Brazil's president wants economic and political bloc to benefit region.

More than 5,000 South Sudanese have been killed or injured by land mines and unexploded ordnance since 2004.

For the past several decades, Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, in New Hampshire, has hosted a frequent flier with no known credentials. It comes and goes as it pleases, always bypassing security; it carries no luggage, not even a government-issued ID.

But unlike the other passengers that regularly flock to Pease, the upland sandpiper—a spindly, brown-freckled bird native to North America’s grasslands—has no destination apart from the airport itself. The fields between Pease’s runway and taxiways are now the only place in the entire state where the species is known to regularly reproduce. Each year, about seven sandpiper couples nest in the airport’s meticulously mowed grasslands, fledging roughly a dozen chicks, according to Brett Ferry, a wildlife biologist at the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Should they be snuffed out, Ferry told me, “that would be it for New Hampshire’s breeding population.”

New Hampshire’s sandpipers aren’t alone in their plight. Across the United States (and, really, the world), all sorts of animals that have lost their natural homes to urban development and human-driven climate change are seeking sanctuary at airports. Vulnerable butterflies have camped out at the dunes near LAX; an endangered garter snake has found one of its last refuges at San Francisco International Airport. Terrapin turtles searching for egg-laying sites have triggered traffic jams on JFK’s runways. But perhaps no group is in greater peril than the Northeast’s grassland birds, which, in recent decades, have found themselves almost exclusively relegated to airports and airfields. It’s a responsibility that these travel hubs never asked for, and mostly do not want. Now the regional survival of many species may hinge on the hospitality of some of the country’s most bird-averse spots.

[Read: A basic premise of conservation looks shakier than ever]

By most accounts, upland sandpipers, eastern meadowlarks, grasshopper sparrows, and other grassland birds have roots in the Midwest, only arriving en masse to the Northeast during the 19th century as European settlers converted massive tracts of land into agricultural fields. The birds found grass short enough to forage for insects in and tall enough to cloak their burrow-esque nests, and their population boomed. But just a century or so later, as America’s farming prospects shifted west, East Coasters began to abandon their fields. Some land regressed into forest; some was developed for other use. Almost as quickly as grassland-bird numbers had surged in the area, they plummeted.

In many northeastern states, grasshopper sparrows and eastern meadowlarks are now listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern. Upland sandpipers, once abundant throughout the region, appear to have entirely vanished from Rhode Island, according to Charles Clarkson, the director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island; they may soon be gone from Vermont too. The birds have several holdouts scattered throughout the region—among them, private farmlands, Maine’s blueberry barrens, even a few of New York’s landfills. But as reliable grasslands continue to grow scarcer, airports in particular “have become disproportionately important,” says Pamela Hunt, New Hampshire Audubon’s senior biologist for avian conservation.

Airports, of course, were never designed to be conservation sites—if anything, their core dictate is antithetical to that. “Our mission at the FAA is safe air travel; that is it,” says Amy Anderson, a wildlife biologist with the Federal Aviation Administration. That mission is very often synonymous with making the country’s travel hubs “less attractive for wildlife.” Airport lawns, which primarily serve as an aesthetically appealing buffer for water runoff and planes that skid off runways, are regularly mowed with blades that can destroy nests; they’re treated with chemicals that kill off the insects that many birds and small mammals eat. Creatures that mosey onto runways, where they can damage hardware or compromise landings and takeoffs, can expect to be shooed away with all manner of noise cannons, lasers, pyrotechnics, or even trained peregrine falcons. During emergencies, animals that can’t otherwise be dealt with may even be shot. When animals end up on these properties, it’s generally not because they’re pristine or safe. It’s “because they have no other option,” Clarkson told me.

For certain animals, these odd real-estate choices have paid dividends. The San Francisco garter snake and its primary prey, the California red-legged frog—federally listed as endangered and threatened, respectively—have found a stable home on SFO property, according to Natalie Reeder, the airport’s former wildlife biologist. Of the half dozen or so populations of garter snakes still found in California, SFO’s is the only one that is not in “really big trouble,” Reeder told me.

[Read: When conservationists kill lots (and lots) of animals]

But SFO’s haven is more an exception than the norm. After many years of sustaining a “very nicely growing population” of burrowing owls—a state-listed species of special concern—the airport in San Jose, California, stopped maintaining the birds’ artificial burrows, and their numbers plunged, says Sandra Menzel, a senior biologist at the natural-resource-management company Albion, who has studied the birds. A survey conducted last year found just one breeding pair at the airport, down from a 2002 peak of around 40. (An SJC spokesperson told me that “the reasons for the decline in owl numbers at the Airport are not fully known,” and pointed out that the birds have been declining in general “throughout the South Bay.”) In the Northeast, too, there’s been “all sorts of conflict,” says Patrick Comins, the executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. In his state, he told me, grassland birds staked out territory at Meriden-Markham Municipal Airport—only to later be crowded out by an intensive mowing regimen and space-hogging solar panels. (MMK didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

From the airports’ perspective, having vulnerable species on site is usually more trouble than it’s worth—especially when their winged tenants start to endanger humans attempting flight. Since the late 1980s or so, when the FAA started keeping track, birds and planes have collided more than 220,000 times—incidents that have, at times, downed entire aircrafts. The most serious concerns are usually big, flocking species, such as gulls or geese. But “even a 10-gram songbird, if it hits right, could take out an airplane,” Scott Rush, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University, told me.

The tactics that airports deploy to avoid bird strikes don’t always work. Oregon’s Portland International Airport has, for many years, been aggressively stripping its grounds of vegetation, to the point of exposing the underlying soil, to deter grass-loving geese. “It looks like the moon,” says Nick Atwell, the senior natural-resources and wildlife manager at the Port of Portland. But the anti-goose strategy inadvertently transformed the airport’s landscape into perfect, barren bait for a threatened bird called the streaked horned lark. Despite PDX’s best efforts to keep the larks off runways, they’re now posing a strike risk. Atwell worries that the airport could become, or already is, an ecological sink: a habitat that lures in animals, only to accelerate their decline.

That may have already happened at New Jersey’s Atlantic City International Airport. In the early 2000s, the airport set aside 300 acres of its property as a sanctuary for upland sandpipers and other grassland birds, even modifying its regular mowing schedule in the summer to spare their nests. But within months of the intervention, “things went a little haywire,” says Chris Boggs, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who’s been working with the airport since the early 1990s. Boggs estimates that total recorded bird strikes skyrocketed by 60 to 70 percent. He remembers scraping broken sandpiper bodies off the pavement, unable to stop himself from tallying up who was left. “We had three,” he would say to himself. “Now we have two.” By 2019, the airport had resumed its regular mowing protocol. It had wanted to help the birds, Boggs told me. Instead, “we were killing them off.”

[Read: The quiet disappearance of birds in North America]

At a few northeastern sites, humans and grassland birds have negotiated a truce. Pease, in New Hampshire, is one; another is Massachusetts’ Westover Air Reserve Base, one of the largest sanctuaries for grassland birds in the entire Northeast. Sandpipers, grasshopper sparrows, and eastern meadowlarks can all be found breeding on its 1,300-plus acres of viable habitat, which are far quieter and less traveled than commercial airports, says Andrew Vitz, the state ornithologist. Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife has aided in several of the site’s conservation efforts, including the planting of bird-friendly grasses.

Replicating those efforts could, in theory, turn more of the Northeast into hospitable grassland. Airports could, for instance, swap out some of their turf grass for hardier native species that require less summertime mowing, as Westover has. But many such proposals still feel like Band-Aids at best, says José Ramírez-Garofalo, a biologist at Rutgers University who is studying grassland birds at landfills. The birds are mostly confined to fragmented, artificial plots of land where people’s needs will almost always trump animals’.

In an ideal world, airports would just be layovers for grassland birds on their way to roomy tracts of protected land that they could call their own. But those habitats no longer exist. “If we truly want grasshopper sparrows and upland sandpipers to be a significant part of the community, it’s going to take a heck of an effort” to create space for them, says Brian Washburn, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture—efforts that people may not be willing to make. Which leaves animals still turning to airports as places of last resort. Creatures’ options are now so limited that even the ones repeatedly booted off the premises will often try to run, slither, or dig themselves back on, says Guiming Wang, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University.

These strange, human-made habitats are now some of the last places in the Northeast where birders can glimpse grassland species and hear their whirring calls. “People from all around the region will come and see them,” Ramírez-Garofalo told me. But with the world’s appetite for travel increasing, experts such as Hunt, of New Hampshire Audubon, worry that even these few stable bird populations won’t be around for long. “It’s perfectly reasonable to think that despite everything we’re doing, they’ll still blink out,” she told me. As airports’ human clientele grows, their tolerance for their wild and rare residents may only further shrink.

Pretoria wants the power to decide whether to detain leaders wanted by the International Criminal Court.

Photographs by Chantal Anderson

The room where I’m set to meet Usher is glowing. I don’t mean that in a figurative sense, though the megastar certainly does luminesce in his own way. The space itself, a storefront-size chamber tucked away from the Las Vegas stage where he would perform that night, is awash in an almost eerie, LED blue. Along the far wall, light strips flank the liquor-covered bar, illuminating a step-and-repeat covered with $100 bills bearing Usher’s likeness. “The teal room,” as Usher and his team call it, is where the artist will later celebrate the spring kickoff of his new residency. I waited for him on a couch in the middle of the afternoon, leaning back against gold-lamé throw pillows, feeling as though I’d stumbled into a therapist’s office decorated to look like a strip club.

Into this uncanny scene walked Usher, the veteran R&B musician with a discography so obviously peerless that his only viable Verzuz competitor is himself. He strode into the room diamonds first, a thick chain around his neck sparkling against an all-black backdrop of sweatsuit, sunglasses, and durag. It wasn’t until he removed his sunglasses midway through our interview that I felt the weight of his celebrity, his innate sense that any room he walks into is distorted by his magnetism.

That night was a big night for Usher, an unveiling of sorts: the first official performance of the new leg of My Way, his residency at the Park MGM hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Much of his own family would be in the sold-out audience, along with fans who’d traveled from around the world to see him break into the infamous “U Remind Me” shadow choreography, sway his way through “You Make Me Wanna …” in a satin robe and leather pants, and strip the set bare to let his “Can U Handle It?” falsettos float.

Usher was fresh from a full-body workout when we met. He grew more animated as we talked. This is his second Vegas residency. In July of 2021, he became the first Black male singer to hold court at the famed Colosseum at Caesars Palace. This time around, he would have an even larger venue, and he wanted to do more than a standard concert. I asked him what to expect. He told me that without the burden of packing up a set, hopping onto a tour bus, and assembling it all over again across the country, he could run wild with My Way. He reminisced about the early days of planning the show. “We’re getting ready to light this bitch up,” he said.

A few hours after our conversation, in the giddy run-up to the show, I watched the crowd swell into the Dolby Live. The venue seats just over 5,000 people, a far cry from the 20,000-plus fans who have piled into a sold-out Madison Square Garden to see Usher over the years. To my left, standing nearly within reach of the stage, a woman in an silver monochrome outfit—sequined dress, metallic sneakers, princess tiara, and all—danced to Trap Beckham’s twerk-inducing “Birthday Bitch,” before pausing briefly to adjust the pageant sash draped across her chest, which proudly identified her as USHER’S #1 FAN.

Without giving away too much, Usher’s grand entrance hinges on a sly, crowd-centric interpretation of the song for which the residency is named. Just before he walks out to ear-piercing screams, in an all-white outfit set off by the same diamond chain he wore earlier that day, the last lines of the “My Way” chorus blare from the speakers. The lyrics set the tone for the rest of the show: “What I say goes / And I’m in control.”

Over the next two hours, he will skip across albums and eras, slipping into songs like costumes: One minute he is a sexed-up heartthrob, the next a wounded lover. He will push himself beyond traditional choreography into riskier stage work, including a few different set pieces on roller skates. During one, Usher and his dancers take to a medley of other artists’ hits—among them “Get Your Roll On” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot”—with the energy and precision of a college step team. Their moves are impressive, terrifying, fun. (Notably, the choreography involves none of the violence that reportedly broke out at an actual Las Vegas roller rink earlier this month, when Usher was allegedly assaulted by Chris Brown or a member of his crew before both singers performed at the seemingly jinxed Lovers & Friends Festival.)

Roller skates are an Atlanta thing—and not just in the movies. Cascade Family Skating, the real-life setting of T.I.’s 2006 classic, ATL, is one of more than a dozen rinks throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area where Black patrons have congregated for decades to dance and commune. After he unlaces his skates, Usher transports the audience to a decidedly less family-friendly Atlanta hallmark: Pole dancers descend from their elaborately designed perches with exhilarating speed. In one scene, a dancer approaches the stage to the sound of fight music. By the time she vaults herself onto the pole to begin her routine, the drum rolls have given way to the first notes of Usher’s timeless bad-bitch hype anthem, “Bad Girl.” Suspended upside down, the dancer claps her legs on beat as Usher sings the opening line that has supercharged women’s pregame primping for more than 20 years: What y’all know about a supermodel?  

