Milley’s appearance breached the long-standing Washington norm that senior officers don’t visit the White House dressed for combat. More important, it violated one of the oldest traditions of the American constitutional order: soldiers stay out of politics.

Reading from scripts is part of Goodell’s job. He is the representative of the league’s thirty-two owners, and he serves as their mouthpiece. The owners do not seem to mind that Goodell’s delivery is wooden, or that the league has stumbled from controversy to controversy during his tenure, or that he is unpopular enough with the public that he is routinely booed during the N.F.L. draft. They don’t mind, clearly, because Goodell has been good for business: in 2018 the league generated around sixteen billion dollars in total revenue

 At eight o’clock, she joined a Zoom call; the lead artist explained that Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., had commissioned eight artists to paint a mural of fifty-foot-high letters spelling out “Black Lives Matter” across two blocks of the street leading to the White House.

If America is to move beyond its troubled and conflict-laden relationship with its police, it must have a broader, serious discussion about what democratic policing can and should be. What are police for?

 Our house was never dirty, but it was never neat, either.

Rome’s defenses had not been breached in 800 years—not since a sack by the Gauls at the beginning of the fourth century b.c., long before Rome became an imperial power.

Census data from 2015, for example, showed homeownership rates for black families in the Twin Cities was about 23 percent; for whites, that number was 75 percent, putting it among the highest in the nation.