Lives: A Brief Vacation From Myself

I was looking in my closet, choosing a shirt, when I lost my mind.

Four hours later, I'm in the E.R., and I don't know how I got here. My wife, Shawn, stands at my bedside, her expression alternating between reassuring and dismayed. Next to her, a doctor in his mid-50s calmly tells me he's going to name three objects.

"I want you to hold these in your mind," he says. "Apple, table, penny." I nod, noticing a semicircle of young interns behind him, listening intently. Then the doctor asks me to multiply 17 times 3.

"I'm not very good at math," I say. He waits. "Let's see. Twenty times 3 is 60, minus 6." I pause, correcting myself. "No, minus 9. Fifty-one?"

"Good." He smiles. "Now, what were those three objects I named?"

I can't recall the objects. I barely remember that he listed them. Flustered, I purse my lips and slowly shake my head, looking at Shawn.

She fills in the blanks for me: I woke up, took a shower, and when I stepped out, I seemed disoriented. I sat down on the bed.

"Wait, remind me, what are we doing today?" I asked her.

"Do I need to remind you again? We're having lunch at the Swerdlows'." I didn't remember that.

I put a hand on my forehead, then lay on my back. "What day is it?" I asked her.

Concerned by my blank stare, Shawn shot me questions: Do you know who came over last night? (I didn't.) Do you remember what we argued about yesterday morning? (I couldn't.)

When I couldn't recall that our eldest son was in college, she called my doctor. He told her to take me to the E.R. immediately. She told me to get dressed and went downstairs to tell our teenage sons what was going on, sort of — that Dad had a bad headache and needed to go to the hospital.

When she came to retrieve me, I was wandering around the bedroom in my boxers. Her phone rang — the doctor.

"I don't care what he's wearing," he told her. "Go."

She drove, and I asked questions: "We're going to the hospital?" "Did you bring my wallet?" "I have my contacts in — what about my glasses?"

She answered patiently. Then I asked again. "We're going to the hospital?" "Did you bring my wallet?" And again. After the fourth repetition, my wife was crying. After the sixth, she pressed harder on the accelerator.

At the E.R., they gave me a CT scan — no bleeding. The doctors asked me questions: Who is the president? (I couldn't recall.) What do I do for a living? (I'm a writer.) What did I have for breakfast? (No clue.) The doctor asked me to draw a clock and draw hands to show 11 o'clock. I managed to do that.

My memory picks up around the moment the doctor is giving me a diagnosis. "We know what this is," he says. "It's benign, and it will happen only once in your life." He gives it a name: transient global amnesia, in other words, inexplicable short-term memory loss. For four hours my brain has replayed the same two-minute loop, recording nothing and missing large chunks of the recent past. I'll recover, but it could take days. The only long-term effect, he says, is that I'll never remember these four hours. Ever.

He sends me to a hospital room for observation. Lying there that afternoon, I spot a black striped shirt on a hanger.

"Who chose that?" I ask Shawn. "I would never pick that shirt."

"You know you've already asked that question 10 times, right?" she says. (I don't.)

That night I get a brain M.R.I., the next morning an EEG. The tests confirm that my brain is normal, but that doesn't help me shake the disconcerting feeling that we are all just one misfiring neuron away from forgetting who the president is or what we did last night or what transpired in our most intimate moments. In an instant, I had become like my grandmothers in their last years, floating through life, uttering the same old phrases as if for the first time.

Your accumulated memories make you who you are — how terrifying is it that they can simply vanish? What do you become then? This question still nags at me every morning I can't remember where I put my keys, each time I can't recall why I came downstairs. Now I have a simple way to ground myself. I repeat three words in my mind: apple, table, penny.

Tom Fields-Meyer is the author of "Following Ezra: What One Father Learned About Gumby, Otters, Autism and Love From His Extraordinary Son."

E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.

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Googling Yourself Takes on a Whole New Meaning

Grant Cornett for The New York Times

Here's what you see if you look at my face: a skinny titanium headband stretched across my forehead. It looks like a futuristic pair of sunglasses, minus the lenses. On my right-hand side there's a computer, a metal frame with a small, clear cube of plastic perched just over my eye. When I tilt my head upward a bit, or run my finger along the side of the frame, the cube lights up. What I see, floating six inches in front of me, is a pinkish, translucent computer screen. It gives me access to a few simple apps: Google search, text messaging, Twitter, a to-do list, some hourly news headlines from CNN ("See a Truck Go Airborne, Fly Over Median," "Dolphin Deaths Alarm Biologists"). Beside the screen is a teensy camera built into the frame of the glasses, ready to record anything I'm looking at.

Performance-Enhancing Devices

Google Glass is only the latest in a long line of wearable technology.

Gail Oskin/Associated Press

Thad Starner and his wearable computer at the M.I.T. Media Lab in 1997.

Google Glass is the company's attempt to mainstream what the tech industry calls wearable computing, to take the computer off your desk or out of your pocket and keep it in your field of view. In a world where we're already peering at screens all day long, pecked at by alerts, the prospect of an eyeball computer can provoke a shudder. But over several weeks of using the device myself, I began to experience some of the intriguing — and occasionally delightful — aspects of this new machine. I got used to glancing up to start texting and e-mailing by addressing its surprisingly accurate voice-transcription capabilities. (I admit I once texted my wife while riding my bicycle.) I set up calendar reminders that dinged in my ear. I used an app that guided me back to my car in a parking lot. I sent pictures of magazine articles to Evernote, so I would have reminders of what I'd read. I had tweets from friends float across my gaze.

