The Deadline: Essays

by Jill Lepore

"Jill Lepore is unquestionably one of America’s best historians; it’s fair to say she’s one of its best writers too." —Jonathan Russell Clark, Los Angeles Times



Best Books of 2023: New Yorker, TIME



A book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.


Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Audiobook, American History, Memoir

622 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 29, 2023

About the author

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.

A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Most of the essays here concern law and politics but a lot have to do with technology, some with culture, and very many with constitutional rule, Trump and Trumpism.” Other than the first 2 (out of 10) parts of the book “…the essays constitute reflections on the relationship between the American past and its fractious, violent present.”

Most of the essays in this book were previously published. They cover a wide range of topics and not all of them were of interest to me. I skimmed or skipped some of those essays, but all of the essays that I read were excellent. I have also read and enjoyed two of the author’s history books.

The first part of the book was autobiographical and the second part dealt with the lives of a few famous people, including Herman Melville and Rachel Carson. There are also essays about Magna Carta, Doctor Who, dystopian fiction, newspapers and digital news, plague years in literature, loneliness, the history of the police, the history of the US Supreme Court, constitutions, immigration, democracies and the on-going debacle that is Trump. I most enjoyed the historical and political essays.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains a series of essays, many published previously, many new, that offer a window into the country and events that have occurred in the country. From a biographical essay on Benjamin Franklin's sister to essays on Herman Melville, William Randolph Hearst to Roger Ails and Fox News, to Trump and the January 6th hearings.... the list goes on and on. Each one offers insight into its topic and a great deal of detail in explaining it. Lepore is an insightful and thorough historian whose writing is concise and well considered. I highly recommend this book- even if it is a bit of a tome. It will be worth it.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forty-six essays, 640 pages. That would suggest a book meant to be dipped into over a month or so. Instead I read through it in one go, in order to try and review this before publication date. These essays are so good that they stand up such a read.

The basic Lepore New Yorker formula is to take a contemporary topic (e.g. gun control, impeachment, commission reports) and alternate between the contemporary story and its historical precedents. Often we learn there is nothing new under the sun, which is either comforting or abhorrent.

My favorite essays were the ones that deviated from the formula a bit: a history of the Barbie and Bratz franchises; a deep dive about Rachel Carson; and a consideration of the parallels between the monster's memoir in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and slave memoirs. In a bit of a surprise, the book opens with four highly personal essays; I found her love of utilitarian bicycling especially endearing. And there is even some old-fashioned reporting such as a preview of the latest VW van, and a visit to the Internet Archive

I must admit I came in as a fan of Jill Lepore's books and her New Yorker articles which I catch occasionally (I wish she had cut one Donald Trump related article in exchange for her profile of Mick Herron). Reading this book is the next best thing to having Ms. Lepore at the family dinner table; she is invited to come over anytime.

Many thanks to netgalley and the publisher for providing me with this copy for review, even if they didn't give me very much time.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a doorstop of a book, 640 pages of Jill Lepore's essays on a range of issues from parenting to politics, from literature to libraries and archives, from Covid to Constitutional interpretation. Lepore is brilliant, rigorous and deeply analytical (my God is is ever good to read proper analysis based on rigorous research!!) Most of this is spectacularly good, and the last three essays, The Trump Papers, In Every Dark Hour, and The American Beast, are the clearest smartest look at the end of the (1st) Trump presidency that I have read. I want to give this a 5-star, but I can't because Lepore drops the ball in her essays on technology.

