I’m just a little annoyed at Jill Lepore. Or is it perhaps a kind of inverted admiration?

My passing “beef” with her is that in THE DEADLINE, a collection of powerful essays mostly from more than a decade of New Yorker contributions, she finds all the best descriptions for the admittedly awful state of our world and seams them into tight, clever phrases that I dearly wish I had thought of.

But that’s what she does --- incredibly well and consistently --- in 600 pages of uncompromising historical analyses covering pretty well the state of everything. It would take an entire review to properly list the expanse of subjects she covers in 10 sections, whose darkly poetical titles play on both our emotions and curiosity.

"Strangely enough, THE DEADLINE generates its own kind of lopsided hope by offering so many absorbing backstories along with unvarnished truths about why our society...is unfolding the way it is. As I see it, I’d rather be an informed pessimist than a depressed one."

For that reason alone, this is a classic case where picking out one or two favorites in such a potent anthology just won’t work. Each of them packs a breath-stopping punch to both the gut and the intellect. And once in a while, THE DEADLINE also hits you square in the heart. Just trust me on this; you’ll know when it happens.

Within these 10 clusters, where each piece is dated and sometimes given a present-day catch-up footnote, some of Lepore’s topics include American politics and their actors (from shady to just plain incompetent); big data and its stranglehold on information; social media that disconnects; odd characters too strange to even be funny; the disintegration of public education; the rise of new and more insidious forms of racism (and other “isms”); the seemingly inexorable decline of democracy; the rise of religious fundamentalism; the buying and selling of justice; the misalignment of basic human rights; gun culture and its cradle-to-grave indoctrination; women’s rights and their misappropriation; the sellout of journalism; the widening effects of COVID-19 on our increasingly insular society; the outrageous waste of corporate brand wars --- and all the usual suspects, ranging from climate change (and its deniers) to child poverty, immigrant-phobia, automation job loss and so on.

No, THE DEADLINE is not an amusing book. But it is a very compelling and needful one, if we are at all serious about connecting the dots (or bullet holes, or blood spatters) among the 21st-century events swirling around us. Lepore targets each theme, and sometimes several together, with the kind of unwavering intensity that forces you to look through the same lens as she does --- a lens clarified by a rigorous, profound and multilayered grasp of history, no matter how gross it looks.

Playing this long game of past and current events, seeing patterns, trends, tendencies and aberrations, is a gargantuan intellectual effort if one is to predict and prescribe with the authority that Lepore does. But we’re living in times when people of mindfulness and principle are almost craving the bitter, undiluted medicine that she delivers on virtually every page of her book.

We already know that there is a great deal to be pessimistic about in this “century of catastrophes,” as I heard a Canadian news commentator call it the other day. But uninformed pessimism leads only to chronic despair.

Strangely enough, THE DEADLINE generates its own kind of lopsided hope by offering so many absorbing backstories along with unvarnished truths about why our society, continental and global, is unfolding the way it is. As I see it, I’d rather be an informed pessimist than a depressed one.