Deadline : Essays by Jill Lepore

When Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker in 2005, her exceptional insights, wisdom, and ability to connect with her readers became immediately apparent. Through her wide-ranging knowledge and sharp writing style, Lepore breathed new life into subjects ranging from long-gone writers to urgent constitutional analysis, to the nation’s troubled affairs. The essays found in The Deadline offer a collection of diverse perspectives on American society, exploring its infatuation with technology, its fractious nature, and its aimlessness despite being armed. Lepore expertly navigates topics such as lockdowns, race commissions, Bratz dolls, and bicycles, examining how they intersect with her own personal losses. These essays continuously cross what Lepore refers to as the “deadline,” representing the irreversible passage of time. With intellectual erudition comparable to Gore Vidal’s United States, The Deadline challenges the conventional notion of the essay and reimagines the very essence of history itself, through its remarkable interweaving of the political and the personal.

#PouredOver: Jill Lepore on The Deadline: Reimagining Constitutional History

I’m Mila Messer, the producer and host of portover, and I’ve been waiting to have this conversation with Jill Laporte for a bit. You know her from these truths, and she’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer, a finalist for the national book award, and also winner of the Bancroft for a book called the name of War. The deadline is just out and it’s 10 years worth of essays, a small selection. I think it’s pretty great. I have to say I didn’t realize quite how closely I’d been reading you in the New Yorker until I started reading the deadline. You have such a wide range of material in this book, and I mean obviously some of the things that people have read, like “if then” start the essay that started that book, is in here. It’s kind of cool to see the starts of all of these different books, and you mentioned it too. They’re little bits and Bobs that have appeared in these truths, but really this is its own work.

When I was asked to put together a collection of essays, I decided to limit it to just the last 10 years, partly because it’s been such an exceptional Ferris wheel of American History. Roller coaster doesn’t even really get it. So, I wanted to think about the political pieces over the last years that would contain the pandemic and would contain the Trump era, and so we’d have a kind of real-time me trying to make sense of these unprecedented times as a historian. But then I also wanted to do something unusual for me, which was to gather together more personal pieces, which I quite infrequently write. I’d never put those in a book before, but in fact, the title essay, The Deadline, is a personal essay, and so I really brought that material to the fore.”

Exploring the Last 10 Years of American History in “The Deadline”

I’m Mila Messer, the producer and host of portover, and I’ve been waiting to have this conversation with Jill Laporte for a bit. You know her from these truths, and she’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer, a finalist for the national book award, and also winner of the Bancroft for a book called the name of War. The deadline is just out and it’s a collection of essays that spans the last 10 years of American history, offering a diverse range of topics and personal reflections.