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Recently, I was rereading Livy’s History of Rome (I am obligated, contractually, to write sentences like this), in order to better understand the story of Cincinnatus, the soldier and statesman who desired only to look after his farm.

Updated at 9:27 p.m. on October 9, 2024
After several days of whirling across the Gulf of Mexico, blowing at up to 180 miles per hour, Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast tonight as the terrible embodiment of a historically destructive season. Milton inflated at a near-record pace, growing from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 behemoth in half a day, to become one of the most intense hurricanes in recorded history.

Watching a film in a theater, free of smartphones, sunlight, and other distractions, can be a hypnotic experience. When the lights go down and the smell of popcorn fills your nose; when the sound roars from the back and an imagined universe is literally projected before you; when multiple sensory inputs braid themselves together to create a potent whole, you might lose yourself in the best possible way.

Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”
Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats.