As Gavin Newsom rose from mayor of San Francisco to governor of California, he championed progressive efforts to reclassify various felonies as misdemeanors, to end the death penalty, and to legalize marijuana. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he signed laws barring cops from using a controversial chokehold and requiring independent probes in police shootings, bragging that “California has advanced a new conversation about broader criminal justice reform.

Looking for their night roost, tiny
birds drop like stars into the darkened dead trees
around me. I thought
dreams were like water, that we
can’t smell anything there. And then you visited me,
your body whole again
but the must of extinction on your breath.
This poem was adapted from Forrest Gander’s forthcoming book, Mojave Ghost: A Novel Poem. It appeared in the July/August 2024 print edition.

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President Joe Biden is abroad this week, commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day with a warning about the risks to democracy around the world. His trip comes at a crucial time for the U.S., as he is dealt challenges from China, Russia, and Iran.

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In pop culture, questions of inheritance take on dramatic, often nasty proportions. Watching Succession, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in all wealthy families, the specter of death elicits insults, infighting, and betrayal.

For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character development, crisis, and conclusion in just a few thousand words. But intentionally reading more short stories made me realize that I’d underestimated the form. These works aren’t just compressed novels: They offer an entirely different experience.

The government SUV is a white dot on the vast volcanic landscape. Beneath the open rear hatch, the geologists Jim Skinner and Alexandra Huff are bent over a map, glancing up at corresponding landmarks. To the west looms the giant lip of a volcano that flooded the area with scorching liquified rock tens of thousands of years ago. To the south, the triangular points of the San Francisco Peaks and, beyond them, the city of Flagstaff, Arizona. Grasses blanket the hills.

In April, a group of people in a red Tesla driving through the Moroccan desert were glued to the odometer on the car’s giant touch screen. “Two million, Hans! Two million,” exclaimed the front-seat passenger to the owner and driver, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg. His 2014 Model S had become likely the first electric vehicle to drive 2 million kilometers, or more than 1.2 million miles. The car could have traveled from the Earth to the moon and back, twice, then circled the equator 11 times.

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For something so small and hollow, the drinking straw has become quite a potent symbol over the years.