November in America signals a time to gather in, take stock and breathe a little. The elections are done by the end of the first week. Thanksgiving beckons, the high holidays begin, media fever subsides – a little – and morphs into retrospective political analysis and projected anxiety about the future, especially, since 2008, the economic future.

It is a pattern I’ve seen repeated over and over. But the season also has its kinks. In the Fall of 2012, one came in the guise of a vast, malign ripple in nature. On 30 October, just before Halloween, Hurricane Sandy made landfall south-west of Atlantic City. And everything changed.