It’s the question most often posed to artists: where do you get your ideas from? David Haig’s answer is: I ask Google. Preserve the mystique, man! Haig is celebrated both as an actor (Killing Eve, The Thin Blue Line) and playwright, whose 2004 hit My Boy Jack was adapted for TV and whose follow-up Pressure is now a forthcoming Hollywood movie. His mouthwatering latest play dramatises the friendship between writer and spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle and escapologist and rationalist Harry Houdini. It’s such a fascinating double act, one assumes Haig must have long nursed an interest in their story. The truth is more prosaic. “I mundanely Googled ‘interesting unusual relationships in British history’,” he tells me. “And that’s what came up.”

Should we admire the man’s honesty (What do you think of AI Overviews? “It’s unavoidably useful”) or deplore his lack of romance? Not coincidentally, these are the same questions raised by Magic, opening in Chichester this month, and probing the friendship-then-friction between Conan Doyle, convinced he can communicate with the dead, and Houdini, unsentimentally calling a fraud a fraud. “For these two dissimilar men to meld together when they meet, it was like a chemical bonding, then to find this critical element that tests and challenges their relationship, I thought that was absolutely fascinating.”

Magic – whose production, by director Lucy Bailey, promises gasp-inducing illusions alongside the drama – stages the pair’s coming together then splitting apart, as Conan Doyle and his wife Jean seek contact with his son Kingsley, killed in the first world war, through the spirit medium Mina Crandon – and Houdini assembles “an army of debunkers” to expose Crandon’s fakery. “Having gone to so many seances himself, pursuing the spirit of his own mother, [Houdini] became viscerally angry and perceived them as abuse of the grieving,” says Haig.

You might expect modern audiences to be wholly on Houdini’s side. But Conan Doyle will be played by Haig himself, who as an actor has won the nation’s heart with all his buttoned-up bureaucrats and establishment Englishmen struggling to keep their upper lip stiff. It’s crucial, he tells me, that audiences sympathise with Conan Doyle, and don’t see his faith as an object of ridicule. “He was seeking a religion that was scientifically based. At the time, it was thought that electromagnetism might absolutely be a means to contact the spirits of the dead. That may now seem ludicrous, but the energy of Conan Doyle’s optimism was always engaging. Hopefully there are lots of laughs in the play, but one of the great challenges is to ensure that element is not played as comedy.”

What interests Haig, in a play he says is all about ambivalences, is that both characters had mixed feelings about their own fame: “Houdini wanted not to be an entertainer but a great writer – like Conan Doyle.” And Conan Doyle felt his most beloved creation, Sherlock Holmes, to be far beneath him: “He was like a great Shakespearean actor trapped in a sitcom all his life.” There’s ambivalence too – hence the show’s title – about the distinctions between faith and fakery. “That’s another theme of the play: how do you define the word ‘magic’? What do you mean by it? Is a spiritual faith a form of magic? Or does it require deception and fakery to be magic?”

Haig approaches all this material, he tells me, from a position of lifelong rationalism. Not for him any sentimentality about how writers get their ideas for plays. “Unless you feel this deep calling to write about something specific,” he says, in defence of his Googling, “you need a little bit of help along the way!

“In Magic, I am playing someone with profound faith, and yet if an atheist can be a profound atheist – well, that’s me. And yet, when people are at their most certain, they’re also suspect, aren’t they?” His grandmother attended “a huge number” of seances, he says – but he has attended none. “I would go to one; I’d be fascinated. But I haven’t, I don’t know why.” But there is in his work an enduring interest in bereavement and the lingering presence of the dead. My Boy Jack was likewise about a son killed in the first world war, a coincidence Haig seems surprised to hear me point out – and which he ascribes in part to the death of his own sister at the age of 22.

