Politics news has been relentless this past week. With so many different stories dominating the daily – sometimes hourly – headlines, we chose to go deep on a couple of them.

On Tuesday, news broke that President Biden had set Sept. 11, 2021 as the last day U.S. troops would be present in Afghanistan. The pullout put an ending point on this country’s longest war – a war that had a clear initial focus, but whose purpose became obscured over time.

Editor Catesby Holmes has spent years building up a stable of scholars who have helped illuminate various aspects of the conflict in Afghanistan. So she quickly offered to do what we call an “Essential Read,” where an editor pulls together a number of stories on a specific subject and writes a narrative that walks the reader through each of them. Catesby wrote in her introduction that “the war in Afghanistan has been long, complicated and deadly, and the road to peace fraught. Here are five stories explaining the history of the Afghan conflict and the faltering peace process.” The stories range from how the U.S. ended up in a war with the Taliban to what the U.S. withdrawal could mean for the rights of Afghan women and girls.

The continuing drama – and for many, the continuing trauma – of the Derek Chauvin trial was the other story we dove into this week. Chauvin is charged with murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. We wanted a scholar to look at how the formal legal process of a trial contrasted with the public discussion of racial justice around Floyd’s death and the death of Black men in encounters with police. Could a trial achieve racial justice? Philosopher Lewis R. Gordon at the University of Connecticut tackled this difficult question, setting out the stakes in his lead paragraph: “There is a difference between enforcing the law and being the law. The world is now witnessing another in a long history of struggles for racial justice in which this distinction may be ignored.”