At moments like this—when there is nothing to do but sift through wreckage, when the universe is scrambled and we perceive that some have emerged lucky and some unlucky, when we’re faced with the puny proportions of our existence—I can’t help but think of the poet Wislawa Szymborska. Almost all of her poems seem to have been written after some gigantic, destructive storm (and, in a way, they were: she is one of the most wry and perceptive poets of post-Second World War Poland), and she has appointed herself chief investigator. Deftly, patiently, curiously, she turns over the objects she finds washed up on the shore after a catastrophic event, imagining what uses they were put to, what uses they might have now.

Click-through to read Wislaw Szymborska’s “Into the Ark,” and more from Sasha Weiss on the poet: http://nyr.kr/WYJqkf

Elizabeth Kolbert on Hurricane Sandy and the reality of North American climate change: “Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque.” Continue reading.

Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty.

Summer floods are common in this region, and yet the authorities were unprepared and under-equipped. They had at least three hours for an emergency warning: officials had learned about the imminent disaster around 10 P.M., and the water didn’t begin to rise dramatically until 1 A.M. But there was hardly any warning at all.

 Masha Lipman: The public’s grief is now mixed with a deep distrust of the government after a horrific flood in southern Russia.  Click-through to read more: http://nyr.kr/NrpPCY