Before the documentary Nuit et brouillard (“Night and Fog”) was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, French authorities censored a still image that appears in the film. In the photo, an unnamed man stands at the far left side of the frame, keeping watch over a wooden building and a scattered crowd of people. A fake beam has been drawn just over his head, concealing … something.

In the uncensored version, released many decades later, we see that what has been blocked is a jaunty rounded cap. It’s called a kepi, and any French civilian would have recognized it as part of the uniform of the French police. The officer is guarding prisoners at Pithiviers, a transit camp 50 miles outside of Paris where Jewish deportees were put on trains for concentration camps farther east. He’s not a Nazi guard or member of the SS, but there he is, aiding and abetting the Reich.

Night and Fog was one of the earliest works of its kind—a dogged, revelatory Holocaust film that showed Nazi atrocities in all their horror, down to the fingernail-scratch marks left on the ceilings of gas chambers. In exchange for covering up the kepi, preventing the French from seeing one of their own blithely supervising genocide, censors ruled that the documentary could keep its final scenes of dead bodies being pushed by bulldozers, like road rubble, into massive pits. Night and Fog’s director, Alain Resnais, considered the quid pro quo sufficient for his purposes.

[Read: What it feels like when Fascism starts]

In the 1950s, would the French have been surprised by the notion that “ordinary” people had allowed or encouraged the extermination of the Jews? The war had ended only 10 years earlier; they had lived through it. They knew which neighbors had acted with cowardice or bravery, and that most, really, had lived somewhere between those two extremes. France had undergone a purge of Nazi collaborators and Vichy supplicants under its postwar leader General Charles de Gaulle, but its results, we now know, were wildly ad hoc; some perpetrators were released and others were shot in the head. De Gaulle’s insistence that good people and bad people had already been sorted, and that the French ought to forgive one another and move on, clamped down on conversations about ambiguity. Uncertainty itself was banished.

More than three-quarters of a century later, the witnesses have nearly all died, and Holocaust stories are told at a remove of three generations or more. Anyone who writes about the war must now wrestle with the idea that sometimes the facts are diluted, lost, erased, enhanced, and flat-out wrong. They also must acknowledge that a limited set of categories has come to define the people who lived in such morally compromising times: victim, villain, or hero. But what of those stories that can not be labeled as either valor or evil? Perhaps we venture only warily into this territory because degrees of culpability are so hard to parse out: Who was acting under duress, and who willingly exploited their countrymen? Who kept silent out of fear, and who was “just following orders”? This group of people might be harder to capture in retrospect, but understanding the nuance of their wartime experience is important if we ever hope to grasp how humanity holds up under the most grotesque of psychological conditions.

Burkhard Bilger didn’t know until his late 20s that his grandfather Karl Gönner had been a Nazi—a party chief, in fact, in a small village called Bartenheim in the Alsace region of France, “the great fault line of Europe,” which has at various moments in history been part of neighboring Germany. After the war, Gönner’s Nazism wasn’t discussed in the family: Bilger’s mother and her siblings were children of the war and their reticence was common for Germans at the time, who hoped to quietly bury their nation’s ugly past. For Bilger’s family in particular, with a former Nazi as their patriarch, the urge to stay mum may have been preservational. They’d been taught “never to ask questions,” he explains in his new family memoir, Fatherland. “The answers could only be dismal or self-incriminating—or worse, self-justifying.”

Bilger himself is an American. He was born and raised in Oklahoma, where his family moved in 1962, partly to escape the postwar misery of Germany and its 17 billion cubic feet of rubble. Despite frequent visits to the enchanting, almost primeval Black Forest where his parents had grown up, he didn’t attempt to parse his grandfather’s murky past until 17 years ago, when his mother, Edeltraut, received a packet of letters from a German relative. The letters, he writes, were from Gönner’s days as a Nazi occupier in Bartenheim, and they “turned his story inside out again.” So Bilger, by then a staff writer at The New Yorker, went digging.