Despite my quick adoption, however, only rarely did I accomplish something with Glass that I couldn't already do with, say, my mobile phone. When I first heard about the device, I envisioned using it as a next-level brain supplement, accessing brilliant trivia during conversations, making myself seem omniscient (or insufferable, or both). This happened only occasionally: I startled a friend with information about the author of a rare sci-fi book, for example. But generally I found that Googling was pretty hard; you mostly control Glass with voice commands, and speaking queries aloud in front of others was awkward.

The one thing I used regularly was its camera. I enjoyed taking hands-free shots while playing with my kids and street scenes for which I would probably not have bothered to pull out my phone. I streamed live point-of-view video with friends and family. But it also became clear that the camera is a social bomb. One friend I ran into on the street could focus only on the lens pointing at her. "Can it see into my soul?" she asked. Later, she wrote me an e-mail: "Nice to see you. Or spy you spying, I guess."

Cameras are everywhere in public, but one fixed to your face sends a more menacing signal: I have the power to record you at a moment's notice, it seems to declare — and maybe I already am. In the weeks before I got Glass this summer, at least one restaurant banned the device, articles fulminated against it and a parody of its use appeared on "Saturday Night Live." In public, I sometimes found myself avoiding people's eyes, as if trying to indicate that I wasn't recording them. (Of course, if there's one thing weirder than someone wearing a computer on his face, it's someone wearing a computer on his face who also refuses to look you in the eye.)

As far as Google is concerned, any social quirks, tensions or paranoias Glass produces now are just temporary side effects — the kind of things we always confront before a new device becomes necessary, accepted, even beloved. Yet there's always a gulf between how creators intend for their tools to be used and the way people actually use them. There can be a divide, too, between the experience of users and those they interact with. From my perspective, I was wearing a computer, a tool that gave me the constant, easy ability to access information quickly. To everyone else, I was just a guy with a camera on his head. With a technology this strange and new, it's hard to tell just what it is: a bridge to the rest of the world — or just another screen blocking people out?

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer and author of "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better," out Sept. 12.

Editor: Dean Robinson

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled part of the name of a venture capital firm. It is Andreessen Horowitz, not Andreesen Horowitz.

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12 Minutes of Freedom in 460 Days of Captivity

When I describe what happened to me on Aug. 23, 2008, I say that I was taken. On an empty stretch of road outside of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, out of the back seat of a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi by a dozen or so men whose faces were swaddled in checkered scarves. Each one of them carried an AK-47.

Photograph by Pascal Maitre

The hotel, in 2008, where Lindhout stayed before her kidnapping.

The truth of it dawned slowly on me, as the men seemed to rise up out of the sand, circling the car with their guns hefted, as they shouted a few words at our driver, as someone tugged open a door. We — me, my traveling companion Nigel Brennan and the three Somali men helping us with our work — were headed that day to a sprawling settlement just outside the city to do some reporting. We were waved out from our air-conditioned vehicle into the sweltering equatorial heat. I remember in that instant a narrow-shouldered woman dressed in a flowing hijab hurrying past on foot. She pointedly looked away, as if a couple of white Westerners getting pulled from a car and being forced to lie spread-eagle in the ditch at the side of the road were an everyday occurrence or, in any event, something she had no power to stop.

It was clear to me then that nobody was going to call for help. Nobody was going to punch some sort of reverse button so that we would be pulled to our feet, put back into our car and sent spinning down the road to where we had started. No, with every second that passed, the way back was becoming more obscure. It was hot, the air tasting like cinder. We were lying on some sort of edge. I pressed my forehead into the dirt, closed my eyes and waited for whatever was coming.

This is how one life ends and another one begins. In the eyes of my family and friends, in the eyes of the cheerful young waiter who served me coffee and an omelet that morning at our mostly empty hotel in Mogadishu, and from the point of view of anyone who would next try to piece together the story, I vanished. And so did Nigel, who was a photographer from Australia and an ex-boyfriend of mine — who decided at the last minute to come with me on the trip and who may well spend the rest of his life regretting that he did.

I was 27 years old. I had spent most of the last seven years traveling the world, often by myself, as a backpacker, financing extended low-budget trips with stints working as a waitress in a couple of fancy cocktail lounges at home in Canada, in the oil-rich city of Calgary. With my saved-up tip money, I went through Venezuela, then Burma, then Bangladesh. I saw Pakistan and Syria, Ethiopia and Sudan. Each trip bolstered my confidence, convincing me that even while strife and terror hogged the international headlines, there was always something more hopeful and humane to be found on the ground.

Before going to Somalia, I spent the last year or so trying to transition to more serious work, learning photography and teaching myself how to produce a television report, locating myself — as many aspiring journalists did — strategically in the world's hot spots. I did a six-month stint in Kabul, followed by seven months in Baghdad. As a freelancer, I filed stories for a couple of English-language cable networks, taking whatever work I could get, and was writing a regular column for my small hometown paper in Alberta. I was getting by, but just barely. My plan was to spend a week in Somalia, which, with its civil war and what seemed to be an impending famine, had no shortage of potential stories to cover. Knowing it was risky, I took what felt like the necessary precautions — hiring a local fixer to arrange our logistics, paying for a pair of armed government guards to escort us around Mogadishu. For me, going to Somalia felt like a steppingstone, though I recognized it was a dangerous one.

Later, our captors would tell us they had been watching our hotel. What happened was planned, to the extent anything like this can be planned. Guns were marshaled; a place to take us afterward was secured. As we headed northwest out of the city that day, they somehow knew Westerners were coming. Maybe it was a cousin's cousin who tipped them off. Maybe it was the sight of our freshly washed S.U.V. rental ripping around the battle-worn Old City, with its collapsed buildings and bullet-pocked walls. Most assuredly, there had been cash promised to somebody — a driver, a hotel employee, a guard — in exchange for information about where the foreigners were headed. We were ambushed just outside the city limits, at a precisely vulnerable moment, right after our government guards climbed out at a checkpoint and just before we were to meet two replacement guards a few kilometers down the road. Somebody — we don't know who — sold us out.

