“Everybody’s here trying to help.” A report from the scene in Hunt, Texas, where aid is incoming, and a reflection on the ruins of Camp Mystic. Plus:

Erin Neil
Newsletter editor

How did this happen? The question remains unanswered in the aftermath of last week’s floods in the Texas Hill Country, which left more than a hundred dead and dozens still missing. And more questions will likely arise in the coming days and weeks, as search-and-rescue efforts continue and hope for finding survivors begins to wane.

Rachel Monroe, a contributing writer who lives in Texas, is currently in Hunt, a town on the banks of the Guadalupe River. “All up and down [State Highway] 39 are these small communities that are just devastated, homes washed away, debris everywhere, enormous trees uprooted,” she tells us. “Stone walls and wrought-iron gates all torn up.” She was visiting a volunteer fire department, a community hub. “There is just a huge outpouring of aid coming in,” she reports. “I just listened to somebody offering to do I.V. vitamin infusions; somebody is going to come in and do massages.” The influx is so overwhelming that it’s unclear, especially with the roads “so messed up,” where the aid-supply trucks will go—there are too many. “The dispatcher at the fire station just kept getting calls—calls from New Hampshire, calls from Oklahoma, from people wanting to send stuff and bring stuff. There are a lot of search teams in rubber boots—both official state search teams and people from the community,” Monroe said. “Everybody’s here trying to help.”

That help is sure to find its place; the devastation is still revealing itself, and, as Jessica Winter writes, it is already immeasurable. Hunt, Texas, is also the home of Camp Mystic, the Christian girls’ camp where twenty-seven campers and counsellors are known to have died in the floods. The questions swirling around this tragedy—about National Weather Service staffing, financing for flood-warning systems, evacuation reaction times, climate-change denialism—are a search for culpability. “Blame, if properly placed, can spur action and save lives in the future,” Winter notes. But it is also a way for us to attempt to “seize control of an uncontrollable and unfathomable set of circumstances.”

Read Jessica Winter on the floods »

Since its inception, this magazine has had a tradition of recommending reading. These days, we have the Briefly Noted book reviews and our ongoing list of the Best Books We’ve Read This Week. Our inaugural issue, a hundred years ago, offered a lightly annotated list called “Tell Me a Book to Read,” alongside a critique of eight other books. Thomas Mallon looks back at the stories touted in that issue, which feature a love-crazed soldier, scheming septuagenarians, an Anglo-French chastity plot, and a suspected nymphomaniac with a taste for fast cars. Read or listen to the story »

Read: Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, “Vera, or Faith,” is out today. If you don’t yet have your hands on a copy, revisit his 2006 short story “A Love Letter.”

Today’s Crossword Puzzle: “The Wretched of the Earth” author Frantz—five letters.

P.S. The T.S.A. is reportedly going to start allowing travellers to keep their shoes on when going through security. Sara K. Runnels once imagined other ways the airport experience might be improved, including a designated lane for “singles hoping for a connection that may or may not give a new meaning to ‘layover.’ ” ✈️

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.