My complaint here is not due to a difference of opinion. Though we appear pretty well politically aligned on most matters, Lepore and I differ significantly on issues of Constitutional interpretation and I do not dock her even a fraction of a point for that. Her opinions on the law are challenging, interesting and well-supported, She added dimension to the way I see several issues, including the invention or recognition (you be the judge) of a right to privacy and relatedly on the reckless use of the Commerce Clause to address all sorts of things. I think it is fair to say Lepore and I are both happy with the results of many of the early cases which identified personal rights in the Commerce Clase, and we also seem to agree that some of them are jurisprudentially unsound and led to decisions that have been very bad for all of us, but we partially disagree on where the errors lay and what the Commerce Clause should do. In any event, as noted, her opinions are well-reasoned and I respect the heck out of them even where I disagree with them. Not so with her writings on tech. She makes some weird arguments against tech qua tech and the ways it is deployed which seem to indicate that we have weakened laws to protect our privacy and that technologists just gotten less responsible and more intent on destroying the world and that in the before times people could have done the things we do now but they reined themselves in. That is crap. In These Four Walls she falsely states that the surveillance of employees through tech would have been illegal before. Not true. There were no such laws, in part because there was nothing yet to legislate. Maybe we should be protecting workers' privacy rights. that is a topic we should be talking about, but we did not do this in the past and she should not hint at an erosion of protection when there is none. Then she cites at one point that the design of systems being used now are substantially similar to things that were around 40 years ago, but now they are being deployed. There are two quite simple and logical reasons that is a specious premise upon which to argue. First, what does substantially similar even mean? The simplest tweak to an algorithm can completely change what it does and how it does it. That is like saying because humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA we are the same. Secondly, to the extent the systems she described had been laid out we couldn't do anything with those ideas 40 years ago. We did not have the computing power to generate and utilize needed data or the data storage solutions necessary to do anything with them. It is like saying Ada Lovelace chose not to make a computer though she knew how and Leonard DaVinci chose not to build a helicopter though the sketches of the Aerial Screw show he could have. No. They had the ideas, they were brilliant, but it was not yet possible to build these things. There were steps along the way where other people had to solve the things standing in the way of turning their visions into reality. Same with the things we have now. Technologists have not lost their way, and they were not inherently more ethical 40 years ago, they just have more to work with now. And yes, we might well be mindlessly driving ourselves to extinction, but not because we were good then and now we are not. Lepore's wholesale disdain for technology was also a problem here. Technology does great things, and it is not possible to get to those great things without seeing that same tech used for less great things. Walls shelter us and imprison us, that does not make walls bad. I hope we are able and willing to regulate things well, but that remains to be seen. (Though just today the EU passed sweeping AI regulation which is an interesting start.) This is a tangent though -- my real issue is not with Lepore's clear antipathy for technology, but with the structure of her arguments and her clear lack of research. She is too good, too wise for that. For that reason I am knocking this to a 4.5 rounded to a GR 4, truly excellent, but with a visible flaw.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written essays mostly assuring the reader that politics has always been a clusterfck. Reassuring, somehow.

[Celeste Haehnel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about new things that I immediately had to google, which I think is the highest compliment I can give. The topics cover politics in some fashion primarily, but also Doctor Who.
Lepore's writing stirred curiosity, but also care. Lepore finds a way to write about people from every walk of life with a kind of detached compassion. It's like Joan Didion in a way. Okay, I stand corrected, that is probably the highest compliment I can give.

[Anna Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve rewritten this review 5 times now, so I’m going to do the opposite of those reviews and keep it simple:

This book is one of the best collection of essays I’ve ever read. Further, Lepore’s reflections will have any mother balancing a life in academia throwing their hands up with in a collective “AMEN!”

I had plans to skip around the essays, to pick and choose. But the first essay gripped me in a way I wasn’t expecting. I could’ve read this in one weekend in a single setting if I’d had the time.

Buying this to have on my bookshelf and gift to future historians, friends, and mothers ✨

[Louise Foerster · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an extraordinary book! In THE DEADLINE by Jill Lepore, I was captivated by intelligent, beautiful writing of fascinating essays that got me thinking -- and I'm still pondering the elegant, thoughtful, and incredibly immediate way she poses questions, explores alternatives, and shines a light for her readers. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

[Bruce Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Jill Lepore, Jill Lepore, I do adore thee, Jill Lepore.

What else can I say? She is a marvel. A person of boundless curiosity, an unquenchable hunger for knowledge, and most important, an extraordinary penetrating and expansive intelligence. Also, she’s a great writer with a sharp sense of humor.

“The Deadline” is a collection of her essays from the New Yorker and elsewhere, along with some new pieces. I read through it with the same eagerness I feel with a mystery I can’t put down. It’s filled with insights and observations and analysis and history and… well, you see where I’m going.

Lest anyone think the book is dry, boring, and academic, permit me a diversion. Until I read this book I didn’t know that the word “deadline” comes from the Civil War. A line (called the “dead line”) would be drawn around a prison and any prisoner going beyond the line would be shot. Needless to say, the phrase takes on a different and profoundly touching meaning in this book. Another, this from her essay about Covid and quarantines and shut downs: “A gang of porcupines is called, magnificently, a prickle.” And baby porcupines are called “porcupettes.” (Porcupines, it appears, rarely leave their nests, so...well, you get.) OK, show of hands: How many of you knew either of these things?

