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On Saturday, agents with U.S. Border Patrol killed a man named Alex Jeffrey Pretti, the second person who has been shot dead by federal personnel in Minneapolis since President Donald Trump launched an immigration-enforcement operation in the city earlier this month. After the first killing, of a woman named Renee Good, who was shot behind the wheel of her car by an ICE agent, federal officials made clear that they had little interest in conducting an impartial investigation into the circumstances of her death. During a press conference, Vice-President J. D. Vance said that federal officials have “absolute immunity” in performing their duties. In the aftermath of Pretti’s death, which has prompted even some Republican officeholders to call for an investigation, state officials have accused the federal government of blocking access to the scene of the shooting. Multiple members of the Trump Administration have called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and falsely described what occurred when he was gunned down, which was captured on video. On Saturday night, a federal judge ordered the government not to destroy or alter evidence after a lawsuit was filed by Minnesota authorities.

To talk about what state officials can and cannot do to investigate and prosecute crimes allegedly committed by federal officials, I spoke by phone with Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown who writes a newsletter on legal issues called “One First.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the law on these questions is so unsettled, how the Trump Administration could try to sabotage potential state actions, and how the Supreme Court might view future cases that feature a clash between executive power and states’ rights.

Tell me if this is helpful—there are two different ways it can be difficult for states to investigate or prosecute federal officials. One of them has to do with the law itself as defined by the courts, and the second has to do with the Trump Administration trying to throw up every roadblock it can. Those seem like different things.

I think that’s very helpful. There’s both the question of whether the law would allow a prosecution and whether as a matter of pure logistics, the prosecution is viable. We haven’t usually had to worry about the second one, but we certainly have to worry about it right now.

So then let’s start with the first one, which relates to why it could be complicated for state officials to charge federal officers with crimes in a state such as Minnesota. What is the primary legal roadblock?

The primary legal roadblock is the doctrine that’s become known as supremacy-clause immunity. This is a not-very-well-developed idea dating back to an 1890 Supreme Court decision, which basically says that federal officers are immune from the consequences of state law for actions they’re performing in the legitimate exercise of their federal duties. And the idea, which I think is actually relatively uncontroversial, is that federal officers who are lawfully acting within their federal duties are necessarily acting in a way that has to override contrary state laws. It’s analogous in that respect to the doctrine that’s generally known as preëmption—that valid federal laws will always displace valid state laws.

So the idea here, in the best case, is that if federal officials are trying to enforce desegregation at a school in the South in the nineteen-fifties, for instance, then state and local officials cannot mess with them?

That’s exactly right. You can’t prosecute federal officers for trespassing, for example, for enforcing a court order on a public school in the civil-rights era.

Was the thinking behind the decision so high-minded, though, back in 1890?

Actually, it was. So, the 1890 decision is this remarkably colorful case about the attempted assassination of Justice Stephen Field, and the question was whether his bodyguard, who was a deputy U.S. marshal, could be prosecuted by California for the murder of the Justice’s would-be assassin. And that was a context where I don’t think it’s especially surprising that the Supreme Court was of the view that the federal officer was immune from prosecution under state law for protecting one of their colleagues.

What other decisions have come up about these questions since 1890?

The biggest problem is that there really haven’t been that many cases, and virtually none that have gone back to the Supreme Court. Most of the development of the doctrine has actually been in lower courts. And one of the things I think is unhelpful is that, even when lower courts held in at least some of these cases that prosecutions could go forward, they were often dropped by the prosecutors before they produced a verdict. So we actually have a very, very tiny number of examples of successful state prosecutions of federal officers in American history. Of course, one might also say we don’t have that many examples in American history of what’s been happening in Minneapolis over the past three weeks.

Has the Supreme Court ruled that Congress needs to provide authorization for states to go after federal officials? Am I understanding that correctly?

The Supreme Court has never said that. There are other contexts in which the Supreme Court has said that Congress needs to specifically authorize, for example, [civil] damages suits before federal officers can be sued for violating the Constitution. But we’ve never quite had that ruling in the context of criminal prosecutions. And that’s because these cases have been so few and far between.

The real development in case law has been trying to figure out exactly where the line is between the officer who was immunized because he was acting in good faith and the officer who went too far and should have known that he was going too far. There is a 2006 ruling in the federal appeals court in Denver, which was written by Michael McConnell, a very highly regarded and pretty right-of-center federal appeals judge. And McConnell says you can prosecute federal officers if it wasn’t necessary and reasonable for the officer, in the carrying out of their federal duties, to do what they did.

