This is the memory palace, I'm Nate the Mow.

A postcard from the Waldorf Astoria, May 19, 1910.

They started crowding into the express elevators at 10 o'clock, bundled in their topcoats, puffed in their furs.

Friends who had been up there earlier in the week had warned them about how cold it gets up on the roof.

Besides, a little extra protection might be useful on a night when there was a chance that they might all die.

Astronomers had been in heaven. They had trained their telescopes on Halle's comet as soon as it rounded the bend on its 76 year circuit.

And they had learned so much about it since then. It's relative velocity, it's eccentricity, it's a felian, it's perihelian.

And they had made two discoveries that had made headlines beyond the academy.

First, the comet's 24 million mile long tail was composed in part of Sinai gas.

In second, for six hours in 1910, when the comet would be at its brightest in the night sky, that tail would envelop the earth.

Those things were in all the papers.

That neither fact posed any but the very slightest, barely calculable danger to anyone at all was less widely covered.

Instead there were stories of pockets of panic from every corner of the soon to be destroyed globe, many were overblown,

and the supposed mass suicides in Hungary, riots over the exorbitant costs of voodoo protections in Haiti.

Others were true. The Florida man selling space in a submarine where people could supposedly be safe from the comet's rays.

The minor in California, who crucified himself, convinced that the end times were nigh.

But here were well-bred and well-red Manhattan nights.

Stepping off the elevator and into the most exclusive party in the world, knowing that the chances that that world might end were incredibly small,

but still big enough to make the whole thing extra fun.

So onto the roof of the Waldorf Astoria.

And into the crisp night air, into its music and its French perfume, and its cigarette smoke.

The women compared their new comet pins with their gold tails and diamond fireballs.

...