Nobody quite knows what causes asthma—but experts say that urban dwellers often have a tougher time managing their symptoms, thanks to a variety of environmental exposures. Here are seven tips for breathing a little easier in the big city.

1. CALL THE EXTERMINATOR.

Cockroaches are a gross—but common—part of urban life, and they live in most buildings and neighborhoods without discrimination. Sadly, their feces and shedding body parts can trigger allergies and asthma attacks in people who are sensitive to cockroach antigen, or proteins in the debris. And even if you don’t spot the bugs scurrying through your own apartment, there are still traces of them nearly everywhere you go in the city, says Dr. Minsoo Kim, an allergist at Columbia University Medical Center.

You can’t totally escape roaches, but taking proactive measures to reduce exposure to cockroach allergen can definitely improve your symptoms. Make sure your home is clean and clutter free, keep food and garbage in tightly sealed bags and containers, and ask your super or homeowner to address any obvious infestations. If they refuse to cooperate, show them a letter from your doctor. Also, consider getting allergy shots. (The same goes if you’re allergic to mice.)

2. GET ALLERGY SHOTS YOU DON’T THINK YOU NEED.

Believe it or not, three of the biggest allergy and asthma triggers in urban areas are dust mites, cockroaches, and—get this—cats. You can reduce the amount of dust in your home, but even if you don’t own a kitty, chances are many strangers on the subway and in the streets do.

“Cat is one of the most mobile allergens, so if someone has a cat and interacts with you, there’s enough allergen floating in the air just from their clothing to actually cause sensitization, and potentially cause problems for people who have cat-associated asthma,” says Dr. Morris Ling, an allergist-immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “You’re going to interact with more people in a city, and because of that you will inevitably encounter a threshold level of cat allergen that could make your symptoms worse.”

In short, going out of your way to avoid your neighborhood bodega cat sometimes isn’t enough. If you live in a city and you know that cats trigger your symptoms, get allergy shots.

3. MOVE AWAY FROM THE HIGHWAY.

“Studies show that the closer you are to an urban center, or high traffic area, the higher the prevalence of asthma severity is,” Ling says. “The reason is that pollutants like diesel exhaust particles, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxides, and volatile organic compounds irritate the airway, and they actually stimulate the immune system.”

Just moving a half-mile or a mile away from a high traffic area can radically improve your quality of life—so consider looking for apartments near, say, a quiet park that’s far away from downtown.

4. WASH YOUR HANDS OFTEN.

“Respiratory viruses are actually the most common exacerbating factor in making asthma worse,” Ling says. “They are responsible to 50 to 80 percent of asthma exacerbations, and the most common cause is actually rhinovirus.”

Since cities are so crowded, you have a greater chance of being exposed to someone with the rhinovirus than you would in a less densely populated area—especially if you use public transportation. Some people, particularly in Asia, wear woven-cloth surgical masks to avoid catching sickness from strangers. But these thin mouth coverings might not be an effective means of protection (plus you’ll likely get some stares on the subway). However, you can minimize your chances of falling ill by frequently washing your hands, staying home when you’re sick, and minimizing contact with people who are.

5. WORK FROM HOME ON BAD AIR QUALITY DAYS.

Media outlets often broadcast “ozone-advisory,” “ozone-alert,” or “ozone-action” days, which refer to local smog conditions that might be harmful to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions. Ozone is far more common in urban areas, so make sure to monitor your city’s air quality levels on a regular basis and stay inside if it’s bad. Can’t skip work? Ask your boss about working from home on days that might cause your symptoms to flare up.

6. SWITCH CITIES.

Love city life and can’t imagine moving to the suburbs? Take a close look at your asthma triggers, and try to find an urban area that doesn’t exacerbate your symptoms. “Asthma is a very heterogeneous condition, and it has different manifestations for different people,” Kim says. If your problem is poor air quality, look for a city that has cleaner air. Constantly catching colds on the subway? Consider going somewhere where you can own a car.

7. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR TRIGGERS (AND TAKE YOUR MEDICATION).

It’s tempting to stop taking your asthma medication if you’re feeling better or if you’re concerned about side effects. However, it’s important to adhere to your doctor’s treatment plan—and to educate yourself about your condition, Ling says. “I think patients have a very important role to play. They need to know about their asthma, and the more aware they are of their own triggers, symptoms and treatments, the better outcome they’ll have. In the busy city, it’s easy to ignore these things.”

Want to ship a bike without breaking it? Just pretend it’s an expensive television set. As The Independent reports, Dutch bicycle manufacturer VanMoof recently did just that after seeing many of their international orders getting damaged. They started printing images of flat screen TVs on their boxes, and incidents of damage dropped immediately.

genius idea alert: @vanmoof bikes had problem with shipping damage. So it put flat TVs on its boxes. Problem solved. pic.twitter.com/dsomNATUoY

— Jason Gay (@jasongay) September 4, 2016

VanMoof wanted to keep their sneaky plan under wraps, but it was eventually leaked on Twitter, prompting the company to confirm the strategy. In a blog post titled “Our secret’s out,” VanMoof’s creative director Bex Rad explained that prior to the disguise tactic, customers were getting annoyed, and the company was experiencing financial losses. And since VanMoof is aiming to sell 90 percent of its bikes online by 2020, they knew they had to find a solution.

“Our team sat together and we imagined that couriers would be more careful with packages if they knew even more precious goods were in them,” VanMoof co-founder Taco Carlier told The Independent. “As our boxes are exactly the size of a huge flat screen television, we decided to print a television on them. It works great.”

The shipping scheme has worked especially well for American orders. VanMoof’s store in Brooklyn had previously been cluttered with refurbished broken bikes that had to be sold at discount prices—but after the new boxes were introduced, damaged goods were reduced by 70 to 80 percent, Carlier told reporters.

[h/t The Independent]

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Humans have a food waste problem: Every year about one third of the food we plan to consume ends up lost or thrown away, and supermarkets are among the worst offenders. Now, a new store in Pudsey, England is offering an alternative to conscientious shoppers. As Metro reports, The Warehouse sells food that would have otherwise been tossed on a “pay-as-you-feel” basis.

The shelves of the newly-opened supermarket are stocked with donations from local businesses, including restaurants, caterers, food photographers, and conventional grocery stores. A lot of the items have exceeded their sell-by date—a vague label that doesn’t necessarily mean that food is unsafe to consume. The dates on their so-called “expired” bottled water, for example, are pretty much meaningless.

The supermarket is run by a UK-based organization called the Real Junk Food Project. Like The Warehouse, the cafes in their global network sell food that would have been wasted and urge their patrons to pay however they can. This means that customers can pay with money, volunteer hours, or pay nothing at all.

Their flexible payment policy makes the market a valuable resource for citizens in need, but the organization makes it clear that they serve the whole community. According to the organization’s website:

“In order for us to prove the value and safety of food waste, we couldn’t just feed specific demographics of people. We believe food waste is absolutely fit for human consumption and so that’s who we feed—human beings.”

The Warehouse is reportedly the first supermarket of its kind in the UK, but similar food waste projects have been launched elsewhere on the continent: In March, Denmark welcomed a grocery store chain that sells “expired” food exclusively.

[h/t Metro]

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Good news for dogs and the people who love them: Over the weekend, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill giving concerned citizens permission to break into a hot car if the pooch inside appears to be in danger, The Los Angeles Times reports.

Under “The Right to Rescue Act,” or Assembly Bill 797, individuals are required to report the situation to law enforcement officials if they think a car-bound animal is threatened. But if the threat is immediate, the vehicle is locked, and officers are taking too long to get there, concerned citizens can now smash windows (or use other means of force) to set the dogs free without fear of prosecution, ABC 10 reports. (Of course, it’s important to think of both your own and the pet’s safety when deciding the most effective method of removal.) Rescuers won’t be punished for their actions, but they will be required to remain at the scene of the incident until authorities arrive.

