Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. In “The Lesson,” from our October 2003 issue, Pulitzer Prize-winning ...

these aren’t the same. After weeks of heat, it rained the day the governor said to take it down. a man who ran shot in the back. The broke and broken schools remain. Not birds, not thorns, not the ...