Think twice: Don’t just send all of your Harvey donations directly to the Red Cross, Jonathan M. Katz writes. The organization has a bad track record after recent disasters, and such band-aid donations exemplify our short-sighted tendency to deal with disasters only after the fact.
Raw burn: James Mattis got caught on tape giving troops a pep talk in which he basically admitted that President Trump is a national embarrassment. Fred Kaplan feels both reassured and deeply disturbed.
Authority on parade: There was no reason for Trump to rescind regulations around police receipt of hand-me-down military gear, except for to allow them to use it recklessly, Leon Neyfakh writes. That makes sense, Jamelle Bouie argues; this is a man who shamelessly fetishizes “law and order” above all.
What they think: Will Saletan looks at recent polls to see what the president’s base believes about race. It turns out the quality most correlated with racism is not “Republican” but “Trump supporter.”
For fun: Game of Thrones doesn’t care about its characters’ bodies.
And that’s its problem,
Rebecca
