As a small child, Manduhai Buyandelger lived with her grandparents in a house unconnected to the heating grid on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There, in the world’s coldest capital city, temperatures can drop as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter months. “Once I moved further into the city with my parents, I had nightmares about my grandparents,” recalls Buyandelger, now a professor of anthropology at MIT. “I felt so vulnerable for them. In the ger district where they lived, most people do not have central heating,…
