Excerpted and adapted with permission from Slime: A Natural History, by Susanne Wedlich. Published February 2023 by Melville House. All rights reserved. A haboob is a dust storm. It’s an Arabic word for a phenomenon that struck the American Midwest like a plague of biblical proportions just under a century ago. This storm was not the work of God’s chastising hand, though; it was the worst man-made environmental catastrophe the United States has ever seen. East of the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains extend like wide corridors all the way…
