February 9, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Michael Schulman’s “Deepfaking Orson Welles.” It’s about a fascinating attempt by a startup studio to use artificial intelligence to restore Welles’s mangled 1942 masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Schulman talks with the key people involved in the project – Edward Saatchi and Brian Rose. He chronicles the making of “The Magnificent Ambersons.” He visits the Los Angeles set where the new A.I. scenes are being shot. And he explains the challenge of the project: 

Simply prompting the computer to suck up the existing movie and spit out new scenes would create a cold, uncanny-valley effect. A.I. tends to flatten lighting, and that would clash with Welles’s rich chiaroscuro. Then, there was what Saatchi called the “happiness” problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. “In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,” he said. “That’s part of why having the actor is really important.”

Schulman even participates in the process. He writes,

Saatchi gave me a preview of how it would all work. Between takes, the crew subbed me in for Pressley, putting me in a period coat and a clip-on tie, and had me blunder through one of Eugene’s lines. Two hours later, the A.I. team sent back a rough clip of Cotten doing the line—turning his head as I’d turned mine, speaking in his voice but with my delivery, even breaking into a laugh, as I had done after tripping over the words. “Usually, we’d spend a lot more time on it, but this is just to give you a feel,” Saatchi said. Still, it was pretty impressive—and disorienting.

“Deepfaking Orson Welles” is a glimpse of the future – the use of A.I. to riff on old movies. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Three inspired lines in this week’s New Yorker:

1. Scott Shepherd plays multiple roles, but is particularly droll as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging hornily through Dublin. – Emily Nussbaum, “Goings On: Off Broadway”

2. Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette. – Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s”

3. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. – Jill Lepore, “The Chapman House”

2025 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those espresso Martinis with a creamy glug of banana liqueur that Rachel Syme wrote about in her wonderful “Bar Tab: Monsieur” (April 7, 2025). Mm, that hits the spot. Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The magnificent 100th Anniversary Issue (February 17 & 24, 2025), loaded with delectable writing, including Jill Lepore’s “War of Words,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents,” Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out,” and Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” 

Highlight #2: The splendid “Takes” series, in which New Yorker contributors revisited notable works from the magazine’s archive. I loved Stephen Colbert’s piece on Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.” Sample: “From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone.”

Highlight #3: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” columns – every last ravishing one of them. I devoured them all, licking my lips, craving more. Here’s a taste:

Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet. [“Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025]

Highlight #4: Nathan Blum’s extraordinary short story “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025). I’m not sentimental, but this piece moved me to tears. It’s about two students at a college in Maine – a freshman who grew up nearby and a senior from New York City – who meet and form a connection. The freshman’s name is Nolan Everett and the senior’s is Heidi Lane. They meet at the climbing wall in the college rec center. Nolan works there as a belayer. Heidi registers to use the climbing wall. She’s never climbed before. Nolan teaches her. The relationship evolves. The ending is heartbreaking. This is the best short story to appear in The New Yorker since Maile Meloy’s brilliant “Travis, B.” (October 28, 2002). 

Highlight #5: The appearance of another great “Tabula Rasa” piece by my hero, John McPhee. In this one, he says, among other interesting things, “I attribute my antiquity to dark-chocolate almond bark.”  

Other top picks of the year (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

Ian Frazier’s “Pigeon Toes,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes,” May 26, 2025 (“‘Are you ready?’ Margouleff asked at the warehouse. He unlocked a door, and immediately a thick, corky scent hit me, the emanation of hundreds of aging guitars—the great variety of hardwoods, the glue and paint and lacquer, the oxidation of strings and coils, the leather straps and handles, and the sarcophagal musk of the cases themselves”). 

Paige Williams’ “Still Life,” June 9, 2025 (“It was nine-thirty in the morning and so windy that miniature flags on graves were horizontal. The gravediggers were preparing for a funeral at two. Four neon-orange stakes marked off a rectangle in front of a headstone. The stone was inscribed with the name of a woman buried at nine feet; her husband was coming in at seven”).

Alexandra Schwartz’s “Going Viral,” September 1 & 8, 2025 (“Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding ‘I’”).

D. T. Max’s “The Behemoth,” September 22, 2025 (“The tower was a cone that narrowed to a point as it ascended. At the center of its circular base was a glimmering white hyperboloid, a gigantic stone object that looked like a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant. The hyperboloid had no top or bottom—it was a skylight that opened onto the nave below. Through this aperture, sunlight could filter all the way down to the church floor”).

Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso,” September 29, 2025 (“In a courtyard strung with lights, at a late-night showing of  ’A Santanotte, a Neapolitan film from 1922, I kept glancing away from the fervid melodrama to admire the projector behind me: a steampunk dream, built in Milan in the nineteen-thirties, which appeared to be made from a trash can, half a dozen alarm clocks, and two bicycle wheels. It emitted a bright plume of smoke, as if miniature furnaces were being stoked within”).

Rivka Galchen’s “The Heat of the Moment,” November 24, 2025 ("In the summer of 2022, a rig set up not far from Cornell’s School of Veterinary Medicine drilled for sixty-five days through layers of shale, limestone, and sandstone, passing beyond the geologic time of the dinosaurs to a crystalline basement dating to the Proterozoic eon, more than five hundred million years ago").

Alex Ross’s “Written in Stone,” December 1, 2025 (“One evening, I leaned on a fence as the sun went down, the horizon glowing orange against a cobalt sky. A whitish mist stole in from the lochs, encircling a nearby house until only its roof and chimneys remained. Spectral shapes caught my eye: sheep were trimming the grass around the site. When they detected my presence, they streamed away en masse, fading into the fog, which matched their coats. The stones loomed as black silhouettes. I felt a sweet shiver of the uncanny”).

Best Cover

Richard McGuire’s “Zooming In” for the April 14, 2025 “Innovation & Tech” issue.

Best “Talk of the Town”

Ben McGrath’s “Dumpster Diving,” September 15, 2025 (“Their attention turned to a giant cherry-colored armoire that had belonged to a professor now on sabbatical in Malaysia. How to get it to Bay Ridge? Ching had an idea. He could have it trucked with the weekly deliveries to Tandon, which is in downtown Brooklyn. ‘Then, there is a wonderful Home Depot probably less than a mile away,’ he said. ‘You can rent a U-Haul for nineteen dollars, and it’s good for ninety minutes. So, if you time it just right, early in the morning . . .’”).

Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan’s Springs,” September 22, 2025 (“On a recent summer day, Greenberg moved through the Bronx with the brisk authority of a biker who has little time for automobiles, methodically checking the map on his phone, pulling copies of Smith’s photos from his backpack, watching for construction sheds. ‘The city will take the photos down, and so will landlords, but they seem to last longest on these sheds,’ he said”).

Nick Paumgarten’s “Big Pink,” October 6, 2025 (“At the head of the quarry, ospreys had built a nest high atop an abandoned derrick bedangled like a maypole with rusty cables”).

Jane Bua’s “Shedding,” October 13, 2025 (“At 8 p.m., the band slunk onstage, the house lights cut out, and Puth trotted up in a baggy Elastica T-shirt. He parked at the fake Rhodes, and the set began. At every keys solo and drum rip, he put on a goofy grin or a quasi-sexual stank face”).

Bruce Handy's “Shadow Boxing,” December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 ("Five plate-glass windows offer a view into a re-creation of the cluttered basement studio in which the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell once cobbled together the “shadow boxes” that he is best known for").

Best Illustration

David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025).

Best of “The Critics”

Justin Chang’s “Mean Time,” January 13, 2025 (“Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike”).

Daniel Immerwahr’s “Check This Out,” January 27, 2025 (“Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers”).

Jackson Arn’s, “Royal Flush," February 17 & 24, 2025 (“In many of the cases from ‘Seeing Red’ where red does dominate, the work in question comes off as an affront, crossing some chromatic line—look at Warhol’s “Red Lenin” or STIK’s “Liberty (Red)” and feel the wet raspberry splatter you”). Arn’s sudden departure from The New Yorker this year saddened me. I will miss him. 

Adam Gopnik’s “Fresh Paint,” April 14, 2025 (“Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open”).

Louis Menand’s “Strong Opinions,” June 2, 2025 (“And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill—Buckley was a show unto himself”).

Anthony Lane’s “Easy Music,” July 7 & 14, 2025 (“Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx”).

James Wood’s “Escape Route,” July 21, 2025 (“Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened”).

Dan Chiasson, “Sense and Sensibility,” August 11, 2025 (“Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman”).

Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back," September 15, 2025 (“Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters”).

Maggie Doherty's “Rambling Man,” October 20, 2025 (“Illuminated by Richardson’s biography, “The Snow Leopard” becomes an even more intriguing object. It is both a record of a man’s failings and a book written to avoid confronting them”).

James Wood’s “Last Harvest,” November 10, 2025 (“These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory”).

