At thirteen, I loved flipping through Ebony, Essence, and Jet while getting my hair done. Back then, I never thought much about hair-product ads. I never considered what else they aimed to sell me, besides a bottle of oil. I do now. Kali Serum, Hair Decoded, Wig Sale, and Kenya Kare—all from my fictitious Pinnacle line—reshape beauty standards and celebrate black imagination. These parodies, from my upcoming graphic novel “Hot Comb,” envision a future in which black women inquire and inspire while loving their hair.

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From “Hot Comb,” by Ebony Flowers, to be published by Drawn & Quarterly.

Around the country this month, people are celebrating L.G.B.T.Q. Pride. This year is especially meaningful since it marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a decisive moment in the advancement of human rights in this nation. This week, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces about the progress of the gay-rights movement during the past few decades. Anthony Hiss reports on a parade, from Greenwich Village to Central Park, celebrating the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, in 1970. Frances Fitzgerald profiles Harvey Milk and explores the growth of the gay community in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco during the nineteen-eighties. Alex Ross reflects on the political progress that gay men and women have made since the seventies, and Michael Specter chronicles the life of the playwright and activist Larry Kramer. Mark Seliger offers a selection of portraits of trans people in Greenwich Village. In “The Perfect Wife,” Ariel Levy recounts how the gay-rights activist Edith Windsor fell in love with her future partner and won a landmark Supreme Court case for gay marriage. Finally, Masha Gessen considers the historian Martin Duberman’s concerns about the future of the gay-rights movement. Taken together, these pieces show how far we’ve come—and how far we still have yet to go.

—David Remnick

“Parade”

“For the first time in a raid on such a bar, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn did not go quietly but fought back—and fought back against both the police and the bar itself.”

“The Castro”

“New York and Los Angeles had their gay areas, but the Castro was unique: it was the first settlement built on gay liberation.”

“Love on the March”

“The gay world is confronting a question with which other marginalized groups have long been familiar: the price of assimilation.”

“The Trans Community of Christopher Street”

“It was in the Village, on Christopher Street and the nearby piers, where many trans and queer people first shared space with others like them.”

“The Perfect Wife”

“For people to embrace same-sex marriage, they needed to focus on the universal desire for romantic love and committed intimacy.”

“Martin Duberman on What the Gay-Rights Movement Has Lost”

“By adopting a narrow agenda that is also socially centrist or even conservative, the movement has forfeited its ties to other oppressed groups.”

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“Public Nuisance”

“By the end of the eighties, Larry Kramer had started the two most effective AIDS advocacy organizations in America—both of them conceived in flashes of pure rage.”

George Orwell’s “1984,” published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” (1921) and Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” (1940). “1984” is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. What accounts for its staying power?

Partly it’s owing to the fact that, unlike “Darkness at Noon,” Orwell’s book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwell’s pages, but American readers responded to “1984” as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84—four million copies were sold that year—because, well, it was 1984. And in 2016 it got a bump from Trump.

The fundamental premise of the novel was its most quickly outmoded feature—outmoded almost from the start. This is the idea that the world would divide into three totalitarian superstates that were rigidly hierarchical, in complete control of information and expression, and engaged in perpetual and unwinnable wars for world domination. This was a future that many people had contemplated in the nineteen-thirties, the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Stalinism and Fascism. Capitalism and liberal democracy seemed moribund; centralized economies and authoritarian regimes looked like the only way modern mass societies could be governed. This was the argument of a book that is now almost forgotten, but which Orwell was fascinated and repelled by, James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” (1941).

It’s true that, after 1949, the world did divide into superstates—not three, but two—and their forty-year rivalry did a lot of damage around the world. But they were not twin totalitarian monsters, the Fasolt and Fafner of twentieth-century geopolitics. They may often have mirrored each other in tactics, but they were different systems defending different ideologies. Orwell, who had little interest in and no fondness for the United States, missed that.

There are some parts of the novel whose relevance seems never to fade, though. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state—Big Brother (borrowed from Koestler’s No. 1) and the telescreen, an astonishingly prescient conception that Orwell dreamed up when he had probably never seen a television. Another is Newspeak, a favorite topic of Orwell’s: the abuse of language for political purposes.