And that ruling has held?

I think the best that can be said is it’s the law of the Tenth Circuit right now. Minnesota is in the Eighth Circuit. So we’re in a place where there’s no obvious binding authority on this issue for state or local prosecutors.

But let’s say that state or local prosecutors in Minnesota decide that that’s a good standard that you laid out from McConnell. Could you potentially have a situation where the question of whether what the federal officials were doing was “necessary and reasonable” would go to court?

I think the way it would have to happen—and who knows if this is how it actually will happen—is that you would have prosecutors in Minnesota bringing an indictment against one or however many officers they believe they can charge. Those officers would then remove the case to federal court under what’s known as the Federal Officer Removal statute, but it would still be a state prosecution. And then I think the next step would be that the officer or officers would move to dismiss on the grounds that they have this immunity. That’s the moment, before this case could really ever get off the ground, that you’d have to have, almost certainly, a federal judge deciding the immunity question, which as you say is a question of both what the standard is and whether the standard is satisfied here.

If we can set aside the specifics of what we have been witnessing the past few weeks in Minneapolis, what do you think the Constitution says on this matter? And what do you think is a proper way for judges to figure this question out?

The missing piece from any effort to tie this conversation to current events is the role that federal-state coöperation has played historically in mooting this question. No history of the United States would tell a story in which the federal government and the states have always got along. But the blue-sky ideal here is that you don’t need these state-level cases—that when it is a close enough call, when a federal officer has acted in a way that raises that many concerns, then the officer would face consequences under federal law first. And so I guess from a structural constitutional-law perspective, what I worry about is how much those federal consequences have disappeared. It is so hard today to use federal law to hold federal officers accountable for violating our constitutional rights. Criminal prosecutions require a President and a Department of Justice willing to prosecute their own officers. And civil liability has been all but foreclosed by the Supreme Court in a series of cases over the past twenty-five years. All that has put pressure on states, whether state prosecutors or state courts through civil suits, to try to find their own ways of filling the gap.

My own preference, and I think the better reading of the Constitution, is that we’re better off with a uniform system of federal remedies, but if the choice is state remedies or nothing, then I think it’s just as clear that the answer should be at least in some cases, state remedies, or else the Constitution can’t be enforced at all.

You recently wrote, “A world in which the Constitution is only enforceable against the federal government prospectively is a world in which the federal government and its officers can do whatever it wants to the people. . . . This is why, for instance, it has proven so much easier to enforce the Second Amendment (where government restrictions are creating forward-looking consequences) than the Fourth (where the violation is usually a one-off).” Can you talk a little bit about the distinction you’re drawing there between the Second and Fourth Amendments?

Yeah, so the law has this long-standing distinction between what the lawyers would call prospective relief and retrospective relief. With prospective relief, the classic example is an injunction where we are trying to stop the defendant, whether it’s the government or a private party, from continuing to do something that’s wrongful. Retrospective relief is when the wrongful act has already ended, and all we’re trying to do is get the defendant to make the plaintiff whole. And for better or for worse the Supreme Court, with some help from Congress, has got us to a place where it is almost impossible to get retrospective relief against the federal government and especially against federal officers, but actually pretty easy to get prospective relief, often in the form of an injunction, such as someone challenging President Trump’s birthright-citizenship executive order to prevent it from being enforced. But when the harm has ended, whether it’s the use of excessive force by a law-enforcement officer or an assault or an unlawful search, those remedies usually are only retrospective, and that’s where it’s become so difficult.

I don’t want to sound naïve and pretend that this Supreme Court or any Supreme Court is just going to call balls and strikes, to quote Chief Justice John Roberts. What are the possible ideological ways that conservative and liberal Justices might approach the question of federal immunity?

It is interesting. There is a bit of an ideological bent to the debate over whether, for example, federal courts can provide remedies for unconstitutional actions by federal officers without an express act of Congress. I actually argued one of the more recent cases, which was decided in 2020, and it split the Court right down ideological lines. I lost five to four. This was the Hernandez case, which is about whether a Border Patrol agent could be held liable for the allegedly unprovoked cross-border shooting of a fifteen-year-old Mexican national. And on the Court there has been, for better or for worse, a deeply ideological split about whether federal courts can provide their own remedies for damages in cases like that.

But the criminal-prosecution question is a little different because it really is two different doctrines running headlong into each other. One of them is executive power, where this Court has obviously been as sympathetic to broad readings of Article II as any of its predecessors. The other is states’ rights, and the conventional principles of federalism under which states are allowed to have their own accountability regimes.