That was 44 years ago; Haig is 70 now and contemplating if not mortality then at least redundancy. “I think this may be [my last play],” he tells me, if uncertainly. “How long do you go on for? How secure is it as you move through your 70s? You think of McKellen and Dame Judi Dench, still faultless as performers. But that’s not the case for everyone. So I just don’t know where it’s going to head yet.” But if it were all to stop now, Haig would look back on a satisfyingly distinctive career, the master of not one theatre-making craft, but two. “I would be very, very reassured,” he pronounces, with characteristic English understatement, “that things have, on the whole, been fulfilling.”

M, a 50-year-old novelist living in an idyllic place by a lake, is travelling to a literary festival to give a talk. A sequence of events, mostly beyond her control, leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar town. It’s dead quiet, except for a travelling circus camped on the outskirts. M checks into a hotel, ignores her phone and wanders around, reminiscing about books read, films watched, museums visited. Some of these recollections are grounded in fable; others are vividly realistic. Among the latter are memories of her childhood and youth, spent in a “country that no longer exists apart from on old maps and in history books”.

M describes the country she comes from as a “beast” waging war against its neighbour. We can guess her meaning without turning to the author’s biographical note. Maria Stepanova – whose masterly In Memory of Memory combined family memoir, essay and fiction – left her native Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We might also wonder how closely The Disappearing Act tracks her own life. But the novelist M is not here to discuss autofiction – she has more important things to reflect on.

What was it like inside the beast? “She’d lived her whole life … doing nothing, or doing only what came naturally to her, and wanting to believe she had got away with it.” Was it wrong of her to enjoy her life there? She understands that “joy was the very thing the beast was bent on annihilating … and that it was important to keep it alive to spite the beast”, but that’s little consolation now that her former compatriots are killing others “with missiles, with fire from the sky, with bare hands”.

M’s relationship with the legacy of her one-time homeland – first and foremost, its language – is inevitably compromised. One of the stories she retells, the tale of a linguist whose tongue is cut out before he can use it, could be about herself. But the book’s laconic style, with distant echoes of poetry, skilfully conveyed by translator Sasha Dugdale, shows that M still has the power of telling.

True to the novel’s title, M’s presence gradually diminishes, starting from her realisation that she is “cut off, a spare limb”. Watching young lovers, “she felt as if these things no longer affected her; the economy of erotic selection and exchange bore no relation to her current existence”. Served bread in a cafe, she leaves it on the plate before suddenly forcing it into her mouth, as if trying to convince herself that she is hungry and therefore still there. These transformations may be alarming, but when “her inner self … gradually quietened, becoming soft, childlike”, it brings a sense of freedom and possibility. Part of her longs to recreate the dream in which “she was on a train to the dacha, the years falling away from her as she travelled” until she was a small child again.

Her mother once told her about a sign reading “There is no way out”: M considers her own exit strategy. Can she find a “novel way out of a hopeless situation”? With no set plan, she visits the circus and offers to help perform a magic act. It involves lying in a sarcophagus with her knees up to her chin, which she finds “boring and painful” though not hard. The owner of the circus asks her if she is a Jew, and M, happily discarding her “Russian novelist” identity, says yes.

The world has labelled her a writer, yet she wants to be seen as herself – whatever that might be – and the circus promises a chance of that. She leaves most of her possessions behind and sets off to join the troupe. She’ll walk through the empty town; she’ll start again at the beginning. It’s not too late, is it?

“There was so much guilt around M, and in her, that it was hard to breathe” – over the past four years, this sentiment has become familiar to many Russians opposing the war in Ukraine. Authors such as Mikhail Shishkin have spoken about collective guilt in their nonfiction; a “common enough motif”, as M says of yet another remembered story. Wherever her escapade brings her next, she is proof that it takes a novelist with poetic imagination to capture the nature of the beast.

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz is famously credited with the line: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” In contemporary European literature, a book these days is often the beginning of a familial feud. With thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife undergoing a sustained boom across the continent, it can increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms.

Such was the case with the French historian Cécile Desprairies, who on Wednesday was sued for defamation by her brother and a cousin over the depiction of her late mother and her great-uncle in her 2024 novel La Propagandiste.

