England captain Leah Williamson tells the United Nations her football career has been a constant "battle" against gender inequality.

The Prince of Wales joins the global stage in New York as the Earthshot Prize finalists are revealed.

Ukraine's president tells world leaders at UN event in New York that they must 'act united to defeat the aggressor'.

"If we let Ukraine be dismembered, is the independence of nations still guaranteed?The answer is no", Biden told the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Tuesday.

How Baseball Saved Itself

For the July/August 2023 issue, Mark Leibovich went inside the desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance.

Thank you for the fantastic article on baseball. During the 1960s, I was a Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. About the time baseball season began one year, I participated in a robust argument over America’s favorite pastime with my colleagues. I felt that it was an incredibly boring way to spend time, and I wanted to debate the subject with empirical evidence. As engineers, we agreed to define “action” as any time the ball or a player was moving. I then used a stopwatch to determine the ratio between “elapsed time” and “action” in a typical game.

I applied this definition to a game the following Saturday. Unsurprisingly, the ratio was 20 to 1—for every hour of elapsed time, one would see just three minutes of action. Professional football and basketball have far more action per hour than baseball under the same definition, which I think explains their relative popularity.

It wasn’t solely the analytics revolution that slowed down the sport—baseball’s always been like that! The question now is whether I should analyze another game to determine if the new rules changed it for the better.

David M. Carlson
Fountain Valley, Calif.

Baseball, the eternal game, shouldn’t be shortened—if anything, it ought to be lengthened, after the model of classical cricket. Live in the moment. Each pitch presents the entire history of the universe. The pitcher rotates the ball in his hand, feeling ever so sensitively for the contours, the stitching, the seams that might yield an advantage, before hurling it to the plate with the force of Zeus’s thunderbolt.

But how will the baseball travel? Will it sink or curve, go high or low, flutter in or out, changing speed as it continues to its destiny? Breathing in, the umpire concentrates on the ball speeding toward him. Breathing out, he calls a ball or a strike, with thousands of eyes cast upon him and his judgment. The loneliness of the umpire, the batter, and the pitcher sets them outside time. At that fateful moment of contact between ball and bat or mitt, all existence is suspended.

To shorten that momentary dance with eternity is to miss the meditative profundity of a baseball game. No, Mark, it is we who are at fault for wanting to speed up the game, with designated batters, virtual walks, limits on mound visits, pitch clocks, and rigid placement of the fielders.

David Glidden
Riverside, Calif.

I wanted to read Mark Leibovich’s article on baseball’s updated approach, but found it difficult when I ran across another dusty relic that needs to go: Red Sox worship among the media elites.

I grew up a Yankees fan, but somewhere along the line, sportswriters began looking at the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry as if it were the defining narrative of baseball. As they cast the Yankees as the bad guys who were always trying to buy the World Series, and the Red Sox as the good guys who represented the nobler, purer defenders of the sport, they seemed to forget that many people in other parts of the country don’t care for either team. If anything, they tend to hate both teams because the sports media spend too much time writing and talking about them. After all, other teams have equally storied pasts. Speeding up the game and giving the rules a hard look will certainly improve the experience for fans, as Leibovich writes. But it’s long past time for the sports media to recognize their part in holding the game back by ignoring more interesting narratives.

Eric Reichert
West Milford, N.J.

I share Mark Leibovich’s joy over the new baseball rules to speed up the game. But baseball isn’t that much slower than other sports. The average basketball game lasts anywhere from 135 to 150 minutes. There are constant interruptions precipitated by fouls, time-outs, and halftime. And the final two minutes on the clock can take 15 minutes.

Most unsettling for those of us who love baseball is the constant complaint from football fans that our sport is slow while football is fast. Their favored 60-minute romp takes more than 180 minutes to complete. And, as a wise observer once pointed out, to make matters worse, football combines two of the most detestable facets of American life—violence and committee meetings.

Perhaps someday the NBA and the NFL will take lessons from MLB and learn how to shorten their games.

Dennis Okholm
Costa Mesa, Calif.

I agree with Mark Leibovich’s conclusions regarding the benefits of baseball’s new pitch clock. The pitch clock is the greatest innovation the sport has seen in ages, and it may well save the game. But the gradual slowing-down of games was not the only thing that drove fans away from baseball.

Consider the 1994 strike, which canceled approximately a third of the season and the World Series and was seen by many as millionaires fighting over lucre, fans be damned. Or consider the over-the-top salaries, even for subpar players, as ticket and concession prices have skyrocketed. Baseball once sold itself as the best buy for family entertainment in America—but it hasn’t been that for quite some time.

Finally, the cheating that has gone on for decades has put off many fans, and the lack of any meaningful accountability has surely only made it worse. Players who were known to use banned substances—Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa—still lead the league’s counts for most home runs in a single season, accolades that should have been expunged from the books. And Leibovich barely touches on perhaps the worst of these scofflaw violations: The Houston Astros were caught cheating in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, including the 2017 postseason, which netted the team a World Series victory. Nonetheless, they were permitted to keep the championship title, and none of the players who cheated was disciplined—they are still playing now. When several Chicago White Sox players conspired to throw the 1919 World Series, by contrast, they were barred from baseball forever. For some fans, these problems are more serious than the length of games.

Allen J. Wiener
Clearwater Beach, Fla.

Mark Leibovich Replies:

Thanks to all those who took the time to reply to my article; I hope it was at least more engaging than the baseball of years past. Major League Baseball certainly has no monopoly on potentially league-destroying scandals. Each major sport has faced its share of drug, gambling, and cheating catastrophes over the years, and no league has cornered the market on bad leaders, clueless commissioners, or idiotic owners either. Sports fans have shown themselves to be willing to forgive a lot—but not necessarily boredom. Of all the sports, baseball is uniquely slow. No matter how many stoppages there might be at the end of a basketball game, the clock guarantees that very few NBA contests surpass two hours and 30 minutes. Football games rarely take more than 3:20, and the fact that teams play only once a week buys a great deal of spectator leeway. Last, I’ll apologize for indulging my Red Sox compulsion. I’ve always assumed that the Sox-Yanks thing was off-putting to nonpartisans, even when the rivalry was at its most compelling (not recently, in other words, unless you count this season’s epic battle for last place in the American League East). In the spirit of fellowship, I’ll concede that some of my favorite baseball friends are Yankees fans. We are more alike than not—beyond just insufferable.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky,” the Atlantic senior editor Jenisha Watts reflects on how her mother’s addiction shaped her childhood in Lexington. She describes finding escape and empowerment in literature and narrates her struggles as a young writer and editor in New York, determined to hide her past. Our cover image is a portrait of her painted by the Ivorian artist Didier Viodé. With a minimalistic color palette and broad, acrylic brushstrokes characteristic of his style, Viodé strove to capture Jenisha’s self-possession.