Adapted from "A House in the Sky," by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett, to be published by Scribner this month.

Lindhout is the founder of the Global Enrichment Foundation, a nonprofit that works with women in Somalia and Kenya. Corbett is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Editor: Ilena Silverman

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Norman Rush’s Brilliantly Broken Promise

LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times

Elsa and Norman Rush at home.

One afternoon at the end of the summer of 2011, on the shady porch of a little red farmhouse near High Tor, in Rockland County, N.Y., the novelist Norman Rush, vigorous at 77, revealed himself as a man of great frankness. "I completely betrayed her," Rush told me, astonishment in his voice over what he'd done to the woman sitting across from him, Elsa Rush, 76, his wife of 56 years.

The three of us were at a table messy with the remains of lunch, a pair of flies making drunken arcs above our empty plates. Broad-chested and white-bearded, with an expression alternately jolly and severe, Rush looked to his wife. Elsa, as emotionally direct as Rush is conversationally frank, is a tall, unfussily elegant woman whom Rush often calls, both in and out of her presence and never emptily, "my beautiful wife." Looking off the porch of the house she and Rush have shared for half a century, Elsa was facing the lawned woodland adjoining us, sunken slightly in its center like a saddle.

"The way I put it to Norman," Elsa said, turning to her husband, "was, 'Whatever you want to write, that's fine.' If you had said, 'I'm going to spend 10 years, and I'm going to write a book about this — ,' can you imagine me saying: 'No! You're not going to do that!' Can you imagine it?"

In retrospect, Rush should have known that what he was doing could lead only to betrayal, given a set of statistics well known to them both. His first book, "Whites" (1986), a collection of stories that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, wasn't published until he was 52; his first novel, the 477-page, National Book Award-winning "Mating" (1991), took eight years to write; his second novel, the 712-page "Mortals" (2003), took 10 years. And yet, upon the appearance of "Mortals," Rush told Elsa — promised her — that his next novel would be a mere 180 pages and take two years to complete. But there we were on their porch in 2011, eight years later, and the "next novel" — "Subtle Bodies," which is at last being published this month — was, as of that date, quite a bit longer than 180 pages and still not finished.

"A hundred and eighty pages," Elsa said. "Taking two years. . . . You've never done anything like that before, so why did you persuade me?"

Throughout his career, Rush has been candid about Elsa's involvement in his writing. Not a literary spouse who stealthily delivers cups of tea to the genius in the attic, Elsa is what Rush calls "a partner in the process," which he describes as "a battle waged in common." Testimony on the depth of their artistic partnership may be found on the dedication pages of his books — dedications that are minor masterpieces of a characteristically trivial genre.

"Everything I write is for Elsa," begins the dedication to "Mating," "but especially this book, since in it her heart, sensibility and intellect are so signally — if perforce esoterically — celebrated and exploited. My debt to her, in art and in life, grows however much I put against it."

But as the years passed after the two-year deadline expired, Rush's debt to Elsa ("the last 10 years of extraordinary forbearance," as he writes in the dedication to "Mortals") compounded at an accelerating rate. The battle waged in common became a struggle Rush felt ashamed to share.

"Guilt will stop you in your tracks," Rush said, of the years that followed his promise. "And I began feeling guilty about this book when it diverged so radically from its original, simpler formulation. Because it was taking time out of our life when there are lots of fun things we could do if I just stopped writing."

For a fiction writer who has counted among his admirers the Nobel laureates J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, not to say a diverse generation of younger writers that includes Benjamin Kunkel and Tom Bissell, Rush's notion of stopping writing was neither desirable nor reasonable — least of all to Elsa, who says, with unfeignable ardor, "I love everything Norman writes!" As such, she found herself clearing their schedule — of cruises booked; hotels reserved; invitations from friends — when Rush needed to keep to his desk. Still, Elsa found it difficult not to grow distressed.

Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for the magazine and senior fellow of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

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The U.S. Open Issue: Roger Federer Can Still Get His Game Face On

Peter Hapak for The New York Times

Postscript Appended

On the first Wednesday of Wimbledon this June, under a bright early-evening sky, Roger Federer trailed two sets to one in his second-round match against Sergiy Stakhovsky, a Ukrainian ranked 116th in the world and best known until that point for pulling out his cellphone during a match to take a photograph of a disputed ball mark. But Stakhovsky had played imposing serve-and-volley tennis, a style seldom seen nowadays, and as the fourth set unfolded on Center Court, it became clear that he was not going to succumb to nerves. Federer, 31 and seeking a record eighth Wimbledon title, would have to contrive an escape.

The specter of defeat can bring out Federer's ornery side. At this year's Australian Open, he twice shouted obscenities at Andy Murray during their semifinal match. (Murray didn't flinch and won in five sets.) Now, with Stakhovsky serving at 3-4 40-love in the fourth set, the Ukrainian once again followed his first serve to the net. Federer's return landed at Stakhovsky's feet, and he short-hopped the ball back to Federer, who took it in the air and rifled a swinging backhand volley at Stakhovsky's head. It was a jarringly violent shot — one radar gun clocked it at 96 miles per hour — and Stakhovsky dove to the ground rather than try to play the ball, which sailed over the baseline and ended up somewhere near Calais. Federer would later deny that he had aimed at Stakhovsky ("this is not the juniors"), but it didn't matter. A short while later, on the 12th point of the fourth-set tiebreaker, Federer pushed a backhand wide, and Stakhovsky sank to the grass to celebrate the biggest victory of his career and one of the greatest upsets in Wimbledon history. On the court where it had started, the Federer era had possibly just died.

