A trip to the boundary waters

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How does a swing state reach extremes? Staff writer Jane Mayer took a deep dive into Ohio State politics. He spoke with politician David Pepper, who wrote “Laboratories of Empire,” about how an extreme gerrymander in Ohio has put his democracy “on life support.” The gerrymander “changed the whole course of history there,” Mayer notes. In addition, Alex Kotlowitz, known as a chronicler of urban life in Chicago, brought a recorder on his annual canoe trip to the remote Boundary Waters wilderness. And Susan Orleans remembers Ivana Trump, who died last month at the age of seventy-three.

Jane Mayer at Lurch to the Right, Ohio

How does a swing state reach extremes? The reporter took a deep dive into Ohio state politics to diagnose why democracy itself is now “on life support.”

A trip to the boundary waters

A well-known chronicler of urban Chicago, Alex Kotlowitz has been returning to the lakes and deep woods of northern Minnesota, summer after summer, for nearly forty years. What draws him back?

Susan Orleans on Ivana Trump

Ivana Trump died last month, aged seventy-three. Orleans remembers her excitement at being Trump long after her divorce from the man she called Donald.

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