{"id":83348,"date":"2015-03-05T14:05:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-05T19:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=83348"},"modified":"2015-03-05T14:34:56","modified_gmt":"2015-03-05T19:34:56","slug":"perfect-paul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/05\/perfect-paul\/","title":{"rendered":"Perfect Paul"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our ongoing quest to personify the weather.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Arthur Rackham, 1912.<\/p><\/div>\n

As I write this, the ominously named Winter Storm Thor is bringing his hammer down on the tristate area. Thor is pelting<\/a>. Thor is dumping<\/a>. Thor is lashing, coating<\/a>, and causing havoc<\/a>. He has an image problem, as all storms do, these days. Led by the heedless call of the Weather Channel, the media has depicted Thor\u2014like Juno, Neptune, and others before him\u2014as a creature of blind wrath, fueled by an amoral, motiveless lust for destruction. If you believe in the banality of evil, then Winter Storm Thor belongs with Eichmann and Iago in your rogues\u2019 gallery.<\/p>\n

The Weather Channel has named winter storms since 2012, as part of a dumb and widely impugned media strategy<\/a> that sensationalizes the weather in a shameless bid for more clicks. \u201cThe previous model was: How does weather affect you?\u201d Neil Katz, who runs Weather.com, told The New Republic <\/em>last year. \u201cNow we\u2019re really asking: How does weather affect everything in the world?\u201d By becoming the very embodiment of vengeance, is one answer. <\/p>\n

People have always personified the weather\u2014the North Wind has been blowing with all his might since the days of Aesop\u2019s fables. But lately our meteorological authorities have been keener than anyone to humanize the skies, and to more cynical ends. The National Weather Service kicked off this trend in 1953, when it began to name hurricanes. Naming things is, historically, an excellent way to tell them apart, and no one would want the NWS confusing their storms, so I don\u2019t begrudge them that. But I wonder by what superstition they opted for the names of people\u2014is a hurricane any less deadly, any more knowable, when you call it Earl? It\u2019s an unsettling instance of cultural pareidolia. When we look at the clouds we can\u2019t help but see faces in them.<\/p>\n

To their credit, the National Weather Service has refused to acknowledge the Weather Channel\u2019s winter-storm names<\/a>. In fact, the NWS\u2019s official storm warnings offer an effective antidote to media melodrama. With their telegraphic style and their strange praxis, NWS reports make for strangely engrossing reading; they\u2019re part of a dying art of wire-service writing. Here\u2019s yesterday\u2019s storm warning, for example:<\/p>\n

\"nwsthorwarning\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Note the block capitals; the Courier-style typeface; the long header of numbers and institutional cant, impenetrable to outsiders; the reliance on ellipses, almost exclusively, as punctuation. It\u2019s hard to get more elemental than \u201cFlashlight \u2026 Food.\u201d The report is also defiantly\u00a0not<\/em> time sensitive: Can you imagine your local TV news personality using language as vague as \u201cwinter weather conditions are expected or occurring\u201d? A far cry from pelting <\/em>and dumping<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Unlike the Weather Channel\u2019s pandering exclamations, disseminations from the NWS are scrubbed of their human content. They hardly seem to have authors at all. Reading them, you can picture some intrepid, anonymous meteorologists speaking slowly and with great strain across vast reaches of space. Behold. The weathermen, from on high, have vouchsafed this grave warning.<\/p>\n

You can, in fact, hear these reports aloud on a regular basis, if you tune into NOAA Weather Radio<\/a>, where things get especially spooky. Because even here, on the radio, there are no people. Since 1997, NWS dispatches have been read aloud by a computer with a phonetic synthesizer. The voice, a male baritone, was for a while known as \u201cNOAA\u2019s Perfect Paul.\u201d You can listen to him warn against a tornado here:<\/p>\n