They still have Blockbuster there.

The stores’ survival has depended on aggressive real estate deals with landlords willing to offer short-term leases and reduced rent. It has required running the business “a lot differently” than Blockbuster ever did, avoiding what Payne calls “a contentious culture over late fees.” Unlike the old Blockbuster, Payne’s version never sends out invoices to customers for late fees; they are simply collected whenever they come into the store. But he has also refused to eliminate late fees entirely like Blockbuster did, a decision Payne calls the “final nail in the coffin.”

Still, a great deal of the business’s endurance has come from the core customer base in Alaska, primarily made up of older people. Alaska ranks high in disposable income among the states, due to good-paying jobs, exceptionally low taxes and payments from reinvested oil savings. Moreover, Internet service is substantially more expensive than in most states, since most data packages are not unlimited. Heavy Netflix streamers could end up paying hundreds of dollars per month in Internet bills, Payne said.

Blockbuster has survived in the most curious of places – Alaska

The Washington Post spoke to Alan Payne, one of the last Blockbuster franchisees, and he he manages to make Alaska sound pretty appealing. The internet is still too expensive for Netflix, and the end of the week still means something. According to Payne, “more than half of Blockbuster’s revenue is generated during a six-hour period on Friday nights.” Doesn’t that sound magical? Remember metered internet connections, late fees, and checkout candy? Would you refresh Twitter as much if you had to pay for each pull?Who needs all those hours of light from the sun if you have the warm, fluorescent glow of the Blockbuster aisles, filled with peeling plastic-covered boxes of all the movies you currently have to pay to rent on iTunes anyway because Netflix’s streaming selection sucks so much? Just think of how much time we’d have for all the right things.

And now he’s dead.

Jonathan Demme, who directed the greatest concert film of all time, as well as the best movie Melanie Griffith or Jeff Daniels ever appeared in (a close second for Ray Liotta to boot), has died. He also did some other movies but those are the two to watch again next. Demme was 73.

Concrete jungle wet dream tomato

Natasha Vargas Cooper, writer

I thought Van Halen’s “Panama!” was “Animal!” And every time David Lee Roth said “Panama,” I thought it was “animal.” Cause why the fuck would there be a butt rock song about a tiny Central American country mostly known for effective infrastructure??? Animal makes more sense. It makes it a better song. I found this out within the last two years on Twitter. I’m not proud.

Logan Sachon, writer

My high school Latin teacher experienced a condition whereby he couldn’t understand song lyrics; it was like they were in another language. But he loved music, and his favorite song was “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues. The song was dear to him because he understood it to be called “Knights in White Satin,” a phrase that made sense, he said, because medieval knights wore a tunic made of linen or silk under their armor. When he learned the song was about sex in a bed with satin sheets, he rejected the premise; for him, it remained a song about medieval warriors wearing silky undergarments. And for me now, too.

Christina Rentz, Merge publicist

Caribou, “Odessa”: The chorus is “She can sing, she can sing,” but in my office, we can’t stop hearing “Chicken steak, chicken steak, chicken steak.” I have now ruined the meaning of the song for everyone! And I am hungry.

Katie Heaney, author, senior editor of BuzzFeed

At the family dinner table when I was around 11 or 12 years old and my younger brother Joe was nine, he announced that he thought it was strange that his elementary school would allow Queen’s “We Will Rock You” to be played before a student pep rally. (I always envied his assigned seat at the end of our table, opposite my dad, because I felt like it lent itself to making pronouncements.) Everyone turned to look at him. “What?” “Why?” He scoffed. “I mean, it’s kind of an inappropriate song.” My dad was like, “Huh?” and the rest of us, even my brother Dan, who was seven, exchanged skeptical looks. “‘Waving your bladder all over the place’??” said Joe. “Pretty violent.” Anyone else among us would have been mortified to be corrected by the entire family at once, but Joe is and always has been the chillest among us.

Caryn Rose, writer and author

One day in the mid-’70s, my father comes home from work one day and is in the kitchen singing a song that sounds vaguely familiar. I have been music-crazy for almost as long as I can remember. So it was with a reasonable amount of confidence that I inquired, “Dad, what song is that you’re singing?”

“It’s this great song I heard on the radio: ‘Like A Greasy Bear.’” He bellowed the chorus: “Like a greasy bear, like a greasy bear.”

