Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

At this rate, we’ll have to rename New York

We require those we admire to be blameless, while the very definition of ‘blamelessness’ is a moving target

issue 23 September 2017

Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts reads to her young boy, his hand on his scabbard.

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