The El Niño still growing in the Pacific is truly fearsome. Sea-surface temperatures in the area are running hotter than we’ve ever measured in past hot spells, meaning: batten down for chaos, some small taste of which we got from this past weekend’s nor’easter and which the Mexican state of Baja California is feeling today as intense winds and flash floods are forming from Hurricane Polo. El Niños come and go every few years as warm water builds along the coast of South America and then spreads eastward on shifted winds, but meteorologists think this will be the most intense example since tracking began, in the eighteen-seventies.

Recent research indicates that global warming may be making El Niños more powerful. And there’s absolutely no doubt that this one is riding in on top of temperatures already greatly elevated by greenhouse-gas emissions, escalating its impacts. In effect, we’re getting a preview of what “normal” weather will be, another decade or so into the climate crisis. We’re time-travelling to 2036. So what will this year’s El Niño bring?

No one can know for certain—the scientists who graph temperatures keep having to lengthen the y-axis. A train of Pacific hurricanes has been soaking Hawaii this season, accruing significant damage. Probably the West Coast of the U.S. can expect very heavy rainfall (though it may also allow for temporary relief from this past year’s no-pack snowpack in the high mountains there).

It may mean drought in southern Africa, where corn harvests fell sharply during the big El Niño of 2015-16. In the past, we’ve seen dramatic drought in the Amazon, which can ill-afford more wildfires. One scary thought: the war in Iran has pushed fertilizer use down sharply; in some parts of Africa, farmers have struggled to find any at all. Drought and flood will almost certainly reduce yields further.

A perfect storm is not hard to imagine, and, with U.S.A.I.D. now Musk-ed out of existence, the humanitarian response may be even more fragmented than usual.

It’s hard to guess how all this will play out politically, but it’s worth noting that El Niño’s peak effects will be in evidence as Presidential-primary politicking begins to gather momentum next year. “Climate-hushing” by Democratic politicians already seems to be on the wane. (Gavin Newsom, who seems fairly barometric in his ambition, recently joined a chorus calling for renewed focus on global warming.) One small flash of silver in these historic clouds may be that we raise the chances for concerted global action to get us off fossil fuel.

The journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a buzzy essay for the Times Magazine, about sending her daughter to a struggling local school—and how she has come to regret it. Jay Caspian Kang argues that personalizing the problem of an unequal school system is the wrong approach. Read or listen to the story » Revisiting a notorious British sexual-assault trial in which a woman was convicted of posing as a man in bed.\ All the A.I. garbage out there has made Vinson Cunningham “appreciate honest bullshit so much more.”

But how can we even tell what’s real on our screens?\ OpenAI has cancelled the release of its newest model, saying that it had “regressed” on safety measures compared to previous versions.

Revisit Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s reporting on the concerns surrounding the company and its C.E.O., Sam Altman.\ The most-clicked item in yesterday’s newsletter was about the D.O.J. lawyers considering whether to quit or keep working for the Trump Administration.

An exhibition: Taryn Simon’s new show at the Guggenheim grapples with patriotism and patriarchy through the long career of an anonymous F.B.I. agent.\ A book: Joshua Specht’s lively history “Property Values” considers two hundred and fifty years of land-ownership tumult in America.\ A movie: “Palimpsest: The Story of a Name,” by the Hong Kong-born filmmaker Mary Stephen, is a fascinating, playful quest to reconstruct a childhood.

See what else our critics recommend this week. Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Offensive player farthest from the line of scrimmage—eight letters.\ Catalogues: Can you sort the items into the correct order?\ Shuffalo: Can you make a longer word with each new letter?\ Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.

P.S. The Yankees meet the Red Sox tonight in the playoffs, in their seventh-ever post-season series. Our beloved former cartoonist Michael Crawford once perfectly captured the complicated emotional nature of the rivalry. ⚾️ Ian Crouch contributed to today’s edition.