These nights, sleep won’t take me. Thirty-one weeks pregnant, I’m too big to ever be comfortable. I toss; I turn; I move to the guest room in the vain hope that having a bed to myself might offer some reprieve from the fact my bones can no longer support my weight. Some time around 3 or 4 a.m., I give up and open TikTok, where the algorithm offers its nightly liturgy of dread.

“If you’re seeing this, it’s meant for you,” a woman in her car, voice low, telling me to install a Ring doorbell because somebody could be casing my house. I live in Chicago, and someone just stole my neighbor’s catalytic converter. It’s plausible, I think. Next, a five-year-old girl in a diaper, horribly abused by her grandmother, multiple Child Protective Services complaints filed and ignored, the child dead now and the complaints a matter of public record – a TikTok. A corpse dredged from a body of water in Elk Grove, Illinois. First, no foul play was suspected. The next video proclaims, “There’s a serial killer in the suburbs of Chicago.” A new fungal disease, drug-resistant, spreading – sexually transmitted? I guess I don’t care very much about that.

Is America numb? Am I numb? Am I going to let my emotional life be run by selfie videos posted to Twitter?

Is America numb? Am I numb? Am I going to let my emotional life be run by selfie videos posted to Twitter?

Then Al Jazeera, on TikTok live, the chyron sliding into frame: attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A man named Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, charged at a Secret Service checkpoint at the Washington Hilton armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives. He fired; agents fired back; he was tackled near a staircase. Trump and the senior cabinet, Vance, Patel, RFK Jr.,........

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