Hi, Slate presents, listeners. I'm Susan Matthews, Slate's executive editor, and I'm here to tell you that our award-winning narrative show, Slowburn, is back with Slowburn becoming Justice Gorsuch.

In this new season, I'll trace the rise of Neil Gorsuch from his formative years as a young conservative through his controversial nomination

to a stolen seat on the Supreme Court. This mild-mannered, self-styled Westerner might not be

the flashiest justice on the bench, but he has somehow become the court's most unpredictable

vote. So I want to share with you the start of our first episode. To hear the

rest of the series, follow Slowburn wherever you listen. Now, here's the start of episode

one, Man with a Plan.

Thank you. In January of 2009, Alphonse Madden was driving a semi-truck along an Illinois highway, hauling a shipment of meat.

He wasn't sure where his next fuel station was, so he decided to pull over onto the side of the road to double check.

That's when things started to go wrong.

The brakes on the trailer froze, and so I was stranded, essentially.

That's Madden talking about what happened to him, at a press conference in 2017. The night he got stuck was one of the coldest of the entire winter. The temperature outside was 27 degrees below

zero. The trailer was one of those super long shipping containers hitched onto the back of the

truck. It was the trailer's brakes that

were jammed up, making it several tons of dead weight. If Madden kept it attached to the truck

and tried to drive, the trailer could skid out across the lanes, with no way to stop it or slow it

down. Imagine being on the road behind that. So he called into his dispatch center to report the

problem. I contacted the company's road assist. They arranged a repair unit. I assumed that the

repair unit would take no longer than an hour to arrive.

Madden settled in to wait, but there was another problem.

The heat in the truck's cabin wasn't working.

Soon, the temperature inside had dropped to negative seven.

...