“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

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.

Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. (Applause.) Wow. Thank you very, very much.

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.

From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.

Then, dutifully, I scrolled through the Day One executive orders:

A full, complete and unconditional pardon . . . offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 . . .

. . . the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States . . .

. . . establishes the Department of Government Efficiency . . .

. . . eliminate the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” . . .

. . . directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.

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:

I was told some time ago about a young man from Perugia called Andreuccio, the son of a certain Pietro and a horse-dealer by trade.

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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