Why Confederate Lies Live On
For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe.
June 2021
In This Issue
Why Confederate lies live on, Black America’s origin stories, Red Cross quarantine ships, Brett Kavanaugh, and new fiction from Morgan Thomas. Plus the Appalachian Elvis, Richard Wright, post-COVID fashion, Stacey Abrams’s fiction, flip phones, and more.
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Is Brett Kavanaugh Out for Revenge?
Three years after his polarizing confirmation hearings, the Supreme Court’s 114th justice remains a mystery.
Purgatory at Sea
Off the coast of Italy, cruise ships are being repurposed as holding pens for migrants rescued from the Mediterranean.
Black America’s Neglected Origin Stories
The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school.
Fiction
Oliver Munday Bump
A short story
Dispatches
Guillem Casasús A Simple Approach to Ending Extreme Poverty
Buried deep in the latest pandemic stimulus package is a transformative idea for helping families.
Lauren Tamaki The Story Behind Stacey Abrams’s Fiction Career
How she became a novelist, what politics and writing have in common, and why, at the end of every good story, someone’s got to die
Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin Burn All the Leggings
What do you wear to the reopening of society?
Scotty Hall Elvis Reenters the Building
In rural Ohio, a performer bookends a year of struggle and survival.
Tabitha Soren The ‘Blurred Existence’ of Motherhood
What it’s like to care for a newborn, in photos
Culture & Critics
Illustration by Katie Martin; images from Popperfoto / Getty The Dharma of Working Out
In her new memoir, Alison Bechdel runs, climbs, bikes, skis, spins, and Soloflexes her way toward transcendence.
Popperfoto; Roger-Viollet; Fred Stein Archive; Martha Holmes / Life Picture Collection; Bob Peterson / Life Images Collection; Phillip Harrington / Alamy; Bettmann / Getty The Opportunists
In Louis Menand’s monumental new study of Cold War culture, success owes less to vision and purpose than to self-promotion.
June Park Women Refusing to Be Like Other Women
New novels by Rachel Cusk and Jhumpa Lahiri explore the liberating power of isolation.
Illustration by Ayşe Klinge; Bettmann / Getty The Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright
A previously unpublished novel invites a reassessment of a writer criticized for his doctrinaire pessimism about race in America.
Departments
Katie Martin The Commons: Private Schools Are Indefensible
“It’s not independence that is indefensible. It’s inequity.”
Tim Lahan An Ode to My Flip Phone
Why can’t I quit you?
Poetry
Paul Spella / The Atlantic
