The Deadline: Essays

Lepore’s newest collection of essays spans the biggest political issues of the past few decades, as well as some of the biggest events of her personal life. The vast majority of these pieces have already been published and are several years old, but such are her erudition, her literary gifts, and her penetrating eye that they all seem timely and fresh. According to her own rules, everything she writes must have “hidden within it, an archival Easter egg.” Whether dealing with the history of impeachment (beginning in 1376), polling, presidential archives, torture, or constitutions, she generally delivers not just a bright egg but a basketful of revelations. Her treatment of the widely hailed report of the House select committee on the January 6 attack on the Capitol is particularly noteworthy. Many hailed the report as a triumph. Lepore calls it “dreary, repetitive, and exhausting” and “a shambles” as history because it failed to ask why anyone could believe U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims about the election. “It blames Trump,” she concludes, which in the end, “explains very little.”