Samaria Rice is the mother of Tamir, not a “mother of the movement.”

Looking back on the George Floyd rebellion.

Armed only with their psychotic courage, they were running, dancing, singing, smashing, burning, screaming, storming heaven: all rapturous varieties of Baraka’s “magic actions.” I listened to 19-year-olds talk nonstop throughout the night we spent in jail, as they howled insults at the officers and swapped stories of humiliation by police. It struck me that they were too young to have seen even the initial phase of BLM. Though well-acquainted with power and violence, they were tasting “politics” for the first time. Whatever the fate of the movement, I suspect that much of their future thinking will be measured against the feelings that filled the nights of 2020: the vastness and immediacy, the blur and brutal clarity.

Last summer, in a small Wisconsin city, the country’s fiercest differences collided in the streets—and a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire, shooting three people. In the aftermath, a disquieting question loomed: Were these among the first shots in a new kind of civil war?

Two lawyers, a summer of unrest, and a bottle of Bud Light.

A Black Lives Matter confrontation pitted neighbor against neighbor—and displayed the raw power of a social media flash mob.

The future (and past) of non-lethal weaponry deployed against civilian populations.