Buckminster Fuller

	The New Republic ⁦‪@newrepublic‬⁩ In explaining the inevitability of "ephemeralization," Buckminster Fuller seemed to assume that all humans wanted to float as free as he did. newrepublic.com/article/167229…   8/21/22, 6:17 AM

‘The place has lost its mind’

	The Guardian ⁦‪@guardian‬⁩ Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: 'The place has lost its mind' theguardian.com/us-news/2022/a…   8/21/22, 6:15 AM

American Democracy Was Never Designed to Be Democratic

To look on the bright side for a moment, one effect of the Republican assault on elections—which takes the form, naturally, of the very thing Republicans accuse Democrats of doing: rigging the system—might be to open our eyes to how undemocratic our democracy is. Strictly speaking, American government has never been a government "by the people."

This is so despite the fact that more Americans are voting than ever before. In 2020, sixty-seven per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot for President. That was the highest turnout since 1900, a year when few, if any, women, people under twenty-one, Asian immigrants (who could not become citizens), Native Americans (who were treated as foreigners), or Black Americans living in the South (who were openly disenfranchised) could vote. Eighteen per cent of the total population voted in that election. In 2020, forty-eight per cent voted.

Some members of the loser's party have concluded that a sixty-seven-per-cent turnout was too high. They apparently calculate that, if fewer people had voted, Donald Trumpmight have carried their states. Last year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, legislatures in nineteen states passed thirty-four laws imposing voting restrictions. (Trump and his allies had filed more than sixty lawsuits challenging the election results and lost all but one of them.)

In Florida, it is now illegal to offer water to someone standing in line to vote. Georgia is allowing counties to eliminate voting on Sundays. In 2020, Texas limited the number of ballot-drop-off locations to one per county, insuring that Loving County, the home of fifty-seven people, has the same number of drop-off locations as Harris County, which includes Houston and has 4.7 million people.

Virtually all of these "reforms" will likely make it harder for some people to vote, and thus will depress turnout—which is the not so subtle intention. This is a problem, but it is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that, as the law stands, even when the system is working the way it's designed to work and everyone who is eligible to vote does vote, the government we get does not reflect the popular will. Michael Kinsley's law of scandal applies. The scandal isn't what's illegal. The scandal is what's legal.

It was not unreasonable for the Framers to be wary of direct democracy. You can't govern a nation by plebiscite, and true representative democracy, in which everyone who might be affected by government policy has an equal say in choosing the people who make that policy, had never been tried. So they wrote a rule book, the Constitution, that places limits on what the government can do, regardless of what the majority wants. (They also countenanced slavery and the disenfranchisement of women, excluding from the electorate groups whose life chances certainly might be affected by government policy.) And they made it extremely difficult to tinker with those rules. In two hundred and thirty-three years, they have been changed by amendment only nine times. The last time was fifty-one years ago...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/american-democracy-was-never-designed-to-be-democratic-eric-holder-our-unfinished-march-nick-seabrook-one-person-one-vote-jacob-grumbach-laboratories-against-democracy

Wendell Berry on Delight

 ...as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism, the Key to Mirth Under Hardship, and the Measure of a Rich Life

"I have always had a quarrel with this country not only about race but about the standards by which it appears to live," James Baldwin told Margaret Mead as they sat down together to reimagine democracy for a post-consumerist world. A generation later, the poet, farmer, and ecological steward Wendell Berry — a poet in the largest Baldwinian sense — picked up the time-escalated quarrel in his slim, large-spirited book The Hidden Wound (public library) to offer, without looking away from its scarring realities, a healing and conciliatory direction of resistance to a culture in which our enjoyment of life is taken from us by the not-enoughness at the hollow heart of consumerism, only to be sold back to us at the price of the latest product, and sold in discriminating proportion along lines of stark income inequality... (continues)

Maria Popova

Consider a minor in American Studies

 

A Big TV Hit Is a Conservative Fantasy Liberals Should Watch

America is as divided over its favorite prestige television shows as news sources.

