Life and Death

2023
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “Watching Childhood End in My Backyard.” The New Yorker, August 26, 2023. Article
2021
Lepore, Jill. 2021. “The Invention of the Week.” The New Yorker, November 21, 2021. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2021. “It's Just Too Much: Has Burnout Become the Human Condition?” The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. Article
2020
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “The Isolation Ward: On loneliness.” The New Yorker, April 6, 2020. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “Don't Come Any Closer: What's at stake in our fables of contagion?” The New Yorker, March 30, 2020. Article
2019
The Deadline: On the lingering of loss
Lepore, Jill. 2019. “The Deadline: On the lingering of loss.” The New Yorker, July 8, 2019. Article
2018
Lepore, Jill. 2018. “The Shorebird: Rachel Carson and the rising of the seas.” The New Yorker, March 26, 2018. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2018. “It's Alive: Two hundred years of Frankenstein.” The New Yorker, February 12, 2018. Article
Bibliography
2017
Lepore, Jill. 2017. “Dead Weight: The burden of the corpse.” The New Yorker, October 16, 2017. Article
2016
Lepore, Jill. 2016. “Baby Doe: A political history of tragedy.” The New Yorker, 1 Feb 2016. Article
Bibliography.pdf
2015
Lepore, Jill. 2015. “To Have and to Hold: Reproduction, Marriage, and the Constitution.” The New Yorker, May 25, 2015. Article
Bibliography
2013
The Prodigal Daughter: Writing, history, mourning
Lepore, Jill. 2013. “The Prodigal Daughter: Writing, history, mourning.” The New Yorker, July 8, 2013. Article
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

A Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction

From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little- studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.

2012
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death

A finalist for the 2013 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.

How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

2011
Lepore, J. 2011. “Birthright: What's next for Planned Parenthood.” The New Yorker. Article
Bibliography
Lepore, J. 2011. “Twilight: Growing old and even older.” The New Yorker, March 14, 2011. Article
Bibliography
2010

AMERICAN CHRONICLES about Robert C. W. Ettinger, a founder of the cryonics movement. Robert C. W. Ettinger is ninety-one years old and he is a founder of the cryonics movement. When he dies, the blood will be drained from his body, antifreeze will be pumped into his arteries, and holes will be drilled in his skull, after which he will be stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen at minus three hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. He expects to be defrosted, sometime between fifty and two hundred years from now, by scientists who will make him young and strong and tireless. Ettinger has already frozen his mother and his two wives, along with ninety-two other people who await resurrection inside giant freezers in a building just a few blocks from his house, in Clinton Township, Michigan. The Cryonics Institute occupies a seven-thousand-square-foot warehouse in an industrial park. Past a shabby waiting room is the small office of Andy Zawacki, who constitutes half of C.I.’s full-time staff. He is also one of C.I.’s more than eight hundred members, which means that he plans to be frozen when he dies. The writer visited the freezer storage area. There were fourteen cylindrical freezers. Each held six patients, and all but four were filled. There were also three older, rectangular freezers. The writer asked if the corpses were put in canisters within the cylinders. “No, in sleeping bags,” Ettinger said. Ettinger was born in Atlantic City in December of 1918. His mother’s family came from Odessa; his father was born in Germany. In about 1922, the family moved to Detroit. When he was eight years old, Ettinger started reading Amazing Stories, a sci-fi magazine. Ettinger dates his interest in immortality to 1931, when he read “The Jameson Satellite.” Mentions Ted Williams’s head, which was frozen and stored at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, C.I.’s chief rival. “Neuropreservation” has a scientific attitude, but that doesn’t make it science. Credentialled laboratory scientists don’t generally think the dead will one day awaken. The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse you get mush. And even if, in the future, scientists could repair the damage done to cells by freezing and thawing, what they would have, at best, is a cadaver. Ettinger announced the dawn of what he called the Freezer Era at the height of the Cold War. His book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” appeared in 1964, the year “Dr. Strangelove” hit theatres. When the book came out, Ettinger became something of a star. The first human being was frozen in 1966; it went badly, and the body had to be buried a few months later. The following year, a man was frozen by an organization that later became the Cryonics Society of California. Ettinger’s father and brother were not frozen; they “were lost.” His first patient was his mother, Rhea, whom he froze in 1977. His second patient was his first wife, Elaine, who died in 1987. He remarried the following year. His second wife, Mae, suffered a stroke in 2000, and she was frozen as well. Ettinger finds nothing so uninteresting as history. Describes the writer and Ettinger going through his family photo albums.

Bibliography
2009
Lepore, J. 2009. ““Baby Talk: The fuss about parenthood”.” The New Yorker. Article

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