Climate change has made the most dangerous floods more frequent, and we are simply not prepared to handle what’s to come, John Seabrook reports. Plus:

Erin Neil
Newsletter editor

At the beginning of the month, the Guadalupe River overflowed, killing more than a hundred people in the Texas Hill Country. Shortly after, floods ripped through North Carolina, parts of the Midwest, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C. And, last Monday night, as rain crashed down on New York and New Jersey, phones lit up, warning residents of imminent flooding. Videos of water rushing into a subway station went viral, and, by Tuesday morning, two people in New Jersey were confirmed dead after their car was swept away by the storm surge.

As temperatures around the world continue to rise, so have bursts of extreme precipitation. We’re now seeing more floods that resemble the volatility of a tornado or a wildfire—events that leave only “a narrow window within which to act before the deadly force of the raging river arrived at your door,” John Seabrook, a staff writer, reports in a piece from this week’s issue. Seabrook argues that we’re living through a distinct age of floods—and that we don’t yet have systems in place that are equipped for what’s to come. Here are a few key things that we all should know.

The idea of a “hundred year” flood is a misleading statistic. The phrase makes it sound as if “a bad flood will occur only once every hundred years,” Seabrook writes. But what the “hundred-year floodplain” actually measures is how likely a flood of a certain magnitude is to occur in a certain area. Someone living in this zone would have a one-per-cent chance of being flooded any given year. And a recent study commissioned by First Street Foundation, a private risk-assessment firm, found that such massive floods, previously considered hundred-year events, are, on average, becoming more and more frequent.

A storm surge is not the deadliest kind of flood. We’re familiar with the footage that shows people in low-lying coastal towns and cities, inundated by rain, wading through streets submerged in water. But those floods often unfold more slowly, allowing people to get to safety on higher ground. A flooded river, by contrast, moves rapidly and “reshapes the entire landscape.”

Millions of homeowners are living on property that is at high risk of flooding, but they don’t truly understand the risks. In recent years, people have moved away from coastal areas to places out of the way of storm-surge flooding, hurricanes, and rising sea levels. But the kind of flooding that occurred in Texas’s Kerr County often takes place in the hilly and mountainous areas that are attracting new residents. “They have merely traded a devil they know for one they don’t,” Seabrook points out. FEMA uses floodplain maps to designate a Special Flood Hazard Area, or S.F.H.A., but the data used to identify these places is based on readings from the middle of the twentieth century or earlier. The First Street study found that, of the more than seventeen million properties that are at risk of flooding, only five million are in a FEMA-designated flood-hazard zone—meaning that many homeowners and buyers are unaware of the risks to their property.

Read more about how we should cope with floods »

Before last week, few people outside the world of data-tracking software had any reason to have heard of the company Astronomer, or of its C.E.O. and head of H.R. But then a video of the co-workers embracing, and then hiding, appeared on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts—before it later appeared just about everywhere else. “If there’s a lesson from so-called Coldplaygate,” Kyle Chayka writes, “it’s the extent to which, during the past decade or so of digital culture, going viral has gone from being an aspirational goal to a form of punishment.” Read the column »

As interest in the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to spike anew, the Department of Justice contacted Epstein’s former girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a prison term following a conviction for sex trafficking and other charges. A House panel also voted to subpoena Maxwell.