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Enough With the Arrogant Attitudes Towards Extreme Heat
In so many aspects of our culture, we view severe heat as something that should be willingly embraced, bravely endured, or blithely ignored.
Novels from One Hundred Years of Solitude to The Great Gatsby to Atonement use heat as a structural and thematic device to intensify emotion and conflict, push things to a breaking point, and then generate catharsis. The quintessential example of this—Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing, which was originally titled Heatwave —has at its narrative center a heat wave that slowly ratchets racial tensions throughout one Brooklyn neighborhood until they explode. Janos Marton, chief advocacy officer at Dream.org working on criminal justice, explained that there is also a constitutional requirement to protect incarcerated people under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and when someone is in custody, the government must preserve their welfare and avoid suffering.
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