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.

Fully occupying the cover of the January 15 New Yorker is a Barry Blitt cartoon of Donald Trump. With his foam-board red tie forever pointing down, this Trump is definitely bigger than Elvis, goose-stepping Mussolini-style into 2024. Despite his swollen presence that seems to have displaced all the world’s crises, Trump’s extended soliloquies at his endless rallies have people wondering whether he’s losing his grip on reality.

We know he had one of those grips when young, in the seventies and early eighties, and was able to rationalize his motives to the press to get press. But now he slurs vowels and mispronounces words in what the New Republic has called a “rambling, incoherent auctioneer style.” He mixes up Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. Talking to a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9—a Friday night—he said: “I didn’t need this; I had a very nice life. Nice Saturday afternoon. I could tell you, if I weren’t doing this, where I would have been, I would have been in a very nice location.”

Why does it feel like Donald Trump still runs America? We know he owns the news hole, if such a thing still exists, but why does his every proclamation set the media agenda? Is it because he can claim all 220 House Republicans as dependents? or because late-night monologues practically write themselves when he adds new riffs to his rally rambles?

The nightmare America that Trump’s presidency conjured always made me think of the gangster-run metropolis in The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s 2003 animated comedy. Trump certainly made our country an omerta system of thugs. Throughout 2019, he leaned on Jerome Powell, the man he picked to run the Federal Reserve, to lower interest rates. By September, he was demanding that Powell cut interest rates to zero or even usher in negative rates, normally a break-glass option during economic crises. At the time, the U.S. economy was growing solidly and consumer spending was strong. Negative rates mean that savers are penalized and borrowers rewarded: there was no logic for such market manipulation.