I am appalled at this error, the same sort of indignation that would have me throwing pillows at the TV while watching any type of music documentary where they got something wrong. You cannot be wrong about music. “Dad, that is not the name of the song,” I said. Understand that my father managed to somehow ignore rock and roll in the ’50s and his idea of a good radio station is 1010 WINS. He still held his ground. “It absolutely is.”

“Dad, bet you my allowance double or nothing that this is not the name of the song.”

My father refused the bet because he (and I quote) “did not want to take advantage of me.”

Of course, we now had to wait for the moment where the song would come on the radio while a neutral third party (a.k.a. my mom) was present. This took what seemed like forever, but was probably only a few days. It was agonizing. I’d hear the song in my room but my father wouldn’t be there or my mom wouldn’t make it to whatever location in time.

We were driving back from New York on a Saturday when I heard the intro of the song come on the radio. I bounced to attention in the back seat, shushing my brother and sisters. “This is it, this is it!”

My father reaches over and turns up the radio with a smug grin. I wait breathlessly through the first verse until the first chorus. As it comes to a close, and the band begins the second verse, my father gives my mother a look that says, “Please now confirm that I am correct.”

Instead, my mother responds: “Jerry, you are crazy. There is nothing in that song about a bear. Pay your daughter her money.”

The song in question? “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” by War. (I guarantee you will never hear it the same.)

To his credit, although my father would often offer his unsolicited opinions on whatever music I was listening to, he never ever argued with me about pop music ever again, and took my burgeoning music scholarship seriously from that moment onward. And although I hope my father is with us for many, many more years, as God is my witness, I am going to figure out how to play that song at his funeral.

Jill Menze, writer/editor

Jennifer Lopez and Ja Rule, “I’m Real”: Apparently I’m not the only one to have misheard this lyric, but when your best friends are a bunch of bitchy J. Lo-worshipping queens, an error of this magnitude is enough to get you banned from group Will & Grace marathons indefinitely. For years, from 2001 to an unforgettable evening in 2012, I did, in fact, think the correct response to Ja Rule’s opening question, “What’s my motherfuckin’ name?” was “Are you Ellie?”

Yes, I realized it made no sense, but I didn’t put much thought into the lyrics by a man who once taught me “every thug needs a lady.” So, Ellie it was, and Ellie it remained. Then my mind was blown. In a very basic #throwback move, two friends and I spent a night watching Laguna Beach DVDs, drinking margaritas and taking the occasional Ja Rule-themed music break. I “Are you Ellie”-ed the shit out of J. Lo’s line, which was met with stares that rival the best NeNe Leakes GIFs. “Did you just say…Ellie? As in, the name?” “Yes?” I sheepishly replied. “Is it…NOT Ellie?” Cue their uncontrollable laughter while I sat there legitimately confused. What the hell else could she be saying? “NO!” I was informed. “It’s R-U-L-E, as in Ja Rule!”

I felt like everything I knew to be true in this world was a lie. Up was down. Down was up. You could tell me Juicy Couture was back in style, and at that moment, I’d believe it. In any case, I looked like a fingers-to-your-forehead Loser, and I’ve yet to live it down. Case in point: To this day, I’m in no fewer than three people’s phones as “Ellie.” But it’s OK, cause they ain’t makin’ or breakin’ me.

Devon Maloney, writer

For the longest time my best friend growing up and I believed the song “Master of the House” from Les Misérables was called “Monster in the Ass” (the song is sung in a Cockney accent, so this makes more sense than you’d think at first glance). We’d stomp around her parents’ living room dancing to it and giggling until we cried. I honestly don’t remember how I learned the correct version, other than becoming a theatre geek a few years later in junior high and quietly realizing that, given the context of the whole musical, it probably had nothing to do with monsters or butts.

Jen Doll, author of ‘Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest’

Sia, “The Greatest”: Recently I was in a spin class and I don’t even know what song was playing [at the time], but it had this refrain that sounded like “Donkey love! Donkey love! Donkey love!” and at some point the instructor told us, “Listen to the lyrics of this song, and DON’T GIVE UP!” So I guess it wasn’t donkey love, though that would have been aspirational in a different way I suppose.

Also, as a kid I thought, “Shot through the heart and you’re to blame, you give love a bad name” was “Something something something, something something something, you give love in Amerrrricaaaa.” Which makes zero sense but again with the ears.