— Elizabeth Hart, Art Director

Corrections

“The Resilience Gap” (September) misidentified Richard Friedman as the former coordinator of Cornell’s mental-health program instead of its former medical director. After publication, “Killer Apps” (September) was updated online to clarify YouTube’s policy for removing videos, which excepts artistic content such as music videos from its prohibition on harassment.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Call it coincidence, serendipity, an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was creepy and amusing all at once. I was beavering away in the basement research room at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles, when Henry Kissinger twice came into view—in the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s scrawl in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the rounder corporeal form of the man himself, in the hallway outside the door.

Kissinger, the last surviving member of Nixon’s Cabinet, was in Yorba Linda last fall for two reasons: to speak at a fundraising gala for the Richard Nixon Foundation and to promote a book he had published earlier in the year, at the improbable age of 99. The book, Leadership, contains an entire chapter in praise of Nixon, the man who had made Kissinger the 20th century’s only celebrity diplomat.

I was there to gather material for a Nixon book of my own. I had been nosing around in a cache of volumes from Nixon’s personal library. I was particularly interested in any marks he may have left in the books he’d owned. From what I could tell, no one had yet mined this remarkably varied collection, more than 2,000 books filling roughly 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Taken together, they reflect the broad range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an underappreciated quality of his highly active mind. To give an idea: One heavily underlined book in the collection is a lengthy biography of Tolstoy; another is a book on statesmanship by Charles de Gaulle; another is a deep dive into the historiography of Japanese art. Several fat volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s mid-century monument to middlebrow history, display evidence of attentive reading and rereading.

Every morning a friendly factotum would wheel out a gray metal cart stacked with dusty boxes from Nixon’s personal library. On the afternoon Kissinger arrived, I had worked my way down to an obscure book published in 1984, a decade after Nixon left the White House. A significant portion of Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News named Russ Braley, is a blistering indictment of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration. In Braley’s telling, the Times’ treatment swung between the unfair and the uncomprehending, for reasons ranging from negligence to malice.

The book had found its ideal reader in Richard Nixon. The pages of his copy were cluttered with underlining from his thick ballpoint pen. It occurred to me, as I followed along, that Nixon was being brought up short by his reading: Much of the material in Bad News was apparently news to him.

[From the May 1982 issue: Kissinger and Nixon in the White House]

My reading was interrupted by a commotion outside the research room. I stuck my head out in time to see Kissinger and his entourage settling into the room across the hall. A group of donors and Nixonophiles had gathered to hear heroic tales of Nixon’s statecraft.

I dutifully returned to Braley. When I got to a chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I found an unmistakable pattern: Most of Nixon’s markings involved the man holding court across the hall. And Nixon wasn’t happy with him. Kissinger, Braley wrote, had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to explicate his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Papers were released. Nixon’s pen came down: exclamation point! Kissinger gave Ellsberg an office in the White House complex anyway, for a month in 1969—a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Slash mark! Kissinger spent his evenings “ridicul[ing]” Nixon “in private conversations with liberal friends.” This last treachery summoned the full battery of Nixon’s marginalia: a slash running alongside the paragraph, a check mark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under “liberal friends.”

Page 551 from Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by Russ Braley (Photograph by Joel Barhamand for The Atlantic)

Still, Braley went on, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, their publication alarmed Kissinger, because they posed a “double threat” to national security and to the conduct of foreign policy. “And to K!” Nixon wrote in the margin.

The contrast between Nixon’s bitter hash marks about Kissinger from the 1980s and Kissinger’s present-day celebration of his old boss offered a lesson in the evolving calculation of self-interest. It also conjured the image of a solitary old man in semiretirement, learning things about a now-vanished world he’d once thought he presided over. It happened often in the reading room in Yorba Linda: With unexpected immediacy, the gray metal cart carried the past into the present, in small but tangible fragments of Nixon himself.

The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people’s libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of “textual activity,” to use the scholar’s clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.

A book invites various kinds of engagement, depending on the reader. Voltaire (whom Nixon admired, to judge by his extravagant underlining in the Durants’ The Age of Voltaire) scribbled commentary so incessantly that his marginalia have been published in volumes of their own. Voltaire liked to argue with a book. Nixon did not. He had a lively mind but not, when reading, a disputatious one; he restricted his marginalia almost exclusively to underlining sentences or making other subverbal marks on the page—boxes and brackets and circles. You get the idea that he knew what he wanted from a book and went searching for it, and when he found what he wanted, he pinned it to the page with his pen (seldom, from what I’ve seen, a pencil).

[From the April 1973 issue: The president and the press]

In his method, Nixon resembled the English writer Paul Johnson. I once asked Johnson how, given his prolific journalistic career—several columns and reviews a week in British and American publications—he managed to read all the books he cited in his own very long and very readable histories, which embraced such expansive subjects as Christianity, ancient Egypt, and the British empire. His reaction bordered on revulsion at my naivete. “Read them?!” he spat out. “Read them?! I don’t read them! I fillet them!” As it happens, Nixon was an avid reader of Johnson, whose books he often handed out to friends and staff at Christmastime.

John Adams, another busy producer of marginalia, liked to quote a Latin epigram: Studium sine calamo somnium. Adams translated this as: “Study without a pen in your hand is but a dream.” Nixon acquired the pen-in-hand habit early, as his surviving college and high-school textbooks show, and he kept at it throughout his life. For Nixon, as for the rest of us, marking up books was also a way of slowing himself down and attending to what he read. He was not a notably fast reader, by his own account, but his powers of concentration and memorization were considerable. Going at a book physically was a way of absorbing it mentally.

