Finishing School is a column in which Mary Norris, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen, asks the eternal questions—Are you supposed to take the toothpick out of the sandwich or eat around it? Can a person be cool and old-fashioned at the same time? Is it O.K. to have a “Moby-Dick” T-shirt for every day of the week?—and does her best to behave under increasingly alarming circumstances.

My obsession with shredding began in May of 2021, in East Palestine, Ohio. I was visiting my friend JK, who had inherited her childhood home, in nearby Columbiana; she’d recently discovered that her mother went to high school back in the nineteen-thirties with Eleanor Gould, whom I knew at The New Yorker. JK had shown a page from a 1934 yearbook to a librarian in East Palestine and told her about Eleanor, who spent more than fifty years as a copy editor at the magazine and was considered indispensable.

The librarian had not been aware that so illustrious a person hailed from East Palestine (the last syllable is pronounced “steen,” as in “Franken-steen”). I don’t know whose idea it was originally—my friend’s, the librarian’s, or mine—but we agreed that patrons of the East Palestine Public Library might like to hear about Eleanor. Maybe they would hang a plaque in her honor at the high school. I wrote to the librarian to set a date, timing my trip with the annual blooming of the trilliums.

Immediately, there were obstacles to the plan. COVID protocol was still in place, so the library was not hosting in-person events. Not easily dissuaded, I offered to mask up and do a video. The librarian countered that the weekend I proposed to visit there was a shredding event scheduled. I insisted that I’d love to attend a shredding event. The librarian began to backpedal furiously, and just before I left for Ohio she informed me that there had been a death in the family and she would not be at the library or the shredding.

Things you can learn about the shredding industry on the internet: The shredder was created by Adolf Ehinger, in Balingen, Germany, in 1935. Needing to destroy some anti-Nazi materials that had been traced to him, Ehinger fed the documents into a device inspired by a hand-cranked pasta-maker, which he developed into the Aktenvernichter, or file destroyer. He mechanized and refined the technology to slice material both vertically and horizontally—the cross-cut shredder—which made paperwork more difficult to reassemble. Even more effective is the hammer mill, which will pulverize your sensitive documents.

The paper shredder entered public consciousness in the United States in the nineteen-seventies, during the Watergate hearings, and began to be widely used after 1988, when the Supreme Court ruled that trash left on the street—bank statements, Social Security numbers, medical records, et cetera—was public property. The most famous shredder of all time is Eddie Van Halen. Whoops, wrong kind of shredding.

A shredding event should be festive, like a carnival, with balloons and cotton candy and a bluegrass band. The East Palestine shredding featured a truck from Protect-N-Shred, out of Cortland, Ohio, bearing the words “Complete Document Destruction” along with an image of a bulldog wearing a spiked collar. Besides the driver, an amiable man who was happy to explain how the shredder worked, only a few nervous schoolchildren stood around, supervised by a woman with a badge that identified her as an envoy of the library. People drove up and opened trunks to reveal boxes and shopping bags full of ancient yellowed papers. The kids helped unload everything into plastic bins, sometimes rejecting a spiral-bound notebook. I leaned in to see what they were getting rid of: old utility bills, high-school Latin homework, a caretaker’s record of a patient’s pill-taking regimen. But before I could see more the librarian approached and said, “I have to ask you not to look.”

I backed off, but I am nothing if not a dogged reporter, and after a while I edged back in to chat with the shredmeister and cast a sidelong glance into the bins before they were hoisted and tilted into the hopper. The librarian approached once more and said sternly, “I have to ask you again to step back.” I didn’t get it. I was innocent of any desire to expose people or steal their financial details. I thought they were shredding certain documents because they wanted to be free of them, the way I wanted to be free of rough drafts, juvenilia, and food diaries.

My guide in East Palestine was Kenny, a friend of JK’s and the proprietor of Styles by Kenneth, a hair salon. I got to see the high school that Eleanor attended (this is where the plaque should go): a monumental W.P.A. project, with the words “AUDITORIUM” and “GYMNASIUM” carved in blond stone. Like the shredding company, the high school had a bulldog for its mascot (“Go, Dogs!”). I learned about Captain Taggart, the founder of East Palestine, formerly known as Mechanicsburg. Its origin story is that Mrs. Taggart was riding alongside the Captain in a horse-drawn carriage, and the landscape reminded her of her travels in Palestine. The designation East Palestine may have come from its location in far east Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, in Appalachia.

One famous resident was W. S. George, who owned a big pottery business. There used to be scads of potteries in the area, which enjoyed an abundance of clay, but all the potteries had closed, run out of business by cheap imports. The former W. S. George Pottery was now a mammoth recycling plant, which seemed like a metaphor for the way of all printed matter.

Back in Columbiana, I saw the trilliums, and JK offered earplugs for the trains that blew through all night. I like the sound of trains, so I didn’t mind. She was concerned that the trains were freighted with hazardous materials, and her fears were well founded. Two years later, a train derailed, and the air, water, and clay of East Palestine were poisoned. Even the recycling plant has since closed. The town will be dealing with the damage for generations.

I have not returned to East Palestine, but I have attended other shreddings, including one in Chelsea, sponsored by a councilman, where I followed a woman to ask, in the most nonthreatening way possible, what she had shredded. She was not at all paranoid. “Things that came in the mail,” she said. “Applications for preapproved credit cards.” After shredding, she said, “I feel clean.” ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated whom the 1934 yearbook belonged to.