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 V)

This is the fifth 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 fascinating “Roving Eye” (January 21, 2008). 

“Roving Eye” is a psychosexual study of the life and work of American model and photographer Lee Miller. It begins piquantly with a description of an extraordinary photo of Miller lying under a camouflage net, wearing nothing but a clump of sod on her vagina. Thurman writes, 

On my way to the London preview, I stopped to ponder a startling image of Miller in a show of military and couture camouflage at the Imperial War Museum. The French were the first, in 1915, to experiment with “disruptive patterns” of light, shade, and color hand-painted on uniforms and artillery—a technique indebted to Cubism. In 1940, the rich and eccentric British Surrealist Roland Penrose decided that he could best contribute to his country’s defense by recruiting artists for a camouflage unit, and lecturing on their research to the Home Guard. The unit had been testing an ointment developed to hide skin from a rifle scope, or at least to disguise it, and on a summer day, in a friend’s garden, Penrose asked Miller, his mistress (they married a few years later, to legitimatize their only child, Antony), to play the guinea pig.

Miller was in her mid-thirties. She had been covering the blitz for British Vogue, and, after the Normandy invasion, she would help to document the liberation of Europe as one of an élite company of women (Margaret Bourke-White, Marguerite Higgins, Mary Welsh, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Martha Gelhorn, among others) accredited as war correspondents. That afternoon, she gamely stripped for the assembled house party, smeared the dull, greenish paste over her body, and stretched out on the lawn under a caul of camouflage netting. In the course of the demonstration, her groin was covered by a clump of sod bristling with matted weeds—a trompe-l’oeil pubis—and one of her nipples snagged in the net. As a finishing touch, the severed heads of two blood-red lilies were placed between her breasts like a funerary offering. The couple’s friend (and partner in a ménage à trois) the American photojournalist Dave Scherman captured the scene, and Penrose used the image in slide shows—no doubt to great effect with the guardsmen.

Gamely stripped for the assembled house party ... stretched out on the lawn under a caul of camouflage netting ... her groin covered by a clump of sod bristling with matted weeds ... trompe-l’oeil pubis ... one of her nipples snagged in the net – Thurman, you have my attention. 

Who is this ravishing, uninhibited, naked poser? Thurman tells us. She explores Miller’s childhood (“The earliest known nude study of Lee Miller, who was christened Elizabeth, was made by her father, Theodore, an engineer whose hobby was photography”). She says of Miller’s parents, “They kept up appearances, but something in the household was seriously peculiar.” In a quintessential Thurman move, she uncovers and probes “a painful secret”: “At the age of seven, Elizabeth [Miller] had been raped, ostensibly by a family friend (all attempts to verify his identity, Penrose told me, ‘have drawn a blank’), and infected with gonorrhea.” 

Analyzing Miller’s life, Thurman turns the camouflage of the Penrose/Scherman photo into brilliant metaphor. She writes,

Miller’s story suggests that beauty can also be a form of camouflage, one that successfully deceives the beholder without offering much protection to the wearer. Her art was always improvised on the run, escaping from or to a man or a place, and she described her life as “a water soaked jig-saw puzzle, drunken bits that don’t match in shape or design.” The memory of a trauma is often fractured in the same fashion by that most devious of camouflagers the unconscious. 

Miller went on to apprentice with Man Ray in Paris. After three stormy years with him, she returned to New York, where she modeled for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. She became, Thurman says, “one of the most sought-after commercial photographers in New York.” She married Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian railroad magnate. “But life in Egypt was also much like her childhood: charmed on the surface, roiling beneath.” In 1937, age thirty, she escaped Eloui and returned to Paris, where she met Penrose. She posed for Picasso. In 1942, she became a war photographer for Vogue. Thurman describes her pictures:

With an eye for the macabre visual ironies scattered by the bombs like promotional flyers for Surrealism, she photographed a ruined chapel, bricks cascading from its portico like worshippers after the service; a smashed typewriter (“Remington Silent”) lying in the gutter; an egg-shaped barrage balloon nesting in a London park behind a pair of geese that are strutting as if they had just laid it; and two air-raid wardens—nubile vestals—masked totemically by their eye-shields.

