. I felt like I was beside myself. I knew I wanted to play college baseball, but I had no idea how I could possibly make it happen.

That’s when I found Carmen. That spring, my dad told me to hop in the car and we’d drive to check out this place called Carmen Fusco Pro Baseball Academy. I was uncomfortable and hesitant at first as I had some previous private instruction going into my freshman year. When we learned that we could train year round and get professional level instruction, we took the chance and spent that year training with Carmen and his staff.

Throughout my first few sessions, I realized I had a long way to go. I had never trained before like the way they did at Carmen’s. I found out that some stuff I had heard from coaches growing up wasn’t accurate – which I had a tough time swallowing. I had zero confidence in my abilities and I had no idea where to find confidence. I tried my best with what I had most days, but early on it was a struggle to put it together. I was an introvert in a completely different facility with people and faces I had never seen before. I didn’t say much of anything to anyone.  

Along with training, I decided to join a team Carmen was putting together for the summer. At these practices, I got my first glimpse of what Carmen was on a baseball field. He was tough, demanding, and taught things I had never even heard of before. I felt like a fish out of water trying to keep up with the older and more polished players. I couldn’t believe what I had gotten myself into, but there was no going back at this point. If I wanted to play college baseball, I knew Carmen was going to be able to get me there.

Over time, I started to figure some things out. The ball started coming off my bat a little bit better. I was becoming more comfortable and making friends at our team practices. I was starting to build some confidence in my abilities with some more consistent training. I realized how important confidence actually was when it came to baseball. I didn’t feel completely out of my comfort zone anymore and I was starting to believe I was a decent player. It was far from a finished product, but it was a much-needed glimmer of hope in my baseball career. The next spring, I ended up making the junior varsity team as a sophomore and starting at shortstop on opening day. It is one of the proudest moments of my baseball career to this day.

I continued to work and train over the next year trying to take the next step to prepare myself to play collegiately. I started to lift weights seriously in the fall and winter of my junior year with my pitching coach Corey Thurman. We would go twice a week at 6 a.m. before school started, sometimes three times. While I had dabbled with lifting before in the past, my time with Corey was the first time I really got after it and started to push around some weight with a structured plan. I started to eat more and put some weight onto my 140-pound frame. I felt my training was paying off and I was starting to look at colleges – and then it all seemed to all fall apart when I was cut from the varsity team my junior year.

While getting cut my freshman year stung, this one hurt really bad. I thought I had done all the right things and prepared myself as best as I could, but now it felt like I was back to square one again with no hopes of playing college baseball. Like my freshman year, all of my friends would be playing baseball this spring and I would be searching for answers yet again – and this time I was running out of time.

If I didn’t have the support system that I had at the time, I’m not sure if I would have kept playing. I was embarrassed, humiliated, and would have to spend yet another spring watching my friends from the stands. However, I knew I couldn’t let everyone down that had helped me get to that point. I had come too far to throw everything away and let other people dictate my dreams. When I found out that I had been cut from the varsity team, I was in the gym the next morning at 6 a.m. with Corey. It was time to get back to work.

Over the next year, I trained harder than I ever had before. I was hitting in Carmen’s and taking ground balls all summer long at his baseball camps. I was hitting the weights with Corey and getting my arm in shape for games. Everything I did that year had two end goals in mind – make the varsity team next spring and find a college to play at next year. There were good days, bad days, and plenty of days where I didn’t feel like showing up and putting in work. Whenever I didn’t feel like doing what I needed to do, I remembered how bad it felt to be on the outside looking in last spring. That was all I needed to keep pushing forward.

That winter, I was able to take one of those monkeys off of my back when I decided to attend Medaille College in the fall. I loved the opportunity it presented in the Buffalo area and it felt like a place I could really flourish at. I was very excited for the road ahead, but I knew I had one more obstacle to tackle – and it scared me.

