The Last Children of Down Syndrome
Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.
December 2020
In This Issue
The Tech Issue: The last children of Down syndrome, the most famous teens on TikTok, and can history predict the future? Plus therapy and parental alienation, why remote learning isn’t the only problem with school, Eddie Murphy’s return, the existential despair of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Adrienne Rich, and more.
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The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.
98 Million TikTok Followers Can’t Be Wrong
How a 16-year-old from suburban Connecticut became the most famous teen in America
Can Children Be Persuaded to Love a Parent They Hate?
When one parent in a divorce has worked to prejudice the kids against the other parent, the last-ditch solution for some judges is to send the children to “reunification camp” with the mom or dad they can’t stand.
The Return of Eddie Murphy
Without a road map, he blazed a trail for Black performers, and then lost his way. Now he’s back.
Dispatches
Danielle Del Plato School Wasn’t So Great Before COVID, Either
Yes, remote schooling has been a misery—but it’s offering a rare chance to rethink early education entirely.
Lauren Tamaki The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future
Mike Pondsmith created Cyberpunk in 1988. Now it’s the inspiration for a highly anticipated video game—and an unlikely oracle.
Asia Pietrzyk Christmas Dies Hard
The middle of a global pandemic might seem like a good time to cut back on holiday excess. But we live in America.
Carlos Chavarría What My Dad Gave His Shop
“I’m more than just my store,” my father told me. And yet, for nearly his entire adult life, all of his decisions had argued the opposite.
Amber N. Ford It Wasn’t a Gun
A material archive of police violence
Culture & Critics
Illustration by Oliver Munday; NBC / Getty Don’t Subject Your Kids to Rudolph
The world is bleak enough as it is.
Vahram Muradyan Teaching Should Be Political
How to talk about race in the classroom
Illustration by Celina Pereira; photographs by Bettmann; Richard Lautens / Toronto Star / Getty The Many Lives of Adrienne Rich
Praised by W. H. Auden as neat and modest, she vowed to be passionate and radical instead.
Dorothea Lange Whitewashing the Great Depression
How the preeminent photographic record of the period excluded people of color from the nation’s self-image
Departments
Katie Martin The Commons: The Constitution Counted My Great-Great-Grandfather as Three-Fifths of a Free Person
Readers respond to our October 2020 features.
Tim Lahan An Ode to Flight Attendants
They minister, they mollify, they bring us blankets.
Poetry
Paul Spella / The Atlantic
