ANATOMY OF A RIOT

Last summer, the murders of three children in a small seaside town in England's northwest triggered a contagion of violence that spread throughout the country practically overnight. The speed and ease with which the riots took shape-propagated by angry men, distorted by social media falsehoods, and amplified by anti-immigrant opportunists-helps explain why this moment when the truth is so fraught is making life in the UK, the US, and beyond feel so dangerous.

- SEAN FLYNN

The morning after the first terrible thing happened, Patrick Hurley was on Tithebarn Road near the corner of Hart Street, cradling a bouquet of lilies and pale-green chrysanthemums. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, was in Southport as well, and she had her own bundle of flowers. She walked a half step ahead of Hurley as they crossed the street to a low, curved wall with a hedge on top, where a dozen or so news crews watched them lay their flowers among those already on the sidewalk in a makeshift monument. They stayed for a moment near the police tape, reading notes others had left, whispering to each other. But they did not speak to the cameras because, really, there was little left to say.

Twenty-four hours earlier, in a studio called the Hart Space, a 17-year-old boy with a kitchen knife attacked 13 people. Eleven of them were children on summer holiday. They were there to practice yoga and make bracelets and dance to Taylor Swift songs. Three girls, ages six, seven, and nine, were killed. There was no apparent motive, no obvious reason-how could there be to butcher children?-other than a disturbed spasm of horrific savagery.

Hurley had been in London that morning, Monday, July 29, which also happened to be the first day of his fourth week as the member of parliament for Southport. He'd been elected only 25 days earlier in a Labour landslide that ended 14 years of Conservative governance in the United Kingdom; in fact, Hurley is the first Labour MP ever elected to represent Southport, which, despite the name, is a town in the northwest of England, on the coast just beyond Liverpool. "It doesn't matter if you've been there for 3 weeks or 30 years," he saysresponding to a slaughter was unprecedented for an elected official in those parts.