Malcolm Gladwell reviews Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: The great Chicago heat wave, and other unnatural disasters

The United States has cities that are often humid—like Houston and New Orleans—without being tremendously hot. And it has very hot cities—like Las Vegas and Phoenix—that are almost never humid. But for one long week, beginning on Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicago was both. Meteorologists measure humidity with what is called the dew point—the point at which the air is so saturated with moisture that it cannot cool without forming dew. On a typical Chicago summer day, the dew point is in the low sixties, and on a very warm, humid day it is in the low seventies. At Chicago’s Midway Airport, during the heat wave of 1995, the dew point hit the low eighties—a figure reached regularly only in places like the coastal regions of the Middle East. In July of 1995, Chicago effectively turned into Dubai. The New Yorker [thanks, Adam; thanks, David]