May you live in interesting times, goes the sly, old Chinese curse. Some eras are more interesting than others, but they’re all fascinating in one scary way or another, not just these desperate times we’re facing now. From “The Evil in the Room,” Norman Mailer’s 1972 Republican National Convention coverage from Miami, which he filed for Life:

“There were ghosts on the convention. And the sense of having grown old enough to be passing through life a second time. Flying to San Francisco in 1964 to write up the convention which nominated Barry Goklwater, he had met an Australian journalist who asked why Americans made the interior of their planes look like nurseries, and he had answered, in effect that the dread was loose in American life. Was it still loose, that sense of oncoming catastrophe going to fall on the nation like the first bolt from God? Such dread had taken many a turn–from fear of Communism to fear of walking the streets at night, which was a greater fear if one thought about it (since the streets were nearer). It was a fear when all was said which suggested that the nation, in whatever collection of its consciousness, was like a person who wakes up often in the middle of the night with the intolerable conviction that something is loose in the system, and the body is on a long slide from which there will be no remission unless a solution is found; the body does not even know where the disease is at. Nor will the doctors, is what the body knows in the dark.”

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Occupying the GOP Convention, 1972: “Don’t hurt the car, don’t hurt the car!”

“It’s a very plastic, packaged thing”: