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From the pages of The New Yorker, this is the weekly comment podcast.
In In the Dark, Amy Davidson Sorkin explores how America is dealing with hurricane disasters.
As President Donald Trump headed to Florida last Thursday morning to survey the damage from Hurricane Irma, he was asked about the 5 million people in the state who were still without power.
He said that repairs to the electrical grid were going well, thanks to what he called the largest assemblage of human beings ever in one area for power.
Indeed.
In Florida alone, tens of thousands of linemen were on the job, brought in from as far away as California, some of them sleeping in trailers at the Sarasota Fairgrounds, where the Wall Street Journal reported they had named their encampment the Hotel Sarasota.
Similar efforts were underway in Alabama Georgia, the Carolinas and Puerto Rico, where a dilapidated power system had collapsed in the first winds.
Still, according to one estimate, three out of four Floridians were without power at one point, and a great many will be for weeks to come.
In a comparison of NASA space photos taken of Florida at night before and after Irma, clusters of cities and suburbs that are normally illuminated disappear into a topography of flooding drawn in power lines.
In some respects, Irma was not as devastating as it might have been.
Miami and Tampa were spared a direct hit, but the Keys were left largely uninhabitable and Jacksonville, 300 miles to the north, suffered severe unexpected flooding, illustrating what may be the most important lesson of Irma how close to the margins many Americans are living.
That lesson involves, most glaringly, climate change.
Irma and Hurricane Harvey, which struck two weeks earlier, are reminders that we live in an era of standardized disaster, with cities sprawling across what are now effectively floodplains.
But in other areas too, relating to infrastructure, income inequality and healthcare.
Irma provided a case study in precariousness.
Last week, as temperatures in the state reached the mid-90s, the police chief of Hollywood Florida announced that eight patients at a rehabilitation center that had lost power, and with it air conditioning, had died of what were apparently heat-related causes.
The Miami Herald described retirement communities that had no working elevators and where food and medicines that were supposed to be refrigerated were spoiling.
In another measure of desperation, in Orange County an emergency crew found three members of a family dead, apparently of carbon monoxide poisoning from fumes emitted by a generator they had bought and set up.
A child in the house had called 911.
There were also reminders last week of the pathology of the federal government's near-bankrupt flood insurance system, which encourages overdevelopment in vulnerable areas and subsidizes the coverage of many august structures, such as Trump's estate at Mar-a-Lago.
Even so, according to the AP, only 41% of homes in Florida's coastal counties have flood insurance.
In many cases, those policies fail to cover damage from mold which, in the heat, can set in almost immediately and persist indefinitely, compromising a house's structural integrity and its residents' health.
In Houston, standing water left from Harvey is also breeding clouds of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
When Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, was asked how he could square the Republican Party's budget-cutting priorities with the need to respond to the hurricanes, he brushed the question aside by saying that America is a big-hearted country that is always willing to cover these emergencies.
But our political system often has difficulty figuring out what constitutes an emergency.
Is it a child missing school because of an asthma attack brought on by mold?
Or a parent missing a mortgage payment because of shifts skipped during a hurricane evacuation?
Half of all American households live paycheck to paycheck.
It's alarmingly easy, with one moderate gust, to get badly off track.
There was an echo in McConnell's assertion of the Republican Party's response to criticisms that dismantling Obamacare would cost millions of people their health, which it dismissed with the blithe insistence that Americans will never let other Americans simply die in the street.
When Tom Bossert, Trump's Homeland Security Advisor, was asked at a press briefing whether the onslaught of hurricanes had led the administration to reconsider some of its environmental policies, such as the abandonment of the Paris Accords, he said that it would take seriously not the cause of climate change, but the things that we observe.
That is a prescription for nothing more than repeatedly rushing to rescue while remaining ill-prepared for the long term.
Similarly, when Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that it would be very, very insensitive to talk about the climate crisis at this juncture, one could only wonder whose feelings he was most concerned about.
I wish that he would have been here when people ran from high-rises.
Miami's mayor, Tomas Regalado, said of Pruitt.
Meanwhile, Trump infuriated members of his own party by acceding to a Democratic effort in Congress to tie a Harvey relief package to a three-month extension of the debt ceiling.
Hurricane relief money will be inadequately spent though, if it does not address the endemic issues that make hurricanes more dangerous or shore up those aspects of government oversight which mitigated the effects of Harvey and Irma.
By all accounts, lives were saved by more stringent building codes, which were put in place after Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Katrina in 2005, and whose fastidiousness Trump has decried.
And significant parts of the cleanup will be in the hands of the EPA, for which the president has proposed deep cuts.
America is a rich country, and still a lucky one.
The linemen are not the only assemblage deployed to respond to the hurricanes.
Tens of thousands of members of the military and the reserves were available to assist in the operations.
Our big cities did not drown this time.
A more acute harbinger of the face of climate change might be the ravaging of islands in the Caribbean and the floods in South Asia the same week, which killed thousands of people.
But with each such storm, the lives of certain Americans get worse in ways that are more difficult to assess.
The disasters of the age of climate change may come on like a loud riot, but they can also set in like a quiet rot.
That was In the Dark by Amy Davidson Sorkin, from The New Yorker magazine September 25th 2017.
Narrated by Dan Bernard.
Also in the magazine this week, Rebecca Mead on what fashion can learn from physics.
Alexis Okewu on designing lingerie in Nigeria.
David Remnick on Hillary Clinton.
Burkhard Bilger on feathers.
James Wood on a novel about refugees.
Sheila Hetty on the novels of Fleur Yagi.
Emily Nussbaum on The Deuce.
Anthony Lane on Mother and Battle of the Sexes.
Fiction by Jonas Hassan Kameri and more.
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