Our weeks these days are definitely whack

Weekly Review >harper's

...a Maryland man arrested for robbing a convenience store was released from jail and then arrested again for attempting to rob the same store; a Michigan man set his garage on fire while attempting to blow up a nest of bees with fireworks; a Minnesota man attempted to avoid being arrested on a drug charge by giving the officer a Get Out of Jail Free Monopoly card...

Split second decisions

Racing the Storm: The story of the Mobile Bay Sailing Disaster >smithsonian

Within a few hours of the start of the 2015 Dauphin Island Regatta, as boats were still streaking for the finish line, the storm front reached the port of Pascagoula, Mississippi, 40 miles southwest of Mobile. It slammed into the side of the Manama, a 600-foot oil tanker weighing almost 57,000 tons, and heaved it aground.

An experienced sailor named Larry Goolsby, captain of a 22-foot boat named Team 4G, was in sight of the finish line when the storm came on; he and two crew members had just moments to ease the sails before the wind hit. The gale rolled the boat over twice, before a much heavier 40-foot vessel hove into view upwind. The bigger boat was moving with all the force of the storm at its back, and bearing down on the three men.

One shouted over the wind, “They’re going to hit us!” just as the bigger boat smashed into the Team 4G, running it over and dragging the smaller boat away.

Parallel worlds in California

'Leave Now': Spray-painted Hate in the California Desert >new yorker

Modern-day pilgrimage of art

The Art at the End of the World >nyt

It got envelopingly dark. We passed the shuttered Golden Spike National Historic Site. In Corinne, we were stopped at a railroad crossing by a train that moved at a constant, slow speed, as if unmanned and responding to dumb instinct. We all felt dozy yet alert and so pricklingly full of well-being. One crow, back at the jetty, had said, very happily and with evident pride, that they had finally, of this formerly scary place, established a point of common connection, ‘‘This is just like Maine.’’ And the jetty was like Maine, minus the tides. Also unlike the flats in Maine, the land revealed by the receding water did not stink primordially, even though there were dead things in it. A bird, for example. It was preserved — brined — and had been artfully abstracted into pieces, all of which were level with the ground that contained them, like fossils in the making. We had traveled all this way to see something we’d never seen, and what we found was what we always saw.

Funnies

Foxtrot - Remote Chance