Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” was originally published in the print edition of The New Yorker on June 17, 1996. “The Fourth State of Matter” is a piece of creative nonfiction in the braided essay format focused on grief, loss, and shock due to proximity to the 1991 University of Iowa shooting in the space-physics department, where the author, Jo Ann Beard, worked as an editor for the department’s space-physics monthly publication. The essay probes and investigates the violent shooting perpetrated by Gang Lu, a disgruntled physics student in the department, against five colleagues before Lu died by suicide.
