Drones and Trust, Air Conditioning History, and Evangelion Crawdads

I wrote something for the ICRC about drones, public trust, and why we can’t brute-force the public into being universally OK with the presence of little flying robots that are extremely hard to tell apart from one another. You can read it here.

Ever since that mind-bendingly awful heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest in late June, I’ve become obsessed with the history and politics of air conditioning. As part of my quest to become a minor-league expert on fun air conditioning facts, I picked up Salvatore Basile’s 2014 book, “Cool.” It’s a delightful wander through the history and cultural politics of air conditioning, and you should buy it.

In just the first few chapters, I learned:

For Europeans and Americans in the 1800s, people took the threat of cold extremely seriously. Heat, meanwhile, was considered a grim natural affliction that must be endured, often even unto death. As Basile writes:

“But when it came to a contraption that could cool the air — not only did many people not understand why it was necessary, but plenty of them scoffed at the notion that such a thing could even exist. Heat was a fact. Heat was a thing that heaven sent you. In those days, it was the Good Old Summertime. If the daily death reports told a different story, well, that was…