A half-hour after the match, Federer entered the interview room and immediately pre-empted any talk of retirement. "I still have plans to play for many more years to come," he said. "You don't panic at this point, that's clear." But his actions in the weeks that followed suggested, if not panic, at least deep anxiety about the state of his game. Federer, who normally takes a break from competition in July, swiftly announced plans to play two tournaments that month — the unfortunately named Bet-At-Home Open in Hamburg, Germany, and the Swiss Open in Gstaad. He caused still more surprise when he arrived in Hamburg and pulled a new racket out of his bag. After years of playing with a quaint 90-square-inch head, he was finally joining the rest of the world in using a larger racket — in this case a 98-square-inch one. (Most players on tour use 100- to 106-square-inch heads). The equipment change seemed to be an admission that he needed more power and a larger sweet spot, but the new racket didn't do much good. Federer was defeated in the semifinals in Hamburg by an Argentine qualifier ranked 114th in the world. The following week, he lost his first match in Gstaad.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Federer during his peak, defeating Andy Murray in the final at the 2008 u.s. Open, to win his 13th grand slam event.

There has been talk of Federer's decline ever since he lost the 2008 Wimbledon final to his archrival Rafael Nadal in a five-hour, five-set epic that many consider the greatest match ever played. And it has grown louder in recent years as his results at Grand Slam events have tailed off. (Between 2005 and 2009, Federer reached the final of 17 majors; since 2010, he has made it to 3.) But three losses in rapid succession to players who would have once struggled to take a set against him was a new low. The sore back that troubled Federer in Hamburg and Gstaad was seen by some as an indication that his body, unfailingly resilient till now, was giving in. Then he withdrew earlier this month from the Rogers Cup in Montreal, the first of two tuneup events that he'd been scheduled to play ahead of the U.S. Open. His ranking fell from third to fifth, the lowest it has been since 2003, the year he won his first Wimbledon.

Postscript: August 25, 2013

Two articles this weekend in the special U.S. Open issue contain outdated references to the tournament. An interview on Page 44 with Jimmy Connors, in which he discusses his brief stint as Maria Sharapova's coach, had gone to press before Sharapova dropped out of the tournament. And an article on Page 31 about Roger Federer had also been printed before Federer was defeated by Rafael Nadal and dropped to No. 7 in the rankings.

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The U.S. Open Issue: Li Na, China’s Tennis Rebel

Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

The patch of Wimbledon grass known as the Graveyard of Champions was supposedly exorcised four years ago, when the blue-blazered gentlemen of the All England Lawn Tennis Club demolished Court 2, built a new grandstand in its place and, in 2011, renamed the haunted space Court 3. But the tennis fans watching the 2013 championships still knew. Li Na, China's tennis rebel, knew, too. This was the same cursed court where top seeds like Pete Sampras and Serena Williams had suffered ignominious defeats, falling to unheralded players in the early rounds. Now Li, the former French Open champion and sixth-ranked player in the world, teetered one game away from a third-round loss to the Czech veteran Klara Zakopalova. "At that moment," she told me later, "I suddenly saw myself with my bags going to the airport. It made my heart ache."

For two hours, Li had struggled against her hard-hitting opponent. Trailing 5-6 in the third set, she walked to the baseline knowing that she had to break serve just to stay alive. Lose the next four points, and she might carry out her pretournament threat to quit the sport she had been forced to start playing nearly a quarter-century ago. Her spring season had been a bruising free fall from the heights of her second Australian Open final in January to her second-round flameout at the French Open in May. Now the graveyard was calling.

As Li crouched at the baseline, the cluster of Chinese fans waving little red flags went still. On the first serve, Li blasted a winner down the line. Five points later, she pounced on her first break-point opportunity, scorching a forehand winner — and letting out a scream — to even the set at 6-all. Two more games, another roar: Li had survived. It was just a third-round match, and she had played erratically. But after her recent run of defeats — marked by what appeared to be a lack of conviction at decisive moments — pulling out this victory felt redemptive. "I fought like mad," she said with a grin. "Winning this match felt as good as getting to a Grand Slam final."

One more obstacle awaited Li that afternoon. Walking into the press room in her sleek white sweatsuit, she looked warily at the assembled Chinese reporters. Her smile was pinched. China's state-run media, which happily extols her victories for bringing glory to the motherland, had recently intensified its attacks on her streak of individualism, which has grown only stronger since she left the Chinese sports system in 2008. The furor began after her collapse at the French Open a month earlier, when a reporter for the government's Xinhua news agency asked her to explain her disappointing result to her nation's fans. "I lost a match and that's it," Li snapped. "Do I need to get on my knees and kowtow to them?" Her comment ignited a round of official criticism, rebuking her lack of patriotism and manners. Now, the very same reporter raised his hand to ask Li, once again, to address her fans. She glared at him for almost a full minute before mumbling, "I say, 'Thank you, fans.' "

Li Na might prefer that we forget about China and judge her by her character and accomplishments alone. Hers, after all, is the tale of a conflicted working-class girl — the daughter of an athlete whose own dreams were thwarted by political strife — who rose to become one of the finest, richest and most influential players of her generation. All in a sport that most of her compatriots had never watched before.

A mercurial star who blends speed and power — and occasional meltdowns — Li became Asia's first and only Grand Slam singles champion when she won the French Open in 2011. She is also the first Chinese-born player to crack the world's Top Five — an elite group she rejoined last month after her run at Wimbledon. With nearly $40 million in sponsorship deals signed in the past three years, she is now the third-highest-compensated female athlete in any sport, trailing only Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams.