So you have two ostensibly conservative principles running into each other.

One hundred per cent. And that’s why, by the way, I think it is interesting that the most recent leading case on this very topic in the courts of appeal was written by Michael McConnell, because he’s exactly the kind of judge for whom that intersection would pose some interesting quandaries.

I was struck that a federal judge has just ordered the federal government to refrain from “destroying or altering” evidence in the Pretti shooting. Is that normal?

Nothing about this is normal. It is unusual to ask a federal judge to tell the federal government to not do something it already is not allowed to do. The difference is that getting a federal judge to do it brings with it the contempt power. Obtaining an injunction—or, I think it’s a temporary restraining order, for now, in this case—is basically just a way of giving that legal prohibition teeth.

What can the federal government do, though, if it wants to throw a wrench into this? Are there specific things that you’d be worried about?

I’m worried already about, for example, just how thoroughly the federal government ran forensics on the scene of Saturday’s shooting. Just how carefully they documented the witnesses. Did they run, for example, forensics to figure out which guns fired shots? Did they do gunshot residue tests on each of the officers who were present, in terms of their hands and clothing? One of the problems here is this ship may have already sailed, but there’s also the concern that many of the witnesses to whatever happened on Saturday were apparently brought down to the federal building. The concern is the spectre of intimidation—and whether these individuals were told that they could leave at any time and/or consult an attorney. And so I think the concern is that, if the federal government didn’t do everything by the book, that could make it harder in any future prosecution, frankly, by anybody, whether it’s the states, whether it’s this Administration, or a future Administration.

I suppose if you wanted to be really cynical, there’s a way in which intentionally doing things not by the book could screw up any prosecution.

Right. And I think that’s why you saw the state and local authorities run to federal court on Saturday night. We should all hope that it wasn’t necessary.

We don’t need to be naïve about this. There’s no chance that the federal government will prosecute these people.

No, no, no. There’s no chance.

I would also imagine that a reason any case needs to be done in state court as opposed to federal is that the President cannot pardon people in a state prosecution, right?

It’s sadly accurate. And even though a state prosecution of a federal officer would almost certainly end up in federal court, it is still a state prosecution, and so it would still be exempt from the President’s pardoning power. It shouldn’t be the case that we’re worried about reflexive pardons from the President, but that’s yet another reason why a state criminal prosecution might seem attractive to so many people at this particular moment.

While we continue not being naïve, am I correct in thinking that there would be a relatively easy legislative fix for some of these questions? I realize the odds of that happening in the next year are also close to zero.

So, if our goal is to insure that there’s some measure of accountability when federal officers violate our rights, then, yes, Congress could fix that in a one-sentence statute. Congress could create a robust damages remedy for federal officers who violate the Constitution. Congress could have it be either the officers or the federal government who’s liable. Congress could legislate what defenses the officers would and would not be allowed to have in those cases. The politics of that are unfortunately messy, but the law is not.

The criminal prosecution piece is harder. I think it would be very hard for this Congress, at least while we have this Supreme Court, to find ways of making it easier for the federal government to prosecute its own officers in cases where the President doesn’t want to. This is part of why I’ve spent really so much of my career pushing for a more robust damages framework. Damages aren’t perfect in these cases, but a broadly available, meaningful damages remedy would not just be a way of making the victims whole when their constitutional rights are violated—it would also hopefully deter federal officers from engaging in at least some of the conduct that we’ve been seeing over the last year. ♦

Twenty years ago this week, the Minnesota History Center, in Minneapolis’s twin city, St. Paul, launched an interactive exhibition called “Open House: If These Walls Could Talk.” It was the most elaborate show the museum had ever attempted. Five thousand Minnesotans came out in the frigid January cold on opening weekend to see an actual house that had been reconstructed inside the museum, like a ship in a bottle. Successive generations of Americans—more than fifty families, across more than a century—had lived in the house, at 470 Hopkins Street, wave after wave of newcomers and immigrants, travellers who made Minnesota, and the U.S., their home. The exhibition told their story as the story of America. It won awards, broke records, and changed how museums tell stories. It is also an archive of a lost America.