Lauren Beck, director of music programming of Northside Festival

Back in my days of youth and innocence, I thought the “Masturbation’s lost its fun” line in Green Day’s “Longview” was “Applications lost their fun.” In my defense, at that point in the song, Billie Joe is complaining about how his mom is bugging him to get a job, so it contextually made perfect sense.

I can’t pinpoint how I came to learn the actual lyric, but I do distinctly remember listening to the song with my older sister in the car before she dropped me off at ballet class and telling her how funny I thought that particular line was — job applications suck, haha, so true. (I knew nothing about having a job at that age, but I could assume that filling out applications was indeed no fun.)

She awkwardly did not return the laugh, in retrospect, probably not wanting to be the one to teach her little sister about sexual self-pleasure. Can’t blame her.

Jessica Morgan, Go Fug Yourself

I sincerely thought the line in Kenny Loggins’ song “Danger Zone” was “I WENT TO the Danger Zone,” when in reality it is, “HIGHWAY to the Danger Zone.” I had heard that song like…I dunno, 3,500 times since Top Gun came out in 1986, and I didn’t realize this fact until literally one year ago while I was driving and it came on the radio. It only took me 30 years. In my defense, “I went to the Danger Zone” seemed like a totally reasonable — if EXTREMELY STRAIGHTFORWARD — thing for someone to be singing in a song called “Danger Zone.”

Nadia Chaudhury still hears “I love Jane Krause” whenever she listens to Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.”

Notes on life

Liana Finck is on the Internet.

Here’s some news about the future.

Let me tell you what the future holds: rain, clouds, fog, showers, clouds, patchy fog, clouds, drizzle, rain. And that’s the good part of the future. The rest of it is going to be considerably less pleasant. Sure, there’s a weekend happening at some point, and eventually it won’t be April anymore, but what makes you think May is going to be any better? What makes you think anything is going to be any better? God, I wish I were as good at kidding myself about the future as you are. I don’t know how you do it. Anyway, here’s ten minutes of techno to take with your perpetual twilight. Enjoy.

★ Smooth gray sky, ever so slightly streaked lighter and darker, spread over a cool walk to and from the school. The day never got any brighter; nothing got worse or better. There was no difference between one direction and another, one block and the next. To move through it was to forget where one had just been.

You know, like a magazine.

*Brasil

Forbes Shows How Different Its Billionaires List Would Look If Top Earners Were Women

Anyway something something distressed assets:

Forbes’ print sales, like those of other publications, had plummeted, but the magazine portrayed itself to would-be investors as an online innovator. Under Lewis DVorkin, its maverick chief product officer, it used more than 1,000 amateur contributors — which were paid based on the popularity of their articles — and allowed advertisers to publish stories directly on to the Forbes site. “Forbes had a double image. It was a company that had been a self-promoting digital pioneer [but] at the same time, they’d put their brand into question,” says Ken Doctor, a media analyst.

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Or, the time they took my Nine Inch Nails album away from me

I was 13 years old and I’d just bought my first CD player, so I needed some CDs. I asked my parents if I could join one of those 10-CDs-for-$1 clubs, and they said sure, under one condition: I could not buy any CD with the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” warning label on it. You know, this one:

So, of course, the first one I ordered was The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. My plan was, when it came in the mail, to quickly haul the cardboard package up to my room and use scissors to snip off the label. Parents couldn’t legally open your mail, I’d heard. What I didn’t expect was that the box itself would have a plastic window so that anyone — the mailman, the neighbors, my parents — knew that it contained a CD deemed Explicit! My parents discovered this and set out to teach me a lesson. What followed was an event that is now burned into some permanent fold of my brain.

My mom and dad — lovely, lovely people — sat me down at our dining room table in Oak Forest, Illinois, opened the CD, and tried to see what this Nine Inch Nails was all about by reading to me, aloud, lyrics from some of the songs. Like, say, “Big Man With A Gun” (“Shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot / I am gonna come all over you”) and “Closer” (“I want to fuck you like an animal / I want to feel you from the inside”). They confiscated the CD and forced me to sell it to a used record store the next day.

The event made an impression, but my parents and I never really talked about it. So, after 22 years, I finally interviewed them about the incident. This interview has been condensed.

Do you remember when I brought home a bad CD?

Mom: A little bit. [pause] Was it Nine Inch Nails? I read the lyrics out loud to you?

