Anna Edwards

The green carpet is gone. Dark wood shelves are no longer in favor.At many Barnes & Noble stores, the green-striped wallpaper and hunter-green walls have been scraped away and painted over in sandy shades of white and pink as the nation’s biggest brick-and-mortar bookseller pursues, in fits and starts, a back-to-basics, books-first strategy.Other stores will have a different look. The design of a new location in Brooklyn reveals the polished concrete floors from its past life as a Barneys New York. A Barnes & Noble recently opened in California with cerulean walls, and an experiment in robin’s egg blue is…

[Update: Videos show fatal encounter.]A man who was wrongfully convicted and spent more than 16 years in prison before being released in 2020 was fatally shot on Monday by a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia during a traffic stop, the authorities said.The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is conducting an independent investigation of the shooting in Camden County, identified the man, who was Black, as Leonard Allan Cure, 53.Mr. Cure was the first person exonerated by the Broward State Attorney’s Office Conviction Review Unit. His case was also represented by the Innocence Project of Florida.The bureau said in a news release…

No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.Yes, of course, there are any number of structural problems facing American politics.Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on…

President Biden’s trip to Israel on Wednesday will put him in a region where grief and fury are mounting, not only toward Israel, but also toward the United States, the world power that has declared unyielding support for its chief Middle East ally.On Tuesday, widespread condemnation of Israel rippled across the region after a huge explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip killed hundreds of Palestinians who had been seeking treatment and refuge. Israel has denied being behind the blast, blaming a Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad, for a failed rocket launch.But even before that, many people across the region…