“The author’s resentment toward the targeted individuals permeates the entire work, which is conceived as a genuine act of family vengeance,” the plaintiffs said in their legal complaint. They claimed there was an “absence of evidence” for the novel’s central plot, a woman’s collaboration with the Nazis, and asked for the book to be withdrawn from the market and pulped.

In the novel, which was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2023 and, in Natasha Lehrer’s English translation, praised as a “clever and vivid book” in the Guardian, the narrator, Coline, tells the story of her morphine-addicted mother, Lucie, betrothed in her first marriage to a “convinced pro-Nazi” and designer of propaganda posters during the Vichy occupation.

While the author has rejected the book’s classification as a roman à clef – a novel in which real people may be thinly disguised as fictional – she has made no secret of being inspired by her own childhood. “Most of the protagonists I was able to draw inspiration from were dead, so there’s a liberation of speech,” she told French television in 2023.

Desprairies’ book can be grouped in the genre of life writing that the French author and literary critic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 christened autofiction, a hybrid of autobiography and experimental fiction that has made inroads on the bestseller lists over the last decade via the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle.

Autofiction often focuses on painful or traumatic childhood experiences. From a legal point of view, “the trouble is that it’s very difficult to write about your own experience without touching on the experience of others”, said Larissa Muraveva, a researcher at Grenoble Alpes University.

Knausgård, whose six-volume My Struggle series frequently thematises his difficult relationship with his alcoholic father, was threatened with a defamation lawsuit by his uncle before publication of the first volume. In 2018, Bergen’s National theatre was threatened with libel over a stage adaptation of an autofiction novel by Vigdis Hjorth, by Hjorth’s own mother.

These threats never materialised into court action and in Norway families portrayed in autofiction have tended to find satisfactory retribution via creative means rather than legal channels. Knausgård’s former spouse Linda Boström Knausgård has published a novel that appears to dispute her ex’s fictionalised account of their breakup, while Hjorth’s sister Helga and a rumoured former lover, Arild Linneberg, a literary critic, have written their own “counter-novels”.

Melissa Schuh, a lecturer in English literature at Kiel University in Germany, said: “The suspicion that some critics have harboured against writers of autofiction is that it allows you to have it both ways. In the context of fiction writing, it frees you from limitations of established genre conventions and lends your writing a possible air of authenticity. From the perspective of nonfiction writing, autofiction allows you to creatively use literary devices of fictionality but also to a degree inoculates you against potential legal action.”

In France, however, novelisation has been less successful at shielding seemingly autobiographical accounts against court action, which may have emboldened Desprairies’ relatives.

In 2013, the prominent autofiction writer Christine Angot and her publisher, Flammarion, were ordered to jointly pay €40,000 in damages for invasion of privacy against her lover’s ex-partner in her novel Les Petits. Another author, Camille Laurens, was taken to court by her husband in 2003 over the use of their daughter’s name in the novel L’Amour, Roman, though she won the case.

Natalie Edwards, a professor of French and head of modern languages at the University of Bristol, said: “It’s striking that there has also been a huge memoir boom meeting a very litigious culture in the US, but we haven’t seen as many legal disputes as in France. In France, a very vague law around privacy has met a very vague writing style.”

In Desprairies’ case, the situation is different in that her relatives are suing her not for invasion of privacy but for “public defamation of the memory of the dead”. Mark Stephens, an English solicitor who specialises in media law, intellectual property and freedom of expression, believes they should not get their hopes up.

“The law on the freedom of the press of 29 July 1881, the law that defines defamation in France, only protects the privacy rights of living people,” he said. “Descendants cannot sue for a blot on a family’s honour unless they can convince a court that their own reputation has been denigrated.”

In her plea, Desprairies’ lawyer argued that linking the story of the book to the author’s living relatives would require “an extreme knowledge of genealogy or a power of divination, which readers do not have”.

Stephens said: “As it stands, their claim looks pretty weak, if not to say impossible. French courts will be slow to muzzle a novelist exposing uncomfortable truths. Family pride makes poor law, and even worse literature.”