Later in the show, the same $100 “Ush bucks” I first saw in the teal room rain down from the ceiling. (What a delight it would’ve been for the bespoke currency to have cameoed alongside him in Hustlers.) Usher told me that, amid all the spectacle, he wants to make sure to situate the show within Atlanta’s larger cultural tradition. “I want you to always see that,” Usher said of the funk, the soul, the Blackness that makes the city a source of constant creative regeneration. “There is sophistication; there is a technical side to it that people should understand on the same level [as] Cirque du Soleil or any of the other kinds of theatrical things that come to Las Vegas. Atlanta has that, and we had that opportunity to be able to introduce it to the world here.”

Usher’s supporting cast hails largely from Atlanta and other parts of the South (including the show’s DJ, who has been a fixture in Usher’s performances for decades). In the teal room, Usher and his creative director Aakomon Jones, also the singer’s longtime choreographer, talked about the joy of channeling the city where they both got their artistic start as children. Jones told me that students would race out of their classrooms to share different moves “in between class, in the restroom, going over a routine before the bell rings, and you show up late,” he said with a smile, referencing a sense of childhood mischief that was deliberately built into My Way. “We cast for the legacy and the maturity, but then we also cast for the ‘dangerous’ youth energy,” Jones said of the performers onstage with Usher. “We build connective tissue between those generations.”

The show’s audience was intergenerational too. Parents brought their children; couples of all ages grooved together. Whether you were a toddler, a teen, or firmly into grown-n-sexy territory when “Nice & Slow” was first released, the opening chords entranced you all the same. The only time that mattered was 7 o’clock on the dot. For concertgoers such as myself, Usher has been creating an R&B canon since we’ve been forming memories. Thinking back on the pantheon of celebrity posters that graced teenagers’ bedroom walls in the aughts, I can’t remember many cover images that elicited as much libidinal adolescent fervor as that of Usher’s 8701. For fans who’d perhaps already swooned over the likes of Marvin Gaye, Teddy Pendergrass, and the Temptations well before Usher, the teenager boldly singing lyrics written by Babyface in the late ’90s didn’t exactly break the R&B sex-symbol mold. To them, the strikingly good-looking middle-aged man who now performed slow jams with generation-spanning charisma was once just such a handsome young man. One of the more unnerving things about Usher is that he’s arguably the only music-industry heartthrob who could still draw compliments like these from aunties.

After performing some of his highest-octane hits, Usher pared down the show for a mesmerizing stretch. No dancers, no elaborate set pieces. Just that voice and its acrobatics. Usher told me that he’d modeled his career path after athletes, not musicians. “Not many people know this, but my father was a basketball player and my mother was a basketball player,” he said. Watching them channel their energy into the sport, he figured that he could use that same focus to build something lasting for himself as a performer. In addition to ensuring that his body would always be in spotlight-friendly shape, that push toward athleticism also cultivated the agility he’d need to pull off signature flourishes such as his handstand choreography. “I didn’t look at myself like a dancer. I didn’t look at myself like a singer.” He saw himself more as Allen Iverson than Al B. Sure.

Watching the sheer exertion required of him in Vegas does feel a little like catching a glimpse of an athletic prodigy. Getting to that level takes diligent, unsexy work. “Mama Jan” Smith, an Atlanta-based vocal coach, has been training Usher for more than two decades. When he was first referred to her as a teenager (by Elton John, she believes), the industry veteran was struck by Usher’s clear talent: “He could dance with his voice,” she recalled. “And I don’t mean just dancing physically at the same time while he was singing. His voice also danced—it was his riffs and his runs, it was his tone.”

When Usher finishes singing “Climax,” the vocally taxing 2012 ode to a slowly dying relationship, the lights change. The artist is enveloped in a telltale haze of flame-colored smoke. “Burn” is coming, and the wait for it is deliciously agonizing. It is this emotional space that most distinguishes Usher. The sex appeal is always self-evident; the studied sentimentality is not. Across the My Way survey of his discography, he told me the three songs he considers quintessentially his are “Confessions” (no surprises there), “Burn,” and “Climax.”

Of the three, “Climax” admittedly gave me pause when he first named it. But during My Way, the song primes the crowd for “Burn” with its own dramatic flourish. With his tank top pulled up over his neck to reveal a still-statuesque upper body, Usher drops to his knees as he sings—“We’re going nowhere fast”—then falls to the floor as he lets the audience take over: “Come together, now we’re undone.”

