This is The Guardian.

Hi, I'm David Wolf, Editor of The Guardian Long Read.

For the rest of the month, we'll be pausing our normal schedule to replay some of our

favourite episodes from 2022 in case you miss them first time around.

Each episode will begin with an introduction from one of the Long Read's editors,

reflecting on why we think it's such a good piece. We'll be back to our regular programming in the new year.

The Long Read I picked today is a deranged pyroscape. How fires across the world have grown

weirder by a historian called Daniel Imivar and it's about fire. The idea for this piece started

with a thought. I was looking around at the coverage of climate change in the climate crisis

and I noticed that about 10 years ago people used to illustrate stories about the climate crisis

and global warming with the cliche picture of a polar bear on a melting ice cap or maybe a penguin

on a melting ice cap but melting ice caps were the theme. I noticed in recent years, maybe even

months, that image had become less common and the more common image now when we're talking about

the climate crisis was a landscape on fire. So you've all seen the footage of fires in California,

people driving along highways and with their mobile phone filming like what looks like the gates

of hell fire pouring out right next to the cars and there've been similar photos and footage often

filmed by people on their mobile phones in Greece, in Australia, all over the world. So we wanted

to publish a piece that looked more closely at the meaning of fire today, both scientific,

historical and cultural and this is the piece that we came up with. It's by a brilliant

historian called Daniel Imavar who is currently working on a history of fire in America.

The thing that makes this piece remarkable to me is the way it synthesizes so much new and

unexpected information about fire. For instance, when we were first talking about this piece,

...