Twenty-two years ago, Texas Monthly, the venerable “national magazine of Texas,” published a ranking of the state’s fifty best barbecue joints. The magazine had named the state’s best barbecue before, but the Top Fifty was an extraordinary feat of carnivorousness—a massive inventory of smoked meat, involving hundreds of meals and uncountable thousands of miles—and it became a phenomenon, on and off the newsstand. Regularly revised and updated in the years since, the list drives tourism both to and within the state, names and shapes trends, makes kings of newcomers, and topples long-established empires. So tremendous is Texans’ desire to read about barbecue, so essential is the food to the very notion of Texan-ness, that in 2013 Texas Monthly appointed the food writer and meat savant Daniel Vaughn to the freshly created role of barbecue editor.

This week, the magazine announced the creation of a new position to stand alongside its barbecue editor: beginning September 18th, José R. Ralat will become the magazine’s and the nation’s first taco editor. Ralat—who was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in New York City, and now lives in Dallas—has been something of a professional taco-eater for more than a decade, first writing taco reviews for the New York Press, and then, after decamping from Brooklyn to Texas, ten years ago, launching a weekly taco column with the Dallas Observer. He’s the author of the blog Taco Trail and, until the end of this week, the food and drink editor at the Dallas-based magazine Cowboys & Indians. His new role sounds like an office drone’s daydream: a full-time salary, plus benefits, just to wander around Texas and eat tacos? Sure thing, kid, dream on. But, as with its editorial commitment to barbecue, Texas Monthly considers this job to be not only serious business but essential Texas journalism: in a state where more than forty per cent of the population is Hispanic, including Mexican and Mexican-American residents, tacos are part of daily life, and key to Texan culinary identity.

I recently spoke with Ralat by phone about his new gig; in our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also explored how to categorize burritos, why tacos are essentially Texan, and Ralat’s mission to correct the record on breakfast tacos.

Do you already have an itinerary mapped out for your first few months on the road?

I have a rough idea that was part of my initial conversation with Texas Monthly—I sent them a list of, like, twenty ideas, thirty ideas. And it just keeps getting longer! It’s a big state, you know? It’s a huge state! And I have some friends who want to travel with me who are up for the drive. I’ll need them, because I don’t drive at all.

That seems like an obstacle for this kind of job.

You’d think so, but it hasn’t stopped me yet. I’m from New York, and I have epilepsy, so at first I just never learned to drive, and then I couldn’t drive—I probably never will. But there are a lot of buses, and there are my friends. Daniel [Vaughn, the magazine’s barbecue editor] lives in Dallas, too, and he and I could conceivably team up on things so we can hit the road together, tacos and barbecue at once. I do plan on doing a taco of the week and a taco of the month, but Mexican food in Texas is evolving quickly, and so I’ll be covering Mexican pizza, and Mexican burgers, paletas, burritos—I’m a little scared of those, to be honest. I don’t know what that’s gonna be like. But I consider burritos to be tacos.

You say that like it’s a controversial opinion.

It’s not, though! There are a couple of books out of Mexico that detail the history of the burrito—an older book, called “Los Tacos de México,” and a more recent one, called “La Tacopedia,” by Alejandro Escalante. They explain that, yes, burritos are large, folded tortillas, but they are still tacos. It’s not a new argument, it’s just not really discussed a lot. I don’t understand why you would want to eat something that big in one sitting. That doesn’t make sense to me. But it does make sense to me that they count as tacos.

Do Mexican burgers and Mexican pizzas count as tacos, too?

I want to cover traditional Mexican dishes, new Mexican dishes, Mexican-American and Tex-Mex dishes. I want to talk to restaurateurs and restaurant owners who have been running the same restaurants for fifteen, twenty, thirty-five years. Taco Deli [a famous taco stand in Austin] is celebrating twenty years this year. They helped make breakfast tacos a national thing, so I’d love to talk to them about why they started, and what they think their impact has been.

If you’re covering the full breadth of Mexican food in Texas, why call the job “taco editor”?

With Mexican cooking, everything eventually makes it into a tortilla. It’s how you eat almost everything: put it inside a tortilla, and then that’s a taco. Tortillas are generally served with meals, at the table. Plus, “taco editor” is real dang catchy, isn’t it?

I would worry about running into an ontological brick wall—if everything is a taco, then the idea of a taco, as a distinct food, maybe becomes kind of meaningless?

No, for several reasons. For one, in general, when we talk about tacos, we’re really talking about tortillas, particularly corn tortillas. Corn is the foundation of Mexican identity, Mexican culture. Also, the taco is a quick, easy, perfect food—we don’t think about them that much because here in Texas we eat them multiple times a week. You buy tortillas nearby—or maybe you make your own, but that’s rare these days. When you go out to eat, they’re everywhere. Do we take them for granted? It’s a good question. I hope we don’t. I certainly don’t.

