Clint Smith

“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Thomas Jefferson,” I said to a group of about 70 middle schoolers in Memphis. Hands shot up across the auditorium. “What do we know about him?” I asked.
“He was the president!” one said.
“He had funny hair!” said another.
“He wrote the Constitution?” one remarked, half-asking, half-asserting.
I responded to each of their comments:
“Yes, he was our country’s third president.”
“That’s actually how many men wore their hair back then. Many men even wore wigs.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Father’s Day looks different for each family. For some, it is a moment to celebrate the dad(s) in your life and let them know how much you appreciate them. Maybe it’s with a homemade card, or pancakes, or an afternoon in which a dad is allowed to take a nap and watch replays of the 1998 NBA finals uninterrupted.

The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun.

After Safia ElhilloYour mother’s mother came from Igboland
though she did not teach your mother her language.
We gave you your name in a language we don’t understand
because gravity is still there
even when we cannot see it in our hands.I ask your mother’s mother to teach me
some of the words in hopes of tracing
the shadow of someone else’s tongue.The same word in Igbo, she tells me, may have four different
meanings depending on how your mouth bends around
each syllable.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.There is a video from the World Cup that I can’t stop watching.It’s not of Christian Pulisic’s self-sacrificial goal against Iran that sent the United States into the round of 16, or Lionel Messi dancing past a Croatian defender before providing the assist that sealed Argentina’s place in the final.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.There is a video from the World Cup that I can’t stop watching.It’s not of Christian Pulisic’s self-sacrificial goal against Iran that sent the United States into the round of 16, or Lionel Messi dancing past a Croatian defender before providing the assist that sealed Argentina’s place in the final.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.There is no player in the world right now like Kylian Mbappé.In the 2018 World Cup four years ago, Mbappé burst onto the international stage as a 19-year-old, scoring four times in the tournament, including a breathtaking goal in the final.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.Typically, when the opening games of the World Cup commence, it is the beginning of summer—a time when I find myself relishing the long hours of sunlight, enjoying enormous platters of barbecue, and wondering how many Popsicles is too many Popsicles for a grown man to eat in a single day. This World Cup, as we know, is different.

A few weeks ago, I was on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Charlotte, North Carolina. Amid an airline ecosystem rife with cancellations, delays, and overbookings, I was relieved to find the trip relatively uneventful. The crew was on time, the pilots were accounted for, and the weather was clear—the sky a vast and uninterrupted blanket of blue.

There are moments when the success of a sports team can transfix a nation. Such moments provide respite from difficult circumstances and can offer a sense of hope that permeates people’s everyday lives. Senegal winning its first-ever Africa Cup of Nations yesterday in Cameroon is such a moment.Senegal is a country where soccer is everywhere. Take a walk along the beaches of Dakar, the capital city, and you will likely find a group of people playing.

Updated at 6:52 p.m. ET on December 14, 2021.Last week, at a small funeral home in Northwest Washington, D.C., I attended the funeral of a teacher I knew from my time working in Prince George’s County schools eight years ago, Yvonne Brown.Ms. Brown loved literature. She wrote and self-published a novel. She started her school’s poetry club. She loved the magic of words. She loved her students.

Rare is the New Orleans tourist who doesn’t visit the French Quarter, the 13-block neighborhood sitting at the edge of the Mississippi River. Residents, too, are accustomed to its sounds and smells and images, which together have come to represent our hometown, one of the most special places in the world. I think of the city I come from every day—especially now.

I am not from England. I have no family in England. And I have not spent a considerable amount of time on English soil. So my investment in the success of England’s soccer team, at face value, doesn’t make much sense. I cheer as Raheem Sterling glides past a defender; I smile as Bukayo Saka sends the perfect pass to a teammate; I hold my breath with the anticipation of possibility when Jadon Sancho gets anywhere within 25 yards of the opponent’s goal.

I am not from England. I have no family in England. And I have not spent a considerable amount of time on English soil. So my investment in the success of England’s soccer team, at face value, doesn’t make much sense. I cheer as Raheem Sterling glides past a defender; I smile as Bukayo Saka sends the perfect pass to a teammate; I hold my breath with the anticipation of possibility when Jadon Sancho gets anywhere within 25 yards of the opponent’s goal.

After having been postponed for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, the quadrennial European soccer championship began in June, hosted by 11 different cities across the continent. Euro 2020 (as it has continued to be called despite now taking place in 2021) follows a season unlike any we had seen before in world football, during which many teams across the globe played the majority of their matches without any fans in the stands.It was a strange and often disorienting experience.

BEN CRUMP LAW FIRM
An image of George Floyd and his daughter Gianna has been circulating around social media since yesterday. George is sitting in the driver’s seat of a car, wearing a black T-shirt and black baseball cap with the word Houston emblazoned in cursive letters above the brim.In the passenger seat is Gianna, who is now 7 years old, but in the photo—taken a few years ago—looks as if she isn’t more than 3 or 4.

During the winter months, the small classroom smelled of wood and heat. Three rows of desks faced the door, and before class began I would rearrange some of them into a circle. Different shades of forest green hugged the walls, the remnants of years of paint jobs done with varying levels of proficiency and care. On bright mornings, the sun sliced through two large windows and bathed the classroom in the day’s new light.

Image above: Portrait of Mollie Williams (Mississippi), taken as part of the Federal Writers’ ProjectThis article was published online on February 9, 2021.On a rainy Thursday afternoon in November, I stepped inside the : the idea that we have been stripped of social and cultural ties to a homeland we cannot identify. I have listened to friends discuss the specific village in Italy their ancestors came from, or the specific town in the hills of Scotland.

On the morning of Election Day in 2018, I went to vote at my local polling site in Maryland and then drove down to the D.C. Central Detention Facility, where I taught creative-writing workshops with a group of 18-to-24-year-old incarcerated young men. I parked, turned off the engine, and felt the soft vibration of the car come to a stop. I sat there and looked down at the I VOTED sticker in my hand—its adhesive clinging to my finger, its waxy paper catching the light through my windows.

It sounded like thunder; it felt like heaven.This is what I remember of Sundays at the Superdome in New Orleans after the Saints scored a touchdown. An endless sea of black and gold. Fleur-de-lis paraphernalia that glistened under the stadium lights. More than 60,000 people on their feet, stomping, screaming, and singing; awash in one another’s delirium.

Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The AtlanticWhat I’ll always remember about the first time I saw the film Black Panther are the costumes that people wore. It was a chilly night in Washington, D.C., and almost everyone in the theater was Black. Children dressed as Shuri, white dots of paint tracing the contours of their face, plastic Vibranium Gauntlets strapped to their arms.