What does Lepore talk about in “The Deadline”? Oh so very much, all of it surprising, entertaining, enlightening, provocative, and smart. She writes about her own past and the loss of a dear friend; the link between the book “Frankenstein” and the abolition movement; the history of automobiles (“By the turn of the [twentieth] century, one of every three motorcars in there U.S. was electric.”); guns in America (for the originalists in the audience: concealed carry was illegal in many states in the first half of the 19th century; in 1893, the governor of Texas said “the mission of the concealed weapon is murder.”); Jane Franklin (sister of Ben); Rachel Carson; bicycles; LeRoy Robert Ripley, who who made a fortune challenging people to Believe It or Not; Robert C.W. Ettinger (a cryonics enthusiast who, in Lepore’s words, “thinks death is for chumps”; the disturbing transience of information in the digital age as time passes (a 2014 Harvard Law School study showed that more than 70% of the URLs in the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of URLs within the US Supreme Court opinions, didn’t link anymore to originally cited information; subsequent studies in engineering, medicine, and science have shown the same thing); how America’s peculiar veneration of the Constitution has led to broken government — most troubling, it’s become nigh impossible to change the document in response to new developments, which makes us outliers among the world’s democracies; we are captives to a document conceived and written hundreds of years ago and reflecting the sensibilities of that era, not the realities of our own); loneliness in America; and, of course, Donald Trump and January 6.

Rather than try to give an overview of the many the treasures in the book, I offer these vignettes:

On book bans and education wars: “There’s a rock, and a hard place, and then there’s the classroom.” (We’ve had a long history in America of controversy about public education, she demonstrates. Observing that “between 1890 and 1920, a new high school opened everyday,” she describes how some people at that time strongly resisted public education because it violated “parental rights.” The courts held otherwise, “deeming free public schooling to be essential to democratic citizenship.”) Resistance to public education, she shows, is (and has been) at its heart a reaction to the “whole Progressive package.” The Left isn’t let off unscathed here, however. Lepore notes that in both the Progressive Era of the nineteenth century and Progressivism today, much of the anger feeding resistance to public education is the product of the “high-handedness, moral crusading, and snobbery that stretches from old-fashioned Progressivism to the modern kind, laced with the same contempt for the rural poor and the devoutly religious.”

On robots and immigration: The first robots, Lepore observes, were essentially blue-collar machines. Today, they’re “white-collar knowledge workers and quinoa-and-oat milk globalists, the machines that will bankrupt Brooklyn.” She goes on to write: “Fear of a robot invasion is the obverse of fear of an immigrant invasion, a partisan coin: heads, you’re worried about robots; tails, you’re worried about immigration. There’s just one coin. Both fears have to do with jobs, whose loss produces suffering, want, and despair… Is the present alarm warranted? Panic is not evidence of danger; it’s evidence of panic.”

On abortion and the Supreme Court: “Beginning in the summer of 2022, women in about half of the United States may be breaking the law if they decide to end a pregnancy. This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito appears to have been surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787.” After noting that women were basically non-persons in the eyes of the law for centuries, she adds: “To use a history of discrimination to deny people their constitutional rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice.”

On political journalism: “Journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It’s faster than it used to be, so fast. It’s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?”

On the writing of history: “Historians and novelists are kin… but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes.” I also loved her observation that, “All historians are coroners.”

On the "Notorious RBG": “God bless Ruth Bader Ginsburg, goats, bobbleheads, and all. But trivialization — RBG’s workout tips! Her favorite lace collars! — is not tribute… Ginsburg was a scholar, an advocate, and a judge of formidable sophistication, complexity, and, not least, contradiction and limitation. It is no kindness to flatten her into a paper doll and sell her as partisan merch.”

On Amazon: Paraphrasing the words of a striking Pullman worker (1894), Lepore writes: “We live in Amazon houses and eat Amazon groceries and read Amazon newspapers and when we die we will go to an Amazon hell. In the meantime, you can buy your Bernie 2020 hats and ASOC T-shirts… on Amazon.”

I’ll conclude with these two final things: First, I’d read several of the essays before, when they were first published, but reading them again was a joy. And most impressively, even my lovely wife the physician, who never reads history or essays, keeps picking up this book and saying how wonderful it is. (Of course, inasmuch she married me, it would not be unreasonable to wonder about how discerning she is.)

