A few years ago, I was brought on board by a New York-based publishing house to be a fiction editor. My first assignment was, instead, a book about Trump’s relationship to Russia.

“Refrains like ‘we were down with you, down with you, down with you’ extend beyond the bounds of normal chorus and invite a particular mode of listening that engages the logic of mantras—sound as vibrational soothing.”

“By preventing myself from thinking about how to do more with my day or why I hadn’t accomplished as much as so-and-so—by ‘doing nothing’—I constructed a new framework of what mattered to me.”

I found myself tensing in crowded places and in groups of loud teenagers, until Paris passed from curfew into our second confinement. Now my mind is over-packed with thoughts of isolation, injustice, and the upcoming election.

“What he didn’t understand was that the more heavenly our experience, the starker its contrast with my mind’s occupations, the wider the chasm would yawn between us, the more alienated I’d be. It was like the story of Moses, in which the water of the Egyptians was turned into blood. A curse had crippled me. Shown blue ocean, I saw crimson gore.”