Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

In 1995, Chicago's heat killed over seven hundred people in a week — mostly elderly, mostly Black, mostly alone. Klinenberg's social autopsy asks who they were and why they died isolated. His answer is structural: poverty, neighbourhood disinvestment, the privatisation of public space. A disaster so preventable it becomes an indictment. The heat didn't kill them. Loneliness and policy did.