Imagine Catastrophe

Our lived experience is no guarantee of future results.

It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognize them in the early stages. —Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

There’s something vaguely yet unmistakably unsettling about August.

Hot and humid days and nights elicit an intermittent torpor. The hours o…