The major animating concern of his research—years spent rooting around in town-hall basement archives, finding and interviewing elderly witnesses who knew Gönner—was figuring out what kind of Nazi his grandfather had been. A repugnant ideologue? A practical agnostic? Was it a mistake he regretted? A desperate move to keep his family alive? Without Gönner around to answer such questions, Bilger had only the records of war and contradictory accounts of hazy memories. So in Fatherland he builds a narrative that admits to its holes, that doesn’t shy away from its incompleteness while it still makes an effort, with the materials at hand, to understand life in wartime and the kind of people whose actions occupy that gray zone of morality.

Fatherland has a mission to give the widest, most generous view of the suffocating and enraging conditions in which its figures operated. In other words, Bilger is attempting a bold, nearly impossible experiment: to see if the reader can find sympathy for a Nazi—one who held chalk instead of a rifle, one who may have saved more lives than a conscientious objector. One who also happens to be his flesh and blood. He lays out the limited details he can find that might justify, or at least explain, why an ordinary man might stay committed to Hitler’s regime.

Gönner was born in 1899 in Herzogenweiler, a hilltop town so bedraggled by the lingering inequities of the feudal system and the collapse of the local glass industry that by the time he was 11, fewer than 100 citizens remained. He wanted to be a priest but instead was drafted into the German army for its last big push across the Western Front, where he lost an eye in 1918 at Liry, near the Somme. He returned home, physically and psychologically battered, too faithless to enter the priesthood and too incapacitated to return to the engineering work he’d left. Teaching was the only field that seemed viable, but he returned to a Germany of such rank economic misery that he had to beg for a working stove in the one-room lodgings he was assigned at his first teaching job at an elementary school. Gönner had been born with little and now could hope only for less. As Bilger writes, “All that was left of his faith, after the war, was a hunger for order and justice.”

Then Hitler arrived. Elementary-school teachers—the least prestigious, most impoverished sort—were intended to act as cogs in the führer’s propaganda machine, which declared that young boys were the raw material that would bring Germany back to prosperity and their teachers the force that would shape them. Gönner signed his party-membership card in May 1933, believing Hitler’s claims that “no one shall go hungry! No one shall freeze!” We know he wrote in 1932 that he had “an open commitment to National Socialism,” and that he attended two rallies at Nuremberg, though Bilger, for all his hearty research, can’t turn up much evidence of what Gönner thought as the Nazi Party evolved in the late ’30s into a runaway freight train of hate, murder, and continental ruin. But he notes that Gönner’s “principles were increasingly untethered from Nazi policies” and presents evidence that he began to perform small acts of passive rebellion.

[Read: The children of the Nazis’ genetic project]

In March of 1942, after a year and a half working as a schoolteacher in occupied Bartenheim, he was given the official and weighty title of Ortsgruppenleiter, or “town leader,” which carried a strange kind of responsibility: The job was to liaise with Nazi officials, to file reports on suspicious villagers, to hand out fines for saying bonjour in the street. The particulars that Bilger turns up about Gönner’s interactions with locals, including French Resistance fighters, his landlady, and the town mayor, sketch an image of a man hemmed in by the existential and practical impossibility of his role.

Gönner didn’t report on villagers when they slaughtered a pig without party approval, or kept an illicit radio, or sang “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. The mayor’s son tells Bilger, “Your grandfather could have denounced my father a hundred times, and he never did.” Another man, one who would later hold great sway over Gönner’s fate, told Bilger’s mother that “it was because of Gönner that no family from Bartenheim had been deported. That no one had died in a camp.” A pupil lays out the ultimate contradiction: “He was a Nazi, but a reasonable one.” But he did sign every letter “Heil Hitler” and recruit boys to the Hitler Youth. He acted as the embodiment of the party in Bartenheim. He resisted and relented. The unanswerable philosophical inquiry that floats atop all of Fatherland is whether “passive resistance” in the face of a life-threatening force like Nazism ought to be categorized as a moral victory or failure.

