The sky's gone out

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.

THIS MORNING, somewhere out walking around the neighborhood, I got this post as a push alert to my watch:

This must have been the same day that I added AQI to my phone's homescreen, when I put on a KN95 just to go to the hardware store for some blue painter's tape for the windows. I remember how impossible it was to focus on anything so long as that orange light, even with the shades drawn, crept into the room.

When I started getting deep into reading for Against, I assigned myself dozens of books. I started a reading log in a hard cover notebook. I thought it would be helpful later, when I had to grab the title and page number of a quote or something quickly. When I would probably get lost if I waded back into the book itself. But soon it turned into an ongoing conversation with myself and these books and my book.

Yesterday at the library, now years into the book and (really) trying to be done with doing any more reading, I started reading the log back from the beginning.

Reading Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed and getting ready to go to New Orleans, July 20, 2021, the on-fire sky first got a mention:

"—the air today is heavy and getting heavier with the smoke rolling in from California, too faint to choke us but thick enough to blot out most of the sun, to make the sky amber—"

On the Crescent riding down to New Orleans a few weeks later, just before I checked into the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles, I was reading Eric Foner and then I looked at (fka) twitter:

Switching now to Ida B. Wells — now that the NHC has christened Tropical Storm Ida

That's the day I put the weather alerts on my phone (starting with the National Hurricane Center's twitter posts).

This wasn't a climate book in 2021 but by 2024—after Ida flooded into Brooklyn, after the summer of fires, after Stop Cop City—it is unavoidably one.

From Kelly Hayes' newsletter today:

"The social tendency to avoid the topic of climate catastrophe does not bode well for our collective willingness to make sacrifices. The truth is, we have a whole lot of culture building to do if we want people to confront the realities of climate change, and if we want people’s investment in one another and the planet to outweigh their short term concerns about what makes their own lives harder."

I really liked this profile of abortion doula Ash Williams, who I got to meet at the conference I co-organized a few weeks ago, ComstockCon.

Marisa Kabas had this nice account of the conference in her newsletter, The Handbasket.

I did Death Panel this week, talking about: abortion phantasms.

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