In late January, when authorities in Memphis charged several police officers in the death of Tyre Nichols and released footage of the incident, Chief C. J. Davis promised that the Memphis Police Department would change while still keeping residents safe.

The early results are not encouraging. In March, Memphis saw 40 murders, likely the city’s highest tally ever, according to a review of public data by the indispensable data analyst Jeff Asher. That’s a big jump over figures of 20 and 22 in January and February, respectively. Something has indeed changed, but it’s that Memphians are less safe.

[David A. Graham: The murders in Memphis aren’t stopping]

The spike in murder is ghastly but should not come as a total surprise. It fits the pattern established around the country after highly publicized killings by police officers. Seeing it recur in Memphis, where officers were swiftly fired and charged with crimes, suggests that though leaders are getting better at their immediate response to such incidents, they have not yet solved the larger challenges posed by them.

The spike is especially heartbreaking in Memphis, where, as I wrote last year, residents have long experienced the painful combination of both over-policing and under-policing: People, especially Black ones, feel harassed by police for minor offenses, yet they don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods. Now, in the aftermath of Tyre Nichols’s killing, a particularly egregious instance of over-policing, police are even less effective at preventing violence in the community.

A surge in violence frequently follows a highly publicized instance of police violence. After long-running demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, following the 2015 killing of Michael Brown, murder ticked up nationwide. Homicide rates rose in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray and in Chicago after the release of videos showing police fatally shooting Laquan McDonald. And many criminologists have pointed to the massive nationwide protests over the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in summer 2020 as an inflection point. Soon after, violent crime and murder went up nationwide, and although they seem to have turned back down, levels are still well above pre-2020 levels.

[David A. Graham: How did it come to this?]

But experts haven’t been able to establish a clear answer for the reasons this happens. Some theories focus on the public: Perhaps people are less likely to trust the police, and therefore opt to settle disputes on their own or don’t report crimes. Others focus on the police: In the immediate aftermath, especially when mass protests erupt, officers are absorbed with managing demonstrations. Then over time, they simply police less. Perhaps this is because they believe they are responding to the community’s desires, as expressed by protest; perhaps it’s an attempt to teach the public a lesson (You want less policing? See what you think when you actually get it); or perhaps it’s because officers are wary of getting in trouble (what the conservative scholar Heather Mac Donald has called the “Ferguson effect”).

Whatever the motivations, some evidence suggests that police have pulled back recently in Memphis. When I visited the city in January, the weekend that footage of Nichols’s fatal beating was released, some activists told me they sensed that officers were making themselves scarce. Data compiled by Just City, a criminal-justice nonprofit, show that the population of the Shelby County Jail has steadily dropped this year, from 2,686 on January 1 to 2,325 on April 1. Long-term jailings have stayed roughly flat, which suggests that the drop comes from police simply arresting fewer people. (The Memphis Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

In my reporting on law enforcement in the city over the past few years, I heard from many Memphians who were critical of the police department, which they perceived to be prickly, disrespectful, focused on petty crimes, and sometimes violent, but they didn’t want to abolish or defund the police. They want safe streets, and they see officers as essential to that. For example, a longtime resident named Mary Wainwright told me she welcomed police officers in her sometimes-dangerous neighborhood, but was frustrated when she saw cops writing speeding tickets while suspected gang members walked the streets by day and bullets flew by night.

[David A. Graham: Murders are spiking in America]

Last Friday evening, after an activist group obtained a draft presentation, the department announced a “juvenile-crime abatement program” in a video. The presentation said a team of officers would “professionally approach” any unaccompanied underage people in downtown Memphis engaged in “illegal activities, to include but not limited to, solicitation of candy or food, handing out flyers for donations, playing loud music, inappropriately dressed, dancing in the street, and any other activity deem [sic] inappropriate or actions that disrupts the harmony of the Downtown community.” By Monday morning, following backlash to the idea, the city said the program was on pause. MPD is still struggling to strike the right balance between harassment and actual safety.

In July 2020, at the height of protests over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, Daniel Perry considered killing someone.

“I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” Perry, then a 35-year-old Army sergeant, wrote to a friend, the Austin Chronicle reported. It wasn’t the first time Perry had spoken about killing people on social media or in messages with friends. On another occasion, Perry mused, “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

After all this talk, Perry did shoot a Black Lives Matter protester in downtown Austin, an Air Force veteran and libertarian activist named Garrett Foster, who had been legally carrying an AK-47 at the protest. Perry, who was working as a rideshare driver, sped his car into the crowd, witnesses said, then opened fire on Foster. Perry claimed that he had acted in self-defense and that Foster was raising his rifle, but prosecutorial witnesses told the jury during his trial that Foster had done nothing of the sort. “I believe he was going to aim at me,” Perry told police in an initial interview, having called law enforcement and turned himself in after the shooting. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”​​

[Esau McCaulley: America isn’t ready to truly understand the Buffalo shooting]

Thursday night, the judge in Perry’s case unsealed a filing that also contained messages the jury did not see before the verdict. The document shows Perry sharing racist memes, referring to Black protesters as “monkeys,” and musing about “hunting Muslims in Europe.” Perry’s attorneys are reportedly seeking a new trial.  

