Dear Reader,

It used to be that talking about the weather was considered Not Interesting. Weather was the refuge of the unimaginative and the small talk-y, people who didn’t know how to broach larger, scarier subjects. More recently however, it seems like weather is one of the only things actually worth talking about. It is suddenly, unmistakably, urgent.

This issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal is dedicated to Weather. Our changing climate is of course, part of the discussion, as is the larger social and economic atmosphere that surrounds us. Amy Leach writes about the ongoing catastrophe that is life on earth. Claire McEachearn writes about her experience fleeing the California wildfires. Aisha Sabatini Sloan interviews climate scientists about their dreams — how does the subconscious deal with the apocalypse? Molly Prentiss’s short story meanwhile considers motherhood and survival. Carolina de Robertis writes about how the sequoia woods irrevocably changed her. J.D. Daniels recalls a wintery, disastrous trip to the desert.

Weather is everyday, local, ordinary. It’s also enormous, critical, political. We should all keep talking about it, until hopefully — and perhaps this is going too far — it is banal again, and deeply uninteresting.

Medaya
Editor, Quarterly Journal