But “1984” is a novel, not a work of political theory, and, in the end, it’s probably as literature that people keep reading it. The overt political material—such as “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the (very long) book that the commissar O’Brien gives to Winston and Julia as he lures them into the trap—is likely now skipped by many readers. (The book’s analogue is “The Revolution Betrayed,” Leon Trotsky’s attack on Stalinism, published in 1937, but it is also a parody of “The Managerial Revolution.”)

O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston, though meant to be the climax of the book, and though people still invoke it, is not completely satisfactory. How does O’Brien convince Winston that two plus two equals five? By torturing him. This seems a rather primitive form of brainwashing. In “Darkness at Noon,” which also ends with an interrogation, the victim, Rubashov, though he is worn down physically first, is defeated intellectually. (Both novelists were attempting to understand how, in the Moscow Trials, Stalin’s purge of the Old Bolsheviks, between 1936 and 1938, the defendants, apparently of their own free will, admitted to the most absurd charges against them, knowing that they would be promptly shot. After Stalin’s death, it turned out that those defendants had, in fact, been tortured. So Orwell was right about that.)

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But who can forget this moment: “ ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them”? Orwell created a story that had suspense and had characters whom readers identify with.

When the book came out, some people assumed that the character they were meant to identify with (with horror) was O’Brien. That’s probably what Orwell had in mind, too. O’Brien was the type he wanted to warn people against: the intellectual who becomes sadistically fascinated by power. The O’Brien figure corresponded to a popular understanding of the lure of totalitarianism at the time: that it tapped into some dark corner of the human psyche. “There is a Hitler, a Stalin in every breast,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it in his liberal manifesto, “The Vital Center,” which was published the same year as “1984.”

Much later, Schlesinger changed his mind and rejected what he called Orwell’s “mystical theory of totalitarianism.” For we are not all O’Briens, waiting for the chance to torture the Winstons of the world. We are more likely all Winstons, knowing that something is wrong, that we are losing control of our lives, but also knowing that we are powerless to resist.

A trivial example is when we click “I Agree” on the banner explaining our app’s new privacy policy. We did not know what the old privacy policy was; we feel fairly certain that, if we read the new one, we would not understand what has changed or what we are giving away. We suspect everyone else just clicks the box. So we click the box and dream of a world in which there are no boxes to click. A non-trivial example is when your electoral process is corrupted by a foreign power and your government talks about charging the people who tried to investigate this interference with treason. That’s Orwellian. And it’s no longer a prophecy. It’s a headline.

On June 22, 1949, Mary Wilkinson and Harry William Streep, of New Jersey, welcomed a baby girl, whom they named Mary Louise. But, as the child’s personality emerged, Harry decided that the nickname Meryl better flattered her, and Meryl is the name that stuck. Seven decades later, the same Meryl Streep has reassumed her legal name in the role of Mary Louise Wright, the grief-addled mother who comes to Monterey, California, in the second season of the glossy HBO drama “Big Little Lies.” She is there following the death of her son, Perry Wright (Alexander Skarsgård), the abusive husband of Celeste (Nicole Kidman), at the Otter Bay Elementary spring gala. The demise of Perry hasn’t freed Celeste; she and Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz), Renata (Laura Dern), and Jane (Shailene Woodley)—the Monterey Five, as the gossips in town call them—are now bonded in an awful and obsessive grief, and Mary Louise’s arrival curdles whatever shaky peace they’ve achieved. Streep sharing a name with her character is a fourth-wall-breaking genuflection to her demigoddess presence, which might alone persuade us that it was appropriate to revive this story.

Streep reportedly so adored “Big Little Lies” that she signed onto the second season of the show without so much as glimpsing a script. But the eruption of hosannas in response to her casting did not completely silence a note of nagging concern. Why mess with such a delicious thing? When the show premièred, in 2017, “Big Little Lies,” adapted from Liane Moriarty’s novel set in Australia, was presented as a miniseries, not a serialized drama. The depiction of upper-middle-class malaise and sororal suffering earned eight Emmys and four Golden Globes, and status as one of the last monocultural phenomena in an increasingly fragmented, niche entertainment landscape. I am not ill-mannered enough to complain about the heavyweight reunion of Kidman, Witherspoon, Dern, Kravitz, and Woodley. If anything, I’m simply weary. No one in the movies or on TV knows when to end their projects anymore. “Big Little Lies” ’s graceful economy and narrative containment had seemed like such a wise decision. Beginning Season 2, I was worried that I’d have to see my beloved, bitchy, balletic “Big Little Lies” become lurching or distended. I hated to think that, once again, greed—of both the financial and the postmodern fan-service sort—had overridden a rare exercise of artistic restraint.

