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

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

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 | 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

1 month 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

1 month 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.
Cole Escola’s Great Day on Broadway

Aug 2, 2024 | newyorker.com | Julian Lucas

“She never made this cake,” Cole Escola informed me, briskly whipping egg whites as I sifted flour. It was early June, and we were baking at Joe’s Pub, the downtown performance venue, where the line cooks watched our efforts with mounting concern. The cake was a white almond cake, and “she” was Mary Todd Lincoln, whom Escola portrays as an unhinged diva with a drinking problem in “Oh, Mary!,” their self-written Broadway début.
How Lonnie G. Bunch III Is Renovating the "Nation's Attic"

Jul 9, 2024 | newyorker.com | Julian Lucas

In September, 2016, when the Smithsonian's crown-like National Museum of African American History and Culture (N.M.A.A.H.C.) opened its doors to the public, its founding director, Lonnie G.