Most articles about presidential debates are well-organized summaries that distill the themes of the different candidates’ remarks and draw conclusions about how the event might affect each one’s standing, going forward, within the dynamic multinodal space of a campaign. This is a useful—nay, a necessary—service in our democratic society. It also fails to capture the actual experience of watching debates. In real time, they are not perceivably ordered discussions, but rather a mishmash of pre-rehearsed sound bites and disembodied factoids inserted desperately into a soundscape of shouting in an effort to advance strategist-created goals and talking points in a way...