Barbecue, especially smoked brisket, is a quintessential Texas food. Tacos, on the other hand, are everywhere—and it seems like Californians sometimes pretend to have a monopoly on them.

A lot of people like to argue about which barbecue is better: Carolina barbecue, Texas barbecue, whatever. I don’t think that sort of thing helps tacos. I think that, for those of us who live along the border, tacos are part of our DNA—and, if the rest of America doesn’t know that, then, hopefully, I can help. A lot of reporting comes out of California. And, frankly, a lot of outside reporting about Texas tacos is due to reporters visiting Austin for South by Southwest. To think that that’s what outsiders think of as “Texas tacos” makes me cringe! Austin is a small city that gets a lot of attention, but it can only really be credited with one taco, and that’s the migas taco, which is their signature: crispy tortilla strips mixed with eggs and cheese, mixed with salsa that can be as simple as a pico de gallo.

Austin gets a lot of credit for breakfast tacos, too.

I hope that I’ll be able to finally correct this: there’s no such thing as an Austin-style breakfast taco! It doesn’t exist. Austin has great breakfast tacos, but for some reason the rest of the country’s breakfast tacos have always been described as Austin-style. They’re no different along the border, where they came from the Rio Grande Valley, which includes northern Mexico. They can be small or large, like the big ones served in thin, almost translucent flour tortillas in Brownsville, or the smaller, thicker, flour-tortilla-based tacos served in cities like San Antonio. To a lot of people who were born or live in Texas anywhere outside of Austin, the idea of calling a breakfast taco “Austin-style” is offensive. It’s not offensive to me—it just bothers me because it’s incorrect. It’s misinformation, and part of my job is to clear that up.

Can you say more about tacos as part of Texans’ DNA?

Tacos are Mexico’s gift to the world. In Texas, we’re lucky enough to live in a place that used to be Mexico, and that helps make them part of our DNA. My wife is Mexican-American, and she’s largely responsible for getting me into this mess. She made me breakfast tacos for the first time, she made me lengua [beef tongue] tacos for the very first time. For me, those were rapturous moments. I’ve joked that I fell in love with her because of breakfast tacos.

I’ve only lived in Texas for ten years, and I’m still not calling myself a Texan, but I’ve been entrenched in this little world for a while now, and I’ve been fortunate enough to tell these stories—not just the stories of the tacos but of the people who make them. I do this job at their pleasure, and I feel welcomed as one of them. I can see how important tacos are to every Texan. We argue about them so much, and for no reason whatsoever.

What are some common taco arguments?

Corn tortillas or flour, that’s intense—the answer depends on where you live and what you eat. People argue about two ways of making tortillas: maseca, a brand of dehydrated corn flour that is combined with flour to make corn tortillas, versus nixtamal, or nixtamalization, which is the ancient, time-consuming process of soaking and cooking corn to separate the hull from the interior of the kernel and imbue nutrients into corn, which is then ground and made into tortillas. That’s a really big question that involves economics, labor, and all kinds of other things. Sure, keeping ancient traditions alive is important, but you also can’t blame a place for using commodity tortillas when it’s expected that they sell two-dollar tacos. Oh, now, there’s an argument right there! Should tacos be cheap, or should they be expensive?

Alex Stupak, the chef of New York’s Empellón restaurants, has talked a lot over the years about how frustrating it is that if he were to offer a dish of, say, two beautifully seared scallops dressed with gorgeous sauce, diners would be happy to pay twenty or thirty dollars for it, whereas, as soon as he puts a tortilla underneath the scallops, people freak out and refuse to pay more than five bucks, because it’s a taco now.

It’s ridiculous! Just like any other food, you get what you pay for. If you want a beautifully made, hand-crafted item—something made from scratch, using ancient methods, with sauces that take days to make—you’re gonna pay five, ten, twelve dollars. I was in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, and I spent twelve dollars on a taco, didn’t even think about it. Because it was handmade, well-made, and delicious.

Barbecue, by contrast, isn’t always a cheap meal—it’s not fancy, but it can sometimes be awfully expensive, and yet people don’t seem to complain about those prices.

It’s true. But I think that tacos are more accessible than barbecue. You can have three Mexican-food businesses in one strip mall, but you could never do that with barbecue. People make barbecue a destination event; tacos are what we eat every day. If you’re running late for work in Texas, you bring breakfast tacos as a mea culpa. But they are, sometimes, getting to be almost as expensive as barbecue, depending on where you go. I blew four hundred dollars at a modern Mexican restaurant, and it was amazing! It was worth it! I don’t expect everyone to do that, or be able to do that, but the point is that, although tacos are more accessible, they can be just as expensive as barbecue, if not more.

Right now, with so much national attention on the border, and the President egging on such intense anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant sentiment, does it seem important for you that tacos are being placed up there with barbecue on the highest level of Texan identity?

