Guardrails, if installed incorrectly or poorly maintained, can kill, rather than save, motorists who crash into them.Photographs by Gabriel McCurdy for The New YorkerSometimes your editor sends you a story idea that makes you jump up and down with excitement. Other times, he suggests that you write about highway guardrails. A few months ago, I received the latter suggestion. I pictured myself on a boiling summer day, standing beside a highway, cars and trucks whizzing past—unable to sit down upon or lean against the thing I’d agreed to write about, as it would be scalding hot and possibly unsound. The guardrail of my imagination extended far into the distance, as inscrutable and unexciting as it was long.Of course, this magazine has a long tradition of engaging with mundane topics—pinball machines, pencil sharpeners, sand—in surprisingly affecting ways. I accepted the challenge and soon found myself talking almost daily with Steve Eimers, whom one industry executive described to me as “the Erin Brockovich of the guardrail industry.” Eimers, a father of nine in Lenoir City, Tennessee, wears his emotions and his obsessions on his sleeve. He is YouTube’s “Guardrail Guy,” a goofy, wonkish, Deep South internet celebrity and autodidact who ran a small window-washing business, before the death of his daughter, in 2017, changed his life, and quite a few American highways, for good. In Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and D.C., I followed the indefatigable Eimers as he toted calipers and a six-foot level on his quest to do what government and corporate America have not: prevent around a thousand people annually from dying in collisions with defective guardrails, like the one that killed seventeen-year-old Hannah Eimers.The resulting story, in this week’s issue, is as much about a man as it is about safety infrastructure and related legislation, including the expected reauthorization of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act later this year. Reporting it changed the way I think about those nondescript structures that fly by in your peripheral vision, as you speed along some stretch of America’s more than a hundred and sixty thousand miles of national highways. You won’t know whether a guardrail has been “Frankensteined” together with random parts—as around five per cent of those which Eimers has inspected have—or otherwise rendered deadly, until it’s too late.Read or listen to the story »What Just Happened?The Trump Administration recently sought the phone records of several Times journalists and their relatives, according to a motion unsealed on Monday, in connection with an investigation into alleged national-security leaks regarding the new Air Force One. We reached out to Ruth Marcus, who has been covering this story, for the latest insights.What is so alarming about this latest development?“The Trump Administration has portrayed its subpoenas of Times reporters as a restrained move targeted at leakers, not journalists. The latest news—that the government isn’t just trying to get the reporters to testify before a grand jury but has also subpoenaed their phone records—puts the lie to that characterization. The Justice Department’s regulations provide that reporters should generally receive a heads-up that their phone records will be sought. That didn’t happen. Prosecutors are supposed to seek this information ‘as a last resort,’ and with subpoenas that are ‘narrowly drawn.’ That didn’t happen either. Two of the subpoenas sought phone records stretching back to January 1st—long before the articles in question, about security concerns surrounding the new, Qatari-donated Air Force One, were published. Those records include information from phones belonging to two of the reporters’ spouses, and one reporter’s mother.“Testifying last week at his confirmation hearing to become the director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, who is overseeing the investigation in his current role as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, assured lawmakers that procedures designed to ‘protect freedom of press’ had been followed. In papers unsealed Monday, the government insisted that it was ‘incorrect’ to assert that it had disregarded the regulations; the record suggests otherwise. In a letter to the judge overseeing the case, Times lawyers aptly summarized the danger of this development, describing it as a ‘bad-faith effort to intimidate the Journalists and chill their ability to report on the Administration.’ ”Editor’s PickPhotographs by Emily Shur