During the rare , vanishing cool days this summer, I woke up early and sat by the open window and read novels—Muñoz Molina, Mbougar Sarr, Salih, Bolaño. Sometimes, when I had to prep for a class I was teaching, I would read essays by Barthes. You don’t hear much at that hour. Wind, a bark, the buzz of someone’s decrepit air conditioner. The one sound that arrested me, taking me away from Ulises Lima’s wanderings in The Savage Detectives or Barthes’s observation, in Mythologies , that plastics are all given “Greek shepherds’ names (Polystyrene, Phenoplast, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene),” was the strange music of the occasional electric vehicle that slowed down in front of the stop sign just west of my apartment. I live in Chicago, where, unlike China or Singapore or Scandinavia, electric vehicles remain a minority presence on the road. Here, the now-antique rip and bust of internal combustion engines still fades into the familiar, unremarkable urban surround. Against this backdrop, EVs stand out.…