Yeah. Some of them are a bit risqué.

Mom: I wanted to embarrass you. We didn’t want you to turn out to be a potty mouth like you are. [laughs] That didn’t work.

I was young, so I wasn’t paying too much attention about it, but it seemed like there was a lot in the news telling parents “you have to watch out for these bad things.”

Mom: I think it was the more violent lyrics.

Dad: Violence… but I know there was something in there that was very sexist, and I know your mom didn’t like that. I remember talking to you about that, saying it’s not appropriate.

But did you know to look out for it because of the Parental Discretion sticker, and that Tipper Gore campaign? Did that affect you?

Mom: No. I don’t think it was the Tipper Gore thing.

Dad: No.

Mom: We were pretty liberal. We’d let you see R-rated movies. But we just didn’t like the words they were saying.

Dad: I think there was something that was very, oh, I don’t know, sadomasochistic kind of thing in there as I recall. At least one of the lyrics. We didn’t think that was appropriate.

Mom: Want me to read them to you again?

No! I don’t need you to! It’s scarred in my brain!

Mom: And how did that make you feel? Weren’t you embarrassed when I read it to you?

Oh yeah. I was super embarrassed.

Mom: That’s how I felt, that my son would be listening to that stuff. I was embarrassed.

I still think it’s good, and it has artistic merit, that it’s more than just lyrics.

Dad: There are a lot of songs like that, though. I’ll really like the music and the song, and then when I found out what they’re actually saying, it’s like, oh my goodness.

That seemed like an era where you guys, as parents, had to deal with stuff other parents before didn’t have to.

Mom: When we were little, the biggest things we had were like… a gun. [laughs] For cowboys and indians. That was it. And I really never had violent toys. We had never dealt with that stuff. And we didn’t think it was good for your brain to even open up that window at that point.

I was in eighth grade, though.

Mom: Yeah, that was too young.

What wouldn’t be too young?

Mom: Like, 18. [laughs] Eighteen.

Do you know how the Nine Inch Nails CD story ends?

Mom: No, what?

I remember you wanted me to sell it back to Discount Records the next day, so there was a full day I still had access to the CD.

Mom: [laughs]

After school the next day, I rushed home because I knew I had an hour before dad came home, and so I had enough time to make a copy of the CD on a cassette tape.

Mom: [laughs] You’re a bad boy.

Dad: We’re gonna have to ground you. Go sit in the corner for awhile.

Mom: And you just wanted to listen to it because we told you not to?

I wanted to listen to it just to listen to it, that’s why I got the album. But it being a “dangerous thing” probably added to me wanting to listen to it more.

Mom: Well, I don’t want you to listen to it anymore.

That’s okay. I’ve listened to it enough. As far as a lesson goes, are you happy with the lesson you gave me?

Mom: You know, the thing was this. As parents, you’re in charge of shaping a human being into a good person in this world, you know? And we wanted to only give you a positive environment all the way around. Even if dad said the F-word every so often…

Dad: Once.

Mom: …our job, our responsibility, was raising you as we saw the best way to do it. And it wasn’t listening to Nine Inch Nails.

Dad: Yeah. There’s no manual for that. Nobody knows what the right thing to do in a situation like that. There are a dozen different ways you can go with it. But you choose one way you think will work. It obviously didn’t, but… [laughs]

I don’t think it necessarily didn’t.

Dad: Who knows? Maybe if we chose a different way, you’d be an axe murderer.

It seems like Nine Inch Nails and Mortal Kombat were some of those early cases of what parents have to deal with now, with so much material out there.

Dad: Oh yeah. I don’t know if you knew, when Elvis first appeared on TV, they wouldn’t show below the waist when he’d wiggle his hips. So, there was some control at some other level.

Okay. That’s all the questions I have.

Mom: I do remember I was really, really mad. You know why?

It’s because I went against the rule.

Mom: You broke our trust. And you know what I always said, once you break it, it takes a long time to build it up again.

Dad: Fifty or sixty years. [laughs]

Have I regained it?

Mom: Oh, yeah. It just takes awhile to build it back up when you hurt someone like that. It was a privilege to order those CDs. We said, “okay you can do it, with these stipulations,” and then you didn’t follow it. That was disappointing.

I know. I’m… sorry?

Mom: [laughs] Are you feeling guilty now?