One of the most heavily represented authors in Nixon’s personal library is Churchill, whom Nixon revered not only as a statesman but also as a historian and an essayist. Nixon’s shelves sagged with Churchill’s multivolume histories and biographies: The World Crisis, Marlborough: His Life and Times, The Second World War, A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a series of sketches he wrote in the 1920s and ’30s sizing up roughly two dozen friends and colleagues, was clearly a favorite. When I retrieved Nixon’s copy from a box, I found it dog-eared throughout.

Nixon’s tastes ran heavily toward history, but he could be tempted away from the past to a book of present-day punditry, if the writer and point of view were agreeable. According to a report in Time magazine, when half a million citizens descended on Washington, D.C., in November 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, Nixon holed up in his private quarters with a book called The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today. The book, slim and elegant, had been sent to Nixon by its author, the historian Daniel Boorstin.

Judging by his notations, Nixon was interested less in Boorstin’s turgid cultural analysis of “consumption communities” and more in his thesis that the ragged protesters gathering outside the White House fence constituted something new in American history: They were not radicals at all but nihilists. Nixon brought out the pen, and in Yorba Linda, a continent and decades away from his White House hideaway, I could still feel the insistent furrow of his underlining on the page. He marked several consecutive paragraphs in a section called “The New Barbarians,” in which Boorstin criticized protesters for their “indolence of mind” and “mindless, obsessive quest for power.”

People read books for lots of reasons: instruction, pleasure, uplift. This was Nixon reading for self-defense.

The book I most wanted to see in Yorba Linda was Nixon’s copy of Robert Blake’s biography Disraeli (1966). A re-creation of Nixon’s favorite room in the White House was one of the Nixon museum’s prime exhibits when it opened, in 1990, a few years before Nixon’s death. (It has since been redesigned.) Nixon himself chose Disraeli to rest on his desk for the public to see. The book was given to him during his first year in the White House, in 1969, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor, prominent Democrat, and future U.S. senator from New York. To the surprise of just about everybody, the year he took office, Nixon made Moynihan his chief domestic-policy counselor, a counterpart in those early days to Kissinger as head of the National Security Council. Despite Nixon’s enduring image as a black-eyed right-winger, his political ideology was always flexible, if not flatly self-contradictory.

[From the November 1974 issue: The friends of Richard Nixon]

Moynihan the liberal hoped to persuade Nixon the hybrid to take Benjamin Disraeli, the great prime minister of Victorian Britain, as his model. Disraeli was a Tory and an imperialist, and at the same time a social reformer of vision and courage. According to Moynihan, Nixon read the book within days of receiving it. Soon enough, the president was calling himself a “Disraeli conservative.” The precise meaning of the tag was clear to Nixon alone, but we can assume it underwent a great deal of improvisation and revision as his presidency wore on.

Disraeli’s appeal to Nixon went beyond his light-footed ideology. Speaking to his Cabinet at a dinner one evening in early 1972, Nixon called Disraeli a “magnificent” politician. Now, he went on, the “fashionable set today would immediately say, ‘Ah, politicians. Bad.’ ” As he saw it, the “fashionable set”—the epithet, suffused with reverse snobbery and class resentment, is pure Nixon—believed that politicians disdain idealism and think nothing of principle. “But,” Nixon said, “the pages of history are full of idealists who never accomplished anything.” It was “pragmatic men” like Disraeli “who had the ability to do things that other people only talked about.” Nixon, who had never shied away from calling himself a politician, wanted to see himself in Disraeli, or at least in Blake’s Disraeli—this “classic biography,” to which, he told his Cabinet, he often turned for inspiration on sleepless nights. And here the book was, Nixon’s own copy, at the top of my growing stack in Yorba Linda.

Disraeli is packed with observations about political tradecraft. They are penetrating, specific, and cold-blooded. The little dicta come from both the biographer and his subject. “He was a master at disguising retreat as advance,” Blake wrote approvingly. Nixon underlined that sentence, and then this one from Disraeli’s contemporary Lord Salisbury: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.”

A line, a check mark, a circle—why Nixon deployed one notation and not another for any given passage is a question as unanswerable as “Why didn’t he burn the tapes?” But it was politics that always caught his eye, and activated his pen. Disraeli, Blake wrote, “suffered from a defect, endemic among politicians, the greatest reluctance to admit publicly that he had been in the wrong, even when the fault lay with his subordinates.” Another from Blake: Successful politicians “realize that a large part of political life in a parliamentary democracy consists not so much in doing things yourself as in imparting the right tone to things that others do for you or to things that are going to happen anyway.”

Should we take marked passages like these, with their ironic acceptance of the fudging and misdirection called for in the political arts, as a gesture toward self-criticism on Nixon’s part? Probably not: Nixon knew himself better than psycho-biographers give him credit for, but self-awareness is not self-criticism. In his chosen profession, he took the bad with the good, and his casual, creeping concessions to the seamier requirements of politics are what eventually did him in.

[From the October 2017 issue: How the Vietnam War broke the American presidency]

If you go looking for them, you can see reflections of Blake’s Disraeli throughout Nixon’s presidency, encapsulated in enduring phrases here and there. It was in Blake that Nixon came across Disraeli’s famous description of “exhausted volcanoes.” Disraeli coined it to disparage the feckless time-servers in William Ewart Gladstone’s cabinet after they had been in office a few years. Nixon underscored not only “exhausted volcanoes” but the rest of the passage from Blake’s text: The phrase, Blake writes, “was no mere gibe … For the past year, the Government had been vexed by that combination of accidents, scandals and blunders which so often for no apparent reason seem to beset an energetic administration in its later stages.”

Nixon feared the same fate for his second term—a loss of energy and direction. The day after his landslide reelection, in 1972, he called together his Cabinet and senior staff. He told them of Disraeli’s warning about “exhausted volcanoes.” And then, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, serving as the lord high executioner, he demanded their resignations en masse.

Not everything in Blake’s Disraeli caught Nixon’s interest; certainly not everything was useful to him. As I paged through, I saw there were many longueurs, stretches of several dozen pages, sometimes more, where no filleting of any kind happened. And then—inevitably, suddenly—Nixon the reader is seized by passages of sometimes thunderous resonance, and the pen is again called into play.