It really is. Since you brought that up, when the shooting happened in El Paso last month, it brought things into focus for my family. My wife’s parents are from El Paso, and we have family there, we have friends there. Since that weekend, my wife says that she’s worried about me when I’m working. It’s a legitimate concern. I don’t know what to say other than, well, I’m still gonna do my job.

Is this a case of, every Texan loves tacos, but not every Texan loves the people who make the tacos?

You know, chili is the official dish of Texas. And it’s designated as such because it is the culmination of all of the foodways that have given this state its culinary identity: it has European influence, American influence, Mexican influence. Tacos and barbecue come out of that same tradition. It’s a shame that people outside of Texas think of barbecue first as a Texas food, but before there was barbecue there was barbacoa—that’s where we get the name from. I like to joke with Daniel Vaughn that barbecue isn’t perfect until it’s in a tortilla.

Now there’s this thing called Tex-Mex barbecue, and that’s really curious to me. It’s a style that includes dishes like brisket tacos topped with serrano-tomatillo salsa on flour tortillas, pork sausage stuffed with queso Oaxaca and serrano chilies, beef-chorizo sausage, smoked-brisket tamales. It’s considered new, but barbecue has always been Mexican and Tex-Mex. Barbacoa, specifically South Texas beef-head barbacoa, is a major influence on contemporary Texas barbecue. Tortillas have long been served with Texas-barbecue elements in Mexican-American households. But it’s only in the past year that this idea of Tex-Mex barbecue has received attention from the mainstream press, and the term has become a buzzword. Is it a case of barbecue co-opting tacos? I think we need to be careful when approaching this kind of topic. It can look an awful lot like Columbusing.

You’ve talked before about how you don’t like to see the word “authentic” applied to food. Why is that?

It’s very confining; it doesn’t allow for a dynamic, evolving system. Authenticity exists, if it exists at all, only on paper—in the kitchen, everyone’s recipe for rice and beans is different. There’s no truly authentic rice and beans.

What do you think people who use the word are actually trying to say?

I think they have a lot of good intentions. But what they’re trying to say is that they know something about that item, that product, that dish. That they have some sort of ownership over it. And we don’t own anything. Even different towns have variations on the same dish. One example is birria, which is a stew—it can be made with goat, it can be made with beef, it can be made with lamb. You can’t really say that one is more authentic than the other. Barbacoa can be made with anything. It’s a process, a method—not an item. Everyone adds something a little differently.

How long do you think a person can write about tacos before running out of things to say?

There’s no telling. There’s enough to learn to last me a lifetime. I’m excited about chile-rellenos tacos, which are becoming more popular, and about tacos de trompo, which are a regional cousin to tacos al pastor. They’re seasoned differently, and they’re only found where there are large Monterreyan immigrant populations, like in Dallas and Houston. I wish I could have some sort of “Star Trek” transporter directly to San Antonio, because the pork-chop tacos there, wow. Whole pork chops, bone in, served on flour tortillas—they’re amazing. I hope I’ll write about tacos forever.

In a recent interview, the writer Malcolm Gladwell said that one of his goals as an author is “to get people to take human psychology seriously and to respect the complexity of human behavior and motivations.” Gladwell, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, could offer a master class in the analysis of human behavior and the complexities of our decision-making processes. Over the years, he has written about topics as varied as the neurological causes of violent crime, the evolution of criminal profiling, the invention of the birth-control pill, and the psychology behind religious fanaticism. He has also written six books, including “The Tipping Point” and “Blink.” His latest book, “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know,” is a provocative look at the detrimental ways in which we often misconstrue the motivations and intentions of others.

This week, we’re bringing you a selection of Gladwell’s pieces from the magazine. In “The Coolhunt,” he follows the path of two fashion “coolhunters” as they discover and forecast cultural and consumer trends. In “The Tweaker,” he examines the editorial genius of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple. In “The Talent Myth,” Gladwell recounts the failings of Enron’s corporate culture and writes about the role of talent and virtuosity in the workplace, and, in a piece from 1999, he considers what sets physical geniuses apart from other people. In “Thresholds of Violence,” he reports on the epidemic of school shootings across the United States. Finally, in “Troublemakers,” he investigates the unconscious biases that lead to racial profiling. Gladwell’s writing offers a fascinating look at many of our entrenched systems and distinctive phenomena; we hope that you enjoy these glimpses into a curious mind at work.

—David Remnick

“The Coolhunt”

Who decides what’s cool? Certain kids in certain places—and only the coolhunters know who they are.

“The Physical Genius”

What do Wayne Gretzky, Yo-Yo Ma, and a brain surgeon named Charlie Wilson have in common?

“Thresholds of Violence”

How school shootings catch on.

“The Tweaker”

The real genius of Steve Jobs.

“The Talent Myth”

Are smart people overrated?

“Troublemakers”

What pit bulls can teach us about profiling.

