Sometimes, there’s only one story. That was so 19 years ago after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Flight 93. The “war on terror” was everything. You may recall that a breathtakingly cynical official told subordinates it would be a good day to put out bad news because no one would notice. It’s like that now, except we’re engaged in a war on the coronavirus. The damned thing gets into everything, dominates everything, subordinates everything else.

A false story came out recently that Bernie Sanders was abandoning the presidential race. But even if it had been true, it would still have sunk swiftly without a trace. We’d have tried gabbing about it for an hour in the hope of making it exciting, then we’d have returned to the fascinating subject of our contagion, like moths to a flame.