Diane Shipley is a freelance writer born in Australia, based in the UK, and writing for publications all over the world, including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Lifted Brow, and The Toast. You can follow her on Twitter @dianeshipley.
Right now as I write this, smoke from fires in the southeastern Appalachian Mountains haze the morning. We’re under orange alert—the air quality bad enough that schoolchildren will stay indoors…