[Luke LeBar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been familiar with Jill Lepore for some time now. I really liked the first few seasons of the podcast “The Last Archive.” This book is a doorstop of a book, collecting almost 20 years worth of essays on a wide variety of topics, from bicycles to gun violence. I am sympathetic to Lepore. I think her perspective on American history fundamentally aligns with mine. The best parts of this book are the essays on American history: bicycles, Barbie, William Randolf Hearst. America is a big and wonderfully strange place full of big personalities and strange characters. Any understanding of our present has to tap into that weirdness and Lepore does a great job of that. There were two essays in particular that I absolutely loved. The first was about Rachel Carson, one of my scientific heroes. The best in the American tradition is in those good soiled men and women who do their best to leave this place better than she found it. Carson is one of those people. The second was on gun violence. It was a criticism and history of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. I cried at the end of that essay. My heart aches because while the bodies of Americans pile high, our Supreme Court continues to make it easier for people to be killed. Lepore makes clear that our history and our present are the realm of dignity denied and death made trivial.

Lepore treats history as social and cultural criticism. I have always enjoyed this approach. Christopher Lasch influenced me deeply in this way. And it is from Lasch that my criticism of this book comes from. Lepore seems to regard populism with disdain rather than as a valuable source of energy and ideas. She consistently seems to stick to the neoliberal line. Sometimes she leans on a “resistance” liberalism that I find impotent in the face of all of the challenges and forces that want to take away the things we hold dear. Lepore has a really great understanding of the influence of technology in American history but has a much weaker grasp in my opinion of religion. Religion is one of the great forces in American history and it has pushed this country in places good and bad. Lepore’s arguments would benefit from a more sympathetic understanding of faith and populism. Solid book, long book.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to Jill Lepore's outstanding historical writing through These Truths, her magnificent history of the United States. She's a brilliant and engaging writer who does the sort of research that imbues her text with a relevance and accuracy that is commanding, and a prose stylist of the first order who recognizes that history is a story that is TOLD, and involves the lives of real human beings.

The Deadline is a collection of Lepore's essays on a host of topics. There's historical writing here, and personal essays, and in-depth looks at the decisions of the Supreme Court and the US under Trump. The research and writing is top notch and all of these essays invite the reader to join Lepore in storytelling about things we don't always see, but which matter deeply. This is one of the very best books I've read this year.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compendium of the author’s New Yorker essays - with Ms Lepore’s characteristic deep dives into history on virtually every topic including Barbie dolls. It really gets going about 25% into this lengthy audiobook (23 hours) with an excellent piece on the rise (and fall) of journalism. I enjoy the curiosity on display, the breezy yet confident writing style, and wide range of topics. Like Mary Roach with an advanced degree in US history.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lugged this book around for a month but it was totally worth it! I feel way smarter having read Lepore’s personal, cultural, and US histories.

[Stefan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb collection of essays/articles. Very highly recommended.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

The longer, more historical, less fun, more nuanced, less emotional, more informative big sister of The Anthropocene Reviewed. 5/5.

[Laura Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want Jill Lepore to be my personal historian and honorary aunt and we can drive around in her VW bus while she tells me stories about Jane Franklin and the secret lives of all the US Supreme Court justices.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jill Lepore’s books should be required reading.

[Casey (ish-i-ness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every essay provides important and original insights into topics that are vitally important to any thinking person in our current era, constantly asking us to mine the depths of our knowledge in any number of disciplines in terms of the events we are witnessing in our lives today. Worth reading as a practice in critical thinking if nothing else, but there’s so much to be gained from reading.

[Ruthiella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not much of a nonfiction reader and even less so of essays, so I am not the right reader for this collection. I definitely preferred the more general interest essays about Barbie vs Bratz or Rachel Carson or Ripley’s Believe it or Not, etc. than I did the more historical, political and/or personal essays.

[Cass · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jill Lepore is a terrific writer, thinker, and historian, but don’t get to know her through this collection!
I am not sure why, but her usual flair, crispness, and originality just do not come across at all in this book.
It might be that the news isn’t fresh. It might be that they are often a little too long and detailed for an essay. It might be that the essay just isn’t her format. I can’t figure it out, but she’s written enough other great work that you have many better choices.