A verdict in the case is expected on 17 March.

One of Australia’s longest running literary journals has been scrapped, in what has been described as an act of “utter cultural vandalism” on the part of the University of Melbourne.

After 85 years, Meanjin, run by the university’s subsidiary Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), will publish its last edition in December. Although the journal’s editor, Esther Anatolitis, worked her last day at Meanjin on Thursday, the spring and summer quarterly editions of the journal are already at the printers.

In a statement, the MUP chair, Prof Warren Bebbington, confirmed Meanjin’s demise, saying it was “a matter of deep regret”.

“The decision was made on purely financial grounds, the board having found it no longer viable to produce the magazine ongoing,” the statement said.

“The two part-time staff of Meanjin were not involved in the decision, which led to their being made redundant this week.”

Bebbington told Guardian Australia that MUP and Anatolitis, who was contacted by the Guardian but declined to comment, had agreed to the wording of the statement, and he declined to confirm that the editor had signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of her redundancy package.

Bebbington also scotched speculation that any pressure was brought to bear on MUP by the University of Melbourne Council, led by the current chair of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, after Meanjin ran an essay highly critical of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and its unequivocal support for Israel’s incursion into Gaza in its last spring edition. The article was written by the Melbourne academic Max Kaiser, a co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia, set up in opposition to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry over the Gaza conflict.

“That’s all completely wrong,” Bebbington said.

“MUP is independent, it makes its own decisions about its publications, and I doubt that the university’s council has even discussed Meanjin this year. There has certainly been no discussion, no communication, with them.”

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The former Labor politician, polymath and one of the National Trust’s Australian Living Treasures, Barry Jones, a regular contributor to Meanjin, has accused the University of Melbourne of muzzling the publication’s editor.

“[Anatolitis] has been exemplary as an editor … and I think she’s been put in an absolutely atrocious situation,” Jones told the Guardian. “Worst of all is the cone of silence that’s been imposed on her, and that’s awful. Universities ought to be promoting diversity, not shutting down debate. This is a very disturbing pattern. I’d like to think it could be reversed, but knowing the way universities operate these days, I doubt it will be. It’s an act of utter cultural vandalism on a large scale.”

A spokesperson for the University of Melbourne said its council was not involved in the decision to close Meanjin, nor were any individual members of the university council involved in the decision.

“The council was only informed after MUP had made its decision to close Meanjin,” the statement said.

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance said the MUP board’s claim that Meanjin is closing because it has become financially unviable “doesn’t add up”.

“The publication recently secured a $100,000 grant from Creative Australia to fund its next two years of operation,” the MEAA media director, Cassie Derrick, said in a statement provided to the Guardian.

“At a time when writers and creatives are increasingly facing censorial voices, the frank and fearless writing Meanjin has always published is more important than ever.”

The former MUP chief executive Louise Adler, director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, who along with five MUP board members resigned in protest in 2019, also expressed scepticism over the publisher’s claims the journal had become financially unsustainable.

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“The costs of running Meanjin were insignificant in the university’s budget,” she told the Guardian.

“It is very easy to cut cultural projects – low sales, declining subscriptions, a lack of funding all provide the rationale philistines are looking for. But with every cultural institution that disappears, the opportunities for writers decline and the literary fabric of our nation is diminished.”

Meanjin, which came under the governance of MUP in 2008, has been revered as a scholarly peer-reviewed journal since its establishment in Brisbane by the journalist Clem Christesen in 1940. In 1945 the publication relocated to Melbourne and Christesen continued to serve as its editor for almost three decades.

It is credited for publishing myriad essays and works of fiction and poetry by emerging writers over the decades, as well as attracting the cream of Australian literary talent. Among its contributors were Patrick White, Randolph Stow, Frank Moorhouse and Thomas Keneally, who told the Guardian on Thursday that Meanjin had been with him all his life and its editor was a cultural asset.

“It is a matter for lament that a journal of such repute and consistent commentary cannot be permitted to have an assured place amongst us,” he said.

