His father was a fireman, and when the boy was small his father gave him a red bandana to carry in his pocket. Somebody asked him once why he kept it.

Also: ships crossing a strait with their transponders switched off, and forty billion dollars of oil that officially never sailed. The frozen ground inside Mont Blanc that has held the rock together for thousands of years, and what this summer did to it. Brussels gets into the housing business. Peat burning under the forests of Borneo. A hundred and sixteen degrees in Death Valley on the ninth of September. What the recorders show about Miami. Twenty five years to hand somebody a shovel. A machine that did in eighty eight hours what men could not do in ninety years. A flag waving out of a storm drain in Louisiana. And the day this country stopped calling itself the United Colonies.

Wedn ...