Sim Chi Yin/VII Mentor Program for the New York Times Magazine

Li Na begins a day of training with Romain Deffet in Beijing's southern outskirts. She trains six days a week, from morning to late afternoon, alternating fitness sessions and tennis.

Still, it is impossible to separate Li from China. She is one of the country's biggest celebrities, with more than 21 million followers on the Twitter-like Weibo (by comparison, LeBron James has 9.4 million Twitter followers). A record 116 million Chinese viewers watched her triumph in the French Open, a bigger audience than the Super Bowl attracted that year. The tens of millions of dollars in endorsements that Li has collected depend on her connection to the Chinese market. Had she been born in Chile, Chad or even Chicago, she would not be one of the top three earners. Nor would the Women's Tennis Association be unveiling a new pro tournament next year in her home city of Wuhan, in central China. Five years ago, the W.T.A. staged two tournaments in the country; in 2014, there will be eight. The W.T.A.'s chief executive, Stacey Allaster, credits Li with helping spark a tennis explosion in Asia. "If the Williams sisters had the greatest impact on the first decade of this century," Allaster says, "then I would say, without a doubt, that Li Na will be the most important player of this decade."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 26, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the city in Canada where the 2012 Rogers Cup tournament was held. The cup, which alternates locations, was played in Montreal that year, not in Toronto.

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Eureka: Mutually Insured Destruction

In March 1947, a winter of heavy snowfall followed by a quick thaw and torrents of rain swelled rivers throughout England and Wales. Over the course of just 13 days, at least 27,000 homes and businesses were flooded. It was one of the worst natural disasters in British history. But thanks to climate change, which can prevent the thick snowpack from which spring floods draw their strength, that sort of flood may be less likely to happen today.

The seemingly inexorable (and increasingly irreversible) march of planetary warming is something we tend to associate with increased devastation — floods and famine, droughts and storms. In many cases, that's true. But there's a reason scientists prefer the term "climate change" to "global warming" — not everything is getting warmer. As the global average temperature rises, it alters weather systems, changing patterns of heat and cold and shifting wind currents. Risk is redistributed along with them.

No one understands risk better than the insurance industry — except, perhaps, the reinsurance industry, the companies that sell insurance to insurers, which also need protection from risk exposure. As the risk managers for the risk managers, reinsurers follow climate change obsessively. A great deal of money is at stake. If the 1947 spring floods happened today, they could cost the insurance industry as much as $24 billion.

In June of this year, the Geneva Association, an insurance research group, released a report called "Warming of the Oceans and Implications for the (Re)insurance Industry." It laid out evidence explaining how rising ocean temperatures are changing climate patterns and called for a "paradigm shift" in the way the insurance industry calculates risk. Traditionally, insurers have predicted the future by studying the past. If your house is on a 100-year flood plain, for example, that's because an actuary looked at historical data and calculated that there's a 1 percent chance of your neighborhood's experiencing a flood of a certain magnitude every year. Over the course of 100 years, that massive flood is likely to happen about once.

But the past can no longer reliably predict the future. A 2011 paper in The Journal of Hydrology suggests that the risk of spring floods associated with snowmelt in Britain will decline. That same year, a paper published in the journal Nature indicated there may be a link between climate change and an increased risk of fall flooding in Britain.

To fully grasp how our changing climate affects their downside, the insurance and reinsurance industries need new ways of modeling risk — systems that look at what's happening now rather than what happened decades ago. That drive is leading insurance wonks to join forces with climate scientists, who might have found a solution.

While the ever-practical insurance industry has long focused on the past, climate science has, for the most part, been fixated on the far future. Scientists built computer models of virtual worlds and used them to test hypotheses about what would happen to our children and grandchildren as the planet becomes hotter.

"But for most practical decisions," says Myles Allen, a climatologist at Oxford University, "what the world will be like in 50 years' time is less important than understanding what the world is like today."

A new method of statistical analysis called "event attribution," developed by Allen, allows climate scientists to better understand how weather patterns work today. It examines recent severe weather events, assessing how much of their probability can be attributed to climate change. These impacts are so complex that isolating them would be like taking the sugar out of a chocolate-chip cookie — nearly impossible, everything is so intertwined. Event attribution tries to break through this ambiguity using brute force.

Harnessing a tremendous amount of computing power, scientists create two virtual worlds: one where the atmosphere and climate look and operate like ours does today, and one that looks more like the preindustrial world, before we started releasing greenhouse gases from factories, cars and buildings. They alter the weather in both simulated environments and see whether natural disasters play out given differing sea-ice levels, greenhouse-gas concentrations and sea-surface temperatures. They do this over and over and over, tens of thousands of times, producing an estimate of how much our altered climate affected the outcome.

It's a slow process that requires sophisticated software, which is why it's a relatively recent development. It took Allen and his team six years and 50,000 simulations to analyze the causes behind an episode of fall flooding in Britain in 2000. Eventually, they were able to say this: 9 times out of 10, the world with climate change had a 20 percent greater chance of experiencing those floods than the world without.

That sort of less-than-satisfying answer is common with event attribution. In 2012, Allen and his team published a paper on the heat wave that baked huge swaths of Russia in the summer of 2010. Their conclusion: that climate change made only a modest contribution, but a warmer climate had made that sort of heat wave more likely to occur in general.

It doesn't fit well on a protest placard, but this information may one day help build better actuarial tables, translating complicated data into real-world impacts. If reinsurers expect to spend more money on losses in your region, your insurance company's insurance gets more expensive, and your policy should, too. But it doesn't always work that way.