In the field of poetry, Meanjin’s lengthy list of contributors include Judith Wright, AD Hope, Les Murray and Sarah Holland-Batt.

Holland-Batt told the Guardian the closure of Meanjin would come as an “enormous loss” to Australian literature.

“It’s quite devastating, really. I’m shocked,” she said.

“It’s become such a mainstay of Australian literature, and it’s a place where so many Australian writers and poets have had their first publications. Meanjin was always the lodestar young people were hoping to publish in.

“All efforts should be made to save it because of the prestige it brings to MUP and to Melbourne University. It’s a real pearl of Australian literature and it’s just an incalculable loss.”

This article was amended on 4 September 2025. The MEAA initially said Meanjin had received a $2m grant from Creative Australia. The MEAA then provided an updated statement with the correct amount, $100,000.

“We have two lives,” Dr Matt Morgan writes, before clarifying: “The second begins when you realise you have [only] one.” Sometimes, as the case studies in this book detail, this realisation comes more suddenly and profoundly than most of us can imagine. For more than 20 years, Morgan has been a specialist doctor in intensive care, labouring at the extreme margins of life. Just occasionally, in his day-to-day education in human mortality, he has witnessed what might, in other traditions, be thought of as supernatural events: people whose vital signs have flatlined, but who have returned to tell the tale. The stories in this book – a sequel to his bestselling Critical – are his accounts of those impossible second acts, and his reflections on what we can learn from those lucky few who have experienced both possible answers to the question of “to be or not to be”.

The “deaths” Morgan examines here come in several shapes and sizes. Ed, now 47, was “fatally” struck by lightning at 17 (and had to overcome his guilt at his best friend not being so fortunate); Luca, 30, lost a battle with Covid during the pandemic, but was restored by the blood oxygenation technique ECMO; Summer took her own life at 25, and regretted it even as her breathing petered out; Roberto was frozen solid on a mountain ledge in the Dolomites and did not register a heartbeat for eight hours and 42 minutes before a flicker returned; the former Welsh rugby international Rhys Thomas, after a catastrophic heart attack, has lived for 11 years without a heart at all – an artificial alternative giving him a lease on life while he awaits a transplant.

The news each of these survivors brings from that “undiscovered country… [from which] no traveller returns” is, in individual ways, a kind of double gratitude. First at the unlikely chance and scientific wonder of their deliverance; second at the privilege of their unique knowledge – that never to be forgotten understanding of the once-in-a-lifetime joy of consciousness itself.

Morgan not only tries to inhabit some of this carpe diem wisdom, but to find lasting ways to impart it to his reader (the lessons of the book are both medical parables and memento mori of one sort or another). Describing Roberto’s remarkable revival through hypothermia, for example, Morgan speculates on the theory that another miraculous return, two millennia ago, may have been the result of a comparable phenomenon: “hypothermia induced by crucifixion may have simulated Jesus’s death. His resurrection [might actually have been] through gradual rewarming in a cave with a consistent temperature. Forget the divine intervention; it was more like divine insulation.”

If Morgan is sceptical about acts of gods, he is never complacent about the special magic of lives lived to the full. He takes as his first example of this his wonderful Welsh Aunty Win, whose funeral he attends on his birthday, and whose 97 years he celebrates in a heartfelt eulogy, testament to her “5,044 Saturdays and lazy Sundays, 1,164 bright full moons, six dark solar eclipses, seven houses, five jobs, two proposals. Three billion heartbeats.” It was Win’s example that caused him to start keeping notes that make up this book, about people who came, in far more dramatic circumstances, to her innate understanding that life was for living.

Inevitably, you learn things along the way here that might act as the handiest set of new year resolutions. The ongoing imperative in every life to find meaning; the solace of being in nature; the responsibility not to waste time in bitterness and to always find space for those you love; the necessity of breaking destructive habits and addictions, and to do all you can to inculcate positive alternatives. YOLO – you only live once – may be the overriding message of these survivors’ tales, but that doesn’t mean “splurging your savings, or making bad choices you might regret the next morning… it means finding meaning in the little things that matter. It means being open to new experiences, whether it is swimming in the cold sea or learning to paint, or learning the kazoo,” Morgan writes. “Go on. Go nuts.”