Bilger’s approach is satisfyingly holistic. Complicating the plot is part of his intent. His broad history of Alsace situates Gönner in a region that was passed back and forth between the German and French several times in his life, a place where many of the citizens spoke only German and allegiance to any one nation wasn’t guaranteed. And the blurriness wasn’t only geographic. Alsace is an ideal setting for studying the various human impulses at work in a time of self-preservation: Some residents displayed great courage, hiding neighbors who had escaped from being forcefully conscripted into the German army, while others arose early that first morning of the occupation to greet the Nazis with cigars and chocolates. Most simply tried to get by, to avoid notice, to wait out the food rationing and random searches—in the meantime, they did what they could to survive.

The categorical imperative at work in Holocaust literature, the need to define good actors versus bad actors, is understandable—no event in recent history has cast so much of humanity into a kaleidoscope of black and white. Cultural depiction has followed the same pattern. There are the portraits of Hitler and his henchmen in films such as Der Untergang; the wide, valuable range of material depicting the genocide of the Jews, including Schindler’s List and Elie Wiesel’s Night; and the heavily documented heroics of foreign forces and resistance fighters—the volumes written about the coders at Bletchley Park, the 101st Airborne, the uprising at the Warsaw ghetto.

But what Bilger shows is how the forces moving against ordinary citizens—the threat of their own deportation, torture, or murder—could turn them into the most unimaginable of all war-battered Europeans, meek preservationists fighting individual wars for their own lives. They may have had soft spines or children to protect. Perhaps they simply didn’t know how to rise up; perhaps they were too self-concerned to care; perhaps they simply consoled themselves that the stories of evil done in their name couldn’t actually be real. As for himself, he explains, “I told myself that I would have done better. That I never would have joined the Nazi Party, never followed Hitler or left my family behind. But then everyone tells themselves that. The more I learned about life in occupied France, the more I could see soft spots in my own character, the ethical give.”

In the immediate aftermath of the war, justice came swooping down on collaborators, perpetrators, and a slew of others caught up in the mix. Gönner, for his part, ended up in a dank French prison before authorities determined his “classification”: They landed on Minderbelasteten, or “less responsible,” and then Entlasteten, “exonerated.” The French, Bilger writes, referred to the enterprise as L’épuration sauvage, the “savage purification”; nearly a third of a million people were charged with treason or collaboration. Evidence wasn’t necessarily available or explicit; there isn’t always time for legal documentation in a war zone. And over the five years of war, it was hard to discern who had resisted so passively that their behavior now looked accommodating or downright treacherous.

The fog of war also applies to citizens. In 2003, the writer and actress Anne Berest's mother, Lélia, received an unsigned postcard with only four words written on it—Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, Jacques—the names of her grandfather, grandmother, aunt, and uncle, all of whom had died at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard dropped in their mail slot, she paired up with her mother to investigate who might have sent it, and whether it was meant as a threat or a memorial. Her novelized family memoir, The Postcard, narrates Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques’ life and death, Berest’s grandmother Myriam’s war spent in hiding in a neglected mountain cabin, and the detective role that Berest, like Bilger, took on to trawl town-hall archives for clues. After she relays their tragedies, Berest wants an answer similar to the one Bilger is seeking: How much culpability does that silent middle bear for the erasure of her family’s story, their possessions, their lives?

Berest’s book is a hit in France—it’s sold more than 300,000 copies and landed on the list of finalists for the Prix Goncourt. But the trouble with The Postcard is that she’s labeled it fiction and so it’s impossible to discern what facts Berest really gathered from old documents and French bureaucrats and which ones are her invention. The story is real, its outlines real, and surely, its pull on Berest is real too. But for a writer who is desperate to understand her ancestors, to learn what threads carry through from their lives to hers, concocting this jam of a story, dosed with sugar and cooked over a hot flame, is a strange and discordant decision. The same flavors emerge, but it’s chemically transformed.

I read The Postcard in tandem with Fatherland, as a sort of counterpoint. What could each book offer as a way of breaking through the haze? They share the same bones: both authors kept in the dark about their grandparents’ wartime lives, both handed cryptic documents that kick-started years-long research, both uncomfortable with the fog that hovers over their ancestry.

