Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part VIII)

This is the eighth and final post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Lepore’s marvelous “The Cobweb” (January 26, 2015), in which she travels to San Francisco to visit an Internet archive called the Wayback Machine. 

What I love about this piece, what sticks in my mind, is the riveting way Lepore introduces her subject – not by describing the Wayback Machine, or even mentioning it, but by chronicling the crash of an airliner. Here’s her opening paragraph:

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 a.m. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The plane’s last radio contact was at 1:20 p.m. G.M.T. At 2:50 p.m. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane; it appears to be a Boeing 777.

This is a strange way to start a piece about Internet archiving, is it not? Actually, it turns out to be quite ingenious. Lepore reports that two hours after Strelkov’s message was posted, it was deleted. The evidence was destroyed. But, hold on, not so fast. Check the Wayback Machine. Boom! There it is. The Wayback Machine saved it. Lepore writes,

On July 17th, at 3:22 p.m. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

Lepore’s use of the deleted Strelkov post to show the value of the Wayback Machine is brilliant! 

My favorite part of “The Cobweb” is Lepore’s account of her visit to the Internet Archive, at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, where the Wayback Machine is housed. She describes the place:

At 300 Funston Avenue, climb a set of stone steps and knock on the brass door of a Greek Revival temple. You can’t miss it: it’s painted wedding-cake white and it’s got, out front, eight Corinthian columns and six marble urns.

Inside, she meets the inventor of the Wayback Machine – Brewster Kahle:

Kahle is long-armed and pink-cheeked and public-spirited; his hair is gray and frizzled. He wears round wire-rimmed eyeglasses, linen pants, and patterned button-down shirts. He looks like Mr. Micawber, if Mr. Micawber had left Dickens’s London in a time machine and landed in the Pacific, circa 1955, disguised as an American tourist. 

Kahle is quite a cat. Lepore tells of the time he put the entire World Wide Web in a shipping container: 

He just wanted to see if it would fit. How big is the Web? It turns out, he said, that it’s twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet, or, at least, it was on the day he measured it. How much did it weigh? Twenty-six thousand pounds. He thought that meant something. He thought people needed to know that.

Lepore points out that Kahle’s Wayback Machine has archived more than four hundred and thirty billion Web pages. What does such a machine look like? Lepore tells us:

At the back of the chapel, up a short flight of stairs, there are two niches, arched alcoves the same shape and size as the stained-glass windows. Three towers of computers stand within each niche, and ten computers are stacked in each tower: black, rectangular, and humming. There are towers like this all over the building; these are only six of them. Still, this is it.

Each unit has flickering blue lights. “ ‘Every time a light blinks, someone is uploading or downloading,’ Kahle explains. Six hundred thousand people use the Wayback Machine every day, conducting two thousand searches a second. ‘You can see it.’ He smiles as he watches. ‘They’re glowing books!’ He waves his arms. ‘They glow when they’re being read!’ ”

The way Lepore joins the dots – from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to reference rot to hyper-text to Brewster Kahle to the Internet Archive to the Wayback Machine – is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of her best.