Yeah. You’re making me feel guilty. This was 20 years ago!

Mom: Good.

I felt guilty then though, too! It still didn’t stop me!

Dad: [laughs]

Mom: Was it that Catholic guilt?

That was probably part of it. All that happens is you feel bad, but it doesn’t stop you. You just end up feeling bad when you do it.

Mom: I think you just feel bad because you didn’t respect our rules.

No, I felt bad because you guys were upset. It wasn’t about respecting rules. I didn’t think the rule was good. I thought it was a bad rule.

Mom: You were 13 years old, of course you’d think it was a bad rule.

There were rules that I felt were good rules. I came home for curfews. But the Parental Advisory rule, I felt, wasn’t a good one.

Mom: I should’ve just played the Sound of Music songs for you all the time.

I’m sure I’d turn out to be a very normal person after that.

Mom: I remember being so, so mad. I should’ve whipped you.

You should’ve whipped me?

Mom: I want you to throw out anything you have that’s Nine Inch Nails. Right now. (to my dad) No, Rocky! Don’t!

What’s he doing?

Dad: I was trying to play some Nine Inch Nails for her.

Rick Paulas’ parents are great people he’s very lucky to have in his life, and entirely responsible for any “good” things he’s done, and exempt from the “bad” ones.

It’s because newspapers and advertising are terminally ill.

The old newspaper business model almost prevented this kind of clustering. Except for the national broadsheets — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and increasingly the Washington Post — newspapers must locate, cheek by jowl, next to their customers, the people who consume local news, and whom local advertisers need to reach. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader is stuck in South Dakota just as the owners of hydroelectric plants in the Rockies are stuck where they are. As much as they might want to move their dams to coastal markets where they could charge more for electricity, fate has fixed them geographically. Economists call these “non-tradable goods” — goods that must be consumed in the same community in which they’re made. The business of a newspaper can’t really be separated from the place where it’s published. It is, or was, driven by ads for things that don’t travel, like real estate, jobs, home decor and cars. And as that advertising has gotten harder and harder to come by, local newsrooms have become thinner and thinner.

This is a good read on the media’s perspective problem, and rightly accounts the lack of coverage of middle America in large part to the collapse of middle American, local and regional newspapers. BUT WHY DOESN’T ANYONE HAVE A VIABLE SOLUTION? It’s not like the journalists of today can all just decamp and move to Sioux Falls or Des Moines to report the local news, partly because there are probably fewer jobs than ever in those cities, and also because they might almost drown after one week of actual reporting. (Just kidding, I think it would be phenomenal training.) And it’s not like Shafer has any actual suggestions:

Journalism tends toward the autobiographical unless reporters and editors make a determined effort to separate themselves from the frame of their own experiences. The best medicine for journalistic myopia isn’t reeducation camps or a splurge of diversity hiring, though tiny doses of those two remedies wouldn’t hurt. Journalists respond to their failings best when their vanity is punctured with proof that they blew a story that was right in front of them. If the burning humiliation of missing the biggest political story in a generation won’t change newsrooms, nothing will. More than anything, journalists hate getting beat.

Why NOT a new kind of Works Progress Administration for internet writers? Yes, Jack, a re-education camp for bloggers. The Federal Bloggers’ Project. They would be sent across the country to umm, collect local stories and ethnographies and tell us exactly how many more days of Donald Trump we will have to endure through their dogged reporting. It’s not like bloggers even know how to REPORT anymore, amirite? Okay fine, I’ll admit it: the only viable solution to this bubble problem is to go back in time to before the Internet and Craigslist killed the newspaper for good. Patch and other hyperlocal news sites will not save us because no one has ever succeeded in making as much money as you used to be able to by telling people what was happening. Why won’t anyone just admit the 5 jillion-ton elephant in the ether: advertising, which is not broken exactly, but irreparably fucked beyond recognition, having been torn to into a state of segmented inequality almost eerily similar to both income inequality and media coverage?

Step Into A Cringe Binge

The signature moment of Donald Trump’s first 100 Days

Three simple nouns, tightly linked, can evoke worlds. Think of Joyce’s famous dictum, from Portrait of the Artist: “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can … using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.” Pretty great, right?

Or consider this: lions and tigers and bears.

Or the kingdom, the power and the glory.

Or rum, sodomy and the lash.

