It is a disorienting thing, to keep a ledger of atrocity, to write the ugliness of each day as it happens. The months smother the months, soon the years will smother the years. Killings that might have once made front-page news slowly submit to the law of diminishing returns—what is left to say but more dead, more dead? The stock market churns, the president steps aside, the future of the most powerful nation hangs by a thread. News is new, and whatever this is, it can no longer be called new. Maybe this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history
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