Special thanks to my children, Henry and Alice, for taking half an hour away from their Disney vacation so that I could visit the Hall of Presidents for this review. When I asked my son afterward if he enjoyed the presentation, he paused for a moment before saying, “I want to say yes but I didn’t.”

Air-Conditioning

The idea for this essay came from my friend Ryan Sandahl, who told me the story of Willis Carrier. I also relied on Margaret Ingels’s book Willis Haviland Carrier: Father of Air Conditioning. The information about the role air-conditioning and cooling fans play in climate change came from the International Energy Agency’s 2018 report, “The Future of Cooling.” Data about the 2003 heat wave catastrophe came from a report first published in France in 2008 in Comptes Rendus Biologies. John Huxham’s account of the 1757 European heat wave was first published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; I learned about it via Wikipedia. For understanding the ways air-conditioning has changed architecture, I am indebted to an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible.

Staphylococcus aureus

I’ve wanted to write about staph since my doctor told me about my fascinatingly aggressive colony of them. I was on so many different antibiotics in an attempt to control the infection that, at one point, the doctor needed to confirm I hadn’t previously taken the drug he wanted to prescribe for me. “This pill is yellow,” the doctor said. “Have you taken a yellow pill before?” Maybe, I told him. “This pill is circular. Have you taken a circular pill before?” Again, maybe. “This drug costs $700 per pill,” he then said. “Have you taken a pill—”

“No,” I said. The drug cost me $2,000 even though we had health insurance, but we’re not here to review the U.S.’s one-and-a-half-star healthcare system. The quotes from and about Alexander Ogston in this essay come from the book Alexander Ogston, K.C.V.O.: Memories and Tributes of Relatives, Colleagues and Students, with Some Autobiographical Writings, which was compiled by Ogston’s son Walter. Most interesting to me were the recollections written by Ogston’s daughters, Helen and Constance, and those written by his colleagues. The stat about Boston City Hospital in 1941 came from a 2010 Journal of the Association of Basic Medical Sciences article, “Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) as a Cause of Nosocomial Wound Infections,” by Maida ?i?irak, Amra Zvizdi?, and Mirsada Huki?, which also helped me understand the contemporary disease burden of staph infections. I learned about Albert Alexander and his daughter Sheila (now Sheila LeBlanc) from a 2012 Press-Enterprise newspaper article by Penny Schwartz, “Local Artists Share Childhood Bond,” which is also how I came to see some of LeBlanc’s paintings. Much of the information about the synthesis of penicillin comes from Robert Gaynes’s 2012 article in Emerging Infectious Diseases, “The Discovery of Penicillin—New Insights After More Than 75 Years of Clinical Use.” I also learned a lot about staph and Ogston’s role in discovering it from S. W. B. Newsom’s article in The Journal of Hospital Infection, “Ogston’s Coccus.”

The Internet

The summer of CompuServe was made magical by the presence of my friends there—especially Dean, Marie, and Kevin.

Academic Decathlon

The Terry Tempest Williams quote is from her book Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. The Maya Jasanoff quote about rivers is from her biography of Joseph Conrad, The Dawn Watch. Academic Decathlon still exists; you can learn more about it at usad.org. Todd, I love you. Thank you.

Sunsets

I learned about Claude glass from Sarah, who also introduced me to the Thomas Gray quote, which is from his journal of touring the Lake District in 1769. The Bola?o quote is from 2666 as translated by Natasha Wimmer; the Anna Akhmatova quote is from “A land not mine, still,” as translated by Jane Kenyon. The Eliot line about the Invisible Light is from Choruses from “The Rock.” The Tacita Dean quote is from “The Magic Hour.”

I have been thinking about the Son/Sun thing for a long time, ever since it was first introduced to me by Professor Royal Rhodes. The only short story I ever wrote about my time as a chaplain, which I finished when I was twenty-three, ended with an extremely on-the-nose scene where the chaplain is driving home after a long forty-eight hours in the hospital, “the risen Sun too bright in his losing eyes.” I’d like to say I’ve learned to better resist the urge to put a button on the figurative points I’m trying to make, but The Fault in Our Stars ends with a wedding, so.

