Yanagihara lulls us into interpreting the title – an echo of a line in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land – as merely condescending or ironic before demonically electrifying it, 400 pages in. Much of the book was written late at night in the renovated bottle factory in New York where she lives (the steel beams apparently block internet reception); I’ve never been able to shake the thought of her calculating that ugly twist after dark.
Dravet Syndrome is just one of many neurological diseases that are exacerbated by higher temperatures, says Sanjay Sisodiya of University College London and a pioneer in the field of climate change's impact on the brain. A neurologist who specialises in epilepsy, he frequently heard from patients' families that they had more troubles during heatwaves. "And I thought to myself, of course, why shouldn't climate change also affect the brain? After all, so many processes in the brain are involved in how the body copes with heat."
As he dug into the scientific literature, he discovered a range of neurological conditions that are made worse by rising heat and humidity, including epilepsy, stroke, encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, migraine, along with a number of others. He also discovered that the effects of climate change on our brains are already becoming visible.
“Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.