[Owlish · Rating 5 out of 5]

"American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars' worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world." p. 270

"Futurists foretell inevitable outcomes by conjuring up inevitable pasts. People who are in the business of selling predictions need to present the past as predictable-- the ground truth, the test case. Machines are more predictable than people, and in histories written by futurists the machines just keep coming; depicting their march as unstoppable certifies the futurists' predictions. But machines don't just keep coming. They are funded, invented, built, sold, bought, and used by people who could just as easily not fund, invent, build, sell, buy, and use them. Machines don't drive history; people do. History is not a smart car." p. 335

"Zuckerberg was particularly obsessed with regular surveys that asked users whether Facebook is "good for the world" (a tally abbreviated GFW). When Facebook implemented such changes as demoting lies in the News Feed, the GFW went up, but the time users spent on Facebook went down. Zuckerberg decided to reverse the changes." p 346

"Collecting data and selling ads does not build community, and it turns out that bringing people closer together, at least in the way Facebook does it, makes it easier for them to hurt one another. Facebook wouldn't be so successful if people didn't love using it, sharing family photographs, joining groups, reading curated news, and even running small businesses. But studies have consistently shown that the more time people spend on Facebook the worse their mental health becomes; Facebooking is also correlated with increased sedentariness, a diminishment of meaningful face-to-face relationships, and a decline in real-world social activities." p. 351

"Over the protests of many Facebook employees, Zuckerberg had adopted, and stuck to, a policy of not subjecting any political advertisements to fact-checking. Refusing to be "an arbiter of truth," Facebook instead established itself as a disseminator of misinformation." p. 351

"The system of government put in place by the Constitution is broken in all sorts of ways, subject to forms of corruption, political decay, and anitdemocracy measures that include gerrymandering, the filibuster, campaign spending, and the cap on the size of the House of Representatives. The law professor Sanford Levinson has written, 'To the extent that we continue thoughtlessly to venerate, and therefore not subject to truly critical examination, our Constitution, we are in the position of the battered wife who continues to profess the 'essential goodness' of her abusive husband.' Or, as Burke noted, 'A state without the means of some changes in without the means of its conservation." p. 379

"Rather than being amended, the Constitution has been betrayed, circumvented, violated, and abandoned, by force of practice. Can a U.S. president compel a foreign leader to interfere in an American election? Apparently. Can a U.S. president refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election and incite a mob to attack Congress in order to prevent the certification of the vote? Apparently. The U.S. Constitution, no less than the UK's unwritten constitution, is more than the sum of its words; it's the accretion of practices and precedents." p. 379

"Alito, shocked-- shocked-- to discover so little in the law books of the 1860s guaranteeing a right to abortion, had missed the point: hardly anything in the law books of the 1860s guaranteed women anything. Because, usually, they still weren't persons. Nor, for that matter, were fetuses...when Samuel Alito says that people who believe abortion is a constitutional right 'have no persuasive answer to this historical evidence,' he displays nothing so much as the limits of his own evidence. 'The page of history teems with woman's wrongs,' as Sarah Grimké once put it. It does not teem with women's rights. To use a history of discrimination to deny people their constitutional rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice. Would the Court decide civil rights cases regarding race by looking exclusively to laws and statutes written before emancipation?" p. 410

"The Constitution never mentions sex, marriage, or reproduction. This is because the political order that the Constitution established was a fraternity of free men who, believing themselves to have been created equal, consented to be governed. Women did not and could not give their consent: they were neither free nor equal...Essentially, the Constitution is inadequate. It speaks directly only to the sort of people who were enfranchised in 1787; the rest of us are left to make arguments by amendment and, failing, that, by insurrection." p. 429

"Polls don't take the pulse of democracy; they raise it." p. 516

"Presidents can be impeached for actions that are not crimes, not least because the criminal code was not written with presidents in mind. Most of us cannot commit such staggering outrages as to direct the FBI to spy on our enemies or enlist foreign powers to interfere in our elections. The president has powers that only a president can exercise, or abuse. Were these powers beyond the reach of the people's power, impeachment would be a dead letter." p. 550

"It's a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent." p. 574

[Lisa Houlihan]

Lepore is my favorite current historian. (So is HCR.)

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I was reading this book, I thought about the astounding range of topics that Jill Lepore has apparently studied deeply, investigated, discussed, pondered, etc. These are not off-the-top-of-her-head newspaper columns. These are deep, insightful, substantial essays, and they cut across politics, history, law, culture, technology, motherhood, and so much more.

There's no way a single person could absorb that information by herself, especially when she's got other major responsibilities, such as teaching at Harvard and being a mom (her first few essays are about the difficulty of being a caring mother and having a serious career). She obviously has a platoon of researchers to look up anecdotes for her and summarize key books and law cases --- the kind of work she did for White male professors as she was climbing the ladder. This is not a criticism of her, but just a thought that I kept coming back to: How can anyone be this smart? It's one thing to read her essays and more or less understand them, but it's a very different thing to go through the background investigation and come up with conclusions and put them down clearly and succinctly, as she does. That's intelligence of a higher order.

