Dear, In The Headlights

“Presidents have dealt with constituent mail differently over the years. It started simply enough: George Washington opened the mail and answered it. He got about five letters a day. Mail back then was carried by foot, or on horseback or in stagecoaches — not a high volume. Then came steamboats, then rail and a modernized postal system, and by the end of the 19th century President William McKinley was overwhelmed. One hundred letters every day?” As you may have guessed, the deluge got a lot worse. President Obama told his team he wanted to see ten letters a day (out of tens of thousands). This is how they picked them. From Jeanne Marie Laskas in the NYT Magazine: To Obama With Love, and Hate, and Desperation. (As always, any reader can reply to any edition of NextDraft and your email will go right to my inbox. And you’ll always get a response from me — or my mom, depending on the tone of the letter.)

+ One of Obama’s final acts as president was the commuting of Chelsea Manning’s Sentence.

+ FiveThirtyEight tracks the last eight years of public opinion across 32 issues to determine how America’s thinking changed under Obama.