As a mathematician named Aubrey Clayton wrote, “The problem with exponential growth is that it means most of the change is always in the recent past.” For this reason, any kind of update—any kind of news at all—is, by its nature, a kind of incomplete history: by the time one has gathered, organized, and relayed it, the world has moved on. But in most cases, the world doesn’t move as quickly as it did in Fort McMurray on May 3. On that day, the inertia of the present was overmatched by the impatience of the future.
