This week in the saga

The year ends the way the whole exile has run — in paper. Three separate documents go out in four days, one of them eighteen thousand words long, itemising a year of the new administration under headings like a record of complete failure. A year earlier the same man made the same argument in a sentence, to eighty-eight million people, in a second. Between the broadsides the country sets a record for infections, and he asks how the promise to solve it quickly is working out. On the third of January, a year and a day after the account went dark, he gives his verdict on the company that closed it: it should not be allowed to do business here at all. And on the thirtieth of December, the office announces something new — a press conference, with a date and a time. The sixth of January, five o'clock.