Hannah Goldfield's “Still Rising,” December 15, 2025 ("From a small tray of sheer pira—Afghan milk fudge, made with cardamom and orange-blossom water—he used a cookie cutter to extract glossy circles to fit into a Danish-like pastry, between layers of a vanilla pastry cream and diplomat cream. The texture of the finished product was delightfully riotous, shards of crisp golden crumb collapsing into the pleasingly claggy fudge and luscious custard").

Best Photo

Malike Sidibe’s portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025)

Best of “Goings On”

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: L&L Hawaiian Barbecue,” March 3, 2025 (“Get a musubi or two, which is marvellous, the squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spamminess of Spam, the sweet smear of teriyaki”).

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: La Tête d’Or,” March 31, 2025 (“A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious”).

Rachel Syme’s “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” May 12 & 19, 2025 (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,’ he said. He was right”).

Marella Gayla’s “Bar Tab: Liar, Liar,” May 26, 2025 (“There was a looser scene on a weeknight, when a round of frosty Martinis, a sampling of cloudy, tart orange wines, and a peppery bottle of red, shared with two colleagues, seemed less like a life-style statement and more like a bold recommitment to the very act of living”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Ice-Cream Sundaes for the Start of Summer,” June 16, 2025 (“The dark, slithery-hot chocolate sauce has a bittersweet edge that makes the whole thing feel dimensional and a little bit electric”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Bong,” September 29, 2025 [“Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description ‘IYKYK’) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below”].

Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” October 27, 2025 (“I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last”).

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: I’m Donut ?,” December 1, 2025 (“The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority”).

Best Poem

Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” March 24, 2025 (“Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters / and know it is time”).

Best “Shouts & Murmurs”

Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked,” April 21, 2025 [“Dances with, rather than fights against, the cream cheese and the lox. (Or whitefish, if that’s your thing. I don’t judge)”].

Best newyorker.com Posts

Joshua Yaffa’s “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine,” August 2, 2025 (“Van Wessel captures how something can be at once utterly horrible, an emotional devastation for which no one is prepared, and also grimly routine”).

Helen Rosner’s “Three Plays on the Pancake,” August 3, 2025 (“Like the version made famous at Golden Diner (which Herrera has credited as an inspiration), these are true, literal pancakes: made not on a griddle but in individual cast-iron pans, which define the pancake’s shape, constraining its boundaries and creating a distinct crispiness to the outsides that plays in beautiful counterpoint to the soft, almost meltingly creamy insides. A serving of two pancakes arrives under a brutalist slab of butter so substantial that I thought, at first, it was a thick slice of cheese”).

Best Sentence

Whistler elongates the fashionable figures into letter openers, and life into a series of dinner invitations to be sliced open. – Adam Gopnik, “Fresh Paint” (April 14, 2025)

Best Paragraph

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party. – Burkhard Bilger, “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Description 

The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead. – Nick Paumgarten, “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025)

Best Detail

Its main entrance, at Twenty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, is marked by an imposing brownstone Gothic Revival structure, the Arch, where a pandemonium of monk parakeets has long kept an elaborate nest. – Paige Williams, “Still Life” (June 9, 2025)

And now here’s to you Burkhard Bilger for your dazzling, vibrant, exhilarating “Stepping Out” – my #1 Pick of the Year! 

Thank you, New Yorker, for another marvelous year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) The New Yorker (100th Anniversary Issue, February 17 & 24, 2025); (2) Mathieu Larone’s illustration for Nathan Blum’s “Outcomes” (November 3, 2025); (3) Photo by Hannah Whitaker for Nick Paumgarten’s “Guitar Heroes” (May 26, 2025); (4) Photo by Matteo de Mayda for Anthony Lane’s “Cinema Paradiso” (September 29, 2025); (5) The New Yorker, April 14, 2025); João Fazenda’s illustration for Robert Sullivan’s “Manhattan Springs” (September 22, 2025); (6) David Plunkert's illustration for Daniel Immerwahr's "Check This Out" (January 27, 2025); (7) James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1871-74); (8) Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin for Hannah Goldfield’s “Take Me Back” (September 15, 2025); (9) Malike Sidibe’s photo portrait of Lorna Simpson for Julian Lucas’s “Now You See Her” (May 12 & 19, 2025); (10) Lanna Apisukh’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025); (11) Luci Gutiérrez’s illustration for Josh Lieb’s “Bagels, Ranked” (April 21, 2025); (12) Brian Finke’s photo for Burkhard Bilger’s “Stepping Out” (February 17 & 24, 2025); (13) Mathias Depardon’s photo for Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents” (February 17 & 24, 2025). 

