★★★★ From indoors, the outdoors looked flawless, especially from the shadowed side of the building and with a breeze coming in the windows. The river was flat blue-brown, without luster. A red-tailed hawk drifted above and below the roofline of the apartment slab across the way. Out in the day, the sun was a little much when it hit directly, but shade was never far off, and the breeze was running through it. It was easy to add a block or two to the shortest route for errands. Sunbathers lined the southern end of the roof deck on the other side of the avenue. The roses in the planter boxes there were swollen and so intensely rose-red they seemed to fluoresce.

“There was a very, very slight rancid butter smell to it, but other than that, the cake looked and smelled edible,” she said. “There is no doubt the extreme cold in Antarctica has assisted its preservation.”

Forget diamonds—fruitcake really is forever.

The hyper-literate contrarian, H.L. Mencken, wore many hats: journalist, lexicographer, scourge of religious and political charlatans and—depending on who you read—unreconstructed racist and anti-Semite or “a tremendous liberating force in American culture” (or maybe, somehow, both). Mencken was the most provocative, entertaining American writer of the early 20th century. He was also a first-class literary critic and, just about a year ago, one of his observations about poetry began tolling again in my head.

“I enjoy poetry as much as the next man — when the mood is on me,” Mencken wrote in a 1920 essay, “The Poet and His Art,” which I first encountered in college, several lifetimes ago. “The mood … of intellectual and spiritual fatigue, the mood of revolt against the insoluble riddle of existence, the mood of disgust and despair. Poetry, then, is a capital medicine.”

Yes. Disgust and despair. Like countless people in the U.S. and around the globe, I spent most of 2016 growing painfully familiar with those two ways of being. (“Emotions” seems too weak a word.) With every sleazy utterance, every open incitement to violence and every brazen right-wing campaign lie, I felt more anxious, angry, and helpless. The cynicism and cruelty on display during the campaign was getting to me.

THE GLOBAL ORGANIC personal care market is expected to exceed $25 billion by 2025; as it grows, so too will the number of companies that rely on syncretic and occult ideas: paranormal energy fields, electromagnetic flows, straight-up magic. It’s no longer enough to employ pesticide-free ingredients — these days, products should have superpowers, too. Many companies are concocting formulas to offset the radiation allegedly emitted by technological devices, while others promote oils that don’t just moisturize the skin, but also feed the soul.

On the one hand, this is a—verbally, linguistically, literarily—wonderful walk through the historical woods of myco-powders and Rudolf Steiner and soul-salves, but on the other hand isn’t it sort of, I don’t know, In Defense Of Nature’s Placebos? I guess this is the great thing about liberty and capitalism: you get to say, “Why not spend thirty-eight dollars on three-gram sachets of powdered bullshit?” You do you. Glorious!

“Holy crap! The Nazis are back! What are we gonna do?”—Freaked Out Phil

No one said being an American was going to be easy. Unless you’re white and rich. What happened in Charlottesville this weekend was unspeakably ugly and maybe should not have been so surprising. If you blow enough dog whistles for long enough, sooner or later, some packs of dogs are going to show up. Nazi dogs. KKK dogs. White supremacist dogs. Very, very bad dogs. Dogs that should not be given bacon treats.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★★ Smooth, small clouds floated on the morning west. The middle of the day got darker, with a local clot of heavy gray over the West 60s, its edge somewhere around Columbus Circle. Down on Union Square, the situation was reversed, with bright sun above and a sulfurously tinted, lumpy darkness lurking a few blocks uptown. The color improved and the differences began to equalize into something bright enough and comfortable enough, a fading but real enough version of high summer. A supercar crept down the block, its hardtop retracted, moving more slowly than the foot traffic. Lush bands of color filled the open end of 72nd Street.

GENERALS KELLY and MATTIS are having an unspoken battle over who can be most like the dad from “The Wonder Years.” IVANKA, brooding, is pinpointing where it all went wrong. STEPHEN MILLER is playing Battleship with KUSHNER DAUGHTER. He can see where her ships are and she knows it, but she is enjoying that STEPHEN MILLER thinks he is superior to her, a child. He is also mansplaining mercantilism. JARED is wearing a cardigan. In other words, everyone is being themselves.

And then a bat gets loose. An actual living and breathing bat—a winged mammal. It’s flying into corners, trying to escape, because it’s trapped inside the Trump White House. As the bat is panicking and spiraling and chirping, everyone becomes an even worse version of themselves, if that were possible. It’s utter chaos.

STEPHEN MILLER [nasally]: You may have sunk my battleship, but I’m privatizing war in order to enrich myself. So who’s the real winner now?

[The bat flaps its wing six inches from IVANKA’s face.]

IVANKA [startled into presence]: Can someone remove the animal as soon as possible?

[JARED is stifling a scream but, as usual, not succeeding. KELLYANNE CONWAY enters. She is group messaging SENATORS SASSE and COTTON on her second, secret phone line. The bat flies into her hair but she doesn’t react because she is comfortable with both vampires and vermin.]

Clean eating – whether it is called that or not – is perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional response to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a dream of purity in a toxic world.

It’s some kind of great irony that one of the biggest factors that separates humans from the rest of Hominoidea—our enriched diet thanks to the advent of cooking, which allowed our brains to grow—remains our greatest source of bodily anxiety to this day.