This week in the saga

The silence begins in earnest. In the capital the other man stands before the chamber and speaks of the war; the chamber stands to applaud a flag that is not its own. In Florida the paper court has stopped issuing paper, and the network that was supposed to replace it has opened its doors onto a corridor: a million and a half names on a waiting list that is not moving, an app the phone-makers rank and the engineers cannot fix. For the first week since the escalator, the loudest man of the age has no way to say anything at all. At the top of his own network the account holds one post, three weeks old. Get ready, it still says.