| |  | | Assistant editor | | Missed yesterday's edition? You can view previous newsletters on this page. | | | Will Walsh of Nocatee, Fla., prays on Monday in front of three crosses honoring the victims of the shooting in Jacksonville, Fla. (Corey Perrine/AP) | | August started with a brawl, and, as long as you weren't the one getting whacked over the head with a folding chair, boy, was it fun. Contributing columnist Ted Johnson couldn't stop watching the viral footage of a Black captain on the Montgomery, Ala., riverfront being assailed by entitled White boaters — and then assisted by Black bystanders who, as Ted writes, "came by land, air and sea" to fight back. The Aug. 5 scuffle was an irresistible spectacle, to Black folks in particular, and lit up the internet with memes. "It was," he writes, "a time." But a conversation Ted had with his father, raised in the Jim Crow era, dampened the fun. Dad was waiting for the other shoe to drop. "The wait wasn't long," Ted writes. "August's pendulum soon swung to pain." On Saturday, a racist gunman killed three Black people at a dollar store in Jacksonville. "Black people being killed for being Black," lamented Gene Robinson, who wrote about that shooting as well. "How many times have we seen this before?" Gene's column cites the many recent instances of racist violence in this country. Saturday's, he notes, was ironic for coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. He sees a nation where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of freedom from prejudice is far from realized. One passenger who recorded the Montgomery brawl said the White aggressor "had this air about him." Ted recognizes that more specifically: white supremacy. Until it's rooted out, Ted writes, yes, Black people will always be waiting for the other shoe. | Reconciliation (and rebuke) for Vietnam | |  | | President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with officials in 1968. (Bettmann Archive) | | In about a week and a half, President Biden will visit Hanoi and formally upgrade the United States' diplomatic relationship with Vietnam. Things have come a long way since the end of the war. Few people know that better than Paul Ignatius, now 102. He is the father of columnist David Ignatius and, as David explains in a column, served at the Pentagon during the war, ultimately becoming secretary of the Navy. "Like most Americans who were involved in the war," David writes of his dad, "he doesn't talk about it much." But dialogue, slow and sometimes painful, has continued over the decades and "dulled what anger remains" in Vietnam, David says. That reconciliation is valuable for its own sake. But it's not lost on David that Biden's "visit will mark one of most important strategic realignments in the Indo-Pacific in recent years," too. While he's there, the Editorial Board writes, Biden should not let the glow of friendship distract him from Vietnam's deteriorating human rights. It's a one-party state that has cracked down on dissent, environmentalism, civil society and religious freedom. Reconciliation might even make it easier — and all the more important — for the United States to tell its partner Vietnam what the board says it ought to hear: "No ruler or system is made stronger when it destroys the rights and dignity of its own people." | |  | | This, the Editorial Board writes, is a problem. Consider how critical the satellite internet industry is to Ukraine's fight against Russia; the war's disruption means that satellite is sometimes the only form of battlefield communication. A recent New Yorker story by Ronan Farrow highlights just how much clout Musk has in that conflict. Should one erratic man really be calling the shots — "literally," as the board writes? The way Musk has already restricted Starlink availability on the front lines, where Ukraine most needs it, suggests no. The board's advice to the United States is to get more of its own satellites up in the sky. It doesn't need to compete with Starlink's many thousands, but rather muster just large enough a fleet that Musk is "no longer the democratic world's only good option." | | Last week, contributing columnist Jim Geraghty shared a profile from Ukraine of the mayor of a small town far from the front lines. This week's is about a singing rabbi. Jim, reporting from Kyiv, writes that "you will rarely find a more effusive, earnest or full-throated musical expression of patriotism" than the viral video of Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman singing about Ukraine's independence. The rabbi's humanitarian work, however, might be even more impressive. Jim interviews him about coming under fire on missions, about Ukraine's Nazi-ridden Azov Brigade, about Israel's role in this war and about the Jews of Ukraine more broadly. Meanwhile, across the world, Catholics in Nicaragua have rallied around their religion, too — much to their own government's dismay. The church there has been at the heart of protests against the country's authoritarian regime, which has inflicted what University of Notre Dame President John I. Jenkins calls a "five-year campaign to silence" Catholics. Things are so dire that even the temperate Pope Francis has said of Nicaragua's president, "I have no other choice but to think that the person in power is mentally unbalanced." Jenkins says the rest of the world should come to the same conclusion. | - Indian journalist Barkha Dutt profiles the unsung (and underpaid) heroes who took India to the moon this month.
- Don't be fooled, Paul Waldman writes: Nikki Haley is no moderate on abortion.
- With August sipped away like a bottle of wine, read journalist Tim Carl from 2020 on wildfires' threat to California's vineyards.
| | It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's … The Bye-Ku. Musk feints at Ukraine Below Orion's belt, see Stars that flicker out *** Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow! | | | | | | |
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