Florida is a case in point. There, where some 2.4 million people live less than four feet above the high-tide line and where many U.S.-bound hurricanes are likely to pass, insurers can only use historical models to calculate risk. Climate scientists estimate that sea levels will rise anywhere between 8 inches and 6.6 feet by 2100 — enough to inundate whole neighborhoods in Miami, even on the lower end. The past offers a comfortable fiction that could limit rate hikes by writing the risk off the books.

As more groups like the Geneva Association call for risk models that account for climate change, politicians are going to get a different message. Denying climate change isn't just foolish — it's bad for business.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is science editor at BoingBoing.net and author of "Before the Lights Go Out," on the future of energy production and consumption.

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Great Tennis Writing From the Magazine

Ewing Galloway

1935

In 1890, when [H. W. Slocum Jr.] was champion, tennis was relatively soft. His advice about serving illustrates that. ''A very swift service is, in my opinion, a waste of energy,'' he gravely admonishes.

By Frank Ernest Hill|Sept. 1, 1935

Arthur Ashe

Associated Press

1966

Probably his best asset is the variety of his stroking. Most ''big'' servers of recent years have been notable for their lack of imagination — their inability to alter their belt-'em-hard serve-and-volley technique. Ashe, though, plays his shots rather as he used to play a trumpet in high school, improvising here and there, mixing sweet, fluid notes with a few ambitious, off-key ones.

By Harry Gordon|Jan. 2, 1966

Evonne Goolagong

Corbis

1971

Weeds sprout in it . . . but it is identifiable as a tennis court because of the gappy, time-rotted net that drapes across its middle. In all the world, it would be hard to find a more utterly undistinguished court. Except for one thing: If you drew a graph to represent the career of the young woman who rules ladies' international tennis, the beginning point would have to be here. On this dry red ground, with a similar cast of chickens and dogs as her gallery, Miss Evonne Goolagong began to hit a tennis ball sweetly and hard.

By Harry Gordon|Aug. 29, 1971

Roger Federer

Rob Tringali/Sports Chrome

2006

Federer's forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice -- the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game -- as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or -- as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject -- to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

By David Foster Wallace|Aug. 20, 2006

Helen Willis

The New York Times

1928

Conservative graybeards . . . could recall the time when women played pat ball in tight-waisted dresses of ankle length. . . . This stalwart young American girl — in short-sleeved middy blouse and skirt . . . hammered the ball with tremendous blows of her racquet such as were rarely seen even in men's play in the past.

By Allison Danzig|Sept. 9, 1928

Maureen Connolly

National Archives of Australia

1953

Like Helen Wills, [Maureen] Connolly practices against men because there are so few players of her sex who can give her a match and extend her sufficiently for her to profit from the workout. Not since Miss Wills was in her prime has any woman played with such force as the little girl from San Diego. Possibly Helen may have hit harder from the forehand, with her greater weight behind the racquet, but from the backhand Maureen, with her perfect timing, fluency, balance and confidence, has developed the most overpowering stroke of its kind the game has known.

By Allison Danzig|Aug. 23, 1953

Billie Jean King

The New York Times

1967

When she was 15 she won her first big tournament with her own hard-hitting style, and since then she hasn't slackened a bit. She still plays a man's game, darting toward the net and glowering over it like an angry bear, covering the court as a fly covers a sugar bowl, slamming serves and mixing ground shots the way Juan Marichal mixes pitches.

By Hal Hidgon|Aug. 27, 1967

Bjorn Borg

Uncredited

1980

Despite all that he has not accomplished at the U.S. Open, [Borg] is a veritable atomic reactor in short pants, a sporting god in sneakers — a champion, in the opinion of some old-timers, who matches anything we've ever seen before.

By Bud Collins|Aug. 24, 1980

Serena Williams and
Venus Williams

Damon Winter/The New York Times

2012

It's more something that [Venus, in a videotape of her as an 8-year-old,] doesn't even know she's doing, something having to do with the transfer of force, of mass, from the back of her body to the front, and the way that this transference is passed along into the shot, the way it enters her racket head at precisely the millisecond she hits the ball . . . the thing you simply cannot and will never learn to do if you are a hack or even a pretty good player who has hit that cruel ceiling, the limits of your own physical ability.

By John Jeremiah Sullivan|Aug. 26, 2012

Produced by TROY GRIGGS, SAMANTHA HENIG, HEENA KO and MAYA LAU. Photo Editor: STACEY BAKER.

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The U.S. Open Issue: Jimmy Connors, Ladies’ Man

Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Postscript Appended

Technically, Jimmy Connors wasn't the most overwhelming player. He was on the slight side; his serve was so-so, his forehand questionable. His only truly great stroke was his two-handed backhand. That he managed to win eight Grand Slam events (five U.S. Opens, two Wimbledons and one Australian Open), spend 160 consecutive weeks at No. 1 (1974-77) and rack up a record 109 career singles titles (John McEnroe and Roger Federer each have 77; Rafael Nadal has 58) is a testament, in large part, to a relentless and, at times, all-consuming will. This trait goes a long way toward explaining Connors's most quietly astounding feat: for 16 years, he held a Top 10 ranking. In an era when tennis careers can flame out over a half-dozen seasons, Connors — who on his 39th birthday won a fourth-round U.S. Open match against the 24-year-old Aaron Krickstein in 4 hours 41 minutes — looks, in retrospect, more and more like a freak of nature or nurture or both.

Tony Triolo/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images

Jimmy Connors after beating John Newcombe at Caesars Palace in 1975, with, from left, the promoter Bill Riordan; his coach, Pancho Segura; and his mother, Gloria Connors.

