My younger brother and I grew up very close playmates. He’s about two years younger than me—the perfect age gap for me to boss him around while still sharing similar maturity levels and interests. I remember him following me around everywhere, and together we played Power Rangers, jumped rope, performed mock criminal trials (my brother was always the criminal, I the prosecutor), and when we got into trouble, we hugged each other piteously and cried. 

Over the past few months, many Asian-Americans have been quivering with anticipation for a movie they say they’ve been awaiting for too long: When was the last time we Asian-Americans had a major Hollywood production with an all-Asian cast? One that doesn’t involve karate chops, nerdy inch-thick glasses, and white-faced, oversexualized geishas? Trailers for Crazy Rich Asians ran on my social media feeds for weeks before the premiere, the algorithms theorizing that since I’m Korean-American and like movies, I would probably want to see two Asian lead characters smooch on screen.

Protesters on Monday night pulled down a Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose symbolism has been a source of debate for years. The bronze soldier known as “Silent Sam” was erected in 1913 as a memorial to students and alumni who fought and died for the Confederacy in the Civil War but also served as a reminder of the South’s history of racism. Hundreds of protesters Monday thwarted police, who have constantly guarded the monument in recent months, by concealing the statue with large banners as they tied a rope or cable around it.

Demonstrators turned out in the nation’s capital on Sunday to mark the one-year anniversary of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Patrol cars escorted a group of about 30 white supremacists from a Metro station to a park near the White House as thousands of counterprotesters chanted and spoke against the group. Jason Kessler, who organized the Charlottesville rally, also led the Washington, D.C., event.

A New York moment:

Almost 150 years ago, a young couple loaded a covered wagon with their few belongings and two small daughters and traveled from their home in Wisconsin to a promised land in Kansas. Coming to a stretch of rolling prairie near a creek, the father’s practiced eye sized it up and declared to his wife, “Well Caroline, here’s the place we’ve been looking for. Might as well camp.” As the little girls bedded down in the wagon that night, they felt the stillness of “stars shining down on a great, flat land where no one lived.”

The federal government has reopened its investigation into the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till, the black teenager whose brutal murder in Mississippi became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. The Justice Department told Congress in a report it is reinvestigating Till’s killing after receiving new information. A 2017 book, The Blood of Emmett Till, revealed that a key witness admitted to lying about what happened before the slaying.