| A genuine surprise of early 2023 has been the sudden ubiquity of balloons. In the skies over North America, in terse statements by government officials, and in headlines around the world, balloons have captured the attention of millions, though not for the first time. In 2010, the New Yorker staff writer Alec Wilkinson published “The Ice Balloon,” about a highly publicized journey by air. In the late nineteenth century, a Swedish explorer named S. A. Andrée attempted to become the first person to reach the North Pole from above, betting that a balloon could transport him where older technologies—ships and sledges—had fallen short. In July, 1897, Andrée lifted off in a balloon called the Eagle, accompanied by a civil engineer and a physicist cousin of the writer August Strindberg. In a little under two days, he hoped, he and his companions would complete the six-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey, making their own bit of history and, perhaps, continuing on to Alaska. The trip didn’t go as planned. Using diaries that were later discovered in ice, Wilkinson pieces together the monthslong expedition, a singular misadventure involving polar-bear meat, morphine use, and sights never previously encountered by humans. The precise cause of the men’s fate remains unknown, but the records that Andrée left behind are vivid. “The sun touched the horizon at midnight,” he wrote in his diary, somewhere in the Arctic. “The landscape on fire. The snow a sea of flame.” | 
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