February 17 & 24, 2025 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the 100th Anniversary Issue, packed with reporting pieces, personal essays, and reviews. The digital version is even richer, containing five additional articles. It’s a sumptuous literary banquet, featuring three of my favorite writers – Jill Lepore, Nick Paumgarten and Burkhard Bilger.  

I love Lepore’s “War of Words.” It’s a look at some of the writer-editor battles that shaped The New Yorker. For example, Edmund Wilson vs. Harold Ross:

Many have balked at The New Yorker’s bruising editing, never mind Ross’s rule that the more they kvetched, the less he thought of them. “Can’t we have some signed agreement about my copy not being changed by other people?” Edmund Wilson asked Ross. (The answer was no. “He is by far the biggest problem we ever had around here,” Ross wrote, greatly regretting having hired Wilson not only as a writer but as an editor. “Fights like a tiger, or holds the line like an elephant, rather. Only course is to let him peter out, I guess.”)

And Vladimir Nabokov vs. Katherine White:

In a letter to Katharine White, Nabokov drew a line not so much in the proverbial sand as with the underline key on his typewriter: “I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift.” White later wrote to Updike, “Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.” 

Lepore’s piece brims with memorable comments on the editorial process. My favorite is John Bennet’s “A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”

Another captivating piece in this excellent anniversary New Yorker is Nick Paumgarten’s “Helicopter Parents.” It’s about a team of scientists who uses a microlight aircraft to teach a flock of endangered northern bald ibises to migrate. How do they do it? Paumgarten tells us:

The birds left Bavaria on the second Tuesday in August. They took off from an airfield, approximated a few sloppy laps, and then, such are miracles, began to follow a microlight aircraft, as though it were one of them. The contraption—as much pendulum as plane—reared and dipped as its pilot, a Tyrolian biologist in an olive-drab flight suit and amber shooting glasses, tugged on the steering levers. Behind him, in the rear seat, a young woman with a blond ponytail called to the birds, in German, through a bullhorn. As the microlight receded west into the haze, the birds chasing behind, an armada of cars and camper vans sped off in pursuit.

It's a fascinating endeavour. The birds are often stubborn. Paumgarten hangs out with a camera crew filming the project:

I retreated with one of the producers to a patch of scrub grass, out of sight of the birds and the cameras. We lay down in the stubble, at the edge of a sunflower plot, the fallen heads strewn in the arid soil like abandoned hornet’s nests. A light breeze kicked up. The sunflower stalks rattled. As the sun warmed the field, the flies got to work.

He describes the action:

The birds began to fly, as Helena called out to them. “Here she comes,” the producer said. Helena began running across the field, toward the microlight. She took big but uneven strides, on account of the knee. Fritz, in the microlight, was waving his arms like a bird. Helena reached the microlight, adjusted her ponytail, and then climbed into the back seat, as the birds flew in ragged circles nearby. Fritz revved the engine, a desperate, needling whine, and the vessel lurched down the airstrip, the chute billowing awake behind him. And then, just like that, the craft was airborne, and Fritz throttled down, and for a moment it hung there, almost ludicrously slow, appearing to swing like a plumb beneath the chute, before turning toward the east, where the rising sun flashed off the sea. You could hear Helena’s keening singsong through the megaphone, a kind of Teutonic muezzin. “Komme, komme, Waldi!” Come, come, Baldies. Two tones, up-down up-down, like a crowd chanting, “Let’s go, Rang-ers!”

The birds wheeled over the aviary while Fritz circled. Komme, komme, Waldi: the song receded as the microlight got farther away and then swelled as it neared. This rise and fall, its approaching and distancing, was at once a cheer, a prayer, and a lament, and it induced in me—and, I somehow believed, in everyone else, too—a kind of heartache, like the longing for loved ones or the pain of their aging away. The microlight’s distant motor echoing off the hangar’s corrugated shell sounded like a deranged string section. An old sailboat was propped against the tin. Swallows darted around, feeding on the flies. A commercial jet passed soundlessly overhead.

This is superb writing! It gets even better. Here’s my favorite passage:

Lying in the desiccated grass, amid the dead sunflower stalks and the barrage of flies, the heat rising—the scorching of the sun, the wheedling of the engine—I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill. The air stank of fertilizer, of the excrement we spread to grow food for ourselves. The miracle of flight, the cycle of poop and protein, our elaborate efforts to undo harm: what creatures we are. Fritz made laps, orbits passing like days.