“Disraeli,” Blake writes, “really was regarded as an outsider by the Victorian governing class.” One can almost see Nixon sit bolt upright and pick up his pen. This is the same ostracism that Nixon himself felt keenly throughout his personal and professional life, in fact and in imagination. The following page and a half, discussing the disdain of the “élite” for Disraeli, is bracketed nearly in its entirety. Some sentences are boxed. Some passages, like this one, are underlined as well as bracketed:

Men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy … inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.

The antagonism of the elites was not the determining fact of Disraeli’s career, but both biographer and subject perceived its profound effects, and so did the man reading about it 90 years after Disraeli’s death. As president, Nixon felt himself similarly situated: the political leader of an imperial nation, highly skilled, aching for greatness, yet in permanent estrangement from the most powerful figures of the politics and culture that surrounded him, nearly all of whom he judged, as Disraeli had, “bustling mediocrities.”

When reading about the elites, Nixon pressed the ballpoint deep into the page. We marginalia mavens, tracing our fingers across the lines today, can only guess, of course. But it may be that in 1969, sitting in the reading chair in his White House hideaway, he already sensed that this was not bound to end well.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Nixon Between the Lines.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When I first spoke with Alden Whitman, the chief obituary writer for The New York Times from 1964 to 1976, I was stunned to hear him say that he did not expect to live much longer. I didn’t reply, thinking that this 52-year-old man must be kidding—he was being melodramatic or had spent so much time writing about death that the subject was consuming him.

“I’m really not well,” he continued softly. “I’ve recently returned from eight weeks at Knickerbocker Hospital following a major heart attack, and I’m concerned that the next experience could be fatal.”

He was sitting on a sofa across from me in the living room of his apartment on the 12th floor of an old brick building on West 116th Street. We were surrounded by shelves packed with books, and there were even more books stacked below on the floor. He shared the apartment with his third wife, Joan, 16 years his junior. They had met seven years earlier, in 1958, at the Times, where she was an editor in the Style department.

I was interviewing Whitman for Esquire, my first profile in a series on reporters and editors, and part of my long-standing interest in writing about “nobodies.” The term media was not yet such a popular part of the lexicon as it would become later, sparked by Watergate. Editors generally assumed that there was not a great deal of general interest in, nor much of a market for, lengthy stories about journalistic endeavors and personalities. Indeed, journalists were not supposed to have personalities. Who they were, what they thought, how they felt was deemed irrelevant. They were coverers, copyists, and the scriveners of other people’s doings and deeds. Yet, knowing them as I did, I believed that they had personal and professional stories to tell that were as worthy of attention as the stories of the so-called news makers whose names and photographs appeared every day in the paper.

[Read: Click here if you want to be sad]

Before becoming the chief obituary writer, Whitman had been a copy editor for the newspaper. I never talked to him when I worked there in the mid-1950s, but the time I saw him in the cafeteria stuck in my memory. He was a short, stout man who’d walked in smoking a pipe and bearing a serious, if not dour, expression that contrasted with his sprightly attire. He was wearing a red polka-dot bow tie, a yellow pinstriped shirt, and a rakish double-vented tan hacking jacket. After selecting his food at the counter, he walked to an unoccupied corner table and began reading for the next half hour, carefully feeding himself with one hand while holding his newspaper with the other, positioning it within an inch or two of his nose and then squinting at it through his horn-rimmed glasses.

Despite what Whitman had just told me, he did not look like a dying man. He was much as I remembered him from the cafeteria—jaunty in a colorful bow tie, puffing a pipe, no signs of emaciation, weariness, or inattentiveness. He spoke in a strong and clearly modulated tone of voice, and his manner was as casual when discussing his ailments as it had been when he had greeted me earlier and asked if I’d like something to drink.

As I sat across from him, pen in hand, I could hardly believe what was happening. Here I was doing what he usually did, having an antemortem interview with a candidate presumably ready for a funeral. I had heard that Whitman had already written dozens of advance obituaries of noteworthy elderly people, who in some cases he had traveled great distances to meet in person and describe at close range before it was too late—Charlie Chaplin, for example, and Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Charles Lindbergh, Francisco Franco, and the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, who was known to have referred to Whitman as the Times ghoul.

Although he was an isolated member of the reportorial staff, the only one whose published writing did not carry bylines, Whitman nonetheless possessed considerable arbitrary power within the paper. It was primarily up to him to decide who was, and who was not, newsworthy enough to warrant an obituary. In Whitman’s world, the recently deceased was either a “somebody” or a “nobody.”

Growing up in a small town on the Jersey Shore in the late 1940s, I dreamed of someday working for a great newspaper. But I did not necessarily want to write news. News was ephemeral and it accentuated the negative. It was largely concerned with what went wrong yesterday rather than what went right. Much of it was, in Bob Dylan’s words, “good-for-nothing news.” Or it was “gotcha journalism,” in which reporters with tape recorders got public figures to make fools of themselves trying to answer tricky questions.

Nevertheless, news continues to be made every day based on the statements and activities of newsworthy people—politicians, bankers, business leaders, artists, entertainers, and athletes. Other people are ignored unless they’ve been involved in a crime or a scandal, or suffered an accidental or violent death. If they have lived lawfully and uneventfully, and died of natural causes, obituary editors do not assign reporters to write about them. They are not newsworthy. They are essentially nobodies. I wanted to specialize in writing about nobodies.

Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, liked my pitch for a series of articles on reporters, copy editors, and editors with whom I had worked in the newsroom at The New York Times. In 1965, he offered me a contract to write about my Times people, as well as other subjects of his choosing, while being guaranteed an annual salary of $15,000.

On the downside, however, I had to please Hayes occasionally by interviewing a movie star or other celebrity. When he proposed that I write about Frank Sinatra, I tried to talk him out of it. I reminded him that there had already been several recently published pieces about Sinatra, and I wondered what more could be said about him. I preferred to not write about celebrities because I knew from experience that few of them had much respect for writers, they were often late for interviews (if they showed up at all), and they regularly insisted that their press agents or attorneys sit in on interviews and review the articles prior to publication.