Perry had lived out his fantasy. There was only one problem: His public and private expressions of violent aggression toward protesters, and his decision to drive his car into the crowd, led a Texas jury to conclude that the shooting was unjustified. The state’s stand-your-ground law does not allow those who provoke a confrontation with the aim of using lethal violence to justify their actions as self-defense. Proving that intent sets a deliberately high standard for prosecutors, because it requires strong evidence of what the accused is thinking. Yet the prosecutors in this case managed to do so in a very gun-friendly state, as the journalist Radley Balko writes, because of “ample evidence that Perry intended to harm the protesters,” including testimony that Perry had asked a friend about the legality of “other incidents in which someone had shot at protesters.” The documentation of ill intent here is unusually comprehensive.  

Convicted of murder, Perry became a right-wing political martyr. Last weekend, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott announced that he would ask the Texas parole board to recommend a pardon for Perry, following coverage from the Fox News host Tucker Calrson portraying his conviction as unjust and criticizing Abbott. Carlson characterized Perry’s conviction by a jury of his peers in one of the most pro-gun states in the union not as a result of the atypical volume of evidence, but as a conspiracy by the liberal billionaire George Soros, who paid “people to put his political opponents in jail.” Fox News has a disproportionate influence over the only constituency Abbott heeds, which is Republican primary voters.

At the center of this series of events is the right-wing fantasy of murdering political opponents and getting away with it, one that the firearm industry has used to sell weapons and that ambitious right-wing politicians have used to win votes. Put simply, some conservatives believe that Perry’s conviction was unjust because they do not believe that it should be a crime to kill a Black Lives Matter “rioter,” a description that in the right-wing imagination applies to any and all BLM protesters regardless of their actions.

There are a number of factors involved in the popularity of this fantasy, including urban-rural polarization and the GOP’s decision to press its advantage in an American electoral system that rewards the dispersed geography of its political coalition. This approach demands that Republican leaders feed their supporters a constant diet of culture-war red meat in order to maintain a sense that their constituents’ way of life is in danger of imminent destruction. Such catastrophism has both inspired and been inspired by a shift in how the firearms industry sells weapons.

Since the expiration of the federal assault-weapons ban in 2004, the firearm industry has juiced its sales by inundating conservatives with advertising that promotes guns as a cure for compromised masculinity, and implies that they need to stockpile firearms for an inevitable political conflict in which they will finally get to kill people they don’t like. That’s partly how we ended up with a haggard pop star so unnerved by an inclusive corporate ad campaign that he shoots at beer cans to self-soothe, a tough guy literally triggered by rainbows.

Gun sales have risen dramatically over the past few years. “Those sales have only confirmed the industry’s strategy for achieving growth, and so the marketing effort has become only more addicted to conspiracy-theory-fueled political partisanship,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms-industry executive, wrote in The Atlantic in 2022. “America is seeing the deadly results of the violence incubated by these dark advertising fantasies.”

[Ryan Busse: The gun industry created a new consumer. Now it’s killing us.]

One might question how often guns are actually used in self-defense, but marketing guns for self-defense or hunting at least has no inherent partisan salience, and America has a long cultural and legal tradition of firearm ownership for such purposes. Perhaps the crucial difference here is the shift from individual to collective self-defense—instead of just selling the possibility of defending your home from a nighttime intruder, the industry and its allies are now selling the idea that buying a gun turns you into a soldier defending civilization itself from the barbarian hordes. You know, people who disagree with them politically. In this worldview, violence against such people is by definition “self-defense,” regardless of the specific circumstances.  

The people who have adopted this political and consumer identity will not necessarily act out violently. In fact, the overwhelming majority of them will not. In a country of more than 300 million with lax gun laws, some small number will act on these beliefs, to bloody and tragic results. But those who have embraced such an identity will be more willing to rationalize, excuse, or defend political violence against their opponents when it does happen. They will also be more open to the illiberal use of state force against those they see as foes in an existential battle.  

Advertising guns for an imminent political conflict has reshaped American gun culture, enlarging a voting constituency that opposes all firearm restrictions, in part because its members dream about someday engaging in murderous political violence. This faction also demands that politicians shape the law so that they can do so with impunity.  

That political pressure was bearing down on Abbott when he made the decision to request that the pardon board grant clemency to Perry. The injustice is that Perry was convicted of murder for killing someone who deserved to die because he was supporting a left-wing cause. The legal system built by decades of Republican dominance in Texas was meant to justify such killings, and when it failed to do so, the governor had to intervene. Facing prison time for shooting a political enemy would spoil the reverie sold to conservatives by their leaders and by the firearm industry—the promise that one day, they too could kill one of the barbarian horde and get away with it. And that would be unjust.

The city of Minneapolis has reached settlements totaling more than $8.8 million in two civil lawsuits that accuse former police officer Derek Chauvin of using excessive force in two incidents that happened nearly three years before he killed George Floyd during an arrest. CNN's Natasha Chen shares details surrounding newly released footage of the two incidents associated with the lawsuits.

Walmart plans to close half its stores in Chicago, a reversal of the retail giant's high-profile commitment in 2020 to expand in the city as part of its corporate racial justice initiative in the wake of George Floyd's murder by police.

Barry Benson tightened his grip on his steering wheel. The federal wildlife-damage-abatement officer had handled bears, coyotes, and wolves. But now he was on a bigger hunt. And he was not alone. At an utterly unassuming, otherwise-bucolic intersection just outside the 280-acre Schmeeckle Reserve in rural Wisconsin, dozens of cars—Benson’s among them—idled in the predawn darkness of 5 a.m., all tuned into the same local radio station, 90 FM, waiting for instructions.

[Read: Wisconsin: Images of the badger state]

Suddenly a voice crackled into the night air: “From where you are now, go past the walking people. Now turn left. Careful, the lane ends. Go past the large cat, the show hosted by David Letterman, the French explorer, the white star, and the printed word seven. Turn left after the protected plastic yellow sleeves. Go past the red arrow. Now turn right. Continue down the road … You have 45 minutes.”

Cars screeched and sped off. The chase was on.

The cryptic announcement was one of hundreds of clues in Trivia Weekend, billed as “the world’s largest trivia contest,” which annually floods the college town of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, with about 10,000 players (the town’s population is just 26,000). For 54 nonstop hours, the college radio station asks more than 400 questions, waiting only the length of a song or two for the answer. The more teams that answer a question correctly, the less it’s worth. There are also scavenger hunts and music scrambles, where eight songs are spliced into 11 seconds and must each be identified.

The morning at Schmeeckle Reserve was in April 2019, in what has been nostalgically called the “before times.” Before COVID-19, of course. But also before mask and vaccine mandates. Before working from home. Before using Zoom for everything from school to funerals. Before toilet paper and flour and baby formula and eggs became hot commodities. Before George Floyd’s murder. Before the insurrection. Before Redditors made bank from GameStop stock.

Trivia Weekend celebrated its 50th anniversary that year (the mayor’s 44th year playing). There was a kickoff parade, which sometimes includes weddings. That year, the parade ended with Governor Tony Evers issuing a proclamation enshrining that weekend as Trivia Weekend statewide.

Over the years, nothing had stopped it. Not a 20-inch blizzard in 2018. Or even the miracle of childbirth (Anne Frederiksen played throughout the Friday night of trivia in 1991 and gave birth that Saturday to a girl who was almost named Trivianna—she went with Lauren instead; her team came in first that year). One year in the 1990s, a local woman fell into a coma in November and awoke in December to doctors warning her she would be hospital-bound for life. “But I have to play trivia in April,” she told them—and she did, sending the quizmaster a thank-you T-shirt afterward embroidered with a needlepoint poem. Even the town’s police, firefighters, and EMTs played on a team called the Choir Boys. The Jeopardy superstar Ken Jennings’s best-selling book on trivia, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, has a chapter about Stevens Point. Trivia Weekend was a way of life. One year, local merchants reported that the only holiday that stimulated the town’s economy more was Thanksgiving. Trivia Weekend was bigger than Christmas.

Then came COVID.

“There is a cloud overhead,” wrote Trivia Weekend’s quizmaster, known as Oz, in an email on March 12, 2020. “Many of you have heard about the announcement by the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point concerning extension of spring break and suspension of in-person classes until April 15th. This is presuming that things don’t get worse, which there is no promise of that … So, I like to avoid the problem. At this time ‘Raid on Trivia 51’ is being postponed until the weekend of October 23, 24, 25, 2020.”

Like many proms and weddings and funerals and office meetings that could’ve been emails, Trivia Weekend in October 2020 was largely confined to Zoom. The marathon took breaks from midnight to 8 a.m., and a lack of human-run phone banks meant that answers were submitted through web forms that hadn’t shaken out all of their flaws. It didn’t return to being in person until last year.