When tryouts came around, I knew I was as prepared as I was going to be. It’s difficult preparing for a tryout because you want to be at your very best each day, but sometimes you’re a little off here or there. Every time you slip up makes you worry about what the coaches are thinking and if that could be the straw that gets you cut again. It can be a nerve-wracking process and it’s something that I had to learn how to deal with the hard way. If I was going to get my chance at varsity, I was going to have to face my fears and show the coaches I could play.

Making the varsity team that spring is something that I’m still proud of to this day. Being able to finish out my high school career on the diamond with some of my best friends is something I’ll never forget. The year had its ups and downs, but it proved to me that I could face and conquer my fears if I put my head down, worked hard, and never gave up. It was an experience that would help prepare me for the next four years of my life. While it didn’t play out the way I had hoped going into high school, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

My freshman year of college opened me up to what it’s like to play Division III baseball. While it’s not DII or DI, I quickly learned that these guys could play. If I wanted to compete with them, I had to take my training to a completely different level. I hadn’t earned the right to play with those guys my freshman year. Showing up, going through the same stuff, and not practicing the mindset on a daily basis prevented me from competing with confidence. The game speeds up big time when you get to college and I simply wasn’t ready to handle it.

The summer going into my sophomore year is when I started to take ownership of my training. I started working at Carmen’s part-time as a coach. After seeing what he did to me as a high school player, I wanted to get into it myself and do the same for others. It helped spark a curiosity for learning that I still carry to this day. On the field, I began to own the mindset as a player and practice it in games. I became obsessed with learning about great players and coaches and what separated them from the rest. Through this, I realized that there was so much that I had left on the table throughout high school. Going forward, I would exhaust every resource out there and use them to become the best player and coach I could possibly be. My winters would no longer be spent going through monotonous workouts and playing video games. They would be spent learning, growing, and dedicating myself to a training process that would get the most out of myself physically and mentally on the diamond.

I felt better and more confident than I ever had before going into my sophomore year of college. I completely changed how I trained and became a student of the game absorbing as much as I could. I started off the year well and earned my first career collegiate start, a game in which I wish I would have thrown a little better. I earned another start but ended up performing horribly and did not see the mound for the rest of the season. I was devastated as I had worked so hard to create opportunities for myself that season but in the end, I could not capitalize on them.

This was a tough point in my career because I knew I was better than what I was showing on the field. It sends you into a spiral of negative thinking causing you to doubt and question your abilities. The love of the game is sucked out of you and you suffer as a player and a teammate. Instead of being supportive and embracing the grind, you selfishly try to find ways where you can earn opportunities again. After changing the way I trained and taking my game to the next level, I had nothing but failed opportunities to show for it.

I ended up getting buried under the depth chart going into my junior year and had lost a lot of confidence in my game. While I continued to learn and grow, I couldn’t seem to put it together on the mound as I had in the past. After months of compensating and adjusting, I began to figure some things out again and took advantage of a few opportunities early on in the season.

My first real opportunity since my last start sophomore year came on the road against a nationally ranked team in LaRoche College. With much of our pitching depleted, I was given a start in the second half of our doubleheader against LaRoche. Using what I had learned over the course of the last two years, I was able to battle through six innings of work leaving the game with an opportunity to get the win. While we could not finish off the game, it was a breakthrough moment in my career.  It taught me the importance of competing with confidence, overcoming adversity, and not letting previous performances dictate my future appearances. After 2.5 years of trial, error, hard work, and heartbreaks, I finally believed I could compete and win at this level.

While the rest of our season did not finish as we would have liked, I took my new sense of confidence into the summer and ended up winning pitcher of the year for the York Central League. I took this into my senior year ready to give it one more run on the baseball field. I picked up hitting again for the first time since my senior year of high school, but my first few at-bats of the season reminded me how hitting isn’t as easy as it seems sometimes. My first six at-bats of the season all ended in strikeouts – sending me into a negative spiral of fear and doubt. Facing the same demons I once used to battle as a young hitter growing up, I had to trick myself into being a good hitter again. Instead of believing the negativity my mind was feeding me, I picked myself up and in my seventh at-bat delivered the game-winning RBI in extra innings for our team’s third win of the season.