Perhaps most famously, Miller posed naked in Hitler’s bathtub. Thurman reports the circumstances:

Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945. The next morning, Miller and Scherman were among the first journalists to document a scene of depravity that sickened combat veterans. Numbly, she did her work. Later that afternoon, they reached Munich, and “wangled a billet,” Penrose writes, in Hitler’s private apartment, on the Prinzregentenplatz—the command post for the 45th Infantry Division. Scherman took a picture of his lover and comrade nude in the Führer’s bathtub. For Scherman, it was a great journalistic coup, and it brought him fame. It brought the model fame, too, though not of the kind that her war journalism deserved. That sensational moment of callous clowning after an ordeal is the image of Lee Miller that is, perhaps, best remembered.

My favorite passage in “Roving Eye” is the final paragraph. Thurman describes Picasso’s portrait of Miller:

What the artist saw was a golden face with green hair and a pert profile; an inverted eyeball leaking a tear and caged by red lids; a blue earlobe with a corkscrew earring; a clenched fist; teeth bared in a smile or a grimace; bulging shoulders—white globes with a brown crust, each bigger than the head—which might be the breasts, displaced, or a bursting heart. But the black cavity of her body has the jagged shape of the torn screen from her “Portrait of Space,” with a void beyond it.

Thurman’s fascination with Miller shows in the vividness of her descriptions. “Roving Eye” is an unforgettable portrait of an entrancing woman. 

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. 

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.” 

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

This is the first 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 wonderful “First Impressions” (June 23, 2008). 

In this piece, Thurman explores the fascinating world of cave paintings. In the Ardèche region of south-central France, she visits the base camp of a group of researchers dedicated to the study of the Chauvet Cave. She describes the layout and contents of the Chauvet Cave. She says of its stunning End Chamber,

A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock. As at many sites, the scratches made by a standing bear have been overlaid with a palimpsest of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

Thurman discusses the meaning of cave art. She considers several scenarios, including Jean Clottes’ controversial theory on shamanism. She writes,

When Clottes joined forces with Lewis-Williams, he had come to believe that cave painting largely represents the experiences of shamans or initiates on a vision quest to the underworld, where spirits gathered. The caves served as a gateway, and their walls were considered porous. Where the artists or their entourage left handprints, they were palping a living rock in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force beyond it. They typically incorporated the rock’s contours and fissures into the outlines of their drawings—as a horn, a hump, or a haunch—so that a frieze becomes a bas-relief. But, in doing so, they were also locating the dwelling place of an animal from their visions, and bodying it forth.

In my favorite part, she goes with a guide inside the Niaux Cave and describes her experience:

The floor near the mouth was fairly flat, but as we went deeper it listed and swelled unpredictably. Water was dripping, and sometimes it sounded like a sinister whispered conversation. The caves are full of eerie noises that gurgle up from the bowels of the earth, yet I had a feeling of traversing a space that wasn’t terrestrial. We were, in fact, walking on the bed of a primordial river. Where the passage narrowed, we squeezed between two rocks, like a turnstile, marked with four lines. They were swipes of a finger dipped in red pigment that resembled a bar code, or symbolic flames. Further along, there was a large panel of dots, lines, and arrows, some red, some black. I felt their power without understanding it until I recalled what Norbert Aujoulat had told me about the signs at Cussac. He was the second modern human to explore the cave, in 2000, the year it was unearthed, some twenty-two thousand years after the painters had departed. (The first was Cussac’s discoverer, Marc Delluc.) “As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper, noting where they’d broken off stalagmites to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say, ‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

They make their way to “one of the grandest bestiaries in Paleolithic art” – the Black Salon, a rotunda a hundred and thirty feet in diameter:

Scores of animals were painted in sheltered spots on the floor, or etched in charcoal on the soaring walls: bison, stags, ibex, aurochs, and, what is rarer, fish (salmon), and Niaux’s famous “bearded horses”—a shaggy, short-legged species that, Clottes writes in his new book, has been reintroduced from their native habitat, in Central Asia, to French wildlife parks. All these creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or a stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one inches long, that Clottes had described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in a cave. When I found him, he looked so perky that I couldn’t help laughing. Alard was patient, and, since time loses its contours underground, I didn’t know how long we had spent there. “I imagine that you want to see more,” he said after a while, so we moved along.

“First Impressions” is an absorbing tour of some of the world’s most spectacular prehistoric art. I enjoyed it immensely. 

On the Horizon: "Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb 'New Yorker' Essayists"

Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023) are two of the great New Yorker essay collections of the last twenty years – where “great” means original, acerbic, perceptive, evocative, analytical, passionate, illuminating, stylish. To celebrate them, I’m going to select four of my favorite pieces from each book (one per month, for the next eight months) and try to express why I like them so much. A new series then – “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists” – starting April 15, 2024.