This weekend, on the streets of Minneapolis, masked agents of the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency shot and killed another American, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti. He, like the poet Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE earlier this month, was among thousands of Minnesotans who have taken to the streets, even amid brutally cold temperatures and a howling snowstorm, to protect immigrants in their state from assault, arrest, separation from their families, and deportation. U.S. immigration policy had become a travesty under the Biden Administration. But nothing about repairing that policy justifies the Trump Administration’s savage, vengeful, and unconstitutional “surge” deployment of ICE agents in American cities, their lawless, masked and wanton violence, or their immunity from prosecution. All over the Twin Cities, immigrants, whether they’re in the U.S. legally or not, have been hiding in their houses, afraid to leave, afraid, even, to peer out a window. Is America still home?

“Open House” was spearheaded by the Minnesota History Center curator Benjamin Filene, who is now the deputy director of public history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “The original idea was that we should do an exhibit about immigration,” Filene says. But he and the design team wanted to put visitors into an actual place and allow them to hear actual voices of actual people. He decided that place should be a house: a container of families and stories and artifacts. He found the house, which is still standing, in a neighborhood called Railroad Island. “No one famous ever slept there,” Filene says. Only ordinary Minnesotans slept there, and sleep there still, if there is still sleep to be had.

Filene and his colleagues tracked down and interviewed everyone they could find who had lived at 470 Hopkins, or who was descended from anyone who lived there, across more than a century. They recorded oral histories; they fabricated period rooms. And then, inside the museum, they built a reimagined version of the house, in which each room featured the furnishings, and the stories, of a different generation of immigrants and newcomers. Two Germans, Albert and Henriette Schumacher, built the house in 1888. You could meet them, and hear their stories, in the sitting room. Then came waves of railroad workers—Scandinavian, Irish, especially—renting rooms in an ever-altering house, subdivided into two units, then three; even the house number changed.. Filene found them in city directories: James Doyle, depot foreman, Northern Pacific Railroad; Frank Appleton, night watchman. Harry and Eva Levey: Mother tongue: Jewish. In the kitchen, if you opened up the oven, you could listen to Michelina Frascone, who immigrated from Naples, in 1931, at the age of eleven, talk about raising seventy-five chickens in the basement. Frascone’s father had worked on the railroad for ten years to save up the money to bring Michelina and her mother to America. Then came the Rust Belt migrants, African Americans who had moved to the Twin Cities from Gary and Chicago and Detroit in the nineteen-eighties, and, finally, the Hmong refugees who had fled postwar Laos, some of whom were still living in the house when its near replica opened in the museum, two miles away.

Every room in the house had interactive features triggered by motion. When you sat down at the dining-room table, Michelina Frascone started telling you the story of her uncle, Filomeno Cocchiarella, who had to go out on Thanksgiving night to repair the railroad tracks. “Please don’t go,” she’d begged him—and he’d got sideswiped, and killed, by a train. In the bedroom, when you sat down on the bed, you heard a man of Scandinavian descent who had married an Italian woman tell the story of how, one night, the bed collapsed—and, as he was telling it, the bed suddenly buckled beneath you. Pang Toua Yang and his wife, Mai Vang, who appeared on a television in the living room, told the story of fleeing Laos with their six children, crossing the Mekong River, and spending years in Thai refugee camps until, four years later, they arrived in Minnesota. Their daughter appeared in the exhibition, too; she became a go-getter realtor, selling homes to more new Americans.

“We went in whatever direction the house took us,” Filene says. Chia Her and her son Tommy Kong told him about growing Asian vegetables in the yard, “the same plot where the Frascones grew grapes.” All those hundreds of hours of oral-history interviews, the census records and city directories, the photographs and mementos: it seemed, for a long time, as if the final exhibition might feel like a jumble. But, when you walked across the threshold of 470 Hopkins Street, something magical happened. All the stories ran together, as if you weren’t visiting fifty-odd families but one very big and sprawling and boisterous American family. That feeling, Filene says, “happened all on its own.”

“Open House” was one of the most welcoming museum shows that ever opened in America. Hardly anything was behind glass. There were forty-two places to sit: couches, dining-room chairs, kitchen stools, armchairs, love seats, beds. You weren’t moved along. You could just hang out—and listen to the walls talk. The exhibition’s whole point, Filene says, was “Come on in, make yourself at home.”