Trivia Weekend was a kind of annual rumspringa, a time when mild-mannered midwesterners could stop living Wisconsinbly and become sleep-deprived zombies animated in equal parts by book smarts, beer smarts, and Google. At the core of the festivities is Network, a team of Pointers (as people from Stevens Point are called) who have been playing every year since 1976, when many of them were in ninth grade—they’ve taken the first-place prize 22 times and placed in the top 10 in all but their first two years (including the pandemic years). They are known as the Dark Lords of Trivia. Their mascot is George Leroy Tirebiter, a long-lost pet tarantula from a member’s childhood. Once, in the 1980s, amid a four-hour perfect run, they debated purposely answering a question wrong to quell suspicion that they were cheating.

Even if you’ve never heard of Network, you may have played against them. One member, Ray Hamel, a quizmaster at Slate, has published more than 2,000 crossword puzzles, including one for every day of the week for The New York Times. Since 1980, he has been taking notes on the movies he watches, and has logged about 11,000 flicks; in 2018, he beat his annual record with 454, but by Trivia Weekend 2019 he was already on track for 650 (he hit 635, which still stands as his record). Another Network member, Jim Newman, has written questions for NPR’s Ask Me Another, runs pub trivia in bars across Los Angeles, has directed a stage adaptation of the old television quiz show What’s My Line?, and created a podcast—Go Fact Yourself—that tests celebrities on their nerdy realms of interest. He went on Jeopardy in 1993 and was beaten by the eventual Tournament of Champions winner the following year.

[Adriana E. Ramírez: Everyone loses on Jeopardy eventually]

Network’s core is Barry Heck, whose mother’s basement hosted the team continuously from  1980 through 2019. When the Heck family moved neighborhoods in 1988, they engineered their new basement specifically for trivia, building bookshelves customized to the exact size of, say, a huge collection of Big Little Books or every World Almanac since 1868 (unlike many trivia contests, outside references are allowed). The prize of the collection, housed in a glass cabinet, is a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica bought by Heck’s grandfather in 1918. The overall collection is so large—extending even to vintage board games (Leave It to Beaver Ambush Game! Nancy Drew! Stick the IRS!) and limited-run cereal boxes (Addams Family cereal! Nickelodeon Green Slime cereal! Sugar Jets!)—that the basement has its own card catalog and a 1,200-page printout from 1999 dubbed the Megadex. Network plays with a dedicated Slack channel running on two large monitors. Amid the clutter are the team’s dozens of trophies.

In 2019, Heck’s trove came particularly in handy. In a complicated question about the Explorer Scout Manual, Heck, himself a Life Scout, sauntered over to his vintage manual, flipped to page 155—“backwoods engineering”—and found the answer. It was worth 400 points, which means only one other team knew it. But he also had secret weapons in his nieces, 15-year-old Emma and 10-year-old Renee, who were well versed in Disney shows and cartoons (about which there are a disproportionate number of questions for an adult contest).

When I asked why he has stuck with Trivia Weekend over the decades, Heck shrugged: “It’s something we do for ourselves, not for the neighbors or the internet or anyone else.” His mother, Mary Ann, now 90, made doughnuts for the team every Sunday morning during the tournament for almost half a century. She loves the group, whom she still calls “kids,” and the feeling is very mutual. When her husband and Barry’s father, Ron, died in 2013, most of the team came back to Stevens Point for the funeral, where the pastor began the eulogy with three biblical-trivia questions, which the team solemnly answered.

From a lonely apartment in Brooklyn (with a cat), then a lonelier one in San Francisco—no roommate, no paramour, no pet—I writhed through much of 2020, including an 18-day fever of 103 degrees Fahrenheit with coughs that led to diminished lung capacity that I developed after reporting on the unfolding pandemic for The Washington Post.

My saving grace was a weekly Sunday-night Zoom session with a motley cohort of L.A. industry strangers—producers, musicians, actors, designers, and writers of all types (one of whom had sent me an invitation). For two hours every week, we could retreat into a carnival of knowledge and know-how (some challenges involved drawing or doing impressions or silently mouthing a catchphrase). I was not alone. We were not alone. Pub-style trivia took off in a big way that year, despite being handicapped by the pandemic. “It’s not a question of being smart. It’s just a neurological quirk where we remember things,” a trivia columnist told The New York Times in a November 2020 trend story. Another trivia leader chimed in: “It’s testing knowledge, but it’s not testing anything important.” The beloved Jeopardy host Alex Trebek had died a few weeks earlier, making us all keenly aware of the power and promise of trivia done well.

[Read: How Alex Trebek made a mundane game show brilliant]

My own trivia night worked so well because it happened every Sunday, rain or shine, whether the Super Bowl or the Oscars or Valentine’s Day. Every week brought fresh pandemic chaos and insanity, and was so heightened—so optimized and maximalized for madness—that it turned trivia night into a capstone cleansing ritual, a baptism in which we reasserted our internal weirdness over anything external. No trophies or prizes. Each week the top scorer gave an improvised assignment—usually an impression—to the low scorer.