Lepore has many fascinating insights, but what stands out most for me is how eloquently she states her points, rather than the points themselves. Nowhere is she better than in showing the cynicism of the right-wing movement that vaulted Donald Trump to the presidency and protected him at every one of his criminal acts, right through leading the January 6 treason. She points out relentlessly the racism, religious fanaticism, the stupidity of the MAGA crowd and the ways that Republican politicians played to the audience, as well as the profound harm it's done to our nation. She shows the same thing in an essay about how we got to this insane situation on guns, in which the Supreme Court has found imaginary rights for private citizens to arm themselves like military invasion forces and kill 40,000-plus of their fellow citizens each year, while the leaders of the country (on the Right) say, Oh there's nothing we can do because it's the Constitution. Bullshit, and she shows exactly which legal decisions are flawed, and why.

She's also fantastic on sex politics, issues such as women in the workplace, the sexualization of girls through Barbies and other dolls, the MeToo movement, and more. And she doesn't come down with easy answers all the time -- for example, criticizing MeToo for excesses in a McCarthy-communist way. I agree with her that there is a big difference between an awkward and unwelcome moment (pat on the lower back at a cocktail party) and sexual harassment of the Harvey Weinstein variety. Treating them both as crimes against humanity doesn't solve the problem, but just raises tensions for everyone. She's brave for pointing this out, given that MeToo people surely have attacked her for conceding any ground on the issue.

She's equally brave for her relentless criticism of the Right. Those folks are crazy and evil, and it's easy to point out their lies. But because they are crazy and evil, it's dangerous to say it publicly. They're the ones with guns. They're the ones who bomb homes and clinics. They're the ones who call the police for fake raids. They're the ones who storm the Capitol. And yet if we didn't have people like Jill Lepore chronicling it, they might actually get away with it.

I'm optimistic that America will right itself eventually --- 20 years or more from now --- and I'm sure that Jill Lepore's insights will help to show the way. That's the highest possible praise you can give to a writer of essays; she is changing public discourse by showing truths in ways that are undeniable.

[Hazel P · Rating 5 out of 5]

🔖 Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn't, we won't be able to agree on th facts, let alone values. (p214)

When we Google-know, Lynch argued, we no longer take responsibility for our own beliefs, and we lack the capacity to see how bits of facts fit into a larger whole. Essentially, we forfeit our reason. （p214)

Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honour. (p408)


✍️ I couldn’t adore the collection of essays more. It took me much longer (around 7 weeks) than I initially planned to finish the 46 essays, but every night spent absorbing the words and paragraphs was unequivocally rewarding. The majority of articles in the collection were previously published in The New Yorker, covering a wide array of topics from politics, the legal system, to technology and literature (such as the origin of “disruptive innovation” and why it is not a reliable indicator of which industry will thrive, or why our pervasive fascination with dystopian novels is alerting).

I was unfamiliar to almost all of the topics. For example, I had never pondered the education of children of undocumented immigrants, nor was I familiar with the principles (as believed by Alito) on which Roe v. Wade was overturned, or the origin of the police. Yet, I cherished each article in the collection and valued the insights shared by Lepore. For example, in “The American Beast,” Lepore pointed out that the January 6th report published by the U.S. government solely blamed Trump, failing to inquire into WHY people believed him. Moreover, the report lacked insights from economic and social perspectives. I admire Lepore's ability to discern the multitude of perspectives a topic embodies and draw upon rich historical context for compelling explanations.

I also found solace in the personal essays. In an interview with Barnes & Noble’s Pour Over in 2023, Lepore revealed that she used to believe writing personal essays would undermine her credibility as a historian and serious thinker, until a friend reminded her that such a mindset was misogynistic. I am thankful to Lepore for embracing her friend’s advice, as it allowed me, years later, as a relatively young reader, to be able to read the piece on Lepore’s Italian grandfather and his journey to self-taught literacy, and to write down the sentence from the article in my notebook, “your teeth are made for this (reading materials)”.

* A couple of articles overlap with "The American Beast," which I spotted in local bookshops earlier this year, and THAT prompted me to pick up "The Deadline."

