Category: You Should See This

By 2012, as the world now knows, the major platforms had created an outrage machine that made life online far uglier, faster, more polarized and more likely to incite performative shaming. In addition, as Instagram grew in popularity over the next decade, it had particularly strong effects on girls and young women, inviting them to “compare and despair” as they scrolled through posts from friends and strangers showing faces, bodies and lives that had been edited and re-edited until many were closer to perfection than to reality.

In the inky darkness of a late summer night last September, three cars filled with armed men began circling Birch Lake in northern Michigan, looking for ways to approach Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s three-bedroom vacation cottage, subdue her — using a stun gun if necessary — and drag her away.

As it turns out, not many insiders know much about them, either. Where did they come from? Who made them? How did they find their way onto the shelves of sex shops and corner stores? And who was profiting? I decided to find out.

“‘Oh my God, please tell the truth,’” she recalled saying as Meyer spoke. “I was on my hands and knees, going, ‘Please tell the truth, Urban, please.’”

In the days to come, the story of the “border ambush” that followed would reverberate outward from the Circle Dug, taken up by blogs and national media, then by politicians and late-night talk show hosts, all certain that they knew the real story of what happened that night.

Or see a recent photograph of her. Or ask her any questions. What does it feel like, 46 years after the first, to have a new novel coming out? Why did you step out of view? Did it make you a more honest writer? Did it serve your soul? I would not get answers. I would not be able to charm her into laughter. I know she is brilliant, obscure, irascible. I imagine her smile is still wry. But does she still wear her head wrapped in 2021? Is she still adept at putting a nosy questioner in her place?

Peter Duffy, author of the 2003 book “The Bielski Brothers,” lamented the lack of a unified collection of these testimonies in a conversation with me recently. “There’s this sense that we’ve done enough on this history. People say, ‘Oh, another Holocaust book, or another memorial,’” he told me. But Mr. Duffy believes that when it comes to what transpired in these forests, “we’ve barely scratched the surface of the story that is there, and probably most of it is lost.” The history is so elusive, in fact, that scholars at The Polish Center for Holocaust Research have called these less-understood stories of Jews who escaped their ghettos and attempted to hide “the margins of the Holocaust.”