Picking every Eagles game this season | Morning Newsletter

While yesterday’s newsletter led with a recap of the final weekend of an (odd) summer, today’s will focus on a day where a number of things started, restarted, or are about to start. First off, most New Jersey public schools got underway, with the majority doing at least some virtual instruction. Indoor dining restarted in Philly for the first time since March. And, the Eagles are getting set to start their season on Sunday against Washington.

— Josh Rosenblat (@joshrosenblat, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

The Eagles return to the field Sunday to defend their NFC East crown. But with no offseason workouts, no preseason, and an abbreviated training camp (not to mention the ongoing pandemic), it’s hard to know what to expect this season. My colleagues are breaking it all down for you.

Where to start? How about with season predictions, where you can compare your picks for each Eagles game with those of our beat writers, Les Bowen, Paul Domowitch, Jeff McLane, and EJ Smith.

For the first time in nearly six months, some Philly restaurants hosted indoor dining with a limited capacity. Yesterday also marked the first day that movie theaters and performing arts venues could reopen in the city. Criminal trial proceedings also resumed. Gov. Tom Wolf announced that restaurants could increase their indoor dining capacities from 25% to 50% later this month if they get an online coronavirus safety certification.

Four years ago, at least 67 public schools in Pennsylvania embraced Native American nicknames and mascots. Today, after long and contentious debate and the Washington pro football team’s losing its nickname, that number has hardly moved, dropping to 64, my colleagues Jeff Gammage and Maddie Hanna report.

They write about the struggle to get schools to change their names, including a successful push by a student-led campaign in Radnor and another in Kennett Square. Part of the challenge in changing these names, they report, is that each Native mascot is a choice made by individual school boards, forcing advocates to go town by town and district by district to make a major impact.

The Johnson House is one of the stops that my colleague Valerie Russ wrote about earlier this year in a story on two walking tours of Philly’s antislavery history. Thanks for sharing this shot, @jessburghaus.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout-out!

“When enough students are infected, universities will send them back whence they came, blanketing the country with freshly infected, but otherwise healthy, people. In turn, that will increase the likelihood of politicians keeping lockdowns in place. But allowing college students to infect each other might not be the worst option — if it’s managed properly.” — write Antony Davies, an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, and James R. Harrigan, the managing director of the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, about the coronavirus on college campuses.

When Doane Academy in Burlington City reopened its campus for the first day of school yesterday, they kept up the tradition of the senior class canoeing across the Delaware River from Bristol. Typically, the entire school would be there to cheer the students, but because of the coronavirus, just parents were there. My colleague Alejandro A. Alvarez captured the scene in this gallery.