Of all the Presidential hopefuls who have promised to oust Donald Trump in 2020, Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, has perhaps the most compelling electoral record. In 2016, he was the only Democratic governor to be reëlected in a red state, winning by four points among Montanans, who had voted overwhelmingly for Trump. His bid is centered on a pledge to reform campaign finance, and, at stops in Iowa, he routinely touts his history of working with a Rebublican-led legislature in his home state to curb dark-money contributions. And yet, Bullock, the last governor left in the race, failed to secure the necessary number of individual donors to qualify for Thursday’s Democratic debate. Like a number of his fellow-candidates, he has criticized the Democratic National Committee’s qualification criteria, which, for at least a night, winnowed the Democratic field to ten. Last month, the billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, who has spent millions of dollars of his own money on advertisements, announced that he had received enough individual donations to qualify for the next round of Democratic debates, in October. A number of candidates expressed dismay, but the most vocal was Bullock, who appeared on television to criticize the lingering influence of money in politics. He conceded that the D.N.C.’s rule was well intentioned, but, he added, “what it really has done is allow a billionaire to buy a spot on the debate stage.”

On Thursday night, as his fellow-candidates stood behind their lecterns in Houston, Texas, Bullock sat at the corner of a glossy wooden bar at the Continental Lounge, a gastropub in Des Moines. The governor was in good spirits, hunched over a glass of Coke, with his right sleeve rolled up and his cowboy boots planted on the base of his stool. “I’d rather be on the debate stage,” he told me. “But I don’t think being on the debate stage is going to define what the first week of February looks like.” Earlier that day, in Clive, Bullock had attended a meet-and-greet hosted by the wife of Iowa’s former governor, Tom Vilsack. By his side at the Continental sat Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa and an old friend, who endorsed Bullock in May. (Miller, Bullock also noted, was one of the first state officials outside of Illinois to back Barack Obama in 2007.) They both ordered bacon cheeseburger flatbreads, which arrived, garnished with pickles, on marbled slabs of wood. Bullock, who had also ordered a refill of soda, looked surprised when the bartender arrived bearing tumblers of Bulleit bourbon.

“This is brought to you by the Gillibrand team,” the bartender said, gesturing to his left. A few former staffers of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, who withdrew her candidacy last week, waved.

“I guess we have to drink, then,” Bullock said, raising his glass.

“To a fair shot,” one of his staffers offered, toasting to their campaign’s slogan.

During the debate, Bullock offered wry, knowing nods on several occasions, as when Andrew Yang unveiled plans to extend his signature “freedom dividend” to ten American families. “So he’s getting names by offering twelve thousand dollars?” Bullock said, pulling up Yang’s Web site on his iPhone. (As he predicted, it displayed a prominent banner for the candidate’s giveaway above a registration form.) Later, the New Jersey senator Cory Booker’s criticism of Trump’s foreign policy—“Trump’s America first policy is actually an America isolated, an America alone policy”—sounded startlingly familiar. “He took my line!” Bullock joked. “C’mon, Booker.” He chuckled at Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar’s zinger on Medicare for All—“While Bernie wrote the bill,” she said, “I read the bill”—and also seemed to appreciate her opening: “Houston, we have a problem.” (“That’s not bad,” he said.) When the first commercial break arrived, ninety minutes in, Bullock glanced at his watch. He expressed a sort of empathy for the candidates when I mentioned that the entire program would include only two breaks. “In three hours?” Bullock asked, shaking his head at the thought of “how much you’d sweat—every break they put more shit on your face.” The onslaught of makeup, he told me, is “one of the most humiliating parts of running for office.”

The bar was loud, and the owners had enabled closed-captioning on the debate channel. Still, it was difficult to tell—without consulting Twitter, as a few of Bullock’s staffers did—who was carrying the night. Bullock characterized the debates as somewhat “disconnected from people’s lives.” “I don’t know that any of these debates are helpful to voters,” he said, using his fingers to scoop a few ice cubes from his empty soda glass into his tumbler. “It really is more about gotcha moments.” He added, “Never before in our history has the D.N.C. been trying to decide who the voices should be going forward.” At the same time, Bullock said, his visits to early-voting states made him question whether anyone besides voters could winnow the field. “I find people are a long way from really making these decisions. Even as you’re all following on Twitter, voters are, like, ‘All right, who won? Or does it matter?’ ” People, he added, didn’t necessarily want to “see all that.”

Neither, apparently, did the staffers. Not long after the break, Bullock’s team, which had been exchanging jokes over plates of bruschetta, poutine, and avocado egg rolls, closed their tab and moved across the street to Up-Down, an arcade bar outfitted with retro video games. The basement was bathed in red and green lighting. Not a single screen showed the debates, but a wrestling match was on, as was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The Bullock team scattered to play at Skee-Ball, Jenga Giant, and Mario Kart. Bullock, a father of three, settled in with an expert’s stance at Donkey Kong—his favorite—hinging at the hips and grabbing the joystick with his left hand. It didn’t take long for him to post the machine’s new high score.