What creatures we are, and what a writer Paumgarten is. “Helicopter Parents” is a fascinating look at the incredible lengths scientists will go to try to save a species from extinction. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The 100th Anniversary Issue also contains a wonderful piece by Burkhard Bilger called “Stepping Out.” It’s about America’s spectacular new marching-band culture. No longer just about marching in formation, marching band has become both a dazzling art and a fierce sport. Bilger writes,

The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores. They don’t call it marching band anymore. They call it the marching arts.

Bilger visits Bourbon County High School, in eastern Kentucky, home of the Marching Colonels. He goes to Indianapolis and spends time with two of America’s most successful marching bands – the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold, and the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds. He attends America’s preeminent marching-band contest – the Grand National Championships in Indianapolis. He talks with band directors, band members, and band parents. Everywhere he goes, he logs his impressions. Here’s his description of a rehearsal by the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds:

Carmel High School is north of Indianapolis, across Interstate 465, in a suburb of lamplit streets and posh boutiques. It was close to 7:30 p.m. when I arrived. Temperatures were in the eighties and the sun had slid to the horizon like a drop of melted wax, but the band was still practicing. The students were lined up outside the school stadium, in a parking lot painted with yard lines and numbers like a football field. They stood at attention for a moment, their arms bent in front of them in various positions, as if holding invisible instruments. Then a voice rang out: “Check! Adjust!” A metronome sounded, and the band began to march.

The voice belonged to Chris Kreke, the band’s director. He was standing on the roof of an observation tower four stories above us, leaning over the railing with a microphone in hand. When I went up to join him, I could see the band’s choreography unfolding below: lines crossing and reversing course, squares collapsing and turning inside out, circles exploding into smaller circles like fireworks in slow motion. The patterns were so complex that the drill designer, Michael Gaines, had to use a 3-D program called Pyware to choreograph them. The coördinates for each player’s movements could be loaded onto a smartphone or printed onto a spiral-bound dot book—one page for each movement—then drilled until they were pure muscle memory. “Look at me!” Kreke said, his voice reverberating below. “That was really good until the end. When we come into page 13, we have to have a much stronger direction change. That is twelve counts, and you have to get a really energetic step-off. Yes?”

“YESSIR!”

And here’s a delightful description of some of the shows he saw at the Grand National Championships:

If the event’s structure seems proof of its military roots, its content is a riot of invention, like a French garden overrun by exotics. A band from Newburgh, Indiana, came out in black cloaks and purple berets, like characters from “The Matrix” headed to a poetry reading. Then they flitted around the field like bats. A group from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, reënacted a solo sailing trip around the world, with the band tossing itself about like waves and rocking on skeletal ships. A show called “The Cutting Edge,” by a band from Cedar Park, Texas, doubled down on the title’s pun, with music from “Sweeney Todd” and Samuel Barber, and the band marching around giant barber poles. Some shows were earnest and philosophical, others sentimental or goofy. In “Menagerie,” from a school in Kingsport, Tennessee, the color guard were caged like animals in a zoo, clad in polka-dot bodysuits. In “Shhhh . . . It’s Rabbit Season,” by a band from Mason, Ohio, the musicians marched out in caps and hunting jackets, like Elmer Fudd, while the color guard wore neon-orange rabbit suits. Then the musicians chased the rabbits around to “The Barber of Seville” and the “William Tell” Overture.

And here’s another splendid passage:

The medal ceremony that night was a surreal sight: more than three thousand band members crowded onto the field in candy-striped rows. Bourbon County ended up placing second in its class—a triumph under the circumstances—just behind another Kentucky band, from Murray High School. But my favorite moment was earlier in the evening. Deep beneath the stands, in the vast tunnels and rehearsal rooms around the field, half a dozen bands were warming up—drumming, stretching, tossing rifles, and playing arpeggios as they waited for their turn to perform. Walking from room to room, I passed wooden ships, Victorian cages, and giant Day-Glo flowers in the hall. A trio of Elmer Fudds was hunched in conversation over here, two orange bunnies giggling in a corner over there. Some strays from the “Menagerie” show came wandering down the hall, past a pair of water sprites from Broken Arrow and a few butterfly girls from Cypress, Texas. It was like the world’s biggest costume party.

"Stepping Out" takes us inside the agonizing, ecstatic, operatic, surreal world of marching band. It's a brilliant piece - one of Bilger's best. 

There’s a fourth article in this marvellous Anniversary Issue that I want to celebrate – Jackson Arn’s “Royal Flush.” But I’ll do that in a separate post.  

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. 

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

This is the seventh 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’ll 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 Thurman’s dazzling “Darkness Wearable” (titled "Dress to Thrill, when it appeared in the May 16, 2011 New Yorker). 

