This has been a historically brutal summer here in New York; July was the second-hottest on record, missing top honors by a mere fraction of a degree. Stoical Scot that I am, I haven’t complained much in these pages, but I have lived at the edge of despair for weeks now, and several times recently (such as when standing for half an hour on a crowded, 115° subway platform a few days ago) I have felt, not without an admixture of gratitude, that I was actually about to slump to the ground and die.
But as bad as it is right now in Gotham, the heat and humidity are, apparently, even worse down South, if such a thing can be imagined. From our Arkansas bureau chief comes this illustrative dispatch.