It’ll be a hot weekend, Weekend Reader readers, but you know what to do: Wear light, loose-fitting clothing. Check up on the neighbors who don’t have air-conditioning. And hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

But how much hydration? How do you know if you’re drinking enough water? Here’s a question-and-answer hydration feature from The New York Times that is, frankly, more interesting than it has any right to be. And here’s a note that may be interesting to readers of a certain age: The bodies of older people (in this case, 60 and older) are not as good as detecting thirst as they are when they are younger.

This is the weekend for the annual Oregon Country Fair, the three-day gathering in a forest west of Eugene. As you may know, the fair always has been relaxed about dress code — and sometimes is fine with no dress at all. But earlier this week, during the fair’s set-up week — when the dress code is just as relaxed — sheriff’s deputies arrested a man for secretly shooting video of naked people in the fair’s communal shower.

Oregon State University’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest is on a list of 26 long-term ecological research facilities that the Trump administration wants to close, according to this story from the Seattle Times.

I’ve just about finished reading “I Heard Her Call My Name,” Lucy Sante’s memoir of transgender transition (I recommend it), and so I read this new Atlantic article about the culture wars surrounding trans people with interest. The writer, Stephanie Burt, argues that trans skeptics look “less like truth-tellers than like merchants of doubt: The debate around trans issues feels analogous to the ones around climate change, or vaccines. When you’re not winning an argument, you say nobody should act without further study, or demand unattainable certainties.”

The Atlantic article, by the way, makes a passing reference to the works of science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr. Here’s the context you need about Tiptree. And somebody should make a movie about Tiptree’s life.

Here’s this week’s long read, from Atlantic writer Annie Lowrey: It’s about her personal war against plastic, and her short (18 minutes) but valiant crusade to see how long she could go without using some kind of plastic product. Lowrey lays out what could be the long-term effects from prolonged exposure to plastic (no one knows for sure) and offers suggestions to how to reduce your daily exposure.

The loss of local journalists in the United States may be worse than previously thought, according to a new study that was released this week. The Poynter Institute has a story about the study.

Writing in The New York Times, columnist Esau McCaulley argues that President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” has succeeded in uniting the different streams of American Christianity — from evangelicals to mainstream Protestants, there’s widespread agreement that “the ravenous greed at the core of this law threatens to devour the poor.” While that’s a worthwhile point, it does beg another question: What are Christians planning to do about it?

Alexandra Petri, the humorist who now writes for The Atlantic, has a new column in which she outlines all the reasons why the United States should embrace the cutbacks at NASA and bag any future plans to explore space. “It’s not like we haven’t been up there before,” she writes. “Going to space is much too ’60s. The whole theme of the Trump administration is undoing things we did in the 1960s, such as ‘end polio’ and ‘enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.’”

But here’s one possible reason to keep our space program intact:

I missed the real fireworks on July 4 — and chances are that you did as well, unless you were aboard the International Space Station. But NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers was on board, and she caught this astonishing image of a red sprite — a rarely seen weather event — triggered by powerful thunderstorms over Mexico. It’s a little late, but I thought you might enjoy seeing the photo, which was originally featured in The Atlantic.

That’s it for this weekend. Let’s gather here next weekend (clothing optional, but recommended) to compare notes about just how much hydration we’re consuming.