At a quarter to ten, as the debate was wrapping up, Bullock left his can of Bud Light at the bar and lumbered up the stairs. His staffers had been trading text messages with their colleagues at the headquarters to hone a statement on the night’s events. Outside, sirens blared. A gaggle of twentysomethings tumbled out of a Jeep, took a glance at a Maserati parked behind them, and asked if it was Bullock’s. “No,” the governor said.

Bullock found a stretch of block with a nondescript background and recited his statement for one of the staffers to record. It took a few takes to perfect—drunken passersby kept stumbling through the frame—but Bullock persisted, criticizing the influence of money in politics, noting his own record, and pointing out that none of the candidates who qualified over him had once broached the subject of fighting dark money. “There wasn’t even one question asked about that in three hours of debate,” he said. “If we want to get anything done, we need to start by getting the corrupting influence of money out of our elections. This is the fight of our time, and it’s been the fight of my career—and I’m going to keep fighting until we win.”

Just as he was graduating from high school, in 1990, Chris Moore had a fanciful idea. He had noticed increasing numbers of so-called sport kites arcing through the skies above his home town of Lenexa, Kansas, outside Kansas City, Missouri. A traditional kite is tethered to its operator by a single line, and is more or less impossible to maneuver. But a sport kite—a needle-nosed, fighter-jet-like wing of nylon or polyester—has two lines, which an operator can use to induce acrobatic turns. Moore was skilled with a yo-yo and had watched riders do tricks on their bikes. He watched the sport kites soar, reverse, and double back, and wondered if the kite could become the next bicycle—a vehicle for art, competition, or some combination of the two.

After he graduated, Moore opened a kite store in partnership with his mother. Sales were slow. The problem, he felt, was that the kites he was buying from suppliers weren’t fast or trickable enough—they could only do a loop or two. Moore brought on an aerospace engineer from the University of Kansas named David Bui, and, together, they started reverse-engineering the kites. Bui turned out to be a gifted scavenger of parts. They built kites using the shafts of high-performance arrows, which were constructed of lightweight aluminum encased in a carbon-fibre wrapper; later, they made their own spars out of tapered graphite tubes that were being used in the production of helicopter frames. The technology they used was modelled on bird bones.

Moore, who has a compact build, a bright smile, and the serious, studious voice of an airline pilot, took his kites on the road, performing at schools and birthday parties, for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and before crowds of thousands at kite expos. In the process, he became one of the most skilled kiters in the world. He and Bui made sixteen-square-foot sails that were stiff but weighed only three ounces. “I could literally walk and move, and my body created enough pressure against this highly controllable feather to orchestrate a whole routine to music,” Moore recalled. He was one of the first people to fly kites indoors—a boast, since it showed that the kites were so light that they didn’t even need wind. Moore had been right about the sport-kite business: he soon opened six stores in Missouri and Kansas, advertising in Stunt Kite Quarterly and other new publications devoted to the sport of kiting. Moore himself became one of its top professionals, travelling each weekend to tournaments around the country and earning a national title.

In 1994, Moore went to France as part of a seven-week European kiting tour. He watched as one of the other performers, with a paragliding sail at his back, made a controlled landing on the water, then used the sail to pull himself through the waves to shore.

“My mind was blown,” Moore said. “I was just connecting all kinds of dots.” He stopped his tour, tracked down the performer, horse-traded one of his kites for a glider, and took it back to the United States. In the past, Moore had been interested in making kites more maneuverable. Now he was fascinated by a different problem: harnessing their power to take flight himself.

In landlocked Missouri, he began a series of reckless experiments. He sat in a three-wheeled buggy, launched a large kite, and, by swooping it through the air, set himself racing across football and soccer fields. He strapped himself into a climbing harness, then tied himself to a soccer goal; by diving a kite down and up repeatedly, he was able to rise into the air, sometimes as high as sixty feet. He found that a well-timed flick of the wrist could bring him in for a soft landing. If his timing was off, he’d sometimes knock himself unconscious.

Moore didn’t know it, but similar experiments were happening all around the world. Wind speeds are higher at the altitudes where kites fly than they are at ground or sea level; in 1984, two French brothers, Bruno and Dominique Legaignoux, had envisioned a more efficient catamaran that was powered by a kite rather than a sail. In the course of developing their vessel, they had built and patented a kite with an inflatable leading edge, which allowed it to float when it crashed onto the water so that it could be relaunched. Their kite had made its way to Hawaii, where big-wave surfers were used to paddling out into swells or getting towed into breaks by Jet Skis. They began experimenting with wind power.

“I was living in my own world—I was in Missouri, in Kansas,” Moore said. There was no World Wide Web to bring these far-flung communities of enthusiasts together. Even so, through one of his customers, Moore heard a rumor. In Oregon, a Boeing engineer and his son, both avid windsurfers, had rigged their windsurfing sail to a long line, attached it to a pair of water skis, and then used the wind to pull themselves along the Hood River. Moore found out the names of the father and son—Bill and Cory Roeseler—and wrote them a letter. They replied with a VHS tape. “I put it in my VCR, and it was a video of this guy and his dad pulling themselves on this kite-like device,” he said. The Roeselers sold him one. When the contraption finally came, it affected Moore so deeply that he sold everything he owned, laid off more than sixty employees at the business he’d built, and moved east from Missouri to rebuild his life on the ocean.