...Millions of people watch "Yellowstone" for the horses and the majestic scenery. There's Beth Dutton's frequent nudity. There's the simple dialogue that does not ask much of the audience. Whatever brings its audience to the show, once they arrive, they are playacting within the vision of America that "Yellowstone" holds. The show suggests that elitism and power can be reconciled with our need to be both moral and self-interested. It is a seductive fantasy because it does not ask the audience to give up anything.

The nominal diversity of the show's cast implies that conservatives don't hate anyone, as long as everyone is willing to conform to their way of life. It acknowledges white land theft and Native American grievance, but it does not make a case for reparations. It accepts that Christopher Columbus was a colonizer but implies that the Duttons' good-enough ends justify the means. It accommodates feminism by making women the most vicious capitalist actors. And it depicts the police as feckless, but it does not want to abolish cops. It wants to choose the cops. That means a lot of guns. "Yellowstone" does not just have gunfights. It has all-out wars. There are military-grade weapons, aerial assaults, night-vision goggles and automatic rifles. When John Dutton cannot win, he starts shooting.

"Yellowstone" isn't ideologically driven, even if ideology is what makes it so comforting for conservative audiences. But in the end, the show shares a problem with Republican Party electoral politics: Neither offers a compelling vision of the future.

Republicans don't solve problems like climate change or economic inequality or water rights or housing costs or stagnant wages. With Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell's leadership, the G.O.P. does not even bother to sell a conservative story for America. Audiences looking for that vision in "Yellowstone" might find that cosmetic diversity needn't be scary, but they won't find much else. Like Republicans, the Dutton dynasty has one defense against demography and time: Buy guns and hoard stolen power. nyt

Solar panel politics

Bill McKibben's latest book explains how we engineered a crisis of the social environment and, in the process, ensured an existential crisis of the natural environment.