The Postcard—perhaps because its author writes herself as incredibly unschooled on the Holocaust, asking her mother painfully obvious questions about the war—never quite rises to the occasion. But in its most revelatory moment, Berest drives with Lélia to the cloistered country village from which her family was seized. She describes their encounters there as stilted and suspicious, as if the locals had been fearing this reckoning with their wartime behavior for decades. The current owner of their family home practically spits at them, demanding they call before they visit. Eventually they lie their way into another home, that of an elderly gentleman called Fauchère who was given their ancestors’ pigs when Ephraïm and Emma were taken into custody. Sitting in his living room is Emma’s rosewood piano. Fauchére begins to show them a photograph of their family home, one they know was lifted right off their family’s wall.

[Read: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?]

Confusion reigns. Fauchère doesn’t quite discern their real identities, and they don’t know quite how he ended up with these items, their items, of dear sentimental value. What’s clear is that Fauchère’s glaze of plausible deniability is what allowed him to drape their piano with his own knickknacks. Berest never finds out how it came into his possession—whether through greed or ignorance—and the piano isn’t mentioned again. But a version of his name is French slang for “thief.” Berest offers him as just one link in the long chain of citizens standing at the edge of guilt.

There’s a scene from Band of Brothers that’s stayed with me for more than 20 years. The series felt dear to me because it depicted the Airborne: My own paternal grandfather jumped with the 82nd into Holland, where he was hit with shrapnel in Arnhem, just by that bridge too far. He was paralyzed and died of his wounds a few years later. All my life I’ve seen reminders of  his heroism in American war films, felt my own third-generation connection to the deadly glory of war. So when, still in high school, I watched the episode in which Dutch resistance fighters march some female collaborators in the street and shave their heads to shame them, I never questioned the women’s guilt as people who had chosen the wrong side, who had sided with evil. These women, a member of the resistance explains to American troops, had sex with Nazis for the advantage. I blithely believed in them as easily categorized monsters, as clearly as the Airborne were heroes. But as Bilger explains, his grandfather’s landlady in Bartenheim, a single mother, gave Gönner lodgings for the desperately needed rent money—and because she didn’t have much of a choice. She suffered the fate of a shaved head and a mauled reputation, despite no evidence that she’d slept with him or even given him a friendly nod. Was she a traitor or a survivor? Or something in between?

David Grann’s nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is the sprawling story of a criminal investigation undoing a systemic evil. It lays out in riveting detail the mystery of the Osage murders of the 1920s, when dozens of Native Americans were killed in a grand conspiracy to exploit their oil-rich land. Grann digs into the societal phenomenon surrounding the Osage, many of whom became ultra-wealthy after generations of displacement and persecution. But the book’s through line is the federal investigator Tom White, who helped solve the murders on the orders of a young J. Edgar Hoover.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will be released in theaters this October, takes a very different narrative approach. White (played by Jesse Plemons) and his agents are characters in the movie, but Scorsese (who co-wrote the film with Eric Roth) focuses more on a particularly complex marriage explored tangentially in Grann’s book, between the chauffeur Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the Osage tribe member Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). Their seemingly loving partnership had nefarious underpinnings: in white landowners’ efforts to seize Native Americans’ rights and money.

The resulting story is extraordinarily told. It should certainly prove to be the splashiest cinematic release yet from Apple TV+, which co-produced the movie with Paramount Pictures. In funding a three-and-a-half-hour, Oscar-friendly epic, Apple is following in the footsteps of Netflix, whose own Scorsese film The Irishman received 10 Oscar nominations and a heap of press attention in 2019. That project burnished the streamer’s reputation as a supporter of the kind of serious, big-budget dramas that “traditional” distributors have begun to balk at. But Killers of the Flower Moon will enjoy something that The Irishman, beholden to Netflix’s insistence on quick online rollouts, missed out on: a wide theatrical release.

That’s a boon for theaters that remain starved of diverse storytelling in a post-COVID landscape dominated by financially safe sequels and franchise expansions, and other streamers should follow suit. It’s also just good news for movie lovers in general, who will get to see Scorsese’s dynamic visuals on the big screen. The gorgeously photographed film takes in rolling Oklahoma hills dotted with oil derricks, the bustling streets of the boomtown of Fairfax, and the enormous cattle ranch owned by the influential local businessman William Hale (Robert De Niro), who steers his nephew Ernest toward marrying Mollie, an heiress to an Osage fortune.

