The Department of Justice Inspector General will review broad allegations of misconduct involving the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices and the bureau’s controversial decision shortly before the election to announce the probe had resumed, the Inspector General announced Thursday.

This is the CNN article, which begins:

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

Hmmm.  But as the Atlantic piece points out:

Does this sort of madness even register on our radar anymore?

Perhaps the increasingly popular premise, that to air a belief is to normalize it, renders a society least able to contest wrongheaded ideas precisely when it is most vital.

My classroom becomes a totalitarian state every school year toward the end of October. In preparation for teaching 1984 to seniors, I announce the launch of a new program aimed at combating senioritis, a real disease with symptoms that include frequent unexplained absences, indifferent reading, and shoddy work.

It seems white people - even non-college educated males - have an identity.

.... At Philadelphia, the leading lawyer in America, James Wilson, proposed direct elections. Wilson was one of only six people to sign the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He wrote the words "We the people" in the document. He's one of the first five associate justices on the Supreme Court. And he was for a direct election.

When he advocated this, James Madison's immediate response was: In principle, you're right, but the South won't go for it because they'll lose every time because they won't be able to count their slaves.

As a country, we needed our President to try and calm us - again.  If anyone deserves to rant, rave, scream and cry more than Hillary, it's Obama.  His legacy and work to make our nation a better place is about to go up in flames, yet he can reach out to us; remind us what America is still supposed to be.

Hillary Clinton often gets described as an incrementalist, with a relatively modest agenda. This makes sense, given that she spent the past two years or so running against a literal democratic socialist and Donald Trump.

But this depiction misleads more than it informs. Amid her blizzard of plans and white papers, the scope and ambition of Clinton’s program often gets missed. Just imagine, for a second, what a world in which it all became law would look like.

Suffice it to say it would look like everything Republicans truly fear.

Nor, crucially, are the Trumpniks a majority. Polls give every indication that Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump, just as she beat Bernie Sanders — who also drew larger rally crowds and more think pieces than she did — in the Democratic primary. Clinton crowds aren’t as big, and her voters aren’t as loud or as interesting to the media. But there sure are a lot of them. And it’s about time we acknowledge them and their emergence as a new silent majority that reelected America’s first black president and is poised to elect its first woman.

On August 25, after a short trip to Baton Rouge to assess flooding in Louisiana and before what will likely be his last visit to China on Air Force One, Barack Obama sat down at the White House to reflect on the past eight years. He led America through a period of dramatic, convulsive change — an era that New York Magazine explores this week in its cover story.

I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe. And that should raise concerns not only about Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election but also about how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.

And Kurt Eichenwald isn't a casual writer.

This will be put in the "ignore" pile by most mainstream media, but it really shouldn't be.  While all the fuss is about the Clinton Foundation and what foreign governments, etc. might expect in return for large donations, the far more dangerous question is how Trump's business ties might affect his policies if he becomes President.

I put this in the "necessary reading" category.

The images here are products of two disasters: one natural, one wholly not. Lieutenant Redpath kept his negatives from ground zero in his basement art studio. When Hurricane Sandy bore down on the Rockaways in 2012, he moved them to a higher shelf to be safe. Within hours, the water was up to the ceiling. “It all happened so fast,” he said.