I would never agree to this kind of review, nor would any newspaper or magazine of which I was aware, including Esquire, but Hayes still desired a big piece about Sinatra in his magazine and wanted me to do it. He reasoned that it was only fair that I sometimes try to help him increase newsstand sales with celebrity covers since he was allowing me to publish stories about journalists whom few Esquire readers had ever heard of, like Alden Whitman. We eventually came to an agreement. I would write about Sinatra if he published my story on Whitman first.

From his start as chief obituary writer, Whitman expanded the scope of the assignment beyond the practices of his predecessors. The older Times staffers had produced advance obituaries largely based on information obtained from news clippings; or, if the subject was a very prominent individual, there might be magazine profiles or even biographies and autobiographies upon which to draw.

Whitman convinced the top editors to allow him to travel around the nation and abroad in order to conduct face-to-face interviews that provided closely observed details: For example, after meeting with Pablo Picasso at the artist’s studio in Paris, he wrote that Picasso “was a short, squat man with broad, muscular shoulders and arms. He was most proud of his small hands and feet and of his hairy chest. In old age his body was firm and compact; and his cannonball head, which was almost bald, gleamed like bronze.”

After compiling a list of people he hoped to interview, Whitman would write them flattering letters explaining that the Times wished to update its files on the lives of such distinguished individuals as themselves, seeking their biographical insights and reflections, and therefore a request was being made for a brief personal visit. Although there was no mention of advance obituary or death in these letters, nor was it explained that such interviews were slated for posthumous publication, the letter’s purpose was still fairly obvious to most recipients; and, indeed, after being granted an interview in Missouri with Harry Truman, Alden was greeted by the former president with: “I know why you’re here, and I want to help you all I can.”

Though there were some who turned down the interview request—for example, the writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson, the French minister of culture André Malraux, and Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery, the British World War II general— Whitman himself refused to interview many people who were not sufficiently notable. Who did, and who did not, meet the “notability” standard was largely his decision. The editors and reporters in the news department devoted their days to the coverage of the living, while it was his prerogative to deal as he wished with the dead and the almost dead.

He also made it clear—in a statement published in the monthly trade-news magazine Editor & Publisher—that he was not receptive to any solicitations from public-relations firms or from other influence peddlers, who might have clients desiring an antemortem interview with him. “This is strictly a business where we call you, don’t call us,” he said, adding, “The Times will place its own value on an obit, and I refuse to talk with anyone who calls up to suggest that so-and-so, still living, would make an interesting obit, and I can have an interview … I simply refuse to speak with anybody trying to guarantee immortality before he dies.”

In completing my own interview with Whitman for Esquire, one of my final questions concerned his own termination, especially because during our time together he had emphasized his failing health. As I wrote in the article:

“But what will happen to you, then, after you die, Mr. Whitman?” I asked.

“I have no soul that is going anywhere,” he said. “It is simply a matter of bodily extinction.”

“If you had died during your heart attack, what, in your opinion, would have been the first thing your wife would have done?”

“She would first have seen to it that my body was disposed of in the way I wanted,” he said. “To be cremated without fuss or fanfare.”

“And then what?”

“Then, after she’d gotten to that, she would have turned her attention to the children.”

“And then?”

“Then, I guess, she would have broken down and had a good cry.”

“Are you sure?”

Whitman paused.

“Yes, I would assume so,” he said finally, puffing on his pipe. “This is the formal outlet for grief under such circumstances.”

Three months after I had finished interviewing him, my article about Whitman appeared in the February 1966 issue of Esquire. Hayes, the editor, liked it and published it under the title “Mr. Bad News,” with the subtitle “Death, as it must to all men, comes to Alden Whitman every day. It’s a living.”

I began the piece by re-creating a scene that Joan had described during our lunch:

“Winston Churchill gave you your heart attack,” the wife of the obituary writer said, but the obituary writer, a short and rather shy man, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and smoking a pipe, shook his head and replied, very softly, “No, it was not Winston Churchill.”

“Then T. S. Eliot gave you your heart attack,” she quickly added, lightly, for they were at a small dinner party in New York and the others seemed amused.

“No,” the obituary writer said, again softly, “it was not T. S. Eliot.”

If he was at all irritated by his wife’s line of questioning, her assertion that writing lengthy obituaries for the New York Times under deadline pressure might be speeding him to his own grave, he did not show it, did not raise his voice; but then he rarely does.

The article drew a favorable reaction from the magazine’s subscribers as well as from some top editors at the Times, and they soon reversed the paper’s anonymity rule for obit writing and began attaching Whitman’s byline to his work. As he continued to produce his well-written and informative memorials, he became a mini celebrity within the journalism profession and subsequently took a bow in front of millions of viewers while discussing his job with Johnny Carson on NBC’s The Tonight Show.

He not only continued to write obituaries for the next 10 years, but he also contributed book reviews and conducted interviews for the paper over lunches with many well-known novelists and poets; he usually showed up wearing a cape. He also had his photograph taken by Jill Krementz, who specialized in shooting literary figures and was the wife of the writer Kurt Vonnegut.

In 1976, he left the Times. Others would inherit his position, of course, although none would be so singularly identified with it. With his retirement, Joan quit her job in the Style department and the two of them moved to Southampton, Long Island, where she hired college students to read books and newspapers daily to her husband. She meanwhile worked as a freelance book editor, co-authored a few books on cooking, and helped edit big best-selling books written by a Times food critic.

[George Packer: I wish my friend could have read her own obituary]

Whitman died of a stroke in 1990. The Times published a 23-paragraph obituary accompanied by his picture and the headline “Alden Whitman Is Dead at 76; Made an Art of Times Obituaries.” It carried no byline.

This article has been adapted from Gay Talese’s book Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener.

When my 76-year-old dad was a child—he doesn’t remember exactly what age—his mother handed him over to her best friend, a woman he called Aunt Edith, in exchange for $10,000. Some details are murky: He doesn’t know whose idea it was or how long the arrangement was meant to last. He does know he lived with Edith, who had no kids of her own and loved my dad like a son, for a year or two, and that she wholeheartedly endorsed the project because his mother, an alcoholic, couldn’t seem to “keep herself together,” as my dad put it.