In 1999, in Nags Head, North Carolina, Moore opened one of the world’s first kiteboarding schools. Kiteboarding promised to combine the best of wakeboarding, waterskiing, surfing, windsurfing, and paragliding; Moore’s school, Kitty Hawk Kites Kiteboarding, attracted hundreds of thrill-seekers willing to strap boards to their feet and kites to their waists. But the sport was a work in progress. There were no safety releases; if a kite, caught by a gust, went out of control, the kiteboarder went with it. “I really just scared the shit out of people,” Moore recalled. “Mostly, they quit after the first lesson.” There were stories of novice kiteboarders being flung into the sides of buildings; people broke ribs, or worse. The problem was obvious. The early adopters knew how to harness the wind—but they didn’t know how to tame it.

In the late nineteen-eighties, a few years before Moore discovered kiting, Don Montague started his own experiments in aerodynamics. Montague, one of the world’s best windsurfers, was frustrated by his performance in light winds. A windsurfer and his sail need to balance each other: only heavier riders can counterbalance the large sails necessary to draw power from low-speed winds. Montague weighed only a hundred and sixty pounds; in competitions, when the wind was low, he had to strap weights to his back. He longed for sails that were both lighter and more powerful, and decided to try to design them himself.

At first, Montague took a traditional approach. Sitting in the middle of a large sheet of mylar, he drew an outline of the sail he wanted in felt pen. He then placed battens—stiff strips of material, usually fibreglass—on the sheet, like ribs. By moving the battens, he could adjust the sail’s shape; by changing their length, he could alter the profile of tension it presented to the wind. And yet this process seemed, to him, alarmingly imprecise. Montague wanted to explore the space of design possibilities in a methodical way, and, from the floor, it was difficult to track changes from one design to the next. What he needed was software that let him move the battens virtually.

Montague is dyslexic. When he tried designing sails with standard “computer-aided design” tools, he found tweaking the numbers, which was the only way to alter a sail’s design in those programs, too irritating. Although he’d been a lifelong tinkerer—as a kid, he’d taken apart telephones and attached a sail to his skateboard—his only formal training as an engineer had been a drafting class at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (To save on tuition, he’d enrolled under the name of a Californian cousin; when a professor discovered the ruse—his daughter, Montague recalls, turned out to be dating the cousin—his time at the university was cut short.) Montague decided that he needed software that would let him play directly with sail designs, and recruited a small group of programmers who worked out of a garage in Maui to build it. “Because I was very visual,” he said, “the programs needed to be extremely visual”—fewer numbers, more pictures; fewer formulas, more drawing tools. The programmers made software that showed him a sail’s shape in three dimensions, allowing him to change the parameters he cared about with a few clicks. It insured that all the parts of the sail would fit together and created a blueprint for the final product.

Later, Montague tried to build software that could simulate a sail’s real-world behavior—accounting for the weight of its mylar, the motion of its boom, the choppiness of the waves. But simulations, he found, were less useful than experience on the water, and so he tested his sails by surfing with them. His tests were driven primarily by feel. Was the sail breathing enough? Was it too stiff? “Point five of a millimetre in takeup on the leech of a sail”—the back edge—“is the difference between a good sail and a bad sail,” he said. “Within ten seconds, I would know what was wrong.” A sail, he concluded, is “basically a living membrane. And unless you approach it like that—if you’re just looking at the numbers . . . you get nothing.” He went on, “You know, we are a computer. . . . So you can’t really say, ‘Oh, you need this fancy computer program.’ I’m actually the best computer you could find for this application.”

By the early nineties, Montague had perfected his more powerful windsurfing sails. His designs—which he refined as the head sail designer at Gaastra Sails and, later, the head of R. & D. at an outfit started by Robby Naish, a legendary surfer—sold in the hundreds of thousands, and transformed windsurfing. (Eventually, Montague would start Makani Power, a wind-based electricity company, which Michael Specter wrote about for The New Yorker, in 2013.)

Like Moore, Montague heard rumors about the Roeselers and their kite ski; in 1993, he met Cory, the younger Roeseler, in Maui. They talked about turning kite-skiing into a sport of its own. But Montague was skeptical: the wind was just too strong. “He was a super-fit guy,” Montague recalled, of Cory Roeseler. “He had gigantic legs to hold these skis in the water.” It took great strength to control the heavy bar of Roeseler’s carbon-fibre-framed kite, which, Montague said, could “whack you in the face.” Kite-skiing seemed more like a stunt than a sport. “ ‘People are going to get hurt,’ ” Montague remembers telling Cory. “ ‘It’s just not going to work. Even though you can do it, no one else can. You’re superhuman.’ ”

I first experienced the power that both Moore and Montague were confronting a few years ago, on an overcast day in Providenciales, in Turks and Caicos. The promise of kiteboarding is that a wind strong enough to draw small whitecaps from the water can take you on a magic-carpet ride. But the same wind can be dangerously uncontrollable.

