• That deep quiet you may have felt around the world on Monday morning, Aug. 24, was the sound of Zoom collapsing. Yes, the irritating online meeting venue that holds us all in its jerky grip went down everywhere for up to three merciful hours, giving remote workers and students around the globe a happy hiatus from postage stamp video windows, electronically lagged voices and the uncomfortable realization that your boss is working in their underwear. We’d like to propose a weekly Zoom holiday, which would give people the chance to do actual work now and then without help from Big Brother.

• David Piercy knows plenty about how Eugene is governed. That’s why we took special note of his letter to The Register-Guard — published twice, incidentally, on Aug. 17 and 18. A retired educator and spouse of popular former mayor Kitty Piercy, he suggests convening a charter review committee that would consider an elected mayor with executive power and a city council with governing authority. Piercy says this would give us the form of government we need “to be responsive to the quickly changing world around us.”  We have long wanted to examine Eugene’s form of government. It sounds like now’s the time.

• Was that SNL or RNC that we’ve been watching all week? You tell us.

• Oregon has an exciting new political leader who’s already on the front page of The New York Times (Aug. 24). Mike Schmidt took office Aug. 1 as district attorney in Multnomah County after beating an experienced federal prosecutor. The 39-year-old DA immediately dismissed charges against more than half of about 600 people arrested since the Portland protests started at the end of May, the Times reports. Schmidt sounds like our kind of guy. Stay tuned.

• Bundled inside the mega corporation that is the University of Oregon are students who don’t always practice social distancing and faculty who beg the students to be adults, not to mention administrators and classified employees who are clutching to their jobs. It has not been a good mix so far in schools across the U.S. with COVID-19. On Aug. 26, President Michael Schill announced that the UO has pulled the plug on most in-person teaching and will go online except for specific lab and studio instruction. The Board of Trustees meets Aug. 27 to approve the plan. With classes set to start on Sept. 29, the decision comes late in the game, and already tempers are flaring. This will be a mess, especially for the more than 2,000 people who are employed by the UO, the largest employer in Lane County. We feel for the classified workers under the SEIU Local 503 umbrella, the backbone of the UO and other state universities. We also hope no one blames the students who are being their authentic selves. After all, how many alleged adults have treated COVID-19 seriously?

• What we’re reading: Merge Left by Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He goes in the same directions as Isabel Wilkerson in her heralded Caste, talking about race and class. His subtitle is “Winning Elections, and Saving America.” We’ll take that optimism right now!

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