The Maui fires, from New York.

I want to write about the Maui fires, but I want to write about them from here — from New York — because I think the distance matters. When something terrible happens somewhere else, the question isn't only what happened and why. The question is also: how do we hold this from a distance, in a way that is honest without being either numb or consumed?

Lahaina burned on August 8th. By the time I'm writing this, more than a hundred people are confirmed dead. The death toll is expected to rise. It is the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century. The images are what images of fire always are: orange and terrible and somehow still beautiful in a way that makes you feel guilty for noticing.

My daughter, eleven, saw the images on a phone. I hadn't planned for her to — I was trying to find a moment to introduce it carefully — but she found it before the moment arrived, which is how things happen now. She came to find me and said: it's very bad, isn't it.

Yes. It's very bad.

She said: what do people do when something like this happens? And I started to answer — emergency services, disaster relief, the infrastructure of response — and then I realised she wasn't asking about logistics. She was asking something else.

What do people do. Not what do institutions do. What do people do.