Our family has a black-and-white photo of him from one Halloween when he was living with Edith, in the early 1950s; he’s wearing a robot costume she helped him make out of boxes and tin. The costume won him first prize in a local contest—$10, a fortune then for a little boy. When he talks about it now, his voice crests with pleasure. Living with Edith was unequivocally good, even if the notion of exchanging cash for a kid sounds contemptible. I remember her as a very old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s who recognized only one person: my dad.

In Loved and Missed, the seventh novel from the British writer Susie Boyt (it’s her first published in America, where she’s at what I think of as a Tessa Hadley level of fame), a similar swap is made. Ruth, a genteel literature teacher living on a dodgy street in London, sells her only family heirloom—a Walter Sickert sketch—and brings the £4,000 it nets to the christening of her granddaughter, Lily. “I don’t know if I’m good and I don’t know if I’m evil,” she narrates, “But I knew what I wanted.” She hands the envelope full of cash to her daughter, Eleanor, a drug addict who shows up to the church with beer cans tucked into the baby’s pram, and assures her that she’ll take Lily off her hands for a while so she can rest. Eleanor understands what Ruth is offering—a permanent, or at least long-term, pseudo-adoption—and tacitly approves. Unlike my dad, whose mother returned to claim him after a while, Lily is never restored to her mother’s care. Instead, she lives in companionable amity with Ruth, their small lives buoyant with simple pleasure.

That’s right, pleasure. Enough to disarm even the most cynical readers. Loved and Missed bottles up those fleeting, blissful moments of child-rearing and spritzes each page liberally with their scent. The happiness Boyt describes is so infectious that you want it to last, for your own sake; it isn’t often that readers of literary fiction float along in such placid waters. Ruth describes her and Lily’s simple habits, such as their cozy evenings dunking biscuits into tea on the couch, or a cheap vacation spent breaststroking in the Balearic Sea, as “the mad celebrations afforded by ordinary time.” “It was like being God or the Queen,” she explains. “The luxurious sensation as I arranged myself next to her in the cool sheets at night, taking care not to wake her, the quiet joy almost inexpressible. I was a professional gambler on a lucky streak. I loved the simple rubbing-along with another person, friendliness, a calm and busy rhythm, lustre and life cheer.”

The two of them amble through their small existence, one filled with homemade cornflower-blue cardigans and shared lemon sorbet. Ruth is a beloved teacher at a girls’ high school, and she vows to bring Lily up with a kind of bountiful rigor: “Lily was not going to have a poultice childhood, a mending service, scrappy and provisional. I wouldn’t step in. She was going to get the most anyone could give.” And so Ruth narrates as Lily grows up in “the thick swoon of it … synchronised breathing, warm tessellated limbs,” followed by childhood birthday parties and the move to secondary school. Heaviness—Eleanor—sits behind a curtain, and Ruth lets us peek at it, but it’s outrageous, really, how engrossing this novel can be even when its two main characters defy narrative convention and bask in their contentment.

The parenting novel is usually a place to let it all out: the drudgery, the indignity, the identity-snatching abasement of sacrificing a life of the mind, of the bar, of the lie-in, for the penal colony of toy-straightening and carrot-steaming. Writers going back at least to Mary Shelley have agonized over the monstrousness of creating a life only to have it devour their own. Works such as Frankenstein and Rosemary’s Baby made their offspring devilish, as if only the most inhuman of children could cause a mother grief. In her 1988 domestic horror novel, The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing describes the loathsome baby Ben as “muscular, yellowish, long,” with “hard cold alien eyes,” to distance him from the other, “real” children. The problems he causes aren’t the work of tantrums or picky eating; he strangles a dog and bends a schoolmate’s arm until it breaks. His own siblings lock their doors from the inside at night, afraid of what he might do.

[Read: The parenting prophecy]

When Rachel Cusk published her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother in 2001, the tenor of the conversation shifted from monstrous children to the everyday but not less fraught realm of raising any child. Cusk wrote openly—and now famously—about the irreconcilable internal divisions of motherhood. “When she,” meaning any mother, “is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.” Struggle became, finally, not just the defining emotion of parenting, but also the most public.

The generation of mommy bloggers and online forums that came next further opened the pressure valve on all the stresses and affronts of contemporary child-rearing. Suddenly, venting was de rigueur, a relief after centuries (perhaps millennia) of tight lips. Fiction and the real world are porous, and novelists were emboldened to chart the daily pitfalls of bringing up baby, especially the need for mothers to Stretch Armstrong themselves into a crossbreed of camp counselor/cruise-ship director/housekeeper/breadwinner/nag of all trades.

As a result, the first two decades of the 21st century have produced a glut of novels obsessed with the stifling banality and identity-effacing nature of parenting, a state of being exacerbated in America by a lack of government help and impossible societal standards. These kinds of novels have kept me company for my own six and a half years so far as a mother: Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations and Lynn Steger Strong’s Want; Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child, which reorients Lessing’s novel in 1990s New York; Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble; Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch; Sheila Heti’s Motherhood; Elisa Albert’s After Birth; the resurgence of the Danish author Tove Ditlevsen’s writing; and the forthcoming My Work, by Olga Ravn. Happiness sometimes lunges out of the background of these novels, but struggle and discomfort are their watchwords.

Loved and Missed inverts that ratio. This is a novel about happiness as the predominant mode. From the start, Lily is a pink-cheeked wonder, the kind of baby who is described as “her usual irreproachable self” at seven months old. She grows up angelic, a sensible child who falls asleep to radio broadcasts about “low-level domestic disasters: how to get red wine out of pale carpets and upholstry, how to make your ageing grouting gleam” and applies herself dutifully to her studies. Ruth never so much as hints about Lily slamming a door or giving cheek.