The bill comes in response to a string of incidents in which dogs died after their owners left them in closed vehicles on hot days. It was drafted by California Assembly members including Marc Steinorth, Ling Ling Chang, and Kristin Olsen, who even filmed themselves sitting in a hot car for more than 20 minutes to demonstrate how dangerous it was to leave a dog in one, according to ABC 7.

“We’re very excited about the lives this new law will save,” Steinorth said in a Facebook statement. “Thank you to everyone who helped us raise awareness of this serious issue and showed their support.”

The Humane Society of the United States and other animal rights groups support the bill—but some people are worried that dog lovers might take things a little too far under the new law.

“I think that should just be logic,” dog owner April Rocha told ABC 7 in May, when the bill was first proposed. “If you see a dog in distress, break the window if you can’t find the owner. I think some people might take it a little far, like they see a dog in there and go a little nuts. I think it depends on the condition, but I think people may take advantage and go extreme.”

California is one of nearly two dozen states with some type of “hot car” law on the books.

[h/t The Los Angeles Times]

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Born September 26, 1888, modernist poet and playwright Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot is best known for writing “The Waste Land.” But the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was also a prankster who coined a perennially popular curse word, and created the characters brought to life in the Broadway musical “Cats.” In honor of Eliot’s birthday, here are a few things you might not know about the writer.

1. HE ENJOYED HOLDING DOWN “REAL” JOBS.

Throughout his life, Eliot supported himself by working as a teacher, banker, and editor. He could only write poetry in his spare time, but he preferred it that way. In a 1959 interview with The Paris Review, Eliot remarked that his banking and publishing jobs actually helped him be a better poet. “I feel quite sure that if I’d started by having independent means, if I hadn’t had to bother about earning a living and could have given all my time to poetry, it would have had a deadening influence on me,” Eliot said. “The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts.”

2. ONE OF THE LONGEST-RUNNING BROADWAY SHOWS EVER EXISTS THANKS TO HIM.

In 1939, Eliot published a book of poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which included feline-focused verses he likely wrote for his godson. In stark contrast to most of Eliot’s other works—which are complex and frequently nihilistic—the poems here were decidedly playful. For Eliot, there was never any tension between those two modes: “One wants to keep one’s hand in, you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper. One doesn’t want to lose one’s skill,” he explained in his Paris Review interview. A fan of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats since childhood, in the late ’70s, Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to set many of Eliot’s poems to music. The result: the massively successful stage production “Cats,” which opened in London in 1981 and, after its 1982 NYC debut, became one of the longest-running Broadway shows of all time.

3. THREE HOURS PER DAY WAS HIS WRITING LIMIT.

Eliot wrote poems and plays partly on a typewriter and partly with pencil and paper. But no matter what method he used, he tried to always keep a three hour writing limit. “I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what I’d done after the three hours were up was never satisfactory,” he explained. “It’s much better to stop and think about something else quite different.”

4. HE CONSIDERED “FOUR QUARTETS” TO BE HIS BEST WORK.

In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism and became a British citizen. His poems and plays in the 1930s and 1940s—including “Ash Wednesday,” “Murder in the Cathedral,” and “Four Quartets”—reveal themes of religion, faith, and divinity. He considered “Four Quartets,” a set of four poems that explored philosophy and spirituality, to be his best writing. Out of the four, the last is his favorite.

5. HE HAD AN EPISTOLARY FRIENDSHIP WITH GROUCHO MARX.

Eliot wrote comedian Groucho Marx a fan letter in 1961. Marx replied, gave Eliot a photo of himself, and started a correspondence with the poet. After writing back and forth for a few years, they met in real life in 1964, when Eliot hosted Marx and his wife for dinner at his London home. The two men, unfortunately, didn’t hit it off. The main issue, according to a letter Marx wrote his brother: the comedian had hoped he was in for a “Literary Evening,” and tried to discuss King Lear. All Eliot wanted to talk about was Marx’s 1933 comedy Duck Soup. (In a 2014 piece for The New Yorker, Lee Siegel suggests there had been “simmering tension” all along, even in their early correspondence.)