But back to the review! I was introduced to that e. e. cummings poem by Jenny Lawton, the brilliant producer who oversaw the podcast version of The Anthropocene Reviewed at WNYC. The Morrison quote about the world’s beauty is from her 1981 novel, Tar Baby. I first read that book because of Professor Ellen Mankoff’s Intro to Lit class at Kenyon College. The Alec Soth quote is from Michael Brown’s 2015 profile of Soth in the Telegraph.

Jerzy Dudek’s Performance on May 25, 2005

The vast majority of the information in this review—the quotes from Dudek and Mirabella, the outline of Dudek’s career, the descriptions of the death of Pope John Paul II—come from Jerzy Dudek’s book A Big Pole in Our Goal. As a Liverpool fan I am admittedly biased, but the book is a fascinating look at a very unlikely career. (Dudek is now in a second unlikely career: He has taken up race car driving.) The Jamie Carragher quotes about his dream turning to dust, and his version of his pressuring Dudek to try the wobbly legs, came from Carra: My Autobiography, which is also a great read. The story of Dudek’s mother visiting the coal mine is told in “Jerzy Dudek: My Secret Vice,” a FourFourTwo article from July 28, 2009, as told to Nick Moore. And then there is the question of whether Pope JP II really said, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” John Paul II did love football (and played goalie as a teenager!), but I could find no firm source for the quotation.

Penguins of Madagascar

I watched Penguins of Madagascar for the first time as a favor to my children; since then, they have watched it many times as a favor to me. I am such a fan of the unshakable earnestness of Werner Herzog’s filmmaking, and also of his simultaneous ability to be self-aware enough to make a hilarious cameo in Penguins of Madagascar. As noted in the review, I learned about White Wilderness first from my dad, and then from watching the film itself, which is widely available. I learned much more about lemmings, including our bygone belief that they rained from the sky, from the Encyclopedia Britannica online article “Do Lemmings Really Commit Mass Suicide?” (Just to say it one more time: No. They don’t.)

Piggly Wiggly

I first heard the astonishing story of Clarence Saunders and Piggly Wiggly from Sarah, who shared with me a passage about the grocery store chain in William Sitwell’s A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Most of the Saunders quotes in this essay, and the quote from Ernie Pyle, come from Mike Freeman’s 2011 book, Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly: The Rise & Fall of a Memphis Maverick. For information about my great-grandfather, I am grateful to my mom, Sydney Green, and my late grandmother, Billie Grace Goodrich, who was incidentally a loyal Piggly Wiggly shopper.

The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest

The George Shea quotations cited here are all from televised introductions to the annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. The Mortimer Matz quote comes from a 2010 New York Times interview by Sam Roberts. The documentary mentioned is The Good, the Bad, the Hungry, directed by Nicole Lucas Haimes. Two histories of Nathan’s Famous also provided helpful background for this essay: Famous Nathan by Lloyd Handwerker and Gil Reavill, and Nathan’s Famous: The First 100 Years by William Handwerker and Jayne Pearl. I did not expect that in my life I would finish two entire books about a hot dog stand, but 2020 was full of surprises, and both the books are quite interesting.

CNN

The first CNN broadcast is available not at CNN.com but on YouTube. To learn more about trends in child mortality, I strongly recommend Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org). It contextualizes data on a wide variety of topics—from Covid to poverty to carbon emissions—with the kind of clarity and thoughtfulness that helps you remember that everyone has birthdays. The statistic about 74 percent of Americans thinking child mortality is getting worse comes from a 2017 Ipsos report called “Perils of Perception.” I learned about it from Our World in Data. Shannon, Katie, Hassan: I love you all. Thank you. Long live the cult of Claremont.

Harvey