Question of the day: What is the relationship between the so-called "Frankenstorm" and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change? Hint: This is not a question that can be answered in 140 characters.

Attributing a single extreme weather event such as a sub-tropical cyclone called Sandy to the human-driven shift in global climate (or, what Andrew Revkin calls "the overall experiment we're conducting on the planet's atmosphere") is, for now, impossible.

But to report on this storm in isolation, without regard for the climatic context in which it is situated, would be to paint an incomplete picture of a reality that affects us all.

Here are six articles by journalists and scientists who have successfully risen to the significant challenge of situating Sandy in its Frankencontext.

‘One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors’, remarks Plato in Book I of The Republic – and that was in fifth-century Athens, the cradle of democracy, political freedom and western culture. One feels that his diagnosis of the present miasma of dysfunction, corruption and post-modernistic nihilism at the heart of Greek governance may have elaborated on that aphorism somewhat. 

Indeed, the headline of an article in today’s Guardian by the recently arrested journalist Kostas Vaxevanis makes a similar point. In publishing the names of over 2,000 wealthy Greeks alleged to have Swiss bank accounts, Vaxevanis attracted censure from authorities who seem more concerned with the prosecution of journalists than with suspected tax dodgers and money launderers. The standoff coincides with a strike due to start today over the suspension of two popular television presenters after they criticized a government official, in what together amounts to a significant assault on freedom of expression by a political class who appear to either comprise or be in thrall to the moneyed elite.

Microsoft’s Windows Store opened its virtual doors today, and “developers are working fast and furiously to stock the shelves” with cloud-based apps for it new Windows 8 operating system, according to CEO Steve Ballmer.

For publishers, the download center represents a new frontier with two major benefits: the potential to tap into a large global audience, and a more favourable division of revenue from digital subscriptions.

The Windows operating system is currently used by most of the world’s PCs, but PC sales have been stagnant for the past two years. With the new software, Microsoft appears to be betting on tablets and smartphones (Windows 8 features an interface optimized for touchscreens), sales of which are rising around the world. It has opened its Windows Store in 231 countries as of today, and is allowing developers to write apps in 109 languages thus far. Ballmer has said that he expects nearly 400 million computers, tablets and phones to run Windows 8 software within the year.

‘Privacy is for paedos’. ‘Circulation defines the public interest’. ‘In 21 years of invading people’s privacy I’ve never found anybody doing any good’. Fleet street veteran Paul McMullan’s take on modern journalism as related to the Leveson inquiry may not be pretty, but it sets in sharp relief the starkly amoral wasteland of sections of the tabloid press, the precise contours of which Lord Justice Leveson has been tasked to expose. In defending, amongst other things, hacking into the mobile telephone of a murdered schoolgirl, McMullan’s stance is abhorrent; yet it is also compelling, since it is the definitive articulation of what the Guardian called ‘the end point of the regulation-free, market-driven, anything-goes tabloid morality’.

Solutions to the present crisis are not noted for possessing a similar degree of uncompromising certainty, unless it is for that which is emphatically not desired. Large sections of the printed media face a paradoxical impasse, recognizing that the status quo of self-regulation has failed, but viewing any sort of official or statutory regulation as the death knell for freedom of speech. Before Leveson reports next month, therefore, the Carnegie Trust has taken the startlingly innovative step of bothering to ask the public exactly what they think should happen next, the results of which are rather revealing.