The rest of my senior season didn’t end as well as we had hoped. While it’s easy to sit back and point fingers, we just didn’t get the job done and it was a disappointing feeling to know we couldn’t make playoffs for the fourth consecutive season. As a senior, you want to go out in a way that really culminates the hard work that you’ve put in over four years as a collegiate baseball player. It was tough to swallow this at times but to me, it wasn’t a fair representation of our senior class and what we brought to the table. Between all six of us, we made incredible contributions to the baseball program, our school, and the Medaille community as a whole. It makes me proud when other people look at us and say the next class coming through has some big shoes to fill.

Playing college baseball has easily been the best decision I have ever made in my life. It taught me how to work hard, dominate the classroom, become a student of the game, make a positive impact on others, and ultimately become a mentor to those who once stood in my shoes. It helped me build lifelong friendships, create unforgettable memories, and drive an incredible experience that I would have never had a chance to live out if it weren’t for baseball. It taught me the pain of failure and how to courageously face your fears. Nothing has taught me more about life than baseball – and quite honestly, I don’t think there’s anything out there that teaches you more about life than baseball. For all the hardships, heartbreaks, and failures I’ve experienced playing, those moments of success where you feel on top of the world make it all worth it. The difference between those who dream about them and those who make them happen is the work that you put in. Nothing in this world can replace hard work.  

Going forward, I couldn’t be more excited to start my journey as a coach and mentor to those who aspire to get the most out of their abilities through the game of baseball. You don’t have to play in high school, college, or any kind of level to determine whether or not you had a successful baseball career. If you can look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and know you gave it your very all to become the best player you could possibly be, you were a success. I know there are people out there like I once was who have no confidence, no direction, and no hope when it comes to their dreams on the diamond. You are not alone. If I could do it, you can do it – and I can help you.

I look forward to the challenges ahead as a coach. I know for sure that my playing days have prepared me for whatever comes my way in the future and I embrace it. Coaches like Carmen and Corey have forever changed my life and are the reason why I want to do the same for others. Being a coach and a mentor to young men and women is a privilege. I won’t take a single day for granted.  

Thanks for taking the time to read my story. It’s not glamorous but it’s something I’m proud of and it’s the reason why I want to turn a children’s game into a career. I’ve been given a wonderful opportunity to positively impact individuals through the game of baseball. It would be my greatest failure in life if I did not take advantage of this.

• Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System

A times investigation found climate change may now be a concern for every homeowner in the country..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today, my colleague, Christopher Flavelle, on a “Times” investigation into one of the least known and most consequential effects of climate change — insurance — and why it may now be a concern for every homeowner in the country.

It’s Wednesday, May 15.

So, Chris, you and I talked a while ago about how climate change was really wreaking havoc in the insurance market in Florida. You’ve just done an investigation that takes a look into the insurance markets more broadly and more deeply. Tell us about it.

Yeah, so I cover climate change, in particular the way climate shocks affect different parts of American life. And insurance has become a really big part of that coverage. And Florida is a great example. As hurricanes have gotten worse and more frequent, insurers are paying out more and more money to rebuild people’s homes. And that’s driving up insurance costs and ultimately driving up the cost of owning a home in Florida.

So we’re already seeing that climate impact on the housing market in Florida. My colleagues and I started to think, well, could it be that that kind of disruption is also happening in other states, not just in the obvious coastal states but maybe even through the middle of the US? So we set out to find out just how much it is happening, how much that Florida turmoil has, in fact, become really a contagion that is spreading across the country.

So how did you go about reporting this? I mean, where did you start?

All we knew at the start of this was that there was reason to think this might be a problem. If you just look at how the federal government tracks disasters around the country, there’s been a big increase almost every year in the number and severity of all kinds of disasters around the country. So we thought, OK, it’s worth trying to find out, what does that mean for insurers?

