How air-conditioning divided U.S. presidents, realigned politics—and made the world hotter

In his new book, ‘The Heat Will Kill You First,’ Jeff Goodell looks at the impact that extreme temperatures will have on everything from food to disease.

William Faulkner hated air-conditioning. He lived for most of his life in a two-story Greek Revival home built in 1848. Faulkner installed plumbing, electricity, and heat. But despite the monumental summer heat in Mississippi, he refused to install air-conditioning. Instead, he added a sleeping porch upstairs. In his novel The Reivers, one of the characters grouses, “There are no seasons at all any more, with interiors artificially contrived at sixty degrees in summer and ninety degrees in winter, so that mossbacked recidivists like me must go outside in summer to escape cold and in winter to escape heat.” (The day after Faulkner died, his wife, Estelle, had a window-unit air conditioner installed in her upstairs bedroom.)

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