“Open House” lasted more than a decade. It was taken down in 2019—the American home dismantled, an open house closed. But maybe, this winter, that home is being rebuilt, on the streets of Minneapolis, march by march, protester by protester, candle by candle, street by street, house by house—a lost America found. ♦

In Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Oscar-winning 2018 documentary, “Free Solo,” the world-class rock climber Alex Honnold expresses reservations about being shot by a film crew while he attempts to become the first person ever to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan monolith without ropes or a harness. “The idea of falling off . . . It’s, like, kind of O.K. if it’s just by myself, but, like, I wouldn’t want to fall off right in front of my friends,” he says, explaining that usually, when he free-solos—the high-risk practice of no-supports climbing—he tends not to tell anyone he’s doing it. “The fewer people know anything, the better, really.” For Honnold, the documentary suggests, free soloing isn’t about fame or attention or money. Instead, it’s about the climber’s own need to prove to himself that he can overcome mortal risk as well as his own fears. To bring cameras into the equation might mar the authenticity of this pursuit.

If being watched is portrayed as a tricky proposition in “Free Solo,” watching, too, is shown to be fraught. The animating drama of the documentary doesn’t hinge just on whether Honnold will emerge from climbing El Cap with life and limb intact but, also, on whether documenting his ascent is even appropriate—a question that members of the film crew, who are all climbers themselves, grapple with onscreen. “I’ve always been conflicted about doing a movie about free soloing because it’s so dangerous,” Chin says. “It’s hard to not imagine your friend, Alex, soloing . . . and you’re making a film about it, which might put undue pressure on him to do something and him falling through the frame to his death.” At the movie’s climax, as we see Honnold finally ascending to El Cap’s peak, hanging on the wall’s granite surface by his fingertips or balancing on a slim ridge with his toes, the shot occasionally pans to one of the cameramen, Mikey Schaefer, who keeps turning away from his lens. “I can’t believe you guys actually can watch,” he says to his colleagues at one point.

How far we’ve come. On Saturday night, Alex Honnold was back, but this time the whole world was invited to watch as he climbed not a natural wonder but a man-made one—the Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world—as part of a special Netflix streaming event, “Skyscraper Live.” The name of the broadcast called to mind one of those nineteen-seventies disaster movies, like “The Towering Inferno” or “Airport,” in which a catastrophe befalls a built environment to harrowing effect. But if part of the pleasure of those films is watching their protagonists’ struggle to just barely escape whatever outlandish calamity has been thrust upon them, in Honnold’s case, the calamity, were it to come, would be self-inflicted. It would also be streamed globally, and in real time, to millions of Netflix subscribers.

“It’s really just sensationalism for the sake of shock and awe, like verging awfully close to Colosseum type entertainment,” a user wrote in a much liked comment on a Reddit climbing thread, and when I watched the special’s promotional trailer, which leaned hard on the event’s critical stakes, I worried that this take wasn’t wrong. (“If you fall,” Honnold says in the promo, as the camera rushes at a dizzying clip down the length of the nearly seventeen-hundred-foot building, “you’re going to die.”) The fact that “Skyscraper Live” was supposed to take place on Friday night but, at the last minute, got postponed because of rainfall in Taipei, was, on the one hand, reassuring, since it indicated that Honnold and Netflix were being at least somewhat sensible by not taking on more risk than they had already signed up for. On the other hand, it reminded me that there was only so much they could control. What if it started to rain while Honnold was climbing? What if the wind picked up? What if there was seismic activity?

Around 8 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Saturday, with the ascent up Taipei 101 about to commence, these possibilities were all raised by Mark Rober, a popular science YouTuber and one of the special’s presenters. Rober’s peppy manner—“finally, believe it or not, we’re monitoring earthquakes!”—was echoed by the event’s team of commentators, among them the Netflix sports anchor Elle Duncan, the celebrated rock climber Emily Harrington, and the man-bun- and undercut-sporting W.W.E. fighter Seth (Freakin’) Rollins. The trio’s bland, affable chatter—“the goosebumps are goosebumping,” Duncan offered at one point, perkily—reminded me a bit of watching one of the sleepier Olympic sports (dressage? archery?) rather than a harrowing life-and-death event.

Oddly, I found this comforting, as it took things down a notch from the melodramatic, “are you not entertained?” vibe the event’s promotional push suggested. It also seemed to parallel Honnold’s own hyper-controlled geniality. Wearing a red North Face shirt, black pants, and black-and-yellow shoes, with his dark hair cut short, and only a cannister of chalk to dust his hands with attached to his waist, the climber, who is now forty, bid a mild, tearless farewell to Sanni McCandless, his wife and the mother of his two young daughters. (When considering, in a prerecorded segment, if his willingness to risk his life has been affected since becoming a father, Honnold said, “I didn’t want to die in the mountains before I had kids, still don’t want to die now that we have kids,” which sounded like a “no” to me.) As Honnold approached the building with no great fanfare, as if he were about to board a local bus or enter a midtown CVS—this despite the thousands of cheering, screaming spectators crowding around the building, ready to follow his every move—I marvelled at the fact that he wasn’t even carrying a water bottle. (For some reason this seemed especially insane to me, maybe because I personally feel immediate disquiet if I even forget to bring along a glass of water when I go to bed at night.)

