In August of 1619, a ship appeared near Point Comfort, a port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this, The Times Magazine argues, was the moment that it began.

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The Times about how slavery shaped the United States in the 400 years since. An essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones anchors the project: “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written,” she says. “Black Americans fought to make them true.”

Here’s what else is happening

New Zealand: Prison officials acknowledged that they had mistakenly allowed the man charged in the Christchurch mosque attacks to send at least one letter from jail calling for racial violence.

ASAP Rocky: The American rapper was found guilty of assault, but will not return to jail, in a case that had drawn the attention of President Trump.

WeWork: The real estate firm, which leases shared office space, took a key step in the process of becoming a publicly traded company — and a test of investors’ appetite for fast-growing but unprofitable start-ups. The company, currently valued at nearly $50 billion, lost more than $1.6 billion last year on just $1.8 billion in revenue, according to a financial prospectus.

Jeffrey Epstein: A New York woman who said Mr. Epstein groomed her for sex starting when she was 14 and then raped her a year later sued his estate, one of many possible lawsuits that his estate may face after his death by an apparent suicide. She tells her own story in an Op-Ed.