[Zachary Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent book. It lost one star because it left me bored from time to time, but some of the essays are in themselves worth the price of admission, so to speak. The titular essay, a personal piece about loss, grief and the passing of time, is one of those priceless entries, as are the essay on Rachel Carson, the review of the January 6 commission’s report and the Clayton Christensen deconstruction.

“For Lear, the author “Of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature” and the editor of an excellent anthology, “Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson,” Carson's familial obligations—in particular, the children—are nothing but burdens that ‘deprived her of privacy and drained her physical and emotional energy.’ Lear means this generously, as a way of accounting for why Carson didn't write more, and why, except for her Sun articles, she never once submitted a manuscript on time. But caring for other people brings its own knowledge. Carson came to see the world as beautiful, wild, animal, and vulnerable, each part attached to every other part, not only through prodigious scientific research but also through a lifetime of caring for the very old and the very young, wiping a dying man's brow, tucking motherless girls into bed, heating up dinners for a lonely litle boy. The domestic pervades Carson's understanding of nature. "’Wildlife, it is pointed out, is dwindling because its home is being destroyed,’ she wrote in 1938, "but the home of wildlife is also our home.’ If she’d had fewer ties, she would have had less insight” (82).

He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.
Excerpt from “Moby Dick,” from an article on Melville’s relationship with the female figures in his life

“It’s very hard to ratify a constitutional amendment, but if a president could amass enough power and accrue enough blindly loyal followers he could get an amendnen ratifed that revised the mechanism of amendment itself. If a revised Article V made it possible for a president to amend the Constitution by fiat, he could turn a democracy into a dictatorship without ever having done anything unconstitutional. What Gödel did not realize is that it's actually a lot easier than that” (380).

“Maybe what people experiencing loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are homes with other humans who love them and need them, and to know they are needed by them in societies that care about them.
That's not a policy agenda. That's an indictment of modern life.”

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jill Lepore is someone I discovered from reading The New Yorker, and now I look for her byline every time I get a new copy. I've been told I need to read her history of the United States called "These Truths", and I plan to do so in the new year.

Lepore's specialty is taking a contemporary political or social issue and examining the historical precedents for it with clarity and incision. This collection of essays is wide-ranging and consistently good. I walked away from each essay with a broader understanding of the issues examined, and a profound respect for Lepore's scholarship and craft.

In order, Lepore's essays in this book examine:
1. motherhood
2. Jane Franklin (sister of Benjamin Franklin)
3. Herman Melville
4. Mary Shelley
5. Rachel Carson
6. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
7. Ripley's "Believe It Or Not"
8. the cryonics movement
9. Bratz dolls
10. Dr. Who
11. dystopian fiction
12. Volkswagen buses
13. fiction versus historical writing
14. Roger Ailes and Fox News
15. truth in a post-truth world
16. the evolution of print journalism
17. the history of American gun laws and gun culture
18. the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State
19. the history of policing in America
20. the Watts race riots
21. the "Wayback Machine" internet archive
22. innovation and disruption in the private and public sectors
23. Facebook
24. constitutions and literacy
25. history of the Supreme Court
26. Guantanamo Bay
27. abortion law
28. undocumented immigrant children's right to an education
29. SCOTUS cases on contraception and gay rights
30. "Me Too" in the context of historical sex panics
31. The Scopes Trial and the fight over school curriculum
32. the Covid-19 pandemic and confinement to the indoors, historically
33. Covid-19 and the loneliness epidemic
34. Covid-19 and burnout
35. the history of opinion polling
36. the 2016 Republican and Democratic conventions
37. the history of impeachment
38. Trump's violations of public records laws and the history of the national archives
39. the rise and fall of democracies, 1930s and today
40. the January 6th report

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to make sense of our current political divides in a historical context.

[James Hallmark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've become a bit of a fanboy of Jill Lepore over the past 5 years or so, first discovering her via her podcast "The Last Archives." I'd like to live next-door to Jill and chat with her over a beer on the porch. She has that sort of engaging, silly, sarcastic, innocent, intellectual personality and is crazy smart. That's an odd combination, but it comes out in her podcasts and in her essays from The New Yorker; and that's what this book is, a compilation of essays by Lapore that appeared in The New Yorker spanning close to 20 years. If you don't know of her, she is a history professor at Harvard, unapologetically liberal, a married mom of three, and the kind of public intellectual that is just as likely to write about buying shoes at Walmart as she is complaining about her daughter's "Bratz'" dolls or about General Washington forging the Delaware. And no matter the topic, the tone of her writing is closer to midwestern, middle-class mom than it is northeastern intellectual. In this book, I found some of the essays heart wrenching (the loss of her best friend to cancer, for example), some funny, some thought provoking, and some not even remotely interesting. And there ya go: a collection of essays. An insider's tip: if you don't want to read the book (it is very long, 640 pages) but would like to hear a few of the essays for free, download (for free) “The Last Archive” podcast and you can listen to 6 of the essays from this book, read by Jill, followed by her being interviewed by Ben Naddaff-Hafrey (her sidekick and good friend). The discussions between Ben and Jill are outstanding and have the vibe of two friends chatting about the essay and the topic, rather than an interview. Fair warning: her reading of her own essays leaves a bit to be desired. She reads like a high school theatre kid who isn’t very good at doing voices. Regardless, good book, and outstanding podcast interviews about selected essays.

[Cgallozzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened via Audible

I follow the writings of Jill Lepore - I think of her as an historian - rather than as an essayist.
While this compendium of previously published essays were good, well written and show complex analysis and thought - I prefer her writing on history..

However.....there were several essays where Lepore narrated more detailed and intimate aspects of her life - difficulty in raising children and being on a 'tenure track' - at a major university; the issues related to caring for her mother and etc.

There were also many essays about where, how and when she 'grew up' - with incidents that informed her worldview.

The most valuable essays to me were later in the compendium - related to the shortcomings she saw in the House's report on the events of 01/06/21 - to paraphrase her thought model - it focuses solely on Trump - ignores all other things that over time led to the conditioning of a large segment of the American populace to embrace Conspiracy Theories - hold that the 2020 Election 'was stolen' (without evidence) - and etc. in other words they didn't answer the 'WHY' (what has happened so that 'N' Million people believe these unsubstantiated lies) question - which is a correct charge - but also not House Democrats original intent. There was and is a missed opportunity here.

The last essay narrates the current time frame where the U S populace sees 'Democracy' dying around the globe - a retrogression to authoritarianism - Lepore reminds the reader that this failure of 'baby democracies' to grow out of infant status - happened after the end of WW I where 'n' new countries and democracies were formed out of the losing Empires.

Good, not great read - good, not great narrator.

Should be of interest to people who follow U S History and of Jill Lepore.

Carl Gallozzi
Cgallozzi@comcast.net

[Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms. Lepore is a master essayist. Whether she writes about matters personal, scientific, political or historic, she is an impressively sharp thinker who detects and observes connections that the rest of us simply miss. Here are some 46 of her pieces, most of them previously published in The New Yorker. Highly recommended. Lepore lovers must also read "These Truths," her superb single volume history of the United States.

Among the types of connections that I found striking and accurate (and timely), consider this one (as it was explored in a presentation summarized later in the Harvard Gazette):

With her eye on history, Jill Lepore said the oft-cited generational divide between older and younger feminists is a manifestation of a longstanding rift in the women’s movement between the protectionists, who are eager to hold on to special rights gradually gained for women over time, and the equalizers, who push for a more sweeping, equal-rights-for-all agenda.

It can be helpful to remember that this deep divide “is with us still,” said Lepore, noting that many people opposed to the direction of Title IX litigation and #MeToo see such efforts as protectionist in nature.

Lepore also recalled the campaign against sex criminals in 1937 by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover used the effort as a political tool to push aside people “with the act of scandalizing their private affairs,” and helped usher in McCarthyism, said Lepore. She called the effort a cautionary tale for the #MeToo movement.

“I almost in a way hate to raise the specter of such a terrifying and fearsome piece of American political and social and sexual history, but I do think it’s the kind of story that we do need to face as we try to determine the future direction of a movement that could lead to lasting change and real justice, but could equally well — and history might suggest [would] — lead to something itself quite terrible.”

[Serena Jampel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started listening to this and about ten minutes in, I desperately marched down to Blackwells, home of the largest room for bookselling in the world, to get my hands on a physical copy. Alas, it was not available in the UK yet. So what did I do? I had my parents literally go buy it and bring it to me. I was already obsessed with Jill Lepore's writing (see: The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity or Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin or, obviously, These Truths: A History of the United States) but this, a collection of her essays, took. my. breath. away. Are all of them winners? No. But they are funny and eloquent and emotional and PERFECT. The most memorable ones for me were about: the death of her best friend, motherhood, bratz dolls, the internet archive, and Frankenstein. But there were like 45 in this massive tome and I'd say 80% of them are breathtaking. God I just want to BE HER. Yeowwwww