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Integral to the anatomy of some ballets and operas is the coda: a last gathering and recapitulation of themes, a pulling of the viewer back into her chair to hear an echo of the story’s conclusion. The beginning of “Big Little Lies” Season 2 (I’ve seen three episodes so far) seems to me that way, as an extended finale of the first season, though drawing on a differently calibrated momentum. In Season 1, a Greek chorus of nosy parents and snide school administrators guided our attentions. In this installment, we tread in the artfully stilled waters of psychological aftermath. Summer is over, when the show opens, and the parents swarm Otter Bay for the first day of second grade. The parents are exhorted to sing a cloying song, but Bonnie, broken by her involvement in Perry’s death, sits stone-faced. Everyone except for Bonnie—who was the one to push Perry to his death—has experienced the action as a communal defense, a unanimous exhale. And yet each of them is still suffocating. The police cannot disprove that Perry succumbed by someone’s hand. In the detectives’ glitching interview tapes, which are spliced in to disturb the opening scenes at school, the women, their faces stained with mascara, insist that he slipped and fell. Immediately, this season’s director, Andrea Arnold, who takes the baton from Jean-Marc Vallée (who stayed on as executive producer), submerges us in an atmosphere of guilt, enhanced by a plague of involuntary flashbacks. At Otter Bay today, the colors are vividly sun-bleached; in dreamy flashback sequences, the palette is ink-gray, and dazed women walk barefoot to a turbulent ocean.

The truth about Celeste’s marriage is out to the group. We also now know that it was Perry who raped Jane years ago, and that he is the father of her son, Ziggy. But the women are still caught in so many lies: to their husbands, their children, and themselves. Free-floating despair conforms to each woman’s temper and the beats of her everyday routine. As Madeline, Witherspoon sprints from a coffee shop to a real-estate open house, selling handsome white couples the dream of professional and romantic achievement that is slipping underneath her own feet like sand. Renata pumps a low-pound exercise weight as she poses for the cover of a magazine’s “Women in Power” issue; later, a selfish choice made by her husband, Gordon, proves that she doesn’t warrant the title. “We’re creatures of want,” he tells her, accusingly. Bonnie drifts, mentally and literally; she goes for runs constantly, in these episodes, while her husband struggles to match her pace. Her mother has arrived in Monterey, too. We still don’t know enough about the trauma Bonnie apparently experienced as a child, and whether that trauma matches what happens in Moriarty’s book, and I’m not sure how I feel about the dragging out of the backstory of the show’s only black star. Hippieish Jane, who doesn’t have wealth as an additional burden, seems the most well adjusted. She flirts with a wily-haired co-worker at her job at the aquarium, a philosophical surfer, asking him if he might be on the spectrum.

“Big Little Lies” is a fairly apportioned ensemble vehicle, giving each actor room to shriek, to cackle, to clutch a glass of wine nervously as she stares at the surf. I especially like the space given to the child actors, who, this season, are reproachful and inquisitive. But no character propels scenes quite like Kidman’s Celeste. This season she is haunted. Her eyes are an electrified, inhuman blue. She takes sleeping pills and wakes up behind the wheel of her car. She struggles to discipline her twin boys, who are growing, frighteningly, more and more like the father they grieve each day. Kidman’s nonjudgmental inhabiting of Celeste’s oscillations continues to be exceptional. Sometimes, Celeste sees herself as a victim, sometimes as a co-conspirator, sometimes as the true monster. Her memories of Perry’s beatings blur with memories of their rough sex, mingling in her mind now as they once did in life. Perry controls her, and has warped her definitions of consent, even from beyond the grave. “As dead as he is, sometimes I think maybe I’m deader,” she tells Madeline. Her therapist (Robin Weigert) compares her to a soldier suffering from P.T.S.D., acculturated to brutality. “You miss the war,” she says flatly.

