IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

One hundred days, one hundred classics.

- JILL LEPORE

In the Penguin Little Black Classics, I found my methadone for doomscrolling.

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