Deadline

<p>Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at <em>The New Yorker</em> 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 <em>The Deadline</em> 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 <em>deadline</em>, the "river of time that divides the quick from the dead." Echoing Gore Vidal's <em>United States</em> in its massive intellectual erudition, <em>The Deadline</em>, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay-and of history-itself.</p>