Jeff Wise

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 9, 2024

The warnings began arriving by telegram. A fierce hurricane had just swung around the western tip of Cuba and was heading for Tampa, Florida. When it made landfall at Tarpon Springs on October 25, 1921, it was the storm of the century. Winds of 120 mph smashed steamships and toppled trees, and an 11-foot storm surge swept away buildings and destroyed crops. At least eight people were killed. “Tampa City of Ruins,” a local newspaper declared.

It’s been more than 100 years since a storm this fierce has hit Tampa, but given the climatic trends, storms that formerly registered as once-in-a-lifetime events are going to be happening a lot more frequently. Hurricane seasons are getting more intense, researchers say, and outlier storms are getting bigger. So while Milton is going to be the worst storm that anyone alive has ever seen in the area, it might not be the last of its scale to come around for a while.

Jill Trepanier, a professor of geography at Louisiana State University, has studied the kind of extreme storms that only appear every 30 years. She found that as waters have gotten warmer, the intensity of these storms has increased. “Thirty years ago, when we thought about what a typical 30-year event looked like in Tampa, it was a Category 3,” she says. “Now, it’s inching toward Category 4.”

This article originally ran in New York magazine on September 18, 2024

The wave of exploding pagers that injured nearly 3,000 and killed at least nine, including a 9-year-old girl, in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday was a stunning and unexpected blow against Israel’s longtime foe, Hezbollah. While the sheer number of casualties will put a damper on the terrorist group’s ability to wage offensive action, physical incapacitation of enemy fighters likely wasn’t Israel’s primary goal. Rather, the move was likely aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that would more significantly undermine the group’s ability to fight.

“It promulgates fear,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “It demonstrates to their enemy, ‘Hey, we can reach out and touch you anywhere, anytime.’ I would imagine that Hezbollah is significantly questioning who is in their ranks, who are their suppliers, and what vulnerabilities they have.”

In military science terms, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is described as asymmetric. Israel is a nation with a standing army and all the resources of a modern economy. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organization whose members are dispersed among the population of Lebanon. While they have fewer men and weapons than Israel, they can attack by surprise then melt away. (Hezbollah has used these sorts of hit-and-run tactics most recently in its ongoing shelling of Israel’s north.) You can’t destroy a guerrilla organization through the kind of direct, tank-on-tank attritional slugfest that Russia and Ukraine are currently waging. Instead, the core struggle is waged in the informational domain and the strategic objective is to degrade the psychological state of the enemy, according to Sullivan.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on August 26, 2024

The sinking of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht in a freak storm off the Sicilian coast last week certainly has to rank among the most bizarre fatal celebrity accidents in years. There was the weird coincidence that Lynch had just gotten acquitted after a yearslong legal battle over a multibillion-dollar fraud; the eerie synchrony of the same-day death of his co-defendant after being struck by car while jogging; the fact that the $40 million vessel had been described as virtually unsinkable; the fact no vessel that size had been sunk by a waterspout in centuries; and the fact that the area where it struck is not known for waterspouts. But perhaps the wildest thing about the whole saga is the yacht’s name, Bayesian.

It refers to a method of statistical calculation that was originally devised by an 18th-century Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes. Lynch named his yacht after Bayes’s method in recognition of its role in building his fortune. In short, he had honored a method of calculating probabilities — only to be killed aboard its namesake by an accumulation of wildly off-the-chart improbabilities.

“The irony is tragic,” says British science journalist Tom Chivers, who writes for Semafor and published a book this year on Bayesian statistics calledEverything Is Predictable. “It’s not a subtle irony. Bayes is the maths of prediction. This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely.”

It’s as if Charles Kane had been crushed to death under a giant rosebud.

This article originally ran on June 6, 2024 in Sherwood News.

On a morning in May, an 78-year-old, 64-foot schooner named the Apollonia raised its sails and cast off from Hudson, New York. As it sailed south it was borne along the half-mile-wide river by a falling tide. The wind was not favorable. The Apollonia could make progress only by tacking at angles to the wind, a process that required three crew members to haul ropes pulling in the sails as the ship turned, before letting them out again once the ship reached its new heading. The ship zigzagged a hundred times before the crew called it quits and tied up for the night. 

In the following days other challenges awaited. At Poughkeepsie the crew was becalmed; at Ossining they had to wait for the tide to rise until the water was deep enough to dock. The most difficult stretch of the voyage lay at World’s End, a narrowing of the river near West Point, where the current runs strong and mountain slopes funnel the wind unpredictably. To get through, said the vessel’s captain, Sam Merrett, “you really have to understand the Hudson.”

A week after it set out, and a hundred miles downriver, the Apollonia at last docked at the One°15 Brooklyn Marina. A morning shower had soaked the deck and in the cabin rain gear was hung to dry. The crew looked tired but happy. What they’d accomplished was not much from a practical standpoint — unloading barrels of barley malt at breweries along the way and picking up assorted goods like grain, flour, beer, whiskey, and preserves to deliver to customers downstream — but from a symbolic perspective it could be seen as epic. The Apollonia is the first sail-powered vessel in decades to run cargo along the US coast, and while the ship and its technology are old, its goal is new and ambitious: to demonstrate effective ways to decarbonize the maritime transport industry by 2050.