There’s a resonance to that classic triplet combination. But if we try to capture something as simultaneously earth-shaking and petty as President Trump’s first three months in office using that same formula, we run up against a predicament as thorny as it is slimy. How do you select the right three nouns, when the president and the creepy totalitarian assholes he’s invited into the White House have given us so many plausible descriptors to work with? Incompetence, oligarchy and treason? Nepotism, autocracy and smarm? Arrogance, greed and turbo-misogyny?

I’m going to go with something pretty straightforward — lies, bluster and puerility — citing what, to my mind, endures as the signature moment of Trump’s first 100 days in office: namely, the cringe-inducing 30-second exchange at his first press conference in mid-February, when NBC’s Peter Alexander called the president out, twice, for wrongly asserting that his electoral-college margin of victory was the largest in four decades.

“You said today that you had the biggest electoral margin since Ronald Reagan,” Alexander began. He then read a list of several recent presidents who had larger — in some cases much larger — margins than Trump’s.

“Why,” Alexander then asked, “should Americans trust you?”

Trump tried to deflect, suggesting that he had been talking about Republican presidents (for which he would still be wrong, even if he meant it) before lamely muttering that he was simply “given” that information. Alexander persisted.

“Why should Americans trust you?” he asked again.

“I don’t know,” Trump said, before again stating that he “was just given that information.” Then, like a not-very-bright kid caught in one fib, embellishment or outright lie after another, but never, ever called to account for it, Trump grasped at the slenderest of reeds.

“Actually,” he said, “I’ve seen that information around.”

Having had yet another of his many, many untrue, self-aggrandizing assertions publicly proven false, the president then ineptly tried to turn the tables. With a smirk on his lips that resembled nothing so much as a bloodworm writhing in the sun, Trump said to Alexander: “But it was a very substantial victory. Do you agree with that?”

I don’t know. I was given that information. I’ve seen that information around. It was a substantial victory.

So many things about this brief back-and-forth are so eminently fucked up that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s begin where Trump did: with his margin of victory. The president won 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227. (Five Democratic and two Republican “faithless electors” voted for other candidates.) In 2008, Obama won 365 electoral votes; in 2012, he won 332. Bill Clinton won 370 and 379 electoral votes in his two victories in ’92 and ’96. In 1988, George H.W. Bush won 426 electoral votes to Mike Dukakis’ 111.

That’s five elections since Ronald Reagan was in office when the victor — including one Republican — garnered more electoral votes than Trump. Why would the president of the United States act this way? Why would he so blithely gibber falsehoods in public — especially about something so ultimately pointless?

One answer, of course, is that Donald Trump is a man forever ready to embrace any self-mythologizing nonsense that’s dropped in his lap, no matter how easily it can be refuted, as long as it adequately fellates his prickly ego. But more alarming than the no-doubt dark, deep-seated reasons behind Trump’s willingness — indeed, his eagerness — to lie about pretty much everything is the utter lack of logic, self-awareness and, above all, leadership that he displayed during that brief exchange with Alexander.

This, it seems, is what passes for mental rigor in the mind of a man tens of millions of Americans still worship as a populist savior and swamp-drainer. Note the sequence:

Step 1: Repeat small lies that your minions hand you as talking points, or larger, nastier lies that spittle-flecked talk-radio hosts and white supremacists tweet at you in the wee hours.

Step 2: When shown that your assertions are false, don’t acknowledge that you’re wrong. Instead, shrug, grin, shuffle, evade and, finally, shift blame elsewhere — preferably on to the shoulders of an unnamed underling.

Step 3: Pretend the whole thing doesn’t matter, anyway, because words and numbers and colors, flags, jobs, walls, media, enemies, immigrants, next question, no, not you, not you, yes, you, the black lady over there.

In the end, that 30-second exchange, less than a month into Trump’s presidency, eerily encapsulates so much of what is distressing and so much of what feels so slippery and dangerous about Donald Trump. His ridiculous claim about his margin of victory is hardly the most appalling of his incessant lies, misrepresentations and distortions over the past many, disgraceful months. But it was our clearest glimpse yet — if not our last, alas — into the charnel house that serves as the man’s imagination: a place where curiosity goes to die, and where undead half-truths shuffle in the dark until their keeper opens his mouth and frees them again.

Lies, bluster, puerility. It has a certain ring, doesn’t it? Like an alarm. Or a long, slow, unanswerable death knell.