Thurman is a master fashion writer. “Darkness Wearable” is one of her best pieces. It’s a review of a 2011 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum called Savage Beauty – a retrospective of Alexander McQueen’s two decades in fashion. Thurman writes,

Even if you never bother with fashion shows, go to this one. It has more in common with “Sleep No More,” the “immersive” performance of “Macbeth” currently playing in Chelsea, than it does with a conventional display of couture in a gallery, tent, or shop window. Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, has assembled a hundred ensembles and seventy accessories, mostly from the runway, with a few pieces of couture that McQueen designed at Givenchy, and he gives their history and psychology an astute reading. McQueen was an omnivore (literally so; he always struggled with his weight), and the richness of his work reflects a voracious consumption of high and low culture. He felt an affinity with the Flemish masters, Gospel singing, Elizabethan theatre and its cross-dressing heroines (a line from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was tattooed on his right biceps), contemporary performance art, punk, Surrealism, Japan, the ancient Yoruba, and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In most particulars, however—including his death—he was an archetypal Romantic.

Her description of the show is superb. For example:

Alienation often accounts for a macabre sense of the marvellous. At the entrance to “Savage Beauty,” there is an evening gown conjured entirely from razor-clam shells. Antelope horns sprout from the shoulders of a pony-skin jacket, and vulture skulls serve as epaulettes on a leather dress. There are angel wings made out of balsa wood, and worms encased in a bodice of molded plastic. “I’m inspired by a feather,” McQueen said of all the duck, turkey, ostrich, and gull plumage in his clothing—“its graphics, its weightlessness, and its engineering.” One of his most demented masterpieces is a glossy black-feathered body cast that transforms its wearer into a hybrid creature—part raptor, part waterfowl, and part woman.

And:

The second gallery is an ornate, spooky hall of mirrors consecrated to McQueen’s gothic reveries about bondage and fetishism. One of the loveliest dresses—with a lampshade skirt of swagged jet beading—has a necrotic-looking jabot of lace ivy that reminds you what a fetish mourning was to the Victorians. Leather abounds, masterfully tortured into submission, as in a zippered sheath with fox sleeves latticed by an elaborate harness. 

And:

Beyond the hall of mirrors is a “Cabinet of Curiosities,” where inventive instruments of consensual torture in the form of jewelry, headgear, footwear, and corsets are displayed like talismans. Videos from selected runway shows flicker high on the black walls, and the animal sounds of a cheering crowd and a woman moaning issue from hidden speakers. In a clip from one of McQueen’s most radical collections (Spring/Summer 1999), an homage to the German artist Rebecca Horn, the model Shalom Harlow revolves on a turntable, cringing in mock horror as two menacing robots spray her white parachute dress with paint guns. The most striking artifact from this collection is a pair of exquisitely hand-carved high-heeled wooden prostheses that McQueen designed for Aimee Mullins, a bilateral amputee and American Paralympic athlete. She modelled them on the runway with a bridal lace skirt and a centurion’s breastplate of molded leather, sutured like Frankenstein’s skull.

And then there’s this extraordinary passage: 

In “Highland Rape” (1995), the breakthrough collection that earned McQueen, at twenty-six, his notoriety as a bad-boy wonder, bare-breasted dishevelled girls staggered down the runway in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty tartan, and distressed leather. 

You can tell from the piquancy of Thurman’s descriptions that she relishes McQueen’s “macabre sense of the marvelous.” It’s her sensibility, too.    

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

This is the sixth 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’ll 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 superb “The War and the Roses” (August 8 & 15, 2016). 

In this great piece, Lepore puts American politics to a reality test of her own devising. The results are dismaying. But first she plunges into the cauldrons of the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. She divides her piece into two sections: the first on the Republican Convention in Cleveland; the second on the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Here’s her opening paragraph:

They perched on bar stools, their bodies long and lean, like eels, the women in sleeveless dresses the color of flowers or fruit (marigold, tangerine), the men in fitted suits the color of embers (charcoal, ash). Makeshift television studios lined the floor and the balcony of the convention hall: CNN, Fox, CBS, Univision, PBS. MSNBC built a pop-up studio on East Fourth Street, a square stage raised above the street, like an outdoor boxing ring. “Who won today? Who will win tomorrow?” the networks asked. The guests slumped against the ropes and sagged in their seats, or straightened their backs and slammed their fists. The hosts narrowed their eyes, the osprey to the fish: “Is America over?”