De Niro is magnificently unsettling in the film—it might be the best work he’s done with Scorsese since Goodfellas—but the emotional powerhouses are DiCaprio and Gladstone. Their characters’ romance embodies the evil yet engrossing tragedy of the Osage murders far better than a procedural crime film ever could. DiCaprio plays Ernest as a charming, foolhardy hick; the World War I veteran beguiles Mollie with his unfettered lust for life. Gladstone, until now best known for her work in Kelly Reichardt’s film Certain Women, is a stunning breakout here as the deeply independent Mollie, the real hero of a tale that is crawling with venal, misguided villains.

In an interview with Deadline previewing the movie, Scorsese explained why he shifted focus from Tom White and the Bureau of Investigation. Essentially, he didn’t want to make a movie about government cops riding to the rescue. “It was something we’ve seen before,” he said. “Look, the minute the FBI comes in, and you see a character that would be played by Robert De Niro, Bill Hale, you know he’s a bad guy. There’s no mystery. So, what is it? A police procedural? Who cares!” In prioritizing the story of Mollie, the corrupt Bill, and the complicit Ernest, Scorsese opts out of a heroes-versus-villains Western and offers a more modern American tragedy: that of the insidious colonial refusal to accept Native Americans’ own agency.

As such, Killers of the Flower Moon is of a piece with not only The Irishman but also Scorsese’s other recent film Silence. These works have a much more melancholic energy than his baroque, frenzied prior efforts—The Wolf of Wall Street, Shutter Island, and The Departed. The 80-year-old director is undeniably in the twilight of his career—“I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time,” he told Deadline. Fittingly, Killers of the Flower Moon is paced deliberately, almost like an elegy. It’s also one of the most rewarding projects of his long career, a sign that Scorsese has no intention of fading away—even as the film landscape transforms around him yet again.

The weeks leading up to summer ring with anticipation. Here come beach days and lazy evenings on the grass and fingers sticky with ice cream. Here come the minor irritations—sweaty clothing and sunburns and the constant tang of DEET. And buzzing beneath all of that, a twang of uneasy dread: Here come the scorching afternoons, the floods, the fires, the hurricanes.  

Already, a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest is breaking records, with many places more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit above the seasonal norm—temperatures that climate change has made as much as five times more likely. Typhoon season has struck the other side of the globe. The exact severity and frequency of the coming heat, fires, and tropical storms is uncertain, but years of record temperatures, sweeping wildfires, and 100-year hurricanes and floods have established a terrible, if loose, standard for what the next few months might bring.

Not a sliver of the U.S. should expect a cool summer, according to the NOAA Climate Prediction Center’s latest three-month outlook: The Eastern Seaboard, Texas, and parts of the Southwest have the highest odds of seeing overall temperatures elevated over the season. Other areas are at risk of more extreme heat, especially parts of the High Plains experiencing prolonged, severe drought, such as Kansas and Oklahoma. When the land lacks moisture and vegetation, “all the energy from the sun goes into heating the ground and then the near-surface temperature,” says Jon Gottschalck, who runs the operational-prediction branch of the CPC.

[Read: Here comes the bad season]

These possibilities reflect a clear long-term trend: “more frequent heat waves, stronger heat waves,” says Ed Kearns, the chief data officer at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that models climate risk. Those heat waves, in turn, can produce heavier rainfall and powerful floods—warm air holds more water vapor—and extend droughts, Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Columbia University, told me via email.

With heat also comes the risk of wildfires, although perhaps not any as catastrophic as those of 2020 and 2021. After years of drought, an especially wet season on the West Coast is delaying, for now, the start of fire season. But once summer sets in, bringing hot and dry days, even welcome winter and spring rain can cut more than one way. Plentiful precipitation and snowpack mean that mountainous areas, including in California, Utah, and the Southwest, are “in good shape” heading into fire season, says Nick Nauslar, a predictive-services meteorologist at the National Interagency Fire Center (although a prolonged heat wave could quickly reverse those conditions). By contrast, in western rangelands at lower elevations, that precipitation has grown copious grass and underbrush, which “pretty much dries out along the West every summer by the time you get to August and September,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. Large amounts of cured grass, in turn, can feed more severe fires in grasslands, woodlands, and the chaparral. Further north, extended drought in Washington and Oregon could trigger an early wildfire season; across the border, fires in Alberta and British Columbia are already sending smoke into the United States.