Taipei 101 comprises several sections, each with its own repetitive climbing rhythm. The bottom, Harrington explained, was the “warmup” part for Honnold—a vertical, largely non-angled climb, with only two trickier spirally ornaments which are supposed to represent clouds, but which reminded me of large steel ears; then came the so-called bamboo boxes—eight steep, basin-like sections stacked like so many laundry bins, each about a hundred feet tall, and edged with an architectural dragon-style element that Honnold had to hoist himself past; after came the tower, with a series of overhanging ledges that the climber dangled on, one at a time, before using his core and arm strength to swing his legs up; and then, finally, a spindly spire, complete with a flimsy ladder to allow for Honnold’s final ascent to the small dome at the building’s tippy-top. The whole thing was very Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times” crossed with Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible,” with a dash of “Black Mirror.”

In his brief moments of rest on one impossibly tiny window ledge or another, Honnold would occasionally smile and wave at the spectators assembled below, or at people standing inside the building as he passed, eager to capture a picture of the climber on their phones, through the windows. (Some appeared to try and get his attention for the sake of a better photo op by gesturing at him, which struck me as absolutely diabolical.) Equipped with an earpiece through which he was able to listen to heavy-metal music (Tool is a favorite, the panel told us), Honnold was also fitted with a mike, and his intermittent comments remained brightly impersonal. He was variously “psyched” or “pumped,” or impressed by how “beautiful” the day was in Taipei; a couple of times he admitted that he was getting “kind of tired” and that it felt “very windy.” Nonetheless, he assured the panel, “the view was incredible” and the experience of climbing the building was “so cool.” More than once, these wild understatements put me in mind of the comedian Nathan Fielder, whose odd blankness is often used to great effect in his work—although Honnold seemed perfectly sincere.

Amid all the patter, too, it was sometimes easy to forget that we were watching a unique feat: a man clambering with seemingly preternatural ease up an almost inconceivably enormous structure, often literally dangling between life and death. Honnold reportedly received a six-figure sum for his participation, but in an interview he gave before the special, he explained that he would have climbed Taipei 101 for free, just for himself, had he been able to receive permission to do so without Netflix’s involvement. The spectacle set up by the streaming platform, in this sense, was just a vehicle for him to achieve a lifelong dream. The terrifying reality of this dream hit home for me during the moments in the broadcast when the panel would quiet down for a spell, and viewers were able to experience Honnold’s body onscreen, accompanied only by the sounds emerging from his attached mike: his breathing and grunting; the flapping of his shirt in the wind; the thumps and bumps as his hands and feet connected with the building’s steel and glass. This was some real shit, stomach-turning but, also, inarguably amazing, and when Honnold reached the top of the building’s spire and said, “Sick!” I felt like I finally understood what he meant, in more than one sense of the word. ♦

It should be thistle-covered,
a labor of thunder bent
through it.
It should fountain sweet-
water arcs into catfish-
mouthed bottlenecks.
It should flock blackbirds
into halos about it.
It should be wrapped in guitar
string and whistle
wind up in its branched
hair of calamitous thorn.
Above all, a rose
carried in a pocket
at least a hundred miles.
Beneath all, a 33-r.p.m.
orbit of diamond-cut
tremble. Surrounding all,
the record skipping on
at least a dozen echoing
country yodels.
I ask again:
Where is the shrine
to Johnny Shines?
I peeked into the
dark covering my eyes
with its ethereal hands,
and then only then
did I hear.

For the cover of the February 2, 2026, issue, the artist Peter de Sève celebrates the brave souls who continue to work when the city is paralyzed by a snowstorm. “Blizzards have provided some of my very fondest memories of living in New York,” de Sève said. “All sound is muffled. The few cars on the road are reduced to a crawl, and big grownups like myself become kids again.”

For more snow covers, see below:

“February 4, 1939,” by William Steig

“Polar Bears on Fifth Avenue,” by Bruce McCall

“Whiteout,” by Christoph Niemann

Find Peter de Sève’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.