This essay appears as the introduction to Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine, to be published this month by the New Press. Hodge is the editor of Harper’s Magazine. His essay “Blood and Time: Cormac McCarthy and the Twilight of the West” appeared in the February 2006 issue.

The 2000s—perhaps we should call them the Naughts, since they will be remembered chiefly for their wants—were a decade in which the American Republic finally succumbed to a kind of autoimmune disorder, in which the social and political systems normally responsible for maintaining the…