“I had found my doomscrolling methadone.” In this week’s issue, Lepore turns to her stack of Penguin Little Black Classics, which has become her way to cope with the darkening state of the Republic. Plus:
- The bureaucratic nightmares of being trans under Trump
- T.S.A. workers are losing their protections
- “The Great Gatsby” turns one hundred
Trump’s declaration of eight national emergencies within his first hundred days marks the high noon of the emergency Presidency, turning an abuse of power into a feature of the office.Illustration by Ximo Abadía
A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump
On the twentieth of January, the year of our Lord 2025, Donald Trump’s one hundred days began.
I read his second Inaugural Address early the next morning in bed, curled, bent to the glow of an iPhone in dark mode, a morning ritual that always feels like sin.
Then, dutifully, I scrolled through the Day One executive orders:
The Day One executive orders included—and depended on—the President’s formal, executive declarations of not one, not two, but three national emergencies: an immigration emergency, an energy emergency, and a terrorism emergency. There was also the Donald-Trump-is-President-again emergency.
I buried my phone under my pillow and closed my eyes. Blindly, I reached over to my nightstand and groped for a book. I pulled off the stack the first of the Penguin Little Black Classics, a collection of slender paperbacks that I’d been meaning to read, each as thin and sleek as my phone, bound in black, with white type on a plain cover. Dark mode.
No. 1, Giovanni Boccaccio, “Mrs Rosie and the Priest,” is described on the back cover as “bawdy tales of pimps, cuckolds, lovers and clever women from the fourteenth-century Florentine masterpiece The Decameron.” The book opened like a flower, like a hinge, like a butterfly, like a pair of hands in blessing. I turned to the first page:
My heart leapt. I had found my doomscrolling methadone. With five hundred gold florins in his bag, Andreuccio set off for Naples. And I made a vow to read one volume of the Penguin Little Black Classics each morning in bed, matins, for a hundred days. Two and a half times Lent. In case of emergency, break open a book.
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Editor’s Pick
Photo illustration by Ricardo Tomás; Source photographs from Getty
The Bureaucratic Nightmares of Being Trans Under Trump
This week, we’re publishing a series of stories about the lives that have been upended in the first hundred days of this Administration. Since taking office, Trump has been targeting trans people; he’s signed executive orders banning trans people from self-identifying their gender on their passports and from serving in the military. “Based on the scale of Trump’s anti-trans policies, the goal is not just to limit trans people’s ability to move through the world safely,” Grace Byron writes, “it’s to codify a moral judgment: that trans people are deplorable.” Read the story »
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Daily Cartoon
“For too long, we’ve all suffered the bizarre and oppressive policies that I installed last week.”
Cartoon by Hartley Lin
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P.S. “The atrocities experienced by Chinese residents of the country remain little known,” Michael Luo wrote, about a brutal episode of racial terror in 1885, in which a group of white miners killed at least twenty-eight Chinese residents of Rock Springs, Wyoming. “Strangers in the Land,” Luo’s epic telling of Chinese migration in America, publishes today.
Erin Neil contributed to this edition.