Eleanor, we learn, started off much like Lily, alone with a single mother and “very nurturing to me when she was little,” Ruth recounts, “looking out for me when I was really struggling, taking the temperature of my days. She was so dutiful.” She goes on, “I should have stopped it.” The implication—one that must follow every parent—is that Ruth can’t know how much of Eleanor’s potholed life path is the result of her own shortcomings as a mother, her inability to recognize when she was asking too much of her child. Eleanor is now a specter. She comes round every few months, thin and shabby in holey sweaters, her arms pinpricked and scabbed from her addiction. She refuses contact unless it’s on her terms, dismisses pats on the shoulder, and leaves Ruth with the feeling that her efforts are repellent: “I had the wrong kind of patience, the wrong kind of sentimentality as far as Eleanor was concerned.” Ruth initially rejects the idea that “having Lily compensated me in various ways for losing Eleanor,” but as time shakes on, she can’t quite determine whether her second go at raising a child is a form of atonement. “I couldn’t keep on trying to balance the equations all the time,” she resolves to herself, “that my care had equalled what she was living.” Because if her careful love still resulted in Eleanor, she seems to wonder, could it also sour Lily? Hidden underneath is a desperate question about parenthood: What if our best efforts are ultimately meaningless?

[Read: The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time]

Regret, then, might actually be what keeps Ruth angling toward bliss. Loved and Missed slips out of time like memory really does; Ruth’s disheartening recollections about Eleanor emerge in the midst of dishwashing or teatime. She relates the story of the first time Eleanor stayed out all night, how a few weeks after she turned 13, “she swung her love away from me.” But the melancholy is threaded into a pattern with joy. Ruth recalls the second time she visited Eleanor during a short stint in prison: “She had filled out a bit. She had these little cheeks. Sunlight ran over our table and onto the floor of the visitors’ centre. I could sit here like this for the rest of my life, I thought.” When Ruth stood to leave, Eleanor dismissed her: “I’ll just see you on the out now, Mum.”  

Ruth and Lily’s relationship is perhaps given extra sheen by Ruth’s boastful narration; until the last quarter of the novel, we are left to speculate whether she is sugarcoating their bliss for her own peace of mind. And there is a general air of suspicion these days that anyone’s happiness is a delusion or a cover-up. (Ruth too is dismissive of another mother’s alleged “peace” when her own addicted child dies: “I wanted to hit her,” she thinks. “She was inhuman.”) But in the final bit of the novel, Ruth grows ill, and suddenly, unexpectedly, the narration shifts to Lily’s point of view. When Ruth isn’t nearby, Lily is still sensible and charming, gracious and generous—if a little more human than Ruth ever colors her. She revels in the snacks that Ruth’s friend Jean offers her, “macaroons and shortbread, Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, tins of Coke, cucumber and carrot sticks,” as if the world is a place of marvels. And she proves that Ruth’s efforts to raise her right have worked: By nature or nurture, Lily has turned out gorgeously. Joy is spread out there too, like luminous, well-buttered toast.

Perhaps this isn’t what we need out of every book that depicts parents, a hit of rapture so potent that we might overdose. But Boyt, who has probably experienced her own share of family drama—she’s the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud, one of his 14 acknowledged children from at least six women—doesn’t subscribe to the notion that it all comes out in the wash. Regret and joy are an indivisible duo for any mother or father, and Boyt wisely mixes them into a beautifully humane chronicle. With this exquisite devotional of a novel, she has turned the ability to find contentment in the muck of parenthood into a courageous art form.

Even as U.S. politics became more contentious and polarized over the past quarter century, a few pockets of the government remained comparatively above the fray, including the courts, which sought to position themselves apart from politics, and state capitols, where pragmatism trumped partisanship.

But those redoubts have fallen in recent years. The Supreme Court has become more ideologically aligned with the Republican Party, and state legislatures host pitched ideological battles. Now institutions that sit at their intersection—state courts, especially state supreme courts—have emerged as a site of bitter fights.

This fall, Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are mulling plans to impeach Janet Protasiewicz, a recently elected liberal justice on the state supreme court, before she has even heard a case—by all appearances for the crime of having been elected as an outspoken liberal. In North Carolina, Anita Earls, a liberal justice on the state supreme court, has sued the state’s Judicial Standards Commission over an investigation it began into fairly anodyne comments she made about implicit racial bias in a press interview.

These two examples are only the latest in a trend of punishing judges for their rulings or simply for their politics. In 2018, a Pennsylvania Republican sought unsuccessfully to impeach four of the five Democrats on the state’s highest court. In 2022, Ohio Republicans wanted to impeach state-supreme-court chief justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican and former lieutenant governor, over rulings about redistricting. In Montana, a bill seeks to make the state’s Judicial Standards Commission more partisan and give it more power to levy consequences on judges.

[David A. Graham: First night at the Republican National Convention]

“There seems to be a growing recognition that if you can’t win at the ballot box or change the way the judges are selected in your state, then judicial-ethics mechanisms in the state may be another tool for exerting political pressure on judges,” Douglas Keith, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me.

One glaring similarity of these cases is that Republicans are behind all of them. Both parties have participated in turning up the partisan heat in state courts. I have cited Protasiewicz’s campaign, which focused on red-meat progressive issues and was heavily funded by out-of-state liberal groups, as a cautionary example of turning everything into politics. Yet GOP lawmakers are going further by attempting to punish their opponents outside of elections. The Brennan Center tracks bills to undermine state courts, and all but one in the most recent survey was in a GOP-led state. (New York is the blue outlier.) Kentucky Republicans passed a law this year allowing cases to be moved away from a court in Frankfort, the capital, essentially to bypass a single judge who has often struck down their moves. In Arizona and Georgia, recent Republican administrations have packed the state supreme courts.

Both the Wisconsin and North Carolina cases fit the trend, but they carry their own peculiar wrinkles. The Wisconsin case is the sort of political train wreck that is common today: foreseeable from a long distance, and yet no one seems able to stop it. Even before Protasiewicz’s April election, Republicans floated the possibility of an impeachment. Now the GOP, which holds gerrymander-bolstered majorities in both houses of the legislature, is poised to follow through. (The governor, Tony Evers, is a Democrat, and the state narrowly backed Joe Biden in 2020, after narrowly going for Donald Trump in 2016.)