It helped us not lose track of the paradoxical power of pointlessness, of genuine free time (monetized hobbies or activities motivated by “self-care” don’t count). In a world desperate to normalize everything, we reclaimed the bravery of our weirdness. It helped that we were strangers enjoying one another’s strangeness. Having lost so much time and momentum, and with so many folks consequently demanding that we not allow another minute to go by without advancing our best selves, here we were goofing around in every week’s crucial final psychic round, in which we guessed people’s names prompted only by their photo.

One week I won by correctly identifying Dick Fiddler (the same week I also scored the most Shark Tank–style investors for my company Bones ‘N’ Things. The pitch: “We got all kinds of bones. Femurs! Clavicles! Skulls! And then also on the side we have, y’know, some things. Some things you probably want. Pretty good things.”). Another week, I correctly identified the 19th-century British General Manley Power and compelled that week’s lowest scorer to do an impression of Captain Crunch’s supervisor explaining why the cereal mascot was being passed up for a promotion yet again.

Trivia has a magic; it encourages a flow state through a multiverse of memories—of possibilities. Every ping everywhere all at once. The wonder of it all, and its refusal to be optimized, maximalized, or otherwise scaled toward mechanization compels us to own our own mystery in ways that are inexplicably human, free from the artifice of imposed or supposed intelligence.

While everyone else was prioritizing the tedium of life hacks or the contrivance of TikTok trends, we were frolicking in the serendipity of rabbit holes and a convoluted extrapolation of Truth or Dare.

One question from pandemic Zoom trivia still resonates with me frequently: In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede determined the exact duration of a moment; how long was it? The answer was 90 seconds. Knowing this has given so many minutes since added momentum.  Any moment, however feral or frenzied, has a life span of just 90 seconds. Now is never forever.

We were and still are definitively in a historic moment of flux—in all the big ways, sure, but also a redefining era for what counts as marginal, incidental, and trivial. We are not back to normal and never will be. Anyone calling for that might as well be asking to “Make America normal again.” Instead, we are tasked with rebuilding a new normal out of hope but also out of memory, which is why it’s so important to remember how we spent those pre-pandemic days.

In the Network basement, Kayla Nelson—the sonographer daughter of a stenographer and one of the team’s many younger-generation women—was brought to tears by finally discovering the source of a mysterious bird image. It was on an obscure backgammon board from 1975. On a whim, because it was the 11th hour of the tournament and no board-game questions had been asked yet, she had googled vintage board-game swan (although most Network players thought it was a dove or a sparrow). She composed herself enough to call in the answer when the time came, to a round of applause.

Later, Thom Aylesworth, a lawyer from Boston who had co-founded the group with Heck, was filing the team’s final quibbles to the complaint line. No one was picking up. “Hang up,” said Nick Pionek, Network’s IT guy, from behind his three computer screens. Aylesworth hung up the landline and Pionek tapped his keyboard. “Okay,” he said, “I’ve changed that phone’s number. Try now.” Dark Lords of Trivia indeed.

At last, the final question came: “A literary character and his two sons were in town to get 10 bags of feed at the store. The store owner informed them that a prisoner had escaped and was out to kill all three of them. As they were leaving the store, the youngest brother accidently bumped into a young man, knocking him into the street. The young brother tried to apologize but the young man jumped up, pulling his gun, putting it in the brother’s stomach and pulling the trigger. Luckily, nothing happened and the young brother proceeded to give the young man a closed right fist, which caused the young man to collapse. What is the complete name of the young man who collapsed on the street?”

Heck stood up. “That’s gotta be a Big Little Book,” he said, and began pulling them off the shelves by the armful, onto the conference table covered by laptops and snacks, each book the size of an overstuffed wallet. The whole team descended on the books like locusts, turning the old pages so briskly that some of them tore or crumbled. “Check all the Westerns! Anything with a cowboy on it! It’s gotta be—”

Too late.

“Phones down in the back; that is it for question eight of hour 54, Trivia 5-0,” said the DJ before announcing the answer: the Bubble Gum Kid.

Network hadn’t even called in a guess. They stood there, at the game’s ungracious finale, amid the chaos of books that now seemed like the flotsam of their sunken hopes. Is this what it felt like to be in the ashes of Alexandria or the rubble of Babel? The silence was deafening. Then they did what all Pointers do at the end of a party: They cleaned up and drank after-party beers in the garage.

