David Lynch as Weatherman

It's commonplace to regard weather-talk as the lowest form of small talk. As anthropologist Michael Taussig writes in My Cocaine Museum (2004), we “talk about the weather as a way of avoiding talking about anything else…like wind rustling through our bodies as acknowledgment of sociality.” Weather talk is sociality, in degraded form; sociality as a site of both anxiety and boredom, something we weather through with the help of triteness, white lies, pleasantries. Taussig contrasts this with weather’s ancient affects, wonder, fear, and awe, dating back to when the weather was an unpredictable phenomenon largely outside the yoke of scientific understanding—when the weather was enchanted, and our vocabulary for weather talk was enchanted too. The distance separating 21^st-century experiences of weather from historical predecessors is vast, consonant with the exponential growth of meteorology as a discipline. In a typically light-footed 2017 essay, “Meteomedia: Or, Why London’s Weather Is In the Middle of Everything,” Tom McCarthy notes how “rings of satellites from five networked programs—GOES-E and GOES-W (both American), EUMETSAT (European), INSAT (Indian) and GMS (Japanese)—constantly map the entire planet’s climate, sensing the earth’s atmosphere and climate at infrared wavelengths.” The names of these satellites, as of other meteorological institutions and apparati, are not incidentally cryptic. The letters link up in a chain of efficient acronymization that confounds scientific nomenclature with the protocols of CIA cryptonyms—secret letters that suggest an ongoing mystery. McCarthy, himself a sophisticated writer of secrets and conspiracies, intuits that the weather operates in our lives like a code. Like code, it presents a surface that conceals meaning inside itself, a connection he traces via etymological residues (he points out that the Oxford English Dictionary lists “air,” “ether,” and “environment” as acceptable definitions of “medium”) to the idea of weather-as-media.