Hi, my name is John Moalum. I'm a writer at large for the New York Times magazine, and in 2016, I wrote a piece for the magazine about clouds.

Yeah, it's a story about clouds. It doesn't sound very important, and I get that at this exact moment in history, you may not think you need to stop everything and sit down and listen to someone telling a story about clouds.

So I get that, but the clouds are actually kind of incidental, and that sense of triviality, that dismissiveness you might be feeling right now, is actually an important part of the whole thing.

There's one person at the center of the story, his name is Gavin Pretter Pinyy.

Gavin was living in London in 2003 when on a whim, he decided to leave his job and moved to Rome for a while, and when he got there, he looked up at the sky and he saw something unusual.

It was blue. There weren't any clouds, and he realized that he missed the clouds that he used to see in London, and he had an idea.

He started something called the Cloud Appreciation Society, which was an online community where people all around the world who loved clouds could look at pictures of clouds, post pictures of clouds, talk about clouds.

It was a ridiculous idea, and he never missed a ticket for a serious idea or an important idea, but he committed to following it wherever it was going to lead him with complete earnestness and passion.

And now the Cloud Appreciation Society has over 50,000 members, and together those amateur cloud appreciators have actually helped to rewrite a small part of science's understanding of clouds.

But even that scientific accomplishment is sort of incidental, because I think you'll see what the story is really about, is these people.

And the way all of us just seem to need to find some kind of beauty or awe or delight in the world, and the lanes will go to find it, and the way we come together in the process.

And the thing is I'd argue that indulging in trivial or meaningless seeming things sometimes is actually a pretty important part of being a human being. It's not the most important part, but it's there.

And as I found writing the story about clouds, it's actually a really powerful engine to bring people together.

So I hope you'll enjoy my story. The amateur cloud society that sort of rattled the scientific community, read by Eduardo Ballerini.

The

The

The

The

The

The

The

The

...