A blue-collar kid from Belleville, Ill., Connors, who is now 60, joined the men's tour as the sport was shaking its country-club gentility. He strutted combatively; he pointed fingers. His displays often crossed the bounds of good taste — he knew better than anyone how to exploit the phallic possibilities of a racket — but that was decades ago. Since then, his demons have quieted; what endures is his incomparable tennis intelligence. Last month, Connors, who was mentored on the court by both his mother and grandmother, was hired to pass some of that aptitude to Maria Sharapova, currently the No. 3 women's player in the world, who seemed to have confronted an impenetrable barrier in the form of her nemesis, Serena Williams. (Williams has won 14 of their 16 matches.)

Well, it didn't quite work out that way. Sharapova lost her first match as a Connors disciple at the Western & Southern Open, a tuneup for the U.S. Open. Afterward Connors tweeted, "Every good round starts with a bogey — not the start we wanted, so back to work tomorrow." But by the end of the week, the partnership was over after only 34 days. (As it turns out, Sharapova pulled out of the Open this week.) This article is the result of several conversations, which have been condensed and edited, from before and after the short-lived experiment with Sharapova. Connors, showing a side of himself that no one who watched him in his prime would recognize, tweeted from Santa Barbara, Calif., a few days after the loss: "Back home in SB — family, pups, and home cooking. Oh — I forgot, and a vodka on the rocks."

Q. Sharapova has achieved a tremendous amount — four Grand Slam victories — and yet appears to have hit a wall with Serena Williams. I guess you wouldn't have signed on unless you felt that wall was breakable.

A. There comes a point with a lot of top players when they look for someone who can see something that can maybe get them over the hump. I worked with [the former player and coach] Pancho Segura when I was young, then I sought him out again when I had a bit of a career stall in the late '70s. With somebody who has Maria's credentials, it's not major surgery. I guess the challenge is just to find that one little tweak that she grabs onto — that one little extra thing that she's looking for. Because she's not missing anything, let's face it. Coaching her is an opportunity that came along to me when I wasn't looking to work, really.

Q. How long have you known her?

A. We spent a little time together before she went down to Australia and won in 2008. So we've been friends for five, six years. I always enjoyed watching her — I like the way she goes about things. She has that attitude that I like.

Q. What kind of attitude?

A. I like seeing in somebody just what it means to them — what they're willing to lay out there to try to be the best. Some players have it in practice, but it doesn't catch. But it catches with Maria. She's willing to lay it all out there in practice, and she's not afraid to do that when she plays her matches, too. That's pretty special to see.

Q. Your partnership ended abruptly after she lost her first match at a U.S. Open tuneup in Cincinnati. What happened?

A. No comment.

Q. Were you surprised?

A. I was just told my services were no longer needed. I wish her all the best, and I'll always be a fan. Whenever this happens, it's mutual.

Q. So was this a mutual decision?

A. It's her decision for sure. She's the player, not me.

Q. Is this the downside of trying to work with a player who has already accomplished so much?

A. I guess it depends on what you're looking for. Taking someone from No. 2 to No. 1 — there's a lot less room.

Q. Do you think what happened reflects the pressure it takes to be No. 1?

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.

James Kaplan co-wrote John McEnroe's autobiography, "You Cannot Be Serious," and is working on the second volume of a biography about Frank Sinatra.

Editor: Jon Kelly

Postscript: August 25, 2013

Two articles this weekend in the special U.S. Open issue contain outdated references to the tournament. An interview on Page 44 with Jimmy Connors, in which he discusses his brief stint as Maria Sharapova's coach, had gone to press before Sharapova dropped out of the tournament. And an article on Page 31 about Roger Federer had also been printed before Federer was defeated by Rafael Nadal and dropped to No. 7 in the rankings.

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The U.S. Open Issue: Roger Federer Can Still Get His Game Face On

Peter Hapak for The New York Times

Postscript Appended

On the first Wednesday of Wimbledon this June, under a bright early-evening sky, Roger Federer trailed two sets to one in his second-round match against Sergiy Stakhovsky, a Ukrainian ranked 116th in the world and best known until that point for pulling out his cellphone during a match to take a photograph of a disputed ball mark. But Stakhovsky had played imposing serve-and-volley tennis, a style seldom seen nowadays, and as the fourth set unfolded on Center Court, it became clear that he was not going to succumb to nerves. Federer, 31 and seeking a record eighth Wimbledon title, would have to contrive an escape.

The specter of defeat can bring out Federer's ornery side. At this year's Australian Open, he twice shouted obscenities at Andy Murray during their semifinal match. (Murray didn't flinch and won in five sets.) Now, with Stakhovsky serving at 3-4 40-love in the fourth set, the Ukrainian once again followed his first serve to the net. Federer's return landed at Stakhovsky's feet, and he short-hopped the ball back to Federer, who took it in the air and rifled a swinging backhand volley at Stakhovsky's head. It was a jarringly violent shot — one radar gun clocked it at 96 miles per hour — and Stakhovsky dove to the ground rather than try to play the ball, which sailed over the baseline and ended up somewhere near Calais. Federer would later deny that he had aimed at Stakhovsky ("this is not the juniors"), but it didn't matter. A short while later, on the 12th point of the fourth-set tiebreaker, Federer pushed a backhand wide, and Stakhovsky sank to the grass to celebrate the biggest victory of his career and one of the greatest upsets in Wimbledon history. On the court where it had started, the Federer era had possibly just died.