...
"Now consider the even deeper crisis of climate change, a crisis that presents the planet with a nontrivial chance that our civilizations could simply collapse in the decades ahead. What might we have done differently in the 1970s, even before we really understood the danger that carbon dioxide was posing? It turns out that in those oil shock years the Carter administration fixed on one key solution: massive government support for developing solar power. “A strong solar message and program,” the president’s domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat told him, “will be important in trying to counter the hopelessness which polls are showing the public feels about energy. I’m quite convinced Congress and the American people want a Manhattan-type project on alternative energy development.” Carter agreed to the plan—indeed, he said a fifth of the country’s energy should come from solar power by 2000. He called for spending a billion dollars in fiscal year 1980 to create a Solar Bank, to fund research, and to provide homeowners with loans for putting up panels. He officially declared May 3, 1978, as Sun Day, calling “upon the American people to observe that day with appropriate activities and ceremonies that will demonstrate the potential of solar energy,” and directing “all appropriate Federal agencies to support this national observance.” He observed this first solar holiday by traveling to a mountaintop in Golden, Colorado, home to a federal solar research facility: “The question is no longer whether solar energy works,” he told a crowd (in a driving rain). “We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs so that solar power can be used more widely and so that it will set a cap on rising oil prices. In many places, solar heating is as economical today as power from nonrenewable sources.” He added, “Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored, and used.” And then a year later he did something even more important: on June 20, 1979, he invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty solar hot-water heating panels. “A generation from now,” he said, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” In truth, it took much less than a generation to deliver the verdict: literal museum piece. Shortly after taking office, Reagan cut the renewable energy research budget by 85 percent and let the tax credits for solar panels expire; he did away with assistance for weatherizing homes and ended energy efficiency requirements for appliances; his national security advisor, Richard Allen, circulated an article insisting that the solar “energy crusade was little more than a continuation of the political wars of a decade ago by other means.… Where salvation was once to be gotten from the Revolution, now it will come from everyone’s best friend, the great and simplistic cure of all energy ills, the sun.” Instead, Reagan pushed hard for increased oil drilling in the United States, and for making sure that no pesky regulations got in the way. “First, we must decide that ‘less’ is not enough,” he said. “Next, we must remove government obstacles to energy production.… Putting the market system to work for these objectives is an essential first step for their achievement.” And so in 1986 the Reagan administration took the panels down from the White House roof and stored them away in a Virginia warehouse. A top White House official—the Washington Post speculated it was U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese—thought the equipment was a “joke.” An official spokesman said, “Putting them back up would be very unwise, based on cost.” As it happens, I know a little about those panels. They were rescued from that Virginia warehouse by a faculty member at Unity College, a small school in a very rural corner of Maine, where for years they sat on the roof of the cafeteria, heating the water used in the kitchen. The college gave away or sold a few of them: I learned about them in 2008 when I visited the Sun-Moon Mansion, the headquarters of China’s largest solar hot-water company. Huang Ming, who’d founded the company, kept one of Carter’s panels in a place of honor in a small museum of renewable energy just off his executive offices. The panels, he said, had helped inspire him to create a business that was currently heating the water for a quarter billion of his countrymen—some Chinese cities, viewed from the air, look as if every single building has a solar hot-water heater on top. Anyway, Unity officials agreed to hand me a couple more of the historic panels, and so in 2010 I rented a van, hitched a trailer behind it, and began dragging them south toward the White House. It was a fun road trip—three students and a professor from Unity were along, so there were iPod playlists and lots of snacks. We hosted rallies in Boston, New York, and Baltimore—we’d pour a gallon of water in the top of the heater, point it at the sun, and eight or nine minutes later steam would be churning out: thirty-one years later these things worked as well as they did the day they went up. Our hope, of course, was that Barack Obama (whom we all had worked to elect) might symbolically reinstall one, up top of his new house. We thought it made sense: when the First Lady had planted the White House garden a year before, seed sales had gone up 30 percent. We thought that the gift might help the administration restart solar history after three decades. But no. Arriving in Washington, we were directed by administration officials to a side door at the Executive Office Building—the five of us were ushered by an intern in a blue blazer into the wood-paneled room where, once, the UN Charter had been drafted. This day, a trio of what the New York Times called “midlevel White House” officials met with us, in the single most frustrating example of bureaucratic obstruction I’ve ever gotten to witness close up. First they filibustered—long boilerplate explanations of how the administration was “building a bigger, better, smarter electric grid, all while creating new sustainable jobs.” I sat back and let the three students respond, and they were magnificent: “Thank you for your good work,” they said politely, over and over. “But no one really knows about it—certainly not our friends, who voted for Obama but are increasingly disillusioned. What better way to spread the word about what you’re up to than the high-profile move of putting solar panels back on the roof?” No, said the officials, but they refused to say why. Literally refused. The students asked, again and again, and the woman who was leading the conversation kept repeating the same phrase: “If reporters call and ask us, we will provide our rationale.” But they wouldn’t provide it to us, and they wouldn’t pose for a picture with the students, and they wouldn’t accept the old panel even to put in storage. Eventually we were back on the sidewalk, and the three college students were talking to reporters. They were in tears—of disappointment, but also I think of genuine perplexity. Amanda Nelson: “I didn’t expect I’d get to shake President Obama’s hand, but it was really shocking to me to find out that they really didn’t seem to care. They couldn’t even give us a statement.” Elliott Altomare: “We went in without any doubt about the importance of this. They handed us a pamphlet.” Measured the way activists measure things, it was entirely worth it: three stories in the Times, plenty of other coverage. We’d moved the needle a little further along. But I felt a little guilty about disillusioning these three students: they’d seen early on some of the cowardice and moral compromise inherent in holding power. And—for all my advanced years—I felt a little disillusioned too. It certainly made it easier to come back to the White House the next year and help organize the mass arrests on that same street corner that marked the start of the national fight over the Keystone XL Pipeline. In time we won that battle: we forced Obama to block KXL, the first loss of that kind Big Oil had ever suffered. And in time—safely into his second term—Obama did indeed put solar panels up on the White House roof. “The project, which helps demonstrate that historic buildings can incorporate solar energy and energy efficiency upgrades, is estimated to pay for itself in energy savings over the next eight years,” a spokesman said. In retrospect, it was pretty clear why Obama wanted nothing to do with those solar panels: they were tainted by their association with Carter. The 1980 election, thirty years later, still dominated our politics. We’d made a choice then, and that choice still held sway, even in the administration of our first Black president, a man who on the night of his nomination had said “this [is] the moment when the rise of the oceans [begins] to slow and our planet [begins] to heal.” But he calculated that we hadn’t yet reached the moment when we could move past that earlier moment in our political history. Read the quote from Obama again that I printed a few pages ago: “Through Clinton and even through how I thought about these issues when I first came into office, I think there was a residual willingness to accept the political constraints that we’d inherited from the post-Reagan era,” he said. “Probably there was an embrace of market solutions to a whole host of problems that wasn’t entirely justified.” Probably. INSTEAD OF MOVING toward solar energy in the Reagan years, we stepped on the gas pedal—literally—in our lifestyles, and on the brake—metaphorically—in the drive for something like social justice." (Continues)

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened" by Bill McKibben: https://a.co/i7UwQMY

Wokeness? CRT? No, just history

"It took an outsider—Charles Dickens, visiting on a lecture tour in 1842 during the last stages of “Indian removal”—to actually register the sadness of it all; he described the Native Americans’ “strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, and in particular to the burial-places of their kindred; and of their great reluctance to leave them.” What I’m trying to say is: my life, and the life of other people like me, was built in very real part on the suffering of others. That’s not wokeness, and that’s not “critical race theory.” That’s history. And the fact that, to some extent, we’ve stopped doing these things doesn’t mean we get to ignore the effects of earlier actions. As Richard Rothstein observed in his classic account of segregation, The Color of Law, “let bygones be bygones” is not a very noble principle if you came out on top."

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened" by Bill McKibben: https://a.co/ex04une

the glory of American history

"By the time a generation had gone to war, with all the hardship it endured, deference to the monarch had not just dissolved but had turned into a hatred of kings, and of the hierarchies they represented. Such psychological upheaval carries costs, of course—you can find in it the roots of the anti-intellectualism that continues to mar our society, the antagonism toward “elites” that translated into, say, Donald Trump’s attacks on scientists like Dr. Fauci or his declaration that “I love the poorly educated.” But Trump, for all his pretense of “draining the swamp,” was actually the embodiment of those old hierarchies, the exception to the American rule. He was the man who sat (at least in his bathroom) on a golden throne; who said, of our nation’s problems, “I alone” can solve them; who insisted that the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want.” The man who installed his family members in positions of high power, and who used occasions of state to line his pockets. And if he and his compatriots tried to use the imagery of the American Revolution to consolidate power (a “tea party” to fight against equal access to medical care, an “insurrection” to prevent the counting of votes), then at least for the moment the tradition of our egalitarian history still managed to hold. It was Jamie Raskin—grandson of a Russian Jewish émigré plumber, now a congressman from Maryland—who concluded Trump’s impeachment trial for that insurrection with an account of those early days of the Republic, of “our great revolutionary struggle against the kings, and queens, and the tyrants … Because for most of the rest of human history, it had been the kings and queens and tyrants and nobles lording it over the common people. Could political self-government work in America, was the question.” He quoted from Thomas Paine: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, but we have this saving consolation: the more difficult the struggle, the more glorious in the end will be our victory.” Raskin didn’t win that legal battle, of course—the bootlickers of the Republican Party protected Trump from prosecution, and they may yet try to install him back on the throne. (How easy to imagine Lindsay Graham or Mitch McConnell in a powdered wig, packing the family silver to flee to London with the other loyalists.) But, at least for the moment, the basic outline of American history shuddered but held. That anger at arbitrary power, that refusal to allow one person to lord it over another or over the whole—that is the glory of American history, and it dates back, if you want a date, to those days and years immediately following the stand on the Green. It’s why I’ve never wanted to give up the flag."

