The Weekly Sift

We’re in a particularly strange part of the news cycle: The Mueller Report is finished, but we don’t really know what it says yet. We have a four-page summary by Attorney General Barr, which came out yesterday, but does not completely answer our questions. Barr says he’ll release as much as he can of the rest of the report, after he has combed it to protect the integrity of the grand-jury process. We’ll see if that happens, how long it takes, and whether Barr decides to err on the side of transparency or hide as much as he can get away with.

In the meantime, we have the summary to digest: no further indictments or sealed indictments, a conclusion that Trump was not a conspirator in the Russian effort to make him president, and a decision by Barr that evidence of obstruction of justice (which Mueller collected, but did not make a recommendation about) does not rise to a level that is worth pursuing in an indictment.

I’ll talk about that in one short featured post, which should be out before 9 EDT. The other featured post will be more light-hearted: “Confronting Season-Change Denial”, which makes an analogy between arguments about climate change and the difficulty New Englanders have convincing each other that spring has really come, with summer to follow. That should be out before 11.

The weekly summary will cover developments in the 2020 race, New Zealand’s fast reaction to the mosque shootings, Trump’s strange obsession with John McCain, the World Happiness Report, and a few other things, before concluding with a marvelous graphic presentation of how the world’s largest cities change through time.