Miley, Mascara, November

None of us are sleeping properly. Some people are playing old Game Boy games for the cheerful chiptune melodies, trying to trick the nervous system into something resembling calm. Some people are sitting in corners imagining how good the world could be if we’d just let it. And Miley Cyrus is on Instagram, crying.

It’s an emotional video, genuinely so—not performed distress but the real kind, the kind that arrives when something you couldn’t imagine actually happening just did. She talks about Hillary Clinton. She talks about the country’s chronic inability to reach what it might actually be. This country could never reach its full potential, she says, still crying, because we are always building walls between us. We don’t need Trump to do that for us. Then something about taking a hammer to the stones, smashing what we’ve built between ourselves. Raw, messy, earnest.

Something lands about the fact that it’s Miley—the tongue, the spectacle, the years of being written off as a trainwreck—who shows up most nakedly honest. All that provocation was apparently in service of someone who actually gives a shit. Good luck, America. I mean it, even if I’m not sure what it’s worth anymore.