Many of the pieces in “The Deadline: Essays” were first published in The New Yorker, and all together, they serve as a kind of guide for the biggest current events of the last decades, reviews critic Carol Iaciofano Aucoin.
If newspapers are the first rough draft of history, magazines can offer a multi-dimensional second draft. A magazine essay, its author afforded the luxury of more writing time, can deliver in-depth research as well as a fresh perspective on a current event or trend. This is what historian Jill Lepore’s ““The Deadline” is a collection of 46 essays, most of which were first published in The New Yorker, where Lepore is a staff writer.
Subjects range across a considerable landscape. There are revelatory profiles of historic figures such as Herman Melville and Rachel Carson and essays on cultural battles that have roiled the nation . There are also essays that simply enrich your understanding of American culture, like “Burned,” which explains how “burnout” morphed from an early 1970s label only applied to drug users to a 1980s term for overwork.
Reading essays on politics in 2023 carries a particular urgency. The 2015 essay “Politics and the New Machine” traces how political polling, once a mere accessory, mutated into a paramount news force and how, according to Lepore, it has made American political life “frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.” “After the Fact,” an article originally published in 2016, tracks how, due in part to the internet, a hold on a shared reality gradually loosened.
“The Parent Trap,” covering education battles over what should be taught in public schools and what books can reside in a school library, illustrates Lepore’s skill at setting a seemingly new issue into a solid historical context. Reaching back to the 1925 Scopes Trial, which argued whether or not evolution should be taught in Tennessee public schools, Lepore highlights how a clash over a specific topic is often about much more.
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