The latest battleground in the push for racial justice? The copydesk

By Wesley Yang

“It doesn’t get any easier than this,” said Sarah Glover, an executive at NBC and former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, referring to a move that The Washington Post would go on to characterize as “the simplest way to begin establishing trust with the black community.” Namely, capitalizing the word “Black” when referring to a racial group who just a few decades ago were the subject of an activist campaign to re-christen themselves “African-American.”

At the time of its coinage, “African-American” was seen as conferring a degree of dignity beyond “black.” It was a new term that, as the journalism professor Lori L. Tharps, writing in READ ON

Why we need a coronavirus commission, and who should—and shouldn’t—lead it

By Philip Shenon

The U.S. government has a long history of blue-ribbon panels to investigate national calamities that become turning points in American history, from Pearl Harbor to the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster to the 2008 financial meltdown. Now the country confronts two cataclysmic events at once: the coronavirus pandemic and the national furor over racial violence and law enforcement that began with the killing of George Floyd.

Congress is hurrying to deal with the second crisis by writing laws to rein in abusive policing. But there is no obvious legislative fix to a global health emergency. So the common wisdom READ ON

In pandemic times, the most privileged New Yorkers find that dealing with domestic staff is especially fraught

By Hannah Seligson

Like many progressive parents, a Manhattan mother of two told her sitter to stop coming in March. She was concerned about the caretaker’s roommates and children, one of whom was still going to work. “We have continued paying her at her regular salary of $1,250 a week. And all my friends have done the exact same thing,” the mother said. Meanwhile, a couple of Upper East Side hedge-funders now living in the Hamptons decided to let government pick up the tab: they terminated their staff in March, and some of their employees are now receiving unemployment benefits. (They plan to rehire them at some point.) READ ON

In this installment: The Tale of the Sag Harbor Squatter

By Alex Oliveira

Paula Rosado normally doesn’t rent out her Hamptons home in the off-season. That’s family time. But recently, Rosado, a marketing professional from the New York fashion world, was approached by a sure-bet tenant who was eager to rent her modest, 1890s, shingled three-bedroom Sag Harbor home through the end of April—a local Realtor named Jonathan Davis.

When it comes to Hamptons real estate, Davis—who currently has at least $70.5 million in sales to his name as an agent for the luxury realty group Nest Seekers International—is descended from royalty. He’s the 30-year-old son of Tim Davis, a Hamptons real-estate READ ON

At a protest in Amsterdam, flashbacks to a childhood shaped by the civil-rights movement

By Andrea Lee

As I stood in the crowded Black Lives Matter protest in Amsterdam’s Dam Square, I was flooded with memories of being a small girl in the Philadelphia of the 1960s, sitting in a starchy Sunday dress in the pews of the First African Baptist Church as I listened to my father, Reverend Charles Sumner Lee, preach about civil rights.

I now live abroad, dividing my life between Italy and the Netherlands, and I’ve long known that these gusts of nostalgia are part of the expatriate experience, proof of the paradoxical fact that distance from your native country only strengthens READ ON

A nation of strivers under lockdown meets the à la carte subscription academy MasterClass

By James Wolcott

For many Americans with a can-do, forward ho! attitude, the coronavirus lockdown has opened a gaping opportunity to devote and invest newly available hours to a course of self-improvement, honoring a tradition that goes back to Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father of personal betterment and kite-flying. Why waste homebound hours stupefying in front of Netflix and Hulu when you could scarf up a new skill, start your own puppet theater, practice mime in front of a mirror, or create new sauces to give meals a festive olé?

This is where MasterClass meets the moment. A luxury-class online subscription service READ ON

Guess which side surrendered at Appomattox

By Douglas McGrath

Here is a simple, long-standing principle of war. If you want statues of your heroes displayed in public squares and you wish to see the flag of your country snapping brightly in the breeze, you have to win the war.

We don’t have statues of King George III or Saddam Hussein. We don’t train our future heroes at Fort Hirohito. You lose the war, you lose the statues and the flags and nobody names a military base after you. Except if you’re the South and you lost the Civil War.

There are hundreds of Confederate monuments throughout the South, READ ON

A Harvard medical professor gets to the root of the 10,000-steps-per-day fad, and it has nothing to do with science

By Will Pavia

According to the fossil record, human beings began walking long distances about 1.89 million years ago, towards the end of the Pliocene epoch. It was only more recently, during the age of the Fitbit, that all able-bodied men and women were expected to take 10,000 steps a day. Now two studies, which together involved more than 20,000 Americans, have cast doubt on this target.

One study, involving more than 17,000 women between the ages of 62 and 101, showed the benefits of walking began to taper off after about 7,500 steps. Another study, involving a younger cohort of about 4,000 Americans, aged 40 and upwards, suggested there were health benefits from more steps but also showed those benefits dwindling before the 10,000-step mark. READ ON

By Camilla Long

So the thoughtcrimers have finally come for Basil Fawlty, the man whose very existence was designed to poke fun at the thick, the hateful, the bigoted and the wrong. You’d have to be mentally deficient to think that this ineffectual and puffed-up obvious idiot was anything to be frightened of, but it appears the BBC believes we need shielding from his “racial slurs” and “outdated language”.

The episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil is lightly rude to some German guests and the bumbling old Major reveals his racist tendencies was temporarily struck from one of its platforms while READ ON

Courtney and Corrie Cockrell, grandnieces of the assassinated civil-rights hero Medgar Evers, consider his legacy through the lens of George Floyd

By Sheila Weller

In the long line of shameful acts of racial injustice in America, countless violent murders of black males incited so much national outrage that activism ensued, each time pushing the country a little closer to justice.

