The thinner the air

This is author and journalist Melissa Gira Grant's newsletter, currently a record of work on her forthcoming book, A Woman Is Against the Law.

IT TOOK ME A YEAR, but this week I started The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell. I only remember how long it's been because Molly Taft had interviewed Jeff for TNR around the same time they were editing what became my very strange series of Supreme Court scoops involving a fake wedding website.

I put the book on to listen to this morning, as I headed out early to tend to part of my flower garden that's gone leggy from too much water draining too slowly, trying to solve the problems out there before the AQI got too high for the day.

Jeff Goodell to Molly Taft on why heat:

I went outside and ran into this wall of heat ... My heart was beating and pounding, I was feeling light-headed. I was like, fuck. I realized I didn’t know anything about the risks of heat and what it meant for my body.

One chapter follows climate ethicists and scientists working together to see how quickly they can use nearly-real-time data to connect extreme weather events with the parties responsible. It's supposed to make climate change more real to all of us, as well as visible to the courts—a tangible way to get justice. I don't know. I just don't have that faith in the legal system.

This isn't to fault those climate scientists. We've been trained to believe the courts can solve problems if they can be made to see them. But given the little time we may have, I wish I could put up a flare here and say, Not this way. A kind of hobo sign marking the courts as not a great place to stop. A plaque to guide others away with the note that this place is dangerous for all living things.

Optimistically: we need not wait for the courts. It might be that the work of naming the parties responsible for the public makes more difference.

(Related: I didn't expect the big mifepristone opinion this week to engage with the prospect of what if anyone could bring a claim against the EPA...)

I did maybe my last story on the Supreme Court's mifepristone case, another Alliance Defending Freedom special.

That plus all my other coverage here:

The Real Reason for Louisiana’s New Mifepristone Law (June 5, 2024)

This 1873 Law Could Be Used to Ban Abortion. Why Not Repeal It? (April 25, 2024)

The Telling Backstory of One Doctor-Plaintiff in the Mifepristone Case (March 28, 2024)

Two Supreme Court Justices Favor Zombie Law From 1873 to Ban Abortion (March 26, 2024)

Who Exactly Is Behind the Supreme Court’s Big Mifepristone Case? (March 7, 2024)

The Judge Who Wants to Drag Us Back to the Victorian Era (September 27, 2023)

Confused About Mifepristone’s Status? That’s Exactly What Republicans Want (April 27, 2023)

What to Watch for in the Supreme Court's Mifepristone Ruling (April 20, 2023)

In Vegas last weekend, Trump fans on the MAGA tent revival circuit melted. Jeff Sharlet watched from a cooler place; it's a show he's seen a lot but he sees more of than most do:

A friend asks if I’m decoding Marjorie Taylor Greene. I don’t think so, I say. I think I’m tuning my dial. I think I’m receiving the transmission. I don’t like the song but the signal is strong.

Today, her mission is to destroy; her target is New York. “I am especially pissed off at the state of New York!” Its crime: the release of the illegal, “this monster,” who went to Georgia and killed “our girl,” Laken Riley. Therefore, New York’s courts have no standing: They dispatch brown-skinned killers (he was released after an arrest for operating a car dangerously with a child) to murder pretty white girls and yet convict a president for, what, scoring with a pretty white girl? Here is the topsy-turvy world of American liberalism: a bad man rewarded—released—to hunt women, a good man punished for “appreciating beautiful women.” It’s also the MAGA indignation time warp, a loop in which an “illegal” is and was and always will be illegal and thus always, as essential as race, a criminal; his further crimes preordained. And the manliness of Trump in particular and red-blooded (read: white) men in general is eternal, unburdened by minor matters such as marriage or newborns or the decades between Trump and the hottie who went to Trump’s hotel room of her own “totally legal” volition. This is the crime? To be a man?

I may be wrapping the section of my book that involved the reporting described in this letter (a find from the Mary Heaton Vorse papers—and as a content note, toward the end, this letter includes a racist slur, one that is relevant to the case):

This is not how we edit magazines now, but—I don't know, should my Slack messages with Molly end up in my papers, now you know I only kind of planned it.

x.