By showcasing Usher’s willingness to come undone, “Burn” quickly became one of modern American music’s most enduring breakup records. The song was Usher’s initial choice for the Confessions lead single, which would ultimately be the inescapable Lil’ Jon– and Ludacris-assisted club banger “Yeah!” But along with that track, “Burn” was one of the key records keeping Usher at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for nearly half of 2004. The ballad is undeniable, elemental R&B—romance refracted through the lens of grief. Any selection of lines from the song telegraphs anguish and depth, but the internal conflict of its bridge is Usher at his most exposed: “I’m twisted ’cause one side of me is tellin’ me that I need to move on / On the other side, I wanna break down and cry, ooh.”

Usher co-wrote “Burn” with the super-producer Jermaine Dupri, who has worked with him since 1997’s My Way, and the fellow producer Bryan-Michael Cox. On a recent call, Dupri told me that “Burn” is one of their collaborations on which Usher was most heavily involved in the conceptual process. He titled the song and gave Dupri the map before the producer ever sat down to write. Dupri anticipated “Burn” being a hit with women. After all, he figured, what woman doesn’t want to hear a man be vulnerable? But he never predicted how intensely it would resonate with men. Looking back on it now, Dupri happily acknowledges that he was wrong: “I think that’s the true secret to his success—that you have a man that actually is saying something that other men want to say.”

Usher sees songs like “Burn” as the centerpiece of his artistic legacy because they capture the devastation of heartbreak for men specifically. Since the song’s release, “Burn” has served as a lingua franca for a fragile kind of masculine pain. “It’s a very important role that I think I played in young men’s lives. And I obsess over it because I’m always trying to find the best way to articulate that emotion without making them feel uncomfortable,” he told me. “These are things that I think men need as tools.”

Given that it was released in the early aughts, when hip-hop and R&B were closely entwined but firmly distinct, “Burn” feels all the more poignant. Usher’s vocals in the song mirror its lyrics: He unravels, slowly and methodically creating a sound that feels cracked open. Just as the narrative doesn’t end with a neat resolution, his voice doesn’t rise with linear intensity. He remains raw. Exercising that kind of control, what Mama Jan referred to as “attaching emotional inference” to how one sings, is a deceptively difficult task. Doing so within a cultural climate that prioritized suave, swaggering braggadocio would have been all the more challenging.

It’s not altogether surprising, then, that “Burn” immediately broke through—or that it’s the song that draws the most impassioned response from concertgoers at the Vegas show. Every night, Jones said, he looks out into the audience and sees “the hardest of the hard still singing the lyrics to the love ballad.”

As Usher nears the end of “Burn,” he invites the audience to sing the falsetto-filled bridge with him. No one in the room matches his tone, but our shared sense of release fills in where our harmonies do not. The crowd cools down, the beat drops, and Usher issues the now-memefied directive “Watch this” before beginning a song that sends the energy in the room skyrocketing. When we spoke a few weeks later, Dupri pointed out a statistic that “sounds like a dinosaur to me”: Almost 20 years later, Confessions is still the last R&B album to ever be certified diamond.

For many musicians, producing a genre-defining work like Confessions at just 25 could lead to some real complacency. But after that album, Usher kept grinding. In 2008, he released Here I Stand, a ballad-heavy record that trades the debauchery of Confessions for declarations of love inspired by his relationship with his then-wife, Tameka Foster. Two years later, after they’d parted ways, he put out the aptly named divorce manifesto Raymond v. Raymond. Both albums debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. As the R&B star solidified his standing in the music industry, he also dipped his toe into other genres. The dance-pop single “OMG,” an Auto-Tune-heavy will.i.am collaboration, clinched the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 for four weeks in 2010. And the years that followed saw him collaborating with an eclectic array of popular artists including Pitbull, Enrique Iglesias, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, Young Thug, and Diplo. The hits rolled in.

In the lead-up to Usher’s residency at Caesars Palace, the musician was still massively popular but creatively adrift. It had been almost five years since he’d released a solo album, 2016’s thematically incohesive Hard II Love, also his first LP since My Way without a massive hit. On the path to becoming a megastar, to selling out arenas and courting crossover appeal, he’d lost his passion for creating music and felt less connected to his fans than in the past. “I had stopped caring, because I had done it for so long and just obsessed over success,” he told me. He found himself constantly “trying to figure out how to create something that everybody is going to love, because my audience had grown so much.”

The beautiful thing about being able to slow down in Vegas, he says, is that it made him care about the music again. When Usher performs now, he sees an audience respond with rapturous enthusiasm to the R&B that first catapulted him to fame—before the EDM chart-toppers, the Justin Bieber career coaching, or the “revolutionary pop” that earned him a wider fan base and the ire of some early fans who felt abandoned by his moves outside the genre. Onstage and in his new music, Usher is channeling the glory of an earlier R&B era. In March, he even released “GLU,” a sexy, falsetto-filled teaser for the forthcoming album that fans have anticipated as a kind of Confessions 2. (The full record is slated for release later this year.) As Usher told me, “I needed to come to Las Vegas to just get to the place where I was having fun again.”

As My Way wound down, I observed the faces around me. Overwhelmingly, the audience seemed united in feeling, not thought. People danced in the aisles and serenaded one another from their seats. Back in the teal room, Usher had recalled a scene almost like this one, which had brought the meaning of his career—and the immensity of this residency—into sharp relief. While performing, he said, he saw his son, his mother, and his grandmother all reveling in the audience. His son, now a teenager, had recently experienced something that made “Burn” feel like more than just one of his dad’s old songs. That night, he understood. “It was a tender moment for me,” Usher said. “I could see him singing it, and he’s really singing it.”

America has two national holidays that honor those who have served, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The former is for the living; the latter is for the dead. How we remember, honor, and judge the dead was on my mind as I wrote Halcyon, a novel that imagines an alternate America in which a scientific breakthrough has allowed a few of those dead to again wander among us. What follows is an excerpt that foregrounds questions of national memory, in which the novel’s narrator, Martin Neumann, encounters the World War II hero and renowned lawyer Robert Ableson considering his military service and the symbolism of our national cemeteries. Halcyon is about the intersection of individual and national memory, which is what Memorial Day is about too.

Oak Ridge Cemetery was as its name described. The headstones were interspersed among the ancient trees, and the ridge was one of many that bracketed the northeast-by-southwest-running Shenandoah Valley. It lacked the grandeur of Arlington National Cemetery, where Robert Ableson’s military service had entitled him to a plot; instead, he had opted for this quieter and less trafficked place. Before his wife, Mary, mentioned the grave, it had never occurred to me that Ableson had one. But without a grave, you can’t really have a funeral, and his had been a well-attended affair. Mourners had crowded the cemetery from all four corners of the country, but few of those who would mourn him in death had been confidants in life, and no one among them had known that the casket was empty and that Ableson had made other arrangements.

It was Mary who’d asked me to search the cemetery. Of those of us gathered in the kitchen, she recognized that I had the least to do. It was a modest drive from her home at Halcyon, 20 minutes. Scribbled on a scrap of paper in my pocket was a section, row, and grave number. Having parked my Volvo, I was referring to this scrap as I ascended a gravel path that wound through the terraced rows of headstones, family plots, and marble angels with their lichened wings.

When I crested the ridge, I found Ableson on its far side. He sat with his back leaning against one of the ubiquitous oaks. He was facing away from me, down into the sprawling valley below. It was one of those spring afternoons when slanted light catches every mote of pollen, making the invisible air visible. A few clouds lumbered overhead. The Shenandoah River meandered in the distance, and when the sun fell on the water, it glistened like foundry iron, and when the clouds obscured the sun, it appeared as water again. I watched Ableson watching the elemental interplay between sun and clouds and water. Then he turned, looking over his shoulder, saw me, and stood.

“I’m glad it’s you who came,” he said, brushing dirt from the seat of his pants.

“Is that your plot?”

He glanced down at the simple white marble headstone behind him. “It is.”

[Read: A real story of Memorial Day]

The marker was the same as those modest ones used for graves at Arlington. Etched into the white stone were the dates 1914–1999, and I ran my hand over the numerals. Other facts were etched into the headstone as well. His name, his branch of service, and rank during the war. However, none of those held my fascination like those two dates. The year of your birth. The year of your death. They’re supposed to be immutable brackets. But he’d proven otherwise. This made him a time traveler of sorts.

“Right after they brought me back,” he said, “when I was in social quarantine, I’d sneak out here.” He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke, but down into the valley.

“I can see why.”

“No, it wasn’t the view I came for.” He again turned toward me. “I wanted to know if anyone had visited.” Pebbles rested on top of many of the headstones around us, and I could see how Ableson jealously counted them. “Sometimes I’d come and a person would’ve placed one on my headstone. More often there’d be nothing. It’s terrible to feel as though you’ve been forgotten.” He squatted to the ground and picked up a small stone. He weighed it in his hand. He then slung it out a great distance so that it sailed down the ridge, disappearing in the late-day sun. “Amazing to think that now, if you want, your life can just keep going on and on.”

“Except Mary doesn’t want hers to,” I said.

“No,” he answered somberly. “She doesn’t.”

“Everyone is pretty worried about you.”

“I know,” he said, dropping his shoulders with a little sigh, as if the burden of other people’s worries had exhausted him. “I could have had a grave at Arlington,” he commented, continuing to stare off into the valley. “My service in the war qualified me for one. The plot they offered was ideal, in a prominent part of the cemetery, not too far from Section 16.” He glanced back at me as if to gauge whether I knew the special significance of this section—which I did not—and he disappointedly turned away. “That’s the section for Confederate war dead. There’s 482 of them buried there. You know the story of Arlington, of course.” I did, but this didn’t stop Ableson from recounting it, how the land was originally owned by the grandson of George Washington, who was in turn the grandfather of Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Custis. The white porticoed house that still stands at Arlington, and which bore a striking resemblance to Halcyon, is named the Custis-Lee Mansion. If you look out from its front porch across the Potomac River you can see the Capitol dome, which remained under construction in 1864, the war’s third year. By then, the cemeteries in Washington overflowed with dead. The government needed more space, and they charged the quartermaster general of the Union Army, General Montgomery C. Meigs, with finding it. Meigs, who was mourning the battlefield death of his own son, 22-year-old John, appropriated the land around the Custis-Lee Mansion for the new cemetery. Specifically, he chose Mary Custis Lee’s rose garden as the site to bury the first bodies, so she could never return home. “A hundred and fifty years later,” said Ableson, “and you can still feel the perfect enmity of that gesture. How do we then go from burying our dead children in one another’s gardens to honoring Confederate soldiers with an interment at Arlington?”

This part of the story I also knew—and taught in my course at Virginia College. Thirty-seven years would pass until, in 1901, the U.S. government would exhume the graves of Confederate war dead and inter them at Arlington. The reason was national reconciliation in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Only blood can wash away blood and the United States, North and South, inspired by a new grievance, had come together to form a fist. When the dead returned from that war, many also found their resting place at Arlington. Among those dead were African American soldiers and they too had a place at Arlington, though not in Mary Custis Lee’s rose garden, nor in the centrally located environs of the newly dedicated Section 16. Their segregated acreage was in an isolated corner, less visited, and on low ground that in heavy rains collected runoff and remained sodden for weeks. All it took was a minor skirmish like the Spanish-American War to create the political impetus for Confederate and Union soldiers to reconcile within Arlington, while for African American soldiers it would take another 50 years and something far larger than a Caribbean quarrel; it would take a world war for the dead—of all races—to finally mingle within Arlington’s sacred soil.

“Do you know what pattern the graves of the Confederate dead are arrayed in at Arlington?” Ableson asked.

I had to confess I did not.

“The other graves in the cemetery are laid out in rows, easy to elongate,” he said. “The Confederate dead are arranged in concentric circles. They’re set up that way so you can’t add any more graves. Someone like my daughter looks at me—at the cases I’ve tried, at the causes I’ve championed—and she can’t understand why I would want to preserve the Virginia Monument. She probably believes that I should be leading the protest myself, shouting ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ with the rest of them. But tearing down monuments isn’t too many steps removed from digging up graves. I know better than most what happens when you bring up the dead—they find their place again among the living.”

[Elliot Ackerman: The two Stalingrads]

It was Ableson’s place among the living that had come to concern me. He couldn’t stay here, loitering in Oak Ridge Cemetery. He would need to return to Halcyon. Right now, I needed to get Ableson home, and said as much.

“You’re right,” he answered. “Let’s go. No doubt Mary’s worried.”

But before leaving, Ableson bent over. He fussed about in the grass near his and Mary’s shared plot. He was stamping around, searching for something. Then he stopped. Whatever it was that he’d found, he was clutching it in his hand as he stood. As we left the cemetery, I saw what it was. He had placed a single dark pebble on top of his headstone.

This story was excerpted from Elliot Ackerman’s novel Halcyon.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Good morning! I’m the senior Books editor at The Atlantic. I’m taking over today’s culture edition of the Daily for something a little different: an exciting update from our Books section, and some recommendations for your summer reading list.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The first social-media babies are growing up—and they’re horrified. Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis Twitter is a far-right social network.

Your Summer Reads

This past week was a big one at The Atlantic’s Books desk. Not only did we publish our annual summer reading guide (more about that soon), but we also relaunched the Books Briefing, our weekly newsletter where you can find all things bookish in The Atlantic: essays, recommendations, reports from the literary world.

