This Week’s Issue: In Search of King David’s Lost Empire

Plus: virtual health care; short fiction from Franz Kafka; and “Crime and Punishment” offers lessons during lockdown. View in browser | Update your preferences Letter from Israel In Search of King David’s Lost Empire The Biblical ruler’s story has been told for millennia. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true. By Ruth Margalit Annals of Medicine The Promise and the Peril of Virtual Health Care During the coronavirus pandemic, telemedicine looks like the future of health care. Is it a future that we want? By John Seabrook The Political Scene What Fiona Hill Learned in the White House The senior fellow at Brookings and expert on modern Russia had hoped to guide the U.S.-Russia relationship. President Trump had other ideas. By Adam Entous Personal History My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died. By Hilton Als Fiction “The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time” “Did he suppose I could fix in a couple of hours what two people had done wrong over the course of their entire lives?” By Franz Kafka A Critic at Large The Lockdown Lessons of “Crime and Punishment” A college class weathering the pandemic finds Dostoyevsky’s savage inwardness and apocalyptic feverishness uncomfortably resonant. By David Denby Comment Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom Emancipation is a marker of progress for white Americans, not black ones. By Jelani Cobb Books Frank Kameny’s Orderly, Square Gay-Rights Activism An astronomer for the Army Map Service was an unlikely, but crucial, combatant for erotic freedom. By Caleb Crain Newsletters Sign Up for The New Yorker’s Books & Fiction Newsletter Book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature, twice a week. Humor and Food Cartoons From The Issue Cartoons from the Issue Drawings and drollery from this week’s magazine. Tables for Two New York City’s Cornucopia of Bread to Go In New York, professional bakers and savants alike have risen to the challenges of the pandemic, offering bread and pastry delivery via online stores or Instagram DM. By Hannah Goldfield This e-mail was sent to you by The New Yorker. To insure delivery, we recommend adding newyorker@newsletters.newyorker.com, to your contacts, while noting that it is a no-reply address. Please send all newsletter feedback to tnyinbox@newyorker.com. For more from The New Yorker, sign up for our newsletters, shop the store, and sign in to newyorker.com, where subscribers always have unlimited access. Contact us with questions. View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe Copyright © Condé Nast 2020. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.