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Six Memorial Day Reads

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This Memorial Day, catch up on Atlantic stories about an AncestryDNA test that revealed a medical secret, why public pools are in decline, 24 books to get lost in this summer, and more.

Unraveling the Secrets of the Inca Empire

Photographs by Musuk Nolte and Murray Orr
The heaps of khipus emerged from garbage bags in the back of the tiny, one-room museum—clumps of tangled ropes the size of beach balls. Sabine Hyland smiled as she gazed down at them and said, “Qué lindo, qué lindo”: how beautiful.

I Remember

I remember the heat.
A dry, suffocating torrent.
The blazing, burning sun
baking the tarmac.
No clouds, no trees,
just a furnace of hate.
I feel the hate.
I remember the heat.
I remember the dust.
Filling our nostrils, caking our mouths.
It rained from the sky
and rose from the ground.
With every turn of the tire
and step of the foot there was dust.
Dust, everywhere dust.
I remember the heaviness.
The helmet pressing on my head,
the armor squeezing my chest.

How to Hide a Constitutional Crisis

America seems to be waiting for a clear indication that the country is in a constitutional crisis. Perhaps President Donald Trump will say, “I am defying a court order, and good luck trying to do anything about it.” But short of that, America’s constitutional crisis was always going to be a bit subtler—and that subtler crisis is already here. The administration is already flouting court orders.

“King of the North”: New Book Examines MLK’s Fight Against Police Brutality & Racism Outside Dixie

Historian Jeanne Theoharis’s new book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South, is a major reexamination of the civil rights leader that offers a different picture of both King’s own experiences of police brutality and his sustained critique of police brutality and the criminal legal system in the North as well as the South.
“We’ve southernized Dr. King.