Foreign desk: How Trump Has Changed US-NK Relations

Even if his summit with Kim Jong Un is postponed again, President Trump’s “force of personality, and the transparency of his character and motives, has succeeded in transforming the nature of every future interaction the US has with North Korea,” suggests The Week’s Marc Ambinder. And, he adds, “not in a bad way.” Kim has already “reshuffled his national security cabinet, replacing aging members of his deep state with younger aides” considered more moderate and amenable to compromise. And, as a result of Trump’s “audacious endeavor,” Washington now knows “a lot more” about how Pyongyang’s high command makes decisions. So even if the US “gets nothing from the negotiations in the near-term, the drama is preparing us well . . . for the long-term.”

Political scribe: Why Weinstein Gets Special Treatment

Harvey Weinstein wasn’t forced to walk the red carpet when he turned himself in on rape and criminal-sex charges, notes Aaron Short at City and State. He showed up at 7 a.m., paid his pre-arranged bail by cashier’s check and was free by 9:30. He wasn’t “arrested unexpectedly, held in jail overnight” or “required to post a financially burdensome bail.” Which is not the usual treatment for accused serial rapists. In fact, Weinstein “is an example of how New York’s wealthiest residents have access to a different justice system than less-affluent accused criminals,” whom DA Cy Vance “holds up for bail worth many times more to them than a mere million dollars is worth to Weinstein and sends them to Rikers Island to await trial for far-less-serious charges.”

Law prof: NFL Pays Lip Service on Domestic Violence

Georgetown law professor Deborah Epstein at The Washington Post tells why she resigned from the NFL Players Association commission on domestic violence: “I simply cannot continue to be part of a body that exists in name only.” Formed after the viral video showing Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee unconscious in an elevator, the commission was meant to “address head-on” the NFL’s “serious problem of intimate-partner violence” and issued a list of systemic recommendations two years ago. But since then, “the commission has met only three times” and the NFLPA hasn’t “implemented any of the reforms proposed.” The NFLPA, she charges, “is no longer interested in even making a public show of concern about violence against women — a point driven home more forcefully during each new NFL draft season,” when players facing domestic violence charges continue to be selected.

Historian: Was Left-Wing Icon RFK Really That Liberal?

At the time of his assassination 50 years ago this week, recalls David Kaiser at Time, Robert F. Kennedy had just assumed the leadership of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing and his death “froze him in time as a symbol.” Yet until his brother’s own assassination in 1963, “liberalism was not Kennedy’s primary characteristic.” As attorney general, “his top priority was a concerted attack on organized crime,” not civil rights, whose protests he tried to silence and whose leader, Martin Luther King, he ordered wiretapped. On Vietnam, he was “more hawkish than his older brother,” the president. And even in the last three years of his life, “caution marked RFK’s positions.” In fact, Kennedy “died as he had lived, a mainstream mid-century Democrat.”

Libertarian: It’s Too Easy to Form an Online Mob

People enjoy forming mobs, observes Glenn Harlan Reynolds at USA Today, because they “allow people to do things they’d be afraid to do on their own — to steal, to hurt and kill, to burn and destroy.” Which is why societies “have developed various techniques to temper them.” Nowadays, we have the online mob; and it’s even “easier (and safer) to be part of an online mob than one in the real world.” Social media, especially Twitter, “seem almost intentionally designed to facilitate online mobbing.” And it’s not just about technology: “There is a whole ‘anger industry’ devoted to ginning up destructive mobs for political reasons.” Current federal and state laws create civil and criminal penalties for organizing (i.e., conspiring) to deprive people of their rights. So far, though, these laws “have seen little application to online mobs.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann