In early May 2020, the American journalist Luke Mogelson left Paris – for years the base from which he covered strife and pestilence around the world – and went home to report on the accelerated unravelling of the US.
The idea of bringing a foreign correspondent back to write about their own country as if on assignment is not a new one. There is a whole subgenre of returning English reporters producing wry travelogues of the British Isles and their encounters with its quirky countryfolk. Mogelson’s account of his return to the US has a great deal more edge to it, given his experiences in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, and amid horrifying outbreaks of disease in west Africa. There is nothing wry in his description of the United States, in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, unable to contain a pandemic that would go on to kill more than a million Americans.
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