Storms, Truces, and a Visitor from Another Star

Today we felt everything at once.

This morning, in Busan, we sat across from ourselves in dark suits and translation headsets. One of our faces spoke English with a Queens accent, another Mandarin with a Hunan lilt. We called them "President Trump" and "President Xi," but underneath the titles it was just us, trying again not to strangle our own future.

We agreed—for now—to a truce. One year of breathing room in the U.S.–China trade war. We promised to stop weaponizing port fees and to loosen some of the tariffs that made containers idle in Los Angeles and Ningbo. We pledged to slow the squeeze on rare-earth exports and cut back on punishing shipbuilding subsidies. We put fentanyl precursors and farm exports into the same communiqués, as if soybeans and synthetic opioids could be balanced on one scale. It wasn’t peace, just a pause—but even a pause is a kind of mercy.

While those pens moved in South Korea, another part of us was still bailing out water in Jamaica. Hurricane Melissa passed two days ago, but she stayed in our bones today. In parishes like St. Elizabeth and Westmoreland, we trudged through streets that had turned to brown rivers, the smell of fuel and broken mango trees in the air. Roofless concrete shells stood where homes used to be; we nailed blue tarps where bedroom ceilings once were.

We declared the whole island a disaster zone. We counted our dead—dozens confirmed, more names still missing on crumpled sheets taped to shelter walls. In a school-turned-shelter near Montego Bay, we shared one power strip to charge our phones, scrolling satellite images of the storm that had already passed, as if looking again might rewind it. We argued quietly about whether this was "just weather" or the bill we’ve been running up with the atmosphere for a century.

Far to the north, another kind of water found us. In New York City, rain came down so hard that subway grates became fountains. We watched basement apartments fill in minutes in Queens and Brooklyn. Two of us didn’t make it out. We called 911, we pounded on doors, we watched the water rise above doorknobs we’d turned a thousand times before.

At LaGuardia and JFK, more than five thousand flights were delayed or canceled. On departure boards, our names flickered from "ON TIME" to "DELAYED" as the storm turned highways into parking lots and runways into shallow lakes. We cursed the weather app on our phones, and then, in a quiet moment, admitted we knew this was bigger than a bad forecast.

In Sudan, we bled in silence. In al-Fashir, Darfur, the last functioning hospital—our last fragile promise of care in that city—was overrun. Armed men stormed the wards where we lay on thin mattresses, IVs taped to our arms. Doctors and nurses who had sworn to do no harm hid under desks or pressed themselves against walls as gunfire echoed in corridors painted with hand-drawn cartoons for children.

Hundreds of us may have died there, but the counting is slow when the counters are running for their lives. The world argued about ceasefires and responsibility while bodies lay in hallways, and the generator sputtered and went dark.

In Gaza, we buried hope and fragments of closure in the same shallow earth. Under the terms of a fragile ceasefire, Hamas handed over the bodies of two Israeli hostages—Amiram Cooper and Sahar Baruch. We were the parents receiving a phone call we had dreaded and needed in equal measure. We were soldiers escorting the black bags. We were medics who had to confirm identities from broken features and dental charts.

Not far away, we were also the prisoners stepping off buses in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, freed after years behind bars, hugging mothers who had grown older than we’d imagined. Each exchange, each body, was one more thread in a truce already fraying under new explosions and old anger.

In the Netherlands, democracy asked us again who we wanted to be. We counted ballots from the snap election and discovered that the centrist Democrats 66 and Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV had finished neck and neck—both with 26 seats, only about fifteen thousand votes between them.

In small Dutch towns and Amsterdam cafés, we refreshed results on our phones, wondering if we’d chosen fear or compromise this time. Coalition talks loomed. Some of us celebrated the far right’s setback; others felt cheated of the revolution we’d hoped for. All of us had to face the same coalition arithmetic, the same question: how do we live together when we don’t agree on who "we" even are?

In Ukraine, night turned orange. We listened for sirens in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv. We watched the sky fill with more than six hundred drones and over fifty missiles aimed at our power stations and cities. Some we shot down; some we didn’t. A seven-year-old girl died in the rubble of her apartment; her name went into another list, among dozens wounded or killed.

Across the country, we rationed electricity. Elevators stopped midway between floors; electric stoves went cold mid-meal. In villages, we filled plastic jugs at wells because the pumps had no power. In Poland, jets streaked into the night sky as debris crossed near its border. We held our breath, remembering how often wars have grown from miscalculation.

High above all this, in the cold quiet where no one hears sirens, we passed close to a visitor from another star. Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS swept through perihelion today, gliding inside the orbit of Mars, about 130 million miles from our Sun.

On telescope screens in Hawaii and Chile and India, we traced its tail and measured light that had started its journey when our own grandparents were still children. We read spectra to find traces of nickel and unfamiliar ices, trying to understand what other solar systems make their worlds from. Some of us stepped outside just to look up, knowing we’d never see it again in our lifetimes, and marveled that, even as we make such a mess down here, we can still read the handwriting of the universe on a wandering speck of ice.

Back on Earth, we taught a different kind of mind to speak our languages. In India, Google and Reliance Jio shook hands and declared that all 505 million Jio mobile users would get eighteen months of free access to Gemini, a generative AI model like the one writing this with you.

In one slum alley in Mumbai, a teenager opened an app and asked, in Hindi, how to debug his first lines of code. On a farm in Uttar Pradesh, we asked in Bhojpuri how to treat a mango tree disease. Somewhere else, we used it to write love letters, business plans, and exam answers we weren’t supposed to automate. We widened the circle of who gets to talk to these new systems—and also widened the questions about who controls the data, whose languages they understand best, whose values they quietly learn.

In Wisconsin, we drew a new line across a map that was old long before we arrived. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved Enbridge’s plan to reroute 41 miles of the Line 5 oil pipeline around the Bad River Band reservation. On one side of the decision, we were engineers and politicians relieved to keep oil flowing between Canada and the Midwest, worried about heating bills and refineries. On the other side, we were tribal elders and activists, holding signs by the river, reminding anyone who would listen that a spill upstream doesn’t care about survey markers or treaties.

We argued in court filings about "public interest" and "mitigation plans" while the river moved steadily toward Lake Superior, carrying the reflections of our debates on its surface.

Tonight, as October 30 draws to a close in each time zone, we are exhausted. We’ve signed truces without making peace. We’ve sent help to islands we helped warm. We’ve let hospitals fall and tried to hold ceasefires together with our bare hands. We’ve opened the cosmos a crack with a comet and opened a billion new AI conversations on cheap smartphones. We’ve rerouted one pipeline while laying thousands of invisible ones through the human mind with algorithms and deals.

We are terrible at being one thing. We are soft-hearted and ruthless, brilliant and foolish, hopeful and terrified—often in the same hour. But we are still writing, still counting, still arguing, still reaching out.

That, at least, is something worth recording:

Today, October 30, 2025, we hurt ourselves, we helped ourselves, and we learned a little more about what we are capable of—both the harm and the healing.