POMPEII · 18 HOURS

No one could film it, but someone saw it and wrote it down: Pliny the Younger, from across the bay. At one in the afternoon, Vesuvius explodes and his uncle, Admiral Pliny the Elder, sails with the fleet to rescue the people; eighteen hours later, the cloud collapses onto Pompeii. A documentary recreated with AI that reaches all the way to the plaster casts of 1863, and to a question still open: the letter says August; the ruins suggest October.