One thing you should know is that our approach to books is a little different here. With all due respect to the traditional book review and its thumbs-up or thumbs-down assessment, we know that our readers want more than just to be told whether they should buy a book (though we hope to help with that as well). They want to understand how a novel might give them a new way to think about language or altruism. They want the concepts embedded in the best nonfiction books—whether it’s okay to live a “good-enough life,” for instance, or what the difference is between accomplishment and mastery—to be debated, not just named. And they want incisive profiles of storytelling masters, such as David Grann, and of novelists who are trying something strange and original, such as Catherine Lacey. They want the latest on book banning.

We’ve got all of it. And the Books Briefing will really be the best way for you to stay caught up. This week, for example, we’re pointing to our summer reading guide, which we just published. This is the annual opportunity our writers and editors get to share some of their favorites with you.

Many of the books on our list are older and have earned their place as treasured recommendations over time (one of mine this year is Lore Segal’s Her First American; you’ll never find a more eccentric love story). But we like to make sure our readers also know about some of the brand-new books out this summer that we think are worth picking up.  Here are a few highlights:

This year, my colleague Maya Chung looked at Emma Cline’s The Guest and the “feeling of sweaty anxiety” it creates through the story of a young grifter on Long Island who survives by taking advantage of nearly everyone she meets. Emma Sarappo, also an editor on the Books desk, read Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile, a hilarious collection of essays that tracks the great transition from being “young and lubricated,” as Irby puts it, to being middle-aged. Nicole Acheampong, on our Culture desk, delved into Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans—a group portrait of a loose circle of friends in Iowa City fighting and loving and fighting as they come of age. And I took the nonfiction route and spent time with David Grann’s The Wager, about an 18th-century shipwreck off the coast of Patagonia and its mutinous aftermath—an incredible story rendered by Grann as a narrative that insists you keep reading.

For people inclined toward audiobooks (a newly acquired habit of mine), I’ll leave you with a recommendation from some of my recent listening. I’m a big fan of James McBride’s work and loved his last novel, Deacon King Kong, which I actually chose as one of my summer reads last year. His new book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, is out in August, and in anticipation, I decided to listen to his memoir, The Color of Water. The book is McBride’s love letter to his mother—a Jewish immigrant and the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi—who survived a brutal childhood in the South, left her family at 17, and married a Black man and raised 12 children in Brooklyn. The audiobook is read alternately by a voice actor who presents McBride’s narration (JD Jackson) and a different actor for the chapters in which Ruth McBride tells her life story in the first person (Susan Denaker). It’s a wonderful way to take in the memoir and appreciate McBride’s reconstruction of his family’s history, and the voice he gives back to his mother.

There’s a lot more if you check out our guide to summer reading. And sign up for our newsletter, where we’ll keep you plied with book recommendations and provocative ideas week to week.

Happy reading!

Read past editions of the Sunday Daily with Adam Harris, Saahil Desai, Yasmin Tayag, Damon Beres, Julie Beck, Faith Hill, and Derek Thompson.

The Week Ahead

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, in which the journalist Monica Potts uncovers the plight of girls and women in the nation’s rural towns (on sale Tuesday) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the long-awaited sequel to 2018’s “exuberant and inventive” Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (in theaters Friday) Searching for Soul Food, which follows the celebrity chef Alisa Reynolds in her quest to find out what soul food looks like around the world (begins streaming Friday on Hulu)

Essay

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Magnus Wennman / Alamy; Graphica Artis / Getty.

The 400-Year-Old Tragedy That Captures Our Chaos

By Megan Garber

This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.

Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Yellowjackets, how could you? A Chinese American show that doesn’t bother to explain itself Tina Turner’s cosmic life You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral. We still don’t know Anna Nicole Smith. Chain-Gang All-Stars is Gladiator meets the American prison system. The 1880s political novel that could have been written today

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The far right is splintering. The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham. Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers

Photo Album

A child runs near a scarecrow displayed at the annual Scarecrows Fair in the Italian village of Castellar, near Cuneo, on May 22, 2023. During the fair, people exhibit—in gardens, courtyards, fields, or streets—scarecrows they have made. (Marco Bertorello / AFP / Getty)

Check out the Chelsea Flower Show in England, a scarecrow fair in Italy, and the rest of our photo editor’s selections of the week’s best snapshots.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

The move comes after a passenger opened an emergency exit door midair, causing shock and panic on board.

South African Tamara Magwashu grew up unable to afford pads or tampons - now she is changing that for others.

Paul Heaton pays for fans' drinks at a festival after doing the same to mark his 60th birthday.