6. EZRA POUND TRIED TO CROWDFUND HIS WRITING.

In 1921, Eliot took a few months off from his banking job after a nervous breakdown. During this time, he finished writing “The Waste Land,” which his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound edited. Pound, with the help of other Bohemian writers, set up Bel Esprit, a fund to raise money for Eliot so he could quit his bank job to focus on writing full-time. Pound managed to get several subscribers to pledge money to Eliot, but Eliot didn’t want to give up his career, which he genuinely liked. The Liverpool Post, Chicago Daily Tribune, and the New York Tribune reported on Pound’s crowdfunding campaign, incorrectly stating that Eliot had taken the money, but continued working at the bank. After Eliot protested, the newspapers printed a retraction.

7. WRITING IN FRENCH HELPED HIM OVERCOME WRITER’S BLOCK.

After studying at Harvard, Eliot spent a year in Paris and fantasized about writing in French rather than English. Although little ever came of that fantasy, during a period of writer’s block, Eliot did manage to write a few poems in French. “That was a very curious thing which I can’t altogether explain. At that period I thought I’d dried up completely. I hadn’t written anything for some time and was rather desperate,” he told The Paris Review. “I started writing a few things in French and found I could, at that period …Then I suddenly began writing in English again and lost all desire to go on with French. I think it was just something that helped me get started again.”

8. HE SET OFF STINK BOMBS IN LONDON WITH HIS NEPHEW.

Eliot, whose friends and family called him Tom, was supposedly a big prankster. When his nephew was young, Eliot took him to a joke shop in London to purchase stink bombs, which they promptly set off in the lobby of a nearby hotel. Eliot was also known to hand out exploding cigars, and put whoopee cushions on the chairs of his guests.

9. HE MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST PERSON TO WRITE THE WORD “BULLS**T.”

In the early 1910s, Eliot wrote a poem called “The Triumph of Bulls**t.” Like an early 20th-century Taylor Swift tune, the poem was Eliot’s way of dissing his haters. In 1915, he submitted the poem to a London magazine … which rejected it for publication. The word bulls**t isn’t in the poem itself, only the poem’s title, but The Oxford English Dictionary credits the poem with being the first time the curse word ever appeared in print.

10. HE COINED THE EXPRESSION “APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH.”

Thanks to Eliot, the phrase “April is the cruelest month” has become an oft-quoted, well-known expression. It comes from the opening lines of “The Waste Land”: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.”

11. HE HELD SOME TROUBLING BELIEFS ABOUT RELIGION.

Over the years, Eliot made some incredibly problematic remarks about Jewish people, including arguing that members of a society should have a shared religious background, and that a large number of Jews creates an undesirably heterogeneous culture. Many of his early writing also featured offensive portrayals of Jewish characters. (As one critic, Joseph Black, pointed out in a 2010 edition of “The Waste Land” and Other Poems, “Few published works displayed the consistency of association that one finds in Eliot’s early poetry between what is Jewish and what is squalid and distasteful.”) Eliot’s defenders argue that the poet’s relationship with Jewish people was much more nuanced that his early poems suggest, and point to his close relationships with a number of Jewish writers and artists.

12. YOU CAN WATCH A MOVIE BASED ON HIS (REALLY BAD) MARRIAGE.

Tom & Viv, a 1994 film starring Willem Dafoe, explores Eliot’s tumultuous marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a dancer and socialite. The couple married in 1915, a few months after they met, but the relationship quickly soured. Haigh-Wood had constant physical ailments, mental health problems, and was addicted to ether. The couple spent a lot of time apart and separated in the 1930s; she died in a mental hospital in 1947. Eliot would go on to remarry at the age of 68—his 30-year-old secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher—and would later reveal that his state of despair during his first marriage was the catalyst and inspiration for “The Waste Land.”