How the Pandemic Defeated America
A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.
September 2020
In This Issue
How the virus won, America’s denial about racism, China’s AI surveillance state, what MasterClass really sells, and novelist Gayl Jones. Plus racial-progess myths, how protest works, Elena Ferrante’s latest, Erin Brockovich, looking for Frederick Douglass, Putin’s rise, and more.
Cover Stories
Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?
Donald Trump has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.
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The Panopticon Is Already Here
Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.
What Is MasterClass Actually Selling?
The ads are everywhere. You can learn to serve like Serena Williams or write like Margaret Atwood. But what MasterClass really delivers is something altogether different.
The Best American Novelist Whose Name You May Not Know
When her first novels were published, in the mid-1970s, Gayl Jones’s talent was hailed by writers from James Baldwin to John Updike. Then she disappeared.
Dispatches
Detail of 'Part 1 Part 2' (2016) by Lorna Simpson (© Lorna Simpson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; photograph by James Wang.) Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress
Whether it’s happening or not
<i>Strike</i> (2018) by Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Incremental Change Is a Moral Failure
Mere reform won’t fix policing.
Illustration by Mark Harris; Mark Summerfield / Alamy; Library of Congress Taking My Children to See Frederick Douglass
How a visit to his birthplace helped me understand this moment of rage, reckoning, and possibility
Mel D. Cole The Myth of the Silent Majority
Americans have learned the wrong lessons about the political consequences of protest.
Lauren Tamaki Erin Brockovich Wants to Know What You’re Drinking
Twenty years after her moment in the Hollywood spotlight, the famed water-safety activist has not slowed down.
Adraint Khadafhi Bereal The Black Yearbook
Photos from the University of Texas at Austin
Culture & Critics
Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin; Fox Searchlight Pictures; Getty The New David Copperfield Movie Might Be Better Than the Book
Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of Dickens’s novel is mad, loving, and brilliant.
Bettmann / Getty What to Do About William Faulkner
A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.
Simone Noronha Elena Ferrante’s Master Class on Deceit
Her latest novel frames lying as a creative act.
Illustration by Celina Pereira; BStU; Ulrich Hässler / Ullstein Bild / Getty A KGB Man to the End
The origins of Putin’s worldview—and the rise of Russia’s new ruling class
Departments
Katie Martin The Commons: Underlying Conditions
Readers respond to our June 2020 issue.
Tim Lahan An Ode to Balloons
Gravity is overrated.
Poetry
Paul Spella / The Atlantic