This is the unifying thread among COVID, the insurrection, the Great Resignation, and inflation: stakes. Across the board, the stakes are high. But what matters is how we respond to these stakes. In most conflicts, especially zero-sum scenarios, the response is some form of brinkmanship—threats and other bullying or imposing tactics. Give us the White House or we’ll storm the Capitol. Give us the Supreme Court or we’ll expand it in our favor. Give us promotions or we’ll quit. Give us raises or we’ll strike. Give us liberty or give us death. The result too often is a kind of gerrymandering of the soul, a parceling of principles for the sake of pragmatism, which only works in theory. By its nature, trivia is not that deep.

[Read: The link between happiness and a sense of humor]

These stakes are traumatic, though, and one of the best-kept secrets in trauma response is to engage in something trivial: a silly game like my own go-to, Candy Crush (a National Institutes of Health study focused on Tetris, which caused hippocampal increases in the brain, reducing anxiety, depression, and PTSD). Something that can absorb attention in a way that mops up panic or pain. It’s a response that literally blocks traumatic memories from forming. Similarly, trivia contests flex your brain’s frontal cortex. “That’s the first thing to go with injury or with age if we don’t use it,” a psychologist who specializes in neurotherapy explained in a Healthline article about the health benefits of trivia.

All of our progress over the past few years is admirable, but also exhausting. Our lives would be far more comfortable if they were just a little more trivial.

On the 55th hour of Trivia Weekend 2019, Network drove to the radio station to collect their trophy. Even at 1:30 a.m., the station was packed with trivia zombies, including babies, elderly women, men in kilts or Princess Leia cosplay, and at least one person in a panda costume (presumably a member of the team Trivial Fursuit). Strangers recognized Heck and asked to shake his hand.

Network came in sixth place in the tournament, up from seventh the year before but far from their regular spot in first. Their standing was out of 341 total teams. Fifth place in 2020, fifth again in 2021, and sixth in 2022. Not quite winners, but not quite losers either. They are Pointers. And we could all use a few Pointers in our lives every now and then. But especially now.

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“Collective grief can have a way of warping the historical lens,” my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II explains in Holy Week, a new Atlantic podcast series exploring the week of fiery uprisings that broke out across many major U.S. cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I spoke with Vann about what happened during that week, exactly 55 years ago, and how it diverted the civil-rights movement in ways that history is in danger of forgetting.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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Kelli María Korducki: The story of the mass uprisings that immediately followed King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, isn’t widely included in most Americans’ civil-rights history education. When did you learn about it?

Vann R. Newkirk II: My whole life. My father got his Ph.D. from Howard University in the ’90s, and there were lots of buildings in Washington, D.C., at the time that had been burned in 1968 and weren’t yet replaced. But I didn’t quite understand what that week meant to America, and how things changed in that year, until much more recently.

Kelli: What exactly happened during Holy Week, 1968? And how did it challenge your understanding of the civil-rights movement until that point?

Vann: After King was killed, there were these uprisings in over 100 cities. The week marked the biggest street unrest in America, really between the Civil War and the George Floyd protests in 2020. You think about that type of thing usually as kind of era- or epoch-defining. People were coming out in grief over King’s death, but also about the loss of what he symbolized: a future that lots of Black Americans were really holding on to. It was kind of the last hope for a lot of people.

The 1960s saw the passage of major civil-rights bills that were, on paper, supposed to bring about certain measures of equality that lots of people had hoped for, in terms of housing, education, jobs, and so on. But by and large, Black Americans were still living in concentrated poverty in the ghettos. They still weren’t getting jobs. There were still staggering rates of school segregation and all types of discrimination in housing and jobs. So Holy Week saw those frustrations boil over.

At the same time, public opinion had been moving away from the movement for some years. King had an approval rating somewhere south of 30 percent in the year he was killed. Among the non-Black public, he was seen as even something of a villain after he came out against the Vietnam War. So what you also saw that week was the greater part of the American public deciding, firmly, that it was done with the civil-rights agenda.

Kelli: How did that play out?

Vann: Like a lot of things in politics, it was slow and then fast. Over the late ’60s, there was an erosion of public support for both protest and civil-rights legislation. And, at least in my reading of the polls and interviews with people who were active in the movement, the assassination appears to have really accelerated that process.

That spring, you also saw the 1968 primaries for president. Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to run again. On the Republican side, the people who were jockeying for the nomination were the people who would end up defining the modern party, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and both were running on these really robust “law and order” campaigns. They were pledging to build what we now know is the basis of the modern system of mass incarceration, courting disaffected white voters who used to vote Democratic and who still supported segregation, or at least didn’t want their communities integrated.

Then the assassination kicks everything into gear. You see a strong reaction from white America against the riots; public-opinion polling shows that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of the riots, and don’t believe that the protests have anything to do with King or with any long-standing disenfranchisement or inequality. A common interpretation was that the protesters were kind of being bad people. And the primary solution, as imagined by the majority of non-Black Americans, is not to implement policy measures that would address the concerns in the Black ghettos, but making sure that further uprising did not happen again, by any means.

