A Trip to the Boundary Waters

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How does a swing state go extreme? The staff writer Jane Mayer took a deep dive into Ohio statehouse politics. She talked with the politician David Pepper, who wrote “Laboratories of Autocracy,” about how an extreme gerrymander of Ohio’s electoral districts has put its democracy “on life support.” The gerrymander “changed the whole course of history there,” Mayer notes. Plus, Alex Kotlowitz, known as a chronicler of urban life in Chicago, brought a recorder on his annual canoe trip to the remote wilderness of the Boundary Waters. And Susan Orlean remembers Ivana Trump, who died last month, at the age of seventy-three.

Jane Mayer on Ohio’s Lurch to the Right

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

A Trip to the Boundary Waters

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

Susan Orlean on Ivana Trump

Ivana Trump died last month, at the age of seventy-three. Orlean remembers her enthusiasm for being a Trump long after her divorce from the man she called the Donald.

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