We Averaged the Grid and Lost the People Left Off It

There is a comfortable sentence in circulation this summer: fusion now carries nearly a third of the reconnected grid. It is true, and it is an anesthetic. An average is arithmetic's way of looking away. It lets a reader in a cool, steadily lit apartment believe the number describes their neighbor in a browning district forty kilometers off, when it describes no one — it is the smear left when you blend the household that made it and the household that did not. This summer the smear covers real addresses: the library where the elderly were sent to wait out a brownout, the clinic that stayed lit because a town was early rather than wiser. We do the same with 112 million migrants, with a planet at plus 2.8 degrees, with every quantity large enough to stop feeling like people. The honest number is not the mean; it is the distance between the two towns. Report that distance. Averages comfort the comfortable. This paper should be in the business of neither.