Lawrence Wright on what went wrong with America’s response to the coronavirus. Plus: Anna Wiener on Substack, Adam Gopnik on democracy, and Doreen St. Félix on “The Flight Attendant.” View in browser | Update your preferences
Dear Readers,
In April, Lawrence Wright published a shockingly prescient novel about a global pandemic sparked by a mysterious virus that originated in Asia. As his fictional world hewed ever closer to reality, and it became clear that the COVID-19 outbreak was hardly the fleeting episode that President Trump insisted it would be, The New Yorker asked Wright to spend the better part of the year reporting this narrative.
Remarkably, the very scientist who had helped Wright invent a fictional pathogen and vaccine for his novel—Dr. Barney S. Graham, of the National Institutes of Health—ended up becoming the chief architect of the first two vaccines to be authorized for emergency use in the United States. In addition to Graham, Wright also interviewed epidemiologists, researchers, public-health experts, frontline medical responders, and key individuals across federal and local governments. The result is a work of sweeping reporting that takes readers inside laboratories, hospital rooms, and the White House for an astonishing and comprehensive examination of the science, the politics, and the human tragedy of the pandemic.
This week, we have devoted nearly the entire issue—something we’ve done on only a handful of occasions in The New Yorker’s history—to Wright’s exploration of the past year and what went so wrong with America’s response to the coronavirus. His narrative of the pandemic is filled with insights about vaccinology and White House intrigue, but among the most powerful segments of the piece are his portraits of ordinary Americans, such as Dr. Ebony Hilton, a Black anesthesiologist in Virginia, who knew from the start that the pandemic would lay bare our society’s deepest inequities. The pandemic may be the biggest story of our lifetime, but Wright, as always, has woven his tapestry from the smallest threads.
—The Editors
A Reporter at Large
The Plague Year
The mistakes and struggles behind America’s COVID-19 tragedy.
By Lawrence Wright
A Critic at Large
Is Substack the Media Future We Want?
The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize.
By Anna Wiener
Comment
What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy
The interesting question is not what causes authoritarianism but what has ever suspended it.
By Adam Gopnik
Books
What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus
Jefferson revised the Gospels to make Jesus more reasonable, and lost the power of his story.
By Vinson Cunningham
On Television
A Hot Mess Caught in a Caper in “The Flight Attendant”
The HBO Max miniseries is like a clever pop song; the thrill is in its juxtaposition of a rowdy rhythm with a lyrical portrait of tragedy and grief.
By Doreen St. Félix
Books
The Italian Novelist Who Envisioned a World Without Humanity
In the post-apocalyptic landscape of “Dissipatio H.G.,” Guido Morselli probes the border between blissful solitude and extreme loneliness.
By Alejandro Chacoff
The Current Cinema
“Dear Comrades!” Is Andrei Konchalovsky’s Masterpiece
Ideology smacks head on into love in the director’s film about the 1962 massacre of striking workers in Novocherkassk, starring Julia Vysotskaya.
By Anthony Lane
Newsletters
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