The sunny emeritus of weathermen, Samuel Clemens, once boasted of counting "136 kinds of weather" in a day. That seems about right. Gradation, in fact, is exactly the point when talking about weather — the slender yet electric line between nasty and nice. We want weather to remain in that charged borderland, to function as the exciting backdrop for our lives or else as the vital stage-left business that stirs the characters and then fades away. Increasingly, weather does not do these things. It intrudes, brings violence and discomfort. Brings worry. Is the [choose one or more] drought, El Ni±o, tornado, tsunami, etc. coming? Is it going? Wasn't it just here? Why is it here again?

If you watch the skies, you've noted that we've had some record weather of late. The world has never been hotter. Parts of Asia have never been wetter. Parts of America have never been drier. And your town ... well, you know what your town has been like. Meteorologists explain that such things are cyclical, that nothing's amiss. Maybe that's true. But in case it's not, we sent contributing editor Mark Levine on a mission into the heart of extreme weather, to get a glimpse of what may lie in wait. The exploration took him to Bangladesh, nature's test kitchen, the most meteorologically battered nation on earth. There the typical Western encounter with the outdoors has been reversed: People don't have experiences with nature; nature has furious experiences with them. "To be a Bangladeshi," Levine reports in "A Storm at the Bone," "is to be standing naked on a golf course in a lightning storm. We couldn't handle it there." Only those ever-calm meteorologists can say whether we'll need to. But if you desire an early forecast, consider this: We've seen the future of weather, and conditions look unsettled.

"She's scary. She's smooth. And she's a really nice person," says Daniel Coyle, who campaigns with Idaho Republican Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth. Viewed by many environmentalists as public enemy number one, she has been a bellwether for the resurgence of get-off-my-land conservatism. "Idaho is like Alaska," says Coyle, a resident of the latter. "It's full of people looking for their own space, who defend it intensely." Chenoweth, he adds, shares their distrust of outside influence. "Voters say, 'She's a wacko, but she's our wacko.'"

"Despite his success, in a way you sort of feel sorry for Hermann Maier," says correspondent Hampton Sides of the gold-medal skier he profiles. "He's no Alberto Tomba: The poor guy isn't exactly enjoying his celebrity." A former Outside senior editor and currently the magazine's Wild File columnist, Sides is the author of Stomping Grounds, a look at American subcultures, from Tupperware ladies to bass fishermen to the Harley Nation. He's now at work on a book about Cabanatuan, the Japanese prison camp of Bataan survivors that was liberated in January 1945.

Since moving from Vancouver to Australia 10 years ago, Canadian husband-and-wife photography team Dennis Montalbetti and Gay Campbell, whose shots of Hermann Maier accompany Sides's story, have shown their work in the Australian National Gallery and in "Heroes," a solo exhibition of black-and-white portraits in Sydney. Besides their 15-year behind-the-lens collaboration (they both compose, he shoots, she prints), the two team up for long-distance bicycling. It was, in fact, what first landed them in Australia. "I cycled around the country in 1978," says Montalbetti, "fell in love with it, and always wanted to come back."

Stewart O'Nan's novel A World Away is partly set on Attu, the focus of "Scratching the Island from the Map." Born in Pittsburgh, O'Nan worked as an aerospace engineer, testing space-shuttle parts, before turning to teaching and fiction. "The men in my family were engineers," he says, "the women, teachers. I was an engineer, then a teacher, and now I'm an unemployed guy." Such modesty — O'Nan was named one of Granta's 20 Best Young American Novelists in 1996. His new anthology, The Vietnam Reader, was published this fall by Anchor Books.

"My father worked on the Alaska Highway," says Attu photographer Charles Mason, who moved north himself in 1984. The head of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks's journalism department, Mason often escapes academia to cruise the Lower 48, shooting everything from rodeos to kudzu to plastic dinosaurs. His new book, The Last Settlers (Duquesne University Press), follows America's last two homesteading families, Alaskans who squeezed in as the state's use of the Homestead Act ended a decade ago.

The author of Small Fortunes and The Day After World War III, Ed Zuckerman lights out on a cycling "reality tour" of Cuba in Field Notes. Zuckerman, who lives in Manhattan Beach, California, has been a "writer-hyphen-producer, consulting producer, executive producer, you name it," for Law & Order, among other television shows. "There's almost always a body discovered in the opening scene," he says. "I wrote one where the corpse was that of a horse. I wanted to do the whole show about the horse, but the producer said we had to have a human."