"The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened" by Bill McKibben: https://a.co/aUoIjXO

the responsibilities of intelligence

"Deductive neatness and intellectual clarity make thought’s work easier, but for the most part miss the point that our thinking must attend to our lives and must therefore to some degree meet those lives on their own terms. When Dewey worried about “the problems of philosophers,” he was not abandoning metaphysical questions and moral theory. He was worried about philosophers who intentionally excommunicate themselves from the flow of ordinary experience and give themselves carte blanche to engage in an intellectually elitist activity that is bent more on keeping unlike minds out than on attending to the reflective needs of a culture. Metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics are quite natural functions of human experience. Problems do not arise when we engage in these pursuits, but only when thought does not return to primary experience and make a difference in how we envision and confront our own futures. To use our philosophical abilities in other ways is to neglect the responsibilities of intelligence."

Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy Book 18)" by Douglas R. Anderson: https://a.co/8lcwB7I

Hard-core meliorists, insane angels

"Following James and Dewey, these American scholars are hard-core meliorists. We are attentive to the ills around us. We think about things; we are committed to goods as ends-in-view. Hence the appropriateness of the tag “insane angels.” We are utopian with our eyes open. That is, as Erin McKenna suggests, we seek to improve things along the way, not to construct some magic, fixed, end-state world.21 We are, one might say, working utopians. Our bringing of “heaven” to Earth is always a finite and fallible project, as Emerson recognizes when he points out that when not in our angelic modes, we easily become “moping dogs.” Both our strangeness—our cultural insanity—and our angelic practices are underwritten by our passion for thinking, writing, and talking. We are practitioners of philosophy. This is not something I think we should deny or dismiss as unimportant. This is where our passions and our abilities lie. I have emphasized the fact that we are teachers because it is a fact often obscured when we describe our profession. But this does not mean that we are not also philosophers and scholars with an angelic passion for some particular strains of literature, history, and reflective thought. We think and write with an eye toward transforming ourselves, each other, and our culture. And though I opened this chapter with a concern for our invisibility, I do not want to underestimate the impact we can have, even when we as individuals remain invisible to our culture. Almost all thinkers in the American tradition have been realists in the same way. This includes James, whom Dewey rightly identifies as a realist in this respect—that our ideas have real effects in the world, they make a difference. The transactions among ideas, actions, and habits constitute a natural process whose powers should not be underestimated. Philosophy understood this way is never “just talk.” Talking turns out to be an important medium of transformation."

"Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy Book 18)" by Douglas R. Anderson: https://a.co/9HIaeVt