The problem is getting data on the insurance industry is actually really hard. There’s no federal regulation. There’s no government agency you can go to that holds this data. If you talk to the insurers directly, they tend to be a little reluctant to share information about what they’re going through. So we weren’t sure where to go until, finally, we realized the best people to ask are the people whose job it is to gauge the financial health of insurance companies.

Those are rating agencies. In particular, there’s one rating company called AM Best, whose whole purpose is to tell investors how healthy an insurance company is.

Whoa. So this is way down in the nuts and bolts of the US insurance industry.

Right. This is a part of the broader economy that most people would never experience. But we asked them to do something special for us. We said, hey, can you help us find the one number that would tell us reporters just how healthy or unhealthy this insurance market is state by state over time? And it turns out, there is just such a number. It’s called a combined ratio.

OK, plain English?

Plain English, it is the ratio of revenue to costs, how much money these guys take in for homeowner’s insurance and how much they pay out in costs and losses. You want your revenue to be higher than your costs. If not, you’re in trouble.

So what did you find out?

Well, we got that number for every state, going back more than a decade. And what it showed us was our suspicions were right. This market turmoil that we were seeing in Florida and California has indeed been spreading across the country. And in fact, it turns out that in 18 states, last year, the homeowner’s insurance market lost money. And that’s a big jump from 5 or 10 years ago and spells real trouble for insurance and for homeowners and for almost every part of the economy.

So the contagion was real.

Right. This is our first window showing us just how far that contagion had spread. And one of the really striking things about this data was it showed the contagion had spread to places that I wouldn’t have thought of as especially prone to climate shocks — for example, a lot of the Midwest, a lot of the Southeast. In fact, if you think of a map of the country, there was no state between Pennsylvania and the Dakotas that didn’t lose money on homeowner’s insurance last year.

So just huge parts of the middle of the US have become unprofitable for homeowner’s insurance. This market is starting to buckle under the cost of climate change.

And this is all happening really fast. When we did the Florida episode two years ago, it was a completely new phenomenon and really only in Florida. And now it’s everywhere.

Yeah. And that’s exactly what’s so striking here. The rate at which this is becoming, again, a contagion and spreading across the country is just demolishing the expectations of anyone I’ve spoken to. No one thought that this problem would affect so much of the US so quickly.

So in these states, these new places that the contagion has spread to, what exactly is happening that’s causing the insurance companies to fold up shop?

Yeah. Something really particular is happening in a lot of these states. And it’s worth noting how it’s surprised everyone. And what that is, is formally unimportant weather events, like hailstorms or windstorms, those didn’t used to be the kind of thing that would scare insurance companies. Obviously, a big problem if it destroys your home or damages your home. But for insurers, it wasn’t going to wipe them out financially.

Right. It wasn’t just a complete and utter wipeout that the company would then have to pony up a lot of money for.

Exactly. And insurers call them secondary perils, sort of a belittling term, something other than a big deal, like a hurricane.

These minor league weather events.

Right. But those are becoming so frequent and so much more intense that they can cause existential threats for insurance companies. And insurers are now fleeing states not because of hurricanes but because those former things that were small are now big. Hailstorms, wildfires in some places, previous annoyances are becoming real threats to insurers.

Chris, what’s the big picture on what insurers are actually facing? What’s happening out there numbers-wise?

This is a huge threat. In terms of the number of states where this industry is losing money, it’s more than doubled from 10 years ago to basically a third of the country. The amount they’re losing is enormous. In some states, insurers are paying out $1.25 or even $1.50 for every dollar they bring in, in revenue, which is totally unsustainable.

And the result is insurers are making changes. They are pulling back from these markets. They’re hiking premiums. And often, they’re just dropping customers. And that’s where this becomes real, not just for people who surf balance sheets and trade in the stock market. This is becoming real for homeowners around the country, who all of a sudden increasingly can’t get insurance.

So, Chris, what’s the actual implication? I mean, what happens when people in a state can’t get insurance for their homes?