Historically, and in very broad terms, candidates for elected judgeships have tended to say little about their specific views, letting their surrogates and—in states with partisan elections—party affiliation speak for them. (Wisconsin judicial elections are nominally nonpartisan.) Protasiewicz and her conservative opponent, Daniel Kelly, jettisoned that, all but running on partisan platforms and signaling their views on redistricting and abortion while drawing national funding. Protasiewicz won the vitriolic campaign by a comfortable 11-point margin.

She was sworn in last month and still hasn’t heard a case, but Wisconsin legislators are now openly discussing impeachment. Conspicuously missing from all of this discussion is the putative justification—and that’s because they’re still searching for one. They’ve argued that her statements violated ethical guidelines, but the state’s judicial-ethics commission rejected that in a letter that Protasiewicz released. They’ve accused her of prejudging cases that might come before her, but none has yet. They’ve also mulled using her acceptance of donations from the state Democratic Party, but the fact is that all but one sitting justice have taken such funds.

Whether or not Protasiewicz’s campaign approach was politically prudent, Republicans have failed to come up with a decent rationale for removing her, which makes clear what the real reason is: A liberal supreme court is an existential threat to conservative politics in the state. If the court throws out the current maps, as expected, it would eliminate the durable, gerrymandered GOP majority in the legislature. It could also loosen restrictions on abortion. Impeachment of state-court judges is relatively rare in the U.S., and it has historically been used in cases of clear misconduct. Using it to punish politics would be a shift, and one that would endanger the court’s ability to act as a check on the legislative and executive branches.

Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the house, did not reply to a request for comment. If Protasiewicz were impeached, she would be suspended pending a senate trial, but Devin LeMahieu, the GOP leader in the senate, has said the body wouldn’t take up impeachment. That has led to speculation that Protasiewicz might be left in limbo—unable to rule, but neither convicted nor cleared—and the court with a 3–3 partisan deadlock, in clear contravention of voters’ wishes.

[David A. Graham: North Carolina’s deliberate disenfranchisement of Black voters]

What is happening in North Carolina is stranger, if not quite so dramatic. Some history is helpful: Battles over voting, including maps and election laws, have been the defining theme of North Carolina politics for the past decade and a half, since Republicans took control of the legislature. Earls, a Black woman, for years led the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a major legal opponent of Republican moves on voting laws. In 2018, she was elected to the supreme court, running as a Democrat in a partisan race. It was the first time since 2004 that supreme-court elections were partisan, owing to a change made by the GOP-led government.

Following the 2020 census, North Carolina Republicans enacted maps that were likely to give 10 of 14 U.S. House seats to the GOP, even though the two parties tend to garner similar portions of the aggregate vote. The state supreme court, then dominated by Democrats, rejected the maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in spring 2022. Republicans then recaptured control of the supreme court in the fall, and reversed the decision. (The legislature, meanwhile, had appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court under the so-called independent state legislature theory; the justices rejected their argument.) The new Republican chief justice also overhauled many other procedures at the court.

An atmosphere of acrimony has come to pervade the court. But although partisanship is par for the course today, employing ethics complaints as a partisan weapon is not. The state’s Judicial Standards Commission, which is chaired by a Republican judge and includes judges from both parties as well as attorneys, received an anonymous complaint accusing Earls of improperly commenting on a case. After an investigation, the commission dismissed the complaint. Then, in June, Earls gave an interview to Law360 discussing race and diversity in the courts. The commission informed Earls that it was reopening its investigation “based on an interview … in which you appear to allege that your Supreme Court colleagues are acting out of racial, gender, and/or political bias in some of their decision making.”

I read the interview with interest, curious to see what the inflammatory comments were, but emerged baffled. In one passage, Earls said her newly elected colleagues “very much see themselves as a conservative bloc. They talk about themselves as ‘the conservatives.’ Their allegiance is to their ideology, not to the institution.” In another, she said implicit bias was in play in the very white and male group of lawyers who argue before the court. “I’m not suggesting that any of this is conscious, intentional, racial animus,” Earls said. “But I do think that our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.”

Although it’s easy to imagine conservatives disliking and disagreeing with this argument, the concept of implicit bias is by now so established and common as to be nearly banal. Beyond that, ruling such comments out of bounds seems absurd given that justices are partisan officeholders elected in political campaigns. The commission does not appear to have issued sanctions for similar instances—most of its rulings involve clear misconduct—and Earls’s lawsuit argues other states don’t offer relevant precedents either. In an emailed statement, the Judicial Standards Commission’s executive director noted, “The Commission is statutorily obligated to investigate all instances of alleged judicial misconduct and cannot comment on pending investigations.”

The experts I spoke with couldn’t imagine any serious sanction emerging from the investigation—certainly not removal or suspension, which are within the commission’s ambit. Even so, Earls decided to sue the commission, alleging “a series of months-long intrusive investigations” that infringe on her First Amendment rights and asking a court to block the investigation. Why bother, I asked her attorney, Press Millen, if punishment was unlikely?

[Quinta Jurecic: The Court eviscerates the independent state legislature theory]

“She can’t keep doing this forever,” he told me, citing the time and effort involved in responding to the investigation. And he said the specter had already led her to turn down invitations to write an article for a national magazine and to a symposium on state courts because she doesn’t know what speech the commission might or might not abide. “Normally when you hear people talk about chilling of free speech it’s always in an abstract and hypothetical way. Not here.”

Bob Orr, a former Republican justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court, told me that the judicial-standards process is “fundamentally broken.” Orr clashed with the commission as a judge, and as an attorney has defended judges involved in investigations. (Orr left the Republican Party over its Trump-era changes.) “I’ve known a lot of members on the panels over the years. They’re good people. They’re trying to do what’s right,” he said. But he said the commission’s structure is opaque, unclear, and unfair to accused judges, who don’t know who filed a complaint, how an investigation was initiated, or how it’s conducted, and have little recourse at the end.

Such a black box lends itself to abuse—and certainly to the perception of abuse—along political lines. “If I were a certain kind of political opponent of hers, she would be a manifestation of one of the most terrifying things imaginable to me: an extremely capable and accomplished African American woman,” Millen told me. The circumstances of the complaint into Earls, similar to the other assaults on state courts elsewhere, make that appear to be the most likely motivation.

New York hosts the six-day UN General Assembly with some world leaders, including Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron, notable by their absence.