That “osprey to the fish” is very fine. Lepore is herself osprey to the fish of American politicians, particularly those who throw around the phrase “the people,” which is almost all of them. “Hope comes from the people”; “Donald Trump is for the people!”; “the American people are not falling for it”; and so on. Lepore is deeply skeptical of politicians’ use of that phrase. She says, “Every tyrant from Mao to Perón rules in the name of the people; his claim does not lessen their suffering.” She quotes the historian Edmund S. Morgan: “Government requires make-believe.... Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.”

Lepore uses everything – water bottles, T-shirts, placards, banners, monuments, ponchos, a jumbo teleprompter, even “a ten-foot-tall American bald eagle, made entirely out of red-white-and-blue Duck Brand duct tape” – to evoke the scene. Nothing escapes her osprey eye. 

And then she makes an extraordinary journalistic move. She steps outside the convention hall. She leaves the turmoil behind. She goes to a beautiful city park. In stream-of-consciousness mode, she writes,

The rule inside the Convention was: Incite fear and division in order to call for safety and union. I decided that the rule outside the Convention was: No kidding, it’s really awfully nice out here, in a beautiful city park, on a sunny day in July, where a bunch of people are arguing about politics and nothing could possibly be more interesting, and the Elect Jesus people are giving out free water, icy cold, and the police are playing Ping-Pong with the protesters, and you can take a nap in the grass if you want, and you will dream that you are on a farm because the grass smells kind of horsy, and like manure, because of all the mounted police from Texas, wearing those strangely sexy cowboy hats; and, yes, there are police from all over the country here, and if you ask for directions one of them will say to you, “Girl, I’m from Atlanta!” and you have to know that, if they weren’t here, who knows what would happen; there are horrible people shouting murderous things and tussling, that’s what they came here for, and anything can blow up in an instant; and, yes, there are civilians carrying military-style weapons, but, weirdly, they are less scary here than they are online; they look ridiculous, honestly, and this one lefty guy is a particular creep, don’t get cornered; but, also, there’s a little black girl in the fountain rolling around, getting soaked, next to some white guy who’s sitting there, just sitting there, in the water, his legs kicked out in front of him, holding a cardboard sign that reads “Tired of the Violence.”

I vote that one of the most memorable passages in all of political journalism. Real life is not in the convention hall; it’s out here on the grass of this beautiful park. That’s my take-away from this remarkable piece. 

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

This is the fourth 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’ll 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 delightful “Buzz” (July 25, 2022).

“Buzz” tells about Volkswagon’s new electric bus, the ID. Buzz. It also salutes the old VW bus, symbol of Sixties counterculture. Lepore attends the New York International Auto Show to see the Buzz: 

Volkswagen displayed its gleaming fleet in a back corner of the main show floor, where the Buzz was parked on a platform behind a plastic half wall and roped off, like a work of art. It was one of the few cars at the show that you couldn’t climb into or touch. 

She visits the Volkswagon factory in Hanover, Germany, where the Buzz is made:

Parts are moved from place to place not with Plattenwagen but with autonomous vehicles, R2-D2-ish beeping carts—the ugly, clumsy ancestors of a new species of sleeker, prettier driverless cars, the dinosaurs to those birds. They stopped, politely, at every intersection, their cameras looking both ways before crossing the road. 

She takes the new Buzz for a test drive: 

The difference between driving the bus and driving the Buzz is the difference between beating eggs with a whisk and pressing the On button of a mixer. There’s just very little to do. The accelerator has a triangle on it, a Play button; the brake has two vertical lines on it, for Pause. 

She says, “I drove around the block, gliding, almost floating, noiselessly, effortlessly. I hit Pause.”

Most memorably, she writes about VW buses she and her family have owned. Here’s her description of their twenty-year-old Vanagon:

It was rusty and brown, with a stick shift, and the locks didn’t work and it smelled like smoke, except more like a campfire than like cigarettes, and we took it camping and pushed down the seats to make a bed and slept inside, with two toddlers and a baby and a Great Dane, and we all fit, even with fishing poles and Swiss Army knives and battery-operated lanterns and binoculars and Bananagrams and bug spray and a beloved, pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection. It was, honestly, the dream. If you took it to the beach, you could just slide open the door and pop up the table—the five seats in back faced one another—and eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches while watching the waves or putting a baby down for a nap. The carpet would get covered with sand and crushed seashells. Weeks later, the whole van would still smell like a cottage by the sea.

That’s one of my all-time favorite Lepore passages. I love the details, especially that “pint-size red plastic suitcase full of the best pieces from our family’s Lego collection.” 

“Buzz” is a perfect blend of factual reporting and personal experience. It’s one of Lepore’s best pieces. 