This capsule summary might lead you to believe that the tone of this season is ponderous, or, worse, pandering and dutiful on the subject of women’s trauma. But “Big Little Lies” resists ideals of “responsible media” in the age of #MeToo. The second season is a little rude, and a little raw, and openly indebted to Andy Cohen and his army of Real Housewives. On one level, “Big Little Lies” is like that reality franchise, a social satire driven by a humiliating exposure of the divas of the nouveau riche. “I don’t fucking care about homeless people!” Madeline shouts at her daughter Abigail, who has decided she will skip college in order to work at a socially conscious startup. “I will not not be rich!” Renata wails, as she slams a glass jail divider. There is a boisterous story line about Otter Bay’s bratty parents being inconvenienced by the second-grade climate-change curriculum. The stooge humor of rich women behaving selfishly pleasurably reflects certain recent stories in the news, including the élite-college-admissions scandal. A show that asks us to watch mothers explain to their sons what assault is, and what it has to do with their fathers, demands some freebie levity, and “Big Little Lies” delivers. Our laughter is a relief.

Stalking through all of this is Mary Louise, an unnecessary character elevated to an indispensable one because, simply, she is played by Meryl Streep. Ostensibly, Streep has come to Monterey to help her daughter-in-law take care of the children. Really, she is suspicious, and intent on solving the lingering “mystery” of Perry’s death. She wears a prosthetic overbite and a portentous crucifix necklace, long coats and cardigans swishing behind her like a modern Miss Marple. The character introduces a sociological tension to the show, bringing a fresh conservatism to the sometimes rote liberal politics of “Big Little Lies.” Mary Louise believes her son to have been cherubic. When Celeste and Jane beg to differ, she accuses them of misinterpreting his actions. She is the older woman who thinks that some men may be rapists, but also that some women are temptresses. There are scenes between Mary Louise and the younger women that play like dramatizations of the generational debates that have been taking place in living rooms, op-ed pages, and on Twitter in recent years. But “Big Little Lies” is too smart to use Streep simply as a proxy for plot development and feminist infighting. Socially awkward and wholly unhinged, Mary Louise pops up behind building walls to gaze lovingly at Ziggy, the grandson she has never known, and picks fights with her natural nemesis, Madeline, who reminds her of a girl who bullied her in school. Streep gives Mary Louise a vicious and eerily hilarious maternal edge. She is clearly having a ball. I can’t wait to see how her story line expands.

There is a picture of Ashleigh Barty from when she was a child, wearing a little tennis dress and holding a tiny trophy. Her round face has chipmunk cheeks, and the racquet held over her shoulder is four or five times the size of her head. The picture made the rounds of the Internet after Barty returned to tennis, in 2016, following a brief hiatus, during which she played professional cricket. It surfaces, inevitably, whenever she makes news, because it is extremely cute. The picture might even be better known than her style of play. And it’s misleading, really, because, although Barty projects a youthful kindness, her game is fully mature, and not sweet at all.

Barty has an unusual game. Many players, even great ones, play shots. She plays points. Many players move from side to side. She moves up and back, high and low, and plays with pace and spin. She has one of the best slices I’ve ever seen—not a changeup, a shot to give herself time and reset the point, but a nasty skid with speed. Her forehand, too, can be scary. Gifted with good hands, she can pick up the ball off the back line, or, given more time, hit it heavy with topspin. On Saturday, she faced Markéta Vondroušová, in the French Open final, and she played a nearly perfect match—hitting with depth and power, using her big kick serve, anticipating Vondroušová’s drop shots, and using a lot of touch herself. She displayed a ruthless calm that must have unnerved her nineteen-year-old opponent, who was playing on the biggest court at Roland Garros for the first time in her life. Barty had the match in hand from the start, and won it easily, 6–1, 6–3.

Barty has long been a favorite of Aussies, who admire her style, her old-school forthrightness, and the fantastic variety of her game. But elsewhere she has been relatively overlooked, despite being the W.T.A.’s leader in match wins this year, making the quarter-finals of the Australian Open, winning the title in Miami, and having an excellent clay season. That has something to do with the popular emphasis placed on slam results, but, as this year’s Roland Garros made clear, there is another factor: it’s hard to pay attention to things that are difficult to see.