New kiteboarders start on land, by learning to fly a small “trainer” kite. Mine was powerful enough to drag me up onto my toes. My instructor drew a small semicircle on the beach: the “wind window.” When the kite sits at the top of the window, or to the sides, it’s in neutral; when it swoops inside the arc, it enters the “power zone.” If you swoop too aggressively and lose control of the kite, it can start spinning. In a “death loop,” the spins become unstoppable; the kite gathers speed, pulling you along with it.

After an hour or so, my instructor hooked the trainer kite’s big brother—a bow kite with a fifteen-foot leading edge—to a harness wrapped just below my rib cage. I had been warned about its power; now I was tethered to it. Feeling its pull, I was reminded of riding a horse: each of the kite’s small motions suggested irresistible strength, and pretending to control it was hubris. Whenever I lost focus, the kite swooped and pulled me downwind. I watched the lines: if my fingers got caught in them, the kite could rip them off.

My first time out, I flew the kite too timidly and barely stood up. Later, at the instructor’s urging, I flew it too aggressively and face-planted in saltwater. In kiteboarding, the learning curve is unusually steep: a rider must coördinate kite and board while reacting to the changing wind. For two weeks, I was often scared and uncomfortable. Then, my first real ride: I coasted for half a mile toward open sea, bright blue above and below, the sun hot, my skin wet, the wind high and warm. I shouted to myself in disbelief. Speed is freedom and freedom speed; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In the mid-nineties, when Montague tried his first kiteboarding setup, the problem of “de-powering” was foremost in his mind. “When I got hold of it, it was, like, ‘We can’t use this in Maui,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘It’s twenty-five knots here—we’ll die.’ ” On a boat, it’s possible to let the wind out of a sail by tightening a line. Kites had no such ability; in fact, in a crash, they tended to fall directly into the power zone, with the strongest wind. “The only reason we all didn’t die in the beginning is because we were already watermen,” Montague said.

While working on their kite-powered catamaran, the Legaignoux brothers had nearly solved the de-powering problem. They could never quite perfect their approach, Montague says, in part because their prototyping process was so slow: they developed their kites by cutting full-scale models out of foam blocks. Montague had the advantage of his sail-design software. He began laying out designs on the computer and bringing them to life outside. “I was so crazed about it that I would be flying the kite in a field at night, in the dark, without looking at it, so that the kite was now an extension of my body,” he said. “Just like windsurfing, it was an immediate feeling.” Montague sewed webbings to the bottom of his kites and attached the lines in combination until he got the behavior he wanted. He brought a staple gun to the beach, so that he could change a kite’s shape with a few staccato snaps.

Montague’s kites had all the power of the old models, but only when you wanted them to. They were dynamically stable, like airplane wings, with a natural tendency to park high and soft, exerting comparatively little force until it was summoned. In a crash, they flapped harmlessly instead of gathering speed. Early kiteboarders had ended their days miles downwind from where they’d started, shuttling themselves back to their launch points by car; Montague’s new kites could go left, right, upwind, or downwind. “The day I stayed upwind in Ho’okipa,” he said, “That was the day the sport was real.”

What followed was a kind of Cambrian explosion—a cascade of small breakthroughs. “Every year was some new mind-blowing thing,” Chris Moore recalled, of the early two-thousands. As the equipment got better, students became more likely to stick around; their demand, in turn, drew more investment in equipment. “Suddenly, the sport became way safer,” Moore said.

A technical revolution can take root only if there’s a human infrastructure behind it. “I started teaching people how to teach,” Moore said. He trained thousands of kiteboarding instructors and developed and conducted instructor examinations. He learned that teachers of high-risk sports have huge liability exposure—a hang-gliding school, for example, might only obtain insurance after proving that it rigorously trained its teachers—and created the Professional Air Sports Association, which began certifying kiteboarding instructors so that the schools could get insured.

Kiteboarding began developing the social on-ramps—culture, community, distinctive rituals and vocabulary—that could turn it from a dangerous hobby into a sport. Today, more than a million and a half people participate. Kites litter beaches in Brazil, Egypt, and South Africa; in the Caribbean and in San Francisco Bay, they sometimes crowd to the point of colliding. As with horseback riding, standardization of the equipment and teaching allows newcomers to forget the improbability of what they are actually doing. A sense of inevitability descends. Of course we sit on the backs of two-thousand-pound animals and order them around; of course we strap ourselves to wakeboards and kites in fifteen-knot winds.

