Accepting the reality of having lost something critical to one’s well-being is not alien to my personal life, but it certainly is to my life as an American. I don’t think official America has ever grappled with the side of good having lost. I say “official” because the Confederate South certainly felt that their good side had lost in 1865. And they showed us so with Jim Crow laws and segregationist policies for a another century and counting. We knew we had lost in Vietnam, but by the time the last chopper left Saigon, Americans were questioning which side was the good side. Same for Iraq and Afghanistan.

What does living in this kind of “crisis” feel like? It’s not a war—at least not like the ones we’ve had since 1945, where civilians never have to sacrifice. It’s not another pandemic. It’s not like a recession or a depression, which used to be called “panics.” No one has the energy to panic. In a letter of October 3, 1961, the time of the Berlin Crisis, the poet Robert Lowell wrote: “there’s just a queer, half apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho nations had died and were now anachronistic, yet in their anarchic death-throes would live on for ages troubling us, threatening the likelihood of life continuing.” Poignant words, but how would he even know what a “nuclear feeling” felt like? Even the most lyrical among us have trouble describing the awful present until the distress has become mundane enough to seem old. In Lowell’s case, “nuclear feeling” dutifully returned almost a year to the day later with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then it lie dormant again until the 1980s.

People “go dark” mostly from erotic troubles. The withdrawal is not the same as grieving the death of a loved one or despairing when you yourself are ill. It’s not the same as Broadway going dark during COVID. A lover’s betrayal sets off a systemwide alarm: the ultimate firewall of intimacy has been breached; it wasn’t a school of endorphins that swum in but one lethal viral contaminant, the Terminator Virus. Your traumatized psyche doesn’t know what to do but flip the master switch, stopping cold every kind of engagement, not just engagement in the arena that has betrayed you, whether that arena is everything associated with one person or half the country’s voters.

The first thing I think about when I go dark on “news” is that millions of Americans live their lives this way. There’s no stopping the election aftermath from seeping into the social media world of fun, so if you want a complete blackout, you have to temporarily quit the fun. But for most of the country, the seepage of news into their TikTok or Instagram fun is the only way they are informed about the activities of government at all.

Less than two months before one of the most important elections in U.S. history, a crisis of confidence in America’s political news media has spilled out into the open. The gist, if you haven’t been paying attention: mainstream media like the New York Times, Washington Post, AP News, and CNN and the three major networks have been failing America by failing to “meet the moment” of the Trump era. Rebecca Solnit provides a good summary in The Guardian: “While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new.”

“The elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind,” writes Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions, issuing ludicrous ‘fact checks,’ and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud.” There is the corporate greed factor, but Bunch sees problems with the profession’s “weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not be portrayed as naive shills for liberalism than to care about saving democracy from authoritarian rule.”

One of the most amazing events of the Paris Olympics was the men’s 1500m field competition, where American Cole Hocker won the gold and his teammate Yared Nuguse took the bronze.

To me, a race—whether in water, on ice, on a bicycle, or on solid ground—is always the center of competition because, like both life and fiction, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the 1500m is the best distance to give you a perspective on all three parts without being too long for a bit of sprinting in the last 100 meters. This is the metric equivalent of the mile (15/16ths of it), and there’s a reason that breaking the four-minute mile has always been a cultural benchmark.

The most remarkable aspect of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life is not his luck in the crosshairs of a mass-shooter—luck that failed so many others (from the 60 people at the 2017 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas to Corey Comperatore in the bleachers at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally). What’s remarkable is how this convicted felon, convicted rapist, insurrectionist, and serial liar has instantly gained an anointed, morally elevated status for the luck of being alive and unhurt save for a cut on his ear.

I’m glad he escaped serious injury, but why is he being treated as some kind of war hero because of a tragedy that killed an innocent man? As he basks in this runoff glory, how can you not think of his insults to the heroic servicemen and women who risked their lives for their country regardless of how many dead souls like Donald Trump it might contain? Whatever happened to karma?

The one joke I remember from Colin Jost’s address to the 2024 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is that online gambling and Taylor Swift are all that’s keeping the economy afloat. It plays to Americans’ locked-in impression that the economy is terrible and that’s why they have soured on Joe Biden.

The reality behind this contorted belief is that Americans’ own spending habits have created and are sustaining this economy. Their continued spending is what propels corporations to keep raising prices. Their gambling and speculation in crypto despite previous busts is inflating markets to new highs. Their bloated retirement investments are making asset managers richer and richer—and that money is going directly into further speculative pursuits, especially anything related to AI.

With the clearing of the pro-Palestinian encampments on Ivy League and other college campuses at the end of last week, the news media turned in unison to thought pieces comparing the antiwar protests of the 1960s with these student protests.

I’m sure today’s protesters like having their efforts enshrined within history, but it’s odd to be talking big-picture history for a timeline that’s barely seven months old. Some of the encampments had barely reached the plural “weeks” before being removed. The brand-new tents at Columbia seemed to have been arrayed like some aerially appealing formation for homecoming weekend. The bright white scarves still had fold creases like T-shirts given out at the start of an AIDS walk.

With the campus reporting, it’s always “the protesters” and not “the movement” because there is no movement. Columnists have noted that the Vietnam War protests also involved elite college campuses and were not effective at ending the war, but even if the Columbia students of 1968 were free agents, their objectives coincided with the anti-war movement that had been mobilized for years in the United States.

Next to vacuum cleaners and Fuller brushes, Bibles are still remembered as something peddled door-to-door from a suitcase. The meme of the evil Yankee carpetbagger lived on in the post-Civil War South, but that didn’t stop folks from welcoming in a sweet-talking local gent who had himself a way.

The pivotal character in one of Flannery O’Connor’s most famous stories, “Good Country People,” published in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), is a door-to-door Bible salesman presenting himself as “just a country boy” by the name of Manley Pointer. Proclaiming that “the word of God ought to be in the parlor,” he enters the world of Mrs. Hopewell of the property-owning class and her unmarried, Ph.D.-laden daughter who has a wooden leg owing to a childhood shooting accident. Mrs. Hopewell has crafted for herself a fatuous complacency of benevolence toward the lower classes, while her daughter, Joy (who has changed her name to Hulga), is an atheist whose bitterness toward Southern ignorance prompts her idea to seduce this clueless hick with her sophistication and send him packing.