Kelli: It sounds like the uprisings during Holy Week reframed Americans’ understanding of political dissent as a kind of dangerous outlier force, as opposed to a mass movement by ordinary people.

Vann: That’s exactly how I’d put it.

Kelli: Do you think that perception has changed at all in recent years?

Vann: The dominant narrative of the civil-rights movement still falls short of explaining why somebody like King would have such a low approval rating in late life, why he was still working and believed that the majority of his work lay ahead of him. Or why America reacted as it did in ’68, why these clashes and divisions transpired.

But I think that, when you go back and look at what led up to King’s death, and talk to people who were alive and politically engaged at that time—which is what we did—you see that although there was a really accelerated time frame of events, they all sort of followed logically from underlying conditions. There’s an ongoing erosion of support for the civil-rights movement and the solidification of backlash; there’s the rise of Black power and Black nationalism. They all happen at the same time, for the same reasons. I think more and more people are developing a more sophisticated understanding of the transition from what I will call the “movement era” to the modern era. Hopefully, this podcast is adding to that.

Related:

Introducing: Holy Week The second assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (from 2021) Today’s News The IRS unveiled a 10-year, $80 billion overhaul plan toward a “digital-first” future. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to enforce a West Virginia law that bans transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports at school. The Tennessee House of Representatives voted to oust the first of three Democratic lawmakers who led a recent gun-reform protest from the House floor. Dispatches Up for Debate: People can’t agree on what college diversity offices should do, Conor Friedersdorf writes.

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Evening Read Brook Pifer / Gallery Stock

The Scariest Part of a Relationship

By Faith Hill

The beginning is all fun and games. You go on a few dates with someone—no big deal, you’re not invested. Then you go on some more, and some more after that. This, whatever this is, is kind of nice. Maybe you mention it to your mom, and then she won’t stop asking about it. Next thing you know, you’re wearing your retainer when you stay over and texting them every time you see a cute dog. Are you … are you in a relationship?

Every couple has, at some point, crossed the creaky, swaying bridge from “unofficial” to “partnered.” But when you’re still in between, it’s not always clear how to safely get to the other side.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The 2024 U.S. presidential race: a cheat sheet There are lots of board games. We settled for Catan. Parasocial relationships are just imaginary friends for adults. Culture Break Nintendo / Illumination Entertainment & Universal

Read. To 2040, the new collection of poems by Jorie Graham that exhorts readers to be present amid the demise of the world.

Listen. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a “cheerfully animated” cinematic rendering of the beloved video-game franchise.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

It was in researching stories for the 2018 King-focused issue of the magazine that Vann uncovered the deeper, and lasting, significance of the events that followed King’s death. That issue can be found in full in our online archive, and makes for a great companion read to the Holy Week podcast.

— Kelli

A huge event today could have a major impact on national politics—and it might not be the one you have in mind.

While a judge arraigns Donald Trump in New York City, voters in Chicago will be rendering their own verdict on who should lead the nation’s third-largest city: Paul Vallas, a 69-year-old former city-budget director and the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, or Brandon Johnson, a 47-year-old county commissioner, former teacher, and longtime paid organizer for the city’s most progressive political force, the Chicago Teachers Union. The outcome could have meaning well beyond the shores of Lake Michigan, offering an indication of where voters—Democrats in particular—are leaning on the issues of crime, policing, and race.

For Chicagoans, though, this election is about more than augurings for the nation. Crime and public safety are, far and away, the issues of greatest voter concern here. Although shootings and homicides are down from a year ago, Chicago’s homicide rate remains five times higher than New York City’s and 2.5 times higher than Los Angeles’s. In 2022, crime in Chicago rose in almost every other major category, including robbery, burglary, theft, and motor-vehicle theft. Those numbers and the pervasive sense of unease about public safety had a lot to do with the defeat of incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the city’s nonpartisan primary in February.

Even great cities are fragile—one furor or fire away from disaster. In the half century that I’ve called Chicago home, Carl Sandburg’s City of the Big Shoulders has been fortunate to produce a succession of larger-than-life leaders when they were most needed. It’s not clear if either candidate in Tuesday’s runoff is that leader. Chicagoans face an imperfect choice between an aging, white technocrat who believes the answer is more, and more effective, policing, and a relatively inexperienced young progressive, a Black man, whose vision for combatting crime and violence goes to conquering poverty and racial inequity.

