Alex Hutchinson

It was a travesty—two travesties, actually, separate but inextricably linked. In May 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, a challenge that had killed more than a dozen people in the preceding decades and that scientists had once declared impossible. The catch: They breathed canisters of pure oxygen, an aid that the Everest pioneer George Mallory—one of those who died on the mountain—had once dismissed as “a damnable heresy.

The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.