Summer’s near suicide prompts several of these revelatory moments. The first of those truisms is that mundane fact that the ultimate irreversible decision is not always the result of long despair, but of fleeting panic: “Several peer-reviewed research papers have shown that 70% of [suicide] survivors thought about killing themselves for less than half an hour, with a quarter considering it for just five minutes,” Morgan writes. Summer’s subsequent reflections reinforce that tragic understanding; she is among those here who experienced seeing life flash before their mind’s eye as her heart stopped, and her single insistent thought at that moment was this: “People are important, not things.”

Summer’s second life – sustained with the help of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) and judicious immersion in the video game Tetris – has been an ongoing lesson in mindfulness: “I’m trying to live for the next few moments, not too many more,” she tells Morgan, before delivering that hard-won truth: “The opposite of happiness is not failure, but boredom.”

Morgan proves an excellent guide to such wisdom. He is grateful to bear witness to these stories – and self-effacing about the part he plays in enabling some of them. In the concluding chapter, he attempts to coalesce all of that thinking, to see if it can be ingrained in less life-threatening ways, by staging a collective “living funeral” for friends and colleagues – “eight grown men” – with different experiences of love and loss. At a remote cottage they get to hear what people may say about them after they are gone, and get to think hard about their legacy, about the lives they have touched, about the difference they have made. And then, a little like the survivors Morgan learns from, they get a chance to have another go at it for real.

• A Second Act: What Nearly Dying Teaches Us About Really Living by Dr Matt Morgan is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Hand was, however, troubled by the Espionage Act charge. The act, passed in a frenzy during the First World War, forbade the sharing or unauthorized retention of “information relating to the national defense” that might benefit a foreign power. But beyond giving examples of what that category might encompass—“document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blue print, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance”—the law didn’t say what it meant. Hand pointed out that the law could not possibly cover every kind of data that had a connection to the national defense, “for in modern war there are none which do not.” He didn’t think Congress intended to shut down all international discussion of agricultural yields, medical breakthroughs, or train schedules.

Hand concluded that espionage must involve secrets. The word “secret” didn’t appear in the law, but in a 1941 decision, Gorin v. United States, the Supreme Court had acknowledged that it would be difficult to show that someone had knowingly engaged in espionage if, say, the U.S. government itself published the information, and so there was no “occasion for secrecy.” Hand broadened that notion, finding that “whatever it was lawful to broadcast throughout the country it was lawful to send abroad.” As he saw it, no secret, no foul. Heine was soon free.

An obvious question today might be whether the information Heine collected was classified, but at the time the modern system of classification did not yet exist. Harry Truman introduced it in 1951, by means of an executive order that other Presidents—and not Congress—have refined. The obsession with labels like “Top Secret” was in part an unintended consequence of Hand’s ruling, according to a timely new book, “State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime” (Basic), by the historian Sam Lebovic. If judges stipulated that national-defense information ought to be “secret,” then the government would oblige by stamping that word on every piece of paper it could.

Classification is now an overbearing companion to the Espionage Act, rather than a clarification of its limits. In the view of the executive branch, everything that is marked classified is national-defense information, or N.D.I. And yet it reserves the right to call non-classified information N.D.I., too. (It has also argued that some information, like the name of a country that hosted a C.I.A. prison, can be deemed officially secret even after it is widely known.) Donald Trump, who is facing thirty-two Espionage Act charges in a federal indictment brought in Florida, has denied all wrongdoing and defended himself by saying that while still President he declassified documents that were later found at Mar-a-Lago—something he had broad power to do. As legal commentators have pointed out, having done so would not necessarily get him off the hook: an Espionage Act conviction requires only that material be N.D.I., classified or not. That’s convenient for Jack Smith, the special counsel. But is it a good thing for the rest of us?

