Julian Lucas

New York

Staff Writer at The New Yorker

Editor at Large at Cabinet Magazine

Contributing Editor at The Ballot

staff writer @newyorker // edits @cabinetmagazine & @thedialmag // jes’ grew carrier

Articles

How Lorna Simpson Broke the Frame

3 days ago | businessandamerica.com | Julian Lucas

As Davis power-washed de Lavallade off the reusable screen, Simpson settled into an armchair and reached into her formidable black canvas tote. “You wanna see?” she asked, pulling out a slim package. Inside were five wallet-size photos, probably from the nineteen-thirties or forties, of a Black man in a three-piece suit trying out various expressions.
How Lorna Simpson Broke the Frame

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Julian Lucas

Lorna Simpson found the meteorite on eBay. “It was for a great price,” she told me, declining to give the exact figure, though she later admitted that it had cost about six thousand dollars. The seller was “some guy upstate” who’d never listed anything comparable and provided no proof of its celestial provenance. But when it was finally delivered—to her airy studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I’d come to see her on a February afternoon—magnets clung to its dimpled surface.
The Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge

1 month ago | rsn.org | Julian Lucas

Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE? The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information.
The Volunteer “Data Hoarders” Resisting Trump’s Purge

1 month ago | nuclear-news.net | Julian Lucas |Christina MacPherson

The Volunteer “Data Hoarders” Resisting Trump’s Purge Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE? New Yorker, By Julian Lucas, 15 Mar 25The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared.
The Guerrilla-Librarian Resistance

2 months ago | rsn.org | Julian Lucas

Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE? The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information.
The Volunteer Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge

2 months ago | businessandamerica.com | Julian Lucas

More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark in a purge that one scientist likened to a “digital book burning,” and which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice. Racing to comply with executive orders banning “D.E.I.” and “gender ideology extremism,” agencies have cut materials on everything from supporting transgender youth in school to teaching children about sickle-cell disease, which disproportionately affects people of African descent.
The Volunteer Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Julian Lucas

The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the January 6th insurrection from its website, and whitehouse.gov took down an explainer page about the Constitution.
Dredging Up the Ghostly Secrets of Slave Ships

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Julian Lucas

On the way down I saw nothing. The water was a blur of teal fringed with rusty shadows, darkening, about twenty feet below, to a sickly emerald. I followed a rope strung between a buoy and a stake in the seabed, pausing occasionally to pinch my nose and adjust my sinuses to the pressure. Just beyond the thermocline, where the temperature abruptly drops, a hand emerged from the murk and grabbed me by the wrist, dragging me the last few inches to the bottom. The silt was as soft as tapioca pudding.
Mati Diop and the Cinema of Impossible Returns

Oct 24, 2024 | newyorker.com | Julian Lucas

The Musée du Quai Branly is a long ark of a building perched over a garden, whose foliage screens the museum from its busy namesake thoroughfare on the banks of the Seine. Literally overshadowed by the Eiffel Tower, it houses more than three hundred thousand pieces of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, most of them legacies of France’s colonial empire.
Danzy Senna Is Amused by Your Mixed Feelings

Sep 3, 2024 | newyorker.com | Julian Lucas

The sad music snuck up on us, stealing into the conversation just as we turned to the future of biracial identity. “We’re under deep suspicion at the moment,” Danzy Senna confided over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we’d settled down at a booth near the piano.