In nine discrete but related essays, an American writer considers the darkening arc of American life — social, cultural, moral and political — since November 22, 1963. The essays' subjects include (in addition to the Kennedy assassination) the Brock Turner matter, the abandonment of labor and the erosion of middle class, and the rise, on the left, of what appears to be a new religion, primitive, puritanical and hostile to the Enlightenment tradition.