One peculiarity of the Espionage Act is that the Gorin and the Heine decisions—rulings from the nineteen-forties concerning a hundred-year-old law—still guide the prosecution not only of spies but of whistle-blowers, leakers, negligent bureaucrats, cyber activists, and, of course, a former President who kept documents marked “Top Secret” in his bathroom. Not that the law differentiates among those categories. Both Trump and Julian Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks, are currently under indictment for violating the section of the act that prohibits the unauthorized retention of N.D.I., among other charges. That section says nothing substantive about intent, and neither do several related provisions. It doesn’t matter whether someone is using N.D.I. to aid a terrorist network, expose a scandal, write a memoir, or impress fellow-gamers (as may be the case with Jack Teixeira, the airman recently indicted under the act for posting files on Discord). It doesn’t matter whether a leaker’s object is to expose discrimination. In 2018, Terry Albury, an F.B.I. agent, was sentenced on Espionage Act charges for having given journalists confidential documents that, he believed, showed that the F.B.I. engaged in racial and religious profiling. What mattered was that the Department of Justice deemed the documents national-defense information.

There’s been plenty of discussion about whether Assange is really a journalist, but the Espionage Act doesn’t care either way—there is no journalist-exception clause. Meanwhile, media outlets, including this one, violate the Espionage Act regularly. The federal government relies on leaking to function, and also forgives a measure of sloppiness in its own ranks. (The fact that classified documents ended up in Joe Biden’s garage is almost certainly less unusual than the subsequent appointment of a special counsel.) The law has always been applied selectively, which raises the question of how its targets are chosen.

“Will she know what this is in reference to?”

Cartoon by Mort Gerberg

By Lebovic’s tally, before 2008 there had been only five prosecutions for giving information to the press. There were eight under the Obama Administration, and another six during Trump’s single term, including that of Reality Winner, who gave the news site the Intercept a single document about alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. Until now, the Justice Department has gone after journalists and publishers only for their notes, their testimony, or other materials as it pursued a leaker. Edward Snowden is the one living in exile in Moscow, not the journalists who published the information he leaked. Officials have regularly assured members of the press that the Espionage Act isn’t meant for them. But this is a pact, not a legal commitment. Lebovic thinks it’s a side deal that the press has made at the expense of its sources and the rest of the country. Assange, for whatever reason—the novelty of WikiLeaks, his personal unpleasantness, his perceived role in damaging Hillary Clinton in 2016—has been cut out of the deal. When the Trump Administration initially sought to extradite him from the U.K., it was on a computer-hacking charge related to his receipt of files from Chelsea Manning when she was a soldier in Iraq. It then added Espionage Act charges, which the Biden Administration is now pursuing. (Assange is fighting extradition.) Manning, who had been sentenced to thirty-five years in prison and served seven years before Obama commuted her term, was jailed again in 2019 and 2020, for a total of more than eleven months, for refusing to testify in the case against Assange.

Because the Espionage Act is so old and the spate of cases against leakers is so recent, one might think that its use in confrontations with the press is new—that an archaic anti-spy law has been repurposed for the information age. In fact, speech was a target from the law’s earliest days. Judge Hand was well aware of that history.

In 1917, as a forty-five-year-old district judge on the brink of promotion to the appeals court, Hand had heard a lawsuit brought by The Masses, a socialist magazine that the Postmaster General sought to prohibit from being sent through the mail. That, too, was an Espionage Act case. The Postal Service was using provisions against interfering with military enlistment or recruitment during wartime; a recent issue of The Masses contained a cartoon depicting the draft in a dark light and a poem praising antiwar anarchists. Hand ruled that the magazine was within its rights. He was overruled in a matter of months, and didn’t get the expected promotion. That incident helps explain why Hand, despite his renown and the efforts of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and others, never made it to the Supreme Court. His wife wrote to him in 1918, “It was the Masses decision which had hurt you but dear, I feel just as you do about it. You couldn’t have done differently and it was a fine thing to do.”