The last few years have been so overwhelming that we’ve come to take for granted that the news never stops. So when we kicked off the Wednesday Morning Dispatch by pointing out Tuesday had been a slow news day, I had to stop and think about it. But it had been. 

We’re in a holding pattern on the pandemic front. We’re not engulfed in protests or getting ready for a big election, or litigating the last one. Sure, there’s plenty going on. Afghanistan is a mess. Haiti’s president was assassinated. New York City finally figured out who won its Democratic mayoral primary. But our phones (or at least mine) weren’t blowing up with relentless breaking news alerts.

When my husband and I lived in Seattle, we quickly became acquainted with the term “sunbreak.” It’s when the relentless drizzle stops just long enough to let the sun come out and the clouds part just enough to give you a glimpse of the gorgeous mountains for maybe 15 to 30 minutes. 

I hope that the past week isn’t just the media equivalent of a sunbreak. It allowed us to cover some important topics in a deeper way than we might have otherwise. (Which, you’ve probably heard us say more than a few times, is central to our mission here at The Dispatch.) We looked at the dangerous COVID outbreak at the Mexico-U.S. border. We didn’t have to relegate the Haiti crisis to a brief third item in TMD. In Uphill, Harvest and Ryan wrote about how some progressives are pressuring the Biden administration to take it easy on China because of climate change. We could let our staffers work on some longer-term projects that I’ll be highlighting in this space in the coming weeks.