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When the door opened and he appeared, Ms. Ullens experienced a “coup de foudre” — a French expression that equates love at first sight with a thunderbolt, she told the French magazine Madame Figaro in 2014.

Can a muralist and product designer infographic his way into telling a compelling love story, from coup de foudre to coeur brisé?

Later that decade, Leaf met Robert Frank, already a star photographer, in what she described as a coup de foudre: “I saw him, and I said, ‘There he is.’

Or all at once, in a coup de foudre, a lightning strike of, “Hey, this is my town!”

Whether he’s writing about Russia and radiation poisoning in “Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies,” 9/11 in “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,” or the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga in “Coup de Foudre,” Kalfus has a gift for penetrating to the core of current events and presenting issues in a provocative way.