Philosophy Americana and experience

"Interestingly, within the pragmatic tradition, it was Charles Peirce, whose work is most traditionally oriented, who explicitly defended the claim that philosophers should describe themselves to their readers. “The reader,” he said, “has a right to know how the author’s opinions were formed” (CP, 1:3).8 For Peirce, philosophy is a historical conversation, and a key piece of this semiotic process is understanding the place from which one speaks (see MS 842). Thus, if one has grown up with Beethoven and Aaron Copland, one should maintain their acquaintance. So, too, if one has grown up on the Ramones and Blondie, on the Temptations and the Shirelles, on R.E.M. and Matchbox 20, or on Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. These are not to be abandoned at the doorstep of philosophy. We need to keep them with us to inform, instruct, and be transformed by our philosophical lives. All of these features of our experiences help constitute the very language of outlooks on the world... This maintenance of our experiential home, it seems to me, is a sort of baseline for what I am calling philosophy Americana. For those of us in dominant sectors of this culture, such maintenance is reasonably easy but needs to be undertaken precisely because we often forget that ours is only one dimension of “America.” For those like Anzaldúa who are not in the dominant sectors, such maintenance is always a difficult and politically oppositional task, but a task the rest of us, through listening, can come to make easier: I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.10 Philosophy Americana will thrive only insofar as there is a genuine conversation among our philosophical outlooks, a conversation in which we listen closely not only to each other’s arguments, but also to the stories we tell about and from the perspectives of our experiential homes. Acknowledging Inheritance In the opening paragraph of “Nominalist and Realist,” Emerson spoke an experiential truth: “I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which he [or she] yet quite newly and inevitably suggests to us” (CW, 3:133). If we embrace our inheritances individually, American philosophy will continue to reawaken itself. It will both imbibe and express, from our representative angles of vision, the richness of our own history and culture, the depth of our despairs and the wealth of our expectations. Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century met with ridicule and resistance in professional philosophical circles. But it was spoken directly from her experience and it spoke honestly of her own possibilities. As Donna Dickenson points out, Emerson’s “Nature (1836) took seven years to clear an edition of 500 copies. Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century sold out an edition twice that size in one week.”11 It was popular philosophy because it captured and expressed experiences lived by many women of the nineteenth century, and for the same reasons it has become important philosophy. We now take Fuller’s awakening call seriously across the culture, even if we do not yet read her work as often as we should, or meet her demands. As noted earlier, American philosophers and philosophers in America, just as the culture at large, have been blind to a variety of representative perspectives and have left a number of needs unattended. Only recently have we really begun to believe that American philosophy north of Mexico speaks Spanish. In 1980 Spanish was not recognized in most graduate programs in philosophy in the United States as a legitimate philosophical language. Only Greek, Latin, German, and French were acceptable. Fond as I am of these languages and their philosophical importance, the exclusion of Spanish, especially in our culture, was more sin than mistake. Not only did we overlook the significant work of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, but we completely ignored and, for the most part, continue to ignore a wealth of aesthetic and political writings from Central and South America. Moreover, a large part of Hispanic thought and experience in the United States was rendered invisible to philosophy in America. For philosophy Americana, Spanish must become a required subject. We need to learn Spanish just as we need to learn rural and urban vernacular speech to grasp more of the breadth and depth of our cultural outlooks—our various autochthonous responses to this land. We learn these languages, again, because someone lives in them and is at home in them—they are the bearers of experience even if language itself is not fully adequate to experience. “By the end of this [the twentieth] century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S.,” says Anzaldúa, “a country whose students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more ‘cultured.’”12 The force of Anzaldúa’s argument is grounded in the experiences she has suffered. Bringing one’s own experience into philosophical reflection nevertheless bears several dangers. It can easily become self-engrossed, self-serving, or even maudlin. It can distract our focus from argumentation and structure in such a way as to become merely descriptive, to be uninstructive. Moreover, as we know, it can become exclusionary, suggesting that the personal version of experience has a corner on the market of ideal experiences. Such were common complaints against pragmatism at the outset of the twentieth century. What those who complained failed to recognize was the cultural embeddedness of and their personal commitment to their own versions of philosophy. As Dewey notes, “It is an old story that philosophers, in common with theologians and social theorists, are as sure that personal habits and interests shape their opponents’ doctrines as they are that their own beliefs are ‘absolutely’ universal and objective in quality” (MW, 4:113). Personal experience does not validate or invalidate beliefs, but it is the place from which they arise and the place to which they return. Though I hope to avoid these failures of hubris and reductionism, I remain fallible and fallibilistic. My hope is to build out from experience; to be inclusive, not exclusive. But inclusion itself must be launched from somewhere—to try to be neutral or to try to repress one’s experiential origins strikes me as an exercise in bad faith, the very thing that will undermine any philosophical outlook. No particular experience can include all other experiences, but in establishing one’s angle of vision, one establishes the premises for reaching out toward others’ experiences, for creating communication. Not a casual conversation but a thick exchange of thought and feeling.

Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (American Philosophy Book 18)" by Douglas R. Anderson: https://a.co/1FTNF1g

Torturing democracy

	Jane Mayer ⁦‪@JaneMayerNYer‬⁩ Just posted: State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy | The New Yorker newyorker.com/magazine/2022/…   8/6/22, 8:41 AM