A half-hour after the match, Federer entered the interview room and immediately pre-empted any talk of retirement. "I still have plans to play for many more years to come," he said. "You don't panic at this point, that's clear." But his actions in the weeks that followed suggested, if not panic, at least deep anxiety about the state of his game. Federer, who normally takes a break from competition in July, swiftly announced plans to play two tournaments that month — the unfortunately named Bet-At-Home Open in Hamburg, Germany, and the Swiss Open in Gstaad. He caused still more surprise when he arrived in Hamburg and pulled a new racket out of his bag. After years of playing with a quaint 90-square-inch head, he was finally joining the rest of the world in using a larger racket — in this case a 98-square-inch one. (Most players on tour use 100- to 106-square-inch heads). The equipment change seemed to be an admission that he needed more power and a larger sweet spot, but the new racket didn't do much good. Federer was defeated in the semifinals in Hamburg by an Argentine qualifier ranked 114th in the world. The following week, he lost his first match in Gstaad.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Federer during his peak, defeating Andy Murray in the final at the 2008 u.s. Open, to win his 13th grand slam event.

There has been talk of Federer's decline ever since he lost the 2008 Wimbledon final to his archrival Rafael Nadal in a five-hour, five-set epic that many consider the greatest match ever played. And it has grown louder in recent years as his results at Grand Slam events have tailed off. (Between 2005 and 2009, Federer reached the final of 17 majors; since 2010, he has made it to 3.) But three losses in rapid succession to players who would have once struggled to take a set against him was a new low. The sore back that troubled Federer in Hamburg and Gstaad was seen by some as an indication that his body, unfailingly resilient till now, was giving in. Then he withdrew earlier this month from the Rogers Cup in Montreal, the first of two tuneup events that he'd been scheduled to play ahead of the U.S. Open. His ranking fell from third to fifth, the lowest it has been since 2003, the year he won his first Wimbledon.

Postscript: August 25, 2013

Two articles this weekend in the special U.S. Open issue contain outdated references to the tournament. An interview on Page 44 with Jimmy Connors, in which he discusses his brief stint as Maria Sharapova's coach, had gone to press before Sharapova dropped out of the tournament. And an article on Page 31 about Roger Federer had also been printed before Federer was defeated by Rafael Nadal and dropped to No. 7 in the rankings.

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Great Tennis Writing From the Magazine

Ewing Galloway

1935

In 1890, when [H. W. Slocum Jr.] was champion, tennis was relatively soft. His advice about serving illustrates that. ''A very swift service is, in my opinion, a waste of energy,'' he gravely admonishes.

By Frank Ernest Hill|Sept. 1, 1935

Arthur Ashe

Associated Press

1966

Probably his best asset is the variety of his stroking. Most ''big'' servers of recent years have been notable for their lack of imagination — their inability to alter their belt-'em-hard serve-and-volley technique. Ashe, though, plays his shots rather as he used to play a trumpet in high school, improvising here and there, mixing sweet, fluid notes with a few ambitious, off-key ones.

By Harry Gordon|Jan. 2, 1966

Evonne Goolagong

Corbis

1971

Weeds sprout in it . . . but it is identifiable as a tennis court because of the gappy, time-rotted net that drapes across its middle. In all the world, it would be hard to find a more utterly undistinguished court. Except for one thing: If you drew a graph to represent the career of the young woman who rules ladies' international tennis, the beginning point would have to be here. On this dry red ground, with a similar cast of chickens and dogs as her gallery, Miss Evonne Goolagong began to hit a tennis ball sweetly and hard.

By Harry Gordon|Aug. 29, 1971

Roger Federer

Rob Tringali/Sports Chrome

2006

Federer's forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice -- the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game -- as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or -- as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject -- to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

By David Foster Wallace|Aug. 20, 2006

Helen Willis

The New York Times

1928

Conservative graybeards . . . could recall the time when women played pat ball in tight-waisted dresses of ankle length. . . . This stalwart young American girl — in short-sleeved middy blouse and skirt . . . hammered the ball with tremendous blows of her racquet such as were rarely seen even in men's play in the past.

By Allison Danzig|Sept. 9, 1928

Maureen Connolly

National Archives of Australia

1953

Like Helen Wills, [Maureen] Connolly practices against men because there are so few players of her sex who can give her a match and extend her sufficiently for her to profit from the workout. Not since Miss Wills was in her prime has any woman played with such force as the little girl from San Diego. Possibly Helen may have hit harder from the forehand, with her greater weight behind the racquet, but from the backhand Maureen, with her perfect timing, fluency, balance and confidence, has developed the most overpowering stroke of its kind the game has known.

By Allison Danzig|Aug. 23, 1953

Billie Jean King

The New York Times

1967

When she was 15 she won her first big tournament with her own hard-hitting style, and since then she hasn't slackened a bit. She still plays a man's game, darting toward the net and glowering over it like an angry bear, covering the court as a fly covers a sugar bowl, slamming serves and mixing ground shots the way Juan Marichal mixes pitches.

By Hal Hidgon|Aug. 27, 1967

Bjorn Borg

Uncredited

1980

Despite all that he has not accomplished at the U.S. Open, [Borg] is a veritable atomic reactor in short pants, a sporting god in sneakers — a champion, in the opinion of some old-timers, who matches anything we've ever seen before.

By Bud Collins|Aug. 24, 1980

Serena Williams and
Venus Williams

Damon Winter/The New York Times

2012

It's more something that [Venus, in a videotape of her as an 8-year-old,] doesn't even know she's doing, something having to do with the transfer of force, of mass, from the back of her body to the front, and the way that this transference is passed along into the shot, the way it enters her racket head at precisely the millisecond she hits the ball . . . the thing you simply cannot and will never learn to do if you are a hack or even a pretty good player who has hit that cruel ceiling, the limits of your own physical ability.

By John Jeremiah Sullivan|Aug. 26, 2012

Produced by TROY GRIGGS, SAMANTHA HENIG, HEENA KO and MAYA LAU. Photo Editor: STACEY BAKER.

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