Getting insurance for a home is crucial if you want to sell or buy a home. Most people can’t buy a home without a mortgage. And banks won’t issue a mortgage without home insurance. So if you’ve got a home that insurance company doesn’t want to cover, you got a real problem. You need to find insurance, or that home becomes very close to unsellable.

And as you get fewer buyers, the price goes down. So this doesn’t just hurt people who are paying for these insurance premiums. It hurts people who want to sell their homes. It even could hurt, at some point, whole local economies. If home values fall, governments take in less tax revenue. That means less money for schools and police. It also means people who get hit by disasters and have to rebuild their homes all of a sudden can’t, because their insurance isn’t available anymore. It’s hard to overstate just how big a deal this is.

And is that actually happening, Chris? I mean, are housing markets being dragged down because of this problem with the insurance markets right now?

Anecdotally, we’ve got reports that in places like Florida and Louisiana and maybe in parts of California, the difficulty of getting insurance, the crazy high cost of insurance is starting to depress demand because not everyone can afford to pay these really high costs, even if they have insurance. But what we wanted to focus on with this story was also, OK, we know where this goes eventually. But where is it beginning? What are the places that are just starting to feel these shocks from the insurance market?

And so I called around and asked insurance agents, who are the front lines of this. They’re the ones who are struggling to find insurance for homeowners. And I said, hey, is there one place that I should go if I want to understand what it looks like to homeowners when all of a sudden insurance becomes really expensive or you can’t even find it? And those insurance agents told me, if you want to see what this looks like in real life, go to a little town called Marshalltown in the middle of Iowa.

We’ll be right back.

So, Chris, you went to Marshalltown, Iowa. What did you find?

Even before I got to Marshalltown, I had some idea I was in the right spot. When I landed in Des Moines and went to rent a car, the nice woman at the desk who rented me a car, she said, what are you doing here? I said, I’m here to write a story about people in Iowa who can’t get insurance because of storms. She said, oh, yeah, I know all about that. That’s a big problem here.

Even the rental car lady.

Even the rental car lady knew something was going on. And so I got into my rental car and drove about an hour northeast of Des Moines, through some rolling hills, to this lovely little town of Marshalltown. Marshalltown is a really cute, little Midwestern town with old homes and a beautiful courthouse in the town square. And when I drove through, I couldn’t help noticing all the roofs looked new.

What does that tell you?

Turns out Marshalltown, despite being a pastoral image of Midwestern easy living, was hit by two really bad disasters in recent years — first, a devastating tornado in 2018 and then, in 2020, what’s called a derecho, a straight-line wind event that’s also just enormously damaging. And the result was lots of homes in this small town got severely damaged in a short period of time. And so when you drive down, you see all these new roofs that give you the sense that something’s going on.

So climate had come to Marshalltown?

Exactly. A place that had previously seemed maybe safe from climate change, if there is such a thing, all of a sudden was not. So I found an insurance agent in Marshalltown —

We talked to other agents but haven’t talked to many homeowners.

— named Bobby Shomo. And he invited me to his office early one morning and said, come meet some people. And so I parked on a quiet street outside of his office, across the street from the courthouse, which also had a new roof, and went into his conference room and met a procession of clients who all had versions of the same horror story.

It was more — well more of double.

A huge reduction in coverage with a huge price increase.

Some people had faced big premium hikes.

I’m just a little, small business owner. So every little bit I do feel.

They had so much trouble with their insurance company.

I was with IMT Insurance forever. And then when I moved in 2020, Bobby said they won’t insure a pool.

Some people had gotten dropped.

Where we used to see carriers canceling someone for frequency of three or four or five claims, it’s one or two now.

Some people couldn’t get the coverage they needed. But it was versions of the same tale, which is all of a sudden, having homeowner’s insurance in Marshalltown was really difficult. But I wanted to see if it was bigger than just Marshalltown. So the next day, I got back in my car and drove east to Cedar Rapids, where I met another person having a version of the same problem, a guy named Dave Langston.

