On a storm-wracked Saturday night in late October, a small, insistent signal went out from an oil tanker in the North Atlantic, and the heavy machinery of maritime emergency response began to turn. The vessel, named the Myra, was inside the Irish Exclusive Economic Zone, a phrase that sounds like a legal technicality but simply means a nation has special rights and responsibilities over a vast stretch of ocean. The weather was brutal. Huge rolling seas, described by people familiar with the situation as severe, were sweeping across the region, and the Myra had sent a distress alert. Within minutes,…

Every now and then, in the middle of an increasingly theatrical and exhausting political season, a person in public life says something so direct, so unpolished, so unmistakably human that it breaks through the noise. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar did that recently when he learned that the FBI was investigating him. Not just a casual request from Washington, not just another bureaucratic letter asking for documents—but formal notice that he was the target of a federal investigation. The letter could have landed like an anvil. It could have made him retreat, hedge, or suddenly become eager to cooperate…