The gruesome 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicagoan visiting family in Mississippi, accompanied by his mother’s decision to let his horribly mangled face be photographed in Jet magazine, was quickly followed by Rosa Parks’s fateful refusal to give up her bus seat. Her arrest would mark the beginning of the hugely successful Montgomery bus boycott.

And on June 12, 1963 (57 READ ON

Online, the only thing worse than not showing solidarity with an important cause is showing it in the wrong way

By Kat Rosenfield

Within 48 hours of the first mass protest following the killing of George Floyd, the e-mails started to roll in. From your gym, your bookstore, your alma mater, the retailer whose Facebook ad for a pizza-print duvet you once clicked on while drunk. They all want you to know that they stand for diversity and against police violence. On Twitter, everyone from Lego to Pornhub to your favorite fast-food franchise has weighed in with a somber statement of support for the protesters (except Arby’s, and you’d better believe they’re on a list somewhere because of it). Facebook is awash in public privilege atonements. Instagram is a sea of black boxes interspersed with influencers posing with READ ON

… and I do not want to speak to your manager

By Duff Lambros

Your name is an introduction and a greeting, a blessing and a wish. It also casts a shadow, a permanent marker that accompanies you from your certificate of birth to the chisel on your tombstone.

Although I have since changed it, my birth name is Karen. I believe my mother scraped the bottom of the barrel of monikers, and Karen stuck to me like toilet paper on the heel of a shoe. My siblings were all christened with ancestral or saints’ names, but there is no St. Karen. Some believe that the name Karen is derived from St. Catherine READ ON

Houston’s black cowboys and cowgirls ride for Black Lives Matter, and champion their unheralded legacy

By Katie Nodjimbadem

Last Tuesday, on a typically blazing-hot Texas day, tens of thousands of people descended on downtown Houston, marching from Discovery Green park to City Hall in response to the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. At one point, a group of about 40 black men and women broke through the mass on horseback, their animals gleaming in the sun as they trotted their way to the plaza.

Footage shared on social media that day captured the moment when these modern-day cowboys and cowgirls led their horses up a grassy rise to look down at the crowd, lifting READ ON

Scott Galloway, one half of the must-listen podcast Pivot, is everywhere these days, railing against big tech and spreading big ideas

By William D. Cohan

We are all desperate for smart non-coronavirus, non-Trump content, and few are satiating that hunger better than Scott Galloway. The guy is inescapable. He’s officially a clinical professor of marketing at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand strategy and digital marketing to second-year M.B.A. students. But there’s so much more: a twice-a-week podcast, Pivot, with Kara Swisher; a new show on Vice TV; a weekly blog, No Mercy, No Malice; and a second weekly podcast, The Prof G Show, launched in March. There are also two best-selling books: The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google; READ ON

By Rod Liddle

My favourite warning photograph on cigarette packets is the one of the lady coughing up blood into a handkerchief. There is something terribly beguiling about the woman. I much prefer it to the chap blowing smoke into a baby’s face or the man staring forlornly at his own, apparently malfunctioning, penis.

When these images were first introduced I used to find it fun to collect them, much as I did football cards as a kid. It got to the point where the woman at the cigarette counter in my local supermarket would keep the rare ones back for me. “Would you like the man with a hole in his throat, the bloke with no legs, or the woman standing by her husband’s grave?” READ ON

For twentysomething protesters, passions run high. Not just in the streets but also on Instagram

By Shawn McCreesh

Wednesday night in downtown Washington, D.C., as tall black fencing was being set in place around the White House, hundreds of millennial protesters gathered under the intense scrutiny of riot troops armed with batons, guns, rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, and flash grenades.

A young woman yelled into a bullhorn, “If your friend makes a joke that’s a little too micro-aggressive, please check them because micro-aggression turns into aggression!” The crowd applauded.

As she spoke, another woman passed out Capri Sun fruit-juice packs and bananas from a cooler on the same corner where earlier in the week I watched as READ ON

The German occupation crushed ordinary life in Paris as its citizens hid from the “brown plague”

By Ronald C. Rosbottom

In June 1940, while scouting for the army following him, a young German lieutenant rode a BMW motorbike toward Montmartre, using the brilliant dome of Sacré-Coeur as his beacon. He found the streets empty, but upon reaching the center of the neighborhood, he saw his first Parisians, and they their first German occupier. The soldier quickly sped away, but the abashed citizens now realized that Paris was no longer theirs alone.

After a lightning-speed defeat by the Germans in May-June 1940, France, and especially Paris, confronted what was quickly named la peste brune (the brown plague, referring to the color of German uniforms), an epithet derived from READ ON

In New York and in red-light districts around the world, intimacy just got even more complicated

By George Kalogerakis

Candlelight. The moon above. And, gazing deeply into your eyes, someone special who also officially qualifies as “part of your small circle of close contacts.”

That’s romance, and sex, in the coronavirus era, according to New York City Health Department guidelines. It should be noted that the nyc.gov fact sheet does attempt to accentuate the positive. Yes, “kissing can easily pass the virus,” and, sure, “COVID-19 has been found in the feces of people who are infected with the virus,” meaning that “rimming (mouth on anus) might spread COVID-19.” However—and here’s the beauty part—“there is no evidence that the READ ON

For enterprising hoteliers, paranoia is the new sustainability

By Bob Morris

In late May, I found myself having strange quarantine-fatigue stirrings. With the twitchy fingers of a slot-machine addict, I checked all the last-minute travel apps for prices at Gurney’s, in Montauk.

But, even on the ocean, was a resort without an open pool, bar, or restaurant worth $560 a night? I suppose one could argue that not being allowed to mix with other guests might be a plus in the Hamptons. But with so much of the sybaritic experience jettisoned by either C.D.C. and W.H.O. guidance or by management, why a hefty “resort fee” upcharge? For the new hand-sanitizer READ ON