June 14/21, 2021, Issue

Cover art by: Tim O’Brien

Feature

It’s Time for Stephen Breyer to Retire From the Supreme Court

The associate justice has served admirably on the Court for 27 years. But for the sake of our basic rights, he’s got to step down at the end of this term.
Elie Mystal
A Year Lived Inside With Instagram and a Dutch Master

What Pieter de Hooch, social media, and the lockdown taught me.
Benjamin Moser
An Afropessimist on the Year Since George Floyd Was Murdered

Notes of a (Minneapolis) native son.
Frank Wilderson
Andrew Yang Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About

Will NYC elect its first low-information mayor?
Liza Featherstone

Editorial

Democrats Should Just Create More Federal Holidays

Arguing that Americans work too much is a winning political message.
Ed Burmila
A Letter to Biden From Jimmy Carter’s Biographer

Sometimes doing the right thing means not getting reelected.
Kai Bird
The Legacy of Radical Lawyer Michael Ratner

His posthumous memoir, just released, is a powerful account of holding the powerful to account.
David Cole
The Nakba Is Now

With the explosion of Israeli violence this last week, Palestinians are experiencing a level of terror that is both new and painfully reminiscent of the terror of 1948.
Saree Makdisi for The Nation
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Column

In California, a Case of Black Land Loss Is Finally Being Made Right

Charles and Willa Bruce, Black landowners in Manhattan Beach, lost their land to eminent domain in 1924. Nearly 100 years later, it’s being returned to their living descendants.
Kali Holloway
When Sensitivity Becomes Censorship

A restrictionist mentality is taking over certain segments of the left.
David Bromwich
Obeisance

Calvin Trillin

Books & the Arts

The Surreal Pleasures of ‘The Masked Singer’

By discarding all the tropes of standard reality TV, this singing competition allows viewers to revel in pure weirdness.
Erin Schwartz
The Story of Sun Ra’s Egyptian Adventure

How a 1971 trip changed the course of the free jazz icon’s career.
Marcus J. Moore
Final Poem for the ‘Field of Poetry’

Phillip Williams
Telling the Story of Undocumented America

Using both journalism and visionary vignettes, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio examines undocumented life in contemporary United States.
Gaiutra Bahadur
The Gilded Age’s Democratic Contradictions

A new history examines how the late 19th century’s raucous party system gave way to a more sedate and exclusionary political culture that erected more and more barriers to participation.
Eric Foner
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