For fifteen years the world has operated on a version of Sarah Palin that was assembled almost entirely from political cartoons, cable news chyrons, and the breathless coverage of a media that found her useful as a symbol and largely uninteresting as a human being — and the collective certainty that everyone had already formed a complete and final opinion about who she is and what she represents has meant that almost nobody was paying attention when the real story, the one that exists entirely outside the political theater, began quietly and undeniably coming to the surface.

What has just emerged about the private chapters of Sarah Palin’s life — the dissolution of her decades-long marriage, the struggles within her family that fame and political exposure accelerated in ways she could neither control nor fully protect her children from, and the personal reckoning that followed the most public dismantling of a woman’s reputation in modern American political history — does not ask anyone to change their politics, but it does ask something harder: to set down the symbol for long enough to see the person, and to reckon honestly with the fact that what was done to her in the public square went well beyond political disagreement and into something that most people, regardless of where they stand, would recognize as simply cruel.