[Alec MacGillis: The cause of the crime wave is hiding in plain sight]

The former, Vallas, is a charismatically challenged data nerd with roots in the city’s white bungalow communities and close ties to its conservative police union. Vallas has pitched almost his entire campaign around public safety, promising to add 1,800 police officers and promote “proactive policing” to confront “an utter breakdown of law and order.” He has also said that police have been “handcuffed” in pursuing crime. That phrase worries some Chicagoans who recall incidents such as the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald, a teenager shot 16 times in the back while trying to flee Chicago police, which led to a Justice Department investigation and a consent decree with the Illinois attorney general requiring the Chicago police to make reforms.

Johnson, more comfortable in the spotlight than Vallas, began the race last fall with little name recognition in much of the city. But with the financial backing of the CTU, he finished strong enough to squeeze Lightfoot out of the runoff, largely by rallying white voters behind his progressive platform. Johnson has pledged $800 million in new taxes on large businesses and the wealthy to make significant investments in housing, mental-health services, and economic development in impoverished communities on the city’s South and West Sides.

Vallas, who has the backing of the city’s business community, has been more circumspect about tax increases. Johnson has attacked Vallas as a crypto-Republican and an opponent of abortion rights (both of which Vallas denies). Vallas, in turn, has questioned Johnson’s experience and attacked him for owing thousands of dollars in city fees and fines. (City officials recently confirmed that Johnson has now paid off the debts.) And whereas Johnson is a bitter opponent of school vouchers and charter schools, Vallas, who has run public-school systems in four cities, favors them.

But the biggest line between the two has come over the issue of public safety and policing. Johnson has pledged to immediately train and promote 200 officers to the rank of detective to help improve the city’s dismal 30 percent clearance rate of unsolved homicides and other major crimes. But he has resisted Vallas’s call for more police, noting, correctly, that even with its current police manpower—down 1,700 officers since Lightfoot took office—Chicago still has more police per capita than New York, Los Angeles, and almost every other big city in America. Given that, Johnson argues, the city should approach its public-safety challenges with other strategies, namely by addressing the historic resource and investment discrepancies between predominantly white communities and communities of color.

[Annie Lowrey: The misery of being a big-city mayor]

Vallas has pummeled Johnson relentlessly for comments he made following George Floyd’s murder, when Johnson pushed for a county-board resolution calling for a shifting of funds from policing and incarceration to human services. In a radio interview in December 2020, Johnson was asked about a comment by former President Barack Obama, for whom I once worked, who had called “Defund the police” a “snappy” slogan. “I don’t look at it as a slogan,” Johnson said then. “It’s an actual, real political goal.”

John Catanzara, the outspoken and divisive head of Chicago’s local Fraternal Order of Police and a Vallas supporter, told The New York Times that there would be “blood in the streets” if Johnson wins, because as many as 1,000 current police officers would immediately leave the force. It was an ugly and incendiary comment. Still, Johnson’s past statement on defunding the police and his current policy proposals have caused cooler heads than Catanzara to worry about Johnson’s ability to effectively lead and motivate the police as mayor. Arne Duncan, Obama’s former education secretary who leads a violence-intervention program in the city, recently endorsed Vallas. “He’s best positioned to try to lead the change that’s needed in the Chicago Police Department,” Duncan told Politico. “Paul has credibility, and he has trust.”

Vallas, who has family ties to policing and helped negotiate the last city contract on behalf of the FOP, argues that his relationship with the rank and file would revive flagging morale and encourage retired, seasoned officers to return to fill some of the new detective slots he plans to create. He promises to offer more rigorous policing without violating the consent decree against excessive force that the city signed after the McDonald murder. But a major test would come if new cases of excessive force by police emerged on his watch.

[Patrick Sharkey: The crime spike is no mystery]

Johnson hopes that the endorsement of two national progressive icons, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, will help stir turnout among younger voters in the runoff. If Johnson wins, he will join them as a luminary of the left, lauded for his new public-safety paradigm. But he will also become a ready target for Republicans, who have made urban crime and the largely exaggerated specter of “defunding the police” a major focus of their attack on Democrats across the country. A Vallas victory, much like that of Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, would help Democrats rebuff such attacks in 2024.

The choice for Chicago voters is not exactly clear. Johnson’s aspirational vision of fighting crime by combatting injustice is more hopeful than the well-trod path of simply fine-tuning policing, but his is a long-term strategy for an immediate crisis. Vallas’s policing-heavy solution is not enough to end an epidemic that has deeper roots, but it is necessary. Although Johnson’s idealism is appealing, he has never run anything larger than a classroom and too often devolves into progressive sloganeering. Vallas’s long experience in government, however mixed his success, is reassuring. Yet, nearing 70, he seems more a caretaker, subsumed in a tangle of numbers, than the visionary the city requires.

We need a healthy dose of what each man offers but can choose only one, knowing that neither has the whole package. Chicagoans want a change. The rest of the country is watching to see which direction the city goes. But it’s possible that neither candidate can provide the transformation the city needs.