Tell me about Dave.

Dave lives in a handsome, modest, little townhouse on a quiet cul-de-sac on a hill at the edge of Cedar Rapids. He’s the president of his homeowners association. There’s 17 homes on this little street. And this is just as far as you could get from a danger zone. It looks as safe as could be. But in January, they got a letter from the company that insures him and his neighbors, saying his policy was being canceled, even though it wasn’t as though they’d just been hit by some giant storm.

So then what was the reason they gave?

They didn’t give a reason. And I think people might not realize, insurers don’t have to give a reason. Insurance policies are year to year. And if your insurance company decides that you’re too much of a risk or your neighborhood is too much of a risk or your state is too much of a risk, they can just leave. They can send you a letter saying, forget it. We’re canceling your insurance. There’s almost no protection people have.

And in this case, the reason was that this insurance company was losing too much money in Iowa and didn’t want to keep on writing homeowner’s insurance in the state. That was the situation that Dave shared with tens of thousands of people across the state that were all getting similar letters.

What made Dave’s situation a little more challenging was that he couldn’t get new insurance. He tried for months through agent after agent after agent. And every company told him the same thing. We won’t cover you. Even though these homes are perfectly safe in a safe part of the state, nobody would say yes. And it took them until basically two days before their insurance policy was going to run out until they finally found new coverage that was far more expensive and far more bare-bones than what they’d had.

But at least it was something.

It was something. But the problem was it wasn’t that good. Under this new policy, if Dave’s street got hit by another big windstorm, the damage from that storm and fixing that damage would wipe out all the savings set aside by these homeowners. The deductible would be crushingly high — $120,000 — to replace those roofs if the worst happened because the insurance money just wouldn’t cover anywhere close to the cost of rebuilding.

He said to me, we didn’t do anything wrong. This is just what insurance looks like today. And today, it’s us in Cedar Rapids. Everyone, though, is going to face a situation like this eventually. And Dave is right. I talked to insurance agents around the country. And they confirmed for me that this kind of a shift towards a new type of insurance, insurance that’s more expensive and doesn’t cover as much and makes it harder to rebuild after a big disaster, it’s becoming more and more common around the country.

So, Chris, if Dave and the people you spoke to in Iowa were really evidence that your hunch was right, that the problem is spreading and rapidly, what are the possible fixes here?

The fix that people seem most hopeful about is this idea that, what if you could reduce the risk and cause there to be less damage in the first place? So what some states are doing is they’re trying to encourage homeowners to spend more money on hardening their home or adding a new roof or, if it’s a wildfire zone, cut back the vegetation, things that can reduce your risk of having really serious losses. And to help pay for that, they’re telling insurers, you’ve got to offer a discount to people who do that.

And everyone who works in this field says, in theory, that’s the right approach. The problem is, number one, hardening a home costs a fantastic amount of money. So doing this at scale is hugely expensive. Number two, it takes a long time to actually get enough homes hardened in this way that you can make a real dent for insurance companies. We’re talking about years or probably decades before that has a real effect, if it ever works.

OK. So that sounds not particularly realistic, given the urgency and the timeline we’re on here. So what else are people looking at?

Option number two is the government gets involved. And instead of most Americans buying home insurance from a private company, they start buying it from government programs that are designed to make sure that people, even in risky places, can still buy insurance. That would be just a gargantuan undertaking. The idea of the government providing homeowner’s insurance because private companies can’t or won’t would lead to one of the biggest government programs that exists, if we could even do it.

So huge change, like the federal government actually trying to write these markets by itself by providing homeowner’s insurance. But is that really feasible?

Well, in some areas, we’re actually already doing it. The government already provides flood insurance because for decades, most private insurers have not wanted to cover flood. It’s too risky. It’s too expensive. But that change, with governments taking over that role, creates a new problem of its own because the government providing flood insurance that you otherwise couldn’t get means people have been building and building in flood-prone areas because they know they can get that guaranteed flood insurance.

