It’s already been a hard winter. Like our cover image, the nation seems to be buried in the impeachment mess, snowed in by snow jobs, blinded by white out. And no forecast predicts a change in this oppressive political weather.

going through the oceans of files, talking
  of boys who were no angels? no. to serve is
a right and our duty, each to each—but
  the potential juror peers into the courtroom
as if it were quarantined for the plague.

Beyond the car seat or the doctor’s prescription, Erin just wasn’t up to the sight of all those other children: the toddlers, the nursing infants, the drooling babies. PARK—anonymous, failed—was the place that fit.

I don’t mean the way New York itself hardens you through constant friction with endless streams of people, their pettiness and self-absorption rubbing against your own until you are encased in a shell of indifference and even cruelty. I mean he solidified me. He gave me substance I had lacked.

and I thank her, and once again I know as if by
physical touch alone the innocence and kindness
of the hopeful before the world disappoints them

There are plenty other private types: a disgraced Exxon executive—here he comes now scooting past my house, yielding for an armadillo—a turncoat from the Jersey mob, with new veneers. I’m former CIA. Here in Portofino Palms the living’s easy, and the big sun blights the shadows of the omertà.

Silence that is truly an absence—the silencing effects of tyranny or the complicit retreat from the horrors of the world—is dangerous, corrosive, murderous. On the page, as in life. This is the silence-equals-death variety where silence is already dead. In fact, it isn’t silence at all; it’s an evasion, a dodge.

hours after having entered another’s body with your own
body, you wonder Did that happen, any of it, and then the staggering away

On her way to work, stopped at a red light, she finds herself staring at a church that has filled one of its windows with big square masking-tape letters:

YOU WANT

THE WORLD

“I thought to myself, ‘God, I’m glad I’m here. I’m so glad that I’m here.’ And it still didn’t occur to me that anybody was doing anything wrong. . . . And the illumination rounds being fired against the sunset, I thought was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”