Another day, another sad bookmark to put down into America’s tawdry manuscript of race relations: New York City agreed to pay the family of Eric Garner $5.9 million, a year after the 43-year-old was killed by a police chokehold — a crime that was ruled a homicide, but did not lead to the officer responsible being indicted.

It’s in this climate that Ta-Nehisi Coates is about to publish his new book, Between The World and Me. And the buzz around it is making him one of the most prominent and feted public intellectuals around. The first chapter is today’s pick.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: A Letter To My Son

In this excerpt in The Atlantic, Coates tells his 15-year-old what it’s like to have your body turned into a strange kind of commodity, a piece of national, racist, painful heritage: “This loss is mandated by the history of your country.”

The Inside Story

Bijan Stephen, an associate editor at the New Republic, recently reviewed the book in a piece worth reading on its own. I asked him to explain what’s so vital and necessary about Coates.

Bijan Stephen: “I think it’s simply the most important book of the summer. Ta-Nehisi writes about the most mundane parts of living with black skin, but does so in a way that’s incredibly relatable — and therefore devastating. Coates’s prose is elegant and elegiac; restrained where it needs to be and loose where it doesn’t. He’s got a fabulous ear for tone, and a brilliant eye for detail: His description of his son, Samori, reacting to the Michael Brown non-verdict, is heartbreaking. Coates sees his son lose his innocence. And then shows us, lets us inside. It’s deeply humanizing, a real triumph of empathy. And that’s his great achievement — he lets us inside of a human life while showing the senselessness of racism and the harm that it does.”