Mr. Vaillant is the author, most recently, of “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World.”
On Thursday, as flames from the Smokehouse Creek fire raced eastward across the Texas Panhandle for the fourth straight day at speeds faster than a person can run, a cold front, driving a snow squall, swept southward over the Great Plains. In an elemental collision, the fire and snow met east of Amarillo, the swirling flakes joining and then melting into the smoke and ash of the colossal prairie fire.
HOUSTON — The bright Texas sun bears down on the cracked cement landscape behind a gas station on the city’s outskirts. Here, an elaborate makeshift structure shields its resident, a lanky man called Slim, from the elements — it can get cold at night, he says.
Changing the leadership, structure, or functioning of any U.S. labor organization is no easy task. Activists and experts have long argued about whether dysfunctional unions are best reformed from the top-down, bottom up, or some mix of the two approaches.