This summer, I rented a kite—a fourteen-metre Cabrinha model, the descendant of a descendant of a design by Don Montague—from Chris Moore’s school, which is now located in Turks and Caicos, and went to the beach. After fifty hours of practice, it was time for my first unsupervised kiteboarding session. I unzipped the oversized backpack and unfurled the fabric downwind; it flapped gently until I pumped it to life. I flicked the inflated leading edge and listened to the pitch; a high note signalled good pressure. Earlier, I’d watched a well-produced YouTube video with animated overlays that reminded me exactly how I should connect my lines. The control bar to which the lines attached was color-coded, and I used a mnemonic, “red rigs right,” to remember which side went where. I clasped my safety leash to the bar and then hooked it to my harness using the “chicken loop,” a device that would allow me to disable the kite in case I lost control.

It’s customary for a kiteboarder to launch with the help of a partner. As I walked sideways into the water, a stranger on the beach righted the kite. It waited, parked in neutral, while he held its leading edge; I gave the signal to launch, and the stranger let go. Most kiteboarders stick to the surface, where they can do everything that windsurfers can, but with far less wind and muscle; the default pose is to recline, shoulders back, hips forward to carve. But it’s easy to take flight. If the wind is good, a light pull on the control bar will start the bow-shaped kite on a turn toward its apex, into the full force of the wind. At the right moment, you turn the board hard upwind and pull the bar: a surge of power lifts you skyward. A beginner might hop a foot above the water, abs tight with effort, then lose the board and crash. But the best riders can rise dozens of feet in the air, then ride away after a soft landing.

I looked around. The waves were short and smooth, the water bath-warm and indigo; for more than a mile, it was no deeper than my waist. The bay seemed designed for kiteboarding. With a few swoops of the kite, I got myself up and moving. It felt entirely natural when I leaned back and cut upwind.

You just left the house in a rush, because of course you chose this morning to stalk your college friend’s neighbor via her online wedding registry, but once you’re halfway down the street you are suddenly gripped with fear as you try to recall—

Did you lock the door? O.K., you definitely did! Remember that nice, audible click you heard as you walked away? There you go. Irrefutable evidence.

But, then, wasn’t your neighbor also talking to you as you closed the door, asking if you were coming to his barbecue and then jokingly reminding you that you didn’t have a choice since you share a yard? And weren’t you so focussed on doing that fake laugh you know is extremely unconvincing while trying to escape that maybe you didn’t lock the door at all? Maybe it’s just swinging wide open, welcoming everyone in the city of Los Angeles into your home.

But, even if they did come inside, they would, in all likelihood, leave immediately. Your roommate’s boyfriend, Dan, is probably right where you left him—lying out on the couch, playing Super Smash Bros. and buying car parts off Craigslist. Is he building a new car from scratch? Why does he need so much raw material? But if Dan has driven you to flee the apartment that you willingly pay rent for every month then surely he’ll convince strangers to leave, too, right?

Honestly, you have nothing to worry about. Just keep walking. Everything is fine. That door is definitely locked.

But, if it wasn’t, what would a potential burglar even steal? I mean, you don’t really own anything that valuable anyway, which is equal parts comforting and upsetting. You’re almost thirty. Why is your most valuable possession your four-year-old laptop? What is wrong with you? Wait, didn’t Grandma Esther tell you that holding on to that block of gold is what got her through the war? You should get a block of gold. Just a nice, big piece that you can melt down and sell on the open market. Now that would be a valuable thing to steal! Yes, this is a good plan. Remember to Google how to buy gold bars later.

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Now move along and don’t look back. You’ve got this.

Wait. What if this ends up being a Goldilocks scenario where someone just strolls in to sleep in your half-broken IKEA bed and use your Hulu login, but then realizes that your password has been changed because your friends do not trust you with their streaming accounts anymore? Or the intruder could go through the fridge and realize that everything has mostly gone bad, except for a half-eaten block of cheese and some hummus. Maybe he will be so depressed by your inability to be a properly functioning human that he’ll leave—but hopefully first go grocery shopping for you out of pity.

No. You’re spiralling. Come on. When have you ever not locked the door?

O.K., sure, there was that one time you were drunk in college and stumbled home and left the door ajar and, in the morning, you found out your friend’s cat had got out and they had to search for Ginger for weeks. But this is different! Like, people have the capacity to change, and this is clearly one of those cases.

Only maybe, to be safe, you should go home quickly and check. It’ll take no time at all! Yes, that’s it. Just a brisk walk back. O.K., now this is more of a jog. You’re really booking it, huh? It’s fine. You needed the steps anyway.

God, this is a disaster. All of your belongings are GONE.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

No, stop. Get ahold of yourself. Of course you locked the door, because you’re a goddam ADULT. Stop doubting yourself.

You’re back. Now just calmly walk up your stoop, past your neighbor, who is already putting up streamers and blasting the Eagles. Stop your hands from shaking, press down on the handle, close your eyes, and—

It was locked the whole time.

Just like you knew it would be. Cool.

Now leave your house so you can do this all again tomorrow.