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HESE ARE BOOM TIMES FOR THE LOLSOB . Watching the news, I sometimes find myself staring at the screen, eyes wide, brain broken, not sure whether to laugh or cry. The farce and tragedy tangle so tightly that it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. How do you make sense, for example, of a leader who, in the midst of a deadly pandemic,

muses about the curative powers of bleach? How do you process a president’s attempt to edit a hurricane with a Sharpie? The words, after a while, stop working. The categories collapse. Many true things have been written about what living under this regime feels like; one of the truest I’ve encountered is a 2017 prediction from the writer Hayes Brown: “This is going to be the dumbest dystopia.”

Even the escapism acknowledges the whiplash. As people lolsob and doom-scroll, many are also watching a sitcom that, as one of its executive producers put it, “mixed melancholy and joy in the same space.” The Office is 15 years old and one of the most

consistently popular shows of this moment. Its renaissance has many explanations: The show is streaming on Netflix. Its mockumentary style—the directly at the camera playfulness it brings to its tales of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company of Scranton, Pennsylvania—gives it currency in the age of the reaction GIF. The series resonates emotionally with those who might be missing their own workplace. And it resonates politically through Michael Scott, the boss who is convinced that the solution to any problem is to put on a good show. I’m one of the people who have found new solace in old episodes of The Office , but I have a slightly different reason for watching. That reason is Dwight Schrute.

Dwight, Dunder Mifflin’s best-performing paper salesman and its worst-performing person, is a category error in human form. He is a beet farmer in a corporate park, a survivalist selling office products, a 19th-century spirit in a 21st-century timeline. He is arrogant. He is, relatedly, a buffoon. “INCORRECT,” he will say about something that is true. “FACT,” he will say about something that is not. He listens to metal but plays the recorder. He defers to the rules right up until he breaks them. Dwight is Darwinism with a desk job. He is anarchy in the guise of law. He is tragedy and he is comedy, and because of that he is intensely cathartic to watch. Many fictions speak to this moment. Dwight K. Schrute, however, inhabits it.

Miles Taylor, the author of the bombshell opinion column published in the New York Times two years ago, will remain as a CNN contributor despite lying to one of the network's hosts about being the op-ed's creator.

Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, told CNN's Anderson Cooper: "I wear a mask for two things ... Halloweens and pandemics."

Taylor was criticized for choosing to remain anonymous until six days before Election Day.

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