Interesting. So that’s a huge new downside. The government would be incentivizing people to move to places that they shouldn’t be.

That’s right. But there’s even one more problem with that approach of using the government to try to solve this problem, which is these costs keep growing. The number of billion-dollar disasters the US experiences every year keeps going up. And at some point, even if the government pays the cost through some sort of subsidized insurance, what happens when that cost is so great that we can no longer afford to pay it? That’s the really hard question that no official can answer.

So that’s pretty doomsday, Chris. Are we looking at the end of insurance?

I think it’s fair to say that we’re looking at the end of insurance as we know it, the end of insurance that means most Americans can rest assured that if they get hit by a disaster, their insurance company will provide enough money they can rebuild. That idea might be going away. And what it shows is maybe the threat of climate change isn’t quite what we thought.

Maybe instead of climate change wrecking communities in the form of a big storm or a wildfire or a flood, maybe even before those things happen, climate change can wreck communities by something as seemingly mundane and even boring as insurance. Maybe the harbinger of doom is not a giant storm but an anodyne letter from your insurance company, saying, we’re sorry to inform you we can no longer cover your home.

Maybe the future of climate change is best seen not by poring over weather data from NOAA but by poring over spreadsheets from rating firms, showing the profitability from insurance companies, and how bit by bit, that money that they’re losing around the country tells its own story. And the story is these shocks are actually already here.

Chris, as always, terrifying to talk to you.

Always a pleasure, Sabrina.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Tuesday, the United Nations has reclassified the number of women and children killed in Gaza, saying that it does not have enough identifying information to know exactly how many of the total dead are women and children. The UN now estimates that about 5,000 women and about 8,000 children have been killed, figures that are about half of what it was previously citing. The UN says the numbers dropped because it is using a more conservative estimate while waiting for information on about 10,000 other dead Gazans who have not yet been identified.

And Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, gave a press conference outside the court in Lower Manhattan, where Michael Cohen, the former fixer for Donald Trump, was testifying for a second day, answering questions from Trump’s lawyers. Trump is bound by a gag order. So Johnson joined other stand-ins for the former president to discredit the proceedings. Johnson, one of the most important Republicans in the country, attacked Cohen but also the trial itself, calling it a sham and political theater.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Shannon Lin, and Jessica Cheung. It was edited by MJ Davis Lin, with help from Michael Benoist, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

• May 21, 2024   •   24:14 The Crypto Comeback
• May 20, 2024   •   31:51 Was the 401(k) a Mistake?
• May 19, 2024   •   33:23 The Sunday Read: ‘Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?’
• May 17, 2024   •   51:10 The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves
• May 16, 2024   •   30:47 The Make-or-Break Testimony of Michael Cohen
• May 15, 2024   •   27:03 The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System
• May 14, 2024   •   35:20 Voters Want Change. In Our Poll, They See It in Trump.
• May 13, 2024   •   27:46 How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China
• May 10, 2024   •   27:42 Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand
• May 9, 2024   •   34:42 One Strongman, One Billion Voters, and the Future of India
• May 8, 2024   •   28:28 A Plan to Remake the Middle East
• May 7, 2024   •   27:43 How Changing Ocean Temperatures Could Upend Life on Earth

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Christopher Flavelle

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Shannon M. Lin and Jessica Cheung

Edited by MJ Davis Lin

With Michael Benoist

Original music by Dan Powell ,  Marion Lozano and Rowan Niemisto

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Across the United States, more frequent extreme weather is starting to cause the home insurance market to buckle, even for those who have paid their premiums dutifully year after year.

Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter, discusses a Times investigation into one of the most consequential effects of the changes.

On today’s episode

Christopher Flavelle , a climate change reporter for The New York Times.

Background reading

As American insurers bleed cash from climate shocks , homeowners lose.

See how the home insurance crunch affects the market in each state .

Here are four takeaways from The Times’s investigation.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter who writes about how the United States is trying to adapt to the effects of climate change. More about Christopher Flavelle

Advertisement