Joshua Benton

The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks—it’s almost always a man—really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor atop the editorial page. For generations, this has been one of the overriding perks of media ownership. If Jeff Bezos wanted to turn The Washington Post’s opinion section over to an AI-powered version of Alexa, he’d be within his rights.

The Paris Olympics’ picturesque marathon course will take runners past many of the city’s highlights—the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre’s glass pyramid, the Eiffel Tower. But it will miss, by miles, a plain one-block street in the 13th arrondissement named Rue Michel-Bréal. That’s a shame, given that Michel Bréal is the reason anyone ever ran a marathon on purpose.

On August 16, 1867, a young farmer named Alfred McDonald Sargent Johnson walked into the courthouse of Cherokee County, Georgia. He had an oath to swear.The effects of the Civil War were still visible in Canton, a village of about 200 people and the county seat. For one thing, that makeshift courthouse was inside a Presbyterian church—its predecessor having been torched by William Tecumseh Sherman’s men shortly before their march to the sea.

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo.

When Republican Senator Mike Lee tweeted last month that “We’re not a democracy,” he wasn’t kidding. He later expanded the thought, saying that it was not “the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens” and that “power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power.

At 4:14 p.m. Delaware time Tuesday, Joe Biden’s campaign sent out a mass text message announcing the presumptive Democratic nominee’s choice for vice president: Senator Kamala Harris of California.

Roy Den Hollander, the “anti-feminist” attorney who authorities say is the chief suspect in the shootings of the son and the husband of a federal judge in New Jersey, attacked that judge by name in misogynistic, racist writings he wrote over a period of years and posted in bulk on the Internet Archive.