The Art of Quotation (Part IV)

Jill Lepore (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Jill Lepore, in her superb “The Shorebird” (The New Yorker, March 26, 2018; included in her 2023 collection The Deadline), makes an interesting move. Quoting from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she uses the first line as an introduction to the rest of the excerpt. Here’s the passage:

Everything is connected to everything else, she showed. “We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die,” Carson wrote:

We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm-leaf-earthworm cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.

The result is a neat in-sentence-block-quotation combo. 

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

This is the third 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’ll 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 Thurman’s dazzling “Silent Partner” (November 16, 2015).

Thurman is a brilliant critic; “Silent Partner” is one of her best reviews. It’s an examination of Letters to Véra (2015), a volume of Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his wife. When it appeared in The New Yorker, it bore the tagline “What do Nabokov’s letters conceal?” That expresses Thurman’s critical approach perfectly. She writes,

On the evidence of these letters, no couple ever enjoyed a more perfect complicity. In his very first sentence, Vladimir tells Véra, “I won’t hide it. I’m so unused to being—well, understood.” In 1924, he reflects, “You know, we are terribly alike.” And a few months later: “You and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love.” He was ready to give her “all of my blood.” Through their decades of vicissitudes, he referred to their marriage as “cloudless”—even to his mistress.

Mistress? Yes, Nabokov had a mistress. Thurman goes behind Nabokov’s letters. She refers to Stacy Schiff’s biography of Véra: “What’s going on, we learn from Schiff, is that Nabokov is enjoying torrid sex with his worshipful mistress while lying to his wife about ending the affair.”

Thurman wonders what Véra really thought of her self-obsessed husband. She writes,

There is little doubt that Mrs. Nabokov took a keen interest in her husband’s every triumph, toothache, and fried egg. But it is also possible to imagine that, in bleak moments, she tired of his endearments (“my little sunshine”), bridled at his pet names (“lumpikin”), and resented the ostentation of a love that can be hard to distinguish from self-infatuation (“It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts”).

But, as Thurman points out, we’ll never know what Véra really thought because she destroyed all her letters. Why? Thurman concludes her absorbing piece with this speculation:

At the end of this volume, you have to wonder what Véra’s qualms were as she disposed of her letters. She must have had some. The truth of her past would never be complete without them. Was it the act of a morbidly private woman refusing to expose herself—and thus, consciously or not, enshrining her mystique? Or an auto-da-fé that destroyed the evidence of wifely heresy? These questions reverberate in the echo chamber of “Letters to Véra.” “You are my mask,” Nabokov told her.

Masks intrigue Thurman. What do they conceal? In “Silent Partner,” armed with the biographies of Schiff and Brian Boyd, she unmasks the Master. 

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

This is the second 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’ll 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 brilliant “Battleground America” (April 23, 2012). 

This piece is about the insanity of American gun laws. It begins with a mass shooting:

Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word. 

It reports appalling gun ownership statistics:

There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American. The gun that T. J. Lane brought to Chardon High School belonged to his uncle, who had bought it in 2010, at a gun shop. Both of Lane’s parents had been arrested on charges of domestic violence over the years. Lane found the gun in his grandfather’s barn.

It looks at the history of the Second Amendment and shows how it has been misinterpreted as a guarantee of the right of individuals to carry a gun:

The constitutionality of the 1934 act [National Fire Arms Act] was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously.

And, in my favorite part, Lepore visits the American Firearms School, in an industrial park just north of Providence, and signs up for a lesson:

Inside, there’s a shop, a pistol range, a rifle range, a couple of classrooms, a locker room, and a place to clean your gun. The walls are painted police blue up to the wainscoting, and then white to the ceiling, which is painted black. It feels like a clubhouse, except, if you’ve never been to a gun shop before, that part feels not quite licit, like a porn shop. On the floor, there are gun racks, gun cases, holsters, and gun safes. Rifles hang on a wall behind the counter; handguns are under glass. Most items, including the rifles, come in black or pink: there are pink handcuffs, a pink pistol grip, a pink gun case, and pink paper targets. Above the pink bull’s-eye, which looks unnervingly like a breast, a line of text reads, “Cancer sucks.”

Lepore deplores the twisted logic of the gun-rights advocates. She writes,

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

“Battleground America” is a powerful argument for gun control. But it’s an argument that faces massive resistance amongst conservatives. Lepore is aware of it. In a Postscript, she writes, “No meaningful gun safety legislation has been passed in the ten years that have passed since I wrote this piece. The mass shootings continue. And in 2022, the Supreme Court sanctioned the reading of the Second Amendment the NRA had so long been fighting for.”