The New Yorker (March 25, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Mark Ulriksen’s “Standing Guard” – The artist depicts the tail-wagging occasion of the first signs of spring.

Bryan Stevenson Reclaims the Monument, in the Heart of the Deep South

The civil-rights attorney has created a museum, a memorial, and, now, a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade and the cradle of the Confederacy.

By Doreen St. Félix

The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead:

A Dutch Architect’s Vision of Cities That Float on Water

Your children love you.
The country you built must honor you.
We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement.
We commit to advancing freedom in your name.

What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?

By Kyle Chayka

In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Handsome double-wide brick buildings line the Herengracht’s banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water’s surface. Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child’s smile, where vacant lots have yet to be developed.