Wildfire predictions largely deal in potential—the events that spark devastating flames, such as drought followed by dry lightning followed by strong winds, are hard to predict in advance. Still, the warming climate, combined with human construction and forest-management practices that have provided more fuel, means that fires are becoming more intense and destructive. Although their severity and location will vary throughout years and locales, Nauslar told me, “there are always fires.”

[Read: Why California can’t catch a break]

And there are always hurricanes. Meteorologists at Colorado State University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pennsylvania have all predicted in the vicinity of 15 named tropical storms, which would be typical of the past decade-plus. CSU and NCSU estimate that roughly six of those are expected to become hurricanes, of which two or three could become major hurricanes. These forecasts are uncertain: CSU’s tropical-storm modeling group, for instance, which predicted a slightly below-average hurricane season, stressed that the years with atmospheric and sea conditions most similar to 2023’s “exhibited a wide range of outcomes, from below-normal seasons to hyperactive seasons.”

Two factors—sea temperatures and unique atmospheric conditions—are pulling predictions in opposite directions, Alex DesRosiers, a CSU atmospheric scientist, told me over email. High sea-surface temperatures should drive more activity, because tropical storms pull energy from warm water. But the likely arrival of El Niño—which tears apart and weakens hurricanes as they form in the Atlantic—would decrease storm activity. “What can change the forecast and what we are watching intently for is the strength of the potential El Niño,” DesRosiers said. A weaker El Niño, like that of 2004, would likely not counteract exceptionally warm waters; a strong El Niño might be enough. Timing matters too: The full effects of El Niño usually come in fall or winter, meaning the earlier half of hurricane season could be worse, Gottschalck told me.

Even if this hurricane season proves to be a (much-needed) lull, the long-term trend is toward more frequent and more severe storms hitting the United States. Global warming might alter steering winds in the atmosphere to push storms onto the coast and decrease vertical wind shear, which will strengthen those storms before they make landfall, says Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Library who has studied the phenomenon. More and more storms are also rapidly intensifying, their wind speeds rising by at least 35 miles per hour in less than a day, likely due to climate change.

Any hurricane can be devastating, especially as rising temperatures and sea levels worsen flooding: “It only takes one storm to make it an active hurricane season for you,” DesRosiers told me. Every wildfire and heat wave, too, threatens to upend lives and livelihoods. Even as some parts of the country could face record-breaking devastation, the coming months may not prove uniformly, uniquely terrible; they may align with the hottest months of recent years or be somewhat less punishing than the summers we’ve just experienced. Even so, a note of disquiet remains. Each of those summers has been out of line with the rest of history; this year’s almost certainly will be too.

The last public execution in the United States was a raucous and tawdry affair. By the time 20,000 people poured into Owensboro, Kentucky, for the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea, a Black man in his 20s who had pleaded guilty to the rape of a 70-year-old white woman, public executions had been on the wane in America for several decades. Reformers worried about the brutalizing effect of such violence on spectators, and southern states seemed disturbed by the displays of mass religious devotion among the gathered crowds, in which white people and Black people often numbered equally. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, hangings that lured the masses began to give way to electrocutions hidden inside prison walls.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: A history of violence]

But Kentucky was a holdout, and Bethea’s execution drew viewers from around the country. Part of the appeal was the widespread presumption that Owensboro’s sheriff, Florence Thompson, would conduct the execution herself, a lurid curiosity at the time. Though Thompson ultimately delegated the job to a male surrogate, the event’s many thousands of viewers still received their share of spectacle in the form of a clearly drunk hangman slurring his way through the execution.