Someone on the East Coast of the United States who turned on the television on Saturday morning to watch the women’s final would have seen, instead, the semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Dominic Thiem. That match, which started on Friday, had been held over, and, as it continued, the women waited, their own start time T.B.D. On Friday, the men’s semifinals had pushed the women’s semifinal matches, which traditionally take place on Roland Garros’s biggest court, Philippe Chatrier, onto the second- and third-biggest courts instead. And they had to start time at 11 A.M. (5 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time). The matches were fantastic, but, with their diminished setting and unpopular time slot, they were sparsely attended. In the U.S., they were not on network TV. The men’s matches had been ticketed separately, and bad weather had complicated things; the tournament was clearly in a bind. Still, the French former champion Amélie Mauresmo was not alone in calling the scheduling decision a “disgrace.”

“I know you guys want headlines on this, and you want me to say something really juicy,” the women’s semifinalist Johanna Konta said, when asked about the scheduling. “What is tiring, and what is really unfortunate in this, more than anything, is that women have to sit—you know, athletes, female athletes—have to sit in different positions and have to justify their scheduling or their involvement in an event, or their salary, or their opportunities. And I think to give time to that is even more of a sad situation than what we found ourselves in today in terms of the scheduling.”

People have long pushed for equal prize money and prime placement on show courts for the women; the argument always made against these things is that the men’s game has bigger stars. This isn’t always true—Serena Williams is more popular in the U.S., at least, than any men’s player right now, with the possible exception of Roger Federer. But, even when it is the case, it is partly because of the decisions made by those who run the game: people won’t want to watch when they don’t know what they’re missing. Barty has a big game, a fantastic backstory, and now a French Open title. She is only twenty-three. If given the chance, she’ll be famous for much more than an adorable old picture. But will that chance be given?

Rose quartz opens up your heart chakra and can attract new romantic relationships. Try holding this stone up to your chest and taking a deep breath in through your nose as you slide the quartz through a gap between your shirt buttons. Exhale through your mouth as you jam it into your bra. The salesperson is staring at you because the crystal is working, and he is in love.

Jasper has a strong grounding energy. Drop it on the ground. Place one foot firmly over it and notice your strengthened connection to the earth as you shuffle casually to the door.

Lapis lazuli is associated with clarity, self-expression, and honesty. Hold this blue stone in your open palm. Walk up to the salesperson and announce, from your newly unblocked throat chakra, “I am stealing this.” Leave the store at a brisk jog.

Amethyst relieves stress, can help calm your thoughts, and brings wealth—the perfect crystal to shoplift when you have anxiety about shoplifting a crystal! Grab a handful of these and feel them transform your pockets into lumpy little gravity blankets. To activate their wealth-attracting powers, charge them on a gold cloth under the light of a crescent moon, or simply sell them on Etsy.

Tiger’s eye is a powerful stone that stimulates vitality and action-taking. Hurl that bad boy right into the street. Did you roll across the hood of a moving cab to retrieve it? Nice. Now somersault over to the sidewalk and consider taking the action elsewhere, because that cab driver is getting out of his car now and, based on a careful reading of his aura and face, he is mad.

Carnelian is a vibrant orange crystal that inspires leadership. Tap into its effects right away by delegating someone else to steal it for you.

Turquoise can help heal ailments of the immune, respiratory, and skeletal systems. Go ahead and swallow this one. You may notice, within a few seconds, that you are choking. Don’t be alarmed! The turquoise is in your respiratory system now, working its mysterious crystal magic. Stumble outside and indicate to a passerby that you are in the market for a Heimlich maneuver. Remember to act surprised when a piece of turquoise comes shooting out of your airway, in case this Good Samaritan is also a narc.

Obsidian is a shield against negativity. Slip a polished chunk into each ear to block the distinctly toxic vibes of the salesperson, who is very negatively calling the police.

Citrine is a bright yellow stone that activates the imagination and stimulates creativity. Once you’ve got this crystal in your hand, there’s no doubt that inspired shoplifting strategies will be bubbling out of you like water from an indoor meditation fountain. Thank goddess for that because, wow, here are the cops already. Best of luck!

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