Inaugurated in this second Trump term is a new mode of dominion in which, writes Vincent Bevins, “the implicit goal of military action is not to create a government, it is to destroy one.” The nation-destroying model is more slapdash and more gratuitous than the American aggression we grew up with, its innovations familiar but somehow nastier.

Oscar Martinez’s remarks were emblematic of a more general response to Midway Blitz: an aggrieved, futile attempt to correct someone who has violently misinterpreted reality. Over and over, I heard Chicagoans point to the normality of life as a kind of defense against the menacing accusations and absurd theories that ICE, Border Patrol, and national politicians had promulgated about the city and then, through the government’s own violence, manifested into being.

We could not have imagined the reality that was coming. Forget escalating: In a few months, even the little our crew had done before falling apart — the cold emails and messages to weapons workers; the community outreach with our masks lowered, for trust building; the signed petitions — would retroactively become dangerous, a cause for firings or disappearings.

Martha Stewart, Walter White, and Rodney Dangerfield walk into a bar. The bartender looks at Dangerfield, asks what he’s having. “Vodka soda,” he replies. The bartender starts shoveling ice. “Double?” he checks. “Course I am,” says Dangerfield. “Dangerfield’s dead.”

One day there is a serious earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — “Noah” — issues a tsunami warning for Alaska, which the National Weather Service overrules within an hour. One day I realize I haven’t seen a bald eagle in a while, and when I ask Ana she says they are all at the annual convention in Skagway. One day a worker wanders over to our science corner of the fish factory carrying a bycatch coho, which must have some mutation, because it should not be fluorescent yellow.

Among filmmakers, dread over money seemed to outweigh any sense of buzz. By the first weekend the lack of major sales had already become a central topic of conversation. As it happens, two of the best films in Sundance’s slate confronted the industry’s distribution crisis head-on.

 — Wait, what did he call you? Sadiya said. Julio applied everything he’d learned of hermeneutics, philology, and translation theory to give Sadiya a serviceable definition of pinche güey — It’s like [Napoleon Dynamite voice] freakin’ idiot — Is it, Sadiya said, I always fancied Chuy more a Pedro type — Wooow, Julio said, you are literally the Danger of a Single Story — Says the guy whose only exposure to South African culture was District 9 — Hey, you forgot the 2010 FIFA World Cup — I didn’t forget, I just didn’t want to relive that trauma .

This is her break. Her good thing. She refers to it as her Success. The money is enough to quit Bill’s, leave that stupid town, accept an internship in London. For a year or so, at the parties she now attends, she regularly brings it up. Crazy, isn’t it, what some people will pay for a piece of cardboard?

As things stand, the field of psychiatry offers us no precise definition for such cases of fleeting madness as those experienced by Mohammed Shatta, though literature has preserved an account of the phenomenon from the perspective of one of its more notable sufferers: L’avenir dure longtemps, by the French philosopher Louis Althusser.

What news, if any, would be contained in Francesca’s voicemail? The fact was, I was worried about Fritz. There wasn’t any need to worry; he was almost completely fine getting into the car. But, as with my son’s fear of the dark, Fritz’s accident was a vessel — something for ambient anxiety to fill and animate.

If Gass entertained any escape fantasies, however, The Tunnel does not indulge them. It’s the big, the biggest, Man Alone in a House story. It’s an anti–systems novel, uninterested in conspiracist linkages, fantasias of historical causality, politics, even money; it’s got no reportage, no news. It’s a novel of minor academic failure but invites no pity or nostalgia — it’s the anti-Stoner, that’s for sure.

As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see. There are always “characters,” but their significance lies in the way they intersect with and illuminate social structure. They never motivate action — what they do instead is perform (and sometimes declaim) the logics under which they operate.

We need a book like Grandin’s now — more so, surely, than he could have known while writing it. If Grandin’s framing emphasis on US influence over Latin America and on the contrasts between Anglo-American and Latin American intellectual traditions sometimes seems too rigid, it is undeniable that we are now witnessing a watershed moment in attempts by the US to reshape Latin America to serve its own ends.

The final possibility that occurred to me, as five milligrams of edible THC began to inflect my thinking, was conjured under a more, shall we say, suspicious hermeneutic. I wondered — and, I can’t emphasize this enough, as just a rube in central New York — if the letters were themselves an instance of the hype cycle, which had reached a specific crest thanks to a recent post on X.com by a corporate evangelist, who announced that AI was at a crucial before-and-after moment in February 2026.