Many legislators and cultural commentators of the 20th century were abashed by the carnivalesque mass indulgence in executions, and some worried that continuing the public killings would eventually result in the end of capital punishment altogether, fretting that a civilized public wouldn’t tolerate such barbarism for long. For both sincere and Machiavellian reasons, therefore, the notion that it was neither decent nor ennobling for the citizenry to enjoy deaths by violence as a spectator sport was crucial in ending public executions state by state. After the media frenzy surrounding Bethea’s killing, Kentucky banned the practice as well.

But American interest in public execution has never quite expired: Just this March, the Daily Wire host Michael Knowles wholeheartedly pitched the idea of public executions on a call-in show, and a Tennessee Republican state representative proposed “hanging by a tree” as a potential execution method. If Knowles’s suggestion landed with little disturbance, that was likely because this territory is already familiar on the right. Earlier this year, Rolling Stone reported that Donald Trump has floated the idea of televised executions. The proposal is of a kind with right-wing moves to harshen capital-punishment protocols as killing criminals becomes a potent electoral issue in the run-up to 2024.

But there’s something ironic about conservatives calling for public executions: If conservatives wanted to let people see executions, they could just stop preventing them from doing so.

States go to great lengths to ensure that their executions remain as secret as possible. For states with active capital-punishment regimes, protecting information about executioners’ identities and qualifications, lethal drugs and drug suppliers, and the precise procedures used in putting citizens to death is crucial to securing the future of executions. This is why access to executions is already as limited as it is, and why execution states routinely limit press access to executions. Members of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections, for example, repeatedly closed the blinds on the observation window in the execution chamber during Clayton Lockett’s botched execution in 2014, blocking the media’s view. The Nevada Press Association sued the Nevada Department of Corrections and other Nevada state officials for full access to executions in 2021. And if I had a nickel for every red-state Department of Corrections that won’t take my calls, I could buy myself a nice cup of coffee.

[From the June 2015 issue: The cruel and unusual execution of Clayton Lockett]

According to a 2018 report by the Death Penalty Information Center, 13 states have enacted execution-secrecy statutes since 2011: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming. In April 2019, Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas signed a bill that expanded upon the state’s existing execution-secrecy laws with new privacy provisions, and in May 2022, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a similar statute in Florida. Last month, state lawmakers in South Carolina passed a set of bills introduced by three Republicans that will levy criminal penalties—including imprisonment—for revealing the identity of executioners or the name of execution-drug retailers.

Supporters of capital punishment need this information to be hidden for a few reasons. First, and perhaps foremost, killing people for a living is something of an ignominious job that many are eager to encourage but few are willing to take. The guarantee of secrecy helps death-penalty states fill jobs.

But the information also threatens the institution of capital punishment itself, because it tends to be highly discrediting. In 2008, for example, the Missouri Department of Corrections was forced to sever ties with a dyslexic executioner with more than 20 malpractice suits filed against him. He admitted that he had mistakenly given some inmates smaller-than-protocol doses of lethal-injection chemicals. In 2012, according to court documents, an Idaho corrections official exchanged a suitcase containing  $10,000 in cash for a dose of lethal chemicals from a vendor in a Walmart parking lot inTacoma, Washington. Wholly public executions would make discoveries along these lines only more, not less, frequent.

But right-wing provocateurs don’t want executions to be public in the sense of being made available to the citizenry for scrutiny as a matter of civic interest. What I suspect they mean is that they would like executions to be vulgarized: to be popularized and commodified but not necessarily to be significantly revealed in any way. A vulgar execution may be televised or livestreamed or otherwise alchemized into content, but like any content, it need not expose the truth. If public executions were to return, they would be edited for effect, and consumed on phone screens and tablets and laptops; the profiteers would be the usual networks and streaming platforms. Anything more comprehensively public would compromise the institution of capital punishment, and its supporters know that.

Without a civic purpose, there’s no strong argument for expanding the American state’s catalog of content to include human slaughter. To claim this new frontier would be to join the ranks of the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations that routinely publicize executions for propagandistic reasons. And it would be to surrender to a fascistic cheapening of human life that is plenty emergent in American society as it is, and needs no further prompting from this kind of mass-market barbarism. For now, these proposals are just talk; with good fortune and an ounce of political wisdom, they’ll remain so.

Police searching for two missing teenagers in rural Oklahoma say they have found seven dead bodies.