Kategori: Lifestyle

To Europeans, the early United States was a curiosity: rich in resources yet poor in history. They were used to a storied landscape, where it was impossible to go for a stroll without tripping over the lithic remnants of some distant era. America, by contrast, seemed blank. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville scoffed at the “day-old ruins” of deserted log cabins—the closest thing to historical depth that this pathetically young country could manage.

He should have spent more time in Ohio. Settlers there were finding thousands of ancient Native mounds and earthworks, some bafflingly large. Refusing to believe that the ancestors of Native Americans could have built such monumental structures, writers floated bizarre theories as to who had. Perhaps it was a lost tribe of Israel, or an extinct race of giants. (Why not both?)

If oversized Jews were indeed behind it, they must have been especially fond of Pickaway County. It boasted mounds aplenty and the earthen remains of two forts, one circular and another square, constructed with startling geometric precision. In 1810, surveyors latched on to the circle and founded a city, named Circleville, in concentric arcs around it. This was “probably the only city in North America developed in a radio-concentric plan,” the historian John W. Reps wrote in 1955. (There’ve been others since.) It was also, he observed, probably the only settler city built around an Indigenous form.

arry Baimbridge spent thirty-one years with the Houston Police Department, including stints as a homicide detective and as commander of the SWAT team. In 2023, he took a job as chief of police for the Spring Branch Independent School District, most of which is within the city. The job was more low-key—no more shootouts with snipers—but it came with its own challenges. After the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen elementary-school students and two teachers dead, the state legislature had neglected to pass any meaningful restrictions on guns; instead, the state required that every school campus have an armed security officer. “Of course, they didn’t provide enough funding for it, but that was the mandate,” Baimbridge said.

The Spring Branch district served thirty-one thousand students across forty-odd campuses—“a very wealthy area on one side of the freeway and a very poor area on the other side,” Baimbridge said. Late in the school year, on February 18, 2025, he got a phone call from Brian Ennesser, a supervisory special agent at the F.B.I.’s Houston field office. The two men had met the year before, when Ennesser formed a threat-mitigation task force, a group that specializes in disrupting targeted mass violence, including at schools. Baimbridge knew right away that something was up; Ennesser usually texted or e-mailed. “Hey, man, we’ve got a problem,” Ennesser said.

The F.B.I. had received a tip about a potential threat to a local school. It involved two teen-agers, one a student at Spring Branch, the other